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her."
    "In case she got up to go for a stroll?" Add another reason for me to want to smack Ramon. There's times and places for a dig ... this weren't one of them. I shot him a glare, which seemed to go right over his head. Maybe he was ornery,
    'cause so far, the accident, crime or whatever it ended up being was about two miles from any portion of BLM land.
    Ramon had no jurisdiction and it likely rankled him.
    Pursed lips and narrowed eyes on Warner's face told me Ramon had poked him a little too hard. "I thought it would be best." Warner snapped.
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    Hard Fall
    by James Buchanan
    "Of course you did." Nadia tried to repair a little damage with her southern charm and a light touch to his arm. "She was your wife. So she went to take photos of the sunrise.
    When did you realize something was wrong?"
    Warner focused his attention on her. "When she did not come to have breakfast."
    "You didn't hear anything?" Nadia smiled and Warner echoed it with a thin version of his own.
    "No, I did not hear."
    I let her have it for a bit, swing the balance back to our dance. "What did you do then?" Thankfully, Ramon had wandered over to the tent and was studying it and the doss about the edges. Idiot was also mucking what scene I had left.
    "I have told you," he sighed, "I went to find her."
    Now I broke in with a hard-edged tone to my question,
    "How long did you look?"
    "Some time." More sniffles without the accompanying water works. "I do not remember."
    "Of course, you were looking." Nadia touched his arm again ... contact to gain trust. "Now if it's okay, Agent Piestewa and Ranger Noces need to look around your campsite and your wife's things. I'm going to head over to the cliff with Deputy Peterson and Mr. Varghese and see that they get started okay. Then I'll be back to talk with you more.
    Alright?"
    Nadia took the equipment from Fred as Kabe eased back into his rack. I hadn't taken mine off for that quick bit. When 42

    Hard Fall
    by James Buchanan
    she signaled ready, I asked Kabe, "You remember where we're headed?"
    He just nodded and started off through the trees following a deer trail. Nadia fell into step beside me. After we'd cleared a ways beyond the camp, she broke the silence. "Is it just me, or was he acting like a fox sitting outside a hen house?"
    "Could just be the language thing." Even to my own ears, I didn't sound convinced at all. "Maybe."
    She gave me a girlish little laugh, like she knew exactly what I was thinking. "Yeah, it don't feel right to me neither."
    It took a good fifteen minutes to get to the ridge and a bit more to track back to the site of the fall. Kabe stopped on a bare strip of rock jutting out into the sky. One brown arm reached out and pointed to near the end. "There. She fell left into the book," using the climbing term to indicate a near perpendicular, inside corner of rock. "Maybe seventy-five feet."
    I took a deep breath and headed over. When I peered down, my mind started cataloging both the implications of the scene and what I'd need to do to get down to it. We'd be doing this one on my flash. In a search and rescue situation, you were lucky if there was any fixed protection, bolts, rings and the like, or traversed routes. 'Course if it was there, that stuff was all manky anyway and possibly the cause of the fall.
    This reeked of a pristine clean wall.
    If I'd tried, I couldn't have missed Anya Warner. A crumpled up doll lay on a ledge below surrounded by a scattering of rubble. Her head twisted nearly backwards and, like Rickland had said, she was pretty much folded in two ... a 43

    Hard Fall
    by James Buchanan
    squashed bug. The rock beneath her looked like someone smeared it with black oil. I knew better, knew what that stain was after baking in the sun for a good four hours or more.
    Nadia had wandered to the edge of the cliff. A low whistle echoed in my ear. "Wow, that's messy."
    "Definitely a victim of R.D.S." I used the military jargon co-opted by climbers long ago for Rapid