In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “I can see that.”

  “I’ve already asked Vince Wynn but he’s not on such good terms with Gale.”

  The gardener turned away and went back to the struggle with the root.

  “I shouldn’t be loafing,” he said.

  Was it the mention of Wynn? Walt wondered. Or had the man received a second signal from within the house?

  “Nice talking to you,” Walt said.

  “I’ll ask if I can,” the gardener told the dug-up flower bed.

  “I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” Walt said, “but I was told water stops tap roots. You put the offending tree on an island and that’s the end of it.”

  The gardener lifted his head and eyed the only stand of aspen, in rough grass between the lawn and the driveway.

  “I might be able to work with that,” he said.

  “Just a thought,” Walt said. But his mind had made a leap to Boatwright and Wynn and the dead man, Gale. Like the trees, if he and Boldt could keep the men from extending their reach to their handlers and attorneys, maybe they’d have half a chance to get some piece of the truth out of them. The secret might be to isolate them, but Walt had no idea how to go about that, given e-mails and cell phones, and the intricacies of both men’s businesses. Unless he could find a way to turn one against the other. One of the two must at least have heard from Gale, whether or not they had a connection to the man’s death. Given Boatwright’s reliance on a team of personal secretaries, there might even be a paper trail to follow.

  He walked the grounds wondering if Gale had done the same some night after being refused an audience with Boatwright, wondering if that was what had happened to Wynn the night the agent had fired his gun into the dark.

  Boldt climbed into the Jeep forty minutes later and Walt started up the motor and drove off the property.

  “Everyone has secrets,” Boldt finally muttered. “But this guy. What a piece of work. My guess is he’s got a couple vaults full of them.”

  “It went that well, did it?”

  “Treated me like I was the water boy.”

  “Is there a connection to Caroline Vetta?”

  “He knows a heck of a lot more than he’s telling,” Boldt said, “that’s for sure. But he’s done so many deals for so many years, has told so many lies, that he’s an expert. Or maybe he’s so old he believes them.”

  “Are you done with him?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Any chance you’ll subpoena his personal calendar?”

  “Gale?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Walt admitted. “I’m told the secretaries run his life, manage every minute of his time. Surround him.”

  “It may very well come to that,” Boldt said.

  Boldt lowered the window and put his hand outside, his fingers outstretched in the wind.

  Beatrice sat up and nosed the back window, and Walt put his window down as well.

  Boldt raised his voice over the wind. “I subpoena someone like that and it’ll be a lot of court time before it’s finally ruled upon and I’ll only be refused. Everyone’s a football fan, including judges.”

  “But we both want, both need, the same thing: his personal calendar. So if I could find a way to get a look at his book, you’d benefit too. I’d make sure of that.”

  “Have you got an angle?”

  “No. Not yet. But maybe Wynn will give me one-give you one. If he can connect Gale to Boatwright… Well, one of the judges here, he’s the home plate umpire for our softball league.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of oil?” Boldt asked.

  “Hates football,” Walt said.

  Beatrice barked into the wind.

  For a moment, Walt thought it might have been Boldt.

  18

  Despite the three full face-lifts, Marty Boatwright’s neck flesh flapped like a luffing sail as he dialed out on his mobile phone. A tall man with flinty eyes and a cleft chin, he’d been mistaken for a Douglas most of his adult life, first Kirk and then Michael. It had been explained to him by one of his lawyers that mobile phones were digitally encrypted and therefore impossible to casually eavesdrop upon, and though the government could monitor any conversation on any phone, stiff warrant requirements meant mobile phones were the safest from unwanted ears. So this call was made mobile to mobile.

  “It’s me,” he said, as Vince Wynn answered.

  “Hey, Marty.”

  “That cop was just here.”

  “Coming here next.”

  “I didn’t tell him shit. Let my boys do the talking.”

  “Okay.”

  “They don’t know shit about her. Nothing but a fishing trip as far as I can tell. Seems like they think it was all sex and power whoring and how maybe there were fees involved. Means she must have deposited the money. Can you believe that? What kind of dumb shit would bank the money?”

  “Caroline-”

  “No names, you asshole!”

  “-may have been a lot of things, but she was not dumb.”

  “You’ll be scratching that on a cell wall you don’t get your act together.”

  “I’m fine, Marty.”

  “We both know what this is about.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And whatever happened to her… She… We talked about this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it doesn’t have to involve us. Doesn’t involve us.”

  “No. That’s right.”

  “So keep it that way.”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s clever, this cop. Looks big and thick but he’s anything but. He’s more Howie Long than Lyle Alzado.”

  “Got it.”

  “Consider your answers carefully, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’m good, Marty.”

  “If you’re so good, what the hell were you doing shooting your gun off the other night?”

  Silence.

  “You thought I wouldn’t hear about that? The whole town’s heard about that. What kind of a dumbass thing-”

  “It was a personal security matter, Marty. A disgruntled former player. They were warning shots is all.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Keep the damn gun in the closet, asshole. We don’t need any more attention than we’ve already got. This thing… her… People are going to jail for this shit. Jail, I’m talking about.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Not me. You hear me? Not me!”

  “So noted.”

  “Stick to one-word answers. Don’t get creative. That mouth of yours. And you’re under no obligation to-”

  “Stu’s here,” Wynn said. “He’ll do all the talking.”

  “Stu? Well, tell him hello for me.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Be careful with this guy, for your own sake.”

  “I will be. I negotiate for a living, Marty. No one ever knows what the hell I’m thinking.”

  Marty Boatwright coughed out a laugh. Half his lung came up. Once it started he couldn’t stop it. He shut down the call without signing off and sank into his desk chair and weathered the storm of old age, his eyes and nose running, the Depends warming at his crotch.

  Prison. No way.

  19

  “This isn’t charity,” Boldt stated as Walt pulled the Jeep up to the wrought iron gate blocking Vince Wynn’s driveway. Walt rolled down his window and announced himself to a speaker key code box.

  “Far from it,” he said.

  “You’d like in on this interview. That’s why the escort.”

  “Not entirely true,” Walt said. “I’m interested in Wynn for Gale. Absolutely. He threatened the man to my face. And I’m curious as to how he reacts to your questioning about Vetta. Absolutely.”

  “I don’t see a guy like Vince Wynn dumping a body alongside a highway, especially not the busiest road you’ve got. Th
e bottom of a construction site maybe, but more likely he’d drive him, or more likely pay someone to drive him, a long way into the wilderness and leave him for the scavengers.”

  “Agreed. But I can see him clubbing him from behind. Wynn’s too smart to take on a guy like Gale face-to-face. You hit him when his back’s turned. You make sure he’s not getting backup.”

  “He could have been jacked, Sheriff. We talked about this. Lured out of the vehicle maybe. Struck from behind. It’s more and more difficult to see it otherwise. We’ve got to find that SUV.”

  Gale’s missing SUV, a rental from Avis, had been the topic of much discussion. City and sheriff patrols were searching parking lots, motels, and campgrounds. State police had been notified and a BOLO-a Be On Lookout-had been issued in the six-state region surrounding Idaho. Walt had hoped for results by now and, along with Boldt, secretly feared they’d lost the vehicle for good.

  “You think it was staged to look like a carjacking,” Boldt said.

  “I think guys like Wynn know what guys like us expect to see. An agent at his level, he’s all about selling an impression of something that maybe isn’t true, maybe isn’t all it’s made out to be.”

  “So he gives us what we want. I’d buy that.”

  “Plays into our comfort zone.”

  “A carjacking gone wrong,” Boldt said, nodding.

  “It’s all after the fact,” Walt said. “He’s all boozed up and he does the guy and then has to backfill. But a guy like that reads the paper up here. He knows what kind of crime we see and how often we see it. We had a carjacking not six months ago where a man was struck with a tire iron while changing a tire. Wasn’t exactly like Gale, but close enough. The doer finished changing the tire and drove off in the car, having no idea the driver had already alerted OnStar. We were given GPS coordinates and had the guy in custody within the hour.”

  “And the body?”

  “Stuffed into a culvert twenty feet from the car. Wynn could easily have read about it and pulled a copycat.”

  Boldt said, “If he’s the killing type.”

  The gate opened electronically and Walt drove through, parking by a basketball backboard.

  “Which is what we’ve come here to find out.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “If Caroline Vetta got him started, broke his cherry, then doing Gale wouldn’t have mattered much to him.”

  A wry smile overcame Boldt. “You and Matthews would like each other,” he said. He took a long look at the house and Walt thought he was using it as his introduction to Wynn. “You’re welcome to join me if you’d like.”

  “I’d just confuse things,” Walt said. “Only two can dance at a time. I’ll leave the advance work up to you. Maybe we’ll pull a Columbo on him and double-team him after you’re done, hit him with Gale five minutes after he’s done fending off Vetta.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Boldt climbed out. “You want to take off, I could call you. I hate to take up your time.”

  “No worries. I’m going to put it to good use.”

  The closest neighbors had a sport court behind the house that integrated tennis, basketball, volleyball, and a backboard onto a single slab of asphalt. Walt crossed it and an apron of green grass to reach a single-story adobe house with four wings running in an X from a central living area, the back of which was a twenty-foot-high wall of tinted glass that faced the ski mountain. He found the front door at the apex of a horseshoe driveway that housed what appeared to be a centuries-old pagoda through which the same stream that passed through Wynn’s estate gurgled in and among an Asian rock garden.

  The woman who answered the door could have been going on sixty but looked more like forty, and showed no signs of work having been done. She was all yoga and juice drinks and acupuncture, wearing stonewashed blue jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt. There was no hiding her surprise at discovering a uniformed sheriff at her front door.

  “Hello?”

  Walt introduced himself by rank.

  “Gwen Walters. I know your face from the papers,” she said. “I voted for you!”

  Walt thanked her. He got that a lot, but wondered how often it was true.

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you have a minute?”

  “Of course.” She motioned him inside. “Tea? Juice?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Sunlight flooded the living room. The outside patio was about the size of Walt’s city lot. They took seats at a teak table in padded chairs covered in Sunbrella fabric.

  “Vince Wynn,” Walt said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought as much.” She squinted, and squirmed uncomfortably in the chair. “The shooting?”

  “Yes. Among other things.”

  “I’m not a gossip, Sheriff. And I respect my neighbors’ privacy. It’s important to all of us.”

  “I agree.”

  “Vince is something of a celebrity in his own right.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Though my husband calls all agents bloodsuckers. He’s in the film business, my husband. Not that you’d know him. An effects director.”

  “Mr. Wynn claimed he had a trespasser. The other night? The shooting?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.

  “The shooting or the trespasser.”

  “I didn’t see anyone.” She looked off into the sky, then back at Walt, still squinting, now choosing her words carefully. “Vince is very… social. I suppose in his business one needs to entertain a great deal.”

  “It’s busy up there,” Walt said.

  “It is.”

  “At all hours.”

  “Yes. All hours. A lot of… partying.”

  “Men guests? Women guests?”

  “Guests. Many guests.”

  “The gun incident. Was that a first?”

  “Vince… How do I put this? The entertaining can go quite late. Can get… I think he enjoys a party as much as the next person. Sometimes it gets a little rowdy, a little late and a lot loud. And if I had to guess, I’d say Vince doesn’t have the best control of his temper.”

  “Hot-headed.”

  “I’m painting the wrong picture.”

  “Fights?”

  “Shouting. Arguments. But they could be phone calls for all I know. He seems to be on the phone more than he’s off, and he likes to take calls outside, I’ve noticed. And his work is confrontational by nature, isn’t it? All that dealing. And the sums! Mark, my husband, keeps up on all of it. A sports fan. Loves living next to Vince. But my God, some of the numbers.”

  “Arguments,” Walt said.

  “He can be loud,” she said.

  “Drugs?”

  She squinted, looked pained to speak.

  “Have you seen drug use in the home?”

  She hesitated and finally nodded. Walt felt a jolt of adrenaline-if he could get her to say it, he had probable cause to search Wynn’s home.

  “Is that a yes?”

  She nodded again.

  “I need a verbal answer.”

  “He’s my neighbor.”

  “He lives a matter of yards from your kids,” he said, keeping in mind the sports court.

  She tilted her head and looked at him curiously.

  “The basketball court. I’m assuming-”

  “Teenagers. Two boys and a girl.”

  “A neighbor like that doesn’t make for the best role model,” Walt said.

  “Don’t patronize me, Sheriff.”

  He was losing her. He’d been so close.

  “Does he… interact with them at all?”

  “He’s great with the boys. Gets them autographed balls and things. But Vince is… proud of his working out. Likes to go around barechested. Personally, it kind of grosses me out, and I don’t love for my daughter to see that.”

  “The night of the gunshots?”

  “I called nine-one-one, if that’s what you’re after, yes. Or maybe you already know that.” She studied him th
oughtfully and won nothing back. “It scared the devil out of me and Mark. The drinking. Gunshots. I mean, we’re not very far away.”

  “The drug use.” Walt made it a statement.

  Gwen Walters seemed ready to say something, but didn’t.

  Walt fumbled with his shirt pocket and produced a photo of Gale and laid it on the table.

  “Have you seen him before?”

  She shook her head. “I have to say he looks vaguely familiar, but no, I can’t say I know him.”

  “A guest of Mr. Wynn’s? Familiar from that?”

  Another shake of the head. “I couldn’t say for sure. There are so many.”

  “But recently?”

  “No, not recently.”

  “How about her?” Walt said, following this with a copy of a newspaper photograph of Caroline Vetta.

  The woman had been mid-sip of some iced tea when she froze in that position, her eyes trained onto the photo. She placed the glass down, looked at Walt, and then back to the photograph. “I couldn’t say,” she repeated far less confidently.

  “She visited Mr. Wynn?”

  “I couldn’t say,” she said yet again. “There are… Vince has a lot of friends. Many of them are women.”

  “But she looks familiar to you,” Walt said.

  “Is it Caroline?” the woman asked.

  “It is.” Walt worked to keep any reaction off his face, while inside he’d gone electric. First-name basis.

  “Different hair when we knew her. It changes her face dramatically.”

  “You knew her as an acquaintance of Mr. Wynn’s?”

  “She came here often for a while. Last year, this was. Ended around Christmas, I think. We heard about what happened to her. Poor thing. She was a sweet girl. Pretty as a picture.”

  “How would you define their relationship? Warm? Hostile?”

  “Same as any other, I suppose. On again, off again.” A light filled her eyes. “You don’t think…?”

  Walt kept any reaction off his face.

  “Vince?” She bordered on outrage.

  “What do you think? Is it possible?”

  “We had them down to dinner. Barbecues. Vince was always so entertaining. The stories he has.”

  “And Caroline?”

  “Caroline was good with men. Flirtatious. Attractive.”