“Show me.” Beverly put two plastic toolboxes onto the ground and slipped the strap of her camera bag from her shoulders.
It took the two investigators less than ten minutes to follow the trail of drying blood six hundred feet into the forest. Jack worked quickly, marking each new droplet with a small yellow flag while Beverly lagged behind, photographing and collecting each drop before documenting its exact location with a handheld GPS unit.
Finally, seeing no more blood, Jack stood and stretched his aching back. Turning, he felt his stomach fall. The top of his patrol car was only barely visible while the Lincoln was completely hidden in the shadows. If the blood really did belong to the missing woman, and she had come this far into the woods, she could easily have become lost. Especially if you were hurt. He looked around the woods, his eyes struggling to adjust to the dappled light.
His gaze fixed on something he couldn’t quite make out. He stared for a moment then realized he was looking at a bare human arm draped over a moss-covered log.
“Beverly! About two hundred feet!” He ran toward the arm and found it attached to a small, unconscious woman. One of her shoes was missing and her blouse and jacket were so badly torn she was nearly naked from the waist up. Her red wool skirt was soaked in blood, much of which, he realized, likely came from the still-oozing wound on the side of her head.