Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Read online

  * * *

  It had been so long since the phone rang that at first he didn’t recognize the sound. He just sat there on the couch, staring blankly at the television, trying to place the familiar ringtone. It finally hit him with the force of an uppercut. He threw himself over the back of the couch, sprinted down the hallway, and ran into his bedroom. The old cellphone was on the nightstand. His hands shook so badly he could barely pick it, let alone flip it open.

  “Michelle?” he whispered.

  He hadn’t used that phone in longer than he could remember and kept the number active for only one reason. It hadn’t rung in more than seven years and there was a part of him that believed it would never ring again, yet still he kept it faithfully plugged in beside his bed on the off chance that one of these days it just might.

  There was a long pause on the other end, during which he feared his heart had stopped beating.

  “Is this John Avery?” a voice he’d never heard before asked.

  That was three hours ago now.

  Everything since was a blur. He had only the vaguest memory of grabbing his coat and running to his car, of peeling out of the parking lot and hitting the highway to the tune of blaring horns and screeching brakes. He drove on autopilot, leaving his body to handle the task of keeping the vehicle on the road while his mind raced through the possibilities.

  The caller had identified himself as Archuleta County Sheriff Wayne Dayton, but had volunteered little else. The entire conversation had been as cryptic as it was unnerving. He’d asked who Michelle was as though he didn’t know and yet seemed unsurprised when John told him.

  Michelle Jenkins, his girlfriend since his sophomore year in high school, had left on an extended skiing holiday with her friends the day after finishing finals. That had been the end of the first semester of their junior year at the University of Colorado, three semesters shy of graduation and the beginning of their lives together. He would have married her. There was no doubt in his mind. There’d never been a single moment in their five and a half years together that he’d doubted they would be together forever. At least not until she failed to call him on the second night, when she was scheduled to arrive at the Wolf Creek Ski Resort. He’d been able to rationalize that as anything from falling asleep during the drive to being unable to get cell signal so deep in the Rockies. Despite the sick feeling that settled into his stomach, it wasn’t until her parents called the following afternoon that he’d known something was horribly wrong.

  The windshield wipers squeaked back and forth across the cracked glass. The freezing drizzle had transformed into outright snow, although it had yet to begin to stick to the roads. Not that he was worried. The old Bronco was great on the ice and he’d logged more hours than he could count on this very highway, under every possible road condition. He’d spent the last seven years combing these mountains with a stack of maps on the seat beside him. He’d driven every highway and every back road, crossed every pass and hiked every trail from Northern New Mexico to Southern Wyoming and Eastern Utah to the Colorado Front Range in an ever-widening search for the love of his life.

  Even after her parents gave up.

  Long after he was dropped from his classes, fired from his job, and evicted from his apartment. Clear up until he simply ran out of money to feed the gas tank and his once athletic frame withered to skin and bones, a consequence of a diet consisting exclusively of caffeine and beef jerky.

  It was at that point he’d been forced to seek employment in order to finance his search. He found steady seasonal work operating chairlifts in the winter and waiting tables in the summer. He moved from one resort town to another, like all of the ski bums with whom he worked, only while they hit the slopes, he spent every spare moment combing the hills for the green Forester the police had never found and any sign of what might have happened to its five occupants.

  They’d last spoken when Michelle arrived in Breckenridge, on the night of the first day. During the subsequent twenty-four hours, she and the others could have easily reached any point in Colorado and its neighboring states. They’d been heading southwest with the intention of hitting the Wolf Creek Ski Resort on the way to Durango. From there, they’d planned to travel north to ski Silverton and Telluride, before veering northwest into Moab and their ultimate destination, Sundance.

  There were simply too many variables to consider. A storm on the second night caused the closure of several passes, which could have rerouted them in any number of directions. There’d been an accident on Highway 160 that backed up traffic for several hours. They were all such good skiers that they could have pulled off the road at any given point and tackled the backcountry. Or, as the police theorized, they could have simply kept on driving and were even now living out of the back of the Subaru on Venice Beach. After all, the five of them hadn’t been dean’s list scholars.

  Dylan Moore might not have had a criminal record, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was a trust-fund kid who spent every waking moment high, as his grades would attest. Jeremy Varner and Amy Douglas did a better job of balancing their partying and their educations, presumably only because neither had a golden parachute the size of Dylan’s. They’d been together for the better part of two years, although only exclusively when it served their needs. Tammie Withrow was an old friend of Dylan’s from their private school days. Her inclusion had been based solely on her willingness to cover the cost of their lodgings and her affection for Dylan, who kept a stable of ex-girlfriends available at all times.

  Michelle was the odd man out in the group, or at least her life trajectory placed her on that course. Amy had been her roommate in the dorms freshman year and her sister at Kappa Kappa Gamma. They’d shared a major, partied together, and hit the slopes while Avery studied and slung pizzas to pay his bills. His grants only covered a fraction of his tuition and his parents couldn’t afford to cover the shortfall, unlike Michelle’s, whose real estate business shot into the stratosphere before the bubble burst.

  More than anything, Avery wished for once he’d been irresponsible, blown off work, and just let himself be swept away by the moment. At least then he’d know what happened to Michelle, even if it meant sharing her fate. Despite what the police thought, Michelle would have come back to him if she were able. The last time he spoke to her parents, they’d asked him not to call again, to leave them to grieve in peace. His own parents had gone from hinting that she might be dead to trying to force that belief upon him. The last time he saw them had been at the intervention they staged for him in Granby. He’d known their hearts were in the right place, but he hadn’t been able to forgive them at the time and too many years had now passed to expect them to forgive him.

  Maybe whatever awaited him in Pine Springs would finally allow him to gain closure, but he wasn’t about to give up hope yet.

  He left Uncompahgre National Forest and the snowstorm behind as he headed south through the San Juan Mountains.

  The dark clouds swelled above the snowcapped peaks in his rearview mirror, like a tsunami preparing to crash onto the shore.

  * * *

  Seaver stood at the top of the ridgeline and surveyed the endless mountains and valleys. The air was cold and biting. Cumulonimbus clouds crested the distant range to the north. The winds up here were completely unpredictable. The storm could just as easily head east and settle against the Sangre de Cristos as it could sweep straight down toward them. As soon as you thought you had Mother Nature figured out, she surprised you and reminded you of your place in the universe. Based on his luck so far today, he had a feeling he’d better dress heavy.

  He looked back down toward the trailhead in time to see a blue and gray Bronco grumble down the rutted road. It pulled onto the slanted shoulder behind the white Search & Rescue truck. Seaver’s Department of Wildlife truck was parked on the opposite side behind the sheriff’s Blazer. Dayton sat on the hood, the brim of his tan Stratton sheriff’s hat pulled down low over his eyes, tapping a restless rhythm on
the bumper with the heels of his boots.

  The sheriff felt it, too. Seaver could tell. You couldn’t live in these mountains for very long without developing something of an empathetic relationship with them. He could feel that something was wrong, and recognizing that same certainty in Dayton frightened him more than the absence of the finches and squirrels in the canopy, more than the thousands of still acres above which not a single hawk or eagle circled, and even more than the condition of the dead ram’s remains.

  He headed back down toward the others. Best to just get this out of the way. They had a long trek ahead of them and undoubtedly an even longer hike back. At least he did. Once he got them to where he found the camera, they were on their own. Whatever happened to that girl…he wanted no part of it. He had his own problems, most notably a diminishing herd of bighorn sheep upon whose lives his livelihood and career were dependent.

  The Search & Rescue tech was waiting for him at the gate where the washboard road ended, looking more than a little impatient. Her black, brown, and white Australian shepherd charged through the underbrush. Denise Crowell was a SARTECH III and a deputy with the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department on loan to the emergency services department for the winter. Seaver had run into her countless times out here in the National Forest, where she trained her dog Zeke for Wilderness Air Scent Search certification. Of course, by bumbling unknowingly into her path he’d ruined her carefully placed scent trails and incurred the kind of tongue-lashing they’d bleep even from cable TV. She didn’t look any happier to see him now, although Zeke scampered up in his little orange vest with the saddlebags on the sides and sniffed his fingertips.

  “Don’t touch him while he’s working,” Crowell said. She was taller than he was and wore her white-blond hair tucked under her orange cap, which matched her jacket. Her striking blue eyes stood out from her pale skin like blueberries in cream. “Once is a courtesy. If I have to tell you again, I’ll do so with your wrist pinned between your shoulder blades and my knee in your spine. Are we clear?”

  She turned her back in him before he could respond. Considering she was like that with everyone, he didn’t take it personally.

  Dayton ambled across the road with Thom in tow. He hailed the newcomer, who hovered outside the open door of his Bronco. The man walked around the hood of his car and extended his hand to the sheriff.

  “Mr. Avery,” Dayton said. “Thank you for meeting us all the way out here.”

  “Like I said on the phone, I’ll help you in any way I can.”

  “That’s good. To be blunt, I think we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  * * *

  Dayton recognized the man from the beginning of the video. He’d been the one who’d initially been doing the filming, the one who stayed behind. He was thinner and his face was prematurely aged by the sun and the wind, but this was definitely the same guy.

  There were so many questions he needed to ask, but he had to be careful for fear of leading Avery to the wrong answers rather than coaxing the right ones from him. So far, all he knew for certain was what he had seen on the videotape. He’d read a half-dozen newspaper articles about the disappearance of the five college kids, yet not one of them contained anything more than speculation. All anyone seemed to know was that these kids had set out upon a two-week ski trip and were never seen again. Their parents had even raised a million-dollar reward for any information leading to their whereabouts. They paid trackers an absurd amount of money and commissioned private planes to fly over the vast swatches of wilderness, and yet none of them found so much as a hint as to where they might have gone after leaving Breckenridge, or if they ever did.

  The papers had stopped reporting about the candlelight vigils on campus within a couple of months, and the volunteers searching the most likely routes gave up shortly thereafter. On the first anniversary of their disappearance, their parents held a tear-filled press conference and raised the reward to five million. On the second anniversary, Trudie Varney, Jeremy’s mother, took out a room at the Breckenridge Lodge and overdosed on prescription painkillers. The following year, Andrew Moore, father of Dylan and CEO of Rocky Mountain Fiber Optics, led the charge to have them all legally declared dead. He must have succeeded, because that was the last mention of any of them in nearly half a decade.

  And considering Avery’s relationship, he couldn’t be entirely certain that he hadn’t been involved. The initial investigators had taken a long look at him and, despite his alibi, hadn’t entirely dismissed him as a suspect. Jealousy was one of the strongest human emotions and a guy’s girlfriend driving off with a good-looking rich kid and reputed player like Dylan Moore was sure to get under any man’s skin, no matter how comfortable he was in it. The police report had contained a whole lot of nothing and had been closed unsolved years ago, with Avery still listed as a person of interest.

  “What have you found?” Avery asked.

  Dayton beckoned Thom with a nod. He stepped forward and handed a stack of computer printouts to the sheriff, who passed Avery the first screenshot from the video recording. It featured the woman standing in front of the green Forester, her face only partially visualized through the static.

  “Do you recognize this woman?”

  Avery stared at it for a long moment before a tear trickled down his cheek.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Can you identify her?”

  Avery ran his fingertips over the image.

  “That’s the day she left. I remember exactly what she was wearing. I see her dressed like that every time I close my eyes and I think about how different everything would have been if I’d just told her not to go. Never let go. She’d have stayed if I asked her to. You know that? Three words and she’d still be here with me…Please don’t go.”

  “Her name, son.”

  “Michelle Louise Jenkins.” He smiled to himself when he said her name. The expression abruptly vanished when the implications hit him. He looked Dayton dead in the eyes. “You found my camera.”

  “Your camera?”

  “Yeah. Michelle thought that if I couldn’t be with her in the flesh, then I could at least be there in spirit. You found it out here?”

  “Why do you think we called you?”

  “How did you know to call me at all?”

  Dayton sighed.

  “We have a long walk ahead of us and there’ll be plenty of time for your questions, but for now I need you to answer mine, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  The sheriff handed the second screen-capture to Avery. It was a shot facing uphill toward the road from the vantage point of the wrecked car. The blowing snow nearly obscured the sliding tracks and the distant forest.

  “Do you recognize this place?”

  Avery stared at the picture for a full minute before speaking.

  “No. Did you find Dylan’s car? Is this where they slid—?”

  “How about this place?”

  Dayton held out a picture of the old wooden ranch house. It was the best image they’d been able to produce as the blizzard blurred the structure.

  “No. What is this—?”

  “One more.”

  He offered a picture of the ravine where the ranger found the video camera. Seaver had taken it with his cell phone after recognizing that the camera had been hidden, not lost.

  Avery shook his head. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.

  “Is this where you found…where you found her body?”

  “No, son. This is where we found your camera, which, as of now, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”

  “What are those other pictures?”

  “More of the same,” Dayton said. He folded the stack in half and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a lie, but it was too soon to spring them on Avery. He needed to watch this guy a while longer to see how he approached the search. The way Dayton saw it, there were two different ways Avery could act: like a man searching for something
he hoped he might find or like a man who already knew exactly what he would find. The pictures of the corpse suspended by its ankles, the indistinct silhouette through the trees, and the expression on the girl’s face—Michelle’s face—at the very end would take that away from him because they left little doubt as to her ultimate fate. “These are the only possible landmarks we could isolate from the recording. We were hoping you might be able to help us identify them. That’s all.”

  “So you think that since you don’t recognize these places they might have been filmed someplace else and someone might have just…dumped the camera here?”

  “We have to consider that scenario.”

  Avery nodded. His expression showed he understood what that scenario implied.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Avery said, but Dayton had already turned to face Seaver and Crowell, who waited at the trailhead, watching the dark clouds roll in over the peaks to the north. “How did you know to call me?”

  “We’re burning daylight,” Dayton said.

  He nodded to Crowell, who opened the plastic bag containing the video camera and allowed Zeke to sniff it. After how long it had been exposed to the elements, it was little more than a formality. Any trace of Michelle’s scent had likely faded years ago. Crowell handed the bag back to Thom, who zipped it up inside his backpack and looked at the sheriff expectantly.

  Avery spoke to his back, so Dayton pretended not to hear.

  “How did you know to contact me?”

  * * *

  Avery walked as though in a trance. In his mind, he relived the memories of his time with Michelle and all of the horrible visions of the misfortunes that might have befallen her that had haunted him through the years. The rational part of him knew she was dead, but there was a small part of him that understood that once he allowed himself to accept it, he would be, too. It was that sliver of hope that kept him going, that gave him the strength to put one foot in front of the other and follow the sheriff up the steep and increasingly treacherous trail, all the while knowing that, like the original investigating officers, he wasn’t convinced Avery hadn’t played a role in Michelle’s disappearance.