Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“Checking up on you, maybe? Hillabrand could have been trying to find out if you ditched him for another guy. Sends his boy to see how many are in your car, how many cars in the drive. It doesn’t spell conspiracy; it spells hormones. You’re pretty. You sparkle. Men go crazy for that.”

Hearing this from him clearly caught her off guard. “Sparkle?” she asked. “Did you say I sparkle?” She stepped closer, laid her hands on his shoulders. “Listen to you!”

Her palms felt warm through his uniform. She smelled of lilac and cinnamon, and, for a moment, she was everything-all he could smell, all he could sense.

A noise from out on the porch surprised them both. He jerked his head in that direction, still skittish from the encounter out back a few nights earlier.

Gail. Her face pressed to the glass and framed by open curtains; her expression that of a voyeur caught in the act. Walt immediately saw the scene from Gail’s point of view: the fire burning. Fiona’s hands on his shoulders, their bodies close. Gail, the most jealous woman he’d ever known. Jealous, no matter what. Almost a matter of pride.

She hurried off the porch. Walt ran to the front door and burst outside, calling her name. The car door thumped shut. Tire rubber whistled on the ice and then gripped. Walt charged up the shoveled path, shouting her name. The car shot back out into the street, fishtailing. He saw only taillights then, as he stood in the middle of the empty street. Still shouting for her to stop.

Since the split, Gail hadn’t come by the house unannounced. Not once. For her to have done so meant… something. His awkward talks with Brandon came to mind. Had Brandon carried the conversation home? Had she wanted to weigh in? Negotiate a truce?

A neighbor, Mrs. Shunt, had ventured out onto her porch to see what all the shouting was about. The sheriff, in full uniform, stood in the street without a jacket, shouting at a departing car. A familiar car. The curtains at the Fridlers’ house moved: the old bird had been spying on him as well. The sheriff’s marital problems were well known, but this was the first time he’d been seen chasing his soon-to-be-ex wife’s car down the street and shouting at her.

Worse, when he turned, there was Fiona at the open front door, partially backlit and actually glowing. Looking radiant. He imagined what Gail must have imagined.

He arrived at the top of the steps, wearing the porch light like a crown, a harsh shadow cast down on him, turning his eye sockets black and hollow. He stood there for a second, wondering if his actions had looked as childish as they now felt. Afraid to go inside with her. Too cold to do anything otherwise.

“That was her?” Fiona asked.

“Yeah.”

“You think she… I mean… we weren’t doing anything.”

The last thing he wanted, the last thing he could handle right then, was a discussion.

Then his mouth betrayed him. “She gave me a lecture about not setting the girls against her. This, despite her bailing on them. When they visit her for a night-a rarity-it’s at a friend’s, never at Brandon ’s. She has this all worked out, as long as it’s her way. And seeing us just now… Oh, boy.”

Fiona approached him. He held up his hands to stop her advance. With the porch light overhead, it felt as if they were both on stage, acting out some melodrama.

Fiona had no intention of embracing him. Instead, with a panicked look on her face, she reached through his defensive pose and grasped the CDC biosensor tag clipped to his uniform’s right chest pocket. She angled it up and into the porch light so that they both could see it.

One wedge of the white hexagon-separated by plastic dividers- was a distinct lavender, on its way to purple.

“You’ve been exposed to something.”

For a moment, Walt couldn’t get past the Gail fiasco. Exposed to the wrath of an ex-wife. But taking notice of the purple triangle, the cold intensified.

Fiona instinctively stepped back.

Contaminated.

Each of the six sections represented a different contaminant. He understood what it meant. “There’s this CDC woman; might still be in town. She’ll know what’s next.”

“Jesus, Walt.”

“You’d better keep back. In fact, you’ll need to stay here until it’s sorted out.” He paused, still processing what it all meant. “This is not good.”

WALT FRANTICALLY SEARCHED HIS CLUTTERED DESKTOP, DISTINCTLY remembering being handed a business card. He’d left Fiona at his house, awaiting his call. The discovery of the triggered biosensor had panicked him. An unfamiliar reaction. He had no love of hospitals; abhorred the early hours of a flu or head cold.

Never mind he felt perfectly normal. Unable to distinguish fever from panic, he began to work himself up. The call to Brandon had gone unanswered. He’d left a message for his deputy to check his own biosensor and to quarantine himself-and Gail-if necessary. Procedure dictated stringent guidelines. Walt was stretching those procedures by visiting his office.

He found the business card at last. Called the cell number and got voice mail. Called the business number and was told by recording that Dr. Lynda Bezel was out of the office until Monday. She was likely still in the valley-Danny Cutter’s water source and bottling plant were located in the Lost River Range, east of Mackay, a three-hour drive each way this time of year. He guessed her investigation would require trips to the plant. Cutter was Walt’s best shot at finding her. More voice mail. He felt feverish and sick to his stomach, his skin itched, his bones ached, his head hurt. He donned a blue hazmat suit over his clothes in the privacy of his office, grateful that, given the hour, he had to walk by only the duty officer. He hurried outside to his Cherokee and drove, determined to find her.

Driving north took him into money country. Ketchum/Sun Valley wasn’t just rich, it was superrich, with more per capital wealth concentrated in such a small area than possibly any place in the country. He was accustomed to driving past the second-home estates, each the size and look of a country club. He arrived at Patrick Cutter’s fifteen-thousand-square-foot vacation home, in which his younger brother occupied a suite in the eastern wing, wearing his impatience and disgust openly on his tormented face.

Patrick Cutter’s estate consisted of five New England barns, all authentic timber-frame structures disassembled and moved from New Hampshire and Vermont and reassembled into an interconnected masterpiece. It was landscaped, even in winter, as if it had been standing for thirty years, and was surrounded by a privacy fence. Walt drove up to the closed gate, his headlights shining across the heated terrace-stone driveway. The only car he saw parked out front was a blue sedan with Boise plates and a rental-car sticker on the bumper. He knew the identity of the renter without running the registration, and, judging by the lack of interior lights, the house looked closed up for the night. Patrick used the place as a second home, spending less than six weeks a year here. His younger brother currently called it home.

Walt tried the phone number again, elected not to leave a second voice mail, and then called in on the gate box. Danny Cutter answered on the fourth ring. Walt announced himself and asked for Dr. Bezel.

“She’s right here,” Danny said. “We were just reviewing inspection reports.”

I’ll bet you were. Danny had a reputation. It was a few minutes past ten. “I need to speak to her.”

He was buzzed through the gate and parked in front of the rental. Danny Cutter answered the door barefoot, his polo shirt untucked, his hair tousled; but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Danny was a young Jack Nicholson in training.