First to Find Read online

  FIRST TO FIND

  a novel by Mark Gessner

  "Never mess with a Geocacher

  --we know all the best places to hide a body."

  -Matt Sargent, aka Prime Suspect

  Chapter 1

  ON A FLICKERING SCREEN a football field away in the bomb squad van, Sergeant Diethelm adjusted the contrast and brightness dials until he could read the yellow stenciled military markings on the green metal box as clearly as if he were pressing his nose up against it:

  30 GRENADE

  HAND FRAG

  DELAY MC4

  In addition to the video feed, the bomb squad robot's chemical sniffers relayed traces of nitrogen, gunpowder, lead, steel, and a few other telltale markers for explosives. X-ray revealed the presence of electronic circuits, a coiled wire, and something that appeared to be lumps of plastic, most likely C4 plastic explosive. Radio-frequency analysis detected the presence of an operating electronic timer. This was the real thing then. His skin tingled. Shit. His first real threat in five years. The whole Al Qaeda business had finally hit home. Those motherfuckers wouldn't get away with it this time, not on Diethelm's watch.

  The golf-cart sized robot was a new acquisition for the Austin Police Department. It was used, a 1990 model, with a few sensor upgrades, and even at a hundred grand a pop, still better than sending in humans. The robot crawled to the site on tractor treads, steered via commands sent down an optical fiber cable tether that snaked along behind the robot as it negotiated the curved jogging path. It looked more like a miniature battle tank than a robot. Instead of a tank barrel it had a ten-foot horizontal metal boom with a cluster of sensors at the end, any one of which could be rotated into place on command. Better than sending in humans, but there was nothing human-looking about it.

  The site had been identified earlier that morning by a passing housewife jogging through the park pushing a doublewide stroller with her two kids inside. She'd stopped to catch her breath on the park bench when she spotted the contrast of bright yellow on olive drab from under a cluster of rocks at the base of a tree near the edge of the crushed gravel trail.

  There'd been an influx of middle-eastern neighbors recently, despite her complaints to the neighborhood association. The association couldn't legally do anything to keep them out, nor did they want to. The new residents always paid their assessments in full and on time.

  Now her worst fears came true. The foreigners were planting bombs on the jogging trails. Her call to 911 was answered promptly, and the squad had cleared the park and cordoned off a perimeter, deploying their mobile base of operations at the trailhead parking lot, less than a tenth of a mile from the bomb site.

  Diethelm made the call to detonate the package in place, rather than risk bringing it out and defusing it. If it was Al Qaeda, they'd likely booby-trapped it anyway. Moving it would be too dangerous.

  The robot extended a small telescoping probe from the end of the sensor boom, and stuck a small magnetic disruptor module to the can. The robot backed off a hundred feet, reeling off a line of thin cable as it did so.

  Diethelm gave the order to fire.

  The disruptor module popped. The tree shook. Rocks, dirt, metal shards, bark, and other debris leapt out dozens of feet in a cloud of smoke and dirt. The explosion wasn't as violent as Diethelm would have expected from an ammo can full of C4 though.

  The robot's work was done.

  The hazmat team went in first, using handheld detectors to check the air for chemical or biological agents. They found none, and the area was cleared for Diethelm's men.

  Diethelm personally led his team in on foot to clear the area, recover, catalog and bag the fragments. They approached the area cautiously.

  What they found did not have them calling the Department of Homeland Security. What they found did not require them to catalog, bag, or tag anything. What they found had them scratching their heads. One of the younger men let out a nervous laugh, before Diethelm stared him down.

  Over near the bench one of the men found what remained of the electronic timer. It had once been a cheap Chinese-made sports watch. What looked like C4 on X-ray was actually a small package of plastic modeling clay, in neon colors. The coil of wire was the wire spiral of a small notebook in a plastic baggie. The area was littered with broken toys, dolls, die-cast metal cars, plastic superhero action figures, keychains, and coins. The chemical signatures the robot had detected turned out to be trace residues from the ammunition and explosives stored in the can when it had been property of the U.S. Army.

  Diethelm crouched, sat on his heels, and leafed through the tattered remains of the notebook. There were dozens of hand-scrawled notes written in there, the first dating back almost two years. A few of the people who had written in the book included miniature Polaroid photos of themselves posing with the ammo can. A folded sheet of paper fell out of the back of the notebook. He picked it up and opened it:

  GEOCACHE GAME PIECE

  DO NOT DISTURB

  You found the cache!

  This is a game piece in a Global Positioning System (GPS) treasure hunting game called Geocaching. Players use GPS navigation receivers to stash and find little containers like this one all over the globe.

  Go ahead, exchange toys and sign the logbook if you like. Be sure to hide the container back just the way you found it. Come visit the website to learn more or to post an online comment about your discovery:

  www.cache-finders.com

  Toys. It was just a game. Four thousand dollars worth of department funds wasted on blowing up an ammo can full of toys.

  Who the fuck hides an Ammo can full of toys in the woods?

  Chapter 2

  THE LAST GOLDEN RAYS of winter sun slipped their grasp from the tops of the pines, and darkness threatened Mount Tamalpais. The wind through the pine needles was a stormy surf overhead, ebbing and flowing, ripping and breaking, deafening, felt more than heard. The wind brought the cold and with the cold came the mist off San Francisco bay. It formed a cold sweat on the faces of hikers hurrying down off the mountain trails. The mist shrouded the windshields and roofs of their SUVs and pickups in the parking lot below. It veiled the treetops in fog and gave steel fingers to the wind. The wind probed these fingers into their light winter clothing and the hikers felt the coldness of that touch, and it wasn't the coldness of winter they felt. It was a deeper coldness, a coldness that reached into their hearts and made them wish to be anywhere else. Anywhere but here.

  Had this been the weekend, there might have been a dozen campers in the overflow camping lot. But this was a weeknight, and people had to go to school and to work tomorrow. They couldn't be up here enjoying the wilderness when the important matters of life went unattended. So they hurried down off the mountain, away from that deathly cold and back to life and warmth and home.

  The steel fingers clawed at the thin jacket of a dark-haired man huddled on the concrete floor of the women’s restroom out in front of the Pan Toll Ranger Station. He wasn’t a camper. He wasn’t a hiker, either, and he did not afford himself the luxury of getting in a vehicle and leaving the mountain. The plan was forming, beginning. He could feel it. Nothing could get in the way of the plan.

  The plan didn't permit him a vehicle. A vehicle could be traced. He'd instead taken Golden Gate Transit route sixty-three, which had dropped him off at the ranger station. The bus fare was only a few dollars. The plan dictated he carry plenty of cash, thousands of dollars in fact, but no way was he paying the ten dollar camping fee.

  When the last ranger locked up and left, the man had hiked down the mountainside and slept in the women's restroom. The plan was not specific on where to sleep, but some things were obvious, compelling. It was cold in that room, but the thick concrete block walls and heav
y steel door blocked most of the wind. He wadded paper towels under the door and he could sleep. Sleep, that is, when the plan would let him. The plan was everything; it was foolproof. Genius. It animated him. It was his new reason for living.

  He ground his teeth in his sleep, and they screamed in protest with each icy breath he dragged in over their worn enamels. He dreamed, and in his dream he was still awake and worrying over the plan. There was no rest until it was done.

  The next morning, he woke before sunrise. Hard concrete floor, cold reaching in despite his attempts to block the wind. But he couldn't stay here until light. The park would be open at seven, and a ranger would likely be here before then, getting the station ready for another day. He gathered up and trashed the paper towels, and then he cut the light and cracked the door. He peered out of the women's room. RV parking, main parking lot, trails lit by the dim orange street light above the ranger station. No one stirring. He slipped out and then slowly closed the door. He hiked a few hundred feet up into the forest behind the ranger station.

  He leaned up against a small moss-covered cinder block outbuilding on top of the hill, off a spur from the main hiking path. The building was no bigger than an outhouse. It was connected via several PVC pipes to a black cylindrical holding tank, as tall as a man. Some kind of water collection and purification system, most likely. The park was too remote and located at too high an altitude for city water. They must have their own supply. The building blocked the wind, and the tree cover would make him difficult to spot from the station. He leaned up against the cold, green wall. The sun wasn't up yet and it was the kind of damp cold that soaks into your bones and chills you from inside.

  It would be great if he could get in, at least until daybreak, but the door was locked.

  He found a high window on the side, the kind that hinges at the top and swings out at the bottom. It faced the ranger station. It was open just a crack. He pushed on the pane, but it closed further. He looked around for a stick or something he could use to pry the window back open. Next to an old campsite he found a discarded tent stake. He pried open the window with the stake, removed the screen, pulled himself up, and climbed inside. There were a few lighted gauges and after a few minutes he could make out the outlines of more pipes, running into some type of junction box, which was itself connected to the top of a short metal gas cylinder, about as big as his forearm. The cylinder was strapped to a rack bolted to the wall. There was another unconnected cylinder on the rack. A spare.

  There wasn't much room in the cramped building, and what room there was had plenty of cobwebs to keep it busy. The room smelled faintly of chemicals: bleach, maybe something else, ammonia? The junction box hummed, and every once in awhile he heard a clicking noise and the sound of gas hissing through metal tubing, and the rushing of water. This obviously wasn't a building they entered on a daily basis. He'd be safe here for a few hours at least, maybe the rest of the day.

  He unstrapped the spare tank and set it on the floor. He wasn't comfortable with this part of the plan. After all, he had enough money to buy a gun. But he'd worked out the plan in advance, each risk mathematically tallied, categorized and computed, and he had to trust it. Couldn't second-guess the plan in the field. That would be suicide. Bring nothing; leave no trace. He worked the plan, and it worked him.

  After sunup, he kept watch over the ranger station from his vantage point inside the water building. Rangers came. Rangers went. He kept notes on their routines, he drew diagrams, he figured distances, he calculated probabilities. He engineered everything according to the plan.

  Would the bastard even be here today? Was the preliminary research correct? Was there anything out of the ordinary? Had he considered all the risks, did the plan have a mitigation strategy for those risks? Think! He pulled out a carefully folded sheet of paper, unfolded it, smoothed it out on his thigh, and then checked each line again.

  At noon he spotted the sonofabitch. Changing of the guard. No one could mistake the stupid grin on that asshole's face as he hopped out of his yellow Jeep Cherokee. Forehead too big, eyes spaced too wide, and the chin off center. His hairstyle hadn't changed since the eighties. Maybe it was a little shorter now. Looked like a fucking boy scout in his ranger uniform. Long way from the country club, aren't we Ricky? Long way from mommy's skirts. The big prick was going to pay.

  California State Park Ranger Richard "Ricky" Nelson took a lot of ribbing for his name to be sure, but he had survived by the threat implied in his size (he stood over six two and weighed in at two-thirty), and by simply laughing along with the ribbing. He'd smile and laugh, all the while twisting the knife in your back, or at least planning the twist for some future time when you'd least expect it. With that name, you had to either laugh it off or get pissed. There wasn't any way to just ignore it and he was too proud to change it.

  The killer had hell tracking him down on the internet with that famous name and frequent job switching.

  He hadn't seen Ricky in eighteen years and fifteen hundred miles or so, but there was no doubting that he was the right guy. From the killer's perch in the outbuilding he could see into the back window of the ranger station. Ricky would work there for the next six hours, checking out after dusk.

  Ricky owned a Rottweiler that kept him company in the Pan Toll ranger station, and followed him out into the park on his rounds. Ricky mostly stayed inside the station though. He did fewer rounds than the other rangers. Slacker. Most of his shift he sat glued to the computer terminal in the ranger station. He'd deal with any visitors quickly, then get back to that screen as fast as he could.

  Ricky's dog was seventy pounds of muscle and teeth but the killer could tell it was a shitty watchdog. It wasn't even trained for basic obedience. An attacker would be more likely to get off with a good licking and crotch sniffing instead of being ripped to pieces. Still, even a shitty watchdog could be protective if its master were threatened.

  That dog had to go.

  Near the end of Ricky's shift, after most of the hikers had gone home, he let his dog outside. After sniffing around and peeing on some trees, it laid its head down on its front paws on the sidewalk behind the ranger station, bored. It sniffed at a passing stinkbug, thought about eating it, decided against that, then put its head back on its paws.

  Ricky walked back behind the counter to the station's computer terminal, where he was busy in an internet chat room, posing as a sixteen year-old boy, desperately trying to arrange a meeting with an undercover vice cop posing as a fifteen year old girl from Alameda.

  Ricky liked them young. When he couldn't actually get underage, he'd settle for the appearance of underage. But tonight he was going for the real thing, or so he thought.

  The killer slipped halfway down the hill toward the station. The dog trotted up to meet him. The dog sniffed, then licked the man’s outstretched palm. The man knelt down to pet the dog, setting the spare tank on the ground behind him. "Good doggie, there that's a nice pup," he whispered. He offered a small strip of beef jerky from his jacket pocket, which the dog snatched and chewed. With the other hand, the man slipped the foot-long tent stake inside the dog's webbed nylon collar, just behind the animal’s head. The man straddled the dog, grabbed the tent stake with both hands, and twisted hard, turning the collar into a nylon tourniquet. The dog's eyes bugged, its last breath caught in a crushed windpipe. It didn't make a sound. The man pulled up and back for leverage, lifting the dog's front paws off the ground. Within minutes, the dog was dead. The man dropped the carcass and then jammed the tent stake into the ground.

  The killer scuttled down the hill to the back window and peered in. Ricky was busy typing on the computer, his back to the window, silhouetted in the glow from the screen, now the only light in the station. He was absorbed. The killer snuck around to the front of the building. Standing in front of the metal door, he looked around. The mercury-vapor lights above the ranger station and parking lot had just switched on. There wasn't a single car in the lot. He heard nothing e
xcept the keening wind in the trees overhead.

  Kneeling in front of the door, he pulled a few coins out of his pants pocket. Pressing his shoulder up against the door slowly, so as not to make a sound, he wedged first one penny, then another on top of that, then another. This was an old college dormitory prank. The force of a stack of pennies wedged in the tiny space between the door and the jamb prevented the striker from moving when you tried to turn the knob.

  Ricky was locked in.

  In the internet chat room, Ricky had convinced the girl to meet with him at an East Bay mall later that evening. A few more minutes were all he needed to close up the ranger station and hurry into town.

  He didn't have a few more minutes.

  The killer scuttled back behind the ranger station and slipped the neck of the tank into a metal vent beneath the window. He sucked in a deep breath, held it, then in six quick flicks of his wrist, twisted the valve on the tank fully open as quickly as possible. He darted off to hide behind Ricky's Jeep, parked next to the station.