The chain of command changed at this point, slipping from Ray Woodman as guide and temporarily falling to Gary Smith-the senior of Auerbach’s two detectives-as the man he’d put in charge of the entire investigation.
Smith, whom I’d only met that morning, didn’t share his boss’s ebullient nature nor his ready acceptance of my VBI-as-support-role speech. Though younger in years, Smith was more traditional in outlook and openly viewed us as a threat to his authority.
He was what I feared would be more the rule than the exception in the future. I approached him clumsily in a moment of sudden visibility, when the proximity of the rock wall overhead revealed itself so abruptly, I felt it was about to fall on us.
“How would you like us deployed?” I yelled at him.
His face turned toward me, his dark goggles blocking his eyes and his mask giving him the appearance of an oversized action figure. He waved a hand around. “Be my guest.”
“That’s exactly what we are. What would you like us to do?”
He didn’t move for several seconds and then said, “The chief tells me you think this guy might’ve been dropped from a plane.”
“Could’ve been, but I didn’t realize how close the cliff was.”
He looked over his shoulder dubiously. “Somebody climbed all the way up there to chuck the body over? Why?”
I shrugged. “Why drop him from a plane after keeping him in a freezer for half a century? We’re not even in the suburbs of normal here. He might’ve also bounced off the rocks before ending up here. Those body parts broke off somehow.”
Another pause. “All right,” he finally said. “I’ll put the Mountain Rescue people on the cliff. You guys can form a circle around the hole and work outward, using the rods we brought as probes. And take the metal detector in Mike’s pack, too. You all have radios?”
“I think so.”
He turned away from me and lumbered off to coordinate with his team, solidifying the them-and-us division in physical terms. But the plan was reasonable enough, given the environment, and we outsiders were still playing a useful role. For the moment, that would have to count as a victory.
It didn’t feel like one, though, after three hours of struggling in the wind-whipped snow, sometimes working a methodical search pattern, other times simply standing stock still in the fog, all visual and tactile references so removed that to venture in any direction was to invite becoming lost or falling prey to the unpredictable terrain. Gentle saddle or not, the supposed “ground” we were standing on was only a thick mantle of compacted snow covering boulders, pitfalls, small cliffs, and a stunted forest of dwarfed evergreens, any or all of which could suck us in, especially if encountered sight unseen.
Eventually, I discovered I wasn’t the only one growing concerned. During one of the few moments when visibility allowed a better view, I saw Ray Woodman about halfway up the Chin, gesturing at his watch to Gary Smith, and then pointing toward the sky. I wasn’t sure if it was the weather or the daylight that had caught his eye, since I thought both were deteriorating, but it was obvious the search team was going to metamorphose back into a climbing party soon.
I was just about to confirm that suspicion by radio, when the entire subject was put on hold.
“Gary? It’s Mike. I think I got something.”
Another blanket of mist was quickly forming, but just before I lost sight of the rocks, I saw one of Smith’s men waving his arms from near the top. After that, I had to rely on my ears alone to learn what was happening.
“What is it, Mike?” Gary Smith asked.
“It’s sort of wedged in here, but it looks like a hand.”
“Leave it where it is. I’m coming up. Did you copy, Gunther?”
“Loud and clear.” I could hear from his labored breathing that Smith was working hard to join his colleague as he spoke. “If it really is jammed in there, I don’t want to mess it up by moving too fast. You want to get up here? It’s pretty easy. I think you could make it.”
I ignored the pointed condescension. “On my way.”
Ray Woodman spoke up just as I felt the unrelenting wind both pick up and become noticeably colder. “I’m not sure I’d recommend that. The weather’s changing. Might be best to just mark the spot and come back.”
Smith tried a sidestep. “How ’bout a compromise? You take the rest of them down. The three of us’ll follow either as soon as we get the hand loose, or can’t and mark where it is instead. I hate to walk away now.”
I didn’t back up Woodman as my instincts told me I should. Too concerned with appearing pushy, and privately fearful that Smith would take such caution as weakness, I allowed his intemperance to overwhelm my good judgment.
Surprisingly-or because he felt outnumbered-Woodman apparently thought Gary Smith was enough of a climber to make this choice, although his tone of voice betrayed some doubt. “All right, but I’m lowering the boom on everyone else. And don’t take too long-you know how fast things can sour up here.”
I made my way over to the Chin’s base, passing Sammie on the way, who murmured, “Show him what you got, boss,” and found that from the foot of the cliff, the climb didn’t look as daunting. During the summer, I remembered, the Long Trail came right down this same face, regularly traveled by people carrying thirty-pound packs. Snow and ice didn’t make it any easier, but I was pleasantly surprised at how fast I joined Smith and Mike on their elevated perch.
Once there, I was also rewarded by Smith’s more subtly respectful demeanor.
“Take a look,” he said and placed his back against the rock so I could squeeze by to where his colleague Mike was crouching by a crack in the wall.
“It’s right in there,” he said. “You can see the ring on his finger. That’s what caught my eye.”
I peered into the gloom of the crack and saw a faint glimmer of gold. Taking Mike’s flashlight, I then clearly saw the stump of a human hand, looking as if it had been broken off a discolored marble statue. I straightened and looked around.
Smith pointed overhead into the mist. “I guess the body bounced here hard enough that the hand stuck like an arrow before breaking off. You may be right about the airplane. I don’t see that happening if someone just chucked him over the edge. It’s too close.”
“How do we get it out?” Mike asked, still crouching over his find.
I held up my ice ax. “Use these as crowbars?”
There was only room for the two of us. Mike put his ax in on one side of the small crack, and I applied mine to the other. It took a while, but eventually we loosened it enough that I could reach in and extract the hand.
I gave it to Smith, who examined it closely. “We can probably get prints from it, and the ring might tell us something.”
A sudden whiteout drew our attention. We looked up at a world without any markers whatsoever. Even our precarious perch had disappeared from view, making me feel I was standing on a cloud.
“Damn,” Mike muttered.
“It’ll pass,” Gary reassured us. “It’s done it a couple of times already today.”
“Not this bad, it hasn’t,” Mike said.
He was right.
“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Gary said. “If it doesn’t blow over, we’ll just have to climb down by feel.”
“We can barely see our feet.”
Gary Smith was losing patience, perhaps goaded by his lingering against Woodman’s advice. “Mike, I’ve been in this crap before. It’s more psychological than anything. You take it slow, it works out fine.”
No one spoke for a couple of minutes, until, as if yielding to an inner, heated argument, Smith wrenched his radio from his pocket and addressed it. “Smith to Woodman. Come in, Ray.”
Woodman’s voice, clear and calm, sounded otherworldly from out of the clouds. “What’s up, Gary? You folks okay?”
“Yeah, just socked in by the fog. What’re conditions where you are?”