Fatalis (4 page)

Two glowing orbs hung above the body in the fine rain. They moved down and then away.

A moment later there was only the rain.

Hannah Hughes stepped from the stall shower. She was headachy and tired as she cracked the bathroom door to let out the steam. Her eyes felt bloated, her round cheeks hurt, and her temples were making a chugging sound.

The rain didn't help. Gray weather, gray mood had always been a mathematical certainty in her life, along with other certainties like super-well-groomed guy, self-absorbed guy. Jocky guy, self-absorbed guy. Guy who drank, guy who overdrank. One day she'd write a book of certainties.

The petite young woman slipped a big towel from the hook behind the door and began drying off. The founder, editor, and publisher of
The Coastal Freeway
, Hannah was tired because she'd only slept for four hours after working eighteen hours straight. Senior reporter Jimmy Taubman had been trying to finish his feature on La Nina for today's edition and junior reporter Susan Crab had spent the previous day bopping between the drizzle-soaked Montecito Trails Foundation San Ysidro Saddleback Loop Trail Run and the Semana Nautica 1SK at San Marcos High School. That left only Hannah to write and edit the page-one stories and come up with the editorial. She always saved that for last; opinion pieces always had more teeth when she was tired and less inhibited.

But while Hannah wasn't quite ready to rumba, she had faith in what one of her journalism professors at Brown University used to call "the adrenaline rush of the world, the flesh, and the devil." Something would always come along to get her engine going.

Pulling on a white terrycloth robe, Hannah rubbed the steamy mirror with her sleeve, and began blow-drying her short, brown hair. As she did, she looked unhappily in the mirror.

She looked wan and tired, like the sober, tiny black-and-white photo on the "Hughes Views" editorial column. Even when she didn't look pale, Hannah hated what another college "mentor"-her then-boyfriend Jean-Michel-used to lovingly call her "angelic" look. Hannah would gladly surrender her inheritance to be a few inches taller. Nothing Amazonian, maybe five-foot-seven with strong cheekbones and dark, compelling Asiatic eyes. Instead, she had large, pure-blue, Lithuanian eyes and a round youthful face that made her seem even younger than her twenty-five years. Younger and more innocent. Whenever she interviewed men they tended to talk distractedly or with polite condescension, as though neither she nor the piece had any weight. A handful, like Sheriff Malcolm Gearhart, barely talked to her at all. What was
The Coastal Freeway
, after all, but a liberal-leaning daily giveaway, fighting for attention in a TV-and-Internet dominated world and earning over half its income from personals placed by lonely women in Ojai and horny men everywhere else. Sheriff Gearhart once said that more people picked up the paper to catch grease during lube jobs and scoop up dog poop in the street than to catch the news. He wasn't right about that, though Hannah knew that if she weren't the daughter of billionaire transportation giant Arthur Curry Hughes, many of the politicians, CEOs, and local movie bigs probably wouldn't talk to her at all. Many were closeted and not-so-closeted woman-haters.

Powerful men, closet misogynists
, Hannah thought. That was another certainty.

Other members of the Santa Barbara County Women's Business Association said the same thing. Samantha Patrick bought Kevin Gold's computer store, didn't change a thing, and watched business fall off thirty percent. Caroline Bennett, owner of Bennett's Surf, said she actually lost customers when she inherited the place from her father. Same fish, same trucks but until she lowered her prices, they went elsewhere.

Interviews with women tended to go better for Hannah, not only because it was us-against-them in many cases but because it was often like talking to her mom or sister. They trusted Hannah and usually gave her terrific quotes wrapped around bare-soul confessions.

Unfortunately, not enough women were part of the Ventura-to-Santa Barbara political and business networks that made decisions-and news. Power was still a boy's club.

Hannah thought she heard her cell phone. She shut off the hair dryer. She couldn't understand why manufacturers didn't make these things quieter. Maybe they were afraid we'd think they weren't working. She'd mention it to her Friday at Home editor. Hair dryers, vacuums, and other things we didn't have to hear were too loud. Phones, car ignitions, and things we had to hear weren't loud enough. There had to be a reason why.

The phone beeped again. Hannah put the dryer down and walked into the bedroom of her beachfront condo. The glass sliders, crawling with rain, looked out onto a choppy, overcast sea. What was that, twelve gray days in a row?

Hannah looked away. Ever since she was a kid in Newport, Rhode Island, she suspected that she was the next stage in evolution. A human solar battery. That was why she'd moved to Southern California after graduating from school. Bake her with sunshine and she could run happily and productively forever. Even when she was tired. But darken the day, cool the air, force her to cover her arms and legs with fabric and she was ready to take hostages.

Hannah plucked the cell phone from the antique secretary beside the door. It was either her mother or her managing editor. She glanced at the digital clock on top of the dresser. It was nearly 7:00 A.M.; ten o'clock in Rhode Island. It couldn't be her mother. Evangeline Benn Hughes would be out on the tennis court at this hour.

"Good morning, Karen," Hannah said as she picked up a pen and pulled over a notepad from the state legislature.

"Good morning, Chief," Karen Orlando said. "Got what might be a hot one for you."

"Shoot."

"I just picked up a call from a Caltrans emergency road crew," Karen said. "A couple of engineers disappeared about an hour ago while they were checking a sinkhole up near Painted Cave. One of the crew members said he found blood on the road."

Hannah made notes. "But no trace of the engineers?"

"Zippo," Karen told her.

"What else?" Hannah asked.

"The crew guy said the sinkhole was 'fatiguing,' whatever that means," Karen went on. "Falling in, I guess. So they're going to have to dig. A second emergency crew is on the way. So is Sheriff Gearhart."

Hannah was waking up fast. With the possible exception of Caltrans, no one hated her more than Sheriff Gearhart. The prospect of getting them both to talk to her was the kind of masochistic challenge Hannah loved.

"I would've sent Jimmy to cover this," Karen said, "but he's rushing to make deadline and before calling in any stringers I figured you-"

"Absolutely," Hannah said. "Caltrans is mine." The headache, lethargy, and exhaustion were gone. "Where's the sinkhole?" Hannah asked.

"It's just east of the cave itself," Karen told her.

"Did they say what shape the road's in?"

"Route 154 and East Camino Cielo are open," Karen said, "though the area around the sinkhole is closed off for two hundred yards in both directions. You'll have to park and walk."

Hannah thought for a second. It was less than three hours before today's edition went to press. She also liked to push herself with breaking news. This was doable.

"I should be there in about a half hour," Hannah said.

"Have Walter meet me at the site and tell Weezie I'll E-mail the story in. Save me two columns above the fold."

"You got it."

Hannah thanked her and hung up. She didn't bother finishing her hair. The dampness on the hill would cause it to frizz anyway. Pulling on black jeans and a
Coasted Freeway
sweatshirt, she slipped on her dog tags and then grabbed her red leather shoulder bag and dropped the cell phone inside. Her office-on-the-hoof, she called it. A high school graduation present from her mother, the bag contained two audio microcassette recorders, her nearly indispensable Palm VII electronic organizer, a no-tech notepad and pens in the event of Palm VII battery crash, and a digital camera in case Walter got a flat.

Within five minutes Hannah was in her red Blazer, listening to the radio talk between Caltrans headquarters and the crew as she tore along the damp, deserted side streets toward the mountains.

Thanks to three cups of coffee, two hundred pushups-using just the first three fingers of each hand to strengthen them- and eagerness to get out of the house, Jim Grand was alert as he drove to the office.
His
office. The mountains.

The terrain of the peaks in the upper Santa Ynez Mountains was extremely steep and unstable, with loose boulders, muddy slopes, and ledges made of leaf-thin layers of rock. Eroded by millennia of wind, water, and tectonic activity, the ledges crumbled easily underfoot. Caves here were often the home to bobcats and brown bears while tumbleweeds and scrub frequently concealed deep pits and crevasses. On days when the clouds were low and covered the peaks, visibility was no more than three or four feet. At night, temperatures typically fell to well below freezing. During the winter, snow and fine, clear ice made the mountains as deadly as higher, more infamous ranges. During the warmer seasons, unwary climbers often rappelled into fields that were used for turkey shoots. Smug mountaineers who saw the peaks as a warm-up for tougher challenges frequently had to be hauled out by the highly skilled members of the Los Padres division of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team.

Jim Grand had climbed, fought, and studied the Santa Ynez Mountains for nearly seven years, ever since he'd returned to UCSB to take over the classes of his former professor Joseph Stroud Tumamait. Tumamait had abruptly left his post to found the environmental group
Hutash
, the Chumash word for earth. Grand knew the mountains well, he respected their moods, and above all he enjoyed the challenge of what Tumamait-when he still had a sense of humor- once referred to as "one of earth's most seductive and temperamental erogenous zones."

But then, the world of mountains, canyons, caves, cave paintings, and especially prehistoric civilization like the Chumash was one that Grand had loved for nearly thirty years.

Crouched on a narrow ledge in a dark, dome-topped cave, Grand was surprisingly rested. For someone who once called petrified wood a pillow, the desk hadn't been half-bad. When the alarm went off in the bedroom five hours later he was alert and ready to focus on the job at hand. He had no classes to teach until the following afternoon and, for the time being, the only ghosts he had to deal with were those of the ancients.

Grand was dressed in warm, light blue, waterproof microfleece pants and a yellow wool jacket The jacket was cut long to keep his backside and upper legs warm, though he had removed the large, zip-away peaked hood. Grand had always preferred to go bareheaded when he was exploring a cave. If something came loose from above he wanted to hear it; small stones often fell before larger ones. And if one of those bobcats or bears came along, or if he went someplace where there were rattlesnakes, he wanted to be able to hear them too. Right now, all he heard was the hollow but delicate trickle of water spilling in from the swallow hole and dripping down the sides of the ledge.

Grand finished checking the pulley rig. It was attached to the rock at the very edge of the cave ledge, held there by a widely set series of short pitons. Grand had designed the array himself to cause as little damage as possible to a site. Slipping the lightweight harness from his duffel bag, he fastened the thick waist-wrap tightly above his slender hipbones and slid his legs through the two, two-inch-wide nylon bands. He adjusted the slider buckles, leaving the leg loops relatively loose. This would give him extra mobility and also help to avoid "rug bum." Once the harness was on,

Grand attached two slender climbing ropes to the belay loop. The other ends of the two-hundred-foot nylon lines were coiled through the pulley system. He would hold one rope in each hand, using the one on the left to lower himself and the one on the right to pull himself up.

After making sure that the lines were secure and untangled, Grand lay them on the ledge and reached back into the bag. He slipped on his night-vision goggles. The four-inch-long cylindrical eyepieces amplified existing light from the visible through the infrared spectra and presented them in different intensities of green, shades to which the human eye was most sensitive. Then he hooked a compact 8-mm video-cassette recorder to his belt There was a lightweight headset and microphone built into the goggles and a small, silver tube attached to the right side of the frame. The tube contained a fiber-optic night-vision video camera, which was jacked into the tape machine. Everything Grand saw and described would be recorded. The tape was not only a useful study tool, it was a valuable precaution. Chumash cave art had been painted with brushes made of animal tails that had been dipped into bowls of powdered minerals such as hematite, diatomaceous earth, and manganese mixed for red, white, and black-the primary Chumash colors. Held together with a binder of animal fat, these pigments could be extremely volatile when exposed to air or light. Significant details, if not entire murals, could be lost within days of a cave being opened. In a geologically active zone, rock slides and earthquakes could also compromise or destroy the art. If anything like that happened here, at least there would be a record of the work.

Grand touched a button on the videocassette recorder. The machine began to hum.

"This is Jim Grand," be whispered. He was speaking softly so his voice wouldn't echo and cause dangerous vibrations. "I'm in a cave that's about fifty feet from the summit of La Cumbre Peak and about twenty-four-hundred feet above sea level. The opening of the cave is roughly a one-hundred-foot climb from East Camino Cielo Road. I came here after finding what seemed to be a reference to the mountain in the Chumash map painted in a cave on Figueroa Mountain. I found the entrance yesterday, on September thirteen, after it was exposed by a rockslide. There's a slide-path directly from the cave opening to a pile of boulders scattered thirty to fifty feet down. In size and composition the boulders match the sandstone on the summit. Their presence in the cave mouth could have been the result of tectonic activity or they may have been placed there by design."