Zero-Degree Murder Page 3

  Her heart sledgehammered in her chest. The harsh cold air stabbed steel knives into her lungs with each breath. She wasn’t going to make it all the way back to the trailhead.

  She skidded to her hands and knees on the hard-packed dirt.

  Get up! her brain screamed. He’s coming for you!

  Diana staggered back to her feet and left the trail, scrambling up the steep incline on all fours. Hands clawed at the dirt and pine needles, grabbed at branches and rocks, anything to pull herself up from the trail, away from the living, breathing demon who pursued her.

  Only fifty feet up the slope, the burst of energy faded and Diana was unable to climb any farther.

  Find someplace to hide! Where?

  She swung around in a full circle. Eyes wide with panic searched the hillside until she spotted a space between two massive boulders. She ran over and wedged herself down in between them. Trembling, silent, wary as a fawn in the brush, she crouched and waited. “Please don’t let him find me,” she prayed over and over. “Please don’t let him find me.”

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. An infinity.

  Where was he?

  Then she heard them—footfalls coming down the trail.

  Fast.

  Diana squeezed her eyes closed, held her breath, listened.

  She imagined him stopping, seeing where she had left the trail, climbing up the rocky incline on velvet lion’s paws to find her.

  But he didn’t stop. He passed directly below her on the trail, so close she could hear his hoarse gasps for air.

  The footfalls faded away.

  Silence.

  CHAPTER

  5

  BEEP! Beep! Beep!

  Shrill tones slapped Gracie awake from a deep, dreamless sleep. Unable to pry her eyes open, she fumbled around on the sea chest. Her hand closed around a warm black banana left over from breakfast four days before and jolted her wide awake. “Dammit!” She wiped yellow mash onto her sweatshirt and scrabbled though the detritus on the table, in the process knocking a teetering stack of last week’s newspapers and mail off onto the floor.

  Her fingers clutched the cool plastic receiver. She dragged it to her ear. “Grace Kinkaid,” she croaked into the mouthpiece. Dial tone.

  Pager.

  She tossed the receiver in the vicinity of its cradle and unclipped the Search and Rescue pager from the waistband of her sweatpants. She squinted at the postage stamp–sized screen and read the neon green message: LOST HIKERS. ASPEN SPRINGS. ALPINE CERTIFIED ONLY. MANDATORY RESPONSE.

  Shit. Another search. The last thing she felt like doing.

  Gracie fell back on the couch and considered setting a personal precedent by not responding when she didn’t have a good excuse. “Let someone else show up for a change,” she complained to the ceiling. “And what does ‘mandatory response’ mean anyway? We’re volunteers. What if we have jobs? What if we have families? Oh, screw it. None of those apply to me, so what the hell? Just do the damn job.”

  She retrieved the dangling receiver and punched in the phone number for the Sheriff’s Office squad room. She hacked like a veteran smoker to boost her voice from bass to tenor and announced, “Grace Kinkaid,” to the deputy on the other end of the line. “ETA twenty minutes.” She plunked the receiver back down. “Wishful thinking.”

  She swung her legs over the side of the couch and sat up with a groan. Elbows on knees, she examined the garage-sale rug beneath her feet and noticed for the first time how its nauseating pea green and orange color scheme didn’t match anything else in the entire cabin. Not even close.

  “Grace Kinkaid to the rescue,” she said to the rug. “Now if only I can stand up.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  ANTICIPATION bubbled up inside Gracie’s chest as she kicked the mudroom door closed behind her and dropped an enormous duffel bag onto the kitchen floor.

  The adrenaline rush that came with every callout had blasted the lethargy to oblivion.

  She knelt on the bare linoleum and unzipped the bag filled with meticulously maintained and packed search clothes and gear. She lifted out a pile of clothes folded neatly at the top of the duffel and stepped onto the tiny braided rug in front of the sink. She mentally assessed the upcoming search while stripping off sweatshirt, pants, and socks and hauling on lightweight fleece long underwear.

  The Aspen Springs Trail. Up on Mount San Raphael. Had it snowed up there yet? She didn’t remember seeing white on the mountain’s barren crown the last time she drove down the hill. But that was the week before last. It had rained in Timber Creek since then. Rain in the valley might mean snow on the mountain four thousand feet higher.

  Gracie plowed through the morass that was her memory of the night before and remembered a buxom weather lady on one of the Saddle Tramp’s televisions predicting a large front swooping into Southern California from the north. Heavy rains were expected to reach the coast the middle of the following day, and the mountains that night with the possibility of up to a foot of snow. The afternoon’s heavy winds could be heralding a storm. A glance at the mini weather station on the kitchen counter told her the barometer wasn’t dropping . . . yet.

  She sat down on one of two mismatched kitchen chairs and stretched on knee-high polypropylene sock liners followed by heavy wool socks.

  There was little chance the search would still be ongoing when the storm hit. Still, prudence dictated she add winter mountaineering equipment to her Search and Rescue pack.

  She groaned out loud at the thought.

  Some searchers, usually enthusiastic rookies, carried SAR packs as heavy as fire trucks with a junk-drawer full of accoutrements and high-tech toys swinging from the outside loops. Gracie knew that while her gear was her lifeline, she didn’t need to carry a Hilton on her back, only enough to survive in the wild for a night, two at the most. Comfort wasn’t the goal. Survival was.

  Team members were required to carry a host of items in their packs, the majority of which Gracie had never used. Since, much to her disgust, physical strength and stamina had proven to be an issue, she had refined, whittled down, packed and repacked her equipment into the lightest, most compact system of anyone on the team. Even then, her summer pack weighed a hip-bruising thirty-four pounds. Winter alpine gear of ice axe, crampons, snow shovel, and a vacuum-packed bag of extra heavyweight clothing, socks, and gloves would weight the pack even more.

  The telephone on the counter rang, jangling Gracie out of her presearch routine. She pulled on a pair of midweight fleece pants and counted off the rings until the answering machine picked up.

  “Happy Day, Turkey!” The screech of her half sister’s voice jarred her like a Black Diamond Jeep trail.

  Gracie’s eyes whipped to the Sierra Club calendar hanging from a magnet hook on the refrigerator. “Crap. It’s Thanksgiving.” Her mood ratcheted back down a notch.

  She buttoned up a neon orange fleece shirt as she listened to Lenora’s voice shrill against the background clamor of a houseful of adults, offspring, her mother’s yappy wiener dogs, and Hortense, the canary: “You live only three hours away and haven’t been to see us yet,” Lenora scolded. The sharp edge to her voice told Gracie the tongue lashing wasn’t altogether playful. “You really need to make the effort.”

  “The highway flows both ways, Lenora.” It came as no surprise that her older half sister—with whom she shared her mother, but not her father—expected Gracie to drive a hundred miles to see her. It would simply never occur to Lenora that she should be the one to schlep across all of the Inland Empire and up the mountain to see Gracie.

  Her sister signed off and her mother came on the line. “Happy Thanksgiving, Grace dear,” Evelyn chirped. “It’s your mother.”

  “As if I didn’t know your voice, Mother dear.” Gracie stuffed shirttails into black Gore-Tex zip-up-the-side pants and Velcroed the waist
tabs closed.

  “I really wish you had decided to come,” Evelyn continued. “Seven hundred fifty dollars really was a fab price for a last-minute L.A. to Detroit ticket.”

  Gracie rolled her eyes at her mother’s obliviousness to her current state of unemployment. Two weeks before, during one of their monthly telephone conversation, Gracie had divulged that she was, once again, out of work. She had left out the part about how she lost her most recent executive job delivering Domino’s Pizza because she told a belligerent tub-o’-lard to stick his penny tip up his fat, hairy ass.

  That was last month and Gracie hadn’t gotten around to looking for another quality job.

  “You haven’t seen these darling babies in so long,” Evelyn cooed.

  Gracie sighed and stood to stomp her heels down into heavy mountaineering boots. “Lenora’s spoiled rotten kids can hardly be considered babies. And they’re most assuredly not darlings.”

  “Or Harold either,” her mother continued. “And . . . and . . . Oh, here he is—”

  There were several seconds of muffled argument and next on the line came her half brother toward whom Gracie felt not one ounce of sisterly affection. Hard to cuddle up cozy to an iceberg.

  Harold’s voice, normally oozing with lawyerly pomposity, sounded forced with good cheer as he wished his little sister a Happy Thanksgiving.

  Hmm, Gracie mused as she sat back down again to cinch tight the boot lacings. Perhaps Wife Number 3—what’s-her-name—was about to become Ex-wife Number 3. Her brother had a nasty habit of sleeping with his future wives while he was still married to the previous ones.

  Gracie listened to several seconds of silence until Evelyn came back on the line and warbled, “We miss you. We love you,” followed by a loud kiss into the phone.

  A chorus of voices yelled, “Happy Thanksgiving!” and “Wish you were here!” followed by a cacophony of “Bye!”

  The call ended abruptly, plunging the room back into silence and leaving Gracie feeling even more hollow than before.

  That Morris, Evelyn’s third husband and Gracie’s stepfather, had been present for the holiday feast in his own palatial home in Grosse Pointe Farms was a given. That, once again, he had refused to wish his stepdaughter “Happy Thanksgiving” should have been expected. Somehow it always managed to catch her off guard.

  Gracie leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring at the yellowed linoleum beneath her feet. She could envision the entire scene in excruciating detail. Her mother—crisp lace apron over smart Pendleton sweater and slacks—gently prodding her husband. “Mo Mo, can’t you at least say, ‘Hello?’” Morris’s refusal to budge from his La-Z-Boy in the den—one hand clenching the chair arm, the other moving only at the elbow to bring his ever-present Johnnie Walker Blue to his lips, granite eyes never leaving his beloved Detroit Lions on the flat screen.

  “Can’t really blame him.” Gracie sighed. A smiled tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.”

  She leaned back and frowned down at the shapeless blob that was her body. As always, when she finished dressing for a winter search, especially after adding her radio chest pack, Day-Glo orange helmet and Gore-Tex parka and gloves, she looked like some goofy hybrid of something-or-other and something-else. “Hieronymous the Hippopotamus meet . . . Michelin Woman,” she grumbled and pushed herself to her feet.

  CHAPTER

  7

  RADOVAN Milocek crouched behind the giant trunk of a ponderosa pine and surveyed the parking lot below him with a hawk’s eyes. Sweat dried on his temples, and his chest heaved with the exertion of jogging all the way down to the trailhead from the rock outcropping.

  The scene before him was unremarkable, tranquil. The parking lot contained only Rob Christian’s motor home and several cars—one of them his own. Not a single person was visible.

  Milocek sucked the cold mountain air in through his nose and blew it out through his mouth to slow his breathing.

  He had anticipated overtaking Diana quickly. But the more distance he covered with no sign of her, the more certain he was that she had hidden somewhere along the trail and he had passed her by.

  Milocek ground his back teeth. He had taken too long finishing the business at the outcropping before following Diana down the trail.

  He would have to go back.

  But he was confident he would find her.

  He remembered that farther up, past the outcropping, the trail split with one leg leading up to the top of the mountain and the other winding for miles through the wilderness area. There was only one way out and that was the trail down to the parking lot.

  He stood between Diana and escape.

  He eyed his own little car parked next to the motor home and calculated how long it would take him to run across the parking lot and climb inside.

  Why not simply drive away, south, to Mexico, then Central, even South America?

  He shook his head. Never again would he run. He would die first.

  The thought of death brought with it a curious sense of release, of calm.

  He physically shook the thought away like a dog shaking water from its fur.

  Milocek backed away from the tree on hands and knees. He pushed himself to his feet, jumped silently down onto the trail, and trotted up the way he had come.

  CHAPTER

  8

  “COME on! Let me in! I need to go!”

  Gracie kneaded the steering wheel of her rust-pocked Ranger pickup. As far as she could see in both directions, a train of cars, minivans, and sport utes snaked bumper to bumper along the Boulevard, the main thoroughfare running the length of the valley.

  Thirty million people within a three-hour drive of Timber Creek. And this weekend it seemed that every single one of those thirty million had negotiated the mountain roads up to the little resort town with the sole purpose of hindering Gracie’s progress to the Sheriff’s Office.

  She sagged down in the seat, chewed a piece of grape bubble gum, and waited.

  The town’s normal population of twenty thousand often ballooned to more than one hundred thousand for long holiday weekends. Which was precisely why Gracie normally hid out in her cabin the entire time, a reluctant box turtle emerging only in emergencies like a search or a craving for a venti Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino from the Safeway Starbucks.

  Gracie popped a purple bubble and leaned over to crank up the London Symphony on the radio. She sank back in the seat and watched the traffic through half-closed eyes.

  Sixty teeth-clenching seconds went by until finally a miniscule space opened up between a Ford Expedition and a white minivan that had slowed to a stop.

  Gracie stomped on the gas. The pickup rocketed onto the Boulevard, then screeched to a standstill an inch from the Expedition’s bumper.

  “Thank God for six cylinders.”

  She laid her head back on the headrest and blew another bubble.

  The Bavarian-style village of Timber Creek lay as a jewel in the mountains one hundred miles east of Los Angeles, six thousand feet higher and a world apart. In a single hour, one could drive the curving, precipitous highway up the mountain, leaving behind housing tracts, office buildings and strip malls, palm trees and labyrinthine freeways, breaking out of yellow air into azure skies and evergreens.

  Gracie eased her foot off the brake and the Ranger inched forward.

  Willow thickets hugged both sides of the road in a rich blend of yellows from brilliant cadmium to dull ocher. Christmas lights draped along fence posts and railings added glowing polka dots of red, blue, and green to the lengthening blue shadows. Gracie craned her neck and just caught a glimpse of the sparkling silver bracelet that was the lake itself. Beyond, the sun hovered, a golden glowing eye in the west.

  Up ahead, a station wagon dragging a muffler turned left, suddenly clearing Gracie’s lane for the final qua
rter mile to the Sheriff’s Office.

  She mashed the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer lunged to the right. Fifty. Fifty-five. She slammed on the brakes, turned into the Sheriff’s Office parking lot, and screeched to a stop. “What the—?”

  The parking lot overflowed with reporters, cameras, lights, and television vans. Channel Four. Channel Seven. Channel Nine. KTLA. They were all there.

  Gracie gaped at the spectacle until a car turned into the driveway behind her, nudging her out of her stupor.

  Duly appreciative that someone had the foresight to cordon off a parking area for incoming search personnel, Gracie stepped on the gas and roared into an open space.

  CHAPTER

  9

  TIMBER Creek Search and Rescue operated under the auspices of the County Sheriff’s Department and functioned out of the Sheriff’s Office—a long, two-story building painted bone white and trimmed in dark brown paint and pink stone.

  Gracie shoved open the heavy reinforced-steel Employees Only door and clumped in, her heavy boots echoing down the narrow hallway leading into the bowels of the building. She pushed in through the door of the multipurpose squad room that served as the Search and Rescue briefing room.

  Walls the color of vanilla pudding were crammed full of maps, bulletin boards, deputy cubbyhole in-boxes, and multiple doors leading to hallways, supply closets, and evidence storage. A chalkboard covered one entire wall and a waist-high shelf serving as a desk ran along three walls. In the center of the room was a twenty-foot-long conference table surrounded by a dozen butt-flattening wooden chairs.

  The squad room’s only occupant was Ralph Hunter, who sat at the conference table reading a days-old L.A. Times. Behind half-moon glasses, the blue-gray eyes slid in her direction. “Hey, Gracie girl,” he said and winked at her.