In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “I just want to find her and get that truck back before it blows up on her.”

  “Did you try her parents?”

  “That relationship… it’s complicated.”

  He thought she sounded more like a psychologist than herself. “So I’ll make the call. We should hear something by the end of the day. It doesn’t take them long.”

  “Should I wait?”

  “No. It’ll be a few hours at the least. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call you.”

  “It’s really nice of you,” she said, her eyes softening.

  “Happy to do it.”

  “I could repay you with a dinner.”

  “I’m with the girls the next few nights. With Boldt here, I’ve been distracted. First job, and all that.”

  “Is he gone?”

  “Leaving in the morning.”

  “How’s that been?”

  “Interesting. We’re kind of working together at the moment.”

  “On the Gale thing?”

  He eyed her. “Good memory.”

  “Easy name to remember.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. Every time he spoke of the dead man he thought of his ex-wife. “Boldt was a big help to me. We’ve got some solid leads.”

  “From canvassing my place, no doubt,” she said, forcing a smile behind it. A smile that didn’t come easily.

  “Exactly. I’ve suspected you for some time.” He lowered his voice playfully. “I might need another one-on-one just to clear you.”

  “Talk to my attorney,” she said, biting back a grin. She pulled herself out of the chair, leaned forward, and kissed him.

  “Thank you,” she repeated. She pulled his head to her lips and whispered. “I like your interrogation techniques. Like them a lot.”

  She left him there, firmly rooted in the chair, his neck still tingling from the sensation of her lips across his ear.

  That afternoon the courts dealt Walt a crushing defeat by refusing him access to Dionne Fancelli’s medical information and therefore preventing him from obtaining a DNA sample of the child she was carrying. He had her underwear, possibly carrying her DNA; he had a swab from the accused teen, but he lacked the DNA of the child in question. The state, increasingly aggressive in possible abuse and paternity cases, was nonetheless inconsistent. He was debating strategy when Nancy’s voice came over the intercom.

  “I have a reporter from The Statesman, Pam from the Express, and a couple of the TV stations all on hold. Hit us all at once.”

  “Concerning?”

  “Martel Gale.”

  Walt swallowed. Gale’s identity had not been released. He had expected the information might leak but not so quickly, and he had to wonder if this was somehow Harris Evers’s doing, Vince Wynn’s attorney. He couldn’t imagine Wynn wanting the news public, but it seemed too coincidental.

  “Issue a no comment.”

  “Got it.”

  His mind reeled. A sports celebrity death would bring the national news next. That, in turn, would bring pressure from the Hailey mayor, state congressman Clint Stennett, and soon, the governor. The cushion he’d hoped for was now gone. The longer the case dragged out, the worse it would get, the more demands he’d receive for an arrest. A good reporter would soon make the connection between Gale and Wynn and Boatwright, and possibly to Caroline Vetta, making his investigation all the more difficult. A good investigative reporter was a real pain in the ass because he or she could beat you to the information, had none of the legal restrictions imposed on law enforcement, and often had more resources at his disposal. One call from Nancy, and it sounded in Walt’s ears like a starting pistol. He abhorred the idea that the investigation had just become a race, but there was no denying it.

  He shot off an e-mail to Boldt, hoping to give him a heads-up. His office would be the next to be contacted. He called his PIO into his office.

  As the office’s public information officer, Deputy “Even” Eve Sanchez had the looks and the brains to be a crowd-pleaser. She was bilingual, beautiful, and young. The cameras liked her and so did Walt.

  He briefed her on Gale and detailed the “potential land mines.” They’d spoken about the case periodically over the past few days, but not with the specifics of his suspicions and the Boldt interviews with Boatwright and Wynn-all information she needed. They would take a public position of “ongoing investigation” and therefore “no comment.” But McClure’s office needed to be warned, and Tommy Brandon and Fiona both needed debriefings with Eve. They scheduled to meet twice daily and he promised updates as he had them. For the time being he would not take any questions or interviews, but when pressed by her, agreed to join her at a press conference the following morning at ten a.m. She would meet him at his house later in the evening to prep him.

  With Sanchez gone, he called Royal McClure to warn him and asked Nancy to bring Fiona and Brandon in as soon as possible.

  He searched e-mails and his own notes about the case, mentally reviewed discussions he’d had with Boldt, and tried to see loose ends that needed tying off.

  One that came to mind was the emergency room admissions for the night of Gale’s death. If they offered anything promising, he’d want to lock them down. The Louisiana list server for anyone affected by the Gale prosecution loomed large. It was just the kind of thing a reporter would scoop him on. He fired off a second e-mail to Boldt asking if he could pull strings as he’d offered.

  He hung up from another call with Nancy-requesting the emergency room log for the night in question-and felt dizzy.

  He needed food. He needed time.

  He ordered takeout, called Lisa, and asked her to stay with the girls.

  Nancy entered his office waving a sheet of paper.

  “Emergency room records,” she said, placing it before him.

  Walt straightened the sheet and read. Two admissions, one a child with a broken ankle, the other an ax wound to the leg. He stared at the page, unable to divorce himself from his father’s jabbing sarcasm about how unreal his son’s job was when compared to one in a major city. Each hospital in Seattle probably saw a dozen emergency room admissions a night, some several dozen.

  “This is it?” he said.

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Not much help.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.”

  He ran his hand through his hair.

  “One of the guys was going to look into the convenience stores and drug stores-Chateau, and the Drug Store, in particular-and see if anyone remembers anything on that night. Can you chase that down?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Wait!” he said, holding the page now, wishing he could choke it. “Midnight to midnight,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He was found on the fourteenth, and we bagged him on the fourteenth. But Royal couldn’t give us a predictable time of death. Temperature drops too much each night. He was guessing he’d been there at least a day, and that seemed supported by the degradation-the predation to the face and limbs. So, let’s say he went lights-out the twelfth or thirteenth.”

  “O… k… a… y?” she said cautiously, accustomed to being his sounding board and knowing to stay out of his way.

  “Which is why I asked for the twelfth,” he said, shaking the sheet of paper. “But it’s a midnight start. It’s a true day, and if Gale was killed-”

  “Late night the twelfth,” she said, unable to help herself.

  “Exactly. Then we should be looking at the thirteenth, not the twelfth.”

  “I’ll call.”

  Impatience got the better of him over the next twenty minutes. He would try answering an e-mail, only to find himself holding down the backspace key and starting over. He looked over his “hot list” of follow-ups to accomplish before the press conference, but felt stymied.

  His computer rang a tone. He saw notice of an e-mail from Boldt and read it. The detective had managed to contact a man in the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, a
deputy A.G. by the name of Robert “Buddy” Cornell. Cornell believed he could scare up at least the e-mail addresses for those people on the Gale list server, and hoped to have it to Boldt by Monday morning.

  Walt pounded out a thank-you and sent it off.

  Nancy was standing in his doorway holding another sheet of paper. She looked different, like she’d tasted something funny. Gone was the playful Dr. Watson who’d sparred with him twenty minutes earlier.

  “You need some food or something,” he said. “You want to go home, I can handle it from here.”

  She said nothing as she stepped forward and slid the piece of paper across his desk, the St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center banner across the top.

  “That’s better,” he said, noting right away that there had been ten-no, eleven!-emergency room admissions on the thirteenth.

  He glanced up from the emergency room report at Nancy, who stood staring down at him, still as pale as a sheet.

  “I’m telling you,” he said, “you do not look well.”

  “Second from the bottom,” she said, watching as his eyes found the printed line.

  His stubby finger traced across the page. He looked up at Nancy, back to the page, back to Nancy.

  “Head injury,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Despite his concern, he wasn’t ready to make that call.

  25

  Recognizing the caller ID as the sheriff’s office central number, Fiona answered her mobile phone, expecting to hear Walt’s voice. She was disappointed to discover it was Nancy, his secretary. Standing in the cottage’s small galley kitchen, she glanced out the window over the sink into the stand of aspen trees and the blinding shock of lilies mixing with the white bark.

  “Nancy?”

  “I need a little clarification on something. We just got the GPS coordinates for the pickup truck you requested-”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “Thing is, the coordinates have it on the Engleton property.”

  “What?”

  “There’s like a five-yard possibility of error or something, so… I’m not exactly sure how to proceed with this. You want me to send a dep-”

  “No, no!” she said, hurrying to the far side of the living room and looking toward the main house. “I can’t believe this. I’m so sorry. Let me look around and get back to you. Does it show where on the property? Does it get that detailed?”

  “There’s a hybrid view: satellite image laid on top of the mapping software. It shows the truck as in the main house. Like the living room. But there’s that margin of error.”

  “I’ll look.”

  “Call me back, would you, please?”

  “Promise. Give me five minutes.” She disconnected the call and slipped the phone into a pocket absentmindedly. She crossed the driveway, oblivious to the chittering of tree squirrels and a red-sailed para-glider working the thermals above a northern ridge. To her there was only the garage. The closer she drew to it, the more trepidation.

  Maybe the device had been removed from the truck and left in the garage, and if so, what did that say about the truck’s disappearance? She and Walt had checked the garage, had stood in the empty bay.

  She rose to tiptoe and peered through the garage door’s glass pane, looking in on the truck bed. Parked right where it belonged. She felt foolish and embarrassed to have put Walt up to the GPS search. Kira had obviously taken the truck and returned it, and Fiona found herself overcome with anger, furious at the girl for putting her through the worry and concern.

  She marched to the front door of the home and found it locked. She knocked loudly, pounding on the door. Kira didn’t answer. She tried the handle again, and stormed back across to the cottage to get her key. Returning, she opened the door and barged inside.

  “Kira! Kira?” She marched room to room, growing madder by the minute. “Kira!” Hit the stairs running. Up a flight, two doors to the right. Threw open the door.

  Empty. No sign of Kira, no different than the room had appeared the last time she’d checked. A twinge of fright ran through her. It hadn’t occurred to her someone other than Kira might have returned the truck. Someone other than Kira might be inside. The mountain man, for instance-was he the one she’d apparently mentioned while under hypnosis? The one who’d given her the concussion?

  She moved stealthily, creeping along the hallway toward the elegant stairway leading to the ground-level living room. Clinging to the handrail, she took each step carefully, turning her head side to side to take in everything around her. Her “damn you, Kira” attitude had reversed, and she was now once again concerned for the missing girl’s well-being, panicked over her own situation, wondering how she’d allowed her emotions to dictate. Nancy would have sent a deputy had she asked; in her determination to protect Kira and the Engletons, she’d acted hastily and stupidly.

  She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. She heard the low hum of the twin Sub-Zero refrigerators, the ticking of the ship’s clock on the mantel. Ringing in her ears, and the thump of her own blood coursing past her eardrums. The house was enormous, multiple levels with several wings, a wine cellar, a sauna, a workout gym. On the one hand, she felt terrified; on the other, if Kira had returned the truck, she wanted to talk to her before the sheriff’s office did.

  The front door called to her. She would feel safer once outside. Instead, she rounded the bottom of the unsupported, curving cherrywood staircase, and moved down a hallway lined with closets and family photos to a back stairwell that she followed lower to the split level. She searched the weight room, the his/her bathrooms, and the sauna. Two guest bedrooms. A utility/storage area. The laundry. She returned upstairs and made her way into the south wing, a guest wing consisting of a pair of two-bedroom suites. Checked all the closets and all four bathrooms.

  As she returned to the living room, she was filled with an added sense of dread, the feeling of being watched. She snatched up a leaded crystal cube-a philanthropic award given to Michael and Leslie by a California hospital-clutching it like a baseball, but wielding it as a weapon carried high at her shoulder.

  “I know you’re in here,” she said softly, knowing no such thing. “I can feel you.” Feeling too much to know what she felt.

  She eyed the wide hallway leading to the garage. It stretched out beyond her, suddenly much longer. More closets and a pantry lined it-a person could hide behind any of the doors, waiting. She tried to slow her breathing, to calm herself, but it was useless. She pressed her back to the wall and edged toward the first of the doors, jumped across the hall and backed up to the opposing wall. She kept the glass cube held high, visualized herself smashing it into a stranger’s face. She tacked her way down the hall, wall to wall, ever alert. Reached the garage door and threw it open.

  It bounced off the stopper and came back at her and she blocked it with her toe. A box freezer in the garage groaned and Fiona suddenly viewed it as a coffin and moved toward it cautiously, slipping past the pickup truck that shouldn’t have been there. With her back to the freezer, her fingers deciphered its latch and forced it open and she lifted its springed lid blindly, finally gathering the courage to peer behind her and see nothing but bricks of frozen meat in white paper wrappers.

  Now, finally, she felt her nerves settling. Her last great fear was that she would find Kira in the truck. She gathered her courage, climbed onto the side rail, and, holding to the exterior mirror with her left hand and still clutching the glass cube in her right, pressed her eyes to the glass and tried to see inside. She moved front seat to back. Empty.

  She climbed into the truck bed and hesitated only briefly before popping the lid on the Tuff-Box toolbox mounted below the cab’s rear window. Tools. A jumper cable. No body. She sat down into the truck bed and released an audible sigh, waited for her light-headedness to pass, and collected herself. Slowly, the anger at Kira reentered her, and it was everything she could do to suppress it.

  She owed Nancy a phone call. She owed Walt an exp
lanation. But her imagination got the better of her. She’d been fixated on trying to explain what had happened to her, where Kira had gone, the body at the bottom of the mountain.

  Knowing Nancy was expecting her call, she moved quickly now, suddenly energized, freed of the weight of her prior fears. It was almost as if she’d rehearsed it, the way she went about it so methodically.

  She found the blank sheets of paper and the Scotch tape in Michael’s office. The acrylic paint in Leslie’s painting studio. She tripped the garage door on her return, and climbed into the truck and found the keys in the center island’s cup holder. She slipped the key into the ignition and left the driver’s door open and the key alarm sounding as she placed the taped-together sheets of copy paper behind each of the truck tires, mixed the eggplant purple paint with some water, and meticulously applied the paint to the tire rubber as if she’d done it a hundred times. She climbed behind the wheel and backed up the truck, and then collected the four strips of paper and liked three of the four she saw. She repeated the procedure for the front right tire and then wiped down all four tires with a wet rag and parked the truck and shut the automatic door, returning to her cottage, where she generated photographs of the truck tire impressions from the Gale crime scene.

  The scale was wrong and so she reprinted two of the photographs, this time enlarging the photos to where she got less of the impression, but a wider width.

  Then, placing the photographs next to the impressions she’d taken from the garage, she studied the tread pattern and took out a tape measure from her kitchen junk drawer, and noticed her hands shaking as she counted the rows of tread pattern and tried to calculate the widths. At last she turned around the photo to her right and moved it along the taped-together copy pages, and gasped at what she saw.

  She jumped and let out a cry as the phone in her pocket buzzed, jolting her. She reached for it, knowing who it would be before ever checking the caller ID.