Killer View

by Ridley Pearson

  He pocketed the torn corner of paper, protecting it in an evidence bag, and left her to work.

  They were thirty minutes into it when Walt stomped his foot down onto the area rug in the small bathroom. His ear had picked up a difference in sound and it did so again. His thumping brought a curious Fiona. He peeled back the area rug, which was tacked on one end but loose on the other.

  It covered a hatch that had a recessed handle carved out of the top. He pulled out the Beretta for good measure, signaled Fiona to step back, and yanked it open. His penlight led the way as he climbed down into the dark. He found a light switch, and a compact fluorescent glowed.

  It was a small, square space, eight feet by eight feet-two sheets of plywood on each wall. It had been dug into the earth but was built only with wood, not concrete.

  Mark had installed the equipment for solar power down here: an inverter, a battery bank. There was a French-made instant-hot-water device, an air pressure tank, and a composting toilet that smelled of peat moss. And two lawn chairs. A portable radio. Five-gallon jugs of spring water. A variety of freeze-dried foods. A camp stove. Two sleeping bags-though not enough room to unroll them.

  Steep ladder steps led down, ending near the battery bank.

  Fiona clicked off several shots by lying down on the floor above. “A safe room?” she asked.

  “Looks that way. Not originally, of course. But he’d made it into one. Check out the bolt,” he said, indicating the open hatch.

  She photographed the three large steel bolts on the underside of the hatch, making note of the steel plating that had been installed on not just the hatch but across most of the ceiling of the room.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Built for an invasion.”

  “Francine could have been down here,” Walt said, noticing a partially eaten protein bar.

  “When?” Fiona asked.

  “When Tommy and I arrived. I never had time to look around. Tommy was shot and… the shooter… And we both took off. Shit! Francine could have been down here the whole time.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I fucked up,” he said.

  “Your deputy was shot.”

  She was making excuses for him and he didn’t like that.

  “It’s pretty crowded down here. Let me get out, and then why don’t you take pictures of everything you can?”

  “Everything?”

  “Cover it. I’m going to alert the Challis deputies to be looking for a set of tracks leaving the area. If Francine was here, she’s gone now. She’s had several hours’ head start.”

  “But why would she take off?” Fiona asked.

  “It’s bulletproof; it’s not soundproof. It’s conceivable she heard her husband go down. Heard someone take him away. Can you imagine that? Then we arrive. More shooting. I’d have taken off too.”

  “God…” she said.

  “Work it like the crime scene it is,” he instructed, as he climbed out of the space.

  She was lying on her stomach on the floor above as Walt climbed the ladder. When they were face-to-face, Walt paused, and, for a moment, they both just stared. “Hillabrand does have a reputation,” he said, in more of a whisper. “He’s supposedly a good guy, someone who doesn’t throw his weight around and who gives back to the community, which is more than you can say for most of the people up there in his income bracket. The Semper Group does billions a year.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Her breath smelled sweet, like chocolate.

  LEAVING HIS CHEROKEE for Brandon to use, Walt rode with Fiona. The long drive through Stanley and back over Galena Pass forced the memory of Randy Aker’s broken corpse back on him, as they passed the turnout where the tire tracks had been found. Twice he caught himself falling asleep but woke up, despite Fiona’s encouraging him to rest.

  She dropped him at his house.

  Lisa had been with the girls since the close of school. Nikki had a runny nose, Emily a stomachache. Walt promised Lisa a bonus for her overtime-a false promise, they both knew, but his intention seemed to mean a great deal to her.

  The clock on Mark Aker’s abduction was running. The blood on the dart’s needle could be used to confirm blood type, but Walt wasn’t waiting. The sled had carried weight. That was enough for him. Lisa agreed to drop the twins off with Myra on her way home. They’d spend the night there. He battled his guilt. He’d fought like hell for joint custody, but, with no legal opinion yet returned, he proved his own worst enemy. It would appear he had little to offer the girls beyond an unreliable schedule and multiple handoffs to a variety of caregivers. Not the most stable environment. If he’d caught Gail treating them this way, he’d have brought it as evidence against her. She might do the same to him. He had to work out a balance.

  He had just come out of a hot shower when he heard the crunch of breaking glass at the back of the house. It didn’t sound like a window; more like a lightbulb, on the back porch. Still dripping wet, he slipped into some workout pants, grabbed the Beretta, and headed stealthily through the house, working his way quickly to the kitchen. He sneaked a look out onto the back porch, surprised to see the light working, then cut quickly to the door and yanked it open, keeping himself shielded behind the doorjamb. With the gun now in both hands, he broke outside for a better look, immediately hopping to his left when his right foot took a shard of broken glass.

  Footsteps in the snow. Walt hadn’t shoveled the back path since the storm and he’d had no reason to be back there. He pulled the shard from the ball of his foot and headed down into the snow in his bare feet. He couldn’t take the cold for more than a couple of seconds, but it gave him a chance to follow the tracks with his eyes out into a stand of aspen that separated him from his neighbor’s house. A silhouette flickered there, tucked into the trees.

  “Hey!” Walt called out.

  Whoever it was took off at a run. Walt made it about ten yards in that direction before his frozen feet stopped him. A short adult, or someone young.

  He returned to the porch and studied the broken glass there. It was thin glass, smashed around a cylindrical plug of milky ice. He avoided it, returned inside, and came back out dressed for the cold.

  Had his visitor dropped it? Stepped on it?

  He had returned wearing a pair of evidence gloves, collected the pieces of glass into a paper bag; the plug of ice went into a Ziploc. Handling the tight curve of the pieces, he tried to fit them together in his mind’s eyes. A test tube?

  Mark Aker, he thought.

  How long had it been out there? Had it arrived frozen or had it frozen on its own? Had the freezing of the contents broken the glass and then someone had stepped on it or had his visitor just now crushed it accidentally? Most important: what was its significance?

  Mark…

  The lack of any note or instruction confused him. Had his visitor been interrupted and a ransom note gone undelivered?

  His cell phone rang from inside the house, and he ran to answer it.

  The hospital lab: the blood recovered from the dart, a dart carrying a barbiturate cocktail typically reserved for bull elephants, had come back a match for Mark Akers: O positive. Adding to the lab’s confusion was the fact that the chemical composition of the dart’s drug matched another they’d processed earlier in the day: that of the patient Kira Tulivich.

  WEDNESDAY

  *

  20

  BY ONE P.M. WEDNESDAY, WALT WAS BEGINNING TO WORK the evidence. The first was the result of Randy Aker’s blood workup out of Boise. It confirmed both medetomidine and ketamine, the same doping agents used on Kira Tulivich and Mark Aker.

  The second was the broken glass and plug of ice-now melted-that he’d had one of his men hand deliver to the Boise lab. Its contents might suggest who’d left it. He suspected it was a gift from Mark Aker; but, with little to back that up, he hoped for the lab’s clarification.

  The third piece of evidence was the torn triangle of paper found stabbed into the wall in Mark’s
cabin.

  Nancy entered his office and unrolled a topographical map across the mounds of paperwork piled on his desk. This was, in part, a comment on the neatness of his desk.

  “Took no time at all,” she said. “The librarian recognized it immediately by the shade of green. She’s a hiker. Uses topos all the time. Sent me over to the Elephant’s Perch and it was the same thing there, only, this time, because of the number printed on it, they pulled the exact map. We matched the torn corner to it.”

  “Mark had a topographical map of the Pahsimeroi Valley hanging on his cabin wall?”

  “Correct.”

  The map did not include his cabin’s location, which intrigued Walt. It covered the valley forty miles to the southeast. He turned the map right side up, putting what would have been the torn piece into the lower-right corner.

  “Get Fiona,” he instructed Nancy. “Tell her I need the reconstruction of the cabin wall. She’ll know what that means.”

  By two P.M., Fiona and Walt had overlaid the topo map, already pinned to corkboard, with the photographic enlargements, all done to scale. Seven eight-by-ten printouts had been taped together to form a whole. These were fitted over the map, using the torn corner piece and the three other corner pushpin marks as references. With the map now fully covered by high-resolution shots of Mark Aker’s cabin wall-the coarse texture and yellow color of rough-sawn timber-it looked as if they’d removed a piece of the wall and had brought it with them. It was the three black dots, like flyspecks, that interested Walt.

  He double-checked the alignment of the photos over the map. Allowing for the fact that three other corner pins might be off by a quarter inch or so, it looked like a good job.

  Fiona eyed it proudly. “You realize the map went on the wall, not the other way around? Shouldn’t we put the wall behind the map?”

  “Yeah, but I want to use the holes that were in the wall to mark our map. We saw three pushpins on the floor. What if they were marking certain spots?” Walt withdrew a pushpin from the side of the corkboard and answered her by carefully poking the pin’s needle through each of the three black specks. He then removed the photographs, leaving the map with three new pinholes in it.

  Fiona went quiet as she watched him work. He crossed to a computer and called up a mapping website that included hybrid images of maps overlaid onto satellite imagery. A few clicks later he had zoomed in on the Pahsimeroi Valley, with small, circular green dots, each the product of a pivot irrigation system-a huge, wheeled sprinkler arm that irrigated a quarter square mile of ground. These identified working ranches. He then cross-referenced the two maps and used the cursor on the computer to give him latitude and longitude for each of the pin markings.

  He wrote down the three locations, knowing they held significance for Mark Aker. It was possible that Aker had visited them, either professionally or otherwise.

  “How’d you do that?” she asked.

  “You just saw me.”

  “No. I mean, how’d it occur to you to do that?”

  “It’s what I do,” he answered.

  “Three pinpricks in a log wall. Are you kidding me?”

  “Three ranches,” he said, standing and studying the topo map. “A vet,” he reminded.

  The discovery that Aker had pinpointed the ranches intrigued Walt. As a vet, the man did plenty of house calls without marking them on maps. He’d been told of Mark’s secretive ways over the past month, of Mark’s spending extra time up at the cabin. But no one knew he’d actually been at the cabin; he could have easily been over in the Pahsimeroi.

  He opened the door to the incident room and called out loudly for Tommy Brandon, startling Fiona with the sharpness of his voice.

  Brandon appeared, his left arm in a sling. It was the first the two had seen each other since the shooting. Other deputies would have taken a week’s leave, but Walt had received no such request on his desk and knew Brandon would give him no excuse to be put on leave.

  “You okay?” Walt asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Want to take a ride?”

  “Where to?”

  “Randy Aker was shot with a ketamine cocktail before he dove off those rocks. He was wearing his brother’s jacket-his brother’s scent. Now, come to find out, Mark was drugged by the same cocktail. And he was interested in three ranches over in the Pahsimeroi. He marked them on a topo map he had pinned to his cabin wall. Whoever took Mark probably took the map as well.”

  “Count me in,” Brandon said.

  21

  BEFORE HE GOT OUT OF THE BUILDING, WALT WAS GRABBED by the officer on duty and introduced to a gorgeous woman from the Denver office of the CDC. Lynda Bezel was in her early thirties and wore a dark blue suit. It wasn’t a look typically seen in Hailey, Idaho. The Sun Valley look was Patagonia and Eddie Bauer; faded jeans, hiking boots, and clinging tops. She had a creamy complexion, and pale eyes that opened wide as she spoke.

  “This might be better discussed in confidence,” she said. She had a raspy bedroom voice and the coy smile that went along with it. She sat in Walt’s intentionally uncomfortable visitor’s chair. She crossed her legs with a whisper of panty hose.

  “I’ve come here as a courtesy,” Bezel began, comfortable with taking the lead. “Daniel Cutter is on probation, as we understand it. Because he’s in the system, I thought it only right to pay you a visit and let you know I intend to question him later today.”

  Walt had a history with Danny Cutter that went back several years. Patrick Cutter, Danny’s older brother, now ran a billion-dollar cellular company. Danny, whom Walt liked better than his far-more-successful brother, had a prior arrest and conviction on drug charges. He’d spent time in a federal minimum security facility before returning to Ketchum, just in time to be caught up in a murder investigation-the valley’s only murder in six years. He was a womanizer, a hard-partying boy who had cleaned up his act and, as part of his attempt to reestablish himself, had founded a bottled-water company, called Trilogy Springs, based in Ketchum.

  “Concerning?” he asked.

  “We were contacted by a Salt Lake City hospital. Two of Mr. Cutter’s employees have taken ill. Their condition is listed as serious. Doctors have not been able to stabilize them. I’m here to interview Mr. Cutter about his company’s role, if any, in these illnesses and to question him about his actions. We have a full inspection team on the way to the Trilogy Springs bottling facility, near Mackay, Idaho.”

  “What actions?”

  “It has come to our attention that Mr. Cutter may have flown the two employees in a private jet to Salt Lake City while possibly denying them medical care locally.”

  “You think he tasked those two down to Salt Lake to avoid being found out? That doesn’t sound like Danny. Listen, Salt Lake ’s the better health care. All our Life Flights go to Boise or Salt Lake.”

  Bezel jotted down something into a small notebook. She looked comfortable in the chair. Maybe she was into yoga; she looked it.

  “You said you came to me as a courtesy,” Walt said, somewhat suspiciously.

  “Exactly.”

  “Is there a probation violation?”

  “He traveled with the employees out of state. I assume that was with your knowledge and permission?”

  He was getting the idea now. Beneath the superfeminine façade was a bulldog. “I’m not his probation officer.”

  “But, as a felon, he’s required to notify your office if he intends to travel out of state, is he not?”

  “He is.”

  “Did he do that in person or by phone?”

  Walt felt cornered. He wasn’t going to lie for Danny Cutter, but he didn’t like the idea of the CDC playing babysitter.

  “I could check with his PO.”

  “Would you, please. The point is, if he entered this facility-your offices-there’s the possibility of contagion.”

  “The illness is contagious?”

  “There are two patients with similar symptoms. Tests are be
ing conducted. Doctors have not yet identified the illness. We’ve asked both Mr. Cutter and his assistant to keep themselves isolated prior to my arrival. My job is to track their movements since their contact with the individuals in question. We’ve also notified the pilots as well as employees at the Fixed Base Operation that serviced the plane.”

  He read between the lines. “Are you saying this is somehow terrorist related?” He’d had the recent warning from Homeland concerning activity by the Samakinn. “Was Trilogy contaminated intentionally?”

  “We don’t know what we’ve got, much less how Cutter’s employees might have contracted it. But, with your permission, we’d like to pass out tags to everyone employed here.” She produced what looked like a car air freshener, a round disc in a cheap plastic frame divided into six wedges of different-colored paper. It dangled from her fingers like a Christmas ornament. “And we’d like both physical swabs of the environment and a few blood samples.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Your deputies and staff come in contact with the public. Should any one of these indicators change colors, no matter how subtle, we need to hear about it.”

  Walt knew from recent training that such indicators had been proven to help field investigators narrow down searches and limit exposure. He had a box of similar tags in a cupboard in the incident room. He’d never had use for them.

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “We’d appreciate it if every member of your staff-”

  “I get it,” said Walt, interrupting. “Leave them with me. I’ll see to it.”

  “Companies in your county are aware of their obligation under federal guidelines to notify both you and our center in the event of suspected contamination or unexplained illness, are they not?”

  “I would assume so. We’ve spread the word, and there’s been a lot of literature.”

  “Can you think of any reason Daniel Cutter would elect not to notify either of us?”