Ridley Pearson - In Harm's Way

It bounced off the stopper and came back at her and she blocked it with her toe. A box freezer in the garage groaned and Fiona suddenly viewed it as a coffin and moved toward it cautiously, slipping past the pickup truck that shouldn’t have been there. With her back to the freezer, her fingers deciphered its latch and forced it open and she lifted its springed lid blindly, finally gathering the courage to peer behind her and see nothing but bricks of frozen meat in white paper wrappers.

Now, finally, she felt her nerves settling. Her last great fear was that she would find Kira in the truck. She gathered her courage, climbed onto the side rail, and, holding to the exterior mirror with her left hand and still clutching the glass cube in her right, pressed her eyes to the glass and tried to see inside. She moved front seat to back. Empty.

She climbed into the truck bed and hesitated only briefly before popping the lid on the Tuff-Box toolbox mounted below the cab’s rear window. Tools. A jumper cable. No body. She sat down into the truck bed and released an audible sigh, waited for her light-headedness to pass, and collected herself. Slowly, the anger at Kira reentered her, and it was everything she could do to suppress it.

She owed Nancy a phone call. She owed Walt an explanation. But her imagination got the better of her. She’d been fixated on trying to explain what had happened to her, where Kira had gone, the body at the bottom of the mountain.

Knowing Nancy was expecting her call, she moved quickly now, suddenly energized, freed of the weight of her prior fears. It was almost as if she’d rehearsed it, the way she went about it so methodically.

She found the blank sheets of paper and the Scotch tape in Michael’s office. The acrylic paint in Leslie’s painting studio. She tripped the garage door on her return, and climbed into the truck and found the keys in the center island’s cup holder. She slipped the key into the ignition and left the driver’s door open and the key alarm sounding as she placed the taped-together sheets of copy paper behind each of the truck tires, mixed the eggplant purple paint with some water, and meticulously applied the paint to the tire rubber as if she’d done it a hundred times. She climbed behind the wheel and backed up the truck, and then collected the four strips of paper and liked three of the four she saw. She repeated the procedure for the front right tire and then wiped down all four tires with a wet rag and parked the truck and shut the automatic door, returning to her cottage, where she generated photographs of the truck tire impressions from the Gale crime scene.

The scale was wrong and so she reprinted two of the photographs, this time enlarging the photos to where she got less of the impression, but a wider width.

Then, placing the photographs next to the impressions she’d taken from the garage, she studied the tread pattern and took out a tape measure from her kitchen junk drawer, and noticed her hands shaking as she counted the rows of tread pattern and tried to calculate the widths. At last she turned around the photo to her right and moved it along the taped-together copy pages, and gasped at what she saw.

She jumped and let out a cry as the phone in her pocket buzzed, jolting her. She reached for it, knowing who it would be before ever checking the caller ID.

Her thumb hovered, wondering whether to answer it or not.

Walt sat facing the computer screen on his dining-room table when he heard the rhythmic tap of footfalls on his front porch steps. He was sending an e-mail to Boldt and hoping to Skype with the detective, to talk through the facts of the case and see if they converged for Boldt as they did for him. The tire impressions had come back from the lab as a BFGoodrich-branded tread-the Radial Long Trail. The pollen collected from Gale’s earwax had been identified as coming from a yellow lily. He’d witnessed Boatwright’s gardener digging up a flower bed. To mix blood into the soil? If he went after a man like Boatwright, he would need more than pollen and some hunches-an army of attorneys was more like it.

The footfalls stopped and Walt prepared himself for the doorbell or a knock. At nine-thirty p.m., it was late for a visitor, and the longer the pause continued, the more convinced he became that an insecure Fiona awaited him at the door. He pushed back his chair and closed the distance to the front door quickly, not wanting to lose her, throwing it open and feeling his expectation crushed as he stood facing a stranger.

“Hello?” he said.

In her late twenties or early thirties, the woman had a tired look about her, stringy brown hair, wore no makeup, had seven empty holes running up the spine of her left ear.

“Sheriff?” A husky, smoker’s voice.

“Yes. May I help you?”

“I need to speak with you.”

“I keep office hours. If you don’t mind-”

“Away from the office,” the woman said, interrupting. “A friend knew where you lived. I’m sorry about this.”

He motioned her inside, and then to the couch. He offered her something to drink, hoping she wouldn’t accept and she asked for coffee-“Any kind of coffee. Instant’s all right.”

He used his coffee press to make two cups and served her in a Simpsons mug. His was a State Farm.

Beatrice combat-crawled across the floor to the woman’s feet and sighed to make sure to be noticed. The woman bent down and petted her and Bea set up camp, climbing to a sitting position and placing just her jaw onto the edge of the couch for convenience.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but it’s wrong of me to come here. But I can’t be seen at your office, or at least I don’t want to be seen at your office.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s about the man. The dead man.”

Walt kept his outward appearance calm, though his insides were anything but.

“Martel Gale.”

“Martel, yes. I didn’t know his last name at the time.”

“You knew him,” Walt said. He sipped the hot coffee in part to maintain the image of nonchalance.

“Sheriff, I’m a member of NA-Narcotics Anonymous. The whole idea is anonymity, so my being here is radically wrong. But when I saw the story in the paper. When they ran the photograph of him-that football one-I felt an obligation to come forward.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“He visited our group last Tuesday night. It was a speaker night so there wasn’t a lot of sharing, but he stuck around for coffee at the end and I talked to him. We get a lot of guests and like them to feel welcome.”

Walt wondered if Martel Gale’s good looks had had anything to do with her welcome.

“He stuck around awhile,” she continued, “and we got to talking and though he didn’t come right out and say it, I think he was here in Sun Valley for the ninth step.”

“You know, I’m familiar with twelve-step programs-AA most of all-and believe me, we appreciate their success, but I’m not familiar with the particular steps.”

“You might call it atonement,” she said. “ ‘We make direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.’ Basically, it’s our chance to remove excess baggage and clear the way for our full recovery.”

“I realize there is the assumption of anonymity,” Walt said, choosing his words carefully, “but with Mr. Gale dead I’m hoping we can look beyond that and you can tell me as much as you know.”

“And I would, except the last part of the step kind of prevents that. I mean, I have no way of knowing who such information might injure, and it’s wrong for me to come here and talk about this in the first place, much less accidentally harm or injure someone by doing so. That’s for the addict to decide. I’m not about to play Higher Power.”