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the scuffle could have occurred here. It’s not a convenient place to dump a body, and he’s one-forty if he’s a pound, so I can’t see someone lugging him all the way in here just to get rid of him. But the guy must have walked back toward Park Road and not the ballpark, unless he could fly. Then Mom and the cops and you and I obliterated his prints. We haven’t looked at the boy’s shoes yet. We were waiting for you.”
    Theresa crouched next to Don and poked at the meager belongings removed from the boy’s pockets. Jacob had carried his wallet with two dollars and fifty-three cents in it, an iPod, and a spring-loaded knife in excellent condition. “So he met someone out here?”
    “His dealer, I’ll bet,” Frank said. “No matter what Mom says, no doubt this kid had some connections. He tries to stiff the guy—no pun intended—or they disagree on terms.”
    Don suggested, “A girlfriend? She took her purse to his head when he tried to get friskier than she was in the mood for?”
    Theresa shook her head. “Not unless she carries a brick in her purse. What about his two friends? I assume you’ve sent a car to their homes?”
    Frank nodded. “It’s kind of weird if you think about it.”
    “What is? I mean, aside from a teenager freezing to death five hundred feet from his house?”
    “This is the second frozen body we’ve found in as many weeks, and both sitting up against something. Usually our frozen people are in cars or apartments where the heat was turned off or something, not usually completely
outside
.” No one in Cleveland took the weather that casually, not even murderers.
    “She was a black thirty-year-old hooker, and she was strangled. This is a white high school student with a bump on his head. Not too many similarities there. Speaking of his bump, any sign of a weapon?”
    “We’re surrounded by them,” Frank said.
    She looked around. The open spaces between tree trunks bulged with fallen limbs, twigs, and dirt, all melting into the same shade of white-topped brown. Snow penetrated the canopy in inconsistent patches, making it impossible to tell what might have been recently disturbed, whether a piece of wood had been flung in from the path or had been lying there since the previous fall. They would canvass, but a needle in a haystack would be a breeze by comparison. She got on the other side of the boy and motioned to Don. “Let’s turn him. I want to get a look at his shoes.”
    The boy wore Nikes with a standard waffle pattern. Stepping gingerly, Theresa noted that the prints farther up the trail matched his down to a worn spot on the right toe, as if he had continued along the path for a few feet and then stopped. Had his attacker called out to him? Then he’d turned back, because he knew who it was.
    The print to the right of the tree, however, consisted of plain tread lines crossing the foot, almost like Keds or some other lightweight wear. It certainly didn’t belong to the victim or any of the large men surrounding her now. “What did the mother do when she found the body?”
    Frank said, “Screamed, touched his face, and checked his neck for a pulse—as if his subzero temperature didn’t tip her off—and ran back to her house to call 911.”
    “That’s all?”
    “I asked her three times.”
    The print looked too large for the mother, anyway. “We’re going to have to cast that.”
    “In snow?” Don asked. “I thought that was, like, nearly impossible.”
    “Just about. But after my last experience with shoe prints I didn’t lift, I’m not taking any chances.” Casting compound generated heat as it hardened, which, obviously, had a deleterious effect on prints in snow. Some precasting sprays provided limited help. But forensic scientists didn’t get to create their scenes; they could only work with what they were given. “I’ll get the tripod and the shutter remote for the camera.”
     
     
    Theresa and Don examined Jacob’s bedroom with its worn