In Harm's Way (11 page)

She lifted Angel off and eased her to the floor and tried again to sit up, this time managing to wedge her elbows under her. Her vision woozy, she felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up. And though the pain drummed intensely at the back of her skull, radiating down through her and provoking the urge to retch, she identified the vertigo and the unexplained silence as the source of her fear. For the fear overcame her like a wave and drowned her. As she vomited, she hoped the purge might clear her head and help her to reorient herself—to remember something, anything. But it was as if someone had placed her there on the floor, had played some awful trick on her, abandoning her with no hints or clues about the cause of her condition, that she was the object of a joke gone horribly awry.

The smell of the vomit disgusted her and made her move. She sat up, pushed away from it, and struggled forward onto hands and knees. If she hadn’t felt the bump she would have sworn she was severely hungover and wouldn’t have been surprised to find a near-empty bottle on the coffee table. A few times in her life she’d drunk herself into blackouts, although not since college. She couldn’t imagine she’d done this to herself, but at that point she would have welcomed any explanation. Anything would have been better than the mental silence that stretched as an empty bridge between her present condition and whatever had come before.

She struggled to her feet and, keeping a hand out on the back of a stool, a wall, and a doorknob, found her way into the bathroom, where she undressed and showered. The blurriness of her vision came and went, and when she threw up for a second time, she told herself to get to the hospital. Not trusting her own ability to drive, she called over to the main house, hoping for Kira, but she never picked up.

With the hospital less than a mile away, she moved slowly toward her Subaru, only to realize she was wearing only her bathrobe. She turned and admired her cottage as if seeing it for the first time. The driveway of Mexican pavers formed a kind of courtyard between the main house and her cottage and there was something there, something that connected everything. Again she tried to fill the void of what had come before the fall—for having found no bottle or evidence of drink, she assumed she’d tripped over the footstool. Her brain was functioning enough to tell her that the only viable explanation for the knot on her head was that she’d been walking backward at the time. Away from something. And that it must have been something compelling to keep her attention off the footstool behind her.

But as she drove off the property, even these thoughts became difficult to recall. She couldn’t firmly place where she’d been when she woke up. She touched her hair and found it wet, but didn’t remember having taken a shower.

She clutched the wheel more tightly, white-knuckled, focusing on the car and road like when she’d driven solo for the first time. That was her only glimmer of hope: she could recall the moment with absolute clarity—sixteen years old and terrified, her father in the passenger seat.

She convinced herself she wasn’t going out of her mind—only that she’d just lost a very important piece of it, a piece she hoped like hell to reclaim.

L
ooking out his back window at the sway of the aspens in a light breeze, Walt recalled a time when his two girls had played just as they were now, but with another woman by their sides. He was grateful for Lisa’s help, her tireless patience, her willingness to both discipline and comfort the girls, but he would have preferred Gail despite all her failings as a mother. The night before, he and the girls had watched a DVD that had landed on his office desk, a documentary about a Mongolian camel who wanted nothing to do with her offspring. The story had had a happy ending: a prayer, a reunion of mother and child, and a weeping camel. There would be no happy ending for his family, for his daughters. From now on the girls would be shuttled between two lives, two very different households, and no matter how hard he tried to explain it, it would be up to them to sort it all out, to make sense of the fractures they would encounter for years to come. He hoped to be the glue to hold it all together, to mend the fractures or at least keep them from widening. He could keep the day-to-day routine working; he knew routine, respected its importance. But watching Lisa laugh and play with them—on their level—he couldn’t help but see Fiona out there—all four of them out there, laughing and teasing and rebuilding something. It was absurd to make such a jump, but now that he’d crossed one line, the other wasn’t so hard, the distance not so great.

He’d clear a day soon and take the girls camping—although they’d probably prefer the shopping malls in Boise. Or maybe shopping and a movie and a motel with a pool.

“You okay?” It was Lisa. He hadn’t seen her approaching.

“Yeah. Good. Real good,” he said.

“You looked a little zoned.”

“I think I just came to an important realization,” he said. “I’ve been laboring under this notion that the girls and I need to suffer because Gail’s gone. You showed me something out there just now.”

“Me?”

“Fun is fun,” he said. “We’re going to start having fun around here.”

“I like the sound of that,” Lisa said, “and I know the girls will too.”

“Thank you,” he said to her, making sure she felt his sincerity. “You’ve practically been living here for far too long. That’s going to change.”

“No problem,” she said. She turned to call the girls. Walt caught himself glancing at the wall phone and thinking of Fiona.

Two nights had passed since the Hillabrand intruder, and still nothing but a few voice mails back and forth. She’d been pleasant enough but not gushing, and he’d expected gushing. She wasn’t feeling well but didn’t want him visiting. He tried to take it in stride. It wasn’t easy.

He debated leaving her yet another message, but couldn’t imagine a more adolescent move.

He returned to the office and sat at his desk, unable to keep his eye off the phone and e-mail. He read over a proposal currently in front of the county commissioners to privately host the Dalai Lama in Sun Valley, an outdoor event expected to draw an audience of between twenty and fifty thousand, with at least ten thousand coming from out of town. There was no way his small office could manage the traffic and simultaneously guarantee the Dalai Lama’s safety; no way he was going to turn over that responsibility to a private security firm, as was being proposed. He nearly began drafting an e-mail, but changed his mind. It could wait.

He reviewed other paperwork instead. A man held in their drunk tank had suffered convulsions and was attempting to sue the county. A suspected rapist needed transfer to Ada County. He signed some paperwork, sent a few e-mails, and made several calls. But each time he reached for the phone, he thought of her, and debated driving out to her place again.

Nancy, his assistant, stood in his doorway. “A body’s been found. Mile marker one twenty-five. Some kids, an Adopt-A-Highway crew, discovered it. Tommy Brandon responded and called it in. Says it isn’t pretty.”

Walt checked the clock. He was scheduled to pick up the Seattle detective, Boldt, at the airport.

“Okay, tell him I’m on my way,” Walt said. “And have someone meet that flight and get the sergeant settled, will you, please?”

“No problem.”

Typically, news of any death ran a feeling of dread through him as he always thought first of his late brother. But that wasn’t the case. He was instead unusually grateful to be called away from his desk, to be rid of the monotony. On the way out the door, he took one last look at his desk phone. Longing.

“And call Kenshaw,” he added, trying to make it sound like an afterthought. He appreciated the excuse to contact her. “Tell her to bring her gear and meet us. Same with the coroner. And Barge Levy. And you’d better check with Meridian to test their availability.” The state crime lab would be involved if there was a determination of foul play.

On his way to the Jeep Cherokee, he identified a lightness to his step, and tried to suppress it.

Several cars and trucks lined the breakdown lanes on both sides of State Highway 75. Fiona’s Subaru was not among them.

Parked on the shoulder behind Brandon’s cruiser were two pickup trucks, one with six Boy Scouts in the truck bed, all armed with pokers and Day-Glo garbage bags. He felt bad that they’d discovered the body, and urged Brandon to release them and get them “the hell away from here.”

Brandon had cobbled together a police tape barrier using a real estate sign, a lug wrench, and a broken ski pole as fence posts. Walt spotted the body at the epicenter of the confined area.

He ordered Beatrice to stay in the Jeep. She smeared her nose against the glass, drawing Chinese characters, desperate to join him.

The lower third of the thousand-foot mountain, a scree field of broken red rock, terminated thirty yards from the highway, where it joined a field of brown, sun-baked weeds and buffalo grass. The open eyes of the dead body, had there been any, would have looked up at the red of the rock, the full saturation of the evergreens, and an impossibly blue sky that was the hallmark of high mountain living.

“Some kind of face-lift,” Walt said, approaching the body. It had been severely preyed upon.

“I haven’t messed with him,” Brandon said. “Wanted to wait for you. But it’s pretty obvious we won’t be matching that face with any missing person reports.”

Walt neared the haphazardly installed police tape.

“There’s a set of tire tracks, so tread lightly,” Brandon said.

“I see ’em.”

Walt dodged the tire treads, and kneeled. “It’s a truck. A pickup maybe.” He studied the lay of the grass. “Three . . . no, four . . . kids and an adult approached the body. That is, if you came in from over there.” He pointed.

“I did.”

Walt parted some grass and used a stick to lift some of the matted weeds.

“The predators were a family of fox and a dog the size of a Labrador. The dog was running. Might have been after the fox, not our John Doe.”

The body appeared to have been tossed into a tangle of twigs and weeds that ran along the base of the scree field, which was piled four feet high in places and stretched out sixty yards or more.

Instead of eyes, two blood-black holes stared up. A piece of the nose was missing. He’d been a big man—six-four or -five, two-seventy. Fit. Wide shoulders. Huge thighs in what had to be custom-tailored jeans.

Walt declined to move the body until he had some decent photos.

As if on cue, Fiona’s Subaru pulled up. She climbed out, waved at Walt, and went around back to collect her gear.

He remembered her saying that their moment together wouldn’t interfere with their professional work, but there was something wrong about her not answering any of his calls or e-mails and now showing up all sunny and bright. In fact he resented it, and had Brandon not been there, he would have rushed over to her and demanded some answers. It was then he realized he was going to be the one to have a hard time keeping this professional.

As Walt stood there, his mind reeling, Brandon had the good sense to direct her around the side of the roped-off area and to help her over the security tape.

She looked tired but determined to appear otherwise.

“Hi, there!” she said, as if they were neighbors running into each other in the supermarket.

“Uhhh,” Walt said.

“Good God!” She staggered back as she spotted the body among the sticks and debris. She glanced sharply at Walt, back to the body, over at Brandon. Back to the body. She looked afraid and confused and as if she might be sick. “Dear God.” She took another step back, kneeled, and retched.

When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes.

He took one quick step toward her, wanting to comfort her, but caught himself like a runner coming off the blocks before the gun.

“You okay? Should have warned you. Sorry about that. You don’t have to do this,” he said.

Brandon looked at him like he was crazy. Walt never excused anyone from a crime scene, especially not the photographer.

“Someone’s got to take the pictures,” Brandon said, speaking what he was thinking. Brandon lacked the social filter that came on standard model human beings. He tended to say whatever entered his head.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I can do it.”

“You don’t look okay,” Walt said.

“You get used to it,” Brandon said, trying for sympathetic but sounding brutish.

Her tears hit Walt the hardest. He’d forgotten how horribly a dead body could impact the uninitiated.

She busied herself, keeping her attention on the contents of her camera bag as she switched lenses and checked filters. Her hands shook to where she dropped a lens. She scrambled to recover it, blowing onto and fogging its glass and inspecting it, but all with the exaggerated movements of someone who knew she was being watched.

Walt heard a car door shut and, turning in that direction, felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck as a silhouette of a massive figure stood on the pavement’s edge. Behind the man, a sheriff’s cruiser had joined the breakdown lane and now the commanding silhouette made sense, and Walt raised a hand toward Sergeant Lou Boldt. He experienced both exhilaration and dread. The teacher had walked in on his unfinished science project.

Torn between wanting to comfort Fiona and welcoming the sergeant, Walt moved toward the highway. Boldt came down the embankment. He was broad-shouldered, somewhere in his late forties, his graying, close-cropped haircut a throwback to the 1950s. His head appeared oversized, a condition emphasized by his short neck. A pair of reading glasses hung around that neck, bouncing off a red tie and crisp white shirt, framed by a brown sport coat, threadbare at the sleeves. As he drew closer to Walt, a warmth filled his pale gray eyes. He reminded Walt of a husky or wolf. They shook hands vigorously, like long-lost friends, Boldt towering over Walt. His voice was deep but surprisingly gentle for such a big man.