Zero-Degree Murder Read online

  This isn’t happening to me, she thought. It feels like a dream. Not reality at all.

  She wished she would just wake up and be in her cozy little apartment on Courtney in sunny, warm L.A.

  She considered lying back down and submitting to the overwhelming desire to close her eyes, to sleep, to be at peace.

  But she was certain if she did, she would never wake up.

  There was no one else on whom she could depend. If she wanted to live, she needed to save herself. If she wanted to live, she needed to move.

  She wished she had paid more attention to the discussions about the trail itself. She knew she had passed a smaller trail splitting off to the left, but she didn’t know where it led. And the portion of the trail she was on kept climbing up and up to what she presumed was the top of the mountain. She didn’t have the will or the strength to keep climbing. Back down the trail was the only sure way out, back the way she had come, back where she had seen Milocek before.

  She had two choices. Try to walk out where death was a possibility. Or stay where she was where death was certain.

  She groaned as she straightened her legs. With arms that felt as if they had been injected with lead, she swept the dirt off her coat and picked off the pine needles one by one.

  Then, holding on to the branch of a nearby bush, she hauled herself to her feet.

  CHAPTER

  46

  “AREN’T you married?” Gracie asked.

  She and Rob had partaken of rice pilaf topped with beef mushroom sauce, which Rob dubbed “not bad” and Gracie “vile,” but choked it down anyway. They were now spreading jalapeño cheese on surprisingly crispy crackers.

  At her question Rob’s face had gone slack, wiped clean of any emotion. Gracie had struck a fresh nerve. Time to backpedal. “Don’t answer that,” she said through a mouthful of crackers and cheese. “None of my business.”

  “I left her six months ago,” Rob said casually, but not quite enough to hide the strong emotion held in check by a well-honed reserve. “I’m amazed you didn’t read about it in the tabloids.”

  “I’m not much for supermarket reading,” Gracie said. “Why did you leave her?”

  “She didn’t love me.”

  Gracie winced. “Sorry.” She knew how that felt.

  Rob nodded, eyes focused on the uneaten cracker in his hand. “Loved the attention though. And the money. And the fame.”

  “Ouch” was the most erudite thing Gracie could think of to say. “Don’t I remember hearing something about you punching out a reporter?” she asked to move on to a different subject.

  “Now that particular story was spot-on.” Rob took a bite of cracker and washed it down with a swig of water.

  “And . . .”

  “And I found out my wife was shagging a friend of mine. A week later my mum died of a heart attack. After the funeral—we’re still at the church—some punk reporter sticks a camera in my face and asks me how I feel about my wife shagging my friend.”

  “Guess he found out, didn’t he?”

  “I’m not proud of what I did. I lost control.”

  “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “What about you?” he asked and stuffed the rest of the cracker into his mouth.

  Gracie straightened her back. “What about me?”

  “Married?”

  “No.” She tore open a package of oatmeal cookies and handed him one, hoping to distract him with more food.

  He persisted. “Never?”

  “Engaged.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “You will maybe.”

  “So no boyfriend even?”

  Gracie’s thoughts flickered in Ralph’s direction. “No,” she answered finally.

  “Girlfriend?”

  A look provided him the answer to that one.

  “Dog?” he pushed. “Cat?”

  “No.”

  “Turtle? Plants?”

  “Had a cactus once. It died.”

  “So you live alone?”

  Gracie squirmed and rubbed her palms on her pants. “Holy . . . It happens, ya know. People do actually live alone. You just said you did.”

  “I do, but I don’t like it. I want someone to share my life with. Someone to do the dishes with. Someone to take care of when she’s sick.”

  “Some people enjoy living alone.”

  “Or so they tell themselves.”

  She shot him her frostiest ice-queen look. “I like my privacy.”

  Rob touched her arm. “Sorry. That was too personal. I, of all people, should be sensitive to prying questions.” But his eyes were twinkling. “I’m trying to figure out what kind of person does what you do. Risk your life for total strangers. You never told me what you do for a living.”

  Gracie cleared her throat. “At the moment I’m unemployed. I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Rob seemed unfazed. “What do you do for fun then?”

  “This is it. This is my fun.”

  “What else besides this?”

  “I read books. Do puzzles: Jigsaw. Crosswords. Boring old-lady crud. That’s all I’m saying. Hells bells. Now I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a bona fide grilling.” When Rob still looked at her expectantly, she said, “I like movies, okay? But I hardly ever go. I might have seen one of yours once though. The swashbuckling one.”

  “Far Horizons. Did you like it?”

  “Don’t really remember. I was smashed when I went in.” She stopped, mortified by that inadvertent window into her life. “Weren’t you in a Western, too?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Did you see it?”

  “Nope.” She stopped, feeling as if she were living one of her recurring bad dreams where she walked out on stage in front of a packed house on opening night only to discover that not only did she not know her lines, she hadn’t even read the play.

  “Keep talking,” Rob said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like talking about myself. I loathe being the center of attention. I hate having my picture taken or seeing myself on TV. H-A-T-E it. Cashman loves it. That’s why he’s on the team. But that’s not why I am.”

  “Why are you then?”

  “I love it. I love being outdoors. I love that it’s contributing positively to a crummy world. I love its immediacy. I do it because when I’m on a search—” She clapped her mouth shut.

  “When I’m on a search . . .” he prompted.

  “That’s all I’m going to say.” She almost said that on a search was the only time she felt at ease and in control of her life, but stopped because she didn’t want him prying into that area of her life so closed off and private that even she didn’t like venturing there. “Your turn,” she said. “What do you do for fun?”

  “Fair enough.” Rob gathered the remnants of the meal together and began stuffing them back into the plastic MRE package. “Rugby,” he said. “Football. Well, soccer to you Yanks. I’m a bit of a fanatic actually.”

  “Go on.”

  “Like to sail. Fencing. Learned it for Far Horizons. Martial arts to keep in shape.”

  “Go on.”

  “Theater.”

  “What do you read?”

  “American westerns. Old ones. Louis L’Amour. Zane Grey. “

  “Who woulda thunk? What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re not getting off that easily. Tell me something hardly anyone knows.”

  “That’s a hard one. Oh, I know. I played the clarinet once.”

  “The clarinet?”

  “I sucked at it.” He smiled.

  “Pun intended, I suppose.”

  “
Kept squeaking the effing thing. Drove everyone daft. Turns out I’m tone deaf.”

  Gracie giggled. “Really?”

  “Can’t carry a tune in a laundry basket. Mum enrolled me in acting class instead.”

  “And the rest is history,” Gracie said.

  His eyes crinkled in a hint of a smile. He cocked his head and looked at Gracie in a way that made her wriggle uncomfortably.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Everyone seems to want a part of me. I can’t trust anyone. Outside of my family that is.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “But you . . .”

  Gracie felt another blush rising. “I have to go pee.”

  She reached over to grab her boot, but Rob put a hand on her arm. “Wait. I’m trying to figure something out.”

  Gracie sat back.

  “We’ve known each other for less than twenty-four hours. I’m telling you things . . . I’m trusting you with things I’ve never told my best mate.”

  “Tricked ya. When we get out of here, I’m gonna sell this story to the tabloids.”

  He smiled at her. “You’re a bloody brat, you know that?”

  “Can’t make headlines with old news,” Gracie said and grabbed up her boot.

  CHAPTER

  47

  IN a waking nightmare, Diana shuffled down the trail. She could see nothing but her hands with splayed fingers stretched out in front of her, the trail beneath her feet and the cloud drifting around her on all sides.

  Moving had warmed her up somewhat, but her hands and feet felt as if they had been carved from blocks of ice, and her eyes and nose ran with the cold.

  She slid her foot along the dirt, kicked a buried tree root and lost her balance. She fell hard onto her already bruised and scabbed knees, but the pain hardly registered.

  She pushed herself back to her feet and stepped over the tree root.

  CHAPTER

  48

  RALPH’S blood pressure inched upward toward meltdown.

  He stood inside the massive Sheriff’s Department motor home facing a six-foot-square wall map of the San Raphael Wilderness Area. Highlighted and crosshatched segments represented the areas already or currently being searched. Instead of the map, Ralph saw only Gracie smiling, Gracie braiding her hair in the back, Gracie standing with her hands on her hips, one long leg cocked out to the side.

  Ralph was able to tune out the organized chaos of a large-incident Command Post: radio traffic, multiple simultaneous discussions. But he wasn’t able to not listen to Incident Commander Nelson Black, who stood ten feet away, berating a young man who didn’t look sixteen, much less twenty-one, and whose name tape read P. Richmond. It was P. Richmond’s assignment to monitor the CP radio and log into a notebook every transmission among the search teams in the field and between the teams and the Command Post.

  “Haven’t you ever worked in a Command Post before?” Black demanded, leaning over Richmond. “You have to log every transmission.”

  Nelson Black was small-framed, pale, and freckled. Ralph thought him arrogant inversely proportionate to his capabilities and knowledge. He was compensating for his shortcomings, physical or otherwise, real or imagined, Ralph supposed, and recalled with an inward chuckle Gracie’s dubbing Black “the only man I’ve ever known with penis envy.”

  Ralph had climbed up into the Command Post in an attempt to ascertain the current status of the search. A terse overview from Black confirmed Ralph’s suspicions that his own briefing that morning had been ignored, the established plan of operation discarded. Black had come in with his own agenda, already knowing how he was going to run the search regardless of what had already transpired in the field.

  When Ralph had confronted him with the fact that a sign-in sheet and other Command Post paperwork had been misplaced and that two searchers from Timber Creek had been in the field for almost twenty-four hours and of whom the CP had lost track, Black became defensive and hostile. Apparently it never occurred to him, or at least he would never admit, that by expanding the search for political reasons, he had lost track of the very team that may have found at least one of the missing persons, probably Rob Christian.

  Even though Black was Incident Commander and therefore in charge of the entire search operation, and the person to whom Ralph had personally handed the clipboard containing the original CP forms, the buck stopped with the elderly Citizen Volunteer who manned the sign-in table and who had since been humiliated publicly and summarily relieved of her duties.

  To top everything off, all but two teams of ground pounders had been pulled in from the field due to the heavy cloud cover—a judgment call Ralph might not have made, but one he wasn’t willing to second guess.

  Before Ralph had the chance to suggest reassigning one or two search teams to the missing SAR personnel, Black had walked over to vent his anger on the unfortunate P. Richmond. Now, as precious minutes were lost, Ralph waited, taking in slow deep breaths to soften the pounding of blood in his ears.

  “Command Post. Ground Six.” The voice of a female searcher over the radio interrupted Black mid-reprimand.

  Richmond picked up the radio and responded in a querulous voice, “Go ahead, Ground Six.”

  A pause from the radio, then, “Uh . . .” Another pause.

  “You stupid . . .” Black said to the invisible searcher in the field. “Everyone with a radio can hear what an incompetent you are.”

  “Go ahead, Ground Six,” Richmond repeated.

  “We . . . We’ve located a four-sixteen.”

  Ralph’s head snapped up. Tentacles of cold flashed down to his fingertips.

  Four-sixteen. Dead body.

  “Quiet!” Black shouted.

  All conversation stopped.

  “Ground Six. Ten-Nine,” Richmond said.

  Radio silence.

  “Ground Six. Ten-Nine.”

  Several more seconds of silence, then, “We’ve located what we believe is a four-sixteen. Down in the canyon. Off the Aspen Springs Trail.” Another pause. “We . . . We think it might be SAR. We can see an orange parka and helmet.”

  CHAPTER

  49

  “I need to get out of here,” Rob said. “I can’t sit here and wait any longer.”

  He had returned to a prone position and, even though she was tired of sitting, Gracie was back at her post in front of the entrance. “I hear you on that one,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Can you make me some kind of a brace or a splint or something?” Rob asked. “I’m walking out.”

  With his pronouncement, Gracie swung around to face Rob, who was already carefully extracting his foot from beneath the sleeping bag. “No, wait,” she said. “You can’t. Your ankle. And you probably have a concussion.”

  “My sister’s getting married the day after tomorrow,” Rob said. “I’ve got to try to get there, don’t I?”

  Grace watched Rob pull on his jacket.

  Rob was willing to try to hike out. If, for too much longer, Gracie was forced to passively sit and wait—immobile, inactive, not knowing what was happening with the search, with Cashman, with the relief team, whether there was a homicidal maniac out there looking for Rob, for her—she was going to go loony tunes. Or have a heart attack. Or a brain aneurysm. Or all three.

  So what was the big, fat problem with what he was proposing?

  The big, fat problem was that moving could be considered negligent on her part. Cashman had hopefully delivered the coordinates of their position to the Command Post, which hopefully in turn had passed them on to a relief team. It would be bad, bad, bad if Cashman or a relief team showed up at the location designated by the coordinates and found Gracie and Rob gone. Not to mention that Joseph, or whoever the killer was—if there even was a killer—might be creeping around somewhere up on the trail.


  The irresistible urge to pack up and be moving engulfed her. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll try and hike out.” She leaned back for her pack. “I’ll splint your ankle.”

  Gracie untwisted one of her trekking poles and laid a section on either side of Rob’s injured foot. “I’m leaving a portion of pole sticking out at the bottom,” she told him as she bound the poles tightly to his leg with duct tape from her pack. “That way, hopefully, your foot won’t touch the ground.” She tested the splint to make sure it was secure and didn’t wobble around. “How’s that?”

  “Brilliant!” Rob’s entire visage and demeanor had changed with Gracie’s decision to try to hike out. His eyes sparkled and he couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice or the grin off his face.

  She looked up into his face. “It may not work.”

  “Worth a gamble,” he said.

  Together Gracie and Rob dismantled the little shelter. Rob shook out the plastic, refolded it, and crammed it into her pack. She stuffed the little sack containing her sleeping bag into the lower compartment of her pack, and fastened Cashman’s sleeping pad, along with her own, to the outside. Rob kept Cashman’s sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders. When Gracie told him he looked like a Cheyenne Indian wearing a buffalo robe his face lit up with a delighted grin.

  Gracie used up the rest of her flagging tape to tie a voluminous hot pink flower on a branch overhanging the creek, worrying the entire time whether she was telling the wrong person exactly where they were going. A five-foot-long arrow she constructed out of stones pointed to a plastic sandwich bag anchored with a rock. A note inside the bag gave the date and time and said that she and Rob were walking back up to the trail and which compass bearing they would be following.

  Gracie hefted her pack onto her back and sagged beneath the weight. She humped the pack higher onto her shoulders and clipped closed the fastenings at the waist and across her chest. Then she handed Rob the remaining trekking pole and followed him down to the creek.