Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

  Hemphill pressed his hands to his temples while Harley rolled down the narrow aisle in his chair and set his laptop and microphone on the table.

  Chuck said, “I already told you what I know.”

  Hemphill flicked his fingers at the microphone. “Just a formality.”

  “You talked to all the students?”

  “I did. Parker was right. Your group has been pretty busy this summer.”

  Chuck kept his tone even. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “You’re a hands-off kind of guy, that’s what everyone says. You let your team leaders run things for you.”

  “That’s what they’re for. And they’ve done a good job. Things have gone smoothly enough.”

  “Up at the mine, maybe. But down here? It’s been a full-on soap opera.” The officer lifted a finger. “First off, there’s your guys.”

  “Team Nugget,” Chuck confirmed.

  “Yep. Drinking, toking, having a good time.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  Hemphill lifted a second finger. “The thing that surprised me was your girls. What your boys were to alcohol and pot, your girls were to bed hopping.”

  “With Team Nugget?”

  “And Falcon House.”

  “The Mexican workers?”

  “The younger ones, some of them, from the sound of things.”

  Chuck rested his fingers on the edge of the table. “None of what you’re telling me speaks to the fact that it was the young woman from Falcon House, Nicoleta, who was killed.”

  Hemphill lifted a third finger and continued as if Chuck hadn’t spoken. “Then there’s your brother-in-law. He knew the victim. Intimately. But I expect you already knew that, didn’t you? You just didn’t feel like sharing that piece of information with us.”

  Chuck studied the tabletop as Hemphill went on. “He was up front with us about it. Told us he slept with her a couple of times at the beginning of the summer.”

  Chuck looked up. “But you haven’t arrested him yet.”

  “That’d be the logical thing to do right about now.”

  At the end of the table, Harley cleared his throat. Hemphill gave the gray-haired cop a sidelong glance before returning his gaze to Chuck.

  “Your brother-in-law takes the prize, I’ll give him that,” Hemphill said. “Out and about every night, and remarkably successful, too, from the sound of things—the way he measures success, anyway.”

  Chuck tucked his hands in his lap. It sounded as if Hemphill believed Clarence was innocent, which meant Kirina hadn’t said anything about seeing him slipping back into the dorm after the murder. “What more can I tell you?”

  “I feel like I’ve got a pretty good sense of him at this point.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t have any physical evidence tying him to the murder.”

  Harley shifted in his seat. “Not yet,” he muttered.

  Hemphill said, “As you can see, Harley and I have a difference of opinion regarding your brother-in-law.”

  “Damn straight we do.” Harley crossed his arms tight across his chest. His face reddened in the muted light of the command vehicle.

  “I respect Harley’s opinion,” Hemphill said. “In this case, however, I disagree with it—at least for now. But the minute I have cause to think otherwise, I’ll come knocking.”

  “What you’re thinking is one-hundred-percent correct,” Chuck said. “Your right-hand man here—” he dipped his head Harley’s direction “—is wrong. Clarence is no murderer. And as for his knife and the blood, he had nothing to do with that, either.”

  “I happen to agree with you,” Hemphill said. “For now, like I said. I think Clarence is telling the truth.” He looked straight across the table at Chuck, his eyes growing cold and hard.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘Who are you looking at?’” Hemphill let a beat pass. “You reported it. You found her.”

  “Which rules me out.”

  “Or rules you in.”

  Chuck’s stomach lurched. He pointed at the microphone. “I thought you said that was only for show.”

  Hemphill said nothing.

  Chuck lowered his head and spoke straight into the microphone. “The picture you have of me should be pretty clear by now. I run as tight a ship in my personal life as I do in my professional life. I’ve been in my cabin, up in the woods, with my wife and daughters every night this summer.”

  The muscles around Hemphill’s eyes relaxed. “Everything you’re saying is exactly what I’ve learned about you.”

  “Playing the tough cop? Seeing if I’d crack?”

  The officer shrugged.

  Chuck worked to corral his anger. “My students, you’ve got nothing on them, right?”

  “So far.”

  “And, despite what Harley here thinks, you’ve got Clarence tagged as innocent, too.”

  “So far as well.”

  “And me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Leaving the focus of your investigation on the residents of Falcon House.”

  “Or an outsider.”

  “Which means my students are free to go.”

  “Day after tomorrow, Friday, as we discussed, if nothing changes. Except, possibly, for your brother-in-law.”

  “You’re going to name him as an official suspect or something, to keep him from leaving?”

  “At this stage, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m not sure.”

  Chuck pointed toward Falcon House. “Your murderer is sitting right over there, in his room. Figure out which one of those guys did it, and we can all go home.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Chuck glanced over his shoulder at the employee dormitory as he headed across the parking lot toward Raven House upon leaving the command center.

  As he’d told Hemphill, the murderer had to be one of Parker’s workers.

  Right?

  Chuck slowed.

  The male workers living in Falcon House were Mexicans who, by all accounts, maintained low profiles and sought only to send their earnings south to their families—not exactly the murderous type.

  But who else could it be?

  He stroked his chin as he walked.

  What about the librarian, Elaine? Immediately upon hearing about the black material in the mine, she’d sent Chuck back to retrieve a sample of the stuff for her. Why had she been so intent on sending him back to the mine? And why, ten years ago, had she retired from Denver to the cold, wintry Colorado mountains rather than the warm, sunny Arizona desert preferred by just about every other Denver-area retiree?

  What of the emergency room doctor, Gregory, ogling Janelle at the hospital, then showing up unbidden at the cabin, ostensibly to check on Rosie? Who makes house calls these days? Did Gregory’s big, showy SUV require truck tires? And did those tires have lightning-bolt-shaped treads? Chuck couldn’t recall.

  The Elk Foundation sticker on the SUV’s bumper indicated Gregory was a hunter. How often, Chuck wondered, did the young doctor drive into the park to go “mountain biking”? Enough to poach half a dozen trophy rams over the course of the summer?

  Gregory’s irregular hours in the emergency room would provide him the opportunity to visit the park whenever he wished, and as a hunter, he knew his way around a rifle. Still, as a well-paid doctor, what need could he possibly have for the extra income he would derive from selling Rocky Mountain sheep horns on the black market? Or could he be poaching simply for the thrill of the illicit game?

  And as for the puddle of blood spilled between the dorms, who could get their hands on human blood more easily than a night doctor with the run of the Estes Park hospital?

  Then there was Parker. How well, after all these years, did Chuck really know the resort manager? And what of the binoculars sitting on Parker’s windowsill? What might Parker have seen through them that he hadn’t admitted to Chuck—and that might have led him to murder one of his young, female employees in the dark
of night?

  Chuck shook his head. Parker? he chided himself. Gregory? Elaine? What were the odds any of them was involved in Nicoleta’s murder, the puddle of blood, the hidden mine shaft, or the poaching of the bighorns?

  He entered Raven House and found Clarence, along with Samuel, in Jeremy’s room. Jeremy slouched on his twin bed as if it were a couch, his back to the wood-paneled wall. Clarence leaned against the worn bureau opposite the bed, while Samuel sat on the room’s desk chair.

  Other than a poster of a curvaceous female skier flying off a snow cornice somewhere high in the mountains wearing only skis, boots, and a bikini, the walls of the upstairs dorm room were bare.

  Chuck stood in the doorway. “You made it through your interviews, I see.”

  Jeremy muttered from the bed, “Like we had any choice.”

  Chuck turned to Samuel. “They fed you dinner at the lodge cafeteria?”

  Samuel’s head bobbed up and down like that of a puppy. “The manager, Parker, stopped by our table. He said he was checking in, making sure we were doing all right.”

  Jeremy’s lips curled up in a sneer. “He’d better be making sure we’re doing all right, with his employees getting murdered right outside our dorm.”

  Ignoring Jeremy, Samuel asked Chuck, “Are we getting out of here tomorrow?”

  “I still get the sense no one’s going anywhere until Friday.”

  Samuel and Jeremy moaned.

  Clarence, sounding fully sober, spoke up in Chuck’s defense. “Someone’s been killed. They need time to investigate.”

  Jeremy shoved his tongue against the inside of his cheek, making it protrude rhythmically a couple of times, then snickered and mouthed the word “someone” to Samuel.

  Samuel squirmed and glanced away. Chuck glared at Jeremy. Clarence, to his credit, said nothing.

  Samuel looked at Chuck. “What’s up for tomorrow, then?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t gotten that far.” He turned to Clarence. “Can we talk?”

  Ignoring Jeremy, Chuck nodded a goodbye to Samuel and headed down the hall with Clarence.

  When they were in Clarence’s room with the door closed behind them, Clarence asked, “What’d you get out of Hemphill?”

  Chuck spun the chair from the desk and sat down with his back to the window. “He doesn’t think you did it. The other cop, Harley—the one with all the homicide experience—disagrees.”

  Clarence perched on the edge of his bed. “He made it clear he couldn’t believe it when Hemphill let me go after my interview.”

  “Learn anything from your visit to Falcon House?”

  “Not really. They’re scared, like everyone else. They didn’t want to do much talking. But they loosened up after a bit.”

  “The girls or the guys?”

  “Both. We compared notes. They claim they’re as in the dark as we are.”

  “Nothing more specific?”

  Something flickered in Clarence’s eyes. He leaned back on his elbows in an unconvincing display of nonchalance. “It wasn’t all wine and roses over there, let’s just put it that way.”

  Chuck waited.

  Clarence cleared his throat. “The old cop isn’t the only one who thinks I’m guilty,” he explained. “I was hanging in the hallway, just talking, when Nicoleta’s roommate, Anca, came out of her room. She came after me when she saw me, screaming, yelling. The others had to hold her back.”

  “She knows about you and Nicoleta, from earlier in the summer?”

  “They’re in doubles over there, two to a room. She had to stay out of the way when Nicoleta and I were doing our thing. So yeah, she knew. No way she couldn’t.”

  Chuck pointed toward Jeremy’s room. “Everybody else knows, too.”

  Clarence sat up. “I was with her at the start. But it wasn’t just me. People pretty much lined up at her door as the summer went on, from what I heard.”

  “How much of that did you tell Hemphill?”

  “Everything. I said I liked her, didn’t know why anyone would want to hurt her.”

  “The line of people at her door could have resulted in hurt feelings somewhere along the way, don’t you think?”

  “I heard some of the guys at Falcon House weren’t exactly pleased—not that they turned down any opportunities with her or anything. And I imagine Anca got tired of sleeping on the floor in other people’s rooms.”

  “You really told Hemphill all of that?”

  “Yes.”

  Chuck frowned. Hemphill hadn’t shared any of that information with him. What else had the officer heard in the course of his interviews that he hadn’t told Chuck?

  Clarence continued, “I told him the truth about everything except…last night.” He paused. “They’re pretty fixated on you, too, you know.”

  “He asked about me?”

  “Sure. Plenty.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him you were the most stand-up guy I knew, that there was no way you would ever have done it.”

  Chuck nodded his thanks.

  Clarence went on. “I think you’re right. It’s one of those Falcon House guys. As far as which one, though, how’s anyone ever going to know?”

  Chuck hung his head and spoke to the floor. “We really don’t know anything yet, do we?”

  “We know it wasn’t you or me—or any of our guys. They’re partiers, sure. Drinkers, skirt chasers.”

  “Like you,” Chuck said, looking up.

  “Like just about every warm-blooded male I’ve ever known. But they’re not killers.”

  “I want you to stay as close as you can to those Falcon House guys. Keep your eye on them. One of them did it. That has to be it. We just have to hope they’ll slip up at some point.”

  Chuck left Clarence and moved on to Kirina. She opened her door at his knock, crossed the room to her bed, and settled her computer on her lap.

  He closed the door behind him. “What’s the latest from the outside world?” he asked, eyeing her laptop.

  “Sartore is freaking out. He’s posting stuff online, asking questions on the one hand and trying to smooth things over with the parents on the other. Basically, he’s making a total mess of everything.”

  “You’ve been sending replies?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing I could say would help the situation.”

  “I just talked to him. He was pretty fired up.”

  “He already posted that you told him we’re stuck here till Friday.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “I knew Nicoleta. Sure, I’m okay with it, if it means finding out who killed her.”

  “You knew Nicoleta?”

  “Of course, I did. She was pretty social. She knew everyone in Raven House. But I have no idea who might’ve wanted to kill her.”

  Chuck sighed. “Sartore told me he’s going to drive up here tomorrow.”

  “You should be glad. It’ll take some of the pressure off you.”

  Chuck hadn’t thought of it that way. He nodded. “How’d your interview go?”

  “The officer was kind of gruff. But it went all right, I guess. Didn’t take too long.” She tilted her head toward her room window, its curtains open. “I saw you go back into the command post with him a few minutes ago. What’d he want?”

  “Thanks to you, he had nothing to say about Clarence sneaking back into the dorm.”

  She waved off Chuck’s gratitude. “I understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Clarence didn’t kill Nicoleta. We all know that. Better to keep the cops’ focus where it should be.”

  “They’re going to zero in on Falcon House tomorrow, sounds like. On the workers.”

  “That’s good to hear. What do you have in mind for us for tomorrow?”

  “I’m not sure. Any thoughts?”

  “I guess we could stay here, finish up cataloging the last of the finds, see if we can spot anything with the Falcon House workers ourselves.”

  “We can
make like Sherlock Holmes,” Chuck said. “Sniff around, solve the case on our own.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Let’s just leave,” Janelle said when Chuck returned to the cabin. “Ahora mismo. They haven’t charged Clarence with anything. Or you. We can be out of here in fifteen minutes and back in Durango by dawn.”

  The girls were settled in their twin beds in the back bedroom. Janelle sat on the living-room couch next to Chuck.

  “They’ll put out an arrest warrant for Clarence,” Chuck said. “For me, too.”

  “Clarence didn’t do anything,” she pleaded. “Neither did you.”

  “He slept with her, Jan.”

  “He what?”

  “He slept with Nicoleta. Earlier in the summer. He was the first of many, sounds like.”

  “He slept with the murdered girl?” Janelle repeated in disbelief.

  “You know full well what he’s like.”

  She rose, crossed the room, and plopped into one of the kitchen chairs. She propped her elbows on the table, using both hands to push her hair away from her face. “What else do you know that I don’t?” she asked.

  Chuck left the couch and slid into a kitchen chair opposite her. “He’s being as open as possible with the cops. That’s why they haven’t taken him in yet. But the longer things go with no other suspects…”

  “They’re wasting their time on him.”

  “Add his having slept with her to the discovery of his knife with the blood, and it’s a wonder he’s not in custody already.” Chuck reached across the table, offering Janelle his hand. “We have to get some sleep. We’ll figure things out in the morning.”

  “We really can’t leave?”

  “If Clarence runs, he’s all they’ll focus on.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and took Chuck’s hand. He pulled her to a standing position and they climbed the stairs to the loft together, her arm tight around his waist, drawing him close.

  Chuck spent much of the night staring out the skylight, cursing himself for his inability to sleep as Janelle tossed and turned beside him. Finally, just before dawn, his eyes closed and he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

  Rays of morning sun angled through the skylight when Janelle shook him awake. He sat up, groggy and confused, and squinted at the bright yellow rectangle of sunlight on the wall.