In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Okay.”

  He signed off and holstered the BlackBerry and followed the sound of Beatrice up ahead of him. She was focused and determined, and it was her level of concentration that returned him to the task at hand. Swallowed in the darkness of a thick conifer forest, navigating more on instinct than vision, led by the sounds from a dog he had come to trust and depend upon, he drove himself on, half-blind, half-terrified, determined to push Fiona from his mind, but finding it impossible. Higher and higher they climbed, Beatrice leading him along a meandering game trail. They were moving quickly, Walt light on his feet and nearly silent, and he wondered if they weren’t closing the gap on Menquez’s killer. The man might or might not know Walt was in pursuit; might or might not be experiencing remorse over killing Menquez. Walt imagined him justifying taking the baseball bat to the head of Martel Gale. But strangling a Forest Service ranger, whether panicked or not, had to weigh differently. Walt imagined him desperate, irrational, and in search of some way out of his actions. He didn’t picture the man a lunatic despite his having jumped through a window at the Casino. The break-in at the Berkholders’ had been cleverly planned and disguised as the work of a bear; that wasn’t the mark of a lunatic.

  He and Beatrice were really moving now, Walt at a near run, Beatrice stopping ahead, waiting, and then bolting on. When Beatrice allowed him to catch up, her body craning forward over her front paws and every inch trembling, he knew they were close. He patted her head and chest and thrust his palm out marking her to stay. Worked forward through some underbrush as quietly as any man or animal could move. Believed himself invisible, faster and more capable than his adversary, no matter how much the person considered himself a mountain man. This, right now, was Walt’s domain, a place where he thrived, a place with which he identified and drew upon for his own identity. Leave the conference rooms and the relationships to others; give him the pitch-black forest and the motivation of a killer on the loose.

  By the time he got a look at the meadow, it was empty. The BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it and it stopped. Starlight gave the grassy field a blue hue, its abandoned campsite like a scar in the distance. Walt reached through the chokecherry, taking hold of a clump of field grass, the ripened seeds falling away; seeds he’d recovered from Gilly’s pants cuff. The cheat grass played out in the driest portions of the meadow in oblong shapes: kidney beans and a hook nose. Walt broke out and entered the meadow but stayed low and held to the boundary of where the forest formed a wall of shadow.

  He clicked his tongue once and Beatrice came padding up behind him faster than he could have expected. A single hand motion, and she heeled. Given his angle, Walt was able to look behind, struck by a darker swath in the still sea of grass: a person, alone, moving from very near where Walt had crouched and in the direction of the abandoned lean-to and campfire. He stayed perfectly still as his eye sought other anomalies. He easily spotted the beaten-down path used by the occasional hiker, the path he and others had used to approach the campsite. He could imagine Gilly there now, having picked up on some markers in the woods, following expeditiously, the way of any tracker. Excited. Driven forward with purpose. Given the line leading that direction, he pictured Menquez’s killer somewhere up near the lean-to, or by now well beyond, following the trail that led up and over the ridge and into Greenhorn Gulch.

  Walt caught the flicker of headlights through the trees below and to his right. The ambulance, he thought. He faced a choice of trying to start Beatrice on the scent again or heading out on the same trail on which he and Brandon had followed the amorous backpackers. He tried to think like his adversary, or if not think, react like him. What would the headlights mean to him? Danger, or curiosity?

  The man had revealed himself as brazen, staying at least some of the time in a tree house within a matter of yards from two women. Did his clubbing Martel Gale suggest an attachment to Fiona? Had Walt perhaps been in store for the same outcome when Kira had interrupted his peering inside the cottage windows? Would the arrival of headlights arouse curiosity? Could the killer resist the gravitational pull to see if his kill had been discovered, and if so, the reaction?

  Walt resorted to what had gotten him here, to the one thing he could trust. He pulled the tissue from his breast pocket, placed it for Beatrice to sniff, and commanded once again, “Find it.”

  49

  “You can’t go up there!” Fiona called out as the ambulance driver put his foot on the ladder’s first rung.

  “Excuse me?” the man said.

  The man’s partner, the medic, approached from the far side of the ambulance. “Lady, we’ve got a shift change in forty-five minutes. We’ve been on twelve hours. We’ve been instructed to do a job here and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere.”

  “To recover a body,” she said, an educated guess on her part. Walt had said his people were on their way. He’d warned her to stay put. But she had to know. Given the ambulance had arrived under no siren or lights, given that Walt had left the area immediately after coming out of the tree house-for she’d watched the whole thing-added up to the obvious.

  “And you are?” the ambulance driver inquired.

  The medic was new, or he’d have recognized her. “Me?” About to give her name, she revised her answer. “Crime scene photographer. You can’t go in there until I’m through, and I haven’t started.”

  “You can identify yourself?”

  “Wait here,” she said to the medic. “Don’t move,” she instructed the driver at the base of the ladder.

  Stall, she thought. She returned with her camera bag and her wallet, displaying her sheriff’s office ID.

  “You want to take some pictures, go ahead and take them. But you’ve got five minutes.”

  “More like a half hour,” she said.

  “I told you, we got a shift change in forty,” he said. “Listen, if this was a big deal the place would be lousy with deputies-am I right? It’s a body bagger, that’s all. We got the call, we do the job.”

  “And I’ve got to do mine.”

  “And I’m giving you five minutes. Four, now that we’ve used one jawing it to death. Hold up,” he called out to his buddy. The driver stepped away from the ladder.

  Fiona slung the camera bag over her shoulder, walked to the ladder, and climbed.

  With each rung she feared what she might find.

  50

  With the advent of a siren coming closer, but still far in the distance, Walt’s blood pressure rose. He had specifically ordered otherwise, and it was only as the siren passed and faded to the north that he realized the cruiser was on another call. Beatrice loaded herself with cheat grass as she spun her loops in the meadow, snorting and hurrying to pick up the lost scent, Walt looking on from a distance, not crowding her, but prepared to follow. As he looked up, he saw thousands of acres of national forest, acres that by now the mountain man knew well, had exploited for the past few months. It gave the man a decided advantage, whereas Beatrice provided Walt a counterpunch.

  Hindsight was nobody’s friend, least of all his. He could see now the unspoken pressure he’d put on Gilly Menquez to deliver; he would have to live with the outcome, while Gilly would not. Could begin to see how he’d allowed the evidence to form unwarranted suspicions, wondering how much of his own feelings had colored those suspicions. Standing alone in the meadow, he felt an urge to cry out, a need to beg forgiveness, though from whom he couldn’t be sure.

  He withdrew his BlackBerry and checked the missed call. Dispatch. He double-checked his radio; still not working even with the added elevation. He called in, his temper getting the better of him.

  “Emergency Services,” answered the outwardly calm woman’s voice.

  “It’s Fleming. Where’s the backup?”

  “We have an ambulance on site, Sheriff. As to the patrols… It appears all but Huxley rolled to Carey on that drowning. Huxley was the other side of Galena. He’s on his way south to
your twenty.”

  Budgetary concerns had lowered his swing shift to six officers in four cruisers. He cursed the commissioners for pulling the dollars out from under him, and his own deputies and dispatch for allowing a patrol void to occur. It wasn’t the first time a group of bored deputies had bunched up.

  Walt’s office rang the Ketchum Police Department as well. “Ketchum?”

  “Four-car pileup with fire and injury at the saddle intersection. Two patrols on site. We need your ambulance up there A-SAP. I called them off just now.”

  Walt hadn’t seen the headlights leaving, his attention on Beatrice. “I need backup, Gloria.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I need those areas blocked and searched as we discussed. This is a homicide suspect, Goddamn it,” he flared, revealing a rare display of emotion. “I want every on-call deputy up here. I want anyone and everyone we’ve got, right now. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “Copy that. Initiating the call tree.”

  It was a not-too-subtle stab at Walt by a very alert dispatcher. Gloria knew her stuff and he’d been wrong to dress her down. All that had been required of him was to order the call tree instigated. His outburst hadn’t helped anyone.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  It caught her off guard.

  “No problem, Sheriff.”

  “Make it happen,” he couldn’t help adding. He disconnected the call.

  His flashlight followed Beatrice’s apparent random looping as she began to define the pattern and Walt knew to move in her general direction. However her olfactory process worked, it eventually led to a smaller, tighter pattern from which she shot out in a straight line, suddenly fixed on the scent. That moment quickly approached, and as she got a faceful of the trail left by the killer, she looked back to make sure Walt was paying attention. She actually looked proud of him as she found him coming up behind her and she tore excitedly to the edge of the meadow, looked back once more, and dropped out of sight. For a moment Walt lost his equilibrium: when he’d last seen her, she’d been nose to the ground, aimed back down the hill toward the Engleton estate.

  51

  Fiona had taken more than the five minutes allotted to her for the A recording of the remains of Guillermo Menquez. So she was surprised to hear the ambulance engine start, and the vehicle drive away when she’d been expecting a reprimand.

  “Hello?” she called down through the hole left by the open trapdoor. “Hello? Are you there?”

  In truth there wasn’t anything more to photograph. She’d taken a dozen pictures of the deceased and another dozen of the tree house interior, overcome by chills most of the time, both to be alone in the presence of a dead body, and to realize someone had been living up here. It looked like it; it smelled like it. There was little doubt that the structure had been used as a hideaway, and the thought that it was but a matter of yards from her cottage and the main house made her sick to her stomach.

  As she came out of the tree house and back down its ladder, she looked over her shoulder to see a tiny light up the hill, winking at her as it descended steadily through the forest.

  She clung there to the ladder and reached for her phone to call Walt, to confirm this was him headed toward her, but didn’t have it on her. She’d left it in her bedroom, along with the handgun. Suddenly the cottage and the main house looked different to her, given the evidence of someone living in the tree house, given the dead body up there. She considered the safe room where Kira had hidden herself, but couldn’t bring herself to enter either the home or her own cottage. The flashlight was heading through the forest at a run, heading down the hill, heading toward her.

  Now she heard her ringtone from within the cottage. She took two steps in that direction but stopped, picturing someone hiding in there waiting for her. The phone’s dull ringing continued through three more cycles and went silent. The phone… The gun… The flashlight, no longer seen.

  No way she was going in there.

  She looked up. Maybe the safest place was in the tree house, standing on the trapdoor to keep it from opening, but not if it was the killer’s lair, not if she had to hole up with a dead body. Hadn’t Walt once said the best place to hide was out in the open? She spotted the stack of split firewood, and beyond, another stack of the unsplit rounds. A trail led up into the woods from just beyond the pond. Where would she feel safer: wandering an empty house the size of a hotel, or tucked away in the woods with her back against a tree? The flashlight had to be Walt. He couldn’t be more than ten minutes away.

  She left her camera bag at the foot of the ladder and hurried to the stack of logs, jumpy and agitated and feeling like someone was constantly a few feet behind her. Glancing over her shoulder nervously. Scared of her own shadow.

  She reached the stack of rounds and there was a baseball bat stacked among the logs. Kira’s missing baseball bat, probably placed there by one of the gardeners. Or maybe it was the bat from outside her own cottage. She wrapped her hand around it and squeezed tightly.

  It felt right.

  52

  Walt followed Beatrice down the hill at a jog, their routine familiar to both: she would go out ahead of him, locked on the scent, then return to within a few yards of him to make sure he was still with her. As he broke out onto a defined path, Walt switched off the flashlight and fitted it back into its loop on his gun belt. It was dark in the woods, but the path revealed itself as a pale ribbon and Walt followed it effortlessly, slowing only occasionally as it turned or twisted around a rock outcropping or became darkened with a tangle of exposed roots.

  As much as he appreciated being on the scent, as much as he understood a killer’s bizarre need to return to the crime scene, he took little comfort. Fiona was not answering her phone. This fact alone drove him toward the Engleton place at a dangerous pace, nearly keeping up with Beatrice, and by doing so, encouraging the dog ahead at a full run. He pushed her faster; she pulled him along. But he was no match for her. She took his pursuit of her as some kind of game and quickly outpaced him.

  Two minutes passed, Walt charging down the descending path. Five. Beatrice’s absence-her failure to return to him-began to weigh on him. Had the sense of game won out over her obligation to follow the scent? Had he confused her with his running? He couldn’t be sure, the woods unfamiliar to him, but it felt as if he would arrive at the estate any minute.

  Beatrice yipped. It was a cry. A painful cry, and it set into him a sense of panic and dread as if one of his daughters had called out. Beware when the hunter becomes the hunted. His first and only conclusion was that the killer had somehow known the dog was trailing him, that Walt, by challenging the dog, had driven her headlong into a trap-that that yip had been Beatrice’s final moment, one last desperate attempt to warn Walt.

  His response visceral and immediate, his foot speed increased exponentially, running blindly now, all out. It was more than a connection between them, it was a bond, Walt to her and her to him. It was something in his blood. The kind of something that couldn’t be explained to another human being without sounding foolish, even childish. The love of family. The love of forever.

  Her yip rang in his ears. Burned. A baby’s cry in the night. A call for help. His eyes blurred, watery from the run, or from tears, or from both. He wiped them away but all was a blurry, darkened landscape, the path’s lighter shade swirling and shifting, suddenly a river beneath his feet.

  A geometric shape among it all: the Engleton roof.

  And then the pain.

  It ripped through both legs at the shins. He hadn’t seen a log across the path, but he went down face-first, losing the gun as he reached out to break the fall, his head flirting with unconsciousness in an effort to escape the pain. It seared from his broken shins, up through his knees, his groin, his stomach and exploded into his head as he cried out a sickening, agonized shriek.

  Blackness loomed at the edges of his consciousness as he rolled over and drew his knees into his chest, writhing an
d gasping for air. Breathe through it! he told himself, as impossible as it was. He could ill afford to pass out. From somewhere through the fog of pain, Fiona appeared on her knees, a baseball bat in hand. Even with the evidence so blatant, it took Walt several seconds to connect the bat with the excruciating pain in his legs, and only then in what amounted to total disbelief. She was mouthing, “I’m sorry…” beneath the intense ringing in his ears and the waves of his own internal groaning.

  Then, from behind her, came the mountain man like a specter. He emerged through the darkness, drawn by Walt’s shriek or out of some sixth sense that made him aware of Fiona’s presence. Whether a lunatic or a calculating murderer who understood the value of a hostage, he moved straight for Fiona, who was herself too absorbed in her own mishap to have any awareness of him. But it wasn’t Fiona he wanted.

  She screamed and rolled away, releasing the bat as the man seized hold of it. It hung at his side like the bat of a hitter stepping up to home plate staring down the pitcher-Walt.

  Whether traumatized or demonized, vengeful, or drugged and demented, both men knew what the mountain man intended to do with the bat as he took another step closer. Fiona, who had scooted away on her back, thrusting herself along the forest floor by digging in her heels, who had moved a good five yards away, also saw the future-where the next ten seconds were headed. Whether to protect him, or herself-Walt couldn’t fathom such thoughts, still gripped in his pain-she rolled to her knees and began sweeping her arms through the pine straw, in what at first appeared such a lame and odd behavior. The gun, he realized in a flash of lucidity. She was going for his gun.

  Movement caught the edges of Walt’s wavering peripheral vision. Beatrice limped onto the path holding her right front paw aloft, her expression-did he imagine it or actually see it clearly in the dark?-one of remorse and grave concern as her master lay writhing in the dirt, a camouflaged giant glowering over him.