Murder in a Hot Flash (28 page)

Where was the press now? The sheriff's department, the lawyer, Rita Latham, when she needed them? Aha, they had driven off into the desert, hidden their cars behind the bushes, and were even now sneaking back this way to the rescue. Oh no, better yet, all the cars and people were really there, she just couldn't see them without her contacts.

Charlie, get a life. This is serious.

I know.

Her last desperate struggle earned her a constellation of stars behind her eyes and a nasty pain in her head.

Voices and lights, many of them and from different directions, all alien and talking gibberish. Oh God, Mitch Hilsten was right. There are such things as UFOs and Charlie was on one. That's why there were two Scrags, one holding on to her and another busy elsewhere. That second one knew everything she and Mitch and Edwina and the Army and even the President didn't know. Even Universal Studios didn't know!

Oh boy.

Chapter
33

Acoyote squinted through dried grasses that matched the color of its coat, its sharp ears and pointed nose trained on Charlie. It was not wearing a bandanna.

“Venom in the scorpion's stinger is used to subdue struggling prey …”

“Charlie, I'm over here …”

A mule deer with a doe's sweet face regarded her with glinty-glass eyes. A bobcat slunk toward her with a frozen snarl.

Charlie lay on a rock floor surrounded by critters behind glass, each in a lighted habitat not much larger than its body.

“After shedding their first skin, these …”

“An ability to veer suddenly makes the bat's flight conspicuously erratic …”

“Don't know where you are, do you, Charlie?”

Wrong. Charlie knew exactly where she was and rolled out of the light on her section of floor. She came up against a turkey vulture hunkering, its enormous wings folded against its body, its featherless blood-colored head turned so it could inspect Charlie squarely with one black bead eye.

She crawled between it and the next display and tried to pull herself up by bracing between them, the pain in her head and the scrambled eggs and green peppers in her belly vying to see which would achieve critical mass first.

Bats, their pinned wings outspread, their eyeteeth agleam … snakes, lizards … big rats standing on their hind feet, little staring mice …

“One of America's largest birds of prey, the vulture also forages for carrion. Usually silent, this massive bird makes a hissing sound when …”

Each display had its own canned message available with the push of a button and someone had pushed all the buttons. There was only one recorded voice but all the messages came out of sync, sounding like a one-man crowd.

The dead wildlife, fuzzy in Charlie's impaired vision but quite recognizable up close with such dramatic stage lighting, ignored the educational intonations and watched with suspicion as Charlie crept past.

The room was dark, the only light coming from the displays as she rounded a dark corner trying to stay out of their illumination.

“This erosion process has taken approximately 150 million years. Much of it is caused by the river's slicing down into the earth's crust as land is forced upward.” The recorded voice had moved with her from wildlife to geology.

“Two thousand feet below, the Colorado River winds its way from the Continental Divide in Colorado to the Gulf of California, a distance of 1,400 miles.”

“‘No sand,' Earl had said, ‘No sand.'” A dark form stood outlined against the lighted display of a molded relief map covering most of a wall. “You know what that means, don't you, Charlie?”

And Charlie did all of a sudden, partly because she had by now identified her attacker. She was in the basement of the Visitors' Center. He would block off the exit up the main stairs. There would have to be a fire exit in a place open to the public. He was only one person. He couldn't block off two exits at once. She looked for a red sign.

“For centuries streams undercut walls and cliffs collapse. Mesas shrink to buttes and then to spires and they collapse, too, and disappear …”

“Couldn't resist the old Hilsten charm, could you? Tawny couldn't keep her hands off him either.” Her tormentor's voice came from a different part of the room each time he spoke and his shadow was gone from the map wall.

“Cracks of thunder split the air, clouds roll across the sun, streamers of rain stretch out to the canyons, but only under the darkest clouds do the drops reach the earth before evaporating …”

“You and Earl and Tawny, quite a threesome, weren't you?” The whisper was that of a deeply angered man and it came from behind a movable partition at the corner of which was a red glow. An exit sign?

“… Stronger, more resistant layers of rock remained to form a rim. Today, the inner crater is 1,500 feet deep and surrounded by cliffs of the Wingate Formation …”

“They found out about Ben, didn't they? And they told you. And the three of you planned to destroy me.”

This time he was right behind her and Charlie swung an elbow fortified by the hand on her other arm pushing with that arm's strength against the fist of this one. She connected with tooth-jarring precision.

He went down with a thud and she took off in the direction of that red glow, only to be dropped as he caught an ankle and pulled it out from under her.

Charlie hit her head on the back of the buzzard display and if she thought things were out of focus before … She had the illusion that the bird raised its massive wings and turned its own head to look down at her. She could have sworn she heard it hiss.

“… outer valley of the Kayenta layer, and finally a second and final lip of cliff formed by the sturdy Navajo sandstone …”

“I was always finding the three of you huddled off together in a corner somewhere.”

“The uranium-bearing layer is in the Chinle Formation.”

“I'm not good enough for you, but Hilsten is.”

Charlie had lost the soft slippers somewhere and he had no trouble removing the overlarge ranger pants even while they struggled.

“The benchlands and white rim belong to the boundary line between the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras and form …”

“That was a mud beach. There wasn't any sand to put in the jet boat's gas tank. So it
was
your sugar that wrecked the engine. That's what Earl …”

“And Ben's death was not a suicide.” John B. sounded euphoric. Surely he could see, whether he raped and killed Charlie or not, his number was up. “Got drunk as a skunk and I drowned him in his own pool. Poor guy'd gone bust. ‘Must have committed suicide,' everybody said. I was going for accidental death due to drunkenness but suicide was okay by me. Worked out fine.”

He was playing with her like Tuxedo, Libby's goddamned cat, played with injured birds, mice, bugs—played with anything injured that was smaller than itself. She squirmed out from under his hands and to her bare feet, knowing damn well he'd catch her again when he felt like it.

“And you thought Tawny and Earl had just discovered this and decided to tell me?”

“Oh no, they knew long before. But they didn't know I was on to them. That's why I assembled this crew for this shoot, at this place. They knew, Charlie. And then they told you.” He grabbed her shoulders and slid her down against the buzzard display and to the floor again.

“You meant to kill Tawny and Earl all along.” Like you mean to kill me. “I didn't know about Ben, honest. I don't think they did either.”

“The APC mines make economic use of the Cane Anticline core by using a solution process. Water from the Colorado River is pumped down through the dome and then upward into huge evaporation ponds.”

“Ben found out I was using the money to put together a film on the side, instead of for a housing development. Why Cabot you want to know, right?”

Actually, Charlie was past caring about anyone but herself, about anything but survival. Her eyesight diminished without corrective lenses, her strength nearly gone, her head and stomach threatening to explode in unison, no fingernails even to mark the bastard … he already had her legs parted so she couldn't do the knee thing mothers always encourage their daughters to resort to …

“I'll show you why, Agent Greene.” He got to his knees and pulled them both to their feet. “You're not a very good psychic, you know.”

John B. Drake turned her around and bent her over the buzzard. She thought he was going to enter her from behind, but he pushed her head down on top of the display. “I made a mistake. People do. You've sure made a bunch lately. See?”

And Charlie did see.

She also could not believe her luck. He turned her around but forgot to spread her legs before he moved his hands from her shoulders to pull her shirt away from her chest.

And for the first time in an incredibly long life Charlie got to use her mother's sagest advice. She gave it everything she had left.

The producer/director of
Return of an Ecosystem
careened off her with a roar of pain and the canned voice continued calmly, unaware of breaking glass, grunts, falling signs, and crashing room dividers. “The river itself has cut deeply into the Paradox Formation. The Paradox …”

“And I'll show you something else, Charlie Greene, I'll show you I'm twice the man I ever was …” His voice was soft and silky now but his S's hissed like an angered buzzard's.

The struggle must have reached the source of the recorded voice because it had finally gotten the message.

“Paradox,” it said clearly, “Paradox, Paradox, Paradox.”

Chapter
34

Maybe it was the fact that Charlie was completely naked now. Maybe it was because the producer/director of
Return of an Ecosystem
was concentrating more on his self-delusions than the reality of his chances of getting away with one more murder. Everybody knows about DNA and semen and stuff these days. And if the sheriff and the press had gone home, the rangers were still here, weren't they?

Whatever the reason, Charlie managed a last emergency squirm out of John B. Drake's grasp and nearly made her getaway good.

But she slammed into Mitch Hilsten at the bottom of the stairs and they both went down hard.

Charlie staggered to her feet first, only to be bowled over by Scrag Dickens as he vaulted down the stairs. This time she just lay still.

And the manic electric voice kept repeating, “Paradox” over the sounds of rage and scuffle and swearing.

Actually, it did seem paradoxical that someone so concerned over ecology as to make award-winning film about it thought nothing of murdering four people. It didn't fit anywhere in Charlie's stereotype file. Then again, she drew most of her perceptions from the writers she worked with and they were almost all liberal to the core. Any environmentalist would be the hero in their works because that was the natural order of things.

“Charlie?” The voice belonged to Mitch. “Go away.”

“What's happening?”

“Scrag and John B. are slugging each other somewhere between the Kayenta and the Mesozoic. Where the hell's that twit of a sheriff?” Charlie intended to live at least long enough to make Ralph Sumpter's day.

But Mitch was off to join the fray before she'd finished speaking.

It took her a while to figure that out. And to become aware that the “Paradox” voice had stilled, the lights in the displays had gone out. In her present and injured frame of reference, time was not a stable commodity.

There was still plenty of commotion from the men though, but it sounded far enough away for her to try again.

Charlie, still buck naked, was on her hands and knees at the top of the stairs when the press arrived. Somewhere between camera flashes Rita Latham, still dressed for the press, tried to block Charlie's present image from exposure while yelling lawyer talk about legal ramifications if they persisted.

Charlie did notice Sheriff Ralph getting in a self-righteous ogle or two first, though.

But it was Sidney Levit who removed his starched white shirt to cover her battered nakedness. Not only that, he lifted her, once wrapped, in his arms like the big rat had the fake ranger in the
Animal Aliens
army scene and carried her off.

She buried her head against his bare chest to ignore the media demands. “Sid? I'm sorry. I had to suspect everybody.”

“You don't have to be sorry, Charlie. I even sort of suspected your mom, just because it was easier. But I began to suspect Drake after Earl's death. I just couldn't understand what he had against Cabot.”

“That's just it. He didn't have anything against Cabot.”

“Poor Mitch.” Charlie rode beside Rita Latham on the long road out of Dead Horse Point State Park, dressed once again in borrowed ranger clothes.

“It would have been ‘poor Charlie' if Mitch had gone off with the rest of us,” the lawyer said ruefully and rolled down her window to let the chill air in to poor Charlie. “I can't believe I let myself get suckered in that way. Or Scrag Dickens either.”

“I can,” Charlie said.

“You're just lucky Mitch didn't fall for Scrag's story.”

John B. Drake had offered Scrag Dickens the only human role in a proposed nature series to be aired on prime time cable. John B. offered this morsel to the desert rat while the two were teamed up to look for Mitch at the cowboy line camp stop on the fated river trip. The series with Disney was a done deal but still a secret until certain financial matters were settled. Scrag was a perfect “character” for the part of host-narrator. No question, the one-time camp follower would accrue fame and fortune and travel the world.

“He even described how the show would open, with me in front of a campfire, playing my guitar and singing.” All Scrag had to do was to lie then, and again tonight.

Scrag had to claim that John B. and he were together the whole time when in fact the director/producer planted Scrag in the shadow of a rock and went off to kill Earl Seabaugh. He smashed Earl's camera and exposed its film—the possible incriminating evidence of Tawny's murder. John B., meanwhile, had stolen Homer's knife before the teams had even parted to search for Mitch, simply slipped it carefully from its sheath before Homer or anyone else noticed. The director was good at shell games, and the river guide wore the weapon more for his image than for actual need so he didn't miss it.