LITMIR.BIZ

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suspicion regarding the auto-belay device, and Chuck suspected what it was.

      “Here we are,” Owen announced, halting at the base of the climbing tower with Chuck and Alden.

      Chuck looked past the tower. Sedans and SUVs glittered beneath the sun in the parking lot, the oversized Bender Archaeological pickup truck among them. Presumably, Thorpe had planned to end his dawn flight by landing in one of the open stretches between the rows of parked cars. Instead, Chuck assured himself, Thorpe had touched down safely somewhere else. As for Ponch’s overwrought concerns? Nothing more than tarot-card-inspired paranoia.

      “Let’s take a look at the auto-belay mechanism together,” Owen suggested.

      Alden squatted next to the device, a metal cylinder six inches around and eighteen inches long bolted to the climbing tower two feet above the ground. A wire cable ran from the top of the cylinder to a pulley affixed to a steel stanchion extending three feet from the top of the tower. “The disable switch is under here,” Alden said, pointing to the base of the cylinder.

      “Did you check it after Jimmy fell?” Owen asked him.

      “Yes.”

      “And?”

      “It was turned off, deactivated.”

      “Meaning?”

      “The rope had no tension. With the device disabled, the rope spools in, but the ratchet doesn’t engage when a climber falls.” He pointed at the top of the wall. “It’s used for retrieving the rope at the end of a climbing session.”

      “But if it’s turned off when someone is climbing . . . ?”

      Alden aimed a thumb at the ground and whistled through his two front teeth, a single, descending note, imitating the sound of a falling bomb. “That’s why the switch is underneath the cylinder, where it can’t be turned off by mistake.”

      Owen turned to Chuck. “You say you didn’t touch it?”

      Chuck thrust out his chin. “I keep telling you, I released the rope and tied myself into it. That’s all I did.”

      Owen asked Alden, “How closely did you observe his actions?”

      “Not very,” Alden admitted.

      Chuck pointed past the line of boulders. “He was back there, under the trees.”

      “Is that true?” Owen asked the tower attendant.

      “I was making sure no one cut in line,” Alden said, his face coloring. “People get pissed off when that happens.”

      “You say you found the auto-belay in the off position when you checked it after the accident?”

      “Right.”

      “So someone had to have turned it off.”

      “Or,” Chuck said, “it’s broken and it switched off by itself.”

      Owen appraised Chuck with cold eyes. “That’s possible, I suppose.” He faced Alden. “Whatever the case, we can’t allow the Yosemite Slam to take place tomorrow without knowing what happened.”

      “I’ve got an extra auto-belay along,” the attendant said, aiming his square jaw at the semitruck attached to the portable tower’s flatbed trailer. The words “Sacramento Rock Gym” emblazoned the front door of the truck in gold letters above the stenciled silhouette of a climber leaning back from the face of a cliff. “I’ll switch out the old one and test everything to make sure we’re good to go.”

      “Correction,” Owen said. “I’ll be the one who will test everything, before the start of the Slam tomorrow morning. If there’s any question things aren’t right, I’ll shut the whole competition down. Understood?”

      “Sure,” said Alden. “But Jimmy . . .” His voice trailed off.

      The ranger snapped, “He’s the whole reason I’m doing this. An hour ago, Jimmy O’Reilly, the man everybody in Yosemite Valley knows as Camp 4’s best friend, nearly died on your climbing wall. My job is to figure out what happened, to recommend whether an ISB special agent should be assigned, whether we need an SAIT. The way I see it, either something made the auto-belay mechanism turn off—” he directed his gray eyes at Chuck “—or someone turned it off.”

      Chuck raised his hands with his palms out. “I’m as upset about what happened as you are. Jimmy and I go way back. I’m here for the reunion.”

      “The reunion,” Owen repeated, his brows drawing together. “Of course.”

      Chuck lowered his hands. “I assume you’ve heard about it.”

      “Jimmy mentioned it to me. I know all about you and your old friends. My father was a ranger here before me.”

      As Chuck already had deduced. “So you’re Owen, Jr.”

      Time unspooled in Chuck’s mind. Owen Hutchins, Sr., had been one of a handful of rangers known unofficially as the Yosemite mafia. Allegedly, the small group of rangers had formed a secret, unspoken fraternity dedicated to ridding Yosemite National Park of visitors such as hippies and drug users considered less than desirable by mafia rangers, who even had been accused of illegally bribing informants to implicate suspected drug dealers in the valley. Nowhere in the Yosemite mafia’s vision of the valley had there been room for the unshorn, dirtbag climbers who populated Camp 4.

      “Dad retired a long time ago,” Owen, Jr., said. “He died a year later. I’ve been a ranger here for five years now.”

      Of the members of the Yosemite mafia, Hutchins, Sr., had been known for his particularly intense devotion to the cause. “You probably know your father wasn’t the most popular guy in the park,” Chuck said.

      Owen’s eyes grew flinty. “He did his job, just like I do mine.”

      “He rode climbers in the valley pretty hard, especially those of us who hung around with Jimmy O’Reilly and Thorpe Alstad. The way I remember it, he wrote us up for pretty much anything he could think of—noise infractions, open container violations, campsite fee payments that were just a few minutes late.” Chuck glanced past the tower where Thorpe had planned to land in the parking lot; Ponch was waiting back at the reunion campsite.

      Owen’s lips flattened. “He kept guys like you in line. He had no choice. It’s the same now. Four million people visit Yosemite Valley each summer, with more coming every year, all of them trying to squeeze into a place not much bigger than an oversized bathtub. The only way that works is with a lot of planning, a lot of control.”

      “Planning I’m okay with,” Chuck said. “But control? A lot of people thought your dad was a total control freak.”

      “He kept a lid on things. That was his job. When something bad happened, like with Jimmy this morning, he jumped on it right away, hard. That’s the right thing to do—get it figured out before the evidence disappears.”

      “Evidence? It sounds like you think someone was out to get Jimmy.”

      Owen’s face hardened. “I don’t work with what I think, I work with what I know. And what I know is that sport climbing on walls with bolted holds is, or should be, one-hundred-percent safe. The YOSAR team rescues people off the big walls around the valley all summer long. But sport climbing? Nothing should go wrong with that.” The ranger looked at the auto-belay mechanism at the base of the tower, then said to Chuck, “Maybe the switch is faulty. Maybe it turned off by itself somehow. That’s possible, sure. But the odds of it happening? Astronomical. Whereas, the idea that somebody turned off the switch by mistake—or maybe, even, on purpose?—that’s what makes the most sense to me.”

      “I understand you need to look into what happened to Jimmy,” Chuck told the ranger. “I get that.” He extended a stiff finger at the auto-belay device. “But there’s no need for me to examine that thing with you. I didn’t do anything to it, and, to be perfectly honest, I resent any insinuation

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