Uncertain Justice

Chapter 32

strong light splashed on the water's surface, so bright it was reflected under the tangled mass of branches to Miles. Numbed by frigid water and weariness, he placidly watched the light strengthen ... and then it began to fade. It got dark again.

The searchers had passed on without seeing anything out of the ordinary.

A primitive human dread of unnamed horrors that hid in darkness got Miles stirring again. Dreamily, he braced his backpack against his leg and unzipped the top section of the pack. It was a self-contained fanny pack that could be detached if the wearer wanted to use it separately, but Miles used it as a storage place for items that didn't fit elsewhere.

Feeling around, he pulled out the small flashlight he kept there and pressed the switch. It had been advertised as waterproof--he could only hope it actually was. The beam flashed into life, half blinding him in the total darkness. He covered most of the lens with his fingers.

After his eyes adjusted, Miles saw he was in a triangular cave of sorts. The ceiling and the two sides in the river were a rotting, malodorous mixture of tangled tree branches, grass, and roots. The remaining side, the riverbank, was a wall of dirt and rocks.

For a second, the twisted limbs seemed to move in the dim light and Miles jerked to attention. At the edge of his vision, they seemed to be waving in his direction but his eyes also reported nothing got closer. He let the gap between two fingers grow wider so he could see better. With the improved illumination, he saw it was only the shaking of his hand that made the shadows move.

He saw a sofa-sized boulder with its upper surface above the water near the riverbank. Miles stood blinking while his fatigued brain processed the information. A swirl of faster moving water rippled branches and the fabric of his pants. Shadows swayed. He forced himself into motion.

He waded to the boulder, the water getting a little shallower as he went. The top surface of the rock was reasonably level and it was only a foot, perhaps less, above the water. Summoning the last of his strength, he awkwardly wrestled the backpack over the edge and crawled up beside it.

He had been clinching his jaw for a long time but tired muscles gave in now. His teeth began to chatter in the frigid night. Hypothermia-induced trembling in his legs and arms began to interfere with his ability to do the things vital to his survival.

Groaning, ready to cry with weariness, Miles pulled open the backpack and fumbled for the remaining survival blanket. He tucked it around his legs with unfeeling fingers and laid down with his head pillowed on the backpack. He switched off the flashlight that he didn't have the strength to hold any longer and tucked it into a pocket in his parka.

He was shivering badly and thought of pulling out his sleeping bag, but discarded the idea immediately. The bag was extremely warm when the goose down filling was dry, but the feathers were useless as insulation when wet.

His parka was made of a synthetic material that would hold in body heat even when soaked so he left it zipped up to his chin. After a time, Miles roused enough to search the fanny pack and pull out the three chemical hand-warmer packets he'd brought with him.

He kneaded the plastic containers with frozen fingers until the substances inside began to release their chemical warmth. He tucked the first inside his parka close to his chest and placed a second one inside the blanket covering his legs ... he pushed it down to his ankles. The third went between his thighs.

Calmly, he settled on his side on the hard rock, curling his body and hunching his knees close to his chest to conserve what little heat his body retained. Still shaking with the cold, he watched the glow of more lights reflecting through the water and into the enclosed space. After a while, his thoughts slowed and he knew no more.

Whether he slept or lost consciousness wasn't important.

§

Because his footprints on the bank showed Miles had been facing vaguely upstream when he jumped into the creek and because Curt misinterpreted a couple of leaves floating down the creek as proof Miles had gone upstream, the search party initially went in that direction.

When they got to the stream's source without finding a place where the fugitive might have exited the water, the helicopter was sent to fly the length of the stream in the other direction to see if he was going that way.

After a number of false alarms--for several minutes the chopper followed a mountain lion in a stop and start chase before the crew identified what they were seeing--the FLIR was used to scan both sides of the bigger river, up and downstream without success.

Search parties on foot passed by several times but never found Miles under the mass of entangled roots, branches, and tree trunks that extended well below the surface of the water. When they came close, their flashlights showed a solid barrier they had no reason to investigate. Even the super-sensitive noses of the surviving dogs were confounded by the lack of any exposed surface Miles had touched on the outside of the mound of debris.

The hounds did get excited when they found his survival blanket caught between two rocks near the bank a few miles downstream and the search concentrated in that area for the rest of the night. The exhausted men and dogs were lifted out by helicopter shortly after the sun rose without finding another trace of the fugitive.

Using the rocks where the dogs alerted so strenuously as a starting point, teams spread out over the next few days trying to locate Underwood. They found nothing though they chased hundreds of leads and rousted dozens of surprised male hikers over a two hundred square mile search zone.

Frustrated deputies just south of Monarch Pass roughed up two men and their families on a picnic when they couldn't produce identification quickly enough. The lawsuits were settled out of court two years later.

Terms of the settlement were not revealed.