Killer Weekend

by Ridley Pearson

  Trevalian hung up wondering if he could walk any farther.

  Twenty-eight

  W alt reached the emergency room at a run. A Secret Service agent guarded the door.

  “Dryer?” Walt asked, not slowing.

  “Special Agent in Charge Dryer is in the Command Center.”

  “Tell him it’s Shaler. He’s going for Shaler.”

  “I’m not your message boy!” the agent shouted after him.

  Walt jumped into the Cherokee-and sped away. Five minutes later he was negotiating the streets of Ketchum. He parked uphill a block from Shaler’s house, pulled the shotgun from the dashboard, and double-checked its load. He realized too late that his protective vest had come back from cleaning and was still in his office.

  The crickets chimed. A dog barked in the distance. The smell of wood smoke lingered in the air. He moved stealthily in shadow, avoiding the streetlight, quickly closing the distance to Shaler’s house. This was the identical route he’d ridden as a pedal patrolman eight years earlier, and for some reason he thought of his brother and how much he missed him. He snuck down a driveway and past a neighbor’s house. He slipped over a rail fence that bordered Shaler’s driveway, his heart tight, his breath short.

  Procedures called for him to wait for backup: Dryer’s men couldn’t be far behind. His earpiece carried the monotonous prattle of his dispatcher’s voice. He needed silence. So he called in his location and went off-air.

  He approached Shaler’s kitchen door stealthily but not wanting Dryer’s sentries to mistake him for an intruder. He paused and studied the layout, looking carefully for signs of the agent guarding the back door.

  No one.

  Adding to his confusion, the interior lights were out. This went against protocol. The place should have been lit like a Christmas tree. He carefully made his way to the back door. His shoe hit something slippery right as his nose picked up the metallic smell of blood.

  He one-handed the shotgun and checked the shrubbery with his Maglite. Twin soles faced him. The agent had been clobbered. His head was bleeding-a good sign. He was out cold.

  Walt moved quietly through the door and into the kitchen. The all too familiar hallway stretched before him.

  Trevalian would have taken the agent’s gun. No vest, he reminded himself.

  He crept down the hallway, the flashlight off but held beneath the shotgun.

  The first door hung open: a small bedroom. Empty. The study door, to the right, also open. The room empty.

  His eye caught a glint on the carpet. He reached down and touched it: sticky. Blood. It could have been an agent’s, or Shaler’s, but something told him Trevalian’s stitches had popped. He worked down the hallway, passed a bathroom and a linen closet.

  One door remained: Shaler’s bedroom. Consumed by his memory of eight years earlier, his courage waned as his scar pulsed with pain.

  He twisted the head of the flashlight, kicked open the door, and stood to the side, expecting a shot.

  Then, an enormous crash of glass. Someone-something-going out a window. He dove into the bedroom, the shotgun pressed tightly against his shoulder. Looked left…right. Clear. Belly-crawled to the louvered doors of the closet. Clear.

  Walt got to his knees. Shaler lay in the bed, absolutely still. But then the flashlight caught her: It wasn’t Shaler but a mannequin.

  A safe room? A panic room?

  He kicked some errant glass from the broken window and climbed outside.

  A man in uniform-a sheriff’s deputy-was well up the hill, keeping to shadow. He dragged a leg behind him.

  Walt heard sirens approaching.

  “Halt!” Walt yelled out at the top of his lungs.

  Trevalian ducked into shadow.

  Police cruisers and sheriff’s vehicles slid around both street corners nearly simultaneously-behind Walt and in front of him. They stood off, aware of the limited range of the shotgun. Their overhead racks threw off colors as two searchlights were aimed onto Walt from opposite directions-each blinding the other car and leaving Walt a fuzzy, glowing image between them.

  Walt was no longer wearing his uniform shirt, and the word was out that a sheriff’s uniform had been stolen.

  “Hands in the air!” a megaphone voice called out.

  Walt dropped the shotgun, shouting, “It’s me!” He turned to face his own sheriff’s vehicle.

  “Stand down!” Brandon ’s voice called out to the Ketchum police car. “It’s Sheriff Fleming!”

  Amplified shouting back and forth, with Walt caught in the middle. He knew the quickest way to resolve this was to lie down on the asphalt until the Ketchum cop got it right.

  Doing so now, Walt peered into the shadows, wondering if they’d lost Trevalian. Again.

  Twenty-nine

  T revalian arrived at the mansion’s front door sweating, bleeding, and out of breath. A man on the run. He pounded hard on the twin doors, pushed the intercom button repeatedly, and then pounded on the door again. He looked behind him, back toward the gate, then returned to pounding on the door.

  A man came from the side of the house. He wore a blue blazer and a scowl. He held a gun and was backed up by a second man behind him. Who now appeared to Trevalian’s left.

  “Hands on your head. Step away from the door. Good. Hands where I can see them. Okay…on your knees-”

  “I can’t. My knee…Listen,” Trevalian said frantically, “you gotta get me out of here. We’ve got to do this someplace else. You know who I am? I’m being pursued.” He lay down on the driveway. “We have to hurry, fellas. The owner of this house…Ask him. But make it quick.”

  Less than a minute later he was loaded into a golf cart and driven around back-through a gate in a ten-foot-high fence-and escorted into what appeared to be a guesthouse. It was all hardwood floors and Stickley furniture. Indirect lighting and lots of glass. The city of Ketchum spread out below, just past the silhouette of the helicopter sitting on its concrete pad on the edge of a vast lawn. Four security guards kept their distance. The man to speak to him wore a Tommy Bahama floral shirt and pale trousers. He offered Trevalian a bottle of water. Trevalian gulped it down.

  “So talk,” this man said.

  “Not to you,” Trevalian said. “With all due respect. Him, or nobody. And if you kill me, then the three letters that are in a mailbox in town get picked up in the morning and go to the sheriff, the newspaper, and CNN. They contain all the details about this job-the e-mails, the payments. You think anything is totally untraceable? You want to take that chance? I get what I want out of this, and I give you the location of the mailbox and you put a little lighter fluid down it, and no one’s the wiser. And if you think you’ll beat the mailbox’s location out of me-give it your best shot.”

  He chugged some more water, draining the bottle.

  Tommy Bahama left the building. He returned more than ten minutes later with yet another security guard-that made five-and a man in his sixties wearing a white terrycloth robe and leather slippers.

  “Mr. Holms,” Trevalian said. “I’d stand, but the knee’s a little worse for wear.”

  “I believe you’ve made a mistake,” Stuart Holms said, waiting as Tommy Bahama helped him into a seat.

  “The mistake was yours-or whoever called me back. The package was not at home. You had bad intel. There was a mannequin in her bed.”

  “You’ve got the wrong man,” Holms said.

  “I’m a little short on time, Mr. Holms. The sheriff is out there looking for me. Secret Service. Police. We haven’t got long. Elizabeth Shaler cost you. Payback is payback. I understand that. If I’ve made a mistake, then turn me over to them. If, on the other hand, I’ve not, then we should be talking about me spending a few days in your panic room, or catching a ride in your helicopter.”

  Stuart Holms regarded him with contempt. “Then we wait for the police.”

  “Hide me until they drop the roadblocks,” Trevalian said. “Use your position, your power, your attorneys-wha
tever you’ve got-to keep me well hidden. Get me to someplace like Reno or Portland. That’s it. No money. No extortion. I have a reputation to protect. We both do.”

  Holms exchanged a look with Tommy Bahama-impossible to read.

  “The location of the mailbox,” Tommy Bahama said.

  “Not yet,” Trevalian said.

  “How do you know we won’t kill you once you’ve given us the location of the mailbox?” Holms asked.

  “How do you know I’ll give you the right mailbox? What if it’s a UPS drop box that doesn’t get picked up until six P.M. tomorrow night? They can’t keep roadblocks up indefinitely. I don’t intend to be here past six P.M. tomorrow.”

  “You didn’t post any letter,” Holms said.

  “You can play that card if you want.”

  “Thought it all through, have you?” Holms could no longer sit still. He came out of his chair and paced.

  “That’s what you hired me for. Tell me otherwise.”

  He stopped in front of Trevalian, glaring.

  “It was the helicopter that got you,” Trevalian explained. “I heard the helicopter over the phone. How many guys have their own helicopter in this town?”

  “More than you’d think.”

  “Six P.M. tomorrow, and then you’re gone,” Holms stated. “And I’ll want those letters.”

  The security guys all touched their ears at once.

  “Perimeter alarms,” one of them said.

  With his finger to his ear, Tommy Bahama nodded. “It’s a fucking army.”

  Stuart Holms growled at Tommy Bahama. “Tell me you searched him for a wire.”

  Bahama grimaced and looked over at the lead security guard, who stared back vacantly, dumbstruck.

  Trevalian casually unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, revealing the tiny microphone taped to his shaved chest. “I was a little slow on this bum leg. Business is business. Am I right, Mr. Holms?”

  “Shoot him!” Holms shouted to the paralyzed Tommy Bahama.

  The door crashed open and in charged a SWAT team, all shouting at once for hands in the air.

  The third man through the door was Sheriff Walt Fleming. He was grinning.

  MONDAY

  1 A.M

  One

  T hey separated the suspects. Stuart Holms was confined to the Situation Room, the small conference room down the hall from Walt’s office. Emil Guyot, Holms’s director of security, a man outfitted in Tommy Bahama casual wear, was given the coffee room, a closet-sized kitchen that held a beat-up aluminum-legged table for two in the corner.

  Adam Dryer had no jurisdictional authority to question anyone, and with the general consensus being that Stuart Holms and his attorneys would find some way to get him out of lockup within the next few hours, and certainly by morning, for Walt it all came down to these two interviews.

  He sucked down what remained of lukewarm coffee. Dryer nursed a milk tea, but kept looking into the cup, his acne-scoured face snarled in disapproval. They occupied Walt’s small office, overcrowded with stacks of journals piled on the floor and some backcountry gear crammed into the far corner. Dryer sat facing Walt’s desk.

  “ Brandon!” Walt called out, his voice echoing down the hall.

  His deputy arrived promptly, the only person in the office who didn’t look completely exhausted at 1 A.M. “Sheriff?”

  “Shut the door,” Walt said.

  Brandon closed the office door and stepped inside. Walt did not offer him the only remaining chair. He lowered his voice, despite the fact that both Holms and Guyot were down the hall behind closed doors, each being guarded by a deputy. “I want you to find me a plaster cast, a boot impression, in the evidence room. I’m thinking the Thompson case, or maybe the Ramone arson. Adult shoe size, no matter what. I want it in an evidence bag marked ‘Hill Trail, Adams Gulch.’ Date it yesterday: Saturday.”

  “Got it,” Brandon said.

  “And I need a contact lens. Find someone out there who doesn’t mind making a sacrifice for the cause. The office will buy ’em a new one. Now here’s the important part: Julie has a whole rainbow of highlighters in her desk. I want to use the blue highlighter to make a small dot on the side of the contact lens. Not too small, not too big. You got all that?”

  “Shoe impression. Contact lens,” Brandon repeated.

  “Go on. And close the door behind you.”

  Brandon left them alone.

  “I don’t follow,” Dryer said, once they were in privacy.

  “The AUSA out of Boise isn’t going to get up here until tomorrow around noon,” Walt said, referring to the assistant United States attorney. “You and I both know that Stuart Holms will have four or five attorneys around him by that time-most from out of state-and that what we caught on Trevalian’s wire, while incriminating, and enough to give us probable cause, may not carry the day in court.”

  “I’m no legal scholar,” Dryer said.

  “We have Trevalian’s use of one of my deputies’ cell phone-he stole it at the hospital-that may be able to be connected to an incoming call he received. If we can confirm that call was from Guyot, then we have a substantially stronger case against them, and we took a cell phone off Guyot. Cloned or not, that could be the smoking gun we need.”

  “I can hear in your voice that you’re doubting all this,” Dryer said.

  “Holms is a shrewd businessman. You hear words like ‘tenacious’ and ‘ruthless.’ I have to think that if Guyot’s involved, and I believe he is, that Holms has promised him the moon if anything ever went wrong. Now it has. You can bet the two of them have coached each other, rehearsed, and worked through all possibilities, including this one: arrest. They’re following a plan that’s been in place for at least six weeks-we know that from the Shaler seating plan. Maybe six months. They’re too well prepared on the Shaler front. They know what to expect, what’s coming. My one hope is to end-run them before the attorneys get involved.”

  “Fucking attorneys.”

  “How are your acting skills?” Walt asked.

  “With a baby face like this?” Dryer asked. Even a weary smile did nothing to improve his gangster looks.

  Two

  I ’m not speaking until I have representation,” Stuart Holms announced from the far side of the conference table. He looked at home, as if this were another of his boardrooms.

  “You just spoke,” Dryer said, “but I get what you mean.” He sat across from Holms, who’d been given time back at the estate to lose the terrycloth robe and don a pair of slacks and a plaid shirt. He wore loafers with no socks. He looked old.

  Dryer’s chair fronted a corkboard where Walt had had the Shaler seating plan hung prior to Holms’s arrival. The man had been facing it now for the past ten minutes.

  “The thing about businessmen like you: They’re always trying to save money, conserve resources.”

  A tape recorder ran on the corner of the table. Stuart Holms could barely take his eyes off it. He said nothing. He seemed to be working hard to keep contempt off his face, but it was a losing battle.

  “The sheriff has an interesting theory. You want to hear it? I’ll take that as a yes. It’s a little far-out for me-his theory. But he’s convinced Mr. Guyot has a lot more to lose than you, and so he’s starting there. With Mr. Guyot. Down the hall. The point being that one of you will deal. You think you won’t, but of course you will. Everyone goes into this thinking they won’t deal. And whoever deals first rolls on the other guy, and then that other guy is…pardon my French…fucked.”

  Dryer sipped from his tea, and gave it that same look of disgust. “If you spend the night here, don’t ask for the tea.”

  “I’ll be home within the hour,” Holms said.

  “A Sunday night, early Monday actually, in July? You think? You could be right, I suppose.” He sampled the tea again; same result. He said, “So here’s the thing. Have you had a chance to look at this seating plan behind me?”

  Holms looked up and gave the imp
ression this was the first time he’d paid any attention to it.

  “You know why we got that out to take a look at it? Because we wondered if any of Cutter’s invited guests had missed the Shaler brunch. Because there could be two reasons for that: Someone was sick, or had a scheduling conflict; or someone wanted to avoid being present when the bomb they’d arranged to kill Shaler went off. And, as you can see by the Xs, only two people missed the talk: you and your late wife.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “This is the sheriff we’re talking about, but your point is taken. Anyway…the sheriff said something about a guy named Raphael. Your chef, I believe?”

  Holms did a very good imitation of being bored by all this. Dryer knew differently-he had his eye on a vein in the man’s neck. His pulse was elevated, his eyes dilated, and he was growing increasingly restless. Walt’s emphasis had been on taking away the man’s sense of control. It seemed to be working, Dryer thought.

  “He said how you don’t eat anything that isn’t prepared by this guy Raphael. And I suppose that’s a personal thing, and I’ve got no comment, although my personal chef is a guy named McDonald, but I doubt the two know each other. So, anyway, the problem for the sheriff is this seating chart, prepared back in June, that has you down for the regular meal. No Raphael. And I’ve got to admit, he has a point: It seems to suggest you knew back in June that you wouldn’t be attending the Shaler brunch.”

  Holms glanced up at the seating chart. Then his eyes darted to meet Dryer’s before once more landing on the chart. Wisely, he chose not to comment. The blue bead on his neck was growing, and beating wildly. His Adam’s apple jumped as he tried to swallow.

  “I figure-or rather the sheriff does-that you wanted to save Raphael in case the bomb took out the kitchen help. So you didn’t book him. Why lose a good chef? Here’s where it gets a little extreme, even for me,” Dryer continued. “The sheriff believes not only that you killed your wife-or had her killed-but that you planned it far enough in advance to make sure it gave you the ultimate excuse not to attend the Shaler brunch. Who was going to question a grieving widower? But that’s where the irony comes in: because here I am questioning you. So maybe that part didn’t work so well.”