The hair on Gracie’s arms prickled as she was struck by the feeling that someone was watching her.
Get off the trail! Go down! Now!
CHAPTER
64
GRACIE could barely see her feet in the gusting snow.
The feeling of eyes watching her had disappeared as soon as she had thrown herself down on the edge of the trail and pushed off the side.
Now she concentrated on working her way down the steep slope past the giant up-thrust of rock that formed the outcropping. She fought the impulse to hurry, firmly planting her ice axe, and then each boot onto the steps she had made on the way up. Stepping with her knees bent, she leaned forward on her ice axe so her feet wouldn’t fly out from under her. One false step, one misplacement of her ice axe, one caught crampon, and, courtesy of her slick, waterproof parka and pants, Gracie would find herself on an E-ticket ride to the bottom. Or worse—face-planting into a tree trunk along the way. The old adage “It’s not the fall that’ll kill you. It’s the sudden stop at the bottom” almost made her smile beneath her balaclava.
At the base of the outcropping, she stopped in the shelter of the tumbled boulders to drink deeply from her water bottle and look around again for Rob’s knapsack. As she twisted the cap back on, she scanned the mountainside below her. What she could see of the pines and firs, bushes and rocks appeared undisturbed by anything other than nature’s fury.
She looked down at the ground around her feet. Beneath the snow, she recognized the signs of a second path diverting from the main track and running along the bottom of the outcropping.
Was that something she and Cashman had missed in the dark when they descended what seemed like weeks ago? Or had it been made after that? Her consternation grew when she remembered that Cashman had passed that way three more times, twice on the first night, the third time the previous morning and had noticed nothing. At least he had made no mention of it to her.
She resigned herself to the fact that she was probably expending valuable energy for nothing when she was already running below empty and trudged along the base of the promontory.
Fifty feet in, she stopped and looked up.
The body had been shoved up beneath a protective lip of granite where no snow had been able to accumulate. What was visible was thankfully not the face, but the back of the head, the torso, the lower portions of both legs, and one arm with a bare hand.
Bright red jacket. Bright yellow shirt. White-blond hair. Reeboks.
Gracie’s brain plucked the details from the Lost Person Questionnaire.
She had found Tristan Chambers.
CHAPTER
65
THERE was no need to check for signs of life. The body had been wedged back into the rocky crevice with the arms and legs tucked around it like so much limp spaghetti. Portions of the shirt and jacket appeared black, and the hair was matted with what was probably dried blood.
The body was confirmation that what Rob remembered about someone dying was, in actuality, fact. At least as far as Tristan was concerned, there was no more uncertainty. No more speculation. No more what-ifs and maybes.
Gracie felt the noose tighten around her neck.
She needed to get out of there. Fast. She needed to get back to where Rob waited alone, unsuspecting, unprotected.
Conscious the area was a crime scene, Gracie touched nothing on the corpse itself. She planted her feet firmly in the snow, pulled out her GPS again, and took a waypoint, labeling it DB. Dead Body.
Death was never pretty. Gracie never got used to it. The smell of fresh blood or decomposing flesh always made her insides roil. Tristan’s body was frozen solid. At least there was no discernible smell. She took in deep, frigid breaths to keep down what little food she had eaten that day.
But as soon as she turned to make her way back along the base of the rock outcropping, her mouth filled with saliva and the familiar metallic taste. She dropped to her hands and knees, and vomited into the snow.
Gracie’s body shook uncontrollably and her teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t keep her mouth closed. Her head hung almost to the ground. She took in deep, heavy breaths to the bottom of her lungs, willing back the vomit that threatened to rise again in her throat. Tears dripped unheeded onto the snow.
Get going. Put your feet under you and stand up.
She spat out the sour taste and wiped off her mouth with a handful of snow. Then, leaning on her ice axe to steady herself, Gracie stood and looked up right into a pair of deep-set blue eyes.
CHAPTER
66
GRACIE yelped and stumbled backward.
The man lunged forward, grabbed the front of her parka, and lifted her off the ground as effortlessly as if she were a hummingbird. “Where is he?” he rasped, his face so close she inhaled his foul breath into her lungs.
Fear shot adrenaline through Gracie’s body. She grabbed at the man’s hands, trying to peel back his fingers. Her hands slipped. She grabbed on to his forearms and tried to twist free.
The man tightened his grip and locked his elbows together so that his fists pressed up under her chin. His knuckles dug into her larynx.
She couldn’t breathe.
She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but no words came out.
She was strangling. Her vision dimmed. Her world shrank into the all-consuming need to free herself and take in a breath.
“Where is he?” the man growled again and shook her until her teeth rattled.
Gracie’s feet flailed around trying to gain purchase on something, anything, so she could push herself up and draw breath.
Do something or you’re dead!
Gracie swung her foot back and kicked the man squarely in the shin with the steel points of her crampon.
The man grunted and bent forward.
Gracie’s feet hit the ground. She coughed and sucked air into her lungs. Then she lifted her foot and stomped down onto his with all of her weight. Steel crampon talons plunged through boot leather, crunched bones, and sank deep.
The man roared with pain and fell back in the snow.
Gracie fell away from him onto her back and wrenched her foot free.
Go! GO!
Gracie plunged down the mountain in giant leaps. Propelled by adrenaline, she jumped, slid, fell, shoved herself back to her feet, jumped again. Twenty feet down. Thirty. Forty.
She was out of breath.
A split-second glance over her shoulder told her the man wasn’t following. Not yet. She slowed a fraction and sucked more air into her lungs.
The man wanted Rob, no doubt to kill him. He would follow her to get to him. At all costs she had to keep him from doing just that.
She glanced back over her shoulder again. The trail she was leaving in the snow would be as easy to follow as a bulldozer’s.
And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
CHAPTER
67
“ROB! Get up!” Gracie dived into the shelter and began stuffing her sleeping bag into her pack. “We have to get out of here! Now!”
Rob sat up in his bag, groggily wiping his face with his hands. “Good. You’re back. Did you find the rucksack?”
“Get up!” Gracie yelled. “We have to get out of here!” She tossed his boots over to him. “See if you can get these on.”
When Rob hesitated, she bellowed, “Move, dammit! We have to get outta here!”
That did it. Without another word Rob kicked his way out of the sleeping bag.
• • •
GRACIE AND ROB abandoned the plastic shelter and raced down the hillside—a minefield of fallen logs and loose rocks lying in wait beneath the snow to capture feet and snap ankles. At the creek, they scrambled along the steep, frozen embankment where no snow had been able to grab hold and leave obvious sign of their passing. F
or a tedious, painstaking quarter mile, they paralleled the water, sliding down, grabbing on to roots and branches to haul themselves back up and continue on.
When the embankment grew too steep to traverse, they dropped down to the creek itself and moved from rock to rock to rock, a finger pointing, a foot stepping, slipping, grabbing, then stepping again.
Throughout it all, if Rob’s ankle pained him, he kept silent.
Adrenaline spent, Gracie’s arms and legs trembled like warm jelly. She willed back the nausea churning her stomach.
Not yet. Don’t crash yet.
Her eyes darted behind them, down to her feet, over to Rob’s, then behind them again, scanning the creek bed, peering through the gloom of falling snow for any sign of the hunter.
CHAPTER
68
“THIS’LL do,” Gracie gasped and slung her pack from her back.
Behind her, Rob sank to his knees in the snow. Hands on thighs, head hanging, he dragged air into his lungs in deep, ragged breaths. “What . . . we doing?”
“Building a snow cave.” She freed her snow shovel from its lash strap and heaved her pack into a bare hollow beneath the spindly bottom branches of a nearby fir tree. “We need shelter.”
On a north-facing slope a third of the way up the mountain on the other side of the creek, Gracie had found what she was searching for: a giant upsweep of snow drifting higher than their heads with enough consolidated snow for a snow cave.
There was no way to tell where her attacker was. He could still be where she had left him at the base of the rock promontory. Or he could be following their tracks. Climbing up from the creek. Closing in for the kill.
But none of that mattered if she and Rob died of hypothermia. With shelter, they had a chance. Without it, death was certain.
Rob put a foot beneath him and staggered back to his feet. He looked as if the slightest provocation would topple him like a felled tree. “I’m . . . help you.”
Gracie opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again. They needed shelter and she couldn’t do it alone.
Working side by side, Gracie and Rob dug directly into the side of the drift. Gracie thrust in her little plastic shovel and tossed snow off to the side. Rob scraped and scooped with the little square of closed-cell foam.
As Gracie worked, time expanded. Every second lasted a minute, every minute an eternity. Fear buzzed inside her head like a swarm of flies telling her to hurry, hurry, hurry. She prayed to Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, Kane, and every other god who might be listening, that she had incapacitated her attacker enough, slowed him down enough that the falling snow—once the enemy—would fill in their tracks, obscure their trail, allow them to melt into the thousands of acres of raw wilderness.
And that the man would slip and fall and break his fucking neck.
CHAPTER
69
GRACIE wriggled through the tiny rectangular hole in the drift. She crawled up into the oblong interior of the snow cave where the lantern flashlight glowed warm and welcoming from its own little snow shelf and, in stark contrast to her jumping nerves, it was quiet and still.
Rob lay stretched out on his sleeping bench, watching Gracie as she turned to kneel in the narrow aisle between the two benches and stow her pack in front of the entrance. “I didn’t believe it, but you were right,” he said, his low voice sounding dead and flat in the enclosed space. “Inside the snow is warmer than outside the snow.”
“Once we close it up, it’ll be warm and reasonably snug inside,” Gracie had whispered to Rob as she smoothed out the cave walls with the straight edge of her snow shovel. Her arms felt as heavy as cast-iron skillets. A thin line of sweat trickled down the hollow between her breasts even as her fingers and toes burned with cold.
When Rob said nothing in return, Gracie looked sharply over at him, aiming the beam of her headlamp directly into his face.
He stood two feet away, carefully shaping and smoothing the domed ceiling with his hands. His entire body was shaking. His cheeks were sunken and the circles beneath his eyes had deepened to purple bruises. His eyes, light and reflecting the snow, looked like shadowed ice. He looked seriously ill.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Gracie said. “Get inside your sleeping bag. I can finish the rest by myself.”
She helped him remove his boots and zipped him fully clothed inside his sleeping bag, which lay atop the sleeping pad and a thick cushion of fir boughs.
Outside, Gracie bricked up the remaining wall using blocks of snow she had cut out of the drift. When she finally knelt to cut out the small round entranceway with her shovel, her hands were so numb her fingers would barely close around the handle. Her frozen toes were nonexistent inside her boots.
She took several precious minutes to smooth out the snow in front of the cave, tossing broken sticks haphazardly across the entrance, mentally crossing her fingers that with time, more snow and a little smile from above, she and Rob would be rendered invisible.
Back inside the cave, Gracie pushed herself up to sit on her own bench and leaned her trekking poles against the wall next to Rob’s head. She shrugged off her parka and picked at the buckles of her crampons with fingers that felt like refrigerated bratwursts. “Goddammit,” she said with teeth clenched.
“What’s the matter?” Rob asked. His low voice sounded flat and dead in the small space.
“I’m cold.” In testament to her words, her teeth chattered audibly.
“Get in the bag here,” Rob said. He unzipped the zipper of his sleeping bag. “It’s already warm. We’ll put yours over the both of us.”
Gracie loosened the laces of her boots and pulled them off with the crampons still attached. Without compunction, she stretched out next to Rob and slid her feet down alongside his. Rob zipped up the bag as far as it would go, then pulled Gracie’s sleeping bag over the top of them. He wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her close against his body.
They lay together, breathing in tandem, Gracie’s head tucked up under Rob’s chin, until finally the sublime heat his body generated radiated through the layers of clothing and into hers. Gradually she stopped shivering.
She sighed heavily and tried to relax her muscles. She was aware of the feel of Rob’s body against her own, her back resting against the hard muscles of his chest, his arm tightly anchoring her body to his, his scent earthy and all male.
“Better now?” His voice was soft in her ear.
“Mmm.”
“Warm enough?”
She nodded.
“What happened? Something happened out there.”
Obviously Rob wasn’t going to let her sleep without an explanation of why she had abruptly uprooted their peaceful coexistence in the plastic shelter and dragged him through the cold, wind, and snow with no stated objective or destination.
If his life’s in danger, he has a right to know. “Up by the trail,” she started. “I found . . .” She stopped. There was no way to say it that didn’t sound like a bad horror movie. “I found a body.”
“A body. A dead body?”
She nodded. “A dead body.”
She felt him sit up. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I mean—”
“It was Tristan Chambers.”
“What?”
“It was Tristan Chambers.”
His arm tightened around her like a tourniquet. “Tristan? He’s dead?”
“I’m pretty sure it was him. He . . . It . . . had on a bright red jacket. And a yellow shirt.” She rolled over on her back so that she could look up into Rob’s face. “I don’t know how he died, but somebody stuffed his body up beneath an overhang.”
Rob frowned. “What?”
“Somebody hid the body. I’m guessing it was the man I met up there.”
“What man?” Rob’s voice was deeper than Gracie had ever heard it.
She described the feeling of eyes watching her up on the trail, finding the body, the attack. She relived the terror, saw the deep-set eyes, the bared yellow teeth. Felt his fists digging into her throat as he lifted her off the ground. His rank breath filled her nostrils.
“Did he hurt you?” Rob’s voice cut in, angry, dangerous.
“Not really,” Gracie said, blinking away the vision. “Mostly scared the hell out of me. He’s actually the hurting puppy. I stomped on his foot with my crampon.”
Rob looked down at her, almost smiling. “Remind me never to scare the hell out of you.”
“The guy’s a tank. Not much taller than me, but really strong. With creepy eyes. Deep set and creepy.”
“Joseph.”
“I thought so. However Tristan died, accidentally or on purpose, Joseph must have hidden the body. I found it.”
Rob wiped a hand over his face. “Jesus.”
“I think it was Joseph who tried to kill you. Because you saw what happened. He’s looking for you. He asked me where you were.”
Rob absorbed the information, then his eyes traveled the interior of the cave. “Are we okay? I mean in here? Can he find us?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “The more time that passes, the better for us.”
“The snow—”
“—will hide our tracks.”
Gracie rolled on her side and felt Rob lie down behind her. His voice was a whisper. “I’m responsible for this. If it weren’t for me . . .”
Gracie reached back, found his warm hand with her own, and drew his arm around her. “We’re okay for now,” she mumbled. “He’s hurt. It’s snowing. There are two of us. We have weapons. Talk about it later.” Her eyes closed of their own accord. “I didn’t find your pack. Your . . . rucksack.”
Zero-Degree Murder Page 19
