Murder on the Horizon (2 page)

“Somebody turn it over.”

Nobody moved.

“Come on,” Gracie said. “Who's got a trekking pole handy?”

“You,” everyone answered in unison.

“Buncha wusses,” she mumbled. With teeth bared, she nudged the hand with the tip of her pole so that it fell back, open palm to the sky, fully exposing the partial tattoo on the inside of the wrist.

Everyone leaned in.

Carrie pointed. “That's a skull and crossbones.”

“And some kind of lettering.”

“What's it say?”

“Hard to read.”

“That's an
A
,” Gracie said. “Then something else. Can't quite . . .”

She heard a faint click and looked over to see Lenny taking a picture of the hands with his cell phone. “Lenny,” she said, straightening. “That turns up on social media somewhere and heads will roll. Yours. Mine. And ours.”

“I wasn't gonna . . .” he said in a way that made Gracie think that was exactly what he was intending.

“I mean it.”

“Okay! Okay.”

“Everybody, listen up,” Jon said. “You post a picture of something like this, of a victim, or anyone we rescue, on Facebook or YouTube or wherever and you're off the damn team faster 'n anybody can say, ‘You're off the damn team.'”

“I got it,” Lenny said, face even redder than before. “Sheesh.”

“That applies to everyone, Lenny,” Gracie said. “Me. Jon. Even Ralph.” She looked around the group. “Everyone okay with me calling this in?”

Several heads nodded.

Unable to tear her eyes from the pile of hands, Gracie pressed the little microphone button on the HT radio in her chest pack. “Command Post,” she said. “Ten Rescue Twenty-two.”

“Ten Rescue Twenty-two,” a male voice answered. “Go ahead.”

2

G
RACIE
stood at the top of the steep driveway of her cabin, fourth from the top of Arcturus Drive, a giant panda mug of extra-strength Folger's Instant in her hands, looking out to where the sun, a glowing orange orb against a pink-pearl sky, hovered four fingers above the rolling hills at the eastern end of the valley. The morning air was still cool on her bare arms and legs, but the wind that blew her hair back from her face felt warm, carrying with it a hint of sage and pine.

She took a sip of coffee and puzzled for the umpteenth time over the severed hands the Timber Creek SAR team had found on the evidence search the previous week.

It was obvious the hands belonged to a man and a woman. But how were they related? Were they married? Brother and sister? Where did they live? Where had they worked? Did they have kids missing them and wondering what had happened to them?

That they had been murdered was a given.

But why?

Cut it out, Kinkaid
, Gracie told herself with a shake of her
head. She knew better than to become emotionally involved with search victims, especially dead ones. But for the past week, the puzzle of the severed hands had insisted on wheedling its way into her thoughts as if with a will of its own.

She took another sip of coffee.

Maybe it had been a family dispute. Or a drug deal gone bad.

Gracie closed her eyes, trying to remember what the tattoo on the inside of one of the wrists had looked like. At the time, she wasn't exactly concentrating on the tattoo on the wrist, rather on the non-attachment of that same wrist to anything else.

It had a skull and crossbones. And some kind of lettering. An
A
.

What else?

That was all she could remember: a skull and crossbones and the letter
A
.

She assumed the hands had been lopped off to keep the bodies from being readily identified. So where were the bodies themselves?

By now
, she figured,
gone with the wind
.

It was a grim fact that bodies left out in the Mojave, desiccated by the dry air and charbroiled black by the merciless sun, torn apart and carried off by coyotes and other denizens of the desert, simply didn't last very long. A few days. “Tops,” Gracie said aloud. That was why it was the ideal dumping ground for bodies and any spare parts lying around.

Quit thinking about it!

Gracie opened her eyes, took another sip of coffee, and looked down at her dog, Minnie, sitting at her feet. Wind ruffled her shining black fur. Her black nose was lifted to the air and twitching.
What scents
, Gracie wondered,
is that amazing nose catching that mine can't?

She winced inwardly as her eyes traveled around the yard, such as it was—after ten years, there were still mostly bare
rectangles of dirt and rock with a clump of bedraggled hot pink petunias near the steps leading up to the front door. The maroon paint of her Ford Ranger pickup parked at the top of the asphalt driveway was freckled with rust. But the Maltby cabin itself she admired with unabashed pride. The logs painted red, the trim and deck stained their natural cedar. A pair of antique skis crisscrossed beneath the east-facing window of the loft bedroom. The antique wagon wheel she had snagged at a Labor Day garage sale for $10.

A burst of hot wind hit Gracie, knocking her back a step. “Wow,” she said. “Santa Anas, Minnie. Fire season's definitely here.”

The dog responded with a single sweep of her feather duster tail along the asphalt.

With years of fire suppression and scavenging bark beetles dealing the final deathblow to millions of drought-stressed trees, the mountains lining the Timber Creek valley were a conflagration lying in wait. The opportunistic Santa Ana winds, blowing in hot and dry from the Mojave, whipped tiny sparks into whirling dervishes of fire. At the beginning of fire season, which, it seemed, began earlier and earlier every year, a clenched fist of low-level anxiety lodged itself somewhere behind Gracie's sternum and stayed there until the first real snow of the winter.

A low growl drew Gracie's eyes back down to Minnie, who now was sitting at attention, fur raised in a ridge along her back, head cocked to the left, ears pricked, eyes riveted on the road below the driveway.

Gracie's eyes followed Minnie's gaze to where a tall, lanky black man was just strolling into view. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, baggy khaki pants, and white tennis shoes scuffed to gray. A U.S. Navy baseball cap lettered in yellow—
USS BEALE, DD-471
—covered his short, gray hair.

Holding the man's hand was a girl, probably nine or ten years old, dressed in a pink butterfly-covered sweatshirt and
shorts, white socks, and pink tennis shoes. Pink ribbons and butterfly barrettes held pigtails in place.

Gracie recognized the man as her new neighbor down the road. She had seen him only once since he and his wife had moved into the bungalow at the bottom of the hill, but was very pleased with the remarkable transformation that was taking place. Once owned by Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, local drug dealers, the house had been a blight on the neighborhood—faded red paint with visible patches of gray cement block, missing shingles, windows opaque with filth, and a trash-littered dirt front yard that turned into a mud wallow with the rain. Over the last several months, the small square house had been painted a sedate taupe with a glossy black front door and shutters. A new sod lawn had been laid and burning bush shrubs strategically placed. A cherry red Adirondack chair and pot of matching geraniums sat on the newly constructed front deck.

Tempted to sidestep out of sight behind her truck, but forcing herself to be a good neighbor instead, Gracie said with a smile, “Good morning.”

The man looked up, his expression guarded, wary.

Minnie barked, the fur along her back bristling into a black ridge.

The man stopped. The girl cried out in fear, grabbing on to the man's hand with both of her own and backing out of sight behind his long legs.

“Minnie, no!” Mortified, Gracie grabbed ahold of the dog's collar. “Sorry. I've never heard her bark before.” She pulled open the passenger door of the Ranger and ordered, “Get in.”

Instantly contrite, Minnie hopped onto the seat.

Gracie rolled the window down and pushed the door closed.

The man and girl had continued walking past the bottom of the driveway.

“I'm so sorry,” Gracie said, walking down the hill toward them. “I haven't had Minnie very long. I guess she's a little
guarded around people she doesn't know.” She stretched out her hand to the man. “Hi. I'm Gracie Kinkaid.”

The hand that took Gracie's was as dry and light as an old leaf. “John Robinson,” the man said in a deep voice, resonant with a pleasing lilt, the origin of which Gracie couldn't place. “This is my granddaughter, Acacia.” The love and pride in his voice was unmistakable. He gave the girl's hand a little shake. “Acacia, say ‘Good morning' to Miss Gracie.”

The pigtails emerged from behind the man's legs. “Good morning, Miss Gracie.” Barely a whisper.

“Good morning, Acacia,” Gracie said, smiling and thoroughly charmed by the display of old-fashioned good manners.

For the next five minutes, Acacia peered out from behind her grandfather up the driveway to where Minnie sat looking out the window of the pickup as Gracie and John engaged in light, get-to-know-you talk about themselves, the neighborhood, and the quality of life in the mountains. Gracie shared that she was the new manager of Camp Ponderosa, a residential camp owned by a megachurch in Orange County, but that most of her life was taken up by her work on the local Search and Rescue team. In turn, Gracie learned that John, a retired attorney, and his wife, Vivian, a retired schoolteacher, had moved to the mountains from Pasadena for the quiet and fresh air. Reading through the lines, Gracie surmised that John and Vivian were raising their only daughter's daughter away from the blight and violence of urban Los Angeles.

Gracie glanced down at her watch. “Oops. I need to go or I'll be late for work. Nice to meet you. And welcome to the neighborhood,” she said, shaking the man's hand again, pleased to see that the return smile had lost a little of its wariness.

“Pleased to meet you as well.”

By the time Gracie backed the Ranger down the driveway and out onto Arcturus, John and Acacia had disappeared around the bend in the road.

3

T
HE
Ranger bumped up and over the rise in the gravel road, glided beneath the hewn-log archway entrance to Camp Ponderosa, and past the dilapidated caretaker's cottage known as the Gatehouse, which served as the camp office.

Gracie lifted her foot from the accelerator, coasting down a short hill and across the little bridge at the bottom, where months of summer heat had reduced the creek to a shining silver ribbon. Leaves on the cottonwoods lining its banks were already hinting at the brilliant yellows to arrive with the autumn.

Twenty feet past the creek, the woods ended with a large recreation field opening up on the left, a paved parking lot on the right. Straight ahead, in front of a tumble of boulders, wooden signs announced the camp's ten-mile-per-hour speed limit and
LOADING/UNLOADING ONL
Y BEYOND THIS POINT
. An eight-foot-high carved bear held another sign indicating the dining hall in Serrano Lodge off to the right.

The road itself continued on through to the rest of the developed ten acres of camp, past a small conference center, Mojave
Lodge, several smaller cabins, staff living quarters, and pristine, five-acre Ponderosa Lake. But it was the surrounding forest that Gracie treasured: two hundred glorious, virtually untouched acres of skyscraping ponderosa, Jeffrey, and sugar pine with an understory of live oak and manzanita, California granite boulders the size and shape of elephants, brimming with pygmy nuthatches and mountain chickadees, chipmunks and raccoons, and an occasional black bear lumbering down from higher elevations in search of water or a snack.

Gracie turned right at the carved bear, then swung the Ranger around to the back of Serrano Lodge—a two-story cinder-block building painted a grayish brown to complement its surroundings. She parked near the back door leading into the kitchen, climbed out of the truck, and held the door while Minnie hopped out from her bed behind the front seat.

It was still surreal to Gracie that she was Camp Ponderosa's new manager. Three months before, a scandal at the camp had resulted in the firing of over half of its employees, including the manager, as well as the adventure programming company Gracie had hired to help run million-watt movie star Rob Christian's The Sky's the Limit camp, a summer adventure program for at-risk youth.

Gracie had spent hours meeting with the church's senior pastor, the congregational elders, and the accountants, after which she had been offered the job of managing the camp. She had jumped at the chance, surviving the frantically busy summer season by working sixteen-hour days and, more often than not, sleeping on a mattress in the empty room across the hall from her office.

Even though the fallout from the scandal had been short-lived, and despite the summer being a resounding success on all fronts, the emotional aftereffects of everything that had transpired, including multiple attempts on her life, had left Gracie feeling unsettled and wondering more than once if she needed a change of scenery, a fresh start somewhere else.

But Gracie adored Camp Ponderosa. As much as in her
cabin at the top of Arcturus Drive, she felt at home there, as if she truly belonged.

Gracie sighed and looked around. A well-fed western gray squirrel flipped its bushy tail from atop a nearby rock. Ten feet above her head, an acorn woodpecker hopped up the giant cinnamon-colored plates of a ponderosa pine. There was a crisp sharpness to the air that followed the first cold snap of autumn, a humming anticipation of winter as if the clear ringing of a bell still hung in the air.

“Come on, Minnie,” she said to the dog sitting patiently at her feet. “Let's go see what Allen's up to.” She crossed the faded asphalt and pulled open the rusty screen door.

Letting the door whack closed behind her, she settled Minnie on her bed in the hallway closet and walked into the well-lit kitchen.

Three of the walls were lined with stainless steel countertops, two enormous walk-in refrigerators, and a commercial dishwasher. The far wall held a swinging door leading out into the main dining room and two roll-up windows on either side, one for serving meals to camp guests, one for receiving dirty dishes. From a CD player on a shelf, Willie Nelson twanged about blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

In the center of the kitchen was an oblong butcher-block prep table. At the near end, Allen, the new head cook, was slicing through the tape on empty cardboard boxes with a box cutter, flattening them out, and piling them up for recycling.

To a fraction of an inch, Allen matched Gracie's height of five foot eight. Somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, the man was wiry without an ounce of fat, but with an extra pound in tattoo ink that seemed to cover every square inch of skin except his head and the palms of his hands. Allen wore a white short-sleeved T-shirt, Rustler blue jeans, and paint-spattered steel-toed work boots. Somber blue eyes. Forehead and cheeks deeply lined. Long salt-and-pepper hair braided in the back and coiled up beneath a hairnet. In Gracie's mind, it took a man without an iota of doubt—or care—about his
masculinity to wear a hairnet. Allen was unflappable; his general expression and mild voice made it seem as if he had made peace with his existence in a hostile world.

Gracie had lucked out with Allen. Operating on a shoestring staff was the new normal at camp, at least until the following spring when occupancy rates would jump again along with the accompanying revenue. She had yet to hire a new maintenance director, but Allen had proven a maniacal worker, jumping in wherever and whenever needed.

The church had hired him away from another camp in the valley. Allen was an ex-con with a stint in San Quentin for a drug beef, but if a church-owned camp wasn't willing to hire an ex-con, who would? While in prison, the man had earned a college degree in sociology. Upon meeting Allen for the first time, Gracie had felt an instant rapport, yet there was a steeliness about him that both scared and reassured her. All she knew was that she would rather have Allen in her corner than not. Plus, considering her own tendency for dinners of cold pizza eaten while standing at her kitchen sink, a taste of Allen's lasagna and walnut brownies and she had been tempted to ask for his hand in marriage.

When Gracie appeared in the kitchen doorway, Allen glanced over his shoulder, then back down to the box he was flattening. “Mornin', sweet pea,” he said.

“How are ya, stud muffin?” Gracie said as she walked over to the commercial dishwasher, slipped an apron over her head, and tied it behind her back.

Allen threw the flattened box on top of a pile on the floor. “As fine as if I had good sense, sugarplum.”

Gracie sprayed a tray already stacked with dirty dishes with scalding water, sending a plume of steam billowing around her, then pushed it along the rollers into the stainless steel dishwasher, slid the door closed, and flipped the On switch.

She grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Not a blamed thing. What'd you do last night?”

“Nothing much. Search and Rescue business meeting. Boring, but necessary. Then a beer after with some of the team at the Saddle Tramp.”

“
A
beer?”

“
A
as in
one
.”

“Tell me, buttercup, what do you find appealing about that Search and Rescue business?”

Gracie reached back to hang up the dish towel, then turned back, leaning against the counter. “It's never the same thing. Kind of like that Forrest Gump thing. You never know what you're going to get. Every mission is different, depending on who shows up, what the circumstances are. Could be a missing mountain biker or a downed airplane or a car over the side. Could be on San Raphael. Could be down in the desert. Could be snowing. Could be a billion degrees.”

“And you like that.”

Gracie nodded. “I do. Not always pleasant. In fact, sometimes it's downright unpleasant. But that's part of the job. I like the challenge. The variety. It's never boring. It's a way of life. Well, it's
my
way of life. Even though I'm only a volunteer . . .”

“No one's ever
only
a volunteer.”

“Even though I'm a volunteer,” she amended.

“Thank you.”

“The team infiltrates everything I do, impacts every decision I make. It's who I am, how I see myself, how I define myself.” She stopped, realizing she had revealed way more of herself than she would have deemed prudent to someone she knew well, much less to someone she had only recently met, an ex-con with unknown history, unknown connections, unknown friends. “Okay, then. Guess I'll go up to the Gatehouse.”

“Thanks for sharing that part of yourself with me, Gracie. I know it's not easy for you.”

Gracie frowned over at Allen. Sometimes he saw a sight more than she liked.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Her Search and Rescue pager shrieked
from the waistband of her shorts. She unclipped it and squinted at the tiny screen.

“Another search?” Allen asked.

Gracie nodded. “Missing juvenile.” She clipped the pager back onto her waistband, then stood unmoving, undecided.

“So what are you waiting for?”

“There's a buttload of work to do in the office.”

“You got a missing kid. Nobody's due in camp until tomorrow.”

“Do you mind watching Minnie again? I could be out all night.”

“Leave the little lady with me. I could use the intelligent conversation.”

Gracie shot Allen a look. He stood, box in one hand, box cutter in the other. “Well, go already! We'll all survive without you for a day.” He winked at her.

“Ha. Ha. Minnie's on her bed in the closet. She's got food and water.” She lifted the receiver of the wall telephone, stopping again. How long would it take her to respond to the Sheriff's Office out of which Timber Creek SAR operated? Her twenty-four-hour SAR pack and everything else—radio chest pack, GPS, floppy hat, fleece jacket, leather gloves, water bottle—were ready and waiting in the bed of the Ranger. All she needed to do was change into her SAR uniform, which hung behind the driver's seat of the truck, then drive the twisting five miles down Cedar Mill Road and another four miles across town.

She dialed the number for the SO squad room and told the deputy who answered, “Kinkaid responding to the search. ETA twenty-five.”

With a wave and a “Thanks, snickerdoodle!” she trotted out of the kitchen.

“Go get 'em, Tiger Lily” drifted down the hallway after her.