TWENTY-SEVEN

The brand on the horse’s flank confirmed it was from Mitch Evans’s livery. It stood in the shade of an oak, its reins tied in a knot around the branch.

The knot told Carney something. Someone familiar with horses would have made a loop, slid the ends beneath the loop, and pulled it tight. This one, on the other hand, was clumsy and overdone.

He climbed down from his own horse and walked closer.

Pierce, who had ridden in silence, began to dismount. But his lack of expertise with horses was obvious as he struggled out of the saddle, sliding in the stirrup and pulling on the mane. He gave the animal plenty of room as he walked away, as if expecting to be kicked, and Carney had a few seconds alone to study the scene before Pierce made it beside him.

“This explains how the bloodhounds didn’t pick up any scent beyond the livery,” Pierce said. “They rode it to here. But why park it here? They must have known we would locate it.”

Carney grunted. Wasn’t worth the effort to tell Pierce that horses weren’t parked. He focused on the livery horse’s saddle. It was askew—just slightly. As if something heavy had slid off of it.

Carney looked at crushed grass and bent branches just past the horse, in the direction the saddle had shifted.

“Someone rolled off the horse,” he said. “Someone bigger than the boy or the girl. Kept rolling too.”

Carney pointed to the obvious trail. He followed but didn’t have to go far to find footprints at the base of a tree, toes outward. The prints were undefined, as if the feet had shifted back and forth.

He took out his vidpod and snapped some photos. Whoever it was had backed into the tree.

“Busted shoelace.” Pierce pointed at the ground. “Strip of cloth.”

Carney took another photo and used a twig to pick up the shoelace. He held it out for Pierce to inspect. It was a single piece of bootlace. The ends had been knotted together, and the knot was two-thirds down the length of lace.

Carney watched Pierce look closely at the tree. Waist high. “There,” Pierce said. “Like a knife tip had been jammed into the tree.”

Carney pretended to take a close look too. While he could see a shoelace clearly enough at arm’s length, he’d have to take Pierce’s word for the mark on the tree. Not the first time that Carney felt disgust about his failing eyes. “So?”

“You’re on a horse, and someone’s used that lace to tie your wrists together,” Pierce said. “Probably your ankles too, otherwise you would have walked to the tree, not rolled to hit it. Strip of cloth here means you’re gagged. They leave you on the horse. You roll off. You’ve got a knife in your front pocket, and when you get to a tree, you stand. Reach into your pocket for the knife, maybe your hands were tied in front of you, not back. Mistake easily made if whoever tied you hasn’t done it much. So you unfold your knife and jam it, blade first, into a tree. Now you have something to cut against. It’ll take a few seconds to snap through the lace, and you leave it there, knot in the middle. You ditch the gag and untie the lace around your ankles, but you keep that one, because later you can put it back in your boot. But you’re in a hurry now. Any second someone might show up and find the horse.”

Not bad, Carney thought.

“Was it your deputy? He big enough to make a hole like that through this brush?” Pierce answered his own question. “Nope. The girl and the boy aren’t big enough to lift him on a horse, let alone subdue and tie him. Chances are it was someone else and the deputy did all the hard work.”

Carney grunted again.

“Why go to all this work?” Pierce said. “There’s three of them. The girl. The factory boy. Your deputy. If this is a fourth person, why kidnap him, tie him up, and leave him with the horse from the livery?

“The one they tied up, whoever it was, and left behind, he must have had a horse when they found him. They took his horse and kept going. Back at your office, the guy is probably waiting to report all this. Once we start tracking his horse, we’ll find them.”

“Curfew.”

“Right.” Pierce made a clucking sound. “Anyone our three met last night was out after curfew. With the horse they took from him. No one will be in your office to incriminate himself.”

“Not yet.” Carney squinted at the screen of his vidpod and made a few adjustments. “Just logged in the coordinates of this location. We can do a reverse trace. Send in this location and approximate time, and we’ll get back a list of all the vidpods that went through this area overnight. That will lead us to the owner.”

“Unless the owner threw out his vidpod too.”

“Nobody moves anywhere without a vidpod. Penalties are too severe. Besides, people get lost in this territory. These parts are like an overgrown maze, and the vidpod has software to help him find his way around.”

“Unless your deputy stole it after dumping his.”

“Billy’s stupid, but not so stupid he’d ignore a knife while going through the guy’s pockets for a vidpod. And if he did steal the vidpod, when we track it, we’ll find Billy. He knows that, so he wouldn’t steal it. And…there’s something else,” Carney said. “If this played out as we suspect, how could this person have traveled after curfew on horseback without triggering any alarms?”

Pierce shook his head. “Explain.”

“Our satellite software is set up to alert the sheriff of the nearest town if any of the horse GPS chips are moving after curfew. So why didn’t I know about the other horse last night?”