The Desert Waits

by J. Carson Black

  Suddenly, the wildlife photographer looked up.

  He slid backward on his stomach, clinging to the rock like a lizard. As he pulled the rifle back, a few rocks were dislodged and slid down the ravine. She looked up again, scanning the cliff.

  He’d have to be careful with her. She was a wily one.

  He could barely make her out, crouched as she was behind the thick network of mesquite branches. But he sensed her. Cowering like a rabbit. The more scared she was, the more he liked it.

  He might kill her, he might not. It was his choice. But the difference between him and the Bible-believing patriots with their bunkers and militias was that once he made a choice, he would carry it out. He didn’t have to justify his actions to anyone.

  As his mother used to say, the world was his oyster.

  Five

  I CAN’T BELIEVE I KILLED HER!

  Grief-stricken Luther van Cleeve Blames Self

  —The National Enquirer

  After an early lunch of dried fruit and a Twinkie she’d bought from the hotel vending machine, Alex cooled off in the stream and lay on a rock in the sun to dry. The feeling of being watched gradually receded. She began to think she’d imagined the other hiker. After a while she dozed off, her mind drifting in and out of consciousness. She found herself talking to Caroline, sitting on the tailgate of the crew truck again, only this time Caroline was a lot younger. Alex heard herself saying how glad she was that Caroline was still alive. So they were blanks after all. What a relief. When she awoke, the sun was hot on her face.

  She remembered Deputy McCutcheon’s face as he broke the news of Caroline’s death to Ted Lang. The familiar void returned.

  Feeling restless, Alex decided to follow the game trail into another offshoot canyon before turning back. The narrow canyon twisted and climbed up through a jumble of rocks. The oaks became thicker, casting deep shadows on the ravine floor. In some places the trail crossed the stream or meandered through marshy areas surrounded by dense brush. Above the canyon the terrain had changed as well. Now dry-looking grass furred hillsides dotted by oak, yucca, and stands of manzanita. Desert had given way to oak woodland.

  Alex was so intent on cataloging the changes in the terrain that she almost stepped on the track in the wet sand of the game trail.

  She knelt down, her pulse thumping mightily in her ears. No way it was a fox. The prints were feline, not canine. A cat walked with its claws retracted.

  A bobcat maybe?

  What excited her most was the print of the hind foot. The heel pad was elongated and much closer to the toes than the prints of any other cat, wild or domestic. It looked like the pictures she’d seen of jaguarundi tracks.

  Impossible, a voice said in her mind.

  But what else could it be?

  Excitement took her like a kite in a gust of wind, lifting her high. What incredible luck. It had to be a jaguarundi. It couldn’t be anything else.

  She could barely contain her excitement. She wanted to jump, shout, do handsprings. A rush of pure joy flooded every extremity like a tumultuous river. Goose bumps ignited the flesh on her arms. Caroline Arnet wouldn’t be the only famous one from their school—

  Mortified, Alex closed her eyes. She’d forgotten again. In her excitement over the cat tracks, she’d forgotten Caroline was dead. Worse, she’d compared her life to her old school friend’s. Had she secretly envied Caroline her fame, her beauty, her wealth? Had she been comparing herself to the star all along?

  Alex stared at the tracks and tried to blot out the uncomfortable realization that, yes, maybe she had felt a touch of resentment of Caroline’s fame. Maybe she did need to show that she, too, could make a great contribution to the world. That her life was better than Caroline’s.

  Well, her inner voice spoke up sourly, you won.

  Alex shook her head, trying to clear it, and concentrated on the tracks. They disappeared into the brush and were lost. She followed the game trail a little farther and was rewarded by scratch at the base of an emory oak.

  The disturbed area looked like a housecat’s flower-bed toilet. Here the cat had marked its territory.

  Alex shrugged off her pack and donned a pair of latex gloves. Unscrewing the cap to the jar of cat urine, she swabbed a Q-tip with the scent and stuck it face-up in the damp sand so that it protruded about an inch high. She wiped the sand around it smooth. If the cat came back to find out what animal had sprayed in its territory, the featureless sand would reveal its tracks.

  Alex glanced at her watch. Just after twelve. She donned her pack again and hiked out. Two more vehicles had joined the VW, a big truck with a camper shell on the back and a Toyota 4Runner.

  The equipment she needed was locked in the Jeep, hidden under a tarp. Alex was able to stow most of the stuff into her pack, but she’d have to carry the small tripod. She was back at the emory oak by a quarter past two. The area was undisturbed.

  Donning her gloves again, Alex loaded the remote-control camera with a fresh roll of film and set it on the tripod across the game trail from the oak tree. She adjusted the tripod so the camera lens was a foot high off the ground, about the height of the cat. Careful not to brush against anything and leave her own scent, Alex attached a reflector to the tree trunk opposite the camera. An infrared sensor beam would trip the camera and its flash every time an animal passed on the game trail. With luck, the cat would catch the scent of another cat’s urine and come to investigate. Then she’d have a picture of him. The picture wouldn’t be good, but it would be enough to identify the cat.

  The sun had shifted on its fulcrum and was making its inexorable journey down the sky. Although the heavens remained a scintillating blue, the quality of light was harder, almost brittle. Each bough of the tree was etched in relief against a backdrop of sun-baked rocks. The canyon was saturated with color like a Maxfield Parrish painting.

  Alex glanced at her watch. Three-oh-eight. She’d done everything she could here.

  As she traversed the trail, her thoughts raced ahead. She had a room, paid for through the end of next week. That would give her eleven days to capture the jaguarundi on film before she had to find someplace else to sleep. Eleven days, thanks to Caroline.

  Caroline.

  Alex stopped on the ridge, looking out at the bajada, the tan desert plain, stretching down to the blue mountains of Mexico. So beautiful here. Caroline would never see another day like this one or feel the sun on her face, the breeze teasing her hair. Alex dwelt on Caroline’s death as if it were a penance. She was a child again, meditating in the living room with her parents, trying to keep her thoughts from straying to the voices of the other kids playing in the park across the street, trying not to think about the hour of sunshine she was missing. She didn’t do very well then, and she was no better at it now. Her mind raced ahead of her like an exuberant golden retriever, circling back impatiently, telling her to forget the past and concentrate on the glorious present.

  An engine started up, progressing from first to second to third until the droning noise receded into the distance. Alex trotted the rest of the way down to the trailhead.

  All three vehicles were gone.

  Back in her room, she turned on the TV, watching the local evening news as she stripped off her clothes. She glimpsed Sheriff Johnson at the end of a sound bite, replaced quickly by the image of a female reporter standing at the entrance to the Hotel Sonora. It must have been taped earlier today. “As you just heard, Kathy, Caroline Arnet’s death has been officially labeled an accidental shooting, and as of now, the case is closed.”

  “I understand they’re having a problem getting the body released from Mexico,” said Kathy Jordan, the anchor for the NBC affiliate. “Is that true?”

  “Sheriff Johnson said he is talking with the authorities, but he didn’t supply any reason for what exactly is holding them up.”

  “We’ll all be keeping a close watch on this story.”

  Alex sat down on the bed and stared at the television. Wa
s she hearing things? What about the cards? The break-in? How could they call it accidental death?

  Anger replaced shock. How in God’s name could they be so stupid? Didn’t Deputy McCutcheon think it the slightest bit strange that Caroline was threatened one day and killed the next? She’d been harassed, molested, then killed, and they called it an accidental death.

  Shaking, she picked up the phone and punched in the number for the Gilpin County Sheriff’s Department. The man who answered didn’t bother to hide his apathy. “Deputy McCutcheon is out. Can I take a message?”

  “I want to know just what he thinks qualifies as a murder in this county. Someone was stalking Caroline Arnet. He knows it and I know it, and I want him to tell me himself why they’re calling it an accidental death. Got that?”

  “Is there somewhere he can reach you?”

  Alex told him. If he could forget the cards, the flowers, the intruder, he’d probably forget where she was, too.

  She almost made it to the dining room when the reporters who were camped in the lobby spotted her.

  “Ms. Cafarelli, is it true you were Caroline’s best friend?”

  “What did you think of—”

  “Did you hear Sheriff Johnson’s statement?”

  Windscreen-capped microphones and cameras poked inches from her face. Alex could see her reflection in their large, round lenses; she looked like a terrified rabbit. At that moment, Alex realized the kind of scrutiny Caroline had been under every day of her career. The intrusion, the noise, the demanding questions. How could anyone stand this? Shaken, she stood in the center of the pressing bodies, unable to move or think or speak.

  A woman thrust her microphone closer. Her hennaed hair clashed with her black-buttoned, tangerine suit. Alex recognized her as the reporter for Scoop! Magazine, a tabloid news show. “Are you aware that some people are saying the shooting was a publicity stunt planned by Caroline gone wrong? Could you comment on that?”

  Alex managed to mumble “no comment.” She tried to push through the crowd, but they hovered a few steps ahead.

  “Her last movie didn’t do well. Her career was going downhill. She needed a boost. Could the person you knew do such a thing, just to generate publicity?”

  “No comment.”

  The woman from Scoop! Magazine held up a high school yearbook. Alex recognized it right away—it was her high school, her junior year. “We want to do an exclusive on you and Caroline, go back to your old neighborhood in Pasadena, really get a picture of her the way she was before she became famous. We’ll pay you, of course.”

  Alex could barely contain her anger. She wanted to strike out, but instead she said, “What kind of friend do you think I am?”

  Unfazed, the reporters shouted more questions. She made a break for the dining room entrance, hoping that in the ensuing bottleneck she’d get away. She tried to make it as difficult as possible for them to follow her, threading her way between tables to a free booth by the window. She’d be damned if she’d wait to be seated.

  Alex concentrated on the menu, trying to avoid eye contact, just in case any of the reporters had ventured into the crowded dining area. Gradually, she became aware that someone was standing over her.

  “You alone?” a male voice asked.

  “Yes, and I’d like to keep it that way.” She glanced up and found herself staring into the pale-blue eyes of Booker Purlie.

  Six

  DIED. Caroline Arnet, gamine star of Linked Hearts and Straw in the Wind, killed on her thirtieth birthday by a malfunctioning prop gun on the set of action-adventure film Jagged Impact.

  —“Milestones,” TIME Magazine

  The passenger train picked up speed as it snaked past the water tower at Two Points and the small Navajo trading post at the foot of the mesa. In a matter of seconds, it had swung across the trestle bridge spanning Vulture Gorge, winding up into the ramparts of the “Tall Mountains,” their slopes populated by spruce and pine below the snow-laden timberline. Down through the mining town of Mule Gulch and back into the flat mesa country, where Navajo shepherds watched from the backs of paint ponies, the train streamed past like a caterpillar on methamphetamine.

  Just as quickly, it lost speed and stopped dead on the track. Nick McCutcheon listened for and heard the crackling of the radio dispatcher.

  Dammit! He strode to the desk and reached for the receiver, kicking himself for becoming immersed in his Lionel train layout when he should have been hustling the camping gear out to the truck. Janice and Ellie would be here soon, and he had planned to be ready by five, out the door, unreachable, and on vacation.

  Doug Childers should have been here to spell him, but it turned out he had a dentist appointment in Tucson.

  For a split second, he debated not answering it. If he knew Sheriff Johnson, it was another wild-goose chase. A bar fight. A decapitated mailbox. A barking dog. Johnson knew he was taking Ellie camping overnight—he’d been planning it for a month. Janice was dropping her off on the way down to Rocky Point with her new boyfriend, and this was a rare opportunity to spend time with his nine-year-old daughter.

  He debated not answering it, but knew he had to. Even though the sheriff had closed the Caroline Arnet case, Nick sensed it could open again any minute. He was about ninety percent certain the star had been murdered by the man who had come into her room the night before.

  When he’d cautioned Johnson that he was closing the case too soon, the sheriff had practically taken his head off. The case was closed, and if Nick didn’t let it drop, he would be “held accountable.” Nick knew what that meant. Come evaluation time, he’d pay.

  But Nick couldn’t understand why Johnson had moved so quickly to close the Arnet case, especially since it was common knowledge among the movie crew that she’d been harassed. Sheriff Johnson was an astute political animal. All his creative energy was funneled into what some of the guys on the force called the Two P’s: promote and protect. Promote himself as sheriff and protect his ass at all costs. Nick had expected Johnson to drag his feet, telling the press that it looked like an accident, but at least give the appearance that he was following every lead. Eventually the excitement would die down and people would move on to other things. That way, he’d have his bolthole—closing the case—available if he needed it, but he’d allow himself some leeway if it turned out it was an easily solved murder. As it was, closing the case this early could backfire and make him look like a fool.

  Shrugging, Nick picked up the receiver. It really wasn’t his problem.

  To his relief, the call turned out to be close by. A woman had gone into her yard to hang up laundry and discovered a “huge green parrot, somebody’s pet” sitting on a tree branch. What she expected the sheriff’s office to do about it, he didn’t know.

  He glanced at the clock. He should be back in an hour, in time for Janice and Ellie’s arrival. He scribbled a note on a Post-It and pasted it to the trailer door, securing it with Scotch tape, and fervently hoped Janice and Bob would wait for him if he were late.

  Considering the weekend they had planned, he thought it was a safe bet.

  Booker Purlie slid into the booth opposite Alex, a man so tiny that Alex wondered if his feet reached the floor.

  She remembered what Ted had said about him: he’s harmless. Booker Purlie looked harmless. Round-shouldered and narrow-chested, he sported a scraggly little Charlie Chaplin mustache, receding brown hair, a mild face, and tiny mouth. His eyes were wide and guileless. He wore a cheap-looking western shirt with pearl buttons and bat-wing yokes. His bolo tie—featuring an inch-long scorpion encased in clear plastic—was pulled tight around his scrawny neck, reminding Alex of the knot in a balloon.

  “I heard you with the reporters. You really a friend of hers?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I was.”

  He wriggled forward in the booth, his eyes avid. “Did she tell you about me?”

  “Actually no, but we didn’t have time to talk much.”

  His eyes, so i
nnocent just a moment before, turned hard as marbles and his complexion darkened to a mottled red. “You were her best friend and she didn’t tell you!” He stood up abruptly, banging his hip violently against the table. He paced the aisle, muttering under his breath and gesticulating. A waiter looked over. Alex could see him debating what to do.

  Dread uncoiled in her like the petals of an orchid, clammy cold.

  “I can’t get a straight answer from anybody around here!” He glared at her. “Do you have any idea how many people I’ve talked to? Do you?”

  Alex treated it like a hypothetical question. She didn’t think she could speak. His face was inches from her own, his eyes like gas flames.

  “I don’t have to put up with this. I have options. You might think otherwise, but I know. I know!” Still fuming, he sat down opposite her again. “I have plenty of witnesses. They’ll come out of the woodwork once I—”

  “Alex?” Ted Lang’s voice came over her shoulder. “You said we’d go look at that location, remember?”

  Alex grabbed the lifeline. “I guess I forgot.”

  “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. I know she told you. Now she’s dead, you’re gonna pretend it didn’t happen?”

  “Leave us alone, Booker.” Ted had Alex by the arm and was guiding her toward the door. His mild face was suffused with heat; a muscle in his jaw flexed.

  “What’s he talking about?” Alex whispered as Booker ran after them, nearly knocking a waitress oft’ her feet.

  “Beats me. Just humor him.”

  Booker buzzed around them like a fly. “Caroline and I had a—”

  Ted stopped. “Booker, Caroline’s gone. Whatever you’re yelling about is done with.”

  As they walked away, Alex glanced back. Booker was already bothering someone else.

  “Thanks for coming to the rescue. What’s this about a location?”

  “It was the first excuse I could come up with. We’ll be shooting there tomorrow. I thought you might like to see it. In the eighties, Alamo Properties started building a planned retirement community down here, Rancho sin Caballos Estates—ranch without horses.” He stepped back to let her through the doorway into the lobby.