The dunes lay ahead of them, a different kind of lightness. Hard light, like going into a different sun. As Babe rolled down the highway, he started to smell the burnt spice of the dunes in his nose.
23
Great Sand Dunes, Latitude 37.47.50, Longitude 105.33.20, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Eileen, participant in many stakeouts, was patient. Alan Baxter, catcher of fish with fake flies, was also patient. What they were not was patient with each other. Eileen could not bear to touch him with her shoulder or leg, but the constriction of the tent opening meant that they had to brush up against each other. They were both sweaty and sandy from their efforts to bury the tent and erase their tracks. Since they didn’t know how long it took to set up the Tesla machine and make it go, they were both in a hurry to get well hidden as soon as possible.
Now the sun stood high and moveless, and the heat shimmered on the sand. In the tent it was stuffy but cool. The latitude 37.47.50 and longitude 105.33.20 was at the bottom of a long spill of sand below them and to their left. A rise of dune in front of them nearly cut off their view of the spot but would keep their tent opening from being seen. Eileen had checked this out herself by standing in the exact crosshairs of their destination and looking at the spot where they’d finished burying the tent. She could see the opening but it looked like a dune shadow. At least that’s what she hoped.
Standing with her GPS receiver displaying the exact center of the dunes gave her a funny feeling. Here was where the Colorado earthquake had originated, or so she believed. Here was where the Burbank earthquake in California had begun, the earthquake that had toppled a cement wall on Lori Leetsdale and started a chain of events that led inexorably to this moment in time, this crossing of paths. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, there would be a kind of showdown, a battle between the people who believed they should interfere and people like herself, who believed they should not interfere. That was the best way she could figure it. While they walked last night in the ghostly white darkness of the sand, she thought about what she was doing here, what she meant to do.
Ultimately, she thought that Jacob Mitchell and his people had crossed a line when they started setting off earthquakes. Once the line was crossed, Krista Lewis’s death was only an addition, not the start, of their evil. Jacob Mitchell—not her father, not Alan Baxter, her heart whispered—believed that he was somehow above other people, better than they were. He believed he could alter people’s lives without their permission because he was something more than they were. Murderers like Teddy Shaw were the same way.
Then wasn’t she, too, an alterer of destinies? She had certainly altered Teddy Shaw’s destiny, permanently. But she was an officer of the law, a person sworn to keep the peace. When she shot Teddy Shaw, she was defending her life, not executing him. If he’d thrown his gun down, she would have taken him alive. She didn’t believe in her own superiority. She believed, simply and ultimately, that people knew what was best for themselves. Even if Mitchell was setting off small quakes in order to stop a big one, creating bleeder earthquakes was only justified in the light, with everyone knowing about it and making their own decisions about what they were going to do. Creating chaos without warning was evil. The end did not justify the means.
Suddenly Eileen realized that Alan was waving at her, gesturing for her to come to the tent. She was standing stock-still in the heat of the late afternoon with her feet on the invisible X, and at any moment a helicopter or a vehicle could come over the horizon. She scrambled up the dune toward the tent opening, brushing out her tracks clumsily as she went, and arrived at the buried tent sweating and panting, her heart pounding.
Now, an hour later, her sweat had dried sticky and sandy and she was bored and uncomfortable. No helicopters had come swooping over the dunes. Nothing moved in the late day’s glare, not even insects. She sat far too close to this man, her father, and didn’t know what to say to him.
“Water?” he said.
“No thanks, I have my own,” she replied stiffly.
They waited.
Great Sand Dunes, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Babe took the first hill of dunes without enthusiasm. She waddled, she sputtered sand, she complained.
“What a pig,” Joe said.
“You couldn’t get up the first ridge in anything else,” Daniel said loudly. Babe’s engine was amazingly quiet for a girl her size but Paris had her in a low roar as he side-walked up the second slope. Paris said nothing, eyes intent on the sand, his hands dancing over the wheel and gearshift.
“An ATV could make it,” Joe said. He’d folded up his modified laptop a long time ago and stored it in a laundry bag he’d brought along for it. An ordinary laptop case wouldn’t hold the whole contraption, and he didn’t want sand to get inside Frankenputer’s guts. Now he was well braced in the rocking vehicle and ready to bitch at somebody, anybody.
The whole approach to the dunes had taken far too long. The bright glare of the sand seemed to be just over the next hill, but every time Babe crested a rolling hill there was another beyond it, and the dunes no closer. Then when they’d finally gotten onto the sand, they’d roared across the low sandy creek at less than a walking pace, Paris intent and silent behind the wheel that he’d taken from Daniel before they’d started into the sand.
The day was blazing toward noon and they hadn’t even gotten out of sight of the creek and the edge of the dunes. Rosen wore Old Spice deodorant and his sweaty body slammed into Joe’s shoulder every time Babe rocked on the sand, which was every few seconds. Joe had never liked Old Spice, and now he hated it with a passion. It caught in his nose and throat, and the queer smell of the dunes seemed to sneak in around it and choke him further.
More, there was no sign of Eileen and Alan Baxter. No sign of earthquake people. Joe had never met Jacob Mitchell, so his mental image of the earthquake people was based on his imagination. He thought of them as trolls in lab coats, men with twisted bodies and hairy eyebrows and long hands like tentacles. He knew they wouldn’t look like that on the outside, but then again murderers never did. He’d worked with a murderer for months, a murderer who killed his best friend, and he’d never known. The murderer, a fellow war gamer, looked nice to the last, when he’d tried to kill Joe with a sharpened screwdriver. He hadn’t looked like a hairy troll on the outside, either.
“An ATV could make the first stretch,” Daniel corrected him. Marcia, sitting on the other side, looked with bright curiosity out the window. She didn’t seem bothered by anything, and she didn’t appear to need to sweat. Joe hated her, too. “The dunes are compressed up against the mountains. They’re higher than any dunes you’ve ever seen. They didn’t exist here ten thousand years ago, did you know that? No one knows why they appeared. Ute Indians describe in their verbal history about arriving one season in the valley and there the beast was, lying against the slope of mountains like something that had moved in and found that it liked it.”
“I read sand is pushed across the valley floor by winds from the west, piling up against the Sangre de Cristos in the east,” Marcia shouted. “Is that why they’re so high?”
“I guess so,” Daniel said. “Anyway, nobody’s ever taken a vehicle in here except Paris, and that was to rescue two hikers four years ago.”
“Did he find them?” Marcia asked.
“Yes,” Paris said abruptly, his profile as intent as something carved from stone. “Dead. Not murdered. They died of hypothermia and dehydration.”
“How could you die in such a small space?” Joe asked. “I can see the mountains from here. Just walk towards the mountains for a day or two and you’re out. The Sangres?”
“Look at them now,” Daniel said. “We’ll lose them as soon as we go deeper into the dunes. You can only see the mountains at the highest peaks, and by the time you get to another peak, you’ve been wandering in circles. The dunes have a huge amount of iron in the sand, so your compass is going to go nuts.”
“The GPS is working fine,” Mar
cia said, examining the object in her hands.
“Let’s hope it keeps working fine,” Daniel said. “We lost some hikers who had a GPS receiver. Who knows what happened? Sand in the works, something else?” He glanced over at Marcia, who gave a small nod. That was right, Joe thought. These two were UFO nuts. They probably thought the hikers had been abducted and murdered by their little gray men. He wanted to snarl in exasperation. Rosen slammed into his shoulder again, Old Spice reeking from his armpits, his face quiet and calm.
“When are we going to reach the center?” Rosen asked, just as Paris reached the top of the dune crest.
“Sometime tonight, after dark,” Paris said. “If we don’t hit a ridge too high to go over. We don’t have much of a moon so we can’t travel in the dark. I could flip Babe and we’d be in real trouble.”
“Why, because we’d have to walk out?” Joe asked pleasantly. Rosen glanced at him, and Joe realized his voice perhaps wasn’t that pleasant after all.
“Because we might not get out,” Paris said, idling Babe and contemplating the dunes in front of him. To Joe they looked like ocean waves frozen as though in a picture, ocean waves in a storm. For a moment he could imagine them moving toward him, and he had to blink hard. It made him dizzy and slightly sick. “We’d be buried under Babe, and she’d sink in this stuff like a stone in mud. Rolling over wouldn’t do any of us any good.” Paris shut up again and rolled Babe down the dune with care, his fingers like a surgeon’s on the wheel and gearshift. Joe saw Rosen nod, and he remembered how Sam Williams had shrugged and agreed with Gonzalez that the only person to call was Paris Linsley. Now he knew why. But it didn’t help his mood or his shoulder when Rosen came slamming against him for the thousandth time. And there were no tracks of Eileen and Alan Baxter, no tracks at all. They hadn’t even found the Bronco, though they’d taken the same route Sam Williams mapped out for Alan and Eileen.
Joe blinked again, trying to keep the waves of sand still like he knew they had to be, looking for a long track in the sand that would mean Alan Baxter was in the dunes with his daughter, the woman Joe Tanner loved and wanted to make his wife. Alan couldn’t be a murderer. He wouldn’t be. Joe squeezed his eyes shut on the image of Alan Baxter driving down some New Mexico highway, humming a tune, his hands freshly washed of blood, laughing at the idiots who were searching the dunes for him.
He didn’t realize he’d made some sound until Rosen nudged him. He opened his eyes and Rosen was offering him a water bottle. Joe blinked at Rosen and saw somewhere in those black eyes the same fear, the same maddened impatience.
“Keep hydrated,” Rosen said. “We need to be ready.”
“Thanks,” Joe said. Rosen’s words were steadying. They were also battle words, and that was good too. Joe was ready. He was ready.
He braced himself against the door frame, watching Paris nurse the wheel and coax Babe up another dune, and he drank deeply.
Great Sand Dunes, Latitude 37.47.50, Longitude 105.33.20, San Luis Valley, Colorado
“I figured out why they’re going to set it off tomorrow,” Eileen said. She felt better as the day started to wind down towards night. The long horrid afternoon was behind them. She’d washed with a dampened washcloth, swabbing at her grimy face and hands and using just a little bit of water on the cloth because they had to conserve what they had left. They had to walk out, too, after this was all over, and they’d need water for that.
“Why?” Alan asked. He, too, had washed his face and hands as they prepared to eat their meager supper. He looked more cheerful as well. Waiting was hard, even if you were good at it.
“Because it’s Saturday morning,” Eileen said. “Saturday morning when everyone is at home in their beds. Saturday at five o’clock here is six o’clock, seven o’clock in the Midwest. The big office buildings will be empty, the highway bridges will be deserted, and the bars will be closed. Saturday morning is the best time for an earthquake. I’ll bet the least loss of life in earthquakes is on Saturday mornings.”
“That’s why the Colorado earthquake was so early,” Alan said.
“At least we know they don’t want to kill as many people as they can. But they can’t set every one off on Saturday and Sunday, that would be too suspicious,” Eileen said. She bit into a crumbly energy bar and grimaced at the dry taste.
“So maybe they don’t know they’re setting off one so big,” Alan said. “Maybe they think this one is a bleeder too. Maybe they think it won’t kill anyone, the way the Colorado earthquake didn’t kill anyone.”
“That’s why we have to talk them into stopping it before they start it. We can’t just barge in and start shooting like some action movie. Who knows how many people it takes to do this? They might be good people who really think they’re saving lives.”
“They killed Jim Leetsdale,” Alan said stubbornly. “And Krista Lewis.”
“We don’t know who killed them,” Eileen said patiently. “Whoever killed Krista was a rapist, not an executioner. She might not even be related to this.” Eileen watched Alan Baxter carefully and swallowed the chunk of dry energy bar in her mouth. It felt like a rock going down her throat. Alan frowned and looked out the tent flap, and if he were a rapist and a murderer Eileen couldn’t tell. Her gut twisted like a hanged thing, and she folded the wrapper around the rest of the energy bar. Her supper was done.
Great Sand Dunes, San Luis Valley, Colorado
“Thank you, Paris,” Marcia said as Paris handed her a plate. Paris Linsley was a sweetheart through and through, despite the accident of birth that had left him with such a handsome face and build.
Paris had kept his balance, it appeared. He’d put on armor like a medieval knight, like Lancelot, who was so handsome he never smiled. Right now Paris, smiling, was handing out cold chicken and potato salad and rolls from Beth Williams’s inexhaustible kitchen, a surprise cooler that he and Beth had hidden in the back of Babe while everyone else was scrambling for their gear.
Marcia bit into her chicken, her plate balanced on her knees, watching Paris. He moved like a dancer, perfectly in tune with his body. Joe Tanner took a plate and forced a thanks. Joe had been wired tight all day. He was desperately concerned about Eileen. There was something additional going on with him and Rosen, some secret they held between them that interested her. Something in their glances when they spoke of Alan and Eileen. Marcia wondered what it was.
She and Daniel had their own secret, their own fears. Here in the dunes things could happen. Things happened in the San Luis Valley, things she’d only read about until now. There might be a human killer out here, but that was not the only thing that walked the dunes at night.
She shivered suddenly, uncontrollably. The sun was gone over the dune heights and the sky was darkening.
“Better bundle up, the temperature’s going to drop like a stone,” Paris said, sitting by her side with his plate piled high with chicken and coleslaw and fruit salad.
“Let me guess,” Marcia said with a smile. “You can eat anything and not gain an ounce, right?”
“Of course,” Paris said with a smile that held bitterness like a dash of salt, bitterness that perhaps only Marcia Fowler could taste.
“Babe is a wonderful beast,” she said, aiming with her chicken to where the Humvee sat, ticking slightly, in the fold of sand where they were going to spend the night. As far as they could tell, they were less than a quarter mile from the center of the dunes. At three o’clock, they had agreed, they would walk in. This agreement was not come to easily. Joe nearly set off on his own before Rosen talked him out of it. Finally he’d subsided, muttering darkly, looking terribly worried. Now he sat with his chicken, untouched, in his lap. Rosen said a few words to him, and he nodded and picked up a piece of food. He ate like he was feeding a machine.
“She’ll get us out, which is important,” Paris said. “What brings you on this posse?”
“I found Krista,” Marcia said simply.
“Oh,” Paris said. He ate a piece of ch
icken with surgical neatness. “And you’re MUFON, right?”
“That’s right,” Marcia said, and didn’t bother asking Paris how he knew.
“So the Taos Hum is caused by this Tesla machine?”
“We think so.”
“So we have to stop it before they set off the New Madrid,” Paris mused. “I get it, I guess. But why kill Krista? I can’t figure that out.”
“I can’t either,” Joe said, squatting at Marcia’s side with his empty plate in one hand. Daniel and Rosen were still eating their supper, sitting in different slopes of sand. Everyone wanted to be far apart from one another when Babe finally stopped.
“Maybe Krista was killed by a boyfriend. Maybe her murder set off this whole chain of events by accident.”
“That’s one theory,” Joe said unhappily, and Marcia read his untold secret in his face in one flashing computation.
“You suspect Alan Baxter, don’t you?” she said, and she realized her voice was far too loud even as she spoke.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t believe it, but—”
“But we don’t have the luxury to take chances with Eileen’s life,” Rosen said. He walked to join them, moving in a quiet way that Marcia admired. He was so light on his feet he hardly left tracks in the sand.
“That’s ridiculous,” Marcia said. “He’d die to protect Eileen. He wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“How long have you known Alan Baxter, ma’am?” Rosen asked levelly.
“Less than a week,” Marcia said, her chin up. “And I don’t care. He’s not a murderer.”
“I don’t think he is, either,” Rosen said. “But yes, we need to make sure he isn’t.”
“But that means anyone could be a murderer. Daniel lives here. He could be one.”
Earthquake Games Page 31