doing something physical and hurt himself. It’s easy to forget that beyond his epilepsy, he’s just a typical boy who loves sports. Everything physical—soccer, basketball, baseball. You name it.”
“I noticed your son has some pictures in his room of your late husband in climbing gear.”
She smiled, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I guess you could say Rick was an adrenaline junkie. He always skied black diamond runs, kayaked Class Five rapids and climbed any route above a 5.8.”
There were some who would put Cale in that same category. When he wasn’t working, he was usually heading to southern Utah to bike the slickrock or go canyoneering through the slots. Adrenaline junkie was probably an accurate term.
“What about you?” he asked Megan.
A corner of her mouth lifted, though the worry in her eyes robbed the expression of any semblance to a smile. Seeing her halfhearted effort still gave him a catch in his chest and he was astonished to find himself wondering what a full-on smile from her would look like.
“I knit, Agent Davis. That’s about as exciting as I get.”
“You never joined your husband when he climbed?”
She shrugged. “I went along a few times when Rick and I were first dating. Trying to be a good girlfriend, you know, interested in the things he liked to do. But I’m not crazy about heights, and he figured that out pretty quickly and wouldn’t let me harness up anymore. After that, I just took along a book, found a shady spot and tried not to get too nervous about watching him conquer some tricky cornice or something. Why are you asking about climbing?”
He trusted her, he thought again. She deserved to know the direction the investigation was taking them. “Can you come outside with me to take a look at something?”
She looked puzzled but rose immediately and followed him out the back door and around the side of the house toward Cameron’s bedroom.
“You told Sheriff Galvez the alarm system was set and the dead bolt was locked on the outside doors, correct?” he asked as they walked.
“Yes.”
“Are you positive about that?”
“Absolutely. I double-checked them when I woke up, before I found Cam missing. I always do when I wake up in the night. I’m still a city girl at heart, I guess.”
“If that’s true, the only other exit is out the window. You told the sheriff that when you found Cameron wasn’t in bed the window was open but the screen was in place, right?”
“That’s right.”
“The state crime scene detective has determined the screen was in backward, as if someone replaced it from the outside. That’s consistent with the window-as-exit-route theory, but we can’t find any evidence on the ground of ladder impressions. It’s always a possibility the rain may have washed it away. Or Cameron may have taken another route down.”
“Like what?”
He pointed to the discovery he’d made earlier with Wilhelmina Carson. “Take a look at those holes there. What do they look like?”’
She frowned. “I don’t know. Termites?”
He caught his smile before it could even start. If those were termite holes, the whole house was in serious trouble. “Look at how uniformly round they are, and the placement of them.”
She stuck a finger in the lowest one, the same one he had used to launch upward. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
He sighed, his shoulder already crying out in protest at what he knew he would have to demonstrate again. He slipped off his shoes and socks again and used the finger holes to scale the wall, stopping a few lengths below where he’d climbed with Willy.
When he dropped to the ground, she stared at him as if he had just stripped naked and cartwheeled across her flower garden.
“You can’t honestly believe Cam used those tiny holes to climb out of a second-story window?”
“The crime scene investigator dusted for prints. She found several sets of prints inside the holes. All of them consistent with what we believe are Cam’s from the evidence in his bedroom.”
“He’s nine years old, for heaven’s sake. And small for his age!”
“How much climbing experience has he had?”
She shivered, though the hot wind still blew out of the mountains. “Some. Okay, quite a bit. We had vaulted ceilings in our house in San Diego and Rick…Rick built a climbing wall in the playroom. Cam loved it, probably because it made him feel closer to his father.”
She stared at those holes, her delicate features troubled. “Suppose I buy your theory that he climbed out of his room on his own. Why on earth would he do such a thing in the middle of the night? Where would he go? Cam didn’t have friends around except his cousins. He wasn’t happy about moving away from San Diego, but he had no reason to run away!”
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