Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

  “No. I almost texted you again to tell you not to come. I mean, they made up. But the argument was different somehow.”

  “Different?”

  “It didn’t feel right, like it was something more than just a lovers’ quarrel. I’m not sure how to explain it.”

  “And after they argued, they headed into the forest?”

  “Which is where she screamed…and he killed her.”

  “That would explain what didn’t sound right about the argument: you heard the murderer make up his mind—you heard him decide what he was going to do.”

  “Yeah,” Clarence said, sounding far from certain. “Something like that. Assuming it was even a ‘he’ that I heard.”

  The wail of sirens rose in the distance. Voices murmured at the edge of the forest as others—alerted, no doubt, by Nicoleta’s scream—gathered behind the dorms.

  Chuck looked down the slope through the trees, where beams of light were headed toward them. “You have to go,” he told Clarence. “Loop around and get back to Raven House.”

  “Why can’t we tell the truth?” Clarence begged, a deep-seated ache in his voice. “I can let them know what I heard, what I saw.”

  Chuck weighed the pain in Clarence’s voice. He aimed his phone light at Clarence’s face. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

  Clarence stared into the light, bug-eyed. “Wh-what?” he stammered.

  Chuck clamped his jaw around each word: “Did…you…know…her?”

  Clarence licked his lips. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light. “Yeah,” he admitted, speaking softly, almost to himself. “I knew her.”

  WEDNESDAY

  EIGHTEEN

  Chuck groaned.

  “It was early on,” Clarence said. “The start of summer.” His eyes strayed to Nicoleta and his voice broke. “Just a couple of times.”

  Chuck turned his light back to the young woman. His head pounded. The lights climbing through the forest from the dorms were drawing closer. “Go,” he told Clarence without looking up from Nicoleta.

  Clarence didn’t move.

  “Now,” Chuck said.

  Clarence didn’t speak. He turned off his light and scurried across the slope, disappearing into the darkness.

  Chuck rested his hand on Nicoleta’s forearm. It was still warm to the touch. He aimed his light down the slope to find that the first of those making their way up the slope were two young women from Falcon House. Before they reached Nicoleta, Chuck rose and walked down the hill to meet them.

  “We have to leave this to the police,” he told them, his arms out to keep them back.

  The young women held up their phones, lighting the body sprawled on the ground twenty feet away from them. They clung to one another and sank, sobbing, to the ground.

  Kirina arrived seconds later, accompanied by more Falcon House residents.

  “I told the students to stay inside,” she said.

  She tried to push past Chuck, but he stopped her. “The best thing we can do for her now is let the police do their work.”

  A pair of paramedics arrived, flashlights and equipment boxes in hand. The emergency lights on the roof of their ambulance flashed through the trees from the parking lot in front of the dormitories. They rushed past Chuck and knelt on either side of Nicoleta’s body, ignoring his pleas that they, too, wait for the police. The paramedics were still crouched over her a few minutes later when two uniformed police officers hurried past Chuck and joined them.

  The younger of the two officers took one look at Nicoleta and backed away, a hand pressed to his mouth. The older one, gray hair showing beneath his cap, bent over the kneeling paramedics and conferred quietly with them. He turned and addressed the gathered group, his voice deep and authoritative. “I want to talk to whoever found this young woman. Everybody else, show’s over. I need you to head back to your rooms.”

  Kirina and the residents from Falcon House took a last look at Nicoleta lying motionless on the ground between the paramedics before peeling away and returning down the slope in ones and twos.

  Chuck stepped forward. “I found her.”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” the older officer said. “We’ll want a statement from you.”

  “Of course.”

  Parker arrived with Officer Hemphill and more police officers a few minutes later. Parker wore jeans and his blue Y of the Rockies shirt. Hemphill was in uniform, his pants sagging where he’d missed a belt loop on one side.

  The paramedics packed their gear and departed while the additional officers erected portable spotlights carried up the hill from their cars. One officer encircled the scene with yellow crime-scene tape, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk. Another set a black case on the ground, extracted a bulky camera, and took pictures of Nicoleta’s body from numerous angles, the flashes of the camera lighting the trees around her like skeletons.

  Hemphill conferred with the other officers and studied Nicoleta’s brightly illuminated body before ducking beneath the crime-scene tape and circling through the trees. When he returned, he motioned Chuck and Parker to him at the edge of the spotlights.

  He turned to Chuck first. “It was you who found her?”

  Chuck described everything he’d seen and heard, beginning with when he’d stood on the sidewalk at the back of the dorms. He explained that he recognized Nicoleta from her snack-stand job.

  “What were you doing outside at two in the morning?” Hemphill asked when he finished.

  Chuck was ready with his answer. “After the thing with the blood, I figured I needed to do some checking around, keep an eye on things.”

  “At two in the morning?”

  “Especially at two in the morning.”

  “And you just happened to be wandering around precisely when this young woman screamed, back in the trees?”

  Chuck nodded.

  Hemphill gave him time to elaborate. When he didn’t, the officer blew air noisily between his lips. He dropped his eyes to his black sneakers, then raised them to Chuck and Parker. “You know the last time anyone was murdered in Estes Park?”

  Neither answered.

  “Decades,” Hemphill said. “Seriously. Decades. And now this.” He eyed Chuck. “And you, chasing shadows in the middle of the night.”

  Chuck said, “If I’d been here chasing shadows five minutes earlier, Nicoleta would be alive.”

  The officer looked away.

  “What’s next?” Chuck asked him.

  Hemphill pointed at the older of the first two officers on the scene. “Harley over there came from St. Louis six months ago. He’ll lead us through it. He’s processed more homicide scenes than he can count. Thought he was coming here to get away from all that.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Hours. All morning, into the afternoon. We’ll take daylight photos before we move the body. We’ll search the woods in daylight, too.”

  “There won’t be any tracks. The ground’s too dry.”

  “We’ll search anyway. I’ll take your statement when we finish.”

  “I just gave it to you.”

  “I’ll need an official transcript. Everything you saw, anything else you can think of. Our Mobile Command Center is on its way. It’ll be stationed below, at the dorms. I’ll meet you there when we’re done up here, or, at least, getting close. Say, three o’clock?”

  Chuck inclined his head. “Three o’clock.”

  Parker addressed Chuck. “I’m thinking the best thing to do may be for you to shut down your field school and get your kids out of here.”

  Hemphill spoke before Chuck could answer. “That’s a no go. I’d like to talk with the students this afternoon, too. All of them, one at a time.” He narrowed his eyes at Chuck. “Including your brother-in-law, of course.”

  “The young woman works…worked…for Parker,” Chuck said. “She lived in Falcon House. My students have nothing to do with this, nor does my brother-in-law.”

  “The knife, remember?�
��

  “Which has to do with Clarence, not the students.”

  “I’d still like to talk to them.”

  “What if I give you their phone numbers?”

  “All interviews will be conducted in person.”

  “Professor Sartore, at the college, might pull rank and let them go,” Chuck said. “He’s in charge of the field school. I’m just running it for him.”

  “I’d prefer that the students stay, but I can’t require it,” Hemphill said. “All interviews, even of suspects, are voluntary—without getting involved in subpoenas, that is.”

  “But any decision, one way or another, as to whether to participate in the interview process can’t help but play into how you view your investigation,” Chuck ventured. “Am I right?”

  Hemphill looked Chuck in the eye. “A young woman has been murdered, you get that? Murdered. My job is to find out who killed her. How much you and your students assist me with my investigation—or don’t—absolutely will be taken into consideration, along with everything else we find out about what happened.”

  Chuck glanced at Nicoleta, surrounded by officers swabbing and snipping at her body, gathering samples of blood, saliva, and hair in small plastic bags. His shoulders sagged. “Okay,” he said. No doubt the hillside behind Raven House would be crawling with police officers throughout the morning, the police cars and the department’s command vehicle parked out front. “I’d like to get my students away from here while you do your work. I’ll have them back for your interviews.”

  “No later than three,” Hemphill said.

  “The field school is scheduled to end day after tomorrow—Friday, mid-morning. I don’t see how I can possibly get them to stay any longer than that.”

  “We’ll see where we’re at when the time comes.”

  Back at the cabin, Chuck showered for a second time that night. Nicoleta’s blood sluiced from his hands and arms. The water disappeared down the drain in red swirls, taking a portion of his soul with it.

  When he slipped beneath the covers, Janelle turned to him, her face tight with anger. “Again you just up and take off without saying anything?”

  He lay on his back and locked his hands behind his head. It was after five, the patch of sky visible through the skylight above the bed growing light with the coming dawn.

  Janelle rose on an elbow beside him. He wanted to take her in his arms and lose himself in the feel of her body pressed to his. Instead, he rolled up on an elbow to face her and filled her in, his voice slow and measured, as if reciting a fictional tale rather than the grim reality of Nicoleta’s murder in the woods behind the dorms and the aftermath with the police.

  “There’s a murderer here in the resort?” Janelle asked as soon as he finished, her voice shaking. “The girls, Chuck. Did you check on them before you came upstairs?” She moved to leave the bed.

  He laid his hand on her arm. “They’re in bed, asleep. I checked. They’re fine.”

  She sat up, pulling her knees to her chest and drawing the sheets around her. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  He sat up beside her. “Whoever did it is long gone.”

  “The night’s almost over. We’ll leave as soon as the sun comes up.”

  “The officer in charge, the one I told you about, Hemphill, is pushing pretty hard to make us stay. Besides, the safest place we can be for now is right here at the resort. There are a million cops working the scene.”

  “What about Clarence? They’re going to come after him, aren’t they?”

  “His knife is the only piece of evidence, to anything, they have at this point. Who knows what they’ll have found by later in the day, though.”

  “They’ve got to find another link, a real one. This Hemphill guy—do you have any idea if there’s anything to what he’s thinking, that one of the students might be involved?”

  “He’s grasping at straws. He doesn’t know anything yet.”

  “He ought to be focusing on Falcon House. That’s where the victim was from.”

  “I’m sure he will. But he’s not going to forget Clarence.”

  She cursed in Spanish beneath her breath. “What about you? Does he suspect you at all?”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the one who found her. You know how it goes: what better way to cover your tracks? And who else could get their hands on Clarence’s knife more easily?”

  “You sound like Hemphill, assuming the two things are related.”

  “The blood was human. And now somebody’s dead. It’s only logical.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t think the blood is related to tonight.”

  “Now look who’s grasping at straws.”

  Chuck flopped backward on the bed. Janelle was right.

  She continued, hovering over him. “What was it Clarence said, that he heard somebody arguing?”

  “He said there was something more to it, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.”

  “Whatever he heard, it was enough to make him text you.” Her voice took on a portentous tremor as she huddled beside him in the half-light of dawn. “And now there’s a record, for the police to find when they check your phones, of the two of you communicating with each other minutes before the murder.”

  NINETEEN

  Chuck raised his downcast eyes, taking in the mine site at the end of the trail. Nothing appeared amiss. The door to the mine tunnel remained as he and Clarence had left it a few hours ago, chained and locked, the plastic storage bins stacked in place beside the collapsed cabin at the edge of the plateau, picks and shovels leaning against the bins.

  The students had been more than accepting of Chuck’s proposal that they return to the mine this morning in order to stay out of the way of the police working the crime scene behind the dorms. Clearly, they were as anxious as he was to stay away from Raven House until their interviews.

  The weather was the same as that which had greeted them at the mine site all summer, clear sky overhead, cool breeze growing warmer as the sun climbed in the east.

  Chuck wandered away from the group, overwhelmed by the memory of Nicoleta’s scream, her vicious neck wound, her last breath, the feel of her hand in his. He lay on a patch of brown grass at the far side of the plateau, his head on his pack, face to the morning sun, eyes closed, fingers interlaced on his chest.

  He half-listened as Kirina took charge, Clarence uncharacteristically silent at her side. She told the students they would spend the morning refilling the excavated squares beneath the collapsed cabin, after which they would return the cabin logs to their former resting places atop the dig area. Upon accomplishing those tasks, she explained, they would head back to the road one last time, carrying the storage bins and tools with them.

  Chuck propped his head higher on his pack and looked out over the plains to the east as the students set to work. After lying awake until sunrise with Janelle stiff and unmoving beside him, he’d helped her get the girls up and dressed before driving with the three of them down through the trees to the lodge.

  Janelle led the girls inside to have breakfast surrounded by hotel guests after she assured Chuck that she and the girls would remain out and about in town, and would not return to the cabin until he came back from the mine.

  Chuck hadn’t called Sartore. Better to let the initial police investigation play out before checking in with the professor at the end of the day. Maybe, by then, Chuck would be reporting the arrest of one of the Falcon House workers to him.

  Sheila, the Navajo student, broke away from the group and took a seat on the ground beside Chuck. “Threes,” she said. She squinted at the morning sun.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Chuck asked, his eyes focused on the hazy expanse of flat land spread before them at the foot of the mountains. There were cities out there, houses and stores and restaurants, all of them filled with people going about their daily lives, none of them having washed someone’s blood from their hands in the middle of the night, none of th
em even aware of Nicoleta’s murder.

  “Bad things come in threes,” Sheila said.

  “That’s just superstition.”

  “It’s not superstition, it’s fact. And last night was number three. First, the blood. Second, the floor falling in. And now, that poor cashier, Nicoleta. One, two, three.”

  Chuck turned to her, closing one eye against the sun. “You’re telling me all the bad stuff’s finished?”

  She rolled her head around her shoulders in a mini-trance, her eyes closed. “It is,” she said, opening her eyes. “I know it.”

  Chuck wished he had Sheila’s certainty. Even more, he wished she knew what she was talking about.

  He stood and picked up his pack. No need to inflict his dark thoughts on her.

  He climbed the ridge away from the mine, the sun warm on his back but the clouds in his head black and threatening. He topped the ridge and looked north across the Mummy Range. What he would give to just keep walking, to climb from peak to peak and never return to Estes Park and the police interrogation awaiting him there.

  He turned and looked down at the students shoveling dirt and rocks into the excavated squares beneath the site of the collapsed cabin, Clarence and Kirina at work with them. A gust of wind curled beneath the brim of his Fort Lewis Skyhawks baseball cap, lifting it off his head. He made a grab for the cap as it became airborne but managed only to swat it, sending it spinning like a Frisbee into the face of the breeze.

  The cap sailed over the far side of the ridge into a steep, granite-walled couloir worn into the mountainside, coming to rest on a chunk of rock fifty feet below the ridge crest.

  Chuck descended the couloir, testing each foot placement before trusting it with his weight, his hands to the granite face behind him. As he bent to pick up the sky-blue hat from the rock, he noticed, between his feet, something entirely out of place in the couloir: a reddish-brown drop of dried blood.

  TWENTY

  Chuck turned his face to the clear, blue sky. He’d seen enough blood the last two days. He had no desire to expend any more mental energy on the stuff.