Murder on the Horizon

THE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE . . .

Gracie withdrew her water bottle from its sling and took a long draught, pouring a little into her cupped hand for Minnie. As she replaced the bottle and looked around, her eye caught on a tree stump a few feet off to her left. She stepped over and looked down.

A symbol had been carved into the wood—a diamond shape with what appeared to be stick legs set above a pair of figure eights.

Gracie had jogged past the same tree stump countless times and had never noticed a carving. “Huh,” she said aloud. “How long has that been there?” She frowned. “And what does it stand for?”

She peered at it more closely.

The edges were crisp, dug-out wood slivers lying on the flat surface of the stump.

The carving was recent.

And creepy.

Berkley Prime Crime titles by M. L. Rowland

ZERO-DEGREE MURDER

MURDER OFF THE BEATEN PATH

MURDER ON THE HORIZON

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

MURDER ON THE HORIZON

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2015 by M. L. Rowland.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-60158-7

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2015

Cover art:
Log cabin
© by Ev Thomas;
Dog
© by Sanne vd Berg Fotografie.

Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For all the Search and Rescue volunteers who routinely risk their lives “So That Others May Live.”

A heartfelt thank you to:

Nancy Chichester, Diane and Terry Hiebert, Dr. Barbara Law, Kathleen Law, Dr. Catherine LeGalley, Jeffrey Norwitz, Mark H. Rowland, Bonnie and Doug Towne.

My editor, Michelle Vega.

Anne McDermott.

“D
AMN,
that's a lot of blood,” a man said, voice echoing in the large room.

“What the hell d'you expect?” a second man said. “Go get a bucket.”

“Hey, got my hands full here! You get a damn bucket.”

Footsteps receded.

The sound of sawing. A curse. The crinkle of heavy plastic.

Johnny Cash's deep bass sang from a radio somewhere nearby: “Now gettin' caught meant gettin' fired.”

Banging and clattering from the other end of the room.

“Bring me two while you're at it,” the first man yelled. “Gotta have something to put . . .” He stopped to sing along.

The man drew in a deep breath and belted out the chorus. “‘I'd get it one piece at a time, and it wouldn't cost me a dime.'” He chuckled and said to himself, “One piece at a time.”

Two buckets plunked on the floor.

“Hey,” the man said. “One piece at a time. Get it? One piece at a time?”

“Yeah. I get
it.”

1

“I
T'S
friggin'
hot
,” Gracie muttered, using a trekking pole to shove aside the bottom branches of a creosote bush. Dust and pollen billowed up around her, sticking to the sweat on her temples and making them itch. Pinching her nose to stifle a sneeze, she bent to scan the buff-colored ground beneath, spotting nothing but a powder blue plastic blob—a soiled disposable diaper tossed from a passing car. With the toe of her hiking boot, Gracie nudged the blue ball aside. Seeing nothing of interest, she stepped back and let the branches swing back into place.

Five members of Timber Creek Search and Rescue formed a ragged line stretching out across the Mojave Desert. Warren was guiding left off the sage-choked shoulder of the I-15 freeway with Jon Barton walking fifteen feet off to his right along the barbed wire right-of-way fence. Gracie walked on the other side of the fence with Lenny Olsen next to her and Carrie Matthews on the far end.

That morning, the searchers had responded to a callout for
an evidence search, leaving the Sheriff's Office substation before dawn, making the two-hour drive down from the Bavarian-style resort town high in the mountains a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, and out into the middle of the Mojave. Their assignment: Comb a mile-long segment of ground alongside the I-15 corridor for a Smith & Wesson Model 57 .41 Magnum revolver, black with a walnut grip, allegedly used in a triple homicide in the tiny desert town of Baker, and, according to a witness, tossed from a motorcycle of unknown make traveling west on the interstate in excess of eighty miles an hour.

Four additional county SAR teams were searching similar mile-long segments, three in front of the Timber Creek team, one behind.

Maintaining a cursory spacing of fifteen feet, Gracie and her teammates walked slowly westward, eyes scanning the ground in every direction. Using feet, hands, and trekking poles, they examined and poked around and beneath every bush, tree, and cactus, turning over every discarded fast-food wrapper, every empty Red Bull can, even scaring up an occasional jackrabbit to watch it zigzag away through the brush.

All wore the team's orange cotton uniform shirt, desert camouflage army-surplus pants, floppy-brimmed hats, thick leather gloves, and knee-high gaiters of black, ripstop nylon, worn over the tops of boots to stave off punctures from mesquite thorns or rattlesnake fangs. One or two of the searchers wore day packs containing internal hydration bladders, some a water bottle clipped by a carabiner to an outside loop with spare water inside their packs.

Gracie stopped and pried a damp strand of hair off her cheek. Squinting behind her Ray-Bans against the blinding glare of the midday sun, eyes burning from pollen and sweaty trickles of sunscreen, she looked around her.

The vast desert dwarfed the searchers—a hardscrabble floor of dirt and rock dotted with stubby clumps of creosote,
mesquite, and sage, its mountains jumbled mounds of chocolate-colored rock lining the northern horizon.

On the asphalt ribbon of highway off to the left, pickups, minivans, and semi-trucks whooshed by in a steady steel stream—eastward toward Las Vegas, lured by dreams of easy riches, sex, or adventure, westward to the flash of Los Angeles and Hollywood, or slinking home with pockets empty and hopes of instant wealth dashed.

When seen only from a car whizzing along the highway at seventy miles an hour, the Mojave Desert appeared as an endless, boring wasteland, harsh, desolate. Closer exploration revealed a diverse plant and animal life—from desert holly to prickly pear, from roadrunners to cactus wrens, bighorn sheep to kangaroo rats.

Gracie loved the desert in the winter. But in the long summer season, when temperatures soared well past one hundred degrees, the Mojave was a superheated skillet, brutal, unforgiving, able to kill the naive and unprepared in less than two hours.

The sun blistered down on the searchers from a faded-denim blue sky, scorching bent heads and backs. A sudden gust of dry wind blasted them with grit and dust.

Gracie turned her back to the searing wind, anchored her hat with her hand, and waited for it to dissipate. Then she slithered down a rocky embankment to the bottom of a dry wash. “Have I said it's friggin' hot?” she said, lifting up one end of a section of blown vehicle tire and tipping it off to the side. She scanned the sandy ground in all directions, saw nothing of note, and slogged across the deep sand and clambered up the other side.

Jon's voice filtered up from the wash. “Only about twenty-two hundred fifty-three times.” FedEx double-trailers roared past on the highway. “I love the smell of diesel in the morning,” he said, reappearing out of the wash.

Fifteen years older and an inch or so shorter than Gracie,
Jon was a retired civil engineer, lean and fit, consistently surprising younger, less-experienced members of the team by outlasting them on the trail. Next to Ralph Hunter, the team's Commander and Gracie's best friend, she trusted Jon's physical capabilities and judgment more than anyone else's on the team.

Gracie laid her trekking poles on the ground. Straightening again, she stood with her weight on one foot, resting the other ankle, which ached from a break several months earlier. “I love evidence searches in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day in hundred-degree weather,” she said, peeling her heavy braid off the back of her neck. She tucked the hair up beneath her hat and retrieved her poles from the ground. Looking over at Lenny on her right, she noticed the young man's cheeks were flushed, and the skin on his burly arms a bright red. “Hey, Lenny,” she said. “Got sunscreen?”

“Forgot it.” Lenny was one of the newest and, at nineteen, youngest members of the team. With a quick, wide smile, a wild thatch of straw-colored hair, and astonishing cornflower blue eyes, he was instantly likable, a good soul, by far the most exuberant on the team. But as time went on and the number of searches Gracie worked with Lenny increased, she was learning his youthful enthusiasm had a downside. Lenny was prone to carelessness about his own safety and equipment, often forgetting the most fundamental tenet of Search and Rescue: Don't Get Dead.

“Boy, you lookin' like a boiled mudbug, you,” Jon called over.

Lenny grimaced. “Huh?”

“Crawfish,” Gracie said. “A boiled crawfish.”

“Okay, I get it,” Lenny said. “I look at the sun, I turn red.”

Gracie dug a four-ounce tube of Banana Boat SPF 100 from her radio chest pack and tossed it over to Lenny, who snapped it out of the air. “Next time maybe wear your long-sleeved shirt?” she suggested. “Keep those arms covered?”

“Yeah, okay,” the young man said without resentment. He
stopped, removed his gloves, tossed them on the ground, and slathered the sunscreen over his broiled arms and cheeks. “How hot is it anyway?”

“Supposed to top out somewhere round a hundred and eight,” Carrie called from the end of the line.

“Hunnert 'n' eight,” Lenny said, lobbing the tube of sunscreen back over his head to Gracie. “That's not a temperature! That's an oven setting!”

“But it's a dry heat,” Jon said, eyes gleaming with mischief behind his wire-rims. “It's so hot,” he said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “cows are giving evaporated milk.”

“Here we go,” Gracie said, then took a long draw of still-cold water from the hydration bladder inside her pack.

From the other end of the line, Warren yelled back in his deep, deadpan voice. “It's so hot, I saw a chicken lay a hard-boiled egg.”

“It's so hot,” Jon shot back, “I saw a chicken lay an omelet.”

Chuckles drifted up and down the grid line.

Inexplicably charging, arms and legs thrashing right through the middle of a stand of sage four feet high, Lenny yelled, “By the time my wife got home from the store with the bread, it was toast.”

Warren yelled again. “It's so hot, the squirrels are
fanning
their nuts.”

Laughter.

“It's so hot,” Jon said. “The hooker's—” He stopped.

“C'mon! The hooker's what?” Lenny asked.

“Later, Lenny. Mixed company.”

“Bah-dum-bum,” Gracie said.

More laughter.

The searchers moved slowly forward without speaking, eyes scanning the hard-packed ground, prodding beneath bushes, kicking over rocks, until Lenny broke the silence by asking, “Hey, Gracie, how far've we gone, d'ya think?”

Squinting back over her shoulder, Gracie could just make
out the overpass where they had parked the team's Suburban. “Half mile maybe. Maybe less.”

“How much farther do we have to go, d'ya think?”

Gracie craned her head and looked up the highway. “Can't see the mile marker yet.” She turned over a child's car seat with the toe of her boot and kept walking, eyes sweeping the ground. “We're not even halfway yet.”

Carrie used her trekking pole to roll a sealed plastic bottle filled with what looked like dark brown tea away from the base of a creosote bush. She bent and picked it up to look at it more closely.

Petite, but physically strong, Carrie was the newest member of Timber Creek SAR, and not yet comfortable joining in the team banter. But there was no fuss with her, no drama. She was smart and competent, did her homework, and was ready for almost anything. As a result, even though Carrie had been on the team less than a year, Gracie trusted her to do her job thoroughly and do it well.

“What are all these?” Carrie asked, examining the bottle in her hands. “I've seen a lot of 'em. They look like iced tea or something.”

Lenny guffawed. “It's trucker piss!”

“Ewww!” Carrie dropped the bottle and wiped her gloves on her pants. “What the hell?” She kicked the bottle away. “Really? Truckers do that?”

“And anyone else driving through the desert who doesn't want to stop,” Gracie said. “Personally, it's my most favorite thing.”

“Yum,” Jon said. “Fermented redneck urine.”

“Ugh,” Carrie said, kicking at the bottle again. “Why can't they keep it to throw it away later? Or at the very least throw it out without the cap so it can dry out. That's just gross!”

“You really think we're gonna find this gun?” Lenny asked, whacking at the ground with his trekking pole for no apparent reason.

“Prolly not,” Gracie answered.

“Then why do we have to do this?”

“The SO covering its behind.” She looked over toward Jon, who had stopped several paces back and was using his trekking pole to poke at something black suspended from a mesquite tree branch a few feet off the ground. “Whatcha got, Mr. B?”

“Dunno yet.”

“Hold up!” Gracie called to the rest of the group. “Jon's got something maybe.”

“Is it the gun?” Lenny asked, trotting over.

Gracie walked over to stand next to Jon.

A black plastic trash bag, knotted closed, hung from the mesquite tree as if tossed from a passing car and snagged by the end of a branch. Its contents, a lump of something, hung at the bottom of the bag.

“What is it?” Carrie asked, walking up.

“No idea.”

“Been out here awhile,” Gracie said, leaning in for a better look. “Plastic's pretty dusty and degraded.”

Gracie looked over at Jon, who was staring at the bag. She could see the layer of dust on his glasses. “Wanna do the honors of opening it?”

“I'm not gonna open it,” Jon said, taking a step back. “You open it.”

“I'm not gonna open it,” Gracie said.

“You have seniority.”

“You're older.”

“You're younger. And tougher.”

“This from the man who runs marathons in the mountains.”

“Warren,” Jon said to his teammate who was just walking up. “Get over here and open this.”

Warren leaned both hands on his pole and studied the bag. “I'm not gonna open it,” he said finally. “Let's get Lenny. Yeah. He'll open anything. Hey, Lenny. You open it.”

With one eye closed in a grimace, Lenny stepped forward and edged the sharp point of his trekking pole into the black plastic and pulled it off the branch. The soft plastic, malleable from the heat, stretched and broke, spilling the contents onto the ground—a pile of human hands.

The entire group jumped back. “Gross! Damn!”

“What is that?” Lenny asked.

“Well, Lenny,” Jon said, “It looks like a little clump of hands to me.”

“Four, to be exact,” Warren said.

“That's so gross,” Lenny whispered.

Gracie looked over at him. His face had lost its color and his mouth was moving as if the 7-Eleven burrito he'd had for breakfast was about to make an appearance.

Her own stomach was doing its impression of Old Faithful, churning beneath the surface with the possibility of eruption at any moment. She breathed in through her nose, out again through her mouth, and then bent, elbows on knees, to examine the pile of hands more closely.

The skin was yellowed, tendons and bones showing white at the severed ends. The nails on two of the hands were painted with little palm trees. “Obviously two different people,” she said. “One's a woman's.”

Warren asked, “Is that a tattoo?”

“Where?” Gracie asked.

He pointed with the tip of his trekking pole. “The wrist there.”

Then Gracie saw it, a portion of a tattoo, on the inside of one of the wrists.

Lenny took a careful step forward and leaned in. “Turn it over.”

“Crime scene,” Gracie said.

“Ya think?” Jon said with a wink in her direction.

“Were they murdered?” Lenny asked, his voice inching into its upper range.

Gracie shot him a look.

Lenny's eyes flicked to Gracie's. “What? I was just asking.”

“Probably not going to make a big difference if we move something a hair,” Jon said.

“Probably not.”