“Ms. Kincannon came in yesterday to report her husband missing.”
“That can’t be.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve seen no report. Certainly, if somebody filed a missing, the report would have crossed my desk by this hour, a full day after the fact.”
At last, Michael flipped around one of the dinette chairs and used it. “There was no time to complete the report.”
“But there’s plenty of time to chase foreign pussy around the swimming hole here?” Gorman chuckled in disgust. “Next question, is the DB you found up on Chloride Cliff Kincannon?”
“Positive ID is pending,” Michael said, “but no. It’s not the doctor.”
“Explain.”
“Kincannon is six-three, red-headed and blue-eyed. The deceased is around five-eleven, brown and brown. Call me narrow-minded, but I’ve never seen a geophysicist in a frilly pink shirt and shiny slacks with black piping.”
“Cause of death?”
“Not determined yet. There’s a possible gunshot wound to the base of the skull, but X-rays showed no bullet. The body is a putrid mess. The pathologist said it was like working on a hundred-and-sixty-pound jellyfish.”
“Did the homicide occur there at the mine or elsewhere?”
“Probably elsewhere, but decomposition is probably in its second week, so checking for post-mortem lividity won’t be easy.” Michael was referring to the pooling of blood in a dead body that might not jibe with the position the body was found in.
“Two weeks...” Gorman’s pursed his thick lips as he fell into thought. A drop of sweat had collected on his chin and hung there, creating an uneasy suspense. When he continued after a minute, it was clear that his biggest concern was the geophysicist, not the identity of the corpse from the shaft. “Why did Ms. Kincannon file with the Kern Sheriff’s Department?”
“She claims they blew her off. Besides that, she believes her husband disappeared while traveling through the valley on his way to see her in Beatty.”
“Do they reside separately?”
Michael did not feel like wading into Dulcie’s occupation or her claim that she and Kincannon had never lived together. So he simply said, “Yes, they’re in the process of splitting the sheets.”
If Gorman was aware of that, he made no sign. But he finally wiped his nose. “So her husband might not be missing at all.”
“Possible.”
“And, most likely, there is no link between the Kincannons and the DB you found.”
Michael wasn’t quite prepared to reveal that he had been shadowing Dulcie when he caught the scent ultimately led him to the mine. Nor was he ready to say what part coincidence had played in this, if at all. The only thing in Dulcie’s favor was that she had not stopped, let alone slowed for the old road up to the mine. “I don’t—”
“Take me through your afternoon,” Gorman interrupted. “When was Ms. Kincannon here?”
“Around three-thirty to four.”
“And the log says you radioed in the DB and requested Identification at five-twenty-seven. What were you doing between four and that time?”
After a second’s pause, Michael saw a way through this that wouldn’t require perjury at some future date. “I decided to check along Dr. Kincannon’s probable routes—”
“Plural?”
“Yes, sir—plural, his possible routes through the park toward Beatty. Just in case I, the park service or highway patrol had missed an abandoned vehicle anywhere along the way he’d taken. Also, I could then honestly report that I’d followed up on the missing.”
“Prudent,” Gorman said sourly—his word when he wasn’t buying a word of it.
“I was giving my cruiser a break in the shade when I smelled that smell. Decided to investigate further on foot. I found the severed hand in a wash-out—”
“I know about all that,” Gorman butted in once more. “The ID boys did submit a report last night.” He polished off his beer, tucked the bottle between the sofa cushions and grunted to his feet. Rising, Michael thought that was the end of the usual interrogation, but the sheriff pivoted at the outer door and said, “Go easy on this Kincannon thing.”
“Sir?”
“Carl Kincannon is an extraordinary man. By that I mean he’s not subject to the rules of ordinary men. He has refused to grant audiences to folks far more powerful than you. You are not to act on any wild speculation. Is that understood?”
“Then you’re ordering me not to try to find out if he’s really missing?”
“Not at all,” Gorman said. “You heard me—just go easy.”
Then the sheriff was gone.
* * *
Michael had one more chore to complete before he could sleep. Too much time had passed for Innocenza still to be waiting for him at the poolside bar. Besides, he was no longer in the mood.
He dialed a phone number from memory.
On the fourth ring, an elderly female voice answered. “Hello?”
“Florence, it’s Michael...”
Silence.
“I need to come on the reservation in the morning,” he went on. “For sheriff’s work. I want your permission, even though the law gives me the right.” He had to wait several long seconds for her reply.
“Do as you wish,” she said, then hung up.
“Thanks, Grandmother,” he said into the dead phone.
Chapter Five
The sun had not yet cleared the Funeral Mountains as Michael set out from his bungalow. The pink and gold tones of the Furnace Creek Badlands were still muted by shadow. Given more time, he would have pulled over to the shoulder and waited for the instant in which dawn spilled across the parched hills like a wild fire. But it promised to be a long day, and he needed to talk to somebody on the reservation before the man left home for work.
Shifting his cup of coffee to his left hand, Michael made a right turn off Route 190.
A sign declared he was entering the Sovereign Nation of the Shoshone. There were years when the tribe possessed no lands at all in Death Valley. Possessed was probably the wrong word. No native ever owned real estate in the European sense. According to anthropologists, each pre-Columbian Shoshone had needed at least fifteen square miles to sustain him. Often, in trying to make clear to outsiders how sparsely populated this country had been back then, Michael explained that if Manhattan had been plunked down between the Mojave and Amargosa Deserts instead of the Hudson and East Rivers, its population would have been two people. Statistical models aside, the Shoshone had gathered in small groups. However, these scattered bands were rounded up by the U.S. Army to share reservations in the Owens Valley with the Paiute there, a culture as different from the Western Shoshone as the Spanish are from the Portuguese. By the time Death Valley National Monument was created in 1933, a small number of Shoshone had drifted home to Furnace Creek and congregated in what was called a rancheria. The park service found this adobe settlement too squalid to exist next to its headquarters, so they evicted everybody and used fire hoses to melt the mud huts back into the ground. Eventually, under public pressure, forty acres were set aside for the tribe a mile south of Furnace Creek.
It was into this enclave that Michael had just turned.
The sovereign nation consisted of twenty mobile-homes strung along a looping road with a handful of tribal buildings in the middle. A few residents had added a traditional touch to their dwellings: brush ramadas for shade instead of aluminum awnings. One particular resident had added an even more native touch around one of her barren side yards: a blind woven from arrow weed for protection against the winds off the Great Salt Pan.
That was Florence Long Shore’s home.
Michael seldom told strangers he was half-Shoshone. It raised too many expectations in whites, Euros especially, and meant little to full-blooded natives.
Slowing as he drove past the double-wide, he wanted to see his grandmother at the front window. Better yet, at the door—holding it open for him as she had so many times.
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The sun finally crested the Funerals, momentarily blinding him as it engulfed the trailer. But it didn’t matter. Florence would never knowingly show herself to him. The old woman would wrap herself in the fires of the sun first.
It was hard to go from favorite to outcast within a year.
He passed the resurfaced basketball court as he made his way to the southern-most trailer in the enclave. He remembered it well. The salt cedars over the leach line were taller, and the fan palm his mother had cultivated was dead. This was where Michael had spent the first nineteen years of his life, and it still seemed as if his mother would step outside any moment now, sweep her bangs from her eyes and gaze out across the pan as if searching for the Tyrrhenian Sea of her girlhood. It must have tortured her, the illusion from the salt-scented wind that she was living on a true shoreline.
That had something to do with Michael’s last name, which was rather unusual within the tribe.
Surnames had been new to the Shoshone, and they scrambled to adopt them for legal purposes. Some used shortened Christian names as last names: Dan, Tom and Dick were the more common examples. Others took the names of the ranching clans that employed them. For that reason, there were both white Gormans—like the sheriff—and native Gormans. Still others invented surnames based on characteristics of their home villages. So it was with the Long Shores, one of whom, now forgotten, had put an ironic twist on the Spanish word for beach, playa, that had been applied to the floor of a desert basin that rarely saw water. Death Valley was a long shore with no sea.
As his mother’s image faded on the front porch, Michael realized that a few things had changed about the double-wide. The awning had been ripped off by a hurricane-force dust storm two years ago and never replaced. The roof had sprouted a satellite dish. The present occupant owned a dull red Mazda pickup. Michael parked behind it, hemming the truck in, and waited for his second cousin to show himself.
Horace Dock was a shaft-closer for the government. The park was riddled with so many unsafe mines the superintendent had hired Horace, a miner by trade, to inspect and seal them. Inspection was a necessary first step because homicide victims, usually from Las Vegas, had the habit of littering the bottoms of shafts in the area, like Michael’s discovery of two days ago. The handless corpse had been dressed in a frilly, Flamingo-pink shirt and dark uniform slacks, suggesting a lounge entertainer or at least a hotel worker.
“Must’ve been a tough crowd,” Michael muttered to himself, shutting off his engine and sitting back with a yawn. He gave every appearance that he no intention of leaving anytime soon.
Eventually, it paid off.
Ten minutes later, with the morning shadows shrinking back into the mountains, the shaft-closer emerged from his front door. Horace shuffled down the stoop and halted on the oil-stained gravel in front of his trapped pickup, chewing on a breakfast of grease-bread wrapped around a hard-boiled egg.
There had been times when his grandmother, not wanting to disturb Michael, had left brown-paper sacks of this deep-fried staple on the steps of his bungalow, an invitation for him to drop by for dinner when he had the chance.
He got out of his cruiser.
Horace turned toward his cousin’s approach but didn’t look him in the eye. He had the leathery and lined face of a full-blood in middle-age. His gaze was habitually sorrowful, but there was nothing sympathetic in it today. His genetic link to the Long Shores showed in his blunt nose, something Michael’s mother was glad Jimmy and he hadn’t inherited.
They stood several feet apart in silence. It occurred to Michael that it was the precise distance at which each of them could swing his arm without their knuckles colliding.
“Heard about the body you found up on Chloride Cliff Monday,” Horace said at last. Then he went on eating without offering anything to Michael. This was a snub. Even a stranger wasn’t denied an offer of food and drink. Desert people around the world were renowned for their hospitality.
“We couldn’t find the name of that old claim on any of our maps at the sheriff’s office.”
Horace looked at Michael, briefly. “A hut with the roof blown off along the way?”
“You got it,” Michael replied.
“That’s the Lucky Boy Mine. A him or a her?”
“Pardon?”
“Was the body you found a man or a woman?”
“A man. I noticed a new warning sign on the hoist-house, Horace.”
The man gazed down the valley toward Hanaupah Canyon. This had been the ancient route up into the Panamint Range, its cool pinyon-pine forests. From this, Michael sensed how uncomfortable his cousin was, how much he wanted to get away. “I put that sign there,” he said.
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. Something like that. I’d have to check the logbook in my government truck.”
“Will you do that for me, Horace? The date is important.”
“I got to get to work.”
“I didn’t find one Monday,” Michael said, not budging, “but is there another way to get a four-wheel-drive vehicle up to the mine?”
“Not since a flashflood cut that ravine in the old road.”
“So you hiked up, like I did?”
“Yes,” Horace replied.
Late Monday evening, the sheriff’s Identification team had arrived on the scene in a Navy helicopter stationed at the China Lake base. The short walk from the landing zone to the hoist-house had left them huffing, so the half-mile hike from Chloride Cliff Road, where Michael had parked, to the crime scene reduced the pool of suspects to those fit enough to heft a 160-pound corpse that distance up the mountainside and then down the ladder in the shaft. There was no question in Michael’s mind that this feat was beyond Dulcie Kincannon, not without help. “Did you see any tracks, Horace—anything—to tell you somebody had been in that ravine or around the Lucky Boy back then?”
“Nothing.”
“Dirt-bike or ATV tracks—something like that?”
“Nothing,” Horace said more sharply. “I couldn’t even get my own quad up there.” His government all-terrain-vehicle.
“What made you post the warning sign at the mine now?”
“Meaning what, Michael?”
“Are you slapping signs on all the hoist-houses this summer?”
“No,” Horace admitted. “It was just the Lucky Boy’s turn.”
“Who decides what gets posted and when?”
“Superintendent.”
“Could the body have been underground while you were up there?” Michael asked.
“I stood right over that hole. I would’ve smelled some-thing, for sure.”
“Why didn’t you close the shaft and be done with it?”
“Can’t, Michael. There’s an old-time building over the Lucky Boy. The hoist-house. Law says you got to save things like that. So the boss man said just to post it and go on my way to the next digging. Eventually, we fence off shafts like the Lucky Boy. It’s on the list for when an order of chain-link comes in.”
Michael nodded. What this really meant was that mines were more carefully monitored than ever before in park history.
“You talk to your brother lately?” Horace asked with a look that bordered on spite.
Michael realized that the man had been slowly building to this. He looked past his cousin at the basketball court where all of them had once played in temperatures that amazed the tourists. Once again, he could hear the ball slapping the hot asphalt. “Not lately.”
“He needs to talk to you.” Then Horace tossed the uneaten nub of his grease-bread on the ground and got inside his truck. “You going to move your cop car,” he said out the open side window, “or do I got to drive over the top of it?”
Chapter Six
Fifty miles after leaving the reservation, Michael crossed the park boundary into what many of the other deputies referred to as unoccupied Inyo County. Panamint Valley, which Michael was speeding down at eighty miles an hour, was a smaller version of Death Valley:
a salt sink between two mountain ranges. Instead of hordes of tourists to disturb its peace, it had Navy jets from China Lake screeching to and from the bombing ranges, some of which abutted against the national park.
Michael would make one stop here, then continue on to Inyokern. A Death Valley investigation invariably led outside the park. Residents were so few both suspect and victim usually were from out of the area.
His cell phone rang. “Hello.”
“Investigator Long Shore?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Dulcie Kincannon, calling back like you asked.”
“Right, appreciate it.”
“Sorry it took so long. I just got off work a little while ago.”
Michael smirked to himself—she made it sound as if she’d just gotten off shift at Wal-Mart. “Dulcie, what is Carl’s shoe size?”
“Oh my God, have you found him?”
“No, no,” he quickly said, realizing that he’d needlessly scared her. “I just forgot to ask you when we talked Monday afternoon. It’s a routine question.”
Her relieved sigh gusted over the airwaves. “Thirteen. His shoe size is thirteen.”
“Does he prefer any particular kind of footwear?”
“Boots. Low-cut boots.” She went on, “I’m sorry about how I left your office the other day. I was just upset and worried about Carl...” Static crackled on top of her transmission.
“Listen, Dulcie, I’m heading into a dead spot for my cell phone...” Even the police channels went dead in lower Panamint Valley. “Another quick question—when Carl comes over to see you, does he take Daylight Pass Road all the way into Beatty?”
“No, he uses Chloride Cliff Road like I do, unless the weather is bad.”
“Why, when it’s not paved?”
“It’s shorter. I live south of Beatty.”
“I see,” Michael said. “Look, I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about all this. Get some sleep, and I’ll keep in touch.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Disconnecting, Michael once again noted the time—10:13 A.M.—for the purpose of a future report. The boot impression he’d found in the hoist-house had measured out as a size thirteen, something he kept tucked in the back of his mind for the time being.
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 4