01 Storm Peak (34 page)
Still, he cautioned himself, Abby sounding genuine and Abby being genuine were not necessarily the same things.
Complicating matters, he did believe that she loved him. That made it difficult to assess his own feelings for her.
All he knew was, whenever Lee’s level gray eyes looked into his, he was sure that she could see images of him betraying her with Abby. He knew he’d hurt her. Badly. And he’d never wanted that.
Miserably, he put his head into his hands. He’d never wanted to hurt Lee, he’d just wanted to fuck Abby three or four times.
“Jesus,” he said to himself.
There was a light tap at the door. Wearily, he raised his head, leaned back in the chair, then realized that this position made his physical arousal a little too evident and hunched forward, elbows on the table.
“Yeah?” he called, “Come on in.”
For some reason he was expecting Lee, maybe because he’d just been thinking of her. He was a little relieved when Denise entered, a couple of sheets of paper in her hand.
“Fax for you, Jess,” she said, dropping the sheets on the table in front of him. “From Denver Fire Department,” she added.
He brought his mind back to the investigation with an effort.
“Oh, fine. Thanks, Denise,” he said, rubbing his eyes with forefinger and thumb. Denise looked at him critically.
“Late night, Jess?” she asked. His eyes were red-rimmed, she noticed, and assumed it was lack of sleep. He shook his head. Last thing he wanted after telling Lee he’d taken Abby to dinner was talk around the office about him having a late night.
“Just couldn’t sleep, Denise,” he smiled tiredly. “Got a few things on my mind.” He indicated the fax on the table, and the whiteboard full of notes, photos and fact sheets. Denise nodded sympathetically
“I can imagine,” she said. “Get you a coffee if you’d like one?” she suggested, and his smile widened a little.
“I’d probably kill for one, honey” he said and she smiled.
“No need to go that far. Just black?”
“Just black.”
She nodded and slipped out, closing the door softly behind her. Idly, Jesse inspected the ID shot that Carrie Tolliver had finally sent through by fax.
Anton Mikkelitz was a reasonably good-looking guy apparently in his mid-thirties with a thick head of blond hair. There was nothing outstanding about him. No scars. No distinguishing marks. No swastikas tattooed on his forehead. No sign around his neck reading “Serial Killer. Keep clear.”
He rose, moved around the table to the whiteboard and taped the photo in position.
Now everything was in its place. Everything was complete. And he was still nowhere.
Then a thought struck him. Of course, everything wasn’t complete.
He reached for the phone, checked on one of his yellow legal pads for the FBI’s number and punched the buttons.
A
gent Annie Dillon’s mind was slowly turning to oatmeal as she tried to compare the list of real aviation spares with the false ones. The parts had serial numbers up to thirteen digits long, with sub-classifications and model categories added to that. The variations between real and counterfeit were absolutely minimal and they tended to occur anywhere through the serial number. Just keeping track of them was enough to make an agent weep, she thought. But she’d already isolated one likely distribution center in Topeka, and now she thought she was onto a second in Oregon.
gent Annie Dillon’s mind was slowly turning to oatmeal as she tried to compare the list of real aviation spares with the false ones. The parts had serial numbers up to thirteen digits long, with sub-classifications and model categories added to that. The variations between real and counterfeit were absolutely minimal and they tended to occur anywhere through the serial number. Just keeping track of them was enough to make an agent weep, she thought. But she’d already isolated one likely distribution center in Topeka, and now she thought she was onto a second in Oregon.
The phone beside her rang and she answered it irritably. For a few moments, she wondered why a deputy sheriff from Colorado would be calling her. Then she remembered the information request that she’d tried to fax through. She hesitated guiltily.
“Oh Jesus, I’m sorry Deputy Parker,” she said. “I’ve been really snowed under here.”
“I know how it can be.” The voice on the other end of the phone was friendly and unhassled. If he’d been at all argumentative, she would have probably told him to take a flying leap and hung up on him.
“As a matter of fact, Deputy, I tried to fax that sheet through a while back and your line was engaged. I meant to get back to it but I completely forgot. I’m real sorry I’ll send it through right now.”
The deputy paused a moment. “No rush,” he said finally “I’m just heading out for an hour or so and it’s a long shot anyway. Send it through when you get a moment.”
She glanced at the tables of figures on the screen of her computer, hazarded a guess at how much longer she’d want to work at them before she was driven screaming into the rain outside.
“Forty minutes, no longer,” she promised. “I’ll send it through in forty minutes or so.”
“That’ll do just fine,” Jesse told her. He broke the connection and she hung up. She turned back to the computer, then stopped, shuffled through the papers on her desk until she found the forgotten dossier and placed it conspicuously on top of the pile.
She didn’t plan to forget it again.
FORTY-FIVEW
hen the fax about Wilson Purdue finally came through, Jesse was out doing what cops spend most of their time doing: pounding the pavement.
hen the fax about Wilson Purdue finally came through, Jesse was out doing what cops spend most of their time doing: pounding the pavement.
He’d gathered up the photos of the suspects on his list—the possible suspects, he corrected himself morosely—and had gone to interview the small list of witnesses that he had available.
Maybe, he thought, there was something in one of the photos that might trigger a memory. A subconscious thought or idea or fact that was lying there buried, just waiting for a small, not-too-well focused ID photo to release it.
He’d also included a couple of completely unrelated photos in the small pile that he’d gathered. It was a control system that he’d used many times before, when checking on eyewitnesses in Denver. Eyewitnesses, really were the worst witnesses of all. Most people make it a practice not to take notice of the appearance of strangers.
Sad to say in this modern, caring world, noticing strangers is not always such a great idea. Making eye contact with strangers has led to people having their skulls parted with tomahawks, or their bodies torn apart by high-powered bullets, or ripped with knives.
As a consequence, most people go through life making sure they don’t notice people around them. Until something happens—and then it’s too late.
Jesse understood how witnesses could feel embarrassed by the fact. To stand and watch a mugging, or a murder, or a beating and then have to admit that it was the event that drew the attention, not the detail of the perpetrator’s height, size, coloring or distinguishing marks, was none too easy, he knew. A person in that situation could feel like a damn fool.
And to compensate, all too many witnesses would try to make any available aid to recognition fit the facts. If a perpetrator had been short, fat and swarthy and an eyewitness was shown a photo of a six-foot-tall Nordic blond, more often than not, the witness would discard his vague memories of the event until he would say with absolute certainty that, yes officer, this is the man I saw.
Otherwise, reason asked, why would the officer be showing me the picture?
For that reason, Jesse always tried to have as many different photos as he could. It reduced the chances of the witnesses trying to second-guess the investigator. So, along with the photos of Wilson Purdue, Anton Mikkelitz, Ned Tellman and Oliver Prescott, he carried small snapshot photos of old friends-a ski instructor from Copper Mountain and one of the detectives from his old squad in Denver. It rounded the pile out a little.
So far, none of the photos had struck a chord. He’d called on John Hostetler first. Jesse liked Hostetler. He’d gotten to know him as a nodding acquaintance, during his time with the ski patrol. The elderly lift attendant welcomed him warmly looked obligingly through the photos, then shook his head sadly.
Strike one, Jesse thought.
Next up to bat was the lift attendant who’d been on duty when Harry Powell, the marketing consultant from North Carolina, had been left slumped in the Storm Peak chair. That killing, Jesse thought, showed a pretty thorough understanding of the working of a ski mountain.
Any lift attendant would have to be distracted by the sight of a passenger who failed to unload. Passengers like that were the bane of attendants’ lives. Go-rounds, as they were called, meant the lift had to be stopped, then backed up, then stopped again, while the unfortunate person was allowed to dismount. And chairlift stoppages meant disgruntled paying customers. What’s more, each lift on the mountain was automatically monitored, so a record of stoppages was kept each day. As a consequence, lift staff watched for go-rounds like hawks, and any attendant who had two or more in a week was usually in for a torrid interview with the lifts manager.
Under those conditions, Jesse was pretty sure the lift attendant in question, Clive Wallace, would have taken no notice at all of the other rider on the chair, who’d skied off into the trees.
And he was right. Morosely, he wondered why he had to be right on that particular item. Wallace stared blankly at the six photos, then shook his head.
Strike two.
It was Randall Hollings’s wife who made the first positive identification.
Her husband was still recovering in the local hospital. He checked his notes and confirmed that she was staying at the Torian Plum condos, overlooking the lower slopes of the mountain. He called the condos, found her and arranged to meet her.
Emma Hollings was eager to help. Her initial, angry reaction to Lee had been the result of shock, nothing more. As the days passed and she realized how lucky her husband had been, and how tragically Walt Davies had died, she had calmed down. Now she was willing to do anything within her power to help the Routt County Sheriff’s Department in its hunt for the killer.
And she told Jesse as much over the phone.
He parked outside the elegant timber building and took the elevator to the third floor. Emma Hollings was waiting for him. She offered him coffee, which he refused, thinking that another cup would set his kidneys into overdrive. As he had with Clive and John Hostetler, he explained that he was following up on a minor chance, just letting her see photos of some possible suspects in case one might jog her memory.
He spread the photos out for her on the coffee table and she hunched forward, frowning, to look at them. After a few moments, she smiled at him apologetically.
“Excuse me, Deputy Parker,” she said, rose and went into the bedroom. When she emerged, she was carrying a pair of half-frame reading glasses, which she perched on the end of her nose as she studied the photos once more. She glanced up, smiled again, a little sadly.
“We’re none of us getting younger, are we?” she said.
Jesse shrugged. “Can’t remember what it felt like to be that way” he admitted.
She nodded once, then went back to her perusal of the six photos. She hooked one of them toward her with a forefinger. Jesse held his breath, leaned forward a little to see which one it was. It was Anton Mikkelitz, he saw—the paramedic from Denver whose photo had come in that morning. Then she frowned again, shook her head and muttered “No” under her breath and pushed the photo back into line with the others.
Jesse leaned back, allowing his pent-up breath to escape slowly in a long, silent sigh.
Mrs. Hollings’s forefinger was patrolling the line of photos again, wavering back and forward along the line, her elegantly shaped and varnished nail hovering.
Then, it stabbed down. Definite and unwavering, like a red hawk dropping onto a jack rabbit.
“Him,” she said briefly. “I’m sure of it.”
Jesse looked quickly at the photo skewered by her fingernail.
“You’re sure?” he asked. “You only caught a brief—”
She didn’t let him finish.
“I’m sure,” she said definitely. “I may have only seen him for a few seconds, but it’s imprinted on my mind. I can see him now. I guess when the adrenaline is running, you see things more clearly, don’t you? You notice things. That’s him. Definitely.”
And to emphasize her point, she tapped her finger on the photo of Detective Sergeant Miles Ferris, of the Denver PD.
Strike three, thought Jesse.
H
e had no better luck with the lift attendant who’d been on duty the same day.
e had no better luck with the lift attendant who’d been on duty the same day.
Inevitably, the lift attendant had been diverted by the crumpling figure of Randall Hollings as the killer shoved him free of the chair and the injured man fell in the path of unloading skiers. His first instinct had been to drag the fallen man clear—to avoid one of those much-hated stoppages if he could. It was only then that he’d realized that Mrs. Hollings was screaming and struggling with the other occupant of the chair.
But by then, Emma Hollings was sprawling in the snow, the killer’s back was to him and he was skiing flat-out for the trees above the Triangle 3 run.
End of the innings, thought Jesse.
He sat in the little Subaru in the no parking area by Gondola Square. While he’d been interviewing the witnesses, some eager-beaver new kid from the town police had written a parking citation for the Subaru and left it under the windshield wiper. He leaned back, rolling his shoulders and neck to ease the cramp there. He was tired and dispirited and at a dead end. Some time later today he’d have to get Denise to sort out the traffic citation with Felix Obermeyer’s office. He cursed quietly. Didn’t the dumb bastard of a cop notice the shiny new police department radio that was installed under the dash of the battered little wagon?
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