Killer View

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.

WEDNESDAY

20

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 pi

He double-checked the alignment of the photos over the map. Allowing for the fact that three other corner pins might be off by a quarter inch or so, it looked like a good job.

Fiona eyed it proudly. “You realize the map went on the wall, not the other way around? Shouldn’t we put the wall behind the map?”

“Yeah, but I want to use the holes that were in the wall to mark our map. We saw three pushpins on the floor. What if they were marking certain spots?” Walt withdrew a pushpin from the side of the corkboard and answered her by carefully poking the pin’s needle through each of the three black specks. He then removed the photographs, leaving the map with three new pinholes in it.

Fiona went quiet as she watched him work. He crossed to a computer and called up a mapping website that included hybrid images of maps overlaid onto satellite imagery. A few clicks later he had zoomed in on the Pahsimeroi Valley, with small, circular green dots, each the product of a pivot irrigation system-a huge, wheeled sprinkler arm that irrigated a quarter square mile of ground. These identified working ranches. He then cross-referenced the two maps and used the cursor on the computer to give him latitude and longitude for each of the pin markings.

He wrote down the three locations, knowing they held significance for Mark Aker. It was possible that Aker had visited them, either professionally or otherwise.

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

“You just saw me.”

“No. I mean, how’d it occur to you to do that?”

“It’s what I do,” he answered.

“Three pinpricks in a log wall. Are you kidding me?”

“Three ranches,” he said, standing and studying the topo map. “A vet,” he reminded.

The discovery that Aker had pinpointed the ranches intrigued Walt. As a vet, the man did plenty of house calls without marking them on maps. He’d been told of Mark’s secretive ways over the past month, of Mark’s spending extra time up at the cabin. But no one knew he’d actually been at the cabin; he could have easily been over in the Pahsimeroi.

He opened the door to the incident room and called out loudly for Tommy Brandon, startling Fiona with the sharpness of his voice.

Brandon appeared, his left arm in a sling. It was the first the two had seen each other since the shooting. Other deputies would have taken a week’s leave, but Walt had received no such request on his desk and knew Brandon would give him no excuse to be put on leave.

“You okay?” Walt asked.

“Fine.”

“Want to take a ride?”

“Where to?”

“Randy Aker was shot with a ketamine cocktail before he dove off those rocks. He was wearing his brother’s jacket-his brother’s scent. Now, come to find out, Mark was drugged by the same cocktail. And he was interested in three ranches over in the Pahsimeroi. He marked them on a topo map he had pi