Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

McLean nodded confirmation as he rubbed the dog’s ears. Moses closed his eyes and leaned into McLean’s legs, confident he’d found a soulmate, which he had, to McLean’s surprise. He’d always liked dogs from a distance, but Moses was the first one he’d genuinely admired, probably because of the animal’s absolute loyalty to his master. Loyalty being something McLean understood and respected.

Axel studied the photographs before scanning them into his Macintosh. “Grim stuff, but we’ll blow things up and see what we get.” McLean smiled at his friend’s back. If anyone could interpret the pictures it’d be Axel, a colleague from their old fire department in California. They’d been a solid team, until a collapsing roof crushed Axel’s back.

He tugged guiltily at the twisted little finger on his left hand. His only injury from a disaster that nearly sent his best friend’s life spinning out of control. It was the only time he had appreciated the unexpected wealth dropped into his lap by his mother’s death. He bankrolled Axel’s new business specializing in computer-enhanced fire scenes, a loan that was almost paid off, and McLean knew better than to forgive the balance, much as he wanted to.

Axel rolled back from the computers, gripped the wheelchair’s arms, and lifted himself up, relieving, if only for a moment, the chronic ache of bedsores. McLean grimaced in sympathetic pain. Axel shot his friend a lopsided grin, lowered himself, and pointed to the pictures. “This guy knew a lot more pain. Who was it, anyway?”

When McLean told him, Axel stared possessively around his cramped room. “Bought this house from him.” A sly smile warmed his scarred face. “Paid cash up front. Funny guy, if you know what I mean. Married his son’s girlfriend.” He snorted and pivoted back to the desk. “Typical of the guy. When I was renting, he tried to toss me out because of Moses.” He paused, caressed the dog’s head, then added without a trace of humor, “Rex Archer had heart surgery last spring, and it’s rumored the doctors had trouble finding it.”

McLean pulled away from Axel’s house, by itself on the outskirts of town, and headed down Highway 199, past the ever present flock of bearded hitchhikers togged out in surplus army fatigues and hunting jackets. He considered giving one a lift, an older man cradling a small dog, but decided against it since he was only going five miles.

He pulled off the highway several minutes later and dug a map out of the console.

The faded blue-line Forest Service rendering showed every logging road and minor gully in excruciating detail, including the curve, but not the rock, where Rex Archer died.

The fatal spot lay ten miles down a track branching off the road he’d stopped on. The land on either side had been thoroughly logged. No tree thicker than a man’s wrist remained standing, and small mountains of branches, bark, and brush waited to be burned in the spring.

McLean, searching for the turnoff, almost rear-ended an army surplus dump truck, outfitted with a water tank and repainted the color of clotted blood, as it wheezed up the road. The water truck took a hard left into a partially hidden clearing just before the secondary road’s turnoff. There the logging company would be maintaining a fire watch.

McLean found the turnoff, and his pickup took the twisting washboard track with the grace of a crippled elephant, but it got him the ten miles, where he stopped at the top of a long incline and stared down at the rock. The spot where his truck idled was flat, giving way abruptly to a heavily rutted track that dived for three hundred feet at an angle steeper than a tenement stairway. The entire area was desolate, never having recovered from some heavy-handed logging more than forty years before.

He let the truck roll down the incline, its wheels gripped by the ruts. The truck rocketed straight toward the boulder.

He slid to a stop and reversed fifty feet up the hill, then climbed out and inspected the ground around the rock, taking soil samples from the still blackened area left by the wreck. He then backed up to the flat where he scoured the top and, clucking softly, scraped up more dirt samples.

More out of habit than hope, McLean searched the hilltop in a series of concentric circles. Reaching the edge of the flat, he stared down the side of the hill into a small ravine. He crabbed down the slope, boots kicking up puffs of dust left by the abnormally dry autumn.

He walked the ravine, picking up and discarding the odd bits of rusted metal, car parts, and other trash that somehow always find their way to the bottoms of gullies miles from the nearest settlement.