"And yet, just now, you called it a murder?"

"Well, from the explosion of the cranial cavity, I suspected a small caliber, high velocity projectile, tumbling end over end, entering from the rear, and exiting out the top of the skull."

"Hump. I didn't catch that bit of detail at all. And I've seen the murdered remains of the Bog People whose skulls were bashed in long ago by stone age weapons."

"To follow up, just this morning I found a spent .222 shell casing."

"Jesus! We really are holding back information. Didn't the sheriff question that the skull had been scattered outward, instead of in?"

"He was mad that you had gone fishing."

"Good thinking. That was a better story than my checking on missing mountain climbers."

"Jenny's thought," Hap said as he patted his daughter's hand while she sat silently listening, dumbfounded, to the discussion. "She felt that mountain climbers in distress might be too good of a story for the press to overlook. Anyhow, 'Willie-B' had to hike into my camp. Then he borrowed my radio to call for a helicopter to move the body, and to save his walking out. He got into quite an argument over the airwaves with the Forest Service, and his county supervisors, over that. You are not exactly his favorite person right now. I doubt he would be very understanding about our —and note the plural —sitting on 'our' theory and evidence."

"It's not too late. Maybe I should tell him. After all the shell casing is the first piece of proof that what had started as a 'what if' conversation, may, or may not, be a possibility."

"Wrong, on two counts. The murder was the first confirmation. And, I don't trust the sheriff."

"Why?"

"Am I correct in assuming that you and I are the only ones who know where the wreckage was found?"

"Yes."

"And that you reported the site as the terminal moraine of Heartbreak Glacier to the sheriff, and asked him to keep this fact confidential?"

"Right. None of the newspapers pinpointed the location as anything other than the 'snowy slopes of Mt. Cascade'."