Murder in a Hot Flash by Marlys Millhiser
“Well, she looks alive, at least,” John B. said. She was on the lower bunk and he had to hunker next to it to be sure.
“God, Charlie, I was so worried about you.” Sid just sat his fanny on the floor and took her hand.
“I hope you guys can talk some sense into her,” the EMT man said. “This woman should be in a hospital. She won’t move, even bit me.”
“Do you feel that bad, Charlie? Or is this guy trying to hustle you?” Rita Latham asked.
“I’ve got a lot of questions to ask you, Miz Greene, and I don’t want you talking to anybody until you’re debriefed,” the sheriff of Grand County told her. “You understand me?”
“I’ve got a few questions about all this,” Mitch said as they huddled in the ranger bathroom to avoid their friends.
“If you mention Alpine Tunnel, I’ll knee your nubbin.”
He sat on the edge of the bathtub and she on the lowered lid of the stool, unable to believe how exhilarating in the face of overexertion, bodily harm, and sleeplessness, simply being alive was beginning to feel. The emergency medical type had treated his wound and left a dramatic swath of bandage around Mitch’s head before being forced off without a paying patient to justify his trip. Charlie had little doubt they’d be charged regardless.
Mitch, too, was doomed to death in a few days or hours if he didn’t let himself be sirened off to the expensive magic of a hospital.
Rita Latham had insisted upon sitting in on the sheriff’s debriefing when Charlie and Mitch went over where they were and what they saw at the time of both Earl’s and Tawny’s deaths. And Edwina was still in jail.
“Could just be, we have two murderers here,” Ralph maintained, trying to stifle the overflow of Charlie’s sputtering anger. “I’m not letting one go until I’m sure.” What’s more, no one on that river trip would be allowed to leave the county until the little sheriff had himself some answers. “And all Mr. Seabaugh said before he died was, ‘There wasn’t any sand’?”
“And for me to run away.”
Scrag had denied hitting Mitch over the head with a rock. He’d apparently been teamed up with John B. on the search for Mitch. And they hadn’t parted before Earl’s death.
Sid had teamed up with Earl and they’d gotten separated and Sid became lost himself.
“Somebody’s lying,” Charlie whispered now.
“I know. I just don’t know who.” Mitch was dejected and disgusted with himself again because after everything else, and posing heroically for the paparazzi, he’d been kneed in the ego when the rangers began to return from, the hunt.
The first one achieving access to the room where they’d all gathered was absolutely furious. “When you made it to the river after being lost for a day and a night, why didn’t you stay put? There’s boat traffic up and down it all day. If you’d waited somebody would have come by, tour boats, or search boats—somebody. That suicidal walk out of there was just plain dumb.”
Mitch had been speechless, everybody else exceedingly uncomfortable. Charlie was hastily trying to arrange some form of damage control to ad-lib their way out of the embarrassment when Ralph the sheriff-prick came to the rescue of his matinee idol.
“Well now, let’s not be so hasty to judge here, fella. Mr. Hilsten is not a native of these parts and what seems obvious to you might not to him. Plus which the man had been hit on the head with a rock and could not be accountable for the state of his reasoning, plus which he was shackled with this female … that’s an awful lot to load any man with who’s suffering from heat, exhaustion, thirst, and hunger.”
Chapter 32
Mitch Hilsten was finally coaxed out, but Charlie refused to leave the rangers’ bathroom.
“What are you going to do, sleep in the bathtub?” Rita said outside the door. “I’ve got a nice motel room for you two lovebirds in Moab. It’ll be a lot more comfortable than in there and the people who live here need the bathroom.”
“What lovebirds?” Charlie opened the door long enough to yank Rita into the room and then lock it again.
“You and Mitch. Charlie, what’s wrong with you?” Rita looked absolutely stunning in a lavender suit, with bright cranberry-colored blouse, earrings, lipstick, and shoes. The only wrong note was the perspiration beading under the makeup on her forehead. “Do you realize how narrowly you escaped death? The press has been playing up your liaison to the hilt, makes for good heartstring coverage. Charlie, you’re from Hollywood, you know the ropes.”
“Well, now for sure I’m not leaving this room. Look at me. Would you want to be splashed all over the tabloids looking like this?” And if you had a history like mine and a rebellious daughter as well as an unreasonable, judgmental mother would you want to add fuel to the press-driven fire? “Rita, has the sheriff decided for sure that Tawny’s death was murder?”
The lawyer nodded. “There wasn’t much left of the poor thing, but after Earl was murdered, the state lab did further tests and found a residue of acetone in fragments of her boots. It’s used in nail polish remover, solvents, that sort of thing. It’s highly flammable and there was a bottle of it missing from the production crew’s supplies.”
“Scrag thought he’d smelled lighter fluid on her.” Charlie hugged her stomach and turned away.
“If you come back to Moab with me you can call your daughter and reassure her you’re all right and you can visit Edwina. Please, Charlie.”
“The murderer’s still out there.”
“I can’t imagine why you’d feel safer here.”
What you don’t understand, lawyer my dear, is that I can’t face Libby or Edwina at this moment. Not after all the publicity that’s gone out about me and Mitch. “I’m too stressed by my ordeal to make any decisions right now, okay?”
Rita put up her hands, palms outward. “Okay, but I do think you’re a little old for this kind of behavior.”
Charlie did too. She just wasn’t in wonderful shape and didn’t completely trust her own judgment either. She used up the rest of some ranger’s Intensive Care Lotion to soothe the tormented skin of her entire body. She gave herself a good talking to and then tried some deep-breathing exercises. She would have loved to crawl back in that ranger’s bunk and cover her head.
The rangers’ quarters were built barrackslike, with old linoleum tile and no wallboard over the studs in places, and the windows were not spacious. But Charlie managed to crawl out of one. Almost.
Rita Latham had been dressed to meet the press. Charlie would find another way out of here. It was fairly dark night by now and she had vague plans to commandeer a vehicle or something.
You’re going to have to face your kid and mom sometime.
Well, maybe I’d like the privilege of doing it in private.
One of your most treasured dislikes in print, on the screen, or especially in reality has always been some dippy victim trying to save her self-esteem by walking into danger on her own. Even if that’s all the guys are buying now in Hollywood, you resent it and you know it.
I’m not walking into danger, I’m climbing out a window and this place is crawling with reporters, rangers, sheriff’s deputies, and tourists. Nobody’s going to pull anything funny now with so many witnesses around. And I need some space.
Charlie lived in the modern world, thrived in Hollywood, and had just survived her second near-death experience in a week. What more could happen?
“Hey, darlin’, let me help you there.”
“Oh shit.” I can’t do anything right.
The window was farther off the ground than it had looked from inside and she was in the awkward position of having part of one leg still in the room and the other unable to reach the earth, trying to support her weight with already sore hands gripping the sharp edges of the cheap metal window frame. Scrag helped her pull the second leg over the sill, while holding her around the waist from behind.
“Listen, Dickens, you don’t let go of me, I’m going to scream loud enough to blow your eardrums down your
“It’s Mitch. Charlie, you’ve got to help him.”
“And you’ve seen too many movies. He’s a big boy, he can take care of himself.”
“He’s hurt.”
“Tough titties, I’m no doctor.” Charlie’s scream ended in a croak when he clamped his other arm around her chest and deflated it of all her screaming air.
She wanted to tell him to give her up, that with all the people around here now, there was no way he could drag her off unnoticed. But she didn’t have much talking air either and the minor squawks she did manage wouldn’t alert anyone not within touching distance. So she tried to make scuffling noises with the soft slippers, which was also futile. All the while, Scrag was dragging and pushing and otherwise moving her along.
On the way around the side of the ranger barracks, they passed a lighted window. The shapes of two men in the room gestured in hot debate. The shapes most certainly brought to mind Scrag Dickens and Mitch Hilsten.
Ooops.
If that weren’t bad enough, when Charlie and her captor started across the road toward the Visitors’ Center—she, held so her feet were off the ground by now and his hand clamped across her mouth—the lighted parking in front of the barracks was all but empty. Just a few blurred lumps, sort of truck size. Even worse, the parking lot at the Visitors’ Center was completely empty.
What, Charlie had told everybody to go away and leave her alone, and they did? She tried to bite the hand clamped across her mouth but that hand had her lips pressed together so she couldn’t get her teeth out.
Where was the press now? The sheriff’s department, the lawyer, Rita Latham, when she needed them? Aha, they had driven off into the desert, hidden their cars behind the bushes, and were even now sneaking back this way to the rescue. Oh no, better yet, all the cars and people were really there, she just couldn’t see them without her contacts.
Charlie, get a life. This is serious.
I know.
Her last desperate struggle earned her a constellation of stars behind her eyes and a nasty pain in her head.
Voices and lights, many of them and from different directions, all alien and talking gibberish. Oh God, Mitch Hilsten was right. There are such things as UFOs and Charlie was on one. That’s why there were two Scrags, one holding on to her and another busy elsewhere. That second one knew everything she and Mitch and Edwina and the Army and even the President didn’t know. Even Universal Studios didn’t know!
Oh boy.
Chapter 33
Acoyote squinted through dried grasses that matched the color of its coat, its sharp ears and pointed nose trained on Charlie. It was not wearing a bandanna.
“Venom in the scorpion’s stinger is used to subdue struggling prey …”
“Charlie, I’m over here …”
A mule deer with a doe’s sweet face regarded her with glinty-glass eyes. A bobcat slunk toward her with a frozen snarl.
Charlie lay on a rock floor surrounded by critters behind glass, each in a lighted habitat not much larger than its body.
“After shedding their first skin, these …”
“An ability to veer suddenly makes the bat’s flight conspicuously erratic …”
“Don’t know where you are, do you, Charlie?”
Wrong. Charlie knew exactly where she was and rolled out of the light on her section of floor. She came up against a turkey vulture hunkering, its enormous wings folded against its body, its featherless blood-colored head turned so it could inspect Charlie squarely with one black bead eye.
She crawled between it and the next display and tried to pull herself up by bracing between them, the pain in her head and the scrambled eggs and green peppers in her belly vying to see which would achieve critical mass first.
Bats, their pinned wings outspread, their eyeteeth agleam … snakes, lizards … big rats standing on their hind feet, little staring mice …
“One of America’s largest birds of prey, the vulture also forages for carrion. Usually silent, this massive bird makes a hissing sound when …”
Each display had its own canned message available with the push of a button and someone had pushed all the buttons. There was only one recorded voice but all the messages came out of sync, sounding like a one-man crowd.
The dead wildlife, fuzzy in Charlie’s impaired vision but quite recognizable up close with such dramatic stage lighting, ignored the educational intonations and watched with suspicion as Charlie crept past.
The room was dark, the only light coming from the displays as she rounded a dark corner trying to stay out of their illumination.
“This erosion process has taken approximately 150 million years. Much of it is caused by the river’s slicing down into the earth’s crust as land is forced upward.” The recorded voice had moved with her from wildlife to geology.
“Two thousand feet below, the Colorado River winds its way from the Continental Divide in Colorado to the Gulf of California, a distance of 1,400 miles.”
“‘No sand,’ Earl had said, ‘No sand.’” A dark form stood outlined against the lighted display of a molded relief map covering most of a wall. “You know what that means, don’t you, Charlie?”
And Charlie did all of a sudden, partly because she had by now identified her attacker. She was in the basement of the Visitors’ Center. He would block off the exit up the main stairs. There would have to be a fire exit in a place open to the public. He was only one person. He couldn’t block off two exits at once. She looked for a red sign.
“For centuries streams undercut walls and cliffs collapse. Mesas shrink to buttes and then to spires and they collapse, too, and disappear …”
“Couldn’t resist the old Hilsten charm, could you? Tawny couldn’t keep her hands off him either.” Her tormentor’s voice came from a different part of the room each time he spoke and his shadow was gone from the map wall.
“Cracks of thunder split the air, clouds roll across the sun, streamers of rain stretch out to the canyons, but only under the darkest clouds do the drops reach the earth before evaporating …”
“You and Earl and Tawny, quite a threesome, weren’t you?” The whisper was that of a deeply angered man and it came from behind a movable partition at the corner of which was a red glow. An exit sign?
“… Stronger, more resistant layers of rock remained to form a rim. Today, the inner crater is 1,500 feet deep and surrounded by cliffs of the Wingate Formation …”
“They found out about Ben, didn’t they? And they told you. And the three of you planned to destroy me.”
This time he was right behind her and Charlie swung an elbow fortified by the hand on her other arm pushing with that arm’s strength against the fist of this one. She connected with tooth-jarring precision.
He went down with a thud and she took off in the direction of that red glow, only to be dropped as he caught an ankle and pulled it out from under her.
Charlie hit her head on the back of the buzzard display and if she thought things were out of focus before … She had the illusion that the bird raised its massive wings and turned its own head to look down at her. She could have sworn she heard it hiss.
“… outer valley of the Kayenta layer, and finally a second and final lip of cliff formed by the sturdy Navajo sandstone …”
“I was always finding the three of you huddled off together in a corner somewhere.”
“The uranium-bearing layer is in the Chinle Formation.”
“I’m not good enough for you, but Hilsten is.”
Charlie had lost the soft slippers somewhere and he had no trouble removing the overlarge ranger pants even while they struggled.
“The benchlands and white rim belong to the boundary line between the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras and form …”
“That was a mu
“And Ben’s death was not a suicide.” John B. sounded euphoric. Surely he could see, whether he raped and killed Charlie or not, his number was up. “Got drunk as a skunk and I drowned him in his own pool. Poor guy’d gone bust. ‘Must have committed suicide,’ everybody said. I was going for accidental death due to drunkenness but suicide was okay by me. Worked out fine.”
He was playing with her like Tuxedo, Libby’s goddamned cat, played with injured birds, mice, bugs—played with anything injured that was smaller than itself. She squirmed out from under his hands and to her bare feet, knowing damn well he’d catch her again when he felt like it.
“And you thought Tawny and Earl had just discovered this and decided to tell me?”
“Oh no, they knew long before. But they didn’t know I was on to them. That’s why I assembled this crew for this shoot, at this place. They knew, Charlie. And then they told you.” He grabbed her shoulders and slid her down against the buzzard display and to the floor again.
“You meant to kill Tawny and Earl all along.” Like you mean to kill me. “I didn’t know about Ben, honest. I don’t think they did either.”
“The APC mines make economic use of the Cane Anticline core by using a solution process. Water from the Colorado River is pumped down through the dome and then upward into huge evaporation ponds.”
“Ben found out I was using the money to put together a film on the side, instead of for a housing development. Why Cabot you want to know, right?”
Actually, Charlie was past caring about anyone but herself, about anything but survival. Her eyesight diminished without corrective lenses, her strength nearly gone, her head and stomach threatening to explode in unison, no fingernails even to mark the bastard … he already had her legs parted so she couldn’t do the knee thing mothers always encourage their daughters to resort to …
“I’ll show you why, Agent Greene.” He got to his knees and pulled them both to their feet. “You’re not a very good psychic, you know.”