Page 11 of Return of the Spider

“I got there and saw the Bronco sitting there, and I got angry because you’re not supposed to be in here with a rig, you know? I walked up and saw the bullet hole through the side window. And then the boy lying on top of the girl. I turned around and rode back here just as the ranger was pulling into the parking lot. End of story.”

“Thank you,” I said, exaggerating my lip movements to be clear.

He shrugged. “A prime fishing dawn ruined. But it could have been worse. I could have been in the car with them.”

Quirk told us he’d seen two sets of big tire tracks traveling the towpath south to the cutoff toward the west branch of the Potomac, then only the Bronco’s tracks heading down the cutoff and another vehicle’s coming back the other way.

“You an expert on tire tracks?” Sampson asked.

“Hard not to see them,” Quirk said.

We left him, went back to Ranger Mulberry. “Can you drive us to within a hundred yards of that cutoff?” I asked.

“We’ll be driving over their tracks,” she said.

“They’ll be the same tracks down there,” Sampson said. “We’ll have forensics take samples over there.”

“Your jurisdiction, your call,” the ranger said.

We crossed the lock and the bridge and headed south on the towpath. Quirk had been right—it was hard to miss the tire tracks in most places.

A few hundred yards south of the bridge, I noticed something on the towpath and said, “Stop.”

The ranger stopped. Sampson and I got out and saw shards of clear and red plastic on the path. John said, “Looks like pieces of a headlight and blinker.”

Almost as soon as he said that, we heard “Ahh” coming from the woods to our right. We went toward the sound and saw a man lying by a tree stump, a good thirty feet from the path. He was on his side, facing us, entangled in a bicycle frame that was bent like a V.

“Call an ambulance!” I shouted to the ranger and followed Sampson into the woods. The closer we got, the more blood we saw on the biker’s bearded face and the more unnatural the angles of his legs and arms looked.

“Sir, can you hear us?”

“Ahh,” he wheezed. “Hepp.”

“Help’s coming,” I said.

“Who hit you?” Sampson said.

He wheezed again. His jaw looked swollen.

“Sir?”

But he’d closed his eyes. Mulberry ran up. “Ambulance is ten minutes out. Jesus, what happened to him?”

I said, “Wild guess, I bet he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit by whoever was fleeing.”

John said, “We have to treat this part of the path as its own crime scene.”

“Agreed,” I said. “I think we should call for a backup team to treat this as an attempted murder, and we’ll go to the primary scene on foot.”

“You go on ahead,” the ranger said. “I’ll stay with the vic.”

Sampson said, “Once the EMTs get here and stabilize him, go through his pack there, see if he’s got identification.”

The bicyclist wheezed again. Mulberry went to him, said, “Just hang on a little bit longer and we’ll get you to a hospital.”

We left the two of them and walked in the weeds next to the towpath all the way to the cutoff. As Quirk had said, there was a single set of tracks there heading to the west fork.

It was nearly eight a.m. when we reached the opening above the river and saw the Bronco. Sampson walked toward the SUV, looking for footprints in the soil.