Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

  ‘People! People!’ Ron shouted into the mic, but after Professor Cloughly and Athena’s announcements the man could exercise his outdoor, just-who-do-you-think’s-in-charge-here sort of voice until his throat grew sore but he’d never regain control.

  Hopelessly entangled in the surge of humanity hot-footing it out of the room, I found myself in the hallway, swept along with the tide. In order to reach the Meriwether Lewis Conference Room before they did – the last thing we needed was for someone to be crushed to death in a stampede – I swam through the crowd doing the breaststroke. When I reached the doors I hastily propped them both open then stood to one side as people poured into the room.

  Projected on a large screen pulled down from the ceiling at the front of the room was an image I recognized: a view of the banks of the Metolius River, its lush marshlands and tall pines. In the center of the image someone had erected a tee-pee of sticks, as if preparing a campfire. To the right, the river raged over the rocks that Jake and I had seen earlier.

  A live picture, then.

  But, other than the rapids, everything seemed still.

  People clogged the aisles, moving clumsily, their eyes glued to the screen. ‘Do you see anything?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Ouch! Watch where you’re going! That’s my toe you’re stepping on.’

  Athena had beaten everyone there. She stood up front, next to the projector, but although I looked for him, I couldn’t find her husband, Jim.

  ‘Sit down, everyone, please.’ Athena leaned into the mic, her lips almost touching it.

  I remained at the door, directing traffic, taking wanderers gently by the arm and shoving them in the direction of the first available chair. Everyone wanted to sit in the front row – no surprise.

  The screen suddenly went blank, replaced by an intense white light. I suppressed an insane urge to fill the screen with hand shadows – I had a good bunny rabbit, a so-so eagle and an amazing camel in my repertoire – which was a wise move, because Susan Lockley chose that precise moment to explode into the room and make a beeline for me. ‘Where’s the fire?’ she whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Something activated Jim’s camera so Athena’s gone to general quarters. If she’d been on a ship all the horns would be going ooo-ga, ooo-ga, ooo-ga.’

  Susan cast her eyes toward the ceiling. Her mouth moved in silent prayer. ‘This better be freaking worth it,’ she muttered at last, her eyes drilling into mine. ‘Honestly, this is the biggest bunch of kooks I have ever worked with. Ever.’

  ‘Sit down, please, everyone.’ Athena again. ‘Jim’s queuing up the recording now.’

  With an exasperated sigh, Susan made her way toward the front of the room. I figured she planned to help expedite the queuing-up process, whatever that entailed.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  I wasn’t expecting to see him, so Jake’s voice directly behind me made me jump.

  ‘I was heading into the scat session,’ Jake said, ‘when the doors flew open and all hell broke loose. Somebody set a bomb off in there or something?’

  ‘You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  I flapped a hand. ‘Never mind.’ I managed a wan grin and quickly explained what I thought was going on. Jim had apparently finished with his set up because he climbed up onto the low dais and took the microphone from his wife. Susan, looking somewhat relieved, came back to stand with Jake, Harley and me near the rear door.

  With the mic in one hand and a remote in the other, Jim, dressed in the same bright red Hawaiian shirt we’d seen him in earlier, began the show. He pointed a remote at the projector and the screen filled with a static image of the clearing and the oversized, campfire-like structure. ‘As most of you know, Bigfoot often builds structures like this, so that is where we put the bait.’

  I leaned closer to Susan and whispered, ‘Tuna fish. Just so you know.’

  On the screen, nothing was happening, except that the river continued to babble and the bushes stirred in the breeze. We waited, holding our collective breaths.

  A creature stepped out of the trees.

  ‘Oooooh … ah!’

  Tall, covered in reddish-brown fur, the animal sloped toward the water’s edge with loose, man-like strides. Its arms were long, its hands – or paws? – swinging just shy of the creature’s knees. Its feet seemed large and hairy. When it reached the river it turned and stared directly at Jim’s camera as if it knew exactly where the camera was. A face like a gorilla, I thought. Too far away to see the eyes.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ someone in the crowd muttered.

  Perhaps the creature heard. It turned and ran, faster than I believed possible for such a large animal. As it fled, the marsh grass lashed its fur like corn stalks until it reached the safety of the tree line and was swallowed up again by the forest.

  SEVEN

  Winsted, Connecticut, August 30, 1895. ‘The Connecticut wild man, that has divided honors with the sea serpent, is a full-grown gorilla. John G. Hall runs a stage between here and Sandisfield, Mass. While he was passing through Colebrook a large animal crossed the highway on all fours and leaped a stone wall … The animal, when the stage approached, stood erect. Hall drew a revolver. The beast did not stir. Hall stopped his horses and was getting a good aim at the brute when off it sped on four feet … uttering awful cries … They say that it has large white teeth, black hair, a muscular form and is about 6 ½ feet tall. It is thought the gorilla made its escape from some circus, and has since made its home among the Litchfield hills.’

  The North Adams Transcript (North Adams, MA), August 30, 1895

  ‘Shit,’ Jake said. ‘What was that?’

  Jim replayed the clip two, three times. He ran it backward, then forward. At the moment where the creature first emerged from the trees he froze the image. Zoomed in.

  ‘Looks like Caesar from Planet of the Apes,’ Susan muttered. ‘Although it’s a bit fuzzy.’

  It had been a long time since I’d seen the classic movie but I had to agree. ‘Except Caesar and his clan walked like chimps,’ I said, ‘mostly on all fours.’

  ‘That’s because they were chimps,’ Jake said. ‘This creature is something entirely different.’

  Jim pressed the remote and the creature moved in slow motion toward the river, turned then stared at the camera. Jim looped the film back, running it over and over, freezing it on the last frame, zeroing in on the creature’s departing backside. ‘Just like Patty,’ I muttered.

  ‘I think Jim Davis just blew Patterson and Gimlin clean out of the water, don’t you?’ Jake said. ‘The video will have to be authenticated, of course, but who better for the job than Martin Radcliffe.’ Jake seemed be to surveying the room. ‘Where the hell is he, anyway? You’d think he’d be all over this thing like a duck on a junebug.’

  I shrugged. ‘I spotted him earlier this morning, getting coffee. Maybe he’s not that much into scat.’ I sent Jake a crooked grin. ‘People don’t usually fake poop, do they?’

  Jake seemed miles away. He didn’t answer.

  When I tuned in again, Jim was saying, ‘I know we could watch this clip for hours – and it will be up on YouTube before the end of the day, I guarantee you – but in order to understand it I think it’s important for you to see how my system works.’

  He aimed his remote and the screen went blank again before returning to what I presumed was the live image of the stick teepee. ‘When the alarm was triggered,’ Jim explained, ‘the camera started rolling. It’s motion sensitive so it actually follows the object that triggered the alarm. And at that point, too, it starts recording.’

  As he spoke, the camera began to pan. ‘We’re live again, now,’ Jim told us, ‘but this time I’m in control.’ He panned first to the left, then to the right, then back again, putting the camera through its paces like an oscillating fan. ‘The range is 360 degrees,’ he continued as the camera began another rotation to the right.

  Now we were viewin
g the river again – the marshland grasses, the pines, the flat ledge higher up where Jake and I had been enjoying the view earlier that morning.

  Suddenly the camera jittered to a stop. ‘What the blue blazes?’ Jim muttered into the mic. ‘Ooooh, have you come back again, you tricky devil?’ Under his control, the camera stalled then zoomed in closer and closer on some anomaly in the forest landscape. A fallen log, perhaps? A bag of trash? Whatever it was, the camera had to be positioned between it and the makeshift teepee.

  Jim thumbed the control and zoomed in, still closer.

  I stifled a gasp.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered, just loud enough for Jake to hear. ‘A trash bag doesn’t wear lime-green track shoes.’

  Jake grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the door. As he passed Susan, he hissed, ‘I don’t care how you do it but keep these people here. Don’t let them out of this room.’

  Susan opened her mouth to protest but Jake silenced her with, ‘I’m a cop. And if you’ve got a cell phone with you, I’d call nine-one-one.’

  ‘Hier!’ he commanded. Harley and I followed.

  A minute later, Jake, Harley and I were racing down the path we’d taken earlier. Before we reached the overlook, however, Jake veered off to the left on a hiking trail I hadn’t noticed before. A carved wooden National Park Service sign read, ‘Riverwalk Trail, 0.3 miles.’

  ‘These shoes aren’t designed for hiking,’ I complained as I scrambled, slipping and sliding on wet pine needles down the steep trail behind him. ‘What do you need me for, anyway?’ I panted as I stumbled over an exposed root.

  ‘You have a cell-phone camera. It’s with you, right?’

  Oh, ugh. I didn’t relish the idea of taking pictures of whatever lay in that sad, dark heap. I prayed it was simply Martin Radcliffe’s trademark shoes that had found their way into a trash bag and not the rest of him.

  When we finally reached the clearing I had to pause, bend over and rest my hands on my knees, gasping, trying to catch my breath.

  ‘Bleib!’ Jake said. Stay. I figured it applied to both me and the dog.

  While waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal, I kept my eyes on Jake as he approached the mound we had spotted on Jim’s camera. Even from my position some ten yards away, I could see it was covered with something in a camouflage pattern. A tarp?

  Jake lifted a corner of the fabric, pulled it back then squatted beside whatever was underneath. He reached out, touched it, paused for a moment then shook his head, just like cops do on TV. Still squatting, with his forearms resting on his thighs and hands dangling between them, he said, ‘It’s Radcliffe, I’m afraid. And he’s not been dead long; the body’s still warm.’

  My heart began to race again. Bile rose in my throat. Breathe in, Hannah. Breathe out. In with the good air, out with the bad.

  Almost before I noticed, Jake was at my side, a comforting hand on my shoulder. ‘You OK?’

  I wasn’t but I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘I’ve seen dead bodies before.’

  I thought nothing could be as horrific as the woman I’d once discovered savagely bludgeoned to death in her Eastport home. Now I stood a good distance away from the flesh and bones that had once been Martin Radcliffe, and yet, somehow, it felt worse. Someone had savaged the man’s face – broken his neck, too, if the unnatural angle of his head in relation to his shoulders was any indication.

  ‘Let me have your jacket,’ Jake said gently.

  I must have looked puzzled because he jerked his head in the direction of Jim’s camera which, I realized, must still be transmitting away, feeding everything we were doing into that conference room back at Flat Rock Lodge, zero point three miles away.

  I slipped out of my jacket – a quilted denim one from Chicos – and handed it over. Holding the jacket open in front of him like a matador, Jake approached the camera and draped it ceremoniously over the camera lens. He patted it almost fondly. ‘Nighty night.’

  When he returned, and before he could ask again, I handed over my iPhone, too. Sitting on a log at the edge of the forest, feeling ill, I watched as Jake moved carefully around Radcliffe’s body, taking photos. When he was done he joined me on the log where I sat, shivering.

  ‘What do you think, Jake?’

  ‘As a professional?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Looks like someone whacked him on the head then broke his neck,’ Jake said. ‘Someone or something.’

  I turned sideways to look at him. ‘Bigfoot? You’re joking. Surely you don’t really believe …?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  Jake snorted. ‘Been at the conference for only one day and already a skeptic. If you stay till the end your eyes may be opened.’

  ‘This may be the end,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt it, Hannah. Too much time and money has already been laid out. Besides, nobody’s going to be allowed to leave until the cops are finished with their interviews.’ He checked his watch. ‘They should be here shortly.’

  Thinking of the staff and hundreds of attendees, I said, ‘That could take until the Fourth of July.’

  Jake laughed grimly. ‘Oh, they’ll narrow it down to a few persons of interest fairly quickly.’

  While we talked, he used his thumb to scroll quickly through the images he’d just taken. ‘Will those photos help?’ I asked, indicating my cell phone. ‘Did you notice any evidence? Footprints, maybe, or tufts of hair?’

  ‘Nope. Pine needles mostly. Leaves, twigs, ferns. A few rocks. The ground was kicked up a bit but nothing obvious.’

  When he was done reviewing the photos I expected Jake to return my cell phone, but he surprised me by tucking it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘A pity your iPhone has been lost,’ he said, smiling crookedly. ‘Perhaps you’ll find it again in an hour or so?’

  I wasn’t worried about losing the pictures he’d just taken. Even as we stared each other down in the forest, I knew the photos were being uploaded automatically, one by one, to Apple iCloud. They would be waiting for me to view, full size, on my computer when I got back to my room. But I couldn’t imagine a situation where I’d ever want to look at them.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A password.’

  ‘I watched you type it in.’

  This guy was as clever as my seven-year-old grandson. Timmy had used the same technique to bypass parental controls while playing The Simpsons on his Kindle Fire. By the time my daughter caught up with the little rascal he’d bought more than a thousand dollars’ worth of virtual donuts with his mother’s real world credit card. ‘I thought you weren’t familiar with iPhones,’ I said.

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘I said I didn’t own one, not that I didn’t know how to use one. It’s an iPad in miniature, and I’ve got one of those.’

  Hugging myself for warmth, I nodded.

  ‘It won’t take long for the cops to get here from Sisters,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stay here while I …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Harley, hier!’

  Harley, who had been lying at my feet, shot to attention. ‘Geh voraus,’ Jake ordered.

  Slowly, deliberately, man and dog circled Radcliffe’s body. ‘Such!’ Jake ordered, and Harley, nose down, head sweeping from side to side, trotted into the forest.

  ‘Stay here, please,’ Jake said. ‘Tell the Sisters police where we’ve gone.’

  ‘But …’ I began. How dare the man leave me all alone when a savage killer was on the loose!

  As if reading my mind, Jake said, ‘You’ll be fine. According to Harley, whatever it was went that-a-way.’ He turned and trotted after his dog.

  I was sitting on the log, still sulking when Jake reappeared less than five minutes later. Jake led Harley to the body and said, ‘Wache.’

  Harley dutifully stood guard.

  ‘Where did it go, the trail?’ I asked when Jake rejoined me.

  ‘Up a path of sorts. En
ds at the parking lot. That’s where Harley lost the scent.’

  ‘Does that mean that whoever it was got into his car and drove away?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Someone who left the conference?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to have been someone attending the conference at all, Hannah. It could have been an outsider, a complete stranger to us.’

  ‘But probably not to Martin Radcliffe.’

  ‘No.’

  I sat up straighter as a thought occurred to me. ‘Security cameras! Hotel security keeps an eye on the parking lot, surely, in case someone decides to break into our cars at night.’

  ‘That would be bears, mostly. No matter how many times they are warned, people continue to leave food in their cars.’ He paused for a moment. ‘To a bear, a car looks like a cookie jar. They’ll even tear through a rear seat if they smell food in the trunk. I wasn’t doing a thorough search, of course, but if there were any security cameras covering that end of the parking lot I didn’t see them. Something for the cops from Sisters to sort out, in any case. I’ve overstepped myself already. Oregon is totally out of my jurisdiction.’

  ‘What don’t you understand about “retired,” Jake?’

  ‘Old habits die hard.’

  I shivered, growing chillier by the minute without my jacket. ‘I wonder if Martin was lying dead over there all the time we were gabbing away up on the overlook?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘Not likely. A semi-educated guess, of course, but as I said, I don’t think he’d been dead all that long.’

  ‘But we saw Jim Davis down here earlier!’

  ‘Correction. We saw someone wearing a bright red shirt down here earlier.’

  ‘Jim was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt at his presentation this morning.’

  ‘True. But I own a red shirt. You probably do, too.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling deflated.

  ‘What puzzles me is why Radcliffe was dressed in camouflage gear.’

  So it wasn’t a tarp. ‘Obviously he didn’t want to be seen by someone.’ I paused. ‘Or something.’

  ‘You’re right. Now that I think about it, it’s likely he was staking out the camera site, hoping to catch someone trying to pull a stunt,’ Jake said. ‘Somebody he could later “out” on his TV show.’ After a thoughtful moment, he added: ‘Jim Davis springs immediately to mind, considering the bad blood between them. Radcliffe made a fool of Jim once – you saw it yourself last night. I can imagine him rubbing his hands together and cackling over the possibility of embarrassing the poor guy again.’