Cold River Resurrection (3 page)

C
hapter
3

Cold River Indian Reservation

Biddle Pass

Search and Rescue (SAR) Base Camp/Incident Command

“Call Portland Mountain Rescue, and call them now,” Smokey yelled into his cell phone. “I want to tell them what we have, we may need them later, and bring that Bigfoot Expedition asshole to the trailer now. Drag him in here if you have to.”

Fire and Rescue had set up the base camp on the flat area at Biddle Pass, an area flat and treeless enough to land helicopters. The logging road continued on toward the mountain for another three quarters of a mile before it turned south along Parker Creek. The white glaciers of Mt. Jefferson towered above the camp. 

As SAR coordinator he knew that often the best place for a base camp was not the closest spot to the beginning of the search, but a place easily accessible for helicopters, multiple vehicles, trailers, with room to turn around.  They could always set up a “spike” camp, a smaller satellite base camp closer to the search area.

He
stood by the incident command trailer and looked around at the camp taking shape.  What would appear to be chaos to the uninitiated - a jumble of SUV’s, trailers, command vehicles, vans, horses, search dogs, and people, actually made sense to him. 

Down the road on the other side of the large meadow, two SAR members were directing traffic for search teams. A search leader waved a clipboard. Team members signed in and then out
again at the conclusion of the search, a tactic designed to not leave a search team member in the wilderness.

“Cheryl.”  Smokey called to a woman attaching maps to the wall of the incident command trailer. She stopped and looked at him.

“Call for a general meeting of all team leaders, four o’clock.”

He turned and watched as an officer led a man into the command trailer.
The man had long hair in a ponytail, wore surplus store woodland camo. Smokey closed the door.

“Sit.” Smokey pointed to a bench on the wall.

“You want to violate the sovereignty of this nation, I should throw you in our tribal jail and see how you fare. What’s your name?”

“Stan Perdue, but I didn’t actually go on the reservation,” he said. He folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Smokey stepped close to Perdue, and the man squirmed into the wall, turning his face away.

“You took money and put people on the rez, knowing that it was illegal, telling them that they would have a good chance of seeing Bigfoot here, didn’t you?” 

“Well, yes, but I  - .”

“Show us,” Smokey said, pointing to a map. A detailed topographical map was on the table. Perdue walked over and put a finger on the map.

“Here. We walked the groups in on the Pacific Crest Trail from our base camp at Pamelia Creek.  Then up to Hole-in-the-Wall Park, across Jefferson Creek, and up to the Parker Creek drainage.” He tapped the map.  “That’s w
here Carl and Jennifer were camped, up there below the Whitewater Glacier.

“Where’s Carl
?”

“I saw him outside,” Perdue said. “Look, I’m sorry, I –.”

Smokey pointed to the tribal officer. “Get him out of here. Keep him in our custody until we figure out what he had to do with this woman’s disappearance.”

The missing girl’s boyfriend entered and dropped on the bench without waiting for instructions. Smokey thought the slight man with constant frown lines on his forehead had the affect of a beaten dog.  The boyfriend twisted his hands, looked up at Smokey, and then looked down at his lap. 

“What’s your name?”

“Carl Robbins.”

“Well Carl, let’s not waste time.  Show us on the map where you last saw Jennifer.”

Carl walked to the wall and stood in front of the map.  “There.” He pointed to a section of trail below Whitewater Glacier, the only trail on the map in that area, Smokey saw.  A trail that eventually led to the base camp where they were now.

“What happened?”

“
Well, yesterday morning we had a fight. Jennifer wanted to go, to get back to Portland, and I wanted to stay for another two days.  She got mad, packed her pack, and left, going south on the trail, back the way we had come. After awhile, I got worried about her, and I packed up and walked back to the base camp off the reservation. I thought she would be there, ahead of me. When I got there, no one had seen her. She, uh, she must have taken a wrong turn.”

Smokey leaned over.  “Carl, look at me.”  Carl raised his eyes.
      

“Carl, did you kill your girlfriend?”

”What, no I –.” Carl started up out of the chair.  Smokey gently pushed him back down.

“Prove it.”

“But she was
alive
when I left.”

“
You said you had a fight. Did you hit her?”

“No, I just talked, we –.”

“How can you prove she was alive?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know, except I would never hurt her.”

“We need some information,” Smokey said. He began asking questions as Sergeant Nathan Green took notes.

He learned that Jennifer had moved to Portland from New York two years ago, and was now working as a copy editor for a small publishing company, specializing in historical romances. She was five foot four, twenty-eight years old, and walked a lot for exercise. Mother in New Jersey. Carl said she had a sleeping bag, a bottle of water and energy bars.

“Carl, is she a quitter?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think she is.”

“She right or left-handed?”

Carl looked up, clearly surprised at the question. “Left.” He held his left hand up. Smokey knew that in this case, the terrain would mostly direct her path, but it could be important. Lost people, especially when fatigued, had a longer stride on their dominant side. Without direction, a left-handed person would walk in a large circle to the right. He remembered a line from a comic:
Hire the left-handed, it’s fun to watch them write.

“Stay here, and don’t touch anything.” Smokey motioned for Nathan to join him outside.  Around the trailer, the activity was more intense.  Smokey walked to the side and spoke quietly.

“Have an officer take Carl to the department. Get the detectives to interview him as the suspect in the woman’s disappearance, a possible homicide. If he killed her, we’ll never find her unless he tells us where she is.”

“I’ll get them on it. F.B.I.?”

The F.B.I. had jurisdiction on Indian Reservations for the investigation of violent crime. Smokey sighed.  He didn’t want to, but they had to be told, and the case belonged to the Feebs if it turned out Jennifer was the victim of a homicide.

“Ask the chief to call the Bend office. Let’s brief and show the teams where he said he last saw her. Some of them will want to go out tonight, set up portable radio repeaters. Computer map the area. Let’s get started.”

Jennifer’s water bottle was long gone, lost in her wandering, stumbling journey.  She worked her way down through thick brush; thirst pushed her toward the sound of water in a wooden, stiff
-legged march.  She stood at the edge of a fast-moving stream, holding her hand out on a large rock, and she settled down, then leaned forward to drink.  She carefully placed Nanna beside her, and used both hands to scoop water from the stream.  When she finished she picked up her doll and held Nanna close and rocked back and forth, thinking she should get up and clean her apartment.

Maybe I’ll wait here just a little while longer.

The necessity and practical side of SAR operations was to find a lost person, and in some cases, to recover a body. The executive part of SAR, Smokey knew, was that one such operation could eat more of an annual budget than two or three homicide investigations.  The logistics to provide food, equipment, overtime, fuel, and the sheer numbers of people needed was staggering.  A homicide investigation could be scaled down.  A search could be, but not before using thousands of hours of search time, sometimes tens of thousands of hours, and occasionally to no avail.

There was no way of knowing when a search might end. On the rez it ended with the location of the person or their remains. 

There were fifty people at the briefing Smokey gave at the incident command trailer.  If we go into tomorrow, he knew, there would easily be double the number of searchers.

“We’ll have a helicopter up in an hour,” Nathan said. Smokey heard the unmistakable rotor sounds coming from the north. He stopped his presentation and watched as two small objects in the sky came toward them, became larger, and slowed as they reached the meadow. The  Blackhawks overflew their location, and then came in from the west, flared, and landed across the road. When the rotors shut down and he could be heard again, Smokey said, “Two Blackhawks from the 939
th
Air Rescue out of the Oregon Air National Guard from Portland. They will stage here.”

As they waited for the pilots and crew to join them, Smokey looked over the assembled group, noting teams from Wasco County SAR, Hood River Crag Rats Mountain Rescue Group, and a K-9 team from Tigard. If she wasn’t found today, there would be more groups arriving tonight for a new and expanded search tomorrow morning.

Smokey finished with the assignments. The searchers left the meeting to assemble their teams. Some would drive back to Cold River, and then make the long drive to the other side of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness area, to coordinate a search from the Bigfoot Expedition camp.

Hope we find her soon, he thought.

“Lieutenant.”

Smokey turned and smiled at Sergeant Nathan Green. Green had been his mentor many years before, a man who was his uncle, his older brother, his best friend in one. Green was short and squat, a power lifter. A few criminals in federal prison had mistaken his short stature for weakness. If anything, Green’s hair was longer than Smokey’s. A long single ponytail was braided with leather.

“What’s up, Big Brother, or as Laurel says, s’up?”

Green laughed. “Lieutenant, detectives want to know whether or not to stand down from the search warrant.”

Smokey looked at his watch. Four-thirty. “No, let’s help them with it. Get it over with. We may need them tomorrow if this goes badly.” He followed Green to his car.

I sure hope we find you soon, Jennifer Kruger.

Smokey had been on a lot of successful searches over the years, but he had an uneasy feeling about this one, and he tried to shake it off as he drove back to the Agency. The last time he had had this bad of a feeling, he lost most of his platoon on a bare mountainside in Afghanistan. He had run out of
pishxu
(sage) on that mission. As part of his tradition, before touching a body, he would take a handful of
pishxu
and rub it in his hands, and then rub across his face, his chest, and up and down his arms. He had taken a bag of
pishxu
with him to Afghanistan. Before he left the country, he only had enough to rub between his thumb and forefinger.

They didn’t find Jennifer soon.

When she was found, their world changed.

C
hapter
4

Whitewater River

At times during the day, Jennifer had moments of lucid thought.
Keep
walking
, the voice said.
Just keep on walking
. The
stay put and build a fire
voice had long gone. Anyway, she was a long way from
stay put.
She had messed up that old wise advice a long time ago. She knew she was losing track of time and couldn’t help it, anymore than she could help wanting to hold her doll. The fact that she really didn’t have her doll, that she was cradling a replacement, was lost on her, even during those moments when she was sure she was awake.

Jennifer slipped into the comfort of illusion. Of hallucination.

Her thirst was overpowering, a constant companion during moments of clear thought and hallucination. She stood on the bank of a river, kneeled down, and began scooping water into her mouth. The water from snow melt churned past her. The river was too wild to cross.  She turned and trudged uphill on a game trail, stepped around a boulder and entered the trees that seemed to reach the sky. A sky growing darker with each moment.

Go
ing to dark before long.

She stepped slowly, the rumble of the rushing water fading with each step, the trees coming closer together. As she entered the forest, Jennifer stopped. Uncertain.

You will die here.

The thought jumped into her head before she could stop it.  She had been having a good afternoon. A hike in the woods, some water to drink. She must have eaten something, but she couldn’t remember. She didn’t seem too hungry. Exhaustion and a large tree stopped her progress, and that was w
here she wanted to stay, even though it was not yet night. She curled tight, pulled her legs up and cradled her head with her arms, holding tight to her Nanna, an unconscious movement, her mind taking her away to the safest place she knew.

In her dream, she was sitting on her deck, holding Nanna, feeling the morning sun on her back, drinking a cup of black coffee and reading the Sunday Oregonian. Her safe place. The Willamette River gleamed below, and the comforting sounds of traffic drifted up to her. Her fourth floor apartment was the perfect place.

Safe. Warm. No wild things. No dead things. No shadows. She dreamed of home.             

She awoke in the wilderness, in the shadows with the dead things.