Ridley Pearson - Killer Weekend

“Don’t you dare.”

Walt thanked her for the call and sat on the edge of his bed reflecting on the past few days. He considered taking an hour or two to start his report before he forgot the details. But he fell asleep still sitting up, slumped down onto the bed with his head nowhere near a pillow, his feet touching the floor. Woke up twice from nightmares, the first involving Trevalian and his thumb on a white button; in the second, he was being mauled by a cougar. He never found his way under the covers. He slept, buck naked, on the bedspread, through the rest of Monday and into Tuesday.

And when he woke up, he made a phone call and headed for a cup of coffee.

A special thanks to Walt Femling and the many outstanding officers of the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office. Walt has allowed me to fictionalize his character, and just for the record, he and his father, Jerry, and he and his wife, Jenny, enjoy wonderful relationships-nothing like what is depicted here. Being sheriff in an Idaho county the size of New Jersey is no easy task. Walt has worn that badge many years, and the citizens of Blaine County owe him a huge debt, as do I.

Thanks to the colorful personalities of the Sun Valley area where I’ve lived, at least part-time, for the past twenty-six years. I’ve fictionalized many friends in these pages, and I beg their forgiveness.

Thanks too, to Dan Conaway, my editor at Putnam. I owe him for hours of work and guidance put into Killer Weekend.

Thanks, too, to Nancy Litzinger, who runs the business side of my life; to dear friends David and Laurel Walters, who put in copyedit hours on the manuscript; to Joey Lambert for all her enthusiasm and energy in the office.

Thank you, Mark and Randy Aker and the Sun Valley Animal Clinic, for allowing me to sit in on canine surgery, and to Barb for her help with the dog training.

Though I fictionalized it, I did my best to represent the business conference as a compilation of many of the (sometimes unbelievable) events (and excesses) that occur in the Ketchum/Sun Valley area. No reference was intended to any one single conference.

Ridley Pearson is the author of more than twenty crime novels and several books for younger readers. He and Dave Barry cowrote the award-winning children’s novels Peter and the Starcatchers and Peter and the Shadow Thieves. In 1990, he was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford University. He lives with wife, Marcelle, and their two daughters, dividing his time between St. Louis and Hailey, Idaho.