01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  He stopped in the F.M. Light store on Lincoln to buy a long woolen scarf. He didn’t rush the purchase. It had occurred to him that people might well remember a man who entered, walked straight to a display and bought the first item he laid hands on. He examined several, eyeing the colors critically, and finally selected a plain, navy blue number—although the color meant less than diddly shit to him. But it amused him to pretend it did. It amused him to play the part of a harmless shopper. Having spent a reasonable time with the selection, and so having merged into the faceless mass of customers that would come through the store that day, he paid cash for the scarf, allowed the sales clerk to put it in an F.M. Light plastic bag for him and left, heading for the bottom end of town.

  The Ham Hockery was closed, of course. He winced at the cutesy-pie name and the cartoon illustration of a happy, smiling, impossibly fat pig, whose nether regions were reduced to slices of ham. Restaurants came and went in Steamboat Springs. Today’s Ham Hockery might well be tomorrow’s haute cuisine Restaurant Francais, or the day after’s Trattoria Milanese.

  He peered in the shopfront window, making a pretense of studying the menu taped to the inside.

  The chairs were stacked on tables, bare of linen or crockery, and the lights were off As near as he could tell, there was nobody in the kitchen area at the rear. Certainly there was no light showing from the doorless entryway that led to the back. The restaurant had that slightly tired look that most night places assume by daylight. He noted the opening hours, six p.m. to one a.m., printed on the menu and nodded to himself. It was barely ten now. He wouldn’t expect the kitchen staff to arrive and begin their preparation until early afternoon.

  He stepped back from the window and took a quick glance around.

  Nobody seemed to be watching him. A big eighteen-wheeler rig was pulling into the Amoco gas station opposite, its air brakes huffing and hissing and squealing as the driver jockeyed into position beside the diesel pump. Half a block up, an elderly man sat in a hard-backed chair tipped back against the wall of a curio shop, a battered Stetson tilted down over his nose, dozing in the bright sunlight. Apart from him, there were a few people moving around. But, as yet, it was too early for any real pedestrian traffic in the streets. Most of that would come later, after the day’s skiing was done. At this time of day, the vast majority of visitors to Steamboat Springs, depleted as their numbers might be, would be peeling off for their first runs down the groomed slopes.

  Casually he stepped around the corner of the alley beside the restaurant, heading for the rear stairs that he’d observed the night before. There was a Dumpster sitting outside the kitchen door. He took the F.M. Light scarf from its bag, wadded the bag up and tossed it into the trash. The scarf he kept in his hand, folded into a neat bundle.

  He eased his way up the back stairs. They were wooden and they groaned a little as he climbed up them. A light still shone above the top landing and he took that as a good sign. It meant that his quarry probably hadn’t surfaced yet. Not surprising. He’d sat and watched him tie on a really late one at the Old Town Saloon the previous evening. He’d wanted to make sure that the man went home. Alone.

  The landing door was unlocked and he let himself into a small vestibule—obviously the place where the apartment’s tenants could remove coats and jackets out of the weather. The door to the apartment faced him. He stepped quietly forward, placed his ear against it.

  Nothing. No radio. No television. No sound of voices in conversation. In the silence of the little vestibule, his own breathing sounded inordinately loud. He slipped the short-barreled Colt from his inside pocket, swung out the cylinder and checked the load. The six brass jacketed. .38 Specials winked back at him in a stray ray of sunlight through the upper glass panel of the outer door. He clicked the cylinder shut, began winding the three-foot length of wool scarf loosely around the revolver and his right hand.

  He’d chosen the Colt Detective Special with this in mind. The Walther, being a self-loader, might snag on the material of the scarf as the action slammed back and forth during firing. The Colt was a simpler, more dependable weapon for this purpose. He made sure that he kept the scarf clear of the hammer spur, wrapping it around the cylinder and the muzzle of the barrel. They were the two areas where gases escaped violently from a pistol. Consequently, they were the main sources of noise when a shot was fired.

  He finished winding the scarf, leaving about twelve inches hanging from his hand. He experimented, snicking the hammer back to full cock, then easing it down again several times. Satisfied that there was nothing to impede its movement or the cylinder’s rotation, he took a deep breath and rapped sharply on the door with the knuckles of his left hand.

  No answer. He rapped again, louder this time, and longer. Again, he heard nothing. He was raising his hand to really hammer on the thin wooden panel of the door for the third time when he heard a hoarse voice mumbling from inside.

  “Yeah, right … coming, okay?”

  Footsteps shuffled inside the apartment. He heard the rattle of the security chain on the other side of the door as the man inside released it.

  “Who is it?” called the same voice, thick with sleep and hungover.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts,” he called brightly. “Got your delivery. Doughnuts and hot coffee. ”

  He figured that no one waking with a hangover would refuse the offer of coffee and doughnuts. They might query the fact that they hadn’t ordered them, but they wouldn’t refuse outright. The lock rattled briefly, then the door swung open. A man stood before him. He scratched his head and yawned. He was wearing red boxer shorts and a gray T-shirt. His feet were bare. Obviously he’d only just gotten out of bed.

  “Didn’t order no doughnuts—”he began, then frowned as he saw Murphy’s right hand coming up, noticed the swathing of navy blue material around it.

  And Murphy shot him through the center of the forehead .

  The muffled .38 made a noise like a hammer hitting a table—hard. It was louder than Murphy expected, but still not so loud that it might draw attention. Above all, it didn’t sound like a gunshot.

  The man was slammed backward by the impact of the bullet. His bare heels skidded on the cheap carpet of the apartment, then he lost his balance and crashed over on his back, colliding with, and splintering, a wood veneer coffee table on his way down. Then he lay silent.

  Murphy stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He leaned over the prone body, ready to fire again if there was any sign of life. But the man was dead. The bullet had destroyed the major part of his brain tissue, bouncing and caroming around inside his skull cavity like some evil pinball game.

  Murphy straightened and stood still for a few seconds, listening.

  There was no sound outside other than the distant hum of traffic on Lincoln, no sign that anyone had heard the shot or the crash of the falling body and breaking furniture. Unwrapping the singed wool scarf from around his hand, he stuffed it inside the parka. The pistol he returned to the inner zipper pocket.

  He left the dead man where he lay, eyes staring sightlessly at the peeling paint of the ceiling, and moved quickly through the apartment. There wasn’t much to see. A small bathroom and toilet. A galley-style kitchen with a few days’ worth of dirty dishes in the small sink, and a bedroom. That, apart from the living room he’d entered, was it. The bedroom had a window that overlooked the river running through the back of town, a few empty lots and a ski repair business. A little farther away, beyond the river, the twin tracks of the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad ran east and west out of town.

  Murphy pulled the shade fully down. The man’s wallet was on the bedside table, as he’d expected. He picked it up now and rifled through the thick wad of crumpled bills in it. There must have been close to two hundred dollars there. He stuffed the money into his pocket and dropped the wallet to the floor. He was wearing thin kid-leather gloves, so there was no problem with fingerprints.

  He’d known the money was there. The dead m
an had been a big winner in a darts tournament at the Old Town Saloon the previous night. Murphy had watched him collect his winnings before he followed him out into the night. He smiled grimly. More good luck, he thought. It gave the cops a motive for the murder. He didn’t want them linking this killing to the Silver Bullet killer. This was just a means to an end. Chances were, they might not ever realize the real motive.

  That was in the cheap plywood closet, which was the major piece of furniture in the bedroom. He checked it briefly, nodding to himself as he found what he was looking for. Then, carefully closing the door of the closet, he made his way to the kitchen again.

  There was a brown paper grocery bag there. He’d seen it crumpled and half folded off to one side of the work area. He opened it now, saw that it was empty. He carefully folded the item he’d taken from the closet and slipped it into the paper bag.

  As an afterthought, he set the bag down on the sofa close to the front door, then went back into the bedroom. He jerked open the three drawers of the bedside unit, scattering their contents at random across the room. Then he reopened the closet. One side was hanging space and he pushed the various items on hangers close together, to conceal the fact that one had been removed. Then he repeated his scattering with the contents of the drawers on the other side of the closet. Socks, underclothes and T-shirts were pulled out and thrown around the room. He left all the drawers half-open. One he pulled too hard and it came right out and fell on the floor. He turned it upside down with his foot, spilling out the few remaining items in it, and left it lying there.

  He stepped back to admire his handiwork. The room looked as if a hurricane had hit it. Doors hung open, drawers sagged on their runners and items of clothing covered every surface.

  The empty wallet still lay in plain view, upside down and spread out like a bird’s wings. He considered it for a few seconds, then nudged it under the unmade bed with his foot. Let them work to find it, he thought. Then they’ll feel like real cops.

  He backed out of the room, picked up the paper bag from the sofa and let himself out. He paused inside the outer door, grateful for the glass panel. Peering left and right, he could see no sign of anyone paying undue attention to the back stairs. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he pulled the collar of the parka up around his ears and tugged the peak of his baseball cap down.

  He continued down the side alley to the street at the rear of the apartment, walked two blocks east before he turned north and headed up to Lincoln again. Another restaurant provided another Dumpster and he dropped the wadded up scarf into it, shoving it down beneath a pile of paper napkins and cardboard cartons.

  He paused at the corner of 9th and Lincoln and took a deep breath. The crystal cold air seared into his lungs and he exhaled with a contented sigh.

  Now he was ready to get back to business.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Lee stood in the ruined bedroom, studying the chaos of clothes and personal effects that had been hurled around.

  Ned Roberts, a sergeant in the town police, edged his way through the door behind her, whistled as he caught his first sight of the room and its contents.

  “I guess he was looking hard for something,” he said softly. Lee nodded. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out a pair of thin Italian leather gloves, and pulled them on.

  “You could say that,” she replied. Then her gaze lit on something just visible under the bed. Her eyes narrowed and she dropped to one knee, reaching under the edge of the disarranged covers and brought out the wallet. She flipped it open.

  “Empty,” she said briefly. Roberts nodded thoughtfully.

  “You think maybe this was a robbery?” he asked. He wasn’t the brightest of cops. He’d made sergeant more as a result of long service than any intrinsic brilliance or ability.

  “Could be,” she said evenly setting the wallet down on the bedside table. “Most folks usually have a bill or two in their wallets-unless he’d had a bad night at poker.”

  Roberts nodded again, frowning in concentration. “I guess that’s a possibility too.” Lee rolled her eyes heavenward. He didn’t see the gesture and didn’t notice her repressing a sigh.

  She examined the drawers of the closet for any further items of interest, found none. There appeared to have been nothing in the drawers other than underclothes, socks, a few shirts obviously washed and folded by the local laundry service-and a few other small items like handkerchiefs, again folded and pressed at the laundry.

  The victim didn’t seem to be a man who cared to do his own washing.

  She rummaged carefully through the hanging space, pushing the clothes apart to see better. A Nevica ski suit, maybe four or five years old, a tweed sports jacket and a couple of thick plaid jackets, three pairs of slacks on one hanger, a Land’s End Windbreaker and, between it and the sports jacket, a spare hanger.

  In other words, nothing.

  She edged her way around Roberts—he was a bulky man and it wasn’t the largest of rooms—and returned to the living room.

  There wasn’t a lot of spare space here, either. The photographer was doing a series of different views of the body, while two other uniformed officers from Felix’s office searched the room. She watched them for a few seconds, then left them to it. They were both capable men. They knew their job and if there was anything worth finding, she knew they’d find it.

  Doc Jorgensen was off to one side, stripping off a pair of surgical gloves. The fingers were stained with the blood from the dead body. Sitting to one side, a dazed look on his face, was the man who had discovered the body some forty minutes ago—a friend of the victim who had come by to go for a beer.

  Doc Jorgensen dumped the gloves in a black plastic trash bag, sealed it and put it with the coroner’s kit for safe disposal. These days, anything with blood on it had to be disposed of. He glanced up at her, inclined his head in a friendly gesture of greeting.

  “So, what have you got for us, Doc?” she asked.

  He hesitated a moment, gathering his thoughts before he answered.

  “Cause of death, obviously, one gunshot wound to the head,” he said. “No other visible marks on the body. No sign of any struggle. I’d say he opened the door and the killer just let him have it. Popped him straightaway. Hard to be exact about the time, but I’d say no more than a few hours. Maybe two. Maybe less.”

  She glanced at her watch. “So, sometime this morning, you’d say?”

  “I reckon. He definitely hasn’t been lying there too long,” the doctor told her. “Be able to make a better estimate later.”

  “Any make on the gun at all?” she asked. Jorgensen obviously hadn’t had time for a full autopsy but he was an experienced medical examiner and he’d seen a lot of gunshot wounds over the years. This was, after all, hunting country. He pursed his lips, weighing his answer.

  “I don’t think it’s our boy, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said finally. She raised her eyebrows, signaling for him to go on.

  “Well,” he said, “the guy who’s been loose on the mountain used a Walther .32 on poor Walt Davies. This is something bigger. A .38 or a 9 mm, by the look of it.”

  “How can you tell that?” she asked. “You haven’t got the bullet yet, have you?”

  The gray-haired doctor shook his head. “No-o,” he said precisely. “It’s still in there somewhere. But there’s extensive damage to the back of the skull—I’d say it’s fractured. You can feel the damage there.”

  “And the bullet did this?” she asked. He nodded agreement.

  “I reckon so. Must have bounced around inside there like a pea in a whistle. Hit the back of the skull from the inside and nearly made it out. Just pushed the bone outward, softened it up some. You can feel it.” He gestured to the body, in case she wanted to feel for herself. She shook her head.

  “I’ll take your word on it,” she said, and he smiled grimly.

  “Yeah. Anyways, I don’t see a .32 doing that sort of damage. Most of its energy would have
been absorbed going in through the front of the skull. And a .45 would have come out the back and taken half his head with it. So that leaves something between the two—a 9 mm or a .38. I’m guessing a .38.”

  Again, she invited him to continue with a tilt of her head.

  “No shell-casing found so far,” he explained. “All the 9 mms I’ve ever seen are automatics. Would have tossed the shell-case out somewhere.”

  She nodded, not convinced. “Could be he picked it up,” she ventured. Doc Jorgensen pushed his bottom lip out in an expression of reluctant agreement.

  “Could be,” he said. “But it’s easier to get your hands on a .38 these days than a 9 mm. More of them around. They’re cheaper too,” he added.

  “I guess the important thing is, you’re pretty sure it’s not a .32,” she said and he nodded emphatically.

  “Bet my ass on it,” he said. “We’ve got us a brand-new killer for this one.”

  Lee shook her head wearily. “Jesus. Just what we needed,” she said. “Well, I guess a change is as good as a vacation.”

  He smiled at her sympathetically

  “How’s it coming with the big case?” he asked. “Jesse turned anything up so far?”

  Lee shrugged. “No, goddammit. We just hit a blind alley. Our best suspect turned out to be dead for the last three months.”

  “I guess that’s as good an alibi as anything,” the medical examiner said. Gathering up his bag, he took his leave. “I’ll be at the hospital. I’ll do the full examination this afternoon,” he said. “Let you know if anything new turns up.”

  She nodded her thanks. “Obliged to you, Doc,” she said. “I’ll be in my office when I’ve finished here.”

  He paused at the door. “I’m still betting it’s a .38,” he said.

  She smiled at him. A tired smile, but a smile.

  “I’ll buy the beers if you’re right,” she said.