Endangered (9781101559017) (18 page)

She grinned. The beam of his flashlight had probably picked up some small movement, a night-hunting lizard or mouse or snake.

At the narrow entrance to her campsite, he turned off the flashlight and stood for a few seconds, listening for movement inside the pocket of boulders.

Her interactions with Perez were starting to feel like some sort of weird tag-team game. She held her breath, waited on top of her boulder until he reappeared next to her tent, the glow from the computer screen highlighting the toes of his boots.

Damn! The laptop was running down the battery. Worse yet, she'd left the photo of Perez on the screen. She slid down the boulder on her backside and landed with a thump beside him.

Perez tripped backward over a tent pole, barely recovered his footing, struggled to slide his right hand around the strap of the large backpack he now carried. Going for his gun.

“You don't intend to shoot me, do you, Agent Perez?” She stepped closer. “How'd you know I was here?”

He straightened, took a deep breath. “OT near Sunset Canyon.”

Her permit notation wasn't nearly enough information to find the hidden canyon. She'd bet that the FBI agent had a marked map and a GPS device in his pocket. And that the helicopter she'd heard a half hour earlier had dropped him off. Perez wasn't even sweating, and he'd somehow traded a small knapsack for a fully loaded backpack since this afternoon.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Visiting.” He eyed the satellite phone, camera, and laptop scattered across the canyon floor.

Stepping in front of him, she flipped the laptop screen down. “I'm working,” she said.

“Obviously.” He unbuckled his waist strap and shrugged out of the shoulder straps, letting his backpack slide to the ground. “Don't let me stop you.”

He sat down cross-legged, facing her. His steady gaze was disconcerting.

“I'm almost done.” She turned the laptop around so he couldn't see the screen before flipping it open again. She sat down, closed the photo file, spell-checked the text file, sent it to Seattle, and then waited for the response. The modem's beep at the end of transmission seemed loud in the quiet evening. She punched the End button on the phone and shut down the laptop.

“Very high tech.” Perez indicated the equipment with a wave of his hand.

“Have batteries, will travel,” she quipped. “Is this an official interrogation, or were you just hoping for a cup of tea?”

He sucked in a breath, then said, “I thought you should know that the superintendent has scheduled the Wildlife Services hunters.”

“What? He said he'd wait for evidence! Damn it!” She glared at him. “It was because of those prints, wasn't it? Just because they were within a hundred yards of the damn shoe, you—”

He held up his hands. “It wasn't me. The volunteers reported their find, and Superintendent Thompson made his decision.”

“They really called off the search for Zack?”

“The search on foot has halted. They'll continue helicopter flyovers tomorrow.”

“Kid killed by cougar, case solved. So why aren't you on your way back to Salt Lake?”

“I'm not that easy to get rid of, Miss Westin.” His brown eyes bored into hers. “Agent Boudreaux and I made the decision to keep going until we find more evidence, or at least until the day after tomorrow.”

She swallowed around the constriction in her throat. “Is that when the hunters arrive?”

He nodded. “They'll want everyone out of the park then.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees, her mind racing with images of hunters marching shoulder to shoulder. They'd have dogs, of course, to flush out the cougars, and they'd use the damn helicopters to spot them from the air. Maybe they'd even shoot the lions from the helicopters. They'd slaughter every mountain lion they came across. Leto, Artemis, Apollo. Others she had never seen, that no one had ever seen before.

What could she possibly do to stop the massacre? Maybe if she wrote about how many taxpayer dollars were spent every year to slaughter wildlife? Most Americans were unaware that their government paid to have thousands of animals killed every year.

Would they care?

A howl drifted out over the mesa, a mournful sound. It was answered by a series of excited yips that built up to a long drawn-out wail.

Perez lifted his chin and gazed the direction of the sound. “Wolves?”

She shook her head. “No wolves in this part of the country. Those are coyotes. You hear them almost every night up here.”

The yipping increased in volume and speed until it resembled hyenas surrounding their prey. Then, the evening air was shattered by a shrieking lament that no canine was likely to produce.

Perez tensed. “What the hell?”

“It's Coyote Charlie.” She stood up, retrieved her binoculars from her pack. “Didn't Ranger Bergstrom mention him to you?” She walked to the narrow mouth of the small canyon.

He was right behind her. “Coyote Charlie?”

“A local nutcase,” she said. “He's been here for years. I caught a glimpse of him summer before last, near the ruins. And Kent swears he appears every full moon to howl with the coyotes. He even saw Charlie buck naked once.”

“What did the rangers do with him?”

The question surprised her. “Nothing. He's not doing anything illegal, except maybe camping without a permit.” She paused. Where would a naked Coyote Charlie attach a permit tag?

Perez pulled his notepad out of his shirt pocket. “What does he look like?”

She rubbed her forehead, trying to remember. “He was a long way off, and I was using binoculars. And it was more than a year ago. When I saw him, he was wearing clothes—pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He had a long scruffy beard, long hair. Medium colored, light brown or maybe dark gray—it's hard to tell at night. Tall, skinny. Scruffy.”

“Got it—heavy on the scruffy.” His pen scratched across the page. “What else do you know about him?”

“Virtually nothing. Backcountry campers catch sight of him now and then, or hear him howling.”

He shook his head. “That's disturbing.”

“Why do you say that? I think Charlie's great.”

His head jerked back and his expression was contemptuous. “You're kidding. What's to admire?”

“The freedom. He's completely uninhibited. He wants to run naked under the full moon, he does it.” She could almost feel it herself; soft, fresh air on exposed skin, gliding barefoot over smooth sandstone through a landscape lit with lunar magic. Like a wild animal, surrounded only by nature. But this was probably not an image an uptight FBI agent could appreciate. She glanced sideways at Perez to check.

The guy was clearly distressed. As he stared at her with frank concern, he ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “Do you have any idea how many schizophrenics are out there, listening to the voice of the devil, receiving orders from angels or dogs? This guy may think he's getting mental transmissions from those coyotes or even from the moon.”

He looked up for a moment as if beseeching the heavens for sanity. When he lowered his head, his straight hair fell back into place, except for one ebony strand that slipped onto his forehead. “Do you know his real name?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Why do they call him Coyote Charlie?”

“Well, the Coyote part is pretty obvious, but I don't know about the Charlie part. Maybe it just sounded good. He's kind of a legend with the park staff. It would ruin the mystery, wouldn't it, to know everything about him?”

They were outside her tiny canyon now, sitting on the sloping plane of the plateau. Sprawled straight-legged on the wind-scrubbed rock beside her, Perez gazed silently at the full moon, at the pinpoints of light strewn across the heavens like crystal beads on black velvet. Moonlight now brightened the open space, lending a blue sheen to Perez's raven hair, a chiseled-stone appearance to the planes of his face. His jawline was dark with whiskers. Sam was pleased to see that at least he had to work at some aspect of personal grooming.

The canine chorus started again. The unearthly shriek joined in, closer than the other howls. Sam stood and raised her binoculars to her eyes, scanned the surrounding hillsides and plateau. Nothing but moonlight on rocks.

Perez rose to his feet. “How far away do you think he is?”

She cocked her head, listening to the howls. “Sounds like it's coming from Horsehip Mesa. That's his usual haunt, just above the ruins. It's about three miles, at least an hour and a half away. In daylight.” Her feet hurt just thinking about it.

“Damn. The chopper pilot told me they won't fly over the park after dark. Something about squirrelly winds over the canyons.”

She nodded. “That's right. Updrafts, downdrafts, thermals.”

“This Coyote guy may know something about Zachary Fischer.”

The child's face welled up in her memory, along with the feel of those damp little fingers. She shook her head. “I doubt it. The rangers have never considered him a troublemaker.”

“Forget your romantic ideas about galloping naked in the moonlight,” Perez told her. “Consider the evidence. Zack's shoe was found on Powell Trail, and Powell Trail leads up here. This wacko might have seen the kidnapper.”

As far as she knew, Coyote Charlie had never been reported in the valley. And there was the shadow figure at the end of the path, the man that she had abandoned Zack to.

“He might
be
the kidnapper.”

Her mind's eye supplied a vision of Charlie squatting on top of crumbling adobe, howling at the night sky, crouched over a small body like a coyote over a rabbit. Damn her overactive imagination! There was the rock bridge; it'd shave more than a mile and a half off the journey. But it'd be dark and dangerous . .

She stood up, extracted her penlight from her vest pocket. “Let's go.”

Perez hesitantly retrieved his own flashlight from the ground. “Three miles in the dark? Isn't that a little crazy?”

“We have moonlight.” She impatiently tapped the penlight against her thigh. “And I know a shortcut.”

He aimed his flashlight at his chin and snapped it on, adding devilish shadows to his grinning face. “Coyote Charlie, here we come.”

Maybe the man wasn't so uptight, after all.

A blood-curdling howl beckoned them.

 

RANGER Rafael Castillo sat in his truck, watching the campground. Someone had to have seen something on the night that Zack had disappeared; more than half of these vehicles had been here at the time.

Things didn't look good for that little boy; a ten-mile radius from the campground had been searched, and nobody had discovered any trace of Zachary Fischer. When the ransom demand had been faxed to park headquarters, Rafael suspected the kid had been snatched and spirited out of the park, no matter what the gatekeeper said. But now that the child's shoe had been found on a trail that led to the interior, he didn't know what to think.

The lights were on inside Russ Wilson's camper, but he didn't see anyone moving around. Maybe Wilson was reading. Or maybe he was watching TV: an electric cord anchored the RV to the outlet that bordered the parking pad. The FBI agents had run a check on the vehicle, as they had on several others in the campground. It had come back clean, registered to Orrin R. Wilson in Rock Creek.

But he still had a funny feeling about the guy. He'd had Zack's cap in his camper—what were the odds of that? Tomorrow, he'd get the Utah DMV to pull Orrin R. Wilson's driving record. Sometimes even parking tickets could say a lot about a man. Where would he find a couple of hours to do that? These double shifts were killing him.

The rhythmic ticking of soles on pavement caught his attention. A man jogged along the asphalt road on the far side of the loop. In and out of the pools of light spilling from RV windows and kerosene lanterns, Wilson ran slowly, tonight dressed in black sweatpants and burgundy hooded sweatshirt, bright white athletic shoes. So he hadn't been lying about the jogging, anyway. He came to a stop at the drinking fountain next to the restrooms.

Tonight Wilson wore no toupee, and Rafael could see that although graying hair clung to the sides and back of his head, his crown was hairless, just as Rafael had suspected.

The sweat on Wilson's face and bald spot gleamed in the bright light over the restroom entrance. As he wiped a drip from his chin on the back of his sleeve, a little boy came out of the restroom and walked up to the fountain. Wilson held the child up to the spout, clasping the small body tightly between his legs and the metal drinking fixture. A smile crept onto Wilson's face as he gazed down at the boy, and it stayed there when he set the child down on the ground. Rafael felt relief when a woman exited the women's side of the building and took the child away with her.

So Wilson was still here. And he did like kids. Maybe he was just fondly remembering his grandkids, but maybe he was the kind of creep that liked kids too much. After making sure that mother and son and Wilson returned to their respective campsites, Rafael drove away.

His mother-in-law sure knew how to pick them. Her first husband, Anita's father, had drunk himself into an early grave. He gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to sort out his thoughts. Did his uneasiness about Russell Wilson come from his experiences as Miranda's son-in-law, as a father, or as a law enforcement officer?

 

THE rock floor fell away into blackness below. Sixty feet beyond the yawning space, the flat white plane of the mesa continued.