“Aren’t those the same?”
“Nope,” he said. “There’s a slow, loopy track in the middle of the night. And then there’s a straight, fast track yesterday morning, about an hour after Pettis called Deputy Sutton. That one heads away from the cabin and out the dirt road to the highway, moving about twenty miles an hour. Then, at the highway, it turns north and accelerates to seventy-five miles an hour.”
“It’s the killer,” breathed Angie. “The collar is tracking the killer as he drives away.”
“Where does it go?” demanded Vickery.
“It ends.”
“You mean he stops?”
“No. I mean he gets out of range. The collar’s still moving fast, then the receiver loses the signal.”
“Crap,” said Angie.
“Leave it on,” said Vickery. “Maybe he’ll come back.”
Nat nodded. “I thought of that. I’m rigging a satellite link, so if the receiver picks up the collar’s signal again, it’ll relay the new track to my computer right away.”
Angie carried a handheld GPS into which Nat James had loaded Jasper’s track, so the route we took would be superimposed on the map of Jasper’s. Slung over one shoulder was her crime-scene camera, and tucked into the belt of her cargo pants was a bundle of orange survey flags. In addition, she’d enlisted students to carry two shovels, two trowels, a couple of baggies of gloves, more survey flags, a partial roll of crime-scene tape, and paper evidence bags.
Stu carried his cigar. I carried a half-dozen detailed topo maps, which Nat James had brought us. The computer whiz was right: FDLE, or at least his piece of it, was highly wired. The day that Pettis had agreed to putting the GPS collar on the dog, Nat had come out to put the finishing steps on the tracking technology. He’d connected the receiver—the small display on which a hunter could see his dog’s position—to a flash drive, which captured the location coordinates that the collar transmitted. He’d reset the tracking interval from five seconds to thirty, to stretch the battery’s life. Then he’d concealed the pair of devices high in the nearby fire tower, as Pettis had suggested, for maximum range.
Most of the dog’s coordinates clustered around and inside the cabin. The one notable and intriguing exception was the long, looping ramble that the dog had taken during his final night.
The top page of the printout I carried was an overview of the area, including a bright red “you are here” dot marking the location of the cabin. From it, a squiggly red line meandered to the northeast before looping back. The other five pages each showed enlarged views of segments of the route Jasper had covered before returning with the bone. According to the tracking data, Jasper had covered seven miles during his final outing. As the crow flew, though, he’d remained within a three-mile radius of home.
Vickery had suggested that we retrace the dog’s footsteps exactly, but Angie disagreed. “I doubt that the dog did a lot of wandering with a big bone in his mouth,” she reasoned. “He obviously wasn’t looking for a place to bury it, since he brought it back, right? See how the last part of the track looks fairly straight? It’s like he was hurrying home with his new treasure.”
“I think I see what you’re saying,” I said. “You think we should follow the track in reverse.” She nodded, and Vickery agreed, so we lined up at the edge of the clearing side by side, Angie at the center, flanked by Vickery and me, with five trainees on either side. Angie had us spread out, arms stretched wide, until our fingertips were barely touching. “That’s your spacing,” she said. “Try to maintain it. I’ll set the pace. We’ll stop and re-form the line whenever it gets too ragged, but try to keep it fairly even.” On her signal we began moving forward in unison, more or less, scanning the ground for bones, signs of recent digging, or anything else out of the ordinary.