Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(13)

Chapter

6



P?INE WIPED A BIT of sweat from her forehead before it leached into her eyes. She was sitting on a boulder and looking out toward the Colorado River. They had been at it for nearly eight hours, starting right after breakfast.

Seven rangers and her. To cover a land mass that, with the park above, was larger than the state of Rhode Island. Even using a chopper, the odds were not in their favor. And there were no circling buzzards to help them out.

So, they had found exactly nothing. No sign of Benjamin Priest. No sign of where or how he might have gotten out of the Canyon.

Pine gave another searching look around. If he had tried to climb out yesterday morning, it would have taken him hours. In fact, the rule of thumb was, it would take twice as long to hike out as it took to hike down.

Pine shook her head in confusion. But if the guy was going to hike out, why take a mule out of the corral? She knew from Brennan that Priest was not going to ride a mule up by himself in the dark. The guy had had a tough time coming down in the daylight with an experienced wrangler next to him.

Sallie Belle’s corpse had been helicoptered out earlier using a winch and a harness designed for large animals. A postmortem would be performed on her body. Pine had a hunch about something, and the post might be able to determine if she was right or not. She had used as many of the tools in her investigative duffel as seemed reasonable under the circumstances, and none of them had led to any clues, much less answers.

Lambert came up to her. “When I texted you about this, you said you were out of town on personal business. Everything okay?”

She glanced at him. “Just getting some R and R. The Bureau allows you to do that every once in a while.”

“So were you on vacation? I wouldn’t have called you in if I’d known that.”

“Relax, Colson, I was on vacation and now I’m not.” She studied the ground in front of her.

“You hear anything back from Flagstaff yet?” Lambert asked.

“Not yet. And I’m not sure how high we are on the priority list.”

Lambert looked out over the ground. “I don’t think we’re going to find him down here.”

“Maybe not alive. So we need to bring in the cadaver dogs.”

“Will do.”

“A teenager went out to the mule pen last night with a carrot for Jasmine, the mule she’d ridden down.”

“To the mule pen? What happened?”

“We escorted her back to her cabin and I told her to be more careful in the future.”

“We?”

“Kettler was there, too. He’d heard her as well.”

“I’m not surprised. Sam doesn’t miss much.”

“He said he was in the Army. And you mentioned that, too.”

Lambert nodded. “Special Forces. Someone he served with told me Kettler got a slew of medals, including the Purple Heart. But he never talks about it.”

“The soldiers who did the most talk the least,” said Pine.

“That’s what I think, too. He’s an amazing athlete. He’s done the twenty-four-hour ultramarathon. And the rim-to-rim-to-rim run down here. He wasn’t that far off the record.”

Pine knew that the record was held by a man who had done that run in under six hours. That was a forty-two-mile trek that involved twenty-two thousand feet of vertical change.

“That’s impressive.” She paused. “He said you told him I lived in Shattered Rock.”

“Well, he asked me after you two met earlier.”

“Did he say why he asked?”

Lambert looked at her in surprise. “Maybe he likes you, Atlee.”

“I guess in my line of work, I don’t think about things like that.”

“Well, we all have a private life. But then again, I’ve got three teenagers at home. So, I don’t know how much private I can have in my life right now.”

“Uh, that would be none.”

Lambert grinned and looked around. “So, what do we do now?”

“Before it gets too dark, I’m going to fly out of here on your chopper.”

“What will you do up there?”

“Investigate the hell out of this.”

“I hope I didn’t call you in just for a dead mule. I know you have other cases to cover.”

“No problem. I’m at a one-agent RA and a woman. So I can multitask with the best of them.”





Chapter

7



P?INE THREW HER DUFFEL down on the floor and looked around her tiny, Spartan one-bedroom apartment on the edge of Shattered Rock, a town so small that the outskirts and the minuscule downtown area were kissing cousins. The apartment building was three stories tall and fully rented out by a variety of tenants. There was only one other three-story “high-rise” in town—a hotel that catered to those visiting the Grand Canyon.

She had never lived in anything larger than a one-bedroom place since leaving home. And her childhood home was a two-bedroom ranch in rural Georgia.

She’d heard that the author Margaret Mitchell had never lived in a place with more than one bedroom for a simple reason: She had never wanted houseguests. Pine didn’t know if that was true or merely anecdotal, but she could relate to the feeling. She was a no-visitors, one-bedroom kind of gal, too.