01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  At least, that was the theory. There was always the chance that he would simply concentrate on the first person through the door, in which case, Lee would have no trouble nailing him.

  Which would be damn little compensation to Jesse.

  He took a deep breath, leaned back against the wall behind him, then sprang up and kicked, flat-footed against the door, as close as he could to the lock. There was a splintering crash as the softwood frame gave way and the lock tore loose. The door slammed open and Jesse was already through it, crouching and moving fast to the left, the Colt held in front of him, weaving side to side as he searched for a target. Behind him, a fraction of a second later, he felt rather than heard Lee enter the room and move right.

  He didn’t look at her. There were still too many hidden places in the room. Places where Mikkelitz might be. Because he sure as hell wasn’t in any of the obvious ones. The bed was unmade and empty. The small, tub-shaped armchair beside it was unoccupied.

  The curtains were pulled halfway across the window. Plenty of room there for a man to hide, and the bed blocked his view of the bottom of the curtains, where he might-might-have seen Mikkelitz’s feet. Lee was in his peripheral vision now, as she moved up level with him. She’d noticed the curtains too and took a pace toward them.

  “Wait,” he said. His voice seemed higher than usual, he thought. His throat and his lips were unusually dry too. He reached behind him, found a heavy vase on the bureau and tossed it, underhand but hard, into the curtains on the left side of the window. It clunked against the wall behind the fabric. He was satisfied there was nobody there, repeated the action on the other side, this time tossing an alarm clock from the bedside table. The vase, made of thick, heavy cut glass, survived the operation. The alarm clock didn’t do so well. The thin glass of its face splintered as it dropped to the floor under the curtains.

  “No one home,” said Lee. He glanced at her in admiration. Her voice was level, unaffected. His own throat was dry and constricted with tension. He knew if he tried to get more than one word out, he’d choke and stumble. He swallowed several times, then noticed that the bed was an old-fashioned brass type. Its high legs held it well clear of the ground and the covers, unmade, had been pulled back so that they draped on the side of the bed nearest him and Lee.

  The concept of a man hiding under the bed might seem like something out of a Charlie Chaplin short. But when the man was a proven killer and armed with at least two handguns, it was hard to laugh at it too much. He gestured to the bed with the muzzle of his automatic. Lee caught on, raised an eyebrow, and swung the Blackhawk to cover the bed. Now, he heard the distinct double snick as she thumbed back the hammer. The sound seemed deafening in the room.

  They edged apart, guns and eyes trained on the bed. Aware that they were totally occupied with it, he jerked his gaze away for a quick glance around the room, just to make sure Mikkelitz hadn’t suddenly appeared in the window, or that he wasn’t emerging from the closet.

  Then, without warning, he dropped prone on the floor, right arm thrust out, pointing under the bed, breaking his fall with his left hand.

  No one there.

  Which left the closet. Lee was nearer to it. He regained his feet, waited a second for his breathing to return to something approaching normal and gestured for her to open the door.

  She did so, springing to the side as the door swung open under her grasp. Jesse held the Colt in a two-handed combat grip. He was slightly to the side and had a clear view of the closet interior.

  Which held everything you might expect a closet to. But not Anton Mikkelitz.

  He let go of the breath he’d been holding. There was nowhere else in the room he might be. There was no connecting bathroom here. The communal bathroom and toilet were at the end of the hallway. As he realized it, he also realized that Mikkelitz might, just might, be in there. It had happened in the past, he knew. More than one criminal had been saved from a surprise raid by a sudden desire to take a piss.

  “Looks like he’s a flown bird,” Lee said evenly.

  “Maybe,” Jesse replied. “We better check the bathroom first. Outside chance that he might be in there.”

  He wasn’t. Finally satisfied that he was nowhere in the immediate vicinity, Jesse let the hammer down on his Colt, snicked up the safety lock and slid the gun into his waistband.

  “What now?” Lee asked him. He shrugged.

  “Maybe he’s gone skiing,” he said. “Maybe he’s gone to the store. I guess the only thing we can do is stake the place out and see when he comes back.”

  She nodded. “I’ll get on the radio to Felix,” she said. “Get some of his men up here. Then I guess we simply sit around and wait.”

  He shrugged philosophically. The tension of the last few minutes was slowly abating, the adrenaline surge gradually dissipating through his system.

  “That’s the way it usually goes,” he agreed.

  She led the way back through the boardinghouse. By now, the other occupants were more than a little alarmed at the proceedings. They’d heard the crash of the door being kicked in, the thuds of the vase and the clock hitting the walls. They wanted to know what was going on. Mrs. McLaren, with the commercial instincts of a good landlady, wasn’t letting on. She had a pretty good inkling of what might happen if other guests found out they had a real honest-to-goodness murderer living under the same roof as they were.

  Lee saw the anxious faces and hurried to forestall any questions.

  “Just calm down, folks. There’s nothing to get excited about,” she said, as they surged forward to question her. “The situation’s under control and there’s no danger to anyone.”

  There were subdued mutterings as they heard her. Before they could begin to discuss the matter, Lee continued. “However, we are going to have to ask you people to spend a few hours away from this house, I’m afraid.”

  The muttering suddenly increased in pitch. One of the guests, an older man with a bald head, except for two white tufts of hair over the ears, stepped forward, frowning.

  “A few hours? Just what do you mean by that, Sheriff.”

  Lee smiled at him with what she hoped was a winning smile. It was a dismal failure. The man’s frown deepened and he shook his head, turning back to talk to his companions.

  “Want us to move out without so much as a by-your-leave. I want reasons before I’m going anywhere. I want to know where I’m going and I want to know for how long.”

  The other guests, three of them now, Lee noticed, chorused their agreement. Out of deference to Mrs. McLaren, Lee was trying not to alarm the other guests. But now she could see she was going to have to give them some details. Her main consideration now was to avoid being drawn into a long debate over the matter, particularly when Mikkelitz could return at any time. She turned to Jesse and indicated the department car.

  “Get on the horn to Felix and let’s get a stakeout set up here. I’ll soothe the locals while you’re doing it.”

  Jesse nodded agreement. She realized that he’d probably had more experience getting stakeouts organized than she had anyway, so it was the right division of labor. As he turned away to the Oldsmobile, she had a further thought.

  “Oh, and Jess—” He stopped, half turned back to her. “Get Tom Legros to get hold of a minibus or something of the kind. We’d better provide transport for these people.”

  “You’ve got it,” he said, and walked quickly to the car.

  Lee took a deep breath, grateful that things were at least under way. Then, plastering the smile back on her face, she turned to face the knot of stubborn boarding house residents.

  “Folks,” she said quietly. “It seems like we have a situation on our hands.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  Lee glanced at her watch, yawned, and reached into the greasy brown paper bag of doughnuts that Tom had just delivered.

  “How do you contain yourself amongst all this excitement?” she said.

  She was sitting in the front bedroom of the
Munsings’ house on Laurel. The Munsings were a middle-aged couple who ran the hardware store downtown. They were law-abiding, pleasant people. They went to church regularly. They contributed to worthwhile charities and, presumably, were kind to small animals and elderly people.

  More importantly, their house was directly opposite the McLaren boardinghouse and Lee had commandeered it as a command post for the stakeout.

  She’d positioned a Carver chair from the head of the dining room table close to the window. With the shades almost drawn, she was sitting, keeping watch on the street and the entrance to the boardinghouse. Jesse was across the room, out of the line of sight from the window, in one of those shell-like armchairs that people seem to place in bedrooms. His long legs sprawled out in front of him. The Cubs cap was tilted over his eyes. He didn’t move it as he replied.

  “Patience is a virtue,” he said simply. She gave him a look of utter disdain. The effect was wasted, she realized, as he couldn’t see it.

  “Still and all, I’d rather be out looking for him, you know?” she said. She shifted her position in the wide, wooden chair. It was comfortable enough, but not so comfortable that she was likely to doze off. She looked at her watch again, realizing that she hadn’t registered the time the last time she’d looked.

  It was a quarter after ten. They’d been here for over fifty minutes. She had six men from Felix Obermeyer’s town police force as backup. Four of them were in two unmarked cars, positioned around the corner at either end of Laurel Street, where they could keep an eye on the approaches to the house without being obvious. They were wearing plain clothes and they’d been told to keep down and out of sight as they waited. The other two were in a house backing onto Mrs. McLaren’s. She and Jesse had taken the frontal position. The Munsings were already at work in their store and they’d been asked not to come home during the day but to check in with Tom Legros at the sheriff’s office in town if they needed to for any reason.

  Lee, Jesse and Felix had debated the need to evacuate the street itself, but decided against it. In a town as small as Steamboat Springs, such activity would almost certainly be noticed. People would start talking and word could reach Mikkelitz. As it was, she’d arranged to keep Mrs. McLaren and her other guests incommunicado for the day. They were sequestered in the Public Safety Building. They had a TV and a supply of movies. They had music. They had an endless supply of coffee. They had their meals supplied from the Steamboat Yacht Club and brought in by Denise.

  The one thing they didn’t have was the freedom to wander around town, talking about it all.

  “Well, you know, Lee,” said Jesse slowly, in answer to her last statement, “we could go looking for him. Problem is, we don’t have the faintest idea where he might be.”

  “We’re going to look a bunch of damn fools if he’s up on the mountain and someone else gets killed today,” she said shortly.

  Jesse tilted back the cap and sat up a little. He thought about it for a second or two, then shook his head.

  “Unlikely” he said finally. “After all, we found the ski patrol uniform in his closet. There’s no reason why he should suppose we’re on to him, so there’s no reason why he wouldn’t wear it again if he had another killing planned.”

  “I know that, Jess,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “I’m just saying I’d rather be out looking than just sitting here waiting.”

  He shrugged, tipped the cap forward again and settled back in the chair. She looked at him in exasperation. The morning had started relatively well. It had been good to work as a team. There was a lot of mutual trust and respect there, and the adrenaline rush as they’d gone into the boardinghouse had given her a sense of togetherness with him once more.

  It had affected him as well, she knew. There had been no room for the cautious, guilty look to his face. There had been no time for her to wonder what was going on between him and Abby, no time for him to stew over it.

  Now, there was.

  They were sitting cooped up in the Munsings’ bedroom, with nothing to do but wait for Mikkelitz to arrive home. Morosely, she realized that he could be out all day. She and Jesse could spend the next eight hours snapping quietly at each other’s heels.

  The handheld radio on the bedside table beside her crackled to life.

  “Someone coming.”

  It was Felix Obermeyer’s voice. The town police chief had decided that this was a big enough case to involve himself personally. He’d taken a position in the car at the eastern end of Laurel, accompanied by one of his officers.

  Lee reached for the radio to ask for more detail. As her hand touched it, Felix’s voice came again.

  “False alarm. It’s old Ted Horton from down the street.”

  Lee settled back in her chair again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jesse’s tense body relax.

  From under the baseball cap, he spoke. “I’ll take over now if you like.”

  There was an underlying apology in his tone. He was doing his best to set things right between them, she knew. But, perversely, she refused the tentative olive branch. It was all very well for Jesse to make magnanimous gestures, but taking over the watch a mere ten minutes before he was due to wasn’t going to make up for what he’d been doing with Abby.

  “We’ll stick to the schedule,” she said shortly and he shrugged to himself.

  Which led her to ask, for the hundredth time: What had he been doing with Abby? And what right did she have to resent it?

  After all, she and Jesse had slept together once. And that had hardly been his idea. She squirmed mentally with embarrassment as she recalled that night at his cabin, hopping one-legged on his porch while she tried to get rid of her boots, then stripping naked in front of him. No wonder he’d screwed her, she thought. She’d hardly given him any choice in the matter.

  But he’d promised nothing. She’d thought she knew his feelings but, obviously, she’d been wrong.

  Proximity, she thought. That was all it was. After all, what was a man expected to do with a nude woman in his room, all heated up for him and raring to go?

  Shake hands and say, “No thanks”?

  She would have killed him if he had.

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized it was her own fault. Jesse wanted her as a friend. He always had. When he’d finally opened up to her about the trouble in Denver, she’d put another value on it entirely. She knew she loved him. She’d loved him for years, even though she only realized it these last few days. And because he’d sought her out as a friend, she’d let herself assume that he loved her too.

  “Shit,” she said to herself quietly, not even realizing that she’d spoken aloud.

  “Say what?” said Jesse, sitting up in the ridiculous, feminine little chair. He stretched his arms and legs and yawned.

  “Nothing,” she said, feeling her face heat up just a little. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  She picked up the folding pair of Nikon binoculars and made a pretense of studying the front door of the boardinghouse. Behind her, she heard Jesse pacing quietly. She was glad to see that the waiting was getting to him too.

  “Think I’ll make some coffee,” he said finally. “You want some?”

  She nodded, glasses still up to her face.

  “Might wash the taste of these doughnuts away,” she said. She heard Jesse give a short snort of laughter as he rustled around in the bag.

  “Kind of explains Tom’s waistline, doesn’t it?” he said mildly. They’d asked Tom to bring them something to eat, hadn’t specified what. In retrospect, Lee realized that they should have expected the tubby deputy to get them a bag of doughnuts.

  She grinned to herself, heard the door close behind Jesse as he went to the kitchen in the back of the house. She set down the Nikons, leaned back in the chair, shifting to a more comfortable position.

  It was nearly over, she thought. Weeks of hunting, thinking, trying to find some clue to the identity of the murderer, and suddenly, one day, a
n old landlady walks in to complain about kids on Ski-Doos and says, “What’s Mr. Murphy’s picture doing on your wall,” and it all falls into place.

  And now it was all over except for the shouting. Or the shooting, she amended.

  But at least that part she felt capable of handling. If it came down to it, she knew she could more than hold her own in an arrest of an armed man. That was her forte. She was a hunter and a tracker. If, at the end of the hunt, there was shooting required, she could accommodate the need.

  Jesse, on the other hand, was more of a thinker than she’d ever be. He seemed to be able to get inside the thought processes of a criminal. To understand why he was doing what he did.

  Not that Jesse was any slouch when it came to the rough end of police work, she thought. She couldn’t imagine anyone she’d rather have backing her up in a firefight. He was a damn good shot. She was better, she knew without any false modesty, and so did he. But he was good.

  Ruefully, she thought to herself that they could have made a hell of a great team. Between them, they covered all the skills necessary for law enforcement in a place like Routt County. They could do a great job together.

  Could have done a great job together, she corrected. She knew that she couldn’t face Jesse on a day-to-day basis anymore. It wasn’t enough for her to be a good old friend, someone whose shoulder he could cry on. She wanted more of him.

  She wanted all of him. But, deep down, she knew Abby had him.

  The doorknob rattled and Jesse re-entered, backing in as he shouldered the door open, carrying two brimming coffee mugs. He set one down beside her and the hot coffee slopped onto the polished wood of the bedside table.

  “Careful,” she said. He muttered apologetically and she grabbed a handful of tissues from under the table and mopped up.

  “May as well take a break now,” he suggested. “It’s near enough to time.”

  She checked her watch. It was ten twenty-eight and they’d agreed to change at ten thirty. Close enough, she agreed. She eased out of the wooden chair, moving between him and the bed to get out of his way. There was a brief moment of body contact, then Jesse had settled himself in the chair. He tweaked the curtains back a touch, then sat back, with a clear view of the boardinghouse’s front porch.