At the tip of the white arrow lay a single, clear contact lens.
Twenty
W alt stood to the side and down the hallway from the Picabo Street Room, out of the way of the conference guests departing a talk given by the secretary of the treasury. Having Doug Aanestad by his side won Patrick Cutter’s attention. The eye communication was between attorney and client, with only a passing glance at Walt.
Cutter dealt with a few enthusiastic guests, waited to make sure the secretary was properly escorted to the next function, and then lingered long enough to have the hallway to themselves for a moment.
“Is that room clear?” Walt asked as he shook hands with Cutter.
“Yes, certainly.” Patrick led them into the room and Walt shut the door. Capable of holding a hundred or more, the conference room smelled of warm bodies and coffee. Two food service personnel entered to refresh the ice water and clear glasses from the dais. Walt asked them to leave, and they did so without question.
“As you know,” the attorney told his client, “the sheriff and his men searched your residence this afternoon.” He focused intently on Cutter’s eyes, attempting to communicate the severity of the situation. “He would like to ask you some questions.”
“Of course,” Cutter blurted out, looking alarmed.
“I advise you, Patrick, to check with me before answering. Do we understand each other? Each and every question, you will check with me before answering. Given this condition, I’m allowing this conversation to take place. But I must have your understanding on this: The sheriff wanted to run a recording device-I have prohibited that; he wanted to see you alone, by himself, also forbidden; he claims to have reason to suspect you in a possible murder investigation, Patrick. That’s right: murder.”
“Danny?” Cutter blurted out. Despite the golf tan, he looked suddenly pale.
“He’ll get to that,” Aanestad said. “But there’s a good example: I don’t want you speaking until I’ve nodded my okay. And I want you to think clearly about your answers before giving them.”
Cutter nodded.
Walt began by asking some of the same general questions he had asked Danny Cutter earlier. Patrick could not recall with any clarity when he’d last seen Ailia Holms-he pointed out the large number of guests he was now dealing with on an hourly basis. He thought it might have been as far back as the cocktail party at his residence. Walt soon moved into more sensitive territory.
“You directed Dick O’Brien to pass along a DVD to me from your home security cameras-”
“Wait just a minute!” Aanestad conferred with Cutter in the corner by a table with a black skirt piled with copies of a book written by the treasury secretary. They returned and both men sat down facing Walt.
“I did,” said Cutter.
“Why would you do that? Implicate your brother like that?”
Cutter checked with Aanestad, who nodded faintly. “It seemed the right thing to do. It’s the cover-up that gets you hanged, Sheriff. We all know that.”
“You could have destroyed it. Who would have known?”
He checked with Aanestad each and every time. “Same answer.”
“You could have warned your brother.”
“He’s an adult.”
“Who has driven which of your cars this weekend, between you and Danny?”
“I drive the Cayenne. I gave Danny the Lexus. My wife either rides with me or uses the Volvo.”
“What about the Land Cruiser?” Walt asked.
Aanestad shook his head, and Patrick Cutter, looking confused, raised his eyebrows at Walt. “I’m advised not to answer that,” he said.
Walt thought him either a very good actor, or someone who knew nothing of the possibility of Ailia Holms’s contact lens being found in his car.
“The keys?” Walt asked.
“Kept on a rack in the kitchen. All but the Cayenne. I keep those with me. I’m passionate about the Cayenne.” He smiled.
It was all wrong. Walt had expected him to be nervous and agitated. Aanestad sat smugly observing Walt’s reactions-Walt’s, not his client’s. Had some coaching gone on in the corner? Walt wondered. Was Cutter seasoned enough from his business dealings to bluff his way through this? It seemed impossible to Walt that Cutter, if guilty, could maintain such a calm facade.
“You were sleeping with Ailia Holms?”
Cutter tried to hold back any reaction, but he slowly crumbled. Feigned astonishment moved into feigned insult. Walt never took his eyes off the man, as the accusation worked through him like an acid. His weapon was patience. He waited, and the waiting was the man’s undoing.
“Nonsense!” Aanestad complained, trying to give Cutter a breath of air. “Where’d you get that? It’s garbage, Walt, and you know it. You should be ashamed, trying such a stunt.”
Walt had gotten it from a single look Dick O’Brien had given him out on the bridge when mentioning the competition between the brothers, but he wasn’t about to reveal his source. “Let your client deny it, counselor.”
Patrick’s eyes shone wetly as he glowered at Walt. At least a minute had passed. Maybe two. The air-conditioning wheezed from the ceiling. Again, a food service worker tried to enter the room from the far end. Again, Walt sent him packing.
Patrick said softly, “I’m upset over her loss, Sheriff. We were…close.”
“Of course you were,” Aanestad said. “You and Stu-”
“Shut up, Doug,” Cutter said.
“How long?” Walt asked.
“This conversation is over!” Aanestad announced.
“Doug!” Cutter chided. “If you can’t keep quiet, I’m going to ask you to leave the room.”
Aanestad’s face went scarlet, his eyes flashed darkly, and he sat back in his chair.
Patrick continued. “I had Dick share the security footage because if Danny did something…if he hurt her in any way…then God damn it, for once he’s going to pay.”
“I’ll need you to account for your whereabouts last night, from nine P.M. to past midnight.”
Without pause, Cutter replied, “I was hosting a dinner at the lodge dining room followed immediately by a dessert function out at Trail Creek Cabin. The commissioner of the FCC. Believe me, Walt, every second of my time can be accounted for, by me, my people, and probably several dozen, if not a hundred or more, witnesses. Do the legwork.”
“The same for Danny?”
Patrick answered only with a saddened face.
“We’re done here,” Aanestad repeated. This time, he won Patrick’s support.
Walt had what he wanted: Patrick had admitted involvement with Ailia Holms, just as O’Brien had inferred. The man could have easily hired her murder.
All three men stood.
Walt asked for Cutter’s passport, winning another shocked expression. “Have one of your people run it down to my office before five.”
“That’s less than an hour.”
“That’s your problem.”
“You are way off, if you think I had anything do to with Ailia’s death.”
“Physical evidence was found in the back of your Land Cruiser possibly connected to the victim. Doug was prohibited from saying anything about that-the only condition of his attendance here.”
“What evidence? That’s ridiculous. Allie and I used that car all the time. We’ve even-” Cutter stopped himself.
Walt said nothing. He felt sordid and tired.
“We cared for each other,” Cutter repeated, as if issuing his defense.
“That’s enough, Patrick,” Aanestad said, taking Cutter by the arm and leading him from the room.
Twenty-one
A few minutes before 5 P.M., Walt parked in his designated space in front of the Sheriff’s Office. The officer on duty told him Myra was waiting in his office. He found her reading the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association magazine.
“What’s up?” he asked, hurrying over to give her a kiss. “Is Kev all right?”
“Better,”
she said. “They may release him tomorrow.”
He sat down behind his desk and checked his e-mail. Too many to deal with. A stack of phone messages. And yet it felt uncommonly good to be back in the office.
“You look like hell.”
“I’m okay,” he told her.
“Are you eating?” With Myra it was always food.
“I’m good.” He looked up, and she looked down, avoiding eye contact. “ Myra?”
“Kev lied to you.”
“I know.”
She seemed both relieved and surprised. Her face brightened.
“He’s in with a bad kid,” he said. “This isn’t like him… We both know that.”
“How much trouble is he in?”
“Enough,” he answered honestly.
“I gave him the what-for. Told him we can’t keep using his father’s death as an excuse for our screwups. I’ve done it as much as him, Walt.”
“We’re all guilty of that,” Walt said. “Why is it we’re so willing to lean back, instead of press forward?”
“Fear. Of the unknown. Of the known. Of tomorrow. Of failure.” She worked herself up toward a cry, broken by Walt’s tossing her a box of tissues, which brought a laugh.
“So that’s a good thing,” he said. “To get through that, I mean. I hope it’s contagious.”
“We had a good cry, the two of us. That hasn’t really happened since Bobby.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“He wants to talk to you.” The way she said it, her eyes unflinching, he knew this was the real reason she’d come. She closed the magazine and set it aside.
“Okay.”
“No, I mean now, Walt. You need to hear this.”
“It can wait. If he’s getting out tomorrow-”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Exasperated, he held himself back from saying something stupid, something he’d regret. But his face belied him.
“I probably should have called you,” she said. “Caught you on the way down valley. I know how busy you must be. But I wanted to look you in the eye. I want you to understand how important this is. Not for Kevin-I don’t mean that. For you. Your job. He wouldn’t tell me what it is, but a mother knows. Right? Something happened in that laundry-that’s all I got out of him. Something he won’t talk to me about.”
“I’ll be heading up valley later on. The conference is in full swing.”
“You’ve got to go now, Walt.”
“ Myra…” he pleaded.
“He won’t tell me, only you. Please. Please do this. He’s your nephew.”
He had some choice words on the tip of his tongue. He looked at her and nodded. He said, “But we’re stopping by your place on the way and you’re making me a banana and mayonnaise sandwich.”
“Deal,” she said brightly. And with that, tears rolled from her tired eyes.
Twenty-two
K evin didn’t look as if he’d be going home the next day. If anything he looked worse than earlier in the day: the bruising around his shattered eye socket had spread beyond the bandages and was a horrid orange. His one supposedly “good” eye was pooled with blood beneath the cornea, the iris barely discernible.
“You look like shit,” Walt said, taking the seat by the side of the bed.
Kevin winced as he stretched the stitches at the edge of his lips into a grin. “Yeah,” he said.
“Your mom said-”
“Yeah,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry for what happened.”
“Me, too. I hear you want to change your story.”
“If I can.”
“Of course you can, Kev. The truth is always a good place to start. You might want to remember that.”
“There was a guy,” Kevin said.
“A guy,” Walt repeated after a protracted silence.
“In the laundry. When we got there. Up there by the register dressed like a ninja. Scared the hell out of us.”
“A ninja?”
“You know, a ski mask. Black clothes. Over in the bags of laundry.”
“A worker? A ski mask? Didn’t you say the alarm went off when you kicked in the door?”
“It beeped and went off. Yeah.”
There’d been no report of a manager or employee being inside the laundry at the time. “What was the guy doing?”
“Scaring the shit out of us.”
Walt suppressed a grin, then sobered to what he was hearing. “Eric went for the window because of this guy.”
“Yeah.” Kevin sounded regretful.
“You were, or were not, trying to steal clothes?” Walt pressed.
“Dry cleaners use a solvent…,” Kevin said softly.
“Meth,” Walt said, closing his eyes tightly. “For cooking meth.”
Kevin let out a slow, ragged breath. “Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Crab.”
“Taylor Crabtree. He put you up to this?”
“Yeah. Said if we were caught, on account we don’t have records, criminal records, we’d get off a lot easier than him.”
Walt fought valiantly to control his temper. “And this other guy-your age, or what?”
“Didn’t seem like it.”
Walt found himself hung up on the alarm having sounded with someone else already inside. “Give me a minute.”
He stepped into the hall to use his cell phone and called Trident Security, the valley’s only security firm. He identified himself and asked to pull up the entry log for the Suds Tub on the previous night, marveling at how quickly he was provided the information.
“There was a log-on at six-forty P.M.,” he was told. “Log-out at one-oh-seven A.M. Another log-on, one-oh-eight. We received an alarm at one-nineteen; called the establishment at one-nineteen, and passed it on to KPD at one-twenty-one A.M.”
Walt clarified that a log-on meant logging on to the security system, an act that would suggest someone leaving the laundry, and that a logoff implied a return.
“Yes, sir. Once we caught that alarm, we called the client in case it was a false. Owner’s supposed to pick up and give us a password. That didn’t happen. No one picked up, so we dispatched KPD.”
Walt asked for a hard copy to be faxed to him. He thanked the guy and hung up, and returned to Kevin. The obvious explanation was an owner or employee-someone who knew the access code. But part of Kevin’s story didn’t add up.
“A ski mask over his head? You’re sure about that? It was dark, right?” This was not the description of an employee hitting the cash register.
“I saw him. He helped Eric. Put Eric’s fingers on his neck to stop the bleeding.”
“The ninja helped Eric?” Walt felt confused.
“You said he saved his life.”
“The doctor said that,” Walt corrected. “He helped Eric?”
“And then, when he turned toward me…” Kevin’s face bunched and Walt could see it was painful. “And I…I just ran.”
Walt helped him to sit. The boy blew his nose and sipped some water through a straw.
“You did the right thing telling me, Kev. We’re going to work this out.”
“I fucked up. I’m so sorry.”
“Couple of things,” Walt said. “One, you’ve got to clean up your language. Two, you say nothing to Eric and, above all, nothing to Crabtree about any of this. I don’t want you talking to these guys. Not a word. Do we understand each other?”
“I got it.”
A nurse cleared her throat. She stood inside the door. Walt had no idea how long she’d been there.
“Need to change a dressing, Sheriff,” she said.
Walt nodded. Kevin reached out and grabbed Walt’s arm. “Can you stay while she does this? It kinda hurts.”
“Sure,” Walt said. He held Kevin’s clenched fist as the nurse removed the bloodied bandage and replaced it with a new one. That side of his face had taken a beating.
“The doctor’s going to come look at this,” the nurse informed the patient. �
�He may want to take one or two more stitches.” Among the bandages and disinfectant, Walt noticed the sealed needles and suture.
“That’s some small suture,” Walt said to the nurse.
“Five-zero. Very small. Used for face, eyes, ears, nose.”
“You mind?” Walt said, letting go of Kevin’s hand.
She passed him one of the sealed plastic bags. It contained a slightly curved needle and a coil of very fine suture. Walt thought back to the contents of the carry-on bag found at the airport. “This is point-zero-zero-five,” he said, just to clarify.
“We call it five-zero, yes,” she said, “five one-thousandths of an inch.”
“What about three? Plain old three? Just the number three?”
“As suture? Number three suture?” She sounded surprised. “Not in people. Vets, maybe-big-animal work. There’s a joke when you’re studying this stuff: Number five suture is used for towing cars. That’s the joke,” she said, when Walt failed to smile.
“I’ve got to make another call,” Walt said.
“I understand,” Kevin said.
“Remember what we talked about.”
“I’ve got it.”
He left at close to a run. His first call was to Fiona. He asked to see any crime-scene photos of Suds Tub.
“And I was wondering if you could get copies of the contents of that carry-on bag to Mark Aker. I realize it’s a Saturday. I could have a deputy-”
“It’s no problem, Walt. I’ll meet you there.”
Twenty-three
W alt didn’t bother to call ahead to the vet’s to check if Mark was in. Given the break-in and the now countywide effort to retrieve the missing pets, Mark wasn’t going anywhere.
Walt entered Aker’s vet clinic with his cell phone glued to his ear. Both of the Cutter brothers’ passports had been delivered to his office. Dr. McClure was consulting an optometrist to verify the prescription of the contact lens found in Cutter’s Land Cruiser.
Fiona entered only minutes behind him. “Got them,” she declared, holding up an envelope.
The receptionist indicated a door below the sign marked DOGS.
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