Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (5 page)

Three searchers froze.

“Get in. Find the MisPers. Get out. I want it fast. I want it clean. Anything else and this will turn into a goddam media circus. Sew it up by midnight.
Comprende?
” His eyes bore down on Ralph.

“Copy that,” Ralph said in the calm, steady voice to which Gracie aspired.

“Get out there,” Gardner said. He pulled the door open and strode out of the room.

With cheeks still burning, Gracie hauled a heavy HT—handheld transceiver—from a Pelican case lying open on the conference table. “Ready for the HT ID?

“Stand by one,” Ralph said, grabbing up the sign-in sheet. “Ready.”

Gracie read the numbers from a label on the side of the radio. “One zero four two nine one.”

Ralph scrawled the ID next to Gracie’s name on the form. “I’ll bring up the CP,” he said. “Take the Suburban and get up there.”

Gracie turned to leave.

“Gracie,” Ralph said.

She turned back. “Yah.”

Ralph winked at her. “Go get ’em.”

Gracie’s anger melted away, no doubt the intended effect.

“I’ll drive,” Cashman announced, grabbing a set of keys from a pegboard near the door and preceding Gracie out of the room.

“Fine by me,” Gracie answered as the pair double-timed it up the long, empty corridor. The novelty of commanding a Sheriff’s Department unit fully equipped with lights and sirens had worn off years before.

But when Cashman also offered to take the radio, Gracie balked, stopping in the middle of the hallway. One relinquished a certain amount of status and control when not carrying the HT. She could care less about status, but on a search the radio was her only link to the Command Post and the outside world. Without a radio in the field, she felt as vulnerable as if she were dangling over a hundred-foot cliff without a belay line.

Cashman stood in front of her with his hand outstretched. Gracie almost told him to go get another radio. They would each carry one. But the heavy HT could literally be a pain in the neck and she was already carrying a heavier than normal pack. She unsnapped the elastic band that held the HT in place on her chest pack, lifted out the radio, and handed it to Cashman.

“I’ll grab maps and be right out,” she said and turned down another hallway. Behind her she heard Cashman say, “I’ll get the Suburban.”

Gracie grabbed a rolled-up set of laminated maps from a back office and walked out the back door of the station.

Blinding studio lights lit up the parking lot like a movie set. News cameras homed in on Cashman already loading gear into the Suburban that sat parked and running in front of the Sheriff’s Office. As soon as Gracie emerged from the building, the invasive lenses turned in her direction. Pulling her hood up over her head, she tossed the maps into the front seat of the Suburban, stalked across the pavement to the Ranger, and hauled her heavy pack from the truck bed.

Every search was different. The required equipment and vehicles varied according to victims, circumstances, weather, and location. Expertise, experience, and personalities changed with personnel—civilian and sworn. As a result, some searches were run with precision and executed without a hitch. Others were bumpy, fraught with fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants moves that left Gracie feeling frayed and wrung out.

Gracie knew—
knew
—that the search ahead of them was going to fall into the latter category.

She hefted her pack onto one shoulder. “Here I am,” she crabbed aloud, “in the biggest media event of my SAR career”—she slammed the tailgate shut and plunked the back window down—“and I’m saddled with the world’s biggest weenie.”

CHAPTER

“C
ONTROL.
Ten Rescue Twenty-two,” Gracie said into the radio microphone.

With Cashman behind the wheel, the Suburban lumbered out of the Sheriff’s Office parking lot and onto the main boulevard.

“Go ahead, Twenty-two,” a female dispatcher answered.

“Departing Timber Creek SO with two SAR members. Heading for two Nora zero five on San Raphael.”

“At fifteen forty-three.”

Gracie rested the radio microphone on her knee and shrugged out of her parka. She tossed it into the backseat, then settled in for the hour-long ride up to the trailhead.

As the Suburban wove its way through the stop-and-go Boulevard traffic, wonking its siren to move slow-moving drivers out of the way, Gracie fine-tuned her equipment and rearranged the gorp, candy bars, and slap-dash peanut butter sandwich into various pockets for easier access on the trail.

“Damn, I hope we find him.” Cashman’s voice barged in on Gracie’s contented fiddling. “I could get Wanda an autograph. She fuckin’ loves Rob Christian.” A few seconds of silence, then, “Yeah. I need to get his autograph.”

Gracie re-Velcroed her knee-high gaiters and retied them at the top with double bows. “Who is this guy anyway?” she asked. “What movies has he been in?”

Steve rattled off half a dozen film titles only one of which—
Far Horizons
—sounded remotely familiar to Gracie.

“Didn’t he punch a reporter or something like that?” she asked, pulling the elastic from her hair and combing through the tangles with her fingers.

“Yeah. Nailed the sucker. Broke his nose. Fuckin’ awesome!”

The Suburban turned a sharp corner at the far eastern end of the valley. Incredibly for a holiday weekend, the highway leading up to the summit then down the back side of the mountain was free of traffic. Cashman floored the accelerator and the Suburban crawled forward at the speed of a full-bellied mastodon running uphill.

Gracie French-braided her hair in the back, refastened it, and pulled on her fleece beanie, tucking the braid up underneath. She leaned back in the cushy leather seat. “What’s all the hoopla about movie stars anyway?” she asked. “Aren’t they all just a bunch of self-important, pampered . . . ?” What was a good alliterative noun? Poodles? “This guy is probably as bad as all the others. Maybe even worse.” She sighed. “God, I’m tired. Joshua Bradford really got to me.”

Gracie watched the scenery flow past as Cashman launched into a lengthy diatribe of the previous night’s recovery, railing about the mistakes everyone else made and why they should have done an infinitely riskier technical ropes litter raise instead of unglamorously hoofing the body out, and why maybe it was time Hunter retired and someone else (namely Cashman) was elected the team’s Commander.

A dense forest of yellow pines scrolled by on their right. On their left, rounded hills dotted with piñon pines and manzanita with Joshua trees behind fell away to the desert beyond. In the distance, milk chocolate–colored mountains glowed pink as the sun sank lower in the west.

The Suburban tires squealed as they rounded a tight curve and drifted over the double yellow highway line into the oncoming lane which, thankfully, was unoccupied. Gracie clutched at the armrest with both hands.

Cashman swerved the Suburban back into its own lane and shifted his monologue to the present search. “Maybe we’ll make the news,” he said with a grin. “That would be fuckin’ awesome.”

Gracie rolled her eyes at the pines.

The Suburban crested the summit. Across a wide valley on the right loomed the monolith that was Mount San Raphael.

Imposing, forbidding, the mountain’s austere beauty beckoned unsuspecting hikers and mountaineers into its ice chutes and rocky canyons, every year claiming lives of men and women alike for its own. An early-season snow had draped a white shroud atop the mountain’s barren dome. Behind it, delicately fringed mare’s tail cirrus caught the late-afternoon sun to blaze tangerine fire against the turquoise sky.

The Suburban picked up speed on the downhill and sailed around a curve. San Raphael was swept from view.

CHAPTER

D
IANA
grabbed the toes of her tennis shoes with both hands and flexed them up and down to get the blood flowing again. The lower half of her body felt like a block of ice from sitting in the same position without moving for so long.

How long had she been there crouching between the two rocks? How long had it been since the devil had passed her by and continued down the trail? She had no concept of the passage of time, only of the paralyzing terror and the violent images that played and replayed in her mind’s eye.

She took several long swallows of water, emptying her water bottle.

Tristan’s bright blue eyes and his smile with its crooked lower tooth filled her vision. A single sob forced its way past her lips and tears stung her eyes. She rubbed them with her fists and steered her thoughts back to the others at the trailhead. What were they doing now? Had they called the police? Was someone out there looking for her?

“Please God,” she whispered. “Please let someone be looking for me. Please let someone come and help me.”

She lay back, stretching out full-length on the thick, soft cushion of pine needles, and stared up at the sky. The sun had dropped behind the western peaks, drawing shadow—blue and cold—across the valley. Pink and orange clouds swirled directly overhead. As Diana watched, the last blush of color faded to rust, then charcoal as swiftly and silently as death.

The feeling in her body crept back, a thousand tiny ice needles pricking her feet and moving up her legs.

The chill of early evening deepened. In spite of her heavy coat and hat, she shivered. She needed to move. She needed to try to get back to the trailhead, to the others, to safety.

She gathered up the knit gloves she had torn off earlier and pulled them, dirt-covered and stiff with dried blood, onto her hands.

Then, willing her stiff body to move, she pushed herself to her feet.

CHAPTER

“C
ONTROL.
Ten Rescue Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.”

“We’re turning off Highway 26 onto two Nora zero five.”

“At sixteen fifty-two.”

The Suburban turned left off the highway and onto the unpaved Forest Service road. For thirty minutes, it climbed up through the San Raphael Wilderness Area toward the Aspen Springs Trailhead, gaining more than three thousand feet in elevation. The SAR vehicle crawled up through steep-walled canyons swathed in darkness, across riffling late-season creeks, slowing almost to a standstill at the hairpin turns, and rounding curves where, inches from the front tire, the mountain dropped precipitously away for a thousand feet.

By the time the Suburban rolled into the trailhead parking lot, the sunset was a memory in swirling pewter clouds against the fading blue sky.

Parked across the entrance of the wide gravel lot was a Sheriff’s Department Chevy Tahoe with a deputy sitting inside. Bright yellow Sheriff’s Department tape cordoned off the entrance to the trail itself. At the far end of the lot sat a giant black motor home and three cars.

The Tahoe rolled ahead to let the Suburban past, then backed into place. Cashman swung the vehicle wide to park in a space opposite the other vehicles.

As Gracie stepped out onto the gravel, a blast of icy wind almost lifted her off her feet. “Windy,” she yelled. She grabbed her parka from the backseat of the Suburban and threw it on. “And cold. Not a good thing for those city people.” She flipped up the hood of her parka. “Unless we find ’em tonight,” she added to herself, “or they have halfway decent karma, this could turn into another body recovery. Or two. Or three.”

In a churning of dust, Ralph circled behind the Suburban in the team’s Ford utility truck, pulling a refurbished travel trailer serving as the team’s mobile Command Post. With maps, whiteboards, radios, batteries, office supplies, dishes, food, water, blankets, and a combination shower/toilet, it held everything anyone could possibly need to run a search.

Cashman swung open the back door of the Suburban and lifted out his pack. “He hauled ass up here.”

“You made great time, Hunter,” Gracie called over to where her teammate was already out of the truck and chocking the trailer tires.

“I gotta piss so bad my eyes are yellow,” Cashman said and trotted off in the direction of a boulder the size of an elephant sitting at the edge of the parking lot.

“I’m going to talk to the deputy,” Gracie yelled to Cashman’s back. She yelled the same information to Ralph, who gave her a thumbs-up in acknowledgment.

Leaning into the wind, Gracie fast-walked across to the Tahoe and tapped a finger on the driver’s-side glass. The window slid open.

The Deputy inside sure was cute. Gracie wished she could remember his name. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” the cute deputy returned.

“You interview the RP?”

“RPs. As in plural. They’re in the motor home,” he said indicating the RV with a nod of his head. He handed her a copy of the team’s own LPQ—Lost Person Questionnaire. An accurate, complete LPQ provided a Fort Knox of invaluable information: clothing, equipment, experience, mental state, medications. An already completed questionnaire would save them half an hour, maybe an hour, and could literally mean the difference between a successful mission and not, between life and death, between rescue and recovery.

Gracie glanced down at the form. Half the questions remained blank. Only the most basic—contact information and physical descriptions of the multiple missing persons—had been completed in the deputy’s neat cursive.

“Sorry,” the cute deputy said. “It’s all I could get out of them.” He followed up with a brief overview of what had happened, which essentially was that fewer people came back than had started out.

“Okay, thanks,” Gracie said. “Guess I’ll go over and give it a try.”

“Good luck,” the cute deputy said in a tone that implied Gracie was really going to need it.

The Tahoe window whispered closed.