“I’d kill for a water.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Wow. Help yourself, chief. The fridge is stocked.”
The loft was a big open space. It had a second level and the front wall was two stories tall with huge windows that reached to the ceiling. The look was airy and minimalist. The view of the city was magnificent. The kitchen was separated from the main space by a long glass counter. The refrigerator was a stainless steel Sub-Zero with double doors.
Coburn grabbed a water and drifted back to Sabrina and the teenager.
“This is Chaz,” Sabrina said.
“Thanks for the water, Chaz.”
The girl shrugged, then walked barefoot back to her MacBook.
A thin woman of fifty plus came down the stairs and floated toward them in bare feet. She was thin nearly to the point of emaciation and she was bald. Her eyes were hidden behind John Lennon glasses with blue lenses. Her arms were bone and her chest was flat. Her pants were black military fatigues and she wore a plain white tank that hung on her frame as if on a wire hanger.
“Who is he?” she demanded.
“His name is Coburn. He’s cool. No worries.”
“Ship him back to where you found him.”
“We need a place to crash.”
“Tell your boyfriend to find a Holiday Inn.”
“Courtney is dead.”
Clover took a step back. She stared without blinking through the blue lenses.
“She was murdered,” Sabrina said.
Clover sucked in a long deep breath and closed her eyes. “How?”
“Doesn’t matter. The police found her body in Washington Square Park. This guy knows who did it.”
Her eyes flicked open. The blue lenses pivoted to Coburn.
“What’s your story?” Clover said.
“The police think I killed Courtney.”
“Did you?”
Coburn shook his head no.
“The men who killed her did this to my face.”
Clover pushed her hands under her glasses to wipe away tears.
“The cops think Coburn was involved. We need a place to lie low for a few days while we dig into this, and my place is no good.”
“Nothing about this makes me happy.”
“Nothing makes you happy,” Sabrina countered.
Clover glared at Coburn.
Manhattan shimmered outside the windows. The Chrysler building stood like a beacon in the distance against a cobalt sky. Sabrina and Clover sequestered themselves in the upstairs loft to talk alone. Coburn saw them up there seated face to face on a bed. He watched Sabrina tilt forward and rest her head on Clover’s shoulder. Clover removed her John Lennon glasses and set them aside. Coburn stared out at the view, then he wandered the apartment in the typical manner of a curious guest.
Chaz ignored him. She was busy with her tiny laptop computer. Coburn stood at one end of the kitchen counter. The countertop was crowded with prescription bottles of all shapes and sizes. The place was stocked like a pharmacy. He scanned the labels. He saw Doxorubicin and Bleomycin, among others. There were several bags of syringes. The picture developed clearly in Coburn’s mind that Clover had cancer and she was fighting it with everything the drug companies could legally market.
Coburn glanced again at Chaz. Her mother wouldn’t be around much longer. Maybe the girl knew and maybe she didn’t. Perhaps the impending loss had provoked the dark makeup, though he figured it had as much to do with hormones as anything.
Sabrina and Clover came down after an hour. The four of them gathered at the kitchen island with Coburn and Chaz on one side, Sabrina and Clover shoulder to shoulder, facing them.
Clover grabbed an ashtray and lit a joint.
Coburn waved away a haze of blue smoke.
Clover gave him a look. “Want a hit?”
“I’ll pass. Thanks.”
She took a long drag.
The doctor in him had a thousand questions for her.
“Where do we go from here?” Sabrina asked.
“We find Ripley,” Coburn said.
“The police say he’s dead.”
“They are wrong.”
“So where do we start?”
Coburn rested his forearms against the counter. “The records of his life will end at the age of twenty-five. That’s when the avalanche supposedly swept him away. He faked his own death.”
“Why?” Chaz asked.
“That’s the million dollar question.”
“Was he in trouble?” Sabrina said. “Gambling debt maybe?”
“Anything is possible, but he has lived off the grid for fifteen years. That’s a long time to hide from someone you owe a few bucks to.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Clover exhaled, the joint held six inches from her face. “In this world you run as far and as fast and for as long as you have to, or you die. People who loan money don’t play nice. You repay what you owe or you wind up in the dumpster with fewer body parts than you were born with. That’s the way the system works, and it does work.”
Clover took another drag.
Coburn watched her. Her eyes were pinched shut behind the blue lenses, and the tendons stood out in her neck. She was tensed up. Her breathing had slowed. She was in pain. The cancer was eating her alive.
“What about warrants?” Sabrina asked. “Maybe he was going to jail. I’d certainly fake my death to keep that from happening.”
“Interesting thought,” Coburn said.
The haze of blue smoke lingered like morning fog on a riverbank. Clover coughed once, and then harder. She set the joint in the cut crystal ashtray. The coughing spell went on for more than a minute and sounded agonizing. The spasms came from somewhere deep inside. By the time they subsided, she looked drained and defeated.
“Clo?” Sabrina said. “Need anything?”
She shook her head slowly, eyes closed, smooth clean scalp shiny in the light.
“So he finds himself in deep water and decides to cut his losses,” Sabrina continued.
“And he does this when he’s all of twenty-five years old,” Coburn said.
“That’s a lot of life left to live. A lot of years to waste behind bars,” Sabrina said.
Clover nodded. “I would have done the same thing. I’d have run. I’d have disappeared and never resurfaced. No way I’d rot in a cell.”
“We don’t know that this was about jail. We don’t know anything about him except that he dropped out of college, then dropped out of sight,” Coburn said. “We are sitting here in a cloud of pot smoke doing some pretty wild speculating.”
“There are only so many logical reasons a person reaches the decision to fall off the face of the earth. You have to have something you’re running from,” Sabrina said.
Coburn slid off his stool and stood with his back to them. He could see them reflected in the big windows. “I saw the look in Ripley’s eyes. He didn’t strike me as the type of guy who’s scared of much, but seeing me and hearing me say his name freaked him out. No doubt in my mind.”
The MacBook had been closed and set aside. Chaz retrieved it and opened the screen. She fired up a web browser and typed Google into the address bar.
They searched: Brian Ripley/Aspen, CO/ Avalanche/ Death/ Obituary.
The Google search spit up a few thousand results, most of it unrelated garbage. Sabrina stood at the girl’s side and Coburn watched over her shoulder. The girl’s mother detached herself from the conversation and staggered upstairs to lie down. She looked weak and tired.
Chaz clicked one link after another. Finally there was a link to an archived newspaper article from the Aspen Weekly News. The byline gave the name of a Pitkin County local reporter. Details were sparse other than the fact that a young man living in the Aspen/Snowmass area had been skiing in the backcountry when he got caught in a snow slide. At the time, the search for the body was still underway. The young man, Brian Ripley of Omaha, Nebraska was missing and presumed dead. There was not
hing spectacular or scandalous.
Sabrina turned to him. “Thoughts?” she asked.
“Back it out to the search results. See what else we find. This just regurgitates what we already know. I’m looking for an obituary.”
There wasn’t one. Not even a mention of the eventual status of the recovery effort. No mention of the body being pulled from the mountainside. The story had been lost, buried, or forgotten.
“Nothing,” Sabrina said.
“New search,” Coburn said.
Chaz clicked on the track pad and refreshed the Google homepage.
“Look for any sort of conviction or judgments against him. Anything that might have inspired him to hide. I want to know if he was facing jail time at the time of the accident.”
Her fingers roamed over the keyboard. She hit RETURN and watched as the screen filled with useless results.
“Bummer,” Chaz said.
“About what I might have expected.” Coburn shrugged. They were back at square one.
Chaz slapped the MacBook shut and took her Snapple to the sofa.
“Where is Ripley?” Sabrina asked.
“Dead, as far as I know, but Smith is somewhere within a few miles of where we sit right now. We can stop chasing the name Ripley right here and now because the trail leads nowhere. He didn’t die, he was simply reborn, and I came face to face with him two nights ago. If we want to find the man who killed your sister, we have to stop looking for the man he was, and concentrate on the man he became.”
48
The cops were back.
The black and white was parked at the curb on the opposite side of the street from Sabrina Swisher’s apartment with both cops sitting inside in the dark talking football. They had a view of her window. There was no light inside her apartment. They’d been given a description and been told to watch and wait. O’Shannon wanted to know if she came or went throughout the night.
They weren’t watching for a petite blonde and they didn’t care when one walked past their car and crossed the street to the apartment building. It was a few minutes after midnight.
Eva DuPont slipped up six flights to Sabrina Swisher’s apartment. It had been remedial work finding the address. She was interested in understanding the link between Courtney Swisher and Brian Ripley, because if she could understand the connection, perhaps she could more easily track him.
She approached the apartment and removed a slim tool from her jacket pocket. A door opened down the hall and a middle-aged couple in their underwear stood in the open doorway arguing. Eva turned away and tucked the tool inside her jacket as she veered back toward the stairs. But then the woman stomped back inside and the man slammed the door.
Eva punched out the lock and it dropped to the floor on the inside. She slithered in like a ghost and put the chain on the door. She knew the cops were watching the window so she left the lights off. What she needed wouldn’t take long. She simply needed to learn what she could about the Swisher sisters and then move on.
Eva burned ten minutes and exited with nothing. The apartment was clean. Whatever she needed to find out about Ripley would not be found there. Maybe she would return in twenty-four hours when the girl was home and dig some answers out of her, then leave her bleeding in the tub.
Eva eased back out the door and took the stairs down. The cops hadn’t moved. She returned as she had come. She walked right past the open window and vanished into the heart of Greenwich Village.
49
Coburn was on his back on a sofa staring at the ceiling in the dark. The lights were out. It was close to 2 a.m. His legs were out straight and his hands were behind his head. He was deep in thought. The women had gone to bed upstairs. Clover and Sabrina were sharing Clover’s bed and they were whispering up there, a tiny lamp glowing like a candle against a shroud of darkness.
Coburn was thinking about the twenty-five year old Brian Ripley and what it would have been like to have been crushed by a snow slide. Coburn had worked as a helicopter guide in the Chugach Mountain Range in Alaska one winter, employed by a friend who owned the guide service. So he knew what it meant to be chased down a mountain by a speeding wave of ice and snow, to hear the roar of it in your ears and feel the chill on the back of your neck.
He thought about the kid he’d gone to school with. Ripley had dropped out at twenty-one. Then he had disappeared at twenty-five. What had he become involved in that forced him to fake his own death? Coburn stared long and hard without blinking and the dark ceiling turned into a movie screen for all the images washing through his mind.
The online article from the Aspen Weekly News stuck with him. It was locked inside his photographic memory. He read the words again. The piece had been picked up by the AP.
Backcountry skier killed in avalanche.
He scrolled through the article multiple times in his head but came away with nothing new. He closed his eyes and exhaled. He was exhausted. The movie in his mind went black. The trail was cold. Ripley was dead. Smith had vanished.
Then Coburn sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. His eyes tracked to the view beyond the windows. He walked through the moonlight to Chaz’s computer. He leaned out and glanced up through the glass floor of the loft and saw that all was quiet and still, then he opened the MacBook.
He brushed his index finger across the track pad, opened the web browser, clicked history and opened the link to the Aspen Weekly News site. He quickly found what he was looking for. The article mentioned Ripley’s wife. Ripley had been married, but no name was given.
Coburn did a fresh Google search and found a wedding announcement from three years previous. It was a single paragraph announcing the upcoming nuptials of Aspen local, Gabriella Elizabeth Verdon, to Nebraska native, Brian Lee Ripley. There was a grainy black and white photo. The larger he made it, the more pixilated and distorted it became, but Coburn recognized the face of his former college roommate. Ripley had taken a bride. Interesting.
Coburn again did a fresh search and found a second mention of Gabriella Verdon, again in the Aspen Weekly News, regarding her involvement in a local charity event. The piece was nearly ten years old, but at least it provided evidence that she had remained in Aspen for a time after Ripley’s death. Maybe she still lived there.
Coburn instinctively reached for his cell and patted an empty pocket. He kept forgetting it was gone. He needed to make a call.
He shut the laptop and glanced for a landline. In Clover’s line of work it was probably best not to have her name attached to a traceable number. He crept up the stairs and poked his head into the loft. Chaz was buried in a mound of bed sheets. On the other side of the room Clover had twisted onto her side and was breathing lightly in her sleep. She was sharing her bed with her friend.
The lamp was on Sabrina’s side of the bed. Clover had drifted off to sleep but Sabrina was awake with her head propped up on a pillow, eyes wide open. She was staring at the ceiling. She was clearly not at peace.
Coburn raised a hand and gestured at her. She saw him and raised her head. He motioned for her to follow him downstairs.
“I need to use your cell,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I have an idea.”
“Share.”
“Ripley was married. The article online mentioned a wife. There’s at least a chance she still lives in Aspen. Maybe there’s a listing. I need to use your cell to call information.” He put his hand out.
“What are the odds?” she asked.
“Probably not good.”
“Yeah.”
“But worth a shot, right?”
“Sure,” she said. “Hold tight a sec. My cell is upstairs.”
Sabrina floated silently up the stairs and returned half a minute later.
Coburn put his hand out again.
She pressed the cell into his open palm.
He dialed 411 and requested information for Aspen, Colorado. He first requested the number for a Gabriella Verdon and the opera
tor told him there were no listings for that name. Next he asked for listings under the name Gabriella Ripley. Again, no dice.
“No luck?” she said.
“No.”
He stared a long moment, unable to take his eyes off her. She let him stare. She was enjoying it. She tilted her head and her hair shifted and fell behind her shoulder.
Coburn broke the spell and glanced at the cell in his hand. “One more idea,” he said.
Sabrina watched him dial and put the cell to his ear.
“Toby? Hey man, it’s Coburn.”
Toby had owned the guide service in the Chugach Range. Now he was an engineer working for an aerospace company in Denver.
“I’m looking for your sister.” Coburn told him. “Is she still working in Aspen? Cool. Can you hit me with her cell number? You’re a stud. Later, man.”
Coburn ended the call and immediately dialed the new number. He locked eyes with Sabrina while the line rang through.
A woman answered.
“Maggie?’
“Coburn? How’s your bod?”
“Getting older by the minute.”
“Where are you?”
“New York.”
“Sorry to hear that. How’d you find me?”
“Your brother.”
“I’ve never forgiven him for leaving Alaska.”
“How about you? Are you still house-sitting for celebrities?”
“Absolutely. I’m living the dream.”
“Making any money?”
“Nah. Don’t want it, don’t need it.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Thanks, grandpa.”
“Tell me why I didn’t marry you?”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
“Ah, now I remember.”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“It’s after two here.”
“Exactly. I was nearly asleep when you called.”
“You’re two hours behind there.”
“Midnight is late in any time zone.”
“Listen, I’m needing some information. Think you could help me out?” Coburn asked.
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