In Harm's Way (36 page)

“Search the main house. Confirm it’s vacant.”

He walked slowly to her, wondering what he was going to say.

“I swear,” she said, beating him to it. She hung her head, shaking it side to side. “I know how this looks, but it isn’t true.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Lowering her voice to where he could barely hear, she said, “Tell me you’re not involved, Walt. If you did this for me—”

“Me? I’m not involved.”

“Seriously?”

“Do you honestly think I’d do something like this?”

They studied one another in the flashes of colored light.

Was he to believe this charade? After their discussion about this very act? Or was she playing out the hand he’d dealt her? Attempting to keep the cover story going?

“A lightning strike,” he said.

She said nothing, but snorted her derision. Her arms crossed more tightly, she lifted her head, wearing a look of incipient terror.

“I was asleep,” she whispered, though defensively. “It could have burned the cottage . . . I could have . . .”

A shudder passed through her head to toe.

For a fleeting moment he was tempted to want to believe her, but the moment passed.

“You called it in?” he asked.

“I smelled it,” she said. “Idaho air-conditioning. Without that . . . who knows?”

Few homes in the area carried any kind of air-conditioning. With forty-degree summer nights, the trick was to throw all your windows wide open and chill the house down and shut it back up again before eight a.m. A well-insulated house could remain cool the remainder of the day.

“Might have saved your life.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

He kept waiting for the wink or the nudge, but it wasn’t forthcoming. She wasn’t going to give him so much as an inch of rope.

“Okay, then,” he said.

“You don’t believe me?” Spoken as if it had just occurred to her.

“Of course I believe you.”

The flashing light continued to play across their faces. She looked at him searchingly. Probing.

“I should get on with it . . .” he said.

“Yes.”

“Get a jacket or something. It’s chilly out here.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“It’s cold. Get a jacket,” he repeated, heading off to a firefighter he recognized as the one in charge.

“Any ideas?”

“Storm strike,” the man said. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had a deep voice. “Best guess.”

“Yeah,” Walt said.

“It’s usually a tree takes the strike, but I’m no expert.”

“Got it,” Walt said, wanting to leave it right there. “Anything you need from us?”

“We’re good. Another thirty or forty minutes. I’ll send some guys back up here in an hour or two to make sure there’re no flare-ups. You might tell her, so she doesn’t scare.” He jerked a shoulder toward Fiona.

“Will do.”

Walt turned back downhill.

“Sheriff?”

“Yeah?”

“Shape of the fire doesn’t add up, in case you care. We should have a pear shape running uphill like this. But if you’ll notice, it’s flipped upside down. Since when does fire run
downhill
?”

“That
is
or isn’t significant?” Walt asked. “You didn’t mention that when I asked.”

“It’s different, that’s all. Significant? It’s not like I can put down a lightning strike to arson. Right? But it’s unusual. In case you care. That’s all.”

“Of course I care,” Walt said a little too defensively.

“Not something we see very often, if at all.”

“I got it,” Walt said.

“Okay. Okay.” The guy huffed, turned, and swung his pickax into the ground, spraying ash and soil. Walt couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard him say something under his breath: “Asshole.”

Worst of all, he thought he probably deserved it.

“Sheriff?” Deputy Linda Chalmers called out from the front door of the main house. Deputy Blompier stood just inside the house in silhouette.

It took Walt a moment to see the person wedged between them, the shorter girl, her arm clasped tightly in Linda’s hand. Took him yet another fraction of a second to process that it was Kira Tulivich. His mind made the identification, and then his eyes tracked over to Fiona, whose surprise appeared too genuine to be anything but. Barefoot, Fiona walked half on tiptoe as she crossed the driveway. She looked up the hill to Walt and back to Kira, mirroring him.

“Found her in a room off the wine cellar,” Chalmers explained as Walt reached them.

“A safe room. Hot plate. Chemical toilet. The works,” Blompier supplied.

“What safe room?” Fiona said, reaching them.

“Blompier, your jacket,” Walt instructed. The deputy peeled off his jacket and Walt placed it around Fiona’s shoulders. She tugged it around herself tightly and seemed to shrink.

Kira, looking tired, could not take her eyes off Fiona. It was this heated, locked stare of hers that interested Walt. It wasn’t a look of daughter to mother, or friend to friend, but one of incredulity, concern. That was it, he thought, the girl was afraid for her, projecting sympathy. Had Kira overheard them talking at the garden? Had she lit the fire? Had she killed Martel Gale, as the evidence suggested? Walt had no choice but to act upon the evidence.

“Kira,” he said, his voice subdued, “I’d like you to come down to my office with me for a talk.”

“Now?” Fiona complained. She tried to win Kira’s attention.

Walt spoke up immediately. “Yes. Now. For the time being I’m asking, but it can get more complicated than that.”

Kira’s focus remained on the sheriff. “Sure. I can do that.”

W
alt wouldn’t have offered any visitor a personal explanation; any one of his deputies or the desk sergeant could convey the procedures and practices well enough. But the woman sitting alone in a row of chairs, separated by a table holding
People
magazine and copies of
Western Sheriffs’ Association
, was not just any visitor.

“Since when don’t you video an interview?” Fiona said angrily.

“We are videoing the interview,” Walt said calmly. “It wouldn’t be approp—”

“Oh, bull.”

“—for you to be in the room.”

“It’s one in the morning.”

“It is.”

“You should do this tomorrow.”

“Let’s not get into this, okay? I’m doing what I have to do. Kira is here voluntarily.”

“So what? You think it’s a conspiracy?” she choked out. “Really, Walt!”

“Of all people, you’ve been around this enough to know the way it works.”

“You try not to judge,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“That’s a pile of crap.”

“It’s voluntary. Exploratory. You think I’m incapable of keeping an open mind?”

“I’m like her guardian or something. I need to be in there with her.”

“She’s not a minor.”

“You notified her parents?”

“That’s up to her. I don’t believe she has.”

“An attorney?”

This was a sticking point. A matter of investigative leverage. “She has not requested a lawyer, and there’s no reason she should. She has not been charged with anything. This is exploratory.”

“Walt,” she chided.

“I’m sorry you came all the way down here. I don’t mean to shut you out. Please know that.” He remained on his feet, avoiding the chairs. He did not want to get into this with her.

“You can’t conduct this interview without an attorney present. She doesn’t know any better. Why won’t you look at me? Look at me please.” He turned. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “You’d actually do something like this?”

“Like what? It’s voluntary. It’s necessary.”

She stood and lowered her voice, taking his forearm in hand and squeezing. “You think you’re helping me somehow? Is that it? I can see it in your eyes.”

How was that possible? How could she nail his thoughts so perfectly? He wanted back behind the restricted door and into his world, but her grip only tightened.

“Listen to me,” she said in a tone he would have rather not heard. “If you put this on her, I will be forced to . . . I will not let her be charged with this.”

“She hasn’t been charged, Fiona. But this—the way you’re acting, isn’t helping anything. Let me do my job.
I know what I’m doing
.” He let that sit there a second.

“But maybe you’ve forgotten who you’re doing it to.”

“We have evidence—hard evidence—that has to be accounted for. For all your good intentions—and I believe in them—there’s a process. A procedure. We’re just at the start of that. She answers these questions honestly, she walks out of here for now. If an attorney gets into it, it will prejudice the interview. That’s when I get backed into a corner and things get tricky. Let’s not get there. Let’s avoid that.”

“You’re setting her up.”

“I am absolutely not setting her up!” He’d raised his voice. It reverberated against the high ceiling. The receptionist on the other side of the window kept her head down.

He lowered his voice to a hush. “Listen to me. I care for that girl, and I care about you. At some point you have to trust me. I happen to know what I’m doing.”

“She’s innocent.”

“Good. Then there is nothing to worry about.”

She started for the doors, turning to look back at him once and put an exclamation point onto her disgust. Then she reconsidered. “No,” she said. “I’m not going. I’m not giving you that. I’ll be right here. Waiting. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Suit yourself,” Walt said, heading back through the door that cloistered him.

He mumbled to himself as he strode down the hall toward the first interview room, where he would find Deputy Linda Chalmers behind the video camera. Truth was, there was nothing to operating the camera; he asked Fiona to do the recording as a way to slip her extra income and get a chance to see her. She had begun to seep into his work and his decision making in ways like this, and he saw it for what it was—trouble—while still feeling no desire to change it. He opened the door and looked at the young woman on the other side of the table, frightened, unsure. Deputy Blompier sat in the chair to the left, by the wall. Walt took the only other chair facing Kira.

“You okay?” he began. Something transformed in him the moment he took his chair. A voice in his head said “game on.”
Establish a rapport. Mimic language. Control emotions. Manipulate
.

The empty chair to her left, the chair intended for an attorney, called out to him. Was he supposed to charge her and fill that chair for her, to give up the slight advantage he held by her not being represented? Did that help anyone?

Kira held a fixed stare of bewilderment and fear. He reminded himself beguilement took on many faces, came in all sizes and ages. Whether or not she might attempt to play him, he couldn’t tell. Her dazed expression seemed real enough. But one learned in the narrow confines of these interview rooms to put away interpretation, to ignore the suspect’s beauty or the tattoos or the lack of language skills and to drill down. So he took a second to make himself comfortable in the chair, his decision made. He took a deep, calming breath and exhaled, placed his forearms onto the table, a man determined, his body language as practiced, as important, as each word, each inflection. He lived for such moments.

He glanced over his shoulder. Chalmers gave him a nod: tape was running.

“Do you want a glass of water or a Coke or anything?”

“I’m okay, thank you.”

“You understand why you’re here?”

She nodded. “To talk.”

“That’s right. Do you have any questions?”

“I don’t get it. Why me? What’d I do?”

“Why do you think you’re here?”

“That guy getting killed and all.”

“You’re referring to Martel Gale.”

“I guess.”

Walt opened a file folder and slid a photograph in front of her. He’d had two choices: an NFL photo, or the crime scene—half the guy’s face eaten off. It wasn’t out of the question that in certain interviews he would have chosen the crime scene photo, but not here. Not her.

“Have you ever seen this man before?”

She nodded.

“It’s important you answer aloud,” Walt said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Please describe the circumstances of the last time you saw him.”

“The only time I saw him, you mean.”

“The only time, then.”

“You were there,” she said. “It was the night of the Advocates dinner.”

Walt caught his breath but maintained his composure.

“I’d seen . . . She’d showed me . . . Never mind. I knew who he was, that’s all.”

Walt hesitated, facing a fork in the road. He knew who she was referring to.
Some cases go cold
. He felt obliged to pursue the identity of “she,” but understood not to. He was painfully aware of the camera aimed at the back of his head.

“You knew who he was,” he said, making it a statement.

“The football guy.”

“You follow pro football, do you?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you recognized a linebacker who’s been out of the league for several years. Can you explain that?”

“I knew who he was. I don’t remember how.” As her eyes lowered to the desk, and her shoulders caved forward, he thought even a first-year graduate student could identify the lie from her body language.

“Seeing him . . . Was that when you stopped for a second in your talk, your address, your speech? You’re right: I was there, and I remember your . . . interrupting yourself.”

“Might have been.”

“Seeing this man caused that kind of reaction? Why is that?” Why couldn’t he bring himself to just ask her the identity of the woman she’d referred to? Why did he insist on dancing around the edges?

“Roy Coats,” she said, naming the man who had brutally assaulted her a few years before. Walt winced at the mention of the man, his memory still holding on to the grainy webcam images of the violent sexual abuse this young woman had endured. His brain lacked the delete button he sometimes wished it had. “I don’t get exactly why. I don’t expect you to get it. But when that guy opened the doors back there and looked inside, it wasn’t him I saw, it was Roy Coats. That happens to me pretty much all the time. In Atkinson’s, out on the street. Can be anywhere. I just see him. He’s looking at me that way he looked at me. Like he knew what he was going to do to me, and me having no clue. Like that. Like people look when they know a secret you don’t. And it makes me physically sick. Like I’m going to puke. I want to scream. I want to scratch his eyes out. Castrate him. Kill him.” She looked up from what had looked like a trance.