Canyon Sacrifice (17 page)

Chuck was making his way up the trail under his own power by the time he and the student ranger, Hansen, reached Hermit's
Rest an hour and a half later. The sun was low in the sky and the trailhead was busy with backpackers preparing to descend into the canyon as the day gave way to evening. It was 6:40. The frequency of shuttle buses slowed from every thirty minutes to every hour as the end of the day approached. The next shuttle wasn't due until 7:30. He hadn't checked in with the caller or Janelle since noon.

Hansen saw Chuck checking his watch. “I'm on my way back to the village,” he said, pointing at a white, park-service pickup truck parked at the far side of the shuttle turnaround. “Want a lift?”

“Another lift, you mean?”

As Hansen drove, Chuck chugged water from a gallon jug stored in the passenger compartment of the pickup. He was rehydrated by the time he climbed out of the truck at the campground entrance. The cut on his palm burned and the bruises on his head, elbows, and shins throbbed, but the nausea and lightheadedness that had plagued him in the canyon were gone.

The campground was shadowed with the onset of evening. He headed across it, angling between sites where families were gathered at picnic tables preparing dinner. The smell of grilled hamburger filled the air.

Ahead, Enrique's shiny blue pickup, two ranger patrol sedans, and several private cars were parked next to Janelle's mini-SUV and Clarence's hatchback in front of the campsite. A crowd of twenty or so people stood around the picnic table at the center of the site, shaded from the last of the day's light by the campground's tall ponderosas.

Chuck's legs wobbled beneath him. He needed food and rest. The last thing he wanted was to face Janelle in front of all these people. But what other option did he have?

Heads swiveled his direction as he got closer. The group around the table was made up primarily of people he didn't
know, middle-aged men and women—recruits, presumably, from the alert Janelle had posted online. In their plaid shirts, button-up blouses, high-waisted shorts, and sensible walking shoes, they clearly were tourists, their faces lined with concern, their eyes wide at Chuck's banged-up appearance. Enrique stood on the far side of the table. He wore a work shirt and jeans. Yolanda, wearing a floral-print blouse and dark slacks, stood in front of her husband. Donald was there, talking on his cell phone. Rachel was there, too. Both were in uniform.

Chuck recognized two women, Dolores and Amelia, Janelle's best friends from Albuquerque, huddled together at the edge of the group. Like Janelle, they were in their late twenties. Along with Enrique, Yolanda, and Clarence, the two were key pillars in Janelle's Albuquerque support network. Dolores was short and, if such a thing was possible, skinnier than Janelle. She wore black, form-fitting yoga pants that flared at the calf above her high-heeled leather sandals. Her sleeveless yellow shirt hugged her tiny breasts and toothpick-thin torso. Her makeup was flawless, her bob-length hair flipped and styled.

Amelia was as big and round as Dolores was short and skinny. Below her midriff blouse, Amelia's enormous waistline muffin-topped over a pair of wide, white-denim shorts. Her shiny black hair, teased and sprayed, rose several inches from her forehead before sweeping backward, helmet-like, to her shoulders.

Chuck wasn't surprised by the pair's arrival. But that didn't mean he was happy to see them. Janelle, Dolores, and Amelia had been tight since their school days in Albuquerque's South Valley, where Dolores and Amelia still lived. Chuck knew Janelle's friends had supported her throughout her trials with Miguel and in her years of single-motherhood since. But as Chuck and Janelle grew closer, Janelle confided that Dolores and Amelia had expressed plenty of concerns about him, questioning
his age, his long-established bachelorhood, his lack of family ties, and the fact that his job kept him on the road so much of the time.

Janelle's friends scowled at Chuck from across the table. Clearly, they held him responsible for Carmelita's disappearance.

Janelle detached herself from the group and ran to him. He tensed, but she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close.

“We—” she said, her voice catching. “We were afraid you were—”

He loosened her grip and held her out from him. “I'm sorry I didn't call. The phone . . .”

Janelle raised her fingers to his face. She touched his scraped chin, then the hard knot on his forehead. “They've been calling here instead,” she said, lowering her hand. “That voice.” She shuddered. “Rachel said there was no way you could survive down there on a day like this.”

“She was almost right.” Chuck checked out the group gathered around the table in the waning light. All eyes were on the two of them. He looked back at Janelle. “He still has Carmelita?”

She nodded, her face drawn.

“What's he been telling you?”

“To wait and see if you show,” she said. “If not, then Plan B, whatever that is.”

“What's Plan A?”

“They haven't said.”

“They?”

“He. She. I don't know.”

“It's Miguel. It has to be.”

“Should be.”

“It's computerized,” Chuck insisted. “His voice.”

“There's something about it, though. It doesn't sound like him. His cadence or something.”

Chuck thought of the twin cuts on his neck. “You think it could be a woman?”

“It just doesn't sound like Miguel, that's all.”

“And these people?” Chuck said of the group. “From your posting?”

Janelle shrugged. “They know she's not just missing, that there's more to it than that. It's been too long. Donald's the only one who knows the whole story. He figured it out pretty quick while he was showing us around. He forwarded my Facebook posting to some sort of online bulletin board they've got here at the canyon. He's a talker. Likes his phone. Knows how to get things out of people.” She squeezed a strand of her hair tightly between her fingers. “He's agreed not to tell the whole story to anyone else—except this Rachel of yours.”

Chuck ignored the look Janelle directed at him. “They haven't told any other rangers?”

“They say they haven't. I've explained to them about the note. But they're saying they can't wait much longer. Donald already has people looking everywhere for us. Maids, cooks, janitors. Rachel's helping him run dispatch. She knows what she's doing, I'll give her that much.” Janelle gave Chuck another look, this time more accepting.

“Sounds like you've got a lot going on.”

She shoved the strand of hair behind her ear and drew herself up. “I know you said we shouldn't do anything. But Donald and Rachel insisted.”

Chuck dipped his head. “You're right. They're right.” He pointed at his daypack, still on his back. “The good news is I've got what he wants. I just need to check in with him.” Then he frowned. It wasn't going to be that simple, was it?

All day he'd been reassured by the belief Carmelita was safe, at least relatively so, with her father. But Janelle had just said the computerized voice might not be Miguel's after all. Chuck
reached behind him and rested his hand on the bottom of his pack where the necklaces were stowed. How was it that a small-time drug dealer from Albuquerque knew so much about Chuck's discovery in the canyon, and about the canyon's trail system, too? The truth was, Miguel couldn't know. Not on his own. Which meant someone else had to be involved, either working with Miguel, or instead of him, someone who knew the canyon well.

“What happens if somebody sees something?” Chuck asked.

“There have already been, like, ten reports. They've been sending people to check, but nothing has panned out.”

“You haven't put it on the Nightly News yet?”

The corners of Janelle's eyes tightened. “I know Miguel. We squeeze him, he might call the whole thing off. He likes his low profile.”

“You just said you don't think it's him on the phone.”

Her face collapsed. “I just want my little girl back,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

Unable to summon a reassuring reply, Chuck turned Janelle by the elbow and they walked to the group gathered around the picnic table. The group parted to let them approach the head of the table. He felt Rachel's eyes on him. Across the table from her, Enrique stood stiffly behind Yolanda, his gelled hair combed across his high forehead. “
M'hijo
,” he implored Chuck, his salt-and-pepper mustache trembling. “Anything?”

“We're getting there, Enrique.”

“Getting there?”

“We pay, they let her go.”

Enrique uttered a string of Spanish curses, echoing Clarence's morning outburst.

Chuck raised a hand and looked around the group. “We'll do what they say. No police. Not until we're in the clear. It won't be long now. Everybody understands that, right?”

Chuck glanced at Donald, now off the phone. Janelle was right about his being a talker. The question was whether Donald was capable of keeping things under wraps long enough for Chuck to trade the necklaces for Carmelita, assuming it wasn't too late already.

“We give them what they want and they give us Carm,” Chuck continued. “Then everyone goes home.”

Dolores spoke up, an edge to her voice. “Jan says what they really want is you.”

Chuck put a hand to his banged-up chin. “They almost got me already.”

“Don't you think you should let the rangers handle this?”

“I'm not sure what—” Chuck began, but Dolores cut him off.

“You've been at this all day, right? And you've gotten nowhere so far.”

Janelle raised a hand to quiet her friend. “We should—” She stopped when her phone chimed. She fished it out of her pocket, checked it, and held it out to Chuck, her eyes pleading.

“Are you there?” came the computerized voice.

“It's me,” Chuck said, walking away from the group. “Chuck.”

“About time.” A pause. “What's with your phone? You haven't been answering.”

Would the caller admit to knowing Chuck's phone was still deep in the canyon? Or was his phone programmed in such a way that it gave its location only when he used it to make a call? “My battery,” he said. “I told you.”

“And this online crap. Facebook, chat rooms.”

“That wasn't me. Besides, your note said no cops.”

“So you decided to tell the whole world instead.”

“I told you, it wasn't me. And no cops have been told.”

There was a lengthy silence. Chuck detected what sounded like a sigh of frustration. Then, “Use the phone you've got now. You're back in camp?” The question was deductive, lacking the
assurance with which the caller had pronounced Chuck's location earlier in the day.

Good, Chuck said to himself. There was still a little something the kidnapper wasn't sure of.

“You have what you were sent for?” the voice continued when Chuck didn't respond.

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” In spite of the computerization, the sudden animation in the caller's voice was unmistakable. “Okay. Ten o'clock. Just you, nobody else. At the BIC.”

The caller pronounced the abbreviation for the Backcountry Information Center as a word,
Bic
, with a hard c, as did all park personnel.

E
IGHTEEN

7:30 p.m.

“She's okay,” Chuck reported to the group. “Long as we keep this thing to ourselves. We're getting close.”

Yolanda reached behind her for Enrique. He squeezed her shoulder. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

Chuck knew he couldn't get away with simply telling those gathered at the table to do nothing. Besides, there was the outside chance they could prove valuable in advance of the exchange. “We fan out, do some looking.”

Janelle clucked in disapproval. “We tried that this morning.”

“Not with twenty of us spread all over the place.” Chuck looked her in the eye. “You're the one who wants to put the pliers to him. This is our chance.”

“Chuck's right,” Rachel said to Janelle. “The phone call points to the girl still being somewhere nearby. They've got to be getting nervous by now.” She turned to Chuck. “You're thinking group text, aren't you?”

“That's exactly what I'm thinking.”

The first adventure race Chuck had attended with Rachel, deep in Washington's coastal rainforest, had been a disaster. Poor trail directions led numerous racers to become lost along the backcountry route. One racer fell to his death from a cliff after straying from the course during the second, rain-drenched night of the competition. In the aftermath of the tragedy, officials determined the primary problem had been lack of trail marshals along the racecourse. But it wasn't feasible to station dozens of marshals along the lengthy courses. Instead, the officials instituted a new rule that essentially turned all competing racers into course marshals. Racers carried GPS-capable cell phones during all competitions and checked in with race marshals by text at
regular intervals throughout each race, making use of the group's growing body of knowledge to keep all racers on course. Rachel likened the process to flying birds. In the same way one bird's movement rippled instantly through the flock and enabled them to change direction as one, so too did the flow of group texts enhance the ability of all competitors to stay on course throughout their contests.