Bitter Sweets

Grateful Dead tee shirt, but she decided he must be a second or third generation Deadhead. He didn’t appear to be more than nineteen or twenty.

    “Dad opened the place last fall,” he replied as he scribbled down her driver’s license number and expiration date on a rental form.

    “So, you’re new. That must be why my friend didn’t know about you.”

    “Don’t tell me you hiked the old trail all the way to the Montoya Ranch.”

    “I did. With these two feet and a twenty-gallon aquarium of water strapped to my waist.”

    “Really?”

    He stared at her blankly; she determined he was a deadhead in more ways than one.

    “No, not really. It just felt like it after the first hour or so.”

    “Well, you’ll get there a lot faster on a bike. You do know how to ride, don’t you?”

    “Sure.”

    “Good. ‘Cause Dad says we shouldn’t rent to anybody who isn’t experienced.”

    Five minutes later, Savannah sat on the bike in front of the shop, staring at the controls on the handles. “No problem,” she mumbled once the kid was out of earshot. “Now, which one do you suppose is the brake ?”

    Two “hit-a-rock-or-some-damned-thing” spinouts, three “lose-your-balance” dump overs, and a first-class “bike goes east, rider goes west” dive, and Savannah was there.

    Well, she was almost there.

    The tin shed, trussed with yellow crime scene tape, was within sight, barely, across the open field. This time she was approaching from the rear, the opposite of when she, Dirk, and Ryan had come before.

    And this was the end of the trail.

    The young guy at the rental shop had described the beginning of the newly established dirt bike path. He had mentioned that hikers, tired of walking the long trail had begun to take bikes into the area. In an effort to stop the flow, forest rangers had erected the barricades across the old path, which the three of them had seen earlier.

    Not to be undone, the bikers had forged another trail. And, although it wasn’t as wide or well established, the path provided an only marginally treacherous route to the Montoya Ranch. This new path had only natural barricades: broken trees, unexpected rocks, the occasional bit of fauna.

    Savannah concluded it was worth the bumps and bruises when she saw the tire marks, which she had been following, come to a halt, in the middle of nowhere, still a distance from the shed.

    Other than that one structure, there was nothing for anyone to see in the area, no reason to come out here. So, why didn’t they ride on up to the shed?

    She had spotted the tire tracks as soon as she had started down the path. The marks had a unique distinction: an extra indentation, not caused by the tire itself, that was repeated regularly. It was a stone, wedged between the treads that created the demarcation.

    Savannah was sure, because the imprint was exactly the same as the one left by the bike she was riding.

    Someone else had recently rented this machine and driven it to this exact spot. And for some reason, they had elected to walk the rest of the way to the shed.

    She got off the bike, released its kickstand, and followed the footprints in the loose soil. The prints were larger than hers, but that didn’t surprise her. All of her suspects were male and had feet that were bigger... except for Vanessa, and Savannah had noticed that her shoes were in proportion to the remainder of the giantess.

    As she neared the shed, the dirt became more compact and rocky, and the footprints faded. That explained why the police hadn’t followed the trail from the shed out to the bike path, she surmised.

    To her knowledge, until today, when she had found it, no one investigating the crime knew that there was another way into the location, other than on foot.

    Savannah paused and listened to a couple of doves cooing in an oak tree. The nearby stream burbled with a relaxing, peaceful sound that belied the violence done here.

    But Savannah’s thoughts couldn’t be soothed by any of nature’s gentle melodies. Because, until today, no one had considered that a seventy-year-old retired army colonel, an arthritis-plagued war hero, a grief-stricken father and worriedsick grandfather, could have made his way into this remote location.

    Standing there, looking at the miserable little shed where the deed had been done, Savannah wondered if Colonel Neilson had killed Earl Mallock. She wondered if she would have done the same thing; she strongly suspected