Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  Horace waved for Michael to approach.

  It took him several minutes to hobble the hundred-yard distance.

  Horace was crouching beside two almost imperceptible tire tracks. These were the most recent of all, within days even of being laid down, when the pan was at its firmest. Kneeling, Michael could make out their width and direction only from the salt crystals that had been crushed under the tread.

  “What do you think?” Horace asked.

  “They’re to a different vehicle.”

  “Not what you’re looking for?”

  “Still might be.” Michael was thinking of the black Dodge pickup his assailant had sped away in. “All these tracks head the same way, so let’s follow them.”

  “You stay here while I get the quad,” Horace ordered, gesturing at Michael’s bandage.

  His left cuff to Levi’s had ridden up as he crouched, revealing a small circle of blood. “Hurry.” He was close to something now, too close to detour into Lone Pine for fresh sutures at the nearest hospital.

  But close to what? he asked himself as he watched Horace trot back to the ATV.

  Premeditation, perhaps. At the very least, the evidence at the quarry suggested a sudden quarrel between the parking valet and the geophysicist. But the revelation that Kincannon had been combing the desert weeks prior to that meeting cast everything into a new light, one Michael found a little blinding, particularly the possibility that—the ATM transaction in Cuba notwithstanding—Carl had been the second gunman on the ridge above Dulcie’s trailer. Still, Michael had seen no gardening tools inside the steamer trunks at Kincannon’s hideaway. And the use of lopping shears suggested a level of prior planning that was callous in the extreme.

  Horace drove up. Michael took the stick from him and perched on the cargo rack again. Because his view was to the rear, he instructed his cousin over the engine noise, “Look for foot tracks!”

  Horace dipped his head and opened the throttle.

  There was yet a third possibility in all this, one that would arise out of Eureka Valley, depending on what he found here today.

  His cousin soon cried, “Boot tracks!”

  “Stop!”

  Immediately, Michael saw that they were large, around size thirteen, and with a pattern identical to that he’d discovered inside the hoist-house at the Lucky Boy Mine. Judging from their depth, they’d been deposited when the crust had begun to harden and not when the playa was awash in brine. He paused only long enough to shoot some photos, then urged Horace on.

  The tracks struck southwest, toward the oven-like rock salt.

  “Somebody’s walked this way more recent!” Horace pointed out scuff marks on the pink surface that became visible against the angle of the sun, which was just beginning to break through the gray sky.

  Both pairs of tracks wended on parallel course out into the hummocks. Eventually, Horace had to park. The lake bed was becoming too contorted even for the quad. “You want me to go out and take a look?”

  But Michael was already rushing past him, tossing him his stick on the fly.

  Fortunately, they didn’t have far to go, for the coarse pinnacles and cavities were heating up under the full sun. From distance of fifty yards and closing, it looked like an animal wallow, a shallow depression in one of the blistering hollows, as if a coyote had been digging after a rodent, spraying salt all around. But Michael knew that neither mammal, reptile nor bird made the pan its home at the height of summer, even briefly.

  Horace saw the possible significance right away. “You want me to probe some?”

  “Go ahead,” Michael said, although he had little faith they would find a body. “Just mind the boot impressions on this side of the hole until I can photograph them.” That’s what it was: the remains of a hole, the elliptical outlines of an abandoned grave.

  The pan had been disturbed to a depth of about two feet. That’s how far Horace could sink his stick before the tip met resistance. As expected, he found nothing, but Michael made a mental note to take soil samples before they left.

  Which would be soon.

  He estimated the ground temperature to be 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and climbing rapidly. He hadn’t really appreciated the mercy of the overcast until now, which was coalescing to the northeast into a white and gray anvil-shaped thunderhead. Too far off to rain on Horace and him.

  His cousin had picked something out of the depression and was offering it to him.

  “What’s that?” Michael asked, the sun in his eyes.

  “Cholla.”

  He accepted the spiny segment, carefully turned it in his palm. This was how the parent plant propagated itself, attaching one of these sea urchin-like sections to a mammal passing by. Ultimately, it would fall off or be brushed off, and—nurtured by rains—start the cycle again. Once again, the desert was giving up a secret in the form of an anomaly, something out of the place. “What’s the elevation here?”

  “Can’t be more than a thousand feet.”

  Too low for the varieties of cholla native to this area. Michael doubted that an animal had carried it here, at least the four-legged variety. Hispanic penitents strapped branches of cholla to their naked backs for Easter shows of faith. An old Mexican down in the town of Shoshone had done that each Easter. But Michael knew no penitent had come this way since last Monday. What’s that cactus that leaves a spiny ball of shit on your pants and stings like the devil? Carson had asked during the gunbattle between Dulcie’s trailer and the ridge. There had been lots of cholla on that ridge near Beatty.

  “Was somebody buried here, Michael?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that body was dug up and hauled away?”

  “Late last Monday.”

  Horace shook his head in confusion. “What’s it all mean?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The late afternoon shadow of the Sierra Nevada had just crept across Highway 395 as Michael pulled into the county seat of Independence. The headquarters of the sheriff’s department stood on the south end of town, a nearly windowless structure with a grimly festive touch of razor wire around the prisoner exercise yard that sparkled in the last sunlight.

  Michael drove past it. On a Sunday afternoon, the sheriff wouldn’t be found in his office.

  On the passenger seat beside him was the segment of cholla Horace had found yesterday. The value of the discovery lay in what it inferred, not what it proved. This cactus was also called jumping cholla because it so readily attached itself to passersby some locals thought it capable of leaping onto them. Reason told Michael that if Carson had been pestered by cholla, so had his companion, the silhouette whose facial features had been washed out by the morning sun. But he now had reason to believe that on last Monday evening this suspect had returned to Eureka Valley for a third time in the past three months. The piece of cholla might’ve fallen off Carson’s clothes, but Michael had a hunch that the man’s body had never left the crew-cab of the black Dodge. In venturing out onto the salt pan, Carson’s companion had not been making a deposit. He’d been making a collection, and in the process of doing so the ball had come off his clothing, most likely a pant-leg cuff.

  After Eureka Valley, the scenarios that had been spinning around Michael’s head were irrelevant. It no longer mattered if Razin had had a reason to strong-arm Kincannon, or Carl had had a motive to kill the Iranian, even in self-defense. All of the relevance lay in the site, the marble pit, the repeat of a motif that involved quarries. These had been the raw materials the criminal artist had used to create an appearance of reality.

  Michael now parked in the courthouse parking lot, grabbed his juniper-wood cane and limped across the street to the Elk’s Club. A sign on the door announced a potluck benefit for the sheriff’s re-election campaign.

  As expected, Gorman was ensconced in his booth at the back of the bar, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s set before him. This half of the long room was in shadow except for a single floodlight that shone down on the sheriff, making him loo
k like an interrogator in a spy movie. It was an effect he had cultivated, no doubt. Cigarette smoke curled lazily through this plunging beam—state law still allowed puffing in private clubs.

  Seeing Michael approach, Gorman gave a flick of his hand, dismissing a captain and his current campaign manager, who got up wordlessly and withdrew to the bar.

  Michael sat, but the sheriff, without explanation, had him move to the opposite side of the booth. “Well, Long Shore,” he asked, “what’s so important to bring you, notably non-partisan in my last election, all the way from Furnace Creek?”

  Michael decided not to mention that he’d stopped off at the hospital in Lone Pine for new stitches after yesterday’s exertions with Horace. But he was about to explain himself when a rancher in a wide-brimmed Stetson interrupted them, making Gorman draw in his large white wingtips from the aisle: “Cole, I just wanted to give you a little something for the campaign.”

  A personal check was pressed on him, and Gorman used it to gesture at Michael. “Thanks kindly, Fred—I’m sure you’ve met my Death Valley investigator, Michael Long Shore. He shed his blood in the line of duty only this week.”

  “Heard about that on the radio,” the rancher said, clapping Michael’s shoulder. “I tell you, I wouldn’t do what you gents do for a million bucks.”

  “Well, we do it for a lot less than that, Fred, something you might tell Supervisor Brown sitting over there.”

  The rancher took the hint and excused himself.

  Michael now understood why Gorman had had him switch sides in the booth: so his bandage could be more prominently displayed. A wounded deputy, if not milking worker’s compensation, was a valuable political asset.

  Michael found himself smiling at the man who had impeded the investigation from the get-go and would go on doing so as long as he sensed political danger in the Kincannon case.

  “What’s so amusing, son?”

  “Nothing.” Michael supposed that their situation was best described as a Mexican standoff. He had no hope of unseating the high sheriff of Inyo County. But neither could Gorman fire his one and only native cop under the present circumstances, not without an inquiry by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was common for people to find a stalemate intolerable for any length of time, and so the sheriff had plunked him back in Furnace Creek, hoping that proximity to the tribe from which he was banished would make him quit. After a moment, Michael lowered his voice. “The man I killed—”

  “The man you may have killed,” Gorman corrected. “In dog-fighting terms, it might be considered a probable kill, but the only evidence we have of that at the scene is some blood that happens to be your own type. But please go on.”

  “When he cornered me in L.A., the man suggested that I might want to start with AEI in Inyokern. It sounded to me as if he’d been there and gotten nowhere with their staff, so—”

  “So AEI might be the solitary half-ass lead you have left on the cocksucker’s identity,” Gorman butted in.

  Michael nodded.

  Only to have the sheriff shake his head. “You’re off the case. What part of off don’t you understand?”

  “The part that involves finding out, once and for all, who the man’s boss was. The way to Carson City could be through Inyokern. And I’ve got the feeling that if we don’t ID this person, you and I could spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.” Michael glanced pointedly at his own gunshot leg.

  Gorman kept a tray of glasses handy on the top of the booth behind him. He slowly reached for one and poured three fingers of whiskey for Michael.

  He hadn’t taken this afternoon’s pain pill in an effort to wean himself off them as soon as possible, and the Jack Daniel’s would be welcome.

  “And so you believe this to be such a delicate matter you want to personally close it out.”

  “Yes, sir. But I need you to run interference if the AEI people squawk.”

  “Why would I need to run interference if they squawk to me?”

  “I was thinking more that they might go to the FBI, especially the L.A. office. I don’t know how deep they’re digging into AEI at present.”

  “That split-tail SAC tells me they’re wrangling in a half-assed sort of way with the institute’s law firm for a look at Kincannon’s will and trust. Though, with Carl now the suspect in the Persian’s homicide, his postmortem plans are far less interesting than when everybody thought the good doctor might be a victim. And when all’s said and done, I wouldn’t be surprised it was Carl himself who punched that bullet hole in your leg.”

  “I’m not going down to Inyokern to find Carl Kincannon. Like I told you, both of us need to find out who the man calling himself Carson was. That’s my sole intent.”

  “You never have a sole intent, Long Shore.” The sheriff sipped thoughtfully from his glass. “When would you go?”

  “Instead of going back to Furnace Creek tonight, I’ll drive down there and start interviewing bright and early tomorrow.”

  “And who would you interview?”

  “I’d start with Joanna Wallace and spread out into the rank and file.”

  Again, Gorman shook his head, and Michael thought he’d been refused. But then the man checked to make sure that somebody hadn’t slid into any of the adjoining booths. “I’m going to tell you something in absolute confidence,” he said, whispering. “You are to bear this in mind while down there. All indications are that the county will soon lose its tax fight with AEI over the geothermal plant, and we’ll have to refund several millions to the firm. So, more than ever, you’ll need a pretext for dropping by their headquarters, otherwise AEI will think you’re snooping around for last-minute dirt related to the taxation case. Also, I don’t want you asking if anybody’s on a first-name basis with the governor of Nevada.” At last, it was out in the open: an admission from Gorman that he suspected his old nemesis, the former Clark County district attorney, was behind this.

  “I’ll come up with something, sir.”

  “You’ll come up with something before you leave this booth.”

  Michael sat back, thinking. “Photograph the vehicle,” he finally said.

  “How’s that?”

  “We want to photograph the type of vehicle Kincannon disappeared in, one of the Hummers out of their motor pool. I also need the VIN, which AEI never gave me, as promised. The photo would be for a flyer we’re putting together jointly with the FBI and Nye County Sheriff.”

  Gorman pouched some whiskey in his cheeks, swallowed, then said, “All right. But if you meet any resistance, you are to back off and confer with me. Understood?”

  “Why, what’s my favorite lawman up to?” Another Elk, this one the manager of the local radio station, had sidled up to the booth to pay homage.

  “Good to see you, Bob. Just doing my job, as always. I’m sure you know my crack investigator out in Death Valley, Michael Long Shore—you ran our news release on how he was wounded in action earlier this week.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Michael was seated in his second bar of the evening. Patronage was sparse, but he’d taken a fairly private table next to a window that overlooked the parking lot. He wanted to keep an eye on his cruiser at all times, so much so that he’d left it under the only streetlamp in the area. He was staying with Jack Daniel’s, which he lingered over as he gazed east. Far off, Telescope Peak was revealed against the darkened horizon as a purple hump. His father had considered it to be his spirit mountain, a source of strength and power, his solace when in personal crisis.

  From the adjoining restaurant came the clatter of silverware and crockery, a murmur of voices. It was the Homestead in Indian Wells, where a lifetime ago Joanna Wallace had suggested that the two of them have dinner, an engagement Michael had broken off when Gorman ordered him to meet with the FBI in L.A. Carl Kincannon’s mansion stood empty on its bluff less than a half mile away.

  The approach of high-pitched engine noise drew Michael’s eye to the lot aga
in. A Corvette had turned in from the highway. The driver started to take the slot besides Michael’s unmarked Ford, but then decided against it and parked several spaces away.

  Joanna Wallace got out of the muscle car and strode toward the entrance. She’d dispensed with her habitual khaki and instead wore a dress. As she passed under the strong light, he was struck once again by how much she resembled the late Dulcie, the same willowy but shapely frame, upturned nose and freckles.

  His glass was half-full, but he finished the rest of the whiskey in it.

  “How are you, Michael?” Joanna asked, appearing before him. When he began to rise, she quickly added, “No, no—stay as you are. I heard about the shooting on the news. Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Have they caught the assailant?” she asked, sitting.

  He was struck by how skillfully put the question was. She didn’t ask if the identity of Michael’s attacker was known, which might have sounded like a personal concern. Law school had trained her well. “No,” he said, “my friend is still at large.”

  She smiled quizzically. “Why do say friend?”

  “Well, he didn’t kill me. So anything’s possible after that, including friendship. What will you have?”

  “A vodka collins.”

  Michael flagged down the cocktail waitress and placed the order, switching from whiskey to a tonic water for himself. He didn’t need a buzz right now. The waitress lit the candle in its glass globe before withdrawing.