In the long pause that followed, Michael wondered if this afterthought was a comment on his being a deputy. A hint of grudging understanding, even. Last night, he’d been going stir-crazy inside his bungalow, pacing around with the aid of his cane, trying to work the stiffness out of his left calf. This had been against medical advice to keep off his feet for a few days more. The cane, an anonymous gift left on his front porch, had been made from a juniper branch, something a Shoshone would fashion. And part of the reason for the pacing had been to keep from taking pain pills and chasing them down with Budweiser. So the ringing of his landline had been a relief. It was Horace, responding to a message Michael had left as soon as he got back from the hospital that morning, asking for help to pinpoint where the lime-green Hummer had been out on the Eureka salt flats. According to his log book, Horace had closed the tunnel atop Last Chance Mountain on May 17th. That’s when he spotted the vehicle to the northwest. Even though tomorrow was Saturday, his cousin had promised to take him up there.
“Anyways,” Horace went on as if there had been no lull, “they came that night, the Mountain Sheep from hereabouts, and while they were all dancing Rat got close to the biggest Mountain Sheep of all and told him they should be friends and dance next to each other. The dance went on all night. But come dawn everybody saw how the big sheep had been stabbed to death. Everybody cried, Rat most of all. He told everybody to go home. He’d do all the right things for Mountain Sheep. You know, bury him right, put him in the fire and burn him up...” Then Horace interrupted himself, “I’ll go down through Hanging Rock Canyon, if it’s all right.”
“No problem,” Michael said, cradling his left leg in his day-pack against the chassis vibration. The less painful route would have been as he’d originally planned last Monday—north on U.S. 95 through Nevada before cutting west and back into Eureka Valley. Horace had no choice but to keep to the unimproved roads, as he had to stay within the park if possible, or stray outside it only where he wasn’t likely to be spotted by his bosses.
Michael gnashed his teeth at they bounced over a washout.
“You okay?” Horace asked, concerned.
“Yeah.”
“You’re looking pale.”
“Stop,” Michael said suddenly, fumbling for the door latch and bailing out. He leaned over the embankment and threw up.
Horace was at his elbow within seconds, handing him water with which to rinse out his mouth. “Maybe we should turn back.”
“No, I’m better. Must be the pain medication.”
“You sure?”
“Positive, let’s go.” Michael knew that his three-day stay in the hospital had cost him investigative time he could never recover. He refused to waste a minute more.
Horace said, “I’d like to swing by the mine. It’ll be easier from there to pick out where that Hummer was. But the ride really gets rough from here to there.”
“Let’s do it.”
“What’s the name of that fish stew your mother made us all that time?”
“Cioppino,” Michael replied. “What made you think of that now?”
“She never knew, but I went outside and threw up.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“I liked it fine, but I still threw up.”
Ten minutes later, after a mile of bone-jarring road, Horace parked near the summit of Last Chance Mountain. Again, Michael rushed out of the cab, but there was nothing left in his stomach and he only dry-retched.
This time, Horace said nothing about it. He got busy attaching the ramps to his tailgate and backing down the all-terrain-vehicle he’d brought along. They were high up, around 8,000 feet, and Michael missed having a light jacket. Losing so much blood had left him cold. He rinsed his mouth for a second time, then sat on the ATV’s cargo rack, facing backwards.
Actually, it was a good day for a search. There was a high overcast keeping the temperature below the century mark.
Horace slid a long stick out of a slot in the bed of his truck. It was for both walking and digging, one end sharpened and then hardened by fire. All he needed to be the complete nomad was a basket hat, which he could doff and use to store the things he dug from the earth. Michael could see how this job suited his cousin. Away from white supervision, alone all day long, he could be a Shoshone. “Hold this for me?” Horace asked.
“Sure.” Michael draped both the digging stick and his cane across his lap. He saw that Horace’s stick was made of juniper too.
“All set?”
Michael nodded, uneasily. His gut was settling down, but only slightly. A cause other than the pain pills might be the bug he’d caught from Dulcie, although her virus had affected her sinuses. And maybe it was spirit sickness, from so much close contact with the dead, lately. That’s how Florence would explain it.
Horace drove the quad straight up the mountainside toward a waste-rock dump. The Last Chance Range was barren, even by Death Valley standards, and flanked by broad desert valleys. Michael was struck again by the immensity of his country. And its ruggedness. This was the most mountainous swathe of California, and Nevada, just over the border, was the most mountainous state in the entire Union. The terrain was like a crumpled piece of paper, whose true dimensions could be appreciated only if you could somehow flatten it all out. Then, that which looked small and contained became vast. Aircraft and vehicles full of people had vanished within sight of this peak, never to be found again. The problem became worse when the disappearance was intentional.
Do you know what it feels like to have somebody close to you just disappear into thin air?
Michael was out of the investigation now. Gorman had assembled his team in Independence, and they were working with Nye County and the FBI. But would all this collaborative effort find out who stood at the top of the criminal pyramid? Carson and Edna Boskovich had been no more than the building blocks. Yesterday, Michael had sent Higgins an email, asking if anybody with the FBI had rattled the bureaucratic cages of the Department of Energy or the nuclear power industry to see if either of them had played a part in all this. The response had been a terse: Do you have a viable lead in this direction, Michael?
No, he had to admit. The only thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Carson’s death had not ended the threat against him. Somebody out there still needed to eliminate the detective assigned to Death Valley.
Horace parked and shut off the quad’s engine. He took his stick from Michael and pointed with it toward the mine portal he’d collapsed with explosives. “I was standing up there...” He swept the tip over the Eureka sand dunes and toward the salt pan at the upper end of the valley, just outside the park boundary. “...and facing Soldier Pass. Make a line in your head between the two.”
Rising on his cane, Michael found the pass in the distant Inyo Range, the gap through which the cavalry had sortied from Fort Independence into Shoshone lands. “Okay, got it.”
“The Hummer was midways on that line out in the salt. The pan’s pink now, but it was red back in May.”
At the height of bacteria bloom, Michael noted to himself, when these microbes flourished in the slushy brine left on the playa by the spring runoff. The Hummer would have almost certainly left tracks in the moistened surface. And there was no way that the driver—or any other possible occupants—could have spotted Horace’s truck. It would’ve been blocked from view by the mountain. And catching a glimpse of the shaft-closer himself would have been problematic, even with binoculars. “What power tools did you use that day?”
“Just my gas drill rig,” Horace said.
No one could have heard that at seven or eight miles, Michael decided. “What time did you set off your charges?”
“Round three o’clock, just before I headed back to the barn.”
“Was the Hummer still visible?”
“No, it left sometime while I was still drilling.”
Michael shuffled over to a rock and sat down. He dropped his pack to the ground and took out his own bino
culars and glassed the playa.
After a minute, Horace drifted away, probing the ground with the point of his stick for edible roots.
Michael had wanted only to think, but his cell phone rang. The other phone, the one Carson had given him, was now in the hands of the FBI’s Technical Services, whose technicians were examining it with greater expertise than Michael had for clues as to the man’s identity. As expected, contacting the service provider had turned out to be a dead end. The pre-paid cheapo had come from a kiosk in a Las Vegas mall, purchased with cash by a redheaded woman, according to the sales clerk. Edna, most likely.
Michael checked his screen: Speaking of the devil, it was a voicemail message from Higgins. In reaching the summit of the solitary peak, Michael had temporarily left the dead zone that blanketed much of the park. “Michael, it’s R.J. Hope you’re on the mend. Your people in Independence told me you’re home in Furnace Creek...”
By your people in Independence, Higgins was referring to the new task force, in which Michael had no part.
“Going back thirty years, we identified all of two former agents who worked in both the Cincinnati and Las Vegas field offices. One was female and one was black. Still, the Vegas people will put together a mug-shot book of ex-employees for you to thumb through when you feel up to it...”
So Carson had been either lying or obscuring his tracks about working for the FBI in the past. Michael would still guess that there had been some law enforcement in the man’s resume.
“Our techies want me to confirm something with you. They want to make sure you absolutely got nowhere near those willows. Type B Positive is what concerns them. That’s what the samples they collected off the brush turned out to be. That’s your type as well. No one is doubting you, but as you can imagine they need to confirm this ASAP.”
“I never got close to them,” Michael muttered to himself. “That’s where Carson died.”
“Let’s see, going through my notes—guys from the Vegas office will return to the ridge to continue the search for any shell casings. I think that’s scheduled for tomorrow. In answer to your question: No, we found no contemporary latent prints in the mobile home, other than the Kincannon woman’s, Edna Boskovich’s and yours. And the cocaine turned out to be ninety percent bogus, which lends credence again to Dulcie going off her nut at being duped. Still no fix on Edna’s boyfriend, but we’ve got him IDed and have a stop and hold on him and his chopper. I’ll fax you his Nevada driver’s license. Oh, you were right—he has an extensive rap sheet, most notably a conviction for transportation and sales, but no longer on parole. That’s it for now.”
Michael flipped shut the phone, reminding himself to ask Higgins a question of his own when he emailed the agent later. He’d missed Dulcie’s autopsy while in intensive care. Had the pathologist swabbed her already stuffed nasal passages for the presence of any of that counterfeit coke?
Then, suddenly, he slapped his palms against his knees.
He did this so loudly Horace heard him from lower on the mountainside and called, “What?”
There it was.
The repeating motif Woody had mentioned in the hospital, the thing that tipped the hand of the criminal artist in all this.
Two blown deals.
First, there had been the confrontation in the marble pit between Kincannon and Razin over a cause that was still up in the air, maybe a breakdown in the negotiations over Carl’s services. Then the motif had been replayed in Dulcie’s trailer, with the twist that the homicidal meltdown was followed by a suicide, seemingly committed in the throes of remorse over the killing, fear of prison, whatever.
Horace was hiking back to him, munching on a succulent bitterroot he’d pried up. “You just remember something?”
* * *
As with most desert byways, the route north through the park was neither straight nor direct. It involved a dogleg down a steep canyon scarred by flash-flooding, the pickup rocking and swaying beneath Horace and Michael the whole of the way. As soon as the road leveled out again, his cousin reached between the front seats for his small cooler, and they shared an early lunch of grease-bread and hard-boiled eggs. Michael nibbled at the bread until Horace finished it for him.
His cousin wiped his hands on his socks, then said, “Anyways, when everybody was gone home from the dance, Rat skinned Mountain Sheep and dried his flesh in the sun, so he could eat it. Soon, he gobbled it all up, so he called for another dance. The Mountain Sheep came again, but this time they didn’t trust him. They were learning Rat’s ways. Still, one of the sheep got stabbed to death. Rat grabbed his bow and said all angry-like he was sure the Mojave people down south had done this thing. But the Mountain Sheep didn’t join him in going after the Mojaves, and after they left Rat didn’t go anywheres either. He just stayed home and cooked the one he’d stabbed...” Horace reached for his water bottle in the cup-holder. He took a sip. With so much use, his voice had grown hoarse. He offered Michael a drink. “You thirsty?”
“Thanks.”
“When Rat was out of meat, he called the Mountain Sheep once more. But as they all danced, one of them stabbed Rat in the belly to even the score. Rat crawled away and everybody chased after him. They found his hole and the dried meat of their brothers, but not him. Still they let it go with his getting wounded. The sheep figured enough was enough.”
That was it. Horace fell silent. The story was concluded. What doubtlessly would sound odd and disjointed to white ears had its meaning, nonetheless.
Michael checked his bandage for any bleeding. There was none. He smiled to himself, but not because his dressing was dry.
In referring to Mountain Sheep and Rat, his cousin had been talking about Jimmy and Michael. One wound had been answered with another, and fate was compensated. Further punishment wasn’t needed; the cosmological scales were in balance again, and things might go on as before.
Michael said, “That’s a good story.”
* * *
They dropped into Eureka Valley, which was split off from larger Saline Valley by the sand dunes he had viewed from above. It was a landscape like the classic Sahara, and Michael could easily imagine a column of the French Foreign Legion winding up one of the serpentine summits.
He now believed that Dulcie had died because of Eureka Valley—and his own ignorance about the true state of things.
After all that had happened to him on the Monday, spending much of it semi-conscious in the back of an ambulance and then on a hospital operating table, Michael had been slow to piece together the sequence of events that ended in murder and the shootout on the ridge. What had triggered all that? A simple test. Michael had tested Dulcie’s innocence about the significance of Eureka Valley, and she’d passed, as best he could tell. But then things had spun out of control. She’d relayed the information to Edna: “I told her you had important business up in Eureka Valley today and needed to see her early.” Edna then told Carson, who knew full well what this valley meant to their scheme. At all costs, Michael had to be prevented from going up there, and the two women had to be eliminated so that subsequent investigators could not pick up his trail afterward. Carson had told all this to the man who’d shot Michael. And that faceless man had been either Carson’s boss or one more buffer between him and the kingpin.
But, no matter what, Dulcie was gone. There was an unspoken shame to most investigations, shame over how informants were used.
Horace remarked out of this deep quiet, “Your color is better, Michael.”
* * *
His cousin drove the ATV northwest across the playa on the imaginary line between Last Chance Mountain and Soldier Pass. Sitting backwards on the cargo rack again, Michael watched the government pickup truck get smaller and smaller behind them. They hadn’t gone far, no more than a mile, when Horace slowed. “Tracks!” he shouted over his engine.
“Stop!”
A ringing silence took over from the deafening engine noise. Michael stepped down with care—he now carried t
he added weight of his pack and its crime-scene gear.
Despite the thin overcast, the playa reflected a searing heat, but nothing as deadly as that on the pan in much-lower Death Valley today. The Eureka lake bed had now been baked hard by the summer sun, but back in mid-May it had been covered with brine. Etched four to five inches deep in this once-pliant surface were the wide-set tracks of a vehicle, probably a Hummer.
“Look, Michael,” Horace said, pointing with his stick again, “another set. Must be where he drove out.”
Michael limped after him to second pair of lines in the playa, studied them a few seconds, then decided, “No, same vehicle, maybe, but these are from a later time.” He would guess at least a month later, even as recent as early July, when the moisture had retreated into the salt crust and the Hummer had cut impressions only an inch or two deep.
While Michael photographed both sets, Horace wandered farther out onto the pan with his stick, even though there was no life here to unearth, except for halophilic archaebacteria, which produced a carotenid pigment like that found in tomatoes and flamingo feathers. They had faded from the bright reddish pink of spring to a fainter rose-pink. As in Death Valley, the smoothness near the old shorelines here was eventually broken by slabs of massive rock salt.
Mines.
Nastour Razin’s corpse had been deposited in a mine. The person or persons responsible, then, would have known that the authorities would be giving special attention to mines as dumping sites. But the lime-green Hummer had been spotted here by Horace on May 17th, six weeks before Razin and Kincannon met in the quarry. Had Carl been scouting for a burial ground, but then ultimately decided to use the Lucky Boy, even though he was tied to it by the paper trail of a mining claim?
But he would also realize that there was no better place to hide a corpse than a salt pan. That which was human soon became saline, and even the most advanced body-locating technologies—such as vapor detection, magnetic resonance and ground-penetrating radar—were impaired by the mineralization and subsurface moisture. Cadaver dogs performed poorly in low humidity. The problem with the Great Salt Pan as a potential site was that it was in the middle of a world-class tourist draw, patrolled by aircraft, rangers and deputies almost around the clock. Had Kincannon sought the same geologic conditions, but in a more remote spot, one more akin to how Death Valley had been nearly two decades before when Michael’s mother had disappeared in the space of a single day?
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 19