Fatal Descent Read online

  “We really don’t know,” Mandy said, “since we don’t know who killed Alex and hurt Elsa, or why.”

  Gonzo put an arm around Kendra. “Well, I sure don’t want Kendra sitting out there alone at night, especially if a killer could be stalking around.”

  “We don’t think anyone’s after any of us,” Mandy said, thinking yet, “just Elsa, potentially. Still, having two guards per shift is a good idea. And we don’t want anyone to know we’re suspicious. You’ve got to keep all this secret from the clients and Cool.”

  Kendra gave a somber nod. “We promise.”

  “That’s going to be tough,” Gonzo said, “since I’m sharing a tent with the guy.”

  “Here’s a solution to both of your problems,” Rob said with a grin. “Tell Cool that you and Kendra are going to sleep outside together tonight, since there’s no threat of rain.”

  “Great idea!” Gonzo grinned at Kendra, and she returned his smile. “We’ll take the first shift. I’m sure we can find a way to keep each other awake.”

  _____

  The alarm on Mandy’s wristwatch beeped in the middle of the night, waking her from a troubled dream. She had been fighting off an attack from a grizzly bear, who seemed to have an almost human form. She roused Rob and dressed quickly. They crept out of their tent and used the dim illumination from their headlamps to locate Gonzo and Kendra sitting at one of the camp tables.

  “Anything?” Mandy whispered.

  Gonzo shook his head. “All quiet.”

  “We’ll take over,” Rob whispered. “Want to use our tent for the rest of the night?”

  “Yeah,” Kendra replied while huddling in her fleece jacket. “I don’t want to wake the gals, and it’s gotten pretty chilly out here.”

  Mandy did feel a definite nip in the air. She pulled a fleece headband out of the pocket of her jacket and put it on. “Where are your bags?”

  Gonzo pointed to their sleeping bags, in the shadow of a few willows on the other side of the kitchen area. It was a somewhat private hideaway that still afforded them a good view of the tents in camp. “If you need to bundle up, feel free to use them.”

  He and Kendra left and crawled into Mandy and Rob’s tent. After listening to mostly silence for about fifteen minutes, except for Paul’s irregular snores coming from the other side of the willows behind Gonzo and Kendra’s bags, Mandy leaned in close to Rob.

  “All’s quiet. Think now’s a good time to look at Alex?”

  Rob nodded and held up Betsy’s wildlife tracking guidebook.

  Mandy took one last glance around the slumbering camp, then followed Rob to the rafts. They climbed into Rob’s raft and positioned themselves at the top and bottom of Alex’s body bag. On the count of three, they hoisted it out of the water and inside the raft. After Rob removed the ropes, Mandy knelt beside the dripping bag and turned on her headlamp.

  She put on latex gloves from their first-aid kit, and he did the same. She laid her hand on the zipper and looked at Rob. “Ready?”

  “Ready.” He opened the guidebook to the place he had marked and trained his headlamp on the page.

  Mandy unzipped the bag a third of the way, figuring they only needed to look at Alex’s head. She pulled back the flaps over his face. The sick smell of flesh beginning to rot rose out of the bag and made her gag. She turned her head to suck in a breath of fresh air, then glanced at Rob.

  His face looked green, and he swallowed convulsively. When Rob clamped a hand over his nose, she did the same. The smell of the latex glove helped mask the odor of death a little. At least enough to keep her from losing her dinner.

  Training her headlamp on Alex’s bloated face, she examined the vertical claw marks that raked one side of his face and along the neck, where he had bled out. Five distinct lines split the flesh, the three inside ones starting slightly higher on Alex’s forehead than the two outside ones.

  “The book says tracks from both bears are about three inches wide,” Rob said, “but that grizzly tracks are longer. And the toes of a grizzly are more separated and less curved than those of a black bear.”

  “We’ve only got claw marks,” Mandy said. “What’s it say about claws?”

  “The claw mark pattern would be different, too.” Rob pointed to the illustration in the book. “See here, on the black bear, the little toe claw is a lot lower than the others.” He looked at the deep scratches on Alex’s head and back at the book. “I’d say those match the grizzly claw description better.”

  Mandy studied the illustration then Alex’s face. “I agree, but it’s not a big difference.”

  “Here’s something else. Grizzly claws are two to four inches long and black bear claws are only one to two inches long and fatter.”

  “That means we should measure how deep these gashes are,” Mandy said, then shuddered at the thought of poking something in Alex’s dead flesh. But it had to be done. “Got anything I can use?”

  Rob pulled out a pocket knife and fiddled with it until he found the tool he wanted, then handed it to Mandy. “Believe it or not, this has a ruler on the edge of the nail file.”

  Mandy held it over Alex’s face, gritted her teeth and breathed through them. “You okay with me sticking it in him?” She almost wished he would say no.

  “I’ll dump it in boiling dishwater in the morning,” Rob said. “Do it.”

  Gingerly, Mandy probed in various places along each of the gashes, swallowing down bile as she worked. For the inside gashes, she was able to go about three inches deep in many places. “I’d say that cinches it. A grizzly paw did this.”

  “But how did Alex sit still for this?”

  Mandy unzipped the body bag farther and gingerly lifted Alex’s arms out of the bag. She examined each wrist in the light of her headlamp. “It doesn’t look like he was tied up. Maybe he was choked first.” She tilted his head back to examine the neck, then sucked in a breath. “Look at this!”

  A red mark appeared around a tiny pinprick hole in the side of Alex’s neck opposite the side that had been shredded by the claws.

  Rob bent in for a closer look. “Is that a needle mark?”

  twelve

  Nature reserves the right to inflict upon

  her children the most terrifying jests.

  —thornton wilder

  Bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed the next morning, Mandy poured a cup of hot coffee and drank a large gulp, scalding her tongue. She grimaced but took another, smaller sip. She needed the caffeine after losing half a night’s sleep. After discovering the needle mark on Alex’s neck, she and Rob had argued quietly for hours while bundled in Gonzo and Kendra’s sleeping bags.

  They had both changed their minds, at different times, about whether they should tell everyone that a killer was among them or keep it secret. The first choice would create widespread panic and suspicion and alert the killer that they were on to him or her. The second choice would allow the killer to come after Elsa again or target a third victim, if there was one, in secret. And if anyone else was killed, Mandy and Rob would feel responsible for the death. But keeping quiet would also allow Mandy, Rob, Gonzo, and Kendra to observe all of the others on the sly to try to ferret out which one was the killer.

  Finally as the eastern rim of the canyon was lightening far above them, they had roused Kendra and Gonzo. While quietly brewing a pot of coffee so as not to wake the others, Mandy and Rob pulled their two trusted guides out of earshot of the rest of camp and filled them in on what they had found.

  Eyes wide, Kendra whispered, “Are we in danger?”

  Gonzo’s tense expression showed he was thinking the same thing.

  “Our best guess is still that the killer’s motives don’t include us,” Rob said, “that it’s something about the relationships between the clients. That’s why Tina and Paul are our top suspects, because Elsa was having an affair with Alex, and
they were both with her when her harness was cut.”

  Kendra clutched Gonzo’s arm. “But so were Les and Cool, and Gonzo’s sharing a tent with Cool.”

  “It’s possible that someone targeted Alex and Elsa for some reason other than the affair,” Mandy said. Or that they were chosen at random by a psychopath in the group. “So we’re not ruling out any of the clients or Cool. The only people we can trust are the four of us.”

  Gonzo drew Kendra in under his arm. “And Kendra’s sleeping with three clients.”

  Rob nodded. “I think it’s best if you two use the same excuse tonight as you did last night and put your sleeping bags together outside. We’ll need to pull watch shifts again tonight anyway.”

  “And staying up two at a time is definitely safer,” Mandy added.

  A rustle in the willow thicket behind them made her turn and stare into the gloomy underbrush. She pulled her headlamp out of a pocket in her fleece jacket and shone the beam into the thicket. The light caught no eyes looking back at them or anything else unnatural. A glance back at camp, still lying in the dark shadow of the towering cliffs looming over them, showed all was quiet there, too.

  She shrugged at the others. “Must have been a bird or chipmunk. Back to our problem. We’ll all have to be on the lookout for anyone acting weird.”

  “Like what?” Kendra asked.

  “Any behavior that’s not typical for someone on a float trip, or anything that just doesn’t feel right to you, even if you can’t say why,” Mandy said.

  “What do we do if we see someone acting squirrelly?” Gonzo asked.

  “Privately tell the rest of us, or as many as you can,” Rob said. “Don’t do anything on your own.”

  “And be super discreet and careful,” Mandy added. “If we do find evidence of who the killer is, and he or she finds out we know, then we’ll become targets, too.”

  Kendra sucked in a breath and clutched Gonzo, but before she could say anything, Cool emerged from his tent. He stood and stretched, then when he saw the four of them, he frowned in puzzlement and walked toward them.

  “Why are you all up so early?” he whispered when he got near.

  Mandy concocted a story about hearing a noise and looking for another camper then quickly directed everyone to start work on breakfast. She gave the excuse that if they got the clients up and moving on the trail to the Doll House early, the heat would be less likely to affect them. Also, they would be more likely to find campers, if there were any up there, before they broke camp.

  Mandy had just finished slicing melons when Rob called, “Coffee!” She used the break in her activities to study the clients as they crawled out of their tents and lined up in front of the griddle. Manning the spatula, Cool was in fine form, flirting with the women and teasing the men as he flipped fried eggs and toast onto their plates. Of course, he was the only guide who had gotten a full night’s sleep. Gonzo and Kendra ate standing up behind the prep table, as if afraid of getting near the clients and needing that barrier, flimsy as it was, between them and a hidden killer.

  Rob moved among the clients, pouring coffee and asking how they slept. Mandy grabbed the juice pitcher and joined him. After all, if she was going to ferret out suspicious behavior, she had to start looking.

  The five remaining Andersons ate quietly around one of the camp tables. Tina and Elsa sat next to each other at another table, so Mandy assumed Tina had made up with her mother. Paul, Betsy, Viv, and Mo gathered around the last table. Paul smiled good-

  naturedly while the three of them ribbed him about his snoring. No one was behaving like they had something to hide.

  That raised a question in Mandy’s mind. How does a killer behave anyway, when not in the act?

  Cool broke her reverie by coming up to Rob with the radio in his hand. Mandy joined them.

  “After I cleaned all the contacts with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol,” Cool said, “I put the radio together this morning and tried it out, hoping I might be able to reach the repeater at the Confluence. It wouldn’t even power on. Sorry.”

  Rob took the radio from him. “Bummer. Thanks for trying, though.”

  Cool left to help Kendra and Gonzo with the dishes, while Mandy studied the radio in Rob’s hand. “You know,” she said, “if Cool wanted to make sure we’d never be able to call out for help, he may have just achieved that.”

  “You think he disabled the radio deliberately? To me, he seemed genuinely interested in helping.”

  “Yeah, he did,” Mandy said, peering at Rob. “But who’s to say he didn’t throw away some part after taking it apart, something vital?”

  Rob stared at Cool. “Maybe I shouldn’t have given it to him.”

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Mandy said. “You weren’t able to fix it anyway. But, his generous offer seems a little suspicious to me. I’m keeping an eye on him.” She moved over to a camp table and started folding it up. She glanced at Cool a moment later, but he was engrossed in talking to Gonzo, as if he had no concerns in the world.

  After the breakfast cleanup was done, Rob organized the group for the Doll House hike, making sure everyone had water, sunscreen, cameras, and so on. All of the clients wanted to go, including Elsa. She insisted her ankle was better, and when Mandy checked it, she saw that the swelling had subsided.

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Mandy said to Elsa. “You could make it worse by putting stress on it so soon after it was injured.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Elsa did a few turns around the camp to show she could walk on it without limping. Then she came up to Mandy and whispered in her ear. “And I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone scare me out of going. I’m not giving up what’s probably going to be my only chance to see the Doll House up close. Nobody would try anything in such a large group anyway.”

  “I hope not,” Mandy said doubtfully. Had Elsa forgotten how many people were around her when she had her accident?

  Rob joined them. Not having heard what Elsa whispered, he said, “We’ll have enough guides along on the hike that if Elsa needs help, we can take turns giving her an assist. And Cool has a couple of retractable walking sticks, if she needs one.”

  From Elsa’s determined chin, Mandy realized the woman would insist on going no matter what, so she nodded.

  In a way, it was good that Elsa was adamant about going. Rob and Mandy had agreed that she would stay behind, with the pretense of guarding their stuff from animals and keeping an eye out for boats on the river. In reality, she planned to search all of the clients’ gear for the grizzly bear claw and a hypodermic needle—if the killer had been stupid enough to keep either one. Unfortunately, a pocket camping knife—which was all that was needed to cut Elsa’s harness—had been on the packing list, so everyone likely had one of those. Mandy also planned to look for journals, letters, or any other clues that might shed some light on what any of the clients were thinking.

  After Rob had parceled out the first-aid kit, trail snacks, and other supplies among himself, Cool, Gonzo, and Kendra, the group was off. Mandy waved to them, then waited impatiently for at least ten minutes before starting her search. She and Rob had told the clients to leave their tents and gear where they were, so they could hike during the cool part of the morning and pack when it was hotter. That plan also made it easier for Mandy to search the gear.

  She started with Cool O’Day’s stuff in the tent he shared with Gonzo. She didn’t find anything of interest, but she noted that he was even more slovenly than Gonzo. She was glad to get out of their funky smelling tent and move on to Paul Norton’s solo tent. She didn’t find a bear claw or hypodermic needle among his things, either, but he was keeping a trip journal, so she sat down to skim it. It was mostly dry notes about what he had done and seen each day. The entry for the evening when Tina had told him about Elsa’s affair with Alex, however, included a paragraph about how upset his daughte
r was. He also wrote about how stupid his ex-wife was for doing such a thing. Mandy re-read the final paragraph over and over again.

  I’m surprised I wasn’t bothered more by Elsa’s foolish affair. If we’d still been married, I would have been ready to kill her. But I feel nothing—other than worrying about the effect on Tina. Maybe that woman is really dead for me now—for good.

  Mandy could interpret the passage two ways. Either Paul truly no longer cared what happened to his wife—or he wished her dead. And Tina had definitely been upset—but upset enough to threaten her errant mother’s life? Mandy checked her watch. She was no closer to the truth, and time was wasting away. She moved on to Tina and Elsa’s tent, but found nothing there. Neither woman kept a journal.

  She decided to focus on the Anderson clan next. She searched Amy and Les’s 2-man tent, but found nothing suspicious other than concealers in a variety of shades in Amy’s cosmetic bag. To hide bruises from Les? Amy also had been recording every snippet of history that the guides had shared with the clients in a journal. From Amy’s comments about where she needed to do follow-up research, Mandy wondered if the quiet woman planned to write a western history book someday. What a surprise.

  Checking her watch, Mandy figured the group had probably reached the top of the canyon rim and were searching for hikers or campers and taking photos of the Doll House. Rob had planned on giving them about forty minutes to explore the formations and ancient granaries there, then they would head back down. And the return trip would take much less time than the steep uphill climb.

  Mandy hurried to the tent that Diana, Hal, and Alice were sharing, along with Alex’s gear. At first, she was going to leave Alex’s gear alone, but then she realized there might be something in it that revealed his relationship with Elsa—or with others. She went through all of his stuff, but nothing shed any light on why someone would want to kill him.

  Diana and Hal’s things weren’t enlightening either, but Diana’s tear-stained notes about funeral arrangements for Alex made Mandy swallow hard and wipe away a tear of her own. Alice’s dry bag turned up nothing but clothes, cosmetics, and a couple of paperback mystery novels. As Mandy was returning the items to the dry bag, she noticed that Alice had drawn in the margins of the novels.