He appreciated the black-hole quality of both sky and air as he drove north from the resort into national forest. He kept a close eye on the odometer as well as the rearview mirror. He turned east onto a dirt track marked for Pioneer Cabin, and put a half mile between him and the asphalt he left behind, having never seen the twinkle of another set of headlights.
The darkest hour really was just before the dawn. He double-checked the car’s ceiling light making sure it wouldn’t turn on as he opened the door. He stepped outside. The cold mountain air stung his lungs and he coughed, immediately trying to stifle the sound.
He leaned back into the car facing two dogs-both shepherds. Toey remained in the front seat, where he’d put her, the leash still attached to her collar. Callie lay down on the backseat, nothing but a long black shape.
He shut his door, came around the car, and opened the passenger door. Callie jumped to all fours and stuck her nose from behind the front seat. Toey bent around to meet noses. Trevalian yanked on the leash and pulled Toey from the car. He double-checked that the small flashlight worked, and then, returning it to his pocket, he led Toey off into the dense forest of Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. A hundred and fifty yards later he knelt and fed her some cheese-flavored chowder crackers from the minibar. He lavished her with praise and softly thanked her for being a good dog. Then he unclasped the leash, commanded her to stay, and walked away.
Twice he turned back and used the flashlight to ensure she was holding the command, her eyes a hollow luminescence in the dark. But in the short time they’d been together he’d learned that Toey was a particularly kind and obedient dog. She wasn’t going anywhere.
His original plan had been to cut her throat and bury her out here, miles from any possibility of being found. But now he walked away, then ran, knowing she would obey his command and “stay” for probably ten or fifteen minutes or more.
He reached the car, fastened the guide harness to Callie, and moved her into the front seat.
The switch was made. And with it, he’d cleared the last of his obstacles.
Eight
W alt awakened in his daughter Emily’s bed to the ringing of the phone in his own bedroom. For the second night he’d avoided that mattress.
He dragged himself out of the stupor of two hours’ sleep, managing to answer the kitchen phone before voice mail picked up.
“It’s Kathy. I’m sorry to call you at home, Walt.” Dispatch. Walt pulled himself into focus. “I tried both your cell and pager first.”
“Go ahead.” He rubbed his face to clear his thought. It didn’t work.
“Stuart Holms called at five fifty-six A.M.”
Walt checked the kitchen clock: seven minutes had passed. “Go on.” Maybe he wouldn’t need the coffee. Just mention of that name had jolted him awake.
“He was a little abusive, sir. Bossy. I told him nine-one-one took the emergency calls. He told me to go to hell.”
Walt knew Stuart Holms by reputation. This didn’t surprise him. “What emergency?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. That’s what I’m saying. Demanded to speak with you personally.”
An alarm sounded in Walt’s head: He didn’t know Stuart Holms personally.
“He sounded upset,” she went on.
Fifteen minutes later, Walt was refueling the Cherokee, wearing a fresh, starched blue uniform shirt and sipping hot coffee from a travel mug. He called the number Stuart Holms had left with dispatch, but had only reached an assistant who said Holms needed to speak with Walt “as soon as was humanly possible.”
Yet it was Holms himself who met Walt at the front door to the colossal modern home out the Lake Creek drainage. Nestled at the base of the mountains, it felt to Walt like a museum of contemporary art. Holms led him to a café table with a view of an enclosed garden through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. They were waited on by a slim woman in her thirties who had a French accent. Stuart Holms ordered Walt a sausage omelet, toasted bagel with cream cheese, coffee, and orange juice. He took smoked salmon, capers, and guava juice for himself.
Dressed in blue pajamas, Holms wore a terrycloth bathrobe and sheepskin moccasins. He looked younger than Walt had imagined him. His name had been in the business pages for decades.
He focused intently on Walt and spoke in a croaking voice that needed more coffee.
“I apologize for the secrecy, Sheriff, but there’s no such thing as privacy, and I need to keep this private. I called you because this home is in the county, not the city, and I’ve had it on good authority that you’re a hell of a lot more trustworthy than the Ketchum police chief.”
“I don’t know about that. What’s the nature of your complaint?”
“Not exactly a complaint. More like a report. It’s Allie-Ailia-my wife. She failed to come home last night.” He looked to Walt for some kind of reaction. “This is entirely out of character, and I’m worried. If I raise the alarm it’ll be over the wire services before I’ve had my morning swim. With Patrick’s conference and all…No need to spoil his party.”
“A guy like you? You’ve got your own people,” Walt said.
“You want my people to handle it, they can, I suppose,” Holms said.
“Does she carry a cell phone?” Walt asked.
“Last I saw her, she’d gone for a run. This was a little after five, yesterday evening. She missed the luau.”
“You’ve tried her cell phone?”
“I called it, only to hear it ring down the hall. It’s on her dresser. Damn awful feeling, that is.”
“Five P.M. yesterday,” Walt stated. “How ’bout the staff?”
“Did she sleep somewhere else? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? With someone else? You think she’s going to slip back into her room and come out yawning as if she overslept? I don’t think so.”
The food arrived.
Walt took down the particulars as he ate. Stuart had expected to see her at the C3 luau. He’d left word with the staff that she was to call him the moment she returned home. Upset with her, he’d headed home, had taken a sleeping pill, and awakened at 5 A.M. to find her room still empty.
Walt polished off the omelet. He thought of his own wife-nearly mentioned it.
“Fabulous omelet,” Walt said.
“That’s Raphael, my chef.”
“An artist.”
“I’ll tell him. He’ll be pleased.”
“We usually give it some time before investigating reports of missing persons, but we can act on this if you like. My question is: What kind of press can you tolerate? If we take this, it’ll mean some phone calls, questions being asked. It’s going to be pretty clear, pretty quickly, what’s going on. I wish I could change that, but it’s going to get out.”
“I want her found.” He didn’t touch his own plate-an artful display of smoked salmon and a bagel.
Walt ran through what his deputies referred to as her 411. “She drives a pale green Volvo SC- 90,” Holms told him. Then he reached into his robe’s pocket and passed a five-by-four card across the table. It included the vehicle’s registration number, her age, weight, and the clothes she’d last been seen in-a gray, zippered shell, a white jogging top, and blue shorts. A recent photo had been digitally printed in the lower corner.
“I have very competent staff.”
“What about your own detail?” Walt asked again.
“We use a company for overseas travel. Yes. New York. Washington. L.A. But not up here. Raphael goes with us everywhere. A few assistants. That’s all.”
Walt studied the photo, remembering where he’d last seen this same woman: on the balcony with Danny Cutter at his brother’s cocktail party.
“Yes, there’s an age gap, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Holms said. “But I’m only sixty. And a young sixty at that. She’s beautiful, and outgoing, and a wonderful conversationalist who likes to talk. Find her, Sheriff.”
“Her favorite places to run?”
“The bike path. Adam�
�s Gulch. Hulen Meadows. Lake Creek. Over the saddle and into Elkhorn. She varies it.”
Walt wrote these down on the back of the same card.
“It’s a lot of ground,” Walt said.
“That’s why you’re involved.”
“We’ll get started,” Walt said. “And we’ll keep it under the radar as much as possible.”
“If you start asking around, Danny Cutter’s name is going to come up. That’s not news to me, and it’s behind us. Just so you know.”
“Okay,” Walt said, though his voice belied him.
“Ailia and Danny are to be partners in a company I’m helping him finance. Those fences are mended.”
Walt faintly nodded, wondering why, if they were mended, Holms felt obligated to mention them.
Nine
A n hour past a sunrise lost to an overcast sky, the rain began. The dirt road out Adam’s Gulch, where the pavement ended, had turned to pale brown slop. Low, swirling clouds concealed the tops of trees up on the crests of the surrounding mountains. The sky fluctuated between a light mist and a steady drizzle. Mountain weather.
Walt donned a tan, oilskin greatcoat bundled in the back of the Cherokee along with climbing gear, snowshoes, and two backpacks capable of keeping him in the woods overnight-one for summer, one for winter. He offered Brandon a poncho, but his deputy refused the offer, content to play the he-man, macho outdoorsy thing to the limit, even if it meant a head cold. The parking lot bustled with law enforcement and Search and Rescue personnel. Nothing like a missing rich woman to get the adrenaline running. A ribbon of Day-Glo tape was lifted, admitting two pickup trucks, both carrying dog kennels in their beds.
Alone, to the right of the Porta Potti and the trailhead sign, a pale green Volvo, its engine cold, was parked over dry dirt. It could have been there an hour or overnight. But it belonged to Ailia Holms and was empty.
Walt addressed the Search and Rescue team. “Listen up! She may be just injured. Could be out for a morning run and the husband has things confused. So let’s not scare her to death. It’s possible she’s been exposed to the elements overnight. Make sure you’re covered for that: space blankets, protein bars, and water. You’ve got your assignments. We’re using channel fifteen. Keep off the radios unless it means something. Okay. Go!”
The group dispersed. Walt turned to Brandon. “You and I will take the Hill Trail. I’ll take the first entrance; you’ll take the second.”
“I’m on it,” the man replied.
By the time Walt reached the Hill Trail, muddy clay was sticking to his boots like wet concrete, heavier with each step. Twice he stopped to scrape globs off the treads. He followed the narrow path up into the trees over rocky, rutted ground roped with exposed tree roots. With the low clouds and thick forest, an unsettling darkness overcame him.
Fiona’s arrival was announced over the radio. She was photographing the Volvo. In his mind’s eye Walt saw Search and Rescue spreading out over the trail and covering ground. He checked in with Brandon. The two were approaching each other from opposite directions.
Discovering a snapped branch-the ripped bark green-Walt knelt and studied the disturbance in the trail’s soil. Normally dry and powdery, the ocher-colored dust was skimmed with a layer of rain. If prodded, the crust of darkened soil gave way to the fine dirt beneath. He followed some impressions that told him two things: First, the leg that had snapped the branch had done so prior to the rain falling; second, it was a man’s flat-soled shoe, size nine or ten, walking slowly and deliberately, not the long strides associated with exercise, not an athletic shoe.
He kept off the path as best as possible and followed the shoe prints, calling ahead to Brandon to switch frequencies. When he met him again on the radio, Walt instructed his deputy to keep an eye out for the tracks, and not to disturb them.
But Brandon professed to know nothing of any shoe prints. It was then that Walt picked up two other such impressions, both heading back toward the parking lot.
The rain fell heavier now, the shoe prints washing away before his eyes. Walt peeled his coat off and lay it across the trail, attempting to protect the matching shoe prints-both heading in different directions. He didn’t dare lift the coat to see if he’d managed to cover them, the rain falling steadily now.
He raced ahead, staying off the trail, dodging trees and stumps and massive rocks. “Tommy,” he called ahead on the radio, “how many times have you seen a guy in office shoes out on one of these trails?”
“Sneakers,” Brandon called back.
“No. These things have a heel and smooth soles. Keep your eyes peeled. Something’s not right.”
The cold rain soaked through the shoulders and back of Walt’s uniform. He wiped his face on his sleeve in order to see.
“Fucking cats and dogs,” Brandon said over the radio. The rain had greatly intensified.
Walt was running now, looking left and right, up the hill and down, the narrow trail meandering just below him.
“I got a million running shoes and hiking boots, Sheriff,” Brandon reported. “But I got nothing like what you’re talking about. No office shoes.”
“Keep your eyes peeled off-trail,” Walt ordered.
“Roger, that.”
Walt felt a tension in his chest-a knowing fear. He relived watching the shoe impressions melt behind the destructive power of the rain. Though but a few miles from downtown, a half mile from the highway, these woods were national forest and subject to the laws of nature, not man. Bears were commonly spotted. Cougar. Elk. Any number of which could scare a runner off a trail, pursue the intruder for dinner or out of defense of a calf or cub. The combination of the discovery of the unexpected shoe prints and the now torrential, cold rain drove home an anxiety that peaked with Brandon ’s next radio transmission.
“Sheriff? What’s your twenty? I think I’ve got something.”
A moment later Walt flinched with the sound of a dull gunshot just ahead on the trail: a flare.
Brandon had found her.
Ten
A woman’s body, bloody and splayed in a tangle of limbs. The top of her running suit was ripped, baring her chest. Her neck was canted inhumanly to one side.
Walt placed a space blanket over her to keep off the rain. Ailia Holms had been mauled. “Bear?” Brandon asked.
“I’m no expert, but I’m guessing cat. Bite marks on the neck, the narrowness of the claws.”
Walt ordered the Hill Trail cordoned off. He and Brandon established a perimeter around the body using dead sticks. With Brandon lifting and replacing the space blanket, Fiona, who had trudged up through the woods, shot dozens of photographs before anyone disturbed the scene. Others arrived through the forest: deputies, a pair of paramedics, and a local doctor, Royal McClure. At Walt’s request, he would serve as medical examiner, an assignment certain to piss off the county coroner, but Walt was intent on doing this the right way. Electing a mortician as coroner did not make him a medical examiner.
McClure, a wiry man in his mid-fifties, had tight, green eyes and a high raspy voice. “I’ll be able to tell you more later. Much more. But for now you’ve got a body dead twelve to eighteen hours. Trauma, blood loss. All the appearance of an animal attack.”
Walt asked, “What are the odds that two cougars attack humans within a day of each other?”
“Who said anything about two?” McClure asked. “These cats cover a lot of ground.”
“We darted one and locked it up yesterday. Down at the Humane Society, the pound,” Walt said. “She sure as hell didn’t do this. I’ve lived here, off and on, for most of my life, and I can only remember one other cat attack before this-and that one was provoked. Now we lose a yellow Lab. Danny Cutter gets run out of the Big Wood by a cat. We dart one, and that same night, another kills a woman out running. Are you kidding me?”
In the midst of removing the space blanket for Fiona, Brandon suddenly pulled the Mylar sheet aside and let it fall to the ground, like a magician who’d given
up on his trick.
“Keep her covered, Tommy,” Walt said, turning from McClure.
“Check it out, Sheriff,” Brandon said, kneeling close to the body. “What the fuck is that?” The rain continued to fall in sheets as it had for the past half hour. Brandon dragged the space blanket back over her once again, covering her head and face, to below her waist, leaving only her lacerated legs exposed.
Walt stepped closer, seeing for the first time what Brandon now pointed to: a small circle of white.
“Paint?” Walt guessed.
“It’s dissolving, whatever it is,” Brandon said. “Dissolving fast. And look there, and there.” He pointed. Then he lifted the Mylar and studied her more closely. “It’s all over her.”
Fiona, of her own volition, scrolled through digital shots while carefully screening her camera from the rain. “I made pictures of those,” she said. “I count seven…no…eight on her chest and torso. Another four on her head and hair.”
“It’s feces,” McClure said, having touched it with his gloved finger and lifted it to his nose. “Bird feces.”
“Birdshit?” Brandon asked. “How’s that possible? Look around her. Nothing.”
None of the leaves, sticks, or plants surrounding the body showed any sign of the white splotches.
“Doc?” Walt asked.
“It’s not my place to comment on physical evidence.”
Walt looked up into the rain. No coverage here, the tree branches not touching. So where had the birds perched?
“You know that blood-splatter course?” Brandon said. “If birdshit’s anything like blood, then the size of these, and the tightness of the rings, means it didn’t fall very far. A bird takes a crap from up there, it’s going to hit like a bomb.”
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