aimed a finger down the slope, where Sentinel Gap opened to the forested lower ridge. “And there,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Oh, my God,” Ponch moaned from behind Chuck.
A piece of red fabric was tucked at the bottom of a headhigh boulder resting on the forested slope below the opening of the gap.
Janelle side-hilled to the boulder ahead of Chuck and Ponch. She put a hand to the stone and leaned around it. “He’s here,” she said, her voice controlled. “The rest of him.”
Chuck looked over her shoulder along with Ponch. The piece of fabric visible from above was the corner of Thorpe’s wingsuit airfoil. Thorpe lay facedown on the far side of the boulder, his arms and remaining leg splayed. Blood was gathered in a small depression beyond and below his head.
Janelle dropped her medical pack to the ground. Donning a pair of latex gloves from an outside pocket of the pack, she knelt and turned Thorpe’s head to her. Thorpe’s black helmet encased his skull. Somehow, his camera remained affixed to the helmet’s crown. His goggles were smashed, his eyes, nose, and cheeks pulverized.
Janelle pressed two fingers to the side of Thorpe’s neck below his jawline, then rocked back on her heels. “No pulse, of course. But we’re always supposed to check.” Her gloved hands, cupped around one another, hung between her legs, her forearms resting on her thighs. “He must have died instantly.”
Ponch turned away and vomited down the slope. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he returned to studying Thorpe’s body with Chuck and Janelle.
“What’s this?” Janelle asked. She touched the suit’s lower airfoil, two swaths of fabric held a few inches apart by stays that lay on the ground between Thorpe’s left leg and where his right leg should have been. One of the swaths of fabric had separated along a seam in the airfoil, resulting in a V that extended several inches into the wing from the foil’s bottom hem. The separation had exposed one of the stays that held the fabric swaths apart to form the airfoil.
The stay, a plastic rod half the thickness of a drinking straw, stuck out from the fabric. The rod was white to its final inch, which was red, like the wingsuit.
Janelle ran her gloved finger along the last inch of the stay. Her fingertip came away smudged. “It’s blood.”
“The suit must have torn,” Chuck said, “when he . . . when his . . .”
“It doesn’t look like a tear to me. It separated. It came apart.”
Chuck leaned around Janelle for a closer look. A length of nylon thread extended from the top of the V’ed separation and lay crumpled on the ground below the loosed plastic stay. “No wonder it came apart, considering the forces involved.”
Janelle cleaned the blood from her covered finger with an antiseptic wipe from her kit. She continued to eye the airfoil and Thorpe’s corpse along with Ponch, but Chuck stepped away. He’d seen enough. The stench of Ponch’s vomit mixed in the air with the rank odor emanating from Thorpe’s mangled body. Chuck swallowed, his stomach heaving.
“I’m tempted to grab the camera from his helmet and smash it to bits,” Ponch said, “even though I know the investigators will want it.”
“You think the footage will reach the internet?”
“I bet it’ll go viral. The whole world will watch him die, over and over and over again.”
“The investigators should keep it private. That’s their job.”
“Huh,” Ponch scoffed. “Everything reaches the internet these days.” He lifted his phone. “It’s time,” he said grimly.
Chuck took out his phone, too. “From way up here, it shouldn’t take long for one of us to get through.”
“As twisted as this may sound,” Chuck said to Ponch as they walked down Four Mile Trail, “I’m not sure how much Thorpe would mind if the footage of his death made it to the internet.”
They’d left Thorpe’s body thirty minutes ago. After getting through to a 911 operator, they had waited until an advance team of half a dozen YOSAR team members arrived before leaving the scene.
“He lived his life in the public eye,” Chuck continued. “He made his living putting himself on display.”
Ponch spun and walked backward, facing Chuck. “Him and all the babes he hung out with.” He turned forward and continued down the trail.
“Hey,” Janelle warned from the front of the line. “That’s the second time you’ve used that word.”
“Young ladies,” Ponch corrected himself.
“Some of us ‘young ladies’—” she made air quotes with her fingers as she hiked a step ahead of Ponch “—don’t have a problem hanging out with older guys.”
“Thanks,” Chuck said. “I think.”
“Janelle’s right,” Ponch said over his shoulder to Chuck. “It’s no secret that Thorpe’s success as an older guy was the result, to a significant extent, of the young ladies who hung out with him.”
“Success?” Janelle asked, an edge to her voice.
“Remember,” Chuck told Ponch, “she’s the mother of two little girls.”
“Who,” Janelle added, “are growing up way too fast.”
“She’s already on her guard for them,” Chuck said to Ponch. “So am I.”
“Thorpe figured out what you two already know,” Ponch said, “which is that boys like girls—a lot. He realized right away that nine out of ten extreme-sport viewers online are males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. The best way to increase his viewership numbers, he figured, was to give those young males what they wanted.”
“Babes,” Janelle said, biting off the word.
“Young ladies,” Ponch agreed. “Thorpe made sure he included a scantily clad female in every one of his videos—hanging out with him in the back of his van, zipping him into his wingsuit on the edge of a cliff before he flew, cracking open a can of beer for him after he landed.”
“How professional,” Janelle deadpanned.
“If by professional you mean building a solid, money-making profession, you’d be right.”
“He was that successful?”
“He and Jimmy were pioneers in the whole idea of outdoor athletes making a living through sponsorships. At their peak, they had lots of sponsors—High Summit energy bars, Rinson ropes, Trongia harnesses, their backpacks, and all their clothes, from their long underwear to their hats to their rain jackets. They’d take anything that came their way. They even accepted a stake in MoJuice, the energy drink, when the company was just getting started. You know the one: For Renegades Only. The MoJuice people didn’t have any money, so they gave Jimmy and Thorpe some stock in the company to sell after it went public. Of course, MoJuice has stayed private while talking about holding its initial public offering year after year all the way through to this year.” Ponch shrugged. “What are
