Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (19 page)

CHAPTER

R
ALPH
stood beneath the overhang of the visitor’s center and watched through the oblique curtain of snow, alpine teams preparing for their snowcat rides up to the Aspen Springs Trailhead. His face was unshaven, his eyes red-rimmed from too few hours of trying to sleep on the hard floor of the visitor’s center along with half a dozen other searchers.

The previous evening, as conditions deteriorated on San Raphael, the Deputy Incident Commander assigned to the twelve-hour night shift had pulled the remaining few teams of ground pounders in from the field. At 0600, newly reorganized and equipped alpine teams—all trained and certified in winter travel and survival—had arrived for deployment. In spite of Ralph’s heated protests, a refreshed Incident Commander Nels Black had assigned only one team of three men and one woman to search specifically for Gracie.

Ralph knew the San Raphael Search, as it was now called, had not officially shifted focus. The rest of the world was interested only in one thing—bringing Rob Christian out alive. Yet for every searcher present, regardless of his or her assignment, locating the original MisPers had become secondary, replaced by a single, all-encompassing goal: find and save one of their own.

If Gracie was injured and off the trail, the chances were infinitesimal that searchers would locate her in this weather. But Ralph empathized with the gut-wrenching compulsion to try. He needed to be out there, too, searching for Gracie, doing everything physically possible to find her, to bring her safely in. He inwardly cursed his injured knee that left him grounded, helpless, watching from the sidelines.

Ralph stared at the small groups of SAR members from Timber Creek and other county teams checking and organizing their equipment carabinered and strapped in place on packs and climbing harnesses—ropes and climbing hardware, ice axes, snowshoes, snow pickets, crampons. The only visible manifestation of the turmoil beneath the surface was the muscle working in his cheek.

Gracie was still alive. She had to be. When pushed, she could be as ornery as a bull at a Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival.

“Hold on, Gracie girl,” Ralph whispered.

CHAPTER

S
NOW
now fell so thick and fast in the canyon that tracks Gracie and Rob made earlier that morning attending to nature’s call were visible only as shallow concave ovals leading from the shelter. The wind had grown into a moaning, blustering demon of wind, sending blasts of bitter air howling and shrieking down the canyon and tormenting the flimsy plastic shelter.

There was no way to predict how long the snow would last. Storms in Southern California rarely lasted more than a single day, but they could be brutal nonetheless. A few years before, a single storm had dumped three feet of snow overnight on Gracie’s cabin at seven thousand feet, several thousand feet lower in elevation than she and Rob were at now.

Upon awakening, Rob’s initial reaction to the snow was similar to Gracie’s—awe at the fierce beauty. But as the severity of their predicament gnawed its way into his consciousness, his fascination had grown into concern. He asked myriad questions—how long will the storm last, how much snow will fall, how does this affect the rescue, how long are we stuck here? To all of which Gracie provided the same answer: “I don’t know.”

Gracie and Rob lay side-by-side in their respective sleeping bags. What remained of the candle stub bathed the interior of the cramped shelter with a honey-colored light. Flickering with each gust of wind, the flame sent shadows dancing throughout the tiny space.

While Gracie forced her body to remain motionless, her mind was still active, darting from thought to thought.

Had
the Command Post been moved down the mountain? Snow would make the narrow, winding road to the trailhead parking lot impassable to all vehicles except snowmobiles and snowcats. How much would that slow down any relief team? Had they pulled teams in from the field? Even alpine? Would she and Rob have to wait until the skies cleared and be airlifted out? What was Ralph doing? How much sleep had he had? How many cigarettes had he smoked? How high was his blood pressure?

Of all the worst-case scenarios Gracie could have conjured in her mind, snow would have been close to the top of the list. Not only would it change the nature of the search, requiring a major shift in personnel and logistics, it introduced a host of complications and hazards for any teams in the field, not to mention for her and Rob. The only thing she could think of that would make their situation worse would be if she were injured in some way.

Or if they were caught in an avalanche.

A spear of terror plunged through Gracie’s stomach. Mountaineers more experienced than she had been killed while sleeping in their tents when it snowed during the night and an early morning avalanche roared through their camp and took them all out.

Gracie clawed out of the sleeping bag and threw on her boots. Leaving Rob openmouthed behind her, she scrambled outside, sighing in relief only when she reconfirmed that the mountainside above the shelter was thick with trees and boulders and held no signs of previous slides.

Back inside the shelter, she crawled into her sleeping bag, quickly zipping it all the way back up to her chin.

“What was that all about?” Rob asked.

“Nothing,” Gracie answered, blowing him off, but hoping he wouldn’t take offense.

A strong gust of wind blustered into the haven of boulders setting the plastic shelter to riffling and flapping above their heads and straining against the anchoring rocks. Gracie held her breath, shoulders drawn up to her ears, eyes skyward, then exhaled when the shelter held and the wind ebbed back to a whisper.

She looked over at Rob. In the dim light, his face appeared washed out and pale, the tip of his nose as if it had been dipped in pink paint. “You doing okay?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she propped herself up on an elbow so she could see his face better. “Rob?”

He lifted bleary eyes to hers.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m going to turn that around and ask you that same question. Are we okay?”

“In terms of . . .”

“Are we going to make it?”

“You mean make it through this? The snow?”

“Yes.”

“Hell, yes! We are going to make it!” She sat up, hunching the sleeping bag over her shoulders and holding it closed at the neck. “Keeping warm and dry is our number one priority. We have lots of water. Our food and fuel levels aren’t so hot. I’m not that worried about food anyway.” Now was not the time to tell Rob they could survive for weeks without food if they had to.

The look on Rob’s face told her he wasn’t convinced.

“We are going to get out of here, okay? They are going to come for us. Could be today. Could be tomorrow. But they are going to come for us. We just have to hunker down and wait it out. Which is exactly what we’re doing.”

After a moment, Rob asked, “Do you believe in God?”

Gracie was silent, unsure of how much of her soul she wanted to bare. Finally she said, “In spite of my ultraconservative, right-wing upbringing, yes, I do believe in God.” She looked over at Rob. “How about you?”

He nodded.

They sat quietly again until Rob said, “Do you believe in prayer?”

Gracie nodded. “I pray. Not often enough. Mostly when I’m thankful for something. I try not to just ask for things.” She frowned. “Never could figure out why sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Maybe this is one of the times it’ll work,” Rob said softly.

“Maybe.” Gracie squeezed her eyes closed.
Please, God
, she prayed,
help me to be strong. Help me to keep Rob . . . and me . . . alive. And please let don’t let Cashman have gotten hurt in some way.

Quite certain that bargaining never worked with the Supreme Being, she added anyway,
If you get us out of this, I’ll do my level best to be a better person. I’ll be nicer to people. I’ll be nicer to Cashman. Well . . . I’ll try to be nicer to Cashman.

Satisfied that that was plenty of sacrifice to placate Him or Her, she signed off with:
If I think of anything else, I’ll get back to you.

CHAPTER

R
ALPH
slouched in a chair in the reception area of the visitor’s center and stared with unseeing eyes at the members of the alpine teams who stood in the kitchen—cheeks flushed pink with cold, snow melting on hats and parkas—sipping cups of coffee and hot chocolate.

The alpine teams had never made it to the trailhead. Three miles in from the main highway, they had found the National Forest Service road that climbed up to the Aspen Springs Trail blocked by a massive snow slide. The road was impassable even to the snow cats in which the teams rode. They had been forced to return to the Command Post until a new search plan could be formulated.

Contracting for a plow to clear the road would take hours, if not days. According to the National Weather Service, the long, narrow storm cell would leave the area by the following morning. The most prudent course of action for the search would be to wait until then when aviation could be deployed.

Ralph blinked, then blinked again as it hit him for the first time since the search began that Gracie might not survive the storm. And with that came the stunning realization of how integral to his life she had become. She was the only bright spot in the darkness. If Gracie didn’t survive the storm, the precarious house of cards that was his life would collapse.

Ralph pushed his glasses up on his head and rubbed his face with his hands. He shoved aside the dismal thoughts with a physical effort. If he didn’t do something constructive to occupy his mind, he was going to blow a gasket.

He picked up the clipboard resting on the arm of the chair, his own clipboard containing the original Command Post sign-in sheets, notes, and radio log, and the personnel and background information of all of the MisPers—the same clipboard he had unearthed that morning from beneath a pile of three-ring binders on one of the Command Post tables.

After the alpine teams had left for their ride up to the trailhead, Ralph had studied the headshots of Rob Christian and Tristan Chambers and the information about them gathered from the production company. He had just turned to Diana Petrovic’s when the alpine teams had returned with the news of the snow slide.

Now he turned back to the missing woman’s information.

Petrovic, Diana. Height: 5’0”. Weight: 97 pounds. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. DOB: 9/15/85. One infraction on her driving record—a speeding ticket in L.A. County three years before. Background check showed no criminal record.

Ralph studied the headshot of the actress. She was attractive as was to be expected. Hair and sparkling eyes, both listed as brown on the driver’s license, looked black in the photo. She wore bangs pushed off to the side and her straight hair shoulder-length.

Petrovic sounded what? Russian? Eastern European?

He flipped to the next pages. Van Dijk, Joseph A. Height: 5’9”. Weight: 205 pounds. Hair: gray. Eyes: blue. DOB:
2/17/54. Clean as a whistle. No driving record. No criminal record.

Ralph turned to the man’s driver’s license picture. He squinted at the tiny photo and wondered why the picture hadn’t been blown up further when it had been photocopied.

Squared jaw, fleshy cheeks, thick neck. In the photo, Joseph Van Dijk was bald. Or at least his head had been shaved.

Ralph looked more closely at the picture.

He couldn’t be certain because the man’s head was turned very slightly to the left—possibly deliberately, but it appeared as if Joseph Van Dijk was missing an ear.

CHAPTER

G
RACIE
had blown it. Big-time.

Inside the shelter, she and Rob lay in their sleeping bags, heads on their crunchy pillows. Outside, the wind howled and moaned and shook and flapped the plastic above their heads.

Rob appeared to be sleeping. At least his eyes were closed. And he had barely moved in thirty minutes.

Gracie, on the other hand, had been puzzling over the realization that, in spite of everything, she was feeling an incongruous sense of contentment. It had been a patriarch’s age since she had felt remotely comfortable around a man other than her teammates, especially in anything resembling a prone position—multiple layers of fleece, down and polypropylene between them notwithstanding.

Until it hit her like a charge of dynamite—without her being aware of it, her feelings for Rob had moved into the mine-filled realm of the personal. He was no longer some nameless someone from whom she was clinically detached, uninvolved, emotionally remote. The man lying beside her was a living, breathing human being of whom, she realized with another jolt, she had grown quite fond.

Anxiety rose up to lodge a fist behind her sternum. The reality that she held Rob’s life in her own feeble hands suffocated her with a physical weight. If he died, she would never be able to live with herself.

“Tell me about your life.” Rob’s soft voice barged in on her thoughts.

“I thought you were sleeping,” Gracie said. “Are you warm enough?”

“Enough. Where did you come from? Your family. Things like that.” He asked the questions offhandedly, like one would if one was used to everyday personal conversations.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Gracie said, eyes focused back on the shelter ceiling.

“I want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m interested.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Liar.”

She turned over and propped her head up on her hand. She studied Rob through half-closed eyes, feeling as if she were teetering on the edge of a crevasse, arms windmilling, and she had to decide whether to leap across the abyss or remain safely where she was.

Come on. If I can jump out of a helicopter, I ought to be able to do this
. “Born and raised in a small blue-collar town in the middle of Michigan,” she said.

Rob sat up inside his sleeping bag. “Michigan. Detroit, right?”

“I’m impressed.”

“Never been there.”

“Congratulations. Nah, that’s not fair. Parts of the state are gorgeous. It’s the cities I can’t stand.”

“Ever been to London?”

“No.”

“New York?”

“No. I told you, I hate cities.”

“How can you hate cities you’ve never been to?”

“I’ve never stuck a red-hot poker in my eye either. I don’t have to do it to know I won’t like it.”

“Why don’t you branch out a little from your placid, uneventful life? Do something adventurous for a change. Come to New York for a visit.”

“There are three chances of me ever going to New York City,” she said. “Slim, fat, and none.”

“Cheeky, aren’t you?”

“Cheeky. You asked me a question, so let me answer.”

“So answer already.” He grinned. “I’m tired of waiting for you.”

She shot him a look. “
Reader’s Digest
condensed version. Morris. Stepfather. Executive. Workaholic. Evelyn. Mother. Racquet Club wife.” A half brother and half sister from her mother’s first marriage. She glossed over a childhood filled with symphonies, theater and ballet lessons. U of M. Budding career in advertising. “You can’t find this interesting,” she said with a grimace.

“I consider myself a student of human nature.” He looked pointedly at her. “So you’re the youngest?”

“Yep.”

“What about your little sister?”

“What little sister?”

“The one you sold into slavery for that sleeping bag?”

“Huh, yeah. That little sister. Oops.”

“Uh-huh. What other lies have you told me?” he asked, eyes crinkling.

Gracie inhaled to protest, but clapped it shut again because at that moment Rob looked so beautiful it was surreal.

“What about men?” he asked. “You said you were engaged. What happened?”

“Burned. No, chewed up and spit out is more like it. That’s all I’m going to say. Your turn. I want to hear every boring detail straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Rob stretched out full length on his sleeping pad, resting his head back on his pine-needle pillow. “My life’s not nearly as interesting as yours.”

“Nice try,” she said, turning over onto her back again. “Spill it.”

As the snow piled up outside the shelter, Gracie listened as Rob presented to her a compendium of his life, which boiled down to born and raised in London, fifth out of nine children, two boys and seven girls. “My way of getting attention in such a big, noisy crowd was to act out, be the ham. I was a royal pain in the arse.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Eventually university. Cut to present day. Currently renting a flat in New York. Upper West Side. Great restaurants and pubs and bagel shops and newspaper stands. But quiet on my street.”

“Mmmm,” was all Gracie could muster.

“There’s an energy about the city. A vibrancy. You need a whole different set of skills to survive there.”

Gracie looked over at him.

“It’s true,” he said.

“Like I said before, three chances . . .” As if to punctuate the point, Gracie’s stomach rumbled audibly.

Rob smiled. “I heard that.”

“I’m hungry.”

Holding her eye, Rob drawled, “I’m so hungry, I could eat a sow an’ nine pigs an’ chase the boar half a mile.” Before Gracie had time to roll her eyes, he sat bolt upright. “Hold on! I had a rucksack!”

“Keep your voice down!” Gracie hissed.

Rob dropped his voice back to a whisper. “A . . . a backpack. I completely forgot about it. I was carrying leftovers from the lunch. Must have lost it when I fell.”

“Could I find it?”

His face fell. “Bloody hell, I don’t know.”

“That’s all right. I can backtrack up to it.” She scrambled out of her bag and grabbed her Gore-Tex pants, lying flat on her back to pull them on.

Rob watched her slip her radio chest pack over her head and clip it in place. “I want to go with you,” he said in a deep voice.

“I don’t want you re-injuring your ankle.”

“I don’t like you going out there alone. It’s not safe.”

“I’ll be careful,” Gracie said, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded. “I’m taking the pack. Block the entrance with my sleeping bag.” She grabbed her mountaineering boots. “If something happens and I don’t come back—”

Rob’s eyes widened. “Don’t say that!”

“If something happens,” she said, “stay here. Do not—Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“Do not try to hike out. You have the most important things—shelter and water. A person can survive for weeks without food.” At Rob’s panic-stricken face, she quickly added, “Not that there’s any way this is going to last that long. As soon as this storm breaks, they’ll send aviation in. Describe the rucksack.”

“Blue. Dark blue. Black straps.”

“Pass me my crampons.”

As she Velcroed her gaiters over her boots, he retrieved the steel spikes from the little storage area at the back of the shelter and handed them to her. “Nasty-looking things.”

“Very useful for walking on ice and slippery slopes,” she said, fastening them to the outside of her pack. “Ice axe.”

He held it up. One end of the axe head—the adze—was flattened to a cutting edge; the other end, the pick, well-honed to a sharp point. The three-foot metal shaft itself ended in a spike. “Another nasty-looking thing.” He turned it in his hands. “What’s it for?”

“Mostly a sort-of walking stick in the snow.” Taking it from him, she gripped the shaft in one hand, placing the other on top of the axe head, the pick facing forward. “But if I fall, I jab it into the snow like this and, theoretically at least, slow myself down. It’s called self-arrest.”

“And you’ve done this?”

“In trainings. It’s really hard.”

“Bloody remarkable.”

“Takes a lot of upper body strength and a lot of practice to become really proficient. I’m not very good.”

Rob watched as she stuffed her arms into her parka sleeves and stretched a balaclava over her head, followed by the helmet, then flipped her hood up on top of everything.

She turned to crawl out of the shelter, then stopped. She pulled up her jacket, unsheathed the hunting knife and laid it carefully on the sleeping bag next to Rob.

“What’s that for?”

Her eyes lifted to meet his. “Just in case.”

She heard Rob curse under his breath as she turned again to leave. He grabbed hold of her arm to stop her. “Gracie,” he said in a low voice. “Be careful.”

“I always am.”

She tried to turn away yet again, but he held on to her arm. “Gracie.”

She turned back.

He looked her right in the eye. “Be careful.”

She looked steadily back. “I always am.”

Gracie tossed her mostly empty pack ahead of her into the snow and crawled out of the shelter.