Long Road to Mercy Read online

  “It’s miles from the ranch,” suggested Rice.

  “There’s a park ranger station down here,” noted Pine.

  “It’s still a long way away, and the ranger on duty didn’t hear or see anything.”

  “Okay, but there had to be plenty of hikers and boaters at the Bright Angel Campground next to Phantom Ranch. The Ranch can’t accommodate all of them, and the rest go to Bright Angel for the most part. And while I know it’s ‘a long way away,’ the mule had to get from the Ranch corral to here.”

  Lambert said, “There were lots of people there. But no one we talked to saw or heard anything.”

  She said, “More to the point, who has the balls to lean under a mule and start slicing into its belly?”

  Brennan said, “Right. And my two cents? You gut a mule you’re going to hear it in the next county.”

  Pine eyed the saddle. “Okay, so who and where is the rider?”

  “Benjamin Priest,” said Rice. “No sign of him.”

  Brennan took up the thread. “He came down yesterday. Part of a crew of ten.”

  “That’s your limit, right?” said Pine.

  “Yeah. We bring two groups each day. We were in the first group.”

  “So, he rode down here and then what?”

  “We stopped overnight at Phantom. We were going to head out this morning after breakfast. Over the Black Bridge and back up to the South Rim. Just like normal.”

  “It’s about five and a half hours down and close to the same back up?” said Pine.

  “Just about, yeah,” agreed Brennan.

  Pine surveyed the area. It was over eighty degrees on the canyon floor and twenty degrees cooler on the South Rim. She could feel the sweat collecting on her face and armpits and around the small of her back.

  “When was it noticed that Priest was missing?”

  Rice said, “This morning when folks came to the dining hall for breakfast.”

  “Where was Priest staying? In one of the dorms or a cabin?”

  Brennan said, “One of the cabins.”

  “Tell me about last night.”

  Brennan said, “They all had dinner in the dining hall. Some folks played cards, wrote postcards. Some sat on boulders and cooled their feet in the creek. Typical stuff. Then everyone went off to their sleeping quarters, including Priest.”

  “When was the last time anyone saw him?”

  Rice answered, “Best as we can tell, around nine last night.”

  “But no one actually saw him get in his bunk or leave the cabin later?”

  “No.”

  “So how did Sallie Belle get here?” she asked, looking at Brennan.

  “At first I just thought she had gotten out somehow. Then I noticed her saddle and bridle were missing. Someone had to put them on her.”

  She continued to watch Brennan. “What were you thinking when the mule was missing?”

  “Well, I thought maybe somebody had decided to go off on a joyride before breakfast.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen folks do some crazy shit down here.”

  “Describe Priest.”

  “Late forties, early fifties. About five feet eight. Around one eighty.”

  “White? Black?”

  “White. Dark hair.”

  “Good shape?”

  “He was thick. But not really overweight. No marathon runner, though.”

  “You have a two-hundred-pound limit for mule riders?”

  Brennan nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Some, coming down.”

  “Seem nervous?”

  “He looked a little green a few times. Mules have fused spines and they walk along the outside of the trail. So their torsos and, along with them, the riders, are sometimes going to be over the edge. It can be unnerving at first. But he soldiered on.”

  She looked at Lambert. “What do you have on him?”

  Lambert took out a notebook and unclipped the cover. “He’s from DC. Works at one of those Beltway government contractors. Capricorn Consultants.”

  “Family?”

  “Not married, no children. Has a brother who lives in Maryland. Parents are deceased.”

  “So you’ve notified him?”

  “He was listed as the emergency contact on Priest’s paperwork. We let him know that his brother is missing.”

  “I’ll need his contact info.”

  “I’ll email it to you.”

  “How did his brother sound?”

  Rice answered. “Worried. He wanted to know if he should fly out. I told him to sit tight. Most people who go missing do turn up okay.”

  “But some don’t,” replied Pine. “Where’s his stuff?”

  Lambert said, “Gone. Must’ve taken it with him.”

  Rice said, “His brother phoned Priest after I talked to him. Also tried his email. He called me back and told me there was nothing. No response.”

  “Social media activity?”

  “I didn’t think to ask about that,” said Rice. “I can follow up.”

  “How’d he get here? Car? Bus?”

  “I heard him say he came by the train,” volunteered Brennan.

  “Where was he staying?”

  Rice said, “We checked at El Tovar, Bright Angel, Thunderbird, and the rest of the possible places. He wasn’t booked at any of them.”

  “He had to stay somewhere.”

  “It could have been at one of the campgrounds, either inside the park or nearby,” noted Lambert.

  “Okay, he took the train up here. But if he came from DC he probably first flew into Sky Harbor. He might have stayed somewhere there until he went to Williams, Arizona. That’s where the train leaves from, right?”

  Lambert nodded. “There’s a hotel at the train depot. He might have stayed there.”

  “Have you made a search down here?”

  “We covered as much ground as we could. No trace so far. And we’re losing the light.”

  Pine took all this in. In the distance came the sharp bark of a coyote followed by the echoing rattle of a snake. There might be a standoff going on out there between predators as the lights of nature grew dim, thought Pine. The muscular walls of the canyon held a complex series of fragile ecosystems. It was the human factor that had intruded here. Nature always seemed to get on all right until people showed up.

  She turned her head to the left, where a long way away lay Lake Mead near Arizona’s border with Nevada. To the right, and also a great distance away, was Lake Powell in Utah. In between these two bodies of water sat the gargantuan Canyon, a deep gash on the surface of Arizona, visible not only from an airliner at thirty-five thousand feet, but also from outer space.

  “We’ll need to bring in an organized search team tomorrow and go grid by grid,” said Pine. “As far as possible. What about the other mule riders with Priest? And the campers?”

  Lambert said, “They all headed out. Some before we even knew Priest was missing.”

  “I’ll still need all their names and contact info,” said Pine. “And let’s hope if something did happen to Priest that we didn’t let whoever did it hike or ride a mule or raft it out of here.”

  Lambert looked uncomfortable with this and quickly glanced at his fellow ranger.

  “Anybody keep watch over the mules during the night?” Pine asked.

  Brennan shook his head. “I checked on them around eleven last night. Everything was fine. We got some coyotes and mountain lions down here, but they’re not going after a pack of mules in an enclosure. They’d get the shit stomped out of them.”

  “Right, like someone would have when they gutted her,” said Pine pointedly, looking at the dead Sallie Belle. “So at least at eleven, Sallie Belle was alive. The ranger on duty didn’t hear anything. What’s his name?”

  “Sam Kettler.”

  “How long’s he been with NPS?”

  “Five years. Two here at the Canyon. He’s a good guy. Exmilitary.”

  �
��I’ll need to talk to him,” said Pine as she mentally catalogued all she had to do. Then her gaze ran over the dead animal. Something was not making sense.

  “Why is the bleed-out above the mule’s withers? It should be below the belly.”

  She looked up at the men, who stared blankly back at her.

  “The mule’s been moved,” Pine said. “Help me turn her.”

  They each grabbed a leg and maneuvered the dead animal onto her other side.

  There, carved on the mule’s hide, were two letters: j and k.

  “What the hell does that mean?” said Lambert.

  What the hell does that mean? thought Pine.

  CHAPTER

  4

  This is Sam Kettler,” said Colson Lambert.

  Pine had been standing on the front porch of the Phantom Ranch dining hall when Lambert had approached with another man dressed in a ranger uniform.

  “He was on duty when Priest and the mule went missing,” Lambert added.

  Pine took Kettler in with one efficient sweep.

  He was nearly six two, his forearms tanned and heavily muscled. He took off his hat to wipe sweat from his forehead, revealing close-cropped, light blond hair. He looked about her age. His eyes were light gray. He was an attractive man, she thought, the muscles of his lean jaw clenching and unclenching as he stood there.

  “Colson said you didn’t hear anything?”

  Kettler shook his head. “It was a pretty quiet night after the campers went to bed. I made rounds, did some paperwork, checked on a trash can that someone didn’t secure properly. Critters got inside and made a mess. Shooed them away. Other than that it was pretty routine.”

  “Colson’s filled you in?”

  Kettler shifted his feet. “A rider missing and a mule cut up.” He grimaced. “Sick stuff.”

  Pine said, “My basic questions are, why take out the mule, and why kill it? Now, we don’t know for sure that Priest did any of that. Someone else could have done it, and maybe Priest stumbled onto it and the person had to shut him up.”

  “That’s true,” conceded Lambert.

  Pine shook her head. Her gut was telling her that this theory was not true. Too many coincidences. Too many things that had to go both right and wrong for it to happen.

  Life was not the movies, or books. Sometimes the simplest answer was the right one.

  She flicked a glance at Kettler. “Think again. You see anything out of the ordinary?”

  He shook his head. “If I had, I would have reported it.”

  “No sounds of a mule being ridden away?”

  “I’m pretty sure I would have heard that. What time do you think it happened?”

  “Not sure. After eleven, certainly.”

  “My rounds carried me pretty far from the corral. If the mule was taken out then, I wouldn’t have heard it necessarily.”

  “Okay, you think of anything else, let me know.”

  “Will do. Good luck.”

  He walked off at a good pace, covering the ground easily and quickly. She noted the bulge of his shoulders as his shirt pulled tight against them.

  “What now?” asked Colson, drawing her attention away from the departing Kettler.

  “Considering we’re going to be searching the Canyon starting early tomorrow morning, I’m going to have some dinner and go to bed.”

  Hours later Pine was staring up at the ceiling of a ten-by-ten spare room at Phantom Ranch. The staff had found a mattress for her and a sheet and a lumpy pillow. This was her home for the night. There was no hardship in this: She had spent much of her life staring up at ceilings in places that did not belong to her.

  Phantom Ranch was located in an area that had originally been called Roosevelt Camp, after President Theodore Roosevelt. He’d stayed there in 1913, after declaring the Grand Canyon a national monument. Pine had also learned that it had been Roosevelt who’d ordered the Havasupai Indian tribe to leave the area so that the park could be constructed, essentially evicting them from their home. The defiant Havasupai had taken twenty-five years to do so, long after Roosevelt’s death.

  Pine didn’t blame them.

  The current Phantom Ranch had been designed and named by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the famed Canyon architect. It had been built in 1922 and was shaded by yellow cottonwood trees and sycamore trees, and had dirt paths crisscrossing throughout. It was a little oasis down at the inner gorge of the Canyon. In the little canteen was a mail pouch for visitors to put their postcards in. The mule train would take it up the following day. The postcards were all stamped with: “Mailed by Mule from the bottom of the Grand Canyon.” What could be cooler than that in a world of smartphones and devices named Alexa that ruled your life?

  She had some changes of clothes and other necessities that she always kept in her truck, along with her investigative duffel. These she had transferred onto the chopper that had carried her down to the Canyon floor. Out here, there weren’t FBI forensics teams just waiting to go in and “CSI” any crime scene that needed parsing. FBI special agents stationed at small RAs pretty much did it all.

  And she was the FBI’s point person for the Grand Canyon. So, right now, Pine was a cavalry of one. And that was just fine with her.

  The current hikers and mule riders were all in their beds in either the dorms or the slant-roofed rustic cabins. Pine had eaten with them in the large dining hall at a long table with wooden-back chairs on the floor and old, dark ceiling beams above. No one knew who she was, and she volunteered no information about herself or why she was there.

  Pine wasn’t into small talk; she much preferred to listen to other people. You learned something that way.

  At dinner, she’d opted for the stew and cornbread and three glasses of water. Hydration was important down here. She’d spoken again with Lambert and Brennan before hitting the sack. Now it was nearly one a.m., and outside the thermometer still hovered near eighty, making the room close and warm. She’d opened the window to let some air in and had stripped down to her underwear, her two pistols within easy reach.

  She had no idea where Benjamin Priest might be. He could have hiked out of the canyon by now, but surely someone would have seen him. His description had been given out to everyone by the rangers. It had been posted on NPS’s website. And if he had killed and carved those letters on Sallie Belle for some inexplicable reason, he would be held accountable.

  She had written up her case notes and emailed her superiors the details, sending along the list and contact information of the hikers, rafters, and mule riders that she had gotten from the Park Police. These would be fanned out to agency offices across the country, so that follow-up could be done. The Flagstaff office had also been notified and had advised her to keep them abreast of developments.

  There was nothing more to do, really, until morning.

  She listened to the sharp wind outside, and the sounds of flowing water from nearby Bright Angel Creek.

  They had posted two sentries by the carcass. Otherwise, poor Sallie Belle would probably be picked clean by nocturnal predators. Pine opened her eyes as the Grand Canyon and the dead mule were pushed aside for the time being in her thoughts.

  In their place emerged Daniel James Tor.

  In some ways Pine had waited nearly her entire life to confront the man she believed was responsible for her sister’s disappearance.

  Why twenty-nine years?

  Six months ago, Pine had only a vague memory of the man who had entered their bedroom nearly thirty years before. Doctors had called it many things, but it boiled down to amnesia brought on by her youth and the traumatic circumstances of the event. For Pine’s own well-being, her mind wouldn’t let her remember. Not as a child, and apparently not as an adult, either.

  Her mother had found her unconscious and bleeding in her bed early the next morning, the tape still over her mouth. An ambulance had been called. She had been taken to the hospital. They feared for her life numerous times during a series of major operations. Eve
ntually, her skull had healed; there had been no permanent damage done to her brain. Thus, she had eventually gone home from the hospital, the only child now left in the Pine household.

  She had been of little help to the police. And by the time she arrived home, the case had grown cold.

  Pine had gone on with her life. Her parents had divorced, principally because of what had happened that night. Both only in their midtwenties, they had been drunk and high and had never heard an intruder come into their home, eventually falling asleep while one daughter lay grievously injured and the other was spirited away by the nighttime invader. They each blamed the other for that.

  And, in addition to that, the primary suspects had been her parents. One cop in particular thought that Pine’s father, drugged out and stoned, had gone into his daughters’ room and taken Mercy, killing her and disposing of her body somewhere.

  And though both her mother and father had passed a polygraph and Pine had said that her father wasn’t the man who had come into the room that night, the police really hadn’t believed her. The town quickly turned against the Pines and they’d had to move.

  After the divorce, Pine had lived with her mother, enduring an existence forever changed by Mercy’s disappearance.

  As Pine had grown older, her life had seemed aimless, her ambitions nonexistent. She felt no purpose in anything. It seemed her only goal was to simply underachieve at everything. She had already started drinking and smoking weed. Her grades were for shit. She got into fights, suffered detentions, and got busted by the cops for underage drinking. On numerous occasions, she’d even shoplifted stuff. She didn’t care about anyone or anything, including herself.

  Then she had gone to a county fair and, on a whim, had decided to have her fortune told. The woman in the little tent had been dressed up with a turban and veils and colorful robes. Pine had remembered smirking at all this, certain it was a sham.

  Then the woman had taken hold of her hand and looked down at her palm. But her gaze had almost immediately returned to Pine’s face.

  The woman’s features exhibited confusion.

  “What?” Pine had asked in a disinterested tone.