Killer Weekend

by Ridley Pearson

  “Expert testimony if I’ve ever heard it,” Walt cracked.

  “Not to mention she rolled all the way down the hill,” Brandon said, ignoring Walt’s jab. “So it’s got to be fresh, right?”

  “He’s right,” McClure interjected. “Or she was out running with dried bird feces all over her.”

  Walt was still bothered by the smooth-soled shoe prints he’d followed earlier. In the excitement of the discovery, he’d neglected to send anyone to protect his oilskin and the tracks it covered. He did so now by radio, but feared a complete loss.

  “And there’s a question of blood,” McClure pointed out.

  Fiona, Brandon, and Walt all turned inquisitively toward him. Their faces ran with rainwater. “Blood?” Walt asked.

  “I count a hundred and fifty-six lacerations, and we haven’t rolled her yet,” McClure said. “So where’s all the blood?”

  Eleven

  O n his second visit in a matter of hours, something about the indulgence of the Holms estate left Walt with a sickening feeling in his gut. It was far too big for two people; how would it feel now with only one?

  He was informed by a staff member that Stuart Holms had already left for the conference. This kind of thing needed to be done in person. Walt drove over to Sun Valley. It took him twenty minutes of moving between various talks and coffee clutches, meeting rooms and hospitality suites to find Holms on the porch of the Guest House in a private conversation with the head of Disney. Walt asked to speak to Holms in confidence and took the vacated chair.

  “There’s never an easy way to say this. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we found your wife out Adam’s Gulch. She was pronounced dead at the scene, apparent victim of an animal attack.”

  The other man’s clear blue eyes ticked back and forth, alternately searching the air above Walt’s head. His brow knotted, and he nodded slightly, and sighed. Then his eyes fell to the plastic tabletop, and he dragged his trembling hands into his lap. “I’ve known since last night. I knew in here.” He touched his chest. “She’s never not come home before. Oh, God. An animal attack?”

  “A cougar possibly. Yes.”

  “Was it her period?” Stuart Holms asked. “I don’t even know, I’m sorry to say. That’s when they attack women, right?”

  “A thorough examination is being conducted,” Walt said.

  Holms kept his head down. He mumbled, “A cat? She liked cats. Loved cats. Volunteered at the pound. Did you know that?”

  “At some point I’m going to take a full statement from you, sir. No hurry, but the sooner we can get to that the better.”

  Holms lifted his head, revealing teary, bloodshot eyes. “Of course,” he said.

  Walt waited a moment uncomfortably. “When?” he said. “When might we get to that?”

  Holms looked away at a piece of the sky. “When I feel up to it, Sheriff. And not a minute sooner.”

  Twelve

  I t was difficult for Walt to think of a meeting as clandestine when the sun shone so brightly and a pair of yellow warblers darted branch to branch in play. The Warm Springs tributary to the Big Wood slipped past beneath the concrete bridge connecting to Sun Valley ’s River Run high-speed quad-chairlifts and the glorious River Run ski lodge. He watched the river’s swirling currents, looking for any kind of repeating pattern, but he saw none. A kingfisher hovered low over the silver brown water, staying there for quite some time before zooming up to a cottonwood branch and taking rest.

  Dick O’Brien had no place here. He was dressed like a man heading to lunch at Yale: khakis, blue blazer, white button-down shirt. Thankfully he’d eschewed the tie. It was the man’s shoes that Walt paid the most attention to: office shoes, with heels. His mind filled briefly with an image of the dissolving, muddy impressions he’d followed up the Hill Trail at Adam’s Gulch. He swallowed dryly.

  O’Brien leaned against the bridge’s wide, concrete rail. He placed a manila envelope between them.

  “Sorry for making the meet out here,” he said. “Just a precaution is all.”

  “This is?” Walt asked, indicating the envelope.

  “A DVD. Cutter’s home security. I helped design it. We’ve got eyes on the gate, exterior doors, the garages. He put half a mil into security on that place. This camera is an interior look at the front door. From yesterday morning…Friday morning, in case you’ve lost track. I have one of my guys assigned to monitoring the cameras twenty-four/ seven. He pointed this…incident…out to me yesterday. We dump anything like this to DVD for safekeeping.”

  “Anything like what?” Walt asked.

  “The Escalade’s got a DVD player, if you want it sooner than later,” O’Brien said. “And air-conditioning. And an electric cooler in the back. Pop. Bottled water.”

  “You can’t just tell me?”

  “Worth a thousand words. Right?”

  “If you say so.”

  A few minutes later O’Brien and Walt occupied the Escalade’s two leather captain’s chairs that made up the car’s middle row of seats. The DVD panel was flipped down and glowing blue. Walt had a cold ginger ale in hand. “What? No popcorn?”

  “We got Snickers in the cooler,” O’Brien said in all seriousness. “Peanuts. Potato chips.”

  “I was kidding.”

  The DVD played. Walt watched as a sweating Danny Cutter, a towel around his neck, opened his brother’s front door and welcomed in Ailia Holms. Walt dialed the rear air conditioner down a few degrees-he’d warmed suddenly. A time clock ran in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

  O’Brien narrated. “Once we heard about her out Adam’s Gulch, I showed this to the boss. He took her death real hard, I might add. And we had a very short discussion about sharing this with you. Just for the record, the boss never suggested blocking it.”

  On the screen the discussion grew heated between Danny Cutter and Ailia Holms, but there was no sound to confirm that. Then, all at once, Danny grabbed her by the forearms and shoved her against a couch. For a moment Walt feared he was about to see a rape. Then the two settled down. Ailia clearly complained about her treatment. Danny showed her to the door, and she left.

  O’Brien stopped the playback. The screen went blue again.

  “Those are the same clothes we found her in,” Walt told O’Brien.

  “It’s yours to do with whatever.”

  “It’s not that I’m complaining, but would you turn this over if it was your brother?”

  “It’s complicated between them-the brothers. Very competitive.” He paused and said, “In all sorts of things.” Then he met eyes with Walt, clearly wanting to drive home this last statement.

  “It’s a big help,” Walt said, “and I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  “It may be for Danny. And I like Danny.”

  “We all like Danny,” O’Brien said.

  “Does that include Patrick?”

  “Like I said: It’s complicated.”

  “Yes, it is.” As they were climbing out of the car, Walt couldn’t resist. “Nice shoes,” he said.

  Thirteen

  T he hospital morgue was located down a subterranean hallway, wedged between a door marked DANGER-HIGH VOLTAGE and another unmarked room used for storage.

  Ailia Holms lay faceup on a textured stainless steel morgue table with drain slits around its perimeter and hoses coming out the bottom.

  McClure pulled off the blue rip-stop nylon dropcloth, exposing her chalk white skin torn by cougar’s claws. Lacerations and puncture wounds covered her torso like unfamiliar constellations. Her pubis was shaved into a short, vertical column of red tangled hair. Walt looked away and recomposed himself. McClure had already done some cutting on her.

  “You asked about any bruising,” McClure said.

  “I did.”

  “You know about lividity: The blood settles into the lowest part of the body an hour or two after death. It fixes, in six to eight hours.” He directed Walt’s attention to some dark bruise
s. “You’ll recall that we found her partially rolled up on her left side.” He pointed. “This area is an example of fixed hypostasis-lividity. Certainly six to eight hours after she was killed she was in this position.” He nodded toward the sink. “Grab a set of gloves.”

  Together, he and Walt lifted and rolled the cadaver just high enough to get a look at her buttocks.

  “See that discoloring?” McClure asked. “The right gluteous?”

  “Yes.”

  “No proof. But it suggests early lividity.”

  “So she rolled and landed partially down the hill, and what…a couple hours later a coyote pulled her over, and she rolled some more?”

  “Could explain it.”

  “What’s the timing?”

  “Eight to twelve hours ahead of discovery. Perhaps coincidental with her death.”

  “May I?” Walt asked, reaching for Ailia’s left arm.

  “Of course.”

  Walt lifted the arm. An obvious bruise, shaped like a mitten.

  “This is antemortem?” Walt asked.

  “Yes. Well ahead of the attack. Maybe as much as a day or more.”

  “It was early yesterday morning,” Walt told him. “That’s consistent.”

  McClure lifted the cadaver’s head. He pulled back a flap of skin, exposing tissue, pink muscle, and white vertebrae. “She has a fracture to cervical number seven, just above the facet for the first rib. Another to cervical three. The tissue at seven reveals edema consistent with an earlier trauma.”

  “The cat broke her neck,” Walt said. “It’s what cats do.”

  “Fractures her neck,” McClure said. “She’s alive but paralyzed. Toys with her for a while.”

  “For how long?”

  “This trauma to the neck occurred an hour or more before the cat mauled her.”

  “Good God.”

  “Most, if not all, of the lacerations inflicted by the cat were post- mortem.”

  “Excuse me?”

  McClure met eyes with Walt and just stared. “Cause of death is heart failure: She bled out. But the timing of all this is speculative.”

  “My guys are out looking for the original crime scene-the location of the attack. All the blood.”

  “You may not find it,” McClure said. He answered Walt’s puzzled expression by explaining, “We luminoled her.” He picked up a tube light from a workstation. “Get the lights,” he said.

  Walt cut the lights. McClure waved a short black light over the body. Beneath the neck, the stainless steel showed a luminous green, indicating blood. The body itself showed very little green.

  “You cleaned her?” Walt asked. “I hope you checked for prints first.”

  “That’s just the thing,” McClure said. “I haven’t washed her. There’s very little blood and there’s a reason for that: The dead don’t bleed.”

  Walt thought back to the shoe prints in the mud and Danny Cutter pinning Ailia to the couch.

  “The cat still could have killed her and mauled her later.”

  “I’ll measure her blood volume,” the doctor said. It meant nothing to Walt.

  Walt paused. “She was moved.”

  “One last point of interest,” McClure said, switching off the black light and returning the room to the overhead tube lighting. “She’s missing her left contact lens.”

  “Missing?” Walt blurted out.

  “Probably somewhere in the woods. She rolled a long way down that hill. You could try to find it, but we both know the odds of that. Still, it’s going into my report.”

  “Would it show if we luminoled the area?” Walt asked.

  “No, the luminol binds to the hemoglobin. If it’s out there, it’s going to take a hands-and-knees search.”

  “Who goes running with only one contact?” Walt wondered, not realizing until it was too late that he’d spoken it aloud.

  “It was a long fall,” McClure repeated.

  But Walt barely heard him. He was stuck back on O’Brien’s shoes and the impressions that had vanished with the rain.

  Fourteen

  I t’s the fishing lady,” came the voice of the guard at Elizabeth Shaler’s front door. This was heard over Adam Dryer’s cell phone with its two-way walkie-talkie feature. Dryer looked over at Shaler, who was currently reading the Saturday edition of The New York Times and enjoying some morning sun in her backyard.

  “Yes, of course,” Liz Shaler said, answering Dryer’s inquisitive expression.

  He flipped through pages on a clipboard. “It’s not on today’s appointment list.”

  “We were supposed to go fishing together, remember? That was all of a few hours ago.”

  “But it wasn’t rescheduled.” To the walkie-talkie he said, “Give her the Mossad, and send her in.”

  “Roger that.”

  “The Mossad?” Shaler asked, tugging down her sunglasses for full effect. “Or don’t I want to know?”

  “She’ll be thoroughly searched. That’s all.”

  “He better not touch her improperly.”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  Several minutes passed before Fiona was led through by one of Shaler’s assistants. She handed a bouquet of stem flowers to Shaler, who drank in a whiff before passing them off to her assistant.

  “You didn’t need to do that.”

  Fiona took at seat at the patio table. “I was sorry to cancel.”

  “Was it Ailia?” Liz Shaler asked. “Was it as awful as everyone’s saying?”

  “I’m not permitted to say. Sorry about that.”

  “No, don’t be. I respect you all the more for it.” She lowered her voice. “I wish some of the people around here were as discreet. I might actually have a life.” She grinned. There was a line of white sun cream showing beneath her nose where she’d missed it. Fiona was tempted to point it out, but didn’t.

  Dryer stood away from them, but remained in the yard under the shade of a tree. He stared at them from there through his sunglasses.

  “Is he just going to hang out there?” Fiona asked.

  “Yes. Amazing, isn’t it? I would be so bored with a job like that. But what are you going to do?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I detest it. As AG, I don’t have protection in New York. The governor does. The mayor of the city. But not the attorney general. All this,” she said, indicating Dryer, “is thanks to Herb Millington, who made a big stink to the DNC when it was rumored I would run.”

  “I shouldn’t stay long,” Fiona said anxiously, causing Liz Shaler to look over at her thoughtfully.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The flowers…Your Honor…were a pretext.”

  “For?”

  “To get me inside. Not that I’m not sorry about missing the session with you. I am. I absolutely am!”

  Shaler pushed away the Times. “Okay,” she said, “you’ve got my attention.”

  Fiona very carefully reached into her purse, slipped out an envelope, and passed it to Shaler surreptitiously. “I shouldn’t be doing this, I know. And I’ll probably get into a lot of trouble for it. I mean a lot. Depending on you, of course.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.” She squeezed the envelope. “Photos?”

  Fiona nodded and smiled falsely because Dryer’s dark sunglasses remained fixed on her from the shade of the distant tree.

  “Should I look at them now?”

  “Your call,” Fiona said.

  “Is he looking in this direction?” Liz asked.

  “Yes. Wait…Okay: He’s checking around.”

  Liz slipped the envelope open and gasped. “Oh, God…”

  “ Salt Lake City,” Fiona said. “These are the shots Walt-the sheriff,” she corrected, “wanted you to see. Agent Dryer wouldn’t permit it.”

  Liz flipped through the stack. Then she gathered them and returned them to the envelope. “God,” she repeated. “Did Walt-?”

  “No, no!” Fiona said quickly. “Please don’t g
o there. This was entirely my initiative. There was nothing said, nothing implied. Please don’t think that of him.”

  “You like him. Walt,” Liz said. “Or you wouldn’t have done this.” She pushed the envelope back across to Fiona. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Fiona said. “It’s just his work…it’s everything to him, you know?”

  “I like him, too,” Liz said. “Very much. He saved my life, you know?”

  Fiona leaned away, looking shocked.

  “Years ago, but believe me, you don’t forget something like that. A person like Walt. Not ever.”

  “He wanted these photos to scare you into calling off your talk. I know that much. Maybe he’s trying to save you a second time.”

  Fiona couldn’t see her eyes through the dark glasses, but she imagined them as scared.

  “And he’ll pay for it,” came the low voice of Adam Dryer.

  Liz Shaler jumped and her glasses wiggled down her nose.

  Dryer snatched the packet of photos with an arm like a frog’s tongue. Fiona hadn’t seen him coming. He leafed through the photos and then pocketed them. “The sheriff was on notice not to show you these, Your Honor.”

  “It wasn’t Walt!” Fiona protested. “It was me.”

  “And I can’t see through that?” Dryer said, stripping the glasses off his face and drilling a look into her. “You tell him he lost his Get Out of Jail card with me.”

  “Leave the photos where they were,” Liz Shaler said vehemently, “and leave us alone. Fiona’s my guest, which is more than I can say about the rest of you.”

  Fifteen

  A s the conference adjourned for lunch, Walt caught Danny Cutter outside a break-out room. Showing no sign of being ill at ease, Danny agreed to speak with him and the two headed down into the subterranean reaches of the hotel.