“We give them what they want and they give us Carm,” Chuck continued. “Then everyone goes home.”
Dolores spoke up, an edge to her voice. “Jan says what they really want is you.”
Chuck put a hand to his banged-up chin. “They almost got me already.”
“Don’t you think you should let the rangers handle this?”
“I’m not sure what—” Chuck began, but Dolores cut him off.
“You’ve been at this all day, right? And you’ve gotten nowhere so far.”
Janelle raised a hand to quiet her friend. “We should—” She stopped when her phone chimed. She fished it out of her pocket, checked it, and held it out to Chuck, her eyes pleading.
“Are you there?” came the computerized voice.
“It’s me,” Chuck said, walking away from the group. “Chuck.”
“About time.” A pause. “What’s with your phone? You haven’t been answering.”
Would the caller admit to knowing Chuck’s phone was still deep in the canyon? Or was his phone programmed in such a way that it gave its location only when he used it to make a call? “My battery,” he said. “I told you.”
“And this online crap. Facebook, chat rooms.”
“That wasn’t me. Besides, your note said no cops.”
“So you decided to tell the whole world instead.”
“I told you, it wasn’t me. And no cops have been told.”
There was a lengthy silence. Chuck detected what sounded like a sigh of frustration. Then, “Use the phone you’ve got now. You’re back in camp?” The question was deductive, lacking the assurance with which the caller had pronounced Chuck’s location earlier in the day.
Good, Chuck said to himself. There was still a little something the kidnapper wasn’t sure of.
“You have what you were sent for?” the voice continued when Chuck didn’t respond.
“Yes.”
“Excellent.” In spite of the computerization, the sudden animation in the caller’s voice was unmistakable. “Okay. Ten o’clock. Just you, nobody else. At the BIC.”
The caller pronounced the abbreviation for the Backcountry Information Center as a word, Bic, with a hard c, as did all park personnel.
EIGHTEEN
7:30 p.m.
“She’s okay,” Chuck reported to the group. “Long as we keep this thing to ourselves. We’re getting close.”
Yolanda reached behind her for Enrique. He squeezed her shoulder. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.
Chuck knew he couldn’t get away with simply telling those gathered at the table to do nothing. Besides, there was the outside chance they could prove valuable in advance of the exchange. “We fan out, do some looking.”
Janelle clucked in disapproval. “We tried that this morning.”
“Not with twenty of us spread all over the place.” Chuck looked her in the eye. “You’re the one who wants to put the pliers to him. This is our chance.”
“Chuck’s right,” Rachel said to Janelle. “The phone call points to the girl still being somewhere nearby. They’ve got to be getting nervous by now.” She turned to Chuck. “You’re thinking group text, aren’t you?”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
The first adventure race Chuck had attended with Rachel, deep in Washington’s coastal rainforest, had been a disaster. Poor trail directions led numerous racers to become lost along the backcountry route. One racer fell to his death from a cliff after straying from the course during the second, rain-drenched night of the competition. In the aftermath of the tragedy, officials determined the primary problem had been lack of trail marshals along the racecourse. But it wasn’t feasible to station dozens of marshals along the lengthy courses. Instead, the officials instituted a new rule that essentially turned all competing racers into course marshals. Racers carried GPS-capable cell phones during all competitions and checked in with race marshals by text at regular intervals throughout each race, making use of the group’s growing body of knowledge to keep all racers on course. Rachel likened the process to flying birds. In the same way one bird’s movement rippled instantly through the flock and enabled them to change direction as one, so too did the flow of group texts enhance the ability of all competitors to stay on course throughout their contests.
Chuck took in the disparate group gathered around the picnic table: the concerned tourists, Enrique and Yolanda with their fear-filled eyes, Rachel and Donald displaying steady resolve, Janelle and Clarence exchanging glances of disquiet, and Dolores and Amelia, their jaws set. Hard to imagine all these people working so closely together that they could change direction as one, but worth sending them out before the exchange nonetheless. Between the nearly two dozen of them, who could say what they might see and report before ten o’clock?
“We’ll head out on foot,” Chuck said. “We don’t want a bunch of people driving all over the place, making a big scene. Everybody will have a specific location. Donald, can you assign spots around the village for people to monitor?”
“Sure,” Donald replied.
“Look for anything out of the ordinary,” Chuck told the group. “I’m to meet them at ten. Anything we spot before then can only help.”
“Everyone should go out in pairs,” Rachel put in.
“But we have to be unobtrusive,” Chuck said. “The idea is to be eyes and ears out there, not mouths.”
An older man in a short-sleeved dress shirt, pleated shorts, and brown loafers raised his hand.
“I’m here at my wife’s insistence,” the man said in a reedy voice, touching the sleeve of a gray-haired woman standing next to him. “And I have to admit, I’m a bit ill at ease right now.” He looked from Rachel to Chuck. “I’m a retired district court judge.”
Chuck felt Janelle grow rigid at his side as the elderly man continued.
“There’s obviously a lot more going on here than you’re telling us. But that’s a-okay with me, and, I think, with the others as well.” The man looked around the table. “I just feel it’s my responsibility, our responsibility, to be sure you’re not putting any of us at risk with what you’re asking.”
Chuck drew in a breath. “Fair enough.”
The retired judge touched the tip of his tongue to his lips. “Okay then. My sense is that we’ve got some sort of family squabble going on here involving the missing little girl whose picture my wife showed me on her computer. I just want to be assured that a resolution to this dilemma is forthcoming, as you’ve indicated.”
Rachel replied before Chuck could answer. “That’s correct, sir. Which is why we—” she glanced at Donald “—are willing to help work through this problem outside of normal, park-service channels.”
“You must know you’re risking your career in so doing, dearie,” the elderly judge said to her.
“A little girl’s well-being is at stake,” Rachel responded. “That’s what is driving my decision-making process at this point, regardless of any potential risks to my career. And, I might add, you’re taking quite a risk yourself in calling me ‘dearie.’”
The judge’s wife smiled and dug her elbow into her husband’s side. The old man chuckled. “Right you are, dear—er, ma’am,” he said. He clapped his hands together. The sound echoed across the campground just as the rap of his gavel must once have filled his courtroom. “All right then. I’m a married man. I know when I’ve been beat.”
He looked across the table at Chuck, who surveyed the group of tourists. There were plenty of squared shoulders; a middle-aged couple turned to one another with grave nods. Before meeting Janelle and the girls, Chuck’s loner self would have scoffed at the idea of sending a group of strangers out on a mission such as this. Yet here were these people, brought together by nothing more than Janelle’s online posting, willing to head out into the coming night on Carmelita’s behalf based on nothing more than the judge’s broad-brush assumption that what they were doing was for the best. Chuck was deeply impressed. Within m
inutes of setting up the group-text account between group members’ phones and sending the tourists off to various outposts around the village, however, he was entirely unimpressed.
Nonsensical reports of questionable activity began pouring in via group text shortly after the tourists dispersed from the campsite.
“Mother and son at market,” came the first text. “Locked and loaded?”
Whatever that meant.
“Behind dumpster,” came another report, with no further information.
Then, a minute later, from the same number, “Just somebody having a smoke.”
And so the texts flew: someone locking up Kolb Studio, a group of college-age kids piling out of a van in front of El Tovar, even a report that the drip-irrigation system had come on at Thunderbird Lodge.
Chuck chided himself as he made his way along a darkened village walkway toward the Backcountry Information Center. So much for his bright idea. But at least the tourists were keeping themselves occupied. He set Janelle’s phone to vibrate, shoved it in his pocket, and gave up trying to follow the unending stream of meaningless texts that proved, yet again, why he preferred to go things alone.
Chuck had insisted he be allowed to follow the explicit instruction of the computerized voice that he make the exchange on his own. He’d brooked no compromise when Janelle wondered aloud whether giving in to the caller’s demand was in Carmelita’s best interest.
“He wants me, just me. That’s what we’ll give him,” Chuck had responded. “We’re almost there. If he tries to pull anything, then we go to the police.”
Janelle had tried to convince Chuck to stay at the campsite until closer to ten o’clock, but he wanted to reacquaint himself with the terrain surrounding the information center in advance of the exchange.
Ten years ago, the site had been an open meadow at the south edge of the village. The contract Chuck won to assess, dig, and screen the meadow for the park service in advance of the Backcountry Information Center’s scheduled construction had been his second at the Grand Canyon. The new information center would provide long-overdue office space for staffers who oversaw the park’s booming backcountry activities—rafting, hiking, backpacking, and mule riding—while a paved lot around the center would supply overflow parking for backcountry users, village visitors, and guests of Maswik Lodge to the west.
Jonathan and Elise Marbury recognized that the required dig would be sensitive, given the meadow’s visible location south of the lodges, eateries, and gift shops lining the canyon rim. Aware of the headline-grabbing allegations of cultural theft that might result if the wrong crowd heard about the dig, the park’s husband-wife curator team selected Bender Archaeological for the contract because of Chuck’s reputation for keeping his work low profile.
Other than one other person to help during the initial site survey, Chuck proposed that he would be the sole laborer at the meadow. He promised Jonathan and Elise he would use the latest in underground spectrographic-imaging technology to minimize digging at the site, as he had for the connector-road contract two years earlier. Upon completing the initial survey and assessment of the meadow, he suggested stringing only one excavation unit at a time rather than the entire site at once. And rather than stringing units with bright white cord as was customary, he proposed stringing each unit with earth-toned cord that would be invisible to passers-by.
Chuck staged the meadow to look like a run-of-the-mill construction zone. First, he created a visual barrier between the site and the village core by running a length of garish, orange, plastic-mesh construction fencing along the north edge of the site. Next, he had several abandoned pieces of heavy equipment brought to the meadow from the discard lot behind the South Rim Maintenance Garage and directed the arrangement of the inoperable pieces of equipment—two rusted backhoes, a small pavement roller, and an oversized Bobcat with a caved-in roof—just inside the orange fencing to create another visual barrier between the dig site and the village. To complete the scene, Chuck adopted the costume of a commonplace construction worker—ratty Carhartts, ripped T-shirt, greasy ball cap, and work boots with steel toes shining through holes worn in the leather.
The Marburys assigned Donald to help Chuck with the initial, above-ground field survey—they knew one another from Donald’s oversight of Chuck’s work on the connector-road contract. Chuck and Donald worked their way from one end of the meadow to the other, Donald holding the surveying rod while Chuck shot elevations across the swath of blue grama grass and sagebrush with his transit from the site’s primary datum point.
While they worked, Donald rattled on about what he thought of the latest Hollywood blockbusters, his belief in the existence of UFOs, the athletic exploits of his high-school-aged nieces back home in San Diego, and a slew of other topics. Chuck responded to each of Donald’s monologues with little more than a grunt, after which Donald launched, unfazed, into a new subject.
Chuck paid only passing attention to Donald’s stories as he shot and recorded elevations across the meadow. He took notice, however, when Donald repeatedly mentioned a female ranger named Rachel Severin who’d recently been assigned to the park.
“You’re trying to play matchmaker, aren’t you?” Chuck accused Donald.
“What? Me?” Donald responded, feigning surprise.
“What? Me?” Chuck mimicked.
Donald made a show of tapping his chin with his forefinger. “Now that you mention it, that’s not such a bad idea.”
“I didn’t mention it.”
“You just said you’re interested in her.”
Chuck blew a jet of air out his lips. “I said you’re trying to set me up.”
“I don’t think so.”
Chuck shook his head in defeat.
The next day Donald reported that the new ranger had agreed to swing by Donald’s apartment for dinner with him that evening, and that Chuck’s attendance was required.
“What about you and this Rachel?” Chuck asked as he repositioned the theodolite on its tripod before sending Donald off to the far side of the meadow with the surveying rod.
“She’s not my type.”
“What do you mean, not your type? You’ve been saying she’s good-looking, athletic, intelligent—what’s not to like about all that?”
“She’s quiet.”
“Quiet?”
“Yeah. Quiet.”
“And?”
“And, well, somebody like me, she’d last about a week before she’d pound me into the turf just to shut me up. But you, you’re quiet, too.”
“Silence is, what, golden in this particular instance?”
“I didn’t say silence. I said quiet. Big difference.”
Donald was right. Dinner was a hit. Rachel’s reserved, self-reliant nature mirrored Chuck’s, which proved to be the one big plus of their on-again, off-again relationship over the years. But their kindred natures proved the one big minus of their relationship as well.
Each time it became logical for the two of them to up the ante in some significant way, to consider moving in together during Chuck’s contracts at the park, or to explore the notion of splitting expenses on a place they both could use during their breaks from work, they shied away from the subject and drifted apart as a result. And while Chuck enjoyed the time he spent with Rachel during the weeks he worked the Backcountry Information Center site, the job itself proved to be the non-event he and the Marburys expected—until the very last day of digging.
NINETEEN
9 p.m.
Chuck moved slowly through the parking lot around the Backcountry Information Center looking for the big black SUV. He circled the center twice but spotted neither the car nor anything else that appeared the least bit out of the ordinary. While monitoring the continuing stream of senseless group texts arriving on Janelle’s phone, he angled toward the six buildings that comprised the Maswik Lodge complex west of the information center at the south end of the village.
Maswik was the only low-cost lodging opt
ion at the South Rim. Given the lodge’s affordability as well as its location next to the information center, Chuck suspected Carmelita was being held in a room in one of its six motel-like buildings. But he didn’t dare risk Carmelita’s safety by knocking on random doors in advance of the exchange. He walked slowly through the grounds of the lodge complex. As with his loops around the information center, however, his walk turned up nothing of note, nor was the black SUV parked in any of the small parking lots fronting each Maswik building.
He settled in beneath a squat juniper at the edge of the forest, thirty feet south of the sprawling Backcountry Information Center parking lot. It was well before ten o’clock. Behind him, the pine forest stretched unbroken to the park’s southern boundary twenty miles away. Ahead, beyond row after row of parked cars, the timber-frame information center with its south-facing wall of floor-to-ceiling windows sat dark and silent.
By now, Chuck was nearly recovered from his collapse on the trail. Though his head still ached from the severe bout of dehydration he’d suffered, he was fully alert. He lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, just beyond the glow of the overhead lights lining the parking lot. The moonless night was comfortably cool after the heat of the day. His watch read 9:45. Fifteen minutes to go. He thumbed through the texts bouncing among the members of the tourist group, but found nothing useful.
He adjusted the strap on the compact set of night-vision goggles Rachel had retrieved for him from her patrol car at camp in anticipation of the nighttime exchange. The goggles weren’t standard ranger issue. Rather, Rachel used them during her adventure races and kept them in her ranger duffel between competitions. He centered the goggles’ binocular-like eye ports over the bridge of his nose. A ghostly, gray-green, infrared image of the darkened Backcountry Information Center settled into focus in the middle of the three-quarters full parking lot. The building was deserted, but even at this late hour the parking lot was alive with tourists making their way to and from their cars.
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