Read Online Prime Witness by Steve Martini - Free Book Online

found up there.
    She makes a face. “Some feathers, and blood,” she says.
    “Animal or human?”
    “Mostly animal, but there were traces of human blood as well. And some small bones, avian, we think.” There are more puzzled looks from Sellig on this. Like the loose ends just keep piling up.
    “We’ve sent the bones and feathers off to the National Wildlife Forensics Lab, up in Oregon,” she says, “for analysis.”
    It seems there are only two people in the country who have any background in such things. One of them is eighty-seven years old, a woman on the east coast. The other is a younger woman, her protégée, who has now been enticed away from the Smithsonian to the wildlife facility in Ashland, a kind of criminalistics lab for offenses against nature and the environment.
    “They should have some answers for us in a few days,” she says.
    “Your best guess?” I ask her.
    “Based on the little bit we have?” she says.
    I nod.
    “I’d say our guy,” she’s talking about the Putah Creek killer, “had nothing to do with the blind in the trees.”
    “Then who did?”
    “It’s only a hunch right now. I’d rather wait till we get something back from the lab up in Oregon.”
    I accept this, and back off.
    “Did they find anything like this at the other two sites, down in Orange County and up in Oregon, a platform in the trees, feathers, bones?” I say.
    She shakes her head. “No. And we’ve gone back to check the area again at the other two sites here in Davenport. We thought maybe we missed something. But there was nothing there either. No platform or ropes.”
    She is pulling on a pair of white running shoes, the kind secretaries around the capital use for fast walks at lunch, their answer to midday aerobics.
    “You didn’t happen to go up there?” I ask. “On the platform?”
    She nods. Suddenly she’s all cryptic gestures.
    Looking at her, somehow I knew that, after the platform was processed by the evidence tech, she could not resist going up and looking.
    “Pretty good view?” I ask her.
    “An understatement,” she says. There’s a sly smile. She moves toward the locker against the wall and opens the door again. I think she’s putting the half-heels away. But when she turns to face me again she’s holding a long cylindrical object wrapped in a terry cloth towel. As she unwraps this I can see metal and glass and on the side, some lettering, the words “Mirador TTB.”
    “It was found on the platform,” she says. “The owner appears to have left in a hurry.” She hands this to me, to inspect.
    “It’s a spotting scope. This is a good one. It would cost about a thousand dollars. Shooters use them for long-range shots, to zero their weapons, to find the strikes on a target without walking two hundred yards.”
    I’m turning it over in my hands looking at it.
    “It’s been dusted for prints,” she says. “We got one smudged latent, unusable, and found some traces of blood on it.”
    “It makes no sense,” I say. There’s an instant of dead silence between us as I look at the scope.
    “You think whoever was up in the tree had nothing to do with the murders.”
    She makes a face, like this is a definite possibility.
    “But they may have seen the killer?” I say.
    She smiles. “Take a look,” she says. She’s motioning toward the scope in my hands.
    I look through the thing, out one of the windows on the far side of the room. Across the broad verdant lawn like the gardens at Versailles, a secretary is taking lunch, seated on a bench with a brown bag. I turn the focus ring, a fraction of an inch, a view like water through crystal. There is moisture on her cheek. She is reading, a little paperback cushioned in one hand—the title clear as the morning newspaper, Erich Segal’s Love Story .
    I consider for a moment in my mind’s eye the elements presented; the magic of this little cylinder I hold in my hand, the scaffold high in the trees along the Putah Creek. I conjure