Fatalis (11 page)

Gearhart began by saying that the sinkhole on the road itself had been cleared out. There was a map of the Santa Ynez Mountains behind Gearhart and he called on Dr. Thorpe to explain how there was a series of fissures that wound through the mountain, possibly connecting to the cavern where Jim Grand had found the radio. Though she and a deputy had made a cursory examination of the fissure Stan Greene had entered, they had found no trace of the engineer other than the backpack. The sheriff said that both backpacks had been removed from the site and were being studied by the crime lab for "the three Fs" -fibers, fingerprints, fluids-as well as any other "remnants." He indicated that while Greene's backpack appeared to be intact, there were gashes on Bill Roche's backpack that were also being analyzed. He didn't want to speculate about what had caused them, though he said that nothing was being ruled out.

Gearhart then revealed that "the team" had also found a flashlight, apparently belonging to Bill Roche. It was discovered in a cavern beneath the cave where the radio had been found. The sheriff speculated that it had been washed down with the radio and said that nothing else had been located.

Overall, Gearhart said, the search-and-rescue effort now consisted of twenty-four deputies covering the ravine, the roadway, and the surrounding mountains-a total of twenty square miles. He also indicated that helicopters would be watching the surrounding area for fresh sinkholes or persons such as hikers or campers who might have seen or encountered the engineers. When Dr. Thorpe returned to the site, she would lead a better-equipped unit into the Painted Cave fissures to make a more complete exploration.

Regarding possible explanations as to where the men had gone, Gearhart still believed they'd be found in the area, possibly in the fissures. He acknowledged that a great deal of blood had been reported at the site and that it was lost in the second-phase collapse of the road. That was one reason he thought Roche may have ended up in the sinkhole. Looking directly at Hannah, he said that speculation regarding "criminal activity" was "irresponsible and premature." He said that he had declared the site a crime scene primarily as a precaution to prevent the accidental obliteration of clues.

Gearhart sat and Chairperson Danza returned to the podium.

"Thank you, Sheriff Gearhart." Danza looked out at the press corps and smiled. "We'll take a few questions before Sheriff Gearhart and Dr. Thorpe return to the field-"

Hannah raised her hand and rose. "Sheriff, I understand that you've checked the Honor Farm and other penal institutions for possible escapees, and have also looked into the backgrounds of the two engineers."

"That's correct."

"Can you tell us anything about those?"

"In all the places we've checked, the prisoners are accounted for," Gearhart said. "We've expanded our investigation into surrounding counties. Those results will be available through Sergeant Levy later in the day."

"And the engineers?" Hannah pressed.

Danza pointed to Carl Lessin.

The Caltrans information officer rose. Hannah had talked to him before on the land-sale fiasco. The smug young man was in his middle twenties and clearly delighted to be sitting there with the big boys.

"Psychological profiles are private and privileged," he said.

"I understand." Hannah persisted. "But if there's a potential risk to the people of this count-"

"There is no discernible risk," said Lessin, "and as Sheriff Gearhart indicated we do not intend to speculate."

A few reporters asked about the sinkholes-how they were created and whether the roads in other areas of the mountains were safe. Dr. Thorpe explained the process concisely and "Joe Caltrans" added that his department had dispatched emergency teams to other sections of mountains to "ascertain the stability of the tertiary road system."

Indicating that Sheriff Gearhart and Dr. Thorpe were needed back in the field, Chairperson Danza ended the press conference. She said that reporters would be contacted via phone or E-mail if there were new developments.

Gearhart left then, promptly and directly, by a side door. The TV reporters went over to Chairperson Danza to discuss going up to the Painted Cave sinkhole and taking videos. Hannah didn't understand what satisfaction any journalist could get being a gatherer instead of an investigator.

The Coastal Freeway
was located in a two-story house down the block from the main post office on the corner of Anacapa and Canon Perdido streets. Hannah left the auditorium, got into her Blazer, and was sitting in her office less than five minutes later, reviewing her notes from the press conference. She was going to E-mail questions to everyone who had been present.

"Who knows," she muttered. "Someone might slip and answer one."

Hannah didn't think the sheriff knew more than he was telling. But she didn't believe the answer was as simple as two men being trapped in a sinkhole. And she didn't think the sheriff believed that either. There was blood on the road-a lot of it, according to the emergency team. If both men had gone under, where did the blood come from? If only Greene was buried and the blood belonged to Roche, where was he? Seriously wounded men did not travel far.

Hannah resented not being able to ask those questions. And she disliked the vanity or politics or whatever it was that prevented Gearhart from ever saying, "I don't know."

After submitting the questions, Hannah checked her E-mail. There were the usual jokes she didn't have time to read from people she barely knew, cover letters with attached press releases from local businesses, and updates from family members that went to siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. She didn't have time for any of that now. Hannah's personal E-mail address was on the newspaper masthead and she'd been hoping for responses to her article on the missing engineers. Perhaps from someone who might have seen or heard something, maybe even a ransom demand.

There was nothing.

After talking briefly with Karen Orlando about other assignments, Hannah decided to visit the engineer's wives. They'd declined to talk to her on the phone, but they might feel differently in person. Before leaving, Hannah instructed Karen to phone her with any RT-radio traffic-that had to do with sinkholes old or new or a missing anything. She also grabbed what was left of Karen's tuna fish sandwich and took it with her.

The drizzle had stopped and the gray skies were a shade lighter than they'd been since morning. The rain left behind damp and darkened roads, an unseasonable chill, and a sense of calm that was somehow more ominous than reassuring.

On the way home Jim Grand decided to stop by the
Hutash
offices on Del Playa Drive to visit Joseph Tumamait. Maybe the paintings would intrigue him, maybe not Maybe he would talk, maybe he wouldn't. It was going to be tough, but it was long, long overdue.

The robust, thorny eighty-two-year-old Tumamait was a leading anthropologist, an expert on Chumash culture and one of Grand's mentors. Born in nearby Camarillo, the scientist was a UCSB graduate who had worked with Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before returning to the west in 1965. Mead's involvement with the mental and spiritual health of primitive peoples had fascinated Tumamait, who passed his love of primitive psychology on to one of his own students, James Grand.

From the first, the men were very close friends and colleagues. Tumamait often risked his reputation to back Grand's revolutionary ideas about the relationship between pre-and post-Ice Age peoples and the monsters they hunted. The ideas were revolutionary in part because they were not based on anthropological evidence but on Grand's own experiences in the field. Grand had become the modern world's foremost expert on prehistoric weapons. Collecting and studying ancient samples, then learning to make his own. Grand became convinced that the hunt was far more than just a matter of food-gathering. The use of weapons required daily refurbishing of blades, careful storage of feathered shafts in clean, dry places, and adjustments dictated by the weather-arrow wood, spearhead bindings, and even the herbal sleeping potions used in drinking water were affected by rain and snow, heat and cold.

Grand believed that the people best-suited to create these weapons-and perhaps to use them-were the shamans, the same people who rendered gods, animals, and tableaux of the hunt on cave walls. But if the shamans among the Chumash and other peoples believed that animals were holy, how could they hunt and consume them?

The answer. Grand felt-and Tumamait agreed-was that the entire process was aspirational. Preparing for the hunt, the shamans and their caste slowly became the animals-in spirit at first, tracking them as an animal would, and then in the flesh when they consumed them. The animal spirit and meat were then passed from the shamans to the tribe as a sustenance and religion.

The idea of warrior-shamans was a revolutionary one, and not wholly embraced by either the scientific community or most of the surviving Chumash. But Grand had the best kind of evidence. He had made weapons and he had dwelt in caves and hunted for food. The entire process made the hunter intimate with the stones and the trees from which he crafted his weapons; with his own thoughts and spirit when he set out; and finally with the elements, the land, and his prey. It was a process about creation, life, death, and spirit. If a young man were not a shaman when he first became a hunter, be probably became one in time. Apart from telling tales to the young or infirm or those who didn't hunt, the only way to express what he was feeling was through art.

Many scientists believed that prehistoric people were simple people, interested solely in survival. They regarded shamans as eccentrics who were feared because they knew some medicine and they knew a few tricks. Grand didn't agree, and Tumamait was his greatest advocate.

Then, seven years before-while Grand was working with the Smithsonian-Tumamait went up to one of the caves where a hiker had found pottery. While he was resting by his stone campfire, Tumamait was visited by the Great Eagle. The scholar later said the Chumash god gave him a mission: to protect the Chumash heritage by protecting the earth. The vision was so compelling that Tumamait came back to Santa Barbara, resigned his professorship, and put both his life savings and his passion into
Hutash
.

Grand understood how that had happened. He had felt the presence of spirits many times in the caves. They always came in the dark, when you were alone, when the senses were alert and the mind was open and undistracted. Sometimes they kissed the soul, sometimes they were an eerie prickle. But Grand had never been moved the way Tumamait had-perhaps, Grand suspected, because he approached experiences like these with the mind and not with the spirit. There were fewer roadblocks getting to the soul.

Tumamait's relationship with Grand changed after the elder's vision. He withdrew emotionally from those who were not Chumash. He tried to maintain his relationship with Grand until the young anthropologist began mapping the Santa Ynez Mountains and discovering new caves. Tumamait had come to regard the paintings as a resting place for the gods. To disturb them was to put the needs of men before the needs of the spirit world. He could not endorse that, nor could he share his insights with those who did.

However, Tumamait did not entirely close the book on the relationship. He also wrote, "Sometimes the gods test us. If they test you, then you will understand, as I have, that we are not masters but servants."

Because they had been so close, Grand always hoped there might be a way to reconnect at some time on some level short of a deific trial. Possibly through a Chumash find, one that would excite the anthropologist that was still somewhere inside Joseph Tumamait One that would convince him of something Grand had always believed, that being Chumash-or any people, for that matter-was a matter of conviction and dedication, and not of blood.

Perhaps the tunnel art was it.

Hutash
became an influential environment organization.

Their chief rivals were powerful oil interests, the construction industry, and transportation groups that used shell organizations to channel money into civic improvements, political campaigns, University of California scholarships, United States Geological Survey research, and other groups and causes. The implicit goal of these donations was to remind Southern Californians that-as a Caltrans executive had once put it-it was not always possible to grow the quality of life without the land to grow it on. Like his ancestors, Tumamait had been able to slow but not stop the encroachment of what he called the
Haphaps
-the destroyers. There were even those at
Hutash
who believed that Grand's grant was given for two reasons. First, so that Chumash cave sites could be identified in order for housing construction to be undertaken without damaging them. And second, to strike at Tumamait by engaging one of his former star pupils. Grand didn't know if any of that were true. All he
did
know was that the more sites he found, the more Chumash caves and former dwellings would be protected now and for all time.

Hutash's
offices occupied the top floor of a modest, three-story building that overlooked Window to the Sea Park in Isla Vista. The tan walls were decorated with turn-of-the-century photographs of Chumash people and settlements. The only artifacts were wall hangings and wood carvings that had been made by modern-day Chumash.

The tall, bald-headed Tumamait received Grand immediately. The men hadn't seen one another since Rebecca's funeral.

Grand was openly happy to see his mentor. Tumamait's welcome was courteous, with a hint-just a hint-of satisfaction in the heavy-lidded eyes. The Chumash elder obviously knew something that Grand did not. The men embraced briefly.

"
Hyvasti
," Grand said, using a traditional Chumash greeting.