Zero-Degree Murder Read online

  She lifted his foot again, resting it in her lap, and started feeling around the ankle again.

  “Bloody hell, woman!” Rob yelled again and yanked his foot away from her so hard she tipped over sideways.

  This guy is starting to get on my nerves.

  Gracie shoved herself upright and grabbed up her first-aid kit. “I don’t think your ankle is broken,” she said. “But I don’t have X-ray eyes and an X ray is the only way to conclusively determine whether you have a bad sprain or a fracture. Both are incredibly painful.”

  “No bloody shit,” Rob said.

  “First I’m going to put a wet bandana on it. It’ll be cold, but it’ll help with the swelling and hopefully it won’t be quite as sore tomorrow. Then later I’ll wrap it tight with an elastic bandage to ease the pain some and make it more stable.”

  Down at the creek Gracie soaked her cotton bandana in the icy water, then kneeling in front of Rob again, draped the folded cloth on the injured ankle.

  Rob yelped and fell back again, which made him groan again with pain.

  “I am sorry,” Gracie said. “This is going to hurt a lot right now, but, please, trust me that it will make it feel better tomorrow.”

  When Gracie placed the cold bandana around his ankle, Rob said, “Effing hell!” through clenched teeth, but kept his foot still. “So, what should I call you?” he asked. “Florence?”

  Gracie couldn’t tell if what she heard in his voice was disdain or amusement or something else. “As in Nightingale?” she returned as she tied off the bandana. With Rob’s eyes burning the top of her head, she concentrated on not dropping his foot as she lifted it up to place it gingerly on her pack.

  “Quick, aren’t you?” he asked, then groaned as she tugged the down bootie over his toes.

  “Sorry again.”

  From her first-aid kit, she pulled a plastic film canister. “My mini-pharmacy,” she announced holding it up. She flipped off the lid and poured a multicolored pile of pills into her hand. “You name it. I carry it. If it’s legal, that is.”

  She extracted two white caplets and dropped them into Rob’s open hand. “Acetaminophen. Tylenol. They’ll take the edge off the pain.” She funneled the rest of the pills back into the canister. “I’m not supposed to dispense medication, but I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  “Thank you,” Rob said so quietly Gracie hardly heard him.

  She handed him the water bottle. “You’re welcome.”

  As he tossed the pills into his mouth and tipped back the bottle to drain the rest of the water, Gracie grabbed the seconds to study the man before her.

  So far, she decided, Rob Christian wasn’t all that bad. She’d had better patients. She’d definitely had worse. Preconceived ideas of how an über-wealthy, high-maintenance megastar would act had prepared her not to like him. But he wasn’t acting out nearly as badly as she had anticipated he would.

  At the moment he didn’t even look much like a mega-star. In fact, in the unforgiving light of Gracie’s LED headlamp, Rob Christian looked like a thoroughly grimy half-drowned pack rat in need of a long, hot soak and a tall brewsky.

  CHAPTER

  23

  GRACIE left Rob looking like a little boy with wide eyes, as if the slightest breeze would knock him over. She zigzagged back and forth up the hillside behind him in search of a suitable place to build an emergency shelter.

  In less than five minutes she had located what she needed at the base of a jumble of elephantine granite boulders, some twenty feet tall. A large flat rock shelf jutted out for several feet, then angled back to the ground, providing a level nook protected naturally on two sides. Construct the third side of the triangle, close off the ends and, voila, a serviceable shelter for Rob.

  The smaller the space, the warmer. Gracie thought she remembered from the Lost Person Questionnaire that Rob was six feet two inches tall. The only time she had actually seen him standing up was when Cashman was helping him into the fleece pants and then she wasn’t exactly paying attention to his height. The shelter, once completed, needed to be about four feet wide, tall enough to sit up in, and long enough for Rob to stretch out comfortably. She would add an extra couple of feet for gear.

  Way too early to wrap her mind around the fact that she might be sharing the teeny space along with him.

  Gracie doffed her pack and knelt beneath the ledge. Using her hands, she scraped and shoveled together a thick nest from the duff that had accumulated for years. Dust from decomposing twigs, leaves, pinecones and needles, and other earthy matter billowed up around her, filling her nostrils and making her hack and cough. She forged ahead, holding her breath while she dug, stopping every few seconds to take in deep gulps of air over her shoulder.

  She pulled a large sheet of orange plastic from a small zippered compartment in her pack. Anchoring the length to the rock shelf with a line of rocks, she stretched the plastic down at an angle and secured it at the ground with more rocks and dirt. She closed up the far end of the shelter with pine branches scrounged from around the area sprinkled with more duff to fill in any cracks. The other smaller end would serve as the doorway and be closed in with her pack and more branches once he . . . they . . . he was inside.

  Gracie crawled into the shelter and laid out her insulated sleeping pad on top of the thick layer of duff, ready for her sleeping bag on top. From her pack, she produced a small yellow flashlight that pulled out into a lantern and hung it from the strap at the apex of the shelter so that when turned on, it produced an incongruous amount of light, warm and welcoming.

  Gracie sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork from the doorway. Not bad, Kinkaid. Those countless pain-in-the-neck trainings really do come in handy.

  Her shoulders slumped at the unwelcome thought that it wouldn’t be good enough for a movie star used to five-star hotels and room service and the fawning, obsequious masses. “Well, it’ll have to be,” she grumped.

  “Shelter’s ready,” Gracie called as she half-slid down the hillside to where Rob sat. She caught sight of his face and stopped dead.

  Rob sat immobile, face oyster white, eyes shadowed in their sockets and staring off into space.

  “Rob?”

  He turned his head slowly and looked up at her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Something happened.”

  Gracie sat down next to him. “What happened?”

  “There was a fight.”

  “A fight? When?”

  “More than a fight.”

  “When was this?”

  “Up there. On the trail. I can’t quite . . . Someone . . .” He massaged his forehead with his fingertips. “I remember . . . trying to get away.”

  “To get away from someone? From who? Do you remember?”

  “It’s all a fog. I remember a lot of . . .” He stopped, frowning.

  “A lot of what?”

  He looked straight into Gracie’s eyes. “Blood.”

  Goose bumps walked ghostly fingers up Gracie’s arms and made all the hair stand on end. “Blood.”

  He nodded. “I remember a woman screaming,” he said, his eyes never leaving Gracie’s. “I think I saw someone die. And I think someone tried to kill me.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  “POST.” The single word blared throughout the little Command Post trailer.

  Ralph snatched up the HT. “Tracking One.”

  With the poor reception, Cashman’s radio transmission had gone digital, his voice sounding like a robot with a screw loose. As a result, Ralph was able to catch only part of a series of numbers followed by intermittent intelligible words. He scribbled down what he could decipher: “Rob,” then “ankle,” followed by “for the night.”

  “Tracking One,” Ralph said into the radio. “You’re Ten-One.” Unreadable. “Ten-Nine.” Repeat.


  Again the digital voice with only two clear words: “Other MisPers.”

  The radio was silent.

  “Tracking One. Ten-One. Ten-Nine.”

  No response.

  Ralph studied the words and numbers he had scrawled on the log. Not much. But for now apparently, it was all he was going to get.

  CHAPTER

  25

  WHERE the hell is Cashman?

  It was after two o’clock in the morning. He had been gone for more than three hours.

  Up the slope behind Gracie, Rob lay within the shelter, warm and, she assumed, sleeping.

  As she waited for Cashman to return, she had wrapped herself in an emergency space blanket the thickness of a sheet of cheap paper and sat down with her back to a pine tree, knees pulled in to her chest. “I wish I had a rad-i-o,” she whispered, tapping a syncopated rhythm with her feet. “Next time I’ll keep the rad-i-o. Next time I’ll bring my own.”

  Not that a radio would have been of the least bit use to her at the moment, but it was like a hard and heavy security blanket, offering succor even in times of canyons and dead spots and things that go bump in the night.

  Gracie leaned back against the uncomfortable knobbly bark of the pine. She had turned off her headlamp, telling herself it was to save batteries and allow her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark, and not that sitting with her headlamp turned on allowed anyone creeping about in the darkness to see her without being seen.

  While she waited, she examined more fully what Rob had told her about seeing someone die and that someone had tried to kill him. Head injury often manifested itself in confusion of facts. But the combination of his story with the presence of blood on the outcropping was too serious to be ignored.

  If a murder or accidental killing had occurred and Rob had been attacked, who had done it and where was that person now?

  Could the group have met someone else on the trail? Gracie had read about hikers who had been murdered—gruesome, horrific murders. What if there was a psycho killer wandering around the wilderness area?

  She looked around, eyes wide. She held her breath to listen, but the heavy thud thud thud of her heart overrode all other sound.

  Quit scaring yourself, dope. Take a deep breath. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs to capacity, then slowly blew it out.

  The probability that someone was out there attacking innocent hikers was so remote as to be ludicrous. And besides, there had been no new tracks up on the trail. The only other option was that it was one of the hiking group itself. Who was the killer, Mr. X? Tristan? Tristan the Psycho Killer? She snorted out loud.

  Had Tristan killed Joseph and then tried to kill Rob? Could Carlos have done it? Or Joseph?

  And what about Cristina? Or Diana? Gracie had almost dismissed both women as the attacker out of hand. But since not considering either one simply because they were women seemed way too much like reverse sexism, she reconsidered both women as the potential killer.

  From the description Gracie had received of Diana, she knew the woman was only about five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Cristina was a string bean, taller than Gracie by three inches, but weighing twenty pounds less. Unless either woman was a black-belt in karate, chances were pretty slim she had taken out Carlos, Tristan and/or Joseph and then had tried to kill Rob.

  Except if she—Ms. X—had a weapon of some kind—a gun, even a knife. Any garden-variety kitchen knife was a potential weapon. And guns were as easy to get in L.A as . . . guns. A gun or knife would certainly tip the scales in a woman’s favor—or anyone’s for that matter. If Rob had no weapon with which to defend himself, he might have had no choice but to run. And very possibly the only direction for him to run had been down.

  Was the killing an accident? Or was it intentional?

  Gracie decided there were too many possibilities of who had done what to whom, accidentally or purposely, and turned to what she should be thinking about, which was where Mr. or Ms. X and the others might be.

  Maybe she had missed something on the way down from the trail. She had been so busy trying to keep from falling on her face that she hadn’t really been keeping much of any eye out for clues or evidence of any kind. Maybe Mr. X was hiding from them when they had come by. Maybe that was why they hadn’t found him.

  What if Mr. X came down into the canyon looking for Rob? What if he had seen her and Steve hiking the trail and had been tracking the trackers? What if, at this very minute, he was watching her, waiting for his chance to pounce?

  Suddenly every sound of the night was a foot stepping on a stick, every whisper of wind the brushing of fabric against a branch, every shadow a man leering out from behind a tree. Or bush. Or boulder.

  Gracie wasn’t law enforcement and so carried no firearm. Ice axe. Crampons. Trekking poles. Any potential substantial weapon was strapped to her pack currently posing as the shelter door. Gracie pulled up her jacket, ripped open the sheath attached to her belt and pulled out a four-inch hunting knife. Not that she had the slightest clue of what to do with a knife in a fight. And even if she did know, the thought of sticking it into someone’s flesh made her skin crawl. Pretty much useless then, she decided, not quite sure whether she was referring to the knife or herself.

  I wish Ralphie were here, she thought and immediately felt better, the thought of him acting as a balm on her frazzled psyche. “The ballast in my stupid-ass, rudderless life,” she said out loud.

  Gracie crashed back to earth, belatedly and with no small amount of guilt thinking of Cashman. He was out there somewhere actively looking for the MisPers. Maybe that was why he was late. Maybe Mr. X got him. Maybe at this very moment he was lying on his back with his throat cut, sightless eyes staring up at the—

  Quit! It!

  Cashman would be very hard to take out, Gracie assured herself. Plus the chances were slim that Mr. X would attack someone wearing Sheriff’s Department patches on his neon orange parka and helmet.

  A branch breaking on the hillside below sounded like a rifle shot in the dark. Adrenaline sizzled like a jolt of electricity all the way to Gracie’s fingertips.

  Someone was stealthily climbing up from the creek.

  Gracie froze, her breathing shallow. She prayed that Rob would make no sound inside the shelter. The hand that gripped the knife’s handle was slippery with sweat inside its glove.

  Leaves rustled. A footstep. Then another. Closer.

  She held her breath.

  “Gracie?”

  “Of course it’s Cashman,” she mumbled in disgust. “I have to quit reading those true-crime books.”

  “I’m here, Steve,” she called in a stage whisper. She slid the knife back into its sheath before Cashman could see it and wonder what she was doing. She would never live it down if he discovered she had thought he was Tristan, the Psycho Killer.

  She switched on her headlamp so he could locate her. “Why aren’t you using your headlamp?”

  “Could see without it,” he said in a perfunctory voice.

  Hard to argue with that. Fear melted into irritation. “What took you so long?”

  Ignoring Gracie’s tone, Cashman dropped his pack onto the ground and plopped down next to her. “Didn’t find nothin’. No other tracks. Reception pretty much sucked. Still windier’n hell up there. I radioed that we found Rob and are bivying for the night and I’ll call in again in the a.m. Not sure it went through.”

  “Did you ask him to page out more teams?”

  “Tried. Don’t think he could hear me anyway. Where is he?” Gracie assumed he was talking about Rob since he glanced around, eyes homing in on the orange plastic. “Up there?”

  Disturbed by the possibility that Ralph might not have received the request for additional teams, Gracie answered absently, “Yeah. Good enough for one night.”

  “Hell, yeah! Can’t exp
ect a Holiday Inn out here.” Cashman pulled out a water bottle and tipped it back, gulping loudly.

  “Rob told me why he left the trail,” Gracie said.

  He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Yeah?”

  Gracie related what the actor had told her, along with her theory that while his story might be injury-induced, it, along with the blood on the outcropping, might be more than a coincidence, and that they needed to be careful. There might be someone out there looking for Rob and intending him, and by default the two of them, harm.

  Cashman recapped his water bottle. “Don’t buy it. He probably fell, got conked on the head and is seein’ things.” He pushed himself to his feet and grabbed up his pack by a strap. “Too many slasher movies or whatever.”

  Leaving Gracie openmouthed, he stepped a half-dozen steps away to a relatively flat spot and pulled the bivy sack from his pack.

  CHAPTER

  26

  MILOCEK sprang from the shadows at a crouched run. In seconds he covered the fifty feet from the edge of the trailhead parking lot to his car, an inconspicuous white Toyota Corolla specifically purchased to blend in among the countless other little white cars in Southern California.

  The motor home and cars were parked in a line at one end of the parking lot. At the opposite end, a marked Sheriff’s Department unit blocked the entrance. On his right sat a Suburban and white utility truck hooked up to a small travel trailer. Lettering and seals identified both vehicles as Search and Rescue. Generator-powered spotlights lit up that half of the parking lot like the Las Vegas Raceway. A yellow glow from inside the little trailer itself suggested someone inside.

  Back at the outcropping Milocek had decided that inaction was his best course of action. If he stayed where he was, he could watch for Diana and the two searchers at once. He had been prepared to wait as long as it took.

  But his body had finally betrayed him. His throat was so parched he couldn’t swallow, and his last urine output had been sparse, what little there was a dark, opaque yellow. He could feel his body growing weaker.