Maybe, he was hiding out. She squelched the traitorous thought. For all she knew, this Mrs. Michaels could be working some kind of a hoax. As PR man for Senator Halliday, Oren made a prime target for a smear campaign.
Perked up with renewed hope, Amy got out of the car. Even though it was a rugged mile hike to the campgrounds, she had to find out if Oren and Elise were there. They could have parked elsewhere and climbed up by one of the other trails.
The rain had stopped so she changed from her slicker to a down jacket and set out through the Douglas firs. Wind shushed through the needled canopy showering her with icy droplets of hoarded rain water. She swore and wiped her glasses.
Ahead of her, nuthatches flitted back and forth in the underbrush, twittering nervously. Inside her brain, a question imitated the small black and gray birds. What if she didn't find them? She lengthened her stride.
In her haste, she tripped over a root and fell onto all fours. She gritted her teeth against smarting bruises, hoisted herself up and limped on.
Half an hour later, the smell of wood smoke took away all thought of aching leg muscles. The heavy timber growth thinned and she entered a clearing. On the far side, his back to her, a man in a green-hooded parka hunkered beside a fire.
“Oren ... ?” He didn't move. Then, she realized she'd only whispered his name. What if it wasn't him? She picked up a club and took a couple of steps. “Oren ... ?”
The man jerked upright and turned to stare at her. “Good Christ, Amy. What the hell are you doing up here?”
She dropped her weapon. “Thank God, it's you.” She rushed forward to give him a joyous hug, but stopped before she reached him. Their friendship had been more boy to boy than boy to girl, and a sudden show of emotion would have embarrassed both of them. Besides, this unshaven, sullen-faced man bore little resemblance to the playmate of her youth.
She peered around, hoping to see a tent hidden among the trees. “Where's Elise?”
He shrugged, poured water on the fire and tossed dirt over charred wood with a small shovel he took from his packsack.
Amy braced herself against a tree. “Oren, I'm not here by accident. I came looking for you.” He raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. She continued with her explanation. Upon hearing of Mrs. Michaels’ call to the sheriff, his sullen expression grew even more so. But when Amy told him his apartment had been wrecked and Elise and his van were missing, he shouldered his packsack and started down the trail at a near run.
Neither of them spoke. Amy couldn't have if she'd wanted to. It took all of her breath just to keep up with him. When they reached her father's car, Oren waited impatiently while she called the sheriff's office. “I'm on Mt. Sosiego,” she said, when Calder came on the line. “Oren's with me.”
“Stay put. I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Oren grabbed the phone. “Meet us at my apartment.”
“Like hell,” Calder shot back. “You set one foot off that mountain and I'll slap you in jail so fast you won't know what hit you. Is that clear?”
Oren crammed the phone into its receiver. “Officious hard-headed bastard,” he muttered.
She rephrased her words several times before she gave up and blurted out, “What happened last night?”
He swung around. “Nothing.”
She wet her lips. “Mrs. Michaels said you hit Elise, and that it wasn't the first time. Is ... is that true?”
His gray eyes darkened. “What do you think?”
“I ... I'm not sure.”
He ran spread fingers through his tousled hair and glowered at her. “You're not sure?” His mouth twisted. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I didn't mean...”
“Forget it.” He hunched his shoulders and prowled back and forth across the parking lot.
The sheriff and one of his deputies arrived a short time later. While the deputy climbed to the campground to look around, Calder interrogated Amy. After he finished, he dismissed her and began on Oren.
As she drove down the mountain, Amy beat the steering wheel in impotent frustration. Tom hadn't let her hear Oren's story, so she knew no more than she had before.
She reached the main road and turned left. Nothing she'd done so far had helped Oren's cause. Perhaps if she located the van she'd also find Elise.
She circled the northern tip of the island. At Devil's Point, she asked fishermen gathered in the store if they'd seen a silver van, and none had. Undaunted, she went on, taking care to investigate all the side roads.
She stopped at the Fish Shack in Lomitas Harbor and ordered a ham sandwich. While she ate, she questioned the waitress and the men working at the marina. Finally, she admitted defeat and started for home.
Along this stretch of Westridge Avenue, evergreens grew so thickly she caught only fleeting glimpses of the surging white-tipped waves in Rosario Strait. All this land, from Lomitas Harbor to a mile beyond Otter Inlet, had belonged to the Prescotts for generations.
Like many others on the island, her great, great-grandfather had had to build the house and beach cottage on a long sloping hillside. The location had one disadvantage. A steep embankment at the foot of the slope prevented him from getting supplies to his anchored ship. To remedy the problem, he'd gone a quarter of a mile north of the house and carved another access through terrain broken by rocky hummocks and yawning ravines.
As Amy passed the road now known as Prescott's Byway, she noticed tire tracks. She stopped the car and walked back to explore the tree-enclosed lane. Although tire marks didn't show up well on gravel, bits of mud and disturbed pebbles indicated a vehicle of some kind had come this way.
Keeping to the shoulder so as not to obscure tracks, she scrambled through patches of bracken fern growing between alder and vine maple. She forced herself to go slow and choose her path with care. The lane straddled a narrow strip of land between two deep ravines, and a misstep would send her tumbling down into a rugged, bramble-festooned gully.
Gradually the road's downward pitch grew more abrupt. She rounded a bend and stopped short. Parked on the side of the road—a road Oren knew better than almost anyone else on the island—sat the silver van.
She swallowed hard and moved forward cautiously. The vehicle had skidded off the graveled surface and sunk to the axle in mud. Dreading what she might find, she peered in the windows. Empty. She took a relieved breath and returned to her car.
After she reported to the sheriff, she called her father's house and caught him as he walked in the front door. She quickly repeated her story.
“I'll be there in a few minutes,” he said.
“I think I'll go on down to the beach,” she said. “The van was on its way out when it got stuck.”
“Take care, Amy. We haven't the vaguest notion who, or what we may be dealing with.”
“Don't worry. I'll find me an equalizer.” She put down the phone, took a crescent wrench from his tool box behind the front seat, and slipped it into her pocket. Her nerves drawn taut, she draped the strap of her camera kit over one shoulder, grabbed the handle of her forensic satchel, and, returned to the byway.
Where the road ended in a turnaround, she studied the surrounding landscape. Anyone heading for the beach or the cliffs would have had to cross the sand dunes. And if he were carrying someone—a shudder went through her—his feet would have sunk into soft sand.
She stood rooted to the spot, picturing Oren lugging ... no, she wouldn't consider it, not even for an instant. She cleared her mind and got down to business. With the infinite care drummed into her by her father and her instructors, she scanned the area, sector by sector. After a ten minute search, she discovered a man's footprint embedded in a mixture of damp clay and sand.
She recorded the time, the weather conditions, and made a sketch of the terrain. Basic requirements out of the way, she lay a ruler alongside the track and snapped several pictures. Wind had hastened evaporation, causing sand particles to sift lazily back and forth within the confines of the f
ootprint.
A metal restraining frame she thrust into damp soil walled in the print. Dental stone mixed with bottled water produced a thick soup that she poured gently into the indentations. Before the cast set rock hard, she scratched the date, her initials and a number in the buff-colored medium.
She flagged the area with bright orange plastic ribbon and trudged over the dunes with an escort of shrieking gulls. On her left, the ravine gradually diminished to a shallow basin overgrown with salal and tall Rose Bay bushes.
Beyond them, she could see a bit of the beach cottage through a stand of Sitka spruce. Ebony-hued, with bark resembling alligator skin, the stunted, wind-twisted conifers straggled downhill. Like hairy-fingered hands, they spread out in wavery lines until they reached a thirty-foot embankment.
Her route led her to the embankment's base. She bypassed their supply shack and moved onto the beach of Otter Inlet. Anchored far out to avoid going aground, Sea King, their two-masted, forty-two foot ketch, rode the swells.
Farther along the beach, in hard-packed sand, she found several faint footprints to cast. As she worked, she tried not to dwell on Oren's reasons for coming to the inlet. Yet, all the while, she knew the direction the prints headed and what lay around a rocky projection blocking her view. The dingy had to be at the usual tie-up—it just had to be. But it wasn't.
The small, wooden craft she had dubbed Rosinante, after Don Quixote's horse, had been tied up at that particular spot for a number of years—a fact Oren knew well.
She slumped down on a piece of driftwood, kneaded a stiff muscle in her back and began to theorize. If a person had intended to use the ketch and couldn't because of the storm, would he be foolish enough to brave the sea in a rowboat? She shivered—a desperate man would.
With her satchel in hand, she ascended wooden steps leading up the embankment and headed north along sandstone cliffs fringed with Scotch broom and gnarled pine. She knew the ocean currents surrounding the island, and where a body would likely wash ashore. Each time she peered over the edge, she dreaded what she might see below.
The area to the north proved unrewarding. Wisps of fog tagging her weary feet, she retraced her steps and started south. The roar of surf grew quieter at Orca Narrows. Here, the sea swept into a broad channel created by a series of colossal sea stacks called Satan's Boot. When the tide poured through, the water became a mass of eddies and choppy, froth-tipped waves.
Along the rim of the bluff, she stooped to examine broken Rose Bay twigs and crushed patches of bush lupine. In some sandy areas, fleshy-leafed succulents had been mashed to a pulpy greenish-gray mass. She studied them thoughtfully for a moment, then chose a more circuitous route.
Brush-clad hillocks made traveling difficult and the weight of the satchel made her shoulder feel as if her arm might pull from the socket.
She checked her watch and groaned. In another hour, daylight would be gone, and only a fool ventured along the cliffs at night. Damn! This whole day had been one frustration after another—this senseless search included. The dinghy might not have any connection with Elise's disappearance. Besides, it had probably come loose all on its own and been swept out to sea. She braced herself on a jagged boulder and took a half-hearted look over the edge.
The boat! She dashed along the verge until she found a slope. Slipping, sliding, snatching shrubbery to slow her descent, she made her way to the bottom and scrambled atop a pile of driftwood. At her noisy approach, a pair of tattlers gave a flute-like call and skittered away on yellow, matchstick legs.
Forty feet away, waves lashed the shingle, grinding black rock against black rock in a gigantic tumbler. Down the beach a couple dozen yards, good old Rosinante perched high and dry.
Her pulse beating loudly in her ears, she unslung her camera and took several distance shots. Nothing must be overlooked. By tomorrow the sand could be swept clean.
Choosing a half-buried cedar log that extended past the rowboat's resting place, she walked along its broad top. Dry mouthed, she jerked her head from side to side, peering into all the places where a body might—She grimaced and booted a chunk of wood out of her way. Murder took on a whole new meaning when it got close to home.
She studied odd striations between the log where she stood and the dinghy. Frowning, she knelt and snapped a number of views, then scooped sand samples into labeled vials. In the shelter of a rock, she discovered a saucer-sized patch of fine lines undisturbed by the wind. She poured a cast and inched closer to her main objective.
By some fortunate happenstance, when the sea had disgorged Rosinante she'd snagged her bow on a hunk of tree root. Bottom side up, she tilted at a precarious forty-five degree angle, but aside from an ugly two-foot gouge in the hull, she appeared sea worthy. Amy set down her satchel, lay her camera on top, and got down on all fours to peer into the boat's shadowy interior.
“It can't be,” she whispered. She closed her eyes for an instant to adjust her pupils to the darkness and opened them quickly to take a better look. No, she hadn't been mistaken. Brown spots trailed across the rowing thwart and spattered the bleached hull.
She swore, adjusted her camera for a time shot, and fetched a spray bottle of Luminol from her bag. If the stains were blood, they'd glow in the dark. Taking the camera control in one hand, she worked the spray pump with the other, aiming a tiny squirt at an isolated brown splotch.
As the chemical reacted with the stain and became luminescent, she let out a groan and triggered the camera. Damn the luck. While she stowed her supplies, her mind grasped at her last fragment of hope. The stains may be blood, but the boards would have to be sawed out and taken to the lab for more sophisticated tests before they'd know if the blood came from a human. Until then, she'd pray that Elise showed up alive.
The plaintive moan of the fog horn at Devil's Point startled her. She swiveled her head. Thick, vaporous clouds billowed toward her from each end of the narrows. She snatched up her things and labored up the slope.
By the time she reached the pathway, leading to her cottage, her arm ached from the load she carried. Quickly she removed a flashlight from a zippered compartment, stashed the bag under low hanging spruce branches, and hurried on. Her father always covered a crime scene with exacting thoroughness so she figured he and the sheriff would still be at work in the lane.
Instead of taking the roundabout route via Otter Inlet, she chose a short cut and scrambled down through foot-snagging roots to the bottom of the ravine. A bulwark of thorny blackberry vines stopped her from clambering up the opposite incline to the lane above as she had intended. Since she didn't want to backtrack, no other choice remained but to travel the boulder-strewn ravine floor.
In the fog-shrouded darkness, her flashlight scarcely penetrated the gloom. Damp strings of moss hanging from ghostly alder branches clung to her face making her heart lurch. A few steps farther on, she vaulted a shallow stream and sank into mud over her shoe tops. Would this horrible day never end?
Lunging to solid ground, she plodded on. As she pushed through a willow thicket, her bobbing light picked out something white in the brambles on the steep slope.
She halted, her heart beating in hard, painful thumps. She took a step, then another before pausing to stare at the sight before her. An ash rose area rug had been tossed from the byway above. As the rug unrolled and flattened out over the briar patch, a blood-stained sheet had tumbled out.
Trembling so violently she could scarcely hold the flashlight, she lowered the beam bit by bit until it shone on the ground. Her body went cold and her breath snagged in her aching chest. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Unable to stop herself, she kept murmuring the words over and over.
On a patch of dead leaves, a few feet in front of her lay a knife: Not just any knife. This one had a shaped stag-horn handle, a polished nickel silver bolster, and a five-inch, blood-smeared blade.
Oren's hunting knife.
Three
Monday, October 24
Amy flexed tense shoulder muscl
es and frowned at the flock of white-coated forensic scientists milling around the crime lab. As a rule, they worked in an atmosphere of quiet, purposeful concentration—except on Monday. Then the hubbub brought back memories of her high school science class. Actually, except for this department's more sophisticated equipment, the two places even resembled each other.
However, the similarity ended with appearance. At this facility, each individual, who stood beside one of the analytical machines fringing the room's perimeter, or who bent over the microscopes crowding the long table where she sat, qualified as an expert in his or her field. Chemical, drug, evidence, and body-fluid analysts—all worked in this room or one of the other eight rooms that made up the Western Washington State Crime Laboratory on the second floor of Seattle's Public Safety Building.
Since starting work here, she'd learned to dread the beginning of the week. The mass of material gathered over the weekend by the lab's mobile unit and the fire department's arson squad wrecked everyone's schedule.
She bowed her head over the stereomicroscope once more and peered through the lens. As she tried to center her attention on the wool fragment under the objective, the three dimensional image blurred. In its place, she saw the knife she'd found in the ravine on Saturday. A knife she'd given Oren on his seventeenth birthday. Now the gift had become damning, irrefutable evidence.
She sighed wearily. So much had gone on during the weekend she hadn't even gotten a chance to visit her Aunt Helen. Saturday night she'd scarcely slept. On Sunday, a gang of men had fanned out in a long line and searched the headlands for Elise's body. Meanwhile, Amy and her father had rowed out to the Sea King in a borrowed skiff to see if anyone had been aboard—no one had.
At mid-morning, the sheriff took them to Orca Narrows in his motor launch. No one discovered any new evidence so they loaded battered old Rosinante aboard and the sheriff headed for Faircliff. The dinghy would have to be cut into bits so the boards could be analyzed.
With Deadly Intent Page 2