Old Chaos (9781564747136) (10 page)

Rob tried to visualize as he felt along the arm. Right arm, crooked around. He touched the baby’s head and another head, wet with blood. The man’s body was pinned beneath the beam. Somehow he’d managed to twist sideways so that his shoulder took the blow, leaving the baby’s head free in the small space between shoulder and chin. The child was stuck beneath his body and the heavy beam. Her cries and the fact that she was wriggling vigorously suggested she was unharmed.

The beam gave a heavy creak. Without thinking, Rob thrust himself under it and took the weight on his bent back. “Pull her out!” he gasped. “Ramos!”

Linda dropped the flashlight, scrambled to the protruding arm, and reached under. “I can’t!”

Gritting his teeth, Rob strained upward. “Pull!”

Linda pulled. After what seemed minutes, the baby popped out, yelling. Linda scuttled away. It seemed safer not to move, though the strain on his back was hideous.

“What the hell?” Jake, arriving with the jack, dropped it with a clatter, squirmed to Rob’s side, and the two of them shoved the beam sideways. With a crash, it toppled against the boulder that had smashed the wall, exposing the upper part of the man’s body. Debris rained down, quieted. Jake’s light focused on the body. Mack. He was wearing pajamas, and both of his legs were pinned. He didn’t move.

W
HERE WAS PEGGY? Where the hell was Beth? Rob watched the ambulance bearing Mack and his granddaughter leave for the hospital. The siren gave a single yelp.

He was standing by the cars waiting for the search and rescue team with its dogs. The Scene of Crime van had arrived, and he’d ordered the crew to string light cables over to the Gautier place. He’d tried to call Drinkwater, to find out about the other houses, but got voice mail. He left another message, then called Minetti, who was busy looking for a hydraulic engineer.

Rob took a swallow of Meg’s coffee and eased his sore shoulders. He’d eaten half a muffin someone offered and probably ought to finish it while he waited.

It hadn’t taken him and Jake long to free Mack’s legs with the jack, but Rob was afraid to move his old friend. The injuries looked too terrible. So they’d rigged a shelter with Jake’s slicker. Mack wasn’t bleeding a lot by then, and Jake claimed he’d found a pulse, but Rob wasn’t optimistic. When they arrived, the medics looked grave.

Rob tossed his muffin into the darkness and headed back to Mack’s house. Dogs or no dogs, he had to find Beth. He was not surprised that Linda, bereft of Sophy, tagged along.

“Somebody should stay with the radio,” he said.

“I told Thayer to do that.” Thayer Jones had driven the SOCO van.

“Where do you think the women are, Linda?”

“I don’t know. It was a big place. The bedrooms downstairs? The bathrooms?”

“The slide hit around five o’clock. Mack was in the upper hall with the baby. It doesn’t make sense.”

“The baby, I think she has…”

He glanced at her. It was just light enough to see her face. She touched her stomach.

“Stomach ache?”

“Colic!” she said, triumphant. She was proud of her command of English idioms. “When Mickey cried like that, the doctor called it colic.” Mickey was her son, Miguel.

Rob tried to remember if his daughter had suffered from colic. “I suppose it’s possible.” He turned his ankle on a rock and swore.

“So the mama’s asleep. She’s been up two nights in a row. The grandpapa is walking the floor with the baby and, um, the
abuela
is fixing coffee.”

“In the kitchen?” They hadn’t looked in the kitchen area at all. The Great Room had fallen on it. “You may be right.” He quickened his pace.

They edged around the ruin of the three-car garage. The roof had collapsed, and the door had sprung. The mashed cars inside reflected glints of light. The ground beyond was not covered with much slide debris, just roof tiles, but it sloped down sharply, treacherous underfoot.

He couldn’t remember what the basement level of the kitchen wing held, but it didn’t matter, because the floor above had slumped, blocking downstairs entry. There was a door on the southwest side, a safety exit, probably from the kitchen, and the metal stairway that led down from it looked intact. He tested it. It creaked but held.

“I’m going up. Shine your light for me.” It was getting close to dawn, but overcast and still raining, so it was dark. He made his way slowly, step by step. When he peered in the door, his flashlight shone on chaos.

Surely no one could live through that. Roof tiles, ripped dry-wall, cross beams, and ceiling fixtures had rained down on burst cabinets and fallen appliances. A big refrigerator lay on its front, cooling cables exposed. And that was just the kitchen. Beyond it, the dining area had taken the brunt when the enormous flagstone chimney fell.

“Beth!” he called. His voice was swallowed by the darkness. He shouted her name again, and this time he thought he heard something. He cocked his head, listening.

“Help…” A reedy cry, barely audible.

Rob rattled the door. It was stuck. He looked down at Linda’s anxious upturned face. “Get Jake and Todd, with a pry bar and the jack. Call for an ambulance.”

“One is already coming.” She trotted off.

Rob turned back to the door. “Beth, it’s Rob. Can you hear me?”

A moan.

“Hold on, sweetheart. We’ve found Mack and the baby. They’re on the way to the hospital. Are you all right?”

“I hurt…head…legs.” She whimpered.

“Where are you?”

“Under…butcher block.”

Rob had never gone into the kitchen. He tried to visualize what she was talking about and failed. He decided to distract her. “Do you know where Peggy is?”

“Sleeping.” She hiccuped on a sob. “She was… downstairs, sleeping. Skip’s not here. Oh God, hurts.”

He talked soothing nonsense to her. It was hard to keep it up. After what seemed ages but was probably less than five minutes, Linda returned with Jake and Todd. They pried the door open, and Rob entered cautiously. He made the others wait outside. Everything was wet because most of the roof was gone, broken tiles on every surface.

Boots crunching the fallen shards, he kept to the edge of the room, inching down toward the far wall. Tiles fell as he walked. When he reached the wall, he found Beth almost at once, knelt, and took her hand. She whimpered but clutched at his fingers with surprising strength.

A roof tile had struck her head a glancing blow. A lump was forming, and there was a lot of blood. He touched the area gingerly, and Beth moaned. He felt no fracture but couldn’t be sure.

She was stuck beneath a cart with a butcher-block surface, which she must have dived under when she heard the slide. A falling roof beam had jammed it against the electric stove. Really a small table on wheels, the sturdy cart had protected her head and upper body from the beam, but her left arm was now pinned between the stove and one cart leg. A big square piece of what looked like granite had fallen onto Beth’s legs. The counter? He heaved the slab off and examined her. Both legs were badly bruised. He thought one was broken, and there might be injuries he couldn’t see. That she was alive at all was a miracle.

He smoothed her pink plush robe over the bruised legs. Her feet were bare. “Beth, we have an emergency here.” No kidding. “Can you tell me who lives in these houses, who’s likely to be at home?”

She gave a distracted moan.

“The Gautier house?”

“Um, four.” She drew a ragged breath. “Husband, wife, teen-aged boy.” A gasp of pain. Her hand gripped his. “Mother-in-law. That’s the wife’s mother.”

“Good. And the others?”

“Hurts!”

“I know, Beth. The medics are coming.” He felt like a torturer. “Am I right in thinking there are two empty houses to the west?”

“Yes. And house sitter.”

“What?”

“House on the creek. Friend is house sitting. They’re in Palm Desert.”

“Okay. What about the other house?”

“Family of three.” She began sobbing with pain, so he let it go. A tile fell too near them for comfort.

Linda was summoning the newly arrived EMTs and a stretcher, but there was still the problem of freeing Beth without bringing the rest of the roof down. At that point, as in
noir
comedy, one of the search and rescue vans drove in. Rob hated to leave Beth, even for a few minutes, but he needed to talk to somebody who knew what he was doing. Beth said she understood. As he left, he heard her crying. Against his better judgment, he sent Linda into the wreckage to hold her hand.

The rescue leader turned out to be a prize. He not only had an extra supply of hard hats, he’d also brought the site plan Fred Drinkwater had filed with the county. He’d got it from Earl. Drink-water was still incommunicado.

Rob explained what he knew to the search leader, whose name was Bat Quinn—as in Bat Masterson, he said. Bat was a high school teacher and a hiker. He knew the area. He also had three burly construction workers on his team. They agreed to take a look at the kitchen and see what could be done, while Bat, his dogs, and the rest of the team searched for survivors. Rob suggested starting with Peggy McCormick, because he knew roughly where she was. After that, the Gautier house. Then the house sitter and the family of three. He’d heard nothing from that direction. He hoped they’d all gone off to Mexico for the winter. It was unlikely.

Bat set off toward the bedroom wing, eyes sparkling. One of the dogs, a beagle, was already snuffling the ground. Her trainer, a young woman in heavy hiking boots, let the dog pull her along. Rob felt his tension ease a little. He took a hard hat for Linda and put one on himself.

Bat’s construction workers rigged supports so the EMTs could go in to Beth with their gear. Shortly after sunrise, Rob heard shouts from the bedroom wing that suggested the dog had found Peggy. He stayed with Beth—partly from affection, partly cowardice. He was afraid to know what had happened to Peggy.

Whatever they’d given Beth had eased her pain and made her drowsy, but she was thinking enough to start to fuss. By the time the medics manhandled her stretcher down the metal staircase, she was in a fine state.

“I’ll see that somebody calls your kids and Skip,” he promised. She’d said Skip had gone back to Portland.

“And Mack. What about Mack? You said he was on the way to the hospital.”

Rob’s throat tightened.

“Is he hurt? How is he? We quarreled.” She was crying again. Rob hadn’t thought of Beth as a crier.

He couldn’t speak.

The paramedics picked up the stretcher—a gurney would have been useless on the uneven ground. Beth twisted her head with its turban-like bandage and glared up at him. “Tell me the truth!”

He cleared his throat, stumbled on a broken tile, and regained his balance. “He’s hurt, Beth. I don’t know how bad it is. He shielded the baby.”

She cried harder. “I wish we hadn’t quarreled.”

Rob shoved aside his own guilt. When he had started the investigation, he’d been thinking in terms of correct police procedure. Common sense had taken a back seat. Meg was right. These people should have been warned, but there was plenty of blame to go around. When he thought of Drinkwater and the tame geologist, his hands itched.

Beth drowsed now, murmuring Peggy’s name and Mack’s, like a litany.

As they straggled up to the road, the young woman with the beagle bounded up to Rob. “Bat says to tell you Wienie found Ms. McCormick.”

“I heard shouting.” Wienie must be the dog.

“She’s trapped in bed with a beam across her chest, not conscious, but she’s still alive. Bat got to her!” Her face shone with hero worship. “Her pulse is strong.”

“Thank you, uh—”

“Mindy.”

“Right. That’s Peggy’s mother in the ambulance. I’ll tell her the good news.” If Peggy was unconscious and trapped, it was mixed news at best.

Mindy went happily off with the dog. Rob sent the three construction workers to see what they could do about freeing Peggy, then reassured Beth and sent her off, too. He called about ambulances. One was on the way. It sounded as if Earl was getting things organized at long last. Rob checked his watch. He told himself to be fair. It was seven-fifteen and barely light.

It was just possible to see the extent of the slide. The Gautier house and Mack’s had taken the worst of the damage, but debris had rolled down around the two houses that lay to the east and on into the creek bed, which was dammed to about the height of a one-story house. The structures to the west looked untouched. Rob thought they were the ones no one had bought. Headlights bounced down the horse pasture on the south bank of the creek. He hoped the driver was an engineer, not just a sightseer.

Rob caught Linda as she headed off with Jake and Todd toward the Gautier house. “Get your camera.”

Her mouth formed an O of surprise.

“Time to document property damage.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Crime scene.”

“Believe it.” Among the defendants would be the County Board of Commissioners. He thought of Fred Drinkwater. If there were deaths, it might well be a murder case—at the very least wrongful death. On impulse, he called Judge Rosen and asked for search warrants for Drinkwater’s office and house. He wanted to document the approval process every step of the way. The judge was sleepy, shocked, and ultimately responsive.