Cold Fear (24 page)

Falling. “NOOOOOOO!” Her
screams rising to the heavens as she plummets.

“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

She cannot breathe, cannot
think. Horror is hammering her senses. Pounding.

Laughing. Hood is laughing.

“Guess she can’t walk on air
and she can’t fly. No better than anybody.”

His brown teeth turn to her.

“How about you, big sister?”

She scurries up the ledge,
sobbing, gasping; his laughter chases her as she runs and runs and runs from
the monster.

Running all of her life.

Running from her sister’s
falling eyes, the death brush of her little hand stained with mountain flowers
and the powder of butterfly wings. The last touch, the last look of horror.
“Watch over your little sister.”

“I’m not scared anymore, Lee.”

Running all of her life.

Free-falling from the horror that destroyed her family;
now feeling a measure of comfort from an FBI agent investigating the suspected
homicide of her daughter.

THIRTY-NINE

Paige and Kobee
ran for high
country, scrambling along treacherous ridges, ledges. Dipping into forests only
to gain elevation or traverse a difficult section.

It was the only way to stay ahead of the thing chasing
them. The only tactic keeping her alive. She continued moving as fast as she
could for much of the day. The grunting thing never emerged. She stopped to
examine Kobee’s wound. Did the thing do that? She tore a strip from a shirt in
her pack, bandaging him with it. Far off, she heard the helicopters. At times
she waved, but they always missed her. Paige forced herself to keep moving.

Oh God, I am so hungry.

So afraid.

Please help me! Somebody!

When Paige stopped to eat one of her granola bars, she
began crying and could not stop.

Does it hurt to die?

Paige whispered weakly. “Mommy, please help me.”

Kobee licked her salty tears. She shared some of her
food with him.

“Don’t worry. I’ll look after you, puppy.”

Paige moved on, but later as the sun began dropping,
fatigue, exposure, and fear continued taking their toll.

Got to keep moving. Climb higher and maybe they’ll
find me.

She believed it was safer at higher levels.

It gave her the advantage of distance to see what might
be ahead, waiting for her, or behind, gaining on her.

As dusk approached, Paige sensed that it was going to
rain again. It was clouding up, getting colder. She began thinking of searching
or trying to build a shelter as she continued ascending a rocky region.

Earlier in the day, she frequently spotted deer and big
horn sheep. It gave her comfort seeing harmless forms of life keeping her
company.

But as she worked her way up the harsh slopes of this
region deep in the Devil’s Grasp, the deer and sheep became scarce.

Wonder where they all went.

The few she did spot seemed to be moving downward in the
opposite direction of her ascension.

Why?

Finally, with little light remaining, Paige chose a spot
atop jagged zone of high cliffs, which was dotted with forests. The ledges
overlooked a sweeping valley from several hundred feet up.

Paige began building a lean-to shelter, using some
spruce boughs against a large fallen tree. She used some as a floor, to soften
the hard, rocky ground. She crawled in, hugging Kobee for comfort and warmth.
Meanwhile, hunger and exhaustion battled within her.

Thoughts of a huge pizza with ham, tons of cheese, spicy
sauce, pineapples, taunted her. As the night neared, she slipped into sleep.

A large branch cracked.

What is that?

Paige was fully alert. Pulse racing with fear.

A horrible, foul smell filled her nostrils.

It was back!

Kobee whimpered softly.

“Shhh.”

Like her first night.

Ohgodpleasehelpme!

Snorting. She heard guttural snorting. Then a woofing,
popping sound. More branches snapping.

It was so close. She heard paw pads, slapping on rock;
claws, scraping near her. Panting. Growling.

It brushed by her in the twilight.

A massive wall of fur, stinking fur, matted with
excrement.

A bear. A giant bear. So close she could touch it.

Paige went numb.

She was going to die.

She prayed.
Mommy. Daddy.

A massive claw swept the branches away; fur brushed
against her, Paige shut her eyes. The second swat sent her hurling across the
ledge top, rolling like a rag doll toward a yawning crevasse.

Paige opened her mouth to scream, hearing the beast
charging and snarling. Its claws scratched across the rock, driving an
unstoppable, unconquerable, carnivorous force as old as time toward her.

Mommy, Daddy, please save me…. Please, oh please,
don’t let it hurt!

FORTY

In the
pre-dawn light deep in Search
Sector 23, a vast slope of lodgepole forest blistered by rock cliffs and fissures,
excitement awakened Lola.

The three-year-old Belgian shepherd’s wagging tail was
brushing the interior of the green nylon pup tent as she worked to rouse Todd
Taylor, her nineteen-year-old handler. Nuzzling, panting and licking his ear to
no avail. Taylor groaned, pulling his goose-down sleeping bag over his head. He
was exhausted. Lola persisted.

“Just a few more minutes, girl.”

Taylor
pulled her into the warm
sleeping bag with him and listened to her heartbeat. It was racing, stirring
him to the sudden realization she had detected something.

“OK, OK. Take it easy.”

He sat up, shivering, in the frigid morning air. He
quickly pulled a sweatshirt over his T-shirt, then whipped on his fluorescent
yellow windbreaker, which bore the words TALON COUNTY SEARCH AND RESCUE, COLORADO. The volunteer group was one of the first out-of-state agencies to arrive. Taylor,
a college freshman from Boulder, was studying to be a paramedic. Lola was
regarded by SAR people across America as one of the best scent-trackers in the
field.

“Coffee,” Taylor moaned, pouring a cup from his thermos.

Sipping it cleared his drowsiness. He faced the dreadful
fact it had rained again in the night.
Cripes.
Theirs was one of the
most remote eastern search zones, and between sunrise and sundown yesterday,
they grid-swept it twice. Taylor kneaded Lola’s neck. He never ceased to marvel
at the ability of tracking dogs to locate people, or traces of them.

Humans constantly give off streams of scents that flow
into the air like vaporous clouds, emissions originating from the bacteria in
the millions of cells in hair, skin, blood, urine, sweat, saliva, which the
body replaces each second. The process produces a distinct human odor that
trained scent dogs like Lola can detect. But Taylor knew the success of the
so-called probability of detection all depended on scores of variables, like
the dog’s health, wind conditions, time of day, air quality and density.

Taylor
hustled, pulling on his
jeans and boots. Lola had picked up something and would bolt the instant he
opened the tent. But he had to take care of business fast; afterward, they
would go.

“You stay, girl! Sit!”

Lola yelped, but sat. Her tail wagged her impatience as Taylor crawled out to relieve himself by a tree. Quickly, he slipped on his lighter pack,
affixed a fresh battery to his radio, clamped a peanut butter and strawberry
jam sandwich in his mouth, gave Lola a dog biscuit, opened the tent.

“Go find it, girl.”

Lola yelped, leading Taylor at a trot deep through the
forest they had gridded early yesterday. He knew they were skirting the edge of
a grizzly’s feeding zone. He double-checked his pack for his bear spray and
bell.

During a search for a lost woman in the Rockies in Colorado, he had startled a sow. Miraculously, he backed away without a scratch, although
he trembled uncontrollably for the rest of the day. The next morning, he and
Lola found the woman, or what was left of her. The grizzly had disemboweled
her. One of her arms was missing. The woman, a tourist from Germany, was the mother of a little boy and little girl. Taylor cried that night. Rangers
tracked and killed the bear. Lola was now moving faster, leading him out of the
forest to the rocky edge.

“Whoa!”

The ledge was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, a
shocker to come upon without warning from the forest.

“Dead end, girl.”

Lola yipped back. Panting, assuming her posture that
said,
This is it, Todd. I’ve found it
. Then she sneezed. Taylor surveyed the rocky stretch of ledge, beautiful against the brilliant, rising sun.

“But there’s nothing here.”

Lola barked, giving an indication it was somewhere along
the rugged cliff top.

“Hey, careful!”

The entire ledge was fissured with crevasses, some no
wider than six inches, some a foot or two. But they were deep, plunging
treacherously into darkness. Lola was panting, tail wagging at one. At the
surface, it ran about twenty feet from the edge into the forest, a gash in the
rock maybe twenty inches wide that descended into a dark eternity.

Lola stood steadfast at one point along the crevasse and
yelped as Taylor realized its mouth was big enough to swallow a child. He
dropped to his knees next to his dog.

“Hello!” Taylor called into the crevasse.

Silence.

For the next three minutes, he called, lying flat on the
rock, listening for the faintest sound of life. Nothing. Suddenly, Taylor’s blood turned cold. Nearly touching his nose were a few threads of fabric, like
something torn from a shirt. Next to it, quivering in the wind, a few strands
of hair. Some blood droplets. Taylor reached for his radio.

The FBI evidence team had trouble finding a safe place
to put down their helicopter. The winds at the altitude of Sector 23 were
rocking the aircraft. Eventually, they found a spot some two hundred yards from
Taylor’s detect point and humped it in.

“Something’s down there,” Taylor said. “Lola’s going
nuts up here.”

“You hear anything?” an agent asked Taylor.

“Nothing.”

Powerful flashlights were aimed down the hole; long
aluminum poles were extended, prodding the depths for any indication of life.
Nothing.

More experts arrived within minutes.

SAR people worked one side of the opening with the aim
of rescuing a victim, while FBI technicians meticulously studied the evidence
at the surface. Using tweezers and a powerful magnifying glass, a technician
was confident the strands of hair were similar to Paige Baker’s. They began
tapping at the rock to remove blood droplets. Preliminary on-scene testing
indicated the trace was human. The fabric was cotton. White. Material and color
were consistent with the socks Paige was wearing when she vanished. Everything
was photographed and recorded. The area was regarded as a restricted federal
crime scene.

Agent Frank Zander arrived. “What have we got here?”

Agent William Horn, one of the FBI’s senior evidence people,
explained the blood, hair and fabric at the mouth of the crevasse.

“It doesn’t look good, Frank.”

“She down there?”

“At this point, odds are she is.”

“How soon before you can confirm?”

“Don’t know. The opening is too narrow and tight for us
to drop a rescuer or tech down there. We’re flying in some small fiber-optics
cameras, listening devices. Looks like this thing stretches to the bottom, four
hundred feet, maybe more. We need an exceptional length of fiber for the
camera, we’re waking up a high-tech firm in California. We’ll need some time,
Frank.”

Zander nodded.

“This is your scene, Bill, and my investigation. Nobody
who is here now is permitted to leave. All radio contact goes through you to
me. It’s all need-to-know. Nobody talks to anybody until it is determined
exactly what we have here. It is critical now that nothing leaks from here.
Critical.”

Horn nodded.

Before Zander returned to the command center, he looked
at the FBI evidence technicians in their hooded jumpsuits with gloves. They
glowed in the dawn against the backdrop of the sky and mountains as they worked
silently on what Zander believed was the grave of Paige Baker.