Shadow Ridge

by M. E. Browning

  “Garibaldi.”

  She reached for a wool turtleneck. “Put me en route.”

  “What about Squint?”

  “I’ll call him when I know more.”

  * * *

  She spied the lights before she saw the scene. Splashes of red and blue bounced off the snowy mountainside, only to be swallowed by the inky sky.

  A deputy blocked the roadway south of the curve. She killed her headlights and pulled alongside the car, rolling down her window. Up close, she recognized one of the recent academy graduates. “Morning, Corbett. Is this Garibaldi’s mess?”

  “Yeah. Stieger’s up there too.”

  “Thanks.” Jo switched her patrol radio to the sheriff’s office comm channel and raised him on the air. Once she was given the all clear, she entered the scene, keeping to the left of the roadway as directed. As soon as she rounded the curve, she encountered the usual cluster of patrol cars, fire engines, and medical equipment that accompanied any major accident. Another patrol car blocked southbound traffic farther up the road. That left maybe one more deputy and a sergeant to protect the rest of the county. The joys of rural policing.

  The ambulance straddled the middle of the road. The doors were shut against the cold, but in the lit interior, Jo recognized the two medics tending Quinn, who held an ice pack on her forehead.

  The Mini Cooper was a bright-yellow mess pressed tight against the mountain. Deputy Tony Garibaldi prowled the edge of the roadway, his flashlight sweeping back and forth. A break in the berm left by the earlier snowplow revealed where the pickup truck had gone over. The other deputy was photographing the ghost depressions left by the truck’s tires before the snow completely obliterated them. She saw the deeper depressions of footprints. Frickin’ firefighters. The ultimate evidence-destruction team.

  Jo approached Garibaldi. The man was impervious to cold. She’d never once seen him wear a cap over his bald head. “Morning.”

  “Hey, Jo. Slumming?”

  “Working a case that happens to involve the woman in the back of the bus and possibly the guy in the truck. Have you confirmed it’s Ronny?”

  He jerked his head toward the ambulance. “We only have her word at this time. She watched him hit a patch of ice and go off the road.” He stepped over an undamaged portion of the snow berm. Beyond that stretched a paltry five or six feet of snow before the point of no return. “All I’ve got at this time is a red truck about sixty feet down. The fire department sent a rookie over the edge to get some rappelling experience. He confirmed the driver’s dead, but didn’t recognize him. He forgot to get the plate. Didn’t notice if there were black stripes the size of his fucking fire truck along the side either.”

  “That’s why he drags hose for a living.”

  “RP says she saw Buck working at the resort tonight. I called. He got off at zero two thirty. The timing’s definitely right.”

  “I was at an event there last night and saw him early in the evening.” Jo toed the berm with the tip of her boot and stepped over to the other side. Even with a cap pulled down around her ears, double layers, and her winter patrol coat, the cold air made her nose run. “There’s no love lost between Kirkland and Buck. Any chance this was a road rage incident gone bad?”

  He shrugged. “There’s red paint transfer on the Mini Cooper, but she said he scraped past her and tore off her side mirror. And riddle me this, who the hell drives a Mini Cooper in Colorado?”

  “The same person who spun it into the side of a mountain.” She held out her hand. “Anchor me?”

  Garibaldi dug his heels down, and they grabbed each other’s forearms while Jo peeked over the side. A sharp drop ended in a clump of trees. The truck had landed nose down, although in the beam of her Streamlight, the crumpled roof indicated it had gone end over end at least once. Branches hid the rear plate. With the growls from the fire engine and ambulance behind her, it was impossible to tell if the engine still ran, but a single wan headlight burned through the pines.

  “The tow trucks are en route. We’ll know a lot more after the sun comes up and the truck’s winched back onto the roadway.”

  The sun wouldn’t rise for over two hours. Jo stepped back from the edge. “Who gets the lucky job of rappelling the tow hook down?”

  “Pretty sure the same rookie’s going back for forgetting the plate. ’Course, they live for this kind of shit.”

  “Do you mind if I talk to Kirkwood?”

  “She’s all yours.”

  She might have imagined the relief on his face. “Thanks. Oh, and when you get the truck to the yard, do you mind if Squint and I come take a gander?”

  “As long as you don’t mind cutting a supplemental. I’ll get Doc Ing rolling when they start winching the truck up, but I’m figuring we’ll be here a couple more hours. I’ll give you a shout when we’re en route.”

  “Awesome. What’s your case number?”

  He rattled it off, and she jotted it on her notepad and jammed it back in her pocket. A supplemental report was a small price to pay to be able to have Squint take a look at the truck. The man rebuilt antique tractors for fun, scouring the country for vintage John Deeres. He had a Quonset hut on his property full of tractors in various stages of restoration. Jo knew enough about cars to change a tire, check her oil, and call Squint when a case required an expert.

  The first of the tow trucks arrived while Jo walked toward the ambulance. Quinn had ditched the ice pack, but even from a distance the goose egg on her temple was visible. She sat on the bench with her legs drawn to her chest and her eyes closed. Tom must have drawn the short straw. He sat between Quinn and the door. His partner was probably reclining in the cab counting her blessings.

  Jo rapped on the door twice and entered the heated ambulance, quickly closing the door behind her.

  “Hey, Tom, mind if I interrupt?”

  Tom leaned across the stretcher and stashed a blood pressure cuff into one of the cubbies. “Not interrupting a thing. Ms. Kirkwood just declined our offer of a first-class ride to St. Francis.”

  Quinn opened one eye. “I can Uber it for a fraction of the cost.”

  “What’s an Uber?” Tom asked.

  Quinn closed her eye and rested her forehead on her knees. “Now you’re just screwing with me.”

  Tom picked up his clipboard and opened the back door. “I’ll leave you ladies to your gabbing, but if a call comes up, we’re back in service.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  He slammed the door, and a few seconds later the ambulance dipped to the side as he climbed into the cab.

  Jo sat. “You doing okay?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Anything hurt beside the lump on your forehead?”

  Quinn raised her head. “What? You a medic now?”

  “Nope.” It was too early in the morning to deal with attitude on an investigation that wasn’t hers. Jo slid off the bench and opened the rear door.

  “Wait. I’m sorry. It’s been a long night.”

  Jo pulled the door closed but didn’t latch it. “I’m not the enemy, Quinn.”

  “I know.” She raised one hand and rubbed her eyes. “Zachary Walsenberg came to my room tonight.”

  “What?”

  “I heard him try to open the door, like it was his room. Maybe he really thought it was. I mean, his wife rented it for me. So it’s possible, I guess.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “When I didn’t let him in, he called me by my name. Said he knew I was a friend of Derek’s and he wanted to ask me a couple questions about his son. Morbid curiosity, I guess.”

  “Did you let him in?”

  Her face twisted. “No.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her jacket.

  The medic’s voice floated through the pass-through window from the front seat. “Unless you want to blow us up, put the cancer sticks away.”

  “There’s oxygen on board,” Jo clarified.

  Quinn stared at the pack with a yearni
ng that suggested it was a risk she was prepared to take before finally returning the cigarettes to her pocket. “I pretended to call security. He was shit-faced. He staggered away.”

  Jo had spoken with the DA last night around ten o’clock as she was preparing to leave. Nothing had suggested he was intoxicated. In fact, he’d apologized for not recalling that Tye and his son had known each other. When Jo mentioned she was investigating a cyberstalking case, he’d suggested stepping it down to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation rather than using the Feds. He hadn’t slurred his words. His eyes were clear. Of course, that had been hours before he contacted Quinn.

  The emergency radio crackled, and Jo listened to Dakota’s voice dispatch a PD unit to a prowler call at an address belonging to an elderly woman with a well-documented raccoon problem. She waited for the transmission to end. “Is that why you left the resort?”

  “Looks like I should have stayed,” Quinn answered.

  “What happened out here?”

  “Hit some ice. Hit the mountain. Hit my head.”

  “And Ronny?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  Warning flags. Honestly was a word seldom used by someone telling the truth. They simply told it. “You called nine-one-one.”

  “He came hauling ass down the mountain. I thought he was going to hit me head-on. Then he headed straight toward the curve. Didn’t look like he even tried to turn. He blasted through the berm. Fucking snow everywhere, and then he was gone. Poof.”

  “Did you see brake lights?’

  “Maybe. I don’t remember. I’d just had my ass kicked by a mountain.” She tilted her head back and rested it against the ambulance wall, eyes closed. “I climbed out the passenger door. Ran to the side of the road. I yelled his name, but nothing. Any chance he’s still alive?”

  “No. I’m sorry. He’s not.”

  “I didn’t like him, but I wish I wasn’t the last person to see him alive.”

  Tye. Ronny. Both of them were dead. “You know what this means,” Jo said softly.

  “Yeah.” Quinn pulled her legs tighter against her chest. “I’m the only one left.”

  Part Three

  QUINN

  26

  With a couple of hours to kill before meeting up with Garibaldi, Jo returned to the PD. Her wet socks were in a heap on the floor, and she rummaged in the back of her desk drawer until she found her last pair of emergency socks. She really needed to get a new pair of boots—or at the very least, do laundry. She drew on the dry socks and went to work.

  The Horton case binder lived on the rickety shelf next to her desk. Quinn’s case file was on the shelf below it, and despite their different locations, in her mind the two investigations had melded. Therein lay the rub. She had to figure out how to move from believing the cases were linked to being able to convince others of that certainty.

  She opened the folders and set them side by side on her desk. She’d already created independent timelines for both cases. On the surface, Tye’s suicide and Quinn’s threats were unrelated events. But Ronny’s accident and Derek’s death made that more unlikely. Jo had nothing concrete to link her cases, just an itch that there was more to the story than she’d been able to unravel.

  As early as the academy, officers were taught the principle of Occam’s razor: the simpler the solution, the more likely it was to be correct. A suspected suicide was usually an actual suicide. The freak accident wasn’t anything more nefarious than an unfortunate event. If it quacked like a duck? It was a duck. The more complicated the crime, the more things could go wrong. It didn’t mean people didn’t plan complicated heists, but they usually screwed them up.

  All she needed was to find one mistake. Inevitably, that error would lead to a second one. And then yet another until all the loosened threads could be rewoven into a coherent pattern.

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her thoughts flirted with possibilities as she searched for commonalities between the cases. She disregarded the manner of death—considered only that three individuals were dead. Factored in Derek’s newly revealed relationship with Tye. The tension between Quinn and Ronny. Her death threats. His accident. The video game that had brought them all together.

  Jo grabbed a legal pad, turned it sideways, and drew a line. She made three tick marks and labeled them from left to right with the three deaths. Under Tye’s and Ronny’s names, she added the date of occurrence.

  Logic dictated that Tye had handed out the game before Derek suicided. She added that to the timeline.

  She referred to her incident report in Quinn’s file. The first threatening email had been sent on March fifteenth, and she entered the event between Derek’s and Tye’s deaths.

  March fifteenth. The Ides of March. Symbolic, or simply another in a long list of coincidences?

  “Et tu, Brute?”

  There was no answer forthcoming, and she turned her thoughts to the phone-call-dodging Professor Lucas. The most obvious issue was his attempt to steal Tye’s game.

  She tore a page from the pad and wrote Tye’s name in the middle, then ringed the page with names. She drew a line between the professor and Tye and then connected Ronny and Quinn to Lucas as well. She tagged those lines school. That left out Derek. She added relationship lines in red ink. Tye to Derek. Quinn to Lucas? He’d showed up on Quinn’s doorstep with champagne, which certainly indicated a cozier relationship than either had alluded to in person. Then there was the frosty relationship between Quinn and Ronny.

  Did Quinn have something to do with Ronny’s death? For that matter, had Ronny run Quinn off the road and lost control of his own truck? The way he drove, anything was possible.

  Lines overlapped across the page. Hell, they’d all known each other—they lived in Echo Valley, for Chrissakes. She wadded up the relationship chart and returned to the case files. She spent the next hour culling snippets of information from the pages to add to her master timeline.

  The empty space below Derek’s name threw off the timeline’s symmetry. She’d been collecting firsthand intel on Ronny Buck for years. Tye’s printout was in his binder. Quinn was from San Francisco, and prior to requesting a welfare check on Tye, she hadn’t racked up any contacts with the police. Jo made a note to contact SFPD.

  That triggered another thought. Maybe an agency further afield had requested info on one of her players. Jo sent a quick email to the elder Sarah in records and requested a search of the state and national databases to see if anyone had queried Tye, Ronny, or Quinn. Even if it didn’t end up in a report, sometimes a simple contact was enough to be significant.

  The timeline still lacked Derek’s info, and she tapped his name into the PD system. Within seconds, the records management program had searched all the reports, citations, contacts, parking violations, pawns, and miscellaneous entries generated by both the PD and sheriff’s office. Two hits. Evidently being the district attorney’s son hadn’t been enough to dissuade a deputy from writing him a speeding ticket. She clicked on the death investigation.

  Her desk phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. “Wyatt.”

  “Hey, it’s Garibaldi. I’m following the tow truck to the yard. We’re about twenty minutes out. You still interested?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Misery loves company.”

  “Ronny?” She wrote the date of Derek’s report on the timeline.

  “Yeah, it was him. The sergeant just notified his father.”

  Her heart went out to Xavier. She didn’t like the man, but no one should have to bury their child. She lowered her pen. “I’m going to miss Ronny.”

  Garibaldi cleared his throat. “The first time I picked him up, he was only eight years old—barely tall enough to look over the steering wheel. He’d been driving that very same pickup out on County Road 122. ’Course, at the time, it was still his granddad’s. You’d think with all his high-speed practice since then, he’d know enough not to push it coming down the mounta
in.”

  “You’d think.” Jo read the date she’d just written. “I owe you one.”

  “See you at the yards.”

  Squint entered the office as she placed the receiver in the cradle. “Sonofabitch.”

  “A little early for name-calling isn’t it? You haven’t even shot me with one of your hair thingies yet.”

  Jo pointed her pen toward the computer. “Tye died on the anniversary of Derek’s death.” She toed the carpet and swiveled her chair. “Which certainly supports a suicide determination. Despondent lover. Nothing left to live for. Guilt.”

  “Something to consider.”

  She held up her pad. “Already on the list. Anyway, that was Garibaldi. He confirmed it was Ronny. The tow’s about to pull into the yards. I’d still like to take a look at it with you if you’re game.”

  “Waiting on you.”

  * * *

  The county’s fleet maintenance yard occupied half a block on the road out of town. A boxy tan building, it squatted in the shadow of the county jail. Four bays marked the front, and all four doors were down. During the week the place buzzed with activity, but on a Saturday the yard was empty except for Garibaldi’s patrol car and the flatbed with Ronny’s wrecked truck strapped on the back. The tow truck driver, Owen, stood outside the cab holding an A&W can and talking with Garibaldi.

  Jo pulled into the lot and killed the engine. For a moment she merely stared at the crushed cab of the pickup. Ronny’s truck had started life as a dingy blue 1970 Dodge ranch truck that belonged to his grandfather. From the time he could hold a wrench, Ronny had helped with the maintenance. When his grandfather passed, the truck became his. By the time he turned sixteen, he’d rebuilt the engine, restored the interior, and painted it cherry red with wide black stripes down each side. The V-8 sucked gas, but the truck hauled ass. Just ask any of the cops who’d chased him over the years.

  That truck no longer existed. Pry marks revealed where the fire department had used the Jaws of Life to cut away the driver door, exposing the interior. A McDonald’s bag hung trapped between metal and the seat.