01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  Round about that stage, Onorato realized he was in over his head. The town police attended to minor crime within town limits—disturbances in Steamboat’s many bars and restaurants, arguments in the lift lines, drunks, lost children, traffic offenses, crowd control and the like. They were the equivalent of the uniformed branch in a big city police force. They weren’t expected or equipped to conduct investigations into serious matters. That was left to the sheriff’s office, which had jurisdiction over the entire county.

  A dead body in the trash container was definitely a serious matter, so the two patrolmen had put in a call to Lee.

  She hunkered down beside the dead body. The corpse stared up at her with sightless eyes. He was male, aged in his early thirties.

  “Guess you’ll never make it to your late thirties now,” she muttered to herself.

  “Say what, Sheriff?” Her deputy, Tom Legros, had stepped into the control room out of the wind to make a call and she hadn’t heard him returning. She shook her head.

  “Nothing, Tom. Just talking to myself is all.”

  There was a small, circular incision under the chin, and a considerable amount of blood had soaked down into the collar of his parka. A considerably greater amount had collected underneath the skin around the chin and lower part of the face, creating a huge, blue-black edema that looked incongruously like a five o’clock shadow in Lee’s flashlight beam. The eyes were wide open. They looked surprised. She guessed they had every right to be.

  “Is Denny Walters on his way?” she called back over her shoulder to Tom.

  He nodded. “Should be here in five, ten minutes, Lee,” he told her. “Doc Jorgensen too.”

  Lee grunted. Jorgensen was the county medical examiner. Denny Walters ran a ski-photo business and doubled as a crime-scene photographer when they needed one.

  Lee snapped on a pair of surgical rubber gloves and gently patted the body down. Under the parka, in the breast pocket, she could feel the bulge of what might be a wallet. Carefully, so as not to disturb the position of the body, she eased the parka’s zipper down a few inches and reached inside to claim it. Not that any disturbance would matter too much now, she thought wryly. The body’s position had been disturbed plenty when it had come rolling out of the container.

  “Uh … Lee, maybe you shouldn’t do that?” Tom suggested, uncomfortable at the thought that he was criticizing his boss.

  “Probably not, Tom,” Lee replied. “But it’s gone and done now.”

  She flipped through the billfold.

  “Well, whatever the motive was, it wasn’t robbery,” she said. “There’s more than two hundred bucks in here.”

  Behind her, Patrolman Onorato was admiring the sight of Lee’s jeans stretched across her buttocks as she crouched beside the victim. It occurred to him that for a sheriff, Lee Torrens cut a fine figure. And he wasn’t the first man in Routt County to think it.

  Born and raised on a ranch out beyond Hayden, Lee had grown up ranching and punching cattle from the time she was eleven. By seventeen, she could ride, rope and shoot as well as any man.

  She stood five feet, nine inches in her socks. Her hand-tooled leather boots added another inch and a half. She was long legged, with the muscles smooth and sculpted from a lifetime of riding, hiking and skiing, slim-waisted and with breasts that were shapely and large enough to put a just noticeable strain on the buttons of her green uniform shirt.

  No one would ever call Lee Torrens pretty. Her features were too strong for that. But she was a decidedly handsome woman, with high cheekbones, a firm jaw and deep-set gray eyes that had a slight tilt to them-maybe the result of an Arapaho ancestor sometime in the past. Her hair was sandy blond and now, in her thirty-ninth year, it had a few streaks of gray in it. Not that Lee was the sort of woman to give much of a damn about that.

  She was the sort of woman you could describe as statuesque. The people of Routt County would describe her, and they often did, as a fine type of woman. And a damn good sheriff into the bargain.

  She picked carefully through the billfold now, easing a Minnesota driver’s license out of one of the card slots.

  “Name’s Howell. Alexander Howell,” she said. She peered into the section where notes were kept, pushing the mixed twenties, ones and fives to one side to reveal a credit card receipt. “And there’s a receipt here from the Overlook Lodge. Better get on to them and see if he has anyone down there looking for him.”

  Tom turned away, heading for the phone in the gondola office. Carruthers caught Lee’s eye and tilted his head in a question.

  “Need us any further, Sheriff?” he asked, adding a little apologetically, “We’re a little shorthanded this weekend.”

  Lee shook her head, smiled wearily.

  “Aren’t we all?” she said, rising from her position beside Alexander Howell’s body. “No. You can leave it to us, boys. Just drop in your write-up in the morning if you will.”

  “Can do,” said Carruthers.

  Lee turned to the small group of lift attendants staring at the dead body.

  “Nobody here seen this guy before?” she asked. They all shook their heads, looking at the chalk-white face on the floor as if, by looking again, they might suddenly remember that he was known to them.

  “Hundreds of people through here in a day,” said Hostetler, unnecessarily. Lee nodded agreement.

  “Yeah, I know, John. It was just a long shot that someone might have noticed him earlier.” She looked at the body critically. “Not that there’s anything about him you might remember,” she added.

  Nor was there. Alexander Howell, in life, looked to have been a most unremarkable person. Average height. Thinning brown hair. Average clothing—Levis, a plaid shirt and a now blood-soaked parka. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and Nike sneakers. You could see thousands of Alexander Howells in a day and not remember one of them.

  Not until he turned up dead, of course. That gave him a certain individuality. A celebrity that he’d never known in life.

  She crouched once more and resumed her study of Alexander Howell. The sightless, surprised eyes still told her nothing.

  She’d heard once that if you looked hard enough into the eyes of a murdered man, you’d see the image of the murderer reflected there forever. Not once in the four times she’d inspected a body had she found it to be true.

  Gently she turned the head to one side, allowing the light to fall on the wound under the chin. Hostetler stooped beside her.

  “Knife maybe, Sheriff?” he ventured. Lee shook her head uncertainly.

  “Mighty narrow blade if it was. More like an ice pick. Something like that,” she replied. Hostetler frowned as if, somehow, the idea of being killed by an ice pick was more unsavory than if the deed were done with a knife.

  “Ice pick, you say?” he said, shaking his head.

  Her deputy, Tom Legros, sauntered back from the phone in the office. “They’ve got him booked in there at the Overlook sure enough, Sheriff,” he reported.

  Lee turned the face again, looking for signs of any other injuries. There were none that she could see.

  “Anyone with him?” she asked, without looking up.

  Tom shook his head, then realized she hadn’t seen the negative answer and said, “Nope. He’s on his own. Booked in for the next four days, they said. They’re booked out down there,” he added irrelevantly.

  “Well, they’ve got themselves a vacancy now,” said Sheriff Torrens, and the three men all nodded. Alexander Howell, naturally enough, didn’t respond.

  TWO

  Jesse Parker hunched on his stool in the Tugboat Saloon and shoveled another handful of cheese and nachos into his mouth.

  “Hear about the ruckus last night up on the Silver Bullet?” Todd said to him as he passed two margaritas to a pair of bottle blondes farther down the bar.

  Jesse never failed to be fascinated how the barman could keep up a conversation while he served three other people. Never missed a beat either. He nodded. “Guy found
dead, as I understand.”

  “Stabbed,” Todd amended. “Knifed once and that was it.”

  “They know why he was killed?” Jesse asked.

  Todd shrugged, moving down the bar to pull two draught Buds in response to a call from a couple of Australian tourists.

  “Those guys sure like their beer,” he commented as he returned, then, in answer to Jesse’s earlier question, “Why not ask the sheriff? There she is now.”

  He nodded his head toward the door. Jesse turned in his seat and saw Lee Torrens entering from the cold night outside. The tall sheriff swiped a few errant snowflakes away from her jacket, then took it off and hung it over the back of a chair as she sat at a table. A few people around greeted her. She nodded in response. Then, looking around the smoky room, she caught sight of Jesse watching her. She raised her eyebrows in greeting and nodded at the empty chair beside her. The meaning was clear.

  Jesse picked up his half-empty Moosehead and slid down from the tall barstool.

  “Catch up with you later, Todd,” he said. The barman nodded and grunted. Carrying his beer, Jesse picked his way through the crowded room to Lee’s table. She was studying the menu and didn’t look up when he dropped into the chair she’d indicated.

  “You should know that by heart,” he ventured. She grinned crookedly, admitting he was right.

  “Guess I keep hoping they’ll surprise me one day” she said. Without even looking, she handed the menu back over her shoulder to a waitress. One thing you could always depend on in the Tugboat, there was always a waitress standing behind you to take the menu, take your order or take your money. They liked to move you in, get you fed and move you out fast.

  “Give me a half-dozen wings,” she said. “And a Coors Light.”

  The waitress slid the menu under her arm and wrote rapidly on her order pad.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “And bring me a bunch of paper towels,” she added. She smiled up at the girl.

  “Got it,” the waitress replied again. There was no answering smile. There was no time for that in the Tugboat. You wanted smiles, go someplace else. She hurried away.

  “So how’s the case going?”

  He didn’t need to say what case he was talking about. With a dead body found in the trash container on the gondola, it was unlikely that he’d be talking about any other case. Lee shook her head doubtfully.

  “Damned if I know, Jess. All we got is a body and a name. No reason. No motive. No suspects. No murder weapon.” She slumped back in the wooden chair, stretching her long legs out under the table.

  “Don’t even know for sure what the murder weapon was,” she concluded. Jesse frowned.

  “Way I heard, it’s a stabbing. You’re looking for a knife, aren’t you?”

  Lee shrugged. “Strange kind of knife. Long, long blade. Very narrow. Went in up under the chin, through the tongue and the roof of the mouth, then into the brain. Could be an ice pick, although I’ve never seen one quite long enough to do the job this one did. Some kind of sharp, heavy duty spike, maybe.”

  Jesse looked at her curiously. “Up under the chin, you say?”

  She nodded, demonstrating with the forefinger of her right hand, pressing it into the soft flesh on the underside of her chin.

  “Right about here,” she said. “Went straight in here and continued right up into the brain. Doc says death would have been almost instantaneous.” Jesse was nodding to himself, looking thoughtful. She continued. “Painful as all hell, but just about instantaneous.” She shook her head, baffled. “That’s another thing, Jess. Would have taken some considerable force to get that spike up through all that tissue and into the brain.”

  “That’s true enough,” Jesse agreed.

  “So how does someone make sure they can swing up under the chin hard enough and fast enough and be that accurate? Tell me that.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Jesse replied. Lee made a small gesture with her hands palm up.

  “Well, think about it: you want to ram a spike up under someone’s chin, right through their mouth and into their brain, you’ve got to take quite a swing to do it, haven’t you?”

  She was interrupted as the waitress leaned between them to set down the plate of wings and Lee’s beer. Absently, Jesse took one of the wings and began gnawing on it. The subject matter of the discussion didn’t seem to affect his appetite. But he’d spent eight years as a homicide detective in Denver and he’d heard and seen plenty worse things in his life. Lee turned to the waitress before she could make her high speed escape.

  “Paper towels?” she asked. The waitress slapped her thigh in annoyance.

  “Forgot ’em. Be right back, Sheriff.” She darted away into the crowd and the smoke haze that filled the Tugboat. Jesse finished his wing, reached for the single paper napkin that had come with Lee’s cutlery. Her look forestalled him.

  “That one’s mine,” she said. He shrugged and licked the extra sauce and juice from the ends of his fingers. Lee picked up a wing and went to work on it herself.

  “You were saying?” Jesse prompted her.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, as I say, it’d take some force to do that, but the killer got it right first time. There was just one wound. One puncture. That’s it. Now you’d expect, with a violent movement like that, it could take two or maybe three attempts to get it right on the spot, and on line. I mean, this guy must have been really swinging that spike, you know?”

  Jesse nodded again. “Could be first time lucky?” he suggested. Lee gave him a pained look and he continued, “Or it could be something else entirely.”

  Her expression changed quickly to one of interest. “You got an idea on this at all?” she asked.

  Jesse nodded. “Could be. Any chance I can get a look at the body?”

  “Got it down at the Public Safety Building,” she said. “In the morgue there.” She started to push her seat back but Jesse laid a restraining hand on her arm.

  “Finish your wings first,” he said. “He isn’t going anywhere.”

  THREE

  The Public Safety Building was on the corner of Eighth and Yampa, almost opposite the Steamboat Yacht Club. On the drive in, in Lee’s Renegade, Jesse remained silent. She glanced across at him once or twice, seeing the line of his jaw highlighted in the passing lights of other cars. She still wondered about Jesse. He hadn’t been the same since he’d come back from Denver two years ago. When you caught him in an unguarded moment, like now, there was still a residue of pain in his eyes, like you’d find in the eyes of an animal caught in a trap.

  There was some considerable history between Jesse and Lee. They’d grown up together, mostly on her father’s spread west of Hayden. It had been in the Torrens family for four generations and it was one of the best ranches in the county.

  By contrast, Jesse’s pa had a small spread on poor hardscrabble land twenty miles away. He ran a few head of cattle and his wife tried to grow crops for sale. But the land could barely support George Parker and his wife, let alone their three boys. As a result, Jesse had taken a job on the Torrens spread when he was twelve, spending his time before and after school riding, herding, cleaning out barns, mending tack, fencing and branding. He and Lee, an only child, became inseparable.

  Inevitably, as they grew older, their relationship turned into something more than friendship. They were both attractive, healthy young people, constantly in each other’s company, and it happened without either of them even realizing that it had.

  When he was eighteen and she was seventeen, there had been a brief and intense physical relationship between them, clandestine and highly satisfying to both parties. Then Jesse, appalled that he had, in his own eyes, betrayed Martin Torrens trust, ended it. He mumbled apologies to Lee and resigned, unable to meet her father’s gaze. Martin, of course, was no fool and had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. In fact, he would have been delighted to welcome Jesse into his family. But the boy was young and Torrens felt he should see something of the
world before he settled down. Above all, he didn’t want Jesse to feel he was trapped into a permanent relationship with Lee. Gravely, he wished him well and let him leave and Jesse headed for Denver, where he joined the Denver PD.

  Lee was devastated. The following year, in an unthinking counterpoint to Jesse’s move, she became a deputy with the Routt County Sheriff’s Department. Reece Colson, the county’s long serving sheriff, soon began referring to her as “the best man I’ve got.” Lee could ride, ski, shoot and track better than any of the men on the force. She was an ideal choice as a law enforcement officer in the vast open spaces and wild mountains of Routt County.

  When Reece hung up his star and gunbelt in 1991, Lee was long established as his principal deputy, with an impressive record of arrests. She was a natural successor to the slow talking, heavily built sheriff. She won the election without any competition, and had continued to do so ever since.

  As sheriff, she had learned the details of the tragic shooting in Wheat Ridge. She’d watched unhappily as Jesse returned to Steamboat Springs and settled into his current, directionless life. By winter he worked on the local ski patrol, refusing to take any position of responsibility or any organizational role. In the summers, he worked on construction projects or as a casual ranch hand around Yampa Valley. She and Jesse were still friends, of course. But there was a guarded reserve about him now in all his relationships. Nobody was allowed to get too close. Time after time, Lee yearned to take him in her arms and tell him everything was all right and help him get back on track. She could see a fine man drifting aimlessly through his life. She knew he’d been one of Denver PD’s brightest homicide detectives. Now he was barely one rung up from a ski bum, hiding from the world. Worse, she thought, he was hiding from himself.