We entered the clearing where Mindy Travelca had been found dead beneath a tree two days ago, and I set down my backpack.
Lien-hua paced to the middle of the field. “The crime-scene investigation unit was all over this place already. And besides, the storms up here would have destroyed any physical evidence. So, what exactly are we looking for?”
I turned in a circle, taking in the view, the mountains, the perspective, the trail. “Not forensic evidence as much as geographic understanding. Why here, Lien-hua? What significance does this place hold for him? A crime scene is everything related to the crime. The air. The wind. The ground. But a crime occurs in four dimensions, not just three.”
Oops, I’d slipped into lecture mode without even realizing it.
“The fourth dimension,” she said thoughtfully. “You mean time.”
“Yes. Time.” I lay down against the tree so that I was in the same position Mindy had been when we found her. I stared out across the mountains. Why did he leave you here, Mindy? Why did he kill you then? “A crime occurs in both space and time. And how those two factors relate to each other is what I’m interested in most.”
Contact lenses. He left them in her eyes.
Time of death: between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m.
She disappeared Wednesday afternoon.
Died on Thursday morning.
He didn’t carry her up the mountain.
She made a cell phone call to her mother at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, said she’d be home on Friday.
What did he leave you looking at? What did he want you to see?
Sightlines were important to him.
“There.” I pointed to a peak directly in front of us. “That mountain there. Which one is that?”
Lien-hua pulled out the map and spent a few moments orienting herself to our surroundings. “Warrior’s Peak. And… wait… there’s a local legend about it… hang on.” She flipped the map over. “The daughter of a Cherokee chief who lived there was abducted by some members of the Catawba tribe and brought here, to this mountain we’re on right now.” Lien-hua glanced over the story printed on the map and then summarized. “Her lover snuck through the night to rescue her, but it was some kind of trap. He was killed, slaughtered, and the girl-rather than let herself be married to anyone from the Catawba tribe-threw herself off this mountain, over there where the cliffs are, where we were standing before. According to the legend her tears falling to the ground became the valleys surrounding these peaks. And listen to this”-she paused to find her place, then continued reading-“some people say you can still hear her crying up on this mountain, when the wind is right.”
A chill settled over me as I sat where Mindy’s body had rested, as I stared out across the valley toward Warrior’s Peak. “He knew the story.”
Lien-hua was quiet, reflective. “He put contacts in her eyes, Pat. He wanted us to think about her tears.”
He wasn’t just one move ahead of us, more like two or three.
Lien-hua must have been thinking the same thing. “This guy is good.”
“He posed her,” I said. “Just like Jamie by the ‘No Loitering’ sign and Reinita on the trail to Tombstone Caverns.”
“Taunting us. Sending us a message. It all plays into his fantasy.” Lien-hua looked around. “Well, right about now is when Mindy died. If they came here in the morning, would that have given him enough time to torture her?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not enough hours of sunlight before her time of death. Not with the extensive petechial hemorrhaging she had.”
“So he spent the night out here with her,” she said.
I looked around. “That’s right. But not here. Not in this clearing; it’s too exposed.”
“So where?”
I pointed to a trail nearby that led to a series of exposed cliffs and outcroppings. “There.”