The Victim at Vultee Arch Read online

  THE VICTIM AT VULTEE ARCH

  BOOK FOUR OF THE MIKE DAMSON MYSTERIES

  By Charles deMontel Williamson

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities between its characters and any real people are a coincidence. The actual locations may have been adjusted or relocated to improve the action. The author has lived in Sedona for more than a dozen years. It is a place he loves. It is also a great place to hike; actual rattlesnakes are very rare. Enjoy Sedona; it is beautiful and fun.

  Please respect the author by using this work only for your personal enjoyment.

  This book is dedicated to my wonderful, smart, and beautiful granddaughter Izzy.

  PROLOUGE

  NEW YORK:

  Sir Henry Griffin did not hear the traffic noise of Fifth Avenue, forty-two stories below his corner office. He did not hear the clatter and banter from the seventy traders and support people in the dealing room that was visible through a glass door that separated his mahogany paneled office from his employees at the North American headquarters of the Merchant Bank of Europe and the Americas. What he did hear was the abrupt ringing of a phone, the special one that he kept in the credenza behind his early nineteenth century maple desk. It was the direct line that did not go through the company’s PBX and recording systems.

  He noticed the 928 area code on the caller ID and answered with his nasal public school British accent, “Good Morning.”

  A voice with a Midwestern American accent said, “The project is finished.”

  Sir Henry did not smile as he said, “Thank you.” He hung up without further comment.

  His thoughts drifted to other difficult decisions made by the North American Managers over the past one hundred and eighty years. He knew that one of his predecessors had hit on the idea of paying a bounty for bison kills as a way of forcing the plains Indians to live on their reservations by eliminating their food supply. That North American Manager needed to protect the firm’s huge investment in western railroad bonds. Five years later he’d been promoted to Chairman.

  He knew that another predecessor had supported a successful revolution in a large South American country to help the company’s long position in coffee contracts. He’d kept his actions secret from the Latin American Manager with whom he was competing for recognition at headquarters in Edinburgh. That North American Manager was promoted to Chairman a year later.

  Sir Henry had needed to make other difficult decisions. He’d protected his Middle Eastern investors when the World Trade Center Towers were destroyed. His first obligation was always to his investors, no matter what they might do with the money he’d earned for them. This current decision had been especially difficult because the young man had shown such promise. The man might have been Sir Henry’s replacement if he received a promotion to Chairman in five or ten years.

  Sir Henry walked across the eighteenth century Persian carpet to the paneled door to his private dining room. The mayor and two commissioners were on the way up for their breakfast meeting regarding the private placement for the Port Authority.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SEDONA, ARIZONA:

  My partner, Chad Archer, looked excited when he came into my office that Tuesday morning in October. Crime is rare in the Sedona area. Chad enjoys getting out in the field to investigate anything more exciting than a stolen camera or a lost hiker. I could tell by his expression that this was something big by Sedona standards.

  Chad said, with a somewhat inappropriate grin, “Mike, I just got a call from Art Johnson. He’s investigating a body in the Dry Creek Area east of Vultee Arch. He’s decided that it’s in our county.”

  The county line between Yavapai County, Arizona and Coconino County, Arizona goes directly through the west side of Sedona. It’s just a line drawn by mapmakers a century ago, and there are no distinguishing landmarks to separate the counties in the wilderness north of town. In this case, a Yavapai County deputy had been called to the scene when a helicopter tour guide had spotted a body in the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness near the natural stone arch. Deputy Johnson was asking the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office to take over the case.

  I had been getting a little bored also. The Sedona District had been very quiet for the past four months, ever since the heartbreaking murder of a young woman at Cathedral Rock. Permanent Sedona residents tend to be affluent retirees and successful artists, not a high crime demographic. I inquired, “Did Art mention a possible cause of death?”

  Chad grinned again, signifying that the case might be more interesting than most local ones. “Killed by a diamondback according to Art. He found the huge rattler nearby with its head smashed by a stone. Looks like the victim at least got the snake that got him.”

  Margaret and I had moved to Sedona three years ago after I’d spent nearly thirty years on the LA Police Department, most of it as a homicide detective. The only rattlesnake death I’d ever investigated was the unfortunate case of a woman who was using a snake in a strange religious practice. She didn’t seek help after being bitten, assuming that God would take care of her.

  “With anti venom, I didn’t think people died from rattlers in Arizona anymore.”

  Chad had grown up in Sedona and gone to college at NAU in Flagstaff. He was my son’s age, but he enjoyed playing the role of mentor when it came to local conditions. Chad explained, “It must have been more than twenty years ago that we had a death in the Sedona area. Actually, I only remember that one death in my whole life. It was a fellow from Phoenix hiking alone over in the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness about twenty miles northwest of here. The man didn’t have a way of getting help. I think the snake crawled into his sleeping bag, but the story is from so long ago that I’m not sure of the details. We have an occasional bite, but people don’t die from them anymore.”

  It was my third year to manage the Sedona office for Sheriff Greg Taylor. My wife, Margaret, and I hike almost every weekend along the dozens of trails in the Sedona area. We had occasionally seen or heard rattlesnakes on a summer morning in remote places, but we’d never had an actual confrontation with one. Sedona is in the high desert at 4,500 feet. It’s much cooler than Phoenix where the snakes are more common. The recent October weather had been in the low forties at night and the low seventies during the afternoon, not snake weather.

  I always share the details of my cases with Margaret, but I was a little concerned that her existing fear of snakes would be sharpened when she heard about this death. I wanted Margaret to continue to enjoy hiking through the fantastic scenery in our adopted hometown without looking down for snakes all of the time.

  “We’d better get going. How far is the body from the Vultee Arch Road trailhead?”

  “Almost two miles. I’ll carry the crime scene backpack,” Chad volunteered.

  Chad is a very athletic young man who runs five miles almost every day. I was glad that he always volunteered to carry the heavy backpack. It contained ou r t satellite phone, GPS receiver, and the various paraphernalia needed to investigate a crime that is far from the nearest road.

  We started out the door toward my white Ford Explorer. It was parked in front of our little nondescript strip mall office. As we walked by the front desk, Rose Rios, our administrative assistant, said, “Meg Hull is holding on line three. She said it’s very urgent.” Meg is a good friend and also a reporter from the Sedona Red Rock News. Our relations with the local press are important, and the rattlesnake victim wasn’t going anywhere. I took the call.

  Meg did not wait to exchange pleasantries. “Mike, is it true that you’ve had a rattlesnake bite death out near Vultee Arch? I need to know by 10:00 this morning to get it in the Friday paper. Everyone in town will be talking about it, and I�
�ll be really embarrassed if it’s not reported at all.”

  There was a note of desperation in Meg’s tone. The local paper had a Wednesday and a Friday edition. If she missed her deadline, the death could not be reported until next Wednesday. Local news as exciting as a snakebite death was not to be taken lightly.

  “We just got a call from Art Johnson. A body of a man was found a quarter mile east of Vultee Arch. He appears to be a snakebite victim. At this point you could say something about preliminary reports from the scene, subject to review by the County Medical Examiner.”

  Meg seemed pleased. “Thanks Mike. I owe you. Can you call me when you get there with an update?”

  “Art had to drive to the Seven Canyons Golf Course to call in. There’s no cell phone service in that area. Chad is taking our satellite phone. But Meg, you know how tight the county’s budget is. It costs a fortune to use the thing.”

  There was a little pause, and then Meg sprang for the bait. “Mike, the newspaper will pay up to twenty dollars of your phone bill if you have something interesting by our deadline.”

  “How did you hear about the death so quickly Meg?” I wanted to know if there was a leak in my office or over at Yavapai County.

  Meg replied cheerfully, “My nephew is on the golf course grounds crew at Seven Canyons. Everyone at the resort is talking about it.” There is something about a small town that I may never get used to after a lifetime in Los Angeles. News travels at the speed of light; it’s as if everyone but me has mental telepathy.

  Chad and I drove through west Sedona to the Dry Creek Road intersection. We turned north and drove past the million-dollar houses that have sprung up in northwest Sedona like toadstools after a monsoon storm. Many of them are second or third homes for wealthy Californians. There is a concentration of Hollywood types in that nearly rural part of town.

  Most of the undeveloped land north of town is part of the Coconino National Forest, but some private owners retained their family homesteads when the area became part of the national forest system decades ago. These in-holdings have become some of the most exclusive and expensive property in Arizona. The dramatic cliffs that make up the escarpment called the Mogollon Rim separate the piñon and juniper forest of the Sedona area from the ponderosa pine of the high country around Flagstaff. Sedona is about 4,500 feet above sea level while Flagstaff, just twenty-five miles away, is 7,000 feet. These tan and red cliffs and the dramatic buttes and other erosion features make the Sedona area a major tourist destination.

  The Enchantment Resort has been perched at the mouth of Boynton Canyon on one of these in-holdings for several decades. The newer Seven Canyons Resort built a Tom Weiskopf designed championship golf course to help sell its timeshare condos and million dollar lots. It is perched across the entrance to Long Canyon and surrounded by the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness. Art had driven to the Seven Canyons to find a usable phone. He was driving back to the Vultee Arch trailhead to meet us and guide us to the body.

  After a two-mile drive ing north on the well-paved Dry Creek Road, we turned northeast onto the bumpy gravel of Forest Service Road 152. The road had not been repaired since the monsoon rains of August, and I was grateful for the high clearance of the Explorer. The Vultee Arch Trail is a popular hiking spot, but on a weekday in October we expected to see few other people in this area. There were several cars at other trailheads that we passed on the way to the end of the road, but Art’s Jeep Cherokee was the only vehicle at the Vultee Arch Trailhead.

  “How did this guy get here? There’s no car.” Chad pointed out.

  “He must have come from Oak Creek Canyon over Sterling Pass,” I said. That is a difficult trail that climbs a thousand feet in a little over a mile. It is a more strenuous way to reach the Vultee Arch. The Sterling Pass Trail is the only route that connects the deep scenic valley of Oak Creek Canyon and the backcountry wilderness where the body was found.

  Art was waiting next to his vehicle. He’s a tall man, about forty, with the knowing and experienced eyes of someone much older. He looks like a basketball player from the days before steroids and weight machines. Art is a redhead with very fair skin that never shows a trace of a suntan. He’s divorced and raising two teenage boys. His wife moved to Hollywood to become an actress ten years ago. I’ve been told she is a striking beauty, but she never visits Arizona and only sees her sons at Christmas. On several other occasions, I’d worked on cases with Art. I thought he was competent but unimaginative. I’d been told he had a quick temper, but I’ve never seen it displayed.

  “Hi, Art. I guess you’re handing this case off to us?” I said, trying to keep the tone good-natured.

  “Good morning Mike. Hi Chad. My GPS receiver indicates that the body is actually in Coconino County. It’s your corpse fellows. Let me take you to the poor bastard. It was not a nice way to go.”

  “Have you identified him?” I asked.

  Art handed me a black alligator wallet with the gold initials QRT embossed on one side. I opened it and found the New York driver’s license of Quentin R. Thatcher. The handsome African American man in the photo lived on Eighty-Ninth Street on the Upper West Side. The wallet contained several of his business cards. There was a Ph.D. after his name on the card.

  Quentin Thatcher had been Managing Director for Global Risk Management for Derivative & Engineered Products for the Merchant Bank of Europe and the Americas. It was a long title. My only son is an investment banker with a Swiss-owned investment bank in New York. I decided to ask him what sort of a job that long ???????????? impressive title really signified.

  There were membership cards for the Park Place Squash Club, and the alumni association of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The wallet also contained the normal number of credit cards. There was a single photo of a smiling girl of about eight. The little girl was dressed in a fancy white dress holding a brass unicorn. Her photo had been laminated in plastic. There was almost a thousand dollars in cash. The young man had been only thirty-one when he died, just three years older than my own son. Thatcher had been a young Ph.D. who was already a managing director of a major investment bank. He must have been a remarkable man. I was saddened by his premature death even though I’d never met the man.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We were in a depression almost completely surrounded by the majesty of the red-rock peaks. The tallest of these, Wilson Mountain was a sheer two thousand five hundred foot multicolored cliff to our South. A series of deep canyons sliced into the escarpment of the Mogollon Rim to our north and west forming thousand foot deep cuts in the red and tan cliffs. The dramatic pyramid shape of Capital Butte had been the most prominent feature as we drove the gravel road leading to this trailhead. It was easy to understand why the Seven Canyons Company had chosen this corner of the Coconino National Forest for its new resort. Margaret and I had only hiked the Vultee Arch Trail once. There were so many other dramatic hikes in Sedona that we hadn’t gotten around to our second hike here yet.

  The trail follows the normally bone-dry Sterling Creek through Sterling Canyon. The north face of Wilson Mountain formed the south side of the canyon. A steep-sided sandstone mesa dotted with cactus and manzanita formed the north side of the canyon. After a brief hike through a manzanita and scrub area we entered a fantastic forest of mature Arizona cypress whose thick multicolored trunks are blended with colors like a rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of red, purple, tan, yellow, orange, and brown. After the cypress forest, the trail proceeds through an area of ponderosa pine, tall orange barked old growth trees. Finally, after one and three quarter miles, we emerged from dense trees of the dry creek bed to an area of red sandstone ledges where the flat-topped Vultee Arch was clearly visible standing out from the canyon wall. The arch struck me as less impressive than the hike to it.

  Instead of taking the trail that leads up to the arch, we continued up an unnamed side canyon, following along the red sandstone shelf. Our passage left no footprints on the slick rock. It was clear that it w
ould be difficult to trace Dr. Thatcher’s route to his fatal encounter with the snake. We climbed up a series of steep sided ledges until we were several hundred feet higher on the canyon wall than Vultee Arch.

  The body was sprawled on a rounded red sandstone ledge partly covered with scrubby junipers. It was in a location that would be impossible to see except from the difficult to climb cliffs above the ledge or from the air. We were fortunate that a helicopter pilot had spotted the victim and called the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. It must have spoiled the holiday of the tourists who’d chartered the flight to view the scenic backcountry, but their discovery of the body brought us here within a day of the unfortunate young man’s death. Art had covered the body with his poncho, not good police procedure, but I understood his action since he was leaving the corpse to hike back to the trailhead and drive to the Seven Canyons. Art had not wanted the buzzards or the ravens to disfigure the body before we returned.

  Chad lifted the poncho and we saw the remains of the young African American man who’d been on the New York driver’s license. His features had been han d som e . There was a large bulbous swelling on the right side of his neck. Two bright red points about an inch apart were clearly visible. The death had not been an easy one, and that showed on his distorted face. An I-phone was grasped tightly in the man’s right hand. I switched on my own cell phone, and the small display indicated that there was no service in this remote spot. He’d tried to get help by phone. The man was dressed in lightweight hiking pants, the kind with removable legs, a long sleeve khaki shirt, and an expensive brand of European hiking boots. There was an expensive Nikon digital camera around his neck.

  “A big one got him in the neck. Damn, I’ve never seen that happen. I’m not certain even the anti venom would’ve helped this man.” Chad commented, his face showing a grimace of sympathetic pain.