She pushed a branch out of the way. “It may surprise you to hear this, but I agree with those three. However, I think you missed the two most important ones.”
“Oh. Well, I find that very…” I waited until the branch had snapped back into place before following her. “Interesting. And they are?”
She stopped walking, let her eyes crawl along the trail for a few seconds. At last, she raised them to peer at me, and I could see that they were filled with deep channels of pain. “The first is fear, Dr. Bowers. Sometimes people do terrible things because they’ve been pushed into a corner. Fear can turn us into different people.”
I didn’t say anything, but the questions rose in my mind, What are you afraid of, Lien-hua? What happened? Did you do something terrible too? “OK,” I said at last. “Fear. I’ll give you that one. What’s the second one?”
She turned and continued down the trail. “Let’s see if you can guess the most important motive on your own.”
Before I could even venture a guess, we came to an overlook just north of the crime scene. The trail skirted along the edge of a steep escarpment, the mountain ending abruptly at our feet and dropping hundreds of feet straight down to the river. I hadn’t noticed this overlook on our hike out to the trailhead on Thursday because of the thick fog that had ushered in the storm.
“Survival?” I asked.
She shook her head, her attention riveted on the view. “That falls under desire-the desire to live. Now, shh… don’t spoil this. It’s beautiful.”
I followed her gaze. The valley swept out before us and then rose majestically to become autumn-tinged mountains, endless and alive. The valleys wandered through the mountain range, each with their own unique patchwork of shadows cast by the community of clouds gathering high overhead. A blaze of sunlight ignited each cloud, making them glow even more brightly against the steel blue sky.
I remembered, years earlier, another wilderness guide telling me that “Appalachian” comes from a Native American word that means “endless mountains”; and staring out across these mountains I couldn’t help but get the impression that they really did fold back endlessly into space and time. The planet’s ancient origami left over from the days when the continents folded together.
The breeze was constant here, rising from the valley, washing up and over us; the gentle morning breath of the hills. I wondered what it would feel like to stand here when the wind was still. What kind of solitude that must be to have the day decide its shape all around you, sky and shadow and peak and valley all draped in deep and primal silence.
“Maybe that’s why he chose it,” I whispered after a few moments.
“What?” She turned to me.
“Beauty.”
“You think he chose this place because of the beauty?”
“Because of the paradox.” I looked at her. The wind blowing up and over the peak was whispering through her hair, letting it escape from gravity for just a moment, feathering it around her head in slow motion, easy and free. “Humans can’t seem to enjoy beauty without destroying it.” I was transfixed by the sight of her. “This trail, for example, cutting through the forest. It’s the only way to experience the solitude of this peak. But the trail also mars the very thing it allows us to enjoy-the scenery. I think beauty frightens us into destroying the things we admire most.” Our eyes met for a fraction of a second too long, that one tiny piece of time that says more than words can say. “That’s the paradox.”
She looked away. “The medical examiner placed the time of death right about now.” Her voice had become efficient and professional. She stepped back from the edge of the mountain, and her hair returned to normal. Life returned to normal.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Let’s go.” And then I followed Lien-hua to the place Mindy died, while thoughts of death and beauty, of Christie’s memory and Lien-hua’s presence, wrestled in my mind.
32
We entered the clearing where Mindy Travelca had been found dead beneath a tree two days ago, and I set down my backpack.
Lien-hua paced to the middle of the field. “The crime-scene investigation unit was all over this place already. And besides, the storms up here would have destroyed any physical evidence. So, what exactly are we looking for?”
I turned in a circle, taking in the view, the mountains, the perspective, the trail. “Not forensic evidence as much as geographic understanding. Why here, Lien-hua? What significance does this place hold for him? A crime scene is everything related to the crime. The air. The wind. The ground. But a crime occurs in four dimensions, not just three.”
Oops, I’d slipped into lecture mode without even realizing it.
“The fourth dimension,” she said thoughtfully. “You mean time.”
“Yes. Time.” I lay down against the tree so that I was in the same position Mindy had been when we found her. I stared out across the mountains. Why did he leave you here, Mindy? Why did he kill you then? “A crime occurs in both space and time. And how those two factors relate to each other is what I’m interested in most.”
Contact lenses. He left them in her eyes.
Time of death: between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m.
She disappeared Wednesday afternoon.
Died on Thursday morning.
He didn’t carry her up the mountain.
She made a cell phone call to her mother at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, said she’d be home on Friday.
What did he leave you looking at? What did he want you to see?
Sightlines were important to him.
“There.” I pointed to a peak directly in front of us. “That mountain there. Which one is that?”
Lien-hua pulled out the map and spent a few moments orienting herself to our surroundings. “Warrior’s Peak. And… wait… there’s a local legend about it… hang on.” She flipped the map over. “The daughter of a Cherokee chief who lived there was abducted by some members of the Catawba tribe and brought here, to this mountain we’re on right now.” Lien-hua glanced over the story printed on the map and then summarized. “Her lover snuck through the night to rescue her, but it was some kind of trap. He was killed, slaughtered, and the girl-rather than let herself be married to anyone from the Catawba tribe-threw herself off this mountain, over there where the cliffs are, where we were standing before. According to the legend her tears falling to the ground became the valleys surrounding these peaks. And listen to this”-she paused to find her place, then continued reading-“some people say you can still hear her crying up on this mountain, when the wind is right.”
A chill settled over me as I sat where Mindy’s body had rested, as I stared out across the valley toward Warrior’s Peak. “He knew the story.”
Lien-hua was quiet, reflective. “He put contacts in her eyes, Pat. He wanted us to think about her tears.”
He wasn’t just one move ahead of us, more like two or three.
Lien-hua must have been thinking the same thing. “This guy is good.”
“He posed her,” I said. “Just like Jamie by the ‘No Loitering’ sign and Reinita on the trail to Tombstone Caverns.”
“Taunting us. Sending us a message. It all plays into his fantasy.” Lien-hua looked around. “Well, right about now is when Mindy died. If they came here in the morning, would that have given him enough time to torture her?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not enough hours of sunlight before her time of death. Not with the extensive petechial hemorrhaging she had.”
“So he spent the night out here with her,” she said.
I looked around. “That’s right. But not here. Not in this clearing; it’s too exposed.”
“So where?”
I pointed to a trail nearby that led to a series of exposed cliffs and outcroppings. “There.”
33
Grabbing my pack I followed Lien-hua along the trail. It brought us to the beginning of a series of cliffs that rose twenty to thirty meters above us and stretched back along the ridgeline. Another trail nearby led along the boulder-strewn base of the crags.