Page 41 of Shadow Sabotage
He refocused on the conversation. “So, May would have been easy, but with a high potential for witnesses. Maybe that’s good. Gives us a place to start. What about earlier? March. Assume Katelyn was killed shortly after she left Laramie and that someone wanted to dump the body at the campground while it was closed. How would they have gotten in?”
“They would have had to hike in,” I said. “Either on the main road by walking around the gate or by taking a nearby trail and cutting over.”
“Walk me through it.”
I closed my eyes, picturing the area. Considering possibilities, eliminating them. Then I found one—a good one.
“There’s a trailhead that connects to the primitive campground. It would have been under snow in March, but it’s a popular route for snowshoers. To get all the way from the trailhead to the spot we found Katelyn is a long walk for most people though. Fifteen miles or so. That’s a long hike in good weather. In snowshoes, it would be even more strenuous.”
Incredibly strenuous, actually. It was the kind of thing the SAR team did all the time, but most people? No way. Snowshoeing burned almost a thousand calories an hour, and that was without carrying a body.
I was ready to discard the idea altogether when I suddenly realized how easy it could be. My eyes popped open and I grabbed Vance’s arm.
“But take that same route on a snowmobile? Easy.”
Chapter Fourteen
Vance
A snowmobile.Claire was convinced that was how Katelyn’s body had gotten into the park. I was starting to think she might be onto something.
There wasn’t much security for the area, but they did have cameras on the gates along with a timestamp record of every time it opened. Between March thirteenth and May fifteenth, the gate had only opened a handful of times, and each incident had been connected to specific work being done at the park.
I got the names of every contractor and employee who’d been on site. It was possible one of them was our killer, that they’d brought Katelyn there and dumped her body hoping the animals would take care of it before the park opened. That would have been risky though. You never wanted a body to be found somewhere connected to you.
After talking with the park director, I had Claire walk me through the campground and show me trail connections and possibilities. She knew the place like the back of her hand. Wetossed ideas back and forth, running different scenarios, and I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed working with her.
We ended up back where we’d started, standing at the top of the embankment that led to where we’d found Katelyn.
“There are far better places here to dump a body,” I said.
“Definitely,” Claire agreed. “And I haven’t even shown you everything. There are some places here where she wouldneverhave been found.”
I chuckled. “Do you spend a lot of time thinking about where to hide your victims?”
“The opposite, actually.” The weight of regret was in her voice.
I turned my head, looked at her. She stared down the slope with a troubled look on her face.
“Your SAR victims?” I asked.
She swallowed hard. “Yeah. We don’t lose people often, but… Man, it sucks when we do.”
I stayed quiet, giving her space to keep going.
But she squared her shoulders and turned the conversation back to Katelyn. “This is the Bighorns. Most beautiful place on earth, if you ask me. But unlike Glacier and Yellowstone, you can hike for days here and not run across another human being. There’s a million places to hide a body. Why here?”
The answer came to me quickly. “Because it was easy.”
“It’s still not smart,” she said, shaking her head.
I turned, looking back toward the campsite. “You’re right about that. But if the killer came here on snowmobile, this spot makes perfect sense. This is the most secluded site of all. It’s tucked into the trees, and you can’t see it until you’re right up on it.”
“Yeah. That’s why I always pick it when I camp here. It’s private.”
“Exactly. Killers like privacy.” I pictured it in my mind, watching it play out. “Maybe he doesn’t have snowshoes or isn’t physically capable of carrying a body very far. So he comes in on the trail, drives the loop, and finds this spot. It’s perfect. Pulls in, starts looking for a place to dump the body. He could have driven the snowmobile right up to the tree line. Getting back up the hill would have been brutal, but pulling a body down it? Not so hard.”
“He could have taken the snowmobile way past the tree line,” Claire pointed out. “The path is wide enough up here that an experienced snowmobiler could drive all the way to where the trail narrows.”
