Just then, Ajanian was interrupted by one of his deputies, who drew him aside and whispered into his ear. They conferred earnestly for a moment, then Ajanian returned to Pender. “A CDF chopper just spotted something that might help you make up your mind. My search-and-rescue boys are going to take a flyover. Care to ride along?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Pender.
2
A big old rambling wooden house built out over a river you could spit into from the back porch. Indians coming and going all evening, watching TV, playing cards, teenagers playing Nintendo, kids in pajamas just hanging out past their bedtimes, trying not to be noticed. In the kitchen an old Indian woman was making tortillas in a cast- iron press and cooking rice and beans over a huge black cast-iron stove.
I was sitting at the round, scar-topped kitchen table eating Indian pizza (flatbread crust, bean topping) with a couple of Rudy’s cousins when Rudy returned. Black hair pulled back in a braid, black hooded eyes, right-angled nose, skin the color of black-raspberry fruit rolls. His faded denim jacket and jeans fit him like they’d been tailored. He shooed his cousins away, sat down, tilted his chair back on two legs, tipped his straw cowboy hat down over his eyebrows, and folded his arms. “Now suppose you tell me why you shouldn’t be lyin’ dead at the bottom of the canyon,” he said.
The thought of making stuff up or holding stuff back never even occurred to me. I gave Rudy the whole story, from the phone call in the trailer to the ride in the Buzzard-mobile. He listened impassively with his chair tipped back and his arms folded. No comments, no questions, nothing in his expression to reveal how he felt or what he was thinking. Every so often, somebody would come into the kitchen and whisper something to him, like in
When I finished, Rudy told me to wait there, that he’d be right back, and left the kitchen. I knew without being told that my life was in his hands, like he was some old Roman emperor. I also knew I ought to be working on some kind of an escape plan in the event of a thumbs-down, even if it was only making a break for the back door or saying I had to use the bathroom and climbing out the window.
But I stayed put, even with nobody watching, for the simple reason that I had nowhere to escape
3
A patrol car shuttled Ajanian and Pender down to the Little League field being used as a helipad. The Humboldt County search-and-rescue helicopter was behind second base, ready to take off. Running in a crouched trot, holding on to his hat with one hand and holding the unfashionably wide lapels of his sport coat closed with the other, Pender followed Ajanian into the chopper. The sheriff introduced him to his two young, flight-suited deputies, Gabel and Garner. Seconds after they lifted off, the sun, which had set a few minutes earlier, was briefly and gloriously resurrected, streaking the dark gray horizon with crimson and yellow bands. Then it disappeared again as the helicopter tilted dizzyingly, wheeled eastward, and continued to climb.
Mountainous terrain rushed by beneath them; rolling hills gave way to bristling ravines and rocky crags. When they reached the designated coordinates, they saw the CDF helicopter circling over the body, shining its bobbing searchlight on a brave white scrap of cloth suspended in the evergreen canopy. The two pilots exchanged thumbs- up through their Plexiglas canopies, then the forestry chopper wheeled away into the darkness. Ajanian duckwalked up to the front of the cabin, removed his cap (Pender had been right about the comb-over), put on a headset with a microphone, conferred briefly with whoever was at the other end, then put his hat back on and duckwalked back to his deputies.
“THE CONSENSUS IS, WE’D JUST AS SOON BRING HER OUT TONIGHT,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “YOU GUYS GET THE FINAL SAY, THOUGH. IF YOU THINK IT’S TOO DANGEROUS TO BRING HER UP IN THE DARK…”
The rescue operation commenced smoothly. While the pilot maneuvered them into position, Gabel attached a safety harness to the cable holding the body basket, basically a stretcher with side rails and straps, and when they were directly above the body, he lowered himself over the side, with Ajanian aiming the searchlight, Pender operating the electric winch, and Garner spotting his partner.
“LOWER, LOWER,” Garner called to Pender, who was trying not to notice how close they were to the cliff. “SLOW IT DOWN…SLOWER! OKAY, A LITTLE LOWER…AAAND…STOP! STOP IT AND LOCK IT.”
It took Gabel only a few minutes of midair ballet to free the body from the trees and strap it into the basket. But
Working the winch again, Pender didn’t get a look at the dead girl until the other three had finished wrestling the basket into the chopper, which rose vertically to gain clearance the second the grisly cargo was aboard, then veered away from the mountainside.
The supine corpse, Pender noted, was in full rigor, arched drastically, with the head and heels touching the stretcher and the pelvis upthrust in a ghastly parody of sexual ecstasy. The girl’s outspread arms were curved gracefully, as if she had been flash-frozen in the middle of a swan dive. Rather than risk further damage to the body by trying to work it free, Gabel had sawn off the branch upon which she’d been impaled, so the front of her T-shirt, stiff with dried blood, was poked up above her heart.
Pender’s gaze traveled upward to the girl’s neck. With the upper surface of the body pale from postmortem lividity, the dark bruises on either side of the throat were clearly visible even in the dim light of the helicopter. As for her eyes, well, they were gone. One socket gaped raw red; the lid of the other had collapsed inward, giving the socket a shrunken appearance. Pender’s stomach churned; he tasted the bile rising in his throat, clamped his lips together, swallowed it back down.
Ajanian, who wasn’t looking all that chipper himself, agreed with Pender that the degree of rigor mortis and the absence of blanching meant the girl had been dead at least twelve hours. He had noticed the bruised throat, too, but agreed that the amount of blood on the T-shirt meant she had to have been alive when she was impaled, which ruled out strangulation as the immediate cause of death.
But whatever had ultimately killed the girl-presumably they’d know more after the autopsy-Ajanian was adamant that if nothing else, the presence of the bruises on her throat meant Luke Sweet would now have to be considered a danger to public safety. This would alter the character of the search considerably. No more all- volunteer or one-person search parties, to begin with. And the public would have to be alerted along with law enforcement.
The sheriff was all but licking his mustache at the thought of a well-attended press conference, with TV lights blazing and microphones bristling, but he still wanted Pender’s help in covering his ass. “WE’RE IN AGREEMENT, RIGHT?” he shouted, as the lights of the ball field came into view.
“YES AND NO.”
Ajanian, incredulous: “EXCUSE ME?”
“YES, HE COULD BE DANGEROUS. NO, I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD ANNOUNCE IT.”
On the ground, while the deputies and paramedics were transferring the now blanket-covered body from the basket to a gurney, Pender explained his reasoning to the sheriff. There were too many people with too many guns out there, he said-it would be like painting a bull’s-eye on the kid’s back. And since Pender also had the impression
