Tainted Trail (11 page)

“How's Kittanning?”

“A little fussy. I think he misses you. Hellena showed up on the pretense of discussing Mom Jo's dogs and got him settled.” Hellena was the alpha female of the Dog Warriors. “I hope you don't mind, but I told her about the shooting.”

“I don't mind.” The Dog Warriors were his family by genetics; they probably should know he had been hurt. It steered his mind, however, to the Kicking Deers. “Did Max tell you? We think we've found my mother's family.”

“He told me that your contacts with Sheriff Kicking Deer haven't gone well.”

“It's worse.” He sighed, wishing she was there, with him. He told her about his meeting with Cassidy Kicking Deer. “Maybe they're right, Indigo. I mean, I'm kind of jumping
to conclusions here. There is a boy missing, believed to be running with the wolves. I'm a boy that ran with wolves. But what if Cassidy is right? Her great-great-uncle is dead, and has nothing to do with me. Maybe because I was out there, being strangely famous for running with the wolves, Jesse Kicking Deer clung to the hope that his uncle wasn't dead, when he really was.”

There was a minute of silence and he listened to her beautiful breathing.

“There's holes to it,” Indigo stated. “First is the sheriff's reaction to the mice. Why would anyone fake pulling mice out of incisions? Normal Native American children do not have mice in their abdominal cavities.”

He followed her logic. “If the Kicking Deer boy was Pack blood, though, he would.”

“Exactly. Secondly, there is the Kicking Deers' reply to your claiming of possibly being several hundred years old.” Indigo repeated the response.
“He's good. I nearly believe him. Somebody talked.”

“As if someone told me something I shouldn't know.”

“Which is the Wolf Boy could be considered two or three hundred years old,” Indigo continued. “Then there is the fact that the grandfather believes that the boy is still alive even though there are photographs of his death. Cassidy indicates a gruesome death. If the body was disfigured, then the question of true identity comes into play. Or did the body disappear?”

“Which would have happened if the boy came back to life.”

“Lastly, the grandfather believes that the child is still alive, even at age eighty-four, which isn't a totally unreasonable life span for a normal person. Remember, though, they're looking for the Umatilla Wolf Boy. Who would believe a person could spend seventy-two years running feral in the Oregon wilderness?”

“Cassidy Kicking Deer doesn't.”

“But Jesse Kicking Deer, who knew the boy personally, does.”

You're virtually indestructible,
Max's voice repeated in
his head. Max would still believe in him after seventy-two years.

“I don't think you're jumping to a wrong conclusion, Ukiah, but I also think you may never get these people to admit you're their relative. I know that this isn't the same, but your moms and Max love you. They're your parents now. You've got them, Cally, Kittanning, and me.”

“I know. It's not like I was planning to move back to Oregon with them. I just wanted to know what my childhood was like.”

“Ukiah, the Kicking Deers loved you enough that seventy years after you vanished, they're still looking for you. Perhaps the old man could give you more details, but it's going to work down to this—they loved you. Knowing how you thrive on being loved, how could you've been anything but happy as a child?”

 

With the three-hour time difference, Indigo needed to say goodnight shortly afterward. Rather than torturing himself about what he hadn't discussed with Indigo, Ukiah thought about what Sam Killington had told him, and wondered what she hadn't.

He wasn't sure if three fires in two months was a huge number. It felt like it, though. If the fires started after midnight, most people
would
be in bed. In a deep sleep, most people
would
die of smoke inhalation before waking. But all of them? Only the large numbers of deaths indicated something wasn't right. It was a deviation of statistics, and that was all.

Yet, that was what seemed to be driving Sam's investigation. The only link between the house fires, the hikers, and drownings—if Sam was telling him the truth, and if she hadn't missed some other connection—was that the numbers were all statistically deviant from the norm. Max would be aquiver now, sure that someone was plotting something. Ukiah, however, was at a loss. He worked with the concrete. A footprint. A blood sample. A stray hair. These were things he could grasp.

When Max, Kraynak, Chino, Leo, and himself played
poker on Fridays, they never let him shuffle the deck or deal. Each and every card felt slightly different to him. As he slid the card facedown across the table, he knew what it was as clearly as if it was faceup.

Max stated that there were ways to predict, based on your own cards, what other people were holding and if your hand beat theirs. Ukiah found the theory impossible to use. He judged his hand against the others' reactions, weighing their nervousness or lack of. Against their regular players of two private detectives, a police detective, and a lawyer, he did poorly. He only did well when outsiders sat in—people more open with their expressions than they knew, and less knowledgeable about Ukiah's skills.

He tried to find angles to Sam's case he could grasp easily.

There was the fact that the families of the house fires had missed appointments, work, and school. Something kept all these people home to die. It kept them in bed as the house filled with smoke. Perhaps it was a killer, holding these families hostage. But fires weren't as destructive as people supposed; even on badly burned bodies, coroners could find evidence of stabbing, gunshots, poison, drugs, and strangulation. Even if the victims had been smothered—which was also death by asphyxiation—prior to the fire, there would be the lack of smoke in the lungs.

The thought of someone stalking through a dark house, snuffing out one life after another, sent another shiver down his back.

He thought instead of Alicia. He wanted desperately to believe she was just lost. He didn't want to think about someone killing her.

Alicia and Rose had set up camp at an isolated point, yet with full access to the road. Anyone could have driven up to the camp, killed both girls, and rode away without fear of detection. If they had wanted to eliminate evidence, they could have carried off the bodies to be dumped elsewhere; in this land of four-wheeled pickup trucks and great tracts of rarely traveled forest roads, there were no logistic problems.

Surely there was comfort in that Rose was still at the
camp, and saw Alicia walk away. Surely in a place as small and remote as the primitive campground, no killer would feel the need to so carefully hide his presence.

But who shot him, and why?

 

“We looked.” Max blew the dust out of the cut in Ukiah's cast, eyed the depth, and placed the hacksaw blade back into the groove. “We didn't find any sign of Alicia. We also tried to find where the sniper would have been when he shot you. Unfortunately we're talking too large of an area—a hundred and eighty degree arc up to a half mile in range.”

Kraynak watched the proceedings from the narrow balcony, doubt clear on his face as he chain-smoked through two cigarettes. “You sure we should be taking that off?”

Max glanced up at Ukiah without lifting his head, a steely command to be silent. Kraynak, like many of their Pittsburgh friends, knew that Ukiah was different. After the shooting in June, it was a fact impossible to hide. Max and Ukiah, however, told almost no one the whole truth. Indigo knew—she had been swept up in the events—as did Ukiah's mothers. Everyone else, Kraynak included, they left to make their own best guesses. A guess, Max insisted, could not be as dangerous as the confirmed truth.

“I'll be fine as long as I don't put stress on the knit,” Ukiah said truthfully.

Max sawed slowly and carefully. “He's good with his left hand, but he's been taught to use his right. The cast is in the way. He can't shoot accurately or move easily with it on.”

“If he shoots with that hand, he'll break the arm again,” Kraynak said.

“Do I have to really carry?” Ukiah asked.

Max looked up Ukiah again. “Yes. If I could have left you a gun at the hospital, I would have.”

Ukiah sighed. It didn't seem right to shoot at someone to defend himself when he was nearly indestructible. He supposed there was a chance he would have to defend Max or Kraynak, who weren't. It might have been the luck of the draw that he was shot and not one of the others. Unless, of
course, the Kicking Deers had something to do with the shooting.

Which reminded him. “I found out something interesting today. Apparently Jesse Kicking Deer has a large reward for the information leading to the return of the Umatilla Wolf Boy to him, and the family isn't happy. It's possible we tripped a trigger there. One of them might have shot me.”

“That's slim,” Max said. “About as slim as the hunter theory.”

“Why don't we just say it?” Kraynak ground out his butt. “The only reason anyone in Pendleton would be shooting at Ukiah would be to stop him from finding Alicia.”

“They had thirty experienced people out the day before,” Max said. “Why not shoot at them?”

“They weren't on the right trail,” Kraynak said.

“How did anyone know what trail I was on?” Ukiah asked.

“Scanner,” Max said. “Sam told you that she heard Kicking Deer report the shooting.”

Ukiah scanned his memory. “I wasn't reporting where I was, and you can't tap the GPS signal.”

They considered the problem in silence.

“Jared Kicking Deer knew we were heading for that hill,” Max said. “We stood there and discussed meeting Ukiah at the foot of the cliff.”

“We said that was slim,” Kraynak said.

Ukiah threw his mind back. “He reported to the dispatcher where he was going. It went out on the police channels.”

“And anyone with a scanner would have heard it,” Kraynak said.

“Ukiah will be up to tracking tomorrow,” Max said, pausing for a confirming nod from Ukiah. “We'll find her then.”

Umatilla National Park, Umatilla County, Oregon
Friday, August 27, 2004

It was the type of morning where the sky turned solid, the very air thickening to a gray blanket. Riffs of fog drifted off the treetops, the forest breathing out into the chilled air like a slumbering beast.

Kraynak and Max were tense to the point of vibrating and trying not to show it. Healed and sound, Ukiah nevertheless still felt battered and bone-bruised. He limped through a grid search, hoping he'd find Alicia before he collapsed again.

He crossed over the point where he lay wounded the day before yesterday and came to where Alicia landed. He crouched close to the earth, trying to glean every detail from the loose crumble of cliff face and weeds.

Alicia had come down through a series of pine branches, resulting in a far easier landing than he experienced. Somehow the search-and-rescue team hadn't trampled this point and he found Alicia's handprints where she pushed herself up to a sitting position.

“She's bleeding, but not too much. I don't think she was knocked unconscious; there's no blood pool. She's moving on two feet with a steady stride. If she had hurt a leg, or couldn't swing an arm, it would show.”

“Incoming,” Kraynak said calmly, but was moving quickly sideways to take cover behind a boulder, pulling his pistol.

Max dropped down, bringing up his pistol.

Ukiah took a deep breath, focusing on the crash of a body moving through the woods. “It's Kicking Deer.”

Max and Kraynak pointed their pistols skyward instead of at the oncoming sheriff.

The county policeman came out of the woods like a storm front. “Why are you out here?”

“My niece is still missing, we're still looking,” Kraynak snapped, holstering his pistol.

Kicking Deer crossed to Ukiah. “You fit to track?”

“I'm fine,” Ukiah lied, feeling anything but fine.

Kicking Deer caught Ukiah's right wrist. Lifting Ukiah's arm up, Jared ran a thumb over unblemished skin, pressing carefully against the healed but still aching radius bone.

The slight pain triggered a deep growl of warning.

Max added his own style of growl. “That's enough, Kicking Deer.”

Jared released Ukiah's arm. Whatever the sheriff thought of Ukiah's condition, though, was carefully hidden away behind a policeman's neutral facade.

“We've lost a day.” Kraynak broke the silence. “We've got a lot to make up.”

Kicking Deer backed up to give Ukiah room. “Lead the way, magic boy.”

Ukiah knelt, ignoring the twinge of pain the action put through his knee and hip. He sorted through the confusion of footprints left by the search-and-rescue team to find Alicia's trail. Luckily, the SAR team had fanned out, leaving her tracks fairly unmarred after the first twenty feet. While the narrow forest road had been somewhat visible from the cliff above, it was totally invisible now. Apparently disoriented by the fall, Alicia headed away from road.

Several hundred feet from the cliff, he stopped, frowning at what her tracks told him.

“What is it?” Max asked as the others caught up.

“She stopped here for several minutes, moved forward a few feet, and then started off at another angle, faster, like she's running from something.”

“An animal?”

He shrugged, unsure, and continued along her trail.
Within minutes the truth was obvious. He hand signaled to Max to wait. “There's a second set of footprints right over Alicia's. A man was following her.” Ukiah backtracked the man's trail, acting on a hunch. Disappointingly, yet as he expected, the track lead back to a slight trail coming down off the ridge. Ukiah returned to the others. “I don't know how I missed him, but I think he was up on the ridge with Alicia. She might have been running from him when she fell.”

Kraynak ground his teeth as he took out a cigarette and lit it.

Max hissed out a curse. “Is she still heading away from the road?”

Ukiah nodded.

“I think we'll just slow you down. Why don't you take off, and we'll follow in the Blazer.”

Jared insisted on being able to tune into their radio link. Ukiah did a top-down check, making sure his body armor was fastened tight, that he had food, water, and his pistol.

“I'm ready,” Ukiah said.

“Be careful,” Max told him. “Don't get too focused that you don't see the danger.”

 

Ukiah called the trail over his radio headset as he ran. “Alicia isn't running, but her stride is long. She walks quickly. I don't think she was hurt badly by the fall. There's no more blood from her. She doesn't pause long. She moves in a straight enough line. The man comes behind her, matching her stride. He wears boots, Timberlands, size ten. He is wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt, mostly in blues. He walks easily, no brushing into trees or bushes; he is not in a hurry.”

A few minutes later, he spoke again, slowing his run slightly so he had breath to talk. “I think she gave him the slip, though I don't know how. She's leaving a fairly obvious trail.”

“For you.” Max spoke over the radio for the first time in a while.

“Perhaps.” Ukiah returned to the point of separation, eyeing the man's trail as it broke off. “The man starts to run.
He's tall, his legs are long, and his footprints are far apart. He seems fairly solid too, judging by the depth of his print. He's a big man.”

Over Max's headset came the distant, explosive curse from Kraynak. This new information of a stalker could not come easy to Alicia's uncle. Ukiah winced for Kraynak.

A shimmering line of sun caught Ukiah's eye. A hair dangled on a branch, so thin it was amazing that he could even perceive it, would not have except for the gleam of light on it. He plucked it free. A human hair. The dead cells gave up a vast store of information. Blond. Male. Blue-eyed. O-positive blood. Early thirties.

Ukiah pocketed the hair and started again after Alicia.

“She seems to know she has lost him. She pauses, turning, turning, I think she's trying to get her orientation, figure out where she is. She starts forward again—still in the same direction. Perhaps she's decided that just getting away from the man is the best course.”

He ran, eyes on the ground, hurrying forward, ignoring his battered body, afraid of what he was going to find at the end. “She walks quickly, still not tired. She is in good condition.”

“But she's moving deeper into the park.”

“She stops. She backs up. Something is in front of her.” Ukiah scouted forward and cursed. “He's here. He got ahead of her and has been waiting. He stands with feet braced, so still, like a statue, sinking into the ground. He's very, very patient to stand so long without moving—but when he does, he does not follow her. He turns and goes back.”

“He just turns and goes?”

“I don't understand it, Max. Alicia has veered and gone down a trail through the creek's undergrowth, she has to hunch down to run, but she scurries like a rabbit, sometimes on hands and knees. She must be afraid. Here's a deer trail. She stands and starts to run. Here's the man again, and she turns.

“Alicia runs. Again the man turns, doesn't follow. He's going to cut her off again—Max, he's herding her.”

“Herding?”

Ukiah needed to stop and pant out his explanation. “He's getting in front of her, and forcing her to go the way he wants.”

There was the rustle of paper. “Ukiah, I've got you on the monitor. Head after Alicia so I can see what direction she took.”

Ukiah started down the deer trail after the running Alicia.

“Oh, damn, Ukiah, the main road is in that direction. She was heading away from it, but now she's pointed right at it.”

Ukiah ran, despite the fact he was reaching the end of his strength, sickened by the realization that this drama took place five days earlier. No matter how fast he ran, he would not get to Alicia before she reached the road.

And yet he couldn't stop running.

Minutes later, he hit the graded berm.

“Oh, damn.” He stumbled to a halt, panting. “She's at the road. There was a car pulled over, waiting. There were people here, standing still for a long time, waiting. Damn it, Max, she hit the road, saw the car, and probably thought she was saved.”

“Maybe she was.” Max held out for hope.

“No. No.” Ukiah groaned at what he could read in the torn earth. “They jumped her. She fought. They took her down to her knees, to her hands, to her face. They bloodied her. They lifted her up, and they put her in the car, and they drove away.”

 

He followed as far as he could, limping now, but the dirt of the berm pounded out of the tires and the car moved on, unremarkable from the countless other cars that had traveled the highway since Monday. He finally gave up and sprawled out onto the hot asphalt, letting the heat bake through his worn body.

Max's Blazer came down the road, slowed and stopped a few feet shy of where he lay, protecting him from any oncoming traffic. He heard the county police car pull over to the berm, its tires crunching on the loose girt.

Max and Kraynak got out of the Blazer, looked down the
ribbon of empty road, and shook their heads. Kraynak sulked off, trailing the smoke of his Marlboros.

“Come on.” Max tugged Ukiah up into a stand and helped him to the back of the Blazer. There, Max gave him a candy bar and made room for him in the cargo area. Rather than chewing, Ukiah simply let the chocolate melt in his mouth.

“There.” Max shifted the climbing equipment into the backseat. “Lie down.”

“I feel horrible that I've lost the trail,” Ukiah whispered, collapsing into the Blazer.

“You did your best.” Max took out his map, unfolding it to study the whole, instead of the small area they occupied.

Sheriff Kicking Deer got out of his car and came to stand beside Max, talking on his shoulder-mounted radio. “We're out on 244, heading west back into Ukiah. The tracker says that she was forced into a car. Let Tim Winholtz know.”

Max looked up from his map to gaze down the desolate stretch of road. “They could have taken her anywhere. Pilot Rock. Pendleton. They could be all the way to Portland by now.”

“We're only going to find her,” Kicking Deer said, “if we can figure out who took her.”

 

The Pittburghers stayed out from under foot while plaster prints of the tire tracks were made, photographs taken, and the whole area combed for evidence. Ukiah thought there would be none, for the people had waited with extraordinary patience. They had not paced, meandered about, smoked cigarettes, chewed gum, spat, or even rocked from foot to foot. They had stood at inhuman attention, sinking into the soft earth of the berm.

“How did he do it?” Ukiah asked. “A million acres of forest, hundreds of miles of road, and yet he herded Alicia up onto the road right where a car was waiting. How did he do that?”

“Radio and GPS,” Kraynak snapped from his far sulking point. “Like you and Max. The car could have coordinated with the field scout and been here, waiting.”

“They would have needed practice to pull it off this flawlessly,” Max said.

“Ex-military,” Kraynak guessed.

“It would explain their orderliness,” Ukiah said. As an ex-Marine, Max lived at a level of military clean that amazed Ukiah's mothers.

“Maybe,” Max said. “Maybe there's a lot more missing hikers than anyone knows.”

 

Alicia had managed to leave one sign of her kidnapping. Somehow, while her assailants wrestled her to the ground, she had slipped her college ring off, pressed it into the dirt until it was almost invisible. It had been a chance in a million that anyone would ever find it, for the search for her had centered around the campground, now ten miles away.

Jared Kicking Deer had found it, shifting gloved-covered fingers through the dirt in hopes of any evidence beyond impressions in the ground. He dropped the ring into a small plastic evidence bag and brought it to Kraynak to identify. “It's hers. Those are her initials engraved there. Alicia Caroline Kraynak. ACK.”

“I'm sorry,” Jared said quietly. “Were you in contact with Alicia prior to her disappearance?”

Kraynak knew where the question was leading, and talked about his last conversation with Alicia. She had been happy and excited, and gave no indication that someone was stalking her, waiting for a moment to get her alone, to make her vanish.

“She had a daily planner,” Kraynak told Jared. “It's back at my hotel room. I looked through it briefly last night. It might have something in it.”

Jared noted the diary into his case tablet. “I'll get it later.” He tucked away the small pad and glanced over at Ukiah, who was limp with exhaustion. True worry got past the cop facade. “Will he be okay?”

“He needs some more food,” Max said. “And lots of sleep, but he'll be fine.”