Blood Trail

but even they took both innate skill and years of practice to acquire the accuracy necessary. Throw in a moving target at five hundred yards. ...

    She'd once heard that according to all the laws of physics, a human being should not be able to hit a major league fastball. By those same laws of physics, the assassin had hit not one, but two, and hit them out of the ballpark besides.

    A quick search turned up rubs in the bark where he'd braced his weapon on the tree.

    "Unfortunately," she sighed, leaning her head back against a convenient branch, "discovering how and where brings me no closer to finding the answers to why and who." Closing her eyes for a moment, the sun hot against the lids, she wondered if she'd actually go through with it; if when she found the killer, she'd actually turn him over to the wer for execution. She didn't have an answer. She didn't have an alternative either.

    It was time to head back to the house and make some phone calls, although she had a sick feeling that a drive into town and a good look at Constable Barry Wu's sneakers would be more productive.

    Climbing down the tree took less time than climbing up but only because gravity took a hand and dropped her seven feet before she landed on a branch thick enough to hold her weight.
    Heart pounding, she made it the rest of the way to the ground in a slightly less unorthodox fashion.

    Had her Swiss army knife contained a saw, she would have attempted to remove that final branch, the one that lifted the climber out of the tree and into the light. Unfortunately, it didn't and whittling off a pine branch two inches in diameter didn't appeal to her. In fact, except for attempting to keep them out of those fields, there wasn't a damn thing she could do to prevent the tree from being used as a vantage point to shoot the wer.

    "Never a beaver around when you need one," she muttered, wishing she'd brought an ax. She had, however, uncovered two facts about the murderer. He had to be at least five foot ten, her height - any shorter and his shoulder wouldn't be level with the place where the rifle barrel had rested - and the odds were good that his hair was short and straight. She dragged a handful of needles and a small branch out of her short, straight hair. Had her hair been long or curly, she'd never had made it out of the tree alive.

    "Excuse me?"

    The shriek was completely involuntary and as she caught it before it passed her lips Vicki figured it didn't count. Her hand on her bag - it had made a useful weapon in the past - she whirled around to confront two puzzled looking middle-aged women, both wearing high-powered binoculars, one of them carrying a canvas bag about a meter long and twenty centimeters wide.

    "We were just wondering," said the shorter, "what you were doing up that tree."

    Vicki shrugged, waning adrenaline jerking her shoulders up and down. "Oh, just looking around." She waved a not quite nonchalant hand at the canvas bag. "You out here to do a little shooting?"

    "In a manner of speaking. Although this is our camera tripod, not a rifle."

    "It's illegal to shoot on conservation authority property," added the other woman. She glared at Vicki, obviously still unhappy at having found her up in a tree. "We would report anyone we found shooting out here, you can be certain of that."

    "Hey." Vicki raised both hands to shoulder height. "I'm unarmed." As neither woman seemed to appreciate her sense of humor, she lowered them again. "You're birders, aren't you?" A recent newspaper nature column had mentioned that birders was now the preferred term; bird-watcher having gone out of vogue.

    Apparently, the column had been correct.

    Twenty minutes later, Vicki had learned more about nature photography than she wanted to know; learned that in spite of the high-power binoculars the two women had seen nothing strange on the Heerkens farm - "We don't look at other people's property, we look at birds," -
    and, in fact, didn't even know where the Heerkens farm was; learned that a .30 caliber rifle and scope would easily fit into a tripod bag, allowing it to be carried into the woods without arousing suspicion. Although neither woman had ever come across a hunter, they'd both found spent shell casings and so were always on the look out. With middle-class confidence that no one would ever want to hurt them, they laughed at Vicki's warnings to be careful.

    There were two bird-watching clubs in London as well as a photography group run