In Harm's Way

The man had revealed himself as brazen, staying at least some of the time in a tree house within a matter of yards from two women. Did his clubbing Martel Gale suggest an attachment to Fiona? Had Walt perhaps been in store for the same outcome when Kira had interrupted his peering inside the cottage windows? Would the arrival of headlights arouse curiosity? Could the killer resist the gravitational pull to see if his kill had been discovered, and if so, the reaction?

Walt resorted to what had gotten him here, to the one thing he could trust. He pulled the tissue from his breast pocket, placed it for Beatrice to sniff, and commanded once again, “Find it.”

49

“You can’t go up there!” Fiona called out as the ambulance driver put his foot on the ladder’s first rung.

“Excuse me?” the man said.

The man’s partner, the medic, approached from the far side of the ambulance. “Lady, we’ve got a shift change in forty-five minutes. We’ve been on twelve hours. We’ve been instructed to do a job here and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere.”

“To recover a body,” she said, an educated guess on her part. Walt had said his people were on their way. He’d warned her to stay put. But she had to know. Given the ambulance had arrived under no siren or lights, given that Walt had left the area immediately after coming out of the tree house-for she’d watched the whole thing-added up to the obvious.

“And you are?” the ambulance driver inquired.

The medic was new, or he’d have recognized her. “Me?” About to give her name, she revised her answer. “Crime scene photographer. You can’t go in there until I’m through, and I haven’t started.”

“You can identify yourself?”

“Wait here,” she said to the medic. “Don’t move,” she instructed the driver at the base of the ladder.

Stall, she thought. She returned with her camera bag and her wallet, displaying her sheriff’s office ID.

“You want to take some pictures, go ahead and take them. But you’ve got five minutes.”

“More like a half hour,” she said.

“I told you, we got a shift change in forty,” he said. “Listen, if this was a big deal the place would be lousy with deputies-am I right? It’s a body bagger, that’s all. We got the call, we do the job.”

“And I’ve got to do mine.”

“And I’m giving you five minutes. Four, now that we’ve used one jawing it to death. Hold up,” he called out to his buddy. The driver stepped away from the ladder.

Fiona slung the camera bag over her shoulder, walked to the ladder, and climbed.

With each rung she feared what she might find.

50

With the advent of a siren coming closer, but still far in the distance, Walt’s blood pressure rose. He had specifically ordered otherwise, and it was only as the siren passed and faded to the north that he realized the cruiser was on another call. Beatrice loaded herself with cheat grass as she spun her loops in the meadow, snorting and hurrying to pick up the lost scent, Walt looking on from a distance, not crowding her, but prepared to follow. As he looked up, he saw thousands of acres of national forest, acres that by now the mountain man knew well, had exploited for the past few months. It gave the man a decided advantage, whereas Beatrice provided Walt a counterpunch.

Hindsight was nobody’s friend, least of all his. He could see now the unspoken pressure he’d put on Gilly Menquez to deliver; he would have to live with the outcome, while Gilly would not. Could begin to see how he’d allowed the evidence to form unwarranted suspicions, wondering how much of his own feelings had colored those suspicions. Standing alone in the meadow, he felt an urge to cry out, a need to beg forgiveness, though from whom he couldn’t be sure.

He withdrew his BlackBerry and checked the missed call. Dispatch. He double-checked his radio; still not working even with the added elevation. He called in, his temper getting the better of him.

“Emergency Services,” answered the outwardly calm woman’s voice.

“It’s Fleming. Where’s the backup?”

“We have an ambulance on site, Sheriff. As to the patrols… It appears all but Huxley rolled to Carey on that drowning. Huxley was the other side of Galena. He’s on his way south to your twenty.”

Budgetary concerns had lowered his swing shift to six officers in four cruisers. He cursed the commissioners for pulling the dollars out from under him, and his own deputies and dispatch for allowing a patrol void to occur. It wasn’t the first time a group of bored deputies had bunched up.

Walt’s office rang the Ketchum Police Department as well. “Ketchum?”

“Four-car pileup with fire and injury at the saddle intersection. Two patrols on site. We need your ambulance up there A-SAP. I called them off just now.”

Walt hadn’t seen the headlights leaving, his attention on Beatrice. “I need backup, Gloria.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need those areas blocked and searched as we discussed. This is a homicide suspect, Goddamn it,” he flared, revealing a rare display of emotion. “I want every on-call deputy up here. I want anyone and everyone we’ve got, right now. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Copy that. Initiating the call tree.”

It was a not-too-subtle stab at Walt by a very alert dispatcher. Gloria knew her stuff and he’d been wrong to dress her down. All that had been required of him was to order the call tree instigated. His outburst hadn’t helped anyone.

“Thank you,” he said.

It caught her off guard.

“No problem, Sheriff.”

“Make it happen,” he couldn’t help adding. He disco

His flashlight followed Beatrice’s apparent random looping as she began to define the pattern and Walt knew to move in her general direction. However her olfactory process worked, it eventually led to a smaller, tighter pattern from which she shot out in a straight line, suddenly fixed on the scent. That moment quickly approached, and as she got a faceful of the trail left by the killer, she looked back to make sure Walt was paying attention. She actually looked proud of him as she found him coming up behind her and she tore excitedly to the edge of the meadow, looked back once more, and dropped out of sight. For a moment Walt lost his equilibrium: when he’d last seen her, she’d been nose to the ground, aimed back down the hill toward the Engleton estate.

51

Fiona had taken more than the five minutes allotted to her for the A recording of the remains of Guillermo Menquez. So she was surprised to hear the ambulance engine start, and the vehicle drive away when she’d been expecting a reprimand.

“Hello?” she called down through the hole left by the open trapdoor. “Hello? Are you there?”

In truth there wasn’t anything more to photograph. She’d taken a dozen pictures of the deceased and another dozen of the tree house interior, overcome by chills most of the time, both to be alone in the presence of a dead body, and to realize someone had been living up here. It looked like it; it smelled like it. There was little doubt that the structure had been used as a hideaway, and the thought that it was but a matter of yards from her cottage and the main house made her sick to her stomach.

As she came out of the tree house and back down its ladder, she looked over her shoulder to see a tiny light up the hill, winking at her as it descended steadily through the forest.

She clung there to the ladder and reached for her phone to call Walt, to confirm this was him headed toward her, but didn’t have it on her. She’d left it in her bedroom, along with the handgun. Suddenly the cottage and the main house looked different to her, given the evidence of someone living in the tree house, given the dead body up there. She considered the safe room where Kira had hidden herself, but couldn’t bring herself to enter either the home or her own cottage. The flashlight was heading through the forest at a run, heading down the hill, heading toward her.