I looked around. The base of the wall was a large clearing, with a couple of exposed rocks, but not much in the way of cover, except for a couple of scattered stands of aspens. They’d fit the bill, but which one was the likely spot?
“The other climber didn't see anyone, or so he says. In my mind, that means he’s the most likely suspect in the shooting.” Patterson glanced around, too, and it was clear his assessment of the situation was much the same as mine.
“It’s always hard to tell,” I continued, “but if I were a betting woman, I’d put money on this being a .22 rifle. That means we’re probably talking about something within 300 feet, give or take, of impact, even if our shooter is an expert — and my guess is that he is.”
Three deaths in as many days from .22 bullets. So much for the folklore that a .22 wasn't lethal for anything bigger than a rabbit.
“Maybe a little more than that if he was good enough to account for drop — the shot had to be into the air. Dimanio — that’s the other guy — says Webster was up nearly 100 feet. I've got him locked in the back. You can ask him where.”
Patterson strode back to the SUV, unlocked the back, and hauled out an obviously shaken man. He stumbled to get his footing. When he looked up at me, his dishwater blond hair was disheveled and his blue eyes red and bloodshot. They were still bright with tears. He walked unsteadily alongside Patterson, who made a cursory introduction to Norman and me when he reached us. I shook his hand; the palm was sweaty. Norman nodded. I noted again his intrinsic dislike of shaking hands, something he told me was a result of his upbringing. One of these days I would have to ask him why.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This has to be rough for you.” Without waiting for acknowledgement, and not wanting to establish anything other than a professional interest, I hurried on. “Can you point out where Mr. Webster was on the wall when he fell?”
Dimanio looked determinedly at the ground, shaking his head, his breathing ragged. He took a gulp of air, looked up and perused the wall. He didn’t hide his feelings well; from the play of expressions on his face, he was reliving the moment in detail. It took a while, but he proved to be of sterner stuff than I thought when he stumbled out of the SUV. At length, tanned and unlined face set, biting his upper lip, he pointed upward to the left of a large cleft that soared upward from the base of the wall.
“There. Just under that little overhang.”
Norman took his rangefinder out of his pocket and played it on the site Dimanio indicated. Then he walked over to the M.E. van, opened the back and fired up his laptop. A few minutes later, he emerged with another sketch and an estimated distance for the shooter. Sure enough, off to the left, at 280 feet, more or less, was a copse of aspen trees.
The Pythagorean Theorem is a beautiful thing, I thought as I surveyed it. In the morning light, without reason to look, it would have easily obscured a murderer. We'd at least found the proper haystack — now to look for the needle.
Patterson and I paced off the distance in silence, Dimanio having been returned to the locked rear of the SUV for the time being and Norman busy in the back of the van preparing to work the scene. We stood by the trees looking up at the wall.
“Damn fine shot,” Patterson said grudgingly. “He’d have been a moving target. It means the murderer was pretty confident.”
“I guess. He was working without ropes—maybe the shooter was just trying to scare him and make him fall. I know it wouldn’t take much to get me to let go up there.”
Patterson turned with a grin, the first good humor I had seen from him.
“That’s because you aren't one of these idiot climbers. These boys have no nerves. They start climbing and all they think about is that rock. Good thing if you want to live to make another climb.”
Then, realizing he’d committed a Telluride faux pas in referring to the climbers in the masculine, added, “Women too.”
“Did Dimanio hear a shot?” I asked. The corpse wasn’t very far from the spot where he said he had been laying out gear.
“Says not.” Patterson cocked his head toward town. “Says that there was some construction noise going on. I can vouch for that. They were already at it this morning when I got here to check out a burglary in town. Noisy. Would have covered anything else.”
It struck me as odd that Tom had been out on a burglary, but maybe he was short-handed. Anyway, it was good luck for us, confirmation of one piece of the puzzle. He removed his hat, wiped his brow with his forearm and replaced it.
“Better be off. Let me know what you find.”
He turned abruptly on his heel, passing Norman as he headed up laden with metal detector, bags, brushes and assorted other implements of scene processing.
Three hours later, as the fading light made it hard to see much of anything on the valley floor, we packed it in, shoving three dozen labeled evidence bags into the locker and tallying the scene photos at over a hundred. Most of them would be worthless. We hadn’t found what we wanted. Either the shooter had policed the area well or we were just plain unlucky — no shell casings, and nothing particularly indicative of human occupation, recent or otherwise. Norman slammed the rear door closed, and we headed back to Telluride in the gathering twilight.
**********
Ben Wallace stepped off the gondola station near the market, enjoying the bright sunlight and glad to see a crowd of people milling around. There had been a big turnout at Mass, but the town of Telluride seemed almost deserted. He was surprised at how fast so many people could disappear from sight; he guessed they all came up here.
The market was almost as crowded as the gondola station. As he threaded his way through the aisles in search of something for dinner, he caught snatches of conversation.
“Right in the heart. He was shot right in the heart.”
“I heard his girlfriend felt the bullet come by.”
“It’s a vet, gotta be a war vet with PTSD. Damn military.”
“They have a kid. A two-year-old. He was in the park, can you imagine?”
“They say Bedsheet saw him running away.”
All of it was spoken in hushed, conspiratorial voices, but Ben recognized the fear in them. He thought about the girlfriend and remembered the day his mother had come into his room—he was packing for a weekend trip to Tech, to try out the dorms when it happened—to tell him about his dad’s death. Hard to believe it had been almost five years. It still hurt.
“There she is!”
Ben looked around in the general vicinity of the voice, then cast about for the “she” in question. It wasn’t hard to pick her out: brown hair matted, twisted into a knot and clipped indifferently on the back of her head, brown eyes vacant and red-rimmed, no makeup, staring absently at the contents of a freezer as though she had forgotten why she was there in the first place. He saw people duck and shake their heads, drop their voices to a whisper and skirt around her, afraid to say anything. He remembered how that felt. Even his friends had disappeared. He’d asked them later why, and the response was the same voiceless answer, a shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulder.
She was standing in front of the pizzas. Ben walked up quietly and stood next to her, regarding the choices, waiting for her to glance over. Eventually she did, her sad eyes catching his for only an instant before she turned them back to the pizzas.
“Too many choices,” Ben said. “Thin, thick, organic, full of chemicals, veggie, meat, white, red.”
She glanced back and tried a smile.
Ben cocked his head. “It’s hard to decide. It’s really hard to decide when you feel so bad.”
The brown eyes widened.
“My dad was murdered a few years ago. It was months before I could even pick out the clothes I wanted to wear. Pizza was way beyond me.”
It was a shading of the truth. It was months before his mom could function. The kid left at home, he’d had no choice but to keep it together, for her and for his dad.
“Yeah.” The voice was small and
shaky. Ben put his arm around the girl, who stiffened for an instant, then turned toward him for an honest-to-God hug.
“I’m sorry,” he said and then went quiet.
He held her quietly until he felt her pull away. His shirt was damp, but she almost had a smile on her face. She opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again. He remembered that, too, how words wouldn’t come. He opened the freezer and took out a couple of pies, handing one to her.
“This is a good one for kids. Lots of goo. Lots of chemicals. Not very healthy. He’ll like it, especially now.”
“She.”
So much for eavesdropping.
“She’ll like it then. The box is pretty. Let’s go. My treat.”
The two of them headed for the exit, Ben grabbing a six-pack, a bottle of milk and a bag of cookies on the way, juggling them as he ran interference for the woman. He paid for the groceries, loaded them in two ecologically insensitive plastic bags, and held the door for the woman.
“Where to?”
She took in a big, shuddering breath and let it out in a deep sigh, blinking in the sunlight, then named a time-share in the center of Mountain Village. They got in line for the gondola, waiting in silence, Ben a protective presence that dispelled curious stares and thoughtless conversation. He didn’t notice the couple in line a few people ahead of him until he saw them step into a gondola, waving the others away and taking the car for themselves in a serious breach of summer, long-line etiquette. The woman was small and blond, the man massive with a curly brown beard and dressed in unfamiliar jeans and a cambric shirt. Ben stared, unsettled, a sense of foreboding and confusion making him forget for a moment the woman he’d taken under his wing.
What on earth was Father Matt doing up here with Marla Kincaid?
CHAPTER NINE
JUNE 8, EVENING
When I opened the door of the house, the smell of sausage pizza greeted me. Ben hollered a greeting from the kitchen as Caleb, my grizzled, drooling bloodhound, loped into the hall to greet me, followed by Zeke, my daughter's poodle-mutt I inherited when my daughter went to college, dancing on his hind legs. My two cats slinked up the stairway to avoid the ruckus, pausing halfway up to look at me with disdain for my traitorous affection to the dogs.
Ben was cutting the pizza when I entered the kitchen, dropping my bag on the desk in the corner. I washed my hands at the sink, crossing the kitchen to drop the towel I used into a hamper in the laundry room before sitting down at the center island where Ben was just pouring my beer. I'd never been able to break myself of washing hands in the sink, but years as an ME had at least made me careful not to re-use a towel once I did.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said.
When I had called ahead Ben had been a little irritated, a combination, I thought, of his enthusiasm for his findings, and the fact that he, like his maternal grandmother, generally had his day planned down to the minute and disliked any disruption of his schedule.
“It took a long time to process the scene, and we didn't find much,” I took a bite of pizza, pre-fab, bake it yourself take-out from the market in Mountain Village. It was perfect, crisp, savory and just cool enough not to sear the roof of my mouth.
“Ahem,” Ben said, reminding me of my manners.
I put down the slice, we graced the dinner, and I listened as he explained what he had found.
“I went through all the files we have. I’m in the process of getting all the photos I can, never know what you’ll find. Especially since there’s this.”
He shoved a five-by-seven glossy of a wrecked Hummer.
I’m not much of a car buff, and it looked like any of the other Hummers in the area, except that this one was an outrageous orange, and had landed in the San Miguel River after a seventy- foot fall. The front was mangled, the front seats shoved up and protruding from the open top. Ben pointed to a spot on the passenger seat in a blow up of the first photo. I took off my glasses, habit of the presbyopic and nearsighted who want to see clearly, up close. There was a tiny dark mark, with a hint of white in its center. I looked up expectantly.
“I think it might be a bullet hole,” he said.
I considered the photo again. Ben was reaching, but he might be right. I remembered the case; it had been only a couple of weeks ago. At sunset, for no apparent reason, a car had driven off the road and into the river, at one of the few points along the way where there is no guard rail to prevent it, right where three large boulders had crashed into the river, the so-called Three Kings, in a mudslide several years before. The weather was clear, the sun was behind the car, not in front; and the driver of the car behind had given a statement that there was no reason to think the victim of the crash—there had been only one occupant — had been drinking, inattentive or speeding. One minute he was fine, the next, driving off the road.
A bullet through the windshield might just cause the driver to instinctively jerk the wheel. There was certainly lots of accumulated evidence to indicate that sudden projectiles of any kind through a windshield had deleterious effects on drivers, even on the safest of roads. That part of the shelf road into Telluride, high above the river, was anything but that. I put the photo down.
“We need to check to see whether the car is still in impound.” The idea made sense, but it wasn't certain. Patterson would need proof.
“Done. It’s there. Lucy and I will go over to Montrose tomorrow. It’s in the wrecker yard there.”
I wasn't surprised he’d elected to ask Lucy Cho rather than Norman to accompany him to Montrose. Lucy was tiny, friendly and just Ben’s type, though I personally thought that she was out of his league.
He’d always been one step ahead of me, something that had made raising Ben a bit of a trial. This time, however, it proved to my advantage. I took another bite of pizza, washed it down with beer. Simple pleasures after a tough day. I looked over at my rusty-haired son, glad that he was there with me, aching for a mother back East who wouldn't have that pleasure again. He was deep in pizza and looked at me quizzically. “What?”
“Nothing. What about the explosion?”
“Not much to tell. The report said that it was a gas leak, but that's not certain. I did some research online. You might be able to explode a propane tank by shooting it.” He grinned. “There are some awesome videos on YouTube. Problem is that most of them show people heating up the tank first. I'm not sure if that's necessary. If it is, I guess it means that the shooting theory is out.”
“Was the tank even accessible? Most people bury their tanks these days. And how the hell did he get propane up Gold King anyway?”
I was constantly amazed at how far out people were prepared to live around here, and in spite of that, how many comforts of home they had.
“Gotta check,” Ben replied around a mouthful of pizza. “And if they can bring ranch trucks up Silver Pick, they can bring up a propane truck. I'm going to check out what the cabin looked like with the realtor that sold it. Didn’t have time this afternoon.”
I nodded, smiling, impressed with my son’s natural investigational abilities. On reflection, I supposed that tracking down IT issues and tracking down forensic evidence might not be so different after all. I reached for another slice of pizza, and we finished dinner in a companionable silence, shuffling papers back and forth, poking at lines of text or details of photos and newspaper articles. Caleb and Zeke sat alongside looking patiently and hopefully from one to the other for a handout of leftover crusts. Pizza bones, my oldest, Adam, had always called them. I was rewarding them with just such a handout when the doorbell rang.
“I'll get it,” said Ben, bolting for the door. He went so fast, it made me wonder whether he had some clandestine appointment he didn’t want me to know about.
Apparently not. He came back into the kitchen with a grin on his face.
“You’ve got company, Mom. A lot of it.”
He stood aside to let me pass, then followed me into the spacious front hall in which waited Father Matt,
accompanied by a confused looking Isa and her dark-haired boy, two other women behind her, with two other children in tow, and a man I’d never met before, tall, and in his early sixties, but as muscular and fit as a much younger man. He had a face that was appealing now, but would have been brash and unfinished in his youth, before time silvered his hair and softened his edges. I found myself staring at him in a way that my Southern mother would have reproved. I shook my head, then nodded to the ones I knew and welcomed them.
“Father Matt, Isa, Pablo.”
I glanced at the others standing behind Isa. One was a woman about Isa’s age, blond-haired and blue-eyed, with two children, a boy about three and a girl of perhaps five, both brown-haired with wide brown eyes. The other was a woman who looked to be about fifty, erect, matronly, with graying black hair pulled into a bun and an ample bosom. Father Matt sensed my confusion and filled me in.
“These are Isa’s friends, Pilar,” the gray-haired woman nodded slightly, “and Lupe, and her children, Ignacio and Mariela.”
He started to say more, but I cut him off and turned to the stranger.
“I don't believe I know you?” I extended a hand, but the answer came from behind him, from Ben.
“Mom, where have you been? That’s Eoin Connor. The writer.”
I recognized the face now from a display in the bookstore in the middle of town. Eoin. I hadn’t known how to say it, but Ben pronounced it Owen. Another of Telluride’s transient stars, I thought, who’d probably last only as long as he got top billing in the window. I wondered if the spelling was his given name or a literary affectation. A firm hand took mine, but the face turned to Ben and he winked with a familiarity that told me this was not the first time my son had met this man.
“That’s me. Eoin Connor. I was looking to find your mother in town, and the good Father there was kind enough to point me the way.”
Awkward silence again. Now I at least knew all the folk in my foyer, but I had no idea what brought them around at nearly ten at night. There was nothing for it but to ask. I smiled at Connor, and excused myself to turn to face Father Matt. His face, at least as much as I could see behind his unruly beard, had a cat-and-canary quality to it.
Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1) Page 11