Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

I rolled to my hands and knees, then pushed myself to my feet. Francis grabbed me around my left knee and I damn near lost my balance.

“Hijo…” his mother said, holding out a hand.

“He’s all right,” I said, and clamped my left hand on his head, using him like a small squirming cane.

“They’ve combed every square foot of the mesa face, Camille,” Estelle said. “Dozens of times.”

“What was the child wearing?”

“His mother says he was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a bright blue down jacket. And sneakers.”

Camille frowned, gazing off through the trees. “I admit, it’s hard to see how they could miss a bright blue coat.”

“Let’s walk out to the edge,” Estelle said, and I glanced down with more than a little apprehension at Francis.

“You stay close,” I said, and he grabbed my hand.

Matching our pace to the boy’s, we wound our way through the trees. That pace was just dandy with me. The air changed as we approached the rim, and I could hear the sweep of wind and, in the distance, the rhythmic thumping of a helicopter.

The view was extraordinary. The overcast was ragged and multilayered, with small rainsqualls breaking loose from the higher clouds and pummeling the prairie to the south. I could see the steep saddle of the San Cristobal Mountains, and the pass where State Highway 56 snaked through the mountains and then shot down to the tiny border village of Regal.

“Whoa,” I said, and pulled Francis to a halt. Directly in front of us was a jumble of sandstone rimrocks, each smooth as an elephant’s back, rounded and forming the cap of the mesa. Over the centuries, great chunks had broken loose and tumbled down, forming a jagged slope where only a few lucky junipers managed to find something to dig their roots into.

I scooped up the youngster, grunting at the unexpected weight. He hooked an arm around my neck, and we stood quietly, looking out at the valley below.

“Would you like to climb down those rocks?” I asked as I turned and looked off to the west.

“You go, too,” Francis said, and I chuckled.

“Not a chance, kid,” I said.

Estelle and Camille stood altogether too close to the edge, with that sure balance enjoyed by the young. Estelle knelt down and pointed. “The first thing they did was grid this whole area.” She held her hands to form a box. “That way, they were certain that they hand-searched every square meter. There were more than two hundred searchers on this rimrock, all day yesterday, and most of the night.”

Camille climbed down into a small crevice and stood with her hands on the broad flank of two enormous boulders.

“Slow work, I can imagine,” she said. She turned and looked at me and Francis. “I have to agree with Estelle, Dad. I don’t see how a three-year-old could even climb down here. And if he fell, he’d either holler out or they’d find him when they combed the place.” She scrambled back up. “We used to party up here when I was in high school.”

“Here and the lake,” Estelle said. “The two favored spots.”

In the distance, I could hear one of the choppers, and it sounded like he was working well in from the treacherous rim.

“Not favored by three-year-olds,” I said, and I was about to add something else when we heard a loud dull thud from the northwest. It was several seconds before I realized that I was no longer hearing the rhythmic thudding of the helicopter’s blades.

“Oh no,” Estelle said, and she turned away from the edge and dashed back through the woods toward the Blazer.

Camille stricken face told me she’d been listening, too. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Let me take Francis,” she said, and neither the boy nor I argued.

By the time we reached the truck, Estelle had the engine going and was talking on the radio.

“Get back to me when you know for sure,” she said. She racked the mike.

“What is it?” I asked.

“They think one of the Hueys had a catastrophic mechanical failure of some kind,” she said. “Nobody hurt, but it was a hard landing. They took out a couple of trees, so the chopper is junk.”

She tapped on the steering wheel, forehead deeply furrowed. Camille struggled with the seat straps for Francis, but Estelle didn’t seem to notice.

“So what else?” I said. She was still staring off through the windshield as if she was mentally computing something that didn’t add up. “This is me, remember?” I said, and grinned.

She turned to look at me, smiling lamely as she did so. “Sorry, sir. That was Bob Torrez I was talking to on the radio. They found a blue jacket. That’s where the chopper was circling when it went down.”

“Child’s jacket?”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced toward the backseat, saw that her son was secure, and pulled the truck into gear.

As the crow flies, the helicopter crash site was less than a half mile from where we had been standing on the rim of Cat Mesa. To reach it by truck, we had to snake our way northwest on the rough two-track as it followed the rim, then jog along a section fence line.

We were suddenly in the middle of a convention. If there had been two hundred searchers on the mesa, at least that many and a few dozen more had materialized, and they were still flooding out of the trees. Where they all came from was anyone’s guess, and how they got there so fast would have been a good case study for a military tactician.

The flight crew of the chopper didn’t have long to relish their privacy. As far as the helicopter was concerned, there wasn’t much to see. The Huey was olive drab junk. It looked as if the pilot had done a wonderful job of backing it down into the trees, where first the tail rotor and then the wide black main rotor had each taken a turn trying to chew pinon and juniper.

There had been no fire, but a Forest Service truck was standing by, its crew and the four Guardsmen from the chopper nervously circling the cooling, ticking machine, watching for smoke.

After the first few minutes, though, the wrecked helicopter was no longer the main attraction. No one was dead or even bleeding; nothing was going to blow up. The Huey was just another piece of debris that would be a problem to haul down off the mesa. Maybe the National Guard would strip out the usable parts and donate the rest of the bent hulk to local hunters as a base camp. It was at least as attractive as the old sofa and wash rack.

Estelle pulled the Blazer to a stop and I turned to Camille. “Will you stay here with Francis?”

“Certainly,” she said, and it sounded like she really wanted to say something else, but I didn’t give her the chance. I couldn’t keep up with Estelle, and I didn’t even try. I plodded after her as she threaded her way through the scrub, making her way toward a convocation that had surrounded a grove of small oak saplings.

I could see Sgt. Robert Torrez, almost a full head taller than anyone else. He’d already made sure that a yellow tape had been strung, and I was sure that irritated the sea of eager faces. A hand plucked at my elbow, and I damn near lost my balance as I turned to see who it was.

“Undersheriff Gastner? You’re back?” I grinned in spite of myself. Marjorie Davis looked as if she had dressed for an expedition to the north woods, rather than just a jaunt into the wilds of her own county. Under normal circumstances, I was a fan of the Posadas Register , the biweekly official newspaper of Posadas County. Marjorie had worked for the school district for a dozen years before deciding to join the wild world of newspaper reporting.

I glanced at the fancy camera that hung around her neck.

“Marjorie, how the hell are you?”

“Fine. What have we got up here? Do you know?”