In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “He could call you on your cell number or maybe your home. He’d rather not call the shop. I mentioned that I knew you used that Internet thing-”

  “Skype.”

  “That’s the one. Said he could do it that way if you wanted.”

  “Did he say what it’s about?”

  “It’s a homicide. He’s a homicide dick. Boldt. We’ve talked about him before.”

  “We have,” Walt said. In the world of homicide, Lou Boldt was a living legend-able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He had a career clearance rate of eighty percent when the nearest competition was in the mid-sixties. He’d not only caught the Cross Killer, but the serial killer’s copycat. Just the idea of speaking with Lou Boldt excited him-being involved with a case of Boldt’s would be rare air.

  “I’d be happy to speak with him,” Walt said.

  “Thought that was how you’d feel, but didn’t want to put words into your mouth.”

  That’s a first.

  “I’m pretty sure I know the homicide,” Jerry Fleming said. “Just guessing, but there’s one been in the Intelligencer off and on for a week now. Makes sense that Boldt would have caught it. Woman assaulted. Beaten to death. Nothing sexual-at least not that’s been reported. Reason it stays in the papers is both because of the beating she took-it was really bad, Walt-and because she had a history of dating people in professional sports.”

  “A call girl?”

  “That’s almost how it reads, but no, I don’t think so. I’m sure Boldt can tell you. Dating, as in living with a guy for a few months. Basketball, football. Didn’t seem to matter. She liked ’em big and strong. Liked the cameras and nightclubs. Papers rumored an affair with one of the team owners, but backed off it pretty quickly. She obviously got around. And then she gets herself pulverized, and of course everyone’s thinking it’s one of the jocks. That kind of testosterone-charged hammering those bucks can deliver.”

  “But me?” Walt asked.

  “I don’t know. I was asked if you’d take the call. If you’d keep it quiet. And I told him how I was sure you would but I’d ask.”

  “Absolutely,” Walt said.

  “That’s all I needed.”

  “How are you?” Walt asked.

  “I’ll give him the green light and you can take it from there. Maybe this Skype thing keeps it the quietest.”

  “He can call me tonight. I’ll leave it up. But how are you, Dad? How’s it going?”

  “He’s an important man over here. You know that, right?”

  “I know that,” Walt said. He wasn’t going to ask again; his father knew as much.

  “Let me know if I can help out with it,” Jerry said.

  The line clicked.

  “Dad?” Walt looked at the face of his phone: Disconnected.

  No kidding, he was thinking, as he pocketed the phone.

  Walt knocked and let himself in through the front door. A camera’s flash caught his eye and he moved in that direction through a living room atop a spongy carpet. The Asian furniture contrasted with big canvases of contemporary art. He headed toward the strobing light with his father’s description of the assault in his mind, half-expecting to see a bloodied body beaten to a pulp on the kitchen floor though his conscious mind knew better-it had been called in as a bear attack. He was there to sign off on that assessment for the sake of any future insurance inquiry. Springtime brought the brown bears out of hibernation. They came down to the valley floor looking for water and were typically seduced by the aroma of garbage cans. Once in a great while one would find its way into a garage or, even more rarely, a kitchen like this one and shred the place.

  Walt whistled, seeing the extent of the damage.

  Fiona glanced in his direction, but her eyes hardened and she went right back to her photography. He wanted to sort out their problems, but kept to business, heading over to deputy Tommy Brandon, who was on the phone.

  Brandon hung up immediately. He wore XXL everything, a ten-hour beard that would have taken Walt six days to grow, and a smugness that came with being the go-to guy his whole life. Walt wasn’t sure when Brandon’s affair with his wife had begun, only that because of it Brandon owed him something beyond the apology he’d never gotten. Gail owed him attorneys’ fees, by his way of thinking, but he’d never see anything. She owed their twin eleven-year-old daughters much more, but that would have to wait until the girls were older and realized the depth and degree of their mother’s selfishness. For now, business as usual.

  “So?” he asked Brandon.

  “Picnic time at the Berkholders’,” Brandon answered.

  The kitchen cabinets hung open, their contents strewn across the countertops: cookies, coffee grounds, tea bags, crackers, broken jars, tomato sauce, jams, pickles-an extraordinary mess. The refrigerator hung partially open, with a slushy pile of leftovers, vegetables, and meats at its feet, as if it had vomited its contents onto the reclaimed barn wood flooring. The freezer oozed frozen lemonade, orange juice, and ice cream in a colorful creamy waterfall that caught each glass shelf.

  Walt was no stranger to bear raids. His father ridiculed him for his responding to them as part of his job.

  “Did you get the claw marks on-”

  “Yes!” Fiona snapped, still refusing to look directly at him. “On the cabinets and the butcher block, both.”

  “The spill beneath the fridge?”

  “Got it,” she answered.

  “Just for the record,” Walt said, “I lobbied her hard. I thought I’d made-”

  “Not hard enough,” Fiona said.

  Bewildered by the exchange, Brandon tried to slip away but Walt caught him.

  “Access?” Walt asked his deputy.

  Brandon led Walt down a short hallway to a four-car garage.

  “Musta been left open, though the owner claims otherwise. Looks like the thing checked out the dog door”-the frame of the dog door had imploded into the hallway-“and maybe the door came open in the process. We found it like this.”

  Walt studied the door jamb, especially its metal hardware, and then did the same on the broken dog door. He looked into the whistle-clean garage-about the size of the first floor of his house-and its ship-deck-gray paint. He descended the three steps and went down on one knee, getting the light right.

  “If she hasn’t done so already,” he said, “have Fiona get shots of the door hardware and some angles of the garage floor.”

  “Will do. But why does the insurance care about the garage floor?” Brandon asked.

  “You ever been to one of these before?” Walt said.

  “Sure.”

  “Open your eyes and use-”

  “Your head,” Brandon finished for him, quoting a Walt-ism.

  “Exactly.”

  Brandon studied the door hardware and didn’t have the courage to ask what he was supposed to be looking for.

  “Fur,” Walt said without looking back as he kept to the very edge of the garage floor. “Animal hair. A tight space like that dog door, we should have seen some caught in the screws or hinges.”

  He worked steadily toward the garage doors.

  “Yeah, okay…” He sounded confused.

  “When was the last time you saw a bear pass over strawberry jam, broken glass jar or not?”

  “Ah…”

  “And since when doesn’t a bear claw a door trying to get it open? It claws the cabinet-in the middle of the cabinet-but not the door?”

  “But there are claw marks,” Brandon protested.

  “Check out the size of them,” Walt said. “A bear that big doesn’t tiptoe through a door. And he doesn’t go through all the food and get back out without leaving tracks.” Walt indicated the clean garage floor. “A flying bear, maybe?”

  “Okay?” Brandon sounded unconvinced.

  “Let’s work the evidence,” Walt said. “Chances are this was a two-legged bear.”

  “A what?”

  “And I’d like to know why he went to a
ll this trouble.”

  4

  With his suit jacket waiting for him on the back of a chair inside the house, and a Seattle Seahawks apron protecting his shirt and tie, Walt pulled the barbecued pork loin off the grill, Beatrice drooling at his feet. It had been a long, poisonously quiet week. He expected to see Fiona later that night.

  “I don’t want dead pig,” Emily said, her arms crossed, her eleven-year-old’s face locked in determination.

  “Don’t do this,” Walt said, collecting his wares onto the cutting board. “This is your dinner. You like bacon, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bacon is pork, same as this.”

  “Then why can’t I have bacon?”

  “It’s the same thing,” sister Nikki said.

  “Because this is what I cooked for dinner,” Walt answered. “I thought you’d like it. It’s your favorite.”

  “Is not.”

  “I like it,” Nikki said.

  “You don’t have to eat it, Em. But no ice cream with Lisa if you don’t eat your dinner.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Nikki rolled her eyes. She didn’t understand her sister any more than Walt did.

  “It is what it is: no dinner, no ice cream. I had planned for the three of you to bike over to Fifteen Flavors. If you’d rather not…?”

  He managed to kick open the door while carrying the board. Beatrice, Emily, and Nikki followed, in that order.

  Lisa charged through the front door, apologizing for being late. Walt conferred with her about the evening’s rules, including bedtime and the ice cream trip, all unnecessary since Lisa knew more about the girls’ routine than he did.

  “You look fancy,” she said, as he got the apron off and the jacket on.

  “My one and only suit.”

  “It suits you.”

  “Ha, ha. It’s the Advocates dinner. Very swishy.”

  He hugged his daughters good night, getting barely anything out of Emily, and heaved a sigh as he closed the front door behind him. An early summer evening was a piece of heaven in Hailey, and this one was no exception. The sun tracked surprisingly high in the sky for seven p.m., skirting the tops of the valley’s western mountains, its golden light taking on a magical, ethereal quality. Neighborhood lawn mowers ticked, the smell of burning charcoal hung in the air. Some kids rode by in a pack of speeding bicycles.

  As he drove north, Walt composed something to say to Fiona, something to try to break the ice. She’d sent him an e-mail with photographs of the bear damage-no message. He’d called twice on the pretense of a follow-up, but she’d failed to call back. It wasn’t the first time Fiona had gone off-grid-she occasionally disappeared for days at a time, unreachable, unpredictable-but this time it felt personal.

  Sun Valley’s Limelight Room, located in the Sun Valley Inn, was a four-star convention hall that had recently undergone a multimilliondollar renovation. It was filled with lavishly appointed tables for three hundred dinner guests, a low stage, and a lectern. Two projection screens displayed PowerPoint slide shows of women at work, mixed with bullet lists of the accomplishments of the nonprofit established to support the battered and abused. Each table of ten had a sponsor. Walt was the guest of a retired general who, thankfully, had picked up the tab for the entire table. Fiona sat to Walt’s left, with Kira Tulivich next to Fiona. Twenty-one-year-old Kira, adorable and gorgeous in a summer dress, had been the victim of a savage assault two years earlier, and an important witness for Walt. Scheduled to give one of the evening’s two keynote addresses, Kira looked both nervous and out of sorts as she studied the cutlery and tried to decide which fork to use.

  Walt elbowed Fiona in the ribs and gestured for her to rescue her charge. Fiona directed Kira to the outside fork and relief washed over the young woman’s face.

  “Thank you,” Fiona whispered.

  “Nice to hear your voice,” Walt said, between bites.

  “We can discuss this later,” she said.

  “But we won’t, will we? Because you won’t return my calls.”

  “Later.”

  “I fought hard for you. Not hard enough, I know-you told me that-but as hard as I dared. As sheriff… I explained my delicate relationship with the paper.” He ate some more salad and watched her move hers around the plate. “You never did tell me why it mattered so much. The way you’ve treated me, I assume it was more than just modesty or vanity. But for the life of me, I can’t figure it out.”

  “For the life of you, no,” she said.

  “But if it was so important-”

  “What’s done is done,” she said, cutting him off.

  “Doesn’t feel that way.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?”

  “Why so angry?”

  “Am I? I don’t mean to be. Seriously. It’s not with you.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Not meant to be.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said.

  He looked up. Every face at the table was looking at them, listening to them. The others immediately returned to their food and they faked conversation, but Walt realized they’d all heard every word. Given the other guests at the table, it meant that most of the valley would know, word for word, everything said. It was the blessing and the curse of the Wood River Valley, and something that all residents willingly suffered as a trade-off to the lifestyle.

  During the entrée, Fiona coached Kira on her talk, and finally the moment arrived when Kira was introduced.

  “We are so grateful to have with us tonight,” the evening’s host began, “a young woman of extraordinary courage, poise, and intelligence. Kira Tulivich turned to Advocates following an ordeal that not only tested her own will to live, but resulted in the apprehension of domestic terrorists by our own Sheriff Walt Fleming, and put an end to a terrorist cell operating within our state. Hers is a story of strength, determination, and recovery, and we are honored to hear from her tonight. Won’t you please join me in welcoming…”

  Her formal introduction was overpowered by the thunderous applause as the guests spontaneously rose to their feet. Kira’s story was already well known. This was her first public appearance since the incident, and the applause carried her from the table to the lectern, some of the women openly weeping. It took her three tries to quiet the crowd. Finally people sat. Kira cleared her throat with a sip of water and began her short and emotional speech.

  Halfway through the speech, Walt felt fingernails scratching at his fist beneath the skirt of the tablecloth as Fiona’s hand found its way into his. He looked over at her, but she never took her watery eyes off the stage. He missed the rest of the talk, his mind racing and unable to light on any single thought except that life brought unexpected pleasures and made it worth getting up in the morning. For the first time at such an event, he hoped the keynote speech would go on for hours.

  Fiona withdrew her hand from his and grabbed her mobile phone, vibrating from within her purse. As she went to stop it, he saw her eyes light upon the screen and consternation grip her face. She slipped the phone back into her purse but their connection was gone. She didn’t even seem to be hearing Kira’s speech.

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  She looked at him, attempting, but failing, to wipe the crease from her brow. She nodded.

  Kira said from the lectern, “I think the main thing I want to say is thanks to the Advocates. The physical healing was the easy part, as it turned out, but the-”

  She stopped abruptly, locked in a stare.

  Walt turned back, following her line of sight to one of the hall’s two center doors, just closing. His sheriff’s instinct was to jump up and hurry into the hallway to see who was out there. But he kept to his seat.

  Kira then searched and her eyes found Fiona, who nodded back at her reassuringly. Some heads turned in the direction of their table. Kira’s eyes finally fell back to her notes and she continued speaking.

  “But the emotional healing, th
e real healing,” she continued, “well… it really does take a village.”

  Walt turned and reached out to both reassure and congratulate Fiona for her mentoring of the girl, but the chair stood empty, Fiona gone.

  Eyes darting around the room, assuming Fiona had gone up to greet Kira as she left the stage, he found his vision blocked as an appreciative audience rose to its feet. Walt stood, tempted to climb up onto his chair, cursing his five-foot-seven frame.

  Instead, he seized the moment, ducking out into the hallway, moving toward the restrooms-thinking Fiona might have gone there-but then, upon seeing a pair of bellmen outside, approached them.

  “A woman?” Walt inquired. “Cream-colored top. Black purse. Maybe left just now.”

  “Didn’t see her.”

  “Don’t I know you?” the other bellman asked.

  Walt ignored it, wondering if the kid had been in trouble or just knew his picture from the local paper. “How about a guy?” Walt said.

  “Big guy? Yeah,” said the first bellman.

  A couple came out-the exodus was under way-and the guest handed the second boy his valet claim stub. The kid took off at a run.

  “Yes, the big guy,” Walt said, trying to hold the other boy’s attention. The rush of people wanting their cars was suffocating. Walt presented his sheriff’s shield, held down low. The boy caught sight of it. “The big guy,” he repeated.

  “Came and went. Wasn’t inside more than, like, two minutes.”

  “How big?”

  “Solid Snake,” said the kid. “You know, Metal Gear, Sons of Liberty?” Reading Walt’s bewilderment, he added, “PSP? Gaming?”

  “Uhh.”

  “Huge, stupid huge. Ridiculous.” A valet stub stabbed at the kid and he accepted it. “Sorry,” he said to Walt. He took off.

  Walt fought up-current against the departing guests and reentered the half-empty conference hall. He located his host and thanked him. He made his way toward the stage and awaited his turn with Kira.

  “You seen Fiona?” Kira asked him immediately. Guests broke in, congratulating her. She shook hands with several of them. Walt wanted a private moment with her but wasn’t going to get it.

  “Restroom,” he said. It was the only explanation that made any sense; Fiona wasn’t leaving Kira in the lurch. “You paused,” he said. “You were looking toward the doors.”