The man now sitting on the stool next to her waited for the right moment. The bartender’s head came up. The waitress slipped a wedge of lime on the highball’s rim. The man pointed to a bottle of single malt, his right arm impolitely extended between the two of them. He asked about the cost and quality of the scotch. As they directed their attention to the bottle, his left hand waved over the top of the kir like a magician’s. For anyone looking closely, the champagne briefly fizzed a little more than it had before. A few grains of sediment sank to the bottom of the glass and then vanished.
He was told the scotch was excellent, and cost as much as a tank of gas. He ordered a draft beer, and stayed on the stool long enough to watch the tray make its way through the crowded room, carried high on the end of the waitress’s steepled fingers. Waited through half the beer, knowing that a young woman would go to the washroom when her head began spinning. She wouldn’t tell her older friends anything was wrong. Might not even ask a friend to join her in the washroom. First, she would try to deal with this herself.
That was when he’d strike.
He finished the beer, placed a modest tip on the bar-neither too small nor too large to be remembered-and freed the stool to one of the many waiting behind him. Working through the busy bar took some time. Given his size and the power of his body, he could have made quick work of it, but invisibility mattered more than efficiency. He took his time, finding openings, and squeezing between the crowded tables, reaching the rough-wood-paneled back hallway. The two rest-rooms shared a wall across from a gallery of tintypes of mining camps from more than a century ago. An exit at the end led to the back parking lot. It helped that it was snowing heavily, helped that his pickup was parked less than twenty feet from the door.
He saw it clearly unfold in his mind, like watching a film but with him in it. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to hunt, to stalk, to kill. He celebrated his own brilliance, reveled in the warmth that anticipation raised in his bloodstream. Got high on it. To everything… a time for every purpose, under Heaven.
He admired the tintypes, or at least pretended to: scraggly-looking guys from the 1800s, showing off rows of enormous brook and rainbow trout hanging from laundry lines outside canvas tents. With the alcohol as a catalyst, it wouldn’t take long for her to feel it. A swimming head. An unexpected warmth and euphoria. An unfamiliar lack of inhibition, accompanied by a penetrating relaxing of her muscles.
He stole glimpses of her across the barroom. Each time she laughed, her strapless bridesmaid’s dress slipped a little lower on her chest, revealing the remnant of a summer-tan line. She might have paid more attention to this even twenty minutes earlier. But now, light-headed and prone to laughter, she didn’t know what she felt except a little too good. Less than five minutes later, just before her left breast completely escaped, her forearm caught the dress, and she pinched the fabric below her smoothly shaved armpits and hiked it back up. This moment of modesty triggered something in what remained of her conscious mind, informing her something was wrong. It couldn’t have been more than a glimpse, a flicker, given the dose. But, in that instant, she excused herself, briefly lost her balance, stumbled, burst out laughing, and once again caught the bust of her dress just prior to total exposure. And then, to his pure delight, she headed directly for him.
A syringe occupied each of his coat pockets, making one easily available to either hand. He wasn’t going to need the Taser: she was cranked. She reached to the backs of chairs for support as she negotiated her way through the crowded room. The live band pounded through a John Mellencamp song, loud enough to make it impossible to think. She caught the beat, and, smiling sublimely, swayed her hips side to side, now on final approach.
She was an eyeful. Unblemished skin. Thick red hair held high on her head in an elaborate braid. A body ripe and heavy with fruit. Rendered helpless and without a conscious thought, she grinned behind half-mast eyes. Her round hips punched out the beat.
She tripped once more, as she cleared the chairs and tables, and headed for the hallway, where he waited, licking his chops like the proverbial wolf. This was going to be fun. She crashed right into his arms.
“Whoa, there!” he said.
She laughed, looked up, and bent back, as she tried to focus. Eyebrows arched, and then pinched, as she failed to recognize him. And no memory of how she’d gotten there. “Excuse me,” she said, some drool running off her lower lip.
He held her by the elbow, knowing she probably didn’t feel it. Things would be going spongy now-in crystalline form, this stuff worked quickly.
“No problem,” he said, giving his most reassuring smile.
“Just need the little girls’ room,” she said. She remembered that much but little else.
He took in both ends of the hall. The timing couldn’t have been better: they were alone.
His left hand found the syringe in his coat pocket and slipped off the needle guard.
“Maybe a little fresh air,” he said, guiding her a few feet closer to the exit.
“You think?”
She stopped. Looked up into his face. Tried to concentrate. “Do I know you?”
“It’s cold out. Feels pretty good when you’re feeling dizzy.”
“I am dizzy,” she said. “How’d you know?”
“Been there,” he said warmly.
She wore five earrings up the curve of her left ear, a rainbow of gems: ruby, sapphire, emerald, two diamonds. An ear worth ten grand. She’d be missing those by morning. She glanced at the word GALS on the rough-hewn door as they passed it, then at her escort, and something registered behind her out-of-focus eyes that the train had missed its stop. But nothing too alarming; it must have felt good to have someone holding her up. “Cold air,” she muttered.
“It’s snowing. It’ll feel good,” he encouraged.
She exhaled, suddenly leaning more fully on his arm. Relying on his assistance now, she sagged, her muscles going all creamy, her head bobbing like a marionette’s.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel pretty good already.”
“No crime in that.”
“Real good, actually. Probably too good.” That made her laugh. She cracked herself up, her voice still bubbly and light, as the exit door slipped shut behind her.
He checked the alley in both directions. Hard to see more than ten yards in the swirling darkness. He’d knocked out the only spotlight on his way inside earlier. A streetlamp thirty yards to his right showed a cone of snow, large flakes falling heavily.
The pickup’s tailgate was already down. A half inch of fresh snow had collected there. The door to the dog carrier hung open as well.
“What’s going on?” she said, a fleeting moment of awareness. But then she stuck out her pink tongue and tried to catch snowflakes. She giggled childishly.
“We’re going to have a good time,” he said. “We’re going to party.”
“I like to party.”
One last check in all directions-the snow and the darkness like a privacy curtain. Someone three cars over wouldn’t have been able to see them clearly. He hit her in the left buttock with the syringe.
“Hey!” she said, as if he’d pinched her there.
She weighed about a hundred and ten. He picked her up and folded her in half without straining.
“This is a game,” he said. “You have to be quiet.”
“Shh!” she said, still giggling, as he pushed her inside the carrier and shut its door with a metallic click of finality.
6
WALT HAD FOLLOWED THE DISTURBANCE IN THE SNOW back through a mile and a half of woods, to the two-lane Idaho State Highway 75, wondering now if the plan had been for the storm to cover the tracks, removing the evidence. He feared Randy Aker’s death was anything but accidental. Proving it would be something else, given that the storm had buried even the circumstantial evidence. So preserving what little hard evidence he believed he had became paramount.
He sent Brandon down the snow-co
vered road on foot to retrieve the Hummer, while Walt kneeled, sweating and shivering in the cold, his winter coat spread out and supported by small sticks to make a tent above a section of the turnout where he and Brandon had carefully uncovered a tire print. They’d gotten lucky: the road had been recently plowed before the car or truck had parked in the turnout; its prints had frozen in the quickly freezing slush left behind by the plow.
By carefully brushing away the light powder, he and Brandon had excavated a portion of the icy tire impression. Now that it was exposed, though, the falling snow seemed to be crystallizing on top of it, adhering to it, necessitating the improvised covering. Alongside the impression were two telltale paw prints-a dog’s. Not wolf, not coyote. Walt continued to gently brush away the powdery snow, exposing three additional animal tracks-also dog prints. No five-legged dogs, as far as he knew, so there were two or more.
He heard the grind of an engine long before he caught sight of the approaching headlights. The snow was really coming down now, the flakes turning larger and wetter. The kind of warm snow that melted as it fell, covering everything in a pasty slush. A tent twig snapped, and one arm of his coat sagged toward the tire impression and, as the wind caught the coat, dragged it in the snow, perfectly erasing two of the dog prints. Walt did his best to shield the remaining three while struggling to support his sagging coat.
He glanced up somewhat desperately at the headlights and saw two people in the cab, and, as it drew closer and parked, he identified the passenger as Fiona Kenshaw. When he thought of Fiona, in his mind’s eye she wore a tight T-shirt and fishing waders; she had her hair trimmed summer short, and she wore no makeup. But as she climbed out of the vehicle, lugging a camera case over her shoulder, he saw she wore a purple downhill ski suit, no hat, driving gloves, and a pair of gray Uggs.
That kind of ski suit was for the Sun Valley set, not Fiona. Maybe it was borrowed, he thought. But even in the headlights, her face was simple and pleasant, with eyes that worked hard to disguise some truth he knew nothing about. Maybe he liked her for this mystery she always carried, maybe for her independence, but he liked her. And, as so often happened in this county, his office relied upon her part-time help.
“Sorry, I was working a wedding,” she apologized, cutting off any comments he might make about how she’d dressed. “A freelance thing. Got here as soon as I could.”
Brandon explained, “We left her car down with my truck.”
Walt directed Brandon to retrieve the blue tarp and tent poles in the back of the Hummer. Ten minutes later, he got his coat back, and, with Brandon holding one of the four corners and Walt the other, with a third corner tied to the bumper of the Hummer, they improvised a tent, under which Fiona went to work.
“You really drive this thing?” she asked him.
“Not often. It was donated by one of our resident billionaires. Comes in handy sometimes.”
“All those toys, and you can’t take your own pictures.”
“I tried. All I got was white on white,” Walt explained. “We’re going to lose this scene fast. I need as much detail as you can get.”
Fiona asked Brandon to hold a bounce screen against his knees, angled to reflect the light off the Hummer’s headlights. She set up a large, battery-powered umbrella flash opposite Brandon and ran off a series of shots. She checked the back of her camera, didn’t like the results, and rearranged the lighting and tried again. Twenty minutes passed doing four different setups. The snowfall increased, and the wind picked up, lifting ghostly white sheets of powder off the pavement and spreading them around. A thin drift blew across the tire print and briefly covered it. Fiona used a soft lens brush to sweep it off, but it was obvious to all of them they were losing the battle.
“These suck,” she said. “No contrast. Bad shadows. You’re not going to like them.”
“I need this,” Walt said.
“Yeah? Well, I need a contrast agent. A dark powder. Hang on.” She hurried back to the Hummer, pulled her purse from the car, and dug through it. “Pays that I was at a wedding and wanted to look presentable.” She held up a compact case. “Face powder. Who’s got a coin?”
She scratched the compressed face powder to dust and blew across it to color the icy tire impression. A few minutes later, she had the shots she wanted and showed them to him on the camera’s small screen, before the three of them took down the rigging and piled back into the Hummer.
“Do I get to know what this is about?” she asked Walt from the backseat.
Brandon looked over, curious as to how Walt would answer.
“It’s a murder investigation,” Walt said.
7
HE HUMMED A LITTLE THEME MUSIC IN HIS HEAD AS A soundtrack. Real life felt like the movies or television only when you added a soundtrack. The cabin was dark and smelled of wood smoke, and other odors not easily placed: cordite, medicines, old dog.
He’d placed her in his only comfortable chair, next to the woodstove. It had a green Pendleton blanket pulled over the cushions to hide the stuffing that escaped its worn pillows. An unusual footstool- woven cane with deer antler legs-held up her bare feet. He’d bound her wrists to the arms of the chair with plastic ties. He’d left her legs free, for obvious reasons.
“You all right?” he asked her. He didn’t care, but he offered his concern as a courtesy.
She giggled-a wet, guttural groan-part of her given to fantasy, part terror. That odd laughing of hers was enough to make him sick. Then again, it aroused him to the point he was needing some satisfaction and that brought him back to the soundtrack, because now he was humming the Rolling Stones. “ ‘I feel great,’” he answered, speaking for her. One of her eyes lifted partially open as he spoke for her, and only then with great effort. The eyeball spun in her head; her lid fell shut, then blinked open again.
The eye surveyed her surroundings, and she tried to sit up. Her left breast popped out of the dress. She looked down at herself, and some drool spilled from her mouth to her chest and slid into the gulf, the fleshy abyss, and was gone.
“ ‘Oops!’” he said for her, now laughing along with her as she made that sound again. “‘Hey, what’s with my arms, anyway?’” he narrated. “‘I mean, I can’t feel anything.’
“Isn’t that right?” he asked her. “Numb as Novocain. The good news is, you won’t want to remember any of this. Good for both of us. Won’t feel hardly anything either, but that’s your loss.” He rubbed his crotch, and then took hold of it and squeezed it like a rapper. “Old Max is dying to meet you.”
His looks must have frightened her on some level, for he was a big son of a bitch, with too much hair and too little grooming.
He waited for her but got only that one wandering eye.
He raised his voice an octave to imitate her. “‘I like to par… ty.’
“We’re going to have fun, all right,” he said.
Ostensibly, he was on contract, but he had ulterior motives, information of his own to collect from her. Had she been horsey, he might have gleaned the information and been done with her. But she was a rare thing of youthful beauty-and the ketamine cocktail would erase any memory of these precious hours. As a survivalist, he knew never to waste anything. Put everything to good use.
“‘Well, what are we waiting for?’” his ventriloquist puppet asked. Her good eye was locked onto the stove, apparently having lost track of him, but he didn’t let that bother him. You didn’t lose track of a man with a near-three-foot span to his shoulders and twenty-eight-inch thighs for very long. You just chose to ignore him. But that wouldn’t last either. Old Max was coming to attention.
A geometric pattern of light rounded the ceiling and fled down a wall like a ghost, and a car engine was heard shutting off. The cabin door opened a moment later, and, with it, came a gust of cold that turned them both that direction.
“Nice,” the visitor said, noticing the gooseflesh on her exposed breast, the tight pucker to her nipple and areola, as he shut the door.
“‘Who are you?’” he imagined her asking.
He’s who you have to thank for this, he answered himself silently.
The visitor was dressed like a shoe salesman. He removed his Eddie Bauer jacket-black suede peppered with melted snow-and stepped away from the door and into the light. He had uncommon good looks, though his face was difficult to read. He might have once been a high school quarterback or varsity pitcher, the kind of guy that didn’t need to drug a girl to get some action. “Stop humming,” he said.
The big man went silent and backed away. He could break this guy with one hand tied behind his back, if he had to, but he wasn’t about to. Both men knew that.
The visitor stepped toward the woodstove, holding his hands out for warmth. “Kira, you can hear me and understand me?”
“Do I know you?” Her words slurred. It was the first time she’d spoken since leaving the bar. “Help me…”
“I will help you. But I need your help first. Okay?” He waited. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. The visitor looked over his shoulder and the big man handed him a syringe from the kitchen table.
“You work at the Sun Valley Animal Center,” the visitor said.
“Do… I… know… you?” she repeated.
“You’re Mark Aker’s secretary.”
“His assistant. Ass-isn’t?” she said, amusing herself. “How do you… know… that?”
The quavering of her voice changed her in the big man’s eyes. She looked so incredibly young and childish, all of a sudden. Just a baby in a bridesmaid’s dress.
“Tell me about the sheep.”
“What sheep? Which sheep?”
“The sheep. The sick sheep. Why are the sheep so sick?”
“Are we going to party or talk nursery rhymes?” She giggled throatily.
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