Killer View

“Your glider will be impounded until further notice. Our people will take it apart-piece by piece, if we have to-in order to determine there were no cameras hidden in it. I can only assume you think you’re doing good, Sheriff. But we both know that do-gooders typically do more harm than good.”

“I was out on a date. I was trying for some romance. You want to arrest me for that? Guilty as charged.”

Amish’s eyelids flared again. His jaw clenched, as he fought to keep his mouth shut. But Walt egged him on with a shit-eating grin intended to make the man feel as small as possible. Interrogations could go both directions.

“This facility is under constant surveillance,” Amish said proudly. “We are watched”-he pointed to the two cameras in the room-

“recorded, scrutinized, and investigated. We are held accountable to six different federal departments. We report to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I know it’s easy to see a place like the INL as a conspiracy in progress, given the materials we work with and the secretive nature of the research conducted here. On-site protests and demonstrations remind us of this on a regular basis. We offer up a fine target for the Greens. But this lab lit the first city in the world with atomic-powered light. The nuclear submarine engine was developed and tested at this facility. Critical situations like Three Mile Island were successfully resolved because we had a working facility in which to simulate repairs. This place matters. And if you work here, you can’t pick your nose without a Senate subcommittee hearing about it. We are not a rogue facility. No matter what people like Sheriff Walt Fleming think. There is nothing here that’s going to help you with this murder investigation of yours.” He answered Walt’s expression: “Read the pages, Sheriff.”

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 pla

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.