Bones on Ice: A Novella (4 page)

“Getting down is the hard part,” Reynolds said.

“That’s what got Bright.” Steele.

“We’ve no idea what got Bright,” Reynolds snapped, then refocused on me. “The last we saw her, we were going down and she was heading up.”

“Why didn’t you climb together?” I asked, nothing in my voice.

“Elon turned back at Kangshung Face. He was feeling awful.” Steele’s pale face was all eyes and trembling mouth. “We lost Bright at the top of the Hillary Step. She—”

Reynolds cut in. “That’s a twelve-meter vertical face. The last challenge before the summit. Everyone has to ascend with fixed ropes, and it can turn into a bottleneck. But not that day.” Reynolds swallowed. Drew a deep breath. “Bright was ahead of us.”

“Always,” Steele interjected.

“She stayed at the top to help another climber who was ascending behind us.”

“We kept on and made the summit just before turnaround.”

“Turnaround?”

“You have to head down by two
P.M.
or you can’t make it back to camp by dark.”

I nodded understanding.

“Above eight thousand meters you need supplemental oxygen all the time. You can’t bivouac that high because you’ll run out. We each had just enough to summit and return.” Reynolds sounded defensive.

“We only stayed at the top ten minutes.” Steele’s saucer eyes were haunted. “No one stays longer than that.”

“Dial back the drama, Dara.” Reynolds gave a tight shake of his head. “On the way down we passed Bright, about a hundred meters below the peak.”

“With a guide?” I asked.

“You kidding? We were too cool for guides.”

The voice came down hard from outside our booth.

Startled, we all turned.

The man was bearded and sinewy tall, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. Holey tee underneath. Boots. Startling green eyes. Uninvited, he dropped to the bench beside me. Assuming this was the tardy Damon James, I slid left to make room.

Chilly nod to the new arrival, then Reynolds resumed his story.

“We used a semi-independent or ‘supported’ company, as they’re called. Sherpas who provide tents, food, supplemental oxygen, fixed ropes. But no guides.”

“Because we’re badass and can get ourselves up and down unassisted.” James was doing sardonic. Maybe his usual demeanor. “Bright’s choice. Or
The Heights
’s choice.” To me. “They told you about the climbers’ Holy Grail?”

“They did.” Back to Reynolds. “So Brighton should have been able to summit by turnaround? She had thirty minutes to go ninety meters.” The length of a short home run. Three NBA courts. One football field.

Just three sets of eyes, staring.

James spoke first. “Doubtful.”

“People don’t understand.” Steele, forward now, elbows on the table. “You’re dizzy all the time. Your brain doesn’t work. One morning I sat in my tent staring at boots for God knows how long, clueless which pair was mine. I had to rest twenty minutes between putting them on and tying the laces.”

“Imagine climbing a thousand stairs, carrying fifty pounds of gear, breathing only through a cocktail straw,” said Reynolds. “One step can take ten minutes. The rule is to never exceed sixty percent of your physical capacity.”

“Which is near zero up there,” offered James.

“The rule is to turn around by two
P.M.
,” Steele repeated, moving toward petulance.

“Rules meant nothing to Bright.” From James. “I tried to talk her into coming down with us but she’d have none of it. She was determined to summit. And absolutely certain it wouldn’t take her past time.”

“We should’ve made them turn around,” Steele said.

“Them?”

“She and the woman she stopped to help,” Reynolds said.

“You couldn’t
make
Bright do anything.” James, now doing scornful.

Something didn’t ring true. “If Brighton was so focused on summiting, why did she stop to offer help at Hillary Step?”

“It was weird.” Steele’s voice trailed off.

“Weird?” I prompted.

“Bright always had to be first.”

“Maybe she did have HAPE or HACE.” Reynolds didn’t sound convinced. “It’s like being drunk. Causes you to make bad decisions.”

“It might have been fine, but for the storm,” Steele said.

“There was a storm?” Were these guys for real, or feeding me the plot from
Into Thin Air
?

“Squall.” James corrected. “It came up fast and slowed everything down.”

“We were half-frozen by the time we got to camp,” Steele said. “My oxygen regulator was choked with ice. Cash was hallucinating and nearly wandered off the side of the mountain.” Disgusted exhale from Reynolds. “We passed out in separate tents. It was after dark when Elon realized Bright hadn’t come back.”

Again, the feeling their story didn’t track. “Nap time over, everyone’s ready to share mountaintop selfies, and no one notices your ringleader’s not there?”

“We had no idea she was in trouble.” Steele was vehement. Too vehement? “She didn’t radio. After passing her below the summit we never heard from her again. It made no sense.”

“Another guide alerted our Sherpa.,” Reynolds picked up the thread. “Said the second late climber came down in bad shape, had to be escorted to Camp One and airlifted out. Damon wanted to go up after Bright, but it was impossible. We were exhausted, it was dark, and—full honesty—we lacked the skills to get the job done.”

“We couldn’t raise her on the radio. It was horrible.” Steele was either genuinely devastated or an Emmy-class actress.

“Nature one, humans zero.” James pantomimed marking a score sheet. “The next day, a Taiwanese group found her body in an alcove on the South Summit, about a hundred and fifty meters below the top. A couple of Sherpas tried to dislodge her but she was frozen in place. Not barely alive frozen, like Beck Weathers or David Sharp. Dead frozen.”

Seeing my look, Reynolds explained the reference. “Sharp was a climber who got frozen to the ground while still breathing and had to be left. His body’s now a trail marker, of sorts. Weathers, they genuinely thought was dead when they left him behind, but he somehow wandered into camp the next morning. They were able to get him off the mountain.”

“Most of him. He left behind a nose, an arm, and most of his toes,” James said. “But I saw the before pics. He wasn’t so great-looking to begin with.”

Jesus flipping Christ
.

James rolled on, matter-of-fact. “Brighton was dead. There was nothing we could do. It was descend or die. Everyone knew the risks going in.”

“What do you think happened to Brighton?”
Not barely alive frozen. Dead frozen
.

James shrugged. “She was either too exhausted or too disoriented to work the ropes down Hillary Step. She sat down to rest and froze in place. It happens.” He paused. “She might have made it overnight if the temperature hadn’t taken a nosedive. But it was just too fucking cold and she had too little oxygen.”

Steele chimed in. “The other climber told the Sherpas that Bright insisted she descend Hillary Step first. Claimed she waited at the bottom but Bright never showed. Said she didn’t have the strength or oxygen to go back up, so she headed to camp to find help.”

“What was the other climber’s name?”

Ten seconds of nothing.

“She was Italian, I think.” Steele looked to Reynolds.

“No. Colombian.”

“She was a solo climber,” James said. “We didn’t know her.”

“You never tried to locate her? I mean later, after you were all down off the mountain?” These three were a piece of work.

“What was there to say?” Reynolds shrugged. “Bright was dead.”

The new silence was broken by Steele. “I’m sorry but I can’t keep kicking myself. It’s been three years. Time to let it go.”

By implied command, Reynolds swung his feet from under the table and stood.

Also rising, Steele said, “It was hard.” Almost pleading. “You just don’t know.” Then, Reynolds in the lead, bodies not touching, the two strode toward the door.

“Ain’t she a darlin’?”

My gaze swung to James. He was watching Reynolds and Steele, his face unreadable. But the venom in his tone was clear.

“You don’t like Dara?”

“If anyone had motive to leave Bright on that mountain it was Dara.”

I didn’t see that coming. “Seriously?”

“Dara hated Brighton. As in, wanted to be her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stand by your man.” The lyric half-sung, half-whispered.

“Dara wanted to be with Cash?”

James did something meaningful with his brows.

“She seems so passive.”

“Passive as a coiled mamba until it takes off your face.” At my look. “Fine. I shouldn’t single Dara out. Everyone verbally loooooooved Brighton, but they were all trying to score something off her. Even me.”

“Oh?”

“You know we were business partners, right?”

“Dara mentioned it.”

“Bright came up with the idea to start a nonprofit to help Nepali Sherpa. Called it Bright Ascents. Hidden agenda: boost our profiles and make us reality TV worthy. I had the Everest connections but Brighton had the charisma. She was the star power with the rich friends. In less than a year she raised over a million bucks.”

“Your role?”

“My handsome face and boyish charm.” Getting no reaction from me, he went on: “I knew the climbing community. Could navigate Nepali red tape. If we ever started a project, I was going to grease the wheels. Until then, I was just along for the ride.” Winsome wink. “Looking pretty.”

“And a small salary?”

“Do you work for free?”

I dipped my chin, acknowledging he had a point.

“Elon Gass?”

“Poor Elon never had a dime to his name. Bright funded his trip. He owed her upwards of thirty thousand dollars.”

“Pretty steep for a walk up a mountain.”

Too late I realized my bad pun. James ignored or failed to catch it.

Derisive expulsion of air. “And that’s the budget version, ma’am.”

“Depends on how you count costs.” My reply was acid. Brighton Hallis had paid the highest price possible.

James scooched right and stood in one quick, controlled move, all angles and knees and sharp shoulders. A long meeting of our eyes. Then, “There’s no love lost between Dara and me. My view? She’s not the brightest bird in the cage. But she’s got one thing right. You weren’t there, you can’t judge. Brighton put herself at risk and ‘paid the price.’ ” Air quotes like angry little hooks. “Hell, she put the whole team at risk. We all could’ve died. I’m sorry she’s gone, but it wasn’t our fault, and I refuse to feel guilty just because she was a pretty blonde with the last name Hallis. Case closed.”

With that, he stalked off.

In a short forty-eight hours I would learn how wrong they all were.

It was Tuesday before my informal “knee therapy” yielded results. At 10:47:22 EST, I was finally able to fully extend Brighton Hallis’s right leg. I checked in with Larabee.

“You’re doing fluoroscopy?” His muffled voice told me he was shoulder-snugging the phone, doing something else.

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to work alone.”

“Fine.” It wasn’t.

“Ditto if you’re ready to roll her for prints.”

“I think the fingers are thawed enough to rehydrate.”

“Any thoughts on what happened to her?”

“Hypothermia, hypoxia, HACE, exhaustion, exposure, head trauma…” I ticked off the lineup of suspects. “A brain scan may be in order if you want to nail specific cause of death.” Soft tissue and organs are Larabee’s department.

He grunted and hung up. Or dropped the phone. Hard to tell.

Suited and gloved, I organized my approach. Prints first. Then radiography. Then. I wasn’t quite sure about the next then.

Maneuvering free the accessible hand, I clamped the shears around the thumb and squeezed firmly, using both palms as before. The blades slowly bit into the desiccated flesh. Severed the bone. The thumb dropped to the table with a soft
thup
. I repeated the process with each finger. When finished, my palms felt bruised inside their layer of latex. But five partial digits lay on the table, dark and hard as petrified twigs.

I placed a stainless-steel bowl in the sink and filled it with a tissue-enhancing solution, the kind used by morticians to plump up Grandpa or Aunt Dee. After submerging the digits, I stepped back and stared, “watched pot” style. Pointless. The process would take hours, perhaps even days.

On X-ray, superimposed bones can be difficult to interpret. Horizontal bodies are easier to sort. Applying cautious but steady pressure, I eased the bent figure toward a supine and fully extended posture. Not easy, but I got the job done. Except for the boots, which were still frozen solid, giving new meaning to the expression “died with her boots on.” For now, they had to stay. Cursing inwardly that every tech was tied up elsewhere, I wheeled the body out of autopsy room five and down the hall to X-ray.

Fluoroscopy is a type of real-time imaging in which X-ray images are sent to a monitor. Overly simplistic, but you get the idea. I hoped a full-body scan would reveal
any abnormalities, trauma, or evidence of disease in the skull, skeleton, musculature, or gut. The technology would also allow me to make hard copies of specific views that might prove useful for comparison to Brighton Hallis’s antemortem medical records.

After rolling the gurney next to the apparatus, which looks sort of like an open-air MRI or CT setup, I muscled the body across onto the platform, head and shoulders first, followed by legs and booted feet. Then I donned a lead apron and radiation glasses, set the dials as I’d seen scores of technicians do, and stepped to the viewing monitor.

A lot of whirring. A few clicks. Then showtime. The arm hooking over the body began its slow journey from the head to the toes, firing images as it progressed. A constantly changing panorama in grays, blacks, and whites lit up the screen.

Watching the inside of Brighton Hallis pass by, my heart sank. The skeletal trauma was beyond my worst fears. Clean breaks and jagged edges suggested that a lot of fracturing had occurred postmortem. I wondered what the hell had happened in the course of the dislodging, ride down the mountain, airlift, and overseas flight. I repeated the scan twice to take it all in, knowing that separating antemortem from perimortem from postmortem injury would be a bitch.

Irritation flared.
Piece of cake
, Larabee had said. Right. Mummified and distorted face. Shriveled hands. No teeth. Shattered bones. I felt a stab of a headache behind my left eyeball. A stab of guilt. The girl in that X-ray unit hadn’t asked for this, either. Focus on the job.

Basics first. ID. Having a full body, I’d been able to take a proper height measurement. Sixty-eight inches, subtracting for the boots. Muscle development suggested small male or large female.

The pelvis, though in several more pieces than it should have been, remained articulated by flesh. I noted a broad sciatic notch, wide pubic bones, and a U-shaped subpubic angle where the two pelvic halves met in front. Good female traits.

That and the gray smudges that were her uterus and ovaries. And the vagina I’d noted when the body was undressed. What we in the business call anatomical “clues.”

The proximal and distal ends of the long bones showed no gaps or indications of recent epiphyseal fusion, the medial clavicle maybe a trace. Given the stage of skeletal development, I jotted an age range of seventeen to twenty-five. Consistent with Brighton Hallis’s known age at death.

Race. Always the puzzler. Pale skin and fair hair straight down to the roots suggested Caucasoid. But death can play strange games with pigmentation. Narrow zygomatics and a nonglobular cranial shape supported a conclusion of European ancestry. The rest of the facial architecture told me little.

Why? The facial distortion hadn’t been due to freezing alone. Along with the dental trauma, both maxillary bones and the lower nasal cavity exhibited breakage in a fairly circumscribed pattern. My first guess was a deadly face-plant on an unyielding surface, probably a conical rock or gorilla hunk of ice. Interpretation was complicated by the fact that the facial damage was superimposed over an area of fracture at the back of the skull.

After forty minutes at the monitor, my notes read: Female, probably white, age 17 to 25, hair blond, height 5′8″. The bio profile was consistent with Brighton Hallis, but not enough for a positive ID.

Confident that would come via the medical file, I popped Brighton Hallis’s antemortem X-rays onto a row of wall-mounted lightboxes and thumbed the switches. Slowly, I walked from plate to plate, taking in detail. In addition to the broken ulna, I spotted a healed stable fracture of the left calcaneus. Not much else of interest.

Back to the monitor. Within minutes, I found an opacity suggesting the old healed ulnar break. Or thought I did. There were now multiple fractures of that forearm, impacting both the ulna and radius. And overlying bones and tissue prevented an unobstructed view. Pressing a button to make hard copy, I moved on.

Not a chance of getting a peek at the feet. Millet Everest Summit GTX mountaineering boots had enough metal in their components, fasteners, and lining to make X-ray impossible.

Frustrated, I arched my back and rolled my shoulders to ease the tension. Maybe antemortem ulnar fracture. Maybe Caucasoid traits. It seemed this body was determined to vex ID at every turn. I was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Boil and deflesh, then eyeball the bones. Piece of cake my ass.

I snagged a cuff of my glove and checked my watch. Almost noon. A quick Diet Coke and egg salad sandwich, then I returned, rolled a stool to the monitor, and began cataloguing and diagraming ME215-15’s cornucopia of injuries.

The images on the screen showed superimposed road maps of diverging, converging, paralleling, and crisscrossing bones and fracture lines. Read: a Wyeth-painted haystack jumble of skeletal trauma. My task was to sort through the damage and pull out the relevant.

The cranial trauma seemed to suggest two direct impacts, one anterior, one posterior. Okay. That worked with the theory of a fall. Maybe the head whipped on the neck, smacking both the face and back of the skull. Or maybe the blows were sustained while jouncing down the world’s tallest rock on a canvas toboggan. As I watched the body cross the screen yet another time, my attention was snagged by damage near the neck, at the level of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. I leaned in, staring, mind running a
zillion explanations.

The wound appeared similar to a type often seen at the MCME. To injuries incurred in a form of violent death more native to urban contexts.

I took in more detail. Made notes. The right transverse process of each vertebra was displaced sharply downward. I saw no brittle edges or sharp, dry-stick splintering. No signs of healing. The fracturing definitely looked perimortem. But that wasn’t what had my heart beating faster.

The damage was limited to one side, clustered tightly, and flowed with similar directionality. That suggested a single, penetrating blow. Perhaps caused by a fall onto something hard and sharp. Perhaps resulting in a punctured vessel.

Had I stumbled upon manner of death? Had Brighton Hallis fallen so hard that an object was forced deep into her neck? On falling, had her head whiplashed, striking both in front and in back?

But something cold and dark was slithering across my brain. What?

Warily, I prodded the source of my uneasiness. The prodding led to Ortiz.

No paradoxical undressing
.

It doesn’t happen every time, I chided myself.

It happens often enough, my brain insisted. Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, almost all the dead atop Everest exhibited some form of paradoxical undressing.

Still.

This woman died gloveless, my mind insisted.

Yet her outerwear was zipped to the chin.

If Brighton Hallis had removed her gloves, her exposed hands would have quickly become frostbitten. I hurried to the platform and studied the victim’s remaining digits. Mummification was uniform. The fingertips weren’t misshapen, blistered, or blackened.

In other words, I saw none of the typical signs of frostbite. Meaning blood hadn’t been diverted away from her fingers prior to death. No hypothermia. Translation: She died quickly.

Over and over. Round and round. A fall? Tumbling rock? An equipment malfunction leading to hypoxia and disorientation?

Hallelujah. I was still at first base.

Then a thought. Hurrying to the computer, I pulled up the photos Ortiz had taken and entered into the ME215-15 case file.

There was Brighton, curved on her side, the polar jacket in place and in remarkable condition. More keystrokes. More photos. Underneath layers showing rips and tears. Cheaper fabric? Note to self: Examine the clothing.

Returning to the platform, I tucked the limbs and rolled the body onto its stomach. Under the harsh fluorescents, the back and buttocks looked dimpled and morgue white. Gashes in the pallid flesh bore witness to the woman’s last rough ride down the mountain. One large abrasion lined up with the damage I’d seen on X-ray at the level of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

I found a handheld magnifier and brought the wound into focus. The abraded area was rough-edged, approximately two inches across, and shallow. Except at the centermost point. There it was deep. Very deep.

I leaned in closer.

My breath froze.