Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  He put away his water bottle and continued trudging up the abandoned road.

  A breeze rose around him, stealthily, like an awakening of spirits that had been disturbed by his trespass. But this wind wasn’t giving up any secrets. It was odorless. It was also out of the south.

  That convinced him to keep climbing west.

  Minutes later, the stench curled around his face again.

  The remains of a shack loomed out of the slope. Just two stone walls were left standing. The roof had been blown off but had landed upright. He knelt to glance under it.

  Nothing.

  He recalled that a hanging valley lay just above. Only such a large catch-basin could have funneled enough rainwater down to erase more than a hundred feet of road and leave a ten-foot-deep gash in the hillside. There was no easy way around. He un-slung his pack and carried it in his arms so he could squeeze into the narrow cleft. He watched for rattlesnakes in the natural perches along the crumbly walls. Nothing worse than taking a bite to the face—at least a festering limb could be amputated.

  Desert sheep had avoided this claustrophobic passageway, but its floor was covered with coyote tracks.

  Michael froze.

  He’d almost stepped on something. Something very much out of place.

  He knelt again.

  It was bluish white, streaked with red. He held out his right hand to compare it to the object. Doing this removed all doubt. The bones on the ground added up to a partially disarticulated right hand.

  Michael took a deep breath, then dug his camera out of the pack.

  The skin, muscle and some phalanges were missing—or had been gnawed away was more accurate, as it was evident canine teeth had been at work here. However, those same coyote teeth weren’t capable of the clean cut that had separated the hand from the wrist. The obvious reason to remove and discard hands was to hinder the identification of a victim. Against the odds, Michael had stumbled across one such hand, but—thanks to a hungry coyote—the finger and palm prints had been obliterated.

  Working quickly, he photographed the hand from various angles, before depositing it in a paper bag. On a day such as today, plastic would only roast the residual tissue. He could have left the hand in place for the Identification team out of headquarters, if not for the chance the coyote might return in his absence and carry it off.

  Michael pushed on, higher, for this wasn’t the source of the smell he’d caught from below. A bigger piece of carrion was still waiting for him somewhere on the mountain.

  Haste.

  This crime smacked of hasty execution, and Michael hoped that would work toward its solution. The person or persons responsible had thought to remove the victim’s hands, assuming the victim had had two, but then neglected to bury them beyond the reach of scavengers. Did that mean the body had been dumped in a reckless hurry?

  He broke from the upper end of the cleft, searching the slope even more carefully now.

  The severed hand had reminded him of something: “The coapicci will cut you kids into pieces and eat you up...” Years before, as their mother began her mental decline, Michael and his brother Jimmy had sneaked off into the Panamints without permission. Instead of scolding them, their grandmother scared them with stories about the coappici, a man-eating giant who dwelt in the mountains. He carried his victims to his bone-strewn cave in a basket strapped to his back. His shovel-like front teeth were certainly capable of a cut as clean as that to the hand now in Michael’s day-pack.

  He came to the hanging valley. Scattered ruins appeared, one of the mines that had fed the Chloride City silver boom. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been here, perhaps while hunting mule deer with his father.

  The stench was now steady.

  That told him something important about the location of the body. Corpses didn’t reek for long out in the open; sun and low humidity turned flesh into jerky before it could rot. Decomposition relied on shelter of some sort.

  He started toward the weathered structures, looking for boot impressions along the way, perhaps even drag marks scoring the ground.

  A homicide victim doesn’t dispose of himself.

  However, those prints not washed away by cloudbursts were soon scoured out by the winds, almost a daily occurrence in a land with scant vegetation as a buffer between the earth and the sky.

  Reaching the main works of the deserted mine, he almost gagged. So close now, so close. Whoever you are, I’m your friend. The last one you’ll ever have. Tell me your story… The hoist-house door was missing, but Michael couldn’t quite force himself through this opening into the structure that covered the shaft. He took a moment to steel himself. Tacked to an outer wall of the building was a park service posting:

  Warning!

  Unsafe Mine Shaft

  Do Not Enter

  The sign looked relatively new, and Michael knew just the park employee to ask to learn when it’d been tacked up. From now on, everything got down to time frames, windows of opportunity.

  At last, he took out a cigar and lit it. There was no going forward without its smoke to mask the stench. Otherwise, saliva kept welling in his mouth.

  He entered the hoist-house.

  Sunlight filtered in through missing boards on the west wall and slanted across the pile of debris left by the collapse of the floor. Here and there, the bare ground was visible, and in one such patch Michael found the print he’d been seeking: The boot impression was at least a size twelve. And it was deeply-cut, suggesting that the subject had been carrying a good deal of weight, like the coapicci bearing a victim on his back to his lair.

  Michael would photograph the print later.

  In all the junk, the location of the shaft itself wasn’t evident at first glance. He had to find the hoist-drum and then follow the cable from the spool across the room. He was picking his way through the nail-barbed timbers when a skirl made him stop. It came from under a chunk of flooring.

  “That’s okay, little wavy one,” Michael whispered, using the Shoshone nickname for Brother Rattlesnake. “Just passing through. From now on, I’ll stay out of your hoist-house if you stay out of my cruiser. Deal...?”

  The snake fell silent, and Michael crept on through the debris.

  Finally, he could see where the cable dropped off into the shaft. He approached its edge and stared down into the dark-ness.

  After a minute, he held the cigar out over the opening. The smoke blew back in his face. It was an up-cast shaft. Air entered the mine from some other point and exited here to flow down the mountainside. That was the only reason he’d caught the smell on the gravel road below.

  He could see where the cable ended in a frayed break a few feet below the surface. The cage, or elevator car, was either resting on the bottom or had been salvaged by other miners years ago. Salvage was more likely, for somebody had taken the time to install a wooden ladder. Michael took his flashlight from the pack and illuminated the descending rungs. They narrowed and then vanished where his beam could no longer pierce the depths.

  He thought about returning to the Ford for his rappelling gear. But that would only add time to what would now be a long evening of work ahead. He decided to trust the rickety-looking ladder.

  On the way down, he halted every few feet to examine the walls around him for traces of dried blood, skin, hair or cloth-ing. These would have been left by a falling body glancing off the rock. All he saw were places where the whitish pack-rat excrement had been rubbed off the rungs by contact—recent contact, otherwise he would’ve found new coatings of dung.

  His heart hammering, he aimed his beam between his boots for a glance below. The bottom was defined only by the usual mine rubbish, broken powder boxes and nesting material transported below by rodents.

  The body, then, hadn’t been carelessly dropped down the shaft, as most were.

  Stepping off the last rung, Michael turned into the powerful draft that indicated the presence of a side-tunnel.

  He switched off his b
eam to confirm something, what he believed to be a fleck of daylight. Yes, there it was—a distant opening to the surface. Two iron rails headed in that directly, glinting faintly. As his eyes slowly adjusted, Michael realized that something boxy was resting midway down the track. An ore car. Projecting above its top was the silhouette of a human head and shoulders. The stench was now so overpowering it made Michael’s eyes water. Yet, clenching the cigar between his front teeth, he advanced.

  The corpse was seated in the car, handless arms draped over the sides, slouching as if the man were taking a bath. His head was inclined forward, partially obscuring the grin created by the shrinking of his lips.

  Chapter Four

  Michael got back to his bungalow from Las Vegas the next afternoon. He shed his clothes of the previous twenty-four hours, which stank of death, and showered. Because the smell persisted, he showered again before donning a fresh Aloha shirt and baggy shorts. He nursed a beer while making a half-hearted attempt to catch up with the reports, but soon quit with a sigh and retired to the lawn chair on the small porch off his bedroom sliding glass door.

  He was still too restless to sleep, although his eyes were shot for reading, his usual diversion.

  Sometimes the heat was audible, like the roar of a furnace. Not from the sun, of course, but from its effect on the salt pan, as the expanding flats swelled and buckled, hummed and pinged. It was that way this evening, following a day that had been 123 degrees, Fahrenheit. It was predicted to be even hotter this weekend. As Michael watched, the sun sank behind the Panamint Range, and the roar stopped. It came as abruptly as if someone had just turned off the gas. In the same few seconds, the sky had gone from milky white to an otherworldly turquoise.

  As if on cue, tourists began vacating their rooms and gathering at the swimming pool, which was just visible between the awning and the roof of his cruiser. He could see young women in swimwear funneling with sensuous grace through the gate in the fence and claiming their chaise lounges.

  Yet, seeing human flesh took him back to the autopsy this morning. He had been sustained through the long night of work at the mine by the hope that the preliminary post mortem would answer all his questions about the badly decomposed body he’d discovered in the shaft.

  It hadn’t.

  Immanuel Kant, in Michael’s estimation the greatest German philosopher, would point out that a chair in a darkened room is not invisible. The viewer simply lacks the illumination to see it.

  Feminine laughter made Michael glance to the pool again. Sleek bodies were cavorting in the twilight, splashing each other with sprays of blue diamonds.

  Arthur Schopenhauer, second best German philosopher, would warn that Michael’s going to the pool night after night was folly, that the satisfying of one desire leads only to the hatching of new desires, and none—no matter how tantalizing—can relieve the dissatisfaction with life that is at the core of human existence. There are loftier pastimes. Music, for example. And reading philosophy, something Michael did almost every evening. Philosophy had always been the solace of exiles, and if anybody was exiled that man was Michael Long Shore.

  Fuck Schopenhauer, he suddenly decided, tossing away the empty beer can on his way out of the bungalow.

  A minute later he stood at the gate, scanning the scantily-clad throng. The Euros, especially, knew how to dress down for a desert night. The staff constantly had to remind the frauleins that bikini tops were not optional.

  Fuck the staff.

  One woman immediately got Michael’s attention: a thin blonde about midway down the long row of chaise lounges. But then, on second thought, the man beside her might be her husband, and by now he’d noticed an olive-complexioned brunette with an empty lounge to either side of her. Her features were strong but pretty in a Mediterranean sort of way, and he sensed that he would prefer her company to the blonde’s, even if the latter proved to be unattached.

  The brunette’s eyes softened as they flashed up at Michael’s approach.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  Reclining, he joined her in pretending interest in the kids doing cannon-balls off the diving board.

  It was a Latin and not a Greek gold cross dangling between her breasts, so he asked in Italian, “Come voi gradiscono il calore?”

  When she blinked at him in what seemed to be mild confusion, he suspected that he had misjudged her nationality. But then she replied to his question whether or not she liked the heat: “Ora e piacevole, ma era troppo piu presto.” It’s nice now, but it was too much earlier. She smiled tentatively. She seemed cautious, like a doe coming down to a watering hole at dusk. “Siete italiana?”

  Michael shut his eyes. Momentarily, it was evening again outside that sand-blasted aluminum mobile home a mile south of Furnace Creek. A different woman was murmuring fondly to him in Italian. He knew it was a common fear, forgetting what a loved one’s voice had sounded like. It helped to hear another Italian female speak now and again. It eased that unreasonable fear. “Mezzo,” he finally said, opening his eyes on the young woman again. Half.

  “Quale meta, la vostra madre o il vostro padre?” Which half, your mother or your father?

  “La mia madre...” He then gave her the Reader’s Digest version: how his father, a sailor with the U.S. Navy, had met his mother in her village near Naples. They fell in love, married, and he brought her back to California. To Death Valley. The rest was opera. Tragic opera, but he didn’t add that.

  “Now let me try English,” the young woman begged.

  “Sure.”

  “What you do?”

  “I’m what we call a deputy sheriff here.”

  “Shariff.”

  “Close.”

  “Six-gun, John Wayne, put-‘em-up?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You enjoy this job?”

  Michael didn’t have a Reader’s Digest version for an answer that complicated, so he punted. “Sometimes. What do you?”

  “I work office in Roma.”

  “Rome,” he corrected her.

  “Okay, okay...Rome.” She laughed, a nice laugh. Extra-ordinarily white teeth, or maybe it was just the contrast with her skin. “What is your name?”

  “Michael. And yours?”

  “My friends call me ’Cenza,” she replied. When he shrugged that he hadn’t heard it before, she explained, “Innocenza.”

  It was time for a little test to see if things could be hurried up. Not that he preferred to rush this, but these rituals were not courtships, and the tourist busses pulled out mid-morning. “Innocenza...?” he said with a slight frown. “I hope not.”

  She gave no reaction. This went on long enough for him to begin to think that either she hadn’t understood or, once again, he had misjudged. But then she offered him an impish smile before inclining head toward the poolside bar. “Possible to get a wine there?”

  “Very possible.” He rose and offered a hand to help her to her feet. As they touched, he saw that her skin tone was nearly identical to his own.

  They had just settled onto their stools at the bar when something—maybe it was the rattle of a palm frond in a sudden breeze overhead—made Michael glance back toward his bungalow. Warnings usually came in small signs. He saw that his door was wide open, and a stocky figure in an off-white seersucker suit stood in it. “See that the lady gets a wine,” he told the bartender, slipping him a ten. Then Michael apologized to Innocenza: “You’ll have to excuse me. Business.”

  “No, no,” she said with a disappointment that touched him.

  * * *

  The front door to the bungalow was still ajar when Michael reached it, but the stout man was no longer in sight. Through the interior doorway to his personal quarters came the clink of bottle glass. Sheriff Cole Gorman was hunched before the open refrigerator, going through the couple brands of beers Michael kept on hand. His ruddy face seemed even more grotesquely fleshy than usual in the stark fridge light. Not only was his
suit unfashionable, it was sweat-blotched.

  Coming in earlier, Michael had tossed his service pistol in its holster on the dinette table. He should have taken it with him to the pool, as resident deputies were never off duty. But he hadn’t. He grabbed it, intending to put it away.

  But the sheriff, catching this movement out of the corner of his eye, had gone still. “Now’s your chance, Long Shore. I know you’ve dreamed of this chance. Might never come again.”

  “It’d never stand up in court, Sheriff.”

  Gorman finally turned and faced him, a bottle in each hand. “Why not?”

  “You’re holding two beers, not just one. It’d look like I gunned you down in cold blood after we’d been talking.”

  “Always imagining things,” the sheriff grunted. “It’s your strength. And your weakness. The same capacity that gives you the appearance of being clever leaves you prone to wild speculation.” He handed over one of the bottles, and Michael clipped his holstered weapon onto his waistband to accept the beer.

  “How’d you get in?”

  Gorman crossed the dining area and sank ponderously onto the small sofa. “I am keeper of the keys to everything in this county. I own this county. You are living in one of my mansions. Breaking my bread. Need I go on?” He drained half his bottle in two gulps. “Now yesterday, according to the dispatch log, you requested a registered owner-check on a Toyota that came back to a Dulcie Kincannon of Beatty, Nevada. Why, pray tell...?”

  Michael opened the blinds, and the slatted twilight fell across the sheriff’s shrewd eyes. “Do you know her husband, Carl Kincannon?”

  “Irrelevant, Long Shore. I believe you understood my question.” Gorman sat waiting.