01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  “You’re telling me,” she said, with a wan smile. “Jess, since you came back here, you’ve been so damn closemouthed about yourself you make a rock look talkative. You can’t keep things bottled up like that.”

  Jesse shrugged moodily. “Don’t see how talking about things is going to make them much better.”

  She laid a hand gently on one of his. “That’s not how you used to feel,” she said. “Time was, we used to talk all the time about our troubles.”

  “Our troubles?” he corrected her with the faintest hint of a smile. “Seems to me all we ever talked about were my troubles.”

  Lee shrugged, trying to lighten the moment a little. “Well hell, I knew if I’d had any troubles, you would have been just happy as a clam to talk about them too.” His smile widened a little. Just a little. Encouraged, she persisted. “Come on, Jess. You know it can help to talk things through.”

  “Talking doesn’t change anything,” he said evenly. She considered this for a moment, then nodded agreement.

  “True. But it can make things more bearable. Least of all, that’s what I thought when we used to talk. I thought I was maybe helping you a little.”

  His steady brown eyes locked on hers for a long moment.

  “You helped, Lee,” he said quietly. “You helped a whole lot.”

  “Well, then?” she said. He was silent, watching her but she sensed he was on the brink of talking, and didn’t know whether to prompt him further or let him decide for himself.

  Finally, the pause was just too long for her.

  “Jesse, we’ve known each other all our lives, and I’m here to tell you that the Jesse Parker who’s been skulking around this town for the past two years is not the Jesse Parker I’d got used to.”

  Again, the faint hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. She thought how much it gave him a lost little boy look.

  “That what I’ve been doing?” he asked. “Skulking?”

  She shrugged, smiling in her turn. “Something pretty close to it,” she replied. He let go a long pent-up breath.

  “Could be you’re right at that,” he said thoughtfully.

  “So?” she prompted and he shifted in his seat, crossing his long legs to make himself more comfortable. For a moment, he hesitated, not sure where to start. Then he shrugged.

  “Hell, Lee, you know most of it. I was a cop. Abby was a reporter with Channel 10 down in Denver. We met through the job—on the Park Hill case.”

  “That was a high profile case,” Lee put in, and he nodded.

  “Lots of media attention, and Abby was part of it. I was the lead investigator and I guess it gave her the wrong perspective on a cop’s lifestyle. She realized her mistake when that case was over and I was back to working gang murders and pulling unidentified bodies out of alleys and spending late nights chasing down leads that usually went nowhere.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “That’s how a cop’s life goes,” Lee said softly.

  “Maybe. It’s not how a TV celebrity’s life goes. Abby had moved from the news to the morning show by then. She had a social life that she claimed was part of her job. Unfortunately my job didn’t fit into it. We should have realized from the start that our jobs just weren’t compatible.”

  He paused, swirling the dark red merlot around in his glass, looking down into it. “Neither were we,” he added softly.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Lee remembered the period well-the agonized phone calls when Jesse would pour out his soul to her, wondering what had gone wrong with his marriage. She’d known then, as she knew now, that nothing had ever been too right with his marriage. But then, like now, all she could do was listen.

  Jesse looked around the kitchen where they’d eaten. Strangely, he felt a little better for having talked about his marriage. The room felt warm and friendly. Kind of easy to be in, he thought.

  “Were you planning on making coffee?” he asked, smiling.

  Lee pushed her chair back from the table and stretched her long legs in front of her. She met his gaze and smiled, shook her head.

  “Nope. I made the dinner,” she said. “Pot’s right there on the cook-top. Coffee’s in the pantry. I take mine black with three sugars.”

  EIGHTEEN

  They moved into the parlor for coffee. Then Jesse went outside and brought in more logs for the fire while Lee dug up another bottle of red.

  They sat in silence, staring into the flames. It was a companionable, thoughtful silence. Not unpleasant. Lee was glad they’d finally talked about Abby. She considered whether or not to bring up the case that had led to Jesse’s resignation from the Denver PD. Her instincts warned her not to.

  When they did talk, it was about the obvious case: the one that had them both working full-time.

  “You think we’ll get him, Jess?” she asked. Jesse stared into the red-hot heart of the fire for a few seconds and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Yep,” he said. “We’ll get him.”

  Lee shook her head doubtfully. “We seem no closer now than we were a week ago. Three people dead and not one worthwhile clue. Not one lead. I wish I could feel as confident as you do.”

  “We’ll get him, Lee,” he said. “I don’t know why I feel that way but I’ve just got a feeling about it. I’ve never had that feeling about a case I couldn’t solve. I’ve always solved a case when I’ve had the feeling.” He shrugged. “I’m psychic. Go figure.”

  Again they sat in silence. Then to her surprise, he said softly “I never had this feeling about the Wheat Ridge case, that’s for sure.”

  She looked at him quickly. The Wheat Ridge case was the last one Jesse had worked on in Denver. The one that had gone so horrifically wrong for him. It was the first time in two years that he had ever made mention of it. She didn’t know how to reply, settled for silence. In a few seconds, he continued.

  “You know about it, don’t you, Lee?”

  She shrugged. “I know some,” she admitted. “The bare facts only. Chief Douglas told me some of it over the phone. It was a long while back,” she added.

  “Seeing how you’ve hired me, maybe it’s time you knew a little more,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  There was a long silence in the small kitchen when Jesse finished.

  Outside, Lee heard the slithering rush of snow finally overloading the roof and sliding off past the window. Jesse remained unmoving, staring, as he had done throughout the entire telling of the events in Wheat Ridge, into the heart of the fire. Maybe he saw something there that gave him comfort.

  At length, Lee said softly, “But you can’t be sure you killed him. What did the postmortem show? There must have been a ballistics report that—” She stopped mid-sentence. He was shaking his head. He finally took his eyes from the fire and met her gaze.

  “He’d been hit by two 9 mm slugs from the Ingram in the upper torso. They were given as the cause of death,” he said simply.

  She stared at him in disbelief. “But what about your slug?” she said finally. “If they only mentioned the Ingram slugs, you must have missed him. So you—”

  Jesse shook his head. “I hit him. I saw it.”

  “Then what happened to the slug from your .45?”

  “Apparently,” Jesse told her, “it was lost somewhere along the way. There was no mention of it.”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. “Lost?” she repeated, her voice expressionless. “How does evidence like that get lost?”

  “Someone tells someone else to lose it. That’s what Chief Douglas did. They covered it up. They didn’t want an investigation—especially not if it would prove that one of their officers panicked and got himself shot by his partner. Tony’s family had suffered enough. He was a good cop and he deserved to be remembered that way. He’d had three commendations for bravery but if this had come out, he’d be remembered as the guy who lost his nerve.” He paused and shook his head. “It was cleaner and simpler to say that Tony lost his life in the li
ne of duty, shot by a drug dealer. That’s how they put it to me. And I went along with it.”

  Lee shifted awkwardly in her chair. “I guess you couldn’t do anything else.”

  “I guess. Problem is, I can’t ever be sure that I went along with it to save Tony’s reputation or my own.”

  “Jesse, you were under fire. Some bastard was shooting at you with a goddamn machine gun, for Christ’s sake!”

  He smiled at her. A small, sad smile that stopped her mid-sentence.

  “Lee, I’m not trying to punish myself with this. I’m stating something that I know in my heart. I killed him. Then I went along with a cover-up.”

  She went to speak and he stopped her with a raised hand. “It was an accident. He shouldn’t have moved. He panicked. I know all this. But I also know I killed him. And when Chief Douglas, for all the best reasons in the world, made sure that my bullet disappeared, he left me with that knowledge, all on my own.”

  They looked at each other for a long, long moment.

  She moved toward him, coming out of her chair, kneeling beside his and taking his hand in hers.

  “You know you can’t blame yourself for this, Jess,” she said simply.

  “I know it,” he replied. “I’ve been saying it to myself for about two years. It’s kind of nice to hear someone else say it to me.” He paused, then added, “Someone I trust.”

  She nodded. She guessed he’d needed this. Needed to purge himself of the two years of guilt that he felt from concealing what he believed to be the truth.

  “This is why you left the Denver PD?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t go on there, Lee, knowing what I knew, with the guys in the squad room all determined to believe otherwise. Nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted to know the truth. They didn’t blame me. In a way I would have preferred it if they had.”

  She stood and moved to the window. The snow was still falling heavily outside. Her Renegade was parked under the lean-to at the front of her yard. His Subaru was an indistinct shape under a mound of thick, fresh whiteness.

  “Hell, Lee,” he said, moving to stand beside her and stare out the window. “I’ve been wanting to tell someone about that night for the past two years!”

  The glass windowpanes were old and uneven. She could see his reflection, wavy and slightly distorted by the irregularities in the glass. Lee said, “I’ve been here.”

  He let go a long, deep breath. In effect, he’d been holding that breath for over two years, she thought. Then he said, “I’m glad you were, Lee. I’m glad it was you.”

  She turned to face him. “That old Subaru of yours is near buried out there, Jess,” she hesitated, then concluded, “Stay the night.”

  He looked into those gray eyes, eyes he’d known all his life. Suddenly, he was remembering her that one time-beside his pickup, outside the school dance, with one breast bared to the cool night. If he stayed, it wasn’t going to be because his car was snowed in and she had to know that. He took another deep breath.

  “Lee …” he began, then stopped. The steady, gray eyes held his.

  He felt strangely short of breath. She was waiting for him to say whatever it was he’d begun to say. He paused, said again, “Lee—”

  The phone rang.

  He saw the momentary flicker of annoyance in her eyes, then she turned away to the phone with a gesture of apology, grabbed it out of its cradle.

  “Sheriff Torrens,” she said briefly. Jesse heard the thin crackle of the voice at the other end of the line. Then Lee asked briefly, “Where?” She pulled a memo block close to her and gestured for him to pass her a cheap ballpoint pen from the kitchen bench. He did so and she wrote quickly on the top sheet, tearing it off and shoving it into her shirt pocket. “Any other damage?” she asked. Again, the tinny voice babbled at her for a few seconds. She nodded. “I’ll be out there directly.” She put the phone down, looked up and saw him watching her, a question in his eyes.

  “Another breakin,” she said briefly, “out at the 7-Eleven by the US 40 turnoff.”

  She’d been sitting in her socks as they’d talked. Now she was pulling her boots on again.

  “I thought Tom was investigating those breakins?” Jesse said.

  “He is. But he’s gone the other way, out past Sky Valley Lodge. There’s been some trouble with vandals out there lately and Tom’s camping out in their warming hut to keep an eye on things for the night.”

  She had her boots on. She stamped them down once or twice. Her gunbelt was on its peg just inside the back door. She swung it on in that one economical movement she’d perfected years ago, took her jacket as Jesse handed it to her, slid her arms into the sleeves and zipped up the front. She slapped her pockets, just to make sure she had her keys, then stopped and looked at him.

  “You be here when I get back?” she asked.

  He hesitated for a second. The moment was gone. “Maybe I should head for home,” he said. “That old clunker of mine should make it if the snow doesn’t get too much deeper.”

  He unhooked his old green service-issue anorak from inside the back door and shrugged into it, cramming the Cubs cap down over his eyes. They stepped out into the snowy night. Lee pulled the door closed behind them, maybe just a little harder than she really needed to. Jesse hesitated, hands crammed in his jacket pockets. He looked up, met her gaze for a few seconds, then said in a low voice, “Thanks, Lee. I’m glad it was you.”

  Abruptly, as if he were afraid to say more, he turned and trudged through the calf-deep snow to the Subaru. She stood by her Renegade, in the shelter of the lean-to, and watched as he knocked a shower of snow off the windshield with one forearm, unlocked the little wagon and climbed in.

  The starter ground slowly a couple of times. Then the worn old engine fired and clattered to life. He swung the little four-wheel drive wagon around in her front yard, then bumped down over the curb and onto the road. The wheels spun as he fed in too much power for a second, but he backed off the gas and they gained traction, biting through the soft snow and finding the tar surface underneath. She watched the mismatched red taillights as they receded.

  The grinding sound of the Subaru’s engine was lost in the blanket of falling snow.

  Lee wrenched open the door of the Renegade and got in, angry as all hell.

  “I catch whoever’s doing these breakins,” she promised herself. “I’m going to shoot the motherfucker.”

  TWENTY

  He sat at one of the window tables in the book and coffee shop between

  Lincoln and Yampa, the pages of the Steamboat Whistle open in front of him. The skies had cleared temporarily, and Steamboat Springs was enjoying a few unseasonal hours of sunshine. It would be short-lived, as another storm front was heading in from the coast and was due to hit the Rockies the following day.

  Of course, the wind still blew eddies of snow from the sidewalk with it and kept the temperature down around freezing. But here, with the sun streaming in the windows and a cup of good, hot espresso close to hand, you could luxuriate in the warmth and well-being that the sun brought with it.

  He frowned slightly as he read the article that had caught his eye.

  INCREASED SECURITY ON MOUNTAIN, the headline read.

  Underneath it, and leading into the article detailing the new security arrangements put in place for chairlifts and gondolas, was a photograph of a dark-haired man in casual civilian clothes. The caption identified him. “Deputy Jesse Parker, former homicide detective in Denver, now assisting the local sheriff’s office. ”

  Parker had plenty to say-most of it with the obvious aim of calming the fears of visitors to Steamboat Springs. New security arrangements on the mountain, the story continued, would prevent a repeat of the previous killings. From now on, no two people would be allowed to travel together on the chairlifts or in gondolas, unless they already knew each other. But for strangers, the permissible numbers would be three, four or one.

  He smiled grimly. Be just your luck, deputy, if I ha
d an accomplice. That’ d spoil your game, wouldn’t it?

  A further subheading caught his attention: FBI BRINGS SIGHTS TO BEAR ON INVESTIGATION Parker went on to explain how the resources of the FBI were at the beck and call of the Routt County Sheriff’s Department. The FBI, he said, had enormous experience in serial killings like these. Reading the text, there was precious little else that the FBI had brought to the investigation. Still, he reasoned, it was keeping The Silver Bullet Murders in the media, and that was all to the good.

  He scanned quickly through the article, making sure there was no concrete progress being reported. Then he set the paper aside and reached for the Denver Post, to see if the same article had been taken up by the city newspaper.

  It had. He found it on page four, with a smaller, more closely cropped photo of Parker at the head of the article. The headline this time read: SHERIFF’S OFFICE ONTRACK OF SERIAL KILLER, which seemed to indicate that some clue might have been turned up. He read the article hastily but, in essence, it was the same as the local version.

  He was interested to read Parker’s thoughts on serial killers. He went back over them now: A pattern was always there, he had told the journalist. There was always some form of continuity to link the crimes, a distinguishing mark or signature about murders like these. It was usually caused by a deep-rooted lack of identity in the killer. A need to be seen and recognized—if not personally, then at least in terms of what he had done.

  In this case, the link seemed almost certainly to be the bizarre choice of murder instrument. The jigger, Parker had said, was the trademark of the Silver Bullet killer. A little known weapon, virtually unheard of outside of the gang wars in Denver and Aurora several years back, it gave the series of crimes the outlandish or recognizable feature that serial killers seemed to crave.

  There were several more paragraphs that dealt with the personal inadequacies and mental shortcomings of serial killers in general. Implicit in the words was a sense of weakness about the killers.