Endangered (A Sam Westin Mystery Book 1) Page 17

  The shooter took a step closer. “Government pig.”

  Rafael retreated to his truck, pulled the radio from his belt, and called for assistance from any other ranger in the vicinity. He wondered where Taylor, the other law enforcement ranger, was right now. None of the general rangers carried guns, but the sight of any other uniform would be welcome. He wondered if the park service would spring for a bulletproof vest. Or pay for his funeral.

  * * * * *

  Sam and Perez scanned the canyon. They both knew the sickly sweet stench was the smell of death.

  “There.” Perez pointed to a pile of brush twenty yards away.

  Oh please, God, don’t let it be Zack. Sam took shallow breaths though her mouth as Perez lifted away the topmost branches. Her heart lurched at the sight of a moist brown eye. Dull now, the light gone from behind the pupil.

  Flies rose and buzzed around Sam’s head. She clenched her teeth to keep from inhaling the insects. Perez brushed away a layer of dried leaves. The head, neck, and legs of a mule deer lay flattened against the sandstone, the stomach and back haunches chewed away.

  “Cougar kill?” Perez’s words were pronounced through the collar of his shirt, which he had pulled across his nose and mouth.

  “I think so,” she confirmed. “Cougars hide their kills if they can’t eat the whole thing. They usually stick close by.”

  She brushed flies away from her forehead with the back of her wrist and shaded her eyes. Turning slowly in place, she surveyed the ground around them. A mottled lizard rested in the sparse shade of a mesquite bush. She lifted her gaze to the bluff nearby.

  A sudden link with piercing yellow eyes jolted her. An adult cougar stood in a shadowy niche in the cliff just above them. A sharp intake of breath informed her that Perez had seen the animal, too.

  The cat glared, flicking its long tail, its gaze locked with hers. She couldn’t inhale. Her lungs burned. The black and white markings on its muzzle were striking. So beautiful, so fierce.

  Then the cat snarled, revealing daggerlike teeth. The low-pitched sound echoed faintly against the opposing cliffside, as if another angry cat stood across the canyon behind them. Sam’s scalp tingled. Her skin prickled into goose bumps.

  The sensation released her from her catatonic state, and she sucked in a breath laden with the taste of rotting flesh. “Back away slowly,” she murmured. “Keep your eyes on him. Don’t turn your back, no matter what happens.”

  They walked backward, feeling for the uneven ground with hesitant footsteps. The cat snarled once more, then leapt down from its shallow cave. In her peripheral vision, Sam saw Perez grab for his pistol. After one last nervous glance at them, the cougar bounded away down the canyon, its tail outstretched behind its body, its padded feet making no sound at all on the hard rock.

  “Wow.” Perez lowered his pistol.

  “Yeah, wow,” Sam agreed. “That was a close one.”

  “Wilderness Westin was scared?”

  She batted a fly away from her temple with a shaking hand. “You’d be crazy not to be scared. Cougars are big predators, and we’re intruding on this one’s territory, right next to its kill. That cat weighs over a hundred pounds, and although he’s still young, he’s a hell of a lot better equipped for close combat than we are.”

  “He? Have you seen this cat before?”

  She nodded. “I think that was Apollo.”

  “Apollo?”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “We named them. Apollo is twenty-two months old; just taking off on his own, staking out his territory. His mother, Leto, and sister, Artemis, are probably close by.”

  Perez rapidly surveyed the rock walls around them.

  Sam folded her arms across her chest and took a deep breath. “Now that Apollo’s gone, you don’t need to worry, although I wouldn’t hang around these remains too long. Cougars care about three things: territory, prey, and self-preservation. Usually, all you need to do is stand tall and slowly back away. They don’t kill for revenge or pleasure. Unlike people.”

  Perez relaxed slightly and turned his attention to the long dark brown stripes that trailed away from the carcass. “Looks like that lion dragged this deer a long way. I thought you said they didn’t do that.”

  “I said they don’t carry their prey far unless they’re worried about other predators or scavengers. Remember all those coyotes last night?”

  “So they can drag a large animal quite a distance.”

  “If they feel they have to.” She knew he was hinting about Zack again.

  His gaze explored the cliff the cougar had leapt down from. “There’s something up there.” He gestured toward the niche with his pistol.

  “Would you please put that thing away?” She backed up so she could match his line of sight from her shorter perspective.

  A mound of red plaster filled one end of the niche. “Looks like an Anasazi storage bin. There are hundreds of those all over the park.”

  She walked to the wall and pointed to small indentations in the rock below the shallow cave. “These are finger and toe holds, the Anasazi version of a ladder.”

  Perez tested a small depression with curved fingers, then hefted himself up toward the niche.

  “Hey!” she protested. “All Native American ruins are protected, off limits. It’s the law.”

  He continued to climb, dislodging a shower of loose sand and pebbles from a toehold in the rock wall. The mottled lizard dashed from its resting place across the canyon floor to wedge its thin body into the dark safety of the nearest crack. One of Perez’s larger pebbles came to rest only inches from the lizard’s new position.

  Sam threw her arms up. “Oh, I forgot, FBI agents are above the law. They go wherever they want to.” She skirted the corpse of the deer and scrambled up the cliff after Perez.

  He had pulled himself into the shallow cave and stood bent over, crouched beneath the sandstone ceiling. “We’re not above the law—we are the law,” he reminded her. “And this bin is big enough to conceal a two-year-old.”

  She crawled into the shallow cave and stood up, the ceiling a few inches above her head.

  The grain bin was nestled into the corner of the sandstone pocket, protected from rain. Perez knelt to examine it. She crowded in beside him and peered through a break in the wattle-and-daub covering, holding her breath. The dust in that bin was God knew how many centuries old. Mouse droppings were scattered like pepper over lumps of dirt and sand and bits of broken pottery. How long did hantavirus remain active in rodent scat?

  She picked up a triangular shard of pottery. The outside of the reddish clay had been painted white, overlaid with a black design of zigzags and triangles. “That’s typical Anasazi design,” she told him. “Geometric patterns and stripes.”

  He rose to his feet, but had to stay hunched over because of the low ceiling. The heel of his boot crunched on a pile of wind-driven sand in the back of the shallow cave. As he stepped away, the sliding sand revealed a white object beneath the red grit.

  “More pottery?” he asked.

  Sand jammed up under Sam’s fingernails as she dug into the pile. The object was large and rounded. A bowl or pot? An unbroken vessel was unlikely, especially outside the protective cover of the storage bin, but it would be an exciting find. Aiding the FBI was probably a legal justification for violating park service regulations. And Perez was half Lakota. Maybe a member from one Native American tribe had the right to handle artifacts from others.

  The object finally broke free of the packed sand.

  “Got it.” She blinked dust out of her eyes. The object was definitely not a bowl. It was strangely shaped, round on top, squarish at the bottom. A pitcher? She brushed at the clinging dirt, turned the white object around.

  Two eye sockets stared blankly up at her.

  14

  They both stared at the skull that Sam held. On one side of the thick bone, a scrap of dried skin was plastered, with a few light brown hairs straggling out.

  �
��Damn it!” Perez growled. “Why’d you touch that thing?”

  “You asked if it was a ceramic pot, remember?”

  “Well, try to remember exactly how it was positioned, and for God’s sake, don’t move your fingers. Don’t get any more prints on it than you already have.”

  He pulled out his pocket camera and snapped two photos of the skull in her hands. She waited while he made notes. It felt wrong to hold the skull up in front of her, like a prize or a course on its way to the table.

  This was someone’s head. The skull had once belonged to a person who felt and breathed. Her own head felt too light for her own body, and she hoped she wasn’t going to pass out. Or throw up. “Is it—”

  He read her thoughts. “Not Zack, no. Unless the flesh was all peeled off immediately.” He bit his lip, considering. “I suppose that’s possible—”

  She stared at him in horror.

  “Possible, but not likely,” he concluded. He bent his knees, lowered himself beside her to peer closely at it. “But the skull is small, so it could be a kid’s. Put it down exactly how you found it.”

  His condescending tone grated on her. “You want me to cover it up with sand again?”

  “No, just position it as closely as you can remember to the way it was when you first touched it.”

  Sam knelt and placed the skull on its side in the dirt. She noticed a sharp ivory point jutting out of the pile a few inches from the skull. The spike of a vertebra bone? Feeling suddenly chilled and a little dizzy again, she wrapped her arms around her chest. “At least it’s not Zack.”

  Perez ran a dirt-rimmed fingernail across the stubble on his chin, making a scratching sound. “I’d be happier if it were.”

  “Jeez, Perez.” She frowned, wiped her fingers on her pants legs.

  “We still don’t know what happened to Zack,” he explained. “And now we have another victim.”

  What a horrible thought. As she followed him down from the shallow cave, she was conscious that every touch of a finger, every scrape of a boot might contaminate valuable evidence.

  “I’ll have to get a Crime Scene team up here ASAP,” he informed her as they walked away. “I don’t know if an ID can be made—but you never know. Maybe we’ve stumbled on someone who’s been on the missing list for a couple of years. Maybe someone who was camping and”—he snapped his fingers—“Coyote Charlie got pissed about an invasion of his territory. Or this might be the work of that cougar we saw. There may be teeth marks on the bones.”

  “You think a cougar dragged a kid up here and then buried the skeleton?”

  “The cat was standing right here, wasn’t it? I think it’s possible that a cougar dragged the body up here, and then wind buried the bones.”

  “No!” She shook her head. “There’s no rogue man-eating cougar. A cougar didn’t kill whoever that is”—she pointed at the niche above—“and even if a cougar killed Zachary Fischer─”

  His head snapped up.

  “All right, I said it!” she admitted angrily. “It’s possible that a cougar got him. But it’s not likely: we’ve found no remains. And what about the shoe, found miles away from where he disappeared? Trust me on this, at least: it’s completely impossible that a cougar would drag anything up here from the valley. We are more than eight miles away from the campground where Zack disappeared. These aren’t six-hundred-pound man-eating tigers, Perez. I refuse to believe that we have some killer cat preying on little kids!”

  His face was grim. “Summer, if it’s not a cougar, then it’s going to be something worse.”

  * * * * *

  Kent Bergstrom sat cross-legged on the warm rock, chewing a bite from a granola bar. His binoculars were fixed on a hawk perched on a gnarled piñon that jutted out of the cliffside. The raptor kept one wary eye on him as it ripped a gobbet of flesh from the dead rabbit it held under its talons. The bird raised its beak and downed the morsel with a single gulp.

  Suddenly, the hawk raised its wings as if to take flight, called out a shrill alarm. Kent scanned the area. A few mesquite bushes, nearly devoid of leaves at this time of year. A prickly pear, ripe with reddish purple fruit and a nest hole that had been carved out by an enterprising owl. No movement. The hawk settled down and was eating again. He lowered his binoculars.

  The mosquito buzz of a helicopter vibrated over near the escarpment. The rhythm didn’t sound right, but that was probably just the sound bouncing off the dozens of hoodoos between here and there. He hadn’t heard any news from HQ, and he hadn’t bothered to request any. This was the third day of the search, and without evidence that Zack was still alive, Thompson would end the official effort at sunset. It was the regs.

  If only they’d find Zack today, alive. Or, if the poor kid had to be dead, at least killed by something other than a cougar. He had never been as scared as he was yesterday, facing down those three armed men with nothing more than his citation book and pepper spray. One had sported a black Eagle Tours cap, no doubt a disciple of Buck Ferguson. Thank God it hadn’t been Ferguson himself, who had a way of inciting the guys around him to violence.

  But there’d be others. Earlier that morning, he’d heard Rafael’s call for assistance. His gut twisted with guilt at the memory. He’d been relieved when Rangers Leeson and Taylor responded, glad that he wasn’t within range to respond. Unbelievable how people worried about wild animals lurking in the bushes when their neighbors two doors down kept loaded semiautomatics under their beds.

  He remembered the terrible words buried deep in his job description, something about “dispatching problem wildlife.” He’d been so thrilled to land the ranger job, a job where he actually got to work outdoors with wild animals, that he’d skipped over the more onerous tasks on the list.

  He could put in a few days collecting garbage, writing reports, giving lectures to tourists who would never venture beyond the visitor center. But could he kill a cougar to keep his job? Was it his job to decide which animals qualified as “problem wildlife”? He doubted it. Thompson and Tanner treated him like a drone most of the time. He suspected that was why they’d sent him on backcountry patrol: they were leaning toward “dispatching” a cougar or two and they didn’t want their wildlife biologist around to muck up the works.

  The buzz of the chopper was nearing now. The pilot was flying exceptionally close to the ground. The hawk leapt into the air and flapped over his head as the helicopter thundered by, invisible beyond the far wall of the canyon.

  A cloud of dust rolled over the canyon rim. Then, amazingly, a mountain lion burst from the red haze, leaping down the nearly vertical cliff in twenty-foot bounds. A shower of pebbles shadowed the panicked cat, the noise of the rockslide growing louder as the roar of the chopper faded. If the cougar didn’t veer from its current course, it would pass right beside Kent. He waited, holding his breath.

  A deep-throated bark rang out behind him, the unmistakable bay of a hunting hound. “There!” someone shouted.

  Kent scrambled to his feet. “No!”

  The two hounds strained at their leashes, frothy strings of saliva flying from their mouths. Three rifles glinted in the sunlight. Kent’s brain barely had time to register the fact that he was positioned between the men and the mountain lion before the rifles went off.

  * * * * *

  Two faint cracks reverberated across the mesa. Damn well better not be gunshots, Sam thought. The rumbling whop-whop-whop of a distant chopper faded away, leaving only the wind moaning through the rock formations.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked Perez.

  He sprawled behind her on a rock, fiddling with his sat phone, a USGS map outstretched in front of him. “Hear what?”

  She checked the sky overhead. Thunder? Clouds were building against the escarpment twenty miles away, but only wisps of vapor drifted above their position. No rain nearby for a long while yet.

  She sat perched on the lip of the cliff, feet dangling over the valley below. “What now?” she asked. “Is Jeeves waitin
g with the helicopter just around the corner? Are you off to park headquarters to meet the Crime Scene team?”

  He shook his head. “I need to stay here and search the area. There might be more.”

  More. She clenched her jaw, envisioning caves strewn with bones. Would Zack be among the dead?

  “At least now you can call off the hunters,” she said.

  His gaze met hers. “Not my job. We’ve found no evidence of Zack. This could turn out to all be coincidence.”

  “Oh yeah. Cougars have been eating campers for years,” she said sarcastically. “Maybe this is a special spot where they bring the bones, kind of like an elephant graveyard—”

  “Okay, okay. This probably has nothing to do with cougars. But maybe Coyote Charlie’s been making a collection up here.”

  Oh God. The human howler had always been a joke, a source of entertainment, of even a certain type of envy. Could the entire park staff have remained oblivious while a serial murderer dumped his victims here? She pulled her legs up and hugged them to her chest.

  He punched a number into his phone. After a hesitation, he said, “Nicole—”

  A loud burst of static from the radio in Sam’s pack drowned out the rest of Perez’s words. She pulled out the instrument, trotted beyond the rock walls to the edge of the plateau again. Radio communications from the valley couldn’t reach this area. She hadn’t expected to intercept anything but maybe a message or two from a passing helicopter.

  “Three-one-one, three-three-nine.” Kent. The radio emitted a screech like chalk scraping across a blackboard, a rasping sound, and then the faint voice again. “Three-one-one. Oh please, three-one-one.”

  Three-one-one was the dispatcher at headquarters. Something was wrong: Kent knew that radio communication was impossible between much of the high country and the valley below. She pressed Talk. “Kent, this is Sam.”

  She released. Nothing but static and what sounded like a gasp. She tried again. “Kent, do you read?”

  More static. Did he have his finger on the damn Talk button? “Kent? Kent?”