In Harm's Way

But as she drove off the property, even these thoughts became difficult to recall. She couldn’t firmly place where she’d been when she woke up. She touched her hair and found it wet, but didn’t remember having taken a shower.

She clutched the wheel more tightly, white-knuckled, focusing on the car and road like when she’d driven solo for the first time. That was her only glimmer of hope: she could recall the moment with absolute clarity-sixteen years old and terrified, her father in the passenger seat.

She convinced herself she wasn’t going out of her mind-only that she’d just lost a very important piece of it, a piece she hoped like hell to reclaim.

13

Looking out his back window at the sway of the aspens in a light breeze, Walt recalled a time when his two girls had played just as they were now, but with another woman by their sides. He was grateful for Lisa’s help, her tireless patience, her willingness to both discipline and comfort the girls, but he would have preferred Gail despite all her failings as a mother. The night before, he and the girls had watched a DVD that had landed on his office desk, a documentary about a Mongolian camel who wanted nothing to do with her offspring. The story had had a happy ending: a prayer, a reunion of mother and child, and a weeping camel. There would be no happy ending for his family, for his daughters. From now on the girls would be shuttled between two lives, two very different households, and no matter how hard he tried to explain it, it would be up to them to sort it all out, to make sense of the fractures they would encounter for years to come. He hoped to be the glue to hold it all together, to mend the fractures or at least keep them from widening. He could keep the day-to-day routine working; he knew routine, respected its importance. But watching Lisa laugh and play with them-on their level-he couldn’t help but see Fiona out there-all four of them out there, laughing and teasing and rebuilding something. It was absurd to make such a jump, but now that he’d crossed one line, the other wasn’t so hard, the distance not so great.

He’d clear a day soon and take the girls camping-although they’d probably prefer the shopping malls in Boise. Or maybe shopping and a movie and a motel with a pool.

“You okay?” It was Lisa. He hadn’t seen her approaching.

“Yeah. Good. Real good,” he said.

“You looked a little zoned.”

“I think I just came to an important realization,” he said. “I’ve been laboring under this notion that the girls and I need to suffer because Gail’s gone. You showed me something out there just now.”

“Me?”

“Fun is fun,” he said. “We’re going to start having fun around here.”

“I like the sound of that,” Lisa said, “and I know the girls will too.”

“Thank you,” he said to her, making sure she felt his sincerity. “You’ve practically been living here for far too long. That’s going to change.”

“No problem,” she said. She turned to call the girls. Walt caught himself glancing at the wall phone and thinking of Fiona.

Two nights had passed since the Hillabrand intruder, and still nothing but a few voice mails back and forth. She’d been pleasant enough but not gushing, and he’d expected gushing. She wasn’t feeling well but didn’t want him visiting. He tried to take it in stride. It wasn’t easy.

He debated leaving her yet another message, but couldn’t imagine a more adolescent move.

He returned to the office and sat at his desk, unable to keep his eye off the phone and e-mail. He read over a proposal currently in front of the county commissioners to privately host the Dalai Lama in Sun Valley, an outdoor event expected to draw an audience of between twenty and fifty thousand, with at least ten thousand coming from out of town. There was no way his small office could manage the traffic and simultaneously guarantee the Dalai Lama’s safety; no way he was going to turn over that responsibility to a private security firm, as was being proposed. He nearly began drafting an e-mail, but changed his mind. It could wait.

He reviewed other paperwork instead. A man held in their drunk tank had suffered convulsions and was attempting to sue the county. A suspected rapist needed transfer to Ada County. He signed some paperwork, sent a few e-mails, and made several calls. But each time he reached for the phone, he thought of her, and debated driving out to her place again.

Nancy, his assistant, stood in his doorway. “A body’s been found. Mile marker one twenty-five. Some kids, an Adopt-A-Highway crew, discovered it. Tommy Brandon responded and called it in. Says it isn’t pretty.”

Walt checked the clock. He was scheduled to pick up the Seattle detective, Boldt, at the airport.

“Okay, tell him I’m on my way,” Walt said. “And have someone meet that flight and get the sergeant settled, will you, please?”

“No problem.”

Typically, news of any death ran a feeling of dread through him as he always thought first of his late brother. But that wasn’t the case. He was instead unusually grateful to be called away from his desk, to be rid of the monotony. On the way out the door, he took one last look at his desk phone. Longing.

“And call Kenshaw,” he added, trying to make it sound like an afterthought. He appreciated the excuse to contact her. “Tell her to bring her gear and meet us. Same with the coroner. And Barge Levy. And you’d better check with Meridian to test their availability.” The state crime lab would be involved if there was a determination of foul play.

On his way to the Jeep Cherokee, he identified a lightness to his step, and tried to suppress it.

Several cars and trucks lined the breakdown lanes on both sides of State Highway 75. Fiona’s Subaru was not among them.

Parked on the shoulder behind Brandon’s cruiser were two pickup trucks, one with six Boy Scouts in the truck bed, all armed with pokers and Day-Glo garbage bags. He felt bad that they’d discovered the body, and urged Brandon to release them and get them “the hell away from here.”

Brandon had cobbled together a police tape barrier using a real estate sign, a lug wrench, and a broken ski pole as fence posts. Walt spotted the body at the epicenter of the confined area.

He ordered Beatrice to stay in the Jeep. She smeared her nose against the glass, drawing Chinese characters, desperate to join him.

The lower third of the thousand-foot mountain, a scree field of broken red rock, terminated thirty yards from the highway, where it joined a field of brown, sun-baked weeds and buffalo grass. The open eyes of the dead body, had there been any, would have looked up at the red of the rock, the full saturation of the evergreens, and an impossibly blue sky that was the hallmark of high mountain living.

“Some kind of face-lift,” Walt said, approaching the body. It had been severely preyed upon.

“I haven’t messed with him,” Brandon said. “Wanted to wait for you. But it’s pretty obvious we won’t be matching that face with any missing person reports.”

Walt neared the haphazardly installed police tape.

“There’s a set of tire tracks, so tread lightly,” Brandon said.

“I see ’em.”

Walt dodged the tire treads, and kneeled. “It’s a truck. A pickup maybe.” He studied the lay of the grass. “Three… no, four… kids and an adult approached the body. That is, if you came in from over there.” He pointed.

“I did.”

Walt parted some grass and used a stick to lift some of the matted weeds.

“The predators were a family of fox and a dog the size of a Labrador. The dog was ru

The body appeared to have been tossed into a tangle of twigs and weeds that ran along the base of the scree field, which was piled four feet high in places and stretched out sixty yards or more.