Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 76

There was zero visibility.

Del Rio thought that the night was so black, even dawn couldn’t break through the moonless and overcast sky.

While Justine went back to the cabin, Del Rio pushed ahead, following the narrow path through oak and sycamore and chest-high scrub in the direction of Danny’s intermittent cries, until the trail ended in a clearing.

He flashed his light around, and there was Danny, just ahead. The kid was wearing only his boxers, lying facedown on the ground, pretty much hysterical.

Del Rio went to him, stooped down, shook his shoulder.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“Nooo,” Danny cried.

His voice was slurred and he stank of booze. Del Rio saw that he was clutching a shoe, like a ballet slipper. Danny’s flashlight was turned off or dead, lying an arm’s length away.

“Where’s Piper?”

Danny rolled onto his side and pointed to where the trail ended and the steep drop into the canyon began.

“What? She’s down there? ”

Del Rio walked a few yards to the edge, pointed his light straight down, and saw a patch of white. He was pretty sure that he was looking at Piper Winnick’s splayed and broken body, a hundred yards down in the canyon.

Del Rio stared for a long moment, hoping he was wrong. The girl looked dead, but maybe she was unconscious. It was a slim possibility, but he had to check.

He went back to Danny, grabbed him by his hair, forced the blubbering kid to look him in the eye. “What happened, Danny? What did you do to her?”

“I can’t…carry her out of there,” Danny wailed. “I want to die.”

Del Rio said, “What did you do, you piece of shit?”

The kid kept crying. Del Rio stood up and walked back to the lip of the canyon.

The canyon wall was at a treacherous forty-five degree angle to the floor. Del Rio looked for footholds, saw jutting boulders, some ledges running parallel to the ground, flat places where he could put his weight. If he watched where he was stepping, he could maybe get all the way down.

Pressing his left hand to the hill, gripping his light with the other, Del Rio started his descent, doing a good job of being a mountain goat even though his heart was slamming hard against his rib cage. He was about halfway to the bottom when, without any warning, his feet slipped across the smooth surface of a rock and shot out from under him.

Del Rio twisted his body, grabbed at the branches of a manzanita with both hands. His flashlight jumped away from him, bounced, and rolled downhill-and then Del Rio lost his tenuous hold and began skidding downward, his whole body sliding over rocks and dirt and grasses until, forty or fifty feet later, the ground came up and dumped him hard on his ass.