Ridley Pearson - In Harm's Way

“Is that where your memory stops?” Katherine said.

“It’s not like I remember hitting my head. But yeah, I’m assuming that’s what happened. Why? What? Are you saying I didn’t hit my head? Are you saying…? That my memory stops there because I did something to him? Is that why you’re looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Don’t give me that crap! Like that! Like you’re looking right now.”

So Katherine looked away. But the seed was planted and Fiona sank into a well of despair. A dark, cold, unmerciful place.

“I thought you were supposed to help me,” Fiona said.

“You want to talk to her again, you’re going to have to charge her.”

Peter Arian carried confidence in a way that disarmed juries and wooed judges. A surfer through college, he was Armani-ad handsome. Even at nine a.m., his eyes had a Hollywood sparkle. He spoke like a southern Californian despite his San Francisco roots.

The thing was, Walt liked Arian. Thought if he’d been a lawyer instead of a lawman, that he might have come out much the same way. He’d occasionally teased the young lawyer about switching sides and joining the prosecutor, but all he’d ever won was a laugh.

The bare hills outside Walt’s office were electric with the morning sun. He wished he were hiking.

“I want to see the evidence involved.”

“I respect your situation, Peter. You’re good at what you do and we both know it. But you do not want to go the evidence route. This is one time where, in the best interest of your client, you should just walk out the door and leave this to me. I like Kira.”

“That’s not happening.”

“Let me talk to her again this morning for an hour or so. Alone. Everyone’s a winner.”

“Walk me through the evidence first.” Arian issued a penetrating look meant to intimidate, but it fell short. “Make a believer out of me.”

“Don’t do this. You know that’s not going to happen.”

Walt’s intercom sounded.

“Sheriff, when you have a minute.”

Walt wasn’t superstitious by nature. There were cops who were: guys who turned their wallets a certain way in a back pocket, wore their shield upside down or carried a talisman. There were guys who checked the calendar in the morning and determined their activities on the whims of numerology. He wasn’t one of them, but the interruption served the same purpose. Something about the timing, something about that look on Arian’s face, something indiscernible, impossible to put a finger on, that weird kind of something that made him act in a way that he felt was inconsistent with his own actions. Nonetheless, he did it. He held out his hand, waited for Peter to shake it, and motioned him toward his office door.

“The evidence,” Arian said, “or no interview.”

His mind made up, his hand forced and his plan with it, Walt said, “I’m going to brief Doug.” The county’s prosecutor, Doug Aanestead.

“We’ll take it from there.”

Arian looked wounded. He forced a grin-more of a snarl-and made for the door.

“That’s a bad call, Sheriff.”

“The bad call was the one Ms. Kenshaw made to you, counselor.”

A knot formed in his stomach. It was one thing to find yourself out on a limb, another thing entirely to crawl out there willingly. He blamed Fiona; he blamed himself for seeing everything through the distorted lens of emotion. He felt foolish and vulnerable and knew perfectly well it was the small decisions that determine success or failure, more so than the bigger ones. He was typically rooted in procedure, so this feeling of flying by the seat of his pants left him queasy. A feeling of regret overcame him. Regret for digging so deeply in the first place.

He returned calmly to the other side of his desk, picked up the phone, and followed up on the intercom interruption.

“Wood River Glass,” he was told, “replaced a cracked windshield in a Ford F-one-fifty on the afternoon of the thirteenth. Truck has a light rack on the cab.”

He did not want to deal with the missing pickup truck right now, but he also did not want to overlook any chance at new evidence. He intended to find Doug Aanestead and make his case.

“Do we have a name?” he asked.

“Dominique Fancelli. Of eighteen-”

“Alturas Drive,” Walt said, supplying the address.

“Well… yeah,” spoken with a mixture of disappointment and astonishment. “But if you knew that-”

“Lucky guess,” Walt said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Issue a BOLO for the F-one-fifty,” Walt instructed. “And have a patrol do a drive-by, real quiet-like, of the Fancelli residence. If that pickup’s in the drive, I want to be notified immediately.”

“Got it.”

He allowed himself a faint smile, the satisfaction of a small victory. He didn’t want to misstep. He’d have to check with the prosecutor about how to approach this as well. Ironically, the law was the reason he most often lost a case.

He called Tommy Brandon because it was only fair: Brandon had made the connection to the red-tailed hawk-a bow hunter-in the first place. It felt good to possibly deliver on a favor, and for Lisa of all people.

Brandon answered on the first ring as if just sitting by the phone waiting for his call.

“Do you feel strong enough to drive about a mile south?” Walt asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think you just got out of the hospital.”

“I told you: the soaps don’t cut it for me.”

“Be ready to move. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

“The pickup truck?”

“Yeah. Did you ever see Little Big Man? The movie with Dustin Hoffman?”

“It’s one of Gail’s favorites,” Brandon said.

No, it’s one of my favorites, Walt felt like correcting. She just happened to have been in the room at the time. But he let it go.

“The Indian scene,” Walt said. “The one where he’s dying. Or trying to?”

“What a great scene.”

“‘Sometimes, the magic works,’ ” Walt quoted.

“Yeah, I remember.”

Walt blocked from his mind the second half of the couplet: “Sometimes, it doesn’t.”

Doug Aanestead reviewed the evidence from behind the twelfth hole on the Valley Club’s upper eighteen. He and his golf partner allowed three other groups to play through, each one increasing the man’s impatience. A light breeze curled the edges of the papers in the open folder, causing Aanestead to wrestle with its contents. His putter was gripped between his knees, the handle sticking out somewhat phallically.

“Honestly, Walt, I don’t love it.”

“Is that right?” Walt understood the risk of his current, and only, plan. The plan he’d wanted to play out on his time frame, not Arian’s. But here he was.

The law could be your friend or enemy, and for the past several days Walt had been working up a way to convince Aanestead he had a pretty good case against Kira. Like Walt’s, Aanestead’s was an elected office. Walt was counting on that.

“It’ll be damn unpopular, indicting this girl. Hell’s bells, she addressed the Advocates this year. We were both there.”

“We were.”

“She’s something of a local hero.”

“We have the bat,” Walt reminded.

“A bat that’s carrying three sets of prints. She’s already admitted to handling the thing. And taking a drive to Yellowstone? That’s not in the code that I know of.”

“No.”

“What about Fiona?” Aanestead asked. “She see Gale around the place? She confirm any of this?”

Walt couldn’t afford to lie. Aanestead had a competent staff. The man was ambitious, was said to have his eye on the state attorney general’s race. He would vet this thoroughly.