Yellowstone Standoff

by Scott Graham

  Last, my tremendous thanks go to the rangers and staffers devoting their lives to preserving and protecting Yellowstone National Park and America’s other national park gems.

  ABOUT THE COVER

  Famed nineteenth-century landscape artist Albert Bierstadt painted “Geysers in Yellowstone,” a portion of which is featured on the cover of Yellowstone Standoff.

  Bierstadt’s paintings of geysers, waterfalls, and other magnificent topography in the Yellowstone area, based on a trip there in 1871, played a significant role in Congress’ decision a year later to preserve the region as America’s first national park. Mount Bierstadt, a 14,065-foot peak south of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, is named in Bierstadt’s honor.

  “Geysers in Yellowstone” is used by permission of the Whitney Western Art Museum, Cody, Wyoming.

  ALSO BY SCOTT GRAHAM

  Mountain Rampage: A National Park Mystery

  The anticipated second installment in the highly praised National Park Mystery Series, Mountain Rampage brings the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, Colorado’s violent gold-mining past, and animal-poaching present vividly to life. Rampage provides readers an inside perspective into Rocky Mountain National Park and the fascinating world of professional archaeology with the return of archaeologist Chuck Bender.

  “Filled with murder and mayhem, jealousy and good detective work—an exciting, nonstop read.” —ANNE HILLERMAN, New York Times bestselling author of Rock with Wings

  “Graham’s clever tale is tailor-made for those who prefer their mysteries under blue skies…” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Canyon Sacrifice: A National Park Mystery

  In Tony Hillerman fashion, this page-turner brings the rugged western landscape, the mysterious past of the ancient Anasazi Indians, and the Southwest’s ongoing cultural fissures vividly to life. A deadly struggle against murderous kidnappers in Grand Canyon National Park forces archaeologist Chuck Bender to face up to his past as he realizes every parents’ worst nightmare: a missing child.

  “A terrific debut novel…” —C.J. BOX, New York Times bestselling author of Stone Cold

  “Graham has created a beautifully balanced book, incorporating intense action scenes, depth of characterization, realistic landscapes, and historical perspective.” —REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE

  “Fingers of steel, zero body fat, and lots of testosterone.”

  — Famed female rock climber Lynn Hill, describing the historic, male-dominated Yosemite Valley climbing scene in the documentary film Valley Uprising

  1

  Twelve-year-old Carmelita was fifteen feet off the ground and climbing higher, her yellow T-shirt bright in the morning sun, before Chuck, caught off guard by her speedy ascent, reacted.

  He took up the growing slack in the climbing rope, sliding the line past his brake hand and through the belay device attached to the harness at his waist. The rope’s braided sheath warmed his skin as it slipped through his cupped palm.

  Skinny as a whiffle bat, her navy tights hanging in loose folds from her tiny thighs and calves, Carmelita balanced the rubber soles of her climbing shoes on the resin holds bolted below her on the climbing tower and grasped additional holds above her head with chalked fingers, hoisting herself skyward.

  “Take it easy,” Chuck called up to her, pride edging his voice, as he took up the last of the slack in the rope. “Give me a chance to keep up, would you?”

  She hesitated for only a heartbeat before climbing higher, her helmeted head back, her moves fluid and natural as she moved from hold to hold up the vertical tower.

  Chuck shot a quick grin at Janelle, standing beside him in a form-fitting fleece top and black yoga pants. “You sure she hasn’t snuck off and done this before without our knowing it?”

  His grin widened as he looked back up at Carmelita. A sweet spot, that’s where he found himself, three years into parenthood, on a working vacation with his family in the heart of his beloved Yosemite Valley in the middle of Yosemite National Park on this warm and sunny mid-August morning, hired to explore the fascinating particulars surrounding a pair of hundred-and-fifty-year-old murders in the valley.

  Everything on this day was right in his world. Perfect.

  A loner turned sudden husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie thirty-six months ago, he was well settled in to his new life now, squeezing in his runs with Janelle before the girls awoke, working in his small study in the back of the house during their school hours, and helping Janelle with household chores and the girls with their homework in the evenings. He’d learned to bid for work close to Durango these days, too, assuring he could make it home on the weekends while he conducted the fieldwork portion of his contracts.

  His morning runs with Janelle kept him fit at forty-five, fifteen years Janelle’s senior, even as gray emanated from his sideburns through the rest of his scalp and new wrinkles pleated the edges of his lips, matching the crow’s feet that for years had creased the sun-scorched corners of his eyes.

  He took in another arm’s length of rope as Carmelita continued her ascent. Her bravura climb, so out of character for her, took him aback. She shouldn’t be doing this. Such brash, public displays were the province of her openly exuberant ten-year-old sister, Rosie.

  His sidelong glance had caught a smile on Janelle’s face that matched his as she watched her older daughter’s confident moves up the portable, forty-foot tower set at the edge of the Camp 4 parking lot.

  Janelle’s smile reinforced what she’d told Chuck in the truck last night, after the girls had fallen asleep in the rear seat of the crew cab as they’d driven deep into the night on the way here from Colorado. She’d spoken softly, so as not to awaken the girls, of her pride at having passed the last of her Emergency Medical Technician certification courses, her EMT application now pending with Durango Fire and Rescue.

  “She must have gotten this from you,” Janelle said at Chuck’s side, her heart-shaped face turned skyward. Her dark hair, long and silky, hung free down her back, and a purple gemstone glittered in the side of her small, pointed nose.

  “Not me,” Chuck said. He took up more slack, maintaining slight tension on the line to assure it would catch Carmelita the instant she fell—if she fell. “I’m a grunter. I climb by force of will. But look at her. She’s defying gravity, and she’s doing it with pure grace.”

  Carmelita passed the tower’s halfway point, still moving higher despite the decreasing size and number of holds on the top half of the structure. She grasped the small resin grips with the tips of her fingers, her weight on her toes. The climbing rope extended from her harness to a pulley at the top of the wall and back down to Chuck in the parking lot below. Her chestnut hair, gathered in a ponytail, gleamed in the sunlight. She showed no hint of fear as she passed thirty feet off the ground, nearing the top of the tower.

  “You go, girl!” Janelle’s brother and Chuck’s assistant, Clarence, called up to Carmelita from where he stood back from the tower’s base with a knot of onlookers, several waiting their turn to climb.

  “Yeah! You go, girl!” ten-year-old Rosie echoed her uncle from where she watched at his side.

  Rosie’s stocky frame contrasted sharply with that of her slight sister, but she could have been her uncle’s twin, he with his squat physique and pot belly, if not for the difference in their ages.

  “No way am I going up that thing,” Rosie declared as she eyed her sister, her thumbs slung through the belt loops of her jeans. “No frickin’ way.”

  “Rosie!” Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories above. Janelle put her hand to her forehead, shielding the sun. “Isn’t that high enough?” she asked Chuck.

  “She might send the thing,” Chuck said. “She might actually top out.”

  Carmelita clambered upward, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no apparent difficulty until, suddenly, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no mor
e climbing to be done. She gave the top of the fiberglass tower a tap. As Chuck had instructed, she leaned back in her harness and planted her feet flat on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope.

  “How’s the view from up there, sweetness?” he called up to her.

  She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above her. “I’ve still got a ways to go.”

  Janelle shuddered. “Don’t get any big ideas, niña,” she warned.

  Chuck relaxed his grip and lowered Carmelita, the rope running through his palm. “I’m glad I belayed her,” he said to Janelle as Carmelita descended, walking backward down the wall. “As light as she is, I wouldn’t have wanted to trust the auto-belay to kick in and catch her.”

  When Carmelita reached the ground, the tower attendant, thickly bearded and in his early twenties, approached from where he’d been talking with a female climber his age waiting her turn on the tower beyond the line of large boulders dividing the parking lot from the campground.

  The attendant’s broad, tanned shoulders extended outward straight as a crossbeam from his tank top, and his powerful quads filled the leg holes of his shorts. The climber wore shiny black climbing tights cut low across her hips and a magenta bikini top. Her bare stomach was smooth and bronzed and flat, and a gold ring sparkled where it hooked through the skin above her belly button.

  The attendant untied the rope from Carmelita’s waist. “Good going,” he told her, offering his palm for a high-five.

  Carmelita slapped his hand and pranced over to Janelle and Chuck, a grin plastered on her face. “That was a blast.”

  “You made it look easy,” Janelle said.

  “It was easy.”

  Chuck lifted an eyebrow at Carmelita. “Not for mere mortals.”

  He freed the rope from his harness, and the attendant set about reattaching it to the cylindrical auto-belay mechanism at the tower’s base.

  Carmelita’s white teeth flashed. “When can I do it again?”

  Chuck indicated the climbers grouped and waiting behind the boulders. Jimmy Anderson stood at the front of the group, in animated conversation with Bernard Montilio, the two of them clearly enjoying the opportunity to catch up with one another after so many years.

  “The line got pretty long behind Jimmy while you were up there,” Chuck said. “I’m glad we came over here first thing this morning.” He hesitated, avoiding Janelle’s gaze, the idea coming to him even as the words formed in his mouth. “The only way you’re going to get to climb any more this weekend is if you enter the Slam.”

  “The what?” Carmelita asked.

  Janelle stiffened at his side as he continued. “The Yosemite Slam. It’s Camp 4’s big climbing competition. It starts tomorrow, runs for three days, through Sunday. That’s why the tower’s here. Jimmy timed the reunion for this weekend to coincide with it. He started it a few years ago to raise money for Camp 4, and it’s gotten bigger every year since. Once the Slam begins, entrants will be the only ones allowed on the tower.”

  Carmelita begged Janelle. “Can I, Mamá?”

  Janelle turned to Chuck, no longer smiling. “A climbing competition? Those are only for adults, right?”

  “The best sport climbers in the world these days are teenagers. Their strength-to-weight ratios are off the charts thanks to the fact that—” he reached out and encircled Carmelita’s upper arm with a finger and thumb “—they’re so skinny.”

  “But that’s teenagers you’re talking about.”

  “I’ll be thirteen in December,” Carmelita reminded her mother.

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  Chuck said, “She was a natural up there just now.”

  “Do they actually have a kids’ division?”

  “Maybe. Even if they do, though, I’d say she should enter the Open division.” He tipped his head to one side. “The way she climbed that thing, you never know.”

  Carmelita’s face glowed pink beneath her olive complexion, but Janelle’s brows drew together. “You mean, where she’d be going up against anybody and everybody?”

  “All the female climbers, anyway.”

  “But that was the first time she’s ever climbed anything in her whole life. You just got her those climbing shoes last week, before we came out here.”

  Chuck eyed the top of the tower. “I don’t imagine she’d win,” he said to Janelle. “But sport climbing isn’t as much about experience and repetitive practice as other sports. It’s a matter of strength and balance—both of which, clearly, Carm’s got by the bucketful. From what I just saw, I don’t think she’d have anything to be ashamed of.”

  Carmelita beamed at him. “Really?”

  Chuck cupped the back of her head in his hand and looked into her luminous almond eyes. “Really.”

  “Cool,” Rosie declared. She jigged at her sister’s side, her arms swinging. “You should do it for sure, Carm.”

  Janelle rested her hand over Chuck’s at the back of Carmelita’s head. “You really think you want to try it?”

  Carmelita nodded, bouncing up and down on her toes.

  “You won’t be sad when you lose?”

  “If she loses,” Chuck said.

  “No,” Carmelita told her mother. “I won’t. I promise.”

  Rosie chimed in, “But I’ll be sad for her. Would that be okay, Mamá?”

  The corners of Janelle’s mouth ticked upward. “Okay,” she said. “You two win.”

  Jimmy threaded the climbing rope into his harness. Still talking to Bernard, his back to the tower, he tied the rewoven figure-eight with knowing fingers and gave the rope a tug, assuring it ran from his waist, up through the pulley at the top of the tower, and back down to the auto-belay mechanism.

  Faded tattoos purpled Jimmy’s sinewy forearms below the short sleeves of his shirt. A long, braided, salt-and-pepper beard curved outward from his jaw like a scorpion’s tail. Stringy brown hair streaked with gray fell from the back of his battered straw cowboy hat to his shoulders. His faded blue jeans hung loose at his waist, and the top buttons of his plaid cotton shirt were undone, revealing a gold necklace with a bear tooth pendant nestled in a patch of silvery hair on his chest.

  “Show us what you can do, Jimmy,” Chuck said.

  “You’re the man,” Bernard said. “Let’s see how much gas you’ve got left in the old tank.”

  Bernard had driven to the valley early this morning from his home in Sacramento. His pasty face and jowly cheeks spoke of his current life as an office-bound attorney, as did his horn-rimmed, turquoise-framed glasses, which could have come straight from a fashion magazine. His waistline pressed at the top of his pleated khaki slacks and the lower buttons of his crisply ironed dress shirt. His brown hair, closely cropped, showed no hint of gray.

  Jimmy turned to the climbing tower and settled his hands on two large holds above his head. “You guys are next,” he said over his shoulder to Chuck and Bernard.

  “Not me,” Chuck said. “No way.”

  “I’m ground-based these days,” said Bernard.

  “You’re scared you can’t do it anymore,” Jimmy said.

  “You got that right,” they replied in unison.

  Jimmy tightened his grip on the two holds and lifted himself off the ground. He ascended the large, easy-to-grasp holds on the lower portion of the tower with no apparent strain, the auto-belay mechanism taking up the slack in the rope as he climbed. Each of his moves was precise, his fingers set, his feet poised on holds beneath him. He angled left and right, scaling the wall with the effortlessness of a gecko, as if he hadn’t aged a day over the last two decades.

  He passed the halfway point on the tower and reached above his head for a small hold thirty feet off the ground. Only two of his fingertips fit atop the tiny protrusion, which sloped outward, providing little purchase.

  He grunted, his first sign of exertion, as he transferred his weight to the hold. He c
lung to the tower, his knuckles turning white. Then his fingertips lost their purchase on the hold and he fell.

  The ratchet in the auto-belay mechanism should have kicked in, catching him when he dropped no more than a few inches. Instead, he cartwheeled away from the wall and plummeted toward the ground unimpeded, his arms and legs flailing, while the climbing rope zipped freely through the auto-belay device bolted to the base of the tower.

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