Earthquake Games

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “That’s my Lucy,” Carolyn said warmly. “Always trying to solve everyone else’s problems. Set down that nephew of mine in his playpen and get just an hour or so of work in, then get some sleep. Teething doesn’t last forever, it just feels that way.”

  Lucy sat for a few minutes, smiling at Hank, after Carolyn hung up. She was so great to talk to. Carolyn had been through it all. She’d survived the war.

  Hank muttered somewhat when Lucy laid him in his playpen, but when she tucked his blanket around him, he sighed and fell asleep again. As soon as she sat down, her springer spaniel nudged her.

  “Yes, darling,” Lucy said, stroking her little dog’s ears and head. “Time for a little bit of Fancy. Then work, and more Hank. When Ted gets home, I’ll pay attention to him, and when he falls asleep Hank will wake up.” Lucy bent her head over her dog’s silky ears and cried a few silly tears, tears of self-pity and tiredness. She despised herself for crying them, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Finally, she sat up and blew her nose briskly and put her hands on her computer keyboard. Time to work.

  Special Investigations Bureau, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Eileen said with a sigh. She’d been trying to get through to Joe all afternoon, and only just a few minutes ago realized he was probably at work.

  Joe Tanner worked at Schriever Air Force Base on a top-secret system that Eileen shouldn’t know about but did because of a murder there a year ago. He was a programmer in the missile defense system and Eileen had learned all about the system that wasn’t supposed to exist. She’d learned how the system worked firsthand, actually. She still had dreams about the nuclear missile arcing through the sky and heading toward the United States, the missile that she and Joe and a few friends had shot down.

  Joe and Eileen had been together ever since. Joe was smart and funny, and his looks made her weak in the knees. Best of all, he seemed to feel no urge to turn her into a little homemaker who’d cook his meals and darn his socks, if that’s what homemakers did nowadays. If a case kept her out late, he simply woke up enough to make room for her in his bed when she crawled in, with never a murmur of complaint. He was just about perfect, and she was entertaining serious thoughts about permanence. Not that she’d tell Joe that. Some things a girl had to be old-fashioned about.

  “I’m fine. I’m glad you’re okay too,” he said cheerfully. “The systems out here came through with no problems. I called once to make sure you were in, but they told me you were busy so I didn’t leave a message. I guess I should have.”

  “I should have figured you’d be out there,” she said. “I was stuck doing street-cop stuff all day long.” She was now at her desk trying to wade through the paperwork she had to file on each incident. The office was boiling with noisy activity. All the off-duty police had been called in after the earthquake, and they were all trying to catch up on paperwork and go home. Captain Harben ran an efficient department, even when his homicide detectives were working street detail.

  “Looters and lost children?” Joe said, and the half-teasing, half-sympathetic tone of his voice sent a brief run of pleasurable goosebumps down Eileen’s spine. “But no lost boyfriends, now,” he added. “What about dinner tonight?”

  “Everyone in Colorado Springs will be going to dinner tonight.”

  “I’ll pack some snack crackers for the wait in line.”

  “It’s a deal,” she said, laughing. “Call me if something comes up.”

  Eileen held the button down on her phone, staring out the window at her mountain, Cheyenne Mountain. It didn’t look any different than it had before, but Eileen felt different, looking at it. The ground wasn’t supposed to heave like that, to quiver and shake like loose mud. Even the huge Cheyenne Mountain had shaken with the quake, if reports were true. NORAD, the underground base in the mountain, had shut down its outside power lines just like it was supposed to if a nuclear weapon had gone off. The drill, apparently, had worked perfectly and with the exception of a small shower of rocks near the entrance, nothing was changed. That was the report from CNN, at least. CNN had exhausted the mystery of the Colorado quake a while ago and was now doing “human interest” stories like Cheyenne Mountain.

  “Hey, there’s one good thing about this fucked-up day,” Peter O’Brien called out to her. He was just sitting down at his desk. His shirt was damp and his forehead was beaded with drops of sweat.

  “What is it, Pete?” Eileen asked, smiling.

  “You’re old news now, hero,” he smiled. Eileen froze in her chair. Had she really forgotten Teddy Shaw? Had she spent an entire day without thinking about killing a man?

  “I forgot,” she said, her voice small in her ears. O’Brien grinned even wider.

  “So has everybody else,” he said. “Now Teddy can fertilize some trees and never kill any more kids and you can go back to being Eileen Reed, that quiet, intelligent, pretty detective that always solves her cases—”

  “Stop it, Pete,” Eileen said, blinking hard. Damn Pete O’Brien. If he found a weakness, what he called a hot button, in another detective, he hammered it relentlessly until the detective exploded like a stepped-on ketchup packet or got over it. Until now Eileen had escaped ribbing. O’Brien figured out very early that Eileen didn’t care about her looks, one way or the other. If some people thought she was pretty, that was okay. If they thought she was ugly, that didn’t matter either. But now O’Brien had scented her concern about shooting Teddy Shaw, and he was out for blood.

  “That red-headed gal, the one who used to be a hot-shot Air Force pilot, the expert interviewer who gets every suspect to spill their guts—oops.”

  There was a brief silence. O’Brien eyed Eileen and she glared back at him.

  “One way or another,” O’Brien added with a charming small smile, and Eileen couldn’t help it. She started laughing. O’Brien stood up at his desk and waved his fists around like a winner in the boxing ring, revealing rings of sweat under his armpits like a slice of an ancient tree and sending an enormous scent wave of Dial soap in Eileen’s direction.

  “The champeeeon,” O’Brien crowed.

  Eileen, still laughing, waved at O’Brien like she was shooing a fly. O’Brien was better than a thousand sessions with Gerri Matthews. Besides, O’Brien would never try to find out what really happened in the back of Teddy Shaw’s van. With luck, Eileen could keep Gerri from finding out too.

  The Great Sand Dunes, Colorado

  The park ranger was much younger than Marcia Fowler and frightened half to death by the earthquake. Consequently, he was horribly rude, which awoke a faint sense of amusement in Marcia and helped her regain her calm. This was no strong and capable Authority, but a tiny puffed-chest youngster barely on the edge of control.

  After assigning another, even younger park ranger to keep anyone from entering the dunes, he walked with Marcia out into the sand. His stride was heroic and his Smokey-Bear hat brim was suitably lowered, as though glowering at the old lady tourist and her ridiculous vapors. Marcia made no attempt to keep up with him, although without the sprained ankle, she could have easily matched his pace. Marcia was a regular at her local fitness center and ran 10k races occasionally just for fun. She sometimes got whistles from her rear view. She had nothing to prove to Mr. Puffy Chest. Twice he stopped and waited for her to catch up, then marched on ahead after a nice rest for him, no rest for her. Marcia plodded on a steady, ankle-saving pace and ignored him. Finally, he reluctantly dropped his pace back to hers.

  “How far, ma’am?” he asked brusquely, after ten minutes of silent hiking together.

  “About a half mile,” Marcia said. The dunes stretched behind them for nearly a mile in almost pancake flatness. The ripples of Medano Creek rushed across the center of the flat stretch of sand. Medano started in the far Sangre de Cristo Mountains and ran under the dunes. The creek surfaced in bare sand and ran for a mile before vegetation took over at the edge of the dunes. The creek was bathwater temperat
ure in the summer and was no more than seven inches deep. During a warm day, like yesterday, Marcia had seen hundreds of children playing in the warm sandy water, splashing and shrieking with delight. Marcia’s rubber sandals were already dry after splashing through the creek. The ranger’s boots were wet and likely to stay that way, another source of amusement to her. Why would you be a ranger at the Great Sand Dunes and not have a pair of sandals to wear on the sand? Because sandals didn’t convey the proper profile of authority, she answered herself.

  After nearly a mile of flat sand, the dunes really began. The first few slopes, miniature foothills, took no more than fifteen minutes or so to climb. After the first hills of sand came mountains, then mountains even larger still, until the tan of the sand met the sizzling blue of the Colorado sky. The sheer amount of sand was astonishing. Marcia had gotten through the first set of foothills and was beginning her first major climb when she’d found the body. At dawn the sand had been full of color, various shades of tan and blue and black. Now the sand was uniformly pale brown and featureless and radiated heat in waves. It smelled, too, a vague and faintly spicy scent that Marcia couldn’t define.

  They crested the last of the foothills and Marcia saw the forlorn shape of the girl. Ranger Keith strode on, hat lowered. She put a hand on his arm and when he stopped she pointed mutely. His face blanched, and for a moment he looked very much like a bewildered, small boy. Marcia knew he’d convinced himself she was a fruitcake, probably one of those UFO nuts, and he was in for a long walk in the sun for nothing.

  “Oh,” he said in a little voice.

  “We’ll have to cover her, and post a ranger to keep people away. Then you can send someone to town to fetch the sheriff,” Marcia said gently. Ranger Keith nodded. His face wore a floundering look, and she almost felt sorry for him.

  “I have to make sure she’s dead,” he said gruffly.

  “Well, make sure of it,” Marcia snapped. “But she isn’t wearing any clothes and she needs to be decently covered. I don’t want people gaping at her.”

  Ranger Keith flushed bright red all the way to the brim of his Smokey-Bear hat. Marcia felt a brief flash of bitter hatred for the creatures that had left this poor woman to be gawked at. She felt fairly certain the ones who’d done this were Grays. In her long walk back to the ranger station, she’d had time to think about the lack of footprints in the sand and the mutilations. The dead girl was tumbled in the lee part of a dune and her body lay in a body-shaped outline. There were no other footprints around her. Some of her skin had been removed in strips. Marcia Fowler was not part of the UFO crowd that subscribed to the belief that aliens were benign, kindly watchers of humankind. She was firmly in the camp of the believers in the malignancy of alien visitations. She’d read the stories of abductions, mutilations, missing time, and men in black. Never was a human body found. There were continuing rumors about the Air Force major found in the Nevada desert, skin sliced off, anus cored away, genitals removed, just like the many documented cow mutilations. But other than the rumors—and this was no more than a rumor—there were no cases of actual deaths.

  This girl might be the first. Marcia felt a brief excited trickle in the pit of her stomach, thinking of the reaction in the UFO community. Then her eyes focused on the blushing ranger. Beyond him lay the sprawled and mutilated form of the girl, and she felt ashamed.

  “Let’s go look at her,” Marcia said firmly. “Then we’ll cover her and go back.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the ranger mumbled. He took off his hat, revealing a surprisingly pink and bald dome. He wiped sweat off the top of his head and put the hat back on. With the hat off, he was a mild and tender looking young man. With the hat on, he immediately became Ranger Keith, strong of jaw and with flashing manly eye.

  They walked down the slope of the dune together, and there was the girl, whoever she was, eyes blinded with sand, dead. Marcia was a biology teacher and dead things were nothing new to her. As a young girl, she’d hunted deer in South Dakota with her father. The flies, the pale skin, the beginning of bloat, didn’t make an impression. Marcia was looking at sharp laser cuts; skin sheared away at her shoulder and down her arm, bruises about the nose and back of the neck. There were bruises about the throat as well, faint marks. One arm was at an odd angle, without any swelling. She’d been killed shortly after her arm had been broken.

  Ranger Keith was suddenly halfway up the dune, head down, hands on his knees. Marcia moved away reluctantly from the girl and walked back up the slope. The ranger hadn’t thrown up, but it was a near thing. Beads of clear perspiration stood out on his cheeks and neck.

  “I need to call this in, before we go back,” he said hoarsely. His hand was fumbling again and again at the catch to his radio, failing to negotiate the small buckle. Perhaps he’d seen dead bodies before, but Marcia knew he’d never seen anything like this before. Fair enough. Neither had she.

  “Right,” Marcia said. She took one last look back, trying to memorize every detail, trying to get a picture in her mind that she could later look at and examine.

  Once the sheriff took her statement, Marcia was planning to make some phone calls. She would contact some people who would suddenly take an intense interest in the San Luis Valley. Maybe, just maybe, this would be the case that would bring the UFO community into the mainstream. If that would happen, Marcia was sure that humans could defeat the Grays. Humans were stronger and smarter and were losing only because they didn’t know they were in a war. The girl, the dead girl, might just unmask the war.

  Special Investigations Bureau, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “Dead body,” Harben yelled. “Peterson Air Force Base.”

  Eileen and Dave Rosen reached for their jackets. The late August weather had decided to pretend it was fall, with high gray clouds scudding overhead and a chilly wind tearing at the leaves of the trees, as though the weather was surprised at the earthquake, too. Tomorrow it could be eighty degrees without a cloud in the sky. There could even be surprise snowstorms in the glorious fall days of September and October, and when those happened, hikers always died, wearing nothing but sandals and light summer clothes and a surprised look. Colorado could be deadly to the unprepared.

  “Great, another Air Force liaison job,” Eileen grumbled to Rosen as they walked to Harben’s desk.

  “You’ll be working with Major Bandimere on this one,” Harben said, hanging up the phone. “I know you hate the liaison job, Eileen, but you two are just too damn good at it. As you well know.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “Government Building 12-E, but that’s okay, Major Bandimere will be waiting to guide you. You don’t have to find it on your own.”

  “Major Bandimere, oh boy,” Eileen said dryly. Rosen and Harben exchanged deadpan looks. Major Deanna Bandimere was very pretty and wore a great deal of makeup. She was just about five foot three, and affected a little-girl, breathless Marilyn Monroe pout that put Eileen’s teeth on edge. Eileen, who wore little makeup and didn’t have the slightest idea how to pout, had little affection for the diminutive major.

  “At least you don’t have to have her hanging all over your every word,” Rosen said under his breath. Bandimere flirted with every male over the age of twelve and Dave Rosen was an available target. “You have any ideas on how to approach this one, boss?”

  “Be careful,” Harben said absently, his eyes already returning to his computer screen. “Keep your eyes open. The major implied that it was a suicide, but I want you to make sure.”

  “No problem,” Eileen said. At least this was a thankful change from all the damn earthquake reports. She and Rosen stood from their chairs, and Harben turned back to his computer terminal.

  “Tallyho,” Rosen murmured.

  4

  Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  The irritating Major Bandimere was waiting at the gate, pert and curly and tiny behind the wheel of the large government truck. She rolled down the window with brisk lit
tle cranks as they pulled up.

  “Hello,” she said to Eileen. “How are you, Ellie? Nice to see you, Dave.”

  “Rosen,” Rosen said frostily.

  “We’ve got a suicide case out at 12-E,” the little Major continued. “Just follow me, we’ll be there in just a sec.”

  “I hate people who say ‘sec’,” Rosen said as Bandimere wheeled her Jeep around in a tight circle and headed back through the gate of Peterson Air Force Base. Eileen laughed out loud.

  “Don’t fret it,” she said.

  “I won’t, Ellie,” he said. Eileen shuddered.

  “Aren’t we lucky,” Rosen murmured.

  “I’d almost rather be filing more earthquake reports,” Eileen said, then glanced over at Rosen.

  “Almost,” they said in unison.

  There was a comfortable silence between them as they followed Major Bandimere, the comfort of nearly a year of police work as partners. Eileen liked Dave Rosen quite a bit. She’d been worried Rosen would try to take over the team, as many men naturally tried to do when their senior partner was a female. Eileen wasn’t going to budge, not after working as junior partner to Jim Erickson for three years. But men didn’t go into police work if they were the passive type. She smelled trouble, but it didn’t happen.

  Rosen was so quiet she found herself thinking that the racist stereotype of the silent Native American was true in his case. Eileen was almost positive that Rosen was Native American, but knew for sure that he wasn’t Sioux. Eileen grew up in northeastern Wyoming; she knew the distinctive characteristics of the Lakota Sioux. Eileen thought for a while he had to be Navaho, but she knew he’d transferred from New York. Whatever he was and wherever he came from, he was the most perfectly balanced man she’d ever met. He never tried to take the lead in their investigations, yet worked as hard as she did. He was a man of few words, but the words he spoke were always sharp as knives. Eileen would talk and Rosen would listen and interject a comment or two, and they would solve their case.