01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  She watched as he made an enormous effort and got control of himself. He reached into the engine and turned off the fuel tap so that no more would flow to the engine. Then he held the throttle wide open and tugged again.

  This time, along with the cloud of blue smoke, the motor ran for half a dozen uncertain beats before dying. He tried to catch it with the throttle, just missed it and cursed again.

  She was looking around, trying to find a way to leave a message. Jesse would come looking for her, she knew that. She didn’t know how she knew it. She had no reason to believe that Jesse even knew she was missing.

  She just believed it. Because if she didn’t, she had to believe that she was going to die. But she had to tell Jesse where Mikkelitz was taking her so he could go looking there.

  She glanced furtively at him. He was head down over the snowmobile, paying no attention to her. She smoothed a section of snow beside the tree and traced the initials “APT” for Abby Parker-Taft, then, with her forefinger, a little smaller, the letters “WS” and an arrow pointing up the mountain in the general direction she thought the weather station lay.

  As she was doing so, she realized, with a detached part of her brain, that she could hear another snowmobile somewhere in the distance, the rasping note of its two-stroke cutting through the cold air.

  She frowned at the letters in the snow, wondering if she could do more. A quick glance at Murphy showed him with his back still to her and she decided she had time to write the words “weather station” in full. She quickly smoothed over the “WS” and began to print carefully, when a sudden explosive roar from the snowmobile made her start with fright.

  The motor was running and he wound the throttle open and closed a few times to clear the plugs, sending clouds of oily blue exhaust drifting in the light breeze. Then he started toward her, reaching into his shirt pocket once more for the key. Frightened, she glanced down at the incomplete message in the snow. She had managed only the letters “WEATH—” but it might just be enough.

  Except he saw the direction of her glance and saw what she’d written. The triumph in his eyes died suddenly, replaced by the cold anger she’d seen before, in the garage of the condo on Ski Trail Lane. Even though she knew he was going to hit her, she never saw the backhanded blow coming, just felt it explode off her lip and knock her spinning, hanging against the cruel bite of the handcuffs again.

  “You fucking bitch,” he said quietly, obliterating the letters in the snow with a quick arc of his boot. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”

  She tried to regain her feet, her free hand up to her mouth where blood was running again. Her lip felt twice its normal size. She didn’t register that he was still talking to her.

  “Didn’t I?” he said, then, in a rising tone, “Didn’t I?”

  And when she didn’t answer him, he hit her again, the arm swinging back in the opposite direction and knocking her from her feet yet again. She sobbed in pain and fear, managing to gasp out, “Yes! You told me! Sorry! Sorry, please … I’m sorry …”

  Then he grabbed her by the hair and she felt her eyes water with the pain as he pulled her face close to his own.

  “Listen, bitch,” he said. “You do as you’re told, okay?”

  “Okay” she whimpered, cowed and beaten, hating him, despising herself. And he shoved her backward so her head slammed against the aspen and her vision blurred for a second or two.

  “Please …” she tried to say, but her voice was barely more than a sobbing whisper. “Please, don’t—” But he hit her again, openhanded this time, across the mouth, and her lips felt like swollen balloons. She forced her eyes open, seeing his hand drawing back for another blow. Then he stopped, as the motor of the snowmobile coughed once and died. He hesitated, cursed violently, then released her to slump semiconscious in the snow as he started to move toward the snowmobile.

  Just as another snowmobile skidded to a halt on the access trail above them.

  And somehow, she knew, Jesse had found her.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Lee was pacing again, up and back, up and back. She’d tried to sit calmly but somehow she just couldn’t hack it. Felix watched her with a tolerant look on his face. At first she was going to stop for his sake, realizing how annoying her action could be. Then she’d noticed his look and thought to hell with him.

  She let go of a pent-up breath and stopped by the window, staring out across the snow-scattered street and the river to where Ray Newton’s Jet Ranger was sitting in the athletics field, its big single rotor slowly turning as he kept the jet turbine at idle.

  She leaned her knuckles on the cracked paint of the windowsill, put her forehead against the chill glass of the inner pane. Like most business premises in the town, the windows were double glazed for insulation. Even so, the glass felt cold enough to freeze water.

  A bunch of town kids on snowmobiles and mountain bikes had clustered around the chopper, wanting to come closer and get a good look. She could see Ray nervously shooing them away, casting worried glances at the rear of the chopper to make sure none of the kids were sneaking around there, trying to get close without him seeing them. Few people realized that the rear of a helicopter was the most dangerous quarter. It was instinctive for people to duck their head under the main rotor as they walked out to a chopper. Yet the big rotating blade was well clear of them. Even if they jumped way up, they’d likely not make contact. But the tail rotor, spinning so fast it was almost invisible, was the real danger. More people had been killed, Lee knew, walking into the whizzing tail rotor of a helicopter than had ever made contact with the big, high-set main rotor. It just went to show. The world was full of careless people, not Michael Jordan look-alikes.

  No wonder Ray looked nervous, she thought. Then she shrugged. That was his problem. She wondered if maybe some of those kids weren’t the ones that had been giving poor Tom Legros hell over the past few days. She turned over the idea of getting Tom to go help Ray keep the kids away from the chopper. It might do his punctured authority a little good. Then she realized it might be a recipe for disaster as well, if the kids chose to make it that way. Besides, Tom had his hands full with the residents of Mrs. McLaren’s boardinghouse. They were still in the building. She’d decided to leave a pair of town cops out at the boardinghouse in case Mikkelitz showed up there. They were settled down in the front room of the Munsings’ house. Any sign of him and they’d be in immediate radio or cell phone contact.

  She pushed away from the windowsill and began pacing again. Felix let go an almost inaudible sigh and she ignored him. Finally, he said mildly, “Pacing don’t get it done, Lee.”

  And she had to look at him. He indicated the old leather sofa against the far wall. “Take the weight off your feet,” he suggested. She shook her head. But at least, he thought, she’d stopped her goddamn pacing up and down like a caged tiger.

  He went back to cleaning his fingernails with an unbent paper clip. He could almost feel the tension radiating from the sheriff, like heat. He shook his head mildly. Patience was what a job like this needed, he thought. And patience was what he’d got plenty of.

  Abruptly, Lee came to a decision.

  “Damn it,” she said. “I’m going up there.”

  Felix frowned at her, letting his tilted chair drop back onto all four legs and swinging his feet down from the desktop.

  “Up there?” he repeated. “Up where?”

  She jerked a thumb in the general direction of Mount Werner. “The mountain,” she said briefly. “Jesse’s right. That’s where he is.”

  Felix shook his head at her, smiling patiently again. “You don’t know that, Lee,” he began, but she cut him off angrily.

  “No. I don’t know that. I sense it, all right? I feel it. Jesse’s right. He’s up there somewhere and I’m going up there too.”

  She’d already swung the .44 in its belt holster around her waist in one movement of wrist and hips and was buckling the gunbelt as she spoke. Finished with that, she too
k her green sheriff’s department Windbreaker from the hook behind her office door and slipped it on. Felix tried reason.

  “Lee, your place is here. This is the communications center. What if he’s not up there on the mountain? What if he’s heading for Denver or Vail and the state police spot him? What good will you be, chasing around on the mountain?”

  She eyed him calmly. Now that she’d decided on a course of action, the tension had flooded away from her.

  “Well, I’ll be just five minutes away by chopper, Felix,” she told the town police chief. “And I’ll be in touch with you, so you can let me know the minute anything happens.”

  She took another comm unit from the desk drawer, similar to the one she’d given Jesse, and slid it into the zipper pocket of her Windbreaker. “Just whistle me up if there’s any news, okay?”

  He shook his head, annoyed at her. “Lee, you’re the sheriff and we’ve got a manhunt in progress. Your place is here.”

  “That may be, Felix,” she replied. “But I’m going.” She opened the door to the hallway, paused before leaving. “Keep in touch,” she said, and was gone.

  She covered the ground to the athletics field in long, purposeful strides. Ray saw her coming and opened the left-hand side door. The kids, sensing a development, started to move in closer as Ray headed around to the pilot’s side door of the Jet Ranger. Lee waved them back.

  “You kids get back out of it,” she called, “or we’ll have your little heads chopped off and rolling in all directions.”

  Reluctantly, they gave ground. Teasing fat Tom Legros was one thing. The long-legged sheriff, with her shapely, tight jeans and a pair of gray eyes that could bore right into your soul, was another matter entirely. All the boys respected her authority. Most of them held her in awe, having heard wildly exaggerated stories about her proficiency with the big .44 she wore strapped to her right hip.

  More than half of them had fantasized wildly erotic activities with her. In their imaginings, of course, she’d been totally compliant to their wishes, a love slave to them-the way they figured most beautiful older women would be with a fifteen-year-old pulsing with testosterone.

  Lee, perhaps fortunately for her own mental well-being, was totally unaware that she was a minor sex symbol to the town’s youth. She swung up into the passenger’s seat of the Jet Ranger, fumbling the safety belt inside the butt of the Blackhawk and buckling up.

  Beside her, the pilot was doing the same thing. Then his hands flew over the control console, hitting switches in a rapid pre-flight routine. He gestured to the headset hanging on a hook on the left dashboard and she put it on as he wound up the jet turbine and the big rotor, lazily flapping past her vision up till now, began to spin faster, beating the air with the characteristic whop-whop-whop of rotary wing aircraft everywhere.

  “Where we headed, Sheriff?” his voice crackled in her headphones. She angled the boom mike down to her mouth, saw him point to a foot operated switch on the floor by her feet and depressed it to talk.

  “Mount Werner,” she said briefly. “Storm Peak.”

  He nodded, slipping a pair of Ray-Bans on. He hit another channel switch on the radio and she heard him request a takeoff clearance from Hadley Airport, letting them know his position, destination and the maximum height he expected to reach. She guessed that made sense. Along with the United Express puddle jumpers that flew in and out of Hadley, there were American Airlines MD-80s and Air West 737s.

  An uninterested voice from Hadley control, some twenty miles away, told Ray that he was clear to take off for Mount Werner, cleared to three thousand feet above ground level. The voice had barely finished when she felt the Jet Ranger stir under her, rising up and sliding sideways a little as Ray fed in the collective with his left hand. The whop-whop-whop of the rotor increased in volume as the little aircraft rose higher, then the note changed as Ray flattened the blades a little and the Jet Ranger, with that peculiar nose-down attitude common to helicopters, banked toward the snow-covered mass of Mount Werner.

  They were cutting across the grid of the town’s streets at an angle now, gaining height rapidly. Lee always found it fascinating to look down from this elevated position—barely three hundred feet above the moving cars on the roads below. They were strangely remote, yet they were close enough to make out small details. The rotor whacked the air loudly above the townsfolks’ heads, yet few of them looked up. Helicopters were no novelty in this area. It was like being in a big, noisy, invisible, buzzing bug, she thought.

  She could make out the shuttle bus heading to the mountain. The ski racks along its side would normally be bristling with skis at this time of season. There appeared to be no more than half a dozen pairs. She shook her head sadly. If Mikkelitz’s motive had really been revenge on the town, he’d succeeded.

  The chopper rose higher and the town slid under her. Now the bulk of Mount Werner was ahead, dominating the landscape. The pure white of the ski trails carved their way through the dull gray of the winter aspens and the rich green of the pines. Her headphones were filled with the extraneous chatter of the controllers at Hadley as they directed local traffic in and out of the airport. Somewhere in the area, a hot-air balloon was asking permission to untether and rise to two thousand feet. She craned around to her left, looking to the flat fields where the balloon companies operated, and saw it-an immense, swollen, red and gold ball down at ground level. Ray saw her looking and hit the intercom switch, cutting off the external chatter and switching to the closed channel within the helicopter.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t come anywhere near him.” She nodded. She wasn’t worried but she guessed Ray was used to soothing the spiky nerves of joy-flight passengers around the valley. He kept the switch open and spoke again.

  “Where you heading, Sheriff? Base of the mountain?”

  That was where all the administration buildings were, of course, so it was logical for him to assume it. She shook her head and hit her talk switch.

  “Right to the top,” she said, pointing. “Storm Peak.”

  “Uh-huh,” the pilot replied thoughtfully. She glanced sideways at him. The Ray-Bans hid his eyes, but she could see a slight frown creasing his forehead.

  “Problem?” she asked. He chewed thoughtfully on his inner lip before answering.

  “Too risky to set down there,” he said. “There’s no designated landing area and you’ve got skiers coming and going all over the place. Like as not, I’ll put down there and someone will ski right into that tail rotor. Can’t do it without someone on the ground to keep an area clear for me.”

  She nodded, understanding. Even with the comm unit, she had no way of contacting the lift attendant at the top of the chair. She guessed she could do it indirectly, by calling Denise and having her call the ski patrol and having them call the attendant’s hut. Then maybe they’d have things organized by sometime next May. She came to a decision. Her choice of Storm Peak was an arbitrary one anyway. There was a simpler solution to hand.

  “There’s a helipad on top of the old weather building,” she said. “Put me down there.”

  The weather station was a quarter mile up the slope from the top of the Storm Peak chair. She could leg it down from there. Or, if there happened to be a pair of skis and boots that were anywhere near fitting her, she’d borrow them. She knew the meteorologists who occasionally used the building kept their ski gear there.

  “You want I should wait there with you?” Ray asked. Again, she considered before answering. She was coming here on a hunch, pure and simple. Because she expected Mikkelitz to show up here. On the other hand, there was no reason why he should be expecting her, or any other cop, to show up. If he saw a helicopter in the area, it could be enough to warn him off.

  “Just drop me off and go. Stay in the general area, but don’t make yourself too obvious, okay?”

  The pilot nodded. “I’ll orbit over the wilderness,” he said, pointing to the miles and miles of thickly treed slopes beyond Mount We
rner. “You need me, give me a call and I can be back in a few minutes. I guess you’ve got a radio?” he added, and she touched her pocket and nodded to him. He continued. “Just set it to guard frequency if you want me. I’ve got a second radio that monitors that all the time, okay? You know the setting all right?”

  She nodded. She knew the frequency for the guard channel.

  There was a faint beeping sound coming from somewhere in the cabin. She saw the pilot glancing around, puzzled. He didn’t like hearing sounds that he couldn’t account for and she didn’t like to be in an aircraft where the pilot was puzzled about something.

  She slipped her headphones off to hear more clearly, realized that the sound was the comm unit in her pocket. She grabbed at it, making an apologetic gesture to the pilot. He nodded and she could see the slight trace of relief in the way his shoulders relaxed and that frown straightened out on his forehead once more. The little radio had an earplug attached by a coiled lead. She put it in her ear now and pressed transmit.

  “This is Sheriff Torrens,” she said, holding the tiny unit as close to her mouth as she could. Even with the background noise of the wind and the whine of the jet engine, she instantly recognized the voice that replied.

  It was Jesse.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Jesse saw the snowmobile first, a Polaris, he recognized. It was heavily crusted with snow, with deep pockets of it on the footboards, the seats and in the instrument binnacle between the handlebars. It had obviously been rolled to get in that condition and, instinctively, he skidded the Yamaha to a halt on the access road. There were two figures near it. One right beside the machine and another a few paces behind, slumped under the trees.

  His first thought was that this was a simple accident, and he didn’t have the time to stop and help. For a second, it didn’t occur to him that this was the snowmobile he was looking for. He assumed that Mikkelitz had too big a lead for him to make up. Then he recognized the flash of pale blond hair under the trees and saw the other figure raise his arm and he rolled off the Yamaha, putting it between him and the man beside the snow-covered machine.