Death valley duel, p.1
Death Valley Duel, page 1
PRAISE FOR DEATH VALLEY DUEL
“Death Valley Duel is a taut, smart, and propulsive thriller that will keep you spellbound. Scott Graham has written a love letter to the California desert, and to parenthood, and to the athletes who push themselves past limits most of us cannot even imagine. This novel is a steady, dangerous, and addictive race toward justice.”
—NINA DE GRAMONT, New York Times bestselling author
“Move over, Chuck Bender, because it’s Carmelita Ortega’s turn. Fans of Scott Graham’s novels will relish in watching one of their most adored characters take center stage. By turns a life-and-death thriller and a fascinating examination of endurance sports, Death Valley Duel is an adrenaline-soaked journey through one of the most forbidding and alluring places in the United States. Expertly paced and compelling, you’ll find it hard to put down.”
—C. MATTHEW SMITH, Twentymile
“The latest installment in Scott Graham’s National Park Mystery series will not disappoint. Death Valley Duel is a propulsive, page-turning murder mystery with an environmental cold case at its core that asks thoughtful questions surrounding water rights and American colonialism that keeps it from being just another whodunit. I found myself reading into the early hours of the morning, compulsively devouring this dynamic novel.”
—MOLLY IMBER, Maria’s Bookshop
“A twisty thriller that promises an epic race to the finish.”
—CLAIRE KELLS, Forgotten Trail
PRAISE FOR SCOTT GRAHAM’S NATIONAL PARK MYSTERY SERIES
“Terrific.”
—C.J. BOX, New York Times bestselling author
“Filled with murder and mayhem, jealousy and good detective work—an exciting, nonstop read.”
—ANNE HILLERMAN, New York Times bestselling author
“One part mystery, one part mysticism, one part mayhem—and all parts exciting.”
—CRAIG JOHNSON, New York Times bestselling author
“One of the most engaging mysteries I’ve read in a long while … delivers it all and then some.”
—MARGARET COEL, New York Times bestselling author
“Lush descriptions of natural beauty and twisted false leads create an exciting, rewarding puzzle.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“As always, the highlight of Graham’s National Park Mystery Series is his extensive knowledge of the parks system, its lands, and its people.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A winning blend of archaeology and intrigue, Graham’s series turns our national parks into places of equal parts beauty, mystery, and danger.”
—EMILY LITTLEJOHN, Shatter the Night
“Engrossing … a glorious portrait of one of the most compelling landscapes on earth. Graham clearly knows the territory. A topnotch read.”
—WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, New York Times bestselling author
“Stunning setting, intriguing plot, and likeable characters.”
—ANDREA AVANTAGGIO, Maria’s Bookshop
“Only a truly gifted novelist is able to keep a reader turning pages while imparting extensive knowledge about the people, the landscape, and the park system. Scott Graham proves yet again that he is one of the finest.”
—CHRISTINE CARBO, A Sharp Solitude
“Graham has a true talent for allowing his readers to feel almost as if they were trekking the park themselves.”
—MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE
“A multilevel mystery that plumbs the emotions of greed and jealousy.”
—THE DURANGO HERALD
“A beautifully balanced book, incorporating intense action scenes, depth of characterization, realistic landscapes, and historical perspective.”
—REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE
“Only the best novelists have the gift of propelling readers into the middle of artfully crafted adventures … Scott Graham once again proves he belongs in the very first rank.”
—JEFF GUINN, New York Times bestselling author
“An extraordinary ride! You know when a reader says they couldn’t put the book down? Yellowstone Standoff is one of those rare books … a tour de force.”
—WIN BLEVINS, New York Times bestselling author
“Get ready for leave-you-breathless high country southwestern adventure.”
—MICHAEL McGARRITY, New York Times bestselling author
Also by Scott Graham
in the National Park Mystery Series
Canyon Sacrifice
Mountain Rampage
Yellowstone Standoff
Yosemite Fall
Arches Enemy
Mesa Verde Victim
Canyonlands Carnage
Saguaro Sanction
DEATH VALLEY DUEL
A National Park Mystery
By Scott Graham
TORREY HOUSE PRESS
Salt Lake City • Torrey
This is a work of fiction set in a real place. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Torrey House Press Edition, June 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Scott Graham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.torreyhouse.org
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-94-2
E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-95-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936532
Cover art by David Jonason
Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf
Interior design by Gray Buck-Cockayne
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are on homelands of Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.
To Kirsten, Mark, Will, and the entire dedicated team at Torrey House, with gratitude
PROLOGUE
The rattlesnakes were restless.
Twisted around one another in the cramped cage he carried on his back, they filled the night air with the buzzing menace of their rattling tails.
A week ago, he’d used reptile tongs to gather the snakes—Mojave greens, the most venomous rattlesnakes on earth—from their den while they dozed through the cool months of winter and early spring. He’d filled the cage with as many of the rattlers as he dared. Now, trapped in their tight confines, they flung themselves against the walls of the crate, making him lurch from side to side as he hauled them through the night.
The load was heavy, the distance to his destination great. But the reward, necessary after all these years, was worth every stride he took, every jerky sway, every stumble in the darkness.
The eastern sky was growing gray with dawn when he arrived. The snakes balled themselves together in the center of the crate, their looped bodies tensed, as he lowered the enclosure to the ground. He set the cage at the side of the drainage, aimed the screen door back the way he’d come, and heaped dirt and rocks over all but the doorway, hiding the crate’s presence in the bottom of the ravine. Straightening, he faced down the dry stream bed and imagined the scene to come with unbridled euphoria.
He would unlatch the screen door and leap back. For a long second all would be still, the silence of the night broken only by the drumbeat of approaching footsteps from lower in the drainage. Then, sensing their freedom, the rattlesnakes would shoot out of the cage, writhing and wriggling.
The snakes would slither off into the desert in all directions. But they would travel only a short distance before responding to the threatening vibration of the footsteps by spinning themselves into tight coils, heads up and tails stiff.
He shivered with delight, savoring the vision of the Mojave greens poised and waiting in the darkness, venom glands engorged and fangs armed, ready to attack their oncoming human prey.
PART ONE
“It’s the same game: get me water first. The hell with the other people.”
—River’s End: California’s Latest Water War
1
“Move into the light, Carm!” Rosie Ortega demanded of her older sister Carmelita in the predawn darkness. “You have to.”
Carmelita flinched at Rosie’s command. Perched on the edge of her folding camp chair in the Mt. Whitney trailhead parking lot, she leaned forward, cinching the laces of her neon purple trail-running shoes.
Standing next to her, Chuck Bender stiffened. He raised a hand in warning to Rosie, who squatted in front of Carmelita with her cell phone aimed at her sister. The last thing Carmelita needed right now, in the tense final minutes leading up to the start of the Whitney to Death 150 ultra trail running race, was Rosie’s phone camera shoved in her face.
Carmelita had asked Rosie to film, edit, and post footage online of her preparation for and participation in the Whitney to Death 150. Set to begin in just a few minutes, the annual running competition across the eastern California desert from Mount Whitney to Death Valley was widely considered one
Rosie, who had just turned fifteen, had taken on the role of Carmelita’s personal filmmaker with her usual gusto. Over the months leading up to the race, she’d captured hours of footage with her cell phone camera of seventeen-year-old Carmelita training for the competition in and around their hometown of Durango, Colorado. She had produced rough-cut videos from the footage and uploaded them to the internet as the April race approached. The videos featured her distinctively raspy voice as she praised Carmelita’s work ethic and quiet confidence.
“I’m not moving,” Carmelita told Rosie without looking up. She bent farther forward in her seat, presenting the back of her head to Rosie’s upraised phone, and continued tightening her shoes.
By Chuck’s count, this was the sixth time Carmelita had loosened and retied her laces while seated in the chair, a show of nerves that, though notably uncommon for her, was fully justified this morning.
The Whitney to Death 150 followed rugged hiking trails and old mining tracks eastward from Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest point in the lower forty-eight states, to Badwater Basin in the heart of Death Valley National Park, at 282 feet below sea level the lowest point in all of North America. In the decade since the race’s inception, barely one in five runners had completed the entire one-hundred-fifty-mile race in the allotted fifty-hour time limit. The other four out of five racers either dropped out or failed to finish in time, victims of the brutal nature of the competition—unrelenting heat and lack of shade during daylight hours and brutally challenging terrain at night.
Last fall, Carmelita had proposed to her mother, Janelle, and Chuck, her stepfather, that she apply to compete in the race and had asked them to serve as her support crew if she was accepted. When they had questioned her about the wisdom of attempting the Whitney to Death 150 at her young age, she had convinced them she possessed the two key attributes required for the competition: the willpower to complete the long training runs necessary over the months leading up to the race, and the mental fortitude needed to keep going when the going got tough, as it inevitably would, over the course of the run. She also promised them that if the race ultimately proved too demanding, she would drop out before she did any permanent damage to her body or psyche.
A staffing shortage at Durango Fire and Rescue, where Janelle worked as a paramedic, had forced her to stay in Colorado and pick up vacant shifts rather than travel to California to serve on Carmelita’s support crew. In Janelle’s absence, Carmelita had recruited Janelle’s younger brother Clarence and his girlfriend Liza to crew for her along with Chuck and Rosie.
As Rosie reported in the videos she filmed and posted, Carmelita’s training for the Whitney to Death 150 had proceeded smoothly, a steady accumulation of miles throughout the winter on snowy trails in the San Juan Mountains surrounding Durango. Perhaps because of the gritty appeal of the unvarnished videos Rosie produced, or the refreshing positivity of her behind-the-scenes narration, the short films proved popular online, with each newly posted video gaining hundreds of new followers for Carmelita’s social media channels.
Carmelita had begun tapering her training mileage four weeks ago, harboring the strength and stamina she’d developed over the preceding months for the formidable endurance test ahead. She’d been remarkably upbeat two days ago, when she and Chuck had spent the day together surveying the race route by car, while Rosie, Clarence, and Liza remained in Whitney Portal Campground, the starting point of the race beneath the towering east face of Mount Whitney.
Now, in the dark parking lot, Chuck bit down on his lower lip, his nerves jangling, as Carmelita retied her shoes yet again in her seat beside him. Her fixation this morning on her laces concerned him. On top of the immense physical challenge presented by the Whitney to Death 150, the psychological pressure of the competition was enormous as well.
“But you have to move,” Rosie said to Carmelita, extending her phone closer to her sister. “It’s too dark where you’re sitting. Nobody will be able to see you.”
With her free hand, Rosie tucked an unruly lock of her dark curly hair beneath the stretchy strap of her headlamp. In the chilly mountain air, her round cheeks, visible in the downward cast of her headlamp beam, were tinged with red.
Carmelita’s hair, as dark as Rosie’s but smooth and straight, was gathered in a ponytail at the back of her neck. The flexible band of her headlamp held her beaming light in place on her forehead over her backward-facing running cap. The light illuminated her thin forearms and delicate fingers as she worked on her shoes.
Opposite her, a floodlight on a portable tripod cast a glowing circle of light on a patch of the otherwise unlit trailhead parking lot adjacent to the campground. The steep winding road up Portal Canyon from Owens Valley ended at the paved lot, where the main hiking trail to the summit of Mount Whitney began.
“You’ve tied your shoes, like, a million times,” Rosie said.
Carmelita hunched her shoulders and continued fiddling with her laces.
Chuck drummed the back of her nylon seat with his fingers, his thumb hooked over the chair’s aluminum frame. He was lean and fit from his decades of work on archaeological digs, though as he neared his fifties, his close-cropped brown hair was flecked with gray, and with each passing year, the crow’s feet extending from the corners of his eyes and mouth cut deeper into his sun-burnished skin. In the cool early morning, he wore a fleece jacket, loose cotton pants, and lightweight hiking boots.
“Please, stop that,” Carmelita scolded him.
He jerked his hand away.
Rosie chortled. She wore black sweats, running shoes with marshmallowy soles like her sister’s, and a bright yellow fleece top. “Geez, Dad. You’re more nervous than Carm is.”
“He should be nervous,” Liza said. She zipped closed one of the many pockets on the custom-made running vest Carmelita would wear during the race, its compartments filled with snack food, packets of energy gel, and soft plastic bottles filled with fruit-flavored electrolyte drink. A whitewater river guide in her late twenties based out of the northern Arizona city of Flagstaff, Liza had gravitated to the position of chief gear wrangler for Carmelita in Janelle’s absence. “You should be nervous, too, Rosie. We all should be.”
“Well, I’m not,” Carmelita said.
Her confident tone reassured Chuck. This was the Carmelita he knew, the Carmelita who had trained hard and well for the race and was ready for whatever was to come over the next fifty hours.
She snugged the laces tight on her shoes, sat up straight in her seat, and slapped her bare thighs below her running shorts. Looking directly into the lens of Rosie’s phone camera, she said, “Let’s do this, shall we, peeps?”
She rose from her chair and faced the lighted circle of pavement. Marian and Doug, the founders of the Whitney to Death 150, scurried back and forth beneath the floodlight, clipping quarter-sized GPS trackers to the shirts of racers gathered in the parking lot. The couple organized and directed the race each year. Both Doug and Marian—known to racers only by their first names—were portly and gray-haired, well past middle age. They were rumored to work for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest employer in rural Owens Valley, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles.
Ten years ago, so the story went, the two had dreamed up the Whitney to Death 150 as a diversion from their tedious engineering jobs in the sparsely populated valley, where the utility company shunted snowmelt water flowing off the east side of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range into the concrete-lined Los Angeles Aqueduct, which transported the liquid gold south to the LA metropolitan area.
Marian and Doug had organized the initial race far from the public eye, with no website, press releases, or official sign-up forms. The first competition, on the demanding route they laid out over isolated public lands between Mt. Whitney and Death Valley, had attracted only a handful of racers via word of mouth. Over the ensuing years, Doug and Marian had continued to host the Whitney to Death 150 each spring, with no overt publicity or special-use permits from federal land agencies. They had maintained the small size of the race, capping the number of accepted applicants at around forty.
