The pilot responded, “Not that golden Lab?”
Tanner nodded. “Thought it was a cougar sneaking up on Molly. And then last night, old Jack Kinley blew away one of his new calves. His own calf, in his own pasture! I hope he’s ashamed of himself.”
Sam’s head ached. She tugged Tanner’s sleeve. “Is the Wildlife Services hunt still scheduled for today?”
The assistant superintendent twisted in her seat. “They’re at HQ now, assigning areas and gearing up. The plan is to start in from the perimeters at noon. With luck, they’ll kill one lion and then this whole mess will be over and done with.” Tanner turned back and resumed her chat with the pilot.
Over and done with? What about Zack? Had everyone already written him off? Sam watched the ground below, unwilling to entertain the idea of never knowing what happened to Zack and a cougar being killed for no good reason. They passed over Curtain Wash, where the skeletons had been found. The area was overlaid with crisscrossed ropes. Search grid. She counted three people in park service uniforms, two in blue windbreakers with FBI printed on the back.
“You got that NCIC stuff okay?” Tanner yelled at Perez. “That list of Charlies?”
The FBI agent nodded, patted his jacket pocket.
Sam leaned close to him. “Charlies?”
“A list of missing Charlies and a list of young Charlie types with criminal records from Oregon dating back three to ten years.”
“And?”
He handed several folded pages to her. “Fifty-six. Too many to sort through.”
She glanced down the first page of names, each accompanied by a brief physical description and the reason the person was sought. Perez had circled two: Charles Richard Allen, thirty-four, reported missing four years ago. Carlos Jose Matera, twenty-eight, reported missing fourteen months ago.
Perez nodded. “Neither seems very likely. Allen was into drugs and pimping; Matera’s only five eight. Our Charlie looked more like six feet to me.” He shrugged. “He’s probably not on the missing list. Lots of adults are never reported—especially if nobody wants them back.”
How sad. At least she had a housemate who would notice if she didn’t come home. Her mind flashed to Adam—would he miss her? She didn’t know what she meant to Adam anymore. And now that she really thought about it, she wasn’t sure they’d ever really meant anything to each other.
She flipped to the second page of names. Now out of the missing category and into the criminals. Here again, Perez had circled a few: Carl Benson Lagos, twenty-eight, armed robbery; Jason Charles Dane, twenty-nine, trespassing; Karl Jacob Davinski, thirty-two, destruction of construction equipment.
“Wolf Davinski!” She pointed to the name on the list. “He was one of the Earth Spirits, along with Fawn Bronwin. It’s got to be Coyote Charlie.”
Perez ’s eyes lit up. He held up his right hand. She smacked it with hers in a high five.
Barbara Jean Bronwin and Karl Jacob Davinski. BJB + KJD. At some point, Barbara and Charlie—Karl—had been a couple, at least in someone’s mind.
They made the Curtain in less than ten minutes and descended into a noisy maelstrom of blowing grit. “Want us to stand by?” the pilot yelled.
Perez shook his head, signaled for the helicopter to lift. Yes, get the infernal machine out of here, Sam thought, hunched into a protective huddle.
As the helicopter faded away, she heard a flutter of feathers and a chirrup. A curious magpie swooped to a perch above them, hoping for a handout. The birds were already learning that helicopters meant people, who usually carried food. A trace of sage floated in the air. The poor plant had probably been ripped to shreds by the rotor whirlwind.
Curtain Creek trickled across the mesa floor, shimmering in the morning sun, then disappeared into a long gash in the earth. The slot canyon zigzagged away from them, rending the mesa floor as if a lightning bolt had broken the mountain in two.
“This is the famous Curtain?” Perez peered down into the crevice. “Doesn’t look like much.”
“The beauty is all inside.”
“And how are we going to get down there?”
She moved to a stack of smaller rocks wedged between two giant boulders. After she had lifted away several of the smaller rocks, the edge of a metal footlocker was revealed. “The park service keeps climbing gear here for emergencies.”
Perez watched her turn over several more rocks until she located the key to the brass padlock. She rummaged through the locker, extracted two tangles of nylon webbing and steel rings. She handed one to him. “Your harness.”
She showed him how to strap on the webbing. When he’d buckled the last shoulder strap into place, he spoke in a low voice tinged with a British accent. “Ready, Q. Bring on the parachute.”
“No chute, Bond. You’ll want to remember that on your way down.” She fastened her own shoulder strap. She pulled out two figure eight–shaped devices and two long coils of nylon rope.
He whistled a low note. “You must have at least two hundred feet of rope there.”
“Three hundred and fifty, actually.” She handed him a coil. “This is yours. Pick an anchor.” A few yards away, a heavy steel ring had been set in concrete that filled a natural crack in the rock surface. Three more rings appeared at irregular intervals.
“Hardly in keeping with the natural surroundings,” he commented.
“It’s better than having people chisel into the rock or tie off to trees. And, as Kent would say”—she felt a sharp jab of pain at the thought of her wounded friend, but pushed it aside to continue—“it saves scraping up climbers from the bottom of the Curtain. It would be virtually impossible to get a stretcher down there.”
He grimaced. “Let’s not talk about scraping up climbers or stretchers right now.”
She threaded the rope through one of the figure-eight descenders, clipped it to the D ring at Perez’s waist, and pressed the rope into his right palm. “Hold this, and grab the other rope with your left.”
She rigged up her own figure eight. “Hold the rope loosely in your left hand, just below your hip. Keep hold of the rope above the descender with your right hand.”
“The friction of the rope pulling through the descender slows you down, so there’s no need to grab the rope unless you want to stop completely. Lean against it, and walk backward. Keep your fingers loose.”
He did as she instructed, staggering back on his heels with jerky steps as the rope slid through the device.
“You’ve got it.” She straightened, letting her rope slacken to the ground. “That’s as much practice as you’re going to get. The only way to learn rappelling is to do it.” She stuffed some ascenders into a pocket, then pulled the shoulder straps of her pack over her harness. Perez did the same with his.
They backed up to the crevice. Perez peered over his shoulder at the drop below, his face grim. Sam stifled a smile, remembering how nervous she’d been the first time she’d rappelled. “Balance on your heels and let out enough rope to hang your rear end out into space.”
They let their ropes out and sank into sitting positions in the harnesses, their boots poised on the brink of the crevice. At least the man knew how to follow instructions.
“Now, keep your legs in front of you and just walk down the rock face.”
With his legs straightened, the opposing rock wall was only inches from the back of Perez’s head. He glanced nervously over his shoulder. “We’re not going to get wedged in here, are we?”
“Don’t worry—the space opens up down below. Let’s go.”
She took two steps down into the crevice, the rope sliding through the descender with a whir. Perez didn’t move. His fingers were clenched around the rope. She grabbed her rope, stopped. “You’re not going anywhere until you release that death grip, FBI. The rope doesn’t move, you don’t move.”
“Just resting.” He relaxed his fingers. The rope whirred, dropping him about a foot. Panic shot across his face. He grabbed the rope again and came to an
abrupt stop.
“You’ll get it. Just keep going. The friction will control your speed.”
Perez passed her with several long strides.
“And the friction also . . .”
He jerked his hand up with a yelp.
“I was about to say that the friction heats up the metal, so don’t touch it.”
“No kidding.”
She kept her own voice low. “Instead of just walking down the wall, you can also push off—gently—and release the rope at the same time. Then swing back in.” She demonstrated, gliding past him like a spider sliding down its thread of silk. Her wounded thigh sent a jolt of fire through her body as her boots slapped against the rock.
“Try it. Easy now, no he-man stuff, or you’ll bounce off the walls.”
She pushed off, let a section of rope pull through, then swung back into the rock face about ten feet below her previous position, wincing a little as she hit. Perez followed suit, ended up slightly above her.
“Good. Keep your feet straight out in front.”
He peered down between his braced legs. “How far is the drop?”
“It’s about a hundred and sixty feet right here.”
“Great. Far enough to become a paraplegic.”
“Quadriplegic is probably more likely. Or just plain dead.” Unfortunately, she said the last word too loudly, and it echoed in the confined space. Dead . . . dead . . . dead.
Perez held a finger to his lips. “Someone might be down there,” he whispered. Then he made his hand into the shape of a gun.
JUST after reporting for work, Rafael Castillo finally called the Utah DMV to check up on Orrin R. Wilson. He’d been awake half the night thinking about the guy. Was Wilson really slimy, or had this whole Zack Fischer thing made him crazy? God knows he’d hardly slept in the last few days.
“No problem, Ranger,” the clerk said, back on the phone after only a couple of minutes. “Here it is—Orrin R. Wilson, Rock Creek, no outstanding tickets. There’s no jacket whatsoever. Amazing. How many people reach the age of seventy-nine without even a speeding ticket?”
“Seventy-nine?” The Wilson he knew was in his early fifties at the latest. Who was this slimeball using Orrin Wilson’s name? The slimeball that had his smarmy hands all over his kids last night?
“Give me his address,” he ordered.
The newly laminated license! He was an idiot! He didn’t deserve to be a law enforcement officer. It wasn’t a replacement license; it was a fake, a newly laminated composite of information and photo. It was no comfort to know that Taylor had fallen for it, too. He kept his foot on the accelerator all the way to Rock Creek.
Now, through the screen door, the elderly Ruth Wilson blinked in confusion. She was still in her bathrobe, her white hair in disarray, reminding Rafael that it was only eight thirty on a Saturday morning.
“Orrin’s in the nursing home, right where he’s been since Memorial Day,” she told him. “He’s not dead, is he?” Tears filled her pale eyes.
He calmed the woman down, then asked about Russ Wilson.
“Russ?” Her dried-apple countenance puckered even more. Then a look of understanding dropped into place as if the proverbial lightbulb had come on. “Oh, you must mean Wally.”
“Wally?”
“My son, Wally. He’s not here right now, though. He’s borrowing our camper for a few days; his old Buick’s in the shop.” Her thin fingers clutched at her worn nylon robe. “I don’t know why he keeps telling everyone to call him Russ, and I certainly don’t know why he’d be using my last name now. I gave him a perfectly good name—Wallace. Wallace Russell.”
“The child molester?” Rafael screamed at the old lady. He’d been keeping an eye out for Wallace’s Buick for days, ever since his name had come up in the FBI check.
Ruth double-checked the lock on the screen door between them. “I don’t know why people have to say nasty things like that about Wally,” she said with a sniff. “Why, he’s got himself a lady friend and everything now.”
21
BANDS of pastel-colored rock rippled down like flowing curtains. They were gliding through millions of years. They’d already passed through the yellow schist that marked the period when prehistoric man first emerged, were fast approaching the lavender rock at the bottom, the color of the earth when the first mammals wandered this area.
The rhythm of rappelling and the colors and shapes of the rock always soothed Sam. In her current state of fatigue, the sounds and motions were almost hypnotic. Normally it would be easy to forget about life outside of the Curtain, about Zack, about Fred Fischer and Buck Ferguson, Coyote Charlie and Kent and the cougars and SWF and Adam and the whole sordid business. Except that now Perez’s warning about someone waiting below with a gun had her itching all over, eager to reach solid ground where she could run instead of being an easy target dangling overhead.
A muffled thump from the bottom of the crevice told her that Perez had not landed well. He rolled to his hands and knees, the seat of his pants covered with damp sand. She pushed off hard and released her rope, landed on both feet on the packed sand floor and was immediately sorry as a stab of pain flashed up from her wounded thigh.
“Nine-point-five,” Perez said. “You’d have to do it without the rope to get a perfect ten.”
Perfect ten, echoed the walls.
“What happened to being quiet?”
He held out his hands. “Nobody here but us.”
They stood in a large antechamber, approximately seventy feet long by thirty feet wide. At the bottom of the crevice, the undulating striped walls of the slot canyon met a floor of damp, fine sand. Sunlight streamed in from above in a narrow shaft, highlighting diamonds of water vapor. At one end of the crevice, Curtain Creek shimmered down the wall, a delicate bridal veil. The cascade became a shining ribbon across the floor and then disappeared into the darkness at the far end of the chamber.
“So this is the Curtain,” he said. “It looks almost organic. Like we slid down the throat of a gigantic beast and now we’re seeing it from the inside.”
Holding her fingers well away from the hot aluminum, she unclipped her descender from the D ring on her harness. “Most climbers only know this chamber: it’s called the Cascade Room. Outward Bound climbs right back up.”
He looked skyward. “Good God. How?”
“Ascenders.” She pulled one that was already threaded with a loop of rope from her pack. “They clamp onto the rope. You put your weight in one, slide the other up the rope, then move to it and slide the other one up.”
“Sounds like work.”
“It is. I brought them just in case. But it looks like we don’t need them.”
They stripped off their climbing harnesses and attached them and the ascenders to the dangling ropes. She made a mental note to tell park HQ that they’d left the park service climbing gear out. HQ would be annoyed, but she could blame it on the FBI. Perez explored the chamber, examining the rippled walls and the sandy floor.
“There are hundreds of different footprints in here,” he observed. “If there was any clue about Zack or Barbara Jean, we’d never notice.”
“Maybe we’ll have better luck below.” She tucked an errant strand of hair into her braid. “From here on, it’s strictly a rock scramble, with a few tight squeezes and wet crossings.”
“Squeezes? Wet crossings?”
“The Curtain feels like a cavern because of its size, but it’s really a slot canyon like ZigZag. The creek slithered down through a crack eons ago, carved out five chambers that descend through the rock layers. Get out your flashlight.” She led the way to the far end of the chamber.
Barely visible in dim light, Curtain Creek spilled noisily down over a moss-covered rockfall into a smaller chamber some twenty feet below.
“Watch your step,” she said in a low voice. “The algae’s slippery.”
They scrambled down the pile, clutching at rocks to steady themselves as they maneuvered over the unev
en footing. At the bottom, Sam studied the chamber anxiously for a moment to be sure they were alone, then limped onto the wet sand and looked back. Perez’s hair and eyebrows were frosted with mist, making him look as if he’d suddenly turned gray.
He stepped down beside her. Only the light from a narrow crack above illuminated the small room; the sun was a spotlight reflected in the glistening water. Two stout pillars of rock held up layers of stone overhead. Generations of swallows had glued mud nests onto the pillars, making the rock formations look as if they had sprouted warts. Several of the elegant long-tailed birds swooped and twittered overhead.
“This is the Drawing Room. In the springtime the birds are so loud, you can’t even hear the water in here.” She gestured at the floor of flat sand and rock. “Hardly anyone comes this way,” she murmured, “So footprints might be preserved in this chamber.”
Perez, now in the lead, inspected every inch of floor and walls with the flashlight he’d taken from his pack. At one point, the beam illuminated a rough wall drawing of two deer etched in ochre, and next to the crude animals were three handprints, two adult-sized and one tiny, with the fat palm and stubby fingers of a baby’s hand.
“The Drawing Room—I get it,” Perez whispered. “Anasazi?”
She shook her head. “The archaeologists say these are recent fakes.”
The light in the chamber dimmed as if a bulb had just winked out. The narrow crack in the chamber ceiling revealed thunderheads gathering outside.
“Oh no,” Sam groaned softly. “Looks like rain.” A rumble overhead echoed her prediction.
“We’ll be dry enough in here.”
“You don’t understand. When it rains, the runoff on the high mesa dumps into Curtain Creek. And remember, Curtain Creek runs through ZigZag Passage and then dumps into—”
“Here,” he finished, his tone suddenly grim. His eyes focused on the placid stream of water trickling slowly across the chamber floor. “How long does it take the creek to rise?”
She sucked in a nervous breath. “It depends on how hard it rains, and how long. If it really pours, it can reach flood stage in a half hour.”
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