Fear No Evil

Chapter 71

We waited for a police dog to arrive and for the FBI helicopter to get in the air.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It said Paladin on the caller ID.

“Alex Cross,” I said.

“It’s Steve Vance, Dr. Cross,” the data-mining company’s CEO said. “We’ve found definitive links from three different attacks by the cartel going back to a small town named Santa Madera. It’s in the mountains about fifty miles east of Mexico City.”

Fifty miles, I thought. Sounds like the car ride I took to see Emmanuella. “What about here?”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Southern Wyoming,” I said. “There was a fight here between the cartel and Maestro. More than forty dead.”

“Forty?” Vance said, shocked. “My God. Can you get us authorization to mine cell phone data in that vicinity?”

“Special Agent Mahoney will get it for you ASAP.”

By the time Ned had made the call, a German shepherd named Maximus was on-site and the FBI helicopter was lifting off with a spotter aboard. From Google Earth, we’d been able to study Fell’s Creek Canyon, which was narrow at the mouth but broadened and steepened deeper into the drainage.

“We going all the way to the back?” I asked as we entered the canyon for the second time that day, now carrying AR rifles we’d gotten from the Cheyenne FBI agents.

“Six miles,” Mahoney said. “And we’ve got the chopper to bring us out.”

Maximus got on the blood scent fast but his handler, Sergeant Arthur Brayton, kept him on a tight rein, especially when we approached the creek bed for the first time.

“You’ll want to check for tracks there in the wet stuff,” Sergeant Brayton said. “See how many folks we’re dealing with.”

Mahoney and I went forward and counted four different sets of human tracks. Three sets were made by large waffle-soled boots of varying sizes, one close to Sampson’s size 13. The fourth set was smaller, with a running shoe sole, and the wearer had been limping badly. There were blood specks to the right side of the right shoe.

“Too heavy for a kid, too light for a man,” Brayton said. “It’s a woman and she’s hit in the meat of her right leg somewhere.”

The wound continued to throw blood, though it became sparser the deeper we went into the canyon. Brayton’s ability to read tracks combined with Maximus’s fine nose had us moving fast but alert in case we pushed them out.

“Anything upstairs?” Mahoney called into his radio.

“You’re running quite a few elk and deer ahead of you,” the FBI pilot replied.

We covered the first three miles in under an hour. Brayton had us slow while the helicopter flew off to refuel. He didn’t want to push them up and over the head of the drainage before we could spot them.

The helicopter returned when we reached mile four. The sky was darkening. Thunder boomed to our west. The pilot made a run up the canyon and saw no activity.

“If they’re still in here, they’re right up ahead of us,” Brayton said. “We get close, I’ll let Max take over.”

The wind picked up. The helicopter flew back to the pasture below the ranch to ride out the storm.

Tensions were high when we reached the last mile, where the trail passed through dense, dark timber before climbing into an alpine bowl. We could see the rock walls of the upper bowl ahead of us as lightning began to crack and flash.

“More blood here,” Sergeant Brayton said, pointing to a thick splash on a rock. “I say they’ve got her in a tourniquet and probably have a coagulant patch on the wound.”

“Fresh?”

He touched the blood. “Sticky. Hours ago. But she’s hit hard. As long as Max can stay on the scent, we will find her.”

We moved closer to the alpine bowl, scanning the steep mountain flanks that soared above it, looking for people climbing out. A quarter of a mile from the open ground, we passed through thick groves of low spruce, like Christmas trees, the kind of place Brayton said a wounded creature might hole up. We all had our AR guns at port arms, ready in case we got in a firefight.

I admit I suffered a few moments of incredible anxiety easing through the last hundred yards of Christmas trees, sure that M’s men were going to spring up and mow us down as they’d done to so many of the cartel gunmen behind us.

Fifty yards from the edge where the trees met rocky alpine terrain, there was a tremendous crash to our right. We all spun toward it, guns shouldered, hearing more crashes, the dog barking wildly.

There was a flash of brown ahead of us. A cow elk and her calf broke from the timber with a clatter and snapped branches as they bolted out of sight.

“I almost had a heart attack there,” Mahoney said.

“I almost soiled myself there,” Sampson said.

My temples were pounding with my racing heart. But I laughed as I lowered the gun. Out in the bowl itself, we found another splash of fresher blood on a game trail that led toward a notch high in the cliffs above us.

“That’s midmorning,” Brayton said, staring up the steep path that led to the notch. “She’s tough, I’ll give you that.”

Lightning flashed again. The bolt hit the ridge to our right. The rain came in a deluge that swept toward us like a dark curtain.

“That’s it,” Sergeant Brayton said, turning Maximus around. “Not even Mr. Nose Wizard could follow a track in these conditions.”

The rain hit us and we were soaked before we reached the Christmas trees.

“The chopper can’t come for us in this kind of weather,” Mahoney said. “We’ll have to hike back.”

“Better we jog back, stay warm,” Sergeant Brayton said. “This is classic hypothermia weather.”

“What’s back up that trail?” I asked. “I mean, over that ridge?”

“Eight miles of wilderness and misery before you hit a web of logging roads.”