He felt her before he took her in. Fiona, standing on the shoulder of the highway by her Subaru, the wind tossing her hair, arms at her sides, shoulders sagged in resignation. Overcome by the sight of death, no doubt. Saddened. But she also seemed to be waiting.
For him?
he wondered. He hoped. He ached to go to her, to leave this, to say something.
She climbed into the car and drove away.
14
W
alt and Boldt approached the nursery on foot, down a dirt track a quarter mile south of the body. The sun shone brightly, sparking off the plastic tarps of the six 50-foot-long hothouses, curved over the garden beds like small Quonset huts. A beat-up green pickup truck was parked at the end where the track widened into a bulb. A miniature backhoe sat outside a barn shed big enough for two vehicles. Next to the shed stood an old, half-sized Airstream trailer with dirty windows and an open padlock hanging from a rusted hasp.
Walt pounded on the door, as Boldt wandered over and looked inside the nearest hothouse.
“Heck of an operation,” Boldt said.
“Nothing much grows here without a lot of help and a little luck,” Walt said. “Twenty below in the winter. High nineties in the summer. Dry as a bone.”
The door was answered by a sleepy-eyed woman in her mid-thirties who’d seen too much sun and too little of the hairdresser. Her forest green golf shirt carried a logo of a tree beneath which was stitched: GOLDEN EAGLE NURSERY.
“Help you, Sheriff?”
“Hope so,” Walt said.
She descended the rough wooden steps, shorter than Walt, sinewy and lean.
“Maggie Sharp,” she said, shaking his hand.
Walt introduced Boldt as a colleague from Seattle.
“Just visiting,” Boldt said.
“What’s up? What’s with all the cars up there?”
“We’re wondering if any time in the past couple of days you saw a pickup truck go off the west shoulder of the highway?”
“Up there? I don’t know . . . No.”
“Anything you can tell us would help,” Walt said, sensing the woman’s hesitation. “You won’t be involved personally.”
“Wasn’t my truck,” she said, as Boldt walked over to the vehicle.
“No,” Walt said. “Wider tires than your Chevy.” Boldt looked over, silently impressed Walt had already scouted the truck. “There’s no law against driving off the road,” Walt said, forcing a smile.
“Wasn’t me,” she said, her tone unnecessarily defensive.
“I think we’ve already established that.”
“So?”
“You’re the closest to the area. Maybe you saw some people up there? Something—anything—going on.”
“At night perhaps,” Boldt said, having joined them.
“I don’t work nights here. Who said I work nights?”
Boldt and Walt met eyes.
Boldt said, “A neighbor of yours, someone in . . . Golden Eagle . . . thought they saw a pickup on the left side of the road, but seeing how this road of yours leads in here, we’re thinking they might have seen your truck and confused it with the truck we’re interested in.”
Walt shot Boldt a quizzical look: where had he come up with that piece of fiction?
“Is that right?” Her eyes told them both she was buying herself time.
“Lights on vehicles can play tricks with the eye at night,” Walt said. “Depth perception. If it was your truck and not the truck we’re interested in, that helps.”
“Why would I be here at night?” Maggie Sharp asked. “It’s not like anyone’s paying overtime around here. I work a ten-hour shift, five days a week. Six o’clock comes around, I’m gone. I appreciate the job and all, don’t get me wrong. Not a lot of jobs going around right now. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying if it was after six, it wasn’t me.”
“Okay,” Boldt said. “That makes sense enough. How ’bout your boss? One of your coworkers?”
“At night? Listen, if there was a freeze warning or something, maybe. And the sheriff can tell you, we get hard freezes every month of the year. But a lot fewer since global warming. Right? And none in the past month or so. It’s a hot summer. Hot and even drier than usual.”
“These things hold up in the thunderstorms?” Walt asked, looking out across the hothouses.
“They do okay,” she said.
“We had a pretty decent storm a couple nights back,” he recalled. “Hailed, didn’t it?”
Her eyes narrowed; she sensed a trap but couldn’t see it clearly. “I can’t speak for the owner,” she said. “All I can tell you is if someone saw a pickup after six it wasn’t me. Wasn’t mine. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So we should talk to the owner,” Boldt said. “About a truck being seen here at night.”
“No. I mean, sure. That’s up to you, right? What do I care?”
And yet she did seem to care. Both men sensed her misgivings.
“If you remember anything,” Walt said, “we’re in the book.”
“Yeah, I think I can find you.” The smile didn’t work on her face, as out of place as the attempted confidence in her voice.
The men thanked her. Walt and Boldt walked back up the road toward the highway.
“How’d you know it wasn’t her truck?” Boldt asked.
“You’re walking on it,” Walt said. “Noticed on the way in that there were only two trucks using this very much. A pickup with narrower rubber—hers—and a dually, probably a delivery truck. There are some other tracks mixed in, but they’re older for the most part and they’re all passenger cars, not pickups.”
“More to this country sheriff thing than I might have thought,” Boldt said.
“I take a lot of heat from my father. He’s ex-Bureau, as you maybe already know. He thinks I’m wasting my time here. A big day for us is a bar brawl.”
“To each their own. You have kids?”
“Two girls. Twins. Eleven going on fifteen.”
“Good place for them, I imagine.”
“Why I’m here.”
“Not everybody gets that,” Boldt said.
“You?”
“Boy and girl about the same age. If I could figure out how to live in a place like this?” he said, looking into the sky. “Yeah. No-brainer. So I get it.”
“If you ever feel like retiring,” Walt said. He meant it more as a joke but he thought how valuable a person like Boldt would be on a contractual basis, and it gave him some new ideas. He’d taken to the guy immediately. He’d prepared himself for some holier-than-thou city detective; was stunned to find the man so approachable.
“What’d you think of her?” Boldt asked.
“Not much. Afraid of something. The badge, I suppose. Get a lot of that up here. You?”
“Same. Wasn’t buying her.”
“So adamant about not working nights.”
“Yeah. So we know two things,” Boldt said.
“She saw something, and she saw it at night,” Walt said. “And that’s a problem for her.”
“And us.”
“And us,” Walt agreed.
Boldt stopped near the middle of the dirt track and spun slowly in a full circle. “Jeez,” he said. He drew in a deep breath, and took in so much air he coughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Walt took in the panorama of sage-covered hills, evergreens, and blue sky. “Forget to look sometimes,” he admitted.
“No property in sight with any kind of view.”
Walt realized Boldt had been assessing the likelihood of witnesses.
“I don’t often canvass,” he explained. “We’ll work the local media. Put the word out. My guys will go door-to-door in Golden Eagle, Rainbow Bend, and maybe some of Gimlet—all nearby subdivisions. There’re a couple private ranches tucked up behind the mountain on this side. That’s why there aren’t any trails up there—there’s a lot of deeded ground.” They reached the highway shoulder and turned north toward the cars scattered off the road. “A truck going off the highway at night,” Walt said. “This stretch is lousy with elk and deer. We see more than a fair share of accidents and rolls right here.”
“You think he may have been on foot?” Boldt asked. “Someone swerves away from a deer and hits this guy on the side of the road?”
“Maybe swipes him. Guy goes down headfirst,” Walt said. “It wouldn’t take much.”
“Then why wouldn’t Martha Stewart back there tell us what she saw?”
Walt bit back a smile.
“We’re going to get along okay,” Walt said.
“I’ll be out of your hair day after tomorrow,” Boldt reminded.
“What if I beg?” Walt said.
Boldt grinned. The two men walked north, cars slowing to rubberneck the cop cars. Walt needed to assemble a team to walk the field, alert for cigarette butts, beer cans, litter of any kind.
Then he remembered that the Boy Scouts had been collecting litter at the time of the discovery, and he took off running up the road, reaching for his radio and calling through to Brandon.
Boldt trailed behind, in no particular hurry, already scheming how he might extend his stay.
15
A
long with three deputies, Walt moved carefully through the litter strewn across the plastic sheets taped to the motor pool’s garage floor. The four piles of trash were kept separate, in quadrants designated by blue painter’s tape. Piece by piece, the bits of highway-side litter—beer cans, cigarette butts and packs, newspaper, fast food, and even a withered condom or two—were carefully dragged and moved away from where the four bright orange bags had been dumped.
It did not escape Walt that these piles possibly represented his best and only chance at nailing a killer, that a bunch of well-meaning children had collected what might be his only hard evidence in the case.
It was seven p.m., well past Walt’s usual office hours, something not lost on his subordinates, and no doubt adding to their concerted efforts. The mood, originally lightened with trash jokes, had turned serious as time wore on. Walt kept his head down, using a wooden poker to separate the garbage into three different piles: useless; personal; possible DNA. Corn chip bags and fast food went into “useless”; anything with handwriting or printing into “personal”; empty beer and soda cans, cigarette butts, the condoms into “possible DNA.” The Boy Scouts had done a thorough job, and though Walt had assigned five of his deputies into the same field to collect evidence, he didn’t anticipate them finding much.
Nancy had stayed late as well, without any discussion. She arrived at Walt’s side carrying a piece of paper in her right hand, and Walt knew what it was without asking. On this day there was only one piece of paper, one piece of information, that would bring her out to the garage in person.
“ALPS?” he called across the garage, his voice reverberating off the corrugated steel roof.
Automated Latent Print System.
She nodded. “It’s him,” she said.
Walt churned, an odd combination of dread and relief: pleased that he’d gotten it right, disturbed by the confirmation.
Martel Gale.
“Notify Boldt,” he said. “See if he wants to grab dinner.”
W
alt couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat down to dinner one-on-one with another guy, never mind that it was a business dinner. Somehow that didn’t matter. It wasn’t political. It wasn’t family. It wasn’t required. He’d chosen to be here.
Boldt was a commanding presence, whether standing over a dead body or sitting across the table at Zou 75, an upscale Asian restaurant on the north end of Hailey’s Main Street. His size accounted for much of it, as did his being easily mistaken for Brian Dennehy, that sense of celebrity that he carried. But more than that, it was the intensity that he radiated, a kind of force field that made even the loudest talker whisper instead, that caused children to stare and adults to speculate on who this person might be.
Walt, accustomed to drawing looks whenever he wore the uniform, knew to ignore the gaping; but with Boldt at the table, he became all the more aware that the two of them were the center of attention.
They waded through the requisite small talk, some sharing about family, their mutual love of the outdoors and Whidbey Island, a place Boldt liked to vacation and where Walt occasionally visited his father. Very occasionally.
“I read the transcript of one of your lectures,” Walt said. “‘The Victim Speaks if You’re Willing to Listen.’”
“Don’t hold it against me. I’m not much of a speaker.”
“I found it interesting, and I have to say I practice most of what you preach.”
“I’ve got nothing new to say, believe me. Rehashing old ideas is all.”
“What does Martel Gale tell us, now that we know it’s him?”
“We covered some good scenarios earlier,” Boldt said. “The watch and the wallet could be a smoke screen, could be for real.”
“Vincent Wynn threatened to kill the man and take his chances with the courts,” Walt reminded. They’d reviewed this during an earlier Skype conversation.
“I have to say it plays several ways when we factor in Caroline Vetta. Maybe Caroline’s killer is dead. Or maybe he’s an easy scapegoat. Or maybe Wynn or Boatwright had their own reasons for taking out Gale that had nothing to do with Caroline. Or maybe it had everything to do with Caroline—that one of them attributed her death to Gale and brought their own brand of justice to the table.”
“We have six pieces of trash that might carry DNA,” Walt said. “That’s discounting the beer and pop cans because they can be so tricky for the lab. Twelve, including the cans.”
“Too expensive to run those without a suspect,” Boldt said.
Walt shrugged, not sure he wouldn’t resort to that at some point. The existence of a national DNA database for felons made it all the more tempting.
“Then there’s your B-and-E’s,” Boldt said. “The possibility this guy ran into the wrong guy in the woods.”
“We should conclude our canvassing tomorrow,” Walt said. “Maybe we pick up something. And our plea to drivers will be on the morning news. There’s a good chance someone saw something. It’s a busy highway. But I’m not holding my breath.”