Stalking Ground

by Margaret Mizushima

  She shrugged, avoiding his gaze.

  “I know it’s different having someone new in the house. It’s hard to take direction from a new person, but I want her to be in charge when I’m gone.”

  “That’s just it, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Her being here makes it so easy for you to be gone.”

  A pang of guilt hit him. Why did parenting have to be filled with so many moments of guilt?

  “We got home from school yesterday, and you were gone. You didn’t get home until late,” Angela said.

  “I was helping search for Adrienne.”

  “I thought we were all going to help search for Adrienne.”

  “You were in school when I got the call, Angel.”

  She shrugged, evidently conceding that point.

  “Look, if you have a concern, take it up with me,” Cole said. “Don’t fight with Mrs. Gibbs about it.”

  “But she’s so nosy, Dad. She’s not my friend, you know. I don’t want to talk to her.”

  Her argumentative tone had begun to irritate him. “That’s a poor attitude. She’s trying to be friendly, and all you’re giving back is disrespect. I thought we raised you better than that.”

  Angela looked down at the floor, biting her lip.

  He tried to rein in his temper. He’d been trying so hard to make a good life for these girls and got little appreciation in return. “Okay, next weekend I’ll get you up to come out to work with me instead of letting you sleep in? Would you like that better?”

  Angela shrugged, refusing to look at him. Sophie stood within the circle of his arm, playing some game with her fingers. He doubted if she’d been paying attention. He squeezed her. “What do you think?” he asked her.

  “About what?” Sophie asked.

  Doubt confirmed. “Come help me here next Saturday.”

  “I want to watch cartoons.”

  “Well, you can do some of that, too. Let’s have you watch TV for an hour first, then come up here.”

  “Okay.”

  If only teenagers were as compliant as eight-year-olds. “I have one more phone call to make and then we’ll go to the house. Angie, I put my paperwork in the box. Do you want to catch things up on the computer?”

  She shrugged again but stood up to go back into the office. She loved the computer work and had taken to it like a horse to green pasture. Maybe that would pacify her.

  “Thanks for cleaning tables, Sophie,” he said.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Okay. You can finish up while I make this call.” Cole pulled out his cell phone, checked the number in his records, and dialed Carmen Santiago of Dark Horse Stable.

  She answered right away, obviously recognizing his number on caller ID. “Hello, Doctor.”

  “How’s Diablo today?”

  “About the same.”

  “I got the lab results back. They aren’t exactly what I expected.”

  A pause, and he could hear the concern in her voice when she spoke. “Why is that?”

  “He’s hyperglycemic, and his liver enzymes are elevated, which isn’t typical with tying up. On the other hand, the enzymes we measure to detect muscle damage are elevated, which is something I’d expect.”

  “Okay? What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Is he eating?”

  “A little bit of hay. Not much.”

  “Has he defecated?” Cole asked.

  “A small amount.”

  “That tells us his gut is still working. What’s his heart rate?”

  “Eighty-five beats per minute. He’s still sweating but not quite as much.”

  Cole thought it over. “Let’s give our treatment plan another day. I should come up tomorrow. I’ll want to run another blood sample.”

  “All right. What time?”

  “I’ll call in the morning and we’ll decide,” Cole said.

  “Late morning will work. Perhaps you can stay for a meal.”

  He needed a chance to spend time with his kids tomorrow, and he planned to take them with him. “No, thank you anyway. My kids will be with me, and we won’t be able to stay. I’ll call in the morning around eight to schedule.”

  “Children? Are you married?”

  He thought the question rather personal. “Divorced.”

  “How many children?”

  “Two.”

  “I love kids. And two more would be fun.”

  It was nice of her to welcome his children. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not sure it will work out. I’ll check with the girls about their plans and get back to you in the morning. Can we decide then about lunch?”

  “Sure. I hope you can join me. I would love to spend time with your daughters.”

  He ended the call, and Sophie looked up at him from across the room where she’d been busily squirting and wiping the stainless steel exam table over and over. “Who was that?” she asked.

  “A lady named Carmen Santiago. She’s got a sick horse.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Sure. I don’t know her very well, but she seems nice.”

  Sophie tilted her head to the side, studying him.

  “Why did you tell her you were divorced?”

  What is that old saying about little pitchers and big ears? “When I told her I had kids, she asked if I was married.”

  A sad expression crossed her face as she looked down at the table. “Why did she want to know that?”

  Cole wondered about that himself, although he had a notion about it. “Just making conversation, I guess. It’s okay, Sophie. I have to tell people about our family some of the time.”

  She nodded, her eyes downcast, as she continued wiping the table.

  He crossed the room, pulled her close with one arm, and hugged her briefly to his side. “You’ve done a great job helping me clean. Let’s go home now and see what we can rustle up to eat.”

  She tipped up her face, giving him a quivery smile that almost broke his heart. “Mrs. Gibbs is making soup.”

  “That sounds good on a cold day. Let’s help Angie finish up so we can go.”

  Following Sophie from the room, his mind jumped back to Carmen. She seemed interested in getting to know him better. He supposed someday he might find himself attracted to a woman other than Olivia. If and when that happened, he knew one thing for sure: he had these kids and their needs to consider before he made decisions about adding anyone to their family.

  Chapter 10

  Brody removed his hand from Adrienne’s hair and stood.

  “You have to go down and organize a retrieval mission,” Mattie said.

  “I’ll stay with her.”

  “Sorry, Brody. You can’t. You’re too close.” Besides, the boyfriend was always a suspect. She didn’t know what to do with that.

  He glared at her. “This is all I have left.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve got memories, and staying here with her corpse shouldn’t be one of them.”

  He looked down on Adrienne’s face, uncovered, reddened, and lifeless.

  “I brought a plastic tarp in my backpack. Let’s cover her and secure the gravesite. Then you need to head down that trail. I’ll give you some flagging tape to mark it on your way down.”

  He looked at Mattie. “I can find my way back up here.”

  “Of course. But there may be more than one party needing to get up here later this afternoon. You might not be able to guide them all. We don’t want anyone getting lost.” She glanced up at the sky, covered with gray snow clouds. He followed her glance and apparently knew what she was thinking.

  “And it might snow before I get back,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit. I’ll make sure we can find the trail.”

  Mattie nodded, trusting him to keep his word. “We need to hurry.”

  She removed the black plastic sheeting she’d carried up in her backpack and started spreading it out. Brody went to the far side of the grave,
keeping his eyes averted from the carnage wrought by some scavenger, and helped her spread it over the site. They secured the sheeting by anchoring the edges with stones. The wind tugged at it, trying to tear it away, but soon the black plastic turned into a taut shield from the elements. It would be up to Mattie and Robo to defend the grave from further desecration by wildlife.

  “Robo and I will go back to the trail with you, and I’ll mark it with orange tape from there to here on my way back. I think it’s probably shorter to head due east instead of coming up the draw like we did to follow the scent trail. I’ll build a cairn in the middle of the trail to mark where you should turn off and head back here.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Brody said. “What if her killer returns while you’re up here alone? What if that anonymous tip was a setup?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.”

  “You have your service weapon.”

  “Right. And Robo won’t let anyone sneak up on us.” She pulled out her GPS and used the compass function to chart a course due east. “It’s time to go.”

  “Wait a minute.” Brody looked back at the black plastic sheet that covered Adrienne’s grave, his face filled with a mixture of emotion. Hesitation, grief, and concern were all registered there, easy for Mattie to read. She gave him a minute to sort through his thoughts, and then said, “You need to get started, Brody.”

  She set out, dodging around towering pine and boulders, staying on an easterly course.

  After following for several yards, Brody broke his silence. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay up here?”

  She didn’t want to tell him that she’d feared all along that they would find a corpse, and she’d planned for it. “I’ll be all right. I brought some food and plenty of warm clothing.”

  “I’ll come back this afternoon. I’ll think of things we need as I go down.”

  Mattie glanced at his haggard face, noting his slumped posture when he typically stood ramrod straight. “Brody,” she said, pausing for emphasis, “unless someone can put you on a horse, think twice before you try to make this climb again. You’ve spent days without food and sleep, and you’ve covered a lot of territory on little fuel. Mark that trail on your way down so anyone can find it.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Stubborn.

  It took about ten minutes to connect with the trail. Brody surprised her when he offered a handshake. He gripped hers hard when she took it. “Thank you for all you’ve done . . . and everything you’re going to do,” he said.

  “Sure, Brody. You’d do the same for me.” That wouldn’t have been true a few months ago, but things had changed between them.

  He turned and started down the trail. Mattie watched him until he trudged out of sight on the far side of the first rise. Brody looked done in, and she worried that it would take him a long time to make it back to the trailhead. Well, there was nothing she could do about that.

  She began to build the cairn, stacking rocks smack in the middle of the trail, large ones on the bottom and progressively smaller ones layered up to the top. She built it about two feet high and knew it couldn’t be missed. Taking out her GPS again, she and Robo headed due west to return to the gravesite, marking trees with orange flagging tape about every twenty yards as they went.

  Once there, Mattie decided to walk a grid with Robo, just in case they could turn up something the killer dropped. She gave him a drink of water and put on his working collar. Snapping a short lead onto his collar, she led him to the start of the grid that she’d already planned mentally, located between the trail and the gravesite.

  “Seek,” she told him, his command for evidence detection, and she gestured toward the ground.

  Robo put his nose down and went to work, quartering the area in short sweeps. Soon he touched the ground with his mouth and sat. At first Mattie couldn’t see what he was indicating, but when she brushed aside some pine needles she discovered a flattened cigarette butt. “Good find, Robo.”

  She bagged it and started searching for footprints. She found several partial cowboy boot prints in the soft ground next to a tree. He must’ve leaned here to have a smoke. She marked them with orange tape on a thin metal spike.

  She also found horseshoe prints. She photographed them, but she could barely see them in the photo. Looking up at the heavy sky, she knew she needed to preserve all the prints from the snow, so the CSI technicians could process them with their equipment.

  After finishing the grid, she decided to use plastic evidence bags to cover the prints. Splitting them open, she chose the prints that were the most clearly defined, covered them, and then anchored the plastic with sharp bits of tree branch and rocks around the edges, being careful to avoid pressing on the middle. She left the orange flags so that anyone entering the area would know not to disturb them.

  Mattie and Robo spent the next hour searching around the gravesite and back toward the trail. She snapped pictures of disturbed greenery, areas where rocks had been removed, and places where the terrain had been altered during the digging of the grave. None of these things would be very useful.

  What she didn’t find brought images and theories to her mind: Robo didn’t indicate finding Adrienne’s scent trail on the ground, and Mattie didn’t spot smaller hiking-boot prints that Adrienne might have left. She theorized that Adrienne had been killed elsewhere and left face down or head down for several hours, accounting for the lividity observed in her face. She guessed she’d been carried here on horseback and then buried, probably by the anonymous tipster. Maybe he felt guilt or remorse, and that’s why he called. The autopsy could confirm the first part of her theory; the rest was guesswork.

  Cold air nipped her face, and she realized the temperature had dropped. She’d better pay attention to her own needs before it was too late. She took off Robo’s collar and tracking harness to let him know he was now off duty. She headed out into the timber to find firewood, taking along his tennis ball, causing him to frolic beside her. His reward was long overdue. She was relieved to see that he acted like his happy self again, his depression left behind.

  But she couldn’t erase the image of Adrienne’s marred face and gaping mouth from her mind, or the one of Brody kneeling beside the dead woman. It would take longer for her own mood to lighten.

  *

  Cole was playing a game of Monopoly with his kids when his cell phone rang. One glance told him it was the sheriff’s department, and he answered it immediately. The caller was Sheriff McCoy.

  “Hello, Sheriff.”

  “I’ve got some bad news, Dr. Walker,” McCoy said. “Adrienne Howard’s body has been found.”

  “I was afraid that’s what you were going to say.” Cole checked his kids and saw they were listening to his side of the call. “Excuse me a moment, Sheriff.”

  He got up from the kitchen table. “Give me a minute, you guys,” he said to the girls. “I’ve got to take this call, but I’ll be right back.”

  “But Dad . . .”

  “I’ll be right back, Angela, and I’ll tell you what’s happening. But now, I need some privacy.” He walked out of the room and headed upstairs, resuming his conversation with the sheriff as he went. “All right, I’m back.”

  “She was found about a half mile down from Tucker Peak. Do you know that area?”

  “I’m familiar with it. I used to hunt that area with my dad. That’s rugged country. How on earth did you find her?”

  “Robo. Look, the reason I’m calling is that I need your help organizing a retrieval mission. And we’re going to need several extra horses to carry our detective and technicians up to the site.”

  By now Cole had reached his bedroom and shut the door. The red digits on his alarm clock said 4:51. It was getting late. “How soon do you want us to load up?”

  “Can we start at sunrise tomorrow morning?”

  “I’m sure that between Garrett and my dad we can organize enough horses by then. You don�
�t think we should go up sooner?”

  “That’s the other part of my problem,” McCoy said. “I’ve got Deputy Cobb up there securing the site.”

  “By herself?”

  “Yes. I need at least one rider to take supplies up to her for the night. A tent, food, water, dog food for Robo, insulated sleeping bags. We’ve got the trail marked, but we’ve also got this snowstorm rolling in. I need someone who can handle himself out in the wilderness during winter weather.”

  There was no way he would let Mattie spend the night up there alone. “I’m your guy.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “Hey, it doesn’t need to be. I’ll contact Garrett and ask him to organize things for tomorrow morning. I’ve got a horse named Mountaineer that can stick to any trail in the dark. I’ll be ready to leave within the hour.”

  “Deputy Brody wants to go with you, but I need him to guide up tomorrow’s party.”

  “I can make it on my own.”

  “I’ll turn the phone over to him so he can give you detailed directions. And thanks, Cole.”

  Cole took notes from Brody’s description, deciding he needed to take a strong flashlight to see the orange tape in the dark. He ended the call and went downstairs to his daughters, his mind making a list of supplies while he went. They both waited at the kitchen table. There was no need to soften the blow with these two. Like it or not, they were experienced in receiving bad news.

  “That was the sheriff. They’ve found Adrienne. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she’s no longer alive.”

  Neither spoke. Angie looked down at the table while Sophie’s worried brown eyes sought out his. “Did somebody kill her, Dad? Like Grace?” Sophie asked.

  “I don’t know any details. But I do know that Mattie’s up there in the mountains, guarding the site by herself.”

  Angie looked up at him, a furrow of concern on her brow. “Alone?”

  “Yeah, I’ve volunteered to take supplies up to her so she’s not caught out in this storm without food and shelter.” Cole realized his action would take him away from the kids for the night, something he’d promised Angie he would try to avoid. He watched her closely for her response.