Canyon Sacrifice

by Graham, Scott

  Chuck inclined his head, a short sharp movement. Clarence. Francesca had opened the door when Chuck had used his name.

  “When did they leave?” Conrad asked, a note of urgency in his voice.

  “Like half an hour ago.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “I told you. He didn’t say.”

  Chuck broke in. “Did they go in the SUV? The one you had at the campground?”

  Francesca’s eyes flashed. “He made me drive it out of the park and leave it. Said it was too showy. Asshole.”

  “The girl, how is she?” Conrad asked.

  “I kept her sleepy, like they wanted. She hardly knew what was going on.”

  Chuck glared at her. “Was she ‘sleepy’ when he took her? Did you drug her earlier tonight?”

  Francesca glowered right back at him. “You’re the reason my Ronnie’s dead.”

  Chuck didn’t hesitate. “It was you who pushed him. You were mad because he went down so easy to me. One lousy punch. But he was a jerk to you anyway, right? He beat you all the time, didn’t he?”

  Francesca’s glower disappeared. Her breaths came fast and shallow.

  “You were ready to be done with him, had been for a long time,” Chuck continued. “You posed him for a picture out on the end of the point, got him up on the railing. It was so tempting, so easy. You gave him a little shove. Who would ever suspect?”

  Francesca’s eyes, darting from side to side, told Chuck all he needed to know.

  “Francesca,” Conrad said. He waited until she gave him her attention. “We have to know everything you know, and we have to know it now. Where do you think he took the girl?”

  “He’s crazy. He keeps getting crazier.”

  Chuck glanced at the map lying open on the bureau. “You were here when he directed me in the canyon?”

  “We couldn’t go out. None of us.”

  “He took the phone?”

  “My phone,” she complained.

  “And the gun?”

  “I could smell it. It’d just been fired. I knew to keep my mouth shut.”

  “But you let him take Carmelita.” Chuck made no attempt to hide his disgust. “You let him take the girl.”

  “I told you. I didn’t want to be next. He was, like, talking to himself. Don, he said. He kept talking about Don.”

  Donald. Chuck gritted his teeth. He’d heard enough. He backed to the door and pulled it open. “I’m out of here,” he told Conrad. He pointed at Francesca. “Call 911. They’ll take her off your hands.”

  He sprinted the length of the balcony to the back of the building, pounded down the rear stairs, and ran south through the Maswik complex and into the forest. He settled Rachel’s infrared goggles over his eyes as he entered the trees. He slowed, weighed down by all that had happened—the car chase, the wreck, what he’d learned from Francesca Calderon.

  Where should he go next? What should he do?

  Francesca had opened the door to the motel room when Chuck announced “Clarence.” Chuck drove his palm into his fist as he remembered what Francesca had said when Conrad had asked her about Carmelita. “They,” Francesca said. “I kept her sleepy, like they wanted.”

  And now “they” were set to use Carmelita as bait to direct Chuck to yet another out-of-the-way location at daybreak—in order to kill him.

  He came to a stop deep enough in the forest to be surrounded by full darkness. It was time he checked in with the only “they” he’d come up with so far. He pushed the goggles up on his forehead and punched in Clarence’s number on Janelle’s phone.

  “Where are you?” Clarence asked upon answering. “You didn’t show,” he sped on, his words tripping over one another. “And now all these sirens. Jesus, Chuck. Are you all right?”

  “Do you still have Carm with you?” Chuck demanded.

  “Carm? What are you talking about? Do you have her?”

  “I was just at the room, Clarence.”

  “Room? What room?”

  Clarence sounded baffled—and innocent.

  “Let me talk to Jan,” Chuck said, reconsidering.

  “My God, Chuck. Where are you?” Janelle said as soon as she came on the line. She sounded truly worried, her voice high and tight.

  Chuck bit his lip. Neither Clarence nor Janelle was putting up a front. The two of them weren’t acting. They sounded genuinely concerned because they were genuinely concerned. They weren’t kidnappers. They were the mother and uncle of a kidnapped little girl, afraid for her safety, and for Chuck’s safety as well.

  “We’re back at camp,” Janelle said when Chuck failed to speak. “We waited, but . . .where were you? The sirens. Do you think they’ve found Carm?”

  “They’re . . .they’re . . .” Chuck ached to tell Janelle about Dolores and Amelia. But he couldn’t. Not over the phone. And not now, not while he continued to wrestle with all the uncertainties ricocheting inside his head. “They still think it’s me,” he said. “They think I’ve got her.”

  “No.” Janelle sobbed. “Chuck. No.”

  The phone beeped in Chuck’s ear, signaling an incoming call. He glanced at the screen. The call was from the 505 number. This was it, his chance to prove Janelle and Clarence innocent beyond any doubt whatsoever. He put the phone back to his ear. “Is Clarence still there with you?”

  “What?” Janelle sniffled. “Of course he is.”

  “Let me talk to him again. Quick. Please, Jan.”

  The phone beeped in his ear a second time; he only had a few more seconds.

  “Chuck,” Clarence said as he came on the line. “Christ, man, you’re—”

  Chuck stabbed Janelle’s phone with his finger, taking the call.

  “This is it,” the computerized voice announced. A handful of unintelligible phrases followed. Then came a few words Chuck managed to make out: “. . . sunup . . . music festival site, site, site . . . alone . . . Don, Don, Don . . . have to, have to, have to.” With that, the caller was gone.

  Chuck lowered the phone.

  The “he” Francesca had referred to in the motel room was not Clarence. The kidnapper, Donald’s killer, was someone else.

  Miguel. The name came to Chuck. Who else could it be? But Janelle had said the caller’s voice wasn’t Miguel’s. Plus, there was Francesca’s confounding reference to “they.” And the fact that the kidnapper—or, now, kidnappers—knew so much about the canyon, and about Chuck’s find, too.

  Chuck mentally replayed the brief call from the computerized voice.

  “Don,” the caller had said, the same thing Donald had said as he lay dying in Chuck’s arms. But why had Donald spoken his own name as he died? And why had the computerized voice just repeated it?

  Suddenly the answer came to Chuck: Donald hadn’t been saying his own name. He hadn’t said “Don,” he’d said “dawn,” just as the caller had said seconds ago.

  Chuck recalled Donald’s last words: “The music . . .”

  Donald hadn’t been hearing things. He’d known what was going on before he’d been shot, and he’d died trying to tell Chuck what he knew.

  The screen on Janelle’s phone blinked off. In the pitch-black forest, Chuck rocked forward to the balls of his feet.

  Dawn it would be, two hours from now, at the abandoned Grand Canyon Music Festival site two miles east of the village, on the very edge of the South Rim.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  3 a.m.

  Who would he face at the music festival site? Was Miguel the “he” Francesca Calderon had referred to? Did the “they” she’d referred to include someone who knew the park and canyon?

  The easy way for Chuck to get the answers he sought was to ask Francesca. But he couldn’t call her because she’d said “he” had taken her phone. Besides, Chuck was sure the opportunity to get the truth from her had passed; she’d be done answering questions at this point. And other than Francesca, there was no one he could turn to for the information he needed.

  He pulled Rachel’s g
oggles over his eyes and set off at a run through the forest in the direction of the music festival site. He stayed deep in the trees and cut a wide arc around Mather Campground, crossing park roads when no cars were in sight, then disappearing back into the forest. He pushed himself, his legs growing heavy, and thought through every suspect he could imagine as he ran.

  Who might constitute Francesca’s “they”?

  His mind rewound two days to the visit to the South Rim Museum with Janelle and the girls.

  The Marburys, Jonathan and Elise.

  He stumbled, just catching himself.

  Could they have kidnapped Carmelita? The Marburys were an eccentric couple, awkward conversationalists at the best of times, prone to nervous tics and stumbling over each other’s words. But odd didn’t necessarily mean evil. Did it?

  In the museum, the park’s two curators had been in quite a rush as they’d made their way through the grand entry hall, their heads bent together over the papers in Jonathan’s hands. After nearly running Rosie down, Jonathan had joined Elise in closely eyeing Janelle and the girls. With a start, Chuck remembered Elise’s last comment before she and Jonathan had headed deeper into the museum. “Work, work, work, work, work,” she’d chirped.

  Jonathan and Elise had been thrilled with Chuck’s discovery of the burial shroud a decade ago. They’d been delighted by the olla basket from the connector-road dig two years before that, and by the double-ported urn from the latrine site dig two years ago. Chuck was their “magician,” as Elise had confided to the girls.

  Chuck never had told the Marburys about his find in the canyon, but they’d surely heard about it from others over the years. Had they somehow convinced themselves getting their hands on the discovery would provide a fitting capstone to their careers?

  And there was more: in the museum, Jonathan had said he and Elise knew Chuck was visiting the canyon. How had they known he was here when he’d arrived at the park with Janelle and the girls only a few hours before?

  The Marburys had entered the grand hall from the administrative wing. Perhaps they’d just left a meeting with Robert Begay, who at the time would have been freshly returned to the village from the scene of the fatal plunge of Francesca’s boyfriend, Ronnie, off Maricopa Point. Had Robert told the Marburys he’d seen Chuck at the promontory?

  Robert. The chief ranger had shown up without warning at the campsite after Carmelita had gone missing. And he’d been at Maricopa Point looking into Ronnie’s death. Would the chief ranger of Grand Canyon National Park show up at the scene of each and every cliff fall at the canyon? The answer was yes, Chuck suspected, if the chief ranger was Robert Begay.

  Robert was a known micromanager, as Chuck knew from personal experience. Two years ago, a few weeks after taking over the job as chief ranger, Robert had hiked all the way to Hermit Creek Backcountry Campground in the inner canyon to personally check on Chuck’s contracted work at the proposed site for the campground’s new latrine.

  Though the odds of coming across anything of interest at the barren site were astronomically long, Chuck had done a thorough job. He’d surveyed, staked, and strung every inch of the open patch of ground where the latrine would be built. He’d worked each five-foot-by-five-foot quadrant in turn, digging to where the layer of soil atop the rocky shelf ended and solid rock began, as deep as eighteen inches in some places, as little as four inches in others.

  At the end of each work day, Chuck had taken to exploring the ridges on each side of the creek. Though his contract did not require additional exploration beyond the confines of the latrine site itself, he was prompted to search the ridges on his own time because past archaeological surveys at Hermit Creek had turned up evidence of Anasazi presence in the form of potsherds, grinding stones, and hunting points along the creek bed, while more recent discoveries elsewhere across the Colorado Plateau indicated the Anasazi had made use of protected spaces beneath boulders and ledges as natural cupboards for storing urns and other clay items out of reach of rain. Three years prior to Chuck’s work at the latrine site, in fact, a pair of youngsters visiting Durango, which was situated in a river valley once populated by the Anasazi, had come across a perfectly preserved Anasazi pot beneath a rock ledge two hundred yards up the mountainside from their motel room on the edge of town.

  It was that find Chuck kept in mind as he zigzagged across the facing ridges above the latrine site during his evening hours, focusing on boulders and rock ledges large enough to provide shelter for stored Anasazi pottery until, just before dark one night, he crouched to look beneath a knee-high rock ledge and discovered the slender, double-ported Anasazi urn so similar to modern Navajo wedding vases. He photographed the urn in situ before packing it out of the canyon and turning it over to the Marburys at the South Rim Museum the next day.

  A week later, Robert radioed Chuck, requesting permission to stop by the latrine site in a couple of days for a “brief show-and-tell,” as he put it. Chuck spent the next forty-eight hours dreading the visit. New bosses invariably were out to prove themselves. What better way for the chief ranger to show his full-time employees at the canyon how tough he was than to make an example of a temporary contract worker by finding problem after problem with Chuck’s work?

  But Robert surprised him. The chief ranger arrived at the campground with just one other ranger, not the sizable entourage Chuck had expected. While the ranger visited with campers along the creek, Robert asked if Chuck would give him a tour of the dig site on its rocky shelf above the creek bed.

  After a cursory look at the unremarkable site, Chuck led the way at Robert’s request up the west-facing ridge to the spot where he’d found the double-ported urn a week earlier. He and Robert squatted side by side, studying the small cavity beneath the low rock ledge where an Anasazi Indian had tucked the urn a millennium ago.

  “Did you think about keeping it?” Robert asked, straightening with Chuck and turning to look him in the eye.

  “The pot?” Chuck replied in surprise.

  Robert nodded.

  “No. Never,” Chuck said with a definitive shake of his head. “It must have been tempting.”

  “What are you saying?” Chuck asked, treading carefully.

  Robert shrugged. “You and I both know how much something like that is worth.”

  Chuck hadn’t been sure how to respond. Yes, the idea of stealing a artifact or two had occurred to him over the years. How could it not? Greed was an inescapable part of the human condition. Acting on such a thought, however, would have gone against everything he stood for as an archaeologist.

  There was, of course, the fact that he’d kept the pots, necklaces, and disks in the alcove on Cope Butte secret all these years. But that was different. As he’d told Clarence, he never would profit from the Cope Butte find; he was just waiting for the right moment to tell the world about it.

  As Chuck made his way through the forest toward the music festival site, a chill passed through him. He’d told Robert the truth: stealing wasn’t for him. But was acting on such a temptation possible for the chief ranger of the park? It was Robert, after all, who had raised the subject with Chuck. Over the last two days, Robert had glared at Chuck on Maricopa Point, shown up unannounced at the campsite first thing the next morning, and come straight for Chuck at the railroad wye after Donald’s shooting, with barely a glance at Donald lying on the tracks.

  Robert’s involvement in Carmelita’s kidnapping certainly would explain the caller’s knowledge of the canyon and its trails. It was conceivable that Donald had stumbled across what his boss was up to and had gone to the wye in an attempt to put a stop to it.

  But why would Robert risk his long and successful park-service career to chase after a rumored Anasazi treasure? And why on earth would he pursue the treasure via the strange route of kidnapping a little girl? Was it possible he and the Marburys were involved in the kidnapping together? Was there something Chuck wasn’t seeing? Something about Robert and the Marburys he didn’t know?
r />   Chuck grunted in frustration, his mind whirling, searching. Another name came to him: Hansen Conover.

  The ranger-in-training had been positioned at Hermit’s Rest when Chuck had arrived there. Hansen had tracked Chuck’s movements in and out of the canyon before coming to Chuck’s aid when Chuck had collapsed on the Chalk Stairs. The young man had been on the scene of Donald’s killing, too.

  But why, if Hansen was involved in the kidnapping, had he called attention to himself by approaching Chuck at Hermit’s Rest? Maybe the thrill of the risky game the young man was playing had made it impossible for him to resist accosting Chuck at the trailhead.

  Had Hansen been among those at Maricopa Point working to retrieve the body of Ronnie, Francesca’s boyfriend? Chuck couldn’t recall the young man among those gathered on the promontory. But Robert Begay had been there. What if the chief ranger and Hansen were working together? What if the two of them, not the Marburys, were Francesca Calderon’s “they”?

  Bewildered, Chuck palmed sweat from his forehead and considered yet another name: Rachel.

  He was sure the Rachel he’d known until the day of their last breakup two years ago was incapable of kidnapping a little girl and holding her for ransom. But two years was a long time. Had their final breakup sent Rachel over the edge? She’d transferred—albeit unsuccessfully—to Everglades National Park, indicating at least some level of dissatisfaction with her work, or her life, at the Grand Canyon. Could her discontent have anything to do with Chuck? Could she have kidnapped Carmelita to get back at him? He snorted at the thought. Was he really such a prize that breaking up with him could drive a woman crazy? Certainly not confident, self-assured Rachel.

  Besides, if Rachel was involved, she never would have gotten hold of Conrad and disclosed Francesca’s whereabouts to Chuck. Nor would she have hopped in her patrol car and given chase to Amelia and Dolores. No, Rachel wasn’t a suspect. Which brought Chuck back to Miguel.

  It was hard to imagine how Miguel could not be involved in Carmelita’s kidnapping. The girls’ father had kidnapped another little girl in the past, and he had at least three motives for kidnapping Carmelita: greed, getting back at Janelle, and going after Chuck. Janelle and Clarence agreed Miguel was smart. He’d successfully pulled off the abduction and return of his niece for ransom, and he’d dealt drugs all these years without getting caught.