4:30 a.m.
Even as Chuck told himself to pull away, he gave himself up to the kiss, and to Rachel. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, the heat of her lips on his a miniature sun at his center.
Rachel’s kiss was searching, questioning. Authoritative, too, as if she was laying down a marker with it, communicating something to him.
As quickly as she’d brought her mouth to his, Rachel drew back. But she kept her hand at the back of his neck, her face inches from him. “Chuck,” she said softly. She looked down, then up at him again, the movement of her head barely discernible in the dark. She swept her fingers up his neck and caressed the side of his head. “Hmm,” she murmured, a single falling note, a goodbye—to him, to all they’d shared as a couple.
He considered various answers, came up with nothing, and settled on the truth. “I’m scared.”
She dropped her hand. “You should be,” she replied.
Just like that, Chuck was back, rooted in the present, and rooted in the realization that Rachel was right, that it was okay for him to be frightened, that he should be frightened. On the heels of that realization came awareness—he loved Janelle and the girls, and if he couldn’t spend his life with them, his life wouldn’t be worth living.
And finally, he realized, dawn was coming far too quickly.
Unsure how much Rachel could see of his eyes in the light filtering from the accident scene, he looked away. He remembered how easily he’d found himself telling Rachel his ridiculous idea of Janelle’s possible involvement in Carmelita’s kidnapping. If he kept talking with Rachel now, it wouldn’t be long before he’d find himself telling her about his plan to make the exchange at the festival site alone, even after Donald’s killing.
“What is it?” Rachel asked, her eyes seeking his.
“Clock’s ticking,” he replied simply.
He looked past her at the accident scene and was startled to find that the ranger who’d been standing at Amelia’s side was headed up the drainage in Rachel’s wake, approaching the point where Desert View Drive cut across the wash. The ranger put a hand to his eyes below the brim of his hat, shielding the bright lights behind him and looking ahead.
Chuck pointed at the oncoming ranger. “They’re worried about you.”
She glanced over her shoulder, then back. “So what.”
He took Rachel’s hand, the one that had brought his lips to hers, and held it as he studied her silhouette. “I have to go.”
Rachel leaned toward him and spoke into his ear. “Find her, Chuck,” she said.
“I will,” he told her. “For you. And for my wife.”
“For the two of us.” Rachel stepped back, and Chuck felt the warmth of her smile in the darkness.
He let go of Rachel’s hand and headed back up the creek bed at a ground-eating lope, guided once again by the night-vision goggles. The cool breeze poured past him, an invisible fog that filled him with foreboding.
He continued a few hundred yards up the wash before climbing from the drainage and running eastward through the forest, Janelle’s voice playing over and over again in his mind. “I told myself you were the one,” she’d said. “I willed myself to believe it.” Rather than appreciate his new family, Chuck had taken to running from them each and every morning. He’d made the leap all too easily to paranoia, to wondering if his wife could be involved in her own daughter’s disappearance. He flushed with shame. What kind of person was he?
He was on a path leading straight to where his father had ended up—alone and forgotten.
He looked through the trees to the eastern sky, brightening with the coming day. He was not his father. Janelle and the girls were not a burden, not something to be discarded the way his father had discarded him. Janelle and the girls were Chuck’s life. For their lives to continue together, he had to win Carmelita’s freedom, had to focus on the here and now—including figuring out how, in light of the accident, Miguel would manage to get past Pipe Creek to reach the music festival site, particularly with Carmelita in tow. One possibility was Hansen Conover. If Hansen was working with Miguel, the junior ranger could get Carmelita’s father past the wreck on Desert View Drive. Or perhaps Miguel was already waiting with Carmelita at the festival site. Or he’d hidden Carmelita somewhere else and would expect Chuck to hand over the necklaces in return for disclosing her whereabouts.
Chuck kept his eyes on the forest floor directly ahead of him and worked to keep his speed up, concentrating on getting to the festival site as quickly as possible to size things up before daylight arrived. He maintained his pace through the forest until, as best he could determine, he was roughly even with the site. He turned north, toward the canyon. The ponderosa forest gave way to scattered piñons and junipers as he neared the canyon rim. The scrubby trees, bent and twisted by the nearly constant winds that blew up and out of the canyon, rose no more than thirty feet above the broad swath of yucca and sage that marked the canyon’s edge.
He reached Desert View Drive and found he’d judged well; he was a hundred yards beyond the turnoff from the road to the festival site. He crossed the empty roadway and crept from tree to tree toward the edge-of-the-canyon drop-off a quarter mile away.
The eastern sky glowed bluish gray. A handful of stars shone overhead. Chuck left the goggles behind on the ground, unwilling to risk the slight sound of unzipping his pack to stow them inside.
He stifled his breathing and stuck to patches of sand and smooth expanses of rock until, fifty yards ahead, rising at the lip of the canyon, the roof structure over the festival performance stage emerged above the tops of the low trees. The dying night sky framed the metal roof, held aloft by thick, peeled-log posts.
Chuck made his way to the eight-foot, chain-link fence that enclosed the site on three sides, all the way to the canyon rim. Beneath the prowed roof, the open rear of the performance stage was separated from the canyon only by a waist-high metal railing. Several hundred blue fiberglass seats, bolted to concrete risers, half-encircled the stage to create an intimate amphitheater providing views of performances and, through the unwalled back of the stage, the abyss of the canyon beyond. A pair of flat-roofed, single-story storage buildings sat close beside one another behind the seating area, separating the amphitheater from a large gravel parking lot.
The festival site was a perfect example of federal money sloshing around until it found a home. A decade ago, a loose consortium of musical groups out of Flagstaff had convinced local politicians and park-service officials in D.C. that the national park, always struggling for funds, could earn some extra cash by hosting a local music festival each year to attract visitors to the canyon from among the park’s local populace. The feel-good idea had gained ground quickly, prompting the musicians and park officials to team up and select the rim-hugging site east of the village for the proposed festival amphitheater.
Upon the public announcement of the site’s selection, the tribal elder serving as president of the Navajo tribe declared the site sacred. Developing the site, he said, would amount to sacrilege. Chuck recalled that Jonathan and Elise Marbury had supported the tribal president, whose contention threatened the entire music-fest proposal until someone in D.C. suggested offering the Navajo tribe’s wholly-owned construction company, Diné Constructors, a no-bid contract to build the amphitheater at the site. The tribal president’s concerns about the site’s sacredness faded away with the signing of the lucrative contract, and a hurriedly approved federal grant funded the facility’s construction by the tribe.
The musicians who had pushed for the festival’s creation played the new amphitheater for a few years, posting impressive videos of their cliff-side performances online, before losing interest in making the lengthy drive from Flagstaff to play before what turned out to be minuscule festival audiences. After the initial acts moved on, the festival’s executive director struggled to find new acts to fill the bill because the federal grant that had paid for the amphitheater’s construction stipulated that only local acts could play it. The festival continued for a couple more years as the tiny crowds dwindled further. The festival took a “one-year hiatus” that had stretched on for four, leaving the site abandoned and bleaching beneath the high-desert sun.
Chuck peered through the fence into the amphitheater. In the murky gray of pre-dawn, he spotted no movement on the stage or in the seating area. No light came from the windows set in the concrete-block walls of the twin storage buildings at the rear of the amphitheater. The site’s gravel parking lot was empty. The only sound was that of the strengthening morning breeze coursing through the branches of the piñons and junipers outside the perimeter fence.
Three outward-leaning strands of barbed wire atop the fence made clambering up and over the chain-link barrier impossible. The site’s entrance gate, also eight feet high and topped by barbed wire, was closed by a length of looped and locked chain where the entry drive reached the gravel lot.
Chuck’s goal was to be hidden and waiting somewhere inside the festival site before the kidnapper or kidnappers showed up. He followed the perimeter fence to the edge of the cliff at the east end of the festival site, hoping to swing around the far side of the fence and into the site where the fence met the lip of the canyon. Rather than come to an end at the top of the cliff, however, the perimeter fence made a 180-degree turn out and over the precipice, topped by three tilted strands of barbed wire, to end bolted into the rock face eight feet below the top of the cliff.
The cliff itself extended without a break from the east perimeter fence past the rear of the open performance stage to the west perimeter fence, which also was bolted out and over the edge of the cliff fifty yards away. The waist-high railing at the back of the stage followed the top of the cliff both directions until it connected up with the two ends of the perimeter fence. A sandy shelf, dotted with boulders and brush, extended from the base of the uppermost, hundred-foot cliff horizontally for thirty feet before a second cliff plunged deeper into the shadow-filled canyon.
Chuck could attempt to enter the site by climbing down one side of the inverted fence and up the other, using the cliff face for traction to overcome the tilted strands of barbed wire, but doing so would require him to negotiate the strands of wire while hanging a hundred feet off the ground. Before he could decide if he was capable of such a maneuver, he heard a car approaching along Desert View Drive from the direction of the village. The vehicle slowed, turned onto the gravel road leading to the festival site, and headed his way.
His decision made for him, he clambered down the links of the overhanging fence as fast as he dared. He dropped his feet below the base of the inverted fence and lowered himself until he dangled from its bottom, his hands positioned between barbs on the lowest strand of wire. He pivoted his body and reached blindly upward with his left hand to begin his climb up the inside of the fence, scrabbling with his feet on the cliff wall. His hand closed over a barb on one of the strands of wire, reopening the wound on his palm. Stifling a cry of pain, he repositioned his left hand and hauled himself upward, grabbing the chain-link fence above the strands of barbed wire with his right hand. He pulled himself hand over hand up the inside of the fence, his injured palm throbbing, until his feet regained their purchase on the bottom of the inverted section of fence.
He clung to the fence, struggling for breath, and edged his head above the top of the cliff in time to catch sight of the oncoming car as it raced up the entrance road toward the festival site. The vehicle, visible in the growing daylight behind the beams of its headlights, was Robert Begay’s hulking white Suburban.