Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“The pickup trucks.” Walt remembered them.

The kid nodded again. “I keep expecting a knock on the door and someone crushing my head in. Coats is fucking out of his mind. He’ll kill me, he figures out it was me. All I want is those cameras out of there. They’re still in there. Get it? He’s gonna find them at some point and then I’m, like, totally fucked.”

“I can probably help you there,” Walt said, his head spinning from the information. “The night of the assault, Coats had company?”

“Yeah.”

“A black Escalade? The guy’s in his late thirties. Pretty buffed out. Dresses well.”

The boy looked stunned. “How could you know that?”

“It’s my job, Taylor,” Walt said, and then mumbled to himself: “It’s my job.”

“WHY AM I BEING MADE TO WATCH THIS?” FIONA ASKED, standing alongside Walt in the sheriff’s office command center. The door was shut and locked, the television’s sound turned down low, so that Kira Tulivich’s agony remained contained within those walls.

“I’m sorry,” Walt said, “but you’re my photography expert.”

“They should be hung. No, castrated with a kitchen knife, then pulled, limb from limb, drawn and quartered. And even that would be too good for them.”

On the screen, Coats and an unidentified male took turns violating Kira Tulivich. The horror played out in the grainy black-and-white of Taylor Crabtree’s webcam, his computer having been confiscated from the RV he used as shelter.

“You may be able to spot a frame we could enlarge or something, to give us a better look at the second man.”

“It’s not that at all, is it?” she said accusingly. “What is it with you, Walt? Always having hidden agendas. Never admitting them. Why don’t you just come out and say you think it’s Sean Lunn?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Oh… give me a break.”

“Is it?”

“That’s what I think, yes. Does anything I see here confirm it, make me absolutely certain? No. But you won’t even speak his name.”

“I can’t,” Walt said, winning a surprised look from her.

“You need me as a witness?” she speculated.

“I need to identify the second man. Yes. That could prove extremely helpful.”

“So you don’t mention his name because, if you did, it could be construed later that you led the witness.”

“Something like that.”

“I’m sorry.” She ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head back. She had an elegant neck, long and regal. “I confuse the professional with the personal, don’t I?”

“It’s easy to do.”

“So why don’t you?” she asked.

Tulivich was held in place by Coats. She let out a horrible scream. Fiona looked away. “Well, if anything will put you off sex, this will.”

“I want them both to pay for this, Fiona. Not just Coats. Coats…I’m going to take care of Coats.”

“Do you have him?”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“No. We do know the Bureau had a confrontation with a man believed to be a member of the Samakinn-an extremist group, part Ted Kaczynski, part Aryan Nation. A second suspect, a woman, is in custody. She’s a meth addict and is proving difficult to deal with. We have a description of a man that’s close enough to Coats to do the trick. It’s all very fluid.”

She dared to look at the screen again. “Jesus… I can’t take any more of this. That poor girl.”

Walt had not taken his eyes off the screen. “Yeah. How ’bout there?” he asked. He used the keyboard’s space bar to stop the video. Used the mouse to back up the footage. “Is that a mirror on the wall? Is that his face in the mirror?”

“It’s too grainy,” she said. “You’ll never get anything. This is incredibly low resolution, Walt. Really poor. Even with enhancement, you’re going to need a shot that’s very strong.”

They watched another thirty seconds, Fiona needing to look away repeatedly.

“Wait!” she said.

Walt paused the video.

Fiona leaned forward and pointed not at the man’s face, but the pants crumpled at his knees. “Look. The back belt loop. It’s ripped. Attached at the top but not the bottom.”

Walt craned forward. “How did you ever see that?”

“I was trying not to look at what was going on.”

He played a short segment repeatedly. Sure enough, the belt loop flapped loose. It was seen only briefly, but there it was on video.

Walt said, “It’s not enough to win a warrant. I can’t say because of that it’s Sean Lunn. I need to see Sean Lunn in those pants. That would give me probable cause for a wider search. It’s not much, even at that.”

“But you’re going to search the cabin, aren’t you?”

“Awaiting a warrant. The judge is golfing down in Twin Falls. It’s still warm enough down there to keep the courses open. One of my guys-we’re working on a phoner warrant.”

“Am I coming along?”

“That’s the third reason you’re here and why I asked you to bring your gear.”

“I’m still mad at you, you know?” She said this proudly.

“I know.”

“Roger hasn’t called.”

“I may have been wrong about him,” Walt said. It came out as a confession, which was not the way he meant it.

“Your timing could be better.”

“I’m a work in progress, Fiona. I don’t have any of it figured out. But losing Mark like this… I know it all has to do more with friendship than we think. More than I understand, at least. It’s what’s important at the end of the day. Right? I need to find him. Dead or alive, I need to know. I don’t understand exactly. I screw up a lot of stuff, but I intend to keep working on my friendships. Starting with you. At some point. I don’t want you mad at me.”

She glared. A hostile, unforgiving look that showed Walt just how far he had to go.

“Okay,” he said. “I get it.”

“You know why I really hate you?” she whispered.

“I didn’t even know you did.”

“It’s because I can’t stay mad at you.” She pushed her chair back. “You’d better turn that off because I’m leaving the room.” Standing by the door, she dug around in her purse and came up with a business card. “Sean Lunn,” she said, waving it. “The night he was trying to talk me onto the corporate jet. Said to call if I needed anything. So I’ll call him. The thing about men? They pretty much wear the same thing all the time. What do you want to bet he shows up in those same pants?”

“You’d do that?” Walt asked.

“I thought you said it’s all about friendship?” she questioned.

“I thought you hated me.”

“You’re not a very good detective, Sheriff. I’m sorry to have to tell you.”

THE WARRANT WAS CALLED IN FROM THE TENTH GREEN by Judge Dan Alban. Within twenty-five minutes, Walt had six of his eight available deputies in strategic positions surrounding Coats’s house, including a sharpshooter positioned up a hill among the ruins of the defunct mine. This kind of deployment wreaked havoc on his department, as it left only two on-duty deputies to patrol a county roughly the area of Rhode Island.

The house was situated so that its detached one-car garage blocked it from view of the other houses and abandoned RVs scattered around the sterile wasteland of pale gray mine tailings. It stood off on its own, out of sight, surrounded by an abnormally high post-and-rail fence topped with a single strand of taut razor wire. The front gate carried two inauspicious signs: BEWARE OF DOG and NO SOLICITING.

Walt and his deputy, Bill Noland, led the way as they pushed through the gate and approached the house at a run. Noland, who was in his late twenties, carried a four-foot stun stick for use on the dogs, if necessary. Walt carried a “flash and bang,” a white-phosphorus stun grenade. Both men also had their Berettas out and at the ready. Behind them came two more men, one carrying the ram, a three-foot, seventy-pound steel maul capable of disintegrating most doors.