Ridley Pearson - Killer View

Walt wanted to take a swing at the guy, more out of frustration than anger, but it wasn’t going to happen. Amish’s confidence was disconcerting. There was a knock on the door followed by the arrival of a man who leaned into Amish’s ear.

Amish said, “You’ll go home tonight, but we’re not done here. We’ll report this violation to some of those six departments, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from more than one of them. This was a stupid stunt to pull, Sheriff. You’ve fooled no one.”

If he was being sent home tonight, then they hadn’t found the photographs.

He waited another hour to be released and around nine P.M. was led outside to a vehicle that drove him and Fiona back to the Arco airport, where the towplane waited.

They didn’t speak while in the car and under escort. After having been dropped off, the shuttle vehicle then leaving the airstrip, Walt turned to her.

“So?”

Her lips pursed. She tugged the strap of her camera bag higher onto her shoulder. “I made the call. You know?”

“E-mailing the photos, you mean? Yeah. That was incredibly fast think-”

“The other call,” she said. “How do you think we got off so easily?”

“Hillabrand?”

She nodded spitefully.

“But… they didn’t have us on anything,” Walt protested. “Why drag Hillabrand into this if they were going to release us, anyway?”

“Let me get this right: you’re mad at me for getting us out of there?”

“I’m not mad at you. But they had no evidence.”

“They had us locked up in interrogation rooms. They had my phone. My phone, not yours. All the photographs were on my phone. Besides, don’t give me that: it’s why you brought me along, right? We established that earlier.”

“It’s not why,” Walt countered. “I hadn’t even thought about Hillabrand until you brought him up.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“It is ! I asked you along because I needed photographs shot. If we hadn’t been forced down, I’d have gone in there on foot tonight. To that construction work. But, listen, I never once considered using your… relationship… with Hillabrand to my advantage-our advantage. Your mention of it actually amused me, Fiona. You don’t know me very well if you’d think I’d do such a thing.”

“There is no relationship with Roger. Just FYI. I’d say that pretty much just came to an end tonight. I felt like a teenager calling Daddy. Who knows what he thought. Ten minutes later, we were released. You can thank me later.”

She hurried off toward the towplane, where the pilot was standing by. Walt packed in with her behind the pilot, and they sat pressed shoulder to shoulder for the short thirty-minute flight. She never said a word to him. He tried twice to break the silence but failed. At the FBO in Sun Valley, she marched to her parked Subaru, climbed in, and drove off without looking back.

Walt arrived home, depressed, and wondering if the INL would take legal action. Hillabrand being dragged into it complicated matters.

He parked the Cherokee out front as he almost always did, despite a garage around back. He liked the police cruiser being seen sitting in front of the house. He hurried up to the front porch, concerned-but not overly so-by the front porch light being off and the rest of the house being so dark. He always encouraged Lisa to keep several lights on.

He managed to key open the door in the dark and flip on the lights.

“Lisa?” he hissed softly.

The couch was empty. He usually found her dozing there at this hour. She’d probably fallen asleep next to one of the twins while reading a bedtime story.

“Lisa?” he repeated more loudly.

His chest tightened.

He hurried through the house, carefully opening Emily’s bedroom door first. Empty . Then Nikki’s. Empty. He checked the face of his cell phone: eleven messages. He had assumed them all to be work related; consumed with the events of the evening, he’d planned to answer them once he got home.

He tried the master bedroom.

Dark and empty.

He had the phone to his ear now, the first of the messages replaying. With no way to skip messages, he was forced to endure the mundane while anticipating the worst.

Finally, he heard Lisa’s voice, bordering on hysterical: “Walt? It was Gail. She was… I don’t know… I’ve never seen her like that. She said you two had an agreement about no women. I thought she meant me. I tried to reason, but she just stormed right past me, saying how she was the mother. The girls are fine. She has them. Please call me. I didn’t know what to do, Walt. I didn’t know what to do.”

He threw the phone. It skipped off the dining-room table and hit the window and broke the glass.

Walt hurried to the door; he knew exactly what to do: get his children back. He caught himself on the threshold, reconsidering. The girls had had enough for one night. Gail wouldn’t have taken them to Brandon ’s-that was indeed the agreement.

He stepped back inside, slammed the front door shut, and locked it. Switched off the light so he didn’t have to see how empty it was without them. He heard the sounds of his own labored breathing. He extracted a single truth from the depths of his depression: they’d crossed a barrier, arriving at a finality to the truce that had been maintained for far too long.

THE HAILEY LIBRARY HAD BEEN A SUPERMARKET IN ITS former life. Walt came here often enough with the twins, but he still couldn’t shake the memory; he expected to smell fresh coffee and doughnuts. Instead, he passed the front desk and a table displaying NEW ARRIVALS. There was an end cap on the nearest stack devoted entirely to Hemingway. Walt wished the fame and lore of Hemingway could have been attributed to the work of the great writer when he’d lived in the valley, but, instead, most of the fame of the place came from the fact he’d died here. Being known as a place where a famous writer ate the wrong end of a shotgun was nothing but trouble for the county sheriff. Others had come here for like purpose. Not so great to be the trendy suicide locale.

He’d never paid any attention to the library’s conference room. It held an oval table that sat ten, with just enough room behind each chair to slip past. There was a pull-down whiteboard at the end of the room, carrying notes written in pink marker that appeared to have something to do with a book sale fund-raiser.

He didn’t appreciate being made to wait, but Danny Cutter had sounded frantic on the phone, and Walt made it a point to tread lightly with the billionaires and their families. And so he waited. Five minutes melted into ten.

Finally, the door opened.

Danny Cutter had that tanned, outdoorsy thing working for him. He wore blue jeans, a pressed white shirt, and an Orvis outdoor coat, black fabric with a brown leather collar and trim.

“Sorry I made you wait,” he said, shaking hands with Walt only after he’d locked the conference-room door and twisted the blinds closed. “I thought if someone followed me, they wouldn’t see you entering after me, and that just felt better.”

“Someone’s following you?”

Cutter shook his head with a look of disgust. “Who knows?”

“Sit,” Walt said.

Cutter took the chair next to Walt and spoke quietly. “You know about the charges at the hotel? The violation of my parole? Chuck Webb said you knew about it, said it could have been worse-much worse-and that I had you to thank for that.”

“Wouldn’t know what he’s talking about,” Walt said, stone-faced.

“Someone called it in to the Sun Valley police. Said I was drunk or stoned or both. So I ended up under suspicion, and they required a blood test because of the parole and I had coke in my system-coke I have no memory of doing, I might add. And that puts me in violation.”