The Dead Man at Doyle Saddle Read online

  THE DEAD MAN AT DOYLE SADDLE

  BOOK SIX 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. Sedona, Flagstaff, the San Francisco Peaks, and the Grand Canyon are places he loves. They are delightful places to hike and to see unique and beautiful scenery.

  The hike up to Doyle Saddle is difficult, but it passes through a lovely alpine forest to reach 10,800 feet, which is well above the tree line. At Doyle Saddle you’ll find an extraordinary panorama of northern Arizona. If you hike on to the top of Humphreys Peak you will reach the highest point in Arizona at 12,633 feet above sea level and 3,843 feet above the trail’s starting point. Enjoy Coconino County Arizona; it is beautiful and fun.

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

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Captain Damson, this is Sean Mark. I have a report of a dead body up in the San Francisco Peaks near where the Weatherford Trail joins the Humphreys Trail — a shooting victim according to the hikers who’ve seen the body.”

  “Where are you now, Sean?” I’d been asking the deputies to call me Mike for the whole three months I’d been working at the Flagstaff office; they seldom did.

  “I’m calling from the base of the ski lift. It’s as windy as hell up here. There’s no chance of using a helicopter to get to the body, and even the ski lift can’t operate. We’ll need to carry him down.”

  “I’m on my way.” I’d hiked the difficult Humphreys Tail four times since I moved to Arizona four years ago; however, my hikes had not been in October with gale-force winds. Humphreys Peak is the highest point in Arizona at 12,633 feet, but from Sean’s description, the corpse was at about 10,800 feet, a location known as the Doyle Saddle.

  I asked my administrative assistant to contact four of our strongest young deputies and have them meet me at the trailhead to recover the body. I notified Coconino County’s only crime scene technician, Jimmy Hendrix, and suggested that he prepare for a climb to about 11,000 feet.

  I’m a native of LA and not used to Flagstaff’s cold weather so I keep a parka in my Explorer even in October. Margaret and I live down in Sedona; it’s only twenty-five miles south of Flagstaff, but 2,500 feet lower, making its winters much milder.

  I picked up Jimmy. “Are you ready to rock and roll?” I’d been kidding him about his name since we met.

  “Mike, you’re probably much too old to climb Humphreys for this investigation. Maybe you should stay at the vehicle and take it easy. In fact, I think you’re even too old to have enjoyed Jimmy Hendrix; you’re probably from the Patty Page era.” He always has a rejoinder for me. I’m not sensitive about my age. I’d enjoyed Purple Haze and other rock and roll classics on radio, but I’m not actually old enough to have been at Woodstock.

  Four years ago, I took early retirement from the LAPD because of a leg injury, but Margaret and I have done a lot of hiking since we moved to Arizona both because we enjoy it and to build up my leg strength. I was certain I could out distance the sedentary, twenty-seven-year-old crime scene technician.

  As we drove the fifteen miles up the winding mountain road, the brisk wind scattered the last of the aspen leaves across the road and buffeted my Explorer like a ship in heavy seas. Bruce Springsteen’s album “The Rising” was playing in my CD player, but Jimmy complained that it was an old man’s music.

  Only two vehicles were parked at the Humphrey’s trailhead, Sean’s Sheriff’s Department Explorer and a tan Honda with a Northern Arizona University sticker in the back window. I joined Sean and the two hikers who’d discovered the body; they were sheltering from the wind in Sean’s vehicle.

  The hikers, Max Hampton and Robert Barnes, were Northern Arizona University students who were doing endurance training by running the trail from the 8,800 foot trailhead up to Doyle Saddle. They ran every other day until the autumn snows closed the trail.

  “After we reached the top, we sheltered from the wind to catch our breath and saw a man’s body. He was crumpled into an odd posture with a bullet through the forehead,” Max said.

  “And the back of his head is blown completely away,” Robert said.

  “Why do you say he was a hunter?” I asked

  ‘There was an orange cap lodged in some rocks, and he was dressed in hunting camouflage,” Robert said.

  “Also, his rifle was on the ground nearby. We didn’t touch anything; we just ran back down and called you guys,” Max explained.

  My first thought was that it was either a hunting accident or a suicide, but it was much too early to rule out murder. I reminded Sean and Jimmy to treat this as a homicide scene even if it looked on the surface like an accident.

  Once the four stretcher-bearers arrived, I sent the NAU students home, and the seven of us started up the mountain with Sean Mark in the lead. We crossed a windblown field that would become the Hart Prairie beginner’s ski slope in a few weeks. After walking under the ski lift, we entered the shelter of the ponderosa forest. The trail was frozen but not snow-covered at this elevation, and we made good time for the first two miles.

  The aspen and ponderosa forest gave way to Engelmann spruce as we gained elevation. Occasionally, we passed a clearing where the arctic winds blasted us, forcing us to walk hunched over to avoid a tumble off the narrow trail. I felt warm enough in my down parka, but my face was numb. I wondered if we would even be able to stand against the wind once we cleared the trees. The wind’s howl and the creaking of the spruce made it impossible to carry on a conversation as we trudged up one switchback after another.

  Around the 9,500-foot elevation, I noticed that Jimmy Hendrix had fallen so far behind that he was no longer visible on the switchbacks below us. I sent Sean down to check on him while I headed up with the four deputies and their stretcher. We rested in a stand of bristlecone pine just below the timberline and waited for Sean and Jimmy to catch up. After fifteen minutes with no sign of our crime scene technician, we began the difficult climb to the saddle.

  When the bulk of the mountain was north of us, the wind was tolerable, but once we reached Doyle Saddle we would be exposed to its full force. The footing as we neared the saddle got more treacherous because snow and ice remained in every shaded area. For the first time I wondered at the sanity of the NAU students who had been running on this dangerous path at well above 10,500 feet.

  I stumbled repeatedly on the slippery trail, but my thick gloves kept my hands from the jagged basalt. The last hundred feet was the most grueling. None of us could stand upright; rather, we crouched like mountain gorillas afraid to expose our chests to the winds. After crawling the last fifteen feet, I could see over the rocks of Doyle Saddle into the wide expanse of the Kachina Wilderness three thousand feet below me on the north side of the San Francisco Peaks. My eyes were watering from the wind and every breath of the thin air was a battle against the gusts that tried to snatch it away before it could reach my lungs.

  I scuttled across the rocky saddle and down into the sheltered area where the students had found the body. The stretcher-bearers remained on the lee side of the saddle waiting for me to examine the area. The scene was just as the students had described. A man in his mid thirties had fallen between boulders after taking a bullet through the forehead. A bright orange cap lay nearby caught between the rocks and covered with brown bloodstains. The man wore a camouflage coat and pants that were much too lightweight for the current weather conditions; there had been no wind yesterday. The blood was long dried
; the man had been dead at least twelve hours, probably twenty-four or more.

  A wallet I found in his pants pocket identified the victim as Zackary Cantor, MD. He had resided in Paradise Valley, Arizona, an exclusive Phoenix suburb. The entry wound on his forehead showed no powder marks, making suicide with a rifle unlikely. It could still have been an accidental discharge of his own weapon when he dropped it. I could see it down slope about twenty feet. To retrieve it, I would need to expose myself to the worst of the winds on the scree slope. I took photos so that we could establish the exact location for future reference.

  I Gollum-crawled down the talus until I could grasp the hunting rifle in my gloved hand. It was a 338 Winchester Mag with scope, suitable for bull elk. As I pulled it close, I noticed a dark form fifty feet lower on the nearly vertical slope. It was the body of a huge 6 by 6 point elk. The season for rifle elk hunting began yesterday, and this Phoenix doctor had apparently gotten his elk and then climbed up here from the forested slopes below to dress it. He’d never reached the carcass with its trophy spread of antlers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had investigated the scene for twenty minutes, taking digital photos and trying not to get blown off the mountain, when Jimmy and Sean arrived. Jimmy was ashen; traces of vomit spotted his down parka. He was shaking too much to take photos, and the wind was too noisy to allow us to talk without shouting into each other’s ear. He apologized for his tardiness and crawled to shelter behind a boulder.

  Poor Jimmy, he was also a native of southern Californian and far out of his element on this mountain. I had expected him to retrieve the round from the elk for comparison to Dr. Cantor’s rifle, but he was certainly not up to that.

  I sent Sean. Since he is a Flagstaff native, I thought it was likely that he loved hunting like most locals and was comfortable in digging into an elk carcass. He rigged a rope around a boulder to add an element of safety to his climb down to the elk remains. Even though he tried to hug the rocks, at times, he seemed to almost soar like a human kite, suspended in the air from the rope he had rigged.

  In another half an hour, we’d done all we could at the crime scene without unwarranted risk to our own lives. Billowing clouds raced towards the mountain. Visibility declined rapidly to fifty feet and an unnatural twilight engulfed us.

  Sean had found a rifle round imbedded in the heart of the elk; it had been a perfect shot. We had no luck in finding the bullet that had passed through Dr. Cantor. It appeared that the victim had been standing on the ridge at Doyle Saddle when the round passed through his head. The likely trajectory would carry it down the mountain on the rocky slope we had climbed. It could have come to rest anywhere in the ten square miles of wilderness below us.

  It began to snow in large clumps, blown into horizontal streaks by the storm. The trek down the mountain got easier once we reached the shelter of the forest, except for one embarrassing episode. As we crossed a treeless talus slope, a gust of wind caused one of the stretcher-bearers to stumble and sprain his ankle. The stretcher, with the corpse of Dr. Cantor strapped to it, tumbled down the slope, rolling and bouncing as it went. After one sharp impact, it rebounded into a pine tree and became entangled in its lower branches.

  The recovery of the corpse and the injury to the deputy added forty minutes to our trek down the mountain. We considered putting the injured deputy on the stretcher and returning for the corpse once we got him down, but Sean managed to fashion a crutch from a branch that allowed the deputy to hobble the rest of the way down.

  The bulky deputy was more worried about the reaction from Kay Sumter, our sharp-tongued medical examiner, than he was about his ankle injury. There would be hell to pay. Dr. Sumter would not appreciate a corpse that was damaged post mortem by careless handling.

  Sean took over from the injured stretcher-bearer. The young man impressed me as capable and resourceful, someone who might do a good job as a detective with the major crimes unit.

  The snowfall stopped as we neared the vehicles. A brisk wind blew the clouds southeast towards the White Mountains. The clear sky revealed the blinding white of the peak’s new snowfall against a cobalt sky.

  Once we were in my Explorer with the heater going full blast, Jimmy said, “Shit Mike, I’m sorry I wasn’t much help up there. I need to get back to regular workouts.” His hands were still shaking, but his color was better.

  “Jimmy, do you mean by regular workouts your participation on the department’s bowling team?”

  “That’s a low blow. I played soccer in college.”

  “NAU doesn’t have a men’s soccer team,” I said.

  “Well, it was intramural soccer. At least I was in reasonable shape back then.” He wiped the remains of the vomit from his jacket with a Kleenex.

  “I think we’re OK on the evidence. We have Dr. Cantor’s rifle, the bullet from the elk, and the doctor’s body. That’s probably enough. No matter how good a climbing shape you were in, we would never have located the round that went through the victim’s head, and that was the most important evidence.”

  “Dr. Sumter will be mad as hell; I’m just glad I wasn’t the one who dropped the corpse,” he said.

  When I returned to my office, I called the Chief of the Paradise Valley Police Department and asked him to help me find Dr. Cantor’s next of kin for notification and to have someone identify the body. He mentioned there had been no report that Zackary Cantor was missing, but he knew there was a local plastic surgeon by that name who owned a large house on the south side of Mummy Mountain. He would call me back within the hour.

  Next, I contacted the medical examiner to explain the post mortem damage to the corpse. Kay was not pleased and asked if the man’s head had been further damaged by our carelessness. I had not opened the body bag after we recovered it from the ponderosa, so I had no idea if there had been further trauma to the head. She would start her examination promptly at 4:00. She knows that I always attend the autopsies for my cases.

  As Chief of Criminal Investigation, I get to decide which detective handles each serious criminal case in the county’s jurisdiction. It gives me a chance to keep the most interesting cases for myself. Most of the serious crimes in Coconino County occur on the Navajo Reservation where the FBI and Navajo Police handle it, or they occur in the City of Flagstaff where they are handled by the local cops. Even though this case looked like an accidental death, I decided to assign myself to it.

  I checked on vehicles registered to Zackary Cantor and found three: a Mercedes sedan, a BMW SUV, and a Ford extended-cab pickup truck. The truck was registered here in Coconino County and the other two vehicles had been registered down in Maricopa County.

  After getting approval from his supervisor, I contacted Sean and asked him to assist in the investigation. I wanted to provide the young deputy with some criminal investigation experience in preparation for a possible future promotion. I liked him, and he had given a good account of himself on the mountain today. Sean seemed pleased. I updated him and gave him an assignment.

  “Check for Dr. Cantor’s vehicles at all of the Inner Basin trailheads as well as the Weatherford trail. If you don’t find his truck at any of those locations, we’ll need to conduct an air search after the wind dies down some.”

  “I know that area well; I’ll find it if it’s there. Captain Damson, I think Doyle Saddle was an odd place to find a prize bull elk. There’s nothing to eat on that basalt slope. The whole scene didn’t ring true to me as a possible accident; it might have been a dispute over the elk. It’s the largest one I’ve ever seen, a contender for biggest elk harvested this season.”

  “It didn’t seem quite right for an accident to me either. Call me if you find Dr. Cantor’s truck.”

  When the Paradise Valley police chief called back, he explained that no one was home at the Cantor residence. He had been able to contact the doctor’s office in Scottsdale and learned that Mrs. Cantor was visiting her sister in LA.

  He had not received an answer at her sister’
s home; however, the doctor’s nurse practitioner was on her way to Flagstaff to identify the body. Her name was Amanda Brandt, and she had worked with the doctor for four years. He gave me her cell phone number, and I called and explained how to reach the medical examiner’s office. She expected to reach Flagstaff by 5:30 or 6:00. The nurse mentioned that Dr. Cantor had a vacation home in the Forest Highlands neighborhood, a gated golf course community south of town. The doctor was a pilot and kept a truck at the airport to use when he flew his private plane up to Flagstaff.

  I was about to leave for the medical examiner’s office when Sean called and reported that he had found Dr. Cantor’s truck at the Weatherford trailhead. He would call for a tow, and let Jimmy Hendricks know so he could come see the vehicle before it was moved.

  The remains of the dead man at Doyle Saddle resembled the victim’s driver’s license photo I found in his pocket, so finding his truck was no surprise. I’d been assuming that we were dealing with the death of Dr. Zackary Cantor who suffered a fatal gunshot wound while in the Kachina Wilderness hunting elk.

  I left for the medical examiner’s office expecting another scolding for the post mortem damage to the remains of Dr. Cantor. Kay would be especially upset because the remains were those of a fellow MD of about her age. Kay was as competent as any medical examiner that I worked with in LA, and the county was lucky to have her in spite of her temper.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The body was nude on an aluminum table. Dr. Cantor had been a short muscular man with washboard abs and a tribal tattoo around his large right bicep. As I approached, Kay Sumter turned and said, “You’re late.” It was about thirty seconds after 4:00.

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  She held up an 8 by 10 photo of the victim’s head that I had taken at Doyle Saddle. “You fools smashed his cranium. It will make anything I report in court subject to challenge, not to mention the difficulty the family will have if they want an open casket.”