Long Road to Mercy

Chapter 11

Blum’s email had contained more information about the website where she had originally found the two articles.

If the letters carved on the mule were referring to Jordan and Kinkaid, then the person who had carved them might have accessed this website. And whenever you accessed a digital space, you left behind your electronic prints in the form of an IP address. The Bureau had busted many a crook who didn’t understand this. It was a long shot, Pine knew, but Blum had also told her that there weren’t very many websites dealing with this subject, so they might just get lucky. Ordinarily, Pine would have forwarded this information to IT specialists at the Bureau who could check out web traffic to a site.

Yet she hesitated to do that now.

Eyes in the back of my head.

Avery had told her that, and yet he was no particular ally of hers. But she was under his chain of command and maybe he was giving her some subtle assistance for some reason as yet unknown. Or maybe he was setting her up to swing in the wind. She supposed only time would tell which possibility was correct.

She finished her beer and took two pork sausages out of the fridge. She had already fired up her little hibachi that was out on the balcony. It had come with the apartment, having been left behind by the last renter. She only had to add a fresh bag of charcoal. Pine wasn’t much of a cook, but eating out every night was not in her budget, or good for her physical well-being.

She plopped the fat sausages on the hot grill, and her nostrils were instantly assailed with the smell of cooking spiced meat.

She grabbed a bottle of water from her fridge, uncapped it, and took a long drink. Dehydration was a real problem here. People trying to hike the Canyon failed all the time to take this into account, despite all the warning signs posted everywhere about how much water and salty foods to carry with you, and how much to consume during your trek. Becoming dehydrated was potentially deadly. Blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels, the heart slowed, the organs could begin shutting down. And then you were gone. All from not imbibing enough H₂O.

She mixed a small salad, cutting up tomatoes, cucumbers, snap peas, and beets. She sprinkled a homemade lemon vinaigrette over it and set it on the kitchen table. A few minutes later she checked on the sausages. They were plump and bursting and marked with the tines of the grill.

Just how she liked them.

She sat at her table and ate, while she used her laptop to look through the website Blum had found. It was quite conspiratorial in tone. The whole country, maybe the whole world, was wallowing in paranoia. She thought it was still anyone’s bet as to whether the internet would turn out to be more good or evil.

She texted a friend of hers who worked for a satellite office of Google in Salt Lake City and gave him the information on the site, with a request that he track the IP addresses that had accessed the site within the last several weeks. Pine had no idea what sort of traffic this site experienced, so she felt it was practical to put in a time parameter, if just to see what sort of volume she’d be looking at.

She finished her dinner and put her plate and utensils in the dishwasher.

It was nearly nine o’clock now, but she wasn’t really tired.

She received an answering text from her friend in Salt Lake. He had gotten the information and would try to have something for her tomorrow.

Pine sat back and thought things through. It was quite a mishmash in her head. How did a carved-up mule that might be tied to an old legend square with a defense contractor gone missing, along with the man impersonating him?

No, she was wrong about that. It was still unproven that Benjamin Priest was a defense contractor. He could be something else entirely. And Benjamin Priest wasn’t even technically missing — the man pretending to be him was.

And why the Bureau’s national security interest?

Pine couldn’t even prove that the real Benjamin Priest had ever visited the Grand Canyon. The only concrete evidence she had was that someone calling himself Benjamin Priest had ridden Sallie Belle down to the Canyon floor and then vanished, leaving a mutilated mule in his wake.

Had the impersonator hiked out at night? Hikers did make the trek from rim to rim at night, to avoid the heat of the day, which could feel like a sauna from May to September.

Pine had made the nighttime journey numerous times, taking a quick nap on the banks of the Colorado at midnight before hiking up to the opposite rim to see the sunrise. But she was in excellent physical shape, knew the trails, and had the right equipment, including headlamps. Walking along rocky, uneven narrow trails with sheer drops without lights was a suicidal endeavor.

So, a guy who was nervous coming down on a mule would have had to hike up alone in the dark. Pine had no way to explain this seemingly incongruous possibility.

And she certainly wouldn’t figure it out tonight.

She stripped off her clothes and took a shower, and put on a pair of gym shorts and a white tank top.

She sat on the bed and looked at her heavily callused hands. She had had to scrub hard to get out the fine bits of weightlifting chalk embedded in her fingers.

When she wasn’t traveling for a case, she lifted three times a week at a gym in downtown Shattered Rock. It used to house a Chinese restaurant, but apparently the denizens of the Rock would rather push iron than eat kung pao. Next door to that was an MMA studio, where she practiced her kickboxing three days a week. On the seventh day, unlike God, she didn’t rest. Instead, she put on her Nikes and ran along the flat, dry plains, with an unforgiving sun beating down on her.

The unincorporated town of Tuba City was to the east of Shattered Rock and hugged the westernmost edge of the Navajo Nation like a parenthesis. Shattered Rock lay just outside the boundaries of the Navajo’s territory, sitting within the Painted Desert. The summers were hot and dry and the winters cold and equally dry because of the barrier mountains to the south.

Her first winter here, Pine thought her skin was literally going to break off. She had gone through a ton of moisturizers and kept a humidifier in her apartment and office running from November to April. Even then, she’d had to buy lip balm and Aveeno by the crate.

She lay back on her bed, one arm across her forehead as she stared up at the dark ceiling. It was a little after ten, and even with her window shut she could hear the baleful howl of a coyote coming from somewhere.

They’d had coyotes back in rural Georgia. While she had watched, her father had shot one that had gone after their chickens. Her father wasn’t the best shot, and the animal hadn’t died right away. Pine could recall her eyes filling with tears as the poor beast writhed in pain. The bullet must have hit its spine and paralyzed its rear legs. Her father had walked over and calmly shot the coyote in the head, ending its misery.

He had turned to his remaining daughter, taken the smoldering cigarette from his lips, and stuffed the still-smoking pistol inside his belt.

“You don’t let things be in pain, Lee, you hear me. That’s one’a God’s creatures, so you got to put them out of their misery, okay? You hear me, girl? Pain ain’t no good that way. Ain’t right. You hear me now?”

This had occurred after Mercy had been taken from them. They were all changed, all on edge, all different from what they had once been. Pain, yes, they were all certain that Mercy had been in pain.

She had wiped her eyes and nodded at her father, but her gaze had remained on the dead animal, its lifeless eye seemed to be trained solely on her, as the blood pooled around its destroyed head. She would never forget the howl the beast had made when it had first been shot. Shot for simply hunting for something to eat. She would never forget its piteous writhing on the ground, its spine crushed by a bullet, unsure of what had just happened, but instinctively knowing that its life was just about over, even as it desperately tried to rise and flee.

And survive.

On this thought Pine’s memory lurched to her sister.

And how Mercy must have felt something similar to this, as she was taken from the only home she had ever known. Her life forfeited by an unknown force. For no reason at all other than a violent lunatic’s whim.

Did someone put you out of your misery?

Did someone take the pain away, Mercy?

I hope he did. I pray he did.

At that exact moment Pine wanted to finally let something out of her that had been inside far too long. She was a dammed-up river desperately needing a release.

But it wouldn’t come. The tears would not come.

The imposing image of Daniel James Tor briefly flitted across her mind.

If he had taken Mercy, she prayed that the end had come quickly. But knowing Tor’s history, she very much doubted that was the case.

With her sister’s features firmly in her mind, Pine fell into a troubled sleep.

As she usually did.