May all the snakes that bite me have dry fangs.
Michael grabbed the flyswatter he stored behind the sun visor and jiggled the pad under the seats, front and back.
No rattler.
This done, he sat inside and gunned the engine to life. Immediately, the temperature gauge needle rose to mid-range. From now on, he would keep a wary eye on it. He did most of his work at night, partly to avoid stressing the engine and partly because most of the human vermin here also waited for darkness before slithering out of their holes.
He checked the dash clock: Dulcie Kincannon was now two minutes ahead of him.
He took hold of the steering wheel—and recoiled. “Merda!”
Sucking on the heel of his palm, he located a pencil-thin ray of sunlight on the door-trim panel. It had just passed over the steering wheel. Now he’d have a blistered palm to remind him of his lapse in attention. Coming in from the field at four o’clock this morning, he’d pulled too far forward under the awning, letting the afternoon sun sneak through the windshield.
Living in the valley had its rules, and you paid if you violated them.
Backing out onto the street, Michael took hold of the microphone—after testing it with a moistened fingertip—and radioed: “Independence, David-Four is ten-eight.”
“Copy, David-Four is in service,” acknowledged the female dispatcher from headquarters in the county seat, a hundred miles to the northwest.
David-Four was Michael’s call sign. The David stood for detective. It was unprecedented for an investigator to be assigned to Furnace Creek, even one born and raised here. All the other detectives worked out of headquarters. In better times, Michael wouldn’t have bothered to raise dispatch prior to venturing out. But, in addition to being posted to Death Valley, he was back on probation, the same thin ice rookies skated on.
He sped toward the Furnace Creek’s main gate.
There had been springs and a seasonal creek in the canyon above the site for as long as the local Shoshone could remember, but it had taken white technology to drill into the underlying aquifer and turn a hardscrabble cattle ranch of the 1880s into a resort with neat rows of date palms, an eighteen-hole golf course and a 3,000-foot-long airstrip. The county rented a bungalow for Michael in the employee-housing section, beyond which the exotic greenery abruptly stopped and the Great Salt Pan, the bed of a lake that came and went on geologic caprice, began its glistening white sprawl to the feet of the surrounding mountains.
While Michael wasn’t certain where Dulcie might look first for her husband, there was only one way in and out of Furnace Creek Ranch known to the public. That was under the log arch.
Did she stop somewhere inside the resort?
He wouldn’t guess that she’d ducked into the Corkscrew Saloon for a little comfort—her eyes had been too clear for somebody who was hitting the bottle. And she hadn’t smelled of alcohol. She’d simply smelled good.
He was almost to the arch when he had to brake: A half dozen busses had pulled in and were disgorging passengers from all over the globe. The tourists shuffled past Michael’s windshield, grinning at the sheer novelty of the heat. Some popped off the lens covers to their cameras as if hoping to capture this shimmering force on film, but then gave up, not knowing its source. Was it the sun? Or was it the ground itself, the asphalt that had the consistency of fresh-baked brownies?
Whatever, they had found the nadir of American existence. At 179 feet minus sea level, Furnace Creek was the lowest census-designated place in the United States.
Welcome to my world.
Michael tapped his horn to part the throng. Every second he waited here, Dulcie Kincannon gained on him. “Move your butts,” he said, pasting on a smile. “Bitte, dozo, prego, s’il vous plait.”
Finally, he could pass under the gateway on State Route 190. But there he faced three choices. Right would take him south, deeper into the valley to the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere: Badwater, an acrid spring 282 feet below sea level. But if Dulcie meant to retrace Kincannon’s likely route of two weeks ago, she had little reason to go south. The dusty byways that linked that end of the valley to his home in Kern County were blocked by the fences around the eastern bombing ranges of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. Across the highway and straight ahead was the Furnace Creek Inn, an enclave of Spanish Revival architecture and Moorish gardens. The inn catered to the upscale who preferred their weather moderate. It wouldn’t open again until mid-October.
No, Michael guessed that Dulcie had headed north.
Turning left, he accelerated past the park administrative complex. The U.S. government Bronco was parked in its reserved spot. That meant the on-duty law enforcement ranger was inside his nice cool office. Sometimes, just overhearing Michael on the radio was enough to make him tag along on a call. The recent creation of the park had left a shared jurisdiction that suited neither the feds nor the county, making both feel like two actresses who’ve worn the same gown to a premiere.
Michael’s air-conditioner was finally throwing enough cool air for him to power up his windows. He barreled past the last shaggy-headed palms of the Furnace Creek oasis and out into the stunning desolation that drew over a million visitors each year, regardless of the season.
Death Valley was just a place where the earth had slumped between two fault-uplifted mountain ranges, forming a vast evaporation dish that over the eons baked off a succession of land-locked lakes and kept their salt. The biggest part of its mystique came not from the other-worldly features of the park, which were strange and haunting in their own right, but from the name a party of white emigrants in the mid-Nineteenth Century had given it as they barely escaped with their lives: Good-bye, Death Valley. The Shoshone had never seen their home as dead. To them, it was life-giving. Nor did they see it as a wasteland, for they wasted nothing.
“He phoned, saying he wanted to drive over and talk. He wanted us to stay friends...”
Snatches of the conversation with Dulcie kept coming back to Michael.
Driving from Indian Wells to Beatty, her husband would have had no reason to swing down to Furnace Creek, meaning the man would’ve passed through Stovepipe Wells and then over Daylight Pass into Nevada. Dulcie had seemed familiar enough with the country to realize that Kincannon would not have used the Beatty cutoff, which Michael was racing toward. He believed she would stick to her husband’s likely route, hoping for some sign of him to have survived the last fourteen days.
Or not hoping.
Sometimes, in Michael’s experience, the reporting party to a missing person clearly didn’t want that person found. The report was a formality to satisfy the insurance company.
But that wasn’t his hunch in this instance. What had she said with such obvious pain in her voice? “Do you know what it feels like to have somebody close to you just disappear into thin air...?”
She’d given him no chance to answer.
Michael veered off the state highway onto the short-cut. The road gradually climbed to a sign that marked sea level. Three hundred miles to the west at this latitude and altitude, the chilly waters of the Pacific were crashing against the rocky coast. There was evidence of a beach here too, an eroded gravel bar deposited by long-vanished Lake Manly. But no blue waves, just skeins of sand whispering along the ground.
Thinking ahead, Michael decided to wait for her at Hell’s Gate, which was just below Daylight Pass on the main road to Beatty. If she didn’t show within ten minutes, he’d assume that she had turned east for Indian Wells, and he would really have to stomp on the gas pedal to catch her before Stovepipe Wells.
He’d dealt with working girls before in the valley, hookers under the misapprehension that it was legal to solicit business in California as long as the acts were performed in Nevada. But in none of those women had Michael found such a peculiar innocence as he had in Dulcie Kincannon. She was probably much in demand if only because she didn’t seem like what she was.
Arriving at Hell’s Gat
e, he parked on the shoulder, let down the windows and shut off the engine to let it cool. No traffic showed on Daylight Pass Road as it wound up to the summit and the Nevada border just beyond.
Michael sat back but was careful not to rest his forearm outside the window and get blistered again.
To the northwest loomed rusty-looking buttes that appeared to be wavering in the stagnant heat. Actually, the temperature up here was five or six degrees cooler than what it had been in Furnace Creek and that much less than what it would reach in Badwater today.
He began humming La Marseillaise to himself. It was Bastille Day.
Nine minutes passed and still no cars showed on the road to Beatty.
Then, just as he was ready to call it quits and head west, Michael caught a metallic-blue glint from the corner of his eye. A small Toyota sport utility.
“Buon,” he whispered in Italian. He always found a touch of predictability comforting. There was so little of it in Death Valley.
The under-powered Toyota was chugging up the grade.
Michael turned on his engine and flipped a quick U-turn.
Twenty seconds later, while Dulcie Kincannon drove past the T-intersection toward Beatty, he was heading south, hopefully of no interest to her in case she’d noticed his unmarked cruiser parked beside the bungalow.
As soon as her Toyota was out of sight, he made a second U-turn and began trailing her. He fished in his glove compartment for the pair of binoculars he kept there and trained them on her rear license plate. Before he depressed the microphone button again, he checked the dash clock: 4:09 P.M. Chances were that the sheriff had called it a day and was huddled with his cronies in the back booth at the Elk’s Club in Independence, plotting for his re-election this November. Unlikely that Cole Gorman would be monitoring the radio, so Michael risked having to explain what he was up to: “Independence, David-Four, I need a registration check through Carson City on a Nevada plate.”
“Go ahead with your plate number,” the dispatcher said tonelessly.
Michael recited it, then focused his attention back on Dulcie’s Toyota. He believed that she was oblivious to his presence until two miles later and in the absence of any other traffic she signaled before leaving the highway for a gravel side-road. He hoped that she’d hit her blinker purely out of habit, for he prided himself on his ability to shadow anyone or anything across the desert.
Why’s she turning for Keane Spring?
Michael racked his brain for a reason she’d be drawn to a clump of stunted willows. Was her turning explained by the need for a pit stop behind some privacy rocks? There were no real facilities until Beatty.
But she continued past the spring, raising a fog of dust that, fortunately, covered Michael’s own progress up into the mountains behind her. Quickly, he shut his windows against the choking stuff.
Her speed indicated confidence, that she’d come this way before.
“David-Four, ready to copy your information?” the dispatcher’s voice said from the radio speaker.
“Go ahead.”
“The current-year Toyota RAV-Four is registered to a Dulcie Kincannon of Box Twelve, Rural Route One-Adam, Beatty.”
“Is there a co-owner?”
“Negative.”
Michael smiled to himself. So what Dulcie owned was Dulcie’s, and what Carl Kincannon owned was Dulcie’s too. No wonder the man’s associates, such as Joanna Wallace, weren’t returning the young woman’s calls. Barring any prenuptial agreements, Dulcie’s share of the divorce settlement in California, a community property state, would be fifty percent. Kincannon’s people weren’t about to give Dulcie’s attorney any ammunition.
Now that Keane Spring could be scratched off, Michael’s mind leaped ahead to her next possible destination. Chloride City lay about three miles above: a sprinkling of shanties and foundation ruins, the remnants of an early Twentieth Century silver camp. However, just to the southwest Chloride Cliff fell away, and from that vantage she could take in the entirety of Death Valley.
Is she headed to the overlook just to think?
Whatever the purpose of this detour, it wasn’t accidental. Michael would now swear to that. She could not have made any other side-trips since leaving Furnace Creek and still arrived at Hell’s Gate when she did.
What is she trying to find along Chloride Cliff Road?
Another, more incriminating thought gave Michael pause:
Or is she trying to assure herself that something remains hidden? Guilt worries a soul.
A washout materialized through the dust, too late for him to brake. His cruiser bounced hard, and his seatbelt clasped him like a python. He’d braced for the impact but still bit the inside of his cheek. Slightly faster and his air bag would have deployed. He plowed ahead, the taste of blood on his tongue. And something else was playing on his senses, something mingling with the fine dust that was sifting through his air-conditioning vents. A faint smell.
Instead of turning off for Chloride City and the overlook of Death Valley, she began descending the backside of the range into Nevada.
Michael pulled off into the shade of a rock spire to consider his next move. He let down his windows and killed the motor. He had no qualms about straying over the border into Nye County. His Nevada counterparts would understand his tailing somebody onto their turf; they did the same on his side of the line from time to time. But he wondered if he was being lured into something. Her self-assurance in coming this way made him suspect that he was being manipulated.
He didn’t like the feeling.
He stepped out of the cruiser and stretched. The dust-shrouded blue speck got smaller and smaller in the canyon below.
Why isn’t she following the paved highway into Beatty? Has someone or something convinced her that two weeks ago her husband strayed off the beaten path and swung south on his way to meet with her?
Michael scanned the eastern panorama for the answer. He couldn’t see Beatty itself. Mine-scarred hills reared up out of the Amargosa Desert and blocked his view of the town. Was the answer in those mines? Kincannon was something akin to a geologist, after all.
The plume from the woman’s car was dissipating over the canyon below into a tan haze. Beyond the mouth of this gorge, the gravel road ran straight as an arrow into U.S. Route 95, which was defined by the big trucks beetling along it. Michael lifted his eyes to the last ridge visible beyond the distant highway: That would be Yucca Mountain, the object of more controversy than any other site in the nation. The federal government and the nuclear power industry wanted to store radioactive waste there for as along as grass grows and the wind blows. The State of Nevada and the environmental movement did not.
Michael was still standing beside his Ford, gazing east, when a stirring of that scarcely amounted to a breeze wafted something familiar to him. It was the thing he had caught ever so faintly just minutes before, a sharp and yeasty sweetness.
Chapter Three
Having already been bitten once by the sun today, Michael gingerly opened the glass lift-gate at rear of his cruiser on a clutter of dusty gear. His full crime scene-kit was in a large aluminum box, but he stowed a day-pack for essentials he could quickly grab and pack out into the desert. Nothing in this canvas bag had proved as useful on occasion as the bundle of the rankest-burning cigars to be found at the gift shop in Furnace Creek. The stench lingering over the area told him he’d need one of them soon.
He took stock of his surroundings and the remaining daylight. To the west, the sand dunes were casting sinuous shadows across Mesquite Flat. He checked his wristwatch: It was 4:49 P.M. “Independence, David Four,” he transmitted over his portable handset.
“David Four?”
“I’ll be away from my unit near Chloride City.”
“Copy, Chloride City.” Pause. “Watch commander asks what is this regarding?”
“Will advise,” Michael replied, clipping the handset to his belt and draping the tail of his Hawaiian shirt over the radio.
&n
bsp; Then he sniffed the air again.
It was out there, waiting for him to find it. Death. Ready to play a grisly game of hide-and-seek.
He left the shade of the outcropping on foot. The light, although beginning to wane, still felt like gasoline on his exposed skin. The Shoshone said this was because the sun was too low. The band up around Elko had solved the problem by shooting the original sun out of their sky with arrows and replacing it with a new, higher one. Apparently, the Death Valley band hadn’t thought to do the same down here.
Michael headed northwest.
It was from this direction that he’d caught the strongest whiff of nauseating sweetness. Air moved across the barren ranges in complex patterns of cross-currents and eddies only a meteorologist would understand. But he believed the odor was creeping down off the steep slope before him. The hillside was scarred by an old road so eroded it was no longer passable by vehicle. The only traffic it had seen lately were bighorn sheep and the coyotes that followed them in hope of picking off a weak straggler.
So far, Michael had found no human tracks.
The sandier ground had been dimpled by a fairly recent rain. He tried to recall the last time a thunderhead had towered over Chloride Cliff. Maybe a week ago, which would have been four or five days after Carl Kincannon had swung through the valley on his way to Beatty. If he had. Dulcie had confessed to not being sure: I’m not. Not completely. This is so complicated.
Michael wasn’t thirsty, but he paused briefly and took a water bottle from his pack. This time of year in the valley, the typical human body required three quarts per hour. He believed he needed less than that but still knew how dehydration ambushed you: perfectly fine one minute, shedding your clothes in a delirious striptease the next.
There was no dignity in a Death Valley death.
Between sips, he examined a patch of sand. It’d been pocked by fat raindrops that had struck the ground with force enough to wipe out any sole impressions. That random squall could prove to be a bit of bad luck. Annual precipitation was 2.33 inches, but that was the average over the entire park. Some places might get less than tenth of an inch in an entire decade. This area would have to be the exception.
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 2