Endangered (A Sam Westin Mystery Book 1)

by Pamela Beason

  She pulled the sleeping bag up to her neck. The howling started again. It sounded a mile or more away. Just coyotes this time. Natural predators, hunting natural prey.

  Humans are so out of sync with nature, she thought. We hunt for sport, not for food.

  Dread of the upcoming slaughter sat on her chest like a stone. Her mind continued relentlessly down the same depressing track. People as predators. Hunting animals. Hunting each other.

  The last thought kept her awake for a long time.

  12

  Dawn was heralded by the rumble of yet another helicopter passing low overhead. Sam peeled away the warmth of her sleeping bag. She wove her hair into her usual loose French braid, then crawled out of the tent. To her surprise, Perez was seated cross-legged a few yards away. He’d used her stove and pot to make coffee.

  His self-sufficiency earned him major points on her mental score sheet. She added another point to his total when he held a steaming cup out to her. A man who spontaneously gave neck rubs and made coffee was definitely a rarity.

  He said, “Depending on what we find in the ruins this morning, I may want to see the Curtain, too.”

  He was certainly a bossy type first thing out of bed. She subtracted five points from his score.

  “Let me rephrase.” He passed a hand over his face, changing his look of chagrin to a charming smile. “Good morning, Miss Westin. Could you please take me to the ruins this morning? And maybe later we could see the Curtain, too. At your convenience, of course.”

  At least he was observant. And adaptable.

  “You’re in luck,” she told him. “I just happen to be going that way. After I check my e-mail.” Perez’s coffee was weak for Sam’s taste, but an improvement over Tanner’s sludge.

  He held out an apple and a banana. “Fruit?”

  She took the banana and peeled it in silence. Although it was lovely to have a hot cup of coffee handed to her first thing, this was way too much conversation for this hour.

  Hoo-hoo-hoooo. Hoo! Hoo! As the call faded, Perez raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Great horned owl,” she told him.

  She chafed her hands against her upper arms. The air was chilly, a reminder that winter was coming on. Zack had been missing for more than sixty hours now. If he were up here exposed to the elements, the chances for his survival were slim. It would be best if someone did have him. Someone who wanted a little boy to love as their own. The vision of the man at the end of the path played in her mind like a videotape in slow motion: he turned from the campground toward her, raised one hand to salute her. If only she could see his face.

  The pink sunrise gave way to dull skies and a cool breeze. Clouds drifted over the plateau, building up against the escarpment to the west. Sam hoped the storms would hold off for a couple of days, as predicted. Late tomorrow evening or early Sunday, Kent had said. The area was desperate for rain, but if Zack was huddled under a bush somewhere barely clinging to life, a cold drenching would end his chances for sure. The only consolation was that if a real gully-washer developed, the planned parade of USDAWS killers might be postponed for a while.

  Perez’s phone chirped. He looked at it, extended a previously hidden antenna, and then answered it. “Any progress?”

  She should have know that the FBI would have some sort of primo satellite phones. She turned on her laptop and satellite hub, checked her e-mail and the latest reports. Two news sites carried stories on cougar sightings near schools and playgrounds. “What does Wilderness Westin have to say about this?” challenged one site.

  She brought up KSEA’s page. Yep, Zachary Fischer was still listed under Feature Stories and the article included a video of last night’s broadcast. Adam again, now looking more comfortable at the news desk, in front of a photo of SWF’s home page with her article and a photo on it. Her photo, of Agent Perez bending over—a red shoe? What in the hell? “Today,” Adam said to the camera, “as this latest article on the Save the Wilderness website explains, a shoe was found on a trail in Heritage National Park. Is this all that remains of Zachary Fischer?”

  “Damn it!”

  “Something interesting?” Perez had ended his call and now sat watching her.

  “Never mind. They find any trace of Zack down below?”

  He shook his head.

  She clicked over to SWF’s website. They’d run the story she’d sent last night and used the photo of Perez inspecting the ground. Max had pumped up the colors: now the rocks were a deeper maroon and the vegetation was greener. And sure enough, a new element had been added: a small red sneaker now was the focus of Perez’s gaze.

  Mad Max was altering reality again. She clicked the photo credit. It reported “composite image” and listed her as photographer along with someone named Doug Grafton, who no doubt owned a photo of a toddler’s red sneaker. Legal but definitely a little sneaky.

  She wrote a quick update about USDA Wildlife Services being dispatched despite the lack of evidence of a cougar attack, about how taxpayer dollars would pay for the slaughter. In e-mail, she begged Lauren to add this information to the website ASAP.

  When she clicked Wilderness Westin’s e-mail icon, a message box popped up to tell her that the e-mail folder had exceeded its limit of eight hundred messages and that the surplus notes were stored in another file in the system. With some trepidation, she opened the e-mail folder. Judging by the headers, most of the messages were rants against nutcases who protected wild animals instead of people. Crap.

  Kim, the SWF office manager, reported that the FBI had called to check Sam’s employment status. She glanced up at Perez.

  “What?” His expression was innocent.

  “Never mind,” she said again, and turned her gaze back to the list. The capital letters of one header leapt out. I have zachary. She gasped.

  She clicked the header. The message opened.

  I Have Zachary.

  It had been sent by someone logged in as 102236. How helpful. She turned the laptop around. Perez read it, then reached for his pad and pen. “Who’s 102236?”

  “I’m a writer, not a tech-head. I don’t know how to do a trace.”

  “We’ll check it out,” he said.

  “Should be easy. You already have SWF’s number.”

  He raised an eyebrow quizzically. After a second, his expression relaxed. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “We had the Seattle office check out this Wilderness Westin character.”

  She turned the laptop back around, studied 102236’s message again. “Think I should respond?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t hurt. String him along; maybe he’ll come back with something more.”

  Give me proof, she typed to 102236. Her hands hesitated above the keyboard as she suddenly envisioned a severed finger, a small ear arriving via FedEx. After adding Tell me something about Zachary that you couldn’t learn from the news, she clicked Send.

  Moving to an online phone directory, she requested a number for Scott McElroy, the Sierra Club hiker Kent had mentioned. He was not in Las Rojas, as she’d originally guessed but lived in Floral, the small town on the opposite side of the park. She copied the number into her pocket notepad.

  Perez buckled on his pack and Sam loaded her knapsack for the day, taking her minimum load of equipment, which didn’t seem minimal at all: phone, radio, camera, notepad, first-aid kit, snacks, jacket, water. She zipped the computer, the satellite gizmo, and the rest of the camping gear into the tent.

  As she was crawling out, Perez said, “Is there any way . . .” He hesitated. “I’d rather not go across that rock bridge again. If we don’t have to.”

  She grinned. “Okay. We’ll go via ZigZag Passage instead.” She didn’t tell him that there was no way she would have taken him over Rainbow Bridge, anyway. Crossing the rock arch was expressly forbidden by park regulations; she couldn’t risk being caught in daylight.

  As they hiked, Perez quizzed her about the park’s topography. “If there’s a bona fide trail down to the rui
ns, why would Charlie travel up and down the cliff walls?”

  “Maybe he does it for thrills, maybe just to prove to us that he can do it. Or maybe it’s a shortcut, like Rainbow Bridge. Who knows? Why does he run around with coyotes?”

  “Good question. And what does he do when he’s not up here howling?”

  “Anybody’s guess, FBI.”

  “Could you stop calling me that?”

  “All right. Perez.”

  “Chase,” he said.

  “Does this new familiarity mean that you’ve decided I’m not a suspect?”

  “I’m ninety percent sure.” He gave her one of his deadpan looks.

  She laughed. “I don’t know if I can call you Chase. It reminds me of Chase Manhattan. Is it a nickname for Charles?”

  He leaned his head back and focused on the sky above, scratching the underside of his chin as he considered whether or not to enlighten her. Finally, he said, “In this case, it’s short for, uh . . . Starchaser.” He checked for her reaction.

  She willed her lips not to smile. “Starchaser?”

  “My mother’s full-blood Lakota—you’d probably say Sioux. And I have a sister named Raven. And a brother named Wolf.” His eyes dared her to laugh.

  She would never have suspected that he was one of those extra-sensitive Native American types. “That’s interesting,” she said carefully.

  His gaze lingered on her hair, her face. “I’ll call you Summer. With your coloring, that name suits you. Do you have a sister named Spring or Autumn, a brother named Winter?”

  “My mother was diagnosed with ALS at the time I was born. So, no sisters; no brothers, either.”

  His face registered his discomfort. “Sorry.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know why I told you that.” Her father and grandparents always mentioned the timing in the same breath, as if it were part of the explanation. When Summer was born, the doctors discovered that Susan had Lou Gehrig’s disease. So the two events were inextricably linked in her memory, and she could never think of her own birth without the pain of guilt for her mother’s fatal illness.

  She needed to change the subject. “In Lakota culture, is a starchaser a good thing to be?”

  “According to legend, the stars are spirits. They carry messages from the Creator to people on earth. So I suppose that a starchaser could be someone reaching for the heavens, trying to be powerful. Or maybe seeking a message.” He shrugged. “It’s a made-up name; my mother thought it sounded romantic.”

  “With a name like Summer, I can identify,” she told him. “People usually ask me if my folks were hippies.”

  “I don’t think many hippies become Methodist ministers.”

  So he had checked her family background as well as her employment record. She let his words hang in the air, hoping it would make him feel guilty.

  “Just doing my job,” he said.

  At times Sam made a point of diverting from the trail to check out a side canyon or the shadow under an overhang. No sign of Zack. In fact, she didn’t see any signs of any other humans along the way, except for footprints in the dust and a scrap of cellophane, which she pocketed. At another time, she would have celebrated the lack of people in the backcountry. With Zack still missing, it just added to her frustration.

  At nine a.m., they stood in a bowl-shaped canyon, a sheltered oasis filled with spindly willow trees.

  “Nice,” Perez observed.

  “It’s nice most of the time.” A thin sheen of water on the hard rock floor reflected the sunlight. Sam pointed. “That’s Curtain Creek.”

  She waved her hand at a series of potholes scoured into the smooth surface. The largest was nearly three feet deep. “When enough rain falls on the high mesas, the water roars through there. It’s what carved out the Curtain.”

  She slapped her open hand on a vertical wall of sandstone next to a crude arrow etched into the rock. “And this is where Curtain Creek comes from. ZigZag Passage.”

  The V of the arrow pointed toward a narrow crevice. At ground level, only eighteen inches of sandy floor separated the opposing cliff faces. The walls undulated up, opening out gradually toward the top.

  Perez stiffened. “This is your other shortcut?”

  Sam slid her arms out of her daypack. Clutching the shoulder straps, she held the pack on one hip as she sidestepped into the narrow space. She glanced back to make sure Perez was following.

  He stood at the opening, scanning the close walls. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is only a crack. A claustrophobic crack.”

  “That’s one reason it’s not an approved trail.” She raised a finger toward the sunlight above. “Blue sky overhead; look at that if you find it claustrophobic. Take off your pack, hold it next to you, and come on.”

  He peered over her head, scrutinizing the passage beyond. “Haven’t there been earthquakes around here? We could be squashed like cockroaches under a shoe.” A solid rock wall loomed a short distance away. “It doesn’t look like it goes anywhere.”

  “It zigs. It zags. Then it opens up again. Don’t worry—it’s a short passage.”

  His rugged face was fixed in a frown.

  “Well, get out your map, Starchaser. Take the long trail to the ruins. I’ll see you there in a couple of hours.” She started down the passageway.

  By the time she reached the bend in the path, Perez was thumping and muttering behind her. She glanced back. He shuffled sideways, his nose only inches from the rock wall.

  The sunlight sifted down from above in narrow shafts, illuminating the layers of rock. The hues were those a master artist would have chosen, blending subtly from one into another. Dove gray. Celadon. Mauve. Bronze. Cream. Buttercup yellow. Each shade represented hundreds of years of geological processes at work.

  “Aren’t the colors incredible?” she murmured.

  “Lovely.”

  His sardonic tone made her smile. “This is called a slot canyon, for obvious reasons,” she told him. “ZigZag Passage is just a tiny preview of the Curtain.”

  “The famous Curtain is another crack in the ground?” He reached the bend in the path where the walls were farther apart, set the pack down and turned to face her, his shoulders brushing the rock on either side. “I can hardly wait.” His inflection implied just the opposite. “I was never one for the sideways-shuffle type of line dances. We Indians like to move forward.”

  “I thought ‘Native American’ was the politically correct term.”

  “No tribe called this place America, so why should we call ourselves Americans? We Lakota called ourselves the People.”

  She scoffed. “Dozens of tribes called themselves the People.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a perfect system. But according to my great-grandmother, it worked fine until you White Eyes started herding us around.”

  “Uh-huh.” She completed the short distance to the sunlit opening ahead.

  Perez emerged behind her, breathing a sigh of relief and stretching his arms wide.

  “You said that you dance?” she asked. “Do you go to the local powwows here in Utah?”

  “I’m Lakota.” Perez intoned flatly. “Well, half Mexican, half Lakota. Not Navajo, not Hopi, not Zuni.”

  Obviously a sensitive point. “I didn’t mean to imply that all tribes were the same,” she backpedaled. “I know you’re stationed in Salt Lake, so I thought you might be interested in local activities.”

  The rocky path, although bounded by huge slabs that had sheared away from the cliffs above, felt remarkably open after ZigZag. One of the bright yellow missing posters was taped next to the vertical slash from which they’d just exited.

  At first the poster startled her, as if it might be a clue left by the kidnapper pointing to Zack’s location. Then the probable explanation occurred to her. “Outward Bound must have left this. They went through ZigZag yesterday, on their way to the Curtain.” Which reminded her how fast time was passing. She tried to pick up the pace but soon lost Pere
z and had to backtrack to find him.

  He’d stopped to examine a petroglyph-covered spire of sandstone. Cream-colored figures danced across a shiny vermilion background. Fat deer ran before three stick figures with enlarged heads. Jagged rays zigzagged down from above the stick figures; the point of origin two curious ovals covered with spots.

  “Aliens attacking earth?” he guessed.

  “Wouldn’t the FBI know all about that?”

  He rubbed his knuckles across the dark stubble on his chin. “That’s an intergalactic problem; CIA jurisdiction.”

  He compared his own hand with an etching of a hand on the rock. His was nearly twice the size of the painted one. “Fremont?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The hand signature was a favorite of the Anasazi. The new park archaeologist, Georgia Gates, could tell you more.” She heaved a sigh. “Kent tells me the staff’s working on a plan to develop the archaeological sites here.”

  “You sound like you disapprove.”

  “I’m not keen on focusing on attractions like that, at least not in this park. People should come here to see nature, not man-made features. Have you been to Mesa Verde?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you know that it’s wall-to-wall people there. No wonder the cougars attack them.”

  He gave her a curious look and she knew her joke had not come off. “Okay,” she said, “Mesa Verde was made into a park to protect the archaeological sites. But Heritage was set aside to protect the beauty of the backcountry. More people will wreak havoc on the ecosystem.”

  “Aha.” He sounded pleased with himself. “They’ll scare away prey animals, leaving the predators hungry.”

  Hungry enough to eat two-year-old boys? Was that what he was hinting at? “I didn’t say that. The truth is, too many visitors scare away both prey and predators. If the park administration focuses on ruins, that means less money for natural resource protection, aka flora and fauna.” Kent would be a wildlife biologist with no funding for recovery or protection programs. “Pretty soon, all that’ll be left is asphalt and rocks and picnic tables.”