Snakes & Ladders Read Free Page B

Before she could say more, he turned back towards the Lucky Lodge.
    In the five o’clock darkness, the building looked even more dilapidated. He took out his flashlight and set the cone to the halfway setting for equal amounts of intensity and expanse. Then he began scouring the crabgrass, taking slow careful steps – the last thing they needed right now was to step on and destroy any trace evidence.
    Felicia came up beside him to assist in the search.
    ‘He ran this way,’ Striker explained. ‘Landed right over there beside the power box. Look for footprints and any electrical stuff, too. Wires, a lens, whatever. Maybe he left something behind.’
    They moved closer to the area where the suspect had landed.
    ‘It’s so cold, the ground is like rock,’ he said. ‘When he landed, he must’ve landed hard.’
    Felicia kept looking. ‘He get hurt?’ she asked without looking up.
    ‘Dunno. He could’ve – though you’d never know it from the way he raced out of here.’
    ‘I’ll call the hospitals.’
    ‘That’s not a bad idea.’ Striker pointed to the east. ‘Maybe he sprained something. Broke a bone, if we’re lucky.’
    Felicia thought this over. ‘If he was high, he could’ve fractured a bone and not even known it – but he will later when the juice wears off.’ She got on the phone and called Central Dispatch. She got them to flag all the hospitals for patients coming in with injuries that could possibly be related to a high fall.
    While she did this, Striker continued searching the outer perimeter for evidence. He did a grid search, line by line. It was an arduous process, but the best way to go. In cases like these, it was one hundred per cent necessary.
    No evidence could be overlooked.
    Not three minutes later, he found a footprint. It was not overly far from where the suspect had landed – just east of the utility box – in a patch of earth that had been recently covered with fresher ground from the construction work in the next-door lot.
    Striker squatted close to the footprint. It was a right-foot imprint. Standard size, maybe a ten or eleven. But that was not what got his attention. What stole his focus was the sole pattern in the mud. It was a checkered tread, and the grooves were deep. The imprint itself was level for the most part, but wore away almost completely near the toe.
    Striker looked around the area, and found a left-shoe imprint that matched in size and tread. He noted that the toe of this shoe was not as worn as the right.
    When Felicia finished her phone conversation, she joined him once again. He showed her his find.
    ‘What does that wear on the toe tell you?’ he asked.
    ‘The wearer had an awkward gait. Maybe from some type of previous injury. Or a leg length discrepancy.’
    Striker agreed.
    They marked the area off for Ident to do a casing of the shoe prints. Then they continued the search.
    Nearly a half-hour later they had cleared the lane, the vacant lot to the west, and were now performing a final search of where the suspect had landed. Striker paused for a moment to look up at the window. Unit 305. From down here, it looked awfully high up.
    Felicia nudged him. ‘He had a mask on, right?’
    ‘Yeah. Black leather thing. Narrow eye slits. Kinda like the one you wore on our first date.’
    ‘Yes, well, I like to surprise my men.’ Felicia looked up to the same window. ‘No power at all, huh?’
    ‘All the power’s been cut off, and it looks like it’s been that way for a long time. We’ll check with the City for an exact date.’
    Felicia thought this over. ‘This guy . . . could he have been a squatter?’
    ‘Maybe. Or even some toad with a warrant. Who knows? Anything’s possible at this point. But it doesn’t explain why he’d have a camera set up outside her window.’
    Felicia nodded, but said nothing.
    Striker swept the flashlight through the blades of crisp grass. He was just about to leave the area when he spotted a glint of silver, coming