Murder Mystery (untitled) – Chapter Three.
The couple from Ohio were excited to finally land in Colorado. They’d flown in yesterday to DIA and last night around midnight they had finally gotten settled into their hotel room @LaQuintaInn in Lakewood. This morning they planned to show up early @RoxboroughStatePark, right after a quick bite of breakfast @EinsteinBrosBagels on Wadsworth. Both of them were 20-year Air Force veterans, and therefore they both had great military pensions. So the couple were finally taking advantage of their flush financial circumstance and their newly emptied nest to travel together. This was the first stop on a whirlwind grand tour that was supposed to include stop-offs at many different ports of call across the globe. A well-deserved victory lap – or so they assumed.
Julia had stayed home with their 2 kids after she retired from active duty many years ago. The kids were now through college and out on their own. Mike was only recently retired from his post-military gig ferrying B-list supermodels and aging rock stars back and forth across the pond on a Gulfstream-V owned by Les Wexner of Victoria’s Secret fame – also of Jeffrey Epstein infamy – but that’s another story for another day.
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Mike’s former passengers were often seen attending the Cannes Film Festival, or headed with an impressive array of long guns to a week-long quail-shoot in Argentina. He once had flown Hillary Clinton around on the campaign trail during primary season, but that did not end well for either of them. Suffice it to say, while Julia manned the fort and kept the home fires burning back in Columbus, Mike was jetting across the globe with the moderately-rich, the semi-famous, and the super-well-armed.
But all that was about to change. Finally, they were traveling TOGETHER. For FUN, no less. And tomorrow they planned to hike South Rim in Roxborough. OK, it was only rated a “Moderate” hike. But this WAS after all within their first 24 hours at altitude. Julia, for one, could hardly wait. Mike was his usual taciturn, inscrutable self. Hey, you don’t endure for long as a private jet pilot by being a Chatty Cathy. Just sayin’.
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“Jeez. I can’t believe I’m THIS outta breath already.”
“Take it easy, hon. The trail will still be here after the sun gets up over South Rim.”
“I know, I know. But I guess I’m kinda excited. You know, this is the first time since you retired we’re actually hiking a trail TOGETHER.”
Mike scowls, takes a long slug from his Nalgene water bottle, and squints up into the uninterrupted blue of a perfect Colorado summer sky, not a cloud in sight. “Try and curb your enthusiasm, dear. This is just our first stop. By the time we make it to The Great Wall of China, you’re gonna wear yourself out.”
Julia smiles and punches him lightly on his manly right bicep. As she does so, she digs the toe of her Red Wing into the soft soil on this upper reach of the South Rim. Looking down, she stiffens, then gasps. “What the…?” Her boot has unwittingly uncovered a tuft of what looks suspiciously like hair… HUMAN hair. She drops to her knees and begins hurriedly sweeping red dirt away with her bare hands. Before long, it’s all too clear what she’s uncovering.
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“Aw hell. Stop digging, hon. Let’s see if we can find a Ranger or something. No way in God’s green earth do I wanna see the rest of that guy’s face.”
Julia is a tough nut, but the sight of the top of a rotting corpse’s partially decomposed head has left her shaken. “My God. That poor man. I wonder how he…”
“Enough. I’m gonna hike on ahead and see if I come across anyone that looks like they know what the hell to do with all this. There’s no cell reception so hopefully I can find somebody with a radio or something who can alert the authorities. They need to get up here and finish what you’ve started. This is a crime scene. It’s not ours to dig up. Let them do their job.”
Julia is a little taken aback by all this verbiage from Mike. That’s more in one shot than she’s heard out of his mouth in all their thirty-some-odd years of marriage. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration – but not by a lot. “OK. I’ll stay. You go. But hurry. Just looking at that guy’s scalp creeps me out.”
What she doesn’t say, but she thinks, is that there’s a big gash on the back of the skull that looks to her an awful lot like it might be the indentation of a blunt instrument. It’s the kind of mark you could make if you brought a claw hammer down really hard on somebody’s head from behind. You know, theoretically speaking.
This is not the sort of thought she ever imagined having on the first day of a World Victory Tour. But there you have it: Life so seldom gives us what we’d planned. And that is every bit as true for the couple from Ohio as it is for the corpse partially buried in the soft red dirt of the South Rim Trail.
<To be continued…>