Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (7 page)

CHAPTER

I
T
was fully dark by the time Gracie and Cashman set off hiking at a fast clip up the Aspen Springs Trail with Cashman in the lead. Rounding the first curve of the trail plunged them into perfect darkness. The glare of the Command Post floodlights vanished as if a giant switch had been flipped.

The obsidian sky exploded with stars. High altitude and pristine air rendered them large, brilliant and unwavering. The Milky Way splashed a hazy river of light across the zenith.

The searchers followed the trail as it meandered along the natural contours of the mountain. In, out, and in again. Rising, falling, then rising again. On its deceptively casual way toward the summit of San Raphael at almost twelve thousand feet.

On the steep canyon walls above and below the trail, their headlamps spotlighted curl-leaf mountain mahogany and huge mounds of manzanita with smooth bark as deep and rich in color as venous blood. All around them, the eerie skeletons of dead pine trees loomed out of the darkness, their needles orange in death, weakened by years of overgrowth and drought, and killed by scavenging bark beetles.

Occasionally the searchers stopped to call out the names of the missing persons or blow long earsplitting blasts on their whistles. Mostly they hiked in silence, the only sounds their own rhythmic breathing, the chink of a trekking pole on rock, the crunch of a boot on grit.

And the wind.

When the trail curved inward into the folds of the mountain, they were mercifully out of its brunt. But most of the time, it whipped around them, howling like a being from the netherworld, rocking tree carcasses and creaking dead limbs, occasionally blasting the searchers so hard with dirt and small stones that they turned their backs, or sought shelter in the lee of a giant boulder or behind the barren husk of a tree.

But in spite of the wind, possibly because of it, Gracie drank it all in—the darkness, the peace, the relative solitude, the sharp, cold air—and felt her spirits lifting. She felt the impulse to burst into song and almost laughed outright at the reaction a Puccini aria would elicit from Cashman.

Gracie often returned from searches mentally spent, physically exhausted, but spiritually renewed. This, she was reminded, was one of the reasons she had joined the team in the first place. The natural world at its purest and most elemental always breathed life into her, reviving her like water to a withered plant.

Gracie was working hard and had descended from the high that came with every callout. Still she felt energized, yet relaxed. Her mind clear, alert. She looked up into the night sky and noticed a deep shadow obliterating the stars in the west. “Clouds moving in,” she called up to Cashman. “Maybe it won’t get so cold tonight.”

As Gracie and Cashman traveled, the hard-packed dirt of the trail gradually softened, growing more malleable, yielding tracks and portions of tracks of hikers traveling in both directions.

Crouching low and off to one side, sometimes on hands and knees, face inches from the dirt, Gracie was finally able to identify a series of fresh tracks laid by someone wearing Reeboks, presumably Tristan Chambers. Selecting the clearest, most complete track she could find, Gracie used the tip of one of her trekking poles to draw a circle around the track, then marked it with pink flagging tape. With her mini measuring tape, she measured the track itself and the stride—the distance from the heel of a right footprint to the heel of the next right footprint. She drew a rough sketch of the tread in her little notebook. Then, again with the tip of trekking pole, she marked the prints, first a left, then a right, then another left, following Tristan’s and hopefully his two, maybe three, maybe five, hiking companions’ progress up the trail.

Theoretically one never tracked alone; rather teams of three tracked with a point person doing the actual tracking with two flankers ahead on either side watching out for hazards. With Timber Creek SAR’s shortage of trained personnel, tracking teams usually consisted of two searchers.

So Gracie examined the dirt, focusing on the Reebok tracks, flashlight held low and parallel to the ground to make even the tiniest portion of a track stand out, with Cashman up ahead on the trail, calling back an occasional “Low-hanging branch” or “Watch it, Gracie. Part of the trail’s eroded away here.”

What she couldn’t afford to dwell on while she tracked was that people’s lives might very well hinge upon her spotting that single stone that had been trod on and moved a millimeter, the remaining indentation casting a sliver of a shadow in the beam of the flashlight. Or the slightest compression of a leaf or pine needle. Or a miniscule section of tread pressed into the soft dirt.

Up ahead on the trail, Cashman stopped and called back, “Here’s where the other trail comes in.” Invisible but for the halo cast by his headlamp, Steve turned on his mag flashlight and fastened its beam on a little cairn of stones.

Gracie hurried forward. The beam of her own flashlight brought to life a muddle of prints on a wide trail juncture, along with scattered cigarette butts and a discarded soda can. “This is where they had lunch all right,” she said. “Haven’t they ever heard of an ashtray? This, hypothetically, is where some of them turned back and the MisPers continued on.”

She walked to the far end of the juncture and pointed her flashlight up the main trail. The beam caught footprints flattened in the dirt, making them shine in the darkness. “Good. We’ve got clear tracks going up the trail,” she said. She pointed with her trekking pole. “There’ll be fewer tracks from here. Maybe now we’ll be able to discern prints separate from the Reeboks.” To herself, she added, “That, at least, is the plan.”

Cashman stood behind Gracie drinking great gulps of water from his water bottle.

“Want to take a waypoint and call it in while I pee?” She unclipped the straps of her pack and let it slide to the ground.

Steve wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve and screwed the bottle lid back on. “Sure thing.”

When Gracie returned from relieving herself in the privacy of her own boulder, Cashman was still monkeying with his GPS, a handheld receiver using satellite signals to pinpoint their location.

Thankful for the respite, Gracie sat on a rock at the side of the trail. She munched on her PayDay and sipped from her own water bottle until Cashman acquired enough signals for a reading.

“Got ’em,” he announced. He lifted the radio mic to his mouth and keyed the transmit button. “Command Post. Ten Rescue Fifty-six.”

“Go ahead, Fifty-six,” came Ralph’s voice, loud and clear. To Gracie, it was comforting to know that he was in the Command Post looking out for them, monitoring where they were. She had been on searches where that wasn’t the case and she didn’t like it.

“We’ve gone point nine miles up the trail,” Cashman radioed. “We’re where the group stopped to have lunch.”

“Copy that.”

“I have coordinates.”

“Stand by one.” The radio was silent, then, “Go ahead.”

Cashman read the coordinates, then signed off.

Gracie stood up and hefted her pack onto her back, feeling its substantial weight settle onto her already sore hips. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

CHAPTER

D
IANA
stumbled to a stop in the middle of the trail. Adrenaline spent, energy exhausted, she could go no farther. Heavy sobs wracked her body and tears dripped from her chin onto her coat.

Vaguely aware that if she traveled down the side of the mountain, she might never be able to crawl back up, she left the trail again. In the impenetrable darkness, she crawled blindly up the steep slope on all fours. A hundred feet up, she fell full-length onto the ground.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she reached behind her and scraped armfuls of leaves and pine needles and tree bark over her body like a blanket.

CHAPTER

M
ILOCEK
stood in the middle of the trail and rolled his cigarette between his teeth.

He found the fresh digs in the dirt where Diana had left the trail and scrambled up the side of the mountain. He found where she had hidden between two boulders, even where she had relieved herself on the ground, leaving behind a wadded-up piece of blue tissue.

But she was gone. And now it was too dark for him to search for any sign of her without the aid of a flashlight.

He swallowed, but not without effort. His dry throat caught and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He needed water.

He had drunk all of his water at lunch and finished off the pint of brandy. He had several more gallons of water, but they were stored in the earthquake kit he kept in his car.

Milocek shrugged. He had gone without water before. He could go without it again.

He clambered up on top of a six-foot-high boulder perched on the side of the trail and sat down on his haunches.

There was only one way out. And that way led right past him. When Diana came back, he would be waiting.

The night closed in around him.

Minutes ticked by.

Milocek’s head snapped up. He had heard something above the sound of the wind. Back down the trail. The high-pitched blast of a whistle.

He heard it again, closer, more clearly. Then voices—a man and a woman.

Milocek slid down the back of the boulder into the darkness.

CHAPTER

G
RACIE
and Cashman followed the tracks along a narrow portion of the trail where the canyon walls jutted steeply upward on the right and fell away into darkness on the left. According to the altimeter on Gracie’s watch, they had climbed to over ninety-five hundred feet in elevation. Snow fields above and below the trail had grown larger and more frequent. Any snow on the trail itself had been trampled into a muddy slush.

By then, Gracie had been able to positively identify additional print patterns mixed in with the Reeboks. One had a smooth sole with a distinctive pointed toe that could very well be from Rob Christian’s city shoes. Another, a honeycomb pattern, was small enough to belong to a woman. Other prints were the lug sole typical of a hiking boot.

“What the—?” Gracie stopped abruptly and squatted at the side of the trail. “Cashman, hold up a sec,” she yelled up to her teammate who was hiking out of sight ahead of her.

“What?” came Steve’s voice out of the darkness ahead.

“I’ve got a whole mishmash of tracks going in both directions.”

She heard a crunching of boots and Cashman appeared next to her. “What’s up?”

Gracie trained her flashlight beam on the ground and pointed. “Look. Here’s a honeycomb. And here’s a lug sole. They’re heading back to the trailhead. But not the Reeboks. Or the smooth sole.” She studied the ground. “I don’t get it. What were they doing?”

The lack of any response from Cashman told Gracie he wasn’t the least bit interested. She knew from past searches that her teammate was focused on one thing—finding Rob Christian and Rob Christian only.

“Call Ralph, will you?” she asked. “Tell him what we have.” To herself, she mumbled, “What the hell? If they were heading back, why didn’t we see them?”

As Cashman held his GPS up to get a reading, Gracie measured the prints and scribbled the measurements into her little notebook.

“Command Post,” Cashman said into the radio. “Ten Rescue Fifty-six.”

But instead of Ralph’s gravelly drawl in return, the radio emitted a loud, obnoxious wonk indicating they were out of range of a repeater to relay their radio signal back to the Command Post.

Cashman said he would see if he could get better reception and trotted back down the trail.

“Dammit,” Gracie whispered. “Sloppy work, Kinkaid.” She had been careless, concentrating only on one set of tracks—the most easily identifiable, the Reeboks. She had missed where the other tracks had begun heading in the other direction. It didn’t matter that she was doing the job of at least one full tracking team, possibly two. She should have noticed the tracks before. They might have to backtrack and see if she could figure it all out.

“Dammit!” she said again and staggered to her feet. Her legs and sacrum felt stiff from tracking with a full pack on and the wind had left her eyes gritty and dry. With the tip of her trekking pole, she drew large circles in the dirt around the clearest, most complete tracks, then tied a long length of pink flagging tape to a nearby branch.

She heard Cashman try the radio again. Another wonk.

Cashman jogged back up to her.

“We need to think this through, Cashman. We now have four sets of tracks going in one direction and two sets going in the other. I have to think about what to do.”

“I know what I’m doin’,” Cashman said. “I’m going up the trail.” He stepped past her and continued up the trail.

“Wait,” Gracie said. “Cashman! Wait a minute!”

Cashman stopped ahead on the trail, but didn’t look back.

She stood for several seconds, muttering curses about Cashman, about the tracks, about her life in general. What the hell was she going to do? Let him go off on his own? “All right, dammit,” she called up to her teammate. “I’m coming.” She followed Cashman up the trail.

Gracie loved the challenge of the wilderness, treasuring it for its deadliness, not in spite of it. Most people wandering its trails seemed to underestimate the risk, treating the outdoors too casually, overestimating their own importance, assuming nothing would happen to them. And, if it did, help was just a cell phone call away.

Every once in a while, the nature gods would sit up and take notice. Fed up with the arrogance of humankind, they would take someone out.

Gracie skidded to a stop. “Dammit.”

“
Now
what?” Cashman called back to her.

“Now there are only two sets of tracks altogether. Only the smooth sole. Going in both directions. And the honeycomb. But in only one direction. What do you see up there?”

With flashlight trained to the ground, Cashman disappeared around a bend in the trail. Half a minute later, he reappeared. “Looks like a couple of ’em went to take a whiz or a crap or something.”

“What happened to the other tracks?” Gracie asked. She turned and backtracked down the trail to the last Reebok print she had marked—a right. Logically the next track should be a left. She examined the ground.

The Reeboks had vanished.

“Where’d they go?” Gracie turned 360 degrees, shining her flashlight beam along the ground in a wide swath until, finally, she spotted an indentation from a boot heel where someone had stepped onto a wide, foot-high berm of dirt and stones, and out onto an expansive promontory of boulders.

“There!” Her sweeping light illuminated a chaos of footprints in the soft dirt. “They must have stopped and taken a break here or something.”

Gracie trained her light on the ground. “What’s that?” She stepped over the berm and crouched down. She picked away several stones and branches strewn on the ground, and brushed away the top layer of dirt with her hand, revealing a large dark stain standing out against the drier, buff-colored dirt. Her stomach muscles tightened. “Cashman, does this look like blood to you?”

Steve moved to stand next to her. “Yeah, that’s blood,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Some hunter probably field-dressed a deer he bagged out of season. Covered his tracks so he wouldn’t get busted for poaching.”

Cashman moved to the far end of the outcropping and looked down over the edge, his headlamp emitting only a meager radius of light into the void. “Think they went down?”

Gracie stared at the stain, focused on the fact that there were probably no deer at that altitude that time of year, if ever.

“Wanna search down below?” Cashman asked.

“I don’t think this is deer blood. I wonder if there was some kind of accident. Maybe with our missing hikers. This is getting way too complicated. We need to call this in.”

“Roger, Roger,” Cashman said with a shrug. But when he keyed the microphone, the radio wonked. “Dead spot,” he said. He paced back down the trail a short distance and tried again.

From where she was, Gracie heard the wonk of the radio. “Nothing,” Cashman called back up to her.

“Why go down if someone was hurt?” Gracie asked herself. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Cashman reappeared beside her. “Wanna walk farther back to see if you can get a signal?” he asked. “I can search on down the hill.”

Gracie pushed herself to her feet. “Not a good idea to separate,” she said. Which Cashman knew full well. “Never leave your partner” was one of the most fundamental tenets of search and rescue. “Never go off on your own.”

“How ’bout we at least find where they went down?” Cashman suggested.

Gracie dragged her attention away from the stain. With flashlights and headlamps trained on the dirt, she and Cashman scoured the area until they found where someone had descended into the canyon—a furrow of churned earth and leaves leading down one side of the outcropping.

“Let’s follow it down,” Cashman prodded.

Gracie stood her ground, chewing the inside of her cheek. Leaving the trail to go down into the canyon was tricky business—bushwhacking off-trail, off-radio, in the dark, on a steep, rocky slope leading to who knew where. She had been there and done that. It totally sucked.

Don’t get dead
flickered through her mind.
Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t become a victim yourself
. “I think we need to backtrack down the trail to find a signal,” she said. “We need to let Ralph know what we’re doing. About the tracks. And about the blood.”

“Fuck the blood!” Cashman yelled. “And fuck Hunter!”

Gracie took a step backward. “Cashman!”

Steve backed off immediately, softening his tone. “Sorry, Gracie. But if somebody’s hurt down there, a half hour could mean we find a DB instead of a person. You can stay here. Or go try and radio. I’m goin’ down.”

Gracie stared at her teammate. This was a side of Cashman she had never seen before. She had never even heard him raise his voice, much less yell at anyone, least of all her.

“Not a good idea, Steve,” she said. “Ralph needs to call in more teams.”

“I’ll mark where I went down.” He hauled out a long strand of neon green flagging tape and tied multiple strands around the branches of a manzanita bush growing out of the dirt next to the trail.

“Cashman, are you hearing me?” Gracie asked, struggling to keep the irritation out of her voice. “This is not a good idea. We need to radio in.”

“I’m Team Leader,” he said without looking at her. He drew out his GPS and held it aloft to collect the satellite signal. “I’m goin’ down. You can come with me. You can stay here. Whatever you want.”

“What the hell!” Gracie stormed several paces up the trail, then stopped, breathing slowly, deeply, trying to squelch her anger.

The risk in altering their course without notifying the Command Post was monumental. Once they left the formal, maintained trail, they would be flying blind, off the radar. If anything bad happened, they would be on their own. Gracie alone with Steve Cashman.

What was she going to do? Let Cashman go down into the canyon by himself? Hike all the way back to the Command Post alone?

Cashman was right about time being critical. She would never forgive herself if someone died because she had a thing about sticking to the rules.

She turned and stomped back down to the outcropping. “Dammit, Cashman, you win. But I don’t like it. One. Bit. Don’t ever do this again.” Gracie hauled out her own GPS and took a waypoint.

With a voice in Gracie’s head shouting a fortissimo, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she and Cashman plunged down off the side of the trail and into darkness.