by Blake Pierce
“I honestly don’t know what Charles wanted there near the end. He was forty-three, you know? A little late to be starting over from scratch. And I think he felt that. I think he was done with the marriage for sure—but was just scared of being alone.”
“You said he had been talking about Devil’s Claw for a while,” Mackenzie said. “Did he climb fairly regularly?”
“Oh, he did it quite a bit when we were married. He used to go out rock climbing almost every weekend. Some people jog, others lift weights, but for Charles it was always rock climbing. He really loved it.”
“Did he stop going as much when the two of you separated?” Mackenzie asked.
“Yes, actually. I think he saw the climbing as one other thing that took time away from me. That was one of the things that sort of drove us apart. He had work and this little wedding band he was in, and then the climbing. We rarely saw each other. I think when things went to hell between us, he non-verbally made the decision to stop climbing as much—as a way to show me he was willing to change without actually engaging in that awkward discussion.”
“I have to ask,” Mackenzie said. “The officer that called to inform you of Charles’s accident said you responded with laughter. Hearty laughter, at that. Can I ask why?”
She smiled, but it was a tired one. It was an ironic sort of smile, one that held shadows of shame. “Two reasons, I guess. First, the shock of it. Sort of a where the hell is this coming from thing. Second…that’s one of the last things I said to him. He told me he was scaling up to Devil’s Claw sometime this week. But he had been saying that for a month, like I said. And I told him…Jesus. I told him to have fun falling off of the side of the mountain. I told him I’d write a charming speech for his funeral. Can you believe that?”
Both Mackenzie and Timbrook remained silent as the heaviness of this settled over the living room. After several moments, Mackenzie did her best to resume. “Would you say things were strained between the two of you?”
“Yeah. Things could get nasty. Name calling. Hurtful comments. That sort of thing. You know…sometimes several months ago, just before we were set to sign the divorce papers…”
“What is it?” Timbrook asked.
“We slipped up. Heat of the moment…it took us by surprise and we slept together. And even that was toxic. Rough, but not in a particularly good way. I think he was trying to hurt me. But he wanted it. We both did. And that’s why I say I don’t know what he wanted.”
“Mrs. Rudeke, do you know if Charles had any regular climbing partners?”
“He didn’t. I think he kind of cycled through them. He did have this one guy he used to climb with up until about two years ago. A friend from college that ended up moving to California. Ever since then, I think he’s just climbed with random people from some of the local meet-ups. But mostly, he did smaller climbs by himself. Lead-soloing, I think he called it.”
“Do you know if he ever made any enemies around here?” Mackenzie asked. “Particularly in the rock-climbing community?”
“In the rock-climbing community, I don’t think so. If he did, he never told me about it.”
“Any enemies otherwise?”
“Just me, I guess.” She frowned here and looked at the floor. “I’m not quite sure how to feel here. I…I know it sounds terrible, but I hated him right there for a while. Hell, I think I still do. He was so conflicted, so needy and just suffocating. I hate that I’m not as sad as I know I should be about this…”
Mackenzie tried once again to give her some room to process it all before she moved on. This time, it was Timbrook who broke the silence.
“Do you by any chance know the names of any of these other random climbers he would climb with?”
“No. But he kept notes. He’d sometimes use a voice recorder app to do almost like a journal sort of thing…to plan climbs and things like that.”
“On his phone?” Mackenzie asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, we think that was lost in his fall.”
“I’m pretty sure he saved it all to his iCloud account. I can access it through my computer if you need it.”
“That would be fantastic,” Mackenzie said. “Would you mind?”
“No, not at all. I can do it right now.”
With that, Tamara walked to the back of the house and out of their sight. Mackenzie and Timbrook shared a look that spoke volumes. They both pitied the woman, as she was clearly doing her best to sort through her emotions over her sudden loss.
But there was something else there, too. Slowly, it seemed that Charles Rudeke’s death was churning up bits and pieces of useful information. There was a feeling of progress in the air now—and though it was shrouded under the deaths of three people, Mackenzie would gladly take that sort of progress if it meant sparing a fourth, fifth, or even more.
Tamara came back with her laptop and pulled up her iCloud storage. She seemed to hesitate a bit as she switched from her account to Charles’s; it was the first time Mackenzie had seen the woman show any signs of grief since they had arrived.
“Here we go,” Tamara said. “But it looks like he’d recently cleaned it up. The last file is only from two months ago.”
Mackenzie saw that there were fourteen audio files. The shortest was only forty-one seconds long. The longest was seven minutes.
“Would you allow me to transfer these files to my phone?” Mackenzie asked.
“Sure. But I don’t really know how.”
“I can handle that,” Timbrook said.
Timbrook took a seat behind the laptop, asking Tamara for a cable to connect the laptop to a phone. As Tamara once again left them alone, Timbrook’s phone rang. Again, Mackenzie could only listen in to one side of a conversation. It was brief and once again, the expression on Timbrook’s face told her that this was likely a promising call. She was ending the call just as Tamara came back in with the cable.
“That was Waverly,” Timbrook said. “He and Petry can confirm that the print we found up on Devil’s Claw is the same as the faded one we found on Logan’s View.”
That’s enough to confirm there had indeed been someone else present at these so-called accidents—likely the same person. Our killer, presumably.
“Prints?” Tamara asked. “You mean, someone was with Charles?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Mackenzie said. She hated to lie to the woman, but suddenly having to accept that her husband’s accident might very well be a murder instead wasn’t something she was ready to burden her with.
But even then, Tamara seemed to start wondering about this herself. The three women fell into silence as Timbrook transferred the audio files to Mackenzie’s phone—one of which had been recorded just yesterday, providing them with perhaps the last recorded words of the latest victim.
***
“There’s one other thing,” Timbrook said the moment they got back into the car. “I just didn’t want to reveal too much in front of Mrs. Rudeke.”
“What is it?”
“Waverly said he spoke with a local hiking guide—someone who isn’t just specialized with the park. This is a guy that knows all of the other local trails and hotspots, too. We’ve been trying to get in touch with him for like two days and Waverly says he finally called us back this morning—about half an hour ago. He said based on the location of Devil’s Claw, there’s only one single parking spot that breaks that hike up. It’s the same little field where Petry picked us up this morning.”
“So the killer likely used it, right? If he hiked all the way up to Devil’s Claw, we would have probably seen him when you and I walked up the trail this morning, right?”
“I was thinking the same thing. The time is a little off, though. There might have been about fifteen or twenty minutes to spare—where he could have come off of the trail before we arrived. But that’s a tight window. I think it’s more likely that he used that field as a stop-over.”
“And if he used it at that exact time, he knew Charles was going
to be there. There’s no way the timing was coincidence.”
“Makes sense to me.”
“We need to head back up there, right now,” Mackenzie said. She then pulled out her phone and pulled up the audio tracks from Charles Rudeke’s iCloud. “For right now, are you a fan of audiobooks?”
“Never liked them,” Timbrook said. “Makes me feel like Mommy is reading me a bedtime story.”
“I understand that. But maybe we can learn a thing or two from this one.”
With that, she opened up the first file and played it. The voice of a dead man filled the car.
“Tim is saying he thinks he’s done with climbing. So that’s another one. No one really seems to be into it anymore. Or maybe they’re just tired of climbing with me. Probably coming off as needy. The fucking separation from Tamara sucks. Harder than I thought it would be. Anyway, I found another cool little spot out near Logan’s View. A bit farther away from where all of the younger climbers hang out. Took about an hour and ten minutes to get to the top. Note to self—don’t piss off birds. A damned blue jay just about took my nose off this morning.”
That entry ended, so Mackenzie started the next one in line. She was going in sequential order, this next entry having been recorded five weeks ago.
“I didn’t even climb today. Some mother had lost her kid on one of the trails, so there was a lot of commotion. Lots of park employees and the police. It just felt sort of weird. Speaking of which, I know it sounds dumb, but I got that feeling again—that feeling like someone was watching me. Trailing me, maybe. I felt it all the way up until I got in my car to leave. Might have just been all of the commotion. Anyway, ’til next time.”
Mackenzie and Timbrook shared a peculiar glance as Mackenzie played the next clip. He felt like he was being followed, Mackenzie noted. Had the killer been following him? Has he been following all of his victims?
“Good climbing today. Met up with Tim, up on Exum Ridge. He’s seen that Free Solo movie and is all about trying something bigger. He wants to take some big trip out to California with this girl he’s seeing. I think this is like the fifth girl this year. But he also said he’ll stick it out with me as I keep doing the smaller climbs. He never came out and said it, but I think he’s trying to be a good friend. He knows I’m struggling with the Tamara stuff…he doesn’t want me to keep it all pent up. He also thinks I’m a shitty climber and, as he says, he doesn’t want to see me fall and kill myself. It pisses me off when he talks about me like that but God knows I don’t want to argue and bring out that temper.”
The entry came to an end. Before starting the next one, Mackenzie replayed them all back in her head. “Any idea if the name Tim or any variations came up on the lists of instructors Waverly and Petry were compiling?” she asked Timbrook.
“No idea. It doesn’t sound familiar, though.”
Mackenzie nodded, thinking. She then pressed play and this time when the voice of recently deceased Charles Rudeke sounded out of her phone and spoke into the car, it sent a little shiver down her back to hear the voice of a dead man.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It was just after noon when Timbrook pulled her car into the thin dirt parking area in the field. It had been a bumpy and jostling ride up the mountain, most of it covering a little dirt track that had never seen any kind of state maintenance. There was only one other vehicle in the field when they arrived, an SUV that had probably had a much easier time making it up the bumpy road.
Mackenzie and Timbrook got out of the car and started to cover the thin stretch of dirt. There were no markers of any kind, no posts, struts, or even rustic wooden boards on the ground to indicate where visitors should park. It made it that much harder to determine where any recent traffic might have come to a stop.
“This is sort of a mess, huh?” Timbrook asked.
“It is. But luckily, it’s a small area.”
Mackenzie honestly didn’t even know if finding any tire tracks would help. Unless they could tie them to tracks at the other sites, it would be fruitless. And so far, no one had been able to recover any tire tracks from the other scenes.
She looked away from the dirt, to the grass and weeds that made up the remainder of the little field. The entire field was caught perfectly between two slightly rising hills. And while it did not offer much of a view, the way the surrounding trees bent outward as the mountain continued its ascent seemed to promise something spectacular above. The grass within the field was mostly weeds and thick crabgrass, trampled by years and years of adventurous feet. Because of that, it was hard to tell where any recent feet had passed through. The only clear sign of passage was the flattened area at the western rim of the field that gave way to Heinz Trail, which started about three quarters of a mile further down the side of the mountain.
Mackenzie walked over to the SUV, parked right along the edge of the tree line. She peered in through the driver’s side door and saw nothing of importance: a phone charger, some loose change in the console.
“Hey, Agent White?”
She looked up and saw Timbrook on the other side of the field. She joined her, her eyes following the direction Timbrook was looking.
“That look like a little footpath to you?” Timbrook asked.
Mackenzie stepped a little closer and looked beyond the tree line. She did see a little path etched out in the foliage. It was barely there, but it was enough for her to consider it some sort of walkway. It was not visible from the tree line due to a thick pile of underbrush and a fallen log; it was almost as if it was been purposefully hidden by nature.
“Yeah, I’d call that a footpath,” she said. “A footpath that might make it easy to come and go from this field without necessarily being seen.”
Without saying another word to one another, the women walked beyond the tree line, stepping over the deadfall and onto the very uneven terrain. Once she was within the forest, Mackenzie could not unsee the little trail. Really, it was barely there at all, nothing more than a little pencil line that had been trod into the fallen foliage, snaking its way down a hill and then taking a shar left turn.
The ground started to swoop downward, nearly at a ninety-degree angle. Mackenzie had to hold on to nearby trees on a few occasions as the ground seemed to tilt under her feet. She looked back at Timbrook and saw that she was having some difficulty, too. The treacherous shape of the trail made it quite apparent why it seemed to be rarely used; you’d have to be very committed to what was at the other end of it to venture down it.
As the trail came to the bottom of the first hill, the trail cut hard to the right and started a slight uphill trajectory. In a few places, it seemed to disappear completely before reappearing in the form of a scant little pathway several yard further ahead. Mackenzie took note of the fact that it was now heading in the direction of Devil’s Claw.
“I’m starting to feel like this might not really head anywhere,” Timbrook said. “There are so many of these little offshoots that—”
“Shh,” Mackenzie said, raising her hand in a stop gesture.
Timbrook fell silent, allowing Mackenzie to focus. For a moment there, she thought she had heard something. She did her best to filter out the slight sounds of the leaves rustling in the breeze overhead, of her own breathing. And there it was again—a muffled sound coming from just ahead.
It was a woman’s groaning.
She looked back to Timbrook to see if she had heard it. The look on her face said it all. They nodded to one another and hurried forward, both reaching for their sidearm as they continued up the trail. As they closed in, they could both hear the woman even over the noise of their shuffling feet along the path.
The woman sounded distressed, clearly in pain. Mackenzie nearly started to yell out for the woman, but then her eyes fell on something else, slightly to her left and down another slight hill off to the side of the little path.
“What the hell is that?” Timbrook asked.
Mackenzie understood the question and although
the answer was simple enough, it still made no sense. Sitting to the left of the path was a small partially dilapidated shed. The color of the wood siding alone indicated that it had been here for ages—but the condition of it also implied that it had not been used in quite some time.
As they took it in and tried to make sense of it again, the sound of the woman’s groaning sounded out.
It was coming from the cabin.
And this time, there was another noise behind her complaints. It was the sound of something moving, something slight and muffled.
Again, she and Timbrook shared a look before heading down the slight slop of the hill and heading for the little shed. Sitting outside of it, Mackenzie could see a very old shovel and what looked like the rim of a tire that had long been forgotten.
Again, the woman’s voice alerted. This time, it sounded more urgent, more desperate.
Mackenzie came to the front of the shed. There were no windows, only an old door that was closed, the frame barely holding it in.
She readied herself, gripped her gun tightly, and kicked the door open.
It took her about two second to gather what was happening. There were two people inside, a man towering over a woman. The woman was practically wrapped around the man, her back pressed against the far wall. Her shirt was pulled up to her shoulders and her pants were on the floor.
And then she saw the man’s naked rear end.
That was all she needed to see to realize that she had just walked in on an amorous couple who had snuck away for some time alone in the woods. If that hadn’t been enough to clue her in, the woman’s shrieks of embarrassment would have sealed the deal. The man, meanwhile, looked angry beyond belief as he withdrew from his partner and wheeled around to their new guests, pulling his pants up as he did so.
“What the hell?” he screamed. He was about to say something else but then he saw the guns and Timbrook’s police uniform.
“Sorry to barge in,” Mackenzie said sarcastically. “But we’re in the area on an investigation and heard a woman that was in distress.”