Endangered (A Sam Westin Mystery Book 1)

by Pamela Beason

  Suddenly a tiny figure slid down over the entire page like a spider on a silk thread. “Cowabunga!” Cameron’s voice yelped from the speakers, startling Sam. Cameron stopped at the bottom of the page to high-five with another sprite, which ran over from the left margin. Then they both dissolved into the text behind them.

  Sam sat back, laughing. Mad Max strikes again. At least someone was getting some enjoyment from this expedition. Cowabunga, indeed. Sam wished she were a wild teenager named Cameron right now instead of a worn-out writer named Wilderness Westin.

  Steeling herself for the inevitable, she pulled up several news sites. Sane World’s page ran largely unchanged. The organization had added only an ad that offered T-shirts for the “unbelievable price of $7.99!” Gleaming cougar eyes stared out from the black fabric. they’re out there was scrawled in burning red letters beneath the eyes.

  On KSEA’s website, there was no mention of the FBI or any ransom attempt. But there was a sidebar in which the secretary of agriculture was quoted as saying, “I have authorized the dispatch of game control officers to Heritage National Monument. The government will do everything necessary to protect visitors.”

  “Oh no, no, no.” She groaned and buried her face in her hands, wanting to cry. Or scream. Please God, let Zack have been taken by a human and not a cougar. She brought the thought up short: what was wrong with her? Please, she amended, let Zack have just wandered off, let him be safe and sound.

  Maybe, just maybe, Zack had been found while she was hiking? She called park headquarters. The news was not promising. The Explorer Scouts had gone home. Rangers would check the backcountry. The unfamiliar voice sounded surprised when she asked if the ruins and the Curtain had been searched.

  “I’d have to check that,” he said. “I’m sure every place that should be searched has been.”

  This guy had a lot more faith in the park administration than she did. Right now, Thompson and Tanner seemed more interested in controlling political damage than in searching the backcountry.

  She’d just set her phone down when it buzzed.

  Adam. “Why didn’t you use the ransom tip I gave you this morning?” she asked on answering.

  “It didn’t go with the other elements,” he explained. “You have to focus to create a good story.”

  She felt like banging the phone against a rock. “You’re focusing in the wrong direction.” She told him about the shoe.

  “You made my day! What a team! So we can say a cougar carried—”

  “No!” she yelped. “We don’t know how the shoe got up there.”

  “Okay, I got it, no need to get agitated; we’re all a little stressed out right now. I’ll find some way to run with it. Thanks, Sam.” And then he was gone.

  We’re all a little stressed out right now? It was clear that Adam felt like a hero. She felt like a salmon swimming upstream, hoping against all odds that the result would be worth the journey.

  The blades of a helicopter sounded a distant drumbeat somewhere to the south. She was glad to be out of the madness down there, glad that Kent was, too. Mesa Camp was a beautiful spot on a high open plateau; he’d have a spectacular view of the sunset. She wished she were there with him instead of stuck in front of a computer.

  In growing darkness, she wrote the latest about the search for Zack. She created a paragraph about the ransom delivery and car chase, then another about the shoe on Powell Trail. Sam frowned, tried to come up with a connection or at least a decent transition. After a couple of false starts, she gave up the idea of linkage and decided to emphasize the confusion of events. She stressed that no sign of cougar attack had been found—all the clues pointed to as yet unidentified humans. Zack was still out there, and he could yet be alive.

  She uploaded the photo of Perez inspecting the site where the shoe had been found. His knees were bent, one hand stretched out toward the ground, his eyes fixed on something there. He’d be glad that the photo was only a three-quarter view and his face was tilted downward; he was unrecognizable.

  She sat with her chin on her knees, staring at the screen. SWF had hired her to write about the cougars, and here she was sending them reports about ransom notes and recovered shoes and photos of FBI agents. How could everything go so wrong in two days?

  “Oh, Zack!” She knotted her fingers into her braid and pulled until her scalp hurt. “Where are you? Please be somewhere warm and safe. And please, please, please, give me a clue where that is.”

  A faint scratching noise drew her attention. Pebbles against rock, something big moving in the area just beyond the canyon mouth. The oddball with the chopped-off hair, coming back? A chill prickled down her spine.

  The last glow of sunset was gone. The sky was black and empty now: the moon had not yet risen. Leaping to her feet, she blinked several times, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness after staring at the computer screen.

  She ran her hands over the dozen pockets of her vest. Where was her pepper spray? She scrambled quickly to the top of the van-sized boulders that surrounded her tent.

  She scrutinized the charcoal-colored shapes of the surrounding rock, surprised at how fast her heart was beating. Solitude and wilderness had always represented security, even serenity to her. But that was before she’d learned that a kidnapper, maybe even a murderer, was skulking around the plateau.

  11

  Sam didn’t need moonlight to pinpoint Agent Perez’s location; his flashlight did that for her. He trudged up the hillside, moving the light around him onto the surrounding rock formations as he walked. At one point he made a little sideways leap, tripped over the bristly skeleton of a desiccated cactus. The hiss of a Spanish curse drifted up to her.

  She grinned. The beam of his flashlight had probably picked up some small movement, a night-hunting lizard or mouse or snake.

  At the narrow entrance to her campsite, he turned off the flashlight and stood for a few seconds, listening for movement inside the pocket of boulders.

  Her interactions with Perez were starting to feel like some sort of weird tag-team game. She held her breath, waited on top of her boulder until he reappeared next to her tent, the glow from the computer screen highlighting the toes of his boots.

  Damn! The laptop was running down the battery, and the satellite gizmo was still on, too. Worse yet, she’d left the photo of Perez on the screen. She slid down the boulder on her backside and landed with a thump beside him.

  Perez tripped backward over a tent pole, barely recovered his footing, struggled to slide his right hand around the strap of the large backpack he now carried. Going for his gun.

  “You don’t intend to shoot me, do you, Agent Perez?” She stepped closer. “How’d you know I was here?”

  He straightened, took a deep breath. “OT near Sunset Canyon.”

  Her permit notation wasn’t nearly enough information to find the hidden canyon. She’d bet that the FBI agent had a marked map and a GPS device in his pocket. And that the helicopter she’d heard a half hour earlier had dropped him off. Perez wasn’t even sweating, and he’d somehow traded a small knapsack for a fully loaded backpack since this afternoon.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Visiting.” He eyed the satellite hub, phone, camera, and laptop scattered across the canyon floor.

  Stepping in front of him, she flipped the laptop screen down. “I’m working,” she said.

  “Obviously.” He unbuckled his waist strap and shrugged out of the shoulder straps, letting his backpack slide to the ground. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  He sat down cross-legged, facing her. His steady gaze was disconcerting.

  “I’m almost done.” She turned the laptop around so he couldn’t see the screen. She closed the photo file, spell-checked the text file, sent it to Seattle, and then waited for the response. After it arrived, she shut down her communications gear.

  “Very high tech.” Perez indicated the equipment with a wave of his hand.

  “Have b
atteries, will travel,” she quipped. “Is this an official interrogation, or were you just hoping for a cup of tea?”

  “I thought you should know that the superintendent has scheduled the Wildlife Services hunters.”

  “What? He said he’d wait for evidence! Damn it!” She glared at him. “It was because of those prints, wasn’t it? Just because they were within a hundred yards of the damn shoe, you—”

  He held up his hands. “It wasn’t me. The volunteers reported their find, and Superintendent Thompson made his decision.”

  “They really called off the search for Zack?”

  “The search on foot has halted. They’ll continue helicopter flyovers tomorrow.”

  “Kid killed by cougar, case solved. So why aren’t you on your way back to Salt Lake?”

  “I’m not that easy to get rid of, Miss Westin.” His brown eyes bore into hers. “Agent Boudreaux and I made the decision to keep going until we find more evidence, or at least until the day after tomorrow.”

  She swallowed around the constriction in her throat. “Is that when the hunters arrive?”

  He nodded. “They’ll want everyone out of the park then.”

  She wrapped her arms around her knees, her mind racing with images of hunters marching shoulder to shoulder. They’d have dogs, of course, to flush out the cougars, and they’d use the damn helicopters to spot them from the air. Maybe they’d even shoot the lions from the helicopters. They’d slaughter every mountain lion they came across. Leto, Artemis, Apollo. Others she had never seen, that no one had ever seen before.

  What could she do to stop the massacre? Maybe if she wrote about how many taxpayer dollars would be spent? Most Americans were unaware that their government paid to have thousands of animals killed every year.

  Would they care?

  A howl drifted out over the mesa, a mournful sound. It was answered by a series of excited yips that built up to a long drawn-out wail.

  Perez lifted his chin and gazed in the direction of the sound. “Wolves?”

  She shook her head. “No wolves in this part of the country. Those are coyotes. You hear them almost every night up here.”

  The yipping increased in volume and speed until it resembled hyenas surrounding their prey. Then, the evening air was shattered by a shrieking lament that no canine was likely to produce.

  Perez tensed. “What the hell?”

  “It’s Coyote Charlie.” She stood up, retrieved her binoculars from her pack. “Didn’t Ranger Bergstrom mention him to you?” She walked to the narrow mouth of the small canyon.

  He was right behind her. “Coyote Charlie?”

  “A local nutcase,” she said. “He’s been here for years. I caught a glimpse of him summer before last, near the ruins. Kent swears he appears every full moon to howl with the coyotes. He even saw Charlie buck naked once.”

  “What did the rangers do with him?”

  The question surprised her. “Nothing. He’s not doing anything illegal, except maybe camping without a permit.” She paused. Where would a naked Coyote Charlie attach a permit tag?

  Perez pulled his notepad out of his shirt pocket. “What does he look like?”

  She rubbed her forehead, trying to remember. “He was a long way off, and I was using binoculars. And it was more than a year ago. When I saw him, he was wearing clothes—pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He had a long scruffy beard, long hair. Medium colored, light brown or maybe dark gray—it’s hard to tell at night. Tall, skinny. Scruffy.”

  “Got it—heavy on the scruffy.” His pen scratched across the page. “What else do you know about him?”

  “Virtually nothing. Backcountry campers catch sight of him now and then, or hear him howling.”

  He shook his head. “That’s disturbing.”

  “Why do you say that? I think Charlie’s great.”

  His head jerked back and his expression was contemptuous. “You’re kidding. What’s to admire?”

  “The freedom. He’s completely uninhibited. He wants to run naked under the full moon, he does it.” She could almost feel it herself; soft, fresh air on exposed skin, gliding barefoot over smooth sandstone through a landscape lit with lunar magic. Like a wild animal, surrounded only by nature. But this was probably not an image an uptight FBI agent could appreciate. She glanced sideways at Perez to check.

  He stared at her with frank concern as he ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “Do you have any idea how many schizophrenics are out there, listening to the voice of the devil, receiving orders from angels or dogs? This guy may think he’s getting mental transmissions from those coyotes or even from the moon.”

  He looked up for a moment as if beseeching the heavens for sanity. When he lowered his head, his straight hair fell back into place, except for one ebony strand that slipped onto his forehead. “Do you know his real name?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Why do they call him Coyote Charlie?”

  “Well, the Coyote part is pretty obvious, but I don’t know about the Charlie part. Maybe it just sounded good. He’s kind of a legend with the park staff. It would ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it, to know everything about him?”

  They were outside her tiny canyon now, sitting on the sloping plane of the plateau. Sprawled straight-legged on the wind-scrubbed rock beside her, Perez gazed silently at the full moon, at the pinpoints of light strewn across the heavens like crystal beads on black velvet. Moonlight brightened the open space, lending a blue sheen to Perez’s raven hair, a chiseled-stone appearance to the planes of his face. His jaw line was dark with whiskers.

  The canine chorus started again. The unearthly shriek joined in, closer than the other howls. Sam stood and raised her binoculars to her eyes, scanned the surrounding hillsides and plateau. Nothing but moonlight on rocks.

  Perez rose to his feet. “How far away do you think he is?”

  She cocked her head, listening to the howls. “Sounds like it’s coming from Horsehip Mesa. That’s his usual haunt, just above the ruins. It’s about three miles, at least an hour and a half away. In daylight.” Her feet hurt just thinking about it.

  “Damn. The chopper pilot told me they won’t fly over the park after dark. Something about squirrelly winds over the canyons.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Updrafts, downdrafts, thermals.”

  “This Coyote guy may know something about Zachary Fischer.”

  The child’s face welled up in her memory, along with the feel of those damp little fingers. She shook her head. “I doubt it. The rangers have never considered him a troublemaker.”

  “Forget your romantic ideas about galloping naked in the moonlight,” Perez told her. “Consider the evidence. Zack’s shoe was found on Powell Trail, and Powell Trail leads up here. This wacko might have seen the kidnapper.”

  As far as she knew, Coyote Charlie had never been reported in the valley. And there was the shadow figure at the end of the path who she abandoned Zack to.

  “He might be the kidnapper.”

  Her mind’s eye supplied a vision of Charlie squatting on top of crumbling adobe, howling at the night sky, crouched over a small body like a coyote over a rabbit. Damn her overactive imagination! There was the rock bridge; it’d shave more than a mile off the journey. But it’d be dark and dangerous . . .

  She stood up, extracted her penlight from her vest pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Perez retrieved his own flashlight from the ground. “Three miles in the dark? Isn’t that a little crazy?”

  “We have moonlight.” She impatiently tapped the penlight against her thigh. “And I know a shortcut.”

  He aimed his flashlight at his chin and snapped it on, adding devilish shadows to his grinning face. “Coyote Charlie, here we come.”

  Maybe the man wasn’t so uptight, after all.

  A blood-curdling howl beckoned them.

  * * * * *

  Ranger Rafael Castillo sat in his truck, watching the campground. Someone
had to have seen something on the night that Zack had disappeared; more than half of these vehicles had been here at the time.

  Things didn’t look good for that little boy; a ten-mile radius from the campground had been searched, and nobody had discovered any trace of Zachary Fischer. When the ransom demand had been faxed to park headquarters, Rafael suspected the kid had been snatched and spirited out of the park, no matter what the gatekeeper said. But now that the child’s shoe had been found on a trail that led to the interior, he didn’t know what to think.

  The lights were on inside Russ Wilson’s camper, but he didn’t see anyone moving around. Maybe Wilson was reading. Or maybe he was watching TV: an electric cord anchored the RV to the outlet that bordered the parking pad. The FBI agents had run a check on the vehicle, as they had on several others in the campground. It had come back clean, registered to Orrin R. Wilson in Rock Creek.

  But he still had a funny feeling about the guy. He’d had Zack’s cap in his camper—what were the odds of that? Tomorrow, he’d get the Utah DMV to pull Orrin R. Wilson’s driving record. Sometimes even parking tickets could say a lot about a man. Where would he find time to do that? These double shifts were killing him.

  The rhythmic ticking of soles on pavement caught his attention. A man jogged along the asphalt road on the far side of the loop. In and out of the pools of light spilling from RV windows and kerosene lanterns, Wilson ran slowly, tonight dressed in black sweat pants and burgundy hooded sweatshirt, bright white athletic shoes. So he hadn’t been lying about the jogging, anyway. He came to a stop at the drinking fountain next to the restrooms.

  Tonight Wilson wore no toupee, and Rafael could see that although graying hair clung to the sides and back of his head, his crown was hairless, just as Rafael had suspected.