Death Canyon

by David Riley Bertsch

He then checked the reservations system on the desktop computer downstairs. There weren’t any bookings for the next two weeks. Big surprise. The unpredictable weather in the early summer could deter visitors, but he wondered whether news of the unsolved crimes or the earthquakes could be to blame.

  There had been several articles on the crimes in the local paper, but nobody had cause yet to link the incidents together and paint the frightening picture that Jake and Noelle were starting to see.

  The major national news websites didn’t give the accidents much coverage either. There were a few mentions of the avalanche and the bear attack in the various travel sections, but nothing else. None of the articles made any connection between the incidents.

  This didn’t surprise Jake. He knew that the police department was almost entirely responsible for press releases in the valley. If Terrell didn’t want to reveal too much, it might not reach the outside media for some time.

  The earthquakes were a different story. Their continuing occurrence was now starting to attract national media attention. Snippets from the Jackson Hole paper were turning up on all the major news websites.

  Grabbing his mug and a handful of granola from the kitchen, Jake headed out to the garage. On the way, he stopped and poked his head into J.P.’s trailer, but it was empty. Jake didn’t hear him come in last night, which worried him only slightly. If there was a party somewhere, it was a good bet that J.P. had found it. He called J.P.’s cell but there was no answer.

  Still sleeping, probably. Damn. Jake had wanted to talk to him about Ricker. Oh well. He let the trailer door close behind him and headed to his vehicle.

  In the garage, Jake unscrewed the top from the glossy green tube that held his favorite creek rod. A custom-made eight-foot-four weight. Fiberglass. Outdated now, since everything was graphite. But it had more soul than its graphite counterparts.

  The fiberglass eight footer wasn’t built for winging flies seventy feet to the far bank. That’s what stealth was for. If you couldn’t get closer than that, you were probably more of a caster than an angler anyway.

  No, the eight footer was a fishing machine. A tool. With a heavy fish on the end of the line, it absorbed runs and headshakes with its flex, protecting the light tippet. It bent but never broke.

  Fish were feeding everywhere along the banks and in the bubble lines, clueless as to the earthquakes and murders. Above the gentle current, pale morning duns flitted and flirted, preparing to mate.

  Jake finished his meager breakfast, put his mug down in the grass, and rigged up the rod. He tied a size 18 spinner to the end of the leader. Pale yellow, like the insects above him. The spinner represented the final stage of the insect, the fragile, ethereal, and lifeless form that fell to the water’s surface after it had mated.

  On his first cast, a trout lazily drifted toward the fly and inhaled it, but the hook didn’t hold. Jake brought in the rig to dry off the small fly.

  As he did so, Jake pondered what to do with the evidence at hand. He wanted to build his case more, but if he came up empty-handed he needed a backup plan to protect himself. He trusted the friends that he made during his years as a Philadelphia special investigator; federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and state cops would believe him.

  The FBI in particular would be interested in looking into any allegations of a corrupt and criminal police force, but he still felt it was too soon. He had no doubt he could get a team to fly in from the East Coast and investigate, but he was worried that it might put their jobs on the line. If Jake was wrong, his friends would take the brunt of it from the head honchos. The federal government wasn’t keen on wasting public funds on domestic crime hunches these days. At the most, he might consider calling on his friends for a bit of investigative research. They had access to databases that the normal civilian couldn’t imagine.

  Jake made another cast. This time, he brought the yellow-bellied trout to hand after two strong runs into the current. He released the fish carefully and washed his hands in the creek.

  When they were dry, he reached into his pocket for his cell phone and called Noelle.

  “Jake? Is everything okay?”

  He cleared his throat. “Fine, yeah. Was just calling to see if you’ve heard anything back from that site—from Graem Ricker, I mean.” Jake picked up his coffee and sat himself down on a stump, listening attentively. The sun was starting to dry the long grass near the creek of its morning dew. It needed to be mowed.

  “Oh. No, I haven’t, I would have called. I won’t be near my computer for a few hours, though. I’m working. Probably be back at one or two.”

  “Okay. Listen, can I check your computer while you’re gone? I’ve got nothing going on today, and I think we need to chat with Ricker as soon as possible.”

  Noelle felt the earth shiver for a second and looked down at the dirt around her feet. A small rock had hopped up from the ground and squarely onto the toe of her shoe. She kicked it off.

  “Yeah, that’d be fine. The key is under the rock to the right of the second step. My computer is by the bed. I’m logged in, so all you need to do is open it up and click refresh to check my messages.” She hoped there weren’t any embarrassing messages in her in-box. “I’ll try to hurry back.”

  Jake finished his coffee and went back inside to get dressed and brush his teeth. The feeding trout would have to wait.

  The weather was getting warmer by the day and Jake was able to drive at highway speeds with the windows open, although he still wore a light jacket. He arrived at the cabin, and the key was where Noelle told him. He felt somewhat awkward going into the cabin without Noelle—it was small and there wasn’t room for any of it to be free of her personal belongings. There were dirty clothes in a pile next to the bed and hand-washed bras hanging above the kitchen sink.

  He smiled and looked around. It was nice to be around a woman again.

  Is that why I drove up here? He shrugged the question off.

  Jake opened the computer and moved his fingers on the touch sensor mouse to wake it up. He clicked the refresh button on the top left of the browser screen. The page reloaded but no new messages appeared. He walked outside and wasted a few minutes wandering around, then came back in and clicked the button again. Nothing. Back outside again. He got a bottle of water from his truck and drank it. It was cold, almost frozen, from the night. He thought about how silly it was to sit here expecting the message to arrive any minute. There was no reason to think the man would ever reply, let alone right now as Jake waited expectantly.

  He thought about Noelle as he paced on the porch. Beautiful, clever, and charming. The more time he spent with her, the more he liked her. He was beginning to feel that it was his duty to protect her from whatever it was that was happening in the valley.

  Back inside again. Click. Nothing. He was only staying for one more try.

  This is a waste of time.

  He should be doing something else, hiking up to Maelstrom to see the avalanche path and looking for clues or going back up to the camp. Any number of things would probably pan out better than this. He went back to the computer.

  A message had been received. Jake clicked on the category on the left margin titled “Messages.” The only message there had the subject line “sure.” He opened it. The message stated the coveted info straight up; it simply read “sure” and then a local phone number. From: Graem Ricker. The long shot had panned out.

  Jake couldn’t believe his luck. Assuming the man was involved with the crimes, he had given up a vital bit of information. Jake could use the phone number to get an address.

  Although he was eager to get moving, Jake decided to wait for Noelle before making a move on Ricker. He thought she would be a valuable asset if the man was hostile. Rather than just showing up at the man’s house himself, he hoped that Noelle could get Ricker to meet them in public somewhere.

  If Jake fooled him using Noelle’s account, he would flee the second he saw Jake. Or he would never answer the door in the first
place. In public, Jake could be assured the interaction would be safe. He wasn’t willing to drag Noelle into a dangerous situation. Surprising a criminal at his house was the definition of dangerous.

  Jake looked at the alarm clock on Noelle’s bed stand. He had plenty of time to kill before she got back from work. With too much energy to sit around and wait, he decided to go up to the top of Maelstrom Couloir.

  He also wanted to talk to his contact at the FBI, but it was lunchtime on the East Coast. Lunch break was one of the few things the government did on time every time.

  I’ll call when I get back.

  Jake felt like they were on the threshold of discovering something important. He knew this probably meant things were coming to a head on the other end of the equation too, so he would have to be cautious. He had no idea what the end game was for whatever dark force was working against him.

  He stood up from the table and scrawled a note for Noelle saying he would be back around 1:30 p.m.

  For now, checking out Maelstrom was his best bet for making progress. He jumped in his SUV and headed toward the ski area, windows down again and ignoring the speed limit. He paid the fee to park close to the base area and went to the ticket office. “One ticket, please.” It was possible to hike up to the couloir, but the trail was about seven miles in length and nearly a vertical mile up. Instead, he chose to ride the tram. From the top, it was only a mile of level walking outside the resort boundaries to Maelstrom. There would be some snow left, but the harsh Wyoming wind kept the trail across the ridge mostly bare. It was only an hour round-trip. By then Noelle would be done with work.

  Jake boarded the tram with a group of tourists and a few diehard skiers who were using the lift to access the high alpine terrain, just like Jake. The visitors, from all parts of the world, took pictures of the valley, the mountain, and each other. They gasped with fright each time the tram swung slightly in the wind.

  When the tram landed at the summit, Jake moved through the crowd and started on his way, heading south along the rocky ridge. The wind was strong, as always, and blowing from the west. The temperature was easily twenty-five degrees cooler than at the valley floor. With no equipment, Jake was able to keep a big lead on the skiers who were headed in the same direction. This was fine with him; he had no idea who was involved with the efforts against him and he didn’t want to be seen snooping around up there.

  Jake scrambled across the craggy granite ridgeline and passed the entrances to many popular backcountry runs: Regret-a-Bowl, Just Chute Me, Paradise, Veni, Vedi, and Vici. The runs plummeted off to his left at varying degrees of steepness. Unlike Maelstrom Couloir, these chutes faced directly east. Before he came upon it, the ridge that Jake was on made an abrupt westerly turn, revealing Maelstrom, which faced due south.

  Jake stepped as close to the precipitous drop as his sensibility allowed. He looked down. This was where the avalanche was born. Below him, he could see where the snow slab had started its journey down the hill. Only a dozen feet past the entrance, there was a sheer cut in the snow—what avalanche experts called a crown—at a ninety-degree angle from the pitch of the slope. This was where the snow had torn free from the material beneath it, beginning its deadly slide.

  The crown was somewhat affected by the sun now; its edges were softened and decayed. Farther down, the debris pile showed the terminus of the avalanche. Somewhere in that pile was where the rescuers had found the victim, suffocated to death by snow.

  Jake thought about how it might have happened: the south-facing slope would have absorbed the early summer sun, causing moisture to drip through the snowpack from the surface and run downhill along a lower layer of snow or even along the ground. When the underwater flow weakened the supporting snow enough, the surface slab would break free.

  Although this type of avalanche moved slowly, it would be quick enough to overtake a skier on a slope as steep as Maelstrom. Once it caught up with you, the soggy snow would be so dense that it would be impossible to escape its grasp. A horrible death, no doubt. Jake started his walk back to the tram.

  He didn’t make it very far. A sense of vertigo washed over him. He stopped walking, thinking he must be getting ill, but the feeling didn’t cease when he stopped. Jake looked down at his feet and noticed a few pebbles nervously bouncing around like popcorn on the granite. Then more.

  There was a tremble from deep within the earth. Some heavier stones were moving now, breaking away from the larger mass that had held them from the beginning of time. Jake looked to his right, down the chutes. A tumble down any one of them would likely result in death. He felt the earth rumble beneath him again, intensifying every moment.

  Slabs of snow were losing their anchor to the steeper slopes and cascading downward toward the flats below. Jake checked his footing. Rocks, larger yet, were bouncing into the accumulating flow of snow, granite, and debris going down the mountain. He backed up several feet and got low to the ground. Like a climber on a hazardous face, he grabbed the rock and held on.

  19

  SOUTH BOUNDARY, JACKSON HOLE MOUNTAIN RESORT

  As abruptly as it started, the earth made one final shiver—the strongest yet—and stopped. The debris flow continued for a few moments longer and then silence fell over the mountain. Jake took stock of his surroundings. The damage was significant, but not catastrophic. The ridgeline trail remained mostly intact. The largest boulders were still in place above the slope, but several pieces of granite approaching the size of golf carts had been shaken loose. They now rested at the bottom of the steep chutes.

  Jake’s breathing and heart rate slowly began to return to normal. That was close. His mind turned to the avalanche—Maybe the book was a coincidence? Maybe a quake started the slide?

  Deep in thought, he made his way along the trail, reminding himself to stay focused, be careful. Another seismic event or even his own footfall could trigger a dangerous rockslide. He kept his eyes open for injured skiers and hikers but didn’t notice anyone.

  When he made it back to the tram dock at the top of the resort’s main peak, the lift wasn’t running. The woman at the top told him they had recorded a major quake. It didn’t likely damage the tram, she said, but the engineers needed to have a look. Just to be sure. The lift would be down for at least an hour.

  As dazed tourists congregated at the top to chatter about the quake, Jake decided to walk the maintenance roads to his vehicle. He had to get back to Noelle’s cabin. He noted the damage on the way down. Below cliff faces and steep rocky slopes, there was evidence of more rockfall. As Jake lost altitude and the terrain became less steep, though, the signs of the quake mostly disappeared.

  The hike to the bottom of the mountain took longer than it looked, more than an hour.

  * * *

  Noelle was waiting on her cabin’s porch. She ran to the driver’s door and opened it for him.

  “Are you okay? Did you feel the quake?” She looked him over. He seemed fine, at least physically.

  “I felt it all right.” They walked inside. Jake put his keys down on the table, shaking his head. “Could I have a glass of water?” Noelle filled a glass. The normally calm man was rattled, which caught Noelle’s attention. She tilted her head with curiosity as she handed him the drink.

  Jake continued after his first sip. “It felt like the mountain was coming down up there. Rocks falling, little avalanches and cornices breaking off. I thought I was gonna get swept off the peak too. A 5.1, they said? Pretty rare around here, huh?”

  “Hold on. Where were you?” She held up her hands, palms out.

  “Top of Maelstrom. I know, I know. I just wanted to put my eyes on the scene before we talked to Ricker. I was up top there when I felt the quake. It really moved some stuff around. Rockfalls, the whole nine yards.” Jake drank more water.

  “Was anyone hurt? What did you find?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Noelle paused. “Well, I looked around this morning near the Gosling site. I thought maybe I w
ould find the screwdriver, or anything that would help—a shoe print, who knows? Nada. There’s too much land to cover. If someone wanted to dispose of a body it’d never be found, never mind a six-inch screwdriver. I talked to the trail crew too. Nobody had seen or heard anything about the attack other than from the newspapers.”

  Jake nodded. “I’ve got good news. You got a message. Graem Ricker actually gave us his phone—”

  Noelle cut in. “I know.” She brought her computer to the table. Jake held out his hand for it and Noelle obliged.

  “If I can send an email from your computer, I can get his billing address. I know a guy . . .” Jake trailed off. “It should only take a few minutes.”

  With his email open, Jake glanced up at Noelle, who was standing behind him, watching. She got the idea. Privacy.

  She sat down across from Jake and the computer. He knew that Noelle wouldn’t recognize any of the FBI domains used for covert communication—@hammerco.com, @magazinepub.com, @20sumthingdate.com, and so on—but it was easier to avoid questioning. Jake got to the point quickly:

  Daniel:

  Long time no see, friend. Let’s fix that sometime.

  Need a physical address for the following name and mobile number, no PO box.

  Jake typed the name and number and clicked send. Before he could finish telling Noelle that it shouldn’t take long a new email arrived.

  Jake:

  Will do. Gimme 10. Walking back from cafeteria.

  Sent from my iPhone

  “Ten minutes,” Jake said. “Think you can wait that long?” He smiled.

  “Pretty resourceful buddy.”

  “He spends all day sitting in a cubicle.” This much was true. “I’m sure he’s loving the excitement.” The latter part wasn’t true. Daniel spent his days doing work that was far more meaningful and stimulating than hacking an address for an old friend. Still, he owed Jake a few favors.

  Ping. The reply was as succinct as the request:

  722 Ranch St., Basement Apt, Jackson.