Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery)

by Rowland, M. L.

  Rob flew out of the trees like an eagle diving for the kill and swung a thick pine branch directly at Joseph’s head.

  The branch landed on a forearm raised in defense and burst into a thousand fragments. Joseph fell backward into the snow.

  Rob’s own momentum overbalanced him and he pitched forward. He grabbed on to a rock to keep from sliding down the hill, then scrambled up as Joseph pushed himself to his feet.

  The two men faced each other.

  The wolverine and the panther, Gracie thought absurdly.

  Then Joseph lunged forward to tackle Rob around the waist.

  The two men fought. Gouging, biting, clawing, kicking, ripping. Eyes, ears, throat, knees, testicles, all fair game. Ugly, primitive, brutal. Both men grunted, yelled. Fell, slid down, then surged up again.

  Blood sprayed, Jackson Pollock red across white snow.

  The reality that Joseph was going to kill Rob slammed into Gracie.

  Do something!

  The ice axe still dangled from its strap on her injured arm. She slipped it off her wrist and, with her left hand, dug the pick into the snow and dragged herself up the slope. With every dig of the axe, she gained a foot. Another. Another.

  Only feet above her, the men broke apart.

  Joseph stumbled backward, fighting to remain upright. He gulped in air like a drowning man rising to the surface. His damaged arm hung limply at his side. His one good ear was torn and bleeding. The gaping hole in his cheek dripped blood onto the ground.

  Rob knelt in the snow, head hanging, eyes lifted toward Joseph, mouth a smear of bright red. He dragged air into his lungs. One eye had ballooned closed. A cut on his cheekbone spilled blood down his face.

  Joseph lunged again, hitting Rob with a body slam that knocked them both into the snow with Joseph on top. His hands encircled Rob’s head, thumbs digging for the eyes.

  With a yell, Gracie surged upward and buried the pick of her axe into the muscle of Joseph’s calf.

  The man’s bellow of pain was lost as a crack echoed throughout the canyon. He rolled off Rob and grabbed around at the axe handle, trying to pull the pick loose.

  Rob threw himself toward the edge of the chute, picking Gracie up by her parka along the way. He flung her down next to the manzanita bush, dove on top of her, and held on.

  High above, the entire hillside shifted and the mountain released its hold. The giant slab broke free, instantly a roaring slide of churning snow. Shaking the ground, it swallowed Joseph and swept him away. A glittering white plume flowered high into the air. Beyond it, a tiny speck grew larger, rotor blades pulsing, soundless against the roar of nature’s fury.

  Sixty King.

  CHAPTER

  79

  GRACIE and Rob sat perched on the side of the mountain, Rob’s arm cradling Gracie close.

  Sixty King hovered overhead. They watched a Sheriff’s Department medic being lowered at the end of a cable, dangling like a spider on a filament of silk.

  “You’re going first,” Rob said, sounding like his mouth was full of cotton balls.

  “No, I’m not,” Gracie answered through a mist of pain.

  “You’re in no shape to argue.”

  With the demeanor of a cranky old lady, Gracie submitted to being treated first. Her right arm and shoulder were strapped in place. Butterfly bandages closed the cut encircling the outside of her eye and the deep puncture on the back of her leg. A wad of gauze stuffed inside her cheek soaked up the blood.

  And even though shock had set her body to quivering like a plucked harp string, she insisted in a loud voice on stepping into the litter of her own volition. She carped and crabbed as she was strapped in, or, as Rob archly informed her, “Packaged.”

  When she was ready, black webbing crisscrossing her body and holding her in position, the clear acrylic head shield ready to be lowered, Rob slowly dropped to his knees and kissed her gently on the mouth. Then he fell back and watched as the shield was clamped in place.

  Sixty King swooped back. The rotor blades whirled the powdery snow into a blinding white tornado that, even with the shield lowered, pierced Gracie’s cheeks with a thousand tiny ice crystals.

  She watched with a critical eye as the medic clipped the litter rigging onto the cable that had been lowered and tightened the quick-link closed. Her eyes slid back to Rob, who flashed her a lopsided smile.

  Then she felt a tug on the cable and was swept up and up into the air.

  CHAPTER

  80

  “DAMN, Kinkaid! You look like shit!”

  “More like death warmed over.”

  “Shit warmed over.”

  Gracie looked down the length of her body to her teammates standing in a cluster at the end of the hospital bed. “Gee, thanks, guys,” she said, fighting to talk intelligibly with a cheek swollen to the size of a baseball. Her unbandaged eye zeroed in on Lenny, who stood looking uncomfortable, one hand thrust deep in the front pocket of his jeans, a stack of newspapers held close to his side with an elbow. The other hand held what looked like an inexpensive Walmart bouquet of carnations, the bright orange sale sticker still stuck to the plastic wrap. “Those for me?” she asked.

  The young man blushed, his own eyes sliding over to an enormous basket of pink, yellow, and white roses with brightly colored balloons, which sat on a table in the corner of the room.

  “They’re beautiful,” Gracie said. “Carnations are my favorite.”

  Lenny grinned with relief and crept up to lay the bouquet on the rolling tray next to the bed.

  Kurt stepped forward and gave her a light peck on her good cheek. “How ya doing, kid? How does it feel to be a hero?”

  Gracie’s eye moved over to where Ralph stood just inside the doorway leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest. “Hey, Ralphie,” she said.

  “Hey, Gracie girl,” he said and winked at her.

  Gracie laid her head back on the crisp pillow and let the sound of her teammates’ banter and joke-telling flow over her. Her eyes traveled from face to face to face. I love these guys, she thought. In spite of the fact that she felt like she had been flattened by a steamroller, and every square inch of her body was as sore as hell, in spite of the fact that only half of her face worked, she smiled with contentment. “Where’s Cashman?” she asked. “I wanna whup his butt for leaving me out there.”

  Silence in the room. Gracie’s words hung in the air. Her eye moved from one man to the next until Lenny piped up, “Hey, Gracie! You’re everywhere!”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah! Look!” The young man plopped the pile of newspapers he had been holding onto the bed beside her. He held up the front page of the L.A. Times so she could read the headlines: WOMAN RESCUES ACTOR! with her own team ID picture and a headshot of Rob beneath. Lenny picked up another paper. “This one’s from San Francisco. “‘They’re Alive!’” he read. “And this one. You’ve been on TV, too! Here.” He grabbed the remote from the bedside table, turned on the television hanging on the wall near the ceiling, and flipped through the channels. “Even . . . What’s that one program . . . ?”

  “Entertainment Tonight?” someone suggested.

  “Yeah! Entertainment Tonight,” Lenny said. “There!”

  The same ID photo of Gracie and a different picture of Rob filled the television screen. A woman’s voice announced: “. . . Hiking party caught in a Thanksgiving Day snowstorm in the San Raphael mountains one hundred miles east of Los Angeles.”

  “It’s friggin’ awesome!”

  A half-ton weight settled in the middle of Gracie’s chest. “Turn it off.”

  “No, wait—”

  Kurt reached up and pushed the Power button on the television. The screen went black.

  A series of clicks out in the hallway drew everyone’s attention toward the door where a man stood just outside the room, a camera pointed directly at Gracie.

  “A camera!” she wailed and turned her head away.

  Ralph and Kurt dived out in
to the hall with the rest of the men on their heels. The door swung closed and Gracie was left alone in the room. She listened to several minutes of scuffling, pounding feet, muffled voices, cursing, and receding footsteps until the door swung back open and her teammates ambled back in.

  “He got pictures of me,” she moaned. “Like this!”

  “Not anymore,” Kurt said, his head lowered and concentrating on deleting the pictures from the digital camera.

  “Don’t know how that joker got through security.”

  “There’s security?” Gracie asked.

  “Reporters are camped outside the front door downstairs,” Warren said.

  “And in front of your house.”

  “Oh, God!” Gracie’s head sank back into the pillow.

  “Guys,” Ralph said and signaled with a barely perceptible nod of his head toward the door.

  Kurt leaned over Gracie and whispered in her ear, “Don’t let the assholes get you down.”

  The men trooped out of the room.

  “Don’t be getting a big head . . .”

  “We’ll be back . . .”

  “. . . a couple of days . . .”

  “. . . bring a bottle of Cuervo.”

  “. . . have to smuggle it in.”

  “. . . in a backpack.”

  “. . . a water bottle.”

  The laughter and voices faded down the hallway.

  Ralph closed the door after them. He walked over and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

  Gracie studied his face. Even through the haze of painkillers, it shocked her how haggard and old he looked, how drawn his cheeks were, how pronounced the lines on his forehead and around his mouth. And that he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a week. “You look like shit yourself, Ralphie,” she said.

  He nodded and said, “I checked your house. I put up some crime scene tape to keep the reporters out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Threw out the sour milk. And green sandwich meat.”

  Gracie rolled her one good eye.

  “Your answering machine was full. You got an offer from a book publisher. And one from a movie company. Your mother left four messages.”

  “Of course.”

  “She sounded distraught.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think she’s genuinely worried. I can call her back for you.”

  “I’ll do it. Maybe tomorrow.” Gracie closed her eyes. “Where’s Cashman?”

  Ralph picked up Gracie’s hand in his cool, dry one. With his gravelly voice low and quiet, he described how Rob had been airlifted out to a landing zone at Aviation’s headquarters. A private helicopter whisked him from there to an undisclosed L.A. hospital, where he was kept overnight for observation. Except for multiple bruises, his injured ankle, and two facial cuts requiring microscopic plastic surgery, he was declared to be in reasonably good condition considering his ordeal.

  Ralph provided only vague generalities about Tristan Chambers and Diana Petrovic, and about Joseph Van Dijk, aka, Radovan Milocek, aka The Surgeon. There was ample time later to delve deeper into that nightmare.

  And in the quiet of her hospital room, Ralph told Gracie that Steve Cashman was dead.

  CHAPTER

  81

  “I should have stayed home after all.” Gracie said through teeth clenched against the pain of riding in a wheelchair over the uneven brick walkway.

  “Almost there,” Ralph said as he pushed the chair up the sidewalk leading to the church.

  Across the wide gravel parking lot, in the lengthening blue shadows of tall pines, a phalanx of reporters and camera crews—held back by several lengths of yellow Sheriff’s Department tape—snapped and filmed the funeral goers as they trickled into the church. A cluster of onlookers, mostly women, huddled to one side. Stationed at various points around the church grounds were several deputies and a security detail of burly men in suits and sunglasses.

  “What the hell!” Gracie growled. “Groupies at a funeral? I want my stupid-ass life back.”

  “Almost there,” Ralph said into her ear.

  The wheelchair swept past a single deputy standing guard and in through the front door of the church. Gracie blinked to adjust her eyes as they passed from daylight into the darkness of the dimly lit narthex.

  Just inside the door stood a small table covered with a white tablecloth on which had been arranged an eight-by-eleven portrait of Steve Cashman in uniform; his scratched and dented helmet; dress uniform shirt, recently ironed; and a coil of Steve’s personal climbing rope. Flanking the entrance to the sanctuary itself were two members of the National Search and Rescue Honor Guard dressed in ceremonial uniform from black berets to charcoal gray shirts and white gloves to 10th Mountain Division ice axes.

  “Don’t stop,” Gracie whispered over her shoulder to Ralph.

  The late-afternoon sun through stained glass cast slanting streamers of color across a sea of orange shirts already seated inside—search and rescue personnel from all over the state, mourning their colleague killed in the line of duty.

  “We should have come earlier,” Gracie said through teeth still clenched so tightly together it was making her jaw ache. She stared straight ahead as heads swiveled and eyes tracked the wheelchair making its excruciatingly slow way down the center aisle to the front of the church. Ralph stopped beside the second row of pews, set the brake, and took the open seat at the end next to Gracie. On the other side of him, in a somber row, sat the eight remaining members of the Timber Creek Search and Rescue team.

  In the front pew of the church, alongside Cashman’s family and directly in front of Kurt, Rob sat looking straight ahead and appearing stiff in slicked-back hair, and a bright white shirt and black suit.

  Throughout the ponderous service, Gracie fought the temptation to glance over at Rob. Instead she stared at the minister, barely hearing his monotone delivery or the eulogies given by her teammates, pondering why the hero label bestowed upon Cashman rang hollow in her ears and about why she didn’t really feel anything about his being dead.

  Even as Ralph and five other men from the team carried the casket bearing Cashman’s body past her back up the aisle, with bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” from the choir loft, Gracie’s eyes remained dry, the neatly folded cloth handkerchief Ralph had placed on her knee before the service unused.

  Immediately afterward, before anyone else in the sanctuary moved, two bodyguards whisked Rob out a side door and Gracie found herself being wheeled by Warren across the front of the sanctuary, through a different side door and into a small windowless room. Warren parked the wheelchair, set the brake, and left the room without a word. “What the—?” Gracie said to the closing door.

  Gracie looked around the room—dark wood paneling, crimson carpet worn to threadbare, a small round table surrounded by four wooden chairs with a box of generic tissues placed dead center.

  It was warm. And stuffy.

  The door opened again and Gracie looked up.

  A jolt of electricity hit her as Rob limped in.

  He closed the door quietly behind him, then he turned and looked directly at her.

  The two studied each other.

  Gracie’s heart was thumping so loudly she wondered if Rob could hear it from where he stood only six feet away. She took in every facet of Rob’s face, the black eye and other contusions, the abrasions, the microscopic stitches on the cuts on his cheekbone and above his eye. He looked taller than she remembered. And cleaner. “You took a bath,” she said.

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “So did you.”

  “Such as it was.” She almost shrugged, but remembered her broken clavicle in time.

  Rob took a step toward her, bent forward and kissed her.

  Soft and warm, Gracie thought. That’s what I’ll remember about his kiss.

  Rob dragged one of the wooden chairs over, placed it an inch away from the wheelchair, and sat down.

  Gracie looked over at him. “I don’t want t
o hear a single word about how much like a lopsided chipmunk I look or how much like shit. And I didn’t want this friggin’ wheelchair, but it’s the only way they would let me come.”

  Rob’s dark eyes sparkled. “Haven’t changed a bit, have you then?”

  “Why the hell should I have changed?”

  He smiled. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you’ll let me whisk you away from all of this. Take you back to London with me.”

  “I don’t suppose there is,” she said and saw a flicker of something flash in the bright brown eyes. But whether a flicker of pain or of relief she couldn’t decipher. “At least not with all the friggin’ paparazzi following you—and me—everywhere.”

  The smile faded. “I’m sorry for that, Gracie. Truly sorry.”

  “Besides, I told you before. I hate cities.”

  “So you did.” He cocked his head at her. “God, I love you.”

  Gracie jerked away from him as if she had been slapped, then grit her teeth as pain shot through her shoulder. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Gracie.” Rob gently lifted her hand and kissed her bruised knuckles, which sent goose bumps up her spine. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “Will you hear me out? Please?”

  She nodded and stared down at the orange buttons of Ralph’s uniform shirt draped around her shoulders—the only one large enough to fit over the massive bandage on her shoulder and arm.

  “I’m not in love with you,” Rob said in a low voice. “Well, maybe I am, but that’s not what I’m saying here.” He bent to look into her face. “Look at me, love. Please.”

  Gracie dragged her eyes up to meet his.

  “How can I say this? You’ve ruined me for good.”

  “Oh—” Gracie began.

  “Let me finish, woman!”

  “Don’t call me woman,” Gracie growled back at him.

  Rob chuckled, bowed his head for a moment, then he said, “You’ve given me my life back. Or given me a new one is closer to the truth. People who live in cities and for cities—and I am one—get all caught up in the minutiae of life, the clutter and clamor and chaos.”