Tahoe Ice Grave Page 24

  Once I was into the turn I hit the gas to get through the deep snow, but my Jeep quickly came to a stop. My wheels spun, but I was high-centered. The buildup of snow was so thick under the Jeep that the wheels didn’t even touch the pavement.

  I put my cell phone in my pocket and jumped out into twenty inches of fresh snow that had fallen since I left Janeen’s a few hours earlier. I opened the rear door for Spot, then the rear hatch. My cross-country skis were still jammed at an angle toward the front passenger seat, my boots and poles sitting in back. I pulled on my boots and gators and snapped my boots into the ski bindings. My gloves and ski poles were last. I shut the rear hatch and Spot and I were off.

  Although my skis are the wide back-country design, the snow was far too deep to glide on. I had to break trail, lifting my skis with each step and pushing down until the deep snow compressed enough to support my weight. Breaking trail is hard work and I was streaming with sweat in a couple of minutes.

  Spot loped alongside, his legs long enough that his feet could connect with the road below while his chest grazed the surface of the snow.

  I ran like a high-stepping drum major, knees rising with each step to keep my ski tips from burying into the snow. My heart and lungs burned.

  The falling snow suddenly stopped as the clouds parted. The moon shined like a spotlight through the snow-draped forest. I saw in the light the faint depressions of tire tracks under the snow. Probably the Viking’s vehicle, the last one to make it through before the snow got too deep. I tried to ski in one of the tracks where the new snow was shallow and I could make better time. Then, just as suddenly, the clouds came back across the moon and the heavy snowfall resumed.

  In ten minutes I turned the corner and came into Jerry and Janeen’s driveway. A Toyota Land Cruiser with knobby snow tires and high clearance was parked in Janeen’s drive. It was covered in eight inches of snow.

  There was one weak light on in Jerry’s house as I approached. He hadn’t thought to turn on the outside lights. Or Phillip had come and they were hiding from the Viking. I didn’t dare take the time to stop and find out.

  I skied through the dark drive, huffing like a steam engine.

  When I got to Janeen’s cabin, I clamored up the snow bank, pushing up the slope with my ski poles. I unsnapped my ski bindings and ran to the front door.

  Light spilled out. The front door hung crookedly on one of its three hinges, banging back and forth in the wind.

  I leaped past the broken door into the living room. Spot jumped after me. There was no sound save the roar of the storm and the loud staccato banging of the front door.

  “Janeen?” I called out.

  She didn’t answer. Spot did the type of point that means he’s smelling something very wrong. He tensed, lowered a few inches, flattened his tail, his back and neck, and pointed his nose toward the kitchen.

  A deep rumble emanated from his chest.

  “Spot, find the suspect! Take him down!” I said, knowing that if the perp was in the house, Spot would attack, oblivious to guns or baseball bats.

  I didn’t worry about whether Spot would know the guilty from the innocent. Dogs have an amazing ability to tell people who belong in a place from people who don’t. But Spot didn’t move.

  “What is it, boy?”

  Spot stopped growling. He glanced up at me for a second, then turned back toward the kitchen, sniffing. The tautness went out of his body and a small cry escaped from his throat.

  It was a cry I’d heard before, and it meant the worst. I rushed to the kitchen. The metallic scent of blood was heavy in the air.

  She sat on the floor in a corner, leaning against the cabinets, her head slumped sideways against the dishwasher. Her thick, beautiful braid cascaded down over her shoulder.

  There was a widening pool of blood on the floor. Streaks of red on her clothes converged to a slash wound in her throat. I heard tiny gurgling breaths. The blood didn’t pulse, but seeped. She was bleeding from a vein, possibly a nicked jugular.

  I grabbed her phone, hoping the land line would get me through where my cell phone hadn’t.

  The 911 operator answered immediately. I told him where Janeen was and her condition. I stressed that the medics would need a helicopter or else snowmobiles and the type of toboggan that ski patrols use to carry people.

  I pulled out drawers looking for some kind of tape and found nothing. You can’t put a tourniquet around someone’s neck, but Janeen needed compression on the wound until she could get a blood transfusion and emergency surgery. I ran back to Janeen’s bedroom and jerked open the closet door. I pawed through hangers, pushed clothes around. Hanging loosely in the belt loops of a coat was a vinyl belt. I jerked it out and ran back to the kitchen where Spot stood, his brow furrowed as he cried softly.

  There was a roll of paper towels above the sink. I wadded some up, pressed it against the wound where the blood was oozing. I used the belt to make a loop across the compress, around her back, then down and under the opposite arm. I tried to tie it off with enough tension to help slow the blood flow but not choke her to death.

  Through it all, Janeen never moved or made a sound save for her gurgling breaths. I didn’t have much hope that she’d make it even if the medics came by helicopter.

  The kitchen door was standing open. It swung back and forth in the wind from the raging storm. One of the windowpanes had shattered in long shards. Snow made a crescent on the floor, melting into a puddle that had found a low spot. The water ran past the glass diamonds to meet the blood and mix in swirls of red.

  Something flicked at my face. I turned to see what it was.

  There was a split in the wooden doorjamb. Caught in the crack and waving like streamers in the ferocious wind were several long hairs so blond and shiny in the kitchen light they looked surreal.

  I looked out at the trail of small, shallow snowshoe prints and much larger, deeper snowshoe tracks that were quickly being covered by the blowing snow. The tracks appeared to go deep into the woods and nowhere near Jerry’s house.

  Phillip had the advantage of light weight and terrain that he knew well. But he was a small boy. And I’d already seen the Viking’s physical ability on the Na Pali cliffs.

  The only weapon I had was Spot. I wondered if I should focus him on protecting Phillip or taking down the killer. If Phillip found a place to hide and I sent Spot as a protector, then Spot might draw attention to the boy and make him even more vulnerable. Spot had a good chance of finding the killer if I could find some article of the killer’s to scent him on. But looking around revealed nothing that would give Spot a clear, strong odor of the killer to pursue. I had no choice.

  I ran back to Phillip’s bedroom and grabbed the pillow off the bed. Spot was at the doorway as I turned. I held the pillow out to him. “Smell this, Spot!” He stuck his nose into the fabric. I practically wrapped it around his snout. “This is Phillip! Remember Phillip? Do you have Phillip’s scent? Okay, Spot!” I ran through the living room, into the kitchen and stopped at the open door. I stuck the pillow on Spot’s nose once more. “Find Phillip!

  Guard him! Do you understand, Spot?” I bent and grabbed Spot’s head, hands on his jowls, my face directly in front of his. “Guard him!”

  I pointed to the open door and gave Spot a pat on his hindquarters. “Go!” I shouted.

  Spot leaped into the deep snow behind the cabin, sinking in to an alarming depth. He scrambled to find footing, but his legs floundered as his body was engulfed. He was a tall example of the tallest breed, but the snow was eight feet deep.

  I watched as Spot floundered, leaping and jerking, trying to gain purchase. He jumped sideways to the left, then right. I saw his left front paw land in one of the Viking’s tracks. Spot felt the difference and clawed himself in that direction. Another paw found invisible footing under the soft snow, then another.

  Spot bounded ahead, following the snowshoe tracks more with his nose than with his eyes, and never looked back as he charged off i
nto the dark storm.

  FORTY

  I had left my cross-country skis at the front of the cabin. I stepped over Janeen’s slumped form, ran back through the cabin and jumped out over the broken front door. A violent gust of wind seemed to suck the air out of my lungs.

  As I popped my boots into both bindings, I had a disturbing realization.

  Janeen Kahale had been chopping onions and the intruder stabbed her with her own knife.

  Nowhere had I seen a knife.

  I pushed through deep snow around the side of Janeen’s little house and came upon the tracks just behind the kitchen door. The blowing snow had nearly obliterated the old marks and was filling in Spot’s fresh tracks. I could see their direction in the weak light coming from the house. I followed them into the forest, trying to make my strides as long and fast as possible, thrusting hard with my poles.

  The wind blasted me as I came out from the cabin’s wind shadow. Storm gusts blew down the mountain and through the forest as if to level everything that wasn’t rock. Mature Jeffrey pines, 150 feet tall, bent and swayed like saplings.

  The tracks I was following became nearly impossible to see in the dark forest. I couldn’t make out the actual marks and had only a vague sense of where the snow had been disturbed. I concentrated on that, heading up at a steep angle through the woods.

  After five minutes of the hardest skiing I’d ever done, I came to a clearing in the trees. The clouds thinned for a moment and the moon lit up the landscape.

  Phillip’s snowshoe prints were very faint but visible in the sudden moonlight. They were closely spaced. The Viking’s prints were larger and deeper, yet despite the snow depth there was a good distance between his footprints as if he weren’t struggling at all.

  I continued on, hoping that on my skis I was faster than either Phillip or the Viking. Spot would be faster still.

  But I realized that even if Spot got to Phillip first, the Viking could use Janeen’s kitchen knife on him.

  As I skied farther up the mountain, the clouds closed in as thick as before and the snow came down in heavy waves. I could see almost nothing.

  I tried to ski faster, but I had to stop and bend down to find any tracks. The wind howled through the trees. A faint trail went up at an angle, through stands of pines. I became aware of a purpose to the direction Phillip had chosen. He was making a gradual ascent up toward the cliffs of Mt. Tallac, mostly staying in the trees to avoid the avalanche danger of the open slopes. I’d been below the area during the summer, on the hiking trail that went across the front of the mountain before making a big loop and arcing on up to the summit 3500 feet above.

  After going up several hundred feet I was panting so hard it was difficult to think. The trail turned to the left and went up a short, dramatic rise into a grouping of Lodgepole pines. I planted my poles hard, turned my ski tips out in a wedge shape and struggled up the slope.

  As I came over the crest I saw that the pines gave way to a large, open slope, steeper than before. The wind was stronger in the open and the tracks even more obscure. I stared through the dark, blowing snow, trying to see the tracks. The trail made a gradual curve upslope toward another stand of trees.

  I skied fast across the open snow field. My vision was strained. As I stared it seemed the snow would get lighter, only to darken again. Suddenly, the barrage of snowflakes stopped and a bright shaft of moonlight cascaded through an opening in the clouds. The wash of light shot across the snow field. Low clouds raced through the sky, then closed together as fast as they’d opened. The moonlight disappeared and the landscape was plunged back into darkness.

  During the brief flash of moonlight, I’d gotten a glimpse of Spot’s tracks. I skied that way from memory now as my eyes readjusted to the darkness. The snow began again, blowing as hard as before.

  When I entered another grouping of trees, I lost the trail. These trees were Red firs, thicker and denser than the previous pines. Spot’s tracks went under some low branches. I ducked under to follow, got a clump of snow down my neck and found myself on virgin snow. I turned a full circle before I found the trail curving off to one side. I’d barely gotten out from under the branches when I followed the tracks under yet another group of trees with low branches. Phillip had made tracking him difficult. This time I skied around the side hoping to save time. But the snow on the other side was again untracked. It took precious seconds to find the trail in a small ravine that led sideways out of the trees.

  The slope rose more steeply through scattered fir trees. Snow still blew, but it was lighter. The moon flashed through the clouds, disappeared, then flickered again. Although the mountain above me was still shrouded in clouds, the cloud blanket was beginning to break up. In another minute, the moonlight was constant enough that the marks in the snow were easy to read.

  Phillip’s snowshoe tracks were far apart relative to his size. Clearly, he was terrified and running at full speed.

  The trail turned and led in a new direction, cutting up at a steep angle. At times the slope was open enough and steep enough to present a serious avalanche danger, but Phillip obviously had no other choice.

  The path climbed dramatically higher, going around boulders and the occasional stand of trees. Although I was nearly running on my cross-country skis, I felt like an ant as I inched my way up the mountain.

  After another twenty minutes of climbing, I’d come up more than 1000 feet. The trail went into another stand of trees and repeated the frustrating pattern of disappearing under thick, low branches. Again, Phillip had changed direction in the trees. When I rejoined the trail the Viking’s footprints were more visible than before, despite the blowing snow. Was I getting that much closer? Or were the clouds thinning, allowing more moonlight through?

  My question was answered by a muffled bark.

  I pushed myself to ski faster. There was no other sound except the howling wind. I scanned the slope above me. It was steep enough to sustain a massive avalanche. Nothing moved except the clouds tumbling across the sky like a movie of bad weather on fast forward. The clouds were thinner and brighter than before with dark patches of open sky between them.

  As I looked up, I sensed movement above me.

  I stopped skiing and tried to steady myself against my panting so that I could figure out what I was seeing.

  The slope I was on rose in a swath of white snow to a vertical face of rock. To one side of the rocky cliff was the famous cross of snow that made Mt. Tallac easy to spot from across the lake. On the other side of the cliff were scattered trees.

  The first movement was a vague perception that I couldn’t place. I continued to watch the mountain in the on and off darkness of racing clouds and bright moon. The second movement was completely obvious.

  The Viking was suddenly exposed to the whole world, a small but brilliant figure on the moonlit cliff face. Even from my distance, his long blond hair glinted and flashed in the wind as he quickly made his way across the face of rock. Except for the ice and snow, the scene reminded me of when he was climbing across the Na Pali cliffs in Kauai. The biggest difference was a light flashing at his side.

  I watched as it went dark, then blazed like a beacon as bright as the moon itself, and then went dark again. Then, as if in a magic act, the Viking suddenly disappeared.

  Before I could figure out how he’d vanished, I suddenly understood what had been catching the moonlight and flashing at his side.

  Janeen Kahale’s chopping knife.

  FORTY-ONE

  I wanted to call out to Spot and try to direct him to the Viking, but I didn’t know where my dog was. And he wasn’t that well trained. He wouldn’t understand attack commands unless I was next to him. Any sound from me would only let the Viking know how close I was.

  Directly above me were a few trees that would provide cover from the moonlight. If I could make it to them before the Viking saw me, I thought I’d be able to skirt around the side of the cliff and climb up after him unseen.

  It wa
s too steep to kick and glide. I turned my ski tips out and tails together in a wedge, drove my poles in hard and hustled up the incline.

  The trees were more widely spaced than I thought. Moonlight shined through and I was exposed as I went from shadow to shadow. There was an open area between the base of the cliff and me. I hoped that the Viking was not looking down at that moment.

  When I got to the base of the cliff, I still couldn’t see where the Viking went. I scanned for any sign of Spot and Phillip. There was nothing, neither tracks nor movement. If I’d made a mistake leaving their tracks, it was too late now.

  I continued across the base of the cliff to the trees at the side. Looking up at the wall of rock, I could see the place where the Viking had last been before he vanished from my vision. But he was not there.

  I started up through the trees at the side of the cliff, setting my edges with each step and jamming in with my poles. My right ski slipped back. I recovered, and reset the ski, stomping it down into the snow. There was a layer of icy crust and my ski lost grip again. This time both skis slipped out from under me and I fell on my face.

  I slid down the slope and rolled sideways. Both skis ended up above me. I could flip them over me, but I was now in a bright patch of moonlight. A rolling skier with windmilling skis is as obvious as a flapping flag.

  I reached out, flipped up the binding catches and was free of the skis in a few seconds. The slope was windblown and crusted. Using my poles for support and balance, I jammed the toes of my boots into the stiff snow and charged up the mountain.

  Most of the time the crust supported me. But every few steps, the crust gave way and I sunk up to my thigh. I used my poles to get back out, thrusting them down with both arms at once.

  Soon, I saw how the Viking had vanished.

  I’d just come out of a group of trees and could see a ledge stretching out across the rock face. There was a hole in the cliff. The tracks went out the ledge toward it.

  The entire world seemed exposed before me. Beyond the cliff, Tallac’s snow cross glowed brilliant white in the moonlight. Fallen Leaf Lake was a huge black finger of water 2000 feet below.