Killer Weekend
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Killer Weekend
Ridley Pearson
The #1 New York Times bestseller returns with a completely new setting-the magnificent natural beauty of Sun Valley, Idaho -and a heart-stopping story in which a local sheriff struggles to protect a controversial politician from the elegant plan of a hired assassin.
Eight years ago, in Sun Valley-snowcapped playground for the wealthy and ambitious-all that stood between U.S. Attorney General Elizabeth Shaler and a knife-wielding killer was local patrolman Walt Fleming. Now Liz Shaler returns to Sun Valley as the keynote speaker of billionaire Patrick Cutter's world-famous media and communications conference, a convergence of the richest, most powerful business tycoons. The controversial attorney general is expected to announce her candidacy for president. It's a media coup for Cutter-but a security nightmare for Walt Fleming, now the county sheriff.
As the Cutter conference gets under way, authorities learn of a confirmed threat on Shaler's life, and various competing interests-the Secret Service, the FBI, Cutter's own security forces -begin jockeying for jurisdiction. Amid the conference's opulent extravagances, Walt is suddenly shaken by an apparent murder, his nephew's arrest, and a haunting legacy from his family's past. The clock ticks down toward Shaler's keynote address as we track the chilling precision of her assassin's preparations.
Ridley Pearson
Killer Weekend
The first book in the Sun Valley series, 2007
For Marcelle
(and our love of Idaho)
PROLOGUE
A s she stood in her small closet undressing for bed, Elizabeth Shaler was annoyed to find some mud left behind by a running shoe that she now put away. About the size of a dollar bill, the mud covered the carpet and spanned the crack of the trapdoor that led down into the three-foot-high crawl space beneath the house. Liz pulled on a cool cotton nightgown. At her feet, cracks appeared in the mud, then widened and spread. These cracks had nothing to do with where she stood, but were instead the result of upward pressure from beneath the trapdoor.
Liz, just shy of six feet tall and athletically fit, placed her dirty laundry into the wicker hamper and tidied up. Her hanging clothes were organized by color and type, her shoes neatly ordered on the shelves. Had she glanced down she might have noticed the widening cracks in the mud, might have noticed the hatch coming open.
She looked around the bedroom for the biography she was currently reading, only to realize she’d left it in the kitchen.
As she headed down a narrow hallway lined with her family’s photographic history, behind her the crawl space hatch popped open an inch. From within the darkness there appeared the top of a knitted ski mask, followed by a pair of skittish eyes.
The kitchen and the adjoining living room afforded Liz a spectacular view of the horizon dominated by Sun Valley ’s rugged mountain skyline, still aglow at 10:10 P.M. She loved this place, her second home, so far from New York and the political life she’d chosen.
She poured herself a glass of water, grabbed the book from the counter, and headed back down the hallway, both hands occupied.
Patrolman Walt Fleming groaned.
Earlier in the summer the town had adopted a free bike campaign. Thirty bright yellow bikes had been spread around town as community property, with the understanding no one would steal them. They were used by anyone wanting to pedal from one place to the next. But the instructions on the bikes clearly stated they were to be well cared for and left in any of the many bike stands around town, a policy prone to abuse. Walt-on a bike himself, one of four officers assigned to “pedal patrol”-spotted one of the bikes dumped into some bushes a half block up the hill from the community library.
He inspected it for flats or damage and, finding none, decided to walk it down the hill to a bike stand in front of the library. He was on his way downhill-walking awkwardly between the two bikes-when he spotted a crawl space screen vent ajar on a house foundation. He might not have noticed, but the framed wooden screen was bent and splintered on one corner-suggesting it had been pried open. Worse, he knew this house: It was on the KPD watch list, the residence of Elizabeth Shaler, New York ’s young attorney general, a woman whose politics and guts he admired. The Shaler family had been coming to Sun Valley for fifty years. Her parents were featured in photographs with Ernest Hemingway on the walls of the Sun Valley Lodge.
He continued walking a few more yards-the click, click, click of the bike gears the only sound on the street. But the appearance of that screen nagged at him. A rookie cop, he was always looking for trouble. Right or wrong, he connected the jimmied screen to the ditched bike, and he decided that together they gave him reason enough to investigate. He laid the bikes down on the curb and worked his way back-quietly-to take a closer look.
Her hands occupied, Liz bumped the bedroom door shut with a throw of her hip. She headed straight for the end table with the glass of water and the book.
The overhead light went off.
She smelled something-someone-sour. And she turned around defensively.
But as she did, a hand clapped over her mouth. Before she had a chance to react, her arm was twisted up behind her back and she was driven down to her knees.
It happened fast: One second the glass of water was tumbling to the carpet, where it shattered against the end table; the next, her hands were clamped behind her and her wrists and mouth were bound with duct tape. The intruder dragged her painfully by the hair to a chair in front of the vanity and sat her down. More duct tape secured her to the padded chair. Tears streamed down her face.
The only light in the room was street light seeping in through the blinds, and a rose-colored hue from the digital clock by the bed. He wore a ski mask and a black T-shirt, but the blue hiking shorts seemed out of place. This was no Ted Bundy. He had a small scar on his left knee. He smelled sharply of sweat. She faced the mirror. He moved nervously behind her.
“You stand for all the wrong things,” he said, his voice taut. “And you’ll pay for that.” He sounded like he was trying to talk himself into this.
Nonetheless, he owned her, and this bothered her more than anything-this sense of control he enjoyed.
“You take companies apart with no thought for the people who actually work there. Come out here-you and all the obscenely rich-and leave the rest of us behind to scrap and fight for a job that’s long gone. What do you care? There’s always a few weeks in Sun Valley to look forward to. I saw the article in Vanity Fair: I know all about you.”
He’d tagged himself: She’d only broken up a few monolith white-collar companies; he was a reader of Vanity Fair. He was in over his head. Her attorney instincts kicked in: If only she could get the tape off her mouth and reason with him.
A knife blade glinted. “Riddle me this: How far does a woman politician make it without a face?” He cut her then, a hot, thin line of blood running across the back of her neck. She felt it sting. Suddenly he was for real, and this changed everything.
“At the end of this you will look like the monster you are,” he said.
She turned away from the reflection in the mirror, determined he not see her fear.
As she did, a movement to her right won her attention: The doorknob turned.
The intruder was fully focused on the mirror, moving from side to side behind her, brandishing the knife, prattling on: “Now where should we start? Huh?” He cut a strap off the nightgown, exposing her left breast.
“What’s a woman without her tits?” he asked her reflection. He amused himself with his own answer: “Richard Simmons.” He cackled loudly, sounding like an old crow.
Shaking now from terror, she knew better than to look at the door, but couldn’t help herself. Someone else was in the house. An accomplice?
She saw the door coming open. Judging by his expression, this was no one he expected. She threw her weight back in the low chair and went over, colliding with him. Tying him up.
She screamed behind the duct tape. The bedroom door flew open. A figure-a uniform-closed the short distance and threw himself into the intruder. The two stumbled across the room in lockstep and smacked into the wall. She heard a whoosh of expelled air; the crack of bone. The swish of the knife blade. A wet, visceral grunt.
She struggled against the tape to get free. The men separated, the knife handle protruding from the belly of the one in the uniform. He staggered backward and a flash of light appeared from his side. The loud clap of the gun’s report deafened her.
The intruder, thrown back by the bullet’s impact, wailed and spun and fell to the floor, writhing in pain. A bitter smell filled the room. “You shot me. You fucking shot me!” the intruder whined, squirming in pain. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The cop staggered toward him, the gun extended. The intruder froze. The cop viciously stomped on the gut wound, and the intruder passed out.
The cop bent over him and she heard the metallic click of handcuffs.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, his voice guttural and wet.
She groaned through the tape, tried to nod.
“Officer wounded,” he said, speaking into a radio clipped to his shirt. He recited her street address and a series of codes. He then took two steps toward her and fell first to his knees before collapsing forward, his head on her bare chest, their faces only inches apart.
“Your Honor…,” he said. And then he passed out.
EIGHT YEARS LATER
PRESENT DAY
THURSDAY
One
S ix men, all wearing white hard hats and orange ear protectors, huddled in one corner of what was to become a themed fast food restaurant, That’s a Wrap, that would sport vinyl wallpaper of Monroe, Bogart, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Harrison Ford. Not twenty feet away, on the far side of a temporary wall, passengers hurried down a long hallway that connected Salt Lake airport’s concourses C and D.
The entrance to the work site was through a thick sheet of black plastic. Sheetrock dust covered the floor along with scraps of aluminum conduit, pieces of electrical wire, and a half dozen used paper cups from the Starbucks down on concourse D.
There was debate among the workers about how to install a length of ventilation duct; the architect had neglected to note the location of the sprinkler system.
“There’s no way, Billy, that you’re going to get around that pipe,” the foreman said at last. “And you sure as shit can’t go through it.”
Billy disagreed. To illustrate his suggestion, he dragged two sawhorses to below the spot in question, threw two lengths of aluminum studs across them, and climbed up, while the foreman shouted out for him to use a stepladder because he didn’t want to lose his workman’s comp record.
But by then there was no stopping Billy. He punched a section of ceiling panel up and into the space above, and slid it to one side.
Shining a flashlight, he poked his head up inside.
“What the fuck?” he said. He withdrew his head and addressed his fellow workers. “Is this one of those haze-the-rookie things? Because if it is, it sucks.”
When no one answered, Billy jumped down and used a broom handle to knock the additional ceiling panels out of the way. The fourth panel wouldn’t budge. Neither would the fifth, or the sixth. He tried another, and it lifted partially. Billy carefully slid it to the left.
Now he and the others could see up into the false ceiling.
“What is that?” one of the men said. “A suit bag?”
It was a six-foot length of bulging, heavy black plastic, zippered shut.
The foreman took a tentative step forward.
“That ain’t no suit bag,” said the smallest of the six workers, a man with a goatee and a tattoo of three X’s on his neck. He spoke softly, which was not his way. “That’s a body bag. And there’s something in it.”
Two
W alt Fleming pulled the white Grand Cherokee marked “Blaine County Sheriff” to the curb in front of Elizabeth Shaler’s home. As he sat behind the wheel, staring up at the house, Walt realized he was rubbing the scar through the shirt of his blue uniform, a firm reminder of that evening eight years earlier. It still pulsed hot from time to time, for no reason at all. It did so now. He felt oddly nostalgic for a moment, reliving the event that had propelled him to the front page and secured his bid for county sheriff, an election he’d won by a landslide.
Now a household name, Liz Shaler had recently returned to her Sun Valley home-albeit a second home-allegedly to announce her candidacy for president. Walt’s job, along with the people inside, was to keep her alive. He radioed dispatch that he was leaving SD-1, his Cherokee, and heading inside.
A black Porsche Cayenne parked behind the Cherokee, and out from the passenger seat stepped Patrick Cutter, with his George Hamilton golfer’s tan and porcelain white smile. Walt acknowledged Dick O’Brien, Cutter’s security chief, visible through the windshield. O’Brien, stocky, and with an Irishman’s nose, offered Walt a mock salute. Two dark-suited minions, a man and a young woman, both of whom, judging by their black clothing, knew nothing about dressing for the arid Idaho summer, attempted to follow Cutter but were quickly turned back by their boss. They returned to the idling car a little sheepishly.
Liz Shaler’s 1950s ranch home would have fit inside Patrick Cutter’s six-bay garage. Walt wondered how that made Cutter feel as he bounded up the walkway like a kid arriving home from school.
The Secret Service agent held the door for Walt. “Looks like Dryer called in the varsity,” Walt said to Patrick Cutter.
“There’s been a credible threat,” Cutter announced. It struck Walt as both odd and unfortunate that Patrick Cutter, no matter how many billions he was worth, should have such intelligence ahead of local law enforcement. With the Cutter Communications Conference-C 3-less than twenty-four hours away, the proper chain of command would have been Dryer, Walt, and then O’Brien, who would tell Cutter; not the other way around.
Cutter could read a man’s face. “Don’t worry, Walt, no one’s pulling an end run on you. Dick O’Brien received the intel ahead of even Dryer.”
“That’s not possible,” Walt blurted out, without thinking.
“That’s the way it is,” Cutter said. “We do a lot of business with the military. Believe me. Those are our satellites they’re using, for Christ sakes.” He winked: a mannerism Walt found intentionally offensive.
They stood half in the house. A man with bad acne scars approached from the open kitchen. He was dressed like a preppie, wearing a white shirt, no tie, a blue blazer, blue jeans, and loafers. He offered his hand to Walt while still too far away for them to shake.
“Adam Dryer,” he said.
“At last,” Walt said. The man tried a little too hard with the handshake.
“You guys have not met?” an astonished Patrick Cutter asked.
“Not face-to-face,” Dryer said, still shaking Walt’s hand. “But if e-mail were any judge, we’re practically married.”
“Mr. Cutter mentioned a credible threat,” Walt said, getting free of the man’s eager hand.
“Did he?” Dryer asked, looking at Cutter disappointedly. “Have you met the AG?” Dryer stepped out of Walt’s line of sight.
Elizabeth Shaler was on the phone in the kitchen. Her eyes lit up at the sight of Walt, and she waved enthusiastically, then pointed to the phone and scrunched up her face into complaint. She wore a sleeveless white shirt with a simple string of pearls. The countertop blocked sight of the rest of her, but she hadn’t added a pound. If anything, he thought she looked a little too thin and not a day older than when the two of them had been in this
house together under much different circumstances.
“I guess you have,” Dryer said, seeing Shaler’s reaction. He sounded almost jealous.
“It’s a small town,” Walt said.
“Or was,” Cutter added, trying too hard to be friendly, “until people like me moved in. Right, Sheriff?”
“Everybody, take a deep breath,” Walt said. “Everything’s fine. I want to hear about this threat. But first, I think I’m being summoned.”
In fact, Liz Shaler was waving him over to her and pointing down the hallway. She placed the phone down, gave Walt an affectionate hug, and said to Dryer, “I’m going to steal him for a minute.”
As she led him by the hand, Walt felt a pain in his gut just beneath the scar. Liz Shaler sensed this somehow and inquired, “Too familiar?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s been too long,” she said, closing the door of a small study behind him. “Oh my God, how good it is to see you!”
She devoted her full attention to him. If it was an act, she was profoundly gifted.
“And you, Mrs. Shaler.”
“Liz. Please. Are you kidding me? It’s Walt, not Sheriff. Is that okay?”
“I prefer it.”
“Really good to see you. So much has happened,” she said. “Where to begin?”
Walt felt she owed him none of this and was about to say so, but her energy silenced him.
“I appreciated your note,” she said. “About Charlie.”
“It was a tragedy. I wasn’t even sure you’d see my note. That it would get through to you.”
“It did. You never met him, did you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“But your note was very kind, as if you had. It meant a great deal to me. And stop it with the ma’am!”