by Joseph Flynn
No, she wasn’t going back to San Francisco. She was staying right here in these glorious mountains. Where she could run along this empty road in the morning, watch the sun poke through the trees, fill her lungs with the thin but bracing air, and experience the joy of gliding along as her muscles gathered and stretched with fluid ease.
Her buoyant mood was helped by the fact that in the past month she’d met two new men, and had dared to allow each of them to buy her a drink — the first time she’d permitted anything like that in over a year. And, wonder of wonders, neither of them had gone psycho on her. Just the opposite. Each of them was charming, each in his way.
Brad and Carter were both good looking. Neither was pushy, thank God. Brad was about her age; Carter was ten years older. Brad was in the first flush of professional success — not on her scale, of course, but he wouldn’t be moving back in with mom and dad any time soon; Carter was starting over after a ruinous divorce, but seemed determined to rebuild his life and not be permanently embittered. Brad was maybe a touch too taken with himself; Carter was a trifle gun-shy.
How to choose, Mary Kay wondered. Or whether to choose at all.
Rounding a curve in the road, she had the uneasy feeling that she was no longer running alone. She looked over both shoulders, but saw no one behind her, and the trees off to either side of the road were too thick for a pursuer to negotiate easily. She listened for the sound of an oncoming runner approaching from beyond the next curve. Nothing. Only the soft whisper of the breeze stirring the trees.
She chided herself for being paranoid. Her stalker was still in prison. He didn’t know where she was, and she’d been told she would be notified in advance of any decision to let him out early. Still, for the first time since she’d come to the mountains, she had that old gut-wrenching feeling: she was being followed.
Another survey of her surroundings, however, produced the same negative results. She didn’t see a soul. As she approached the upcoming curve, though, her hand went to the canister of pepper spray clipped to the waistband of her running shorts. By leaving San Francisco and moving to Goldstrike, she’d fled as far as she ever intended to flee; she had made a vow that anybody who fucked with her from now on was going to have a fight on his hands. Rounding the curve, she saw no one coming uphill.
Mary Kay took her hand off the pepper spray, and forced herself to relax. Her breathing fell back in synch with her stride. She wondered if she’d ever be able to really trust a man again.
That was when the idea for the game hit her: Sorting ‘Em Out.
She would collect the experiences of hundreds — no, thousands — of bright, successful women. Listen to all the smart moves they’d made with men. All the disastrous ones, too. Define the categories of men available to date. List their pros and cons. Start with a first date. Program male moves. Female countermoves. Add some humor, music, and cool graphics. Offer the chance to commit to, or bail out of, the relationship at any point. Then show the likely results of the choice.
What a great game for young women! All women, really.
Pretty big market.
Might even be a movie if sales —
The bolt of fear struck Mary Kay like an axe between her shoulder blades. There was a stalker behind her. She felt it. He was closing in fast. Her throat went dry with fear. She could imagine being dragged into the trees.
She started to sprint, and her right hand closed on the canister of pepper spray.
Then, only two strides into her burst, she heard a deep, guttural grunt. Something stunningly strong hit her, a cluster of razor sharp blades slashed her left shoulder and the back of her neck. The force of the blow spun her around and knocked her off her feet. She came to rest on her bottom and her bloodied elbows.
And there looking down at her, above huge, gleaming fangs, close enough to feel and smell its heated, putrid breath, were the feral yellow eyes of a mountain lion.
The cat snarled and raised a claws-out paw, but it didn’t strike. It paused as if unsure as to how it should dispatch prey that met its fearsome gaze and refused to look away.
In that instant of hesitation, it was the woman who struck.
She blasted the beast’s eyes, nose and mouth with her pepper spray. The lion howled and backed off, raking her abdomen and thighs as it went. But it didn’t run away. It stood not five feet from her shaking its head frantically, trying to rid itself of the effects of the spray.
Mary Kay scrambled to her knees and leaning in as far as she dared emptied the canister in the big cat’s face. The animal shrieked with pain, and swiped at her, but partially blinded now, it missed.
Still, the mountain lion didn’t run away. It lay flat on its belly and ran its forelegs over its eyes and nose trying to relieve the terrible pain and clear its vision. Mary Kay knew if the cat succeeded it would kill her for sure. But she was out of spray.
So she did the only thing she could think of. She got to her feet, held the canister out at arm’s length and hissed to mimic the sound of the stinging spray being released.
That was enough for the mountain lion.
If fled clumsily into the trees from which it had stalked her.
Terrified, bleeding and stiff, Mary Kay Mallory began to run haltingly in the direction from which she’d come. She knew it was a little better than a mile to the scenic overlook where she’d parked her car. She had to make it back there before the cat’s senses cleared, before it could regain her scent, before it came for her again.
Chapter 3
Ron Ketchum was lucky that Route 99 had a turnout at the point opposite the crucifixion. He moved the Explorer off the road so nobody would come around the curve and rear end them. Oliver called for back-up: cops to keep the traffic moving; Officer Benny Marx, the department’s crime scene specialist and Dr. George Ryman, a retired internist, who served pro bono as the town’s medical examiner. Ron also told the deputy chief to have somebody scrounge up some kind of screen to shield the victim from public view. The sight had jolted two cops with almost thirty-five years of experience between them. If the motoring public came around the bend and saw that corpse, the result might be anything from a vehicular accident to a heart attack to … well, nightmares were a pretty good bet for anybody who saw this particular body.
Ron got out of the car and noticed the tire marks on the pavement. Somebody else had pulled into the turnout recently, and then taken off fast enough that a fair amount of rubber had been left behind. Ron saw that Oliver had noticed the tire marks, too.
“Killer or just a coincidence?” the chief asked.
“Never met a coincidence in my life,” the deputy chief replied. He leaned back into the Explorer and came out with a digital camera. He started taking pictures of the tire marks from several angles. He dropped into a squat and eyeballed the black streaks.
“Nice wide tires. Probably expensive. Kind you find on some fancy foreign car.”
Ron gave Oliver a bleak look as the deputy chief stood up.
“Yeah, I know,” Oliver said. “Fat lotta good that’ll do us around here.”
Goldstrike didn’t have the Rolls-Royce density of Beverly Hills, but there were more than enough Range Rovers to make up the difference. And any car that ever raced down a mountain road in a James Bond movie could be found in somebody’s garage in town. Unlike Oliver, there were plenty of people in the Sierra who liked to drive fast right out there on the edge of eternity.
“Tell Benny when he gets here to take some samples of that rubber and make some measurements and impressions anyway,” Ron said. “Even if the marks are from tires found on something common like a Beemer, it’s good to be thorough. You never know when you’ll get lucky.”
“Right,” Oliver agreed, making a note of the instruction.
Then Ron dictated the time they’d found the body, and the weather conditions. Oliver wrote it all down. Back in the City of Angels, the chief had been the homicide detective, the deputy chief had been the street cop.
T
hey crossed the road and saw the two sets of footprints in the rain-softened earth. Both sets had the toes pointing toward the road. Both sets appeared to have been made by the same shoes or boots. But one set of footprints was outlined by a pair of grooves. The chief interpreted the signs.
“The killer dragged the victim to the tree walking backward. Means the poor sonofabitch was at least incapacitated before he got nailed up. We’ll need Benny to make molds of these footprints.”
Oliver wrote it down.
“You see any sign anybody else was up here?” Ron asked.
The deputy chief took a long look around. The charred tree rose from a shelf of bare earth that was approximately fifteen feet wide. Just behind it, the land dropped away. Not a cliff exactly, but a steep slope covered with fir trees. Oliver didn’t think anyone involved in the crime had arrived or departed that way.
“No,” he answered.
“Okay, photograph the footprints from here.” After Oliver had taken several exposures, Ron added, “Follow behind me so we disturb the area as little as possible.”
The two cops walked over to the corpse, paying careful attention not to step on any possible evidence. Ron saw no signs of blood spatter. If there’d been any, the rain must have washed it away.
The victim was a very dark skinned man. His head rested on his right shoulder. He appeared to be in his mid-to-late twenties. The flesh above the left brow had been laid open to the bone. His arms had been stretched upward with his elbows bent and his wrists twisted to accommodate the curvature of the tree. One nail had been driven through each of his palms. The victim’s knees were bent and the sole of his left foot had been place over the instep of his right. A nail had been driven through both feet and into the tree. The victim’s toes touched the soil at the base of the dead tree.
The only article of clothing on the body was a pair of pale blue boxer shorts that were stained with urine. A smell of feces indicated that the bowels had also vented. Maybe post-mortem, maybe while the man was still alive.
The victim had been roughly Deputy Chief Gosden’s height, but his lean build was more like Ron Ketchum’s. There were indentations on either side of the nose, as if the victim had been a long-time wearer of eyeglasses.
Oliver, looking over the chief’s shoulder, nodded at the blow to the forehead. “You think the poor sonofabitch was dead before he got stuck to this tree?”
Ron, having a better vantage point, noticed there was a second gash at the crown of the victim’s skull. “Looks like he caught another whack up here.”
“So, what do you think? The one in back to knock him out, then nail him up, then the one in front to keep him from screaming too loud?”
Ron looked around. The road behind them was the only sign of the twenty-first century. Otherwise, it was a wilderness. He asked, “Who’d hear him scream out here?”
Oliver took an old Zippo lighter out of his pocket and started flicking the top open and shut. A former smoker, he had finally managed to quit last month, with considerable persuasion from his wife and additional coaxing from Ron. Now, the deputy chief played with his lighter whenever he wanted a cigarette.
Ron intended to indulge the nervous tic for another week or two. Then he’d tell Oliver to knock it the hell off; it was driving him crazy.
“You look at his face,” Ron said, reconsidering the victim, “it seems there’s just too much pain there for him not to know what was happening to him. He might have been dazed, but I think he was alive and aware when he got nailed up.”
“Yeah, me too.” Oliver snapped the lighter shut sharply, trying to control his rage.
“Can’t have happened too long ago. The hands would start to give way; he’d be sagging more. And the coyotes would have started in on him.” Ron glanced at Oliver. “You recognize him?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
“Motherfucker,” the deputy chief cursed, jamming the lighter back in his pocket.
“Oliver,” Ron said, “this doesn’t have to be a racial killing.”
“It doesn’t?” Oliver asked in open disbelief.
“Could have been one black guy killing another.”
They’d both seen plenty of that in L.A. But neither had seen a crucifixion before.
The deputy chief was in no mood to debate. He just asked, “You want me to call the mayor now?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ron said. “Mayor for Life Steadman won’t want to miss this one.”
Clay Steadman, a movie icon for forty years, billionaire real estate developer, the town’s largest property owner, and the fifth-term mayor of Goldstrike, arrived in his gleaming black Land Rover shortly after Dr. Ryman and the detail of back-up cops had appeared. Nobody, as of the moment, had yet to find a way to screen the corpse from public view, and Officer Benny Marx advised against it regardless, not wanting to take a chance of displacing some subtle piece of evidence.
The chief noted the mayor’s arrival and escorted him to the victim along the now well trampled path that everyone had used. The two men arrived at the victim just as Dr. Ryman was making an incision in the man’s abdomen, not terribly far, anatomically, from where the Roman soldier’s spear had pierced the side of Christ.
“What the hell are you doing, George?” the mayor demanded of the doctor.
Dr. Ryman answered mildly, “Taking his liver temperature to fix the time of death. Problem is, with the rain last night cooling him down, that could be a little tricky.”
The physician inserted a probe with a thermometer through the incision he’d just made. The mayor grimaced and looked over his shoulder. He wasn’t being squeamish, Ron knew, he was just making sure no townsfolk were approaching to witness the ghastly proceedings. Townsfolk or reporters. But it was still early, and the only witnesses were those who had a professional interest.
The mayor fixed his chief of police with a steely stare known to moviegoers around the world and instructed him in an equally familiar glacial whisper, “I want the bastard who did this.”
“Now, there’s an idea,” Ron responded blandly.
Clay Steadman had hired Ron Ketchum personally, and the chief respected the mayor. But unlike most people, Ron never really cared for Clay’s movies, or the way the mayor sometimes lapsed into dialogue from the silver screen.
The mayor’s ball-bearing gaze bore down on his chief of police, but he knew if there was one man in town — or anywhere else — he couldn’t stare down, it was Ron Ketchum.
“Let me know when you have something,” Clay told Ron.
“Yes, sir.”
“Nobody’s going to do this in my town and get away with it.”
More movie dialogue, Ron thought. But he agreed with the sentiment completely. Goldstrike was his town, too.
Chapter 4
In January, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, originally from New Jersey, was building a millrace for his partner, John Sutter, in California’s Coloma Valley when a gleaming pebble approximately half the size of a pea caught his eye. He stooped to pick it up. It was gold. By the fall of that year, gold was being sought and found in California from Tuolumne in the south to the Trinity River in the north — a distance of four hundred miles.
By 1849, word of the discovery of gold in California had spread across the United States and around the world, and the rush was on. In just that first year of the gold rush, more than ninety thousand people heard the news, imagined themselves wealthy, and abandoned their homes and former lives with scarcely a second thought or a backward glance.
And that was just the Americans. Additional thousands poured in from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and even Australia.
Most of the gold seekers were the young, adventurous and desperate; an estimated 98% of them were male. A cottage industry of publishing guidebooks on how a traveler might find his way west sprang up. One such publication indicated an overland route from New Orleans to the Sierra that could be traversed in only thirty-six days — when the
actual travel time was two hundred and sixteen days. Another suggested a southern route through Mexico that crossed “thickly settled country.” Instead, it passed through a killing desert and the territory of hostile Apaches. Of the almost ninety thousand who headed west in 1849, only forty thousand made it to the gold fields. Of those who did make it, 99% didn’t find enough gold to cover their expenses. All the best claims had been staked in 1848.
Still, the gold rush, far more than earlier agrarian migrations, was largely responsible for the development of the American West. It was the primary reason for the founding of the city of Denver. It was responsible for the direct admission of California to the Union in 1850, having been ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848, just after the Sutter’s Mill find, but before the word got out. Congress didn’t bother with the usual requirement of California becoming a recognized territory first.
Besides finding gold, the other impetus to head west was the opportunity to “mine the miners.” At a time when the prevailing wage for a laborer was a dollar a day, jobs digging gold on someone else’s claim were being offered at a pay scale of ten to fifteen dollars per day. Simple labor had become a way to strike it at least moderately rich.
A not dissimilar thought occurred to a young man in Chicago when in early 1849 he first heard the news of gold being found. Michael Walsh was, fittingly enough, a journeyman brewer. At the time, Walsh was chafing under the stern direction of his mentor and father-in-law, master brewer Hans Koenig. True, Hans had taught him the marvelous craft of making beer. And Hans had allowed the young man to marry his only daughter, the tall and comely Adeline. And the old braumeister had even built a home for his daughter and son-in-law when the first of their three children had been born.