Endangered (A Sam Westin Mystery Book 1) Page 14

  The sweat on Wilson’s face and bald spot gleamed in the bright light over the restroom entrance. As he wiped a drip from his chin on the back of his sleeve, a little boy came out of the restroom and walked up to the fountain. Wilson held the child up to the spout, clasping the small body tightly between his legs and the metal drinking fixture. A smile crept onto Wilson’s face as he gazed down at the boy, and it stayed there when he set the child down on the ground. Rafael felt relief when a woman exited the women’s side of the building and took the child away with her.

  So Wilson was still here. And he did like kids. Maybe he was just fondly remembering his grandkids, but maybe he was the kind of creep that liked kids too much. After making sure that mother and son and Wilson returned to their respective campsites, Rafael drove away.

  His mother-in-law sure knew how to pick them. Her first husband, Anita’s father, had drunk himself into an early grave. He gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to sort out his thoughts. Did his uneasiness about Russell Wilson come from his experiences as Miranda’s son-in-law, as a father, or as a law enforcement officer?

  * * * * *

  The rock floor fell away into blackness below. Sixty feet beyond the yawning space, the flat white plane of the mesa continued.

  “You call this a shortcut?” Perez growled. “I can’t fly.”

  “You won’t have to.” Stepping down onto a narrow ledge a foot below the rim, Sam directed the flashlight onto the rock at her feet. “Stay close to me, and watch your step.”

  He climbed gingerly down beside her and peered over the canyon lip. “Must be at least forty feet down there.”

  “Closer to sixty in the middle,” she said in a soft voice.

  “How are we—” He stopped in midsentence as Sam’s flashlight beam revealed the narrow strip of limestone that spanned the canyon. She stepped out onto Rainbow Bridge.

  Perez sucked in his breath, hesitated a second before asking, “Have you done this before?”

  “Of course.” But only once, and that had been in daylight. She tried to sound confident even as she fought the urge to hold out her arms like a tightrope walker.

  When she was about ten feet onto the span, she noticed that Perez remained on the lip of the canyon.

  “Hey, FBI, you coming or not?” She squatted, placed a hand on the stone. The grainy surface was warmer than the air, having absorbed the sun’s heat all day. Making a fist, she thumped it against the wind-worn rock. “It’s solid.”

  He switched on his flashlight and sidestepped out beside her, sweeping the beam nervously back and forth over the bridge surface and into the yawning space below.

  The smooth surface of the rock arch gleamed in the moonlight. Sam cautiously advanced, preceding her steps with the penlight’s beam. The circle of light slipped off the lip of limestone to her right, revealing a drop off into inky space only inches away.

  “Just keep the rock in front of your feet. And don’t look down.” The warning was as much a reminder to herself as it was encouragement to him.

  She held her breath all the way, thankful that her flashlight highlighted not a single serpent. The warm, smooth rock of the arch was everything a desert snake could desire on a crisp fall night. She thought about how the cougars had sprawled across the wind-worn surface.

  Where were Leto and her cubs now? Waiting silently in the shadows nearby, watching these two foolish humans risking their lives in the moonlight? No, they were probably prowling the canyons, hoping to surprise a sleeping deer. Or crouched under an overhang somewhere, still traumatized by all the flyovers today.

  After reaching the other side of the canyon, Perez ignored Sam’s outstretched hand and stepped down carefully beside her. He exhaled heavily, and she felt his breath, warm on her shoulder and neck.

  The howling began again a few seconds later.

  “He’s not far away now. Keep your voice down. Sound really carries out here at night.” She dowsed her light and climbed up to the top of the mesa, Perez right on her heels.

  “There.” Sam pointed. The apparition stood with his back to them, bare feet spread, arms outstretched. Coyote Charlie wasn’t naked tonight. Splotched fatigue pants hung loosely from his narrow hips, and a T-shirt clung to his lean chest. He wore a kerchief over his hair. As the series of coyote yips increased in volume from the other side of the canyon, the man clenched his fists, threw back his head, and belted out a haunting howl.

  Perez drew the pistol from his belt, held it with both hands as he walked toward the ghostly figure. As the mournful note wavered and faded away, Perez’s footsteps became audible on the hard rock surface. Coyote Charlie swiveled to face the FBI agent.

  “Hands in the air!” bellowed Perez. He halted, his feet shoulder distance apart. “FBI!”

  Charlie was motionless for a moment, hands held stiffly out to his sides. Then he bent at the waist, and with a scrabbling of hands and feet, abruptly disappeared from the horizon, leaving only a star-spangled sky where he had stood.

  Perez sprinted forward. Sam ran after him, catching up as he slammed to a stop at the edge of the mesa. Their flashlights revealed a series of narrow ledges jutting out from the sheer cliff face at their feet. The ultra-high-pitched squeaks of bats were shrill in the night air. A shower of pebbles rattled somewhere below.

  She couldn’t resist needling Perez. “That worked out well.”

  He sputtered what she suspected were Spanish expletives.

  “Give it up, FBI. We’re not going to catch him tonight. He knows this area like the back of his hand.”

  “Damn.” He sighed. “What’s down there?”

  “The ruins.”

  He peered more intently into the blackness below.

  “You can’t see them from this angle. This cliff is a crescent-shaped overhang, what they call a blind arch. Beneath it are some Anasazi ruins. Below that, a waterfall that comes out of the Curtain. And there’s Goodman Trail, which leads up through Sunset Canyon; it comes out about a half mile from here, behind those hoodoos.” She indicated a row of rock sentinels to the west. Normally a brilliant red in daylight, they were dark gray and sinister-looking in the moonlight.

  “I want to go down there.”

  She groaned. “We’ve already got nearly an hour hike back to my camp.”

  “I don’t want to go down there tonight,” he clarified. “But first thing tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Since when does the FBI need my permission to go anywhere?”

  He turned and faced her. “Since this FBI agent needs a guide. Can you take me to those ruins tomorrow?”

  Sam considered. “If we can stop off a few places along the way, looking for Zack.”

  He nodded. “Even better.”

  “You’ll have to keep up.”

  He stiffened. “Haven’t I so far?”

  “And only if you’ll share information.”

  “We’ll have to see about that.” He slid the pistol into the holster at the side of his belt and visibly relaxed. “It’s a fine night for a moonlit stroll.”

  He was right. The Temple Cap sandstone gleamed like new-fallen snow in the bright moonlight, the whiteness broken occasionally by spiky bursts of yucca and stark skeletons of dwarf junipers. The air was reasonably warm, too, somewhere around sixty degrees right now. If Zack was out here somewhere, as long as he was sheltered from the wind—

  “That child might make it through a night like this,” Perez said, startling her.

  She resolved to block embarrassing thoughts from her brain when he was in the vicinity.

  For a long moment he stood in silence, head thrown back, examining the sky.

  “You know,” he finally said, his words so soft that she had to strain to hear them, “I’d forgotten the stars.” He shook his head. “How could anyone forget the stars?”

  Over an hour later, they returned to the hidden canyon. Sam shoved her gear into her tent and sat down to untie her laces. Perez picked up his pack. “There’s not enough space for anoth
er tent here. I’ll camp outside.”

  “Suit yourself.” She yawned and kicked off her boots and sat rubbing her neck.

  “Whiplash?”

  “Huh?”

  “I noticed the back of your car. You got rear-ended recently?”

  “Three days ago.” She yawned again. Perez might have zipped around in a helicopter today, but she’d hiked more than a dozen miles, and that on almost no sleep from the night before. “My neck’s just a little stiff.”

  He set down his backpack. Then he slid his hands under the collar of her shirt. The motion made her shiver. He rubbed his palms over her neck and upper shoulders for a moment, creating a warm friction, and then his long fingers began to knead the muscles along her backbone. “How’s that?”

  “Mmmmm.” Sam was pretty sure she shouldn’t be enjoying the massage as much as she was. She needed to stay alert, stay on the job. For Save the Wilderness Fund. For Zack. For the cougars. But his long fingers felt heavenly as they expertly manipulated her sore muscles. She leaned back into his hands.

  “Feels good,” she murmured, her voice embarrassingly husky. What a cliché. He’d think she was deprived of sensual contact. Which, actually, she was. Fans imagined that the gorgeous Adam Steele had a hot sex life, but in truth he was so busy that their intimate encounters had been few and brief. He wasn’t a toucher, except for laying his arm across her shoulders now and then. And she didn’t want to think about Adam in any way right now.

  Warmth flooded downward from Perez’s fingers. In another minute, she’d be making little mewing sounds. “Were you a masseur in your former life?”

  “CPA,” he said.

  “An accountant?”

  “Lots of agents come from accounting backgrounds.” He pulled his hands out from beneath her collar and moved them lower down, pinpointing the V between her shoulder blades. His thumbs started little curlicue movements. Along with a not wholly pleasant burn in her injured muscles, tingling sensations crept through her body. In a minute he’d know she wasn’t merely deprived. Depraved would be a more accurate description.

  Zack, she reminded herself. Her job. She couldn’t become a puddle of warm ooze.

  She swallowed, sat up straighter. “Much better,” she said briskly. “Thanks.”

  He rubbed for a couple of seconds more, then stood up. “You’re welcome.” He shouldered his pack again. “Good night.”

  She crawled into her tent and zipped the flap shut.

  He paused outside. “I still want to question Coyote Charlie.”

  You would, she thought. “Good night, Special Agent Chase J. Perez.”

  His footsteps slapped softly against the limestone of the canyon floor, then faded away.

  She closed her eyes but couldn’t drift off. Her neck still tingled where Perez had rubbed it. She checked her watch: to her surprise, it was not quite eleven o’clock. Sliding out of her sleeping bag, she found the portable radio in her pile of gear, crawled out of the tent, and carried the radio to the top of the biggest boulder. Perez was nowhere in sight, but she could see shadows moving just beyond a row of upthrust rocks; that had to be him. She raised the radio to her lips, pressed the button. “Three-three-nine, come in, three-three-nine.”

  After two more tries, Kent answered, breathless. “Three-three-nine.” She guessed that he hadn’t had his radio on his belt but had to scramble for it.

  “Hey, Kent, it’s Sam.”

  “Sam? I wondered who’d be in range up here at this hour. You have a radio?”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a short silence, and then he said, “Smart-ass.”

  “You gave me that one.” She laughed. “How’s it going there?”

  “Aren’t the stars incredible? I saw a collared lizard today. He ran away on his hind feet, just like one of those nature films on TV.”

  “Whoa, I’m jealous. I’ve never seen that.”

  “The G-D helicopters scared everything else away. Everything except good ol’ boys. Castillo wrote five citations for menacing with firearms today; Taylor’s up to three. Hope we’re not becoming another Yosemite.”

  She knew what he meant: rangers on constant patrol with pistols and nightsticks.

  Kent continued. “I had to read the riot act to three hunters packing rifles. They weren’t exactly polite, but they left peaceably enough. I’ve got Mesa Camp all to myself. Your turn.”

  “Enjoy the peace and quiet, Kent. Anything new about Zack?”

  “Nope. And damn, that can’t be good . . . They’ll be asking me to hunt down Apollo next.”

  He obviously hadn’t heard about Wildlife Services being called in. Sam chose not to enlighten him. Let him be happy for one last evening.

  “Oh, wow! Just saw a shooting star! Or maybe a UFO—I’ll have to ask FBI Man if he knows anything about that.”

  “I saw Coyote Charlie tonight.”

  “Naked?”

  She snorted. “Not this time. I only saw him from a distance, and he vanished pretty quickly. Does he ever come down to the valley? Does he live nearby—maybe in Las Rojas or Floral?”

  “Hmmm. I’ve never heard about him except up in the high country. But he’s got to live somewhere not too far away, right?” For a few seconds she heard only breathing. “Wouldn’t it be weird if he turned out to be the high school English teacher or something?”

  Somehow she’d never thought about Charlie talking, let alone holding down a job. Perez was right: her concept of the park phantom was too romantic. Charlie was, after all, human. “Do you know how he got the name Coyote Charlie?”

  “I’m trying to remember.” His breath rasped across the airwaves. “Scotty—that’s where I first heard it.”

  “As in ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?”

  “As in Scotty McElroy—he heads up the local branch of the Sierra Club. He was hiking this area twenty years before it became Heritage National Monument. Scotty’s the one who first called him Coyote Charlie.”

  Sam made a mental note to tell Perez.

  “Are you looking for Coyote Charlie?”

  “He might have seen something that would help find Zack. I just want to ask him a few questions.”

  “Don’t we all!” He laughed. “You’ll wear out your boots before you catch Charlie.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Good night, three-three-nine. Over.”

  “Night, Sam. Three-three-nine, clear.”

  * * * * *

  Perez rested his head on his rolled-up pants and listened to the quiet murmur of Summer Westin’s voice. He could tell by the rhythm that she was using a two-way radio, but he couldn’t hear the actual words. Briefly he considered walking closer to her camp, but in this bright moonlight, she was sure to spot him.

  What a beautiful night. He hadn’t camped more than once or twice since he was a kid. Summer Alicia Westin was a paradoxical combination of wilderness savvy and the edginess that he’d noticed in people with high-stress, high-tech jobs: too many wires feeding into too few circuits.

  He remembered an old Lakota legend about a wizard whose beautiful wife was repeatedly stolen away by supernatural animals—magic buffalo and thunderbirds. No animal would need to carry off Summer Westin; she’d follow any of them willingly.

  The two kidnappings he’d worked on so far had ended in shallow graves in the woods. But then again, this might not be a kidnapping; the evidence didn’t add up. Fischer’s uncorroborated story of his whereabouts the night of his son’s disappearance, and then again during his walk about town the next day. The ransom note. The shoe on the trail. Paw prints near the campground, near the shoe.

  Westin was right, it would make his life and Nicole’s easier if it turned out that a big cat had grabbed the kid—then it would be a case for the animal experts, not the FBI.

  What a jumble of disconnected events and people: they needed more than just two agents on this. The local cops weren’t good for much of anything.

  There had to be a pattern in there somewhere
; there always was. He closed his eyes to review what he’d learned so far.

  * * * * *

  Sam ran her fingers over a worn cross-stitched rose on the ancient pillowcase she always traveled with. It had been her first embroidery project at the age of nine. The feel of the thick cotton thread always brought back thoughts of the Kansas countryside where she grew up. And as always, a trickle of guilt intertwined with the memories of her family. According to their expectations, she should be a well-settled matron by now. Not Wilderness Westin, cyber-reporter in the midst of a major disaster story splashed across the television news by a man she previously thought of as a romantic interest.

  What would tomorrow bring? At least by accompanying Agent Perez, she’d learn of any new developments. Poor Zack. This would be his third night alone. If he was alone. And if he was still alive.

  He could be face down in a creek. In the trunk of a car, gagged and bound. With some toddler-loving pedophile. And because he was still missing, trigger-happy good ol’ boys were going to murder any cougar that showed up in their gun sights.

  Quit it. She closed her eyes, concentrated on seeing cougars free and healthy. She envisioned Zack safe and warm, playing with his toys, laughing with his mother.

  Imagining Jenny Fischer conjured up Fred as well. Could he have intentionally injured his son?

  Could Coyote Charlie be a villain? She’d always envisioned him as a vagabond who identified more with wild things than with his own species. A lost sixties type on a spiritual quest, sort of like the odd hiker she’d met this afternoon, but one who prowled around at night with other nocturnal animals.

  Perez had hinted that Coyote Charlie might be psychotic. She’d read stories of Vietnam vets going berserk, murdering their families while reliving Viet Cong attacks in the middle of the night. What did the world look like from Coyote Charlie’s eyes in the wee hours? Did he relive some mad past? Was he a gentle creature rambling in the moonlight, like the mule deer, or a predator who took advantage of the darkness to stalk his prey? Did he prey on children?

  Predators of children. Wilson. LEGOs and animal crackers. Zack’s red cap. There was something slimy about that man. He was a cave-dwelling salamander, pale and soft, afraid of the sunlight. But Perez had said that Wilson’s record had checked out. And he didn’t fit in easily with the shoe. She remembered the feel of Wilson’s soft belly as she’d brushed up against him in his RV. Could he hike four miles without having a heart attack?