"I'm not doing real well," he announced.
My clinical appraisal was that Kimber's assessment was an understatement. I asked, "How's your pulse?"
"Too fast"
"Chest pains?"
"Not yet." Great.
"Do you take any medication for this?" I'd wanted to ask that question since I'd learned about the panic disorder, but I'd been hesitant to relate to Kimber as a clinician. Many sufferers have their symptoms largely controlled by medication.
"I've tried them all. I either can't tolerate them or they don't help."
Wonderful.
"Don't worry, I'll be okay. Are they here yet?" He didn't bother to look for himself.
Panic disorder is a physical ailment more than a psychological one. In the face of no apparent danger, the body begins to prepare the organism for a potentially cataclysmic confrontation. It prepares for the coming fight by releasing adrenaline, increasing respiration, changing blood-flow patterns, and sharpening the senses. I could talk to Kimber until he and I were both blue in the face-I wasn't going to do anything to readjust his raging hormone secretion. In fact, the stimulation of my efforts might aggravate his condition even further.
I answered, "No, they're not here. We must have made good time. What would be helpful to you right now, Kimber?"
"I think I'll lie back down until they get here. Close my eyes. The dark is good for me usually. And the music helps, if you don't mind."
I didn't mind. I set the ignition so that the accessories had power and stepped out of the car. The sky was cloudless and most of the stars in the universe seemed to have chosen that night for a convention above the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. The air at seven thousand plus feet was cool, and I wished I'd grabbed a sweater from my room before leaving Steamboat.
Van Morrison crooned at me from inside the closed car.
What did I wish right then? I wished I were in a cozy cabin somewhere on the outskirts of Clark reclining in front of a warm fire with an arm around my wife.
What did I have instead? Beneath a canopy of stars I was standing sentry for an agoraphobic forensic genius who was having a panic attack in the backseat of my car while I was waiting for a guided tour to the site of the decomposing body of a woman who I wished had never died.
Either I was fresh out of wishes or my genie was on vacation.
I walked far enough from the car that I couldn't hear the music that was comforting Kimber in the backseat. Three dozen steps away I was blanketed in a quiet that was absolutely surreal. The air was still and it was as though the trees were holding their collective breath, trying not to rustle a single leaf.
I strained to hear the water rushing over stones in the Elk River a quarter mile distant, but couldn't. Even the crickets had paused from their incessant chirping. The loudest sound in the universe was the blood rushing through blood vessels near my ears. That sound seemed to roar.
I spotted headlights weaving up-valley through Clark before I sensed the hum of an approaching engine. The headlights moved toward me patiently, deliberately.
As the car slowed and began to forge a slow turn into the dirt lot in front of the Clark general store, I'd already come to the conclusion that the person driving the car couldn't possibly be Russ Claven.
The vehicle, an early Ford Explorer, approached mine in the lot. I stayed put outside the arc of lights from the store and watched as the car stopped not alongside, but rather directly behind mine. I didn't think
Kimber could hear its approach above the lyrical strains of Tupelo Honey. The door of the Explorer opened. Using both hands on the frame of the door for support, Phil Barrett pulled himself from the driver's seat and stepped out.
My mind generated quick questions. Where are Russ and Flynn? How did Phil know he could find Kimber and me up here? Why did he park his car behind my car?
The crickets resumed their symphony and the wind lifted a thousand million leaves all at once. The blood rushing to my ears quieted. I moved sideways two steps until I was hidden behind a tree.
Phil Barrett banged on the window of the car and seconds later tugged open the driver's door. The interior lights flashed on. I was afraid that the intrusion was a sufficient shock to give Kimber a coronary, but when Kimber popped up in the backseat, it was Phil who hopped back, startled. With the door open Van Morrison was blaring loudly enough to awaken everyone who lived within a hundred yards. I assumed that was no one. Phil reached into the car and killed the ignition power.
"You alone, Mr. Lister? I was told to expect to find both you and Dr. Gregory here." Who told you that, Phil?
I couldn't hear Kimber's reply. He was cupping both hands over his eyes.
Finally his rotund voice crossed the dusty lot. I heard him say, "Would you close that door, please, Mr. Barrett? The lights are so bright." Phil said, "The sheriff asked me to bring the two of you along to join Dr. Claven and Ms. Coe." "The sheriff of… what?" Kimber continued to shade his face with both of his hands.
"Routt County. It's his jurisdiction. The body was found up in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. The whole blow down up there is in his jurisdiction."
Kimber was climbing out of the backseat. He asked, "What is that? What's a blow down
I knew what the blow down was. It had been big news a few years earlier. In October of 1997 freak winds, estimated at over 120 miles per hour, tore across the ridge tops on the western side of northern Colorado's Continental Divide.
In one specific area of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness called the Routt Divide, just a few miles south of Clark, the winds were so fierce that they flattened entire forests that had once extended over twenty thousand acres. Where the winds struck hardest they either felled the trees or uprooted them. Not occasional trees toppled, but every tree fell to the ground. From the air, the massive forests appeared to have been harvested by a giant scythe. Forest Service estimates had over a million trees either uprooted or sheared from the landscape in a matter of minutes. On the ground the once grand forests were reduced to immense mounds of unstable rubble.
Phil Barrett was explaining this otherworldly phenomenon to Kimber along with the news that Dorothy's body had apparently been found somewhere in the blow down I was astonished that her body could ever have been discovered there.
Salvage loggers had cleared what they could from almost two thousand acres of the rugged terrain starting in the fall of 1998, but the majority of the blow down was too dangerous and too remote to permit even salvage logging. I'd seen photographs and videotapes of the un logged areas. If Dorothy's body was hidden up there, finding it would have been like trying to find a grain of rice in a chopstick factory.
"Where are Flynn and R-uss?" Kimber asked.
"They've been kind enough to offer their assistance to Sheriff Pilander. He has his hands full up there." Barrett hooked his thumb across the road, in the direction of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness.
"Flynn is helping to secure the crime scene. Russ is doing an initial examination of the body. Pilander is lucky to have them; there aren't a whole lot of people with their skills on call around Routt County, you know." Kimber said, "There aren't too many people with their skills on call anywhere, Mr. Barrett."
"Of course. Speaking of experts, Mr. Lister, where is Dr. Gregory? I was told he'd be with you."
I used that as my cue to step out from behind the tree and walk toward Phil Barrett's wide back. Kimber said, "There he is." I said, "Hello, Phil. Heard you drive up. I needed to take a leak."
He spun on me as though he were afraid I was going to hit him from behind. I was impressed at how fast he moved. With some inventive costuming, I thought, he could have another career as the mascot at a swine farmers' convention.
"Dr. Gregory, hi. I'm supposed to drive you guys up to where the body was found." I shook my head and said, "No can do, Phil. I agreed to ferry Kimber up here to see Flynn and Russ. Now that I've done that I'm heading back down the hill and I'm going back to bed. I'm sure I'll hear all the details about finding Dorothys body sometime tomorrow. That's plenty soon for me."