PROLOGUE

EL PORTAL, CALIFORNIA
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
FEBRUARY, 1999

The killer knew his terrain. For several years he had studied it, observing those who checked in and checked out, as they unpacked and repacked the trunks of their cars, changing clothes, showering—he liked to think about that—then dining in the restaurant, so clean, so fresh, so … youthful. The next day they’d drive into the park; maybe he’d see them again, but probably not.

They were part of the landscape, the brown young girls with their backpacks, their finely toned muscles, their energy. They came and they went; it didn’t matter, really. In some ways they were all the same, even as their clothes and colors changed; they were innocent, which was what he craved. He knew what his secret heart desired, even if he couldn’t tell another soul.

The sprawling lodge was almost like home to the killer. He knew its geography like he knew his own body. There was the main administration building with its lobby and gift shop; there was the restaurant and bar, with the glittering blue pool behind, in summer always worth watching. There were the sprawling, boxlike complexes of rooms, upstairs and down, 206 in all, in six separate buildings inching up the slope toward the mountain behind.

And across the highway was the river. Rushing through its narrow canyon, bouncing over arrays of broken granite slabs and stones, the Merced was a constant, almost living thing: bright, merry, mischievous in its own way, the world’s largest gravel-making machine. On its banks, shaded by trees, one could find a hidden beach, where one could strip off everything, and try to become one with the mystical landscape.

All in all, the killer loved El Portal: there was work, there were familiar faces, there was a sense of security, a place that had become home. He might be faceless, but he was the permanent one, the one who was there year-round, just like the gigantic gray cliff faces in the awesome park farther up the bouncing river: Yosemite.

Yosemite: for most of his life, it seemed, Yosemite had been some sort of lodestone, subtly drawing him, or at least influencing his fortunes and that of his poor, tattered, tragic family. Who knew what the place’s power was, or where it came from? But it called to him, summoned him, in a deep way he did not completely fathom. It was light, it was air, it was darkness; and in some part of his mind, the killer knew the park was menace, although he could never explain how, or why. It was freedom, and it was nature; and true nature was as savage as it was unpredictable.

As he was …

*   *   *

You could drive into the park—it almost seemed sacriligious to call it a park when it had nothing in common with the tamed swatches of greenified ground that most Americans called parks—and almost immediately be overwhelmed by the grandeur of the bowl of the valley, surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs, decorated by enormous waterfalls descending thousands of feet to the valley floor. It was why the tourists came, of course, nearly 4 million each year. Every day, tens of thousands streamed up the narrow road along the banks of the Merced, and into the canyon, by bus, by car, by bicycle, even on foot. And all of them gawked, craning their necks at the gigantic cliffs and the waterfalls that glistened down their sheer faces.

In his mind, the rubberneckers were trespassers, an evil necessary for him to survive, to live, but seen as a temporary infestation of the true park, the true beauty of the valley. In a way, the tourists were nothing more than moving objects, and unnatural ones at that. He had the same sort of feeling for the visitors that one might have for a herd of cattle that belonged to someone else.

None of them knew, or would ever understand, what Yosemite meant to him. It was seared in his soul, and would always be so tied up in the pain, the guilt, the anger, the sorrow of his life that no one would ever guess at the forces raging inside of his placid exterior. It went back a long way.