by Kyle Mills
“Quite a mess, ain’t it,”the sheriff said.“Boy looked like Swiss cheese. She even punched holes in his feet.”
“Mess”was an understatement. The van looked like someone had butchered a live cow with a chainsaw inside.
The brightness of the floodlights surrounding them amplified the gore, giving it a weird television quality. Blood was spattered over almost every surface and item inside—dried, thank God. The smell of wet blood in any quantity had a tendency to make him physically ill. Beamon let his eyes wander to the floor and saw something about the size of a quarter with what looked like dried gelatin clinging to it. A closer inspection revealed a few strands of dark hair. Part of Tristan Newberry’s skull and brain.
Beamon wanted nothing more than to light a cigarette, walk to the other end of the clearing, and erase this picture from his mind. But he couldn’t. The macho code of law enforcement clearly stated that he was to look unaffected and poke his head in farther.
“Of course, a lot of the stuff that was in there has been removed and cataloged—including the victim.” The sheriff pointed to the bed in the back of the van.“There was a sleeping bag back there with what looked like recently dried semen on it. We’re checking to see if it belonged to Newberry.”
“No lack of blood samples,”Beamon observed.
“Reckon not.”
Beamon nodded at what looked like a full canvas sack still lying on the bed.“What’s in there?”
“Rice. Probably used it as a pillow.”
“She used a bag of rice as a pillow?”
The sheriff frowned deeply.“Climbers.” She fairly spat out the word.“Most of ’em don’t have a pot to piss in. When they first started coming here, a bunch of ’em came to the Chamber of Commerce and told us how much money it would bring into the area. What a load of crap. When it’s sunny they’re out here squatting on public land. When it’s raining they’re sitting in the local cafés all day, drinking free coffee refills and reading yesterday’s newspapers.” She pointed to a blood-painted box full of vegetables behind the driver’s seat. Most were still covered with dirt.“Stolen from a local farmer’s field would be my guess.”
Beamon stepped away from the van and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. He nodded toward the vegetables as he lit one.“I’ve seen it before. Usually starts with turnips. Pretty soon they’re on to rhubarb and Belgian endive.” He waved in the general direction of the blood- spattered interior of the van.“Then this.”
From her expression, he could see that she didn’t appreciate the humor.
“Were there any other tracks around?”Beamon asked, letting the smoke roll satisfyingly from his mouth.
The woman didn’t say anything for a moment, then shook her head.“Lots of people come up here and, you know, there’s been a lot of rain.”
Beamon nodded in what looked like agreement, but knew from her body language that when they’d gotten the call, every cop within a hundred miles had driven his cruiser up there and parked within ten feet of the van to have a look.
“It seems pretty cut and dried,”she continued.
“How so?”
She looked at him with a touch of suspicion etched into her face.“She—Darby Moore—probably asked Newberry out here to go climbing. Near as I can tell, they’d had a long-term relationship. Newberry had sex with her and then told her he was seeing someone else.” She was starting to sound a little worked up.“I’ll bet it was about that scar on her nose—have you seen pictures of her? He probably didn’t find her attractive enough for him anymore. You can kind of see why she would react the way she did.”
Beamon wasn’t sure how to respond to that piece of conjecture, so he didn’t.
“We found an article on a climbing area in Mexico in the van and a map with a route down there highlighted,”the sheriff continued.“We’re guessing that’s where she went. Her wallet was gone and Newberry’s was empty.”
“Why didn’t she take the map?”
’Too bloody.”
“She must have been a mess, too,”Beamon observed.
“Probably washed off in that waterfall.”
“Did you find the clothes she was wearing when she killed him?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I doubt you could get that much blood out in a waterfall, but then, I’ve never showered in one. You would think, though, that somebody would have noticed a very bloody or very damp woman hitchhiking up Route 19.”
“Maybe she didn’t have any clothes on when she killed him. Newberry was in his underwear.
“Beamon shrugged.“It’s possible—worked for Lizzie Borden. But I’ve got to think that most people would just feel silly axe-murdering someone naked.”
eighteen
Mark Beamon looked through the windshield at the deep blue of the sky and the intricately woven foliage above him as he slowed the car to a crawl. The sun was filtering through the trees and coaxing from them a murky vapor that flowed through the open windows of the car and condensed inside.
He’d spent the better part of the morning at the local sheriff’s office going through the artifacts from Darby Moore’s van. He hadn’t found much, beyond finally getting the sheriff’s name: Bonnie Rile. And that general waste of time had left the more athletic part of the investigation for the full heat of the day.
He pulled off the quiet dirt road into a clearing, stopping his car about twenty feet from a small group of young people. There were ten or so of them, sitting in a rough circle on tattered lawn chairs and sleeping bags. A couple pulled joints from their mouths and shoved them under whatever was handy as Beamon stepped from the car.
“Howdy,”Beamon said as he came up next to them. No one spoke. They just held their ground and stared at him.
It wasn’t a surprising reaction. He hadn’t really come to West Virginia expecting to play George of the Jungle. The most appropriate thing he’d been able to fish from his overnight bag was a pair of khakis, a leather belt, and a white button-down. His only real accommodation to the terrain was a pair of obnoxiously colored and outrageously expensive tennis shoes he’d bought in Fayetteville. Or, more precisely, that Reynolds, Trent, and Layman had bought in Fayetteville.
The young man who seemed to be in charge gave Beamon only a cursory glance and then went back to the map spread out on his lap.“Good afternoon, officer,”he said as the two kids unfortunate enough to have their backs to Beamon abandoned their chairs and moved to a safer distance. He suddenly felt like he was in a spaghetti Western and it was high noon.
“I guess you’d be Jared Palermo. They told me I’d find you out here,”Beamon said, watching the young man draw a large circle on the map in his lap and then cross it out. He had a strange build—not the symmetrical puffiness of the more dedicated members of the gym Carrie had insisted he join. Palermo’s back and shoulders created an exaggerated V shape that looked out of balance with his scrawny legs and hard, flat chest. Most noticeable, though, were the Popeye-like forearms that looked to be larger in girth than his biceps, and the way his tan skin looked paper-thin where it stretched over his meticulously defined musculature. Beamon still didn’t know all that much about this rock-climbing crap, but from where he was standing, Palermo’s reputation as one of the best looked well deserved.
“Don’t tell me the cops have finally decided to support our search for Darby,”Palermo said with a sarcastic edge.“I know how much they’d hate to get the psycho rednecks that kidnapped her in trouble—being their cousins and all.”
That wrung a few quiet snickers from the bravest of the circle, but a scowl from Beamon shut them back up.
“Don’t know that much about what the cops are doing, Jared, but my advice to you would be not to hold your breath.”
He finally looked up.“If you’re not a cop, then who are you?”
“My name’s Mark Beamon. I was wondering if you could help me out and answer a few questions.”
Palermo’s eyes narrowed and his bare torso tensed, causing an impres
sive anatomical display.“I don’t know who you are, but—and I mean this in the nicest possible way—fuck you.”
“I just told you who I am.” Beamon pointed to one of the abandoned beach chairs at his feet.“You mind?”He flopped into the more comfortable looking of the two before Jared or any of his friends could say anything.
“I’ll tell you, Jared, I figure you owe me. I’ve been looking for you for three hours, and that’s cost me sue hundred and twenty-five dollars.” Beamon had calculated his five- thousand-dollar a day penalty for not turning up Darby at two hundred and eight dollars and thirty-three cents per hour.“So you can understand that I’m already in kind of a bad mood.”
“This is all just a bunch of bullshit,”Palermo said, his voice raising in pitch and volume.“Darby did not kill Tristan. No matter how much and how long you West Virginia assholes hassle me, it won’t change that.”
Beamon crossed his legs and locked eyes with the young climber. ’Tell me, Jared. Do I look like I’m from West Virginia to you?”
Palermo tried for a few seconds to stare him down, but soon lowered his head and concentrated on his feet.“No.”
“Look, I don’t want to turn this into a fight. I’m getting into this thing independent of the cops and all I want is a little bit of your time. What I can offer you in exchange is a hell of a lot more of an open mind than you’ll get from the sheriff’s department.”
That actually might have been a slight exaggeration, but it sounded good. Beamon was better than eighty percent certain that Darby had found out Tristan was sleeping with the local high school cheerleading squad or something and aerated him with her ice tool. This kind of thing happened every day and the killer’s neighbors always said things like,“He/she was so quiet and polite”or“They seemed to have such a great relationship.” Love could make people crazy. Hell, it was on the verge of doing it to him.
“I can guarantee you she didn’t kill him,”Jared said to a uniformly affirmative murmur from his minions.“Unless he died of sandstone poisoning.”
“Of what?”Beamon hadn’t heard that term before.
“Unless he decked—died in a fall, man. Think about it. Let’s say Darby, for no apparent reason, decides she wants Tristan dead. What would she do? She’d wait for him to get sixty feet up on a climb and when he falls, she’d let go of the rope. No one would ever be able to prove a thing.”
“Maybe it was a crime of passion. Maybe it was two o’clock in the morning and he told her she looked fat or something.”
Jared put his hand out to silence the chorus of“Pleases”and“Yeah rights.”
“Look, man. Darby and I have been friends for a long time—you know that or you wouldn’t be here talking to me. As far as I know, she and Twist hadn’t even seen each other in two years—he decided he wanted to be a lawyer and then got some fuckin’ government job. She was probably passing through D.C. and needed a place to stay and convinced him to go climbing for the weekend. Where’s the passion in that?”
Beamon nodded thoughtfully and leaned back in his chair. In his experience, passion could be spirited from thin air. People were just fucking nuts. And that probably went double for people who chose to dangle off cliffs and obtained half their personal possessions from a Kmart dumpster. He looked around him, lingering on the anxious young faces that made up the semicircle. Despite himself, he had to like what he saw just a little bit. They were kids who did what they wanted and ignored what society told them they had to do. After spending an unfortunate amount of time with some of the older children of his friends, he’d been wondering if any of the members of this generation could think for themselves. Apparently, some could.
“Why don’t you come back to the sheriff’s office with me, Jared. You could take a look at a few things for me. We could talk a little,”Beamon said as he struggled out of the low-slung chair. Not surprisingly, Palermo didn’t move.
“Come on, Jared. Your friends can hold down the fort on their own for an hour.”
“Do I have a choice?”
Beamon shrugged.“Everyone has a choice. But I expect you’ll be a lot happier in the long run if you grant me this one favor.”
Palermo rose slowly to his feet, grabbed the shirt that had been hanging on the back of his chair and started toward Beamon’s car. He had to push a stack of climbing books and magazines onto the floor in order to fit his thin frame into the passenger seat. When Beamon turned the key in the ignition, John Krakauer’s audio book Into Thin Air started in the tape deck.
“Been studying up, huh,”the young climber said, picking up an issue of Rock and Ice magazine and turning to a page marked with a paper clip.
Beamon glanced over at the glossy photograph after he had bounced safely onto a smoother section of the dirt road. It depicted Darby with her ice axe wedged into a fissure on an ice-glazed cliff face. A heavy bank of clouds had formed a thousand feet below her but thinned out enough in the distance to reveal a bright blue ocean. The only text on the page was printed in small letters along the bottom. The North Face. Never Stop Exploring.
“Quite a photograph,”he said.
“Thanks,”Palermo responded absently.“I took it.”
nineteen
Beamon waved a greeting to the cops sitting around in the sheriff’s office but didn’t stop. At the back of the station, he grabbed Jared’s arm, pulled him into the storage room, and yanked the door closed behind them.
“Jesus,”Jared breathed as he gazed down at the contents of Darby’s van organized nearly on the floor and on shelves against the wall. A good half of it was encrusted with Tristan’s blood.
“I’m sorry, Jared, I guess I should have prepared you for this.” The truth was, he hadn’t because he needed the shock value. That, combined with separating Jared from his friends and the support they provided, would hopefully throw the young climber off balance and improve Beamon’s chances of getting some straight answers.
Jared’s eyes crinkled up and the color that had drained from him started to slowly come back.“What the fuck, man. You can’t even think Darby did this. What the hell happened?”
“Shotgun,”Beamon lied.
Jared shook his head in disbelief.“This is so incredibly stupid. Where would Darby get a shotgun? The girl’s probably never fired a gun in her life!.”
Beamon gauged his reaction carefully. The details of Newberry’s death had been kept extremely quiet. If Jared had heard whisperings about the ice axe, then his reaction would have gotten him an Oscar nomination.
“I don’t know where she got the gun,”Beamon said, looking down at the gear littering the floor.“Hopefully, I’ll figure that out eventually. In the meantime, let’s play a little game. You tell me what stuff in here doesn’t belong to Darby.”
Jared sniffed loudly and stood his ground.
“Why the attitude?”Beamon said.“We both want the same thing. We want Darby found. If you’re right and Tristan’s killers have her, sooner is better than later, right? And if the sheriff’s right and she killed Tristan, then shouldn’t she have her day in court?”Beamon leaned against a low table and motioned toward the floor again.
Jared contemplated his position and loyalties for a few more seconds and then nudged at a pile of climbing shoes with his foot, separating out a couple of pairs.“These aren’t hers.” Next, he hooked the toe of his sandal through a climbing harness, careful not to let his bare skin touch the blood dried on it and gracefully flipped it out onto a bare spot on the floor.“Neither is this.”
“You’re sure,”Beamon said.
“Yeah. Darby was sponsored by Boreal, North Face, and Black Diamond. Those shoes were 5.10s and the harness was a Petzl. She’d get in trouble if she wore those.”
“From her sponsors?”
He nodded.“There isn’t a lot of money in climbing. It’s not like you join a team and get a ten-million-dollar signing bonus—even if you’re the best in the world. The only way to make a living is from guiding jobs or from sponsors—compani
es that pay you or give you free gear so that you’ll do ads for them and such. They also pay for expeditions and travel sometimes.”
“And that’s how Darby supports herself?”
Jared shrugged.“I don’t know if you could say Darby makes much of a living. She never wanted to be on a payroll ’cause she doesn’t like being tied to a schedule. Mostly she just got gear and trip money.”
Jared continued through the equipment, toeing out various articles of clothing, a rope, and some quickdraws that had all belonged to Tristan. The young climber’s conclusions were no great revelation. Beamon had spent a fair amount of time poring over recent climbing magazines and matching up the gear brands in the pictures and ads to what was strewn across the floor. He’d missed the rope, but caught pretty much everything else. It seemed that Darby bought almost nothing. Even her underwear came from some gear manufacturer or another.
“That’s it, man.” Jared said finally. He fell into a chair, exhausted, as though he’d just performed a grueling athletic feat. Unfortunately, he hadn’t said a word about the item that Beamon was really interested in.
“You know, I’ve walked around the cliffs here and figured out what most of this stuff does,”Beamon said, nodding at the floor.“The shoes, belay devices—all that.” He pointed to the ice axe hanging on the wall.“But what the hell do you do with that thing?”
“It’s an ice tool, man. You use it to climb ice. Or to protect yourself on snow.”
Beamon kept his voice casual, not wanting to tip Jared off that the shotgun story was a fabrication.“What ice? It’s eighty degrees outside. Could it be Tristan’s?”
Jared leaned forward to get a clearer view and shook his head.“This year’s carbon fiber Black Prophet. It’s the one Darby uses. I do too. Looks new; she probably got it as a replacement for one she broke or something.”
Beamon nodded with calculated disinterest. He’d thought it was strange that the murder weapon would be the only cold weather piece of gear in the van—his overly suspicious nature at work again. Black Diamond, the manufacturer of the axe, hadn’t returned his calls yet.
