When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (30 page)

Ahead, the dense forest started to thin out. As they got closer, Gil could see they were at the edge of a rockslide area, which was common at the higher elevations. Within a few more feet, they left the deep snow of the forest and were starting up a boulder-covered hill. With the cover of trees gone, the storm had nothing to hold it back. The blowing snow stung Gil’s face, and he pulled his wool hat down over his ears, which were getting eaten raw by the wind. They walked on rocks peeking through a hard layer of snow that was swept smooth by the continual wind. They could move more quickly now, but every few feet, one of them would step onto the snow and break through the crust, sinking up to his knees into crevices between the boulders.

For the first ten feet or so, the ground was almost level, and they could follow the edges of Hoffman’s footprints as he cut his way across the open area. Then the tracks were gone, wiped clean by the wind. Gil heard Joe yell something into the howling wind, likely a curse against the weather. Up to this point, Hoffman’s trail had required no special skills to follow. Now Gil would have to actually put his tracking skills to the test. His father had taught him to track when he was seven. It had come in handy on the job, mostly when they were searching for lost kids or Alzheimer’s patients who had wandered away from home.

Gil tried to yell over to Joe, “I need to cut for sign.”

“What?” Joe yelled.

“I need to cut for sign.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Just stand there and don’t move.”

Cutting for sign was a method of looking for a trail after tracks had been lost. Gil walked an
S
pattern as best he could in the terrain, away from where Joe was standing. Following a trail across a rock field meant looking for tiny details—a groove made by a boot hitting some ice, or dirt that wasn’t the same shade as the surrounding surface, except Gil had to do all this during a blizzard. The wind and snow would quickly erode any signs Hoffman had left behind. The only good thing was the darkness. Tracking at night was much easier than during a sunny day. That’s because tracking is a game of light and shadows. A tracker can use a flashlight to make shadows the noontime sun would blot out. A print not visible from above will be clear if a tracker crouches down, shines a light on it, and looks from the side.

It took a minute, but Gil found a rock displacement. A larger rock had been moved slightly, resulting in a half inch of disturbed soil above it. It was enough to tell Gil that Hoffman had pushed the rock backward with his foot as he walked toward the north. He whistled over to Joe, who came to join him.

They moved forward, with Gil crouched low to the ground with his flashlight, looking for the next groove that would tell them they were on the right path. The hill got steeper and the rocks got bigger, but the wind was unchanging. Gil found a toe dig in a small pocket of snow, which showed that Hoffman had dug in the tip of his boot as he pushed himself up to grab a rock above. Gil and Joe holstered their weapons, unable to keep a grip on their handguns while trying to climb up the boulders on the slope. Gil got small cuts on his wrist where his gloves did not quite meet his jacket. And he felt blood on his knee after he slipped and cut himself on a sharp edge. He heard Joe give a muffled “ouch” a few times as he tripped.

“We should head back,” Joe said, close to Gil’s ear so they could hear each other in the wind. “We can call in backup.”

“Just a little while longer,” Gil said. “We have to be gaining on him. He’s wounded.”

Joe shook his head, but kept going. They lost the trail two more times, forcing Gil to spend long minutes cutting for sign among the boulders. Gil was starting to have a hard time feeling his fingers. He tried to wiggle them slightly, knowing that if he had to pull the trigger, a stiff finger would make for a slow response time.

A minute later, Joe put his foot on a patch of snow and, before he could react, the snow gave way. He slid into a coffin-sized crevice between the boulders, landing hard against the rocks a few feet below. Gil slid down to him, trying not to slam into him in the dark.

“Are you okay?” Gil asked, bending close to Joe, trying to help him up. Joe had a five-inch scrape on his left leg where a rock had sliced through his pants. They climbed up out of the crevice as best they could, both stiff from the cold. Their frozen jeans and parkas didn’t allow them full range of motion. Even with Gil’s help, Joe struggled to his feet as he got to the top and leaned against a boulder. His face was half covered in snow that he tried to wipe off but only managed to push down his neck.

“This is crazy.” Joe had to yell through the wind just to be heard. “We have to turn back. No one even knows where we are.”

“He can’t be too far ahead,” Gil yelled back. “He’s losing blood.”

“And so are we. These rocks are cutting the hell out of us.”

“Just a few more minutes.”

“He’s got nowhere to go, Gil,” Joe yelled, the wind taking most of the sound away with it. “There are no houses. There are no roads. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. He’ll be dead in a few hours. And so will we unless we go back.”

“He can’t be that far ahead,” Gil yelled. He got up and started to walk slowly forward again. But Joe didn’t move.

“Look at you, you can barely walk,” Joe yelled.

“I’m going to keep going,” Gil said, moving again, the snow burning his raw face. This time Joe did move. He took a stride forward and grabbed Gil’s arm, pulling him backward. This time they both slid into the crevice, and hit the bottom hard, a dusting of snow and small rocks falling on them. Gil felt his shoulder twist the wrong way under him and struggled to get up. But Joe held him in place, pushing on his chest and pinning his legs under him.

“We can’t do this,” Joe yelled in the wind. “We have to go back.”

“Get the hell off me,” Gil yelled, pushing back hard against Joe, who fell into the rocks behind them, hitting his head. They both sat up as best they could, Joe holding a hand to his head. They looked at each other as the wind quieted down for a moment.

“We have to go back,” Joe said again, wiping the blood from his hands onto his jeans. Gil took the scarf from around his neck and handed it to Joe, who pressed it against his head to stop the bleeding.

“He’ll get away,” Gil said.

“We can’t catch him if we’re dead.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

February 25

The fires had come early to the Southern Rocky Mountains. It was only the end of February and there was already a ten-thousand-acre one burning near Los Alamos. Mateo Garcia caught sight of the smoke plume stabbing into the bright blue sky across the valley floor as he and Baby turned a corner of the trail. There had been no real snowfall in almost two months, leaving the lower elevations of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains clear and dry.

Baby made her way up the path, going slowly because of rocks and branches that had fallen during the last big winter storm on Christmas Eve. Mateo could hear the wind clawing through the upper branches of the ponderosa pine, the wood groaning and creaking. They weren’t making particularly good time, but that wasn’t the point. Mateo preferred to be safe instead of fast. Today, his only job was to act as escort to the two riders ahead of him. He was their guide and babysitter. Riding Phantom was a tall Hispanic detective who, Mateo had found out, was one of the Montoyas from Galisteo. He seemed to have a good seat on the horse and knew how to nudge her forward when she got lazy. The smaller detective, with red hair and a twitchy face, was less sure of himself. They had found an old mare for him to ride. He made a lot of kissing and clicking noises to his horse, which ignored his efforts to control her.

They were out here because of Willie. When the weather had turned at the beginning of January, it had gone from snowy and windy to warm and windy, and everyone became restless. In town, people started to work on their gardens. In the mountains, people started to roam again. That’s when Willie came back into the shop.

Mateo had been busy doing the books when Willie walked into Garcia Hardware. His beard was still a squirrel’s nest and he looked as if he had lost ten pounds off his tall frame over the winter, but his walk was brisk as he came straight to the counter and said without prompting, “I found something.”

“What did you find?” Mateo asked, noticing once again how greetings among the mountain men didn’t seem to matter. He hadn’t seen Willie in three months, yet they talked as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

“A man.”

“What is this man doing?”

“He’s dead.”

“Is he in your camp?” Mateo was worried that maybe a squatter had wandered into Willie’s spot and things had ended in violence.

“No. In the mountains.”

“There’s a dead man in the mountains?”

“Yes.”

Matt had Willie point on a National Forest map to the approximate spot where he had found the body. Then Willie left, heading back into the mountains. It had taken three days to get a proper search party going. The posse members reasoned that if there was a dead body, moving quickly wouldn’t make him any less dead. And those extra days would allow members to get their animals fed and get some time off work. They spent two days in the mountains doing a grid search as best they could in the rough terrain, often having to get off their horses and walk up the steep inclines. Willie’s directions had been specific, but the area he’d circled on the map encompassed more than a square mile. He been able to describe in detail the way the body was propped up against a ponderosa pine, just north of a stand of Gambel oak and west of a double stump of a white fir, but those details weren’t included on a topographical map. It would take a coordinated, long-term search effort to find the body, plus more than a little luck. As such, they weren’t surprised when they didn’t find the body during the first search. They came back a second time, spending twelve hours working their way through another search grid. The third time they came back, they used it as a training run for six new members who had signed up. Mateo had almost forgotten about the body, instead concentrating on measuring up the new members and their mounts. He was planting flags for the new trainees to find as part of an exercise when he stopped to look at the view. It was at that moment that he saw something lying against a tree, near a stand of Gambel oak and a double stump of a white fir. Right where Willie said it would be. Only then did Mateo call the police; until that moment he’d been unsure if the body had been a figment of Willie’s imagination.

It was two more full days before Mateo went back up the mountain with the detectives. In the interim, the posse members dealt with the necessary logistics of conducting a body recovery—setting up base camp, organizing transportation, arranging reliable communication, and finding extra horses, gear, and feed. They decided that one rider—in this case, Mateo—would bring the police up to the body first, so they could see the scene as undisturbed as possible. The body recovery team would follow with the field investigator from the Medical Examiner’s Office, and together they would coordinate how to pack the body out.

Now Mateo had been on the trail for about four hours. Ahead, a Clark’s Nutcracker landed on a sagebrush next to the trail. The gray-and-black bird bounced on the branch, which was almost too thin to hold him, then flew off as the horses approached. At the top of the next ridge, Mateo had the detectives get off their horses and walk the rest of the way on foot, so as not to fill the air with dust. As soon as the little detective got off his mare, he started complaining about soreness. But Mateo knew he would really be in pain tomorrow, after his muscles started to stiffen up. Mateo led the detectives the last ten feet to the body in a single file, like the posse members had been doing since they first found the man. They had been specially trained in forensic scene management, for when a search and rescue turned into a body retrieval, as happened all too often.

When Mateo was within a few feet of the body, he let the tall Hispanic detective take the lead. The dead man was lying up against a ponderosa pine. The body was in surprisingly good condition, but then, it would have been frozen and only just recently thawed. The animals and squirrels hadn’t eaten much of him, and there wasn’t a smell. The red-haired policeman stood a few feet away, not approaching the body, but casting nervous looks at his partner and the dead man. The Hispanic detective crouched down and stared intently at the body for a few moments before looking off at the trees as they swayed in the wind. He watched the forest for so long that Mateo began to wonder if he was waiting for something. Then the detective stood up suddenly and began to walk back to the horses. As he passed his partner, Mateo heard the detective say, “It’s not him.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Annice Barber, Angela Barber, John Barber, Kristen Davenport, Pat West-Barker, and Tasha Rath for their constant support, along with Deborah and Tania, who gave me great insight into their worlds.

I also wish to thank, as always, Anne Hillerman, Jean Schaumberg, the Tony Hillerman Mystery Writing Contest, Peter Joseph, Thomas Dunne Books, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press for giving me my start in this business.

Finally, to the Santa Fe Police Department, the Santa Fe Fire Department, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department, the Santa Fe County Fire Department, and
The Santa Fe New Mexican
newspaper—thank you for being champions of the public, each in your own way.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR