Читать книгу Arches Enemy - Scott Graham - Страница 13

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Chuck slid to a stop in front of the fallen block of sandstone. A forearm and hand protruded from beneath the edge of the boulder. A thin navy glove sheathed the hand and a sleeve of indigo fleece covered the forearm. The hand was small, that of a woman. The hunk of stone, ten feet long by six feet wide, rose out of the mud to Chuck’s beltline. Blood pooled in the wet earth around the forearm and along the base of the jagged segment of rock. In the pallid overcast light, the blood was dark red, almost black.

Chuck shuddered as he stared at the woman’s arm and hand extending from beneath the rock. He had unearthed countless ancient skeletal remains without emotional distress while conducting his archaeological digs over the years. But the sight of the forearm, extending from the woman’s body crushed beneath the fallen rock just minutes ago, filled him with anguish.

Janelle squatted next to the forearm. Steeled, Chuck supposed, by all she’d seen and experienced on her new job as a part-time paramedic for Durango Fire and Rescue over the last few months—victims of traffic accidents, domestic abuse, bar fights—Janelle took the petite upraised hand in both of hers without hesitation. She peeled off the glove. The hand was purple, its fingers folded inward. Turquoise polish adorned the nails. A gold band and matching jeweled ring encircled the ring finger.

“The skin is cold,” she said over her shoulder to Chuck. “No pulse, of course.”

“It can’t be more than thirty minutes since the collapse.”

“Death clearly would have been instantaneous.” She fingered the sleeved forearm. “I recognize the fabric. She’s wearing a Top Peak Atomizer—the latest thing in cold-weather athletic wear these days. I was thinking of getting one for Carm for her birthday, to use on her after-school runs this winter.”

Bending, Chuck put his shoulder to the stone block above the victim’s forearm and hand. He dug his boots into the mud for traction and put his full weight into shoving the jagged-edged boulder. The block didn’t budge.

Janelle rose and put her shoulder to the stone next to his.

“One, two, three,” Chuck counted.

They shoved the rock together, huffing, until their boots lost their grip and slid in the wet earth, leaving long stripes in the viscous mud. Still no movement.

They straightened. Up close, the bitter odor of blood rising from the base of the block enveloped them. Chuck turned his head, his forearm to his mouth.

“Move away if you’re going to lose it,” Janelle said. “This is a crime scene. I know we’ve already contaminated it by being here, but there’s no need to add to what we’ve already done.”

Her words instantly settled Chuck’s stomach. He lowered his arm. “Crime scene? You came to that conclusion awfully fast.” He scanned the sandstone promontories encircling the flat. The shadowy depressions in the surrounding rock ridges made for countless hiding places.

Janelle’s mouth turned downward. “You don’t get it. I’m talking about the truck, the seismic pounding.” On cue, another thump rumbled across the flat. “That’s what brought down the arch, like you said.”

“Or the victim brought it down herself.” Chuck pointed at the leaden sky overhead, where the span had soared. “She was up there for some reason. She was out on the arch when it collapsed. That’s completely against park rules.”

“Just because something’s against the rules doesn’t keep people from doing it. Before we left home, Carmelita showed me videos on her phone of people climbing on arches all around southern Utah. There’s footage of people doing handstands on them, practicing yoga, even swinging off them on ropes.”

“But Landscape Arch was so long, so narrow. You’d have to be crazy to go out on it.”

“That’s what scares me. I’ve been worried Carm might go out on one of the arches to click a selfie to send back to her climbing teammates, just for bragging rights.”

“You didn’t say anything about that before we came.”

“I convinced myself I was just being a freaked-out mom.” Janelle’s eyes ran along the line of jagged blocks lying in the mud. “Maybe I wasn’t.”

“Carm’s not crazy.”

“Given where her hormones are at these days …” She let the sentence dangle.

“Speaking of whom, we need to call this in so we can get back to her and Rosie.”

Janelle reached for her phone. “I’ll do it. I know the lingo.”

Shortly after Janelle completed the call—a brief conversation with a 911 dispatcher in rat-a-tat first-responder patter—the thumps from the seismic truck outside the park ceased.

By the time Chuck and Janelle reached Devil’s Garden Trailhead on their return hike, sirens wailed from emergency vehicles approaching on the park road. A dozen vehicles streamed into the parking lot. White ranger sedans and parkservice pickup trucks slid to a stop on the wet asphalt, along with a pair of local ambulances, a Grand County Sheriff’s Department sport utility vehicle, and a hulking short-wheelbase fire truck. The vehicles’ sirens died away as they parked.

National Park Service personnel and first responders leapt from the vehicles, a handful of women among mostly men ranging in age from mid-twenties to well over fifty. They greeted one another, their voices grave and their demeanor reserved. A few of the staffers and responders glanced at Chuck and Janelle as they threw on winter jackets and gear packs and slammed the doors to their vehicles. Chuck and Janelle stepped aside, allowing the workers to stride past them and on up the trail.

Another white park-service pickup truck arrived at the end of the road as the park staffers and responders departed on the muddy path. A pair of black bars stenciled on the truck’s front doors marked it as that of the park’s chief ranger. A large red work truck trailed the pickup into the parking lot. The words “O&G Seismic” and the company’s pump-jack logo emblazoned the doors of the work truck.

Chuck glowered at the O&G truck. “Here come the murderers,” he muttered.

“Nobody killed anybody,” Janelle responded. “I told you, that’s not the kind of criminal activity I was talking about.”

Chuck spat on the ground. “The shock waves from O&G Seismic’s thumper truck caused the arch to fall, and the woman we found is dead as a result. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who works for O&G is an accomplice.”

The work truck towed a flatbed trailer with a yellow front-end loader chained to its bed. The truck pulled to a stop, its air brakes hissing. The driver and a passenger, both men, hopped out. The workmen wore heavy leather boots and blue insulated mechanic overalls with O&G Seismic patches on the breast pockets.

One of the men was in his early twenties, Chuck guessed. Vestiges of teenage acne pocked his cheeks. He was slight, his knees knocking around inside the wide legs of his overalls. He settled a hardhat on his head and pulled on a pair of heavy leather work gloves.

The other man looked well past middle age. His salt-and-pepper beard climbed his cheekbones nearly to his eyes and descended below his chin to his collar, swathing his face and neck like a wool balaclava. Gray hair poked from beneath his greasy hardhat.

Arches National Park Chief Ranger Sanford Gibbons climbed out of his white pickup and crossed the pavement to the O&G workers. Leaving Janelle’s side, Chuck strode through the falling sleet to the ranger and workmen.

Sanford turned to Chuck and extended his hand. The chief ranger was a head shorter than Chuck and at least thirty pounds heavier, his stomach bulging beneath his rain jacket. A gray mustache and beard covered his upper lip and jaw. Deep creases cordoned the sides of his mouth. Plastic-framed glasses encircled his wide-set green eyes, topped by bushy eyebrows. His face was pale save for small circles of red, high on his cheeks above his beard, growing brighter in the cold.

Rather than shake Sanford’s hand, Chuck confronted the two workmen, his arms stiff at his sides. “They sent you to clean up the mess you made, did they?”

Sanford raised his palm to Chuck. “There’s no call for that.”

Glaring at the two men, Chuck said, “They crushed a woman. They murdered her.”

The older of the two workmen threw back his shoulders, his eyes flaring and his facial muscles twitching beneath his beard.

“Please, Chuck,” Sanford said. “I asked them to come. I need their help.”

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t been to the site yet. I need these guys to get out there.” Sanford took hold of Chuck’s arm and tugged him away from the workmen. “Come with me.” Leaning close as they walked together across the parking lot, Sanford said in Chuck’s ear, “Let it go. That’s an order.”

Chuck scowled over his shoulder at the two O&G Seismic employees. They glared back, their gloved hands twisted into fists, then set to work unfastening the chains that secured the loader to the trailer.

Chuck turned away and drew deep breaths as he wound with Sanford through the scrum of parked emergency vehicles to Janelle, who shot him a withering look.

“I know,” he acknowledged, hanging his head. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“You’re absolutely right you shouldn’t have.” She held out a hand to the chief ranger. “You’re Sanford, aren’t you?” They shook. “I’m Janelle Ortega.” She aimed a thumb at Chuck. “I’m married to this hothead.”

Sanford tipped his head at Janelle. “I knew what I was getting into when I signed the contract with him. His reputation preceded him, I’m afraid to say.”

The chief ranger had selected Chuck’s one-person firm, Bender Archaeological, to perform the contract that had brought Chuck to Devil’s Garden two days ago with Janelle and the girls.

Janelle admitted, “I had a pretty good sense of what I was getting into when I married him, too.”

On the far side of the parking lot, the older of the two workmen climbed into the operator seat of the front-end loader, atop the flatbed trailer, and fired up its engine. A dark cloud of diesel exhaust belched from the stack as the engine coughed to life. The engine settled into a rattly idle and the older man backed the machine, freed of its chains, off the trailer and braked it to a stop. The younger man tossed the loosed chains into the loader’s front bucket, then clambered onto the machine and hunkered behind the driver, clutching the metal roll bar for stability. The older man threw the loader into gear with a grinding clank and drove the machine across the parking area. Leaving the pavement, the loader straddled the hiking trail, the machine’s oversized rear tires crushing bunch grass, sage, and rabbitbrush into the saturated soil on either side of the path as it trundled northward.

Sanford turned to Chuck, his eyebrows rising behind his glasses to the sleet-speckled brim of his forest green National Park Service ball cap. “You’re the one who found her?”

Chuck tilted his head to Janelle. “We found her.” He explained to Janelle, “As chief ranger, Sanford is in charge of law enforcement in the park.”

“In that capacity,” Sanford said, “I’ll want to check in with both of you as soon as I can get back. But I’ve got to head out to the site first.”

Chuck eyed the twin lines of crushed plants left by the frontend loader as it proceeded up the trail.

Sanford followed Chuck’s gaze. “Least of my worries. I made the call. No choice. The clouds were too low to bring in a chopper for an aerial lift.”

Chuck said, “The chunk of rock on top of her is pretty big.”

“I’m hoping the loader can handle it. The loader can dig under and we can get the body out that way if we have to.”

Janelle pooched her lips, studying the departing machine. “I think it’ll work.”

Sanford dipped his chin to her. “We’ll know soon enough.” He looked at Chuck and sighed. “As if the contract wasn’t enough.”

“Along with the collapse of the arch itself,” Chuck said, “if it turns out she’s a local—and you have to figure she most likely is, or was—then this’ll be a bigger deal with everyone around here than anything having to do with the contract.”

“In which case I’ll be dealing with two big deals.” The chief ranger set his mouth in a hard line, his mustache hiding his upper lip. He set off across the pavement after the loader. Turning and walking backward for a few steps as he departed, he said, “Don’t go anywhere, either of you. I’ll have plenty to ask you about when I get back.”