In Harm's Way

Fiona relaxed the camera. “I’m done until I can get closer.”

“Gloves?” Walt asked Boldt, producing a pair of surgical gloves and offering them to his guest. But Boldt waved him off and, reaching into the pocket of his sport coat, withdrew a pair.

“I’m going to play up the significance of the tire tracks and try to work them into the story, so for now, Fiona, give me whatever you can of the tracks, and stay well clear of them if possible. Brandon, you’ll help me roll the body. We’ll go after it from the other side. Fiona, make sure to get close-ups of the sticks and all this stuff around him.”

“What’s all this rock and debris from? Landslide?” Boldt asked.

“Snow slides,” Walt explained. “Each winter we see slides all along here. A number of deer and elk are found as it melts each spring.”

“Lovely.”

“The slides shove all the year’s deadfall, the smaller live trees, you name it, down ahead of them. Rock, scree, and everything else piles up here at the bottom.”

“Looks like a bomb hit,” Boldt said.

“Pretty close to that.”

Boldt processed what he’d been told, filing it away. You could see the guy thinking. Over his entire career, Walt had investigated a dozen suspicious or criminal deaths. Boldt probably handled that many per month in a bad month, and had been doing so for a quarter century.

Brandon established a route up through the detritus and led the way for Fiona, who climbed tentatively. Walt could tell by the way she moved that she still wasn’t herself. She should have taken his offer to walk away from this one; he could have faked his way through some pictures.

“You noticed the red-tail,” Walt said. “The hawk,” he clarified. “Anything else I’ve missed?”

Fiona was down on one knee taking pictures, partially obscured by the upended branches. Head down, she was either adjusting a setting on the camera, or struggling for composure.

“Could it be an accidental death?” Boldt asked. “This location?”

“Absolutely.”

“But the boots and clothes don’t look exactly right,” Boldt said, searching for what Walt had been getting at.

“They’d stop me from making too hasty a ruling, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It is.” For the first time in several minutes, Boldt stepped closer to the pile of bramble and sticks. “I might bag his head and hands and feet,” Boldt allowed, clearly reluctant to say anything. “Paper bags. Prior to rolling him. Moving a person that size… moving him out of there is going to be an adventure. Bound to shake a few leaves off the tree.”

“Tommy!” Walt called out.

“Paper bags,” Brandon said. “Got it.”

“Back of my Cherokee if you don’t have them. Left side. In the backpack.”

“I’m on it.”

Fiona met eyes with Walt through the tangle of twigs, still looking slightly pale and definitely disoriented. He wished there were something he could do for her. He wanted to dismiss her and allow her to get away from looking close-up through a lens at the man with the missing eyes. Her own eyes were distant and unfocused; he wasn’t sure she even saw him.

“Maybe that’s enough,” he said to her. “We can take it from here.”

She shook her head. “I’m good,” she said.

“A big guy like this doesn’t go down easy,” Boldt said.

“No.”

“The head wound, right at the scalp line? There’s not enough blood.”

“Postmortem? Maybe occurred when they tossed him.”

“They is the operative word. A guy that size, it would take two.”

“Might have been robbery,” said Brandon, returning with the paper bags and tape. “Check out the tan line on his left wrist.”

“Yes, I saw that, too,” Boldt said. “Not just a missing watch, but a big watch-a very big watch.”

“A TAG Heuer maybe. Something like that. You tell him about the break-ins?” Brandon asked.

Walt dressed down his deputy with a single look. He had no intention of ru

“He’s referring to a pair of B-and-E’s in the area. Made to look like bears. Probably some itinerants. We get a lot of that in summers, more so this year because of the economy.”

“But doubtful he was out hiking,” Boldt said, repeating what he’d been told.

Boldt looked up the inhospitable scree face of the mountain. Low cumulus clouds moved swiftly north to south against the static edge of the mountain peak. It was disorienting; for a moment it appeared the mountain was moving, not the clouds.

Walt wasn’t buying the hiking theory. There were no established trails up there where the trees met the scree field. He didn’t expect a city cop to understand it, but he wasn’t going to repeat himself. He could invent a story to explain the tire tracks: the driver could have veered off road to avoid hitting a deer, the tracks having nothing to do with the body; or a driver might have spotted the body and, not knowing what it was, driven over for a closer look and then taken off; or the pickup might have dumped the body.

“Get the name of the Boy Scout leader, the guy driving those kids, and let’s get them out of here,” Walt instructed Brandon. “We don’t want them seeing us rolling him. This is bad enough already.”

Maybe the medical examiner would be able to tell a better story. “Bruising might fill in some of this,” Walt said.

“True enough.”

He and Boldt moved through the thicket of tumbled debris and approached the body from uphill.

“Brandon!” Walt shouted. “Get a tarp. Back of the Cherokee.”

Brandon waved.

More cars slowed. He saw people using their cell phones to take pictures. Boldt saw it too as they waited for the tarp. He pointed out a dirt track that led to a nursery south of their position.

“We’ll canvass the area and put something out on the radio,” Walt said. “This is the one and only road up and down the valley. We could easily have a witness to the truck ru

When Brandon returned with the tarp, the three men positioned it and then rolled the body. The back of the skull was staved. The blunt force had been delivered by something fairly wide, long, and solid.

“Well, there’s our cause of death,” Boldt said.

“Those jeans are worth a week’s pay,” Brandon said, spotting the leather tag on the belt loop. “And those boots are Van Gorkoms. Custom made, Mountain Trekkers. Fifteen hundred a pop.”

“Ouch,” Boldt said. “So the guy was a clotheshorse.”

“Apparently not the only one,” Walt said. “I’ve never heard of Van Gorkoms.”

“He’s wearing what? Size fifteen?” Brandon said. “Guys like him and me, we can’t buy stuff off the rack.”

“But you don’t wear Van Gorkoms,” Boldt said.

“Me? A saddlemaker in Shoshone makes my hiking boots. They’re okay but they don’t last, and they give me blisters when I’m breaking them in.”

“I don’t think the detective actually cares, Tommy.”

A fade line on the back pocket of the blue jeans suggested a wallet, but as Walt searched for it, he came up empty-handed.

“Missing billfold, missing watch,” Boldt said.

Walt shook his head.

“A carjacking gone bad?” Boldt suggested.

“Probably the best explanation we’re going to get on what we’ve got,” Walt said, hating to admit it.

“It was his vehicle, you’re saying.” Brandon sounded impressed. “A hitchhiker maybe, or someone fakes a breakdown and gets this guy to pull over. Guy gets out to help and gets a tire iron on the back of the skull for being the Good Samaritan. They get a wallet, a watch, and an SUV, and the whole thing’s over in three minutes.”

“They hit him a little hard, and dump the body as quickly as possible,” Boldt said.

The sleeves of the dead man’s shirt were both torn, and Walt reached to open the one on the left arm wider, revealing a sloppy tattoo. It looked like two initials: KK. He tore the shirt slightly wider: another poorly delineated tattoo of a fat-cheeked cherub beneath a storm cloud blowing up a storm.