The Last Detective by Robert Crais

out.
    I said, “It'll be faster if we split up. You take this side of the shoulder. I'll cross the top, then move down the far side.”
    Pike set off without a word. I worked my way across the top of the shoulder parallel to the street, trying to find a footprint or scuff mark. I didn't.
    Gray knots of brush sprouted over the slope like mold, thinning around stunted oaks and ragged pine trees. I moved downhill in a zigzag pattern, following erosion cuts and natural paths between great stiff balls of sagebrush. Twice I saw marks that might have been made by someone passing, but they were too faint for me to be sure.
    The shoulder dropped away. I couldn't see my car or any of the houses on either side of the little point, which meant that the people in those houses couldn't see me. I looked across the canyon. The windows in Grace Gonzalez's house glowed with light. My A-frame hung from the slope with its deck jutting out like a diving board. If I were surveilling my house, this would be a fine place for it.
    Pike appeared silently between the brush.
    “I went down as far as I could, then the slope dropped away. It's too steep on that side for anyone to use.”
    “Then help me with this side.”
    We searched the ground beneath two pines, then worked our way farther down the slope toward a single scrub oak. We moved parallel to each other and ten meters apart, covering more ground that way. Time was everything. Purple shadows pooled around us. The sun kissed the ridge. It would sink faster, racing with the night.
    Pike said, “Here.”
    I stopped as I was about to take a step. Pike knelt. He touched the ground, then lifted his glasses to see better in the dim light.
    “What is it?”
    “Got a partial here, then another partial. Moving your way.”
    Dampness prickled my hands. Ben had been missing for twenty-six hours. More than a day. The sun settled even faster, like a sinking heart.
    I said, “Do they match with the print we found at my place?”
    “I couldn't see that one clearly enough to know.”
    Pike stepped over the prints. I moved toward the tree. I told myself that these prints could have been made by anyone: neighborhood kids, hikers, a construction worker come looking for a place to piss; but I knew it was the man who had stolen Ben Chenier. I felt it on my skin like too much smog.
    I stepped across an erosion cut between two balls of sagebrush and saw a fresh footprint in the dust between two plates of shale. The print pointed uphill, leading up from the tree.
    “Joe.”
    “Got it.”
    We moved closer to the tree, Pike approaching from the left and me from the right. The tree was withered, with spiky branches that had lost most of their leaves. Thin grass had sprouted in the fractured light under the branches. The grass on the uphill side was flat, as if someone had sat on it.
    I did not move closer.
    “Joe.”
    “I see it. I've got footprints in the dirt to the left. Can you see?”
    “I see them.”
    “You want, I can get closer.”
    Behind us, the sun was swallowed by the ridge. The pooling shadows around us deepened and lights came on in the houses on the far ridge.
    “Not now. Let's tell Starkey. Chen can try to match the prints, and then we have to start knocking on doors. This is it, Joe. He was here. He waited for Ben here.”
    We backed away, then followed our own footprints up the hill. We drove back to my house to call Starkey. We had seen her leave almost two hours ago, but when we tooled around the curve she was parked outside my front door, no one else, just Starkey, sitting behind the wheel of her Crown Vic, smoking.
    We swung into the carport, then hurried out to tell her.
    I said, “I think we found where he waited, Starkey. We found prints and crushed grass. We've gotta get Chen out to see if the prints match, and then we have to go door-to-door. The people who live over there might've seen a car or even a tag.”
    It came out of me in a torrent as if I expected her to cheer, but she