The patrolman had started down toward the fallen body, then he hesitated, turning back to the top of the chairlift.
The woman came off the chair at the same time the killer did. Realizing that no one had made any sense of her cries, she grabbed at him now to try to stop him before he could get away. Setting his skis, he shouldered her away violently, sending her sprawling, adding to the confusion of the moment. As she fell, her fingers grasped the goggles and the scarf wound around the lower part of his face, dragging them down.
He could see the patrolman skating back up the slight slope, only a few yards away. But the woman was sprawling on the snow between them and he knew he had a good head start for the trees down the Triangle 3 run. He set his poles and skated at the same time, picking up speed almost immediately. He turned to see the patrolman, tangled with the woman’s skis as she rolled over, trying to rise to her feet again. His eyes met the patrolman’s and he saw the puzzled look of recognition there.
“Mike?” said the ski patroller. “Is that you?”
Cursing, he turned away again and accelerated into the first steep drop among the trees.
He ran straight down the fall line in the deep, ungroomed snow. There were moguls
—
ungroomed bumps
—
under the fresh cover and he let his legs go loose to absorb them automatically. He checked once, turned right to miss a pine, ducked low under the outstretched branches that it flung at his face, then threw in three quick turns, still keeping in the fall line.
The goggles dangled uselessly around his neck. Eyes slitted against the wind and the glare, he could sense the other skier somewhere behind him. Not too close, but not far, either.
An access trail cut through the trees before him. He let his knees come up under him, then straightened his legs like pistons, sailing high over the trail, landing in an explosion of powder snow some five yards on the other side, his knees almost up to his chin to absorb the shock of landing.
He came upright again, maintaining his balance and speed. Check, check, check. He set his edges with lightning speed, one side to the other, his knees pumping as the bumps hammered up at him. His breath whipped away in steamy wisps in the cold air. He let his skis go where they wanted, concentrating on continuous movement and staying in the fall line, as far as the undisciplined stands of pines allowed him.
He came off another bank, soared briefly, exploded into the snow again, nearly lost it, recovered, regained speed. He heard a cry behind him, risked a quick glance and saw the patroller tumbling in a welter of arms, legs and skis as he missed his landing.
It allowed him to increase his lead even further. But, as far as he could see, the other man hadn’t lost his skis in the fall and he’d be up and skiing in pursuit within seconds. An expert skier could often simply roll out of the fall and come back upright almost instantly.
And he knew Walt was an expert skier.
And there was the real problem of the day. He’d recognized the patrolman. Walt Davies. And he’d been recognized himself. Walt had called him by name. So, even though he could outdistance Walt down the mountain and lose himself in the tangle of trees and different runs on the lower slope, that simply wouldn’t solve the problem anymore.
There was a stand of pines ahead. Thick and close together, with widespread branches reaching almost down to ground level. There was no way through them, so he slewed to the right to go around them.
He skirted the grove of trees until they thinned, then threw in a high-speed check turn to the left, reversing direction and heading into the shadows they cast.
Then he threw his skis sideways, ramming the edges hard into the snow, fountaining the soft powder up in a huge drifting cloud as he hockey-stopped in a few yards.
He jump-turned to face back the way he’d been coming. Letting his stocks dangle, he unzipped the parka, reached inside for the Walther and slammed back the action, pumping a round into the chamber. He breathed deeply to steady his hand. He could hear Walt coming, throwing in that same high-speed left turn to come around the grove of pines. He’d have no trouble seeing the way to come. The snow was carved deep with the marks of his own turn.
He saw a flash of blue and yellow between the trees, then Walt sped out into the clear, hunched low, knees pumping.
And saw him standing, waiting.
It was inevitable that Walt would come to a stop. Possibly he thought that his quarry had decided to surrender. Maybe he thought he was injured. But it was instinctive for him to stop as soon as he could. He skidded a little farther down the mountain, finishing four or five yards away.
The Walther wasn’t a big gun. The slugs were not much more than a .32 caliber. But four of them were enough to kill anyone.
Walt toppled slowly, his expression one of deep disbelief. He simply knew that this couldn’t be happening to him. He was still disbelieving it when he died.
THIRTY
L
ee was out on Highway 129 toward Hahn’s Peak when word came through about the shooting.
There’d been another breakin-this time at a gas station a few miles south of the Peak. And this time, in broad daylight.
The gas station had seemed deserted. With the recent falls of snow, the owner had expected little traffic to be coming through to the Peak and had closed down around three o’clock. To the passerby, the station would have appeared locked and deserted. But there was a storage room at the rear, where the owner had kept his pickup parked under cover, to save the tray from filling up with snow. And there was also a small, cramped office where he did his accounts and correspondence.
The side door of the gas station had been forced with a crowbar, just like the previous breakins. And the register had been rifled, although in this case, there was little money in it. The owner had emptied the register when he’d closed up. The cash was with him in a locked steel strongbox in the rear of the building, where he’d been catching up on some paperwork before going home for the evening.
Obviously the burglar didn’t realize there was still someone on the premises. Alerted by the splintering sound of the crowbar on the doorframe, the owner had come around the side of the building to investigate.
And he’d brought with him a single barrel Winchester 12-gauge.
Lee was studying him now. He was an elderly man, balding, with a few strands of hair still combed over the crown of his head, as if inviting the missing locks to return, and marking a place where they’d be welcome.
“I called, Sheriff,” he was saying now, in an excited, slightly high-pitched voice. “I called and said, ‘Who’s there? who’s in there?’ But he never said nothing back. Not a word!”
Lee nodded, encouraging the man to go on with his story. There was still a good deal of adrenaline flowing, she realized, evidenced by the way the man was rattling his words out like a machine gun, and the higher than normal pitch of his voice.
“Then, all of a sudden, there he was in the doorway! A big feller, comin’ right at me before I had a chance to think!”
“Big, you say?” Lee interrupted gently. “How tall would you guess?”
The elderly man stopped, considered for a second. “Huge,” he insisted, after thinking about it.
Lee tried again for a little more specific information.
“Huge, tall? Or huge, heavy build?” she asked. Again, he thought about it. She noticed that the whites of his eyes were very round and she could see them clearly, all the way around the iris. She wondered if this might be the effect of delayed shock, thought that it probably was.
“Both,” the elderly man decided, at length. “He was a mountain of a feller, coming right at me. I didn’t even get a chance to draw the hammer on the old 12-bore here.” He gestured to the shotgun that Tom Legros had gently taken from his hands when they arrived, and leaned against the display window of the gas station office.
“Knocked me clean over, Sheriff. Knocked me clean over on my ass.” He hesitated, bobbing his head in deference to the fact that Lee was a woman. “Begging your pardon for that, Sheriff,” he added, a trifle embarrassed.
Lee gestured that there was no offense.
“But you did get a shot off?” she asked, and the bald-headed man nodded several times, emphatically.
“Hell, yes!” he said. “I was rolling here in the snow while he high-tailed it to his car, so I snapped a cap at him right enough. Would have hit him too if it weren’t for that goddamned pump.”
The metal body of one of the gas pumps was scarred and scoured by the blast of small lead pellets. The perspex window that covered the gauge had several small holes in it as well.
“Only bird shot, mind you, Sheriff,” he added. “I never keep a heavy load in the gun. Just bird shot to frighten them away, you understand.”
“I understand, Mr. Cooley,” Lee said, in her best understanding voice. “So, did you get a good look at this guy when he came out?”
Cooley screwed up his eyes, concentrating. “Other than to see he was huge … not really. Apart from that he was kind of”—he searched for a word, finally found it—“average.”
Lee and Tom exchanged a gloomy look. Mr. Cooley, they both knew, was not going to be what the law described as a reliable witness.
“So,” drawled Lee, “huge in an average sort of way, I guess?”
And Cooley nodded. “That pretty well sums it up.”
“Hair color?” Lee prompted. Ned Cooley unconsciously ran a hand over his own inadequate cover.
“Sort of … I don’t know, brownish, I guess?” he said uncertainly. Then, convincing himself, “Maybe he had a hat on. Fact is, I’m sure he did.”
Lee resisted the temptation to catch Tom’s eye again.
“What kind of hat would that have been?” she asked, going through the motions.
“Unh … well, maybe it was one of those there Navy watch caps,” Cooley said uncertainly. “Yeah, that’d be it, I guess. And he had on … dark clothes …”
Lee tried again. “Jeans maybe, or overalls?”
Cooley looked at her unhappily, went to answer, stopped and said in a dejected tone, “Truth is, Sheriff, I just don’t know. I’m not even sure about that goddamn hat either.”
Lee nodded. “Sometimes these things happen too fast,” she offered, and he seized on the explanation.
“That’s it! I mean it all just happened at once! One minute I’m standing here saying ‘Who’s there?’—and you know, I didn’t really expect there was anyone going to be there-then I’m flat on my ass in the snow.” He shrugged an apology again and she waved it away. “And that damn gun went off and blew all hell out of my gas pump. I never even meant to fire it at all. It just went off when I went over.” He looked at the two of them, miserably. “I’m sorry about this, Sheriff. I never noticed too much. I’m not even sure how big the guy was. Chances were, he was just normal size.”
He paused, thinking back, and said softly. “He sure seemed huge at the time though.”
“That’s the way of it,” Tom said soothingly and Cooley looked at him gratefully.
“I’d surely like to be more help to you, but—” he shrugged, defeated and admitting defeat. Lee closed her notebook, slid it back into the back pocket of her jeans.
“Well, Mr. Cooley, if you can’t remember details, it’s best if you tell us rather than try to make them up. Saves us going off on wild-goose chases.”
“I guess,” the bald man replied. He still looked deflated. The adrenaline was dispersing now, Lee thought, and she turned as the radio in her Renegade crackled to life. She heard her name called.
“Excuse me,” she said to the gas station proprietor, and made it to the Jeep in three long-legged strides. She reached in through the open door and unhooked the mike, depressing the send switch.
“This is Sheriff Torrens,” she said, then released the switch so that the base station could reply. She recognized the voice as Denise’s. Sometimes she filled in on the radio net when the normal operator was having a break.
“Sheriff? There’s been another killing up on Storm Peak?” Somehow, Denise contrived to turn the statement into a question, as if she couldn’t believe the bad luck herself.
Lee swore softly under her breath, then pressed the button again.
“Is this our boy again?” she asked. It was unlikely that someone else might have started murdering people up on the mountain, but she guessed it was always a possibility.
“That’s right, Sheriff,” said Denise. “Tried to kill one man with that stabber thing he’s been using, then shot a ski patroller who tried to catch him—Walt Davies.”
Lee let the microphone drop to her side, leaned against the cold metal of the Jeep. She knew Walt—and his wife and their twin baby daughters.
“Jesus,” she said softly. She noticed that Tom Legros and Ned Cooley had moved closer to the Jeep, listening in to the conversation. Tom looked stricken at the news about the ski patroller.