Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (13 page)

CHAPTER

“I
don’t give a fat rat’s ass about your protocol,” a man’s voice yelled from directly outside the Command Post trailer. “I want more manpower out there and I want it now.”

Through the CP’s paper-thin walls, Ralph could hear the angry voice as clearly as if the man were standing right next to him. He leaned over in his chair to peek out through a slit in the yellow gingham window curtains.

At the foot of the trailer steps, two men stood face-to-face only two feet apart: Sergeant Ron Gardner and Miles Kleinman.

Gardner had arrived on-scene a few minutes earlier and received a lightning briefing of the search from Ralph. He had dropped off the printed results of the various searches Deputy Montoya had run on the MisPers the night before, information that Ralph was studying when Miles Kleinman had blown into the parking lot in a canary yellow Corvette and introduced himself as one of the movie’s executive producers. The man was dressed for an Antarctic expedition in knee-length parka with fur-lined hood and Sorel boots. A young woman whom Ralph assumed was a production assistant of some kind stood several feet back from the pair, looking bleary eyed and hugging a manila envelope to her chest.

Ralph noted that Kleinman appeared not the least bit cowed by Gardner, who stood a full twelve inches taller and outweighed him by at least seventy-five pounds. It amused him that the Sergeant for once was having to take the shit while someone else dished it out. “Herr Kleinman,” Ralph said to himself, “you’ve got balls.”

“We believe our search team located Mr. Christian last night,” Gardner said. “They overnighted in the field and are bringing him out this morning.”

“
A
team?” Kleinman interjected. “How many men on a team?”

“Two,” Gardner answered.

“Two! What the—!”

“Mr. Christian is with one of our most experienced members. Grace Kinkaid is—”

“He’s with a goddammed woman out there?”

Gardner took a step closer and looked down on the man. “Mr. Kleinman, Ms. Kinkaid is one of the most competent members on this team. Or anywhere. If anyone can keep your man safe, she can.”

The muscles around Ralph’s mouth twitched. If only Gracie could hear this. Gardner was actually defending her.

Kleinman waved a ski-gloved finger inches from Gardner’s nose. “I want more manpower out there. I want him brought in and I want him brought in now. I don’t give a good goddam what it costs!” He spun around and stalked across the parking lot.

The assistant timidly stretched out the manila envelope toward Gardner, who snatched it out of her hands. She hurried across the parking lot in Kleinman’s wake. Gardner turned toward the Command Post.

“Here it comes,” Ralph said to himself as he let the curtain drift back into place. He was already standing when the trailer door banged open and Gardner climbed in, dwarfing the tiny trailer. He smacked the manila envelope on the metal desk. “Personnel records,” he said. “Have they radioed in yet?”

“Negative,” he said. “I’m expecting them to call in at any minute.”

“Goddammit! What the hell are they doing out there?” An artery pulsed visibly at the man’s temple. “Call V Forces and get more teams up here.”

“Teams should be rolling on-scene anytime now.”

“I want a county-wide page out,” Gardner said. “Saturate the field. I want teams crawling over every inch of this goddam mountain until this guy walks through the front door of the SO.”

Ralph felt his blood pressure inching higher. He despised the “do something even if it’s wrong,” mentality, especially when it needlessly endangered lives. The worthless expenditure of manpower and money was for two things only: public relations and Gardner covering his own ass.

Gardner grabbed the door handle in his ham-hock fist. “And close down this rattletrap. It’s an embarrassment to the Department. V Forces will bring a real Command Post up to Sandy Flats.”

He pulled the door open, and said in a parting shot over his shoulder, “How the hell did we end up with a screw-up like Kinkaid in the field on this one?” In a perfect imitation of Cashman, he left, slamming the door behind him.

Ralph checked the clock still swaying on its nail. 0655.

As soon as the replacement Incident Commander arrived and Ralph briefed him on the operation, he would have to leave. He was tempted to cancel the appointment and work another shift. He hated leaving the CP with teams in the field. He simply didn’t trust anyone else to look out for them, especially with the search ballooning into a full-fledged county-wide operation.

But he had no choice. His prescription had run out and his cardiologist wouldn’t renew it without an office visit. He would have just enough time to drive home, shower and shave, then drive down the hill. Barring an unforeseen delay, he should be able to return to the Command Post by mid- to late-afternoon.

He lifted the radio to his mouth. “Control. Command Post.”

CHAPTER

G
RACIE
knelt on the ground, wiping both of her metal cups clean of the tea. “So have you been able to remember anything else of what happened up on the trail?” she asked Rob, who sat leaning up against a boulder, eyes following Gracie’s every move in a way she was getting used to, but still found intensely perturbing. “Or how you became separated from everyone else? Or where they might be now?”

“I’ve tried,” Rob answered. “Believe me. But I can’t remember a thing. Makes me wonder whether I didn’t dream it. The bit about the blood. And the person lying on the ground. Hallucination or something.”

“Sometimes happens with head injuries,” Gracie said, choosing not to mention the fact that she had seen the blood with her own eyes.

“Don’t mention it to anyone, please. Publicity and all that.”

“Not a word.”

Rob lifted his eyes skyward. “So what does this mean? This fog or whatever it is?”

“Cloud.”

“Cloud then.”

“First off,” Gracie said, setting the cups aside and sitting cross-legged on the ground, “it means no aviation. No helicopter evacuation. At least not until the sky clears. And it looks like your ankle is bad enough that we’re not hiking out. They’ll most likely send in a relief team and litter you out . . . carry you out on a litter, a stretcher.”

“Humiliating. How long will that take—the relief team?”

“Hard to say. A team should have already been called in. They have to hike in, package you—”

“Package me?”

“Secure you in the litter. Then carry you out. Best guesstimate? They should have you back to the CP by midafternoon. Maybe. Hard to say exactly when.”

“Late afternoon! Bloody-blast-it-all-to-hell!”

Gracie leaned back on her heels and watched Rob warily. She relaxed again when the explosion tapered off to a muttered string of obscenities. Rob pulled off his cap, scratched his head, which made his hair stand up in little spikes, then pulled the cap back on. He looked up at Gracie, saw the look on her face and said, “Sorry. Sorry.” He blew out a breath. “It’s just that I
have
to get out of here. I’m supposed to fly out of LAX this evening. My sister’s getting married. I’m giving the bride away.”

“You may not make your plane.”

“It’s my own damned fault,” he said with vehemence. “Where is this . . . Command Post, did you call it?”

“Trailhead parking lot.”

“And who will be there?”

“You mean aside from all the reporters that are probably camped out there by now?”

“The media is there? Effing hell! Just shoot me now.” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead.

Gracie made the effortless leap into caregiver mode and noted that beneath the pink cheeks Rob’s pallor resembled homemade flour paste. “Take it easy,” she said. “Try not to get yourself worked up. It’s possible they’re not allowed up there, in which case they’re all still back at the SO—the Sheriff’s Office—in town.”

Rob looked not at all placated.

Gracie could empathize somewhat with the man’s distress. She despised the media, the constitutional right to free speech and the public’s right to know notwithstanding. Whenever reporters appeared at a search, they were an unwanted distraction. The vans. The cameras. The lights. The incessant prying and prodding. And even when they were spoon-fed details from a search, nine times out of ten they got it wrong.

She shuddered at the thought of them focusing their microscopes on her and her life. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like for any kind of celebrity, and decided that in that area Rob most decidedly received her sympathy vote.

“How far are we, right now, from the . . . Command Post?” Rob asked suddenly.

Gracie mentally calculated the distance. “Four miles. Maybe five. I’d have to check the map for an exact distance.”

“Five? That’s all? I can walk five miles.” He grabbed the trekking pole. “I’m walking out.”

“Hmm,” Gracie said, watching him carefully. “I don’t think you’ll be able to with that ankle.”

“Well, I have to try, don’t I?” He pulled himself to stand on one foot, then swayed, almost falling.

“Whoa!” Gracie jumped up to catch him in case he toppled over. “You better sit down before you fall down.”

Rob obediently sat down, looking more ashen still.

“We’re going try to get you out of here as quickly as we can. I promise.” She pushed her sleeves back to check her watch: 7:08. They should have called in to the Command Post an hour ago.

She looked around for the radio, then remembered that Cashman had it, probably inside his sleeping bag to keep it dry and the batteries warm. Her eyes wandered over to where her teammate lay a few feet away, silent and unmoving, encased within his army-green bivy sack.

He looks like a big fat zucchini, Gracie thought and fought off the urge to prod him with her toe.

She stood up abruptly, hands on her hips.

“What’s going on?” Rob asked.

“We need to call in,” she answered distractedly. “Steve has the radio.” She stepped down to where the man lay. “Cashman. Wake up.”

Not a twitch from the bivy sack.

She leaned directly over him. “Cashman. Get up.”

Still no response.

“Cashman,” she yelled in a shrill voice reminiscent of her ninth-grade algebra teacher. “Eeesh.” She tried again in a normal tone. “Cashman, you have the radio and we’re late checking in with the CP. Cashman!”

With an enthusiasm too fully charged for him to have just awakened, Cashman unzipped his bivy and popped out his head. Ignoring Gracie completely, his eyes sought out the actor on the hillside above him. “’Morning, Rob.”

Rob lifted a hand and smiled. “Good morning.”

How long have you been awake?

Cashman sat up and kicked out of his sleeping bag. He produced his hiking boots from inside the bivy and pulled them on. “You survived the night,” he said to Rob, then guffawed loudly at what he obviously thought was a great joke.

“Thanks to Gracie,” came Rob’s casual reply.

When Gracie looked over at the actor, he winked at her.

Gracie felt her cheeks flame. “We need to radio the CP, Steve,” she croaked. “Rob’s stable enough. I can take my turn and hike up to radio in.”

CHAPTER

G
RACIE
collapsed full-length onto the ground next to where Cashman was crouched sipping coffee. “Nothing,” she said, panting. “No reception.”

Since they hadn’t been able to raise the CP from anywhere near where they had left the trail, she and Cashman had studied the topo map and decided to take a calculated gamble in order to save time. Instead of climbing all the way back up to the trail, Gracie would climb the shorter, presumably faster, distance up the mountain directly behind them to try to acquire a radio signal.

Before she set out, she and Rob had set a world’s record for fastest breakfast consumed mainly because throughout, Cashman stood over Rob bragging about how he never got cold and that he could hike faster and farther than anyone else on the team. Rob gulped down his instant apple-and-cinnamon oatmeal, then politely announced, “I’m knackered. I think I’ll lie down for a bit,” and withdrew into the shelter.

Equipping herself for expeditious travel, Gracie left her SAR pack behind, taking only her chest pack with the HT fastened to one strap and her GPS to the other, a minimal amount of survival gear, a full water bottle and a single trekking pole. She headed straight up from the shelter and was instantly swallowed up by beckoning wisps of cloud.

With visibility at ten feet, sometimes less, Gracie climbed the mountain blind.

She tested for radio reception at regular intervals. The telltale wonk of the radio grew more obnoxious with every failed attempt.

She scrambled up the incline, hauling herself up by a branch to gain ten feet, clawing at the earth with both hands to scramble up fifty, then a hundred, two hundred, only to find the way completely blocked by boulder piles or fallen trees materializing out of the mist. Each time she fought back her mounting frustration, sliding back down far enough to circumvent the obstacle, then clambering back up to regain the distance lost and plod on. Each breath seared her lungs. Leg muscles quivered. Hair clung like damp yarn to her forehead and neck.

She stopped and pulled out her GPS to reassure herself once again that it was tracking her route so when she descended in the cloud, she could retrace her steps and find her way back to the bivouac.

She pulled the map from her pocket and pinpointed her location, confirming what the altimeter on her watch told her—she had climbed more than twelve hundred vertical feet and now stood higher than the trail across the yawning canyon, invisible in the pearl gray sea of cloud.

She turned on the radio. Still no signal. And the battery was almost dead. She turned it off again.

She studied the op art of contour lines on the map. In the area above where she stood, the lines grew more densely packed together, indicating the mountain grew steeper and even more treacherous farther up.

As a last resort, she pulled out her cell phone and turned it on. No little bars indicated reception, but no message announced “No signal” either. She pressed 911 and waited. Nothing. She moved ten feet in every direction, each time with the same discouraging result. No signal.

“Shit!
Shit!
”

They had made the wrong call. She should have climbed back up to the trail again and hiked to where they knew there was reception. The fact that hindsight was always twenty-twenty provided her not one ounce of comfort.

She glanced again at her watch. It had taken her an hour to climb up from the bivouac. It would take at least half that to descend. The miscall would cost them more than ninety minutes.

Ralph would be apoplectic that she hadn’t radioed in. The brunt of his wrath would fall on her shoulders—that was a given. She wasn’t the designated team leader, but seniority and experience made it her responsibility. Making the wrong decision and not calling in on time was egregious. Even worse, relief teams might already be out looking for the other MisPers. Her miscalculation could cost someone his or her life.

“Sorry, Ralphie,” she said, unable to shake the feeling that she had let him down personally. “Well, absolutely nothing to be accomplished by sitting here sniveling . . . um, blubbering . . . uh, wringing your hands . . .” Since she couldn’t think of a single other synonymic phrase with which to waste a little more time, she stashed the phone and map back into her pocket and started back down the mountain.

• • •

CASHMAN LEANED BACK
on an elbow and crossed one well-muscled leg over the other. “So the CP still doesn’t know where we are.”

Gracie pressed her forehead to her knees. “I should have gone up to the trail.”

“So if any relief teams are out there—”

“They’re searching blind.”

“They could search for hours before they found us. Fuckin’
if
they found us.”

“Gee, thanks, Cashman,” she said. “Push the knife in a little deeper.” She stared at the ground, biting her lip. “Let’s think this through. Rob can’t hike out. Aviation can’t fly in. We go much longer without contacting the CP and the search for the MisPers will shift to a search for us, and I really don’t want that to happen. Plus, the longer relief teams are out there looking for us, the higher the risk to them.”

“I’ll hike up to the trail again,” Cashman offered. “Call in. Lead the relief team in.”

As much as Gracie loathed the idea, that was exactly what they were going to have to do.

Gracie hated breaking the rules. She was secretly proud of her reputation on the team for adhering to regulations and procedures, or, as she liked to put it, for “dotting her t’s and crossing her eyes.” But when emergencies or situational anomalies occurred, flexibility was an asset. Rules needed to be broken or at least bent a little in order to problem solve. If they had to separate again, then so be it.

Cashman pushed a little harder. “I’m the faster hiker. I can get help here quicker.”

Before Gracie could respond, he jumped up and flicked away the dregs of his coffee. He hauled his sleeping bag out of the bivy sack and began mashing it into its own little stuff sack.

“Don’t hike all the way back to the CP,” Gracie said as she watched him pull the drawstrings tight. “Just hike as far as it takes to get a signal.”

Cashman stuffed his bivy into its sausage-shaped sack.

“Cashman? Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

For some reason, Gracie didn’t believe him. “Just call in the coordinates.”

“Gotcha.”

Gracie watched Cashman pack together the rest of his gear. She hadn’t liked it last night when he had taken the radio with him. She definitely didn’t like it now.

The specter of an unknown attacker out there somewhere reemerged. Gossamer fingers of unease tickled the back of her neck. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Cashman,” she said.

“It’ll be fine,” Steve replied so flippantly Gracie knew he was blowing her off.

Her mind reached back to an avalanche class she had taken the winter before last where her male instructor had emphatically drilled into their brains that proportionately far more men died in avalanches than women, mainly because women tended to listen to those still, small internal voices when they whispered, “Are you out of your fucking mind?!”

Gracie pushed herself to her feet. “Maybe we’re rushing this a bit,” she said. “Let’s think this through some more. What are our other options?”

“There aren’t no other options,” Cashman said. “You’ll be okay ’til I get back.”

Ignoring the condescension, she asked, “Will you leave me your sleeping bag?”

Cashman’s face told her that was the last thing in the entire world he wanted to do.

“Never mind,” she said. “Bad idea. How about your sleeping pad at least?”

No answer.

“C’mon, Cashman. It’s only for a couple of hours. You won’t need it. We’ll be stationary. You’ll be moving.” She felt like she was asking a ten-year-old if she could ride his new shiny red Schwinn. “You’ll get it back. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Cashman thought for a moment, then made a big show of unclipping the roll of closed-cell foam from his pack and tossing it at her feet. The sleeping bag landed next to the foam. “Rob can use this, too,” he said, the implication obvious. He clipped the top of the pack closed and threw it onto his back, cinching up all the belts. With no further word, he turned away from her and started down the hill.

“Cashman,” Gracie called.

He paused and looked over his shoulder.

“Keep an eye out for any sign of the others,” she said in a low voice. “And don’t take any chances, okay?”

He gave her a thumbs-up.

With no small amount of trepidation, Gracie watched her teammate disappear into the cloud.