Chuck had heard Kirina admit to Sartore that she had tried and failed to find it within herself to kill Sheila—but she’d never actually confessed to killing Nicoleta.
“You murdered Nicoleta,” Chuck repeated, standing over Jake. “She paid you in sexual favors for fixing her car, and she told you about the gold, trying to use the information to win herself a green card.”
Jake’s body stopped trembling as Chuck continued, glaring down at him. “You figured it out. You found the calaverite—the gold. No more tuition worries, especially when added to what you stood to make off your poaching. All you had to do was kill another ram or two and slip a few loads of ore out of the mine. But Nicoleta got her claws into you, didn’t she? She wouldn’t let go.”
Chuck shuddered. It all made sense now. With the summer drawing to a close and her return to Bulgaria eminent, Nicoleta had worked two angles at once—cutting herself to blackmail Clarence, and threatening to reveal her sexual relationship with Jake as leverage over him.
The words of the librarian, Elaine, rang in Chuck’s ears: “I’ve been around long enough to know that when someone dies, there’s usually a reason for it—and the person who’s dead is usually part of the reason.”
Chuck stared at the back of Jake’s head. “You agreed to meet her. She said you had to find her a husband, a visa, some way to stay here, or she’d tell everyone what you’d done with her. The two of you argued. You lured her into the forest and gave her a good shake, just to make her see reason. But she screamed instead. You were desperate. You had to keep her quiet.” Chuck recalled the fluidity with which Jake had flipped open his switchblade a few minutes ago. “Your knife appeared in your hand as if by magic. You didn’t mean to kill her; it just happened.”
Jake looked up at Chuck, his eyes black and bottomless. He opened his mouth and howled like a caged beast, twisting his bound wrists. The cord securing him fell away and he scrambled to his feet.
Chuck stepped back, stunned. Jake had retrieved his knife from the grass and used it to cut through the cord binding his hands and feet without anyone noticing.
Jake swung his arm, aiming for Chuck’s stomach, his knife flashing in his hand. Chuck leapt away. The instant the blade passed him, he danced forward on his toes and unleashed a straight-ahead left to Jake’s face. His fist exploded against Jake’s cheekbone, snapping Jake’s head backward. Chuck followed with a right to Jake’s body. Jake slashed backhand with his knife. Again Chuck leapt away—but not quickly enough.
Jake’s knife ripped through Chuck’s shirt and sliced his sternum. Blood poured down Chuck’s chest and stomach, warm and wet. He grabbed Jake’s knife arm as it reached the apogee of its swing and drove the knife into the ground, following with the full weight of his body.
Jake’s knife hand crumpled in the turf with a snap as Chuck piled himself atop the wrecker owner’s arm. Jake screamed in agony, then bit down hard on Chuck’s shoulder. Chuck threw himself atop Jake, freeing himself from the ripping teeth.
Jake’s arm, bent backward ninety degrees at the wrist, was useless. Chuck raised a fist, ready to pummel Jake into submission, but Jake twisted away, dragging himself through the grass on his knees and elbows. He slipped free of Chuck’s grasp and rose to his feet. Before he could take a step, Chuck grabbed him from behind and spun him around. Chuck reached for the back of Jake’s head with both hands and, summoning all his remaining strength, yanked downward while swinging his knee up.
Chuck’s knee met Jake’s nose with a sickening crunch. An explosion sounded and bits of Jake’s skull and brain tissue sprayed away into the night. At the same instant, a dart of pain followed the path of a projectile into Chuck’s gut.
Chuck looked up to see Anca standing a few feet away, a look of horror on her face, her pistol held out before her, smoke rising from its barrel.
Jake fell from Chuck’s grasp to the ground, a portion of his skull missing. Chuck collapsed to a sitting position beside Jake’s inert frame. He put his hand to his flayed chest, took it away, and peered wonderingly at his palm, red with blood. He probed his belly with his fingers, finding a small hole seeping still more blood. A shard of the bullet from Anca’s gun must have ricocheted into his torso.
He lay back on the grass and stared at the smoke floating across the night sky above him. The smoke was thick and black, but his mind was clear, the pain in his stomach negligible. Seconds later, Janelle and Gregory leaned over him, their faces drawn. Carmelita and Rosie appeared, too, kneeling, teary-eyed, at his head.
“Chuck,” Carmelita cried.
“Daddy!” Rosie sobbed.
He stifled a groan. “I’m going to be all right,” he managed. “I promise.”
The girls quieted, their small hands stroking his hair.
Chuck closed his eyes and relaxed, confident in Gregory’s capable hands, and surrounded by his family.
EPILOGUE
A dozen ewes topped the northwest ridge, followed by their calves. A pair of juvenile rams came last, sniffing the air and rotating their heads, on full alert.
The Rocky Mountain sheep worked their way across the north face of Mount Landen, nipping at bunches of brown grass on the high peak’s treeless slope. The animals paused just below the rocky northeast ridge. The far side of the ridge fell away to a three-sided plateau topped by bent, rusted, ore cart tracks and a pile of logs where a cabin once had stood.
One of the calves trotted up and over the ridge crest. The remaining sheep hesitated, shoulders twitching, heads held high. When the calf did not race back over the ridge in panicked retreat, the rest of the herd followed, clambering up and over the crest one by one.
The ewes, calves, and pair of young rams fanned out on the east-facing slope, feasting on the low, dry grass that had grown untouched here throughout the long, hot summer. The animals grazed along the slope to the small plateau, where the rusted rail tracks led from a heavy, iron door set in the mountainside to the logs lying in a jumbled heap at the edge of the plateau. The mountain fell away from the plateau to foothills and on to plains stretching eastward to a flat, distant horizon.
The calves led the rest of the herd across the rock-strewn ground, kicking up their hind legs as they leapt the rails. The sheep spread out to browse again on the far side of the plateau, paralleling a dusty footpath leading around the peak to the paved highway that climbed the mountain’s south flank.
The larger of the two young rams lifted its head to sniff at the last of the wood smoke rising from the burnt trees below, a reminder of the thick pall of smoke that had enveloped the high peaks of the Mummy Range for the last several days.
The ram lowered its head and made a playful charge at its fellow young male, forcing the smaller ram to flee across the rocky ground. The larger ram planted its hooves and shook its half-curled horns in victory as the first drops of rain fell from the bank of dark clouds that hung close over Mount Landen. The rams bent their heads to the tufts of bunchgrass on the mountainside as the drops fell harder, wetting the parched alpine slope and initiating the centuries-long process of healing the charred forest below.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With this, the second installment in the National Park Mystery Series, I am ever more aware of the critical role my early readers play in improving the quality of my work. My utmost appreciation goes to my first reader, my wife Sue, and those whose blazing intelligence and strong editing skills join with Sue’s to enhance my writing: Anne Markward, Mary Engel, Kevin Graham, John Peel, and, for spotting and correcting my police-procedural errors, Lt. Pat Downs of the La Plata County Sheriff’s Department.
My thanks go to the smart, dedicated folks at Torrey House Press—Kirsten Johanna Allen, Mark Bailey, and red-pen-wielding Anne Terashima. I count myself lucky to be a member of the Torrey House team of authors, whose friendship and camaraderie I have come to cherish.
My thanks also go to America’s independent booksellers, whose dedicated work to keep books and reading alive makes possible what I do, in
cluding Maria’s Bookshop owners Andrea Avantaggio and Peter Schertz and their inimitable staff in Durango, Colorado, my home turf.
Finally, my heartfelt appreciation goes out to all those devoting their lives to preserving and protecting the wild places that define the western U.S., particularly wildland firefighters and the national park rangers and staffers who so capably balance the preservation of the West’s most iconic lands with the introduction of those places to an ever-growing number of park visitors.
ABOUT SCOTT GRAHAM
Scott Graham is the author of Canyon Sacrifice, the first installment in the National Park Mystery Series. Graham’s previous book, Extreme Kids, won the National Outdoor Book Award.
Graham was raised in the Rocky Mountain town of Durango, Colorado, where echoes of Colorado’s gold-mining past featured in Mountain Rampage resonate to this day. He has explored the high mountains of his home state his entire life, including numerous hiking, climbing, and backpacking trips deep into the Rocky Mountain National Park wilderness.
Graham has made a living as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, radio disk jockey, and coal-shoveling fireman on the steam-powered Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. He is an avid outdoorsman and amateur archaeologist who enjoys mountaineering, skiing, hunting, rock climbing, and whitewater rafting with his sons and wife, an emergency physician.
ABOUT THE COVER
Famed nineteenth-century landscape artist Albert Bierstadt painted “Rocky Mountain Landscape,” a portion of which is featured on the cover of Mountain Rampage, in 1870. The painting is based on studies he made during a trip to the Estes Park region in 1863.
Bierstadt’s paintings of geysers, waterfalls, and other magnificent topography in the Yellowstone area based on a trip there in 1871 played a significant role in Congress’s decision a year later to preserve the region as America’s first national park. Mount Bierstadt, a 14,065-foot peak south of Rocky Mountain National Park, is named in Bierstadt’s honor.
“Rocky Mountain Landscape” hangs in the White House. It is used here by permission of the White House Historical Association.
ABOUT TORREY HOUSE PRESS
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
—Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day
Love of the land inspires Torrey House Press and the books we publish. From literature and the environment and Western Lit to topical nonfiction about land-related issues and ideas, we strive to increase appreciation for the importance of natural landscape through the power of pen and story. Through our 2% to the West program, Torrey House Press donates two percent of sales to not-for-profit environmental organizations and funds a scholarship for up-and-coming writers at colleges throughout the West.
www.torreyhouse.com
ALSO BY SCOTT GRAHAM
CANYON SACRIFICE
Book One in the National Park Mystery Series
This page-turner brings the rugged western landscape, the mysterious past of the ancient Anasazi Indians, and the Southwest’s ongoing cultural fissures vividly to life. A deadly struggle against murderous kidnappers in Grand Canyon National Park forces archaeologist Chuck Bender to face up to his past as he realizes every parents’ worst nightmare: a missing child.
“This riveting series debut showcases Graham’s love of nature and archeology, simultaneously interjecting some serious excitement. Recommend to readers who enjoy Tony Hillerman, Nevada Barr, and C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett series.”
— LIBRARY JOURNAL
“A gripping tale of kidnapping and murder…in a style similar to mysteries by Tony Hillerman.”
—ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
“A riveting mystery…Graham takes readers intimately into the setting, his knowledge of the places he writes about apparent at every turn.”
—DURANGO TELEGRAPH
“A terrific debut novel…”
—C.J. BOX, New York Times best-selling author of Endangered
“All my life, I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate.”
—Edward O. Wilson
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Evolutionary Biologist
ONE
“Grizzly bears are not what you’d call predictable creatures. When they’re surprised in the wild, they’re as apt to rip somebody to shreds as they are to run the other way.”
Yellowstone Grizzly Project junior researcher Justin Pickford, recently of Yale and Princeton—as he’d already boasted not once, but twice to Chuck Bender in the five minutes since Chuck had met him—didn’t know the first thing about what he was saying. But as a brand-new member of the park’s grizzly-research program, he clearly was pleased with the authority he’d granted himself to say it.
“In the case of the Cluster Team,” Justin went on, “it just so happened the bear wanted to rip somebody to shreds.”
Chuck, junior even to Justin as a Yellowstone National Park researcher, looked the young man up and down. Justin wore the requisite park-researcher outfit—sturdy hiking boots, Carhartt work jeans, untucked flannel shirt, bandanna headband. While his attire matched that of his fellow young researchers in the Tower Ranger Station meeting room, his scrawny, reed-thin physique did not. During his initial forays into the park’s rugged backcountry in the weeks ahead, Justin would have to bulk up to attain the broad shoulders, trunk-like legs, and concomitant stamina of the three dozen other, experienced researchers in the room, or he’d be gone, back to the computer-tapping, paper-pushing world of academia on the East Coast.
Justin leaned toward Chuck and asked conspiratorially, “Have you seen the footage?”
Chuck glanced around the log-walled room. Folding chairs lined its scuffed, pine-plank floor. A platter of cookies and a three-gallon dispenser of lemonade sat on a table in back. The researchers, all in their mid- to late twenties, two males for each female, visited with one another in small groups, plastic cups in hand, waiting to take their seats upon the arrival of Yellowstone National Park Chief Ranger Lex Hancock.
Chuck turned back to Justin. “From two years ago?”
“Yep. The fall before last.”
The video had been yanked from the internet the instant it appeared.
“Can’t say as I have,” Chuck said.
Justin’s blue eyes glowed. “Want to?”
Chuck hesitated long enough to convince himself viewing the infamous footage qualified as worthwhile research. He nodded.
Justin cocked a finger and headed for a windowed door leading to the building’s side porch.
As reflected in the door’s glass panes, Chuck looked a lot like the other researchers—hiking boots, work jeans, flannel shirt—though his shirttail was tucked in and he needed no bandanna to keep his short, thinning hair in place. The door’s reflection displayed his lean, weather-beaten frame, which spoke of his having survived much on the journey to his mid-forties, as did the deep crow’s feet cutting from the corners of his blue-gray eyes to his silver-tinged sideburns.
Outside, the chilly air bit through Chuck’s cotton shirt. It was eight in the evening, the second week of June, the days long and lingering in the northern Rockies. The sun, a white disk behind a thin veil of clouds, still hung above the tall stand of spruce trees rising beyond the parking lot to the west. He drew in his shoulders and shivered. How could it possibly be this cold?
Back home, at the edge of the desert in the far southwest corner of Colorado, daytime highs were in the nineties by now, and the nights, while crisp, weren’t anywhere near as frigid as here in Yellowstone, where the last vestiges of winter held sway even as the longest day of the year approached.
“Let’s make this quick,” Chuck told Justin, rubbing his palms together. “Hancock will be here any minute.”
Justin fished his phone from his pocket. “The video-frame sequence is every three seconds, but the sound runs in real time. That’s what’s so brutal.�
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The young researcher swiped the phone’s face with his finger. “Martha forwarded this to me,” he said. Martha Augustine was the backcountry coordinator for the Grizzly Project. “She said I should see it so I could decide for sure if I was in.” He tapped at his phone as he talked. “It happened in the upper Lander Valley, at the foot of Saddle Mountain.”
“A long way from where we’re headed,” Chuck said.
“Twenty miles or so,” Justin agreed. “With the lake in between.”
He held up his phone and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Chuck. A paused video feed filled the phone’s tiny screen. The trunk of a tree framed one side of the shot, a few feet in front of the camera. The remainder of the frame was filled with a view of a sloping meadow, brown with autumn. Dark green fir trees blanketed a hillside on the far side of the grassy meadow.
Justin punched play. A rasping noise issued from the phone’s small speaker. Chuck cocked his head.
“That’s the griz,” Justin said. “Snoring.”
A low-pitched grunt of alarm came next. The bear had awakened—and something had awakened it.
“The Cluster Team showed up, just doing their job,” Justin explained. “Blacktail Pack had taken down an elk at the base of Saddle a week before; a GPS cluster of the wolves’ transmitters told the wolfies as much.” Justin used the informal term for the park’s Wolf Project researchers. “The two members of the Cluster Team hiked in and rigged the camera to film the pack’s behavior around the carcass. They were coming back to retrieve the camera and find out what they’d managed to record. Little did they know, the griz had chased off the wolves and was sleeping right on top of the kill.”
A dark shadow covered the video feed, causing Chuck to flinch. When the video stream advanced to its next frame three seconds later, the shadow drew away to become the back of a grizzly bear’s broad, brown head.
Mountain Rampage Page 24
