“Start her up again, Frank.” He tossed the comment briefly over his shoulder, sensed the other man slowing down and dropping behind him. The gondola swayed as he stepped quickly inside, then the cable engaged, the doors clamshelled shut and they were moving out into the thickening fog above Yampa Valley.
FIFTY-TWO
A
bby looked up quickly as he boarded the cabin and sat opposite her.
He could see the anger in her eyes still.
“Abby …” he began, in a conciliatory tone, but she put up a hand, as if to ward him off.
“Just leave it, Jess,” she said tightly. “You’ve said all there is to say.”
“Let’s not finish like this,” he said, then, conscious that there was a third party present, he looked sidelong, saw the ski patrol uniform for the first time and understood why the attendants had allowed a second person to load with Abby. He frowned slightly. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, although his face was partly obscured by the upturned collar and the wool cap pulled down low over his eyes. Sitting alongside him the way he was, it was difficult to get a clear look at his features without being too obvious. Maybe he’d seen him around the ski patrol headquarters. There were so many new faces that came and went each year on the patrol and he couldn’t keep track of them all. He dismissed the man from his thoughts, turning back to Abby.
“So, Abb,” he said gently. “Where to now?”
She looked around at him, the anger and the hurt still evident.
“For us, you mean? Looks like nowhere, doesn’t it?”
“I meant for you,” he said, deliberately not rising to the bait she’d offered. She shrugged, huddled herself deeper into the fur-trimmed parka. He’d loved her once, he realized, but even then, he’d known she had the capacity to act like a spoiled child.
“I guess I’ll go back to my room at the Mountain View,” she said. “Then tomorrow, I’ve got a taxi ordered for eleven to get me to my flight from Hayden.”
“Back to Denver?” he asked. Again, her eyes accused him.
“Where else?” she replied. “At least there’s something for me in Denver.”
He felt the man beside him move slightly. He glanced sideways at him, with a look that apologized for involving him in a personal scene like this. Caught unawares, the other man was watching them intently. He’d moved slightly away from Jesse, leaving a small space between them. As Jesse’s gaze caught him, he turned away abruptly, obviously embarrassed at being caught listening in so openly. He stared out the far side window at the fog.
“I’ll drive you to the plane,” he suggested, turning back to Abby. She smiled. The smile never reached her eyes.
“Taxi’s fine,” she said shortly. Then her eyes slid away from him to look at the man beside him. Jesse followed her gaze. The man had been fumbling with the zipper of his parka. As Jesse looked at him, his hand dropped to one side. He grinned at the deputy.
“Little warm in here,” he said. Jesse cocked his head thoughtfully.
“Wouldn’t say warm exactly” he replied. “Sure is a lot colder outside in that wind,” he conceded. As if in answer to his statement, a gust of wind rocked the cabin, clearing the surrounding fog slightly and showing the lights of the condos on the hill as they slid down past them. The other man shrugged. He seemed a little tense, but then, Jesse thought, he’d be the same way if he had to sit in a gondola cabin listening to a relationship hit the rocks and break up.
As if he was thinking the same thing, the man turned away, peering out the window into the night. It was the nearest he could get to not being there, not witnessing their argument, Jesse thought. He glanced over his shoulder—he was sitting facing uphill-and saw the misty lights of the bottom station looming out of the fog behind him.
“Nearly there,” he said, to no one in particular. The man turned back and, just for a moment, Jesse thought he saw a trace of anger cross his face. Then it was gone, if it had ever been there at all, and the next minute, they were sliding into the light and the noise of the bottom station. The doors chunked open and the gondola rocked as it came onto the slow speed detached cable. Jesse stepped down at the unload point and turned to offer a hand to Abby. She ignored it pointedly steadying herself with one hand on the side of the gondola as she stepped down.
“I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” he said, falling into step beside her. She shook her blond head angrily.
“I can get a cab,” she replied shortly. They came out of the gondola building now and he gestured toward the Alpine Taxi rank. It was empty.
“You’ll have to call for one. Could be waiting twenty minutes or more, this time of night.”
It was just on eight thirty, a time when most people were heading out for their evening of après-ski activity. Even with the reduced number of tourists in town, the half-dozen taxis that served Steamboat would be running flat-out. Abby hesitated, then shrugged, realizing the sense of what he’d said.
“All right,” she said. “Drive me back to the hotel. Then get the hell out of my life.”
She turned toward where they had left his dented Subaru an hour ago. He had to walk quickly to keep up. Idly, he glanced around to see where the ski patroller had gotten to. But there was no sign of him anywhere.
L
ee had spent the evening wandering aimlessly around her small house. She’d made a quick, thrown together meal of hamburger, hash browns and beans, then turned the TV on. After a few minutes, she turned it off again, went through to the kitchen and sat at the kitchen bench for twenty minutes, cleaning and oiling the Blackhawk. She lined the five heavy .44 Magnum slugs up on the bench, spun the action several times, checking for dirt or grit, eased back the hammer, let it down again, spun the action again and then reloaded the five chambers.
As ever, she left the one under the hammer empty.
She thought about Jesse, wondering where he was, what he was doing. Instinctively, she knew that he was with Abby and she didn’t want to think about that. She pushed the subject to the back of her mind.
Something was preying on her consciousness. Something about the downtown killing. There was something she was missing, she just knew it.
She bundled the kitchen trash into a paper bag and crunched through the crusted snow to the garbage can just inside her front gate, crushing the new load down on top of the already full contents. She jammed the lid back down again, fastened the clips that held it in place and went back into the warmth of the kitchen.
She still couldn’t place it. It was nagging at her and she still didn’t know what it was.
Annoyed, she flipped on the TV again. Letterman was explaining to a New York audience how they’d arranged for a man leading a tame bear to try to get entry to the Russian Tea Room. A remote camera was following the action. The studio audience shrieked. Letterman arched his eyebrows and his bandleader sidekick made a few seemingly serious protests. If you believed the studio audience, it was hilarious stuff. Lee watched it, stone-faced.
On the other channel, Jay Leno was interviewing one of the seemingly endless succession of near identical Baldwin brothers on the latest in a seemingly endless succession of near identical action movies. They showed a clip. The Baldwin brother was hanging off a train as it sped into a tunnel. There was a ball of flame as the carriage exploded—Lee wondered why a railway carriage would explode in a ball of flames. Then a stuntman leapt from the exploding/burning carriage onto a grassy slope beside the tracks, tucking into a ball and rolling. Then, in close up, the Baldwin brother—she thought it might be Alec—rose groggily to his feet, wisps of grass in his hair and dust covering one shoulder of his carefully ripped leather jacket.
She killed the TV for the second time in half an hour.
Damn! she thought. What was it? What was the small detail that was gnawing away at her subconscious? She’d tried ignoring it, tried to concentrate on other things, hoping that would allow her brain to sort it out and present a solution to her out of the blue.
Only it hadn’t happened. So now she tried the other way. She dropped into her customary armchair, hooked one leg over the arm and concentrated. In her mind, she went over every detail of her time in the apartment.
The empty wallet. The clothing scattered across the floor. The dead body, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.
No powder burns. Was that it? She shook her head. Doc had explained the absence of powder burns, with his theory of a cloth wrapped around the killer’s gun.
Was it something that the victim’s friend had said? She racked her mind again, going over his words. She rose, went to where her cold weather uniform jacket was hanging on the back of the kitchen door, took out her leather-bound notebook and checked through the notes she’d made.
She had an uneasy feeling that the fact had to do with someone other than the victim and the killer. Someone she’d seen in connection with the crime. Unbidden, a picture of Packer Thule came to her.
Packer, in her office, in his blue and yellow patrol uniform, worried that someone might have a grudge against the ski patrol. Was that it? Was that the reason for the killings?
She shook her head irritably. The first three victims had no connection at all with ski patrol.
Maybe that was the killer’s plan? Kill three unconnected men to throw suspicion away from his true aim—to kill members of the ski patrol? No, damn it. It was too bizarre.
She got up abruptly, pacing the room in long, impatient strides. The wood in the slow-burning stove was almost consumed, so she fed another two logs in, moved them around with a poker so they were settled in the hottest section of the embers. That killed three minutes or so. She glanced at her watch. Twenty-seven minutes past ten.
“Shit,” she said quietly. She hated it when this happened.
She moved to the bedroom, shivering a little as she left the warmth that the stove provided to the kitchen and living room. She preferred to sleep in an unheated room—it was just the transition from one to the other that was a problem. Quickly, she stripped off her plaid shirt, jeans and underwear, folding the shirt and jeans carefully and laying them on her bureau, kicking the underwear into a half-full laundry hamper by the door.
Her naked skin goose-bumped in the chill air and she felt her nipples harden. She glanced down at them idly, couldn’t help thinking about Jesse and felt a quick wash of sadness over her. Nude, she slid under the down-filled duvet, shivering slightly at the cold touch of the sheets. She curled up, waiting for her body heat to warm the bed around her, wished that Jesse were there, then wished that she hadn’t thought of him. Her hand crept to the warmth between her thighs, hesitated a moment. Then she swore quietly, knew if she started that she’d start thinking about Jesse even more. She rolled over abruptly, shivered again as her skin made contact with a new, ice-cold part of the sheets and tried to sleep.
It was over an hour before she managed it.
FIFTY-THREE
T
he early morning sun streamed into Lee’s bedroom, moving with deceptive speed as it traced a path closer and closer to the bed. Finally, the first rays touched her face. She frowned, still sleeping, as she felt the warmth, then suddenly was wide awake, sitting bolt upright.
“Jesus,” she said to herself. “The closet. It’s the closet.”
She tossed back the bedclothes and ran to the door. The remnants of the logs she’d put on the fire the night before were still glowing in the stove and the room was a good ten degrees warmer than her bedroom. She barely noticed it as she scooped the keys to the Renegade from the bench that divided living room and kitchen and jerked open the front door of the house, gasping as the intense cold hit her.
The Jeep fired on the second crank and she jerked it into drive, the wheels spinning as they cut through the crust of snow, then biting on the tarmac underneath. She hesitated at the intersection, saw there was no cross traffic, then gunned it toward the town center.
The low angle, early morning sun reflected blindingly from the snow on the sidewalks, trees and buildings. She fumbled in the glove box of the Jeep, found a pair of Ray-Bans and put them on one-handed, flinching slightly as the ice-cold metal made contact with her skin. There wasn’t much traffic around at this hour of the morning. She glanced quickly at her wrist to see the time, remembered that she’d left in too much of a hurry to put on her watch. It was still on her bedside table. The dashboard clock read 6:25.
Six twenty-five on a perfect, sunny, ice-cold morning.
The lights were with her as she came to Lincoln. She turned right, barely slowing down and letting the Renegade fishtail just a little. She thought of winding up the siren and beacon, decided she didn’t need them. There wasn’t enough traffic around to warrant it. And besides, she’d done enough racing down Lincoln with the siren howling this week, she thought. She shifted uncomfortably as she remembered the last time-and the aftermath.
She was coming up on the Ham Hockery now. She eased up on the gas, waited for a gap in the light traffic coming in the opposite direction, and took a left into the alley beside the restaurant, parking behind the Dumpster.