Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (18 page)

CHAPTER

M
ILOCEK
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

G
RACIE
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

R
ALPH
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, but 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.

As three members of the recovery team daisy-chained the last of the anchor webbing, and inventoried and packed away the heavy steel carabiners and rigging plates and Prusik-minding pulleys, four other team members carried the Junkin litter containing Cashman’s body encased in a white plastic body bag, out to the trailhead parking lot and the ambulance that waited there.

Now the only thing that remained for Ralph to do was visit Wanda, Cashman’s wife, who by this time had received the news that she was a widow and their little girls had lost their father.

But Ralph’s thoughts hadn’t gone there yet. By the light of his headlamp he regarded the scarred radio microphone resting in his open palm. While neither Cashman’s GPS nor the HT itself had been recovered, the microphone had survived the four-hundred-foot fall into the canyon clipped to Steve’s parka, the microphone that told Ralph with a certainty that chilled the blood in his veins that Gracie was out there essentially alone. Without a radio.

A cold, delicate touch brushed the back of Ralph’s neck. He tipped his head back and looked up. White flakes, large and fluffy, floated down from above.

It was snowing.

CHAPTER

M
ILOCEK
sat at the base of the outcropping with his back against a granite boulder. He drew cigarette smoke deep into his lungs, then exhaled it through his nostrils.

The day ebbed toward evening with the flat layer of leaden clouds casting a pall across the entire canyon. The air was damp and chilled him to the bone.

Climbing up from the creek, he had resumed his search for any sign of a trail, but had found nothing. Except for the one instance of hearing what he was certain were human voices, he had heard anything.

When it had grown too dark to see, he climbed back up to the trail. He would resume the search the following day.

Milocek rarely second-guessed his own actions. But he cursed himself now. He never should have taken that first swig of brandy. He had dropped his guard, lost control. Killing the interfering man on the outcropping had been an impulsive act, the mark of an amateur and a fool.

He considered again if, when the woman recognized him, he should have simply returned to his car and driven out of the country.

But he knew exactly what would happen if his identity were revealed. Manhunt. Capture. Imprisonment. Extradition. Tribunal. Execution. The decision to salvage the situation or die trying had been the right one. The only one.

But he wasn’t giving up the fight yet.

Milocek’s gloved hands balled into fists. He ground his back teeth until they squeaked.

Rob and the woman searcher were down there in the canyon. He could feel them. Smell them. Taste them.

Something wet and cold touched Milocek’s face. He looked up.

It was snowing.

CHAPTER

I
T
was snowing. Hard.

Encased in her sleeping bag, Gracie stared at the powder-puff flakes dancing an ominous ballet of nature before the shelter entrance. Six inches of snow already hung on the surrounding boulders and the bushes and trees beyond, rendering the landscape a monochromatic palette of dark and light.

In the protective cove of granite boulders, the little shelter lay immune from the worst of the storm. Beyond, the moaning, blustering demon of wind blasted the snow into a swirling wall of white. Occasional icy breaths stole into the shelter through layers of fleece and straight to the skin.

Overnight Gracie and Rob’s passive wait for relief had turned into an active fight for survival. All of life’s other problems were shoved to the background. All self-doubt was erased. All Gracie’s thoughts, all her energy laser-beamed into a single goal: Stay alive.

Years of training kicked in and Gracie mentally ticked off everything she could remember about survival theory. Survival is a state of mind. Think positive thoughts. A positive mental attitude is number one on the list for keeping oneself alive. Despair was one sure marker on the slow route to death.

The snow also brought a curious sense of relief. While the storm meant no rescue for the time being, its protective layer also provided a respite, albeit temporary, from Joseph, if the man hadn’t hiked out at the first sign of snow.

It was a given that while it snowed there would be no aviation evacuation. And it was a real possibility that the Command Post would elect to endanger no additional lives and pull any existing teams in from the field. The one thing that was a certainty was that she and Rob were stuck for the duration.

As quietly as possible, Gracie unfolded the map. First she pinpointed their location. Then she calculated approximately how far it was from the shelter down to the creek and up the other side of the canyon to the trail, from there to the parking lot. With the snow, she was fairly certain the Command Post would have been moved to a lower elevation, possibly the Coon Creek Jump-off, the junction of two forest service roads five miles back down the mountain. If not there, then the Sandy Flats Visitor’s Center a mile or so down the main highway, the nearest location suitable for a large SAR operation. All told, the distance from the shelter to where Gracie could guarantee there would be a live person was more than ten miles.

Her eyes slid over to where Rob slept, the drawstring of his sleeping bag pulled so tightly around his head that only the top half of his face was visible.

Gracie was confident she could make the ten miles, even in the snow. But she couldn’t take the chance that Rob might not.

They would stay right where they were and wait it out. Someone would eventually come. Search and Rescue never abandoned its own. Ralph would never leave her out there
.

Not to mention the fact that the man who lay sleeping only inches away from her was literally worth his weight in gold. As soon as the storm blew past, the entire country would be out looking for them.

All they had to do was stay alive that long.