His inbox was stuffed with mail, almost all of it with attached image files. He started sorting through them. Most of them were unimpressive, often grainy, usually taken at the most inopportune times, with the subject’s eyes closed or mouth open, the sort of thing only a mother could treasure and only a mother could take. He scanned them with practiced ease, finding nothing of interest and nothing he could use on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. He glanced at his watch. He was hard up on his deadline, and the story still needed to be put together, a first person report.
The microwave buzzed, and he retrieved the organic macaroni and cheese he’d bought, dousing it with Tabasco sauce, a habit learned from the men who worked in the slaughter pens in Chicago. He was on his second bite when the image loaded on the screen. It was so unexpected, he had to put the plate down and focus in on it to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
He wasn’t. There, in profile in the background of a shot taken of a tow-headed child by her doting mother, was the sledding hill and the small grove of trees that had so interested the cops and the Medical Examiner. And right there in the middle of it, he could see a small flash of flame. Talk about a lucky shot. Right place, right time, right angle, and right in front of him.
Wilson sat back in his chair excited and satisfied. Persistence paid off. With a little cropping and enlargement, his front page, above-the-fold story would be accompanied by a picture that showed the very instant of the shooting. He wondered whether the AP would pick it up and smiled to himself as he took another bite of macaroni. He bet they would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JUNE 9, MORNING
I slept in as long as I could, if you could call the fitful tossing and turning that passed for rest these days sleep. Even after my mind was fully awake and the sun was long up, I remained in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to make sense out of the past two days. Two murders in three days, in a town where no one ever intentionally killed anyone else. It was one of the reasons I chose to locate the Center in Telluride; that, plus the fact that I had wrested the house I lived in out of my former partners at ten cents on the dollar in settlement of my suit against them. I wanted to be in a place where murder was remote, and I was in control of how and when I entered into its domain.
Montrose or Grand Junction would have made more sense, especially since they both fell under the generous jurisdiction the state had given me. But I enjoyed the luxury of showing up, calm and collected an hour or two after the call, leaving the initial response to associates I had appointed in every town of any size on the Western slope. I had planned my life carefully so that I had to go calling on murder; it didn’t come calling on me. I had encountered death on my own doorstep once before. I never wanted to again.
Man proposes, God disposes. Here I was on a bright June morning, with not one, but two deaths in rapid sequence, if not on my doorstep, at least in my front yard. I stretched, got up and pulled on my clothes. Lucky for me Telluride was the kind of place I could go to Mass in jeans and boots, and Father Matt was the kind of priest for whom it would matter more that I was there than how I was dressed.
I encountered Ben in the front hall, tucking his shirt into his khaki pants. He was better dressed than usual for Sunday morning. A sophomore in college, Ben was deep in the throes of doubt, but he knew that as long as he lived under my roof and lived off my bank account, he had no choice in the matter of Sunday Mass.
“You look nice. Going somewhere?”
His neck colored, telegraphing that he was about to lie to me. “Mass with you.”
Okay, not an outright lie, but the crimson just above his collar told me there was more to it than that. I considered pushing but decided not to, and he wasn’t volunteering anything else. We walked the short distance to St. Patrick’s Church in soft summer sunshine, the air clean and fresh.
The church was abuzz when we arrived, a larger crowd than usual, every pew on both sides filled, the chatter among the faithful filling the little building to the rafters.
“What gives?” Ben asked. “There’s hardly ever this many people here.”
Technically, Ben was right. It was literally SRO in the main part of the church, though our customary places in the loft, right in front of the statue of St. Anthony, were open. Summer often brought large turnouts, especially since both faithful and curiosity seekers were drawn by Father Matt’s introduction of the Latin Mass, but nothing like this.
“Two murders, one in broad daylight. People are nervous. Nervous people go to church.”
I knew from experience that killings close to home made people think about God. They either ran to Him or away, but they almost never ignored Him. Seems that the good people of Telluride, permanent or transient, had more faith than I gave them credit for. More than I had. They were here looking for solace.
I was here only out of duty, out of sheer, longheaded obedience. I was still mad at God for taking John from me, and I was in no mood to forgive the man who’d been the agent of my grief. Still, holding on to the barest remnants of our life together, I financed the parish generously in John’s memory. I kept coming to church out of fidelity to his rock-solid faith though my angry mind rarely gave me a moment’s rest, and I never went up for communion.
That had been a source of confusion for Father Matt who had a little trouble understanding why I would come week after week and infuse massive sums into parish activities when I might as well have been a board on the wall for all I participated. Ben thought me a hypocrite for attending church at all, but he was at that stage where I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t and, frankly, I didn’t care what he thought. I was keeping him in church for John’s sake, and that was all that mattered. And I was finding that, in the midst of the darkness that seemed to be my lot in life these past few years, I was drawn, compelled almost, to this little parish. I never missed Sunday, made most daily Masses, and even stopped in from time to time just to sit in the quiet of the balcony, looking down on the empty pews. I wasn’t sure why, really. It just seemed the thing to do. Most of my life these days was on autopilot. This was no exception.
Father Matt kept it to under an hour and I was in the morgue, discharging my other Sunday duty by doing the post-mortem on the unlucky Frisbee player. Quick already had the body on the table when I arrived, a tray of instruments laid out, bottles labeled, and camera ready. We worked together in near-silence, so familiar with each other’s ways that he anticipated my needs, and I stayed out of his way. It was like the macabre dance of two experienced partners who looked neither at their feet nor at each other, but spent the time lost in thoughts and worlds of their own making. I surfaced from mine long enough, once, to wonder what Quick was thinking; for myself, I was trying not to remember John and trying to squelch the rising knowledge that this was not going to be the last two-shot murder in my jurisdiction.
It was a straightforward autopsy, two shots to the chest, remarkably close together. I retrieved the bullets, one of which was just beneath the skin of the back, having traveled through the man’s heart and between two ribs. It was enough to kill him, but what probably dropped him on the spot was the other bullet, the one that lodged in the innards of the pacemaker he had implanted. I’d have to do a little research, but I was pretty sure that the bullet caused either excruciating electroshock or a sudden disruption in heartbeat that prevented the man from moving. I was willing to bet the shot to the pacemaker came first, the shot to the heart second, though it hardly mattered. He was dead either way.
“I’ll finish up, boss.” Quick broke the silence as I dropped the last bit of tissue onto my stock jar and screwed the lid on tight. I shook my head.
“I’ll help. Nothing better to do.”
I returned Sig Monson’s — that was the man’s name, a well-heeled young man whose daddy had made a fortune in real estate — vital organs to his body and stitched up the y-shaped incision that had given me access to all his secrets, including his enlarged heart that had been pierced by a snipe
r’s bullet. I put a stitch in the scalp to hold it in place where I had cut it to get at his unremarkable brain, then I took a cloth and washed the dried blood from his face and torso, hands and arms, feet and legs, finally holding him up off the table as Quick took the sprayer and hosed the table and the man’s back clean.
It always cost me something to finish up a case this way. It was a dropping of those medical examiner defenses I had learned over the years to cultivate so well, and I always felt a fresh stab of pain, displaced grief for the victim and the family, unwelcome for the hurt but the only way I knew I was still among the living. It was my nod, perfunctory though it was, to the person who had been a person before he was a body in my morgue and, like going to church, it was something I simply had to do. It fed some deep and unspoken need, though I had no clear idea what.
At length, the body was tidy. Quick and I transferred him onto the gurney, a new body bag around him and a clean toe tag with all his information in place. Quick returned the gurney in the cooler to await its transport to the funeral home in Montrose. I thanked him, washed up, and headed back upstairs, carrying the pacemaker and the free bullet with me. The autopsy was finished but just like in the Houston case, the trouble was only beginning, and I wanted a little time to get out in front of it, if only by a nose.
**********
Hunter DiManio had run into Jim Webster on the sidewalk in front of the Steaming Bean. It was a beautiful, clear Sunday morning, the town just beginning to come alive with people crossing the street in easy conversation, careless of traffic, for it always stopped for them and there wasn’t that much anyway. It was easy to tell the residents from the tourists from those who lived down valley, he thought. The residents dressed in one variation or another of faded shorts, well-worn tees and scruffy sandals, accented by a variety of tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks. The tourists were more self-conscious in matching, but oh- so-current, outfits crisp from a well-packed bag. The down valley folks were generally a bit older than the Telluride hoi-polloi, and ran more to jeans, boots and cotton shirts: ranchers, carpenters, plumbers, tradesmen.
He stepped aside as a short, white-haired woman, erect and intent on her destination, made her way down the street, eyes fastened on some distant goal, face set, mouth unsmiling. She wore rancher's denim, but clean and pressed and a straw hat, and she carried a black book with ribbons for markers in the crook of her arm. Her face was made up with dark-lined eyes and a too-red mouth, startling in contrast to her clothes and bearing.
Down valley, he thought, and tough as nails.
He watched her catch up with a tall man, slim-hipped and barrel-chested, as erect as she was. He slipped a protective arm around her as she slowed her steps, her goal obviously accomplished. They were just within earshot. He heard the man call her by name.
“Ivanka, my love!”
He smiled at that. It seemed off to hear something so extravagant from a man so very old.
Jim had come out of the Steaming Bean just then, coffee in hand, sandy hair still damp from his morning shower. He stood under the trademark oval sign and bent down to pat the head of a yellow hound someone had left outside.
“I’m heading up to the Ophir Wall to do a little easy climbing. Interested?”
He named a spot in a miniscule town, a face of rugged rock that had become a playground for local climbers. Sipping from the brown cup with the brown corrugated collar, he waited for an answer, stepping aside to let a middle-aged man pass by. Belatedly, Jim recognized the sheriff, who stopped at the side of a county SUV parked in the middle of the street opposite the Bean. He waved and the sheriff waved back, shouted a wish for good climbing and drove away. Jim turned his attention back to the man before him.
Hunter’s eager face telegraphed his enthusiasm for the invitation. Interested? Interested in a little climb with a man who’d bagged all the fourteeners by the time he was himself fourteen, who’d summitted Everest and K2 twice each? Interested in a little climb with the best-known free-solo climber in the country — maybe the world — author of books and star of documentaries? Interested in climbing with a man who hadn't let the last name he shared with the Washington luminary who was his father keep him from his dreams of mountaineering?
“Hell yes, I’m interested!”
Jim patted him on the shoulder, smiling. “Good deal. Let’s go.”
They walked together down the street to the little half-Victorian Jim had bought by violating that first rule of trust funds: never touch capital. It had a neat little patch of lawn and a bed of columbines, just starting to come into bloom. It had been a late, cold spring, but the weather was warming now. Jim was throwing a cooler in the back of the Jeep when the old woman passed them, alone again.
Jim smiled and spoke, “Nice day.”
The woman slowed her steps, paused, turned and smiled back. Her face was creased with wrinkles and browned by the sun.
She had an accent when she spoke. “Yes, it is.” Then, “What is it you are doing? So much baggage!” Her “Y” sounded like a “Ch.”
Jim laughed and tossed the gear bag and ropes onto the cooler in the back. “A nice day for a climb on the Ophir Wall.”
The woman shook her head and continued up the street, muttering, “Foolishness. So dangerous.”
They saw her climb into a dilapidated, faded red Toyota truck with the image of a deer in white on the side of the driver’s door, faded and scratched by too much time in the sun and too many encounters with the landscape. They watched it head off down the street, sending up a cloud of dust and rattling as it went. Hunter wondered aloud whether he’d ever be that old and scared.
“Not if you keep climbing. We tend to check out early.”
He climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key, and they were off. They passed the red truck on the way up to Ophir, careening into the oncoming lane on an almost-blind curve, testing their nerve and their luck as they passed the rattletrap with the ancient engine not making more than 35 miles an hour up the steep slope. Hunter saw the white head shake in disgust as they passed.
The rock was dry and the sun hadn’t topped the wall, an imposing face that stretched up to the morning sky, as close to vertical as God and climbing allowed. Only the reverberation of a contractor driving pilings down in the town marred the perfection of the morning; construction took no days off when the weather was good and there was money to be made. Ophir wasn’t a hot bed of building, though it was picking up. Hunter surmised that the only day the pile driver would be free to do some work in this tiny town was on a Sunday when all the rich folks in Mountain Village or Aldasoro or wherever would want their peace and quiet.
The rhythmic slam-slam-slam of steel against steel echoed against the rock, leaving the silence in between strokes all the more potent, making the wide space at the foot of the wall, just off the road, seem unexpectedly part of civilization when it wasn't intended to be. Here was where the very edge of nature reared itself up: a huge face of rock, crabbed and streaked with planes and angles, crevices and overhangs, a rubble of stones, large and small, piled up at its feet. Talus, geologists called it, for ankle, the ankle of the rock as it rose from the earth. Talus, because if you tried to climb it, you hoped you'd be lucky enough that only your ankle would suffer misfortune.
Hunter pulled out the gear and laid it on the soft grass on the clearing at the bottom of the wall. It was unusual that they were the only ones there: no other climbers, no other hikers, not even the invariable passerby just checking out the real estate. He heard a couple of cars pass on the road, but no one pulled in.
Business in Ophir, he guessed, maybe part of the construction crew arriving late. The crunch of tires on gravel was the only sound apart from the rhythm of the pile driver.
Jim handed Hunter an energy bar and a bottle of water. The two men chatted, leaning against the Jeep in the warming sun, swapping climbing stories for half an hour before Jim decided he had enough adulation from this third-tier climber and stood up to prepare
for his ascent. He peered up at the wall for a long minute while he stretched his hands, his shoulders, his legs, his core; Hunter could tell he was prepping the route in his mind. Hunter started to lay out the ropes, belay devices, the carabiners, the cams and hex-bolts, the harnesses and helmets as he watched. Jim's routine was impressive and methodical. By the time he was done, not even the small joints of his toes – life or death to a climber – were left untested, unattended. When he finished, Hunter tossed a spool of tape, and Jim began to wrap his hands as methodically as he had broken in his body.
“Toss me the chalk bag.”
Hunter looked up again from his unpacking to see Jim pulling on his sticky shoes. He caught the bag with one hand and powdered his hands.
“I think I’ll take a little warm-up climb.”
Hunter watched him as he ascended the nearly-sheer face of the wall, eking out holds where none was visible. His ascent was smooth, brisk, and graceful. Time magazine had described him as a human Daddy Longlegs, powerful arms reaching to improbable lengths to find a grip and strong legs to propel himself upwards. There was no reason to be taking a warm up, Hunter thought, other than to show off, but damn! The man was good.
It was almost like watching music, and Hunter wondered how long it took to develop that sense of internal coordination, so that as soon as he made one hold, he found another, three points on the rock at all times, ascending like he was a wave in the rock itself, pulsing upward. He was nearly a hundred feet up. Hunter glanced at his watch. There were people who couldn't walk down a street that fast.
In a grove of aspens, a figure aligned eye and scope, watching the man on the face of the rock, tracking his progress until it was easy to anticipate his moves. He had a pattern, a preference, so characteristic that it gave his climb an even, rocking quality as he arced from side to side in his climb. It would be enough to be close. The fall would kill him.
Still, the shooter was confident. Listening to the pile driver, counting in time, watching the climber. Patience. Patience. One more cycle, across, back. The finger that caressed the trigger was skillful, and it pulled twice. The cracks of the rifle were drowned by the sounds of construction.
Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1) Page 9