Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  “I’m coming off a complicated relationship,” she explained from the passenger’s seat. “I’ve flirted tonight and I’m sure I came on a little too strong, and I apologize for that. I’m here for the wine auction tomorrow. I may or may not stay a day or two more. And if I do stay, I’d like to see you again. And this time with no excuses or apologies. But tonight . . . I need to collect myself and not do something self-destructive. Is this making any sense or are you about to scream?”

  “A little of both,” he said.

  “I hope it matters to you that I like you. I hope it matters that if I stay after the auction it will be to see you.”

  “We’re scheduled out Sunday morning,” he said. “Back to L.A.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, if you’d like to reconsider, I can be very forgiving.”

  She answered with a kiss, knowing she’d just cost him his job. She slid out of the car without another word.

  13

  You can pick up the room-service stuff,” Summer Sumner told the woman who’d answered the direct-dial.

  Her father had abandoned her after his egg whites with salmon, off to a meeting, though he’d booked a tennis court for the two of them at eleven A.M. She’d had a Belgian waffle with mixed berries, orange juice, and green tea. She felt bloated.

  The suite was gi-normous, two bedrooms that shared a living room, a balcony with views of the outdoor skating rink and Dollar Mountain—“the kiddy hill.” She didn’t care one bit about getting rid of the dirty dishes and the rolling cart; it was the room-service boy that interested her. She was crushed when, as it turned out, an older guy with a Russian accent retrieved the breakfast cart.

  She waited five minutes and ordered wheat toast, no butter, and another cup of green tea. Fifteen minutes later, a knock on the door drew her to the peephole.

  She held the door for him. “Put it anywhere.”

  He might have been the same bellboy she’d seen the day before: about her height and skinny. It looked like his mother cut his hair. He was either her age or a couple years older, which would work just fine. He had an honest face, shy blue eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke.

  “Sign here, please.”

  “You delivered our breakfast too.”

  “Yeah.” He was fighting to remain professional. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “When do you get off work?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I’m pulling a double. Seven A.M. to three, and three to eleven tonight. Why?”

  “Why do you think?” she asked.

  He placed the tray on the coffee table.

  “Are there any hot springs in the area?” she asked. It was a loaded question: she’d read in the town paper, the Mountain Express, about the hot springs being a magnet for teenagers.

  “I . . . ah . . . yeah. There are.”

  “Could you take me?” she proposed.

  “Me?”

  She made a point of looking around the room. “Yeah.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You suppose or you could?” she asked.

  “I suppose I could. But not until eight. A friend can cover for me. And . . . like . . . I don’t have my suit or anything, and I live about—”

  “Who said anything about suits?”

  “Ah . . .” He’d turned beet-red.

  She had him exactly where she wanted him.

  “I’ve got to get out of this hotel,” she said. “This place is totally driving me crazy. I’m like a prisoner.”

  “I could definitely take you,” he said. “Are you meeting someone there or—”

  “Dude? No. It’s just us, you and me, right? Unless you want to invite some friends along. But I don’t bite or anything. It sorta sucks, hanging around here. And my dad’s got some private tasting and dinner thing tonight to do with the wine auction, and obviously I’m not invited since the drinking age is twenty-one, which might lead you to ask why he brought me on this trip in the first place since I can’t do anything he has planned. And the obvious answer would be how stupid it was for him to bring me along and how I did not want to come, but, then again, he is seriously stupid, or can be, and therefore here I am.”

  “I’m not supposed to interact with guests.” He just threw it out there.

  “Yeah? So?” she asked.

  His eyes ticked furiously back and forth. He was cute enough but immature.

  “So, I’ll meet you just after eight in the medical-building parking lot. It’s over by the inn. You know where that is?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “If you’re not there by quarter after, I’m gone,” he said.

  I doubt that, she thought. “Oh, I’ll be there,” she said, smiling.

  14

  But if it’s vinegar,” Fiona said, standing on a small stepladder in the glare of fluorescent lights, her camera mounted on a tripod and aimed straight down, “then why would anyone bid anything for it?”

  Walt had set her up in the Command Center, a room laid out like a college lecture hall that sat fifty. There were half a dozen flat screens suspended from the ceiling and an electronic white board. He carefully rotated the first of the three bottles exactly as Remy had instructed. It, along with the others, remained cradled in gray foam. The initials, etched into the glass below the label, came into view:

  J.A.

  “John Adams,” he said. “The John Adams. The wine was a gift to Adams from Thomas Jefferson upon Adams’s return from Holland, where he’d just secured the financing necessary to save the republic. These bottles celebrate the United States before it existed.”

  “But a million dollars!?”

  “It’s an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar reserve. They could go far higher than a million,” Walt said. “They sell as a single lot. Remy says his experts claim the wine is still drinkable, but to get that price it doesn’t have to be.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “There’s ego involved. Since it benefits the center, a nonprofit, the bids get ginned up to astronomical prices. It’s all about who gets what, who can spend what, not drinkability.”

  “The more I learn about this place, the less I understand.”

  “It’s a pissing contest . . . Pretty easy to understand.”

  Walt continued rotating the bottles. She fired off shots.

  “Does he get them back after this?”

  “No. It’s on us to protect and transport them. A motorcade for a couple of wine bottles. All because they’re evidence in a homicide.”

  “You think other sheriffs deal with this sort of thing?”

  It was a question his father might have asked. He reacted defensively, muscles tensing, a spike of heat up his spine, then calmed himself down and said, “It is what it is. We have to assume they may try for them again. Wine is like fine art: there’s always a black market willing to pay. These people were obviously well organized, well informed. I’m assuming they have a backup plan.”

  She climbed down the stepladder. He liked the way she moved, enjoyed watching her . . . hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed it, in fact, until that moment.

  They were interrupted by a deputy trying to suppress his contagious excitement.

  “Sheriff, we’ve got something.”

  Thirty minutes later, Walt was riding shotgun in the Hummer, a vehicle anonymously donated to the Sheriff’s Office by a Hollywood star. Ostentatious and unnecessary most of the time, the Hummer rode high and carried four easily. Its roof rack, light bar, and the whoop-whoop of its siren cleared the three northbound lanes like a snowplow in winter.

  “It’s possible,” he told the other three, all of whom were decked out in SWAT gear, “that the suspects may possess paralyzing gas. They’re to be considered armed and dangerous. I saw two men out Democrat Gulch. Now we’ve added a woman to that. We’re going in small. Don’t make me regret it.” He could have called up the entire twelve-man Special Response unit, but m
obilizing the squad took time he didn’t have.

  Brandon raised his voice to carry over the roar of the siren. “How do we know any of this?”

  “Evidence,” Walt hollered back.

  Walt and Fiona had been interrupted by a hyper deputy named Carsman.

  “The traffic cams you asked for,” Carsman had said, poking his head into the Command Center. “We’ve got the wrecker before and after it hooks onto the Taurus.”

  Walt and Fiona had followed Carsman down the hall to the office’s computer lab.

  “We picked up the Taurus and the wrecker heading north on Airport Drive,” Carsman explained.

  The traffic cam archives produced color images shot at two-second intervals. Because of the two-second jumps, cars appeared and disappeared from Main Street.

  “We don’t pick them up again until the south-facing camera at Croy,” Carsman continued. Pointing to the screen, he said, “The wrecker. This is Malone’s Taurus. Now, check this.”

  A woman pushed a stroller out into the crosswalk. The traffic stopped and held as she bent over picking something up.

  “Freeze it!” Walt said.

  “She dropped something,” Carsman said.

  “A driver had come to her aid.” On any other day, this would have been cause for mild celebration: traffic fatalities at crosswalks were a serious problem in the valley. The fact that traffic had stopped for a pedestrian was a relief to see.

  Walt watched the same series several times: the wrecker backing up, the Taurus making the turn attached to it.

  “The traffic cams are, what, two months old?” Walt said. “If they scouted this back in June, they wouldn’t have known about them. That’s probably the only reason we’ve got them on camera.” The system was designed to capture the plates of cars running traffic lights. Within a few minutes, they had the wrecker’s registration, and the Yukon alongside it.

  “The Yukon’s going to be a rental or a stolen vehicle,” Walt had informed Carsman. “If it’s a rental, it’s on a stolen or counterfeit credit card, which won’t do us any good, but run anything you get as far as it takes you. The Yukon’s our lead for now. Call every hotel, inn, and lodge in the valley. With parking being what it is, most require plate numbers at check-in. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Within twenty minutes, the Yukon had been placed at the Summit Guest House, a sixty-room, midpriced hotel on the north end of Ketchum.

  “Room two twenty-six,” Walt now told Brandon from the Hummer’s passenger’s seat. “One night left on the reservation.”

  “And tomorrow night’s the wine auction,” Brandon said.

  “I guess they aren’t sticking around afterward.”

  Brandon soon killed the Hummer’s overhead lights and siren, pulling off Main Street into an office-building parking lot north of Atkinson’s Market, well out of sight of the Summit Guest House. Walt and the three deputies climbed out, one carrying a door ram. The three were armed with semiautomatic rifles, “flash and bang” grenades, tear gas, and other hardware. The group held to a tall wooden fence at the end of the parking lot that screened them from the guesthouse. Room 226 faced west, looking out at Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

  Walt put a man on the back door and sent another to the front. He and Brandon addressed the receptionist and then the manager. The sight of Brandon decked out in SWAT gear and the county sheriff in a Kevlar vest startled the man. He was a tightly wound fortysomething, with thick glasses and a high voice.

  Walt asked that the second floor be cleared, a process that consumed the next several minutes.

  Walt asked for the elevators to be shut down. He and the three climbed the staircase in double time, hurried down the corridor, and regrouped outside of 226. The deputies wore gas masks, helmets, and ear protection.

  Walt used a master card key to crack open the door. The ram took out the inside chain as the door flew open. The three deputies swarmed the suite ahead of Walt, calling out loudly, “Clear!,” as they quickly determined the status of the bathroom, closet, and bedroom. Walt followed inside, annoyed by his bad luck. Then he looked down and saw wet footprints on the carpet.

  He called out a radio code into the room that meant: “Suspect in hiding.” It proved a second too late.

  A door on the bedroom armoire came open, and a naked woman streaked across the small room, dragging a shirt behind her. She grabbed something off the desk, rushed out the open door to the balcony—left open by Brandon—and jumped.

  Brandon was a split second behind her. He leaped over the rail and fell straight down through a canvas patio awning that had supported her weight but failed to support his.

  “I’m okay!” Brandon shouted.

  Walt watched the woman’s bare backside flee across the parking lot. She pulled on the shirt midstride.

  By the time the other two deputies took off, she was long gone. An escape route had been planned. Walt was betting she’d grabbed a cell phone off the desk.

  No one had seen her face, but Walt thought he had a vague idea what she looked like. It was the woman with the baby stroller.

  15

  On a manicured lawn, nestled behind the Sun Valley Lodge and cast against a backdrop of rugged, summer-snowcapped mountains, loomed an enormous white tent. In a darkening sky, fiery pink clouds began to melt and dissolve. Vintners put last-minute touches on their tables in preparation for the wine tasting, a preview of the following night’s auction items.

  The presenters, smartly dressed and deeply tanned, knew one another well. With the preview being as important to them as the rehearsal dinner was to the bride, nerves were on display. It was a matter of honor and company pride to fetch higher bids than the competition, even at a fund-raiser. A few lots would sell with reserves. The most famous of these was the John Adams.

  Walt, Brandon, and a deputy named Blompier delivered the attaché case without incident. The search for the female suspect had failed, adding to Walt’s unease. Although the motel was being watched, Walt didn’t expect anyone to return.

  With the temperature in the low seventies and expected to drop ten degrees every hour for the next three, the Adams bottles had been transferred to a temperature-controlled Plexiglas viewing case. Brandon stood guard immediately behind the case despite Remy having requested something low-profile.

  Guests began arriving.

  Seeing the reverence in the faces of the onlookers as they approached the Adams display, Walt understood how rare such a viewing had to be. To him, they were three scratched old bottles of wine, but he overheard the discussions: the story of Remy’s discovery of the bottles in Paris, the lengthy authentication, marred by some kind of myth straining to be legend . . . the controversy . . . and always the astronomical reserve price.

  Walt had posted several deputies: four in uniform outside, two in plainclothes inside. He had the Mobile Command vehicle, the MC, parked nearby, a thirty-foot RV tricked out with all sorts of communications equipment, all of it donated.

  Walt spotted Remy, crossed the tent, and politely ushered him into the grand dining tent, where a sea of bare round tables and a massive stage awaited the following night’s festivities. He handed Remy a stack of nine photographs that Branson Risk had e-mailed to him.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  The photos were dark, the faces distorted by movement. The man in question had been wrestling with the attaché case, which was locked to the Taurus’s seat frame. Two of the nine caught a piece of his face in focus.

  “No,” said Remy.

  “You have to wonder how these people knew what they knew,” Walt said. “They went to a lot of trouble trying to steal that case.”

  “The Adams bottles have been in the catalog for months, Sheriff. Whoever did this has had a long time to plan.”

  “But as I understand it, Branson Risk contained the delivery details to a handful of people.”

  “I’m certain of it. But they are in the business of moving valuable art, are they not? Certainly they m
ust establish patterns to their work, no?” He passed the photographs back to Walt.

  “It still doesn’t explain how they knew which flight Malone would be on or which car he’d rented.”

  “Someone at the airport . . . a TSA agent, perhaps. The case required all sorts of waivers because of the TSA’s ban on fluids. We did as they asked. If you paid off the right agent, you’d know what’s moving where.”

  “You’ve thought about this, have you?” Walt asked.

  “It’s my million dollars, Sheriff. A man has been killed. Yes, I’ve thought about it.”

  “We are on occasion asked to provide transportation for valuable art,” Walt conceded. “As you can imagine, there’s a great deal of it in this valley. This kind of thing is not entirely foreign to me. But, honestly, we’ve met private, not commercial, jets. I’ve never known of any big-dollar private art arriving on a commercial flight.”

  “That was at my request, I’m afraid,” Remy said. “Your local airport ran out of landing times for general aviation, given the high volume of private aircraft arriving this weekend. That left us the option of landing the bottles privately in Twin Falls and driving them two hours north or flying them in commercially and requiring a nightmare of paperwork. The less they’re moved, the better. I opted for the commercial flight, going against Branson Risk’s recommendations. So the blame falls on me.”

  “And Branson Risk,” Walt said.

  “I’m not convinced this is going to get you anywhere.”

  Walt tapped the top photograph. “I need to identify this individual. I need to know how they could be so well prepared and ready for Malone’s arrival.”

  “You believe they will try again.” Remy made it a statement. “I seriously doubt that.”

  “Tonight, tomorrow night—they’ve spent time and money on this. They’ll make another try. It’ll be something bold, daring, and, they hope, completely unexpected. The way they used the wrecker tells us that much.” He pulled Remy deeper into the tent, well out of earshot. “What if I could have a local artist duplicate the bottles? Copy the labels? Replace the real bottles with fakes?”