by Thomas Zigal
Ragged footsteps shuffled across the hardwood. He was coming toward her. “I know what you and the other bitch did to him. What you did to me. She’s dead now and you’re going to meet her in the worm world.”
Kurt stuffed the .45 in his holster and dashed for Carole.
“You killed the music, you little cunt.”
Kurt grabbed her shoulder and pulled her to the floor just as the man sprang at her with the eight-inch knife. His momentum carried him stumbling over their bodies into the shadows and for an instant Kurt lost track of where the knifer was. Carole screamed and scrambled to her feet and bolted through a doorway into the master bedroom with the man scurrying after her. In a dead run Kurt tackled him from behind and they rolled through an open sliding door onto a small balcony where Carole had tried to escape. The man slashed at Kurt but missed, slashed again, the blade carving air near his face. Kurt seized his cutting arm with both hands, battling him for the knife, but in their scuffle a sharp knee caught him in the groin. He groaned, losing his hold. A wild swinging elbow cracked his chin and everything went black for an instant. When he opened his eyes he saw Jack Stokes crouching over him, laughing his vile laugh, the long gleaming knife drawn back behind his ear in that final savage motion before he thrust the blade into Kurt’s chest. He crossed his forearms, hoping to deflect the blow. Then suddenly Jack was jerked backward toward the balcony railing. Carole had collared his loose duster and was dragging him away from Kurt. The man stumbled against the low railing, almost toppling over the side, but quickly caught his balance and lashed at Carole with the knife, drawing blood across her shoulder. She cried out, and in that moment Kurt leaped at the man and slammed him against the railing. Nails groaned and the wood gave way. With long flailing arms, Jack Stokes tried to take Kurt with him, but Kurt slipped his hold and grabbed on to the rail as Jack tumbled into a free fall. The broken section swung outward like a ranch gate but held Kurt’s 220 pounds. Clinging to the rail, dangling above the deck, he watched the man plummet twenty feet toward the hot tub. There was a long, heaving moan when his body hit solid redwood.
“I’ve got you,” Carole said, kneeling over him at the edge of the balcony, clutching his shoulders. He glanced up and saw blood trailing down her arm.
A few minutes later, when he had finally dragged himself to a standing position on the balcony, they held each other trembling in the cold night and peered down at the body sprawled on the deck below. The drop alone may not have killed him. But the hunting knife was embedded in his rib cage. Blood spattered his gray beard and long silver hair.
“Mom, I heard a noise.”
Her twelve-year-old was standing in his pajamas at the patio door, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Everything’s okay, sweetie,” she said, leaving Kurt to embrace her son and turn him away from the sight below. “Let’s get you back in bed.”
“You’re bleeding, Mom. What happened to you?”
“It’s just a scratch. Come on, now. Back to bed. Tomorrow is a school day.”
Kurt watched them disappear into the darkness of the house, a doting mother comforting her sleepy son. He tried to imagine her as the young woman called Pariah, wild and reckless and strange, doing the things he knew she’d done back in those days when they’d all run so hard and burned so bright. He tried, but he couldn’t see her playing that part. She was someone else now. Pariah was as dead as the man lying in his blood on the deck below.
Chapter thirty-six
After a long night with the coroner’s team and three hours of sleep on a couch in Corky’s study, Kurt drove back to the Elk Mountain Lodge and hiked into the woods to have a look around the cabin one more time. His deputies had cleared the floor, raking catalogs and mail-order debris into two-dozen fat brown storage bags stacked in orderly rows against a wall. They had also removed five loose floorboards with punji-like nails and had placed orange traffic cones next to the tiger-trap holes. Kurt walked over to the nearest hole and discovered that one of his men had used a tree branch to spring the leg trap spiked in the ground underneath the cabin. A quick inspection showed him that the two other traps were also inoperative now. But he wasn’t prepared for the rush of dread he felt when he saw the trail of dried blood near the hole where Muffin had gone down. He stared at her blood and wondered if she would ever walk without a limp.
Opening one of the storage bags, he found a sheet of pizza coupons labeled with the Aspen P.O.B. number that appeared on every piece of mail. He pulled the cell phone out of his jacket and dialed directory assistance for the number of the Aspen post office. His old poker buddy Bruce Davis, twenty-five years in the postal system, was now the head supervisor.
“I need to know who’s renting one of your boxes, Bruce,” he said after a short round of pleasantries. “Can you help me with this?”
“Tell me it’s police business,” his friend suggested, “and I’ll act properly intimidated.”
“It’s a murder investigation. Does that qualify?”
Kurt read the number and Bruce put him on hold, then returned a few minutes later with a name Kurt didn’t expect to hear. The box account fee was paid up until the end of the year and currently rented to a Mrs. Alvina Stokes of Houston, Texas. Possibly Jack’s mother, Kurt thought. His friend volunteered the woman’s phone number in area code 713.
“Thanks, man,” Kurt said. “I owe you one.”
After five rings he had decided to try again later, but the line finally clicked. There was a long awkward silence, followed by a feeble female voice saying hello.
“May I speak with Mrs. Alvina Stokes,” he said.
“Speaking.”
She sounded very old and possibly in poor health. He identified himself as the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. “Are you any relation to Jack Stokes, ma’am?”
“I’m his mother,” she said, her voice warbling. The weak phone connection wasn’t helping their conversation. “Is my son in some kind of trouble, Sheriff?”
In his kindest manner, saying the words slowly and with profound regret, he told her that her son was dead.
“Dear Jesus.” He expected her to cry, but instead she took a deep breath and raised her voice. “I’ve been waiting for this phone call for a long time, Sheriff. It comes as no surprise. How did it happen?”
He told her that her son appeared to be mentally disturbed and that he had tried to kill someone, and that in the process he had died in the hands of law enforcement. He did not tell her that Jack had murdered two people, or that he himself was involved in Jack’s death.
“Have you been in touch with him, Mrs. Stokes? When was the last time you spoke with your son?”
“Ohh,” she said, struggling with memory and resignation. “He called here about three months ago asking if I would rent him a postal box up in Colorado, where he wanted me to forward his mail. It was the first time I’d heard from him since he left the state hospital in Rusk. I didn’t know where he was.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me about Jack,” Kurt said. “Had he been under psychiatric care?”
“Oh, dear me, yes. That poor boy had a rough go of it. He was disturbed, like you said. The drugs did that to him. Burned a hole in his mind. He was never the same after he lost his best friend, a boy named Rocky that played in his rock ’n’ roll band when they were kids.”
She told him that after Rocky’s death her son had disappeared for several years, sending postcards from India and other faraway places. “For a while he lived with some hippies in Amsterdam, Holland,” she said. “And then lord knows whereall. Then one day—oh, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago—I heard a knock on my front door and there was this bum standing there, long stringy hair and a nasty beard, his teeth half rotted out. I started to call the police. I didn’t recognize my own son. He was homeless and half dead from malnutrition and babbling like a loon.”
She took him in, she said, and watched his mind slowly deteriorate over the next few years. The doctors diagnosed him as schizophren
ic. He seldom left the house and made no attempt to communicate with his old friends or the outside world.
“My poor crazy boy thought all the junk mail that came every day was letters from his music fans. He started sending autographs to the return addresses. He liked to cut out pictures and paste them in his scrapbooks. Brassiere ads, mostly. Pretty girls. He wouldn’t let me throw anything out, and his room got so cluttered up we had to start using the garden shed to keep his catalogs in.”
Kurt glanced over at the row of storage bags. “Is that what the Aspen p.o.b. was for?” he asked, trying to understand this. “You were forwarding junk mail?”
There was a long delay on the line, then the old woman spoke again. “He was my son and I did what I could for him,” she said.
“Getting mail every day, making his scrapbooks—that was the only thing that gave him pleasure.” She paused, then asked, “Do you have children, Sheriff?”
Kurt smiled. “A son,” he said. “Eight years old.”
“You sound like a gentleman. I bet you’re a good father to that boy. You know what I’m talking about. We do whatever it takes to make our children happy.”
Kurt walked over to the empty writing desk. The deputies had confiscated the typewriter, the scrapbooks, everything. The only sign that Jack Stokes had worked at this desk was the crisscross of X-acto knife lines in the soft wood.
“You said he’d been in a mental hospital, Mrs. Stokes.”
“Oh yes. The doctors put him there,” she said. “It nearly broke my heart. I’d been taking care of him a long time when he got in trouble with the law, and they wouldn’t let him stay with me no more.”
She explained that Jack had been convinced that the local children were spying on him, mocking him behind his back, so he set animal traps in the bushes around their house and along the fence, hoping to catch them at it. Instead, he had snared a neighborhood dog, and the dog had bled to death. “The authorities figured it was time to put him away before he hurt some kid,” she said.
Kurt thought about the rottweiler with its slashed throat, dying in the snow. “Why did they release him from the hospital?” he asked.
“He was there two years, Sheriff. They said he’d behaved real good and was well enough to go. My lawyer told me it was the overcrowding. They needed the room for somebody worse off than Jack.”
“And that was how long ago?”
“Ohh,” she said, that sigh again. “About March, I believe.” Six months ago. “My brother drove up to Rusk to bring him home but Jack wouldn’t get in the car. He didn’t want anything to do with us anymore. So Glenn gave him some money and said good-bye and we didn’t hear from the boy again for maybe three months, when he turned up in Colorado.”
Kurt reached inside his shirt pocket and retrieved the page torn from the book. He placed it on the desk and unfolded the creases with his free hand, staring at the image of the young ponytailed Jack Stokes with his arm around Dana. “Mrs. Stokes, did your son ever talk about an old girlfriend?” he asked. “Specifically a young woman named Dana. He knew her when he was in the Rocky Rhodes band.”
He could detect a change in her voice. “Jack was a looker back in those days,” she said with a mother’s pride. “Tall and built like a ballplayer. He had lots of girls, Sheriff. They followed him all around. Dana, you say? I didn’t know their names. The last time I went to Rusk he told me one of his old girlfriends had paid him a visit. Maybe it was that Dana, I don’t know. You never knew if it was Jack’s imagination. His mind was all awhirl and he couldn’t get a good grip on the things of this world.”
Kurt studied the old photograph of Dana Smerlas with her boyfriend the drummer. Maybe she was the reason Jack had found his way back to Aspen after his release from the mental hospital. Maybe she had invited him. There’s a cabin up in the mountains, Jack, where no one will bother you. Aspen may have been the last place where he could remember being young and happy and in love.
“Thank you for talking with me, Mrs. Stokes. I’m very sorry I had to call you with such bad news.”
“Will you help me make arrangements to send his body back home, Sheriff? I will pay for it. I have some money in the bank.”
Kurt smiled sadly. “That won’t be necessary, ma’am. Pitkin County will take care of the expense.”
“I’m going to bury him next to his father,” she said, her voice expressing emotion for the first time since their conversation began. “They never spent much time together. Maybe the two of them will get along now.”
After Kurt hung up, he took one final look around the cabin and then stepped outside into the raw morning air. He stood on the steps and smelled the scent of pine and wondered if the Bauer brothers would level these woods to build their new ski resort. He thought about poor Jack Stokes, a ’60s casualty they had used to their advantage, playing the crazy bastard like a toy drum. Dana had known where he was and lured him back, and Westbrook had done the rest.
By the end, the old rocker was so screwed up he’d thought he was his best friend and idol, Rocky Rhodes. He had assumed a lover’s rage and gone after Nicole and done their dirty work for them. And now that Jack was dead, everyone could walk away with what they wanted. Westbrook had his new facility and Dana had her husband back. Walt Bauer could build his resort. Tra-la-la, Kurt thought, what a wonderful world it would be.
Chapter thirty-seven
Monday afternoon Kurt met with the D.A. in his office at the courthouse. Don Harrigan was a short, chipmunk-cheeked man prone to expensive haircuts and humorous ties. Today he was wearing one that looked like a salmon hanging from his neck. He was Kurt’s age, nearly fifty years old, but he’d taken better care of himself and looked ten years younger. There wasn’t a gray hair on his sandy blond head.
“Come on, Kurt, you know how it works,” Harrigan said, reacting to Kurt’s impatience. “It’s one thing to know something, it’s another thing to take it to court. Ask Marcia Clark.”
“Here’s a photo of them together when they were young,” Kurt said, slapping the torn page onto Harrigan’s desk. “He’s got his arm around her.”
“So what?” Harrigan shrugged. “Frank Sinatra appeared in photos with half the underworld. It doesn’t mean he conspired to commit murder.”
Kurt raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, but you know what I mean,” Harrigan said. “We still don’t have a conspiracy case. And maybe we never will, Kurt. Maybe this is one we’ll have to live with. ‘Drug-fried loon comes back to take revenge on all his old druggie friends.’ I’m not unhappy with that.”
“Except it isn’t the whole story, Don, and you know it.”
“Spit in one hand and wish in the other, Kurt, and see which one of ’em gets wet.” He held up his palms. “So far they’re bone-dry.”
Kurt made a face. “I hate it when you go southern on me.”
He ambled to the window with his hands in his pockets. There was snow in Spar Gulch and higher up Aspen Mountain, and snow plowed to the street curbs. This early snowfall promised a long white winter. The tourists and merchants were going to love one another again.
“You haven’t told me about your visit with Lyle Gunderson this morning,” Kurt said. “I guess that means it didn’t go well.”
Harrigan remained seated behind his desk. “When I got to the hospital Lyle was talking with a lawyer from Ross, Ewing, Jordan, and Smith. Same Denver firm that represents Westbrook. Same people who’ve made a fortune off the Bauer family for the past fifty years.”
Kurt turned to face him with a smug smile. “And that’s why you know I’m right about this thing,” he said.
Harrigan nodded. “Follow the lawyers,” he said.
“So what are they advising our boy to do?”
“Cop to a simple invasion-of-privacy charge,” the D.A. said. “He isn’t admitting he showed the tapes to Westbrook or anybody else.”
“God damn,” Kurt said, shaking his head. “Can’t you threaten him with serious jail time?”
/> “How?” Harrigan asked. “It’s pretty clear to me that Lyle and Westbrook have cut a deal with each other, through their lawyers, to concede absolutely nothing. So how do we prove the videos changed hands? And even if we do, what does it mean?”
Kurt paced back and forth across the office, taking mental stock of what they had. No proof that Westbrook had been nurse-maiding Jack Stokes in a remote cabin on Bauer land. No proof that he had shown Lyle’s lurid videos of Nicole to the crazy bastard. And not one shred of proof that Westbrook and Dana Smerlas had done all of this to make Walt Bauer happy.
“What time is the press conference?” Harrigan asked.
Kurt glanced at his watch. It was three-thirty. “Half an hour,” he said. “What do you suggest I tell them, Counselor?”
Harrigan stood up from his desk and came forward with his hands in the pockets of his pleated tweeds. His brow was furrowed in serious contemplation. “Tell them Jack Stokes was a deranged man who hounded Nicole Bauer to death, murdered two of her old friends, and then went after an innocent family,” he said. “Tell them you stopped him, Kurt. You did your job. Isn’t that enough?”
It wasn’t enough and they both knew it.
“Corky’s a very shrewd man,” Harrigan said. “He’ll spin this so you come out looking like the hero. And you know what, Kurt?” he said with a warm smile. “You are the hero. So quit beating yourself up. You stopped the bad guy from killing again.”
Kurt rubbed his face and the back of his neck. “Then how come I don’t feel like a hero, Don?”
The D.A. was too short to put his arm around Kurt’s shoulder. He contented himself with gripping an arm. “Look, buddy,” he said, walking Kurt to the door, “we can’t get at those people right now, and maybe we never will. It’s going to take time and a shovelful of luck. Make your peace with that.”
Kurt didn’t know if he could ever accept that version of peace. “But believe me, stranger things have happened,” Harrigan said with a cavalier shrug. “Old partnerships sometimes dissolve in acrimony. People spill their guts to get even. You never know.”