Angels Fall

find a stray hair, but what's that going to prove?"
    He tossed the branch aside. "Nothing. All he has to do is cover the tracks leading out. Plenty of places to bury a body around here. Or, if it were me and I had a car, I'd toss it in the trunk and drive somewhere else. Somewhere I could take my time digging a hole deep enough the animals wouldn't uncover her."
    "That's not cool. It's cold."
    "Killing somebody takes ice or heat, depending. Getting away with it? Yeah, that takes cold blood. Seen enough?"
    She nodded. "More than."

Chapter 9
     
    AS THEY WALKED BACK. Recce uncapped her water bottle and drank. When Brody held out a hand, she passed it to him.
    "They always say there's no such thing as a perfect murder."
    He drank deep, handed her the bottle. "They say a lot of things, and they're wrong a good part of the time."
    "They really are. But still, whoever she was, she belonged somewhere. She came from somewhere. Odds are she had a job, a home. She might have had a family."
    "Might have, could have."
    Annoyed, Reece jammed her hands in her pockets. "Well, she was connected to at least one person. And he killed her. They had something between them."
    "Back to might have, could have. They could have met the day they ended up here, or been together for a decade. They could have come from anywhere. Traveling in from California, up from Texas, out from back East. Hell, they could've been French."
    "French?"
    "People kill in every language. The point is, the odds of them passing through are just as good as they are for them being from the area. Probably better. Fewer people live in Wyoming than live in Alaska."
    "Is that why you moved here?"
    "'Part of it. Probably. You work for a newspaper, a big-city paper. you're in people up to your eyeballs. The point is, the odds are better that whoever these people were, they came from somewhere else."
    "And they got into a fight to the death because they got lost and he wouldn't stop to ask for directions: It's a male plague worthy of some serious ass-kicking. I grant you. But I don't think so. They met there or went there because they had something to talk about. Or argue about."
    He liked the way she talked, Brody decided. Rarely in a straight line. Like when she cooked, juggling any number of dishes at the same time. "Supposition, not tact.
    "Fine, I'm supposing. And I'm supposing they weren't French."
    "Possibly Italian. Lithuanian isn't out of the question."
    "Fine, a Lithuanian couple gets lost because, like men across the globe, he values his penis—among other things—as a compass. So he's incapable of asking for directions and thereby disparaging the power of his penis."
    He frowned at her. "This is a closely guarded male secret. How did you crack the code?"
    "More of us know of this than you could possibly guess. In any case, they get out of their car, tromp through the trees toward the river, because sure, that's the way to figure out where they are. They argue, fight, he kills her. Then, being a Lithuanian mountain man, he expertly covers all tracks and takes the body back to their rented Taurus so he can bury her in their homeland."
    "You ought to write that down."
    "If that's the sort of ridiculous nonsense you write, I'm amazed you've been published."
    "I might've stuck with the French, just for that international scope. But it goes back, Slim, to they could have been anyone from anywhere."
    It helped to think of it as a puzzle. It gave it more distance somehow.
    "If he covered his trail the way he did, he knows something about hiking and tracking."
    "A lot of people do. On the 'could be' side, they may have been here before."
    Brody glanced around. He knew this type of terrain because he'd hiked in areas like it, and used areas like it in his work. There'd be columbine and money flowers spurting up before much longer. Honeysuckle blooming as it twined wherever it could reach. Shady spots, pretty spots.
    It would show off better toward June.
    "A little early in the season for tourists." he calculated, "but people come this time of year because they want to avoid the summer and winter crowds. Or they're heading somewhere else and stop for a short hike. Or the ones you saw live in the Fist and sampled your cooking."
    "That's a really happy thought. Thanks."'
    "You saw what he was wearing. Would you recognize it again?"
    "Orange hunter's cap, black all-weather jacket. Coat. No, jacket, I guess. I see that kind of thing every day. I just didn't get a good enough