Murder on the Horizon - Couverture souple

Rowland, M.L.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0425263681 ISBN 13 : 9780425263686

Editeur : Berkley, 2015

Synopsis

The Search and Rescue mystery series returns readers to Timber Creek, where the hot, dry Santa Ana winds are blowing. But more than just the threat of wildfire endangers the tiny mountain community...

Gracie and her Search and Rescue teammates are searching along the highway in the middle of the blisteringly hot Mojave Desert when they make a grisly discovery—a trash bag containing human body parts. Not long after, Gracie's growing friendship with a ten-year-old runaway draws her unwittingly into the secretive, hate-filled world of the boy's family—a group of gun-toting extremists. As a wildfire roars into Timber Creek, Gracie finds herself caught up in an explosive plot that, unless she stops it, will destroy countless innocent lives.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

A former search and rescue worker for over a decade, M. L. Rowland lives with her family on the Arkansas River in Colorado. She is the author of Zero Degree Murder.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

“DAMN, that’s a lot of blood,” a man said, voice echoing in the large room.

“What the hell d’you expect?” a second man said. “Go get a bucket.”

“Hey, got my hands full here! You get a damn bucket.”

Footsteps receded.

The sound of sawing. A curse. The crinkle of heavy plastic.

Johnny Cash’s deep bass sang from a radio somewhere nearby: “Now gettin’ caught meant gettin’ fired.”

Banging and clattering from the other end of the room.

“Bring me two while you’re at it,” the first man yelled. “Gotta have something to put . . .” He stopped to sing along.

The man drew in a deep breath and belted out the chorus. “‘I’d get it one piece at a time, and it wouldn’t cost me a dime.’” He chuckled and said to himself, “One piece at a time.”

Two buckets plunked on the floor.

“Hey,” the man said. “One piece at a time. Get it? One piece at a time?”

“Yeah. I get it.”

CHAPTER

1

“IT’S friggin’ hot,” Gracie muttered, using a trekking pole to shove aside the bottom branches of a creosote bush. Dust and pollen billowed up around her, sticking to the sweat on her temples and making them itch. Pinching her nose to stifle a sneeze, she bent to scan the buff-colored ground beneath, spotting nothing but a powder blue plastic blob—a soiled disposable diaper tossed from a passing car. With the toe of her hiking boot, Gracie nudged the blue ball aside. Seeing nothing of interest, she stepped back and let the branches swing back into place.

Five members of Timber Creek Search and Rescue formed a ragged line stretching out across the Mojave Desert. Warren was guiding left off the sage-choked shoulder of the I-15 freeway with Jon Barton walking fifteen feet off to his right along the barbed wire right-of-way fence. Gracie walked on the other side of the fence with Lenny Olsen next to her and Carrie Matthews on the far end.

That morning, the searchers had responded to a callout for an evidence search, leaving the Sheriff’s Office substation before dawn, making the two-hour drive down from the Bavarian-style resort town high in the mountains a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, and out into the middle of the Mojave. Their assignment: Comb a mile-long segment of ground alongside the I-15 corridor for a Smith & Wesson Model 57 .41 Magnum revolver, black with a walnut grip, allegedly used in a triple homicide in the tiny desert town of Baker, and, according to a witness, tossed from a motorcycle of unknown make traveling west on the interstate in excess of eighty miles an hour.

Four additional county SAR teams were searching similar mile-long segments, three in front of the Timber Creek team, one behind.

Maintaining a cursory spacing of fifteen feet, Gracie and her teammates walked slowly westward, eyes scanning the ground in every direction. Using feet, hands, and trekking poles, they examined and poked around and beneath every bush, tree, and cactus, turning over every discarded fast-food wrapper, every empty Red Bull can, even scaring up an occasional jackrabbit to watch it zigzag away through the brush.

All wore the team’s orange cotton uniform shirt, desert camouflage army-surplus pants, floppy-brimmed hats, thick leather gloves, and knee-high gaiters of black, ripstop nylon, worn over the tops of boots to stave off punctures from mesquite thorns or rattlesnake fangs. One or two of the searchers wore day packs containing internal hydration bladders, some a water bottle clipped by a carabiner to an outside loop with spare water inside their packs.

Gracie stopped and pried a damp strand of hair off her cheek. Squinting behind her Ray-Bans against the blinding glare of the midday sun, eyes burning from pollen and sweaty trickles of sunscreen, she looked around her.

The vast desert dwarfed the searchers—a hardscrabble floor of dirt and rock dotted with stubby clumps of creosote, mesquite, and sage, its mountains jumbled mounds of chocolate-colored rock lining the northern horizon.

On the asphalt ribbon of highway off to the left, pickups, minivans, and semi-trucks whooshed by in a steady steel stream—eastward toward Las Vegas, lured by dreams of easy riches, sex, or adventure, westward to the flash of Los Angeles and Hollywood, or slinking home with pockets empty and hopes of instant wealth dashed.

When seen only from a car whizzing along the highway at seventy miles an hour, the Mojave Desert appeared as an endless, boring wasteland, harsh, desolate. Closer exploration revealed a diverse plant and animal life—from desert holly to prickly pear, from roadrunners to cactus wrens, bighorn sheep to kangaroo rats.

Gracie loved the desert in the winter. But in the long summer season, when temperatures soared well past one hundred degrees, the Mojave was a superheated skillet, brutal, unforgiving, able to kill the naive and unprepared in less than two hours.

The sun blistered down on the searchers from a faded-denim blue sky, scorching bent heads and backs. A sudden gust of dry wind blasted them with grit and dust.

Gracie turned her back to the searing wind, anchored her hat with her hand, and waited for it to dissipate. Then she slithered down a rocky embankment to the bottom of a dry wash. “Have I said it’s friggin’ hot?” she said, lifting up one end of a section of blown vehicle tire and tipping it off to the side. She scanned the sandy ground in all directions, saw nothing of note, and slogged across the deep sand and clambered up the other side.

Jon’s voice filtered up from the wash. “Only about twenty-two hundred fifty-three times.” FedEx double-trailers roared past on the highway. “I love the smell of diesel in the morning,” he said, reappearing out of the wash.

Fifteen years older and an inch or so shorter than Gracie, Jon was a retired civil engineer, lean and fit, consistently surprising younger, less-experienced members of the team by outlasting them on the trail. Next to Ralph Hunter, the team’s Commander and Gracie’s best friend, she trusted Jon’s physical capabilities and judgment more than anyone else’s on the team.

Gracie laid her trekking poles on the ground. Straightening again, she stood with her weight on one foot, resting the other ankle, which ached from a break several months earlier. “I love evidence searches in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day in hundred-degree weather,” she said, peeling her heavy braid off the back of her neck. She tucked the hair up beneath her hat and retrieved her poles from the ground. Looking over at Lenny on her right, she noticed the young man’s cheeks were flushed, and the skin on his burly arms a bright red. “Hey, Lenny,” she said. “Got sunscreen?”

“Forgot it.” Lenny was one of the newest and, at nineteen, youngest members of the team. With a quick, wide smile, a wild thatch of straw-colored hair, and astonishing cornflower blue eyes, he was instantly likable, a good soul, by far the most exuberant on the team. But as time went on and the number of searches Gracie worked with Lenny increased, she was learning his youthful enthusiasm had a downside. Lenny was prone to carelessness about his own safety and equipment, often forgetting the most fundamental tenet of Search and Rescue: Don’t Get Dead.

“Boy, you lookin’ like a boiled mudbug, you,” Jon called over.

Lenny grimaced. “Huh?”

“Crawfish,” Gracie said. “A boiled crawfish.”

“Okay, I get it,” Lenny said. “I look at the sun, I turn red.”

Gracie dug a four-ounce tube of Banana Boat SPF 100 from her radio chest pack and tossed it over to Lenny, who snapped it out of the air. “Next time maybe wear your long-sleeved shirt?” she suggested. “Keep those arms covered?”

“Yeah, okay,” the young man said without resentment. He stopped, removed his gloves, tossed them on the ground, and slathered the sunscreen over his broiled arms and cheeks. “How hot is it anyway?”

“Supposed to top out somewhere round a hundred and eight,” Carrie called from the end of the line.

“Hunnert ’n’ eight,” Lenny said, lobbing the tube of sunscreen back over his head to Gracie. “That’s not a temperature! That’s an oven setting!”

“But it’s a dry heat,” Jon said, eyes gleaming with mischief behind his wire-rims. “It’s so hot,” he said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “cows are giving evaporated milk.”

“Here we go,” Gracie said, then took a long draw of still-cold water from the hydration bladder inside her pack.

From the other end of the line, Warren yelled back in his deep, deadpan voice. “It’s so hot, I saw a chicken lay a hard-boiled egg.”

“It’s so hot,” Jon shot back, “I saw a chicken lay an omelet.”

Chuckles drifted up and down the grid line.

Inexplicably charging, arms and legs thrashing right through the middle of a stand of sage four feet high, Lenny yelled, “By the time my wife got home from the store with the bread, it was toast.”

Warren yelled again. “It’s so hot, the squirrels are fanning their nuts.”

Laughter.

“It’s so hot,” Jon said. “The hooker’s—” He stopped.

“C’mon! The hooker’s what?” Lenny asked.

“Later, Lenny. Mixed company.”

“Bah-dum-bum,” Gracie said.

More laughter.

The searchers moved slowly forward without speaking, eyes scanning the hard-packed ground, prodding beneath bushes, kicking over rocks, until Lenny broke the silence by asking, “Hey, Gracie, how far’ve we gone, d’ya think?”

Squinting back over her shoulder, Gracie could just make out the overpass where they had parked the team’s Suburban. “Half mile maybe. Maybe less.”

“How much farther do we have to go, d’ya think?”

Gracie craned her head and looked up the highway. “Can’t see the mile marker yet.” She turned over a child’s car seat with the toe of her boot and kept walking, eyes sweeping the ground. “We’re not even halfway yet.”

Carrie used her trekking pole to roll a sealed plastic bottle filled with what looked like dark brown tea away from the base of a creosote bush. She bent and picked it up to look at it more closely.

Petite, but physically strong, Carrie was the newest member of Timber Creek SAR, and not yet comfortable joining in the team banter. But there was no fuss with her, no drama. She was smart and competent, did her homework, and was ready for almost anything. As a result, even though Carrie had been on the team less than a year, Gracie trusted her to do her job thoroughly and do it well.

“What are all these?” Carrie asked, examining the bottle in her hands. “I’ve seen a lot of ’em. They look like iced tea or something.”

Lenny guffawed. “It’s trucker piss!”

“Ewww!” Carrie dropped the bottle and wiped her gloves on her pants. “What the hell?” She kicked the bottle away. “Really? Truckers do that?”

“And anyone else driving through the desert who doesn’t want to stop,” Gracie said. “Personally, it’s my most favorite thing.”

“Yum,” Jon said. “Fermented redneck urine.”

“Ugh,” Carrie said, kicking at the bottle again. “Why can’t they keep it to throw it away later? Or at the very least throw it out without the cap so it can dry out. That’s just gross!”

“You really think we’re gonna find this gun?” Lenny asked, whacking at the ground with his trekking pole for no apparent reason.

“Prolly not,” Gracie answered.

“Then why do we have to do this?”

“The SO covering its behind.” She looked over toward Jon, who had stopped several paces back and was using his trekking pole to poke at something black suspended from a mesquite tree branch a few feet off the ground. “Whatcha got, Mr. B?”

“Dunno yet.”

“Hold up!” Gracie called to the rest of the group. “Jon’s got something maybe.”

“Is it the gun?” Lenny asked, trotting over.

Gracie walked over to stand next to Jon.

A black plastic trash bag, knotted closed, hung from the mesquite tree as if tossed from a passing car and snagged by the end of a branch. Its contents, a lump of something, hung at the bottom of the bag.

“What is it?” Carrie asked, walking up.

“No idea.”

“Been out here awhile,” Gracie said, leaning in for a better look. “Plastic’s pretty dusty and degraded.”

Gracie looked over at Jon, who was staring at the bag. She could see the layer of dust on his glasses. “Wanna do the honors of opening it?”

“I’m not gonna open it,” Jon said, taking a step back. “You open it.”

“I’m not gonna open it,” Gracie said.

“You have seniority.”

“You’re older.”

“You’re younger. And tougher.”

“This from the man who runs marathons in the mountains.”

“Warren,” Jon said to his teammate who was just walking up. “Get over here and open this.”

Warren leaned both hands on his pole and studied the bag. “I’m not gonna open it,” he said finally. “Let’s get Lenny. Yeah. He’ll open anything. Hey, Lenny. You open it.”

With one eye closed in a grimace, Lenny stepped forward and edged the sharp point of his trekking pole into the black plastic and pulled it off the branch. The soft plastic, malleable from the heat, stretched and broke, spilling the contents onto the ground—a pile of human hands.

The entire group jumped back. “Gross! Damn!”

“What is that?” Lenny asked.

“Well, Lenny,” Jon said, “It looks like a little clump of hands to me.”

“Four, to be exact,” Warren said.

“That’s so gross,” Lenny whispered.

Gracie looked over at him. His face had lost its color and his mouth was moving as if the 7-Eleven burrito he’d had for breakfast was about to make an appearance.

Her own stomach was doing its impression of Old Faithful, churning beneath the surface with the possibility of eruption at any moment. She breathed in through her nose, out again through her mouth, and then bent, elbows on knees, to examine the pile of hands more closely.

The skin was yellowed, tendons and bones showing white at the severed ends. The nails on two of the hands were painted with little palm trees. “Obviously two different people,” she said. “One’s a woman’s.”

Warren asked, “Is that a tattoo?”

“Where?” Gracie asked.

He pointed with the tip of his trekking pole. “The wrist there.”

Then Gracie saw it, a portion of a tattoo, on the inside of one of the wrists.

Lenny took a careful step forward and leaned in. “Turn it over.”

“Crime scene,” Gracie said.

“Ya think?” Jon said with a wink in her direction.

“Were they murdered?” Lenny asked, his voice inching into its upper range.

Gracie shot him a look.

Lenny’s eyes flicked to Gracie’s. “What? I was just asking.”

“Probably not going to make a big difference if we move something a hair,” Jon said.

“Probably not.”

“Somebody turn it over.”

Nobody moved.

“Come on,” Gracie said. “Who’s got a trekking pole handy?”

“You,” everyone answered in unison.

“Buncha wusses,” she mumbled. With teeth bared, she nudged the hand with the tip of her pole so that it fell back, open palm to the sky, fully exposing the partial tattoo on the inside of the wrist.

Everyone leaned in.

Carrie pointed. “That’s a skull and crossbones.”

“And some kind of lettering.”

“What’s it say?”

“Hard to read.”

“That’s an A,” Gracie said. “Then something else. Can’t quite . . .”

She heard a faint click and looked over to see Lenny taking a picture of the hands with his cell phone. “Lenny,” she said, straightening. “That turns up on social media somewhere and heads will roll. Yours. Mine. And ours.”

“I wasn’t gonna . . .” he said in a way that made Gracie think that was exactly what he was intending.

“I mean it.”

“Okay! Okay.”

“Everybody, listen up,” Jon said. “You post a picture of something like this, of a victim, or anyone we rescue, on Facebook or YouTube or wherever and you’re off the damn team faster ’n anybody can say, ‘You’re off the damn team.’”

“I got it,” Lenny said, face even redder than before. “Sheesh.”

“That applies to everyone, Lenny,” Gracie said. “Me. Jon. Even Ralph.” She looked around the group. “Everyone okay with me calling this in?”

Several heads nodded.

Unable to tear her eyes from the pile of hands, Gracie pressed the little microphone button on the HT radio in her chest pack. “Command Post,” she said. “Ten Rescue Twenty-two.”

“Ten Rescue Twenty-two,” a male voice answered. “Go ahead.”

CHAPTER

2

GRACIE stood at the top of the steep driveway of her cabin, fourth from the top of Arcturus Drive, a giant panda mug of extra-strength Folger’s Instant in her hands, looking out to where the sun, a glowing orange orb against a pink-pearl sky, hovered four fingers above the rolling hills at the eastern end of the valley. The morning air was still cool on her bare arms and legs, but the wind that blew her hair back from her face felt warm, carrying with it a hint of sage and pine.

She took a sip of coffee and puzzled for the umpteenth time over the severed hands the Timber Creek SAR team had found on the evidence search the previous week.

It was obvious the hands belonged to a man and a woman. But how were they related? Were they married? Brother and sister? Where did they live? Where had they worked? Did they have kids missing them and wondering what had happened to them?

That they had been murdered was a given.

But why?

Cut it out, Kinkaid, Gracie told herself with a shake of her head. She knew better than to become emotionally involved with search victims, especially dead ones. But for the past week, the puzzle of the severed hands had insisted on wheedling its way into her thoughts as if with a will of its own.

She took another sip of coffee.

Maybe it had been a family dispute. Or a drug deal gone bad.

Gracie closed her eyes, trying to remember what the tattoo on the inside of one of the wrists had looked like. At the time, she wasn’t exactly concentrating on the tattoo on the wrist, rather on the non-attachment of that same wrist to anything else.

It had a skull and crossbones. And some kind of lettering. An A.

What else?

That was all she could remember: a skull and crossbones and the letter A.

She assumed the hands had been lopped off to keep the bodies from being readily identified. So where were the bodies themselves?

By now, she figured, gone with the wind.

It was a grim fact that bodies left out in the Mojave, desiccated by the dry air and charbroiled black by the merciless sun, torn apart and carried off by coyotes and other denizens of the desert, simply didn’t last very long. A few days. “Tops,” Gracie said aloud. That was why it was the ideal dumping ground for bodies and any spare parts lying around.

Quit thinking about it!

Gracie opened her eyes, took another sip of coffee, and looked down at her dog, Minnie, sitting at her feet. Wind ruffled her shining black fur. Her black nose was lifted to the air and twitching. What scents, Gracie wondered, is that amazing nose catching that mine can’t?

She winced inwardly as her eyes traveled around the yard, such as it was—after ten years, there were still mostly bare rectangles of dirt and rock with a clump of bedraggled hot pink petunias near the steps leading up to the front door. The maroon paint of her Ford Ranger pickup parked at the top of the asphalt driveway was freckled with rust. But the Maltby cabin itself she admired with unabashed pride. The logs painted red, the trim and deck stained their natural cedar. A pair of antique skis crisscrossed beneath the east-facing window of the loft bedroom. The antique wagon wheel she had snagged at a Labor Day garage sale for $10.

A burst of hot wind hit Gracie, knocking her back a step. “Wow,” she said. “Santa Anas, Minnie. Fire season’s definitely here.”

The dog responded with a single sweep of her feather duster tail along the asphalt.

With years of fire suppression and scavenging bark beetles dealing the final deathblow to millions of drought-stressed trees, the mountains lining the Timber Creek valley were a conflagration lying in wait. The opportunistic Santa Ana winds, blowing in hot and dry from the Mojave, whipped tiny sparks into whirling dervishes of fire. At the beginning of fire season, which, it seemed, began earlier and earlier every year, a clenched fist of low-level anxiety lodged itself somewhere behind Gracie’s sternum and stayed there until the first real snow of the winter.

A low growl drew Gracie’s eyes back down to Minnie, who now was sitting at attention, fur raised in a ridge along her back, head cocked to the left, ears pricked, eyes riveted on the road below the driveway.

Gracie’s eyes followed Minnie’s gaze to where a tall, lanky black man was just strolling into view. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, baggy khaki pants, and white tennis shoes scuffed to gray. A U.S. Navy baseball cap lettered in yellow—USS BEALE, DD-471—covered his short, gray hair.

Holding the man’s hand was a girl, probably nine or ten years old, dressed in a pink butterfly-covered sweatshirt and shorts, white socks, and pink tennis shoes. Pink ribbons and butterfly barrettes held pigtails in place.

Gracie recognized the man as her new neighbor down the road. She had seen him only once since he and his wife had moved into the bungalow at the bottom of the hill, but was very pleased with the remarkable transformation that was taking place. Once owned by Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, local drug dealers, the house had been a blight on the neighborhood—faded red paint with visible patches of gray cement block, missing shingles, windows opaque with filth, and a trash-littered dirt front yard that turned into a mud wallow with the rain. Over the last several months, the small square house had been painted a sedate taupe with a glossy black front door and shutters. A new sod lawn had been laid and burning bush shrubs strategically placed. A cherry red Adirondack chair and pot of matching geraniums sat on the newly constructed front deck.

Tempted to sidestep out of sight behind her truck, but forcing herself to be a good neighbor instead, Gracie said with a smile, “Good morning.”

The man looked up, his expression guarded, wary.

Minnie barked, the fur along her back bristling into a black ridge.

The man stopped. The girl cried out in fear, grabbing on to the man’s hand with both of her own and backing out of sight behind his long legs.

“Minnie, no!” Mortified, Gracie grabbed ahold of the dog’s collar. “Sorry. I’ve never heard her bark before.” She pulled open the passenger door of the Ranger and ordered, “Get in.”

Instantly contrite, Minnie hopped onto the seat.

Gracie rolled the window down and pushed the door closed.

The man and girl had continued walking past the bottom of the driveway.

“I’m so sorry,” Gracie said, walking down the hill toward them. “I haven’t had Minnie very long. I guess she’s a little guarded around people she doesn’t know.” She stretched out her hand to the man. “Hi. I’m Gracie Kinkaid.”

The hand that took Gracie’s was as dry and light as an old leaf. “John Robinson,” the man said in a deep voice, resonant with a pleasing lilt, the origin of which Gracie couldn’t place. “This is my granddaughter, Acacia.” The love and pride in his voice was unmistakable. He gave the girl’s hand a little shake. “Acacia, say ‘Good morning’ to Miss Gracie.”

The pigtails emerged from behind the man’s legs. “Good morning, Miss Gracie.” Barely a whisper.

“Good morning, Acacia,” Gracie said, smiling and thoroughly charmed by the display of old-fashioned good manners.

For the next five minutes, Acacia peered out from behind her grandfather up the driveway to where Minnie sat looking out the window of the pickup as Gracie and John engaged in light, get-to-know-you talk about themselves, the neighborhood, and the quality of life in the mountains. Gracie shared that she was the new manager of Camp Ponderosa, a residential camp owned by a megachurch in Orange County, but that most of her life was taken up by her work on the local Search and Rescue team. In turn, Gracie learned that John, a retired attorney, and his wife, Vivian, a retired schoolteacher, had moved to the mountains from Pasadena for the quiet and fresh air. Reading through the lines, Gracie surmised that John and Vivian were raising their only daughter’s daughter away from the blight and violence of urban Los Angeles.

Gracie glanced down at her watch. “Oops. I need to go or I’ll be late for work. Nice to meet you. And welcome to the neighborhood,” she said, shaking the man’s hand again, pleased to see that the return smile had lost a little of its wariness.

“Pleased to meet you as well.”

By the time Gracie backed the Ranger down the driveway and out onto Arcturus, John and Acacia had disappeared around the bend in the road.

CHAPTER

3

THE Ranger bumped up and over the rise in the gravel road, glided beneath the hewn-log archway entrance to Camp Ponderosa, and past the dilapidated caretaker’s cottage known as the Gatehouse, which served as the camp office.

Gracie lifted her foot from the accelerator, coasting down a short hill and across the little bridge at the bottom, where months of summer heat had reduced the creek to a shining silver ribbon. Leaves on the cottonwoods lining its banks were already hinting at the brilliant yellows to arrive with the autumn.

Twenty feet past the creek, the woods ended with a large recreation field opening up on the left, a paved parking lot on the right. Straight ahead, in front of a tumble of boulders, wooden signs announced the camp’s ten-mile-per-hour speed limit and LOADING/UNLOADING ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. An eight-foot-high carved bear held another sign indicating the dining hall in Serrano Lodge off to the right.

The road itself continued on through to the rest of the developed ten acres of camp, past a small conference center, Mojave Lodge, several smaller cabins, staff living quarters, and pristine, five-acre Ponderosa Lake. But it was the surrounding forest that Gracie treasured: two hundred glorious, virtually untouched acres of skyscraping ponderosa, Jeffrey, and sugar pine with an understory of live oak and manzanita, California granite boulders the size and shape of elephants, brimming with pygmy nuthatches and mountain chickadees, chipmunks and raccoons, and an occasional black bear lumbering down from higher elevations in search of water or a snack.

Gracie turned right at the carved bear, then swung the Ranger around to the back of Serrano Lodge—a two-story cinder-block building painted a grayish brown to complement its surroundings. She parked near the back door leading into the kitchen, climbed out of the truck, and held the door while Minnie hopped out from her bed behind the front seat.

It was still surreal to Gracie that she was Camp Ponderosa’s new manager. Three months before, a scandal at the camp had resulted in the firing of over half of its employees, including the manager, as well as the adventure programming company Gracie had hired to help run million-watt movie star Rob Christian’s The Sky’s the Limit camp, a summer adventure program for at-risk youth.

Gracie had spent hours meeting with the church’s senior pastor, the congregational elders, and the accountants, after which she had been offered the job of managing the camp. She had jumped at the chance, surviving the frantically busy summer season by working sixteen-hour days and, more often than not, sleeping on a mattress in the empty room across the hall from her office.

Even though the fallout from the scandal had been short-lived, and despite the summer being a resounding success on all fronts, the emotional aftereffects of everything that had transpired, including multiple attempts on her life, had left Gracie feeling unsettled and wondering more than once if she needed a change of scenery, a fresh start somewhere else.

But Gracie adored Camp Ponderosa. As much as in her cabin at the top of Arcturus Drive, she felt at home there, as if she truly belonged.

Gracie sighed and looked around. A well-fed western gray squirrel flipped its bushy tail from atop a nearby rock. Ten feet above her head, an acorn woodpecker hopped up the giant cinnamon-colored plates of a ponderosa pine. There was a crisp sharpness to the air that followed the first cold snap of autumn, a humming anticipation of winter as if the clear ringing of a bell still hung in the air.

“Come on, Minnie,” she said to the dog sitting patiently at her feet. “Let’s go see what Allen’s up to.” She crossed the faded asphalt and pulled open the rusty screen door.

Letting the door whack closed behind her, she settled Minnie on her bed in the hallway closet and walked into the well-lit kitchen.

Three of the walls were lined with stainless steel countertops, two enormous walk-in refrigerators, and a commercial dishwasher. The far wall held a swinging door leading out into the main dining room and two roll-up windows on either side, one for serving meals to camp guests, one for receiving dirty dishes. From a CD player on a shelf, Willie Nelson twanged about blue eyes cryin’ in the rain.

In the center of the kitchen was an oblong butcher-block prep table. At the near end, Allen, the new head cook, was slicing through the tape on empty cardboard boxes with a box cutter, flattening them out, and piling them up for recycling.

To a fraction of an inch, Allen matched Gracie’s height of five foot eight. Somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, the man was wiry without an ounce of fat, but with an extra pound in tattoo ink that seemed to cover every square inch of skin except his head and the palms of his hands. Allen wore a white short-sleeved T-shirt, Rustler blue jeans, and paint-spattered steel-toed work boots. Somber blue eyes. Forehead and cheeks deeply lined. Long salt-and-pepper hair braided in the back and coiled up beneath a hairnet. In Gracie’s mind, it took a man without an iota of doubt—or care—about his masculinity to wear a hairnet. Allen was unflappable; his general expression and mild voice made it seem as if he had made peace with his existence in a hostile world.

Gracie had lucked out with Allen. Operating on a shoestring staff was the new normal at camp, at least until the following spring when occupancy rates would jump again along with the accompanying revenue. She had yet to hire a new maintenance director, but Allen had proven a maniacal worker, jumping in wherever and whenever needed.

The church had hired him away from another camp in the valley. Allen was an ex-con with a stint in San Quentin for a drug beef, but if a church-owned camp wasn’t willing to hire an ex-con, who would? While in prison, the man had earned a college degree in sociology. Upon meeting Allen for the first time, Gracie had felt an instant rapport, yet there was a steeliness about him that both scared and reassured her. All she knew was that she would rather have Allen in her corner than not. Plus, considering her own tendency for dinners of cold pizza eaten while standing at her kitchen sink, a taste of Allen’s lasagna and walnut brownies and she had been tempted to ask for his hand in marriage.

When Gracie appeared in the kitchen doorway, Allen glanced over his shoulder, then back down to the box he was flattening. “Mornin’, sweet pea,” he said.

“How are ya, stud muffin?” Gracie said as she walked over to the commercial dishwasher, slipped an apron over her head, and tied it behind her back.

Allen threw the flattened box on top of a pile on the floor. “As fine as if I had good sense, sugarplum.”

Gracie sprayed a tray already stacked with dirty dishes with scalding water, sending a plume of steam billowing around her, then pushed it along the rollers into the stainless steel dishwasher, slid the door closed, and flipped the On switch.

She grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Not a blamed thing. What’d you do last night?”

“Nothing much. Search and Rescue business meeting. Boring, but necessary. Then a beer after with some of the team at the Saddle Tramp.”

“A beer?”

“A as in one.”

“Tell me, buttercup, what do you find appealing about that Search and Rescue business?”

Gracie reached back to hang up the dish towel, then turned back, leaning against the counter. “It’s never the same thing. Kind of like that Forrest Gump thing. You never know what you’re going to get. Every mission is different, depending on who shows up, what the circumstances are. Could be a missing mountain biker or a downed airplane or a car over the side. Could be on San Raphael. Could be down in the desert. Could be snowing. Could be a billion degrees.”

“And you like that.”

Gracie nodded. “I do. Not always pleasant. In fact, sometimes it’s downright unpleasant. But that’s part of the job. I like the challenge. The variety. It’s never boring. It’s a way of life. Well, it’s my way of life. Even though I’m only a volunteer . . .”

“No one’s ever only a volunteer.”

“Even though I’m a volunteer,” she amended.

“Thank you.”

“The team infiltrates everything I do, impacts every decision I make. It’s who I am, how I see myself, how I define myself.” She stopped, realizing she had revealed way more of herself than she would have deemed prudent to someone she knew well, much less to someone she had only recently met, an ex-con with unknown history, unknown connections, unknown friends. “Okay, then. Guess I’ll go up to the Gatehouse.”

“Thanks for sharing that part of yourself with me, Gracie. I know it’s not easy for you.”

Gracie frowned over at Allen. Sometimes he saw a sight more than she liked.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Her Search and Rescue pager shrieked from the waistband of her shorts. She unclipped it and squinted at the tiny screen.

“Another search?” Allen asked.

Gracie nodded. “Missing juvenile.” She clipped the pager back onto her waistband, then stood unmoving, undecided.

“So what are you waiting for?”

“There’s a buttload of work to do in the office.”

“You got a missing kid. Nobody’s due in camp until tomorrow.”

“Do you mind watching Minnie again? I could be out all night.”

“Leave the little lady with me. I could use the intelligent conversation.”

Gracie shot Allen a look. He stood, box in one hand, box cutter in the other. “Well, go already! We’ll all survive without you for a day.” He winked at her.

“Ha. Ha. Minnie’s on her bed in the closet. She’s got food and water.” She lifted the receiver of the wall telephone, stopping again. How long would it take her to respond to the Sheriff’s Office out of which Timber Creek SAR operated? Her twenty-four-hour SAR pack and everything else—radio chest pack, GPS, floppy hat, fleece jacket, leather gloves, water bottle—were ready and waiting in the bed of the Ranger. All she needed to do was change into her SAR uniform, which hung behind the driver’s seat of the truck, then drive the twisting five miles down Cedar Mill Road and another four miles across town.

She dialed the number for the SO squad room and told the deputy who answered, “Kinkaid responding to the search. ETA twenty-five.”

With a wave and a “Thanks, snickerdoodle!” she trotted out of the kitchen.

“Go get ’em, Tiger Lily” drifted down the hallway after her.

CHAPTER

4

FROM the time Gracie flew out of the back door of the camp kitchen to the time she turned into the parking lot of the Sheriff’s Office substation, twenty-three minutes had elapsed.

Standing next to the Ranger in back of Serrano Lodge, she had pulled on her newly washed orange SAR uniform shirt, camo pants, and hiking boots while keeping one eye on the road into camp lest an unexpected visitor be treated to an impromptu peep show. With a quick stop at the office to tape a note and hastily drawn map on the front door to take any inquiries down to Allen in the camp kitchen, she careened out of camp and down steep, winding Cedar Mill Road at a hair-raising speed of fifty-seven miles per hour. Multiple stoplights and slow-moving traffic in town added another nail-chewing eleven minutes.

Gracie swung the truck into a parking space alongside the Sheriff’s Office building—long, two story, painted off-white, and trimmed in dark brown. Grabbing up her radio chest pack from the passenger’s seat, she walked over to where Warren was climbing down from out of the team’s ton-and-a-half utility truck behind which, hooked up and ready to go, was the mobile Incident Command Post, or ICP—a donated travel trailer refurbished and equipped with everything the team could possibly need to manage a search: maps and whiteboards, Incident Command System forms, laptop, copy machine and printer, office supplies, handheld radios and batteries, water and blankets.

Idling next to the utility truck was the team’s Ford F-150 pickup pulling a trailer carrying two ATVs. Both vehicles and the Command Post trailer were white, emblazoned with the Department’s signature chevron.

“Hey, Warren,” Gracie said, threading her arms through the straps of her radio pack.

With graying rust-colored hair and a mass of freckles, Warren was a big man of few words and many talents, working behind the scenes, doing whatever needed to be done for the team without thought or need for thanks or acknowledgement.

As Gracie clipped the radio pack on and untwisted the straps, she scanned the other vehicles in the parking lot. Her spirits drooped. Ralph Hunter’s bright red F-150 pickup was nowhere in sight.

Ralph was Gracie’s rock, the one person to whom she could talk, the one person she could rely on to always be there for her, to always care.

At least he had been in the past.

But several months earlier, Gracie had met Ralph’s rare display of emotional vulnerability with not love and compassion, but pity. Ralph’s response had been a cold fury and Gracie had been afraid she had lost her best friend forever. But Ralph had forgiven her and all was right with Gracie’s world until, unwittingly, she had hurt him again. That time he hadn’t forgiven her, freezing her out of his life and leaving her sick at heart.

Normally, Ralph clocked more hours and responded to more calls than any other member on the team except for Gracie. He had been on the team longer than anyone else. His leadership and experience were the mortar holding together the disparate set of personalities on the team. But, in the past six weeks, he hadn’t responded to a single callout, his absence from the last two team business meetings the topic of much speculation.

But Ralph not responding to searches or attending meetings because of a tiff with Gracie was an impossibility. He was too much of a professional to let personal squabbles get in the way of the job.

Something else is going on, she thought. He hadn’t returned any of her calls about SAR business and the five times she had driven past his house, his pickup hadn’t been parked at the top of the driveway. Ralph was a building contractor for high-end homes. Maybe his absence was as simple as his business picking up.

Worry and anxiety about Ralph pricked at Gracie. If he didn’t show up for this search, she decided, she would drive over to his cabin and camp out in front until she found out what was going on.

Gracie jolted back to the present. If Ralph didn’t show up for this search, managing the operation would fall to her. She looked around at the people and vehicles in the parking lot, taking stock of who had responded, thinking ahead to which assignment could be given to whom. Most of the core group—the diehards who showed up for almost every search—were there: Carrie, Jon, Warren, and Lenny.

“Kinkaid!” Jon called as he walked across the parking lot, backpack over one shoulder. “You in the ICP?”

“Unless you want it,” she called back.

“Hell, no!”

Carrie emerged from the employee’s entrance of the SO followed by two new team members, a married couple about whom Gracie knew nothing. Carrie conferred with the man and woman for a moment, then walked across the parking lot to hand Gracie a Dispatch printout of the original missing person call and a heavy Sheriff’s Department radio. “Gardner’s Watch Commander,” she said. “He basically said, ‘You’re on your own.’”

“Of course he did,” Gracie said, snapping the radio into her chest pack, perfectly content to conduct her own briefing, especially if it meant not having to deal with her nemesis on the Sheriff’s Department, Sergeant Ron Gardner.

Carrie held up a half-inch-thick sheaf of paper rubber-banded together. “MisPer flyers?”

“Hang on to ’em until we get on-scene, will you?” Then she looked up and yelled, “Okay, everybody, circle up for a briefing.”

When everyone had gathered around and the small talk had dribbled away to silence, Gracie said, “To those of you for whom this is your first search, welcome and thanks.” She looked down at the Dispatch report in her hands. “Our MisPer is a missing juvenile. Baxter Edwards. Eleven years old. Blond over—”

“Hey, that’s—” Lenny interrupted.

“—the same kid,” Jon finished.

“That’s two times in two months.”

“Three.”

“Months?”

“Times.”

“Kid’s a runaway,” Warren offered.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be called out for runaways,” Lenny said.

Gracie frowned. “I’m not familiar with him because I was—”

“Sitting at home eating bonbons,” Jon interjected.

“Loafing,” Warren added.

“Um, recuperating from a broken ankle?” Gracie said.

“Wimp.”

“Slacker.”

Gracie acknowledged the good-natured ribbing with a smile, and continued. “We’re not usually called in for runaways, especially chronic ones. My guess is it’s because of the boy’s age and the fact that he’s been missing for over twenty-four hours.” Her eyes moved over the printout. “Anyway . . . physical description. Blond over brown. Four foot seven. Sixty-six pounds. Black glasses.”

“He looks like Mr. Peabody,” Lenny said.

“Mr. Peabody’s the dog,” Carrie said. “The kid’s Sherman.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Okay,” Gracie said, forging ahead. “Last seen wearing woodland camouflage pants and jacket. Carrying a black backpack. Went missing from his home in Pine Knot sometime yesterday afternoon. Family’s been out searching for him.”

“Ain’t that just peachy,” Warren said.

“They’ll have trampled all over any tracks,” Lenny said.

“Grandmother finally called the SO this morning,” Gracie continued.

“Why would they wait over a day to call it in?” Carrie asked.

“Let’s just say the family doesn’t like law enforcement,” Jon answered.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Warren added in a low voice.

“They all live in a big, like, fortress in the woods,” Lenny said, his blue eyes shining.

“Compound,” Jon amended.

“Yeah. I heard they have an underground bunker and everything. Like on TV. They’re . . . what do you call ’em?”

“Doomsday preppers.”

“Yeah! Doomsday preppers!”

“Friggin’ wing nuts.”

“Hey, I watch that show.”

“Let’s stay on task here,” Gracie said, shifting her weight to the other leg to ease her aching ankle. “A missing eleven-year-old is an emergency, regardless of whether he’s a runaway or not. What happened with this kid the last two . . . three times?” She looked up. “Anybody know?”

“First time,” Jon said, “Baxter showed up over the river and through the woods at Grandma’s house a half mile or so away from home. They don’t all just get along. Kid told the debriefing SAR member—that would be moi—he was holed up at his fort the entire day. Close mouthed about where said fort was. Second time, he was spotted walking along the Boulevard by Maple. He was picked up by a deputy. Third time, who knows?”

“Third time,” Carrie said, “janitor at the high school found him scrounging in one of the Dumpsters for food.”

“Okay then,” Gracie said. “Warren’ll drive the ICP up. Set it up in the parking lot of the park next to the fire station. Corner of Spruce and Clampett.” She looked up. “Who’s driving the ATVs up?”

Lenny raised his hand.

“Good. You and Warren on ATVs. You both okay with that?”

Lenny pumped the air with his fist. “Sweet.”

“Okay, boss,” Warren affirmed.

“Jon and Carrie. Since the family’s uncooperative, we won’t be able to interview the parents. Grab an MPQ and go talk to the RP, the grandmother.” She looked down at the briefing sheet. “Sharon Edwards. 1058 Oak Street.”

Jon and Carrie scribbled down the information in pocket-sized notebooks.

“At least until things get set up in the ICP, Warren is Comms. Mr. Towne?”

Warren cleared his throat. “MAC10 talk group. I’ll distribute radios to teams when we get on-scene. Those of you who are new on the team and haven’t had the radio training yet, get with a more-experienced member who can show you how to find the right channel.”

“Standard safety message,” Gracie said. “Wear hats and sunscreen.”

“I’ve got mine!” Lenny announced, holding up an enormous economy-sized bottle of generic-brand SPF 110.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Berkley
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0425263681
• ISBN 13: 9780425263686
• Reliure: Poche
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible