Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery)

by Rowland, M. L.

  “Royal pain?” Rob said without looking up. “No, wait. Did you say something?”

  “This immobility is killing me,” Gracie said. “I feel like in one day we’ve devolved from bipeds to amoebae!”

  Rob squinted over at her. “What is your problem?”

  “I can’t stand this waiting. I can’t stand lying here doing nothing. I need to be doing something.”

  “Teach me something about survival then.”

  Gracie ignored his suggestion. Her eyes roved the interior of the tiny shelter, the bark of the fall log, the slanting ceiling, the backpack propped in the doorway, eventually settling on her own hands. She spread her fingers wide in front of her face. Dirt embedded under short, ragged nails. Torn cuticles. Dried blood on skinned knuckles. “Yow,” she whispered. “These hands are either a manicurist’s wildest fantasy or her worst nightmare.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I need a bath.”

  “A what?”

  “I can feel every teeny particle of dirt on my body. One whiff of my armpits would make a New York City garbage collector weep. I need a bath.”

  “But I’m kind of enjoying that rotting cantaloupe smell,” Rob said so quietly Gracie wasn’t sure she heard him correctly.

  She rolled over to face him. “What?”

  “I was joking. You know, a joke?” He smiled down at the cards and continued reading.

  Gracie propped her head up with her hand and studied Rob.

  Abrasion scabs and dirt smudges still showed beneath the thirty-six-hour beard stubble. His hair curled out from beneath the fleece hat like a Chia Pet. He looked adorable.

  Somehow, Gracie observed, the grubbier Rob became, the more attractive he became, the more male, if that was in any way possible with someone who had Testosterone Machine practically tattooed on his forehead. She marveled that someone that good looking and famous and rich could be such a regular guy. She had never met anyone as famous as Rob, but she had known a number of good-looking wealthy men in her past life. The vast majority of them were Absolute Shits.

  Yep, she decided, Rob Christian was just a regular guy. More than that, he was kind of . . . She searched for the right word. Nice.

  Tears blurred Gracie’s vision. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve before Rob noticed. The last few days had taken a toll on her physically and emotionally, strip-mining away the protective outer layers like geological strata, allowing horrible, unspeakable things to rise up to hover beneath the surface, things like emotions. “Okay,” she said, “what do you want to know about survival?”

  “Oh, good.” He straightened. “So tell me, oh, guru of all that is the outdoors, what is it like to freeze to death?”

  “I don’t think this is a good time to talk about that,” Gracie said. She sat up and crawled over to her pack. “Why don’t I beat your arse in a nice game of poker instead? Somewhere around here I have the world’s tiniest deck of cards.”

  “Don’t blow me off. Please.” His voice was low. “I’m not asking out of morbid curiosity. I’m looking for information. The unknown sucks. Knowledge, even if it’s bad, affords equilibrium.”

  Succinctly put, Gracie thought, and filed the phrasing into a mental manila folder for future reference. She sat back and pulled her sleeping bag up around her shoulders. “Let’s see. Freezing to death. Not really such a bad way to go.”

  Rob’s eyebrows merged into a frown. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Not that dying is a pleasant proposition. But some ways of biting the dust are more preferable than others.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The team’s had lots of discussions about this at the bar during our after-meeting meetings. The consensus is that dying in one’s sleep is, of course, hands-down the preferred method. Stabbing, bludgeoning, and being killed by a wild animal are horribly violent and painful. Suffocation and drowning are claustrophobic and torturous.”

  “Do tell,” Rob said.

  “Burning to death is the worst. Beheading is quick, but the anticipation sucks.”

  Rob chuckled, bobbling his cup. “I almost spilled my cocoa. Or whatever this foul, barely potable concoction is I’m being forced to drink.”

  “Bite me,” Gracie said.

  “I’m getting used to it, you know. The insipid flavor is growing on me.” He had a Puckish gleam in his eyes. “Kind of like a fungus.”

  “Har-dee-har,” Gracie said. “May I please continue my pontification?”

  “By all means.”

  “Strangulation is probably the best violent death if there is such a thing. You lose consciousness quickly and have no idea what happens after that. That’s it. That’s all I can remember.”

  “So . . . freezing to death is a good thing?”

  “Not so bad. Relatively speaking of course. Aside from the initial shivering and extremity pain, the mind and body gradually shut down and you just ease on down the road. So relax.”

  “Doesn’t any of this search and rescue stuff . . .” He gestured with his hand as he searched for the right word. “. . . Scare you?”

  “Scare me?” Gracie thought for a moment. “This is what we train for. Most of the time you don’t think about what you’re doing, whether it’s dangerous or whatever. You just . . . do it. So scare me? Not really.” She added under her breath, “It’s the normal, everyday crap I can’t handle.”

  “What was that last part?”

  “Nothing.”

  Rob smiled down at the cards.

  Gracie lay back down again, closed her eyes, and tried to take her own advice and relax. She concentrated on clenching every single muscle in her body all at once, then releasing them. Clench. Release. Clench. Release. Tension drifted away.

  She was almost asleep when Rob said, “What would I do if I got caught in an avalanche?”

  “I’m taking those cards away from you.”

  “Come on. I want to see how much you know.”

  It took several seconds for Gracie to wake back up sufficiently to put her train of thought on the same track as Rob’s. “The textbook answer is that as soon as you get swept up in an avalanche, make swimming motions through the snow and try to stay as close to the surface as you can. And keep your mouth shut.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Since it was apparent that napping wasn’t in her near future, Gracie turned over again and propped her head up on a hand. “So when you stop, you don’t end up with a big plug of snow in your mouth.”

  “Bugger.”

  “If they don’t get squished to death by the slide itself, a lot of people suffocate. When the avalanche stops, the snow sets up like cement, like a really cold body cast. If you’re still conscious when the slide is stopping, you cup your hands in front of your face like this . . .” Gracie covered her nose and mouth with her hands. “. . . So you have an air pocket. Then maybe, maybe you can keep yourself from suffocating to death.”

  “Bugger,” Rob said again. “How would you know which way is up?”

  “Drool. Whichever way the spit slides is down. If they haven’t found you within about thirty minutes, you’re probably dead.”

  When Rob looked thoughtful, she added, “The best way to survive an avalanche is to not get caught in the first place.”

  “And how would one accomplish that? It doesn’t talk about that on the cards.”

  “Glaring omission,” Gracie said. “A lot of factors create prime avalanche conditions. Recent heavy snow. How steep the slope. Moisture content. Aspect—what direction it’s facing. Signs an avalanche has passed that way before.”

  “What signs?”

  “No trees. Only young trees. No branches on the uphill side. Or if you’re walking across a snow field—which, by the way, I would not advise. But say you are . . . If, when you take a step, the snow sends out cracks? Or if you hear a loud kind of a crack? Or a weird echoey whoomph sound?”

  “Not a good thing,” Rob said.

  “Definitely not. If you hear that sound, y
ou better hightail it outta there or you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

  She looked up to find Rob staring at her. “Quit looking at me like that,” she demanded. “It’s really starting to get on my nerves.”

  He grinned. “You have so much knowledge about things I don’t. In fact, I never knew enough about them to know I didn’t know anything about them.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m an actor. From the city.”

  “Ya think?”

  “My life is movies. Make-believe.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Will you shut up and let me express this without any editorial comments? This is some kind of epiphany for me.”

  “I’ll be good.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” he said, winking at her, which, much to her surprise, made her stomach do a backflip. “Movie’s aren’t the real world.”

  Gracie stifled the urge to say “Ya think?” again.

  “But this.” He threw out his arms. “This is the real world. What we’re doing here is the real world. And it’s fantastic. You are the real world and you’re fantastic.”

  “And you’re whacked.”

  CHAPTER

  54

  MILOCEK examined the ground where he presumed Rob had landed when he jumped from the outcropping.

  He had cleaned and dried himself off with water and his cloth handkerchief and pulled his clothes back on, all the while reformulating his plan. There was no longer any need to wait, to remain inactive, passive. He was on the offensive.

  Dodging search teams along the trail had cost him precious time, and the day had slipped into afternoon. By the time he made it back to the outcropping, he had only two or three good hours of daylight left.

  A few feet away from the base of the promontory, he found Rob’s blue knapsack lying on the ground. Reserving a thorough search of the contents for later, he threaded his arms through the straps and shrugged the pack onto his back. Then he followed the path down the side of the canyon.

  For several hundred feet the trail was clearly visible and easily followed. But as Milocek descended, the trail grew more and more diffuse until eventually he lost it altogether.

  Like a bloodhound that has lost its scent, he scoured the ground with his eyes. Bent low to the ground, he made long, slow horizontal sweeps back and forth and back and forth across the incline, dredging for any sign of human passage. Frustration grew inside him like volcanic pressure pushing up the earth’s crust. His nostrils flared with each heavy breath. Thick, stubby fingers clenched into tight fists, unclenched, and clenched again.

  Halfway down the incline, he stopped to straighten and stretch his aching back.

  The cigarette stopped midway to his mouth. The faint, but distinct sound of human voices wafted up from the canyon.

  Milocek flicked away the cigarette and plunged the rest of the way down to the bottom of the canyon.

  A few feet from the embankment that dropped down to the water, he stopped and stood without moving for more than thirty minutes.

  He heard nothing above the rippling of creek water.

  A furnace of rage seered his chest. His head swiveled from side to side like an angry bull. Every nerve reached out as if with internal radar, every ounce of energy focused toward the detection of the tiniest movement, the merest whisper of sound that might lead him in the right direction.

  Milocek took one final drag of his cigarette and flung it down to smolder on the damp ground.

  He turned abruptly and climbed back up the side of the canyon.

  CHAPTER

  55

  GRACIE crouched on the ground several feet up the hill from the creek embankment, eyes fixed on the partially smoked Camel nonfilter lying at her feet. Three cigarette butts lay nearby.

  As the afternoon crawled toward evening without the appearance of Cashman or a relief team, Gracie had been forced to accept that she no longer controlled the situation, or the search, and conceded that she and Rob would be spending a second night in the field. Rob accepted the news with equanimity and lay down again for another nap.

  Gracie had lain dozing for a few minutes, then while Rob still slept, she crept out of the shelter. As a surprise for Rob, she fashioned little pillows for them both by stuffing pine needles into bread bags kept in her pack.

  Then she hiked down to the creek to replenish their water supply. After refilling and adding iodine purifying tablets to both her water bottles and the hydration bladder from her pack, she climbed up the embankment and stopped at the top to readjust her pack. As she loosened the straps, something white standing out against the dark brown of the earth thirty feet away caught her eye.

  Crouching on the ground, she drew off her glove and pinched the burned end of the cigarette between her fingers.

  Still warm.

  Not very long ago, while she and Rob were in the shelter, possibly even while she was hiking down to the creek, someone had stood in the same place long enough to smoke four cigarettes.

  Gracie pushed herself to her feet, the hair rising on her scalp. She turned in a slow circle. The heavy cloud had lifted somewhat, not sufficiently for her to see all the way up the canyon, but enough to take stock of the area. There was no further sign of a human being, no movement, no unnatural color. She heard nothing but the rippling water of the creek below.

  She studied the ground again and found where someone had stood for some length of time, but no definitive footprints led in any direction. The muted light was the worst possible for tracking.

  Gracie slid back down the embankment, stepped stone by stone across the creek and scrambled up the other side. She followed the creek up for a short distance to where the pink flower of flagging tape still hung from a branch. She slit the ribbon with her knife and gathered up the strands, stuffing them into a pocket of her parka. The sandwich bag containing the note she tucked into the same pocket. One by one, she picked up the stones of the giant arrow and placed them at random around the site. Then she crossed over to the other side of the creek and crept up the side of the canyon.

  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, b
ut 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.