Walt threw himself up into the space, spinning, preparing for someone on the other side of the elevated trapdoor, but the space was empty. He caught his breath as he scrambled to Menquez, still not quite believing the tree house was empty. The flashlight’s beam caught the overhead vaulted ceiling, a tiny loft, and the rope ladder leading to it.
Gilly Menquez was warm to the touch. No more than thirty minutes dead. Probably closer to ten or fifteen. Walt called it in as calmly as possible over the radio, but there was no return, the radio’s signal lost to the contours of the geography. He tried his phone and got through.
“I want the highway entrance sealed,” he explained to his dispatcher. “Ambulance and coroner to the residence. Every deputy available is on the manhunt. We want Greenhorn covered and a team to watch Cold Springs. Contact Roger Hillabrand and have his place locked down. This guy could be out there. Could be long gone.”
The bottom third of Gilly’s boots were soaked. Brown mud filled the space between the heel and sole. There was a piece of velvet leaf caught in the cuff of his khakis, along with pine straw and flecks of bark. But it was the amber beads of field grass that won his full attention. These, along with the cheat grass stuck to his socks. You didn’t find grasses in the forest, only in meadows, and one meadow in particular came to mind: Gilly had returned to the high mountain campsite they’d discovered, the same campsite he’d been keeping an eye on when he’d drunk himself into a blackout. Walt could picture Gilly, an expert tracker, starting there and working his way down to the Engleton estate. Could picture him finding his way directly to the tree house, could only imagine his surprise when he’d thrown open the trapdoor ahead of him.
As he came down the exterior ladder, he slipped a couple of rungs, catching himself at the last second. Seeing this, Beatrice lunged, but did not leave her spot. He saw her and, reminded of her value to him, returned to the tree house, carefully retrieving two of the discarded tissues without touching them himself. A moment later he presented the tissues to Beatrice’s discerning nose and issued a single command: “Find it.”
The dog, a bundle of repressed energy, took off at a shot, nose to the ground, executing her bizarre loops and double-backs at the base of the ladder at astounding speed. Wagging excitedly, she faced her master and paused expectantly. She’d caught the scent.
“Find it,” he repeated, motioning into the woods. Beatrice raced off into the darkness and Walt followed, his mobile phone already dialing Fiona’s number.
“What’s going on?” she said before even identifying him. “Are you here?”
“I need you to listen carefully and do exactly as I say,” he said. “Are you with me?”
“Okay.”
He hadn’t checked her Subaru. He hadn’t cleared the main house. He was trusting Beatrice but knew some slight possibility existed that the dog might be following Gilly’s scent and not the killer’s.
“Do you lock your car?” he asked.
“What the hell?”
“I need you to stay with me, Fiona. I need you to answer my questions and do as I say.”
“Why are you breathing like that? What’s going on?”
“I’m in the woods above you. Do you lock your car?”
“No.”
The car was a likely hiding place. If the killer had spotted Walt’s approach, had left the tree house while Walt had circled the main house, he could be anywhere—including in the back of the Subaru, awaiting a hostage.
“Your doors and windows are locked?”
“Yes. You’re scaring me.”
“Good. I want you alert. My people are on their way. It may take them a while. They’re coming in quietly, on my orders. Do me a favor and don’t shoot one of my deputies. But if anyone tries to break into your place, shoot first and ask questions later. You got that?”
Silence.
“My guys will not break into your place. Certainly not without announcing themselves. Are you with me?”
“What the hell’s going on, Walt?”
“It wasn’t Kira,” he said.
“I told you that!” she said indignantly.
“The guy . . . our mountain man. He’s been living in your tree house.”
Her gasp was audible through the phone.
“At least part time. He’s been up there.”
“The tree house?
Our
tree house?”
“Stay put. My guys are maybe ten minutes out. Are you with me?”
“I won’t be a victim again, Walt.”
“It’s not going to come to that.”
Beatrice’s continuing up into the forest pulled Walt in that direction. He could call her off, return, make sure Fiona got in the Subaru and that the Subaru was safe.
“I’m just saying.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
“We?”
“You and me.”
The silence was protracted. Walt felt it in his chest.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Okay.”
He signed off and holstered the BlackBerry and followed the sound of Beatrice up ahead of him. She was focused and determined, and it was her level of concentration that returned him to the task at hand. Swallowed in the darkness of a thick conifer forest, navigating more on instinct than vision, led by the sounds from a dog he had come to trust and depend upon, he drove himself on, half-blind, half-terrified, determined to push Fiona from his mind, but finding it impossible. Higher and higher they climbed, Beatrice leading him along a meandering game trail. They were moving quickly, Walt light on his feet and nearly silent, and he wondered if they weren’t closing the gap on Menquez’s killer. The man might or might not know Walt was in pursuit; might or might not be experiencing remorse over killing Menquez. Walt imagined him justifying taking the baseball bat to the head of Martel Gale. But strangling a Forest Service ranger, whether panicked or not, had to weigh differently. Walt imagined him desperate, irrational, and in search of some way out of his actions. He didn’t picture the man a lunatic despite his having jumped through a window at the Casino. The break-in at the Berkholders’ had been cleverly planned and disguised as the work of a bear; that wasn’t the mark of a lunatic.
He and Beatrice were really moving now, Walt at a near run, Beatrice stopping ahead, waiting, and then bolting on. When Beatrice allowed him to catch up, her body craning forward over her front paws and every inch trembling, he knew they were close. He patted her head and chest and thrust his palm out marking her to stay. Worked forward through some underbrush as quietly as any man or animal could move. Believed himself invisible, faster and more capable than his adversary, no matter how much the person considered himself a mountain man. This, right now, was Walt’s domain, a place where he thrived, a place with which he identified and drew upon for his own identity. Leave the conference rooms and the relationships to others; give him the pitch-black forest and the motivation of a killer on the loose.
By the time he got a look at the meadow, it was empty. The BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it and it stopped. Starlight gave the grassy field a blue hue, its abandoned campsite like a scar in the distance. Walt reached through the chokecherry, taking hold of a clump of field grass, the ripened seeds falling away; seeds he’d recovered from Gilly’s pants cuff. The cheat grass played out in the driest portions of the meadow in oblong shapes: kidney beans and a hook nose. Walt broke out and entered the meadow but stayed low and held to the boundary of where the forest formed a wall of shadow.
He clicked his tongue once and Beatrice came padding up behind him faster than he could have expected. A single hand motion, and she heeled. Given his angle, Walt was able to look behind, struck by a darker swath in the still sea of grass: a person, alone, moving from very near where Walt had crouched and in the direction of the abandoned lean-to and campfire. He stayed perfectly still as his eye sought other anomalies. He easily spotted the beaten-down path used by the occasional hiker, the path he and others had used to approach the campsite. He could imagine Gilly there now, having picked up on some markers in the woods, following expeditiously, the way of any tracker. Excited. Driven forward with purpose. Given the line leading that direction, he pictured Menquez’s killer somewhere up near the lean-to, or by now well beyond, following the trail that led up and over the ridge and into Greenhorn Gulch.
Walt caught the flicker of headlights through the trees below and to his right.
The ambulance
, he thought. He faced a choice of trying to start Beatrice on the scent again or heading out on the same trail on which he and Brandon had followed the amorous backpackers. He tried to think like his adversary, or if not think, react like him. What would the headlights mean to him? Danger, or curiosity?
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
“Y
ou 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
W
ith 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.”