The Call of the Mild p-3 Read online

  But that plan couldn’t work once they found Mathis’ body. “We have to face the truth,” Shawn said. “One of our group is a murderer.”

  “You don’t know that,” Savage said. “For all we know it could have been one of them.” He waved a hand at the acting troupe, who were huddled together as far from the lawyers as they could get without leaving the safety of the camp.

  “Save it for the courtroom,” Balowsky said. “There’s no jury here to taint.”

  “It wasn’t one of them,” Shawn said.

  “How can you rule them out so definitively?” Savage said.

  “Do you even know their names?” Shawn said.

  “I know Miranda,” Balowsky said. “And I can vouch for her whereabouts all night.”

  “Which by some astonishing coincidence gives you an alibi, too,” Gwendolyn said.

  “That never occurred to me,” Balowsky said. “But I suppose you’re right.”

  “The fat chef is named Bram Tchaikovsky, or something like that,” Savage said. “The rest of them have some kind of cowboy names.”

  “Exactly my point,” Shawn said. “These are anonymous, faceless figures. Redshirts, actually.”

  “They’re wearing white,” Jade said.

  “It doesn’t matter what color their clothes are,” Shawn said. “You’ve got your three stars and one major guest player beaming down to the planet along with one security officer you’ve never seen before. Who do you think is going to get mowed down by space Nazis before the opening credits?”

  “They’re wearing white and they’re still alive, while Mathis is dead,” Jade said. “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “He’s trying to say they’re bit players,” Gus said. “We don’t really know them except for the limited function they perform in the camp. We haven’t been able to differentiate them in any substantive way, and they are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. So there’s not much point in assuming that one of them is the killer.”

  “Are you saying that you are ruling them out as suspects because they lack sufficient entertainment value?” Savage said incredulously.

  “Absolutely,” Shawn said. “Do you think it’s too early to start thinking about lunch?”

  “We can’t just sit down and eat lunch when there’s a killer among us,” Jade wailed. “One of us is dead. Don’t we care at all?”

  “We sat down and ate breakfast when there was a killer among us,” Shawn said.

  “We didn’t know,” Balowsky said.

  “One of us did,” Shawn said. “Which brings up an important point. We need to rethink our plan.”

  “It seems to me that the only change we need to make is to accelerate it,” Savage said. “Gwendolyn and I should leave immediately.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “If these two are our only hope of survival, we want them on the trail before the killer can get to them.”

  “Unless,” Gus said, “one of them is the killer.”

  “That would be a problem,” Shawn said. “Because if one of them killed Mathis, then it would only make sense for that person to kill the other hiker and escape, as we all starve to death waiting for a rescue that will never come.”

  “Go ahead, say it,” Gwendolyn demanded. “You mean me.”

  “It could be Savage,” Shawn said.

  “Standard English usage is to use the male pronoun when talking about someone whose gender is not known,” Gwendolyn said. “When you avoid pronouns altogether, you really mean ‘she.’ ”

  “Female pronoun there has a point,” Gus said.

  “I can prove it wasn’t me,” Gwendolyn said. “Because I wouldn’t have used a knife. I could have snapped his scrawny neck with my bare hands or smothered him with a pillow. Hell, I could have jammed a finger through his eye socket into his brain and he’d have been dead before he noticed I was in the tent.”

  The other lawyers moved a step away from Gwendolyn.

  “Well, that certainly sounds like the declaration of an innocent person to me,” Shawn said. “Who’s for sending her out on the trail with Savage? Show of hands?”

  Not a hand went up. Not even Gwendolyn’s.

  “What if one of them isn’t the killer?” Balowsky said. “Then do we just stay here waiting to be picked off one by one?”

  “There’s no reason to assume the killer is going to strike again,” Shawn said. “Of course, since we have no idea why that person killed Mathis, we have no way of predicting what that person will do next.”

  “There are other pronouns beside ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ” Gwendolyn said. “For example, there’s ‘I.’ And then of course there’s ‘ you.’ How do we know you aren’t the killer?”

  “She’s right,” Savage said. “We don’t know anything about you two.”

  Shawn looked hurt. “What do you want to know?” he said. “I’m an open book. With pictures. And a table of contents. An index. Pull me off the shelf and check me out. And you don’t even have to reshelve me when you’re done. There are metal carts placed in the aisles for your convenience. Which is actually kind of annoying if you’re looking for a title and someone has stuck it on the cart and no one’s gotten around to putting it back in its place.”

  Gus could see the lawyers getting restless again. And worse-suspicious. If Shawn kept talking this way, it wouldn’t be hard for the real killer to plant a suspicion in the minds of the others.

  “Morton Mathis infiltrated Rushton, Morelock six months ago,” Gus said. “We joined the firm only a couple of days ago. Whoever he was hunting there, clearly it wasn’t Shawn or me.”

  “We don’t know he was searching for any of us,” Gwendolyn said. “All we have is your word on that. For all we know you were the criminals he was hunting all along, and you came along on this trip just to kill him.”

  “And a darned good plan that would have been,” Shawn said. “So many criminals are able to plot the perfect crime, but when it comes to the getaway, that’s where they slip up. So we designed a murder in which getting away was impossible from the beginning, so there was no chance of it going wrong.”

  The logic of Shawn’s argument, or at least the complete lack of it, seemed to quell the lawyers’ suspicion of the two of them. Gus took advantage of the opening.

  “Grab your packs,” he said. “We need to get going.”

  “Before lunch?” Shawn said.

  “No lunch for us,” Gus said. “We need to leave the fresh food for the Triton Players. They’ll stay here until we can get a helicopter up to them.”

  “All of us?” Balowsky said. “What if I want to stay here with Miranda until you come back?”

  “What if you want to stay here until we’re gone, then kill all the actors and make your escape in the wilderness?” Savage said.

  “Then at least there would be five fewer actors in the world,” Gwendolyn said. “Mathis wouldn’t have died for nothing.”

  “Gus is right,” Shawn said. “We all go or none of us goes. And if none of us goes, none of us is getting back home.”

  There was grumbling from the lawyers. Grumbling and more suspicious looks. But then Savage marched over, swung his pack up on his back, and fastened the straps. “Let’s go,” he said. “Those trails aren’t going to hike themselves.”

  One by one the lawyers put on their packs and headed towards the trail. Gus took a moment to tell the actors what was going on and give them a chance to join the trek down the mountain. Either Coty or Bismarck-Gus still couldn’t say which was which-looked like he wanted to come along, but troupe loyalty outweighed the desire to flee the meadow, and since there was no way the chef would make it past the first day, they all decided to wait for rescue. If nothing else, Helstrom reasoned, the owner of the costume shop where they had rented their terrorist outfits would report them missing if they didn’t return the clothes in a few days.

  Shawn, in the meantime, had been going through Mathis’ pack and dividing the packets of
dehydrated food between his load and Gus’. When Gus came up to him, he swung his pack up on his back. “Race you to the bottom?” Shawn said.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  There was a pain in Gus’ left foot. At least that’s where it started every time he took a step. A dull, throbbing ache pounding across his sole, it pulsed a few times, then traveled up through his ankle to his calf on its way to his knee, where it knocked around for a bit before traveling up through his thigh. It stopped only when Gus lifted his foot. That’s when it started on the other side.

  How long had they been hiking? Gus had no idea. They had set out before eight in the morning, and the sun was well past midpoint in the sky by now. He could have checked his watch to see what time it was, but he’d misstepped while maneuvering through a stony patch of trail, and a rock had gone out from under him. He’d managed to keep his head from slamming into the ground, but only by using his watch to check his fall. At the time it had seemed like a fair trade-off, to smash the watch’s face in order to protect his own, but about now a spell of unconsciousness-even a permanent one-was sounding pretty appealing.

  Gus was once again taking up the rear position in the line of hikers. He’d volunteered for the job at first because he liked the idea of being able to see what everyone was doing. It was much harder for any of them to sneak up on him that way.

  But after all these hours, strategy didn’t have anything to do with his positioning. He just wasn’t keeping up, not even with Balowsky, who had started off limping and complaining about rocks in his shoes, but who had picked up his pace as the trail steepened. He had no idea how long it had been since he’d seen Gwendolyn. Maybe she’d managed to cut six days off the hike and was already down at the bottom. Or maybe she had run up ahead to dig pits and cover them with brush, so that the rest of the hikers would all fall to their deaths impaled on sharpened stakes. About now, even that sounded preferable to walking for most of another week.

  For what felt like hours, Gus had been hiking behind Savage and Jade, who whispered and giggled together like the newest couple on the junior high school campus. Gus had had to slow his pace in order to get out of earshot after he accidentally overheard them giving legal-jargon-based nicknames for the parts of each other’s bodies.

  Then something had gone wrong between the two of them. Savage said something, and Jade stiffened angrily. He tried to apologize, but she slapped him hard across the face and accelerated away from him. He marched along sullenly for a moment or two, then broke into a jog to go after her. They disappeared around a switchback, and Gus hadn’t seen them again.

  At first Gus hadn’t minded being alone. Under the blazing sun it was easier to let his mind focus on nothing but making sure that each foot hit solid ground at every step.

  But after a couple of hours the trail took that familiar turn, and scrub brush started appearing along the wayside. Within minutes Gus was entering the pine forest.

  That shouldn’t have been a problem, he kept telling himself. He’d been here already, and there had been no feelings of panic, no flashbacks to his familiar nightmare, no hallucinations.

  At the time, though, Gus had had plenty of more pressing issues to worry about. There was something about the prospect of imminent murder at the hands of insane terrorists to keep you from thinking about being lost in the forest. Now that threat was gone, and as much as he tried to convince himself he needed to stay wary in case the Triton Players were actually a front for a real terrorist band, and they had just been pretending to be innocent actors to throw off suspicion until they could make their move, he couldn’t help feeling that the trees were pressing in on him.

  Part of the problem was that they were. As the trail moved farther into the woods, it was growing narrower. Now it was just a slender track, sometimes completely obscured by heaps of brown pine needles. If he took his eyes off it for more than a second, if he lost his concentration and drifted off the path, would he ever find it again? Or would he be hopelessly lost, like he was in the dream, lost and chased by some hideous unseen monster?

  Gus fought to keep these thoughts out of his mind, but it was getting harder and harder. The pain in his feet and legs was keeping him anchored to reality, but he could feel the ropes starting to fray.

  He followed the trail around an enormous tree, only to find Shawn sitting against the other side of it nibbling at a granola bar.

  “Can you believe people actually fight to protect this kind of wilderness?” Shawn said, getting to his feet. “Go ahead, try to tell me it wouldn’t be better without a Burger King every couple of miles.”

  Gus stopped. “How far ahead are the others?”

  “They’re spread out over a mile or two,” Shawn said. “If it makes you feel any better, even Gwendolyn was looking like she really needed a sylvan pool to splash in.”

  “It doesn’t,” Gus said. He took a step forward and felt the pain run up his leg.

  “It should,” Shawn said. “We need these people to be at least as exhausted as we are.”

  “Small chance of that,” Gus said. “Why?”

  “Because it’s our only chance of survival,” Shawn said. “We need the killer to be tired so that he or she starts to make mistakes.”

  For the first time in hours Gus didn’t feel the ache in his legs. He didn’t think about the horrors of being lost in the wilderness.

  “Mathis was the threat to the killer, and Mathis is dead,” Gus said. “Why kill again?”

  “Because as long as any of us is alive, Mathis is still a threat,” Shawn said. “If the world knows he was murdered, they’ll also know it had to be one of us. And once they start investigating, they’ll figure it out. It may take a while. If it’s Lassiter on the case, it may take decades. But they will figure it out.”

  “But if we all disappear in the wilderness, no one will ever know what happened.” It was so obvious that Gus couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. “The killer is presumed dead along with the rest of us. The only difference is we’re all rotting out in the woods, while he or she is smuggling that chip out of the country.”

  “I’m going to follow Gwendolyn’s lead here,” Shawn said. “Let’s just call the killer ‘he’ from now on, and remember we don’t know the real gender. Because if we have only hours left to live, I don’t want to spend precious seconds of my life saying ‘he or she.’ ”

  “Fine,” Gus said. “He’s going to kill us all. He’ll have to kill all the actors, too.”

  “He’s got time,” Shawn said. “Even if Rushton isn’t playing games, no one’s going to know anything’s wrong for at least four more days. It will take another forty-eight hours before they send out the search parties. And they’re not going to find anything, if the killer is smart.”

  “So what do we do?” Gus said.

  “As I see it, we’ve got a couple of options,” Shawn said. “First, we could kill all the lawyers before they can get to us.”

  “I’m going to pass on that one.”

  “Just as well,” Shawn said. “I don’t really have enough energy for a mass killing. It looks so easy when you see it in the movies, but when you start figuring all the logistics, all the luring the victim into a secluded location, then hiding the body, and then getting ready to start all over again with the next one, it gets to be a lot of work.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just drop behind them on the trail and shoot them all at once?” Gus said.

  “You mean like you?”

  “Yes, Shawn,” Gus said wearily. “That’s the real reason I’ve been taking up the rear. Because I am actually the killer, and I plan to eliminate all the lawyers. On the off chance I ever catch up with them, of course.”

  “You have to admit, it would be a great twist,” Shawn said. “No one would ever see that coming.”

  “No one ever saw that Tommy Lee Jones was killing Laura Mars’ models, either,” Gus said. “And for the same reason: It’s really stupid and makes everything that comes before it ridiculou
s.”

  Gus pushed himself off the tree and started walking down the trail, trying to ignore the pain in his feet and legs. Shawn caught up with him within three steps. Or almost caught up with him; the trees grew so close here there was only room to walk single file.

  “Okay, okay, forget the twist,” Shawn said. “We’ll focus on finding the real killer, even if it turns out to be the most obvious suspect.”

  “You mean Gwendolyn?”

  “Of course not,” Shawn said. “She’s a trained killer, a natural hunter, and a born predator. She’d murder us all as soon as look at us. Sooner, probably, if she knew how bad you looked right now.”

  “Which makes her the most obvious suspect,” Gus said.

  “Maybe in that bizarro universe you live in,” Shawn said. “She’s so obvious she couldn’t be the killer. Not if we’re going to maintain any self-respect as detectives.”

  Gus tried to ignore the throbbing in his head, which was beginning to pulse in rhythm with the pain in his legs. “So when you say ‘the most obvious suspect,’ you really mean the least obvious suspect, who is most obvious by virtue of not being obvious at all.”

  “Now that is some respectable detectiving,” Shawn said.

  “Who are we talking about?” Gus said.

  “I’d think it would be obvious.”

  Gus tried to glare back at Shawn, but all he could see behind him was the edge of his own pack. “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you, but only because you’re tired and cranky,” Shawn said. “Jade Greenway.”

  Gus stopped so suddenly that Shawn walked into his pack, nearly knocking them both over. He steadied himself against a tree as Shawn came around to face him. “What makes you say she’s the killer?” Gus said.

  “Jade is perfect,” Shawn said. “She’s quiet and kind of shy and seems pretty easy to intimidate, at least compared to the rest of this bunch. She’s the only one who ever expressed remorse over Mathis’ death, even if it was expressed more as a confirmation of her own moral superiority than as any actual sense of grief. And she always wears bright green, which makes her unbelievably easy to see, especially if she tries to hide in this dusty brown forest.”