Zero-Degree Murder Read online

  Anything could happen with Cashman, and Ralph didn’t like it that Gracie was alone in the field with him and out of radio communication for so long.

  The inside of Ralph’s eyelids felt like 40-grit sandpaper. The year-old chocolate-chip granola bar he had washed down with cold, bitter coffee still sat in his stomach as a lead brick in an acid bath. His patience had drained away along with the hours of the cold, solitary night and now stood at low tide. At the same time, his anxiety for Gracie had increased until now it felt like a pair of fists slowly twisting his gut. His surly mood had intensified when it had grown light enough for him to realize the entire mountain was enshrouded in cloud so thick he couldn’t see the motor home parked across the parking lot.

  The weather translated to no aviation. Any injury to the MisPers would necessitate a litter carry-out. Relief personnel due at 0700 would arrive chomping at the bit to be deployed into the field.

  Except Ralph had no idea where to send them.

  “Come on, Cashman!” He glared at the radio as if it were an animate object intentionally withholding information. “Why the hell haven’t you radioed in?”

  CHAPTER

  33

  IT took several seconds for Diana to realize that her eyes were open and that the reason she wasn’t seeing anything was because there was nothing to see. No trees towering overhead. No green, rounded bushes. No gargantuan boulders. Only an impenetrable wall of cloud.

  There was no sound but that of her own breathing.

  It was as if, sometime during the interminable night, she had been entombed in a shifting white sepulcher.

  Her hips and shoulders felt bruised from lying on the hard ground. She had slept only in fits and starts and was exhausted to the marrow.

  Her water bottle was empty. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, yet the thought of food nauseated her.

  She considered trying to walk out again, but the thought of Milocek out there looking for her pinned her to the ground.

  She would stay where she was, encapsulated within the cloud.

  Eventually someone would come for her. Surely help would come.

  CHAPTER

  34

  TO answer the call of nature, Gracie clambered over rocks and tree trunks to a reasonable distance between her and the shelter.

  Baring her backside to the elements in below-freezing temperatures didn’t bother her. It was simply what one had to do if the urge was great enough. It was, however, a major pain to get up in the middle of the night and put on one’s boots to walk what hygiene, courtesy, and modesty, in that order, determined was a reasonable distance from the sleeping area to tend to normal body functions. Peeing in a strong wind or driving rain was the worst. Gracie envied the physical strength that most men seemed to take for granted, but peeing outside in inclement weather was the only time Gracie truly regretted not being male.

  Back at the bivouac, with Cashman still snoring inside his bivy sack, Gracie crouched a few feet from the shelter and fired up her little Dragonfly stove to brew up a nice cup o’ tea for the British gentleman who, judging from the noises emanating from within the orange plastic, was due to make an appearance at any moment.

  Moving around had worked the stiffness out of her joints, and, in spite of minimal sleep, Gracie felt well rested. While the threat from ghoulies and ghosties hadn’t totally vanished with the night, it had dissipated, pushing into the realm of the improbable that someone had been killed the day before, that Rob had been attacked, and that someone was actually out there intending them all harm. By the light of day, muted as it was, everything she had thought and felt the night before all seemed so melodramatic.

  Gracie sat on the square of insulated foam, waiting for the water in her canteen cup to heat and anticipating with dread her next encounter with the Englishman.

  Seized with a surge of self-consciousness, she yanked off her gloves and beanie and combed through her unruly hair with her fingers.

  Her hair had always been thick and wavy and, as a result, totally unmanageable. It made women with thin, limp hair jealous and men want to run their fingers through it. But, ever since she could remember she had thought it a royal pain. She kept it long not because of its attraction to men, but in spite of it. By braiding her hair or clipping it up, it actually took her less time than with short hair to look halfway decent in general and not have “helmet head” after a search.

  Gracie had only half completed a rough French braid when Rob appeared in the shelter doorway, looking around him, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth. “It’s cold.”

  “It is that,” she said, tying off the braid with the elastic, although, in her estimation, the temperature wasn’t much lower than about forty-five degrees.

  “May I?” He gestured to her trekking poles still clipped to the outside of her pack.

  “Be my guest. You sure you want to be up and about?” she asked, eyes riveted on the little bubbles drifting up through the heated water to the surface. “I’d be happy to bring you a hot cup of tea. Water’s almost hot.”

  “I have to piss like a racehorse.” When she looked over at him, he reddened. “Sorry.”

  Gracie shrugged. “That’s a good thing. Means you’re not dehydrated anymore.”

  “I don’t usually swear around women,” he said, fiddling with one of the trekking poles. “Somehow with you, though, it feels like one of the boys.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Hang on. That’s not what I meant. How does this thing work?”

  “Untwist it, pull it out to length, then twist it back to tighten it. There are two joints.”

  With more dexterity than Gracie had the first time she messed with the poles, Rob set the pole to maximum length.

  “This strong enough to hold me?” he asked.

  “It’s titanium.”

  He shot her a look that said that wasn’t much of an answer, then used both hands on the pole to pull himself upright.

  Gracie noticed that as Rob stood up, he was careful not to let even the big toe of his injured foot brush the ground. They were definitely not hiking out. “Would you like some privacy?” she asked.

  “Stay put,” Rob said and hobbled around the side of the shelter, leaning heavily on the pole.

  As Rob stood with his back to her and watered a large manzanita, Gracie openly admired his wide shoulders and narrow hips. On the previous night, she had seen in the blinding snapshot of his nakedness—which she knew would be forever embedded in her brain—that his long-limbed body was well-muscled without an ounce of fat. She wondered what he did to get a body like that. And what movies he had been in. For the first time in her life, she wished she had read some of those vacuous celebrity magazines in her dentist’s lobby. But who knew?

  Rob turned around and limped toward her. Gracie noticed that, even injured, he moved with the fluidity of a big cat. A tiger. No, a panther. She swatted at her face to drive the thoughts away.

  After some gentlemanly resistance, Rob accepted the proffered insulated pad. With much maneuvering to protect his ankle, he sat down on the ground not far from Gracie.

  Even in the stark light of day, such as it was, the overall grime and the deep shadows beneath Rob’s eyes did nothing to diminish his excruciating good looks. If anything, the cold air rendered him even more handsome, giving his cheeks a ruddiness that, much to her chagrin, Gracie was finding enormously appealing.

  She tractor-pulled herself back to reality. She dipped and redipped the two-year-old tea bag, concentrating on the burnt sienna tannin swirling into the steaming water, hyperaware of the man sitting silently a few feet away.

  As if of their own volition, her eyes lifted and met Rob’s.

  The actor sat with head tilted slightly, a quizzical look on his face, eyes focused directly on her, intent, studying.

  Gracie’s hands trembled. Instantly
she felt clumsy, awkward, every movement clunky, unnatural. In a flash, her nose was longer than Pinocchio’s. Her breasts were the size of hen’s eggs. Her bottom was a beach ball stuffed down the back of her pants. She found herself desperately wishing that, instead of all those new Search and Rescue toys, she had spent some of her carefully hoarded money on getting her teeth whitened or a decent haircut instead of hacking at it herself.

  Defiance muscled the discomfiture aside and she lifted her chin. “What are you looking at?”

  “You,” he said. His voice was calm, unaffected by the intimated challenge. “I’m not looking really. Rather . . . observing.”

  The defiance dissolved as quickly as snowflakes in the sun. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Gracie said, dropping her eyes again.

  “Why not? I thought women liked being looked at.”

  “I don’t.” To cover up the abruptness of her remark and bridge the resulting silence, she announced, “Tea’s ready,” as gaily as if they were sitting in some snug little kitchen in the Cotswolds. She poured the tea into his cup and handed it to him, concentrating on holding the cup steady. “It’s really hot. You might want to let it cool a bit.”

  Gracie moved over to a flat-topped boulder a safe distance away from Rob to enjoy her own spot of tea. As she blew on the hot liquid, she tried to imagine objectively what someone—what Rob—was seeing when he looked at her. Five-foot-eight. Reasonably slender, although not by fashion-runway standards. Any flagrant lumps and bulges blessedly disguised beneath layers of fleece and Gore-Tex. Dark auburn hair sloppily braided and topped off by the highly attractive fleece beanie with the flaps pulled down over her ears. Hazel eyes. A little mascara probably wouldn’t have hurt, but who the hell wore makeup on a search?

  Imagining what Rob saw was easy. Knowing what he thought about it was an entirely different matter. Surely nothing noteworthy when compared to leading ladies of Hollywood or London. Her entire summation of her positive physical attributes had taken no more than ten seconds. She concluded that no way, even on a good day, could she measure up, much less after twelve hours in the field, including a night in a cramped makeshift shelter.

  “Not only are you not in the playing field, sweet pea,” she whispered to herself, “you can’t even see the parking lot.” Her eyes flicked over to Rob, then back to the tea. “So what do people call you?” she asked. “What should I call you? Mr. Christian? Fletcher?” She faked a silent laugh. “I crack myself up.”

  When he didn’t respond, she said, “That was supposed to be a joke. You know, a joke? Not that it even resembled one.”

  She didn’t dare look at him. She knew he was still watching her.

  When he did finally answer, his voice was mild. “I asked you to call me Rob.”

  “Yah. Right.” Her cheeks felt hot, which meant they and her entire neck was bright red. “How could I have forgotten that?” Her voice trailed off.

  “What do people call you?” Rob asked.

  “Grace. My friends call me Gracie.”

  “That’s a beautiful name. Grace.”

  Gracie snorted.

  “Why the snort?”

  “One of the reasons my parents named me that was they were hoping I would turn into a clone of my sister. Life is full of disappointments.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Instead of gorgeous, smart, law degree, they got a tomboy with zero brakes for the brain-speech connection. When I was little, my mother washed my mouth out with soap so many times I became quite the connoisseur of brands.”

  Rob’s mouth twitched.

  “I always preferred the taste of Ivory to Dial.”He chuckled. “So what did you do to warrant such extreme retribution?”

  She mentally sifted back through the myriad examples. “One of the most memorable occasions was when I was ten, I told my squirrelly faced teacher to kiss my ass.”

  Rob’s face lit up like sunshine on aspen leaves, eyes bright, teeth white and perfect. He threw back his head and laughed out loud.

  It was the first time Gracie had really seen him smile, much less laugh.

  So this is what all the fuss was about.

  Rob took a sip of tea. His face scrunched up as if he had bitten into a sour pickle. He spat out the mouthful and dumped the entire cup onto the ground.

  Gracie sat up with indignation. “Hey!”

  “What the hell was that?”

  “It’s tea.”

  “That’s supposed to be tea?”

  “What the hell! This isn’t some Notting Hill café, you know. If you don’t want to drink it, then . . . too bad. It’s all you’re going to get.”

  “Right then,” Rob said. Lips pursed, he looked around while nodding his head several times.

  “The British and their friggin’ tea,” Gracie grumped under her breath.

  Rob held his cup out toward Gracie. “Got any more of that delicious concoction? That . . . tea?”

  She stood up, snatched the cup from him, refilled it with the steaming liquid, and handed it back to him.

  He looked at the cup in his hand. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any milk around here.”

  Gracie glowered at him.

  “Didn’t think so.” He blew on the tea, then took a sip, this time swallowing it with visible effort. “The purtier the gal, the worse coffee she makes,” he muttered with an exaggerated drawl, then aloud he said, “Thank you for the tea. It’s excellent. Nectar of the gods.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Gracie said.

  CHAPTER

  35

  “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.