He looked up for a moment as if beseeching the heavens for sanity. When he lowered his head, his straight hair fell back into place, except for one ebony strand that slipped onto his forehead. “Do you know his real name?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Why do they call him Coyote Charlie?”
“Well, the Coyote part is pretty obvious, but I don’t know about the Charlie part. Maybe it just sounded good. He’s kind of a legend with the park staff. It would ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it, to know everything about him?”
They were outside her tiny canyon now, sitting on the sloping plane of the plateau. Sprawled straight-legged on the wind-scrubbed rock beside her, Perez gazed silently at the full moon, at the pinpoints of light strewn across the heavens like crystal beads on black velvet. Moonlight now brightened the open space, lending a blue sheen to Perez’s raven hair, a chiseled-stone appearance to the planes of his face. His jawline was dark with whiskers. Sam was pleased to see that at least he had to work at some aspect of personal grooming.
The canine chorus started again. The unearthly shriek joined in, closer than the other howls. Sam stood and raised her binoculars to her eyes, scanned the surrounding hillsides and plateau. Nothing but moonlight on rocks.
Perez rose to his feet. “How far away do you think he is?”
She cocked her head, listening to the howls. “Sounds like it’s coming from Horsehip Mesa. That’s his usual haunt, just above the ruins. It’s about three miles, at least an hour and a half away. In daylight.” Her feet hurt just thinking about it.
“Damn. The chopper pilot told me they won’t fly over the park after dark. Something about squirrelly winds over the canyons.”
She nodded. “That’s right. Updrafts, downdrafts, thermals.”
“This Coyote guy may know something about Zachary Fischer.”
The child’s face welled up in her memory, along with the feel of those damp little fingers. She shook her head. “I doubt it. The rangers have never considered him a troublemaker.”
“Forget your romantic ideas about galloping naked in the moonlight,” Perez told her. “Consider the evidence. Zack’s shoe was found on Powell Trail, and Powell Trail leads up here. This wacko might have seen the kidnapper.”
As far as she knew, Coyote Charlie had never been reported in the valley. And there was the shadow figure at the end of the path, the man that she had abandoned Zack to.
“He might be the kidnapper.”
Her mind’s eye supplied a vision of Charlie squatting on top of crumbling adobe, howling at the night sky, crouched over a small body like a coyote over a rabbit. Damn her overactive imagination! There was the rock bridge; it’d shave more than a mile and a half off the journey. But it’d be dark and dangerous . .
She stood up, extracted her penlight from her vest pocket. “Let’s go.”
Perez hesitantly retrieved his own flashlight from the ground. “Three miles in the dark? Isn’t that a little crazy?”
“We have moonlight.” She impatiently tapped the penlight against her thigh. “And I know a shortcut.”
He aimed his flashlight at his chin and snapped it on, adding devilish shadows to his grinning face. “Coyote Charlie, here we come.”
Maybe the man wasn’t so uptight, after all.
A blood-curdling howl beckoned them.
RANGER Rafael Castillo sat in his truck, watching the campground. Someone had to have seen something on the night that Zack had disappeared; more than half of these vehicles had been here at the time.
Things didn’t look good for that little boy; a ten-mile radius from the campground had been searched, and nobody had discovered any trace of Zachary Fischer. When the ransom demand had been faxed to park headquarters, Rafael suspected the kid had been snatched and spirited out of the park, no matter what the gatekeeper said. But now that the child’s shoe had been found on a trail that led to the interior, he didn’t know what to think.
The lights were on inside Russ Wilson’s camper, but he didn’t see anyone moving around. Maybe Wilson was reading. Or maybe he was watching TV: an electric cord anchored the RV to the outlet that bordered the parking pad. The FBI agents had run a check on the vehicle, as they had on several others in the campground. It had come back clean, registered to Orrin R. Wilson in Rock Creek.
But he still had a funny feeling about the guy. He’d had Zack’s cap in his camper—what were the odds of that? Tomorrow, he’d get the Utah DMV to pull Orrin R. Wilson’s driving record. Sometimes even parking tickets could say a lot about a man. Where would he find a couple of hours to do that? These double shifts were killing him.
The rhythmic ticking of soles on pavement caught his attention. A man jogged along the asphalt road on the far side of the loop. In and out of the pools of light spilling from RV windows and kerosene lanterns, Wilson ran slowly, tonight dressed in black sweatpants and burgundy hooded sweatshirt, bright white athletic shoes. So he hadn’t been lying about the jogging, anyway. He came to a stop at the drinking fountain next to the restrooms.
Tonight Wilson wore no toupee, and Rafael could see that although graying hair clung to the sides and back of his head, his crown was hairless, just as Rafael had suspected.
The sweat on Wilson’s face and bald spot gleamed in the bright light over the restroom entrance. As he wiped a drip from his chin on the back of his sleeve, a little boy came out of the restroom and walked up to the fountain. Wilson held the child up to the spout, clasping the small body tightly between his legs and the metal drinking fixture. A smile crept onto Wilson’s face as he gazed down at the boy, and it stayed there when he set the child down on the ground. Rafael felt relief when a woman exited the women’s side of the building and took the child away with her.
So Wilson was still here. And he did like kids. Maybe he was just fondly remembering his grandkids, but maybe he was the kind of creep that liked kids too much. After making sure that mother and son and Wilson returned to their respective campsites, Rafael drove away.
His mother-in-law sure knew how to pick them. Her first husband, Anita’s father, had drunk himself into an early grave. He gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to sort out his thoughts. Did his uneasiness about Russell Wilson come from his experiences as Miranda’s son-in-law, as a father, or as a law enforcement officer?
THE rock floor fell away into blackness below. Sixty feet beyond the yawning space, the flat white plane of the mesa continued.
“You said you knew a shortcut,” Perez growled. “I can’t fly.”
“You won’t have to.” Stepping down onto a narrow ledge a foot below the rim, Sam directed the flashlight onto the rock at her feet. “Stay close to me, and watch your step.”
He climbed gingerly down beside her and peered over the canyon lip. “Must be at least forty feet down there.”
“Closer to sixty in the middle,” she said in a soft voice.
“How are we—” He stopped in midsentence as Sam’s flashlight beam revealed the narrow strip of limestone that spanned the canyon. She stepped out onto Rainbow Bridge.
Perez sucked in his breath, hesitated a second before asking, “Have you done this before?”
“Of course.” But only once, and that had been in daylight. She tried to sound confident even as she fought the urge to hold out her arms like a tightrope walker.
When she was about ten feet onto the span, she noticed that Perez remained on the lip of the canyon.
“Hey, FBI, you coming or not?” She squatted, placed a hand on the stone. The grainy surface was warmer than the air, having absorbed the sun’s heat all day. Making a fist, she thumped it against the wind-worn rock. “It’s solid.”
He switched on his flashlight and sidestepped out beside her, sweeping the beam nervously back and forth over the bridge surface and into the yawning space below.
The smooth surface of the rock arch gleamed in the moonlight. Sam cautiously advanced, preceding her steps with the penlight’s beam. The circle of light
slipped off the lip of limestone to her right, revealing a drop-off into inky space only inches away.
“Just keep the rock in front of your feet. And don’t look down.” The warning was as much a reminder to herself as it was encouragement to Perez.
She held her breath all the way, thankful that her flashlight highlighted not a single serpent. The warm, smooth rock of the arch was everything a desert snake could desire on a crisp fall night. She thought about how the cougars had sprawled across the wind-worn surface.
Where were Leto and her cubs now? Waiting silently in the shadows nearby, watching these two foolish humans risking their lives in the moonlight? No, they were probably prowling the canyons, hoping to surprise a sleeping deer. Or crouched under an overhang somewhere, still traumatized by all the flyovers today.
After reaching the other side of the canyon, Perez ignored Sam’s outstretched hand and stepped down carefully beside her. He exhaled heavily, and she felt his breath, warm on her shoulder and neck.
The howling began again a few seconds later.
“He’s not far away now. Keep your voice down. Sound really carries out here at night.” She dowsed her light and climbed up to the top of the mesa, Perez right on her heels.
“There.” Sam pointed. The apparition stood with his back to them, bare feet spread, arms outstretched. Coyote Charlie wasn’t naked tonight. Splotched fatigue pants hung loosely from his narrow hips, and a T-shirt clung to his lean chest. He wore a kerchief over his hair. As the series of coyote yips increased in volume from the other side of the canyon, the man clenched his fists, threw back his head, and belted out a haunting howl.
Perez drew the pistol from his belt, held it with both hands as he walked toward the ghostly figure. As the mournful note wavered and faded away, Perez’s footsteps became audible on the hard rock surface. Coyote Charlie swiveled to face the FBI agent.
“Hands in the air!” bellowed Perez. He halted, his feet shoulder distance apart. “FBI!”
Charlie was motionless for a moment, hands held stiffly out to his sides. Then he bent at the waist and, with a scrabbling of hands and feet, abruptly disappeared from the horizon, leaving only a star-spangled sky where he had stood.
Perez sprinted forward. Sam ran after him, catching up as he slammed to a stop at the edge of the mesa. Their flashlights revealed a series of narrow ledges jutting out from the sheer cliff face at their feet. The ultra-high-pitched squeaks of bats were shrill in the night air. A shower of pebbles rattled somewhere below.
She couldn’t resist needling Perez. “That worked out well.”
He sputtered what she suspected were Spanish expletives.
“Give it up, FBI. We’re not going to catch him tonight. He knows this area like the back of his hand.”
“Damn.” He sighed. “What’s down there?”
“The ruins.”
He peered more intently into the blackness below.
“You can’t see them from this angle. This cliff is a crescent-shaped overhang, what they call a blind arch. Beneath it are some Anasazi ruins. Below that, a waterfall that comes out of the Curtain. And there’s Goodman Trail, which leads up through Sunset Canyon; it comes out about a half mile from here, behind those hoodoos.” She indicated a row of rock sentinels to the west. Normally a brilliant red in daylight, they were dark gray and sinister-looking in the moonlight.
“I want to go down there.”
She groaned. “We’ve already got nearly an hour hike back to my camp.”
“I don’t want to go down there tonight,” he clarified. “But first thing tomorrow. Okay?”
“Since when does the FBI need my permission to go anywhere?”
He turned and faced her. “Since this FBI agent needs a guide. Can you take me to those ruins tomorrow?”
Sam considered. “If we can stop off a few places along the way, looking for Zack.”
He nodded. “Even better.”
“You’ll have to keep up.”
He stiffened. “Haven’t I so far?”
“And only if you’ll share information.”
“We’ll have to see about that.” He slid the pistol into the holster at the side of his belt and visibly relaxed. “It’s a fine night for a moonlit stroll.”
He was right. The Temple Cap sandstone gleamed like new-fallen snow in the bright moonlight, the whiteness broken occasionally by spiky bursts of yucca and stark skeletons of dwarf junipers. The air was reasonably warm, too, somewhere around sixty degrees right now. If Zack was out here somewhere, as long as he was sheltered from the wind—
“That child might make it through a night like this,” he said, startling her.
She resolved to block embarrassing thoughts from her brain when Perez was in the vicinity.
For a long moment he stood in silence, head thrown back, examining the sky.
“You know,” he finally said, his words so soft that she had to strain to hear them, “I’d forgotten the stars.” He shook his head. “How could anyone forget the stars?”
Over an hour later, they returned to the hidden canyon. Sam shoved her gear into her tent and immediately sat down to untie her laces. Perez picked up his pack. “There’s not enough space for another tent here. I’m going to camp outside.”
“Suit yourself.” She yawned and kicked off her boots and sat rubbing her neck.
“Whiplash?”
“Huh?” The man had a knack for startling her with his perception.
“I noticed the back of your car. You got rear-ended recently?”
“Three days ago.” She yawned again. Perez might have zipped around in a helicopter today, but she’d hiked more than a dozen miles, and that on almost no sleep from the night before. “My neck’s just a little stiff.”
He set down his backpack. Then he slid his hands under the collar of her shirt. The motion made her shiver. He rubbed his palms over her neck and upper shoulders for a moment, creating a warm friction, and then his long fingers began to knead the muscles along her backbone. “How’s that?”
“Mmmmm.” Sam was pretty sure she shouldn’t be enjoying the massage as much as she was. She needed to stay alert, stay on the job. For Save the Wilderness Fund. For Zack. For the cougars. But his long fingers felt heavenly as they expertly manipulated her sore muscles. She leaned back into his hands.
“Feels good,” she murmured, her voice embarrassingly husky. What a cliché. He’d think she was deprived of sensual contact. Which, actually, she was. Fans imagined that the gorgeous Adam Steele had a hot sex life, but in truth he was so busy that their intimate encounters had been few and brief. And he wasn’t a toucher, except for laying his arm across her shoulders now and then. And she didn’t want to think about Adam in any way right now.
Warmth flooded downward from Perez’s fingers. In another minute, she’d be making little mewing sounds. “Were you a masseur in your former life?”
“CPA,” he said.
“An accountant?”
“Lots of agents come from accounting backgrounds.” He pulled his hands out from beneath her collar and moved them lower down, pinpointing the V between her shoulder blades. His thumbs started little curlicue movements. Along with a not wholly pleasant burn in her injured muscles, tingling sensations crept through her body. In a minute he’d know she wasn’t merely deprived. Depraved would be a more accurate description. There was Zack, she reminded herself. Her job. She couldn’t become a puddle of warm ooze.
She swallowed, sat up straighter. “Much better,” she said briskly. “Thanks.”
He rubbed for a couple of seconds more, then stood up. “You’re welcome.” He shouldered his pack again. “Good night.”
She crawled into her tent and zipped the flap shut.
He paused outside. “I still want to question Coyote Charlie.”
You would, she thought. “Good night, Special Agent Chase J. Perez.”
His footsteps slapped softly against the limestone of the canyon floor, then faded away.
She closed her eyes but couldn’t drift off. Her neck still tingled where Perez had rubbed it. She checked her watch: to her surprise, it was not quite eleven o’clock. Sliding out of her sleeping bag, she found the portable radio in her pile of gear, crawled out of the tent, and carried the radio to the top of the biggest boulder. Perez was nowhere in sight, but she could see shadows moving just beyond a row of upthrust rocks; that had to be him. She raised the radio to her lips, pressed the button. “Three-three-nine, come in, three-three-nine.”
After two more tries, Kent answered, breathless. “Three-three-nine.” She guessed that he hadn’t had his radio on his belt but had to scramble for it.
“Hey, Kent, it’s Sam.”
“Sam? I wondered who’d be in range up here at this hour. You have a radio?”
“Of course not.”
There was a short silence, and then he said, “Smart-ass.”
“You gave me that one.” She laughed. “How’s it going there?”
“Aren’t the stars incredible? I saw a collared lizard today. He ran away on his hind feet, just like one of those nature films on TV.”
“Whoa, I’m jealous. I’ve never seen that.”
“The G-D helicopters scared everything else away. Everything except good ol’ boys. Castillo wrote five citations for menacing with firearms today; Taylor’s up to three. Hope we’re not becoming another Yosemite.”
She knew what he meant: rangers on constant patrol with pistols and nightsticks.
Kent continued. “I had to read the riot act to three hunters packing rifles. They weren’t exactly polite, but they left peaceably enough. I’ve got Mesa Camp all to myself. Your turn.”
“Enjoy the peace and quiet, Kent. Anything new about Zack?”
“Nope. And damn, that can’t be good . . . They’ll be asking me to hunt down Apollo next.”
He obviously hadn’t heard about Wildlife Services being called in. Sam chose not to enlighten him. Let him be happy for one last evening.
“Oh, wow! Just saw a shooting star! Or maybe a UFO—I’ll have to ask FBI Man if he knows anything about that.”
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