by Thomas Zigal
Heavy boot steps were approaching from the lobby. Muffin and Linda Ríos appeared at the patio doors. In their bulky vests and strapped-on gunbelts they looked like combat soldiers trained for door-to-door fighting. “We’re ready to roll when you are, boss,” Muffin informed him.
Dana Smerlas gave him a cunning smile. “Well, boss,” she said, offering her limp wrists, “cuff me or kiss me. What’s it going to be? If you don’t want to play anymore, I’ve got a lunch date with another man.”
Kurt had no cause to detain her and they both knew it. “You’re free to go, Mrs. Smerlas,” he said without hesitation. “But don’t go far. We will continue this discussion another time.”
“I can hardly wait.”
She hitched her handbag strap onto her shoulder and sauntered directly toward the two female deputies, forcing them aside as she passed between them and walked through the patio doorway into the lobby.
“Mrs. Smerlas!”
Kurt called her name but she didn’t slow her stride. He followed after her across the golden pinewood lobby and called her name again just before she reached the Bavarian door. She stopped and pivoted to face him.
“What now?” she snapped. The shrewd defiance was gone from her eyes. At this moment she seemed only restless and tired.
“Smerlas doesn’t know any of this, does he?” Kurt said. “You’ve kept it from the poor dumb bastard. Your past, everything. He doesn’t know you’ve watched a video of him and Nicole having sex and it made you mad enough to want her dead.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply before she spoke. “I realize you hate my husband and what he stands for, Sheriff Muller. And I know you’d do anything to stop him from becoming the next Colorado congressman from the Third District. But let me assure you there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to prevent that from happening. Your pathetic little bedroom scandals won’t work, no matter how low you stoop.”
“This isn’t about your husband’s career, Mrs. Smerlas—”
“No, you’re right,” she said, cutting him off angrily. “It’s about male ego, isn’t it, Sheriff? My husband was sleeping with her, too, and that’s been eating you alive.”
She saw the surprise on his face and bore in deeper, searching for an open wound. “Did you think you were somebody special,
lover boy? The only rabbit going down that hole?” she asked with a cruel smirk. “It’s killing you that she was fucking your old rival, isn’t it? ‘How could she do that to a prince like me?’ But hey, don’t get down on yourself, Romeo. That’s what every man wonders when a woman makes a fool of him.”
She shrugged indifferently, the smirk spreading across her lips. “Imagine that story when it hits the press. ‘Enemies clash over sex partner.’ You come after me and my husband, that’s all the public will hear, mister. ‘Sheriff’s probe motivated by sexual jealousy.’ Everything else will be buried on page eight.”
He knew she was right. It would be too easy for the media to spin this as simply a clash of alpha males.
“What’s the matter, Sheriff? Cat got your tongue?” she said. “I feel your pain. Let’s continue this discussion another time, when you’re in a better mood to talk dirty.”
She turned and opened the heavy door and walked across the lodge’s front porch and down the steps to her GMC Yukon. A small, graceful woman who was doing everything in her power to protect her secrets and cover her tracks. And maybe someone else’s as well.
“Want me to bust that chick for you, Kurt?” Muffin was making her way across the lobby behind him. “We’ll figure out what to charge her with later on.”
He shook his head. “Let’s give her a little more rope,” he said.
He turned to find Muffin and the three other deputies standing together near the reading chairs, staring at him, embarrassed by the conversation they’d overheard.
“What are we waiting for, Kurt?” Gill asked him with a stern expression. “We’ve got a search warrant. Let’s go find that killer.”
Chapter thirty
Kurt assigned Linda Ríos to babysit Westbrook while he and the other deputies teamed up to search the cabins. Dotson and Florio drove down to those near the creek, and Kurt and Muffin hiked up a snowy trail to the woods at the foot of Elk Mountain. As they made their way out of sunshine and into the spruce forest, the light faded into deep blue shade and the air felt arctic and sealed. With their weapons locked and loaded, they followed a worn path that meandered alongside a dry runlet clogged with scree. When they came upon the first cabin, Muffin ducked behind a thick spruce trunk with her pump twelve-gauge and Kurt crouched in the icy underbrush a few yards away, focusing his binoculars. There was no movement inside the cabin, no light.
“I want this guy alive,” he said. “I want him to talk.”
“Let’s not get too cute about taking him, Kurt. He’s a stone killer. God knows what else he’s packing besides that hunting knife.”
She raised her shotgun and covered him while he hobbled on his bad ankle to the backside of the small wood structure. The windowpanes were iced over and dirty. He wiped a clear circle with his jacket sleeve and peeked in. The interior appeared dark and empty.
He holstered the .45 and cupped his hands around his eyes, pressing his nose against the glass for a better view. He could make out an old iron woodstove and a small bed with a bare mattress. The place looked as if it hadn’t been occupied in months. He walked around to the front door and signaled for Muffin to join him.
Untrammeled snow crusted the steps and small entry porch. No one had entered or left the cabin since the snowfall two days ago. The door was unlocked, and when he gave it a nudge with his boot he heard rats scurrying across the floorboards. He could smell their feral nest. “Nobody’s home,” he said as they stepped inside and looked around.
The cabin wasn’t as rustic as it appeared from outside. The walls were bare cedar and there was no electricity, but the furnishings included a table and two chairs and a writing desk with an empty bookcase on either side. Dust layered every surface. There was a kitchen nook with shelves, a cutting block, an aluminum sink and faucets. A kerosene lamp sat on a side table next to a rocking chair. The bed’s mattress had been chewed down to the stuffing by the little critters that had vanished at the sound of the creaking door.
“Who stays in these places?” Muffin asked, resting the shotgun across her shoulder.
“Westbrook’s patients, I imagine. Weekend navel-gazers. The ones who need their own space.”
“If I holed up in this little dump for very long I’d need therapy, too.”
“Let’s check out the other one,” he said. “It’s a hundred yards farther back.”
He led the way silently along the rocky runnel as it curved westward through the forest, climbing steadily toward its ancient dry source somewhere high in the mountains. Sunlight slanted through the thick overhead limbs. Soon they caught sight of the second cabin deeper in the woods, unassuming and bark brown, concealed by surrounding foliage. They huddled in the brush, trading turns with the binoculars. The undergrowth made it difficult to see anything clearly.
“I know you want him in one piece,” Muffin whispered, “but watch your step, okay? I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
With his deputy stationed behind a tree, her twelve-gauge raised aloft, Kurt lowered his shoulders and fought his way through clinging vines for twenty yards or more before he could gain a better angle of vision. From his hiding place he scanned the front of the cabin with the glasses and noticed something that made him swallow hard. Footprints tracked the snow on the steps leading up to the door. Someone had been here recently. And maybe he was still inside.
Kurt waved to her, nodding his head emphatically: He’s here! He motioned for her to approach the left side, he would take the right. She gave him the thumbs up and sprinted to a tree closer to the cabin, the shotgun braced in both hands.
As he moved off quickly through the wet vines he snagged his foot and began to slide
downhill over a mat of soggy spruce needles, snapping twigs in the chill silence. Halfway into the slide he lurched to his feet in a running stumble, sounding like a bear crashing through bamboo. When he reached the side of the cabin he dropped to his knees and rolled underneath a snarl of wild bushes for cover. His jeans were wet, his hands were numb-cold, and he couldn’t catch his breath or slow his pounding heart. He worked his fingers, blowing into cupped hands. If he had to use his gun right now, he wouldn’t feel the trigger.
The air around him was ripe with decay. A few yards away, pegged to the frozen ground by a railroad spike, lay a steel trap that had snapped off a small animal’s leg, possibly a raccoon. The animal was gone but its blood-dried stump protruded from the jaws, teeming with maggots. All Kurt could think about was that poor trapped rottweiler with its throat slit from ear to ear.
The .45 gripped in both hands, he rose slowly on his aching ankle and peered into the cabin window. It had been shrouded by a white sheet, denying him a view inside. He edged along the wall until he reached the corner of the cabin, only a few feet from the porch. Muffin was kneeling on one knee underneath a front window, her shotgun aimed at the door. She gave him a damning look that said,
Where have you been? He signaled that he would take the lead, and in four long strides he was on the porch yelling, “Pitkin County Sheriff! Open up! ” He jiggled the doorknob but it was locked. Stepping back, he kicked the door with the sole of his good foot. The frame split away after three hard blows and the door jarred open.
“Look out!” Muffin shouted, grabbing his jacket from behind and pulling him down.
The knife blade swung through the open door, carving the air above their heads, then arced back inside. Kurt aimed his pistol but saw that the weapon was tied to a trip cord. It swung at them again, the second time with less velocity. The pendulum had lost its momentum and the knife retracted into the cabin, where it dangled harmlessly from its cord looped over a rafter. If Muffin hadn’t reacted quickly, the blade would have struck Kurt squarely in the chest.
“Police! ” he shouted, pointing the .45 into the darkness. He could smell the man, the same rank, piss-soaked body odor from the sleeping bag in the Wheeler attic. “Give it up, Rocky. Let me see your hands! ”
They both crouched in the doorway, Muffin beside him with the shotgun set against her shoulder. The windows were covered by sheets and tattered blankets. Rising slowly, hip to hip, they scanned the dark room for movement. The only sound was the buzzing of flies. Kurt took a step to his left and ripped down one of the blankets, pouring daylight across the enclosure.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Muffin said, sighting down the barrel of the twelve-gauge. “What the hell is this?”
The cabin was cluttered knee-deep with piles of magazines and catalogs and cardboard boxes stuffed with what appeared to be years of collected junk mail. Satisfied that no one was hiding inside, Kurt holstered his weapon and inspected one of the boxes. Grocery flyers, coupon packets, contest entry forms, credit card offers, subscription renewals, political endorsements, notices bearing the snapshots of missing children. He checked the mailing labels and discovered that every item was addressed to a box number at the Aspen post office.
“I guess his momma never made him clean up his room,” Muffin said, looking around at the mess.
“Be careful,” he said, glancing up at the knife slowly twisting at the end of a long strand of mailing twine. “The whole place may be booby-trapped.”
“You figure that’s the knife?”
“Same kind,” Kurt said. The blade was certainly long enough.
He noticed an old Underwood manual typewriter pushed to the back of the writing desk. Taking cautious steps through the deep drifts of cut-up magazines, he made his way to the clunky machine. On the desk two drip-streaked bottles of Elmer’s Glue-All and a rusty X-acto knife lay atop a stack of glossy pages slit from a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
“It’s our man,” Kurt said.
A page torn from a book was taped to the wall above the typewriter. The page missing from the library book. Photographs of Rocky and his friends.
“This is disgusting,” Muffin said, her footsteps shuffling across littered paper. “The crazy loon left some food out over here and it’s crawling with flies. I can’t even make out what it was.”
Kurt scratched at the taped edges with his blunt nail, carefully extracting the page from the wall. He held the sheet in his flattened palms with a nervous delicacy, as if it might smudge or deteriorate at his touch. There were two photographs on each side of the sheet, a rogue’s gallery of Rocky’s entourage from that hip bygone Aspen of twenty years ago. Studying the faces in one group shot, the surly body language and self-conscious posturing, he was nearly certain he’d found the young Dana Smerlas. Her coy smile hadn’t changed in two decades. She was lounging in a circle of hippies on Nicole’s Starwood lawn back before the walls and floodlights and laser eyes were installed. They were all laughing and mugging for the camera. A joint was making its way from one hand to another. Dana’s hair swirled in the breeze, long and thick and darker than Kurt had imagined. She was wearing a loose Mexican peasant blouse and jeans, her legs tucked underneath her the same way they had been on Westbrook’s couch. The young freak with his arm around her shoulders wasn’t Rocky but one of the band members whose name Kurt couldn’t remember now, maybe that drummer Jack something-or-other, the guy with the blond ponytail on all the album covers. In this picture he was shirtless and clearly enamored with his own physique, showing off his wildly tattooed arms and muscled upper body.
“What’s he doing with all these magazines?” Muffin asked.
Kurt opened the cover of a dog-eared spiral notebook lying on the desk and turned the pages. “He likes to cut out pictures and words,” he said, examining the images of women glued to each page. “Looks like he’s got a hang-up with the opposite sex.”
“Hey, here’s some old clothes and his stash of weed,” she said. “God, it stinks.”
Kurt turned around to caution her, but before he could open his mouth she had taken another step and the floor collapsed underneath her, a funneling commotion of paper and cracked wood. Powerless, he watched her go down, her legs giving way and disappearing through a hole in the floorboards. There was a loud steel snap, metal on bone, followed by her scream and the roar of the twelve-gauge blowing out a window.
“My leg!” Visible only from the waist up, she pounded the floor with her fists, trying to pull herself out of the hole. “It’s a fucking leg trap!”
Kurt ran for her, toppling the mounds of magazines in his way. Halfway across the room his boot found the soft give of a loose board and in that moment he knew what was coming next. He flinched and deflected the upswinging board with his forearm, and the six-inch nail driven through the board only grazed his jacket, ripping leather.
“Don’t come any closer!” Muffin cried. “The floor’s a tiger trap!”
The son of a bitch had set crude booby traps all over the cabin. Kurt stopped abruptly and knelt down in the magazine debris and began crawling on his hands and knees, testing the floor’s firmness foot by foot as he pressed his way toward her. She was grimacing from the pain, her face bathed in sweat. She had managed to pull one leg out of the hole but the other one was pinned in a steel-jawed animal trap chained to the concrete slab underneath.
“Hurry, Kurt,” she moaned. “I’m gonna pass out.”
Digging away the scattered pages that had been sucked into
the hole, he saw that the trap had snared her between the ankle and calf, metal teeth chewing into bloody cammo. He forced his large body down into the hole, no more than five feet in diameter, three feet deep, a dank, earth-smelling space beneath the cabin. Using both hands and all his strength, he pried back the jaws, feeling the steel claws rip away from her skin and bone.
“Oh, Christ!” she screamed.
“Can you lift your leg?” he asked, forcing the tight jaws apart with wobbling hands.
“Grab your knee and lift!”
She gripped her cammos and dragged her leg upward, shrieking in agony. He released the jaws and they snapped together with a wicked ring.
“Oh, god, Kurt!” she cried, scooting away from the hole. “God, it hurts!”
He peeled back her ragged pant leg and stared at a splinter of exposed white bone. She raised up on her elbows, took one look, and fainted dead away, her head thumping against the magazines. Kurt jerked the radio from his belt and called the deputies searching the cabins near the creek.
“Officer down!” he said, breathing quickly. “I need a chopper here pronto. Do you read me, Gill? I need a medevac team!”
“Copy that, Kurt.”
“There’s a snow field between the lodge and these woods. Tell them to put the chopper down there.”
“Will do.”
“Get over here, Gill. Muffin’s hurt bad.”
“Copy that. We’re on our way.”
He took a deep breath and examined Muffin’s leg again. There wasn’t as much blood as he’d expected, not enough to warrant a tour-niquet. The jaws had struck solid bone, fracturing the tibia. Using his Swiss Army Knife he slit her pants up to the knee, releasing pressure. Then he removed the department cap from her head and smoothed her sweaty hair with his shaking fingers.
“You’re gonna be all right, champ,” he said, staring into her slack face, praying she could feel his hope on some deeper level. He looked again at her leg, a hash of torn flesh and exposed bone, and feared that the injury would end her career in law enforcement.
Kurt peeled off his jacket and placed it across her chest. The flies were beginning to swarm around them and he knelt over her, batting his arms to ward them off her face and damaged leg. It was impossible to stanch the anger that overwhelmed him right now. He wanted the psychopath who had done this to her. And the people who had set him loose.