Tainted Trail Page 5

  “Well, we both have satellite phones; they’re a must for a geologist,” Rose explained. “We recharge them when we drive to Pendleton. I charged mine going to town on Saturday, and she charged hers coming back. When we were out on Sunday, she forgot to get her phone out of the van, but it’s not there now.”

  “You sure she didn’t take it out and still forget it in camp?” Max asked. Alicia’s memory was almost as bad as Ukiah’s was perfect.

  “When she didn’t turn up at lunchtime, I tried calling her. When I called, I didn’t hear her phone ringing here in camp. It rang a couple of times and then dropped me into her voice mail. I thought it was weird, she should have been able to hear it and answer if she was carrying it. So I started to look for it here in the camp, some place I couldn’t hear it ring.”

  “And you didn’t find it?” Kraynak asked.

  “No.”

  Ukiah gazed about the tent. It was filled with little homey touches that reflected Alicia’s hand. A dreamcatcher hung from the center post, to catch her common nightmares. He shook his head and ducked out of the tent.

  Rose continued with her account of the day. “I tried calling Alicia every half hour. When she didn’t come back by evening, I called the park rangers and then you. I should have called while it was still daylight.”

  “That’s okay. You did fine,” Kraynak soothed. “Do you remember what she was wearing?”

  Rose said that she didn’t remember, but in the last day she had pieced together which of Alicia’s clothes were missing. Hiking boots. Blue jeans with a Celtic-knot design painted down the outside seam. A mottled mauve T-shirt. An oversized flannel button-down shirt, mostly in red. Backpack. Phone. Field journal and compass.

  The conversation turned to the search that had started at dawn yesterday.

  “They asked the same questions that you’re asking,” Rose said. “They seemed pretty organized.”

  All thirty searchers seemed to have moved through the campground, trampling out Alicia’s presence. Ukiah pressed fingers into the various tracks, picking up the dirt and sifting it though his fingertips, sniffing it, and then tasting it, trying to determine when the prints were made and by whom.

  “It’s so weird having you here,” Rose said. “She talked about you guys all the—what’s he doing?”

  “He’s tracking,” Max answered without pause.

  “It looks like he’s eating dirt.”

  “It only looks that way,” Max assured her.

  Ukiah started a spiral search from the heart of the camp. The women had been in Oregon almost three weeks before Alicia had vanished; she had walked around the camp in every pair of her shoes. Ukiah found hundreds of her footprints. It was going to be difficult to tell which was the last set of tracks she had set down. He ranged out to the fringe, to find departing tracks, which were fewer in number.

  Nose almost to the ground, he examined Alicia’s various trails. The sun was rising as he leaned back, stretching.

  Max caught the motion. “How’s it going, Ukiah?”

  “She left the camp the day before yesterday with this trail here,” Ukiah answered, standing. “I’m going to be switching into high gear. You ready?”

  Max consulted his map and compass. “Hmmm, that trail runs kind of parallel to one of the forest roads, keeping about two to five miles from it. You going fast?”

  Ukiah nodded. “It’s a clear trail.”

  “Okay, go ahead, we’ll follow in the four-by-four.”

  He turned to go, then remembered that he unthinkingly promised Indigo a phone call. “Oh, Max, can you call Indigo for me and see how Kittanning’s appointment went?”

  “Sure thing.”

  So he went, at an easy lope he learned from the wolves.

  Over the voice-activated radio, Ukiah caught Max’s side of the phone call to Indigo as he headed out of the campground into the park proper. She kept the conversation short, limiting it to a report that everything went smoothly with Kittanning’s checkup, hopes that they find Alicia quickly, and then a pledge of love to be passed along.

  After that was silence as he tracked Alicia over steep hills, through rugged valleys, and across dirt forest roads. Occasionally he caught the sound of the Blazer as Max drove the forest roads, trying to keep them close together via Ukiah’s GPS tracer.

  Max broke the radio silence after a half an hour with a muttered, “What the hell does he want?”

  “What is it, Max?” Ukiah paused on a rocky spar at the top of a ridge. Trees screened the Blazer from sight. A red light flickered oddly through the green, too bright and quick for brake lights.

  “There’s a police car that just came up behind us and it’s flashing its lights at us,” Max explained.

  “Oh, joy,” Ukiah muttered, and plunged down the next hillside.

  “How are you doing?” Max asked now that the silence was broken.

  “That last part was fairly steep, you nearly had to rock climb, and I found red-flannel fiber on some of the stones. They have her sweat on them.”

  “Good. Can I help you?”

  Ukiah paused on the edge of the stream meandering through the valley, wondering at Max’s last sentence. A third, deep male voice came over the radio, and he realized that the police officer must be standing at Max’s window, speaking into the vehicle so the voice-activated radio could pick it up. Max had spoken to the police officer.

  “Which one of you is Alicia Kraynak’s uncle?” the police officer asked.

  “I am.” Kraynak’s answer sounded slightly distant, as Max’s mike was on his left. “Homicide Detective Raymond Kraynak, City of Pittsburgh Police Department. You found her?”

  “Sorry, no,” the stranger’s voice rumbled, and yet seemed familiar. Over the radio, it was difficult to tell.

  Ukiah jumped over the creek and started up the next hillside. It was even steeper than the last.

  The remote conversation continued, with the policeman asking, “Then you’re the private investigator from Pittsburgh?”

  “I’m Max Bennett, Bennett Detective Agency.” Max’s introduction seemed loud after Kraynak’s. “My partner is tracking Alicia in the next valley over. We’re using a global-positioning tracking device with a geological software interface.”

  There was a grunt from the policeman. “Fancy setup. What’s your range?”

  “About fifty miles, here in the mountains,” Max said.

  “He’s on foot?” the policeman asked.

  Max confirmed this and added, “And moving fast.”

  Another grunt. “Tracking done right is slow work.”

  Ukiah shook his head and scrambled up the last few feet of the steep hillside. A whiff of plastic caught his attention. He sniffed, trying to locate the source. It seemed to come from a deep crack in the stone. He reached down into the rough-edged darkness. His fingertips brushed plastic tainted with Alicia’s presence. The shape and the material suggested a wireless phone. Try as he may, he couldn’t get a grip on the object to pick the item up. “Max?”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “Have Kraynak ring Alicia’s phone.”

  “Ukiah wants you to ring Alicia’s phone,” Max relayed to Kraynak. “What’s up, kid?”

  “I think I found her phone. It’s down in a crack where I can’t reach it.”

  The overture from William Tell chirped out from down between the boulders.

  “That’s it. It’s her phone.” He considered the stone surrounding the crevasse. There was no indication that Alicia ever searched for the dropped phone. “I think she never noticed that she lost it.”

  Max relayed the information to Kraynak.

  “Is she hurt?” Kraynak asked.

  “Did you hear that?” Max asked, meaning Kraynak’s question.

  “There’s no blood sign here.” He continued his climb up the rocks. “And she seemed to make the summit without any problem. In fact, she just scrambled up onto another higher set of rocks, maybe to take a look around.”

&nb
sp; “Ukiah says no,” Max told Kraynak.

  “She’s crossing over the ridge into this next valley. Are you going to be able to follow?”

  There was the rustling of paper. “Yeah, this road swings in that direction. We have to keep on moving to keep in radio range with my partner. Is there a number we can reach you with updates?”

  Ukiah winced at the skewed conversation, needing to think a moment before realizing Max started off talking to him but had switched over to the police officer.

  “I’ll follow along behind,” the policeman stated.

  This time it was Max that muttered, “Oh, joy,” but hopefully after the officer returned to his own car.

  Ukiah ran for another hour, the track still clear. Max and Kraynak talked, but trying to maintain a three-way discussion was maddening, so Ukiah refrained from making comments. Something about the case had triggered the men’s nostalgia, and the conversation covered the hardships of their fifteen-year friendship: the Gulf War, Kraynak’s struggle to quit smoking after his father died of lung cancer, Max’s ordeal to make his Internet startup company a success only to have wealth become meaningless to him, and the harrowing accident that killed Kraynak’s brother. Hinted to, but never spoken about directly, were the death of Max’s wife and his years of near-suicidal depression.

  Ukiah had just gained another ridge, when Max whistled to catch his attention.

  “The road nips in to almost a mile of you, to the west. You want to swing over and pick up food and water?” Max asked.

  “Yes!” Ukiah replied. He had drained his water bottle a long time ago and he was on the verge of starving. “I’m coming in.”

  He swung over to the west edge of the ridge. The rocky hill dropped sharply, nearly a cliff, and then the land leveled out into a small meadow. The Blazer sat pulled off the dirt road. The squad car parked behind Max was marked with UMATILLA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

  Max spotted him on the skyline and whistled. Ukiah waved and came down the hillside in a series of leaps and bounds down the rocks.

  “Shit!” Kraynak’s curse came over the headset. “He’s going to kill himself.”

  Max’s laugh echoed from in front of Ukiah and the radio. “If it makes you nervous, don’t watch him. He’s half mountain goat. I’ve never seen him fall. What do you want, kid, tuna fish or smoked turkey?”

  “Tuna,” Ukiah answered into his microphone, running through the last sparse stand of trees, “but lots of Gatorade first.”

  Max was dropping the tailgate as Ukiah cleared the last trees. The police officer was beside Kraynak and they were watching Ukiah come at the easy wolf lope. Ukiah could smell the tuna sandwich, though, unwrapped on the truck’s roof. It sucked in his attention.

  “I knew you were good, kid,” Kraynak called as Ukiah scrambled down the road’s bank. “But I didn’t know this good. You’ve been running at that speed for the last three hours. How long can you keep it up?”

  Ukiah caught an ice-cold bottle of Gatorade from Max. “I don’t know.”

  “It usually gets dark before he tires out,” Max said, pulling out a second bottle of cold Gatorade while Ukiah drank the first one. “That’s as long as you keep him in liquid and food.”

  Ukiah snatched up the sandwich and tore into it. “This was too long, Max. Get me some food to carry when I pull out, okay?”

  “You want a second sandwich now?”

  Ukiah started to nod his head, and noticed for the first time exactly who stood beside Kraynak. It was Jared Kicking Deer. Sheriff Jared Kicking Deer, according to the nametag on his neatly pressed gray uniform, complete with handcuffs and service revolver. What a wonderful person to have pissed off with you. Ukiah gave a wary nod to his possible relative.

  Sheriff Kicking Deer nodded back, seemingly just as wary.

  Max noticed the exchange and his body stiffened. “Did I miss something?” Max murmured to Ukiah as he handed the second bottle of Gatorade to him.

  “He’s Jesse Kicking Deer’s grandson,” Ukiah quietly explained. “He threw me out of his mother’s house last night.”

  Max glanced at Jared, and turned back to Ukiah, swearing softly. “Sorry, kid, he didn’t give a name, and I didn’t think to read the nametag. What do you think he wants?”

  “The mind boggles.” Ukiah shrugged, unclipped his water bottle, and handed it to Max. “Could be he’s just worried about the missing college student.”

  “Well, it’s a chance to win him over with your charm and beauty.”

  Ukiah laughed and finished the rest of the sandwich. Max handed him back the refilled water bottle and a fanny pack of candy bars, beef jerky, and trail mix.

  “I can’t imagine her having gone much farther on Monday than this,” he announced to them. “She wasn’t moving very quickly in the last valley and actually stopped quite a few times to bang chips off rocks and such like. She ate lunch already, so we’re into travel she did during midday. If she planned to go back to camp, she has to change course soon.”

  “So, she hasn’t started to backtrack?” Kraynak asked.

  Ukiah shook his head. “No. We’ve been swinging east and south for the last hour, so I think she planned to circle back around instead of backtracking.”

  Max pulled the map from the Blazer, and unfolded it onto the tailgate. “Well, if she didn’t come down that ridge this way, she could have taken this spur, which would have landed her near this road here.” He tapped where the darker squiggle of the road nearly touched a stacked series of light squiggles that indicated a very steep hill. “It’s a fairly level hike back to the campground then, at least according to the map.”

  “We’ve had some bad falls from that hill,” Sheriff Kicking Deer stated. “It’s taller, so it’s a vantage point. On the maps, that point looks no steeper than the rest, but it’s actually a cliff. People not familiar with the area often park and try to find their way up and down it.”

  Kraynak studied the map. “Why don’t we drive over while Ukiah takes the high country? We’ll meet at the bottom, here.”

  Max nodded. “Okay. Sounds like a plan. You set, kid?”

  “Set.” Ukiah gave them all a wave. “See you later.”

  As Ukiah started to run, Sheriff Kicking Deer returned to his car and radioed in their plans.

  Ukiah backtracked the mile, scrambling easily back up to the ridge and starting along it. His mind, though, kept returning to Sheriff Kicking Deer. Win him over with charm and beauty? He laughed to himself. How do you convince a person that you’re his ninety-plus great-uncle when you look eighteen? Maybe in the future he could use cryogenic sleep as an excuse, but he disappeared in 1933.

  Reports of alien abductions flourished after the chaos he and the Ontongard caused with the Mars Rover. The NASA Channel faithfully caught and CNN endlessly replayed every moment of the mother ship—from when the cloaking shields dropped to its blinding self-destruction. Later, a hacker group claimed responsibility for the video feed, saying that they swapped the live coverage with doctored footage. Later still, a small group of experts, willing to undergo world ridicule, pointed out evidence why the ship couldn’t have been computer-generated graphics. Despite everything, few people believed in aliens, except those who also believed in government conspiracies.

  No, he couldn’t say aliens had abducted him. He hated the idea of lying.

  Besides, the East Oregonian newspaper article specifically named him the Umatilla Wolf Boy. Maybe the Kicking Deers were expecting an unaging child. Perhaps the true problem was that he looked too old.

  “This isn’t good.” Ukiah squatted at the cliff edge, scanning for the track.

  “What is it?”

  “Can you see me?”

  “No.”

  Ukiah worked his way out onto a narrow outcrop and waved down at the three men. “How about now?”

  “Okay. We see you. What’s up?”

  “The track stops here. I think she fell.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Ukiah
leaned carefully out, over the ledge, to look down at the jumble of rocks. “Can you work over until you’re under me and see if she’s—”

  Something hit him on the right side of the chest, just over his heart. As it slammed him around in a half spin, he heard a loud crack echoing across the valley. Even as he realized that he had been hit by a bullet, and that he was falling over the outcrop’s edge, another struck him hard.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Umatilla National Park, Umatilla County, Oregon

  Wednesday, August 25, 2004

  “Ukiah! Ukiah!” Max scrambled over the rocks to him.

  So he was on the ground. Ukiah had hit an outcrop of rock coming down, his arm taking the brunt of the fall in an explosion of pain. He fell again, a second hard hit, this time in the stomach, and then tumbled a few more feet. He expected a third drop through free fall, but apparently he had run out of cliff. Ukiah slowly rolled over, moaning in pain as he did. “Somebody shot me, Max.”

  “I know.” Max unzipped Ukiah’s windbreaker.

  “Don’t let him shoot you!” Ukiah pushed at Max, trying to get him to take cover.

  “We’re fairly well-screened by rocks here,” Max said. “I’ve got my vest on too. Now, lie still.”

  “Oh, I’m not going anywhere.” Ukiah quit struggling and let Max undo his body armor.

  Sheriff Kicking Deer joined them, ducking down behind the rocks, talking fast and low on his radio. “Officer needs backup, shots fired. I’ve got a shooter with a high-powered rifle that just shot the damn tracker. I’m going to need an EMS crew at the foot of Slide Hill. I need backup. Get hold of the state police and tell them we have a sniper.”

  Kraynak crouched beside Max. “How bad is he?”

  “The vest took the bullets,” Max muttered, eyeing Ukiah’s bared chest. “I think the fall damage is going to be the worse.” He leaned up to brush blood-soaked hair back from Ukiah’s forehead and scowled at the wound he located. “There’s where the blood is coming from.”

  “I think I broke my right arm.” Ukiah considered the rest of his body. “I wrenched my left leg somehow—maybe the hip is broken or maybe it’s the knee. The whole damn thing hurts. And my stomach is killing me.”