I smiled. “Any footprints in that mud?”
“Well, now that you mention it, seems like maybe there were. Is that what you were after?” I nodded.
Dolores had been developing my slides for years now; during that time, she’d seen photos from crime scenes that had made hardened cops lose their lunch. She always seemed interested, but her questions invariably stopped short of nosiness. I didn’t mind sharing a few details, because I knew she’d keep anything she saw or heard to herself. In her mind’s eye, she seemed to click back through the strip of film. “Nothing but mud in some, but others, you’ll probably find something interesting. You must’ve been shooting at night.”
“In a cave, actually.”
“I wondered where you’d found all that mud, dry as it’s been this month. Always something new with you, Doc.”
“Keeps life interesting, Dolores. Keeps old age at bay.” I paid, took my receipt, and waved as the drive-through window slid shut and Dolores disappeared into the depths of FotoFast.
Back at the office, I inserted the slides, upside-down, into a carousel tray and snapped the tray onto the Kodak projector. I switched on the projector’s lamp and turned out the overhead fluorescent. As the autofocus lens ratcheted in and out, seeking clarity, green and yellow blurs gradually resolved into the ATVs we’d wrangled up the mountainside and into the cave. Sheriff Kitchings’s belly flashed up, filling half the screen, as he wriggled through the narrow squeeze. His face was contorted and his teeth were clenched with the strain. I studied him, this man who had asked for my help and then hidden the truth from me. Something about the photo disturbed me. The image—the way he was hoisting his belly—was grotesque, but that wasn’t what nagged at me. I stared at his face awhile longer, still unable to put my finger on anything specific, then moved on. The soles of three different boots—the sheriff’s, the deputy’s, and mine—
flashed past. Only then, because I had purposely loaded the three-boot reference photos out of sequence, did my shots of the cave’s muddy floor begin. The first few images showed some hint of foot traffic, but the angle—high, shooting nearly straight down—made everything appear flat and featureless. As the camera angle got progressively lower, shadows appeared and grew, as if the sun were setting in the cave, throwing the contours of the mud into sharp relief, revealing a world of texture. A world of footprints.
The prints reminded me of craters on the moon, seen through a telescope: at full moon, viewed straight-on, the rocky surface appears deceptively smooth. But at other stages, especially when viewed at the terminus—the border between light and dark—the craters and canyons show themselves to be rugged, razor-edged, and forbidding. The cave’s craters were made by human feet, not by massive meteorites, but the surface looked almost as pocked and layered as the ancient face of the moon.
Kitchings had told me that he and Williams ventured into the grotto just far enough to determine that a body lay there. Sure enough, two sets of tracks—a lugged-sole pattern that matched the sheriff’s boots and a rippled design that matched Williams’s—led toward the rock shelf where the body lay. The tracks stopped, and some random, layered trampling suggested shifting stances by both men. Then the tracks reversed direction, leading back toward the camera and in the direction of the grotto’s entrance. I nodded to myself; it was what I’d expected to see, based on what they’d told me.