The something was two granules.
I decided I wanted them.
To pluck them free I'd need a tool from my field kit and a sample bag in which to deposit them, and my kit was in my pack in the cargo hold.
All right, I'd examine them in situ.
I bent my head to see what I could see. Granules, yes. I'd want to scope them back at the lab but right now I made a quick and dirty field ID. Size: a couple hundred microns. Shape: slightly irregular. Color: dark gray. Charcoal-colored actually, and it wasn't out of the question that these were activated charcoal.
I'd used the stuff myself, to deodorize my cat's litter box.
I thought back to the Devil's Nose Lodge. Hadn't seen any cats, but it was not out of the question that Charlotte Lassen kept cats around—excellent varmint hunters—in case the ferrets didn't do the job. As for activated-charcoal cat litter, I knew from experience that cats tracked the stuff all over the place. And if Charlotte swept it up, and then wiped her hands on a towel, transference might have occurred. And let's say it was a worn towel, so Charlotte relegated it to the boathouse bin.
Hmmm.
“Lake Mead,” Wes said. “Up ahead.”
I wanted to examine the towel more thoroughly, for more granules, but that risked dislodging them. Instead, I carefully folded the towel and placed it in my lap and then looked out the window.
Down below, the Colorado snaked through a dry landscape of amber and bronze and cream, all of it glazed by the low sun yearning to meet the horizon of the Colorado Plateau. The river spilled into a sprawling bluff-rimmed lake. Judging from the mineral bathtub rings, it looked to be less than half its high-water size.
We flew to the end of the lake where it came to an abrupt end, pooling against a wedge-shaped concrete behemoth.
“Hoover,” Wes said. “Another fucking dam.”
Justin said, “Cities gotta drink.”
Neely said, “Lotta straws in the river.”
Below and beyond the dam, the greatly reduced waters of the Colorado River continued southward.
Walter's voice came in the headphones. “How many dams in all, Wes?”
“On the main stem? Fifteen. On the tributaries, hundreds.”
I braced for another hawk-like dive down to the dam, Wes aiming us like a missile as he'd done this morning at Glen Canyon, but he simply banked and flew over the small town adjacent to the reduced river.
“Boulder City, Arizona,” he announced.
Hometown of rafter Megan Schrader.
Neely said, “Getting footage, Edgar?”
“Nonstop.”
“On to Vegas, Wes.”
Hometown of rafter Sam Pendleton.
Wes headed northwest, following the straight highway across the reddish desert, above a sprawl of houses and low-slung businesses and then, rising ahead, we approached the towers of Las Vegas. Not yet lit up. The gambling city was bounded by dry-looking mountain ranges.
“Address?” Wes asked.
Nobody knew.
“Just get Vegas,” Neely said. “A visual. Where the poor rafter came from.”
After we'd skirted the Vegas strip, and Wes banked to head back to the Grand Canyon, Neely said, “Wes, swing by Flagstaff on the way back.”
Wes nodded, checking the dashboard map.
Eighty miles south of the Canyon. I knew the location. Walter and I had driven it. Flagstaff hospital. Reid's hometown.
AFTER WE LANDED I BAGGED my towel and Wes's in separate garbage bags—which nobody remarked upon, everyone being weary, and it getting dark outside. Walter fell in beside me as we trudged away from the chopper.
“The towels?” he asked.
He doesn't miss a thing. I explained.
He said, “We'll take a peek back at the lab.”
I wasn't sure I had the wherewithal to take a peek at anything tonight
“The Devil's Nose,” he said. “Let's finish it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I'M SURVIVING,” BECCA said out loud.
She was embarrassed about how she'd freaked, at first. When she first regained consciousness in here. But shit, who wouldn't?
She was really embarrassed about how she'd screamed when she took her first steps and walked into her backpack. Kicking the softness where her parka was stashed. Thinking it was the boar or a human body, or something.
She laughed. She laughed at herself, now. Sometimes.
She could forgive herself for thinking there was a dead boar in here with her. That was a hallucination.
But she still freaked, sometimes. When she did, she squeezed her hands into fists so the nails bit into the skin. That usually worked.
She freaked, mostly, when she thought about nobody knowing she was here, about not being able to self-rescue. And, creepiest of all, she freaked when she got the feeling that something here in her cave was weird. Not natural. Not wild-boar weird, but the kind of weird she couldn't laugh away.
She'd explored. She'd found the edge of a hole, and that was scary, that was a place she didn't want to fall into. But she didn't find the weird thing.
And then she freaked about not finding it.
Stop that, girl. You've come so far!
Yeah right, she told her inner Becca, her bossy companion who sometimes got on her nerves. But this time Bossy was right. Stay positive.
She decided to review her supplies. Again.
When she'd first found her pack she made a catalog of her treasures:
(1) Water.
Two one-gallon Nalgene bottles, one in each mesh pocket. Both full. As a clue—telling her how far she'd hiked, from wherever she'd started—that told her exactly not enough. She might have hiked a long way and drunk a lot of water and then gotten water from a stream and filtered it and refilled one or both bottles.
After her first greedy gulps, she'd stopped and scolded herself. Ration it, Becca. Okay, it was Bossy who scolded her.
But it was Becca who knew how to ration. She'd taken that wilderness survival course because she was going to become a ranger. So. She remembered that the baseline minimum daily water need was thirty-two ounces. That was for a man who weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. She was a woman who weighed one hundred and ten. But the man-baseline didn't allow for water loss through activity, or peeing, and she was going to be doing some of that, so she decided to stick to thirty-two ounces.
Then, she needed to divide her daily ration into four portions. And she needed to drink each part in full—not sip it—because she needed to fool her body. Couldn't let it think that the need for rationing was over, and start shedding water.
That was hard, figuring out her daily ration. She didn't know when it was morning and when it was night. What was a day, here?
(1a) The water seep.
The water seep really was part of (1) but it wasn't exactly so she gave it a subsection.
It was at the far wall. It was coming down through a crack. There wasn't a lot but it was there if she needed it. First she'd drink the water from her bottles because she knew that was good. The water seep could be full of giardia. That was a nasty bug that gave you diarrhea and she didn't need that! Giardia was in the water all over the place because of shitheads who weren't careful where they pooped.
You tasted it, girlll.
Just a little bit, at first. Before she thought about giardia. She hadn't been thinking straight. And the seep was good. She'd wanted to guzzle. That's when she remembered giardia. Be careful.
(2) Food.
Her pack held: four granola bars and two foil packets of tuna and a squeeze tube of cheese and a baggie of Triscuits and a baggie of honey-glazed almonds and two wrinkly apples and trail mix with nuts and raisins and M&Ms. It also held two freeze-dried dinners—chili mac, and beef stroganoff with noodles. And two packets of instant oatmeal. She'd have to use her precious water to reconstitute that stuff.
So she ate the other stuff first. She was rationing her food, and didn't need Bossy to scold her. The survi
val course said the more you eat, the thirstier you get, so only nibble enough to keep away hunger pangs, and to have energy. She needed energy for when she was ready to self-rescue.
So she nibbled. But her mental health was important too, so she allowed herself one M&M whenever she thought she might cry.
The food was a clue, too. It told her she hadn't set out on a long backpacking trip. But still, what day had she fallen into this cave? And what about mileage? She was a strong hiker and she usually left other people in the dust. She might have hiked twenty miles in one day.
The trash bag was empty. That could mean (a) she hadn't stored any used wrappers, so hadn't been hiking long, or (b) she'd eaten some meals and stowed her trash and went someplace to restock her food and empty her trash, and then went off hiking again. The trash bag was no help.
Or maybe she hadn't gone backpacking at all. Maybe she'd been taking supplies down to her cave at home, to her special place. She sometimes used her backpack for that.
(3) Headlamp.
This was her darkness-killer. She only turned it on for short periods, when she started to wonder what happened and where she was and if she'd ever get out...that's when the wild boar came around.
She'd also used it to set up her campsite.
And, to explore. That didn't take long, because her cave wasn't that big. There was some rubble on the floor, and she had to watch out not to trip.
She'd found out there was a big hole. She'd only looked into it once real fast and she didn't know how deep it was and she didn't want to go to the edge again because it was crumbly and she was afraid she'd fall in.
The other direction, up, there was a hole into her cave. It was about twenty feet up to the top, to the tunnel. It was about ten feet across. Like a fat chimney.
It was dark up there, at the top of the chimney.
That's where she'd fallen from. She'd figured out how. She must have taken off her pack to get something and then dropped it, and it fell into the hole, and she'd jumped for her pack and tripped, and fell in too. Or maybe Bossy figured that out. Bossy lived in the subconscious and knew stuff Becca's conscious didn't. And Bossy wasn't afraid.
Like, climb out girlll.
Becca had tried. The walls of the chimney were rough, and maybe there were footholds. The three times she tried, she hadn't gotten far because when she put weight on her bad ankle, it buckled and she screamed. She needed to wait for the swelling to go down.
(4) First-aid kit.
It had an ace bandage and she'd used it to wrap her ankle.
It had ibuprofen—yay!—and she took those to help the pain in her head and her ankle. Her head was better. But she still got headaches. And sometimes she got confused.
She hadn't needed any of the other things in the kit but she was glad to have them, just in case.
Every time she thought just in case, she freaked.
(5) Warm clothes.
Her down parka was her best friend.
It wasn't a clue, though. Too bad. She always carried it, because it compressed down and didn't take up much space in her pack. Ditto her wool hat and gloves. Just because she carried warm stuff didn't mean she'd hiked to someplace cold. Even in the desert it got cold at night.
She was wearing the warm stuff all the time down here. And the hat and gloves cheered her up. They were lime-green, her favorite color.
(6) Sleeping bag and pad.
They were: a down mummy bag and a thinsulate pad. Take that, hard rock floor!
Take that, cold cave.
(7) Toilet paper.
She always carried a roll, and a plastic baggie to stow the used. She'd set up the toilet in the farthest-away part of the cave. She bagged the waste, and used rubble to bury the bags, and to cover where she peed.
It wasn't until the second day that she needed the toilet.
She wasn't sure of the timing. Her phone was broken. When she fell into the cave. Or maybe the wild boar stepped on it. Ha! She gave Bossy the middle finger, before Bossy could tell her there was no boar. Becca knew that. She was making a joke.
(8) Maps.
At first, she'd cried while pulling out the map case. Maps were supposed to tell you where you were, where you were going, and how to get back. But the map case always lived in the map pocket of her pack, and the maps were the ones she always carried. The canyons around home, of course. And Grand Canyon, and Lake Powell area, and Canyonlands, those kinds of places.
The maps were useless, down here.
She finished her review of supplies. Nothing new, but that didn't stop her from doing the review over and over. It gave her hope. Sometimes, she hoped somebody would find her, but it had been a long time and nobody had.
Nobody knew where she'd gone.
She didn't know. Backpacking? Her special cave?
Nobody knew.
She remembered taking a vacation leave, from work. She'd done it by text. So she hadn't been talking to people, so people at the Canyon wouldn't know. And everybody else in her life would be thinking, she's somewhere else. They wouldn't know any more than that. Because she didn't tell everybody about everybody else—at least, not her family, and Wes. She kept Wes her secret. Maybe someday she'd introduce him to the family. But what if they all hated each other?
She wished for Wes, right now. She'd left him a note saying going home. Right? But she didn't, right? Go home. Even if she did, Wes didn't know where it was. Also, she remembered they argued about something. When was that? Anyway, he wanted her to leave notes wherever she went. She didn't like being told that. Now she wished they hadn't argued. She wished she wasn't such a rogue Becca—that's what he called her. His rogue Becca. Sometimes with a smile. Sometimes not. Sometimes during sex, and that was hot. Sometimes when he wanted to know everything and she wanted some space, and they argued. She didn't want space, now.
When she wasn't wishing for Wes, she wished for Uncle Reid. He was so smart, and so good at everything.
She even wished for her mom and brother. Yeah but even if they knew where she was going, would they come looking?
Mom loved her. But Mom didn't really care where she went.
Jeff didn't love her. Maybe because they had different fathers. Maybe because Mom treated her better than Jeff—and that wasn't saying a lot! She felt sorry for him. She wished she'd been nicer to him. Maybe he would have come looking for her.
What you been smoking, girlll?
Bossy was starting up again.
Becca listened, and then cried a little.
Her head hurt. She was so tired. She needed to sleep.
Mostly, down here in the cold and the dark in the belly of the boar's lair, she slept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WALTER AND I ENTERED the conference room fifteen minutes after the appointed hour of three PM—late because we'd worked late, and then slept late this morning, and reconvened back in Walter's cabin-lab, getting a late start, and, finally, late because we'd finished the last bit of analysis at ten minutes past three and then dashed over to the admin building.
Everyone else was already here—the HGP team on one side of the table and Superintendent Martin Atherton on the other. Shades of the meeting day before yesterday.
This time, though, we had a newcomer. He sat at the far end of the rectangular table—on the table. He appeared to be contemplating the monolith at the back the room, the tower of Grand Canyon rock layers.
Walter and I made some noise.
Everyone turned to us, except the man.
Neely and Justin and Edgar looked nearly as strung-out as I felt.
Martin, understandably, looked drawn. “Well?”
We took the empty chairs, me between Walter and Martin.
“As expected,” Walter answered.
“Well, we may have a problem.” Martin sat egret-tall, gazing down at us. “And that's why Dave Quillen is here.”
I expected as much.
At the mention of his name, Quillen pushed off the table and turned to fac
e the room. He had a heavy wide-jawed face, and knife-sharp peaked eyebrows. He wore his aluminum-gray hair in a brushy cut. He was dressed Southwest casual: powder-blue shirt and khaki pants, with a woven brown-and-blue leather belt.
Walter and I introduced ourselves.
He took a chair, at the far end. He took a wallet from his shirt pocket and flipped it open, displaying the gold FBI badge. “Special Agent David Quillen.”
AGENT QUILLEN—AS HE wished to be called—filled us in.
Superintendent Atherton, as Agent Quillen referred to him, had made contact with Quillen early this morning and filled him in. After a preliminary round of investigatory emails and phone calls, Quillen had requested this meeting. He wanted all of us to attend. While awaiting Walter and me, he'd gotten a backgrounder from the others on yesterday's events, and then used the remaining ten minutes to study the representation of the Canyon's geology.
So he wasn't just admiring the pretty rocks. All right, that impressed me.
He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “First order of business, the forensic report on the Mancos Shale.”
That was my cue. I briefly explained the lab match I'd made between the Mancos rock chips from Frank Hembry's pocket and the samples we'd taken at the fossil cave in Paradox Valley.
Quillen listened keenly. “Your conclusions?”
“Based on the match, and Reid Lassen's association with Paradox, I'd conclude that the Mancos likely originated with Lassen, and not Hembry. How they ended up in Hembry's pocket...” I shrugged.
“A gift? A theft? A fight? Leading to the incident?”
“Not out of the question.”
“Anybody else want to weigh in?”
Nobody had anything to add. The HGP team, no doubt, was in watch-and-wait mode. Waiting for Special Agent David Quillen to explain why he was here.
Quillen addressed Walter. “Then let's move on to your report.”
Walter said, “Cassie found granules embedded in the towels from the Lassen boathouse shed. Last night, I put them under the microscope. I have some expertise in this area, and I was able to identify them as Pyrodex. It's a type of black powder, used in muzzle-loading rifles and shotguns, and also...”
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