Fatalis (5 page)

Grand turned toward the dim light coming through the narrow roof entrance.

"What you're looking at is the cave ingress," he said. "It's a swallow hole and it's about seven feet behind me. The hole itself is about three feet across and five to six feet deep. Water from the higher peaks and from ongoing rainfall is continuing to pour into the swallow hole and spill over the sides of the ledge I'm on. The slope of the ledge is approximately twenty degrees from the bottom of the hole to the edge, which is consistent with long-term erosion from running water. However, until the La Nina effect there probably hasn't been any runoff in here since the late Pleistocene flooding. That's very promising. A dry interior would have suited a Chumash artist. The height and also the inaccessibility of the site also would have been appealing to a shaman looking for solitude. The cave elevation is approximately one hundred and fifty feet higher than any I've found in this region."

Grand turned back toward the heart of the cave.

"From where I'm standing, the size of the cave is deceptive," Grand continued. "It's only about thirty-five feet to the other side of the cave but it goes down quite a way." The scientist stepped to the edge and looked over. "It's a little over two hundred feet to the floor of the cave. And as soon as I finish gearing up I'll start my descent."

Grand paused the video camera. He squatted and removed a tiny flashlight and a packet of thick, white chalk from the duffel bag. The chalk was to make temporary notations on the rock, if need be, from water-flow patterns to a record of his own travels. He put both in his jacket pocket, then put his research pouch in another pocket. This was an oblong leather case that contained a scalpel for scraping off paint samples, tiny plastic bags for storing them, and a magnifying glass. Then he pulled out a pair of work gloves. After slipping them on, Grand stood and looked out at the cave.

Before returning to the UCSB, Grand had spent two years working as a field researcher for the anthropology department of the Smithsonian Institution. During that time, and before that when he was in grad school, he had explored caves in Russia, Spain, France, Turkey, Australia, and the United States. Wherever Grand was, when he was alone in a cave, searching for prehistoric art and artifacts, he felt as though he'd come home. Yet he had always felt a special closeness to the Chumash. The early inhabitants of the American West Coast had a singular view of nature and their place in it.

Though Chumash meant "bead maker" in their native tongue, these ancient people were much more than that. Migratory bands of Chumash had apparently come to Southern California as far back as a thousand years ago, drawn by the warmer and drier climate that followed the Ice Age. Unlike most hunter-gatherers of the time, who followed the seasonal movement of animals, the Chumash made permanent homes in the mountains and ravines. They harvested food from the sea and rivers, collected nuts and berries from the Lower Santa Ynez River Canyon, and trained themselves to be exceptional predators, because those who were not were
chotaw
-prey. Grand had found the remains of many of their weapons in the caves and along the riverbeds. He marveled at their precision, at the aerodynamic arrows made of hollow bird-bone and the rocks that had been split so carefully that their edges were sharper than modern razor blades. The Chumash also left paintings on cave walls. Grand had personally studied and interpreted more than a dozen of these, adding to the handful that anthropologists had already found.

The paintings were fascinating because they didn't only depict daily activities. The Chumash were deeply religious and used small, hidden places like this to document their beliefs with art. They believed that life was a game called
Peon
, in which the benign and destructive gods collected knowledge and experience. When the game was over, it would start again. If the benign gods had won, all living things would benefit. If they had lost, the world would suffer.

All gods, good and bad, were pictured as animals. The Chumash did not hold humankind in high regard. They considered them awkward and vulnerable, which was why they worked so hard to hunt and to live in packs and to become more like the wolf or the bat or the insect.

The Chumash believed that the chief of the gods, the Great Eagle, carried the sun, moon, and stars in its beak and talons. During the day the sun prevented the Great Eagle from being seen; at night it was hidden by the darkness. The Great Eagle was served by the Sky Coyote, who dwelt in the clouds above the earth. The Sky Coyote nourished the inhabitants of our world by making it rain. Meanwhile, roaming the earth itself in spirit, the Bear Mother protected the Chumash by keeping the monstrous denizens of the lower world at bay. The Chumash believed that this underground realm was ruled by the chief of the evil gods, a pair of giant serpents, on whose backs the world rested. Sometimes the snakes stirred, causing a great shaking. Only the diligence of the Bear Mother kept them from emerging. But sometimes the shaking woke the evil
Nunashush
, monstrous creatures that lived in the foot of the mountain peaks and came out at night to eat all living things.

Curiously, though the Chumash had left behind paintings of the other spirits as well as many animals of the late Ice Age, Grand had never found a rendering of the
Nunashush
. Most students of Chumash mythology believed that was because evil was a personal thing, different to every member of the tribe. To some it might be a wasp or a shark, to others a hurricane or a rival tribe member.

Grand disagreed. The Chumash were extremely articulate, art-wise. The shamans who created the bulk of the art-work had ascribed symbolic meaning to everything. Spiders and their webs were life and its changing nature, snowflakes were death, fish were the young, and wolves were the old. Grand believed that the shamans knew exactly what the
Nunashush
looked like. He felt that the holy men didn't paint them because they had found a different way to portray them. Perhaps they painted them beneath a rock from which they couldn't escape or on tree bark, which they burned in effigy.

Standing here and thinking that the last humans to see this place may have been the Chumash reminded the scientist of when his parents had taken an unhappy six-year-old to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon. Now, as then, he felt immortal and humble at the same time.

After checking to make sure there were no paintings directly below the ledge, Grand was ready. Stepping over the double ropes so they were between his legs, he turned his back to the ledge, knelt, and took one rope in each hand.

"I'm going over," he said as he stepped off the side.

Grand descended at a forty-five-degree angle. The pulleys kept the ropes from rubbing on the rock ledge as he literally walked down the face of the cliff, his strong arms constantly working the lines. Releasing the down-rope not only allowed him to descend but gave him the ability to walk from side to side. Tightening on the up-rope brought him back to center. The combination of his angle and the horizontal play enabled Grand to read the entire escarpment as he descended.

It took nearly an hour to crisscross the top half of the cave wall. Grand moved slowly so he wouldn't miss anything; Chumash paintings were sometimes just single icons that could easily be mistaken for moss, seepage stains, or a mineral embedded in the wall. As he knit his way back and forth along the cave wall, Grand occasionally recorded a note about something that wouldn't be apparent to the fiber-optic lens: the length of the escarpment, which was about thirty feet; the degree of declination, which was about ten degrees off-plumb, the wall sloping in toward the base; the dampness of the air the lower to the ground he got; and the fact that there appeared to be large, vertical cracks on both sides of the cave at ground level. Grand wouldn't know for sure whether it was an opening or a shadow until he got to the bottom, which would be soon. Typically, Grand's time limit in the harness was about ninety minutes. There was the strain on his arms, chafing from the leg loops, and exhaustion from the intense, careful concentration. The air was also thin in these high caves, adding to the strain. It wasn't that he couldn't push himself; but he was afraid he might miss something if he did. He would go back up in a few minutes, rest and change the tape, then come back down.

Just below the halfway point, on the right side of the cave, Grand suddenly stopped.

"Hold on," Grand said into the microphone. "There's something here."

Grand straightened his knees so that be could step back slightly from the escarpment He stared at the relatively smooth expanse of rock. There were definitely images there, large shapes that appeared to cover nearly the entire bottom right-hand quarter of the cave wall. From the corner of his eye Grand saw something on the opposite wall. He turned to look across the chasm. The same images had been rendered there as well.

Grand didn't know exactly what he was looking at. He was certain of only one thing.

He'd never seen anything like them.

Forty-seven-year-old Malcolm Gearhart hung up the phone. After quickly finishing his second cup of coffee, the former Marine took his portable radio from the desk drawer. He slipped the radio in its belt loop, grabbed his freshly blocked cap from the hook behind the door, and left his office in the back of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office station in Goleta.

Gearhart made two stops on his way through the quiet administration center. The first was at the office of Chief Deputy Mike Valentine. Gearhart briefed the veteran law officer about the call he'd just received from the Caltrans District 7 Division Chief, Maintenance, regarding a 3611-10-two missing engineers. The only clue a repair crew had found was a portable radio lying in the road. The sheriff asked Valentine for four deputies from his LEO- Law Enforcement Operations, Investigations Division. He wanted two of them to meet him at Painted Cave and the other two to have files on the missing workers E-mailed from Caltrans. He wanted a complete breakdown: telephone records, bank transactions, credit card charges, and anything else that might point to a debt, extortion, or a potentially hostile contact-a mistress, a bookie, a bar or restaurant or gas station where angry words might have been swapped.

Valentine wrote down each of the requests because that was how Gearhart liked things done. Thorough, accurate, and carefully documented. No confusion, no repetition.

Next, Sheriff Gearhart stopped at the dispatcher's cubicle in the communications center, which was also where the 911 calls were received. It was Deputy Felice Washington who had taken the call from Caltrans. Gearhart informed the young woman that he wanted an immediate update of any news from the site or from Caltrans and that Chief Deputy Valentine should be copied on any of the updates. He wanted the data sent digitally, to the patrol car's mobile data computer, with an audio backup to the car radio to make sure the information had been received. The dispatcher entered the instructions on her keyboard and sent them to the other stations. If she were on a call or away from her post, one of the other communications officers would know exactly what to do.

The procedure having been established and executed, Gearhart continued toward the door.

Without breaking his stride, the tall, broad African-American set his cap squarely on his head and made sure that his black tie was tightly knotted before stepping outside. The sheriff's black-and-white was parked directly in front of the recently remodeled two-story building. Ignoring the cold drizzle, he walked to the car and eased in.

Ordinarily, Gearhart would not be investigating a routine 3611 -10-a Santa Barbara County noncriminal missing-persons report. Nor would he have involved Chief Deputy Valentine or the LEO. More often than not, missing persons in Santa Barbara County were boaters who'd been knocked around in a storm, a child who'd wandered away from the beach, or a hang glider who'd become disoriented in a cloud and smacked into a tree. But the Caltrans DCM said that there was blood at the site-a great deal of it. When a 3611-10 became a possible 187-which referred to the homicide section of the California Penal Code-Gearhart became involved.

The sheriff started the engine, turned on the windshield wipers, and adjusted the rearview mirror. He caught sight of his dark eyes. They said,
God help anyone who fucked with his county
.

They were right.

There was violent crime in Santa Barbara County. The sheriff's office had a most-wanted list of murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molesters, bank robbers, and even a terrorist who had posed as one of Santa Barbara's over one hundred homeless people in order to hide explosives at the shelter in the center of town. However, most of those crimes predated Gearhart's term. Since being elected sheriff of the SBSO two years before, the popular officer had turned crime fighting into a team sport He'd expanded the Reserve Deputy Program, enlarged the Aero Squadron to patrol the mountains and coast, set higher fund-raising goals for the civilian Sheriff's Council, and beefed up the youth-oriented sheriff's Explorer Post-which an editorial in the radical
Coastal Freeway
dubbed the "Gearhart Youth," a nasty allusion to the Hitler Youth. That had earned the paper and its editor a permanent place on Gearhart's personal shit list. Not that he'd ever had any love for the press. They'd helped cost him and his fellow soldiers a victory in Vietnam with their endless coverage of protests, sit-ins, and fashionable anti establishment bullshit. Now the press was simply hooked on the public's right to know. Which was fine, except that reporters usually took that to mean they had the right to pry, insinuate, slant, and panic.

Since Gearhart's election, the SBSO had enjoyed a sense of purpose and community. The number of names on and below the most-wanted top twelve had dwindled. Directly across the street, the county jail was half as full as it had been when Gearhart took office. The minimum security Honor Farm was nearly empty. Murders were primarily crimes of passion and the county still had them. But people who wanted to rob, rape, kidnap, and molest tended to stay clear of Gearhart's beloved hills and shoreline.