About to give up on the idea of tracking them down, she spotted a saucer shaped section of wicker sticking out of the snow on a small rise. She fought her way to it on her belly, swimming in the snow rather than trying to force her way through it. The other lay fifteen feet from there, near the river's edge.
When she had them both locked into place, shivering from her snow bath, she followed the trail she'd left behind. “It wasn't real,” she told the winter wood.
She didn't expect an answer, but she got one. From the depths of her mind, closer to the surface than it had any right to be, a voice drifted up. You know it was.
She turned away from the tracks and began making her way toward the village. “No, I don't. It wasn't real.”
3
Hudson Foster could have gone all year without getting the call. Today of all days, the last thing he needed was to deal with death. Five years was a long time, but for some things, there were not enough years to dull the memory, or the pain. He preferred to take the anniversary of his wife's death off. Stay in bed, with nothing to worry about except changing the channels on the TV and how many ice-cold beers remained in the fridge.
Deaths in Yellowstone were tragic, but they were also expected. Unfortunately. Every year tourists either took on hikes that were too strenuous for their abused tickers, or put themselves in bad situations, thinking those famous last words—'I know what I'm doing' or 'just for a minute'. The season hadn't even started yet, and this day of all days, should have been off-limits for another death.
He pulled onto the narrow shoulder of the road and walked the last hundred yards to Sulphur Caldron. Mike Garrett, a veteran ranger and Hudson's mentor, was already there. Red and blue lights on the top of his truck strafed the snow blanketed trees. As he walked, he crisscrossed the road, looking for anything out of place. If the man died before the snow plows made their most recent pass, they'd never find evidence near the roadway.
He found a smooth patch of snow, taking a mental note of where each of his footprints marred its surface, and stepped over the wall to stand on the edge of the smoking pit. Despite the bad weather that had been plaguing the upper regions of the park, plenty of red could still be seen. “Recent,” he muttered and began a careful search of the perimeter.
“The witness,” Mike pulled his eye away from the viewfinder of a camera and nodded toward a hiker being questioned in the main turnout. A full-gear backpack sat at his feet. “Say's he got here an hour and a half ago. One car since then, he sent them to find reception to make the call. No one else, except us.”
Hudson pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture of a waffle pattern imprinted in the bloody snow. “Was he wearing snowshoes?”
Mike shook his head and used the camera to point into the woods. “Snow boots. The snowshoe tracks come and go from the same direction.”
They were too far away from the caldron for Hudson to make out who the other rangers were, but he assumed they were based out of Fishing Bridge and had been first on the scene. One spoke to the hiker while two others stepped in and out of view behind the nearest snow wall. Mike followed his gaze. “Silver Lexus. Presumed to be the victim's.
“ID?”
“Car's registered to Lester Dunkirk, Lake Hotel manager,” Mike snapped a few more pictures of the body at the bottom of the caldron and pointed to one wall. “Not a shoe I'd wear out here in the winter.”
Hudson snorted, “Not a shoe you'd ever wear. That looks like an Oxford. If it belongs to Lester, he paid more for it than you did for your entire wardrobe.”
“When you're as sharp as I am, there's no need to spend a fortune just to hide ugly toes.”
Hudson stopped at the blood trail and took a few more pictures. Not of the snowshoe prints, but another set of prints, which looked as if they'd been there before the blood was spilled. “Someone else was here.”
“Not Mr. Oxford?”
“Tennis shoes.” Hudson followed the tracks to the edge of the caldron and back. “They were here first. There's an Oxford print over the top of one of them.”
He followed the prints back to the head of the blood trail and pointed out the path they took around the deepest impressions in the snow. Hudson put his hand next to a print and took another cellphone picture. Mike followed up with the department camera.
“Small for a man, maybe six and a half. That'd make it about a woman's size eight.”
“Shit,” Mike looked over the prints with Hudson, reading the story that had been left in the snow, and took a deep breath. “So Lester meets Mr. Tennis Shoes, Mr. Snowshoes comes up behind him and puts him on the ground. They follow him back to the caldron and finish him off.”
“Or,” Hudson offered, “Mr. Tennis Shoes and Mr. Snowshoes are the same person. Mr. Snowshoes hikes in, takes off the snowshoes and waits for Mr. Oxford. Once the job is done, he becomes Mr. Snowshoes again but just can't resist one last look and walks back to the caldron.”
“I like yours better. Means we only have one crackpot to track down,” Mike walked back to the edge and stowed his camera away. “Season hasn't even started yet.”
“That might be a blessing,” Hudson grinned. “Instead of three million suspects, we only have a few hundred.”
“Should be a piece of cake then.”
The sound of crunching snow caused them both to turn. Calvin, a second-season ranger with Howdy-Doody red hair and freckles, stopped at the base of the boardwalk. “Rescue and Recovery has been rerouted to Sylvan Pass. Avalanche.”
“Damn,” Hudson looked back at the caldron. “We're going to have to get dirty, aren't we?”
Mike chuckled and nodded before turning back to Calvin. “You guys finished with the hiker and the car yet?”
“Everything in the car has been bagged and tagged. Hiker didn't have much more to offer. Billie's going to take him to Mammoth to stay for a few days, in case you need him.”
Mike and Hudson grinned at each other before nodding toward the rookie female ranger. “Why don't you run him down, Calvin? Tell Billie we're going to need her help here.”
The young ranger lifted his hat and scratched his hair, glancing back at Billie. He turned back to the senior rangers, lips puckered tight to keep from smiling. “That buffalo carcass you broke me in with last season doesn't look so bad anymore.”
It took twenty minutes to get the lines anchored and another fifteen to get suited up in harnesses and protective gear. Hudson pulled out toothpicks and drew against Mike to see who would be going into the caldron with Billie to fish Lester's body out.
Dark clouds rolled in the distance, grumbling a warning that a spring snow storm was heading their way. Mike drew first, pulling a whole toothpick from Hudson's grasp. Hudson hid the end of his own, non-broken, toothpick and cried foul even as he started suiting up. The old man could hold his own in any wrestling match with poachers and drunks, but Hudson wasn't about to test Mike's ticker by letting him haul a dead savage out of a thermal feature.
“Why do they call them savages?” Billie asked.
Hudson thought he'd spoken out loud. He paused in his climb down the hill and looked up. Her face was pale, her eyes locked on the dead man as she picked her way down the slope. The question hadn't come from what he'd said, but from an attempt to keep her mind off the horrible task she was about to perform.
He welcomed anything that took his mind off the familiar feel of the climbing harness and the memories it forced to the surface. Five years ago, and one bad decision, his ice climbing days had come to a screeching halt. Five years had passed and he still had to force himself to put the harness on to do his job.
He tested the ground with one gentle nudge before putting his weight on it, and turned his thoughts to Billie's question. “It's old school. Back from the early days of concessions in the park, when they lived in tents with very little in the way of civilized amenities. Savage was kind of a catchall for them. If you were a dishwasher, you were a pearl diver. If you were a housekeeper, you were a
pillow puncher.”
“I have a friend that works in the accounting office in Canyon—” Billie didn't test her next step and her foot broke through the crust, washing it in scalding hot water that stung even though she was wearing heat and acid resistant boots. She jerked it back up, glanced sheepishly at Hudson and tried a new spot. “What should I call her?”
“My advice,” Mike called from the top of the ridge where he monitored the climbing rigs, “Don't call her. Savages and Pine Pigs don't mix.”
Startled, she looked back up at Mike and tripped on a rock. “Pine Pigs?”
“That's us,” Hudson grinned. “But they don't know that we know they call us that.”
“Kristi would never—”
“Bet your ass she would,” Mike laughed. “The first time she got caught doing something she shouldn't be doing. Now pay attention and don't mess up my evidence.”
She looked at the boiling, acidic pool of yellow sludge and then back up the hill at Mike before shrugging the unspoken, smartass retort at Hudson.
He looked away, forcing a serious expression while he studied the pool. He would have liked to keep the banter going. It made the job easier to handle. Death was easier to deal with if you could keep your mind off of the sordid darkness it represented. This one was going to be messy. “Send down the hooks, Mike.”
Spending time in a 190º acid bath had done a job on the body. Using the hooks, it was more like fishing a giant chicken out of a huge crockpot than trying to retrieve a man. At least the strong fumes that roiled out of the pit masked the smell of the body. It took another hour to get him to the banks of the caldron and into the body bag.
As Mike used a winch to pull Lester back up to the boardwalk, Billie leaned out, pulling her harness tight and used her hook to fish in the pool.
Hudson eased his way over to her. “What do you have?”
Thunder rattled through the valley, and the sky lost its shine. She let her lip slip out from between her teeth to answer. “I think it's a chunk of wood. Could be nothing,” she answered and bit her lip again, concentrating on not falling into the pit.
Hudson looked back up the slope, to the broken railing where Lester fell through. He grabbed a bucket and used his own hook with hers as a pincer to grab the lumber and drop it in. “Good job, rookie. It might be nothing, but we'll take everything we can find.”
He was on his way back up to the boardwalk when a glint of gold caught his eye in the last of the waning light. “Hold up, Mike.”
Buried deep in the sidewall, one small corner peeking out of the mud, was a small piece metal. Hudson dug around it, revealing a mangled pair of thin rimmed glasses. He had only seen Lester once or twice, couldn't remember if the man had worn spectacles or not, but he thought it was a safe bet they were his. He pulled an evidence bag out of the suit, gathered up the glasses and gave Mike the thumbs up to reel him in as snow pellets began to fleece the ground.
With the body taken care of, the suits shed and the gear stowed, they sent Billie on to Mammoth with Lester and crawled into Mike's truck to escape the onslaught of ice. “We're losing those snowshoe tracks.”
“Where are they going to go?” Mike snorted, “Hop a train? Cross the border into Mexico?” He started the truck and kicked it down into drive. “There's only one place in that direction—Canyon.”
“The call's been made. No one is leaving the park that we can't track,” Hudson said as Mike pulled up next to his truck. “Didn't this guy have family at Lake?”
“That sounds about right. The Lake rangers should be talking to them around now. We'll get our ducks in a row with the photos and evidence, start pulling backgrounds on the people he was working with for pre-season.”
Hudson got in his truck and rolled down the window. “What about Canyon?”
“Divide and conquer?”
“Want to draw straws? See who gets stuck with which camp?”
Mike laughed and shook his head as thunder rolled across the ridge. “Why, so you can cheat and take the one you want?”
“You knew about the toothpick?”
Mike laughed and combed his fingers through his silver hair. “Of course I knew.”
“Why didn't you say anything?”
“I might be getting old, but I'm not stupid. Let the young bucks do the dirty work.”
“Uh-huh,” Hudson couldn't believe the old man had pulled a fast one on him. “I see how it is now. Next time, I'm breaking yours.”
“You get Lake. Canyon's closer to home.”
“God forbid an old man would have to drive that far from his geriatric chair,” Hudson laughed as Mike pulled away.
4
Gracie made it home while the storm still held its breath. Fred and Ginger went crazy as she approached the RV, plastering themselves to the front windshield like some crazy Garfield dolls with suction cups on their feet to hold them to the glass. The dashboard was a blur of red and cream colored fur, black noses, and pink tongues as the Pom-Chi's celebrated her homecoming with complete, unrestrained joy.
Exhaustion from the trek back to Canyon pulled at her. The fear that had been riding her, fear of what she had seen, fear of what she had heard and felt, and a fear of what she may have done, faded with each excruciating step back up the mountain. She needed the love that Fred and Ginger so faithfully gave, but she had been gone all day and even the most faithful of dogs had their limits.
She rubbed and kissed them just long enough for them to accept the open doorway to go outside and potty. With them safely in the small, fenced in yard, she peeled out of her snowsuit and slid into warm sweats. With the coffeepot gurgling her favorite song, she opened the door and sat on the couch, arms open for the avalanche of fur that was coming.
Ginger, more longhaired Chihuahua than Pomeranian had always been the team acrobat and went straight for the top of Gracie's head. Fred landed in her lap, paws around her neck. From different, and constantly moving, directions, the dogs slathered her face with kisses. Gracie rubbed, petted and scratched anything she could get ahold of as they danced around her.
Everyone said her dogs were spoiled. They were right. No matter how much she loved them, no matter how much she gave them, it would never be enough to repay them for all they did for her. Their unconditional love was only a small part of the debt she owed them.
When they had received enough loving to make up for the hours she'd been gone, Fred jumped onto the floor, stood on his back legs and pawed at the air, touching his paws together on each pass as if he were praying instead of begging. Ginger sat next to Gracie on the couch, watching her brother, her tongue lolling and a big goofy grin on her face. “Ginger, you going to help him?”
Ginger vaulted off the couch and began to dance. Fred, with stronger Pomeranian genes, was able to stay on his back feet while dancing in circles. Ginger, more Chihuahua than her big brother, gave voice to her exuberant energy stores by doing backflips between each dance.
Laughing, still warm by their affection, Gracie pulled a couple of dog biscuits from the pantry and waited for them to notice. When the scent of the treats caught their attention, they moved to the couch. Propping their noses on the edge, they went still, only their eyes moved while they watched Gracie come closer.
She placed one treat in front of each little nose and stepped back. Their self-control was incredible. She could have filled her coffee cup, sat at the table and enjoyed the whole drink. Neither dog would break that stance until she gave the word.
Julie had seen this strange display a few times. Each time Gracie made them wait, Julie would squirm in her chair and call her a bully. Gracie laughed, knowing that it wasn't she who had created this little game, it was her fur-babies. They had tried it three times before Gracie had figured out what was happening and learned to play along.
She poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. She blew on the thick, rich liquid and whispered, “good job.”
Faster than she could track, Fred attacked Ginger's treat while
she attacked his. They each took up a position on opposite corners of the throw rug, with butts in the air, and devoured their stolen treats.
“Where's my coffee!”
Gracie almost doused herself with the hot liquid as Julie slammed her hands and face up against the window next to her. The built-in air raid sirens that were Fred and Ginger went off at full volume. They launched themselves over her, and the table, to let Julie know her surprise was not appreciated. For the second time in as many seconds, Gracie juggled her coffee to keep it in the cup.
“If I wasn't so happy to see you, I'd call you an ass!” Gracie shouted through the window and climbed out from under the dogs.
With a handful of the dogs' toys, Gracie opened the door and threw them into the yard. As the dogs rushed out to play, Julie slipped in and Gracie closed the door. She hated locking her babies out when Julie was over, but the dogs were always so excited to have company that it would take an hour to quiet them enough to have a decent conversation.
“Kristi and Kari checked in this morning, too,” Julie grabbed a cup out of the cabinet and helped herself to coffee. “They should be about done getting settled in. Figured we could catch up and then head for dinner at K-Bar.”
Three hours earlier, Gracie would have given anything to see Julie. Now, warm and safe in her motorhome, it was even easier to believe it had all been in her head.
Julie snapped her fingers under Gracie's nose. “Earth to Gracie O?”
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“All right, child,” Julie sat her cup down and leaned forward, taking Gracie's hands in hers. “You look drawn, pale. And now you're orbiting the moon while we should be celebrating being back home.”
Gracie took a deep breath and gave Julie's hands a squeeze. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.”
“Then spill it. What's going on?”
“I saw something today.” She tried to be strong but as she spoke, her voice grew softer, more frightened. As if responding to the vulnerability Gracie felt, Julie moved to the other side of the table and put an arm around her, giving her strength.
Canyon Echoes Page 2
