Zero-Degree Murder Read online

  Every once in a while, the nature gods would sit up and take notice. Fed up with the arrogance of humankind, they would take someone out.

  Gracie skidded to a stop. “Dammit.”

  “Now what?” Cashman called back to her.

  “Now there are only two sets of tracks altogether. Only the smooth sole. Going in both directions. And the honeycomb. But in only one direction. What do you see up there?”

  With flashlight trained to the ground, Cashman disappeared around a bend in the trail. Half a minute later, he reappeared. “Looks like a couple of ’em went to take a whiz or a crap or something.”

  “What happened to the other tracks?” Gracie asked. She turned and backtracked down the trail to the last Reebok print she had marked—a right. Logically the next track should be a left. She examined the ground.

  The Reeboks had vanished.

  “Where’d they go?” Gracie turned 360 degrees, shining her flashlight beam along the ground in a wide swath until, finally, she spotted an indentation from a boot heel where someone had stepped onto a wide, foot-high berm of dirt and stones, and out onto an expansive promontory of boulders.

  “There!” Her sweeping light illuminated a chaos of footprints in the soft dirt. “They must have stopped and taken a break here or something.”

  Gracie trained her light on the ground. “What’s that?” She stepped over the berm and crouched down. She picked away several stones and branches strewn on the ground, and brushed away the top layer of dirt with her hand, revealing a large dark stain standing out against the drier, buff-colored dirt. Her stomach muscles tightened. “Cashman, does this look like blood to you?”

  Steve moved to stand next to her. “Yeah, that’s blood,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Some hunter probably field-dressed a deer he bagged out of season. Covered his tracks so he wouldn’t get busted for poaching.”

  Cashman moved to the far end of the outcropping and looked down over the edge, his headlamp emitting only a meager radius of light into the void. “Think they went down?”

  Gracie stared at the stain, focused on the fact that there were probably no deer at that altitude that time of year, if ever.

  “Wanna search down below?” Cashman asked.

  “I don’t think this is deer blood. I wonder if there was some kind of accident. Maybe with our missing hikers. This is getting way too complicated. We need to call this in.”

  “Roger, Roger,” Cashman said with a shrug. But when he keyed the microphone, the radio wonked. “Dead spot,” he said. He paced back down the trail a short distance and tried again.

  From where she was, Gracie heard the wonk of the radio. “Nothing,” Cashman called back up to her.

  “Why go down if someone was hurt?” Gracie asked herself. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Cashman reappeared beside her. “Wanna walk farther back to see if you can get a signal?” he asked. “I can search on down the hill.”

  Gracie pushed herself to her feet. “Not a good idea to separate,” she said. Which Cashman knew full well. “Never leave your partner” was one of the most fundamental tenets of search and rescue. “Never go off on your own.”

  “How ’bout we at least find where they went down?” Cashman suggested.

  Gracie dragged her attention away from the stain. With flashlights and headlamps trained on the dirt, she and Cashman scoured the area until they found where someone had descended into the canyon—a furrow of churned earth and leaves leading down one side of the outcropping.

  “Let’s follow it down,” Cashman prodded.

  Gracie stood her ground, chewing the inside of her cheek. Leaving the trail to go down into the canyon was tricky business—bushwhacking off-trail, off-radio, in the dark, on a steep, rocky slope leading to who knew where. She had been there and done that. It totally sucked.

  Don’t get dead flickered through her mind. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t become a victim yourself. “I think we need to backtrack down the trail to find a signal,” she said. “We need to let Ralph know what we’re doing. About the tracks. And about the blood.”

  “Fuck the blood!” Cashman yelled. “And fuck Hunter!”

  Gracie took a step backward. “Cashman!”

  Steve backed off immediately, softening his tone. “Sorry, Gracie. But if somebody’s hurt down there, a half hour could mean we find a DB instead of a person. You can stay here. Or go try and radio. I’m goin’ down.”

  Gracie stared at her teammate. This was a side of Cashman she had never seen before. She had never even heard him raise his voice, much less yell at anyone, least of all her.

  “Not a good idea, Steve,” she said. “Ralph needs to call in more teams.”

  “I’ll mark where I went down.” He hauled out a long strand of neon green flagging tape and tied multiple strands around the branches of a manzanita bush growing out of the dirt next to the trail.

  “Cashman, are you hearing me?” Gracie asked, struggling to keep the irritation out of her voice. “This is not a good idea. We need to radio in.”

  “I’m Team Leader,” he said without looking at her. He drew out his GPS and held it aloft to collect the satellite signal. “I’m goin’ down. You can come with me. You can stay here. Whatever you want.”

  “What the hell!” Gracie stormed several paces up the trail, then stopped, breathing slowly, deeply, trying to squelch her anger.

  The risk in altering their course without notifying the Command Post was monumental. Once they left the formal, maintained trail, they would be flying blind, off the radar. If anything bad happened, they would be on their own. Gracie alone with Steve Cashman.

  What was she going to do? Let Cashman go down into the canyon by himself? Hike all the way back to the Command Post alone?

  Cashman was right about time being critical. She would never forgive herself if someone died because she had a thing about sticking to the rules.

  She turned and stomped back down to the outcropping. “Dammit, Cashman, you win. But I don’t like it. One. Bit. Don’t ever do this again.” Gracie hauled out her own GPS and took a waypoint.

  With a voice in Gracie’s head shouting a fortissimo, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she and Cashman plunged down off the side of the trail and into darkness.

  CHAPTER

  19

  MILOCEK ground his back teeth together. Frustration burned in his chest. The arrival of Search and Rescue presented yet another complication.

  He had crept up behind the searchers, tailing them as they followed the tracks to the rock promontory. Motionless and invisible back down the trail, he listened as they discussed the stain in the dirt and argued about what to do.

  Milocek’s hand moved to the knife at his waist. He itched to pull it out.

  There had been a time when he would have taken on two adversaries at once. But years of fast food and living the anonymous civilian life in America had made him soft, flabby, had reduced his stamina and dulled his reflexes. He would have to wait for the right moment and take them one at a time.

  His hand dropped from the knife.

  He watched the rescuers leave the trail to follow the path down into the canyon.

  The tracks the woman searcher had found confirmed what logic had already told him—that Diana was hiding still farther up the trail.

  Milocek considered his dilemma. Should he go after Diana? Or should he follow the searchers who might lead him to Rob?

  The razor-edged knife blade sliced easily through the green plastic ribbon the searcher had tied to the branches of a bush next to the trail. Milocek gathered up the multiple strands and stuffed them into his jacket pocket.

  CHAPTER

  20

  RALPH sat at the green metal desk in the Command Post. The HT lay inches from his left elbow, the volume turned up all
the way so he wouldn’t miss the tiniest hint of a transmission.

  The wind outside buffeted the rickety trailer, sucking heat out through invisible cracks and seams and forcing Ralph to wear his Gore-Tex parka, wool hat, and fingerless wool gloves to stay warm.

  Half an hour earlier, David Montoya, the deputy on-scene, had knocked on the trailer door to notify Ralph that Carlos Sanchez had been reached on his cell phone. He and his wife, Cristina, had in fact checked out of the hotel in town and were driving on the 10 Freeway to their home in Santa Monica.

  Montoya had also handed Ralph a piece of paper on which he had scribbled basic information obtained from a check of license plates of the vehicles in the trailhead lot.

  The chair creaked as Ralph leaned back to study the information. The motor home and one of the cars, a Cadillac Escalade, had been rented the week before by the production company. A second car, a 2008 Toyota Corolla belonged to one of the MisPers: Joseph Van Dijk of Riverside. The third, a late model Ford Mustang convertible, belonged to one of the RPs: Michael Benjamin of Brentwood. Nothing much pertinent to the search.

  Ralph didn’t like searching without reliable physical descriptions of the missing persons. In a few minutes, he decided, he would walk over to the Tahoe and talk to Montoya again to see what the deputy could do about obtaining more information on each of the MisPers. It might take a little time, but what else did the man have to do while sitting in his unit all night long?

  Ralph switched his thoughts to the Sanchez couple. The fact that they had driven down the hill was significant to the search in that it definitively narrowed the number of MisPers from six to four.

  He needed to notify his search team.

  Ralph lifted the HT to his mouth. “Tracking One. Command Post.”

  No response.

  “Tracking One. Command Post.”

  Still no response.

  They’re in a dead spot, Ralph thought. He would have to wait until they called in.

  Gracie and Cashman had radioed in the coordinates of their location at regular intervals since they had left the Command Post. It had been almost ninety minutes since their last transmission.

  In the rugged terrain, with no repeater high or close enough to catch the team’s signal and rebroadcast it back to the CP, long radio silences were to be expected. There wasn’t a damned thing Ralph could do about it except assume his team would radio in when they were able.

  Ralph pulled a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights from his parka and drew out one of four remaining cigarettes. He had started smoking again when Eleanor had been diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. Throughout the long ordeal, he had managed to keep it below half a pack a day. Now, six years after her death, he was finally trying to quit.

  He stuck the unlit cigarette in the fold of his wool hat and turned his attention back to the search.

  Ralph had meticulously recorded each new set of coordinates called in from the field on the laminated USGS topo map of the wilderness area spread out on the little desk. With a black transparency marker, he had drawn an X on the map at the location pinpointed by each set of coordinates, then highlighted the team’s progress in yellow.

  Ralph looked at the last black X, the point where the meandering yellow line ended. Where the hell were Gracie and Cashman? They could be just about anywhere within sixty thousand acres of precipitous canyons and jagged mountain peaks.

  Ralph scowled down at the map. He hated being out of contact with his search team, Gracie in particular. There were too many variables. Too many things could go horribly wrong.

  “Come on, Cashman,” he said. “Call the hell in.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  GRACIE and Cashman dropped down from the trail, following the obvious signs that someone had descended there. Fallen leaves had been churned up, their dark wet underbellies gleaming in the light of the headlamps. Newly scuffed and overturned dirt showed darker brown against the dryer top layer.

  Negotiating their way into the depths of the canyon proved even rougher and more hazardous than Gracie had feared. The mountainside was steep, plunging down for more than a quarter mile. Headlamps illuminated only puny circles of dim light ahead of them. Loose stones, sticks, and leaves melted away underfoot. Soft soil released its hold on seemingly well-anchored branches. Gracie’s anger at Cashman dissolved as she concentrated on keeping her feet from flying out from under her.

  The searchers slithered down the incline, heavy packs propelling them forward. The inclination was to hurry, allowing gravity to do most of the work. But gravity was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, urging them to go faster. Traveling fast on a search wasn’t always better. Sometimes it was stupid. And dangerous. A misstep invited a turned ankle or torn ligament or becoming part of the scrabble of pebbles and stones trickling down before them.

  And in this case, if they hurried too much, they might bypass any deviation from the main track, or overlook some sign or key piece of evidence along the way.

  So Gracie maintained a slow, deliberate rate of descent, cautiously picking her way down, bracing herself with her trekking pole on the downhill slope, placing each boot securely on stable ground before lifting the other. “Slow down, Cashman,” she called down to her teammate who was barely visible below her. “I can’t see squat.”

  Cashman hadn’t heard her. At least he hadn’t altered his pace.

  On searches Cashman always traveled too fast, hiking far ahead of the others, ignoring field protocol that dictated the team travel at the pace of its slowest member. When someone—not always Gracie—reminded Steve of that fact, he invariably stepped to the back of the line, deferring the lead to another—the implication being slower, therefore weaker—member. Someone else should set the pace, he would say. He always went too fast.

  “Cashman!” Gracie yelled. “Slow down!”

  He definitely heard her that time for he stopped and waited for her to catch up. “Maybe you should go first,” he said as Gracie stepped down past him. “I always go too fast.”

  The farther they descended into the canyon, the rockier and less stable the ground became with more fallen logs blocking their path. The trail grew less obvious, harder to follow. Individual footprints were nonexistent.

  Because they were out of the worst of the wind, Gracie was beginning to overheat. Not a good thing. As long as they kept moving, she was fine. But as soon as they stopped, if she didn’t dry off the sweat forming on her body and pack the warm layers back on, evaporation and conduction would sap every last bit of heat from her body and hypothermia would swoop in. Stay dry or die was one of those slogans actually based on fact.

  “I have to stop and ventilate,” she called up to Cashman. She slid to a stop, propping herself on the uphill side of a ponderosa pine trunk. “I’m starting to sweat.” Avoiding the sap caked on the tree’s giant plates of bark, she unzipped her fleece top as far as it would go and the side zippers of her pants from the waistband to below her knees even though they would flap about ridiculously like cowboy chaps. “Nobody said this was going to be a fashion show,” she announced to the tree.

  Cashman slid to a stop beside her. He uncapped his water bottle and gulped down the remaining liquid, which reminded Gracie that she too needed to keep hydrating. Altitude plus exertion equaled dehydration. She took a long draw from her water bottle.

  Gracie’s shoulders and hips ached from the heavy pack. It didn’t bode well if the search lasted well into the night which it very possibly might.

  “Whistle,” Cashman said.

  Gracie plugged her ears as he blew three blasts on his plastic whistle.

  The sound ricocheted around them and faded away to nothing.

  The searchers listened, not breathing, but heard only the wind whispering through the surrounding bushes and trees, drowning out even the natural murmurings of the night.

  Gracie formed a me
gaphone around her mouth with her hands. “Rob!” she yelled. “Cristina! Joseph!”

  “Carlos!” Cashman yelled. “What’s the other one’s name?”

  “Diana.”

  “Diana! Rob!”

  Gracie stopped. What was that? Had she heard something? She cupped her hands behind her ears, silent, straining to hear something.

  Nothing.

  “Let’s go,” she said, stepping out from behind the tree and continuing down the incline.

  “Rock!” Cashman’s yell split the darkness above her head.

  Instinctively Gracie hunkered down as a waterfall of stones and rocks rattled and bounced around her, one basketball-sized shooting past only inches from her head.

  Cashman called down from above, “Sorry about that, Chief!”

  Gracie scrambled to her feet. As calmly as she could, she said, “I’d like to remind you of the most basic of SAR principles that says ‘Don’t kill your teammate.’”

  “Shhh! I heard something.” The excitement in Cashman’s voice was unmistakable.

  The two leaned forward to discern any sound that might be remotely human.

  Gracie opened her mouth to say that she didn’t hear anything when Cashman yelled, “Down there!” so loudly it almost made her lose her balance.

  He pointed down and off to their right.

  He has the ears of a jack rabbit, Gracie thought. Then she heard it—a faint voice. “Down here!”

  Together Gracie and Cashman raced down into the canyon, caution abandoned, surfing the dirt, loose rocks, leaves, pine needles, adrenaline coursing, recklessly ignoring any danger.

  “Careful, careful,” Gracie warned herself as much as Cashman. “It’s not going to do anyone any good if one of us gets hurt.”

  As soon as she said it, Gracie’s boot slipped. She was sliding, gaining momentum, heavy pack driving her forward like a giant hand giving her a nudge. Frantically she grabbed on to a passing branch. Her body swung in a wide arc and she landed flat on her stomach with an “oof,” banging her knee on something hard. Another bruise tomorrow was the only thing her brain registered.