In Harm's Way (18 page)

“There was a man. I think he was speaking to me . . . saying something to me . . . though I don’t know what, exactly.”

Trying to connect what she was being told with an unwilling memory, Fiona felt as if she were reaching into dark water.

“Don’t force it,” Katherine said. “There’s no rush. The point is: you’ll get there if you need to. You’ll find it if it’s important.”

“Of course it’s important. There’s a piece of my life missing.”

“Maybe for good reason.”

“The only reason is because I hit my head.”

“Not necessarily. We’ve discussed this.”

“Protecting myself from myself? I don’t buy that.”

“And I’m not selling, just trying to help you to work this out.”

Fiona felt herself cooling off. Whatever it was, it had to be something major for her to have gotten this worked up about it. But what, she had no idea.

“I need this,” she said.

“We generally have what we need. The general misperception is that we need what we want.”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

“Words to live by,” Katherine said.

“Can we try again?”

“Not today. Soon enough, though.”

“Thursday’s session?”

“We’ll see.”

“I need to know.” She hung her head. It was everything she could do not to cry.

“
N
o, I’ll handle it,” Walt said into his BlackBerry, staring at the dairy case in Atkinson’s Market. “I’m heading that way anyway.”

On the other end of the call, Tommy Brandon said nothing.

Walt understood the source of his deputy’s confusion: he rarely, if ever, refused the offer of help. Overburdened and overworked, he welcomed, even preached the need for such initiative. But here he was, pushing back on Brandon. And there was Brandon, not understanding—
or understanding too well
, Walt thought. Brandon was no slouch; he probably saw right through Walt’s justification.

He cursed Brandon’s efficiency. In studying topographic maps and Google Earth images of the area around the location of Gale’s body, all in an effort to widen their canvassing, Brandon had made an interesting, and possibly damaging discovery: the Engleton property—where Fiona lived—was technically immediately adjacent to the crime scene, if one discounted four hundred feet of elevation. Looking from high above, only the blur of the scree field separated them.

If Gale had not been tossed from a pickup truck, then he had likely fallen to his death from the eastern edge of the Engleton property, though the condition of his clothes did not suggest he’d been hiking. The contradictions needed clarification.

Someone needed to question Fiona—and quite possibly Kira—and Walt was not leaving that to anyone else.

He reviewed his exchange with Brandon, searching for a believable if inelegant way out.

“She has some photos of the scene for me,” he said, realizing, upon reflection, how stupid it sounded: Fiona e-mailed her photographs to the office. He had to end the conversation—quickly.

“Listen, I’m in Atkinson’s trying to buy string cheese. Nikki is very picky, and I can’t for the life of me remember which brand it is she likes. For her, there’s only the one. I’ll take the Engleton place. You divvy up the rest and we’ll hope someone saw something.”

“Got . . . it,” Brandon said, intentionally clipping his words so that Walt would not miss his unspoken message.

A man stepped up and, without so much as looking at the shelves, snagged a carton of milk from the case and dumped it into his cart, on top of several 12-packs of beer and a half-dozen bags of beef jerky.

Walt recognized him immediately from his driver’s license photo: Dominique Fancelli, stepfather of Dionne Fancelli, the pregnant highschooler. A dozen options crowded Walt’s mind: confrontation, arrest, intimidation. Maybe he could steer him out back and just beat the shit out of him and take his chances with voters. Paying no attention to the string cheese, Walt placed it into his cart, his eyes never leaving the man.

He pushed his cart, following the man down the paper aisle. Watched him load up on paper towels and toilet tissue and consider an air freshener. Stood there watching, hoping the man might turn and provoke him. Not much could test his patience, but this man had Walt’s heart going arrhythmic in his chest.

Fancelli continued toward the checkout lanes and Walt followed as if on surveillance, holding back yet fully focused on the target. Reminding himself how unprofessional it would be to confront the man, Walt turned his cart away and headed for the fresh bread beneath the Country Bakery sign. He was considering a loaf of raisin bread when Fancelli appeared in his peripheral vision, leaving with a bag of groceries in hand. A teenage girl, no older than thirteen, passed him on her way into the store, and Fancelli ogled her bare legs and tank top. Before Walt could even make sense of it, he’d abandoned his cart and rushed through the swinging door.

Fancelli was halfway across the parking lot, zeroing in on a tricked-out pickup truck, swinging the bag like a schoolboy.

“Fancelli!” Walt marched in long, stiff strides, reaching the man as he turned around. Fancelli’s eyes flared at sight of the uniform. His brow furrowed. The bag slowed its pendular motion.

Walt invaded the man’s space, putting his face to Fancelli’s, unbothered by their height difference.

“How’s Dionne doing?” he asked, a bit breathlessly.

Fancelli leaned away but did not take a step back, his eyes creased, his lips suddenly bloodless and thin. His nostrils flared.

“Give her my best.”

The man’s head nodded, nearly imperceptibly.

Walt stepped away and offered him his back as he returned to the store.

“No problem,” Fancelli croaked out.

Walt stopped and looked over his shoulder at the man, visions of Emily and Nikki playing before his eyes. For all the reasons bullets were manufactured, this seemed a way to put one to its best possible use. He caught his hand actually touching the grip of his sidearm. He turned back and walked on, a fraction of a second gone, but a lifetime passed.

H
e arrived at the top of Fiona’s driveway to the yellow profusion of the Engleton flower beds, the air gauzy and charged with a glow of late afternoon. He was slightly out of breath and light-headed, anticipation roaring in his ears.

Knocked on the cottage door. Stepped through as she answered.

“I’ve missed you. You’ve been awfully quiet.” The hopeful yet sad look in her eyes prompted him. He took her chin in his right hand, placed his left on her hip as if dancing. She didn’t object, and though he saw distance in her eyes as he kissed her, she returned his offer as if he was somehow the answer she’d been awaiting. As they spun, she shoved the door closed with the palm of her hand and they crashed across the coffee table and fell to the couch, this time without a hint of amusement. She infused the act with a seriousness, a disconnected commitment, and he sensed the danger of the moment, but was unable to hold himself back. If talk had been required, it was too late for both of them. If he’d thought himself bulletproof, he was not. She closed her eyes tightly as he joined her, a mask half of pleasure, half of pain that caused him to reconsider, but again, he couldn’t stop. He fell atop her with a gasp, surprised and alarmed by his urgency and the unshakeable knowledge that somewhere in the middle of their frantic actions she might have asked him to stop if she’d been so inclined.

“Wow,” she said, confusing him, because she sounded so happy. “I ought to answer the door more often.”

“I didn’t plan that,” he said.

“Which makes it all the more wonderful.”

“It’s not really me, to do something like that.”

“Well, then maybe you’ll change.” She kissed him.

“Maybe I already have.”

She left him, collecting and dragging her clothes with her to the back of the cottage. A few minutes later she had a pot of hot water going, and they were both dressed and it was, for a moment, as if nothing had happened. Her cheeks and chest were flushed as she sat down next to him. She looked out from behind sleepy eyes and he wanted her again, right there. But he behaved himself, containing himself to the tea and a few minutes of delicious silence that they shared with the fading gurgle of the cooling tea kettle.

“Tell me this was a social call,” she said.

He felt a painful spike in his chest. The uncommon urge to lie. A matter of days, and he was already corrupted, prepared to compromise his ethics for this woman. The danger sign flashed for the second time in a matter of hours: she was getting to him. If he went forward unguarded, unchecked, he needed to accept that some of this was irreversible, that the flip side of such happiness and heart-pounding excitement was the abyss.

“Not entirely,” he said, prepared for her to distance herself, glad when she didn’t. “Brandon noticed on the map that this place, and the Berkholders’, to a lesser degree, are in fairly close proximity to the body site.” He added, “As the crow flies, which bodies do not.” He’d thought he might win a smile out of her, but she’d gone cold and he thought back to their work on the body and again regretted keeping her on the scene for so long. He was about to apologize for that when she spoke.

“So what does that involve?”

“Asking you and Kira if you’d seen anyone matching Gale’s description, which I think you just might happen to have pointed out when we found the body. I’ll talk to Kira briefly—”

“She’s not around.”

“—or not, and then look around the place and call it good. Same at the Berkholders’. Really it was just an excuse to see you.”

“You saw a lot of me,” she said, cupping the mug of tea and offering him a vexing look of encouragement.

“This is getting complicated,” he said.

“It is.”

“More so for you than me.”

“Certainly not true. You have the girls to think of. I understand that. It can’t be easy. It’s the beast in the room we’re not discussing. Why is that?”

“Some of this can wait.”

“For . . . ?”

He grimaced.

“You think this isn’t serious? It’s been two years in the making. It’s very serious. To me, that is. If it isn’t serious to you, that’s important for me to hear. I’m a big girl. I get it.”

“It’s serious.”

“Yes, it is. So the girls are a big part of it, and I want you to know that I defer to you on how we—if there is a ‘we’—handle it. They don’t need to know, shouldn’t know until we’re awfully sure where this is going. Once I become part of their lives, if I become part of their lives, it’s not fair to them to retreat, so we’d better be awfully sure we know what we’re doing. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m looking forward, not back. I’m trying to keep my pulse down because every time I look at you it runs out of control. I’m seeing a future instead of fearing one and I’m hungry for the first time in what seems likes years.” He considered this. “You want to get something to eat?”

“I thought you have to canvass.”

“When will Kira be back?”

“I don’t keep her calendar.”

“I’ll walk around the premises. No sign of the bear-man, right?”

“Kira will tell you she hears things, but that’s Kira.”

“And you? Do you hear things?”

She turned away, and he thought maybe he’d embarrassed her and he wondered how he’d managed. Gail had been out of his life long enough, and the girls had dominated his attention, that he’d forgotten about how dealing with a woman was so incredibly different.

“It may take me a while to get good at this,” he said. “I’ve lived in a bubble for too long. It may take me a while to remember that all women are not eleven-year-olds.”

He got the smile he’d been hoping for earlier.

“Some of us are seventeen,” she said.

“Point taken.”

“Have a look around. I’ll clean up and we’ll grab some dinner. That is, if you want?”

“It was my idea.”

“Take your time. Give me fifteen minutes.”

A woman who could clean up in fifteen minutes? He’d hit the mother lode.

“Back shortly,” he said.

Sunset was still two hours out, but dusk had begun as a change to the quality of light, the mountains stretching long shadows across the narrow valley and turning the air a dusty gray. Walt walked the perimeter of the property, admiring the garden beds all dominated by a profusion of vibrant lilies, and the meticulous landscaping, briefly envious of the wealth on display. The valley was a playground for trust funders, and there were times that kind of inherited, unearned money made him crazy. His tracker’s eye caught evidence of activity up the hill toward the east ridge, where he found a dump pile of dried twigs and leaves. He circled high above the house and cottage, then around and down a grassy slope overlooking a small teardrop pond. He walked the back side of the house, arriving at the attached garage, and peered in through the window to notice a vehicle missing from the first of the three bays.