Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“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.

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.