Zero-Degree Murder

by M. L. Rowland

  When Gracie walked up to the shelter, Rob was leaning against the fallen log, arms folded across his chest. The frown on his face molded his eyebrows into a single dark line. He looked so much like an angry housewife waiting for an errant husband that Gracie almost smiled at him.

  “Where the hell—?” he asked in a sharp voice.

  Gracie silenced him by placing a single finger on his mouth.

  With her mouth two inches from Rob’s ear, she described to him what she had found.

  Rob whispered back that as far as he knew, only one of their hiking party smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

  Joseph.

  As night settled like an icy cloak at the bottom of the canyon, Gracie and Rob demobilized the second shelter and moved deeper into the wilderness. A half mile down, they located a triangle of bare ground, suitably level and surrounded by giant boulders. Evergreen boughs placed over the top effectively masked the beacon of orange plastic and added extra insulation. Unless one stood directly in front of the two-foot wide passageway leading in to the refuge of boulders, they were completely invisible.

  In silence, they heated their dinner over Gracie’s tiny stove—the remaining packet of chicken noodle soup spiced with a little bottle of Tabasco from the MRE. They topped off a quarter each of the flat, but still tasty peanut butter sandwich with the packet of stale Skittles, which Rob painstakingly divided in half.

  In silence, they crawled into the shelter. By the dim light of her headlamp, Gracie checked and rebound Rob’s ankle with the elastic bandage.

  In the dark, they climbed into their respective sleeping bags and lay down side by side, the trekking poles and Gracie’s bared hunting knife between them.

  CHAPTER

  56

  RALPH stood at the edge of the Aspen Springs Trail and watched the recovery team retrieve Steve Cashman’s body from the depths of the canyon.

  The all-encompassing cloud had lifted, but an unbroken layer of slate gray stratus clouds still obscured San Raphael and the surrounding mountains, and brought with them an early dusk.

  Ninety minutes earlier, two EMTs had rappelled down the high-angle cliff to where the battered body lay at the bottom. They had radioed back the positive identification as a Timber Creek SAR member. Male.

  Until that moment, Ralph hadn’t realized how profound his terror was that Gracie might be dead. The report that the body was Cashman’s elicited shock and a deep sadness. But his relief that it wasn’t Gracie so overwhelmed him that he sagged down onto a rock before his knees gave way.

  From a vantage point up the trail, Ralph watched the somber setup of the ropes system and the long, tedious process of hauling the litter containing Cashman’s body up the side of the mountain to the trail.

  The grim irony that Cashman had pushed to do a technical ropes body recovery only two days before wasn’t lost on Ralph. Cashman had gotten a body recovery all right. His own.

  How the hell had Cashman fallen from the trail? Ralph wondered. For all his flaws, the man was a mountain goat. If Cashman and Gracie had located one or more of the MisPers and one of them had been injured, Gracie, as the EMT, would stay behind with her patient or patients, and Cashman would hike out to radio in for a relief team.

  But Steve had hiked almost all the way back to the CP. Why hadn’t he called in earlier, as soon as he emerged from the dead spot?

  Ralph grimaced. Cashman hadn’t called in because he was Cashman. Publicity hound. Glory seeker. He wanted to be the hero. He had big news and wanted to deliver it in person. And that decision had somehow cost him his life.

  As three members of the recovery team daisy-chained the last of the anchor webbing, and inventoried and packed away the heavy steel carabiners and rigging plates and Prusik-minding pulleys, four other team members carried the Junkin litter containing Cashman’s body encased in a white plastic body bag, out to the trailhead parking lot and the ambulance that waited there.

  Now the only thing that remained for Ralph to do was visit Wanda, Cashman’s wife, who by this time had received the news that she was a widow and their little girls had lost their father.

  But Ralph’s thoughts hadn’t gone there yet. By the light of his headlamp he regarded the scarred radio microphone resting in his open palm. While neither Cashman’s GPS nor the HT itself had been recovered, the microphone had survived the four-hundred-foot fall into the canyon clipped to Steve’s parka, the microphone that told Ralph with a certainty that chilled the blood in his veins that Gracie was out there essentially alone. Without a radio.

  A cold, delicate touch brushed the back of Ralph’s neck. He tipped his head back and looked up. White flakes, large and fluffy, floated down from above.

  It was snowing.

  CHAPTER

  57

  MILOCEK sat at the base of the outcropping with his back against a granite boulder. He drew cigarette smoke deep into his lungs, then exhaled it through his nostrils.

  The day ebbed toward evening with the flat layer of leaden clouds casting a pall across the entire canyon. The air was damp and chilled him to the bone.

  Climbing up from the creek, he had resumed his search for any sign of a trail, but had found nothing. Except for the one instance of hearing what he was certain were human voices, he had heard anything.

  When it had grown too dark to see, he climbed back up to the trail. He would resume the search the following day.

  Milocek rarely second-guessed his own actions. But he cursed himself now. He never should have taken that first swig of brandy. He had dropped his guard, lost control. Killing the interfering man on the outcropping had been an impulsive act, the mark of an amateur and a fool.

  He considered again if, when the woman recognized him, he should have simply returned to his car and driven out of the country.

  But he knew exactly what would happen if his identity were revealed. Manhunt. Capture. Imprisonment. Extradition. Tribunal. Execution. The decision to salvage the situation or die trying had been the right one. The only one.

  But he wasn’t giving up the fight yet.

  Milocek’s gloved hands balled into fists. He ground his back teeth until they squeaked.

  Rob and the woman searcher were down there in the canyon. He could feel them. Smell them. Taste them.

  Something wet and cold touched Milocek’s face. He looked up.

  It was snowing.

  CHAPTER

  58

  IT was snowing. Hard.

  Encased in her sleeping bag, Gracie stared at the powder-puff flakes dancing an ominous ballet of nature before the shelter entrance. Six inches of snow already hung on the surrounding boulders and the bushes and trees beyond, rendering the landscape a monochromatic palette of dark and light.

  In the protective cove of granite boulders, the little shelter lay immune from the worst of the storm. Beyond, the moaning, blustering demon of wind blasted the snow into a swirling wall of white. Occasional icy breaths stole into the shelter through layers of fleece and straight to the skin.

  Overnight Gracie and Rob’s passive wait for relief had turned into an active fight for survival. All of life’s other problems were shoved to the background. All self-doubt was erased. All Gracie’s thoughts, all her energy laser-beamed into a single goal: Stay alive.

  Years of training kicked in and Gracie mentally ticked off everything she could remember about survival theory. Survival is a state of mind. Think positive thoughts. A positive mental attitude is number one on the list for keeping oneself alive. Despair was one sure marker on the slow route to death.

  The snow also brought a curious sense of relief. While the storm meant no rescue for the time being, its protective layer also provided a respite, albeit temporary, from Joseph, if the man hadn’t hiked out at the first sign of snow.

  It was a given that while it snowed there would be no aviation evacuation. And it w
as a real possibility that the Command Post would elect to endanger no additional lives and pull any existing teams in from the field. The one thing that was a certainty was that she and Rob were stuck for the duration.

  As quietly as possible, Gracie unfolded the map. First she pinpointed their location. Then she calculated approximately how far it was from the shelter down to the creek and up the other side of the canyon to the trail, from there to the parking lot. With the snow, she was fairly certain the Command Post would have been moved to a lower elevation, possibly the Coon Creek Jump-off, the junction of two forest service roads five miles back down the mountain. If not there, then the Sandy Flats Visitor’s Center a mile or so down the main highway, the nearest location suitable for a large SAR operation. All told, the distance from the shelter to where Gracie could guarantee there would be a live person was more than ten miles.

  Her eyes slid over to where Rob slept, the drawstring of his sleeping bag pulled so tightly around his head that only the top half of his face was visible.

  Gracie was confident she could make the ten miles, even in the snow. But she couldn’t take the chance that Rob might not.

  They would stay right where they were and wait it out. Someone would eventually come. Search and Rescue never abandoned its own. Ralph would never leave her out there.

  Not to mention the fact that the man who lay sleeping only inches away from her was literally worth his weight in gold. As soon as the storm blew past, the entire country would be out looking for them.

  All they had to do was stay alive that long.

  CHAPTER

  59

  RALPH stood beneath the overhang of the visitor’s center and watched through the oblique curtain of snow, alpine teams preparing for their snowcat rides up to the Aspen Springs Trailhead. His face was unshaven, his eyes red-rimmed from too few hours of trying to sleep on the hard floor of the visitor’s center along with half a dozen other searchers.

  The previous evening, as conditions deteriorated on San Raphael, the Deputy Incident Commander assigned to the twelve-hour night shift had pulled the remaining few teams of ground pounders in from the field. At 0600, newly reorganized and equipped alpine teams—all trained and certified in winter travel and survival—had arrived for deployment. In spite of Ralph’s heated protests, a refreshed Incident Commander Nels Black had assigned only one team of three men and one woman to search specifically for Gracie.

  Ralph knew the San Raphael Search, as it was now called, had not officially shifted focus. The rest of the world was interested only in one thing—bringing Rob Christian out alive. Yet for every searcher present, regardless of his or her assignment, locating the original MisPers had become secondary, replaced by a single, all-encompassing goal: find and save one of their own.

  If Gracie was injured and off the trail, the chances were infinitesimal that searchers would locate her in this weather. But Ralph empathized with the gut-wrenching compulsion to try. He needed to be out there, too, searching for Gracie, doing everything physically possible to find her, to bring her safely in. He inwardly cursed his injured knee that left him grounded, helpless, watching from the sidelines.

  Ralph stared at the small groups of SAR members from Timber Creek and other county teams checking and organizing their equipment carabinered and strapped in place on packs and climbing harnesses—ropes and climbing hardware, ice axes, snowshoes, snow pickets, crampons. The only visible manifestation of the turmoil beneath the surface was the muscle working in his cheek.

  Gracie was still alive. She had to be. When pushed, she could be as ornery as a bull at a Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival.

  “Hold on, Gracie girl,” Ralph whispered.

  CHAPTER

  60

  SNOW now fell so thick and fast in the canyon that tracks Gracie and Rob made earlier that morning attending to nature’s call were visible only as shallow concave ovals leading from the shelter. The wind had grown into a moaning, blustering demon of wind, sending blasts of bitter air howling and shrieking down the canyon and tormenting the flimsy plastic shelter.

  There was no way to predict how long the snow would last. Storms in Southern California rarely lasted more than a single day, but they could be brutal nonetheless. A few years before, a single storm had dumped three feet of snow overnight on Gracie’s cabin at seven thousand feet, several thousand feet lower in elevation than she and Rob were at now.

  Upon awakening, Rob’s initial reaction to the snow was similar to Gracie’s—awe at the fierce beauty. But as the severity of their predicament gnawed its way into his consciousness, his fascination had grown into concern. He asked myriad questions—how long will the storm last, how much snow will fall, how does this affect the rescue, how long are we stuck here? To all of which Gracie provided the same answer: “I don’t know.”

  Gracie and Rob lay side-by-side in their respective sleeping bags. What remained of the candle stub bathed the interior of the cramped shelter with a honey-colored light. Flickering with each gust of wind, the flame sent shadows dancing throughout the tiny space.

  While Gracie forced her body to remain motionless, her mind was still active, darting from thought to thought.

  Had the Command Post been moved down the mountain? Snow would make the narrow, winding road to the trailhead parking lot impassable to all vehicles except snowmobiles and snowcats. How much would that slow down any relief team? Had they pulled teams in from the field? Even alpine? Would she and Rob have to wait until the skies cleared and be airlifted out? What was Ralph doing? How much sleep had he had? How many cigarettes had he smoked? How high was his blood pressure?

  Of all the worst-case scenarios Gracie could have conjured in her mind, snow would have been close to the top of the list. Not only would it change the nature of the search, requiring a major shift in personnel and logistics, it introduced a host of complications and hazards for any teams in the field, not to mention for her and Rob. The only thing she could think of that would make their situation worse would be if she were injured in some way.

  Or if they were caught in an avalanche.

  A spear of terror plunged through Gracie’s stomach. Mountaineers more experienced than she had been killed while sleeping in their tents when it snowed during the night and an early morning avalanche roared through their camp and took them all out.

  Gracie clawed out of the sleeping bag and threw on her boots. Leaving Rob openmouthed behind her, she scrambled outside, sighing in relief only when she reconfirmed that the mountainside above the shelter was thick with trees and boulders and held no signs of previous slides.

  Back inside the shelter, she crawled into her sleeping bag, quickly zipping it all the way back up to her chin.

  “What was that all about?” Rob asked.

  “Nothing,” Gracie answered, blowing him off, but hoping he wouldn’t take offense.

  A strong gust of wind blustered into the haven of boulders setting the plastic shelter to riffling and flapping above their heads and straining against the anchoring rocks. Gracie held her breath, shoulders drawn up to her ears, eyes skyward, then exhaled when the shelter held and the wind ebbed back to a whisper.

  She looked over at Rob. In the dim light, his face appeared washed out and pale, the tip of his nose as if it had been dipped in pink paint. “You doing okay?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she propped herself up on an elbow so she could see his face better. “Rob?”

  He lifted bleary eyes to hers.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m going to turn that around and ask you that same question. Are we okay?”

  “In terms of . . .”

  “Are we going to make it?”

  “You mean make it through this? The snow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hell, yes! We are going to make it!” She sat up, hunching the sleeping bag over her shoulders and holding it closed at the ne
ck. “Keeping warm and dry is our number one priority. We have lots of water. Our food and fuel levels aren’t so hot. I’m not that worried about food anyway.” Now was not the time to tell Rob they could survive for weeks without food if they had to.

  The look on Rob’s face told her he wasn’t convinced.

  “We are going to get out of here, okay? They are going to come for us. Could be today. Could be tomorrow. But they are going to come for us. We just have to hunker down and wait it out. Which is exactly what we’re doing.”

  After a moment, Rob asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  Gracie was silent, unsure of how much of her soul she wanted to bare. Finally she said, “In spite of my ultraconservative, right-wing upbringing, yes, I do believe in God.” She looked over at Rob. “How about you?”

  He nodded.

  They sat quietly again until Rob said, “Do you believe in prayer?”

  Gracie nodded. “I pray. Not often enough. Mostly when I’m thankful for something. I try not to just ask for things.” She frowned. “Never could figure out why sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “Maybe this is one of the times it’ll work,” Rob said softly.

  “Maybe.” Gracie squeezed her eyes closed. Please, God, she prayed, help me to be strong. Help me to keep Rob . . . and me . . . alive. And please let don’t let Cashman have gotten hurt in some way.