Lost Girls

by George D. Shuman

Genres: Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Sherry Moore would do anything for her confidant and best friend, retired Admiral Garland Brigham. So when he suddenly asks her to assist a team of U.S. Navy SEALs in a daring high-altitude rescue on Mount McKinley, she doesn't hesitate and soon finds herself flying across the country to hang vertically off an Alaskan cliff, tethered to Captain Brian Metcalf. Sherry, renowned for her ability to see the last eighteen seconds of a deceased person's memory, takes the hand of a dead climber, hoping to ascertain the whereabouts of his missing climbing team. But what she sees leaves her with visions that will haunt her long past Alaska.

While rumors of slave girls being trafficked around the Caribbean have circulated for years, little credible evidence has been uncovered about these "lost girls." When detective inspector Rolly King George recovers the body of a young blond woman, naked except for a shocking tattoo branded onto her cheek, he knows she may hold the key to toppling this criminal underworld. Through delicate back-channel negotiations, Sherry arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, to see the deceased and finds that things are more complicated than she thought: the remains are of Jill Bishop, an American teenager last seen in a Santo Domingo marketplace.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Release date: September 16, 2008

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 256

Sample

Lost Girls

1DENALI, ALASKA

Raw winds hailed lacerating ice, stinging earlobes and ruddy cheeks beneath the climbers’ black snow goggles. The storm had an under-growl that suggested it was both alive and malevolent.

It came out of nowhere as polar storms do, the clockwise rotation of Pacific highs meeting counterclockwise Siberian lows, fusing to form a cyclone in ancient cauldrons of granite and glacier. Mountains the size of Denali virtually produce their own weather.

Allison Metcalf descended the headwall below the summit clipped to a fixed line, testing the ice with crampons on the toes of her boots. The well-trod western approach was quickly vanishing under their feet, transmuting into an alien environment of wind-sculpted ice. She took another step and then another, trying to quell the rise of panic. Only three hours ago they had stood on top of the Western Hemisphere. Now they were in a race for their lives to get beneath it.

The spatial world was no more. There were no more ups and downs, no rights or lefts. One could reach out an arm and not see the glove beyond the wrist. If any of the climbers were to unclip from the fixed line, even for a moment, it was doubtful they would find it again; more likely they would wander off the side of the mountain or fall into one of the hundreds of bottomless crevices of prehistoric ice.

“You okay?” Sergio’s voice caught faintly on the wind. He was below her, but still close, only a dozen feet away. Was he straggling to look out for her?

“Okay,” she yelled, but the words evaporated with a blast of chilled air. She tugged gently on the line tethered between them and a moment later she felt his acknowledgment. It felt good, this tangible connection to another human being.

If they could at least descend to high camp at 17,000 feet, they might survive the night in the uppermost cradle of the summit. The poor buggers above Archdeacon’s Tower had yet to negotiate an exposed knife-edged ridge. They would not be so lucky, would not last an hour when the sun dropped below the horizon and windchills plummeted below minus sixty degrees. Allison could not imagine a night of terror in subzero hurricane winds, tethered to four other people in the open, any of whom might panic and make an error fatal for all of them.

Allison had met only two of the other climbers from the teams still up at the summit, both of them women from British Columbia. They’d shared stories of climbs in the Canadian Rockies and a stove for soup this morning as the sun began to rise. One of them was also named Allison. They’d laughed about the chances of that, but now she found that other woman’s face etched upon her mind, could not dispel it.

Suddenly Allison’s feet went out from under her and she began to backslide, frantically grabbing for the ice ax on her belt. Just before she went head over heels, she wielded the ax two-handed, driving its pick into the side of the mountain to break her fall. She hung there a moment on her side, both arms extended, hanging on to the handle, but then the ax let loose and she began to spiral away, chin raking the ice-sheathed granite until her boots struck something solid.

She tried to blink away the snow that covered her eyes, to see through the hail of white wind, and there was Sergio’s purple snowsuit. He wrapped his arms around her waist and put his face to hers and it was cold.

“You okay?”

She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. Her mouth was filling with warm blood, her eyes welling with tears.

He helped her to stand, neither able to see the other’s expression through the dark lenses of their goggles. She put a gloved hand over his heart and held it there and he nodded. Then he gave her his ice ax, turned and pointed down and grabbed the line, descending into the whiteout. Allison nodded as he disappeared. There was no time to reflect.

But Allison did reflect. She had spent last night in Sergio’s sleeping bag. It was the first and only time since they had met—eight days before in the village of Talkeetna, where solo climbers came to buddy up with summiting teams—that he had even spoken more than a dozen words to her. Allison thought him arrogant at first, one of those handsome playboy types with infinite time and money on his hands. She had even goaded him about it on the mountain, trying to provoke a reaction until in an unguarded moment in their tent she saw an unmistakable look of despair on his face. It was then she realized there was more to Sergio than met the eye. He hadn’t come to Denali to conquer the mountain. He had come here to run away. But from what—a lost love, a failed marriage, some deep incomprehensible disappointment in his life?

They never got to talk about it and perhaps, she thought, they never would.

She remembered his lips pressed to the side of her neck in the cocoon of that sleeping bag last night. He had actually cried after they made love. He did not want to leave the mountain, he’d told her. His warm tears had been wet on her neck; he’d told her he did not want to return to who he was.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK
FIVE DAYS LATER

Harsh sunlight glinted off the big blades of the HH-60 Pave Hawk, creating strobe-like effects inside the helicopter’s cargo bay. Captain Metcalf, sitting opposite Sherry Moore, shielded his eyes from the rapid-fire bars of white light deflecting off her snow goggles.

“Glaciers.” He leaned toward the edge of her helmet. “We’re almost there.”

Sherry nodded, her stomach queasy as the craft began to tilt on its side, darting toward the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Sherry was no stranger to helicopters. She’d spent much of her life being whisked from one place to another, knew the crew seats of the big corporate Bells and Hueys and Sikorskys, even the fleet of luxury VH-3Ds designated Marine One when the president of the United States was on board. But the Pave Hawk was like nothing she had experienced before; it was the difference between riding a flea and a bumblebee.

“Is it clear? The summit?” she asked.

“Blue skies. Hard to take your eyes away,” Metcalf said absently. She felt him looking at her just then, knowing he was regretting the offhanded reference to sight.

Her own images of the mountain were formed from books she’d listened to on tape or disk, of blinding white snow and black granite walls, of ice-blue glaciers and bottomless crevices.

“I can imagine,” she said softly.

The Alaskans called the mountain by its Indian name, Denali, meaning “the great one,” though U.S. geological maps still call it Mount McKinley. It towered four miles above five glaciers, with more vertical face than Mount Everest, high enough to be seen from Anchorage, a hundred and thirty miles away, on a good day.

There were no climbers on the summit of Denali today. No colorful string of snowsuits negotiating the Denali pass or the notorious ridge or the turn called Windy Corner.

All of the climbers known to have survived the storm had been found below 14,000 feet, near basin camp, where National Guard Chinooks were evacuating them as fast as they could assemble.

Above 14,000 feet, conditions were simply indescribable, or, as one Denali ranger told reporters, a wasteland of flash-frozen cornices. Of valleys pitted with hidden fissures wide enough to swallow rescue teams or helicopters.

The storm was the result of a low-pressure system that had inserted itself on the mountain last Sunday, generating what was known as a polar cyclone. The system laid upon Denali for five days, producing a dozen feet of new snow in gusts of wind exceeding 100 miles per hour. The storm virtually resculpted the upper third of the mountain.

Now it was Friday and twelve people were still missing above basin camp. One expedition of four had summited the morning of the storm and was making their way back to high camp when the storm hit. Their last FRS radio transmission before the communications system went down due to the storm was from the Denali pass, 800 feet above high camp. They had every chance of making it then, but five days later they could not be reached, and it was impossible to know where they had finally dug in to weather the storm. It was also unlikely their supplies had been sufficient to sustain them.

Other expeditions, one from Thailand and one from British Columbia, were only nearing the summit when the storm suddenly developed. Their last reports indicated they were going forward, only a few hundred feet to the top, before they would turn around.

The cyclone hadn’t been predicted, but that was the nature of Denali. The sheer mass of the mountain created its own weather. Any beautiful morning could end with an afternoon storm and a climbing disaster.

Meteorologists, as always, wasted no time getting their warning out, but those on the upper third of the mountain needed days, not hours to make their descent, and that was under optimal conditions. Anyone above basin camp last Friday was there to stay.

From the television on board the private jet taking Sherry to Alaska, Sherry learned there was little hope for climbers above 16,000 feet. Teams attempting the summit would have cached much of their equipment and food below, leaving them light for the final two-day ascent to the top of the mountain. Which meant that time was their greatest enemy. Even if they managed to reach high camp, there would be little food and fuel for heat, certainly not five days’ worth.

The park rangers set up a triage area in the permanent medical station on basin camp, doctors from Anchorage and Fairbanks dividing their attention between cases of frostbite and acute mountain sickness. There was no small number of broken bones too, and a tent was set aside for bodies retrieved from a rescue in the gully below the vertical headwall under Camp 6. Three had fallen to their deaths.

A fourth body, photographed by search planes, was dangling off that headwall by a line wrapped around his boot. He was hanging just below the 16,000-foot mark and his jacket, once bright purple, showed faint lavender under a sheath of heavy ice. Perhaps a carabiner or ascender broke, releasing him to the gale-force winds. Perhaps the winds themselves upended him and tangled the rope around his boot? Whatever the case, exposed to the elements as he was, he managed to make a signal mark with luminescent paint on the granite wall. The mark appeared to look like an arrow pointing upward with a circle on top. He was obviously trying to leave a message. To show rescuers there were survivors above the ledge. By altitude, he could only have been one of the team of four who had radioed they were trying to reach high camp the day the storm set in on the summit of Denali. Apparently they had descended to Camp 6 over the next two days, where they would have had to dig out a snow cave, but where above the ledge and under all that new snow should the rescuers look? Any original sign of a cave would have disappeared an hour after it was built, and finding it now, under new snow, was fairly impossible.

A spokesperson for the National Park Service announced they would not be committing teams to a random search above basin camp. It would pose too great a risk for the people and equipment it would take to get them there. More than a hundred people were on Denali when it hit, all but twelve having had time to descend to the ranger station at basin camp, or they were already below it. But even this group suffered countless casualties.

Landing zones above basin camp could no longer be presumed safe; it was late in the climbing season and glaciers were beginning to fracture, forming bottomless crevices, some as wide as a house. New snow above them presented the constant threat of avalanche and last, but hardly least, another storm was forming off the Bering Strait that would be upon them by midnight, obliterating the mountain in yet another whiteout. Rescue teams made it clear they would make no attempt to search the upper third of the mountain without clear evidence of life. The endeavor was not only risky but would divert badly needed personnel and helicopters already committed to evacuating known survivors. As for the body hanging from the ridge, his team was probably already dead. The marking he had made on the side of the mountain was not a sign of life, they reminded. It was only a sign, and how many days old?

It was all a little hard to digest, Sherry thought. She’d been following news of the disaster on Denali throughout the week. There was a sad recap of the story every evening as the storm prevented rescuers from getting to the mountain. But a mountain in Alaska was far removed in time and place from her living room in Philadelphia. She could not imagine a relationship to it.

Then, this morning, Garland Brigham, her neighbor and best friend, knocked on her door. It was six A.M. He had been awakened by a call from Washington state senator Metcalf. The senator’s only daughter, Allison, had been with the team of four believed to have survived the first day of the storm.

There had been a break in the weather. Rescuers were gearing up to reach the survivors. Metcalf wanted to know if Brigham’s famous friend would fly to the mountain and attempt to learn if there had been any radio contact between the survivors and his daughter’s team before the communications systems went down. Sherry, he said, would be given access to the bodies of the fallen climbers. Could any of them have seen his daughter descending when the storm hit? He was grabbing at straws, Brigham said, and the senator well knew it. Still, it was only two A.M. in Alaska. She could be on Denali before noon if she left right away.

Sherry Moore would do anything for Garland Brigham, even if only to make a demonstration of compassion. By 6:30 A.M. she was in a military police car speeding for Philadelphia International. At 6:50 she climbed the carpeted stairs of a luxury Gulf-stream jet and was handed a mug of coffee. She was the only passenger flying at .85 mach across the country.

She knew from what Brigham had told her that the rescuers had daylight in their favor. The Alaskan sun wouldn’t set until midnight, providing nineteen hours of light. She also knew that the senator’s son, U.S. Navy SEAL captain Brian Metcalf, would be meeting her in Anchorage, where she would transfer to a privately contracted helicopter from Washington State that would take them to Denali National Park and basin camp.

Sherry had dozed on and off during the flight, listened to cable news on satellite television, and spoken with Brigham by phone several times. He told her that Captain Metcalf had contacted him and wanted to know if she might attempt, with him, to reach a body hanging from a headwall. Metcalf was convinced it was a member of his sister’s team. The man had apparently been trying to leave a message with signal dye on the side of the mountain when he died.

It wasn’t a request and it didn’t require an answer. Brigham was only warning Sherry what to expect when she arrived in Anchorage. But there must have been a conversation between the two men about her physical capabilities. Metcalf would not have raised the possibility of descending a mountainside with a blind woman unless Brigham had assured him that she was in good physical condition. Brigham wouldn’t have told Sherry what he thought she should do—he never tried to lead her one way or the other—but he might have considered it a real option.

One thing she knew with certainty: He wouldn’t let her do anything that might compromise her safety. She knew as surely as she knew her own name that if Brigham raised the possibility of such a thing, he had complete confidence in Metcalf’s abilities. As for the biological side of it, all Sherry needed was a body intact, with the remnants of a neurological system and an inactive brain, to see a corpse’s final seconds of memory.

Sherry felt the helicopter getting buffeted in the wind. She knew something about the Pave Hawk: it was a modified version of the army’s Black Hawk, seventeen million dollars’ worth of technology refitted for rescue work in hostile terrain. It was used not only in the mountainous extremes of Afghanistan but also in civilian rescues like those for Typhoon Chanchu and the Indian Ocean tsunami and Katrina in New Orleans.

There were three other men in the chopper, all navy SEALs, she’d been told, and they were strapped in harnesses on the benches to her right. Sherry’s toe struck the duffel bag between them. It would be orange or red or yellow, filled with morphine and oxygen, heat packs and adrenaline syringes, and there would be CO2-charged splints and neck braces and of course disposable body bags. Metcalf might have come to perform a rescue mission, but all rescuers knew that such undertakings often turned into a recovery. She knew Metcalf was thinking about that. Thinking about his sister.

She couldn’t quite say how it had happened. One moment she was heading for the relative safety of basin camp to visit the bodies of three dead climbers. The next she was listening to Metcalf’s argument for reaching the dead man, and donning heavy snow gear to descend the side of a mountain.

Metcalf was not a man of many words—he wasted none explaining their objective—but he was nonetheless convincing. She felt confident in his presence, and it was a contagious feeling that continued throughout the mission. She knew now why Brigham had let it get this far. You didn’t always need eyes to size up a man. The perception of comportment was not exclusive to people with sight, nor were qualities such as competence and self-assurance. Metcalf was a Navy SEAL and that assumed certain abilities, but there was far more to Metcalf than ability.

The plan was extraordinarily simple, he told her. The pilot of the Pave Hawk would drop them above the headwall at 16,200 feet. Then they would belay off fixed lines—already attached to the side of the mountain—and rappel 400 feet to where the body was hanging. Recovering the dead climber’s body was not an option—there was no time for rescue baskets and Metcalf could hardly divide his attention between a blind woman and a dead man once they were down there. But if the dead man had been part of Allison Metcalf’s team, Metcalf might be able to make clear the meaning of the message the climber had been trying to write on the side of the wall. If they could decipher it, Metcalf could radio the information to his men up above and they could focus their search accordingly.

Sherry often went into these kinds of situations feeling doubtful. What a person was thinking about in their last few seconds of life was not always what her clients wanted to hear. No one knows the precise moment they will expire and what random thoughts might occupy their short-term memory when they did. This was especially true when death is inevitable but protracted. People preparing themselves for death run the gamut of emotions, all the while searching their mind for visual references of their journey through life.

The man hanging from his boot had surely frozen to death. He was probably thinking about loved ones in the end, most people did, but he might also have been occupied by the technical problems of his situation, how to regain the fixed line on the side of the mountain, how to right himself again.

Even if he could still focus on the message he was trying to leave, Sherry couldn’t imagine him producing a mental image that might help them locate a team of climbers buried in a snow cave above them. In fact she could not imagine how he had hoped to find his own way back in a storm of the magnitude that had been described.

It occurred to her that he might never have had the intention of returning. That he might have known he was not coming back, that his message on the wall was an act of extreme selflessness.

“Kahiltna Glacier.” The pilot’s tinny voice came over the headphones. Metcalf tapped the side of her helmet and Sherry nodded to acknowledge that she’d heard. That her equipment was operating.

She pulled the microphone away from her mouth to speak to Metcalf privately. “You know the admiral?” Brigham had never mentioned Senator Metcalf before. She was aware that Brigham had friends on Capitol Hill, had even overheard a woman at one of those rare gatherings at Brigham’s house comment on a birthday card with the presidential seal.

“Mostly by reputation, ma’am.”

“Reputation?” she repeated lightly. Sherry had never thought of Brigham in terms of having a reputation.

Metcalf was silent again, even stoic. Except for the brief description of what he’d asked her to do on the side of the ridge, since leaving Anchorage he’d spoken only to his men and always in fewer than three words. He didn’t like questions, or so it seemed. He wasn’t used to them and they probably made him uncomfortable.

“So you’ve never met?” Sherry couldn’t help herself.

“We’ve met,” Metcalf allowed.

Sherry had always had a nose for people’s discomfort. She knew that Metcalf had a lot going through his mind. His sister, alive or dead, was out there somewhere. One could only imagine the stress he must be under. She couldn’t help but wonder why he was putting such energy into taking her along with him. It didn’t quite fit the manner of the man. Was it Brigham’s influence over the captain that had convinced him to meet her? Men like Metcalf would not be happy chauffeuring civilians around in times of crisis. They were far more likely to put faith in training and experience rather than some paranormal exercise. Metcalf just had to be thinking this was a waste of precious time, but then why was he doing it? Was it in deference to his father or the admiral’s rank? Had the senator called Brigham or was it the other way around?

Sherry’s ability to “see” dated back to an incident in her childhood, an inadvertent gesture of tenderness that linked Sherry to a dead girl’s mind, flooding her with images of things that she had never known and could not possibly have seen. For all the skeptics who would follow, none were more critical of her interpretations than Sherry herself, and it wasn’t until many years later that she realized she was actually seeing glimpses of memory, the final seconds of a person’s life.

Much could be said about Sherry’s documented experiences with corpses since then. The press had labeled her paranormal, but Sherry’s ability was gaining credibility in the medical community and an impressive list of neurosurgeons and scientists around the world were beginning to draw parallels between Sherry and new research on how human memory is stored.

Each year researchers inched closer to the possibility that Sherry’s ability to link short-term memory was based in science, not metaphysics. On paper it made sense. Millions of skin receptors and nerve cells were wired directly through the deceased’s central nervous system to the cortex of the brain. If memory was but an encoding of the body’s sensory experiences, then why couldn’t the right kind of electrical stimulus tap into it? The wiring was in place. The brain was still there, and brains were computers.

She was curious about Metcalf, but not at the expense of alienating him, so she decided to let it lie. The day was half gone. The Alaskan sun would set before midnight. She would do what she came to do and then she would be back on the jet and heading for home. All of this would be behind them.

She heard Metcalf clear his throat. His head was near. He seemed to be leaning in toward her. He surprised her by speaking and this time it was with inflection.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

She hesitated a second. She wanted to get this right. For some unfathomable reason she wanted this man to trust her, to like her, even if he could not believe in her. She couldn’t explain why that was. She usually didn’t dwell on the misgivings of others, but Metcalf somehow mattered; she wanted to reach him on a personal level and it wasn’t going to be easy. It was a little like trying to approach a wild animal, she guessed. It would require the use of round, harmless-sounding words. Say the wrong thing, use the wrong tone, and it was over. But she really wanted to understand Metcalf’s relationship with Brigham.

“We met in the Pentagon once and several times at my father’s home in Boston. I actually remember him from my teenage years. How about you? Have you known him long?”

“Ten years, a little more,” she decided to say.

“So you’re close then,” Metcalf said. “Friends?”

Sherry smiled. “I can honestly say he has become my best friend, Captain.”

Metcalf took a moment to digest that, seeming uncertain about the ground in front of him. When he finally decided to speak, he turned to face Sherry, covered the mike on his headphones so the pilots couldn’t hear, and spoke loudly over the din of the engines. “A lot of people would go to hell and back for that man. Myself included.”

Sherry was surprised by the emotion in his voice. It clearly wasn’t an idle declaration. He really meant it. But what did that mean? Metcalf didn’t sound old enough to have served with Brigham; by her estimation he couldn’t possibly have been a peer, so what would he know about Brigham to qualify that statement?

“Whatever he told you, about what we have to do up here this afternoon, I want you to know you’re in good hands. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, I promise.”

Sherry nodded, but she wasn’t thinking about the mission anymore.

“He’s been retired as long as I’ve known him, Captain,” she said. “I’m forty-four, Miss Moore. I joined the navy straight out of college. I did three years under the admiral in the Gulf. He was my CO during Desert Shield.”

Sherry pulled off her own headphones. “You served together?” she said, surprised.

“He never talked about the Gulf?”

She shook her head. “He never talked about the navy. I always imagined he was a bureaucrat. You know, life behind a desk.”

Metcalf was silent again, but now Sherry wanted more.

“He told me he was stateside at the Pentagon.” Sherry wanted to keep the conversation moving.

Metcalf grunted.

She was losing him. He was getting defensive again.

“He said he pushed papers,” Sherry prodded.

Metcalf actually snorted.

“Well, tell me!” she blurted out, and immediately she regretted it.

There was a moment, a crossroads moment. Sherry knew she had either lost him or broken through.

“Did the admiral ever speak of DEVGRU?” he said at last.

Sherry shook her head. “No. What’s it mean?”

“It’s an acronym for development group. The admiral chaired the special warfare development group in the Pentagon. This was following the First Gulf War.”

Sherry’s expression was blank. Chaired, she thought, trying not to be cynical. He had probably “chaired” a dozen committees at the rank of admiral, which meant he delegated assignments to rear admirals and subordinate commanders. No big deal about that.

“What’s so special about DEVGRU?” she asked.

“Let’s just say there was nothing trivial about the kinds of papers he pushed.”

“Tell me about DEVGRU. What kind of development…” she began, but Metcalf put a hand on her shoulder, leaning close to keep from being heard by the pilots. “Ma’am, I don’t feel comfortable talking about Admiral Brigham behind his back. I was just trying to make conversation.”

With that he put the headphones back on and Sherry knew it was over. He wasn’t being unpleasant, but he’d reached his limit of conversation.

She sat quietly for a moment. Then she leaned into him, shoulder pressing against his bicep. “Thank you, Captain. I just want you to know I understand that this can’t be easy for you. I know how odd you must think it is, my being here. Maybe even a waste of your time.”

“Miss Moore,” he said, abruptly pulling the headphones away. “I started this day with nineteen hours of daylight and a suggestion from Admiral Brigham that bringing you here was worth every hour doing it. That might not carry a lot of weight in the civilian world, but if Admiral Brigham also suggested you could fly this helicopter to Denali, I’d be strapping in next to you, so you see I do not take the admiral’