Canyon Sacrifice (27 page)

A flatbed wrecker, its emergency lights flashing, was backed to the narrow hole in the guardrail where Amelia's car had plunged off the road. A mechanic in overalls edged his way down the slope from the wrecker, winch cable in hand. The cable unwound from a spool in the bed of the truck with a loud whine. Amelia looked on, immersed in her phone conversation, as the man backed past her toward her battered car.

But where was Rachel?

Several rangers, three in uniform and the rest in street clothes, looked down on the scene from along the guardrail. Two spoke into handheld radios. One appeared to be Hansen Conover. The rangers' patrol cars were parked haphazardly at the side of the road behind them. There was no sign of Robert Begay's Suburban.

Finally, Chuck spotted Rachel. She stood off by herself on the far side of the wrecked car, at the very edge of the precipice where the wash fell away into the canyon. Her back was to the accident scene, her shoulders bowed. She rocked back and forth in obvious distress. Rachel had disobeyed basic law-enforcement guidelines in continuing to give chase to Amelia and Dolores, innocent as they'd turned out to be, after they'd refused to pull over upon her first catching up to them on Center Road. Chuck had demanded that she do whatever it took to stop the escaping car. If fault for the accident lay with anyone, it lay with him.

Chuck had held it together through everything since Carmelita's disappearance—his ill-fated trip into the canyon, Donald's killing, the confrontation with Francesca—but this
was too much. His legs gave out and he sank to the ground. Seated in the sand, he pulled Janelle's phone from his pocket and dialed Rachel's number. She flinched at the first ring and stood unmoving through the second. Not until the third ring did she slide her phone from her belt case and look at it. She brought it slowly to her ear. “Chuck,” she said, her voice weary.

“Rachel.”

“What was I thinking?”

“I'm the one who sent you after them.” He spoke quietly to ensure his voice didn't carry to the accident scene. “I was wrong. About Janelle, too. I was wrong about everything.” The void he felt inside himself was as gaping as the canyon.

Rachel straightened in response to Chuck's words of reassurance. “These women, they're already threatening to get lawyered up,” she said indignantly, her tone that of the adventure-racing ranger Chuck knew so well.

His reply was impulsive: “Turn around.” If he could have reached out and taken her in his arms that instant, he'd have done so. “Look up the creek.”

She turned away from the canyon. “It's dark,” she said. She was looking straight at him over the roof of the wrecked car. From this distance, in the glare of the spotlights, her face was a splash of white against the blackness of the canyon.

“I'm here,” Chuck said, “with you. You're looking right at me.”

Rachel did not reply. She set off in his direction, stepping around the smashed car and past Dolores and the ranger.

Chuck scrambled to his feet. “Rachel,” he warned her.

The rangers along the guardrail watched with rapt attention as she walked away from the accident scene. No one made a move to intercept her.

Chuck took an involuntary step backward when Rachel reached the point where Desert View Drive turned at the bottom of the drainage and crossed the creek bed. She climbed up
to the raised roadway, strode across the blacktop, and dropped back down to the wash on the other side. She left the glare of the spotlights behind and faded into the night, disappearing from the view of her fellow rangers.

A long second passed. The rangers peered up the wash into inky blackness. Then, one by one, they turned back to the scene of the accident, where the wrecker operator now lay on his back at the rear of Amelia's compact, attaching the winch cable to the car's undercarriage.

Rachel advanced through the enveloping darkness. She made her way up a low rise and wound through a clump of sagebrush until she drew abreast of Chuck.

“Over here,” Chuck whispered, his nerves jangling. He cast a frightened glance at the rangers, who, thankfully, remained where they stood.

Rachel angled toward the sound of his voice, stopping only when she was so close to him he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face. She stood with her back to the brightly lit accident scene, silhouetted in front of him, her face an invisible mask.

He shrank from her when she raised her arm. But, as she'd done hundreds of times over the years they'd been together, she merely cupped the back of his neck in the palm of her hand. Her touch was just as he remembered it, both firm and pliant, as if in the simple act of reaching out to him she was both asserting herself and offering herself to him.

She drew his face to hers and kissed him.

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

4:30 a.m.

Even as Chuck told himself to pull away, he gave himself up to the kiss, and to Rachel. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, the heat of her lips on his a miniature sun at his center.

Rachel's kiss was searching, questioning. Authoritative, too, as if she was laying down a marker with it, communicating something to him.

As quickly as she'd brought her mouth to his, Rachel drew back. But she kept her hand at the back of his neck, her face inches from him. “Chuck,” she said softly. She looked down, then up at him again, the movement of her head barely discernible in the dark. She swept her fingers up his neck and caressed the side of his head. “Hmm,” she murmured, a single falling note, a goodbye—to him, to all they'd shared as a couple.

He considered various answers, came up with nothing, and settled on the truth. “I'm scared.”

She dropped her hand. “You should be,” she replied.

Just like that, Chuck was back, rooted in the present, and rooted in the realization that Rachel was right, that it was okay for him to be frightened, that he
should
be frightened. On the heels of that realization came awareness—he loved Janelle and the girls, and if he couldn't spend his life with them, his life wouldn't be worth living.

And finally, he realized, dawn was coming far too quickly.

Unsure how much Rachel could see of his eyes in the light filtering from the accident scene, he looked away. He remembered how easily he'd found himself telling Rachel his ridiculous idea of Janelle's possible involvement in Carmelita's kidnapping. If he kept talking with Rachel now, it wouldn't be long before
he'd find himself telling her about his plan to make the exchange at the festival site alone, even after Donald's killing.

“What is it?” Rachel asked, her eyes seeking his.

“Clock's ticking,” he replied simply.

He looked past her at the accident scene and was startled to find that the ranger who'd been standing at Amelia's side was headed up the drainage in Rachel's wake, approaching the point where Desert View Drive cut across the wash. The ranger put a hand to his eyes below the brim of his hat, shielding the bright lights behind him and looking ahead.

Chuck pointed at the oncoming ranger. “They're worried about you.”

She glanced over her shoulder, then back. “So what.”

He took Rachel's hand, the one that had brought his lips to hers, and held it as he studied her silhouette. “I have to go.”

Rachel leaned toward him and spoke into his ear. “Find her, Chuck,” she said.

“I will,” he told her. “For you. And for my wife.”

“For the two of us.” Rachel stepped back, and Chuck felt the warmth of her smile in the darkness.

He let go of Rachel's hand and headed back up the creek bed at a ground-eating lope, guided once again by the night-vision goggles. The cool breeze poured past him, an invisible fog that filled him with foreboding.

He continued a few hundred yards up the wash before climbing from the drainage and running eastward through the forest, Janelle's voice playing over and over again in his mind. “
I told myself you were the one
,” she'd said. “
I willed myself to believe it
.” Rather than appreciate his new family, Chuck had taken to running from them each and every morning. He'd made the leap all too easily to paranoia, to wondering if his wife could be involved in her own daughter's disappearance. He flushed with shame. What kind of person was he?

He was on a path leading straight to where his father had ended up—alone and forgotten.

He looked through the trees to the eastern sky, brightening with the coming day. He was not his father. Janelle and the girls were not a burden, not something to be discarded the way his father had discarded him. Janelle and the girls
were
Chuck's life. For their lives to continue together, he had to win Carmelita's freedom, had to focus on the here and now—including figuring out how, in light of the accident, Miguel would manage to get past Pipe Creek to reach the music festival site, particularly with Carmelita in tow. One possibility was Hansen Conover. If Hansen was working with Miguel, the junior ranger could get Carmelita's father past the wreck on Desert View Drive. Or perhaps Miguel was already waiting with Carmelita at the festival site. Or he'd hidden Carmelita somewhere else and would expect Chuck to hand over the necklaces in return for disclosing her whereabouts.

Chuck kept his eyes on the forest floor directly ahead of him and worked to keep his speed up, concentrating on getting to the festival site as quickly as possible to size things up before daylight arrived. He maintained his pace through the forest until, as best he could determine, he was roughly even with the site. He turned north, toward the canyon. The ponderosa forest gave way to scattered piñons and junipers as he neared the canyon rim. The scrubby trees, bent and twisted by the nearly constant winds that blew up and out of the canyon, rose no more than thirty feet above the broad swath of yucca and sage that marked the canyon's edge.

He reached Desert View Drive and found he'd judged well; he was a hundred yards beyond the turnoff from the road to the festival site. He crossed the empty roadway and crept from tree to tree toward the edge-of-the-canyon drop-off a quarter mile away.

The eastern sky glowed bluish gray. A handful of stars
shone overhead. Chuck left the goggles behind on the ground, unwilling to risk the slight sound of unzipping his pack to stow them inside.

He stifled his breathing and stuck to patches of sand and smooth expanses of rock until, fifty yards ahead, rising at the lip of the canyon, the roof structure over the festival performance stage emerged above the tops of the low trees. The dying night sky framed the metal roof, held aloft by thick, peeled-log posts.

Chuck made his way to the eight-foot, chain-link fence that enclosed the site on three sides, all the way to the canyon rim. Beneath the prowed roof, the open rear of the performance stage was separated from the canyon only by a waist-high metal railing. Several hundred blue fiberglass seats, bolted to concrete risers, half-encircled the stage to create an intimate amphitheater providing views of performances and, through the unwalled back of the stage, the abyss of the canyon beyond. A pair of flat-roofed, single-story storage buildings sat close beside one another behind the seating area, separating the amphitheater from a large gravel parking lot.

The festival site was a perfect example of federal money sloshing around until it found a home. A decade ago, a loose consortium of musical groups out of Flagstaff had convinced local politicians and park-service officials in D.C. that the national park, always struggling for funds, could earn some extra cash by hosting a local music festival each year to attract visitors to the canyon from among the park's local populace. The feel-good idea had gained ground quickly, prompting the musicians and park officials to team up and select the rim-hugging site east of the village for the proposed festival amphitheater.

Upon the public announcement of the site's selection, the tribal elder serving as president of the Navajo tribe declared the site sacred. Developing the site, he said, would amount to sacrilege. Chuck recalled that Jonathan and Elise Marbury had
supported the tribal president, whose contention threatened the entire music-fest proposal until someone in D.C. suggested offering the Navajo tribe's wholly-owned construction company, Diné Constructors, a no-bid contract to build the amphitheater at the site. The tribal president's concerns about the site's sacredness faded away with the signing of the lucrative contract, and a hurriedly approved federal grant funded the facility's construction by the tribe.

The musicians who had pushed for the festival's creation played the new amphitheater for a few years, posting impressive videos of their cliff-side performances online, before losing interest in making the lengthy drive from Flagstaff to play before what turned out to be minuscule festival audiences. After the initial acts moved on, the festival's executive director struggled to find new acts to fill the bill because the federal grant that had paid for the amphitheater's construction stipulated that only local acts could play it. The festival continued for a couple more years as the tiny crowds dwindled further. The festival took a “one-year hiatus” that had stretched on for four, leaving the site abandoned and bleaching beneath the high-desert sun.