In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  Walt, who couldn’t hear anything beyond the rush of his own blood past his ears, who sensed Fiona clambering in the underbrush, raking left and right in search of his handgun, who saw Martel Gale’s and Gilly Menquez’s killer turn toward the woman, clearly sensing she presented the greatest threat, managed a single word to rise up through the pain.

  “Defend!”

  Beatrice squealed again as she lighted onto her injured paw, bounding some four feet through air like a projected missile-a dozen bared and flashing white teeth.

  53

  Walt found the wheelchair an embarrassment, never mind a necessity. The orthopedist told him that despite the lack of any fractures, he wouldn’t walk for a week. He spent as much time as possible behind his desk, because it hid his disability, his condition forcing him to reassess what formed his self-identity.

  Nancy came in to wheel him. “I can do it myself,” he barked.

  “You’re going to be a delight in your old age, you know that?”

  “Maybe I won’t get there.”

  “Not if you work without backup.”

  “That was supposed to be my fault?”

  “Was there somebody else out there in the woods with you? Did I miss something?” She grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and Walt didn’t object. She rolled her eyes behind his back.

  “Yeah… well…” he said, lacking any decent retort. He hated her sometimes.

  “You sure you’re up for this?”

  “I’m fine.” He loved her at other times.

  “It can wait.”

  “No, it can’t. I can’t. He can’t. It has to happen now.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  She delivered him to Interview 1, as charmless and bland as Interview 2, but one door closer to reception.

  He thought it some aspect of Intelligent Design that he should be the one conducting the interview and she the one behind the video camera. All they lacked was Beatrice, currently bandaged and on the floor of his office asleep. She’d taken a piece of cheat grass in the pad of her front paw, had run on it, leaped on it, and driven it in so far that Mark Aker had to remove it surgically.

  The accused, in the jail’s blue jumpsuit, won the Charles Manson look-alike contest. Curly black, tangled hair. Unshaven. Basset-hound brown eyes. Peter Arian had wisely ducked this one, letting a wet-behind-the-ears public defender by the name of Crawford sit in the attorney’s chair. Crawford worked to lose his neophyte’s startled look, making him appear to be the one accused of homicide.

  “Sheriff,” Crawford began, “my client objects to any alleged victim of his-”

  “You! Shut the fuck up,” said the accused. Handcuffed, he couldn’t add the punctuation he would have clearly liked.

  Walt appreciated the reprimand. Crawford was now officially a spectator. The attorney glanced in the direction of the video camera and Fiona, but then thought better of making any further protest.

  “I don’t care who you are,” the accused stated dryly. “Why should I? It’s not like I killed you.” He smiled. He might have had decent teeth once. He looked directly at Fiona, and therefore directly into the camera lens. “I wasn’t going to let him push you around. Him knocking you down like that.”

  Walt had some housekeeping to take care of: name, age, current residence; but he let it go for now. Fiona had been warned not to engage with the man.

  “Is it running?” Walt asked her.

  She nodded.

  “You can leave the room.”

  She slipped from behind the tripod and past the wheelchair. She leaned down and whispered, “I wasn’t pushed.” Walt nodded. She closed the door gently. Her presence had accomplished what he’d hoped; he wasn’t going to put her through anything more.

  Walt said, “You shot one of my deputies. We have your prints off the chair you threw through the window, and they’re going to match your prints at booking, and that’s going to buy you a long, long time in maximum. The State of Idaho doesn’t take kindly to people shooting its peace officers. So you might as well tell me everything.”

  To Walt’s surprise, Randy Dowling then confessed to the two murders and Brandon’s shooting. He’d killed Gale in a fit of rage at him pushing Fiona and hurting her-the way it had looked from his vantage point behind a living room window. “My own wife walked out on me. You probably know that much, am I right? Me being the loser I am? That’s what you’re thinking, am I right? Takes the kids with her. All because of money. Because I lose my stinking job. I’m a CPA. I’ll bet you know that. A guy like you knows everything, right? You bet you do. But you don’t know me. I’m not the guy you think I am. College of Central Utah. Top twenty-five of my class. You know all this, I’m not telling you anything new. I’m putting it down on tape. I was this guy,” he said, pointing his two cuffed hands at Crawford, who recoiled. “Even looked like him. You’d a bought insurance from me, the way I looked. But a guy that big pushing a fine-looking woman like that one. Gave him the old Louisville Slugger up top of the head. Beaned him. Thought it was lights out till the prick got up and came at me like Frankenstein. Jesus. Like trying to chainsaw a sequoia. Guy takes these steps toward me, and me, I’m backing up lockstep. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten back up. His eyes are staring straight ahead-I swear he doesn’t see me-and right as I think he’s about to do me, he drops to his knees and then face-plants into the garden. Down for the count. Like a zombie. Night of the Living Dead. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Walt had witnessed other confessions where the guilty party proved himself eager to purge, but honestly hadn’t expected it of this one. He’d initially appraised the man’s wild looks, deciding he had an ignorant lunatic on his hands. When Nancy had brought what little they could find on him, Walt had ordered it double-checked. But now the man was confirming what they’d learned about him. Somewhere down the line he’d be deemed a victim of the economy by a sympathetic press or a politician seeking additional funding. A poster boy for all that can go wrong.

  “You cooked meth,” Walt said, seeing it as a conversation starter.

  Crawford leaned forward but not for long, his participation shortened by a woeful look from Dowling.

  “And damn near every penny went into an envelope I slipped under the door of my wife’s mother’s place. I can take care of my family. We sure as hell aren’t food stamp people.”

  “The tree house.”

  “I got tired of running around, you know? Your people-people like you, like that other one-scouring the woods looking for me. You know how that feels? You get treated like an animal, you start acting like one. You drove me to that place. You, and people like you. Couldn’t leave well enough alone. You know how many people are out in these woods, Sheriff? More than you think. And come to find out these other people have tree houses nicer than a lot of people’s homes. Including mine. What’s with that? You think I liked it out there? Shitting in a hole? Getting sick from the water? What kind of country is this when you can’t even drink the creek water? How’d we let something like that happen?”

  “So you killed him?”

  “Mostly I slept days and moved around the woods at night. Safer that way. Fewer of your kind. Except for that one. A drinker, that one. I’d had my eye on him before. No real threat to me. Not until he pokes his head up in that tree house like it’s Groundhog’s Day. Scared the shit out of me! Wanted to take my tree house away, I’m thinking. So I kicked him-kicked him in the throat, turns out. Grabbed him by the hair. Hauled him up. Musta broken a bone or something in his throat. Voice box, maybe. Guy went purple on me. Didn’t mean for it to happen that way. I’m not a killer.”

  “There are two men dead.”

  “Yeah, but that just kind of… happened.”

  “What happened to those men?” Walt asked.

  “I just told you.”

  “You killed them. Martel Gale and Guillermo Menquez.”

  “If you say so.”

 
; “It’s you saying so, Mr. Dowling, not me. Are you saying you killed them?”

  “I killed them. I dragged Gale up the hill and dumped him. I’m not proud of it, you understand. I’m not like some sicko or something, you know. I’m not one of them. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t like that. It just… happened. You think about it: it was bound to happen. A person like me. You and everyone like you did this. You’re the ones made it happen.”

  Dowling was still ranting about the economic inequalities of the valley as Walt let the door shut behind his chair.

  Fiona had her back pressed against the wall across from him, her expression severe.

  “So?”

  Walt shook his head. “The lunatics are easier.”

  “He didn’t confess?”

  “Oh, no, he confessed. No resistance at all. Gilly messed us up by taking the ATM card. This guy, he took Gale’s cash out of the wallet. Left the cards. Gilly came along and hijacked the ATM card. We thought we were looking for one guy, when it was two.”

  She said nothing. Uninterested.

  “Lunatics?” he said. “I meant they’re easier to live with. To sleep. A guy like this? He’s going to haunt me.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he was avoidable. You don’t need to be haunted too. The least I can do is shelter you from that.”

  She squatted so she could face him eye to eye. He found the pose vaguely sexual and reminded himself once again that he was on dangerous ground with this woman.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  He’d forgotten what it was he’d said.

  “For the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve wanted nothing but independence. To take care of myself. To protect myself-defend myself-whatever. To be reliant upon no one. To trust no one.”

  “Sounds lonely.”

  “About as lonely as a divorced man with two young daughters, I imagine,” she said.

  “No arguing that.”

  A female deputy entered the long hallway and Walt looked at her, and she stood and put her back against the wall to allow the woman to pass. To her credit, the deputy passed without a glance. Walt thought Fiona looked sexy against the wall like that, too.

  Trouble.

  “This is extremely complicated,” he said.

  “Yet incredibly simple,” she countered, allowing a smile onto her face.

  “But complicated.” He had to have the last word.

  “My point being, I wouldn’t mind someone sheltering me from some of the stuff. Just as long as that someone allowed me to shelter him in return. I won’t be a kept woman, but I’m not an open relationship type.”

  “You’re racking up the points,” he said.

  “In the good column, I hope.”

  “In the very good column,” he said.

  “We take it slow,” she said.

  “Look at me,” he said, indicating the wheelchair. “What’s it look like to you?”

  54

  “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig!” shouted Emily. More enthusiasm than she’d showed in a very long time. Their father confined to a wheelchair, the two girls had taken it upon themselves to make dinner-microwaved, prepackaged meat loaf and stovetop mashed potatoes-and were incredibly proud of their effort.

  “You know Fiona,” Walt said.

  “Of course!” the girls said almost in unison.

  “She’s going to hang out tonight. Help me out. Maybe help get you guys in bed and then take off.”

  “No problem,” said Nikki. “You want to help him or us?”

  Fiona considered her options. She placed Walt’s briefcase into his lap and entered the kitchen with the girls.

  He feigned complaint and wheeled himself into the dining room, following up on an e-mail to Skype Boldt.

  “You heard?” Boldt asked when his visage appeared on screen.

  “Heard what?” Walt said. “I thought you were calling about Dowling.”

  “I am. Indirectly, I am,” Boldt said gruffly. “But since it came from your office, I thought you’d probably already heard.”

  “It’s been a busy afternoon.”

  “Lab results came back on the blood from Wynn’s shoes: Caroline Vetta’s blood type. DNA comparison’s next. A couple days out. But if I was a drinking man, I’d be popping the bubbly.”

  “Vince Wynn?”

  “Lover’s quarrel. He couldn’t stand that she’d moved on. Pulled a Steve McNair in reverse.”

  “Did he reclaim the shoes? I thought you needed my help with that?”

  “Blood shadow,” Boldt said. “We had a blood shadow at the Vetta scene, an empty shape of a shoe print in an otherwise sea of blood. That shoe shape is distinctive. Exclusive. It was Wynn’s brand. That gave us the warrant we needed. His sweat will carry the DNA we need in the shoes. He’s toast.”

  “Vince Wynn,” Walt said, still in shock.

  “Now I can justify my expense coming over there,” Boldt joked. “And just for the record, I wanted to pass this along.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your father called.”

  Here it comes, Walt thought.

  “Was crowing proud as a peacock about how his son-his son-solved a multiple homicide. And no, Walt,” Boldt interrupted before Walt had a chance to speak, “it was not to compliment me on whatever role I had in it. It was to tell me about you. It was to brag on you.”

  Walt let the words swim around inside him. Found it no use to fight the curl at his lips.

  “No kidding,” Walt said, allowing astonishment in his voice.

  “None. And I knew you should hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “I thought you would. Proud as a peacock, I’m telling you.”

  “Means a lot.”

  “Yes, it does.” More than you know. “Well,” Walt said, “Vince Wynn.”

  “I know.”

  “You were looking at him all along.”

  “Don’t do that,” Boldt said. “Don’t take away from your moment.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “We’ve all had fathers. Fathers and sons. It ain’t easy.”

  “No.”

  “But… I don’t know…”

  “Yeah, I’m with you.”

  “I’m outta here,” Boldt said.

  “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Back at you. You need me on the witness stand, I’m there.”

  “You’re just looking for another excuse to use the expense account.”

  “You know me too well.”

  The screen went blank.

  Walt stared at the royal blue.

  “What was that about?” Fiona called out from the kitchen. “Anything important?”

  Walt considered how to answer that. Caught his own reflection in the blue and the glass of the monitor. His reflection was still smiling.

  He reached up and turned off the monitor.

  Ridley Pearson

  ***

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  Ridley Pearson, In Harm's Way