In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  He ordered Beatrice to stay in the Jeep. She smeared her nose against the glass, drawing Chinese characters, desperate to join him.

  The lower third of the thousand-foot mountain, a scree field of broken red rock, terminated thirty yards from the highway, where it joined a field of brown, sun-baked weeds and buffalo grass. The open eyes of the dead body, had there been any, would have looked up at the red of the rock, the full saturation of the evergreens, and an impossibly blue sky that was the hallmark of high mountain living.

  “Some kind of face-lift,” Walt said, approaching the body. It had been severely preyed upon.

  “I haven’t messed with him,” Brandon said. “Wanted to wait for you. But it’s pretty obvious we won’t be matching that face with any missing person reports.”

  Walt neared the haphazardly installed police tape.

  “There’s a set of tire tracks, so tread lightly,” Brandon said.

  “I see ’em.”

  Walt dodged the tire treads, and kneeled. “It’s a truck. A pickup maybe.” He studied the lay of the grass. “Three… no, four… kids and an adult approached the body. That is, if you came in from over there.” He pointed.

  “I did.”

  Walt parted some grass and used a stick to lift some of the matted weeds.

  “The predators were a family of fox and a dog the size of a Labrador. The dog was running. Might have been after the fox, not our John Doe.”

  The body appeared to have been tossed into a tangle of twigs and weeds that ran along the base of the scree field, which was piled four feet high in places and stretched out sixty yards or more.

  Instead of eyes, two blood-black holes stared up. A piece of the nose was missing. He’d been a big man-six-four or -five, two-seventy. Fit. Wide shoulders. Huge thighs in what had to be custom-tailored jeans.

  Walt declined to move the body until he had some decent photos.

  As if on cue, Fiona’s Subaru pulled up. She climbed out, waved at Walt, and went around back to collect her gear.

  He remembered her saying that their moment together wouldn’t interfere with their professional work, but there was something wrong about her not answering any of his calls or e-mails and now showing up all sunny and bright. In fact he resented it, and had Brandon not been there, he would have rushed over to her and demanded some answers. It was then he realized he was going to be the one to have a hard time keeping this professional.

  As Walt stood there, his mind reeling, Brandon had the good sense to direct her around the side of the roped-off area and to help her over the security tape.

  She looked tired but determined to appear otherwise.

  “Hi, there!” she said, as if they were neighbors running into each other in the supermarket.

  “Uhhh,” Walt said.

  “Good God!” She staggered back as she spotted the body among the sticks and debris. She glanced sharply at Walt, back to the body, over at Brandon. Back to the body. She looked afraid and confused and as if she might be sick. “Dear God.” She took another step back, kneeled, and retched.

  When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes.

  He took one quick step toward her, wanting to comfort her, but caught himself like a runner coming off the blocks before the gun.

  “You okay? Should have warned you. Sorry about that. You don’t have to do this,” he said.

  Brandon looked at him like he was crazy. Walt never excused anyone from a crime scene, especially not the photographer.

  “Someone’s got to take the pictures,” Brandon said, speaking what he was thinking. Brandon lacked the social filter that came on standard model human beings. He tended to say whatever entered his head.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I can do it.”

  “You don’t look okay,” Walt said.

  “You get used to it,” Brandon said, trying for sympathetic but sounding brutish.

  Her tears hit Walt the hardest. He’d forgotten how horribly a dead body could impact the uninitiated.

  She busied herself, keeping her attention on the contents of her camera bag as she switched lenses and checked filters. Her hands shook to where she dropped a lens. She scrambled to recover it, blowing onto and fogging its glass and inspecting it, but all with the exaggerated movements of someone who knew she was being watched.

  Walt heard a car door shut and, turning in that direction, felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck as a silhouette of a massive figure stood on the pavement’s edge. Behind the man, a sheriff’s cruiser had joined the breakdown lane and now the commanding silhouette made sense, and Walt raised a hand toward Sergeant Lou Boldt. He experienced both exhilaration and dread. The teacher had walked in on his unfinished science project.

  Torn between wanting to comfort Fiona and welcoming the sergeant, Walt moved toward the highway. Boldt came down the embankment. He was broad-shouldered, somewhere in his late forties, his graying, close-cropped haircut a throwback to the 1950s. His head appeared oversized, a condition emphasized by his short neck. A pair of reading glasses hung around that neck, bouncing off a red tie and crisp white shirt, framed by a brown sport coat, threadbare at the sleeves. As he drew closer to Walt, a warmth filled his pale gray eyes. He reminded Walt of a husky or wolf. They shook hands vigorously, like long-lost friends, Boldt towering over Walt. His voice was deep but surprisingly gentle for such a big man.

  “I hope I’m not intruding.”

  Walt thought how much more impressive the man was in person, compared to a chat window on a computer monitor.

  “Not at all,” Walt said. Both men knew he was lying.

  “Never been one to sit around a motel room.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “You mind?” he asked, nodding toward the crime scene.

  Walt waved him forward and glanced at Fiona, wondering how she was doing. Wondering if she’d give him some look, some sign that she was indeed the same woman who’d freely-hungrily-shared herself with him only a few days before. But she maintained her professional demeanor, her head in her gear-or maybe she was still too overcome by the sight of the body to look up.

  Boldt accepted introductions and then went silent, almost reverent, as he approached the body. He didn’t comment on the amateur job of the tape barrier. He didn’t make small talk with Fiona or Brandon. Instead, he looked left and right, studied the ground as Walt had done, took in the tangle of branches and brambles that partly concealed the body.

  “Don’t let me get in the way,” he finally said to Walt.

  “Happy to have you,” Walt lied, wishing he’d had a few minutes more alone with the body before Boldt had arrived.

  Boldt stepped closer, moving slowly and deliberately. “I hate outdoor scenes,” he said. “Give me a nice small apartment any time.”

  “A lot of variables,” Walt said.

  “Far too many.”

  The man’s precaution impressed Walt. The tentativeness of each step. The scrutiny of his surroundings.

  Brandon caught Walt’s eye and raised an eyebrow, also impressed.

  “Coyotes?” Boldt asked.

  “A family of fox and a good-sized dog,” Walt answered.

  “Did that hawk have a role in it?” Boldt asked.

  He’d caught Walt by surprise, a situation that brought a flush to his face. Boldt pointed out a matted mess of reddish feathers and blood-stained down ten yards south, at the edge of the tangle of avalanche debris.

  “Red-tail,” Walt said, identifying it immediately. “Looks fresh. You’re right.”

  He instructed Brandon to bag the dead bird, and Brandon looked anything but thrilled.

  “You think he was thrown in there?” Walt asked.

  “Kind of looks it,” Boldt said. “Are those tire tracks from a pickup truck?”

  “We’ll need to pull a tape to confirm it, but I’d say so.”

  “He’s a big boy,” Boldt said. “Hell of a throw from that distance.”

  “Got that right.”

&nbs
p; “Odd place to dump a body if that’s what we’re looking at,” Boldt said, one eye cast toward the highway. “All the open country you’ve got around here, and a person chooses the side of the highway.”

  “He could have been hiking. Could have come down the side of the mountain. But there are no real trails along this stretch. And if he’d been bushwhacking, his socks, where they’re exposed, would be covered in cheat grass and be carrying good old Idaho dust. The socks are way too clean. He’s a mess-don’t get me wrong. But he wasn’t hiking.”

  “I like the way you think,” Boldt said.

  A guy like Boldt would never see the accident first. He would look for foul play, invent it from a dozen different scenarios and then slowly and willingly backtrack to settle on accidental death or natural causes, but only much later.

  “Maybe…” Walt said, “someone did him in the vehicle, panicked, and dumped him here. More an act of passion.”

  “Works for me.” He didn’t sound at all convinced, and Walt wondered why he’d thrown that out there. Better to keep his lips zipped around Boldt.

  As Boldt moved to his right, dropped to a knee, and then stood back up, Walt’s resentment over the intrusion gave way to admiration. It was like watching a big-league hitter at batting practice.

  “Listen,” Boldt said, “do what it is you do. Don’t let me interfere.”

  “We would normally wait for Fiona-Ms. Kenshaw-to give us the go-ahead,” Walt replied. “When she’s through with him in this position, we’d roll him and look for ID and go inch by inch for evidence.”

  “I’m making you uncomfortable,” Boldt said.

  “Dead bodies make me uncomfortable, not visiting detectives.”

  Fiona relaxed the camera. “I’m done until I can get closer.”

  “Gloves?” Walt asked Boldt, producing a pair of surgical gloves and offering them to his guest. But Boldt waved him off and, reaching into the pocket of his sport coat, withdrew a pair.

  “I’m going to play up the significance of the tire tracks and try to work them into the story, so for now, Fiona, give me whatever you can of the tracks, and stay well clear of them if possible. Brandon, you’ll help me roll the body. We’ll go after it from the other side. Fiona, make sure to get close-ups of the sticks and all this stuff around him.”

  “What’s all this rock and debris from? Landslide?” Boldt asked.

  “Snow slides,” Walt explained. “Each winter we see slides all along here. A number of deer and elk are found as it melts each spring.”

  “Lovely.”

  “The slides shove all the year’s deadfall, the smaller live trees, you name it, down ahead of them. Rock, scree, and everything else piles up here at the bottom.”

  “Looks like a bomb hit,” Boldt said.

  “Pretty close to that.”

  Boldt processed what he’d been told, filing it away. You could see the guy thinking. Over his entire career, Walt had investigated a dozen suspicious or criminal deaths. Boldt probably handled that many per month in a bad month, and had been doing so for a quarter century.

  Brandon established a route up through the detritus and led the way for Fiona, who climbed tentatively. Walt could tell by the way she moved that she still wasn’t herself. She should have taken his offer to walk away from this one; he could have faked his way through some pictures.

  “You noticed the red-tail,” Walt said. “The hawk,” he clarified. “Anything else I’ve missed?”

  Fiona was down on one knee taking pictures, partially obscured by the upended branches. Head down, she was either adjusting a setting on the camera, or struggling for composure.

  “Could it be an accidental death?” Boldt asked. “This location?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But the boots and clothes don’t look exactly right,” Boldt said, searching for what Walt had been getting at.

  “They’d stop me from making too hasty a ruling, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It is.” For the first time in several minutes, Boldt stepped closer to the pile of bramble and sticks. “I might bag his head and hands and feet,” Boldt allowed, clearly reluctant to say anything. “Paper bags. Prior to rolling him. Moving a person that size… moving him out of there is going to be an adventure. Bound to shake a few leaves off the tree.”

  “Tommy!” Walt called out.

  “Paper bags,” Brandon said. “Got it.”

  “Back of my Cherokee if you don’t have them. Left side. In the backpack.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Fiona met eyes with Walt through the tangle of twigs, still looking slightly pale and definitely disoriented. He wished there were something he could do for her. He wanted to dismiss her and allow her to get away from looking close-up through a lens at the man with the missing eyes. Her own eyes were distant and unfocused; he wasn’t sure she even saw him.

  “Maybe that’s enough,” he said to her. “We can take it from here.”

  She shook her head. “I’m good,” she said.

  “A big guy like this doesn’t go down easy,” Boldt said.

  “No.”

  “The head wound, right at the scalp line? There’s not enough blood.”

  “Postmortem? Maybe occurred when they tossed him.”

  “They is the operative word. A guy that size, it would take two.”

  “Might have been robbery,” said Brandon, returning with the paper bags and tape. “Check out the tan line on his left wrist.”

  “Yes, I saw that, too,” Boldt said. “Not just a missing watch, but a big watch-a very big watch.”

  “A TAG Heuer maybe. Something like that. You tell him about the break-ins?” Brandon asked.

  Walt dressed down his deputy with a single look. He had no intention of running down every active case.

  “He’s referring to a pair of B-and-E’s in the area. Made to look like bears. Probably some itinerants. We get a lot of that in summers, more so this year because of the economy.”

  “But doubtful he was out hiking,” Boldt said, repeating what he’d been told.

  Boldt looked up the inhospitable scree face of the mountain. Low cumulus clouds moved swiftly north to south against the static edge of the mountain peak. It was disorienting; for a moment it appeared the mountain was moving, not the clouds.

  Walt wasn’t buying the hiking theory. There were no established trails up there where the trees met the scree field. He didn’t expect a city cop to understand it, but he wasn’t going to repeat himself. He could invent a story to explain the tire tracks: the driver could have veered off road to avoid hitting a deer, the tracks having nothing to do with the body; or a driver might have spotted the body and, not knowing what it was, driven over for a closer look and then taken off; or the pickup might have dumped the body.

  “Get the name of the Boy Scout leader, the guy driving those kids, and let’s get them out of here,” Walt instructed Brandon. “We don’t want them seeing us rolling him. This is bad enough already.”

  Maybe the medical examiner would be able to tell a better story. “Bruising might fill in some of this,” Walt said.

  “True enough.”

  He and Boldt moved through the thicket of tumbled debris and approached the body from uphill.

  “Brandon!” Walt shouted. “Get a tarp. Back of the Cherokee.”

  Brandon waved.

  More cars slowed. He saw people using their cell phones to take pictures. Boldt saw it too as they waited for the tarp. He pointed out a dirt track that led to a nursery south of their position.

  “We’ll canvass the area and put something out on the radio,” Walt said. “This is the one and only road up and down the valley. We could easily have a witness to the truck running off the shoulder.”

  When Brandon returned with the tarp, the three men positioned it and then rolled the body. The back of the skull was staved. The blunt force had been delivered by something fairly wide, long, and solid.

  “Well, there’s our cause o
f death,” Boldt said.

  “Those jeans are worth a week’s pay,” Brandon said, spotting the leather tag on the belt loop. “And those boots are Van Gorkoms. Custom made, Mountain Trekkers. Fifteen hundred a pop.”

  “Ouch,” Boldt said. “So the guy was a clotheshorse.”

  “Apparently not the only one,” Walt said. “I’ve never heard of Van Gorkoms.”

  “He’s wearing what? Size fifteen?” Brandon said. “Guys like him and me, we can’t buy stuff off the rack.”

  “But you don’t wear Van Gorkoms,” Boldt said.

  “Me? A saddlemaker in Shoshone makes my hiking boots. They’re okay but they don’t last, and they give me blisters when I’m breaking them in.”

  “I don’t think the detective actually cares, Tommy.”

  A fade line on the back pocket of the blue jeans suggested a wallet, but as Walt searched for it, he came up empty-handed.

  “Missing billfold, missing watch,” Boldt said.

  Walt shook his head.

  “A carjacking gone bad?” Boldt suggested.

  “Probably the best explanation we’re going to get on what we’ve got,” Walt said, hating to admit it.

  “It was his vehicle, you’re saying.” Brandon sounded impressed. “A hitchhiker maybe, or someone fakes a breakdown and gets this guy to pull over. Guy gets out to help and gets a tire iron on the back of the skull for being the Good Samaritan. They get a wallet, a watch, and an SUV, and the whole thing’s over in three minutes.”

  “They hit him a little hard, and dump the body as quickly as possible,” Boldt said.

  The sleeves of the dead man’s shirt were both torn, and Walt reached to open the one on the left arm wider, revealing a sloppy tattoo. It looked like two initials: KK. He tore the shirt slightly wider: another poorly delineated tattoo of a fat-cheeked cherub beneath a storm cloud blowing up a storm.

  Walt thought he heard Fiona gasp as she took several more shots of the overturned body. Drawn by the sound, Walt looked over at her, but she wouldn’t come out from behind the camera. Her hands were shaking too much for the shots to be any good. He shouldn’t have asked her for the close-ups. He’d been thoughtless and cruel, and he wished it was just the two of them so he could apologize.