Catherine Willows rushed to the Grissom home as soon as Brass called. Nick Stokes would take over her shift so she could be there for Sara and to serve as a liaison between the crime lab and the agencies involved in the search. Every lab rat not on night-shift duty had volunteered to stay on to assist in their respective fields. They were sent home to rest and be ready if needed.
Sara paced the living room. She grew more and more desperate, more and more frustrated that there was nothing for her to do, no way for her to help. The flashbacks had started hours ago, morphing her experiences 18 months ago into what Gil might be feeling now. Was he alive? Conscious? Hurt? Feeling as desperate as she felt when she made her way to the top of the boulder with the clear 360-degree desert view that told her there was nothing, absolutely nothing, of civilization within her line of sight? She had considered giving up right there, lying down on the boulder and letting the blazing sun bake the life out of her. She closed her eyes and tried to will encouragement to Grissom:
Don't give up. No matter how hopeless it seems, please, don't give up. We're coming. We will find you.
I will find you.
She checked her watch. It crossed 6:36 p.m. The worst of the day's heat was over. The worst of the sun was setting. He would be terribly sunburned by now and susceptible to extreme chills in the cold of the desert night. If he survived to morning, he faced another 14 hours under the blazing sun with little, if any water.
She wanted to believe he would find a way to survive.
She knew how unlikely it was.
The sound of Brass snapping his phone shut jerked her out of her reverie.
"Park Service Police found the Tahoe," Brass announced. "It was parked at a cove about four miles north of Davis Dam, at the end of route nine. They put a LoJack receiver in a chopper, and when they got high enough, they picked up the signal."
"Gil?" Sara asked.
Brass shook his head. "Not yet. The chopper and units on the ground are backtracking route 9 to 163. But it's going to be getting dark…" His voice trailed off.
"I'm going down there," Sara said. She started hunting for her keys and her wallet.
"Not tonight, Sara," Catherine said, catching up to her in the kitchen, putting both her hands on her shoulders to stop her. "There's nothing you can do tonight."
Sara felt her temper flare and tears sting her eyes. She willed both of them away.
"I can't just sit here," she said. "He didn't just sit here when it was me."
"He also didn't try to wander the desert in the dark," Catherine said. "He went out the next morning. I know. I was with him." She moved Sara back to the sofa. "So pack a few things tonight, and first thing tomorrow, before dawn, even, you and I will go down there, Sara. Together. We'll find him. We will. It will be all right."
Brass interrupted. "They think they've found the bike, uproad about 12 miles from the Tahoe," he said. "They're trying to recover it now."
Sara's chest felt tight. "Recover it from where?" she asked.
Brass sat down next to her and took her hands. "We don't know for sure yet that it's Grissom's, but there's a bike lodged in some sagebrush about 40 yards below the roadway."
Sara shuddered. "Any trace of Gil?"
"Nothing yet."
"Tell me they're not stopping for darkness," she said.
Brass put up a hand, palm out, to try to calm Sara, which was hopeless, and he knew it.
"They're doing the same thing down there we did up here for you," he said. "As soon as it starts to cool down, they'll send up choppers with IR, and try to locate a heat source that might be a body."
Brass mentally kicked himself as soon as he said "body." What a crappy choice of words.
If Sara noticed, she didn't rise to it, though Brass thought he did see her flinch a little.
xxxxxxx
Two members of the U.S. Park Service's search-and-rescue team had rappelled 42 yards down the sloping canyon wall to tie off Grissom's mangled mountain bike so it could be hauled up to the road. The saddle pouch contained his wallet and cell phone, confirming ownership.
If team members had been on the site 70 minutes later, they might have heard the crack of a rifle reverberate around the rocky landscape.
Luke and James Blount, air conditioning contractors who lived a few miles west of Kingman, Arizona, had poached an elk as the beast used the cover of dusk to make its way to the river to drink. With practiced skill, the two men gutted the carcass to let it bleed out and took turns pulling on a bottle of Black Jack while waiting for the process to run its course, Then they skinned and field-dressed the elk, putting the choice parts into an enormous cooler on the back of Luke's big black Dodge Mega-Cab pickup. The rest they left on the desert floor for the coyotes and turkey vultures. Three hours after the kill, they were ready to head home.
They finished off the bottle of sour mash as Luke pulled away from the site, and James tossed the empty out the window. They were slightly drunk and juiced on bourbon and adrenaline as they whooped over the successful hunt that would feed their families for months. There wasn't much thrill in the hunt itself – it had been more of an ambush, actually. But it was always a thrill to get away with a big-game poach right under the noses of the wardens.
"I'd sure have liked that head on my den wall," James said as the crime scene faded from their headlights.
"Not worth the chance," Luke told him. "All we need do is get stopped for something with a fresh elk head stickin' out the back window."
Luke carefully steered the truck back toward highway 163, which would take them east across the Nevada/Arizona border and home.
"Whoa, hold up," James said suddenly. Luke didn't know what James was thinking, and the truck slowed only a little as he took his foot off the accelerator.
"I said stop," James repeated, and Luke did, finally, following his younger brother's finger, which was pointing at something in the periphery of the headlight beams, something tangled up in a pinion tree. "What the fuck is that?"
"Looks like a body," Luke said. He repositioned the truck to put the site at the center of the headlight illumination. "Yep, it looks like a body." He grabbed for his door handle but stopped when James grabbed his left arm.
"Don't get involved. Just leave it. Let's get outta here."
"I'll leave it if he's dead," Luke said. "It ain't right leaving somebody alive out here without a chance in hell of survival."
Luke pulled closer and left the engine running so his battery didn't drain. James grabbed a flashlight and both men left the truck, approaching the body with caution.
"Holy mother of god," Luke said as James played the beam over the shredded flesh on the desert floor. "He's gotta be dead. Where the hell'd he come from?"
Luke crouched down and touched the inside of the man's left wrist. He shook his head.
"I don't feel a pulse," he said.
"Then let's the fuck split," James said.
Luke nodded, but before he got up, he touched the side of the body's throat, over the carotid artery. He looked up at his brother in surprise.
"Got a pulse here," he said. "Ain't much of one, but this poor guy's definitely alive."
"We can't call the cops," James said. "They'll trap the cell phone number, trace it back to us and pretty soon be askin' hard questions about what we was doin' out here after dark."
Luke thought a minute. They could drive the guy into Kingman and leave him on the hospital steps. Well, no. Too much chance of witnesses. The only other alternative he really didn't want to consider. But he had no choice.
"Let's get him in the back seat," Luke said. "We'll get him back to Kingman and take him to Bill. He'll know what to do."
James laughed at the thought of asking their Uncle Bill for help. "You think Bill's gonna nurse this guy back to health? A drunk doctor who can't even field-dress a deer cause his hands shake so bad? And who's gonna nursemaid this poor fool? Laura ain't gonna give up our spare bedroom to a stranger who's gonna bleed all over the mattress. Martha ain't gonna put him up at your house."
"Let's just get him back across the state line alive," Luke said. "We'll worry about the rest later."
So it was when the chopper with the IR heat-seeking gear passed over the pinion tree, Grissom's body was long gone, and the remains of the elk carcass had cooled, leaving nothing for the sensitive instruments to read.
xxxxxxx
Pain!
His head had bounced a little and contacted something padded but hard. As intense sensory discomfort trilled along his nervous system, his body instinctively tried to move away from it, which only triggered new agony from his chest to his feet. His own moans woke him.
"Hey, Luke, take it easy," a man's voice said. "Slow down. You're bouncin' him around, and he's probably got broken bones."
"I'm doin' the best I can here," another man said. "It was a pothole is all. I didn't see it."
The injured man slowly opened his eyes. It took a monumental effort, sapping strength he didn't have to spare. He lay in almost total darkness, his surroundings silhouetted by some dim external light source. It occurred to him after a minute of thinking about it that he was in the back seat of a car, or a truck, maybe. He could see the backs of two bucket seats to his left. He had no idea what was on his right. His head hurt too much to turn it to look.
When he rolled his eyes up, he could see a vehicle door with an armrest. That must have been the impact source that woke him. He could see his legs bent at impossible angles, out of necessity. He was too tall to lie in a normal position along the back seat of a car. His left leg throbbed obsessively, and when he tried moving it to a more comfortable position it shot bolts of agony that went right to his brain. The only place that hurt worse than his ankle was his chest, left side, four or five inches below his collar bone. And that burned like fire, making it difficult to breathe.
He had no idea where he was.
He had no clue what had happened to him.
He couldn't identify either of the voices he heard.
He had no memory of being stretched out along this seat.
And then it hit him like an uppercut.
He couldn't summon any memories before this moment.
He had no idea who he was.
It was as if a black hole had sucked his life from him.
His memories. His past. His knowledge of what he looked like. His plans. His passions. His deeds of good, or evil. Those he might have loved, and who might have loved him back. Those he hated, and those who reflected his hatred.
Gone. Erased.
There was nothing he could summon except the all-encompassing pain and the growing despair.
The situation terrified him. He had lost all sense of self. The only world he knew was this small, metal-encased shell filled with silhouettes. He was nothing more than a silhouette himself, devoid of identity, substance or depth. Two-dimensional.
Oh, God, he hurt so much.
The physical agony was bad enough; the emotional agony was worse.
He felt the red waves lapping at him, and he welcomed them and let the oblivion carry him away from the pain.