Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘Yeah. Mine’s pretty old – it only goes to the power of three. If that’s not good enough, though, they’ve got one at the crime lab in Missoula that’ll probably show you a fly on the wall a block away.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I forget the exact numbers but it’s pretty damn good. Are you doing anything right now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve still got my chains on. Why don’t I come and get you and we’ll see what we can see with the projector I’ve got here?’

  ‘Well … fine. I’ll put my boots on.’ The snow had finally stopped falling, she saw when she poked her head out, and it wasn’t all that cold. She put the watch cap back in her pocket, came back inside, brushed her hair and put on lipstick. Storm’s over, no use going around looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.

  Tasker pulled into her clean-shoveled driveway, hopped out and trotted up her clear-and-dry front steps. He was reaching for the doorbell when she opened the door. ‘You made good time,’ she said. Very good, Alice. You just won the banality prize.

  ‘Nothing to stop me,’ Tasker said. ‘Everybody’s inside watching games on TV.’

  All along the street, though, as they drove back downtown, warmly clad people were coming out of houses pulling on gloves, opening tool sheds and sweeping off steps. Every so often, the sun broke through the clouds and reflected so brilliantly off the fresh snow that the few drivers on the streets slowed to a crawl, waiting for snow-blindness to pass. The day was taking on a giddy holiday feeling; people called to each other as they flung snow off their walks. Down the block, a mother with two small children was teaching them how to make snow angels.

  When the sheriff’s van took an unexpected turn off Veronica Street onto Sullivan, he said, ‘Hope you don’t mind, I have to go this way to pick up my pizza. Will you have a slice? Must be almost lunchtime.’

  ‘Oh, that sounds good,’ she said. No use telling him she’d abandoned a half-eaten apple to go look at pictures with him. ‘I’m surprised Carlo got open so fast.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s an animal for work. I can see his chimney from my front window, and when I saw smoke come out I remembered I didn’t get much breakfast, so I phoned him and said, “Carlo, are you really going to open?” He said he came down to check on the place and found half-a-dozen hungry strays hanging around the front door, hoping he’d show up. He said, “I can’t deliver to most places yet but people are calling in, saying they’ll come on skis to get it, so why not?” He’s got the only food place open in town right now, he’ll probably have a banner day.’

  ‘But you get yours at the back door?’ she asked, as they stopped in the alley.

  ‘I kind of have special needs.’ He set the brake but left the motor running. ‘You be OK here for a minute?’ He scooted in the back door and came out with a flat box.

  The sheriff’s office felt dark and dismal after the brilliance in the street. Tasker busied himself adjusting the thermostat and turning more lights on. Alice wondered, How long does he sit in this drab place alone before it occurs to him to turn up the heat? It reminded her of something she had often thought about her husband – that he enjoyed comfort but was not very good at arranging it for himself.

  Tasker got the projector out of a cupboard, muttering to himself about cords. When he had it set up he pulled down a screen on the wall facing his desk. He’d already uploaded Alice’s pictures into his computer; now he hooked the computer up to the projector. He pulled another chair alongside his own, put up the first picture and asked Alice, ‘Is this an OK height for you?’

  When she assured him she could see the whole screen, he put the warm pizza box and a stack of napkins between them and said, ‘Let’s chow down while we watch these pictures. I’d like to look at a few of his smoke-and-fire shots first, so I can get the lay of the land.’

  They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, gobbling pizza and watching the fire eat its way up a slope of Meredith Mountain. Alice thought happily, How’s this for best use of a snowbound Sunday? She felt proud of herself for finding something to move the case along. Also, she privately admitted, it was fun to sit close to a nice, quiet man who seemed to want her there.

  On the first picture, it was obvious that even at the lowest power she could see much more detail than she had in the digital archive. The first enlargement was worlds better, and the second showed so much more detail that Alice’s heart picked up speed again.

  ‘Hey, you know, this might actually work,’ she said, and they grinned at each other. ‘You want to go to number 189 now.’ She watched as Tasker scrolled through the pictures, slowing as he got into the 180s. Then the nose of a well-used Ford pickup came up out of a draw, travelling east to west on a bumpy farm track along a fence.

  Alice read aloud an excerpt from Jonesy’s story, as she’d written it up for the Guardian last week, ‘A standard heavy-duty Ford pickup, dark blue or black. Long bed, probably three-quarter ton, dual wheels in back. Small load, though. Maybe a few hay bales covered in a tarp.’

  ‘Sure fits the description, doesn’t it?’ Tasker said. ‘So dirty, you can’t tell the color, but dark, for sure. This side view – we can’t see the size of the load. Club cab. How many people in it, do you think?’

  ‘Hard to say. Two at least but it could be three. Go slow,’ Alice said. ‘It turns, in a minute. There, stop there. See the license plate?’

  ‘I think I see the buffalo skull. Can’t read the letters and numbers before and after. Looks like it’s all smeared with mud, doesn’t it?’

  He got up, rummaged in a drawer and came back with a magnifying glass. ‘Let’s see if I can …’ He tried standing beside the light stream, holding the glass in front of the numbers, but always got too much of himself between the light and the screen. While he was contorted across empty space, peering through his spyglass, his phone rang.

  Alice asked him, ‘You want me to answer it?’

  ‘Uh … no, I better do that.’ He straightened with a grunt, came back to the desk, grabbed the ringing phone and said, ‘Tasker.’

  Alice heard Stuart’s voice say, ‘Hey, Sheriff. I see your lights on. Any chance my aunt is hiding out in your office?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ Tasker said drily. ‘But you can ask her if you like.’ He handed the phone to Alice, not looking amused.

  ‘I go to all that trouble to get you a day alone with your girl,’ Alice said, ‘and now you call me anyway? What’s wrong with your brain?’

  ‘I am alone with my girl. But she’s a lot like you, Alice – she goes ape over pictures.’ Alice heard a giggle and a slap, and then he added, ‘I happened to mention to her what you were doing today and she lit up like a candle and demanded I find you. Isn’t that ironic?’

  ‘Highly. What does she want?’

  ‘She wants to know if you’ve seen any sign of the dark pickup we were all talking about after—?’

  ‘We’re looking at it.’

  ‘Alice, really, no joke?’ His voice had changed; he was excited. ‘Is it heading for Grizzly Gulch like Jonesy thought?’

  ‘It could be. Hold on.’ She put the phone against her shoulder, looked up at Tasker and said, ‘Is it all right if I …?’

  He took the phone away from her and said into it, ‘Are you ready to swear you do not have Mort Weatherby in your vehicle?’ Alice heard laughter and a denial, and then Tasker said, ‘You can each have one slice of pizza if you’re hungry, but the next one’s on you.’

  There was another outburst of hilarity and then they were both in the doorway. Judy was wearing a glamorous red fox hat and holding a pizza box.

  ‘We were hoping you might be hungry,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Tasker said. ‘Here, Stuart, help me with chairs …’

  Alice told Judy what they were looking at and they all settled in, but with the newcomers on the inside seats now, next to the pizza boxes. They ran the sequence through again, from the beginning, so Judy and Stuart could see the tru
ck emerge out of the draw, traverse the screen and disappear into smoke.

  ‘I know exactly where that is,’ Judy said.

  ‘Yeah, well, so do I,’ Stuart said. ‘I took the picture. But it doesn’t tell us where the truck came from, does it? Or where it’s going.’

  ‘I can make some pretty good guesses on the first question, though,’ Jim Tasker said, staring at the screen thoughtfully. ‘I know that stretch of two-track – it just runs along the back of some pasture land. There’s no driveways opening onto it until it gets almost down to Owl Creek. That’s where it joins County Road Ten, and even then you’ve only got, what? Three or four ranch houses between there and the highway.’

  Stuart turned a tricky smile toward the sheriff and asked, ‘Any chance that an enterprising sheriff could maybe drive down that two-track and find the guilty pickup?’

  ‘Well, not today. There’s two or three times as much snow up there on the mountain as there is down here. County roads won’t be cleared for a couple of days, and nobody’s ever going to plow the two-track. Any red-hot reporters who happen to be within hearing distance of my voice right now should remember that we don’t know the truck in this picture is doing anything wrong.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Stuart said. ‘But wouldn’t you like to meet the owner that takes his pickup for an innocent spin into the middle of a forest fire?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ Tasker said. ‘And I’m so grateful to this lady who spent most of Sunday finding these pictures that when I find out who that owner is, if I decide to take him in for questioning, I will give her the story first. Otherwise, of course, you all understand I can’t discuss any of this with you.’ He stood up, nodded, smiled. ‘Thank you, Alice.’ He shook her hand.

  ‘My pleasure,’ Alice said. She looked around for her coat, unsure of herself suddenly, feeling she’d taken a misstep somewhere. But as long as she was already standing, she added, ‘Stuart can take me home.’

  ‘Right now, if you want me to,’ Stuart said, standing up. He put his slice back in the box and closed it. ‘But, Alice? You never found the second series of pictures, huh?’

  ‘What?’ They were all looking at him now.

  ‘When I got back on the ground,’ Stuart said, ‘the incident commander told me I’d have to wait a while for my ride back to Base Camp – all the vehicles were in use. But I looked and saw I had plenty of room left on my memory card, so I shot another round like that first one we looked at. You didn’t find it?’

  ‘Never even looked.’ She looked at the sheriff. ‘You got time to look for it?’

  ‘Sure!’

  They went back to the computer and clicked ahead to the next folder.

  After that, for some time the room was filled with the sound of four people chewing on fresh pizza slices, while the clicker slid the pictures along.

  ‘There!’ Stuart said at the first clear picture of a pasture fence.

  He had made the second round exactly the same as the first, with a five-degree turn between each shot, but this time the turns were counter-clockwise. And the pictures were shot an hour and a half later, so the light was brighter and trickier on the first half of the series.

  There were six smoky views, then five where the camera was pointed right into the sun, which washed out the images, if any. One more five-degree turn, though, and the full picture reappeared in glorious color, with the front bumper of the dirty old pickup just nosing into the right side of the frame. All the pizza-eaters stopped chewing and said, ‘Whoa!’ or some such noise.

  They all sat still while gooey pieces of meat and cheese slid off their slices, and Stuart ran the series, which proved to be the previous views of the fire in reverse order. The dirty old truck came bouncing down out of the smoke and fire at what must have been reckless speed, bumping along the distant two-track that was being consumed, now, by the raging fire. A couple of times fire leaped up right in front of the vehicle, forcing it to veer out of the tracks and onto the even bumpier terrain to the driver’s left. But he kept going, over boulders and a couple of logs, bouncing on and off the trail – the fence posts behind him were all on fire now – and finally the truck disappeared into the draw they’d watched him come out of in the earlier series.

  A collective sigh came out of the watchers. Then silence held for a long moment, until Stuart said, ‘Looks like the lucky bastard made it home.’

  After another few seconds, Alice said, ‘Well, now we know how the victim got up there.’

  ‘And why he was there instead of in the mine,’ Tasker said. ‘That’s been driving me crazy ever since we found him. I kept asking myself, “Why did they drop him there? Why not in the mine where we’d probably never have found him?” These pictures do seem to answer those questions.’

  ‘That must have been where the truck was headed,’ Stuart said, ‘in the first series we watched. Don’t you think? But by the time they got up there, the fire was getting into Grizzly Gulch, and the incident commander ordered everybody off the mountain.’ He looked at Alice. ‘Doesn’t that sound right?’

  ‘That’s what everybody says happened.’

  ‘So they just dropped the body and ran, like everybody else.’

  Silence again, till Judy said, ‘Who’s “they”?’

  There was a great shuffling of feet, nobody meeting anybody’s eyes, till Tasker said, ‘Whoever owns that pickup, I guess.’

  ‘You recognize it?’ Stuart said.

  ‘Looks like trucks I see around town every day,’ Tasker said.

  ‘Well, we’ve got distant views of both sides now,’ Alice said. ‘Did you say the crime lab has a good enlarger?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ the sheriff said. He stood up, suddenly more authoritative, and distant. ‘And if this turns out to be the truck that makes the case for this department, I’m afraid all this casual detective work has got to stop – we don’t want to poison the tree that holds the fruit, do we? I’ll take a couple of copies of shots from this side of the vehicle and send them to Missoula for enlarging.’

  ‘Better take a copy of that license plate, too,’ Alice said. ‘You might get that enlarger to show you the numbers.’

  ‘And the people in the truck,’ Stuart said. ‘Can we try that?’

  ‘Yes. Um …’ Tasker said. When they were all looking at him, he said, ‘I don’t want you to publish any of this information yet. Do you understand? Stuart? Alice?’

  ‘I understand, all right,’ Stuart said. ‘But I work for Mort Weatherby. So do I have to ask, Alice? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think we have to ask. If the sheriff says he can’t let us publish it we won’t, of course. But I think we have to tell our employer that we’ve happened on some information so sensitive that the sheriff has said we’re forbidden to say it out loud until he arrests the killer of the roasted man.’ She looked around. ‘Can we all agree to that?’

  Tasker looked at Judy. ‘You on board?’

  ‘Sheriff,’ Judy said, giving him her Valkyrie look, ‘you tell me where we stand, and I’ll be there.’

  He smiled at her and said, ‘Good girl.’ They filed out of his office, no smiles now, just quiet goodnights. It was dark outside, and very cold between the snowbanks.

  ‘What a strange Sunday,’ Alice said, as they drove down the big horseshoe of Sullivan Street and turned onto Veronica. ‘Every time we made a plan, we changed it.’

  ‘Ah, well, we can go skiing some other Sunday,’ Stuart said. ‘We will, won’t we, kiddo?’ He smiled at Judy, beautiful in her fake fur hat.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, smiling back. ‘Maybe even together.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The storm caught most Gamers unaware. Never given to newspaper reading and too concerned, now, with the problems in their supply line to watch TV news or even YouTube, they stayed in touch with each other but not with the weather.

  Naughtie was trying to get them all to say they’d be satisfied with more pot like that he’d procured for them last Saturday. He told them pro
udly how fast he’d made friends with a medical-marijuana licensee named Nick, after he learned the man grew about twice as much as he needed and financed his gambling habit with the proceeds from the rest.

  ‘This guy is so smart he can afford to be lazy, and I caught him just at the right time – he’s got a crop established, he’s thinking long term now and ready to make deals. He hates marketing – says the risks and the way it eats up time are almost enough to make him quit.’ Naughtie had practiced the rocking hand movement that went with this pitch. ‘Almost but not quite. So he’ll save enough weed for eight of us every week, at this reasonable price, if we’ll commit to making him our steady supplier.’

  Usually the group followed his lead without much argument, but today Naughtie couldn’t seem to get a consensus. Undie still wanted to try for opioids and heroin, but he admitted he had no leads to a new supplier; there was only Nod’s group.

  ‘Well, and what good are they?’ Naughtie said. ‘Winkin’s been gone for weeks, and we’ve never seen Blinkin, have we? Seems to me that group was mostly hearsay.’

  Drafty felt the same way. An amiable, thick-necked athlete, the captain of his football team, he liked his pleasures to be dependable and sweet, like his girl. ‘I can’t stand anxiety,’ he said. ‘I say we take this good weed now while we can get it.’

  ‘Why are you so ready to settle for second best?’ Undie said. ‘There’s plenty of product around, we just have to keep looking.’

  ‘Nothing second best about my life,’ Drafty said. ‘I get laid regular and I’ve got good ID for beer and cigarettes. Now, if I can lock in a reliable supplier of weed at the right price – well, you tell me … what else does a reasonable person want?’

  ‘In a word?’ Undie said. ‘Heroin.’ He kept his voice down; the hall monitor was nearby. But beneath his calm, he was seething. Why am I talking to this cretin?

  ‘Oh, yeah, H, your new favorite thing,’ Drafty said. ‘You’re so sure it’s worth taking bigger risks to get jazzier thrills. But if we get caught with heavy drugs in our hands we lose everything.’