It was a not-too-subtle stab at Walt by a very alert dispatcher. Gloria knew her stuff and he’d been wrong to dress her down. All that had been required of him was to order the call tree instigated. His outburst hadn’t helped anyone.
“Thank you,” he said.
It caught her off guard.
“No problem, Sheriff.”
“Make it happen,” he couldn’t help adding. He disconnected the call.
His flashlight followed Beatrice’s apparent random looping as she began to define the pattern and Walt knew to move in her general direction. However her olfactory process worked, it eventually led to a smaller, tighter pattern from which she shot out in a straight line, suddenly fixed on the scent. That moment quickly approached, and as she got a faceful of the trail left by the killer, she looked back to make sure Walt was paying attention. She actually looked proud of him as she found him coming up behind her and she tore excitedly to the edge of the meadow, looked back once more, and dropped out of sight. For a moment Walt lost his equilibrium: when he’d last seen her, she’d been nose to the ground, aimed back down the hill toward the Engleton estate.
51
F
iona had taken more than the five minutes allotted to her for the A recording of the remains of Guillermo Menquez. So she was surprised to hear the ambulance engine start, and the vehicle drive away when she’d been expecting a reprimand.
“Hello?” she called down through the hole left by the open trapdoor. “Hello? Are you there?”
In truth there wasn’t anything more to photograph. She’d taken a dozen pictures of the deceased and another dozen of the tree house interior, overcome by chills most of the time, both to be alone in the presence of a dead body, and to realize someone had been
living
up here. It looked like it; it smelled like it. There was little doubt that the structure had been used as a hideaway, and the thought that it was but a matter of yards from her cottage and the main house made her sick to her stomach.
As she came out of the tree house and back down its ladder, she looked over her shoulder to see a tiny light up the hill, winking at her as it descended steadily through the forest.
She clung there to the ladder and reached for her phone to call Walt, to confirm this was him headed toward her, but didn’t have it on her. She’d left it in her bedroom, along with the handgun. Suddenly the cottage and the main house looked different to her, given the evidence of someone living in the tree house, given the dead body up there. She considered the safe room where Kira had hidden herself, but couldn’t bring herself to enter either the home or her own cottage. The flashlight was heading through the forest at a run, heading down the hill, heading toward her.
Now she heard her ringtone from within the cottage. She took two steps in that direction but stopped, picturing someone hiding in there waiting for her. The phone’s dull ringing continued through three more cycles and went silent. The phone . . . The gun . . . The flashlight, no longer seen.
No way she was going in there.
She looked up. Maybe the safest place was in the tree house, standing on the trapdoor to keep it from opening, but not if it was the killer’s lair, not if she had to hole up with a dead body. Hadn’t Walt once said the best place to hide was out in the open? She spotted the stack of split firewood, and beyond, another stack of the unsplit rounds. A trail led up into the woods from just beyond the pond. Where would she feel safer: wandering an empty house the size of a hotel, or tucked away in the woods with her back against a tree? The flashlight had to be Walt. He couldn’t be more than ten minutes away.
She left her camera bag at the foot of the ladder and hurried to the stack of logs, jumpy and agitated and feeling like someone was constantly a few feet behind her. Glancing over her shoulder nervously. Scared of her own shadow.
She reached the stack of rounds and there was a baseball bat stacked among the logs. Kira’s missing baseball bat, probably placed there by one of the gardeners. Or maybe it was the bat from outside her own cottage. She wrapped her hand around it and squeezed tightly.
It felt right.
52
W
alt followed Beatrice down the hill at a jog, their routine familiar to both: she would go out ahead of him, locked on the scent, then return to within a few yards of him to make sure he was still with her. As he broke out onto a defined path, Walt switched off the flashlight and fitted it back into its loop on his gun belt. It was dark in the woods, but the path revealed itself as a pale ribbon and Walt followed it effortlessly, slowing only occasionally as it turned or twisted around a rock outcropping or became darkened with a tangle of exposed roots.
As much as he appreciated being on the scent, as much as he understood a killer’s bizarre need to return to the crime scene, he took little comfort. Fiona was not answering her phone. This fact alone drove him toward the Engleton place at a dangerous pace, nearly keeping up with Beatrice, and by doing so, encouraging the dog ahead at a full run. He pushed her faster; she pulled him along. But he was no match for her. She took his pursuit of her as some kind of game and quickly outpaced him.
Two minutes passed, Walt charging down the descending path. Five. Beatrice’s absence—her failure to return to him—began to weigh on him. Had the sense of game won out over her obligation to follow the scent? Had he confused her with his running? He couldn’t be sure, the woods unfamiliar to him, but it felt as if he would arrive at the estate any minute.
Beatrice yipped. It was a cry. A painful cry, and it set into him a sense of panic and dread as if one of his daughters had called out.
Beware when the hunter becomes the hunted
. His first and only conclusion was that the killer had somehow known the dog was trailing him, that Walt, by challenging the dog, had driven her headlong into a trap—that that yip had been Beatrice’s final moment, one last desperate attempt to warn Walt.
His response visceral and immediate, his foot speed increased exponentially, running blindly now, all out. It was more than a connection between them, it was a bond, Walt to her and her to him. It was something in his blood. The kind of something that couldn’t be explained to another human being without sounding foolish, even childish. The love of family. The love of forever.
Her yip rang in his ears. Burned. A baby’s cry in the night. A call for help. His eyes blurred, watery from the run, or from tears, or from both. He wiped them away but all was a blurry, darkened landscape, the path’s lighter shade swirling and shifting, suddenly a river beneath his feet.
A geometric shape among it all: the Engleton roof.
And then the pain.
It ripped through both legs at the shins. He hadn’t seen a log across the path, but he went down face-first, losing the gun as he reached out to break the fall, his head flirting with unconsciousness in an effort to escape the pain. It seared from his broken shins, up through his knees, his groin, his stomach and exploded into his head as he cried out a sickening, agonized shriek.
Blackness loomed at the edges of his consciousness as he rolled over and drew his knees into his chest, writhing and gasping for air.
Breathe through it!
he told himself, as impossible as it was. He could ill afford to pass out. From somewhere through the fog of pain, Fiona appeared on her knees, a baseball bat in hand. Even with the evidence so blatant, it took Walt several seconds to connect the bat with the excruciating pain in his legs, and only then in what amounted to total disbelief. She was mouthing, “I’m sorry . . .” beneath the intense ringing in his ears and the waves of his own internal groaning.
Then, from behind her, came the mountain man like a specter. He emerged through the darkness, drawn by Walt’s shriek or out of some sixth sense that made him aware of Fiona’s presence. Whether a lunatic or a calculating murderer who understood the value of a hostage, he moved straight for Fiona, who was herself too absorbed in her own mishap to have any awareness of him. But it wasn’t Fiona he wanted.
She screamed and rolled away, releasing the bat as the man seized hold of it. It hung at his side like the bat of a hitter stepping up to home plate staring down the pitcher—Walt.
Whether traumatized or demonized, vengeful, or drugged and demented, both men knew what the mountain man intended to do with the bat as he took another step closer. Fiona, who had scooted away on her back, thrusting herself along the forest floor by digging in her heels, who had moved a good five yards away, also saw the future—where the next ten seconds were headed. Whether to protect him, or herself—Walt couldn’t fathom such thoughts, still gripped in his pain—she rolled to her knees and began sweeping her arms through the pine straw, in what at first appeared such a lame and odd behavior.
The gun
, he realized in a flash of lucidity. She was going for his gun.
Movement caught the edges of Walt’s wavering peripheral vision. Beatrice limped onto the path holding her right front paw aloft, her expression—did he imagine it or actually see it clearly in the dark?—one of remorse and grave concern as her master lay writhing in the dirt, a camouflaged giant glowering over him.
Walt, who couldn’t hear anything beyond the rush of his own blood past his ears, who sensed Fiona clambering in the underbrush, raking left and right in search of his handgun, who saw Martel Gale’s and Gilly Menquez’s killer turn toward the woman, clearly sensing she presented the greatest threat, managed a single word to rise up through the pain.
“Defend!”
Beatrice squealed again as she lighted onto her injured paw, bounding some four feet through air like a projected missile—a dozen bared and flashing white teeth.
53
W
alt found the wheelchair an embarrassment, never mind a necessity. The orthopedist told him that despite the lack of any fractures, he wouldn’t walk for a week. He spent as much time as possible behind his desk, because it hid his disability, his condition forcing him to reassess what formed his self-identity.
Nancy came in to wheel him. “I can do it myself,” he barked.
“You’re going to be a delight in your old age, you know that?”
“Maybe I won’t get there.”
“Not if you work without backup.”
“That was supposed to be my fault?”
“Was there somebody else out there in the woods with you? Did I miss something?” She grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and Walt didn’t object. She rolled her eyes behind his back.
“Yeah . . . well . . .” he said, lacking any decent retort. He hated her sometimes.
“You sure you’re up for this?”
“I’m fine.” He loved her at other times.
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t. I can’t. He can’t. It has to happen now.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, boss.”
She delivered him to Interview 1, as charmless and bland as Interview 2, but one door closer to reception.
He thought it some aspect of Intelligent Design that he should be the one conducting the interview and she the one behind the video camera. All they lacked was Beatrice, currently bandaged and on the floor of his office asleep. She’d taken a piece of cheat grass in the pad of her front paw, had run on it, leaped on it, and driven it in so far that Mark Aker had to remove it surgically.
The accused, in the jail’s blue jumpsuit, won the Charles Manson look-alike contest. Curly black, tangled hair. Unshaven. Basset-hound brown eyes. Peter Arian had wisely ducked this one, letting a wet-behind-the-ears public defender by the name of Crawford sit in the attorney’s chair. Crawford worked to lose his neophyte’s startled look, making him appear to be the one accused of homicide.
“Sheriff,” Crawford began, “my client objects to any alleged victim of his—”
“You! Shut the fuck up,” said the accused. Handcuffed, he couldn’t add the punctuation he would have clearly liked.
Walt appreciated the reprimand. Crawford was now officially a spectator. The attorney glanced in the direction of the video camera and Fiona, but then thought better of making any further protest.
“I don’t care who you are,” the accused stated dryly. “Why should I? It’s not like I killed you.” He smiled. He might have had decent teeth once. He looked directly at Fiona, and therefore directly into the camera lens. “I wasn’t going to let him push you around. Him knocking you down like that.”
Walt had some housekeeping to take care of: name, age, current residence; but he let it go for now. Fiona had been warned not to engage with the man.
“Is it running?” Walt asked her.
She nodded.
“You can leave the room.”
She slipped from behind the tripod and past the wheelchair. She leaned down and whispered, “I wasn’t pushed.” Walt nodded. She closed the door gently. Her presence had accomplished what he’d hoped; he wasn’t going to put her through anything more.
Walt said, “You shot one of my deputies. We have your prints off the chair you threw through the window, and they’re going to match your prints at booking, and that’s going to buy you a long, long time in maximum. The State of Idaho doesn’t take kindly to people shooting its peace officers. So you might as well tell me everything.”
To Walt’s surprise, Randy Dowling then confessed to the two murders and Brandon’s shooting. He’d killed Gale in a fit of rage at him pushing Fiona and hurting her—the way it had looked from his vantage point behind a living room window. “My own wife walked out on me. You probably know that much, am I right? Me being the loser I am? That’s what you’re thinking, am I right? Takes the kids with her. All because of money. Because I lose my stinking job. I’m a CPA. I’ll bet you know that. A guy like you knows everything, right? You bet you do. But you don’t know me. I’m not the guy you think I am. College of Central Utah. Top twenty-five of my class. You know all this, I’m not telling you anything new. I’m putting it down on tape. I was this guy,” he said, pointing his two cuffed hands at Crawford, who recoiled. “Even looked like him. You’d a bought insurance from me, the way I looked. But a guy that big pushing a fine-looking woman like that one. Gave him the old Louisville Slugger up top of the head. Beaned him. Thought it was lights out till the prick got up and came at me like Frankenstein. Jesus. Like trying to chainsaw a sequoia. Guy takes these steps toward me, and me, I’m backing up lockstep. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten back up. His eyes are staring straight ahead—I swear he doesn’t see me—and right as I think he’s about to do me, he drops to his knees and then face-plants into the garden. Down for the count. Like a zombie. Night of the Living Dead. I couldn’t believe it.”