“This is about the boys, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cade answered. “Gage said you’re law enforcement.”
“In the forest, anyway. Also a biologist. I can tell you which hat I prefer.” He leaned back, lifted his coffee, sipped and then sighed. “All right then. How can I help?”
DeeJay leaned forward. “We need to know how the perp got to the site where he hung the bodies last time. It’s not in the reports, and you know the country.”
“About as well as anyone,” he agreed. “Nobody asked me that before. Curious. Or maybe not. They found the scene so long after it all happened.” He straightened, put down his cup and began to sort through maps. “We’ve been looking for the boys, you know. None of us can get what happened last time out of our heads, so we’re looking to see if he’s stashing bodies in the forest again. Nothing so far.”
He pulled out one map, moved the stack to the side and unfolded the one he’d chosen.
“Did you get all your hikers safely out yesterday?” DeeJay asked.
He looked up from the map and smiled faintly. “We did. Those that wanted to ride it out are hunkered down in cabins we have here and there. Weren’t that many. Great skiing now, though, not to mention avalanche risk. I guess we just have to hope they aren’t too foolhardy.”
He pulled a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket and pointed to a spot on the map. “This is where the guy hung the kids last time. Pretty dense forest, lots of rocks, lots of undergrowth. Not the kind of place some hiker might come on casually.” He looked up, meeting their gazes. “Not an easy place to get to with a body.”
“ATV?” Cade asked.
“Possible, but it wouldn’t be a straight line. What are you hoping for?”
“A direction he might have come from.”
Craig nodded and looked down at the map. “Considering we allow ATVs only on designated trails, he’d have been running a real risk coming that way.”
“He’s a risk taker,” DeeJay said. “He wouldn’t be operating here again otherwise.”
“I figured that. Well, I’ll be honest. There’s no real trail in that area, not close by anyway. And these maps don’t say much about what’s growing there, where the boulders are and so on. You’re going to be relying a lot on my memory here, unless you want me to go out there and ride over it. And if he came up over the property that the resort just brought...well, that’s private and never been my headache. After all they’ve done out there to put in the slopes and build roads, it would be pretty much impossible to tell anything now.”
Cade leaned closer. “So he could have come across the private property, then into the forest land?”
Craig nodded. “It would be my guess he did exactly that. Less chance of running into me or one of the other rangers, who’d have given him hell for driving off a designated trail. Nobody would think twice about him doing that on basically abandoned private property.”
DeeJay looked at the map. She was reasonably good at reading them—it had been part of her early training—but as a military cop she hadn’t often needed to rely on terrain maps. “There was a way to get up there on the private property?”
“Most likely.” He drew a finger down the map south of the forest boundary. “Lots of people have bought that land and sold it over the years, all of them with ideas for some kind of resort. None of them ever came to fruition until this last group. Luke Masters could probably tell you better than anyone what kind of access there was before the build started. I’m sure there was some. Maybe enough to get a pickup truck at least part of the way. Then an ATV? I don’t know. It’s pretty rugged out that way, but you’d either have to hoof it or use an ATV to get up that far. I’d bet on it.”