Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  Under the Killer Sun

  -A Death Valley Mystery-

  Kirk Mitchell

  www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/mitchell.htm

  Copyright © 2011 by Kirk Mitchell

  Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The political and administrative settings of this novel are not meant to represent the actual policies of any tribe or law enforcement agency.

  Books by Kirk Mitchell

  Historical thrillers

  Black Dragon

  With Siberia Comes a Chill

  Civil War novels

  Shadow on the Valley

  Fredericksburg

  Alternate History

  Germanicus series:

  Procurator

  The New Barbarians

  Cry Republic

  Never the Twain

  Death Valley Mysteries

  Under the Killer Sun

  Dee Laguerre Mysteries

  High Desert Malice

  Deep Valley Malice

  Parker/Turnipseed series

  Cry Dance

  Spirit Sickness

  Ancient Ones

  Sky Woman Falling

  Dance of the Thunder Dogs

  Novelizations

  A.D.

  Backdraft

  Writing as Joel Norst:

  Delta Force

  Lethal Weapon

  Colors

  Mississippi Burning

  Under the Killer Sun

  -A Death Valley Mystery-

  Kirk Mitchell

  Chapter One

  Michael was dreaming that he was one of the nocturnal creatures of the desert, deep inside his dark and cool burrow until twilight—when the buzzer sounded.

  Grunting, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and heaved himself up. The linoleum was warm against the soles of his bare feet. He grabbed his Levi’s off the floor and hopped into them. His jeans felt as if they’d just come out of the drier.

  The buzzer rasped again. And again.

  “Coming!” Michael slid his pistol out from under his pillow and into his belt holster. An Aloha shirt was thrown over the weapon to hide it. He shuffled through the door that separated his private quarters from the resident post: a twelve-by-twelve foot office with scarred wooden furniture retired from service in the justice court.

  The sun was curling its fingers around the edges of the venetian blinds. He parted the slats and squinted out into the dazzle, thinking perhaps that his grandmother had come to fix supper for him. But that hadn’t happened in a very long time. And the figure standing on the stoop was slender. Decidedly female, he judged from the hips. Apparently alone with nothing in her hands. The expression on her face was blanked out by the glare.

  She thumbed the buzzer button one last time.

  Michael glanced at the wall clock. It was 3:05 P.M. Swinging open the door, he braced for the blast of heat. It almost felt as if it could crisp his eyebrows and singe his nostrils. “May I help you?”

  “Are you the sheriff?” She was a willowy brunette in her mid to late-twenties. No older than thirty, Michael felt sure. She wore a halter top, shorts, and low-cut boots. She had soft brown eyes. Her cheekbones and upturned nose were sprayed with tiny freckles.

  “I’m not the sheriff,” he explained, stepping back so there was room for her to enter the cramped office. He opened all the window blinds, then gestured at the fat face in the official photograph on the wall. “Are you looking for Sheriff Gorman?”

  “I’m looking for a sheriff.”

  “There’s only one sheriff. The rest of us are his deputies.”

  “Did I wake you?” she asked, frowning. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “That’s okay,” Michael said, “I had to get up to answer the door anyway.” She didn’t appear to get his little jest. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m Dulcie Kincannon.” She put the stress on her last name, as if it should mean something to him.

  Kincannon seemed familiar, but he hadn’t gotten enough sleep to feel like searching his brain. “Michael Long Shore.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.” He settled in behind his desk, seeing no reason—now that she understood that she’d gotten him out of bed—to apologize for being caught in Levi’s and a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt. He checked the outdoor thermometer monitor he kept next to the radio. The air temperature in the shade of the bungalow’s eaves was a brisk 122 degrees, Fahrenheit. Her face glistened with perspiration, but her skin wasn’t flushed. So, presumably, she had just gotten out of the small blue Toyota sport utility parked in the visitor’s space.

  “I’d like to report a missing person,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My husband.”

  Michael noted the gold wedding band she wore on the appropriate finger. “Have you talked to the park police?”

  “They sent me here.”

  “Did they explain why?”

  “The ranger just told me that this is a national park but the sheriff still handles most things.”

  “Some things,” Michael clarified. When Death Valley had been upgraded in 1994 from a national monument to the largest national park outside Alaska, the federal government had allowed the sheriff to keep limited criminal authority within those boundaries. Otherwise, he would’ve lost control of half his sprawling county.

  “Do you handle missing husbands?” Dulcie asked. No hint of irony in her voice.

  She had an innocence he found disarming. “Are you saying your husband went missing here in the valley?”

  “Probably.”

  “When?”

  “July first, most likely.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No, we’ve been separated for some months now.”

  “Since...?”

  “January.” Her eyes misted briefly. “That’s when he said he thought we’d made a mistake and started changing his mind and everything.”

  “Okay, but when did you last see him?”

  “Four weeks ago. At that big empty house in Indian Wells.”

  She was getting ahead of him with talk about a residence.

  “Have you had any contact with him since the breakup in January?”

  “Just a quick phone call that Tuesday.”

  “Which Tuesday?”

  “July first.”

  Michael looked up at the wall calendar. Today was Monday, July 14. Bastille Day. They were celebrating in Paris, and tonight the French tourists would kick up their heels in the Corkscrew Saloon here. Last year, a wrangler with the park service had punched one of them—the joys of international peacekeeping in the sheriff’s most remote outpost. Michael took the incident report pad from the desk. “What’s your husband’s name?”

  “Dr. Carl Kincannon.”

  That Kincannon—merda. Michael penned in her husband as victim on the form, even though he knew the assumption to be premature. A husband who disappears with divorce looming on the horizon is more likely a refugee than a victim. “Where do you two live?”

  “Carl lives in Indian Wells and I live near Beatty.”

  “Indian Wells, California, and Beatty, Nevada?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  That meant more than one hundred road miles separated the estranged couple, Michael estimated. “So you’ve lived apart since the separation?”

  “No, we’ve always lived apart.”

  “But you’re legall
y married?”

  “In Mexico,” Dulcie answered. Michael’s face must have betrayed his skepticism, for she added, “It was done at the civil office down there in Guadalajara. We even had to go to a planned parenthood lecture. It was in Spanish, but we still had to sit through it.” For the first time, she smiled. “We did everything just like they said, so it has to be recognized here in the states.”

  “May I see your identification?”

  “Sure.” Taking a woman’s billfold from the back pocket of her shorts, she had a moment’s difficulty separating her Nevada driver’s license from the clear vinyl covering it. “Here.”

  Michael believed the license to be genuine, but he also knew that the forgers were always just a step behind the latest technology. Her hair had been a shade darker the day Motor Vehicles had photographed her. At twenty-seven, she was a year younger than Michael. A rural route address of Beatty, an old mining town which touted itself as the gateway to Death Valley. Actually, it was the backdoor to the park. After taking down her cell phone number, he asked, “What’s your occupation, Ms. Kincannon?”

  “I’m in the legal sex trade.”

  Michael looked up at her, sharply. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I work in a brothel just outside Beatty,” she replied with a complete lack of self-consciousness, almost primly.

  No wonder the park service sent her here. Inwardly, he debated going on. But mention of Carl Kincannon made him hesitant about kissing this off too obviously. “You happen to know your husband’s address in Indian Wells?”

  She gave it to him.

  Indian Wells was a small community at the foot of the southern Sierra Nevada, maybe eighty miles southwest as the crow flies. If a crow could fly over Death Valley in July. “Isn’t Indian Wells served by Kern County Sheriff’s Department?” He knew the answer but was pointing out that this case might be theirs, not his.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Okay,” Michael muttered, relenting. “What are Dr. Kincannon’s hair and eye color?”

  “Uh, red and blue, though he’s getting kind of gray. I call the shade salt and paprika.”

  “Height and weight?”

  “Six feet-three inches, about one hundred and ninety pounds.”

  “What is his date of birth?”

  Without hesitation, she rattled off October 9, 1943.

  Michael decided that he would learn more about this May-September relationship if he played dumb. “Is Carl a medical doctor?”

  “Oh no, he’s a geophysicist.” She took obvious pride in having mastered the word.

  “What’s that?”

  “Like a geologist, but more.”

  “Was he out here in the desert prospecting?”

  “No, nothing like that. Carl does studies for companies. Big companies. Whole countries, sometimes.”

  “Okay, but what makes you so sure he went missing here in Death Valley?”

  “I’m not. Not completely. This is so complicated.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Smiling again, she took one of his business cards from the holder on the desk and read out loud: “Michael A. Long Shore, Investigator, Inyo County Sheriff’s Department.” Her clear brown eyes held his. “What’s the A stand for?”

  “Adriano.”

  “Spanish?”

  “Italian.”

  “Are you Italian? You look it, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  Michael ordinarily saved this kind of discussion for cocktails at poolside in the evenings. “Ms. Kincannon, what makes you think your husband came here to the park?”

  “Through the park. It’s the only way Carl would’ve come from Indian Wells. He phoned me that Tuesday—”

  “July first?”

  “Right. He phoned, saying he wanted to drive over and talk. He wanted us to stay friends. He wanted for us to talk before the lawyers got into it. He never showed up.”

  In the lull that followed, Michael returned her license to her. “Ms. Kincannon, how do you know for certain, then, that the doctor vanished somewhere in the park or even Inyo County?” Increasingly, this all sounded like something Kern County should handle. He would do the courtesy report for them and let it go at that.

  “Carl started out to see me. He left Indian Wells on the first. I know that.”

  “How?”

  “I just do. He wouldn’t phone and then forget. Not something like this. Still, I tried to get hold of Joanna to make sure when Carl left over there. She wouldn’t return my calls.”

  “Jo—?”

  “Joanna Wallace. She runs Carl’s firm for him. Alternative Energies Institute.”

  Michael made a note on the right margin of the form, then sat back and chewed on the cap of his pen. He ran the sparse network of desert highways and byways through his mind. It took him only seconds to come to the same conclusion that had led Dulcie here: The most direct route Dr. Kincannon would have taken from Indian Wells to Beatty was through Inyo County and, more specifically, Death Valley. The alternatives involved needless detours of hundreds of miles. “Have you discussed any of this with Kern Sheriff’s Department?”

  “I tried, but I think Joanna got to them—they brushed me off like the ranger guy here.”

  “Are you saying Ms. Wallace has some reason to lie about the doctor’s whereabouts?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” she said, bitterness creeping into her voice.

  Michael wondered if this alleged disappearance might be explained by pre-divorce maneuvering, with Dr. Kincannon’s executive officer running interference for him while he battened down his financial hatches. That if depended on another if: Was the Mexican marriage even legal in California? “What does the doctor drive?” Michael went on.

  “The institute has all kinds of cars in its motor pool. Hummers and pickups. He just grabs one when he needs it. I don’t think cars mean much to him.”

  Finally, Michael sighed. “Look, Ms. Kincannon, I need to follow-up on a few details—”

  “You don’t believe me.” She looked stung.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re going to check with Joanna to see if I’m making this all up.”

  “Look,” he repeated, “I just can’t call out the search teams for your husband on the basis of what you’ve told me. Inyo County is over ten thousand square miles in size. That’s larger than the state of Vermont. Death Valley, the biggest part of my beat, is around five thousand square miles. That’s one-and-a-half times the area of Delaware...” Swiveling around in his chair, Michael opened a file-cabinet drawer. “These folders are my confirmed missing person cases. Tourists from all over the world. Possible suicides. Suspected homicides. The bad news is that none of them, if here in the valley, are still alive. Most disappearances occur in summer, and you don’t wander around Death Valley for more than a few hours during daylight at the height of summer. The good news is that we have no confirmation the doctor was even here...” He stopped when he realized that her eyes had filled with tears.

  Dulcie Kincannon asked in a hush, “Do you know what it feels like to have somebody close to you just disappear into thin air?” She came to her feet. “Never mind, Investigator Long Shore. I’ll find Carl myself.”

  “Please, Ms. Kincannon, it’s over a hundred and twenty degrees out there right now. You can’t just—”

  But she’d gone, slamming the door behind her.

  Chapter Two

  By mid-afternoon in July, the air trapped inside the great convection oven called Death Valley gets as hot as any to be found on the planet. That’s when tourists step out of their air-conditioned cars and collapse never to regain consciousness, when birds drop out of the sky and crawl under bushes to pant like dogs. It’s a heat that sears your eyelids and lungs. It passes through you like an invisible flame and can kill within minutes. Exposed bodies are mummified in the space of a few days, the corpses of adults so desiccated they can be lifted up with one hand, the bones rattling in hollow cavities create
d by the shrinking of the internal organs.

  All this was on Michael’s mind as he sat behind his desk, twirling his pen between his fingers and trying to decide if the young woman who’d just stormed out of his office was really Dr. Carl Kincannon’s estranged wife. He’d never met the man. Like many brilliant and wealthy eccentrics, the geophysicist had an obsession for privacy. His Alternative Energies Institute ran a geothermal plant in the southwest corner of Inyo County, but until now Michael had had no reason to visit it. Only once had he seen Kincannon in person, at the courthouse—a tall man with a shock of reddish hair and a beard turning white. He’d been among the scientific pioneers to figure out that earth was far more restless than it had seemed lately. Much of his early work had been done in Death Valley and the nearby Sierra Nevada.

  Sighing, Michael grabbed his radio handset and cell phone from their chargers. Even with these, communication over the desert ranges was spotty. And he never liked to test the July sun. But he would follow the presumed Ms. Kincannon until she was safely out of the area. He couldn’t let her die of heat prostration while doing her own search after being denied help by the sheriff’s department.

  He locked up the bungalow and hurried down the front steps before she got too far ahead of him.

  Outside, his first breath caught in his throat as if his nervous system had confused the torrid air with fire. Even the Shoshone had abandoned the valley floor in summer for camps high in the mountains—that is, until the park service curtailed their annual migration in order to keep a year-round eye on them.

  The side windows to Michael’s unmarked sheriff’s cruiser had been left down. He had no choice. Even when his white Ford Expedition was parked under the awning, its interior became a sauna if shut-up during the day. An open cop car was a tempting target for human mischief-makers. The previous deputy assigned here had also left his windows down in summer, only to be startled by a buzz while on patrol. He’d nearly rolled the cruiser trying to untangle his legs from the rattlesnake slithering around them. He still got fanged. Fortunately, the side-winder’s bite had been dry—a few strikes come without venom.