by Thomas Zigal
Chapter twenty-two
Kurt attempted to sleep on the trip back to Aspen, but Muffin wouldn’t let him. “Hey, wake up,” she said, shaking his knee. “You’re not bailing out on me until you answer a few questions yourself. Like what’s the Gahan Moss thing all about?”
“I went to see him at the Magic Mushroom House,” he said. “I thought he might know something about Rocky.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear any more of this,” she said, catching his eye in their reflection on the dark windshield glass.
“I also paid a visit to Jay Westbrook.”
She threw back her head, groaned, and slapped the steering wheel. The car veered across the white stripes but she quickly guided it back on course. “Didn’t I tell you to stay out of the investigation?” she said.
“They’re both protecting secrets,” Kurt said. “I don’t have any answers, but I know the two of them are in this up to their short hairs.”
“If you don’t stay out of this case, Kurt Muller, you’re going to fuck it up so bad the D.A. won’t get near it.”
Kurt gazed out the side window at the muted lights of Carbondale. “You haven’t told me about the autopsy yet,” he said, working hard to blot out what he knew had happened to Nicole’s body on the stainless steel table. The Y cut, the organ probes.
Muffin shrugged. “No surprises. It was an uncontrolled fall, with fatal damage to her skull and neck. No signs of other trauma.”
Kurt breathed deeply. “Tox?”
“She was legally drunk, Kurt. She must’ve kept drinking after you left. And there was definitely antipsychotic medication in her system. The stuff in her drawer.”
He pounded his thigh with a clenched fist. “Westbrook knew she had a drinking problem,” he said, “yet he prescribed a drug that can make you see little green men if it’s mixed with alcohol.”
Muffin glanced at him, then back to the highway. “So what are you saying?”
He hadn’t thought it through with any precision. “He gives her shit to make her even more paranoid than she already is. He sends her a fucked-up kid he knows will spy on her with his video camera,” he said. “You tell me, Muffin. Is this his idea of an amicable divorce?”
“You think Lyle was making videos for his shrink?”
“It’s possible.”
She was silent for several moments, considering the possibilities. “So Westbrook’s the crazy jealous type who likes to keep a close eye on his ex-wife? Like the notorious Heisman Trophy winner.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe he gets off watching her do it with other men,” she said. “Maybe that’s his thing.”
The tapes as a command performance for Jay Westbrook and god knows who else, Kurt thought. The idea made his skin crawl. “But why the drug?” he asked, thinking aloud. “What does that get him?”
“And what about the letters?” she said, lost now in the labyrinth of conjecture. “And our man with the hunting knife? Where does he fit in?”
Kurt massaged his forehead. “This is giving me a headache,” he said.
Muffin reached over and rubbed his shoulder. “It’s probably the concussion,” she said. “You’ve been pounded pretty hard today, my friend. Why don’t you go ahead and catch a few winks? We’ll be home soon.”
The car climbed the steep roadway, hugging curves above the dark valley. Snowflakes swirled in the high beams. Kurt relaxed his head against the seat rest and briskly rubbed his face. The cool ring raked his jaw. He lifted his hand and stared at his spread fingers.
“Why the hell are you wearing that thing?” she asked him. “It should’ve been logged in the evidence cage with her other stuff.”
“I’m stuck with it,” he said, tugging at the band. “I can’t get it off.”
“Here,” she said, gripping the ring, pulling. There was a tug-ofwar, her strength, his resistance, the ring gnawing into his knuckle.
“Muffin,” he said, wincing from the pain, “what if somebody showed those tapes of Nicole to a jealous lover? Not to Westbrook, but to a psychopath completely off his rocker. What if somebody showed them to Rocky Rhodes?”
With one hand steering the wheel, her eyes fixed on the dark highway, Muffin continued to pull. “Come on, Kurt. You’ve got to stop talking like he’s alive.”
“The biography said he was always insanely possessive. Seeing the tapes would make him so crazy he’d want to kill her. Plus everybody else he thought was sleeping with her. And that’s exactly what he typed on my typewriter.”
She was jerking the ring now, rubbing his skin raw. “Okay, so where has Rocky been all this time?” she asked. “And why is he coming out of mothballs now?”
Kurt withdrew his hand before she managed to pull the finger out of its socket. “Damned if I know,” he said, sucking on the broken skin.
He thought about the man’s haunting, strangled laugh—how it had sounded like someone who hadn’t used his voice in a long time. Maybe someone shut away for his own good.
“Did you use a lubricant?”
“What?”
“Your finger,” Muffin said, raising an eyebrow. “Have you tried Vaseline or liquid soap? I’m sure there’s a tube of K-Y lying around your bedroom somewhere.”
They were passing the airport, only a few miles outside Aspen. The radio hissed, alerting all units. The dispatcher was reporting an alarm at the architecture offices near Rumpf Park, the firm of Guerin and McCord. An image flashed through Kurt’s mind, the stylish Ben Guerin and Andy McCord eating pâté crackers at Smerlas’s party. “Christ, I hope it’s not another bear,” he said.
“What would a bear be after in an architect’s office? Glue stick?”
“Let’s pick it up,” he said. “One of the architects working late probably forgot to disarm the system.”
They arrived in ten minutes. A Pitco Sheriff’s Department car and a flashing Aspen police unit were parked in front of the place, an old mining-era Victorian home that had been converted into an elegant design studio with offices. The structure sat on the same knoll as a quaint bed-and-breakfast next door, and up the hillside between them rose a stairstep path made from railroad ties. Muffin and Kurt got out of their vehicle and she shone her flashlight on the sloping lawn. The only tracks were human, a crisscross of footsteps in the light snow, arcing toward the top of the knoll.
“They’ve gone around back,” she said.
The railroad ties were aglaze with ice and Kurt couldn’t set his footing on the weak ankle. They abandoned the stairsteps and trailed up the frozen rise, discovering a backyard garden area with prim trellises and redwood picnic tables. Tonight’s snowfall had powdered the split-level decks, dusting the flower boxes and planters. In another month the alpine winter would bury this entire gardenscape beneath deep white drifts, leaving only a handrail poking out here and there to mark the architects’ ambitious design.
From the foot of the wooden stairs they could see three uniformed officers roaming around in a high-ceilinged studio with glass walls facing the decks. The track lights were turned on, burnishing the blond wood paneling to a golden umber. When Kurt and Muffin reached the sliding doors, they noticed that the lock had been jimmied by crude means, possibly a crowbar. The break-in was not the work of a professional.
“Gentlemen,” Kurt said, entering the studio. “What have we got?”
“Looks like simple vandalism,” said Gill Dotson, the only sheriff’s deputy on the scene. The other men were from the Aspen municipal police.
“Somebody gave the place a good trashing, Kurt,” said Mike Marley, his second busy night in a row. “But this time it was a two-legged beast.”
Several file cabinets had been jerked open, their folders emptied onto the gleaming hardwood floor. Sketches, blueprints, handwritten notes, memoranda, correspondence typed on embossed letterhead. The officers were weaving around the clutter, careful not to disturb the debris.
“Get the owners on the phone,” Kurt said, surveying the chaos. “T
hey’ll have to sort through this themselves. It’s probably some disgruntled employee they fired recently. Somebody pissed off and making a statement.”
“Could be a greenie,” Gill said. “They hate these guys.” He was stooped over a slanted drafting table, examining an X-acto knife angrily impaled in the wood. “Guerin and McCord, you know their rep. Condo builders, nature rapers. Glitzy hotels hanging off a mountain.”
“Whoever it was,” Marley said, pointing at a scale model dominating one of the tables, “they got at this one here pretty good.”
From where Kurt was standing, the smashed balsa wood construction resembled a pillaged miniature Oz. “What is it?” he asked, walking over for a closer inspection.
“You mean, ‘What was it?’” Gill said.
The officers gathered around the table, staring at the destruction. The centerpiece was a replica of one of those glitzy hotels Gill had mentioned, its roof crushed by a furious blow. Fragments were scattered on the street layout around the hotel, tiny houses swept aside, apartment buildings sheared in half. The plastic support towers of a ski lift and its wire cable had been stripped from the papier-mâché
mountain range above the resort village, if that’s what it was. The only feature that hadn’t been wrecked was the snow-white range itself, a veined mass of peaks enwrapping the village like nurturing hands. It wasn’t Aspen or Snowmass, but there was something familiar about the simulated landscape.
Kurt picked up a tiny piece of balsa not much larger than a matchbox. It was a commercial shop, painted with impressive detail, the minuscule sign above its door saying BOUTIQUE.
“Whoa, people,” Muffin said, joining them at tableside, “this is classified stuff. I’m sure these architects would load their pants if they knew a bunch of yahoos like us were poking through their con-fidential megamillion-dollar projects.”
“Right,” Kurt said, setting the little shop back down on a foundation of dried glue. “When the college boys get here, drool a little, scratch your nuts, and show them you’re too dumb to violate anybody’s privacy.”
The men laughed.
Muffin pulled Kurt aside. “All right, wise guy,” she said, “I’m taking you to your Jeep. We’ve got other things to worry about, like a trunk full of porno tapes. These boys don’t need our help to write up a friggin’ break-in.”
He had parked his Jeep near Doc Brumley’s house in the West End neighborhood on the other side of Main Street. On the drive over, Muffin radioed the deputy stationed outside Kurt’s home on Red Mountain.
“It’s quiet now,” Mac Murphy said. “The TV van left about one o’clock. A couple of meathead reporters hung around another hour and then blew it off for the night. They threatened to be back at daybreak. Tell Kurt he’d better find himself another crib till this thing dies down.”
She pulled up next to his Jeep. The small overpriced bungalows rowed along Bleeker Street were dark and somnolent, their ice-beaded trees glittering in the cruiser’s headlights. “You can stay at my place,” Muffin offered. She lived in a narrow, claustrophobic mobile home in a trailer park at the foot of Smuggler Mountain.
“Last time I did that,” he said with a tired grin, “there wasn’t much room for both of us in your bed.”
She dropped her chin, cutting her eyes at him. “You can take the first shift,” she said. “You need the sleep more than I do, old fella. I’ve got to round up Linda and start looking through those tapes.”
“Use the A-V room in the jail,” he said, serious now. “Lock yourselves in.”
“There’s no microwave. How are we going to pop the popcorn?”
“Ha ha,” he said, opening his door to the chilly night. “Beep me if you find something.”
“Don’t you want my key?”
He stood in the brittle snow, his hand resting on the cruiser’s cold roof. “Hold that offer,” he said, closing the door.
The window hummed, lowering halfway. “Kurt, where are you going? You need to get some sleep. You know what the doctor told you.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, macho man, suit yourself. But you’d better be ready to meet the press first thing in the morning, right after their vodka and Malt-O-Meal.”
“They have to catch me first, don’t they?”
“They’ve got nothing better to do with their time. And neither do the Bauer brothers and their lawyer.”
He inhaled the crisp wintry air. How much longer could he run from them all? “Beep me when you find something,” he said. “I won’t be far away.”
Chapter twenty-three
Joey Florio was on duty, sitting in a Pitco cruiser nosed up to the wrought-iron gates of Nicole Bauer’s mansion. Burglar lights irradiated every square foot of her property, turning night into day. The lighting was so bright, the deputy was reading a magazine without using the interior dome. Kurt tapped on the window. “Bang, you’re dead,” he said, aiming his index finger and raised thumb like a pistol at the side of Joey’s head.
The window whirred, releasing radio music and the aroma of coffee. “Your point being?” Joey said with a surly smile.
“Good thing Son of Sam is locked away.”
“Like I didn’t see you park your Jeep down there by that big ugly monstrosity.”
Kurt turned and stared back down the road at the neighboring villas. “Has Starwood Security been by?”
“Every half hour like clockwork. Two knuckleheads in a marked Volvo. They have instructions to shoot anybody on the street with less than six figures on their check register.” Joey opened the door and got out to bounce on his toes, wake himself up. “What’s in the bag?”
Kurt handed him a tall, steaming cup of coffee, courtesy of the night clerk at the Snowflake Inn. “Anybody home?” he asked, nodding at the mansion.
Joey shook his head. He thumbed the lid off the cup and took a cautious sip, his entire face swirling in smoke as if his mustache were on fire.
“Have you seen that kid Kyle? The chauffeur with the blond hair.”
Joey shook his head again. “I came on at midnight. The place was empty.”
Kurt looked through the gate spears at the mansion glowing like the showcase stop on a Christmas tour of homes. She had forti-fied her castle, taking all the right precautions, state-of-the-art lighting and sensor alarms. The place was invincible. No crazed intruder could breach her walls now. So instead, someone had gone after a deeper frailty, the old worm turning inside her.
“I need to get in,” he said.
Joey shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said. “I’ve got the gate opener. And the guys left the patio door unlocked.”
It was the same glass door the young junkie had shattered with the butt end of her kitchen knife. Kurt slid the door a few inches, expecting the alarm to sound. When nothing happened he entered the house and passed quietly through a long dining area cloaked in shadow, making his way into the great room with its flagstone fireplace and high-arching windows, an impressive view of the bright-lit, opulent dwellings arranged along the lower hillside. Upstairs, in the hallway outside Nicole’s bedroom, he stopped to gather courage before opening the door. Something was preventing him from going inside, and after a moment he realized it was an overpowering sense of dread. When finally he turned the knob and gave a push, the room lay silent before him in the soft amber of a single night-light. For an instant he imagined her lying on the four-poster bed in her silk nightgown, smiling at him expectantly. What took you so long, darling? But the bed was empty, still unmade from this morning, the covers mussed exactly as he remembered them. The telephone receiver sat in its cradle. He sagged against the doorjamb, considering the magnitude of what had happened here. Someone had stalked her, preying on her fragile nerves, scaring her to death. The coroner was mistaken if he declared this a suicide. She had been driven to it by someone’s sadistic torment. He wished he felt blameless and professionally detached from this case, free of guilt, but her death bothered him on so
me deeply visceral level and it was time to make amends.
He forced himself to enter the room. Standing perfectly still in the dark center of her close, familiar world, he thought he smelled a faint scent of jasmine. His eyes traced the passage she had taken to the glass doors, secured now and untroubled by the calm night. The police tape had been removed. Out on that icy deck two people had gone to their deaths. So many secrets and lies. This house was forever doomed.
Gazing toward the ceiling, searching the white space above the hall door, he tried to calculate the precise angle of vision from the video camera as he’d witnessed it on tape. There was a central air grate in plain view, a small rectangular metal plate positioned a few feet above that painting entitled “Territory,” the battle between bear and bighorn ram.
Standing on a chair, Kurt used the screwdriver on his Swiss Army Knife to loosen the four screws. When he removed the plate he discovered that Lyle had left the camera behind, no doubt because the deputies parading in and out of the bedroom all day had ruined his access. It was a simple Magnavox camcorder, braced firmly in place on what looked like the base of a tire jack. He pulled the flashlight from his hip pocket and checked the tape compartment. Empty. Two cords trailed away from the camera. They were plugged into extension cords that ran for four or five feet and then disappeared down a hole in the sheet metal.
You sick little prick, Kurt thought. Why were you doing this to a woman who had been so good to you?
He screwed the plate cover back in place and left the room. Downstairs he turned on the light in the room directly underneath Nicole’s suite and discovered that it was Lyle’s bedroom. There were signs that the young man had been in a hurry to leave. Bureau drawers were flung open and emptied out; hangers dangled in the closet like wire wind chimes. Discarded clothing was scattered across the bed. Lyle had packed most of his worldly possessions into the trunk of Nicole’s Saab.
As Kurt crossed the room to a computer terminal resting on a glossy white desk, he recalled what he’d asked the young man at the hospital: Who were you running from? The law? Or was somebody else after you? It was still a good question. Maybe Lyle was involved in a blackmail scam that had gone sour. Or maybe he was afraid of the same lunatic who had frightened Nicole to death.