Naked Edge

This book is humbly dedicated to the Dine people of Black Mesa for opening their hogaans to a lost
Bilagaanaa
journalist, feeding her roasted corn, frybread, and mutton stew, and sharing their troubles and joys and prayers with her. I came to the
dinetah
to help you, and in the end it was you who helped me.
Ahehee'.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With love and deep gratitude to Ray James (Salt Clan) and to Kat Kozell-James for their endless support, love, and friendship. You are always in my prayers and in my heart. You reached out to me when you didn't even know me and turned my face to the East so that I could start again.
Ahehee'.

Special thanks to Rick Hatfield for sharing his expertise on the duties, challenges, and gear involved in being a mountain ranger.

Additional thanks to Teresa Robertson, RN, CNM, for sharing her experiences of working as a midwife among the Dine; to Sgt. Gary Arai for his gun expertise; to my mother, Mary White, RN, for her input on the medical scenes; and to my brother Robert for his help with the technical climbing aspects of this story.

A lifetime of thanks to Robert White, my father, for instilling in me a deep love of the mountains and the life within them and for sharing his knowledge of astronomy; and to my brother David for
living--
and for sending me all the beautiful photographs from his hikes.

An enormous thank-you to my editor, Cindy Hwang, for her understanding and patience as I worked for more than a year to write this book. Thanks, too, to Natasha Kern, my agent, for (yet again) helping me through my midmanuscript jitters.

Love and thanks to my beautiful sister, Michelle, for reading every word I write and re-write; to my beloved Gangstas--Sue, Kristi, Libby--for holding my hand and helping me breathe through the rather painful birth of this book; and to my dear, sweet FOPs for always being there for me.

And as always, thanks to my sons, Alec and Benjamin, for their help, love, and encouragement. You are what I cherish most about being me.

PROLOGUE

THE COYOTE CAME out of nowhere. It streaked across four lanes of traffic directly in front of Katherine James's pickup truck, ears back, head down, tail tucked between its hind legs, then disappeared in the prairie grass to her right. Kat's foot jerked off the gas pedal, but it was already too late. At fifty-five miles an hour, she'd already blown past the spot where it had left the road.

Whenever the Ma'ii crosses our path, we stop and make an offering to show our respect. If we don't, our lives might be thrown out of balance, and bad luck might come upon us.

Grandma Alice's voice sounded clear in her mind, accompanied by an image of gentle, old hands sprinkling yellow corn pollen on red earth. But the rutted, dirt roads of K'ai'bii'to on the
dinetah
--Navajoland--were far removed from the traffic of Colorado's infamous Highway 93. If she stopped now, bad luck would immediately come upon her in the form of a ten-car pileup.

Pray for me. I drive 93.

The slogan on a popular bumper sticker popped into Kat's mind as she glanced at the SUV in her rearview mirror and pushed on the gas. And then she did pray, muttering a few words in her mother tongue, thanking Coyote.

But a sense of uneasiness had already settled on her skin, and it stayed with her despite the bright morning sky and the deep green beauty of the forested foothills. It was still with her when she turned off the highway and headed west on CO-170 toward Eldorado Canyon State Park. Only when she'd parked her pickup and gotten her first good breath of mountain air did the feeling begin to fade.

Leaving her cell phone in the glove box, she grabbed her backpack from the passenger seat and slipped the straps over her shoulders. Packed with just enough to see her through a midmorning hike--a sweater, a pair of binoculars, her pouch of corn pollen, water, and frozen grapes--it wasn't heavy. She locked the truck, zipped her keys in the front pocket of her pack, and started up the dirt road toward the trail.

The summer sun shone warm and bright, her shadow stretching out on the road before her. Thickets of tall choke-cherry bushes lined the trail, their branches laden with clusters of wine-red fruit, food for hungry bears trying to fatten up for winter. Broad-tailed hummingbirds buzzed through the limbs of a nearby ponderosa pine, so quick and tiny they were almost impossible to spot. White butterflies gathered at the edges of mud puddles left by last night's downpour, the scent of water calling them to drink.

Grandpa Red Crow had been right. "What you need, Kimimila," he'd said, calling her by the Lakota nickname he'd given her, "is a chance to be alone with the sun and the wind and the sky."

Not that she was actually alone. The road was lined with Subarus and Jeeps and SUVs of all kinds, transportation for those who'd come to the canyon to climb the cliffs for which it was famous. People drove in by the hundreds to crawl up the rocks like four-legged spiders, ropes trailing like webs behind them.

But the climbers didn't bother her. Growing up in a two-room hogaan with seven brothers and three sisters, her aunt Louise, her mother, and her grandparents, she'd long ago learned to turn inward when she needed privacy. Besides, she hadn't come here to get away from people. She'd come to get away from the concrete and neon of the city, to breathe clean air, to feel earth beneath her feet.

It had been three years since she'd left the reservation, perhaps the best and toughest decision of her life. It wasn't that she didn't like living among other Navajo, or Dine. In fact, there'd been a time in her life when she'd vowed never to do what so many young Dine people did--grow up, go to college, and then leave for high-paying jobs far away from the parents and elders who'd raised them. She hadn't been able to keep that vow, but not for lack of trying.

She'd gotten her journalism degree at the University of New Mexico, then come back to the rez to work at the
Navajo Times,
hoping to use her skills to help give a voice to the voiceless among her people. At first, she felt she'd found her place in the world. In her first year as a reporter, she'd broken a story about families growing sick after being relocated from traditional homesites to government housing that had been built on the radioactive mine tailings. She'd won awards for her work, but the greatest reward had been the satisfaction she'd felt at helping Dine families.

She'd lived in a trailer in Tseghahoodzani--known to the outside world as Window Rock--during the workweek, making the long drive home to K'ai'bii'to each Friday night, her truck filled with food and water she'd bought with her pay-check. Her grandmother would wait up for her, welcoming her home with warm frybread, a hot bowl of mutton stew, and a strong cup of coffee, asking her to sit and share the news from the Earth's Center--the ceremonial name for the Navajo Nation's capital. But her mother had made it clear that she'd have been happier had Kat stayed away.

That's how it had always been--love from her grandmother, loathing from her mother. Though Kat had hoped her mother would at least come to respect her for the work she did at the newspaper, nothing had changed. No matter what Kat might become, no matter what she might accomplish, she had done her mother unforgivable harm. She'd been conceived of a man who wasn't her mother's husband--a
Bilagaanaa
man.

A white man.

The only thing Kat knew about her father was the color of his skin--and the fact that he'd gotten her mother pregnant, then left her to deal with the consequences alone. He hadn't even stayed on the rez long enough to put his name on Kat's birth certificate.

"Every time I look at you, I see him," her mother had told her more times than Kat cared to remember. "Your green eyes, your light hair, your white skin. Why did you have to be born?"

Kat's eyes were hazel, not green. Her hair was dark brown, and her skin was more caramel than peaches and cream. But there was no denying that she was fathered by a different man than her brothers and sisters, a fact that they refused to forget, calling her a "Half-ajo," instead of Navajo, and teasing her about her eyes. And so, faced with her mother's resentment and the indifference of her siblings, she'd piled everything she owned in her pickup truck and left K'ai'bii'to behind. It was the only time in her life she could remember seeing tears in her grandmother's eyes.

"Don't forget your Dine tongue," her grandmother had said, before turning back to her weaving, too upset to watch Kat drive away.

Kat had driven north to Denver, winning a coveted seat on the Denver Independent's Investigative Team--the 1-Team--as its environmental reporter. Although she missed her grandmother and the wide-open beauty of the desert with all of her soul, she loved her job and had grown to care for her fellow I-Team members. And if the city sometimes seemed to press in on her, making her feel shut off and alone?

Well, that's why there were mountains.

She came to the trailhead and left the dirt road behind, ducking beneath pine boughs and following the steep trail uphill. From somewhere overhead came the cry of a prairie falcon, followed by the chatter of a nervous squirrel. Falcons nested in these cliffs, as did golden eagles. Kat had been coming up here all summer to observe the nests from a distance, watching the young grow from fuzzy hatchlings to sharp-eyed hunters. The nests were now empty, but she still loved to hike to the top of the ridge and look out over the valley to the east and the high, snow-capped peaks to the west. Somehow, the vastness of the landscape made her problems seem small.

She hiked on, losing track of time, thoughts drifting away amid the scents of growing things until her mind was empty and free. The muscles in her thighs burned, her heart pumping, her lungs drawing in breath, the rhythm of footsteps, heartbeat, and breathing seeming to flow together like a song. When at last she gained the top of the ridge, the sense of uneasiness was gone, replaced by a feeling of contentment.

She walked to her favorite spot--a rocky outcrop at the top of the ridge. There, she shrugged off her backpack and looked out over the land--distant city to the east, a sea of mountaintops to the south and west and north. Far below her, cars and trucks looked like toys parked along a ribbon of road. Above, there was only sky.

She unzipped her pack and was about to take out her water bottle when she heard a crack and then a strange scraping noise, like stone rubbing stone. Then the rocks beneath her feet gave way--and she fell.

She screamed, reached, but there was nothing to grab. The world swirled gray around her--no up, no down, only motion. She hit something, kept falling, then hit again, bone snapping painlessly, the breath knocked from her lungs.

I didn't want to die today.

She remembered the coyote, an image of it darting in front of her truck flashing through her mind.

And then there was nothing.

GABRIEL ROSSITER CRIMPED the chalked fingers of his right hand around the small handhold, then carefully shifted his weight onto his fingertips, drawing himself to the right. He didn't notice his skinned shin or the people far below taking pictures of him and pointing, or the sweat trickling down his temples, his mind focused entirely on the rock as he worked the arete on a bad-tempered geological accident known as the Naked Edge. Scraped fingers reached again, caught rough stone, and held. He maneuvered his way around the jutting, razor-sharp edge for which the climb was named--no ropes, no cams, nothing beneath him but six hundred feet of air.

Some people needed heroin. Gabe preferred adrenaline.

He looked up and picked his way up the rock face with his gaze, thinking his way through his next move in a language without words. This was what he needed--internal silence, emptiness, oblivion. He needed to forget.

He reached with his right foot ... And then he heard her scream.

He caught just a glimpse--rocks spilling down the side of a nearby slope, a woman falling with them--and felt a moment of vertigo as she tumbled out of sight. And then a decade of experience kicked in.

So much for your day off, buddy.

He fired himself around the arete and thrust his fist into an overhanging hand crack, liebacking his way on hand jams to the final pitch and an easy finish. Then, with no ropes or gear to pack up, he was off.

It was a long, exposed scramble down the Eastern Slabs, but the rock was dry, enabling him to move quickly. He knew the terrain as if it were his own backyard--and really, it was. He'd been climbing here since he was sixteen, and he'd been a Boulder Mountain Parks Ranger since he was twenty-four--eight years. He'd spent almost every waking moment of his adult life in these mountains. He'd done his fair share of rescues over the years--and had helped bring down his share of bodies.

And that's what you're going to find today, Rossiter
--a
body.

He didn't let the thought slow him. If by some miracle she had survived, she was going to need his help.

He moved down the steep rock face, his cell phone out of his pocket and in his hand the moment his feet hit dirt. He dialed 911. "Sixty-forty-five, off duty."

"Go ahead, sixty-forty-five."

"Rockslide in Eldorado Canyon State Park approximately one half-mile north of Redgarden Wall. Saw a woman go down with it. I'm en route, but I don't have a damned bit of gear with me. I'll call again when I have her location."

"Copy, sixty-forty-five
--"

That was all he needed to hear.

He hung up and took off through the trees at a run.

IT TOOK GABE almost ten minutes to reach the base of the rockslide area. Sucking wind, his heart pounding from exertion, he searched for her amid the rubble--boulders as big as trash cans, smaller rocks, mangled tree branches. He found a lone turquoise earring and a backpack that must have belonged to her. But he didn't find her.

There was really only one possibility.

She was dead and buried, crushed somewhere beneath all that rock.

"Dammit! Goddamn it!" He pulled his cell out and dialed 911 again. "Sixty-forty-five, at the site."

"Sixty-forty-five, can you repeat? You're breaking up."

"At the site. No sign of the victim, but there's no way she walked away from this. She's probably buried. There's a good ton of rock here. We're going to need--"

A cry.

Stunned, he stopped midsentence.

Another cry--the sound of a woman in pain.