Murder Off the Beaten Path (Search and Rescue Mystery, Band 2) - Softcover

Rowland, M. L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425263673 ISBN 13: 9780425263679

Verlag: Berkley Pub Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

As a member of a mountain search and rescue team, Gracie Kinkaid routinely volunteers to put her life on the line. But it’s at her new day job at a residential camp in the mountains of southern California where she finds her life is really in danger

As a volunteer for Timber Creek Search and Rescue, Gracie responds to a call out for a car that’s gone over the side of a treacherous mountain road. The crash, which Gracie quickly suspects is no accident, proves to be one in an escalating and deadly series of events that lead her right back to Camp Ponderosa, a church-owned camp where she works as Program Director. As Gracie probes more deeply into the dark secrets at the camp, she unearths a hidden world of illegal activities, including murderand finds herself going head-to-head with desperate perpetrators who will do anything to silence her forever.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

M.L. Rowland is the author of Zero-Degree Murder: A Search and Rescue Mystery.

M.L. Rowland is the author of Zero-Degree Murder: A Search and Rescue Mystery.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

THE station wagon shot over the edge of the cliff, headlights parallel beacons slicing the night. It smashed against the mountainside. Glass shattering, steel shrieking, the car cartwheeled, plunging down and down and down, smacking into trees and boulders, crashing through bushes, until finally, at the bottom of the canyon, it slowed. Rocked once. And stopped.

The groaning of settling metal drifted away with the dust.

The cooling engine ticked to a stop.

Dead silence.

CHAPTER

GINA Ramirez was missing, and Gracie’s little toe hurt.

Her sock, crusty from the previous day’s wear and pulled on in the dark that morning, had bunched up inside her hiking boot. Even with a liner sock, the fabric rubbing against a blister on the outside of her toe had begun to burn only a quarter mile out on the high-mountain trail along which she now hiked. Exhaustion from searching for the missing fifteen-year-old girl for five out of the last seven days manifested itself in stubbornness, an unwillingness to stop to remove her knee-high gaiter and her boot and place a square of moleskin over the raw spot.

As Gracie limped down the trail, she swiped away sweat burning the outer corner of her eye with the back of her wrist. Sweat stained the armpits of her orange uniform shirt and saturated the rim of her floppy hat, plastering ropy strands of damp hair to her forehead and the back of her neck. The waistband of her desert camo army pants was wet where the strap of her heavy pack was cinched atop bruised hips.

Behind Gracie hiked Lenny Olsen. A burly six-foot-five with a wild thatch of straw-colored hair, he was one of the newest members on Timber Creek Search and Rescue. Normally the young man’s ready grin and effusive banter never failed to make Gracie smile. But that morning, Lenny was so glum, so grimly silent, it took a mumbled curse or size 12EEE hiking boot kicking a stone to remind her he was there.

The fawn-colored National Forest Service trail along which the two searchers hiked meandered just below the mountain ridgeline at over nine thousand feet. Rounded clumps of manzanita crowded in on both sides, shiny leaves against smooth, dark red bark. On the right, white fir and ponderosa pine reared up against the clear cerulean sky. On the left, intermittent openings in the trees below offered Sierra Club–calendar glimpses of the Bavarian-style resort town of Timber Creek. And beyond, Timber Lake glittered, diamonds on cobalt satin, beneath the afternoon sun.

Gracie breathed in the cool, sweet high-altitude air. Any other day, hiking in heaven on earth would have sent her spirits soaring with the ravens. But that day, hoofing it down the trail, she barely noticed the natural world, brilliant and perfect, brought low by a cruel world where a teenager could vanish without a trace.

Media alerts and flyers papering the entire valley and surrounding communities displayed a picture of the missing girl: bright dark brown eyes, a wide smile revealing tiny pearl teeth, shoulder-length black hair held back from her face by a pink headband. Gina Ramirez. Age fifteen. Five foot one inch tall. Eighty pounds. Last seen wearing a dark pink T-shirt with a light blue hoodie, blue jeans, white sneakers, diamond-chip earrings, and a thin gold bracelet with a pink enamel heart.

According to the briefing search teams received upon their arrival at the Incident Command Post, the girl had last been seen around ten o’clock the previous Monday night. Bouncing up the stairs to her bedroom, she had called a cheerful good-night to her parents sitting in the living room watching Animal Planet on the flat screen with their two young sons. The following morning, Gina was gone. Her bed hadn’t been slept in.

Seven grueling days of searching followed. More than one hundred searchers representing fourteen teams from five southern California counties. Ground pounders. Trackers. ATVs. Aviation. Dog teams. Horse teams. Vehicle and boat patrols. Street by street, knocking on doors, passing out flyers, talking to locals, questioning tourists, dredging the lake. Neighborhoods. Businesses. Marinas. Every building, vehicle, and boat within a two-mile radius of the girl’s house had been searched. And searched again. Every trail in the surrounding mountains had been hiked. And hiked again.

Not a single piece of evidence had been found. Not a single clue. Every possible scenario had been examined. Every tactic exhausted. With each passing day, hope for finding Gina Ramirez alive faded like the last glimmer of afternoon sunshine on lake water.

By the end of her fourth day of searching, Gracie was on autopilot, her mind numb, shutting out everything but the present and the bulldog obsession to keep searching, to find little Gina Ramirez alive and bring her home to her family. She squinted behind her Ray-Bans, head swiveling from side to side, eyes skimming the steep incline thrusting up on her right, plunging down on her left, trying to pick out anything resembling a clue, any unnatural color standing out against the surrounding gray rock and the green tapestry of bushes and trees. A flash of gold. An ordered pattern.

“All teams stand by for announcement.” Ralph Hunter’s voice over the radio microphone clipped to Gracie’s chest pack made her jump. She slid to a stop on the trail, pulled off her gloves, and tucked them into a pant-leg pocket.

Lenny stopped so close behind Gracie his breath tickled the back of her neck. “What’s happening?” he asked. “Did somebody find her?”

“Nope.” Gracie withdrew her GPS from its own little pocket on her chest pack and held it aloft to acquire satellite signals. “They would have announced it.”

“Then what are—?”

Ralph’s voice over the radio cut Lenny off. “Per IC, all teams return to base. Repeat. Return to base. All teams acknowledge.”

“Shit,” Gracie whispered.

“What’s happening?” Lenny asked again.

“Ground Forty-six. Acknowledged,” a man’s voice said over the mike, then a woman’s: “Dog Eight copies.” Another man’s: “ATV Seventeen. Ten-four.”

Gracie waited, poised to call in, hand on the radio microphone. “They’ve called the search.”

“They called it?”

She cleared her throat and thumbed the mike button. “Ground Forty-three. Copy.” She jerked her gloves back on. “We’re done.”

Lenny bent to peer into her face. “That’s it?”

Gracie looked into his wide eyes, a startling cornflower blue. “That’s it.”

“It’s over?”

Knowing she was lecturing, she said, “Technically, they’re probably only suspending it, not calling it off, so they can resume later if they find any clues or evidence.” She concentrated on wrapping the straps of her trekking poles around her hands. “For us, for now, it’s over.”

“Fuck!” Lenny stomped twenty feet back up the hard-packed trail, stopped, and bent over, elbows on knees, head hanging, taking in deep breaths.

Exhaustion anesthetized most of the pain, but tears burned Gracie’s eyes.

They had done everything they could.

But it hadn’t been enough.

Little Gina Ramirez had officially become a statistic.

CHAPTER

GRACIE pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor and guided her Ford Ranger pickup, a rust-spotted maroon, around the steep curves of Cedar Mill Road on the five-mile climb from the valley floor up to Camp Ponderosa high in the mountains. The air, warm and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley Pub Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425263673
• ISBN 13: 9780425263679
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar