Mountain Rampage (15 page)

He knew what lay ahead, yet even as he followed the route toward the rotting carcasses, he couldn't help but marvel at his surroundings. He was outdoors, hiking in the woods, on a summer day, far from all the trouble back in town.

Squirrels scurried up tree trunks ahead of the group. They scrabbled sideways around the trees to keep the trunks between themselves and the students, poking their heads out for brief looks and chattering noisily as the group passed. Gray
jays tracked the students, flapping from branch to branch and announcing the group's progress up the mountain with deep-throated caws. The forest smelled of pine and vanilla. Twigs broke under Chuck's boots with crisp snaps, releasing small puffs of dust from the forest floor.

After thirty minutes of uphill progress, the path split in two. A right fork continued up the mountain to the open slope above, while a left fork angled through the stunted trees just below tree line.

Chuck led the group along the left fork. He stepped aside when they reached the fen a few minutes later, allowing the students to line up at the edge of the small meadow next to him.

The morning breeze had carried the scent of the rotting carcasses away from the students during their hike, but here, within the tight ring of trees, the reek of the rotting carcasses was overpowering.

The students recoiled, hands over their mouths and noses. Samuel fled the way they'd come, his arms clasped across his stomach.

Jeremy spoke through his fingers. “Why'd you bring us here?” he demanded of Chuck. “Is this your idea of some sort of sick joke?”

Chuck looked at his boots, suddenly ashamed of himself. Why
had
he brought the students here?

He should have let them relax in the sun beside the beaver ponds in the valley below before heading back to town for their interviews. But he'd brought them to the scene of the sheep slaughter instead.

Jeremy was right. What had he been thinking?

He waved for the students to retreat from the fen. “Let's back off and regroup.”

He called ahead for a halt a couple hundred feet from the meadow. The students turned, lined along the path, Samuel
having rejoined them along the way.

Chuck attempted to explain himself. “I spotted the tire tracks in the pullout and the boot prints headed up the mountain. I wanted to make sure where they led.”

Jeremy's eyes grew round. “You knew where you were taking us all along?”

“I had a pretty good idea. And I had my reasons.” Chuck paused, seeking the right words to justify his actions. “What have we just spent the summer doing?” he asked the students.

They looked at one another. Sheila raised a tentative hand.

“Historical archaeology,” she said. “Digging up the recent past to learn more about it.”

“Correct. And with everything we've done, if you think about it, perhaps the single most important thing we've learned this summer is how far humans will go in the pursuit of one particularly powerful human desire: greed.”

The students cast uncertain glances at one another.

Chuck pointed up through the trees at the summit of Mount Landen. “Think about where we've been digging, way above tree line. The miners who worked up there in the winter more than a hundred years ago faced blizzards, sub-zero cold, and avalanches, not to mention lightning storms in the summer, along with all the dangers of the mining operation itself—for what?”

“For gold,” Samuel said. He reprised a bit of his act from the mine tunnel: “The mother lode! All the riches in the world!”

“Samuel's exactly right,” Chuck told the group. “A hundred years ago, gold was used for one thing and one thing only: ornamentation. These days, at least, there are a few industrial uses for the stuff. But back in the 1800s, gold was all about showing your friends and neighbors how wealthy you were. To do that, people would pay a fortune for the stuff, and miners would risk their lives, day in and day out for years on end, digging it out of the ground.”

Jeremy pointed past Chuck at the fen. “I don't see what any of that has to do with what you just showed us.”

“They're one and the same,” Chuck explained. “What you saw back there is an example of what people still are willing to do—what they're willing to risk—a century and a half after the Pikes Peak gold rush, to come up with something others will pay big bucks for.”

He told the students about the Chinese appetite for aphrodisiacs, the headline-making news of the black market's shift from rhino to Rocky Mountain sheep horn, and how, as a result, the park's rams had found themselves in the poacher's crosshairs.

“You mean,” Kirina asked when he finished, “somebody killed all those rams back there just for their horns?”

“Only the rams' heads are gone,” Chuck affirmed. He looked at the ground in front of him, then up at the students. “Maybe you guys are right. Maybe—especially after what happened last night—I shouldn't have brought you up here.”

Samuel said, “No. I totally get it. My dad's a hunter—a real hunter, not some sleaze-bag poacher. I just want to make sure somebody takes out the rat bastard who did this.”

Chuck exhaled. “So do I,” he said. “I'll be reporting this, of course. But in the meantime, one thing we can do is make sure the poacher knows we know what he's up to. He's killed six rams on Mount Landen—on
our
mountain. Let's make sure he doesn't kill any more.”

“What do you have in mind?” Kirina asked.

Chuck addressed the group. “I want you to walk all the way around the meadow through the trees, kicking over stones, rolling logs, tossing downed branches around—anything we can do to show him we've been here.”

“Good,” Kirina said. She took over, directing the students to spread themselves along the slope and leading them up the mountain through the forest, looping around the meadow.

Clarence approached Chuck after Kirina and the students set off. “The poacher—how many times you figure he's been here this summer?”

Chuck frowned, unclear where Clarence was headed.

“He couldn't possibly have made a successful kill every time he came,” Clarence said. “What do you figure, he shot one every fourth time? Every fifth?”

“Something like that.”

“Which means that, all told, this guy has to have driven through the East Entrance Station at least a couple dozen times this summer. Double that when you figure entering
and
leaving.”

Chuck's eyes grew wide with understanding. “The guy's a regular,” he said.

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

“We should talk to the East Entrance Station rangers,” Chuck said.

Clarence shook his head. “What was it you told us at the beginning of the field school? Zillions of people visit the park every year, something like ninety percent of them in the summer. And of those ninety percent, most drive through the East Entrance Station on their way up Trail Ridge Road.”

“So you're back to saying it could be anybody.”

“Just the opposite. We can assume the guy's a local, right? He lives here, which is how he's been able to keep doing this for the whole summer. And that means, even with all the cars coming and going through the entrance station, he'd likely be recognized, eventually, by the park rangers at the station, no matter how nondescript his car.

“Whoever he is, he's a known entity. He raises no suspicion, no matter how often he comes and goes.”

Chuck clicked his tongue in approval. The deep tracks in the pullout were made by big, heavy tires. Who could enter and leave the park on a regular basis, in a large vehicle, without leading to questions?

“An ambulance?” Chuck wondered aloud. Then he answered himself. “No.” An ambulance carried a crew of two, but the path up the mountainside, trodden by only a single pair of boots, indicated the poacher worked alone.

“A passenger van like ours?” Clarence asked. “For hauling tour groups in and out of the park?”

“I don't think so,” Chuck said. “It would have to be filled with passengers to avoid suspicion.” He took a few seconds, thinking. “How about a park staffer driving a park vehicle?”

“Afraid not,” Clarence replied. “The idea that a ranger could blow off his duties for hours at a time, day after day, over the
course of the summer to poach Rocky Mountain sheep? Impossible.”

Kirina appeared from higher on the mountainside. “There's something up here I think you should see,” she called down to them.

She led Chuck and Clarence to the well-defined drag path winding its way through the trees from the upper mountain. The students stood along the path, overturned rocks and logs demarcating the stretch of forest they'd already crossed, pristine forest floor beyond.

Chuck and Clarence crouched beside Kirina at the edge of the path. She pointed at a small puddle of blood, no more than an inch across, pooled in a cupped portion of a broken tree branch lying on the forest floor. “There.”

Chuck studied Kirina's discovery. The bullet wound in one of the rams must have spurted a pulse of blood as the poacher dragged the animal to the meadow, and the brief cascade of blood had pooled in the cupped portion of the rotting branch. Three hours ago, Chuck had walked right past the puddle, focused on the fen ahead.

The sun, breaking through the trees, lit the small pool's viscous, red surface.

Chuck peered at it. The blood should not be viscous, nor should it be red. It ought to be dried to a hard, dark sheen.

He touched the surface of the puddle with a fingertip. His finger came away shiny red. He looked down the slope into the small, sunlit meadow a hundred feet away as he worked the blood between his finger and thumb.

The poacher was still at it. He'd made his last kill no more than a day or two ago, just over the ridge from the mine site, at dawn or dusk when Chuck and the students weren't at the mine.

Chuck blinked, blind with anger. He rose and turned his back to Clarence and Kirina and the students.

“Let's go,” he called over his shoulder, his voice dark with fury.

He strode down the mountain ahead of the students, his vision clearing but his rage continuing to burn white-hot in his chest.

He could do little about Nicoleta's murder beyond waiting for the police to act.

But as for the sheep killer?

That
he could do something about.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

Chuck pulled the van to a stop in front of Raven House.

Half a dozen Estes Park police sedans lined the parking lot in front of the dorms. A shiny white recreational vehicle emblazoned with the words “Estes Park Police Department Mobile Command Unit” was positioned in the middle of the gravel lot. A group of uniformed officers stood outside the command vehicle, arms folded, observing the return of the van.

The students stared, speechless, at the officers, prompting Chuck to say as he parked, “I'll head over and see where things stand.”

“What about Clarence?” Sheila asked from the back row.

Clarence, in the passenger seat opposite Chuck, looked straight ahead and said nothing.

“They'll be talking to him, too,” Chuck answered.

“But what about his knife?”

Chuck gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white. “There's nothing at this point—
nothing
—linking the blood found between the dorms with what happened last night. For now, I'm sure, the police are focusing all their efforts on the murder.” He shut off the engine. “Straight to your rooms, please. Wait there until you're called for your interviews. Then you can head over to the lodge cafeteria for dinner; I'm sure the dining hall will be closed.”

He climbed out of the van without waiting for anyone to respond. The gathered officers parted as he approached the command vehicle. At Chuck's knock, Hemphill opened the door and motioned him inside.

The new-vehicle smell of off-gassing plastic filled the interior of the vehicle. Everything was bureaucratic gray and off-white. Formica cabinets and countertops lined the walls except where a small table and facing bench seats were bolted in front
of the vehicle's sole window. A built-in television, tuned to a news channel and muted, glowed from the wall of cabinets opposite the table. Below the television, a two-way radio sat on a small counter.

Chuck recognized the only other person in the vehicle, the older cop, Harley, who'd come to Estes Park from St. Louis. Harley sat in a wheeled office chair at a counter running the width of the rear of the RV. He nodded at Chuck before going back to studying a pair of laptop computers arranged in front of him. A wire led from one of the computers to a small microphone on a plastic stand.

Chuck took in the high-tech interior of the vehicle. “Pretty nice setup for a town your size,” he said to Hemphill.

The officer waved dismissively. “Homeland Security money.” He slid into the bench seat on the far side of the small table and motioned Chuck to the seat opposite him.