In Harm's Way (38 page)

“I will not stay out of it. I will not allow that. She’s been through—”

“This is my job. My world. Stay out of it.”

“Is that an order, Sheriff?” All life had gone out of her. She leaned away from him, nearly tipping over the chair.

“If I can’t push Arian off the base, if he gets to her, then my game plan is over. At that point, you two will need to get in front of this.” A mechanical silence hung between them—the eerie whisper of HVAC. “Terry Hogue’s the best criminal lawyer in town. You call Terry.”

“What plan,” she said. “You said you have a plan.”

“Had,” he corrected. “I said I
had
a plan. With Arian in the mix, the evidence is going to come out, and that’s coming back to bite her.”

But a worm started drilling through his head: the unidentified prints on the baseball bat; Fiona’s insistence she hadn’t set the fire; the probable height of Gale’s attacker. The bits and pieces began to come together in unexpected ways.

“The fire was not a lightning strike,” he said. “You don’t talk about something and two hours later it spontaneously combusts. Do you see how it plays out if it’s forced to play out? Kira goes off the rails at the Advocates dinner. She’s unstable. She takes after him like she almost did to me that night. Then she takes the truck and runs. Comes back and hides. Overhears us, and sets the fire. There is evidence to support most of this. My plan . . . Well, at least I had one. I hope you do.”

She was squinting and blinking and looked as if she was either going to cry or pass out.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I need a minute.” She sat there breathing deeply. He wasn’t sure what to do—an uncommon feeling in him. “I need to see Katherine. I need to talk to Katherine.”

“Who’s Katherine?”

“Katherine,” she said, as if that answered him. Standing from the chair, she hurried toward the interview room door.

“Don’t walk out on me,” he said.

She glanced over at him, turned, and was gone.

“I
t was like a door opened, or something,” Fiona said.

“Okay.” Katherine crossed her legs and brushed the front of her blouse.

Fiona had been made to wait a half hour while a client finished her session. Katherine had pushed back the next appointment to accommodate Fiona’s arrival.

“Will you hypnotize me?”

“Perhaps there’s no need. Tell me about it.”

“Walt mentioned . . . He started talking about that night. And I don’t know . . . like I said, it was like a door coming open.”

“It happens. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I’m not sure what there is to tell.”

Katherine offered her a sly but affecting grin as if she knew there was much to tell.

“He
was
there,” Fiona said.

Katherine said nothing. Did not ask her for a name. Barely moved at all.

Fiona felt at the center of a wind storm, leaves and sticks swirling, each with a message written on it. Words. Names. Parts of sentences. Like a magnetic word game for the refrigerator, a hundred thoughts or glimpses of thoughts awaiting some semblance of order. Her instinct was to try to stop it, to try to grab hold of one or two and begin organizing them, but the more she reached, the more the cloud moved away from her.

She felt the tears spring to her eyes before she knew what was happening, before she had a chance to protect herself from them. The leaves moved closer. “What a bastard,” she whispered dryly.

“You’re safe here,” Katherine said.

“Prick.”

“Take your time.”

“He just arrived, you know? Unannounced. All of a sudden, just there at the door, like I expected him or something. Such a prick. So typical.” She sniffled and dragged her wrist across her nose, creating a snail line. Katherine leaned forward and offered a tissue. Fiona saw it more as a flag of surrender and refused it. “I didn’t know why he was there. I thought maybe to kill me. You know? After the trial and everything. But it wasn’t even him. Not the Marty I knew. Had known. Whatever.”

She looked out through the blur: Katherine, with her expressionless face. How did people do that? Sit there, impassive, while the other person eviscerated herself? She might have been waiting for a cake to finish baking. If she’d had knitting . . .

“I backed inside, and he followed without invitation. When he spoke, it was like it wasn’t even him. Like he was channeling someone else. I couldn’t process it all. Round peg, square hole. Him, soft-spoken and polite. Me, loud and demanding. I told him to get out, and he stopped and turned around. This is Marty we’re talking about. The Gale Force. I told him to wait, and he stopped, and it was like I controlled him. Me, controlling him. Try that one on for size. He stopped again. ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, and he spoke to the door, not to me. His back to me. His hand on the doorknob. Maybe he didn’t want to be there. That’s what was going through my head: this guy shows up and he doesn’t want to even be here. And it was like he was reading my thoughts—I always thought he could. He tells the door how he’s part of a program and that part of the steps of that program—And I cut him off. Scornfully. Abusively. Marty Gale reformed. As if. And he waits me out, politely, I might add, and then starts into it again like it’s something he’d rehearsed, and maybe he had for all I know. How it’s something he’s got to do, for me and for him. For both of us. Wants me to know this is not a gift, not a negotiated truce, but a requirement to his sobriety, and how what it amounts to is an apology.

“He says that word,” she continued, “and as he does, he looks over his shoulder at me. Delivers it like a spear into my heart. An apology. Marty. You know how long I’d waited for that? For that one word: apologize? All the shit I’d been through with him. The hell. The endless hell of it all. And me too weak to leave, and him too overpowering to allow me to. Too Marty. Too unpredictable and dangerous. And here it is, and it’s not ‘better late than never.’ Never would have worked for me just fine, thank you. Apologizing. Turning toward me now. Tears, real tears, streaming down his face. How he didn’t know the guy he’d been, how the things he’d done—” She pursed her lips and realized her eyes were clear now.

“I think he stepped toward me. I must have stepped back. Whatever happened to him happened after that. Maybe once I fell, he came to help me. Maybe K—Maybe someone showed up and saw him bent over me like that. How should I know? What a bastard.”

“Is that where your memory stops?” Katherine said.

“It’s not like I remember hitting my head. But yeah, I’m assuming that’s what happened. Why? What? Are you saying I didn’t hit my head? Are you saying . . . ? That my memory stops there because I did something to him? Is that why you’re looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Don’t give me that crap! Like that! Like you’re looking right now.”

So Katherine looked away. But the seed was planted and Fiona sank into a well of despair. A dark, cold, unmerciful place.

“I thought you were supposed to help me,” Fiona said.

“Y
ou want to talk to her again, you’re going to have to charge her.”

Peter Arian carried confidence in a way that disarmed juries and wooed judges. A surfer through college, he was Armani-ad handsome. Even at nine a.m., his eyes had a Hollywood sparkle. He spoke like a southern Californian despite his San Francisco roots.

The thing was, Walt liked Arian. Thought if he’d been a lawyer instead of a lawman, that he might have come out much the same way. He’d occasionally teased the young lawyer about switching sides and joining the prosecutor, but all he’d ever won was a laugh.

The bare hills outside Walt’s office were electric with the morning sun. He wished he were hiking.

“I want to see the evidence involved.”

“I respect your situation, Peter. You’re good at what you do and we both know it. But you do not want to go the evidence route. This is one time where, in the best interest of your client, you should just walk out the door and leave this to me. I like Kira.”

“That’s not happening.”

“Let me talk to her again this morning for an hour or so. Alone. Everyone’s a winner.”

“Walk me through the evidence first.” Arian issued a penetrating look meant to intimidate, but it fell short. “Make a believer out of me.”

“Don’t do this. You know that’s not going to happen.”

Walt’s intercom sounded.

“Sheriff, when you have a minute.”

Walt wasn’t superstitious by nature. There were cops who were: guys who turned their wallets a certain way in a back pocket, wore their shield upside down or carried a talisman. There were guys who checked the calendar in the morning and determined their activities on the whims of numerology. He wasn’t one of them, but the interruption served the same purpose. Something about the timing, something about that look on Arian’s face, something indiscernible, impossible to put a finger on, that weird kind of something that made him act in a way that he felt was inconsistent with his own actions. Nonetheless, he did it. He held out his hand, waited for Peter to shake it, and motioned him toward his office door.

“The evidence,” Arian said, “or no interview.”

His mind made up, his hand forced and his plan with it, Walt said, “I’m going to brief Doug.” The county’s prosecutor, Doug Aanestead.

“We’ll take it from there.”

Arian looked wounded. He forced a grin—more of a snarl—and made for the door.

“That’s a bad call, Sheriff.”

“The bad call was the one Ms. Kenshaw made to you, counselor.”

A knot formed in his stomach. It was one thing to find yourself out on a limb, another thing entirely to crawl out there willingly. He blamed Fiona; he blamed himself for seeing everything through the distorted lens of emotion. He felt foolish and vulnerable and knew perfectly well it was the small decisions that determine success or failure, more so than the bigger ones. He was typically rooted in procedure, so this feeling of flying by the seat of his pants left him queasy. A feeling of regret overcame him. Regret for digging so deeply in the first place.

He returned calmly to the other side of his desk, picked up the phone, and followed up on the intercom interruption.

“Wood River Glass,” he was told, “replaced a cracked windshield in a Ford F-one-fifty on the afternoon of the thirteenth. Truck has a light rack on the cab.”

He did not want to deal with the missing pickup truck right now, but he also did not want to overlook any chance at new evidence. He intended to find Doug Aanestead and make his case.

“Do we have a name?” he asked.

“Dominique Fancelli. Of eighteen—”

“Alturas Drive,” Walt said, supplying the address.

“Well . . . yeah,” spoken with a mixture of disappointment and astonishment. “But if you knew that—”

“Lucky guess,” Walt said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Issue a BOLO for the F-one-fifty,” Walt instructed. “And have a patrol do a drive-by, real quiet-like, of the Fancelli residence. If that pickup’s in the drive, I want to be notified immediately.”

“Got it.”

He allowed himself a faint smile, the satisfaction of a small victory. He didn’t want to misstep. He’d have to check with the prosecutor about how to approach this as well. Ironically, the law was the reason he most often lost a case.

He called Tommy Brandon because it was only fair: Brandon had made the connection to the red-tailed hawk—a bow hunter—in the first place. It felt good to possibly deliver on a favor, and for Lisa of all people.

Brandon answered on the first ring as if just sitting by the phone waiting for his call.

“Do you feel strong enough to drive about a mile south?” Walt asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think you just got out of the hospital.”

“I told you: the soaps don’t cut it for me.”

“Be ready to move. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

“The pickup truck?”

“Yeah. Did you ever see
Little Big Man
? The movie with Dustin Hoffman?”

“It’s one of Gail’s favorites,” Brandon said.

No, it’s one of my favorites,
Walt felt like correcting.
She just happened to have been in the room at the time
. But he let it go.

“The Indian scene,” Walt said. “The one where he’s dying. Or trying to?”

“What a great scene.”

“‘Sometimes, the magic works,’ ” Walt quoted.

“Yeah, I remember.”

Walt blocked from his mind the second half of the couplet: “Sometimes, it doesn’t.”

D
oug Aanestead reviewed the evidence from behind the twelfth hole on the Valley Club’s upper eighteen. He and his golf partner allowed three other groups to play through, each one increasing the man’s impatience. A light breeze curled the edges of the papers in the open folder, causing Aanestead to wrestle with its contents. His putter was gripped between his knees, the handle sticking out somewhat phallically.

“Honestly, Walt, I don’t love it.”

“Is that right?” Walt understood the risk of his current, and only, plan. The plan he’d wanted to play out on his time frame, not Arian’s. But here he was.

The law could be your friend or enemy, and for the past several days Walt had been working up a way to convince Aanestead he had a pretty good case against Kira. Like Walt’s, Aanestead’s was an elected office. Walt was counting on that.

“It’ll be damn unpopular, indicting this girl. Hell’s bells, she addressed the Advocates this year. We were both there.”

“We were.”

“She’s something of a local hero.”

“We have the bat,” Walt reminded.

“A bat that’s carrying three sets of prints. She’s already admitted to handling the thing. And taking a drive to Yellowstone? That’s not in the code that I know of.”