Killer View

by Ridley Pearson

  Killer View

  Ridley Pearson

  When a skier goes missing at Sun Valley 's Galena Summit, Sheriff Walt Fleming quickly assembles his crack search-and-rescue team and heads out into the snowy night. Despite the treacherous conditions, Walt and his group, including deputy Tommy Brandon and Walt's best friend, Mark Aker, set off on skis, accompanied by highly trained search dogs. Within minutes, something goes horribly wrong: a shot rings out, and one of their team is dead. By morning, Mark Aker has disappeared.

  Torn between professional responsibility and the desperate urge to find his friend, Walt is further challenged by an unexplained illness at a local water bottling plant that sends workers to the hospital and sets off biohazard warnings. Following threads of questionable evidence through the glitter of Sun Valley leads Walt to an unlikely – and darker – source, and reveals a crime played out on a much larger scale than he originally envisioned. Waist-deep in snow and knee-deep in lies, the life of his friend in the balance, Walt begins to suspect that the whole operation is controlled by people of great wealth and power, which leaves him where he started: out in the cold.

  Ridley Pearson

  Killer View

  The second book in the Sun Valley series, 2008

  ***

  Copyright © 2008 by Ridley Pearson

  For Marcelle, Paige, and Storey

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Gordon Russell for his founding of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, his continuing support, and, most of all, his friendship and his love of the written word.

  Special thanks to Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling, Hope Stevens, R.N., Dr. Phil Tarr, Dr. Paul Hruz, Brad Pearson, and Roger McGuinn for their expertise on subjects ranging from nursing care to Gamma-Scout radiation detectors. Any mistakes are all mine. Thanks, too, to Nancy Litzinger for office management, Robbie Freund at Creative Edge for all the IT solutions, Christine Pepe at Putnam for her diligent and patient editing, as well as Amy Berkower at Writers House and Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists for their representation. Killer View was written using StoryMill word processing software.

  SUNDAY

  *

  1

  HE SAW HIMSELF AS A CAMERA WOULD, AND OFTEN THOUGHT of himself in the third person, as if an omniscient eye were looking down on him and his activities. It was no different that Halloween night, as he prepared the syringes. He talked to himself-out loud- narrating every carefully conceived action, as if reading from a script. He could picture himself as one of those guys on the Discovery Channel or A & E.

  “He moves with the utmost care as he makes his preparations, as skilled a technician as he is a hunter…”

  The snow was falling to beat hell, which brought a twisted grin to his scrappy face. Virgin snow-the irony not lost on him, although his education had stopped in the ninth grade and irony, per se, was unknown to him. Fresh-fallen snow erased tracks. No one knew this better than a tracker, and, according to the voice-over, he was among the most accomplished trackers in all of Idaho, all of the West, if you excluded Montana, because there were guys up there who could follow wolves for three hundred miles on foot without a dog. Not him. He used his dogs and their radio collars whenever called for.

  “The final preparations almost complete, he anticipates the events in the hours to come with near-military precision…”

  On that night, he was scheduled for a twofer, a tricky bit of timing and complicated logistics, especially given the storm. He intended to get an early start for just this reason, the narrator in his head reminding him of the importance of meticulous preparation and execution.

  He arranged the five darts and two syringes, methodically checking dosages, storing them in two metal lunch boxes, the kind he’d once carried to school, the kind his daddy before him had carried into the mine. This one was lined with a gray foam rubber, not a white napkin or sheet of paper towel. He double-checked the charge on the Taser, was half tempted to test the thing on one of the dogs, as he sometimes did. But with Pepper’s staying behind, plump with a litter, he couldn’t afford to have another one out of commission for the night.

  Next came the firearms: the 22-gauge dart rifle; the MAC-10, with its three-speed taped magazines; the double-barreled sawed-off, for under the seat of the pickup. He was careful to separate the Bore Thunder/Flash Bang cartridges from the 12-gauge shot. The flash bangs performed like stun grenades but could be fired from the sawed-off. He kept the right barrel loaded with one of these in case of a run-in with law enforcement; he’d stun the bastard and then shoot him up with some ketamine and leave him by the side of the road, knowing he wouldn’t remember what day it was, much less the make or registration of the truck he’d pulled over.

  He attached the magnetic license plates over the pickup truck’s existing ones-a move as routine to him as brushing his teeth-a necessary precaution when working with his private clients. The plates were registered to a similar truck in Bannock County.

  He stuffed some fresh chew behind his molars, hawking a gob of spit onto the garage’s dirt floor. Even after being off of crystal meth for six months, at moments like this he found the allure of it tough to resist.

  He checked the straps on the wire cages for the dogs. The snow wouldn’t hurt them any, and he was in too big a hurry to trade them out for the vinyl carriers that were better in bad weather. He put only one of the weatherproof carriers in the back, the biggest he had. He double- and triple-checked its electric mat, a black sheet of heavy rubber, a wire from which ran to a 12-volt outlet installed in the side paneling of the truck bed; it was warm to the touch-a good sign.

  The specially outfitted carrier was large enough to hold a mastiff or Bernese mountain dog, or a mature sheep.

  Beneath his stubble, he carried a hard scar on his chin, looking like a strip of stretched pink leather, the result of a meat hook slipping when transferring a she-cat from the pickup to the dressing shed. He scratched at it, a nervous habit, the result of too many hours with nothing to do. He spent far too much of his life waiting for others, a disappointing aspect of being a work-for-hire.

  But now he had purpose, a higher calling.

  It was time to put things straight. There were enough assholes in Washington to fill a latrine. It was about time they remembered him and others who believed in their country.

  2

  THE MALE CAUCASIAN, TWENTY-FOUR, A SKIER, WAS SAID TO have been missing for over three hours. A man’s panicked voice had made the call to 911: “A friend of mine… He never showed up… We thought we’d accounted for everyone. I have no fricking idea how we missed him but… I think he’s still up there.”

  “Calm down, sir.” The county’s ERC operator.

  “Calm down? WE LEFT HIM UP THERE. We were skiing the Drop on Galena Pass. He never came off that mountain. He’s out there somewhere. You got to do something.”

  Click.

  “Sir?”

  Blaine County sheriff Walt Fleming had listened to the Emergency Response Center tape several times, trying to judge if it was a prank or not. It wouldn’t be the first time some yahoo had called in a false alarm to Search and Rescue. This one sounded authentic. And hanging up on such calls was, sadly, not that unusual. Guilt could be a powerful motivator. Didn’t need to tell a sheriff that.

  A life in the balance.

  A snowstorm. A miserable night.

  Walt had set Search and Rescue’s phone tree into operation.

  Now, standing in blowing snow, in the freezing cold, with only his pale face protruding from the parka, Walt caught his reflection in the glass of a nearby pickup. Where others saw a capable outdoorsman, Walt saw a softness settling in, his desk job taking over. Where others saw a face that could be elected, Walt saw fatigue. No one had ever called him hands
ome; the closest he’d gotten was “good-looking,” and that from a woman who no longer shared his bed. He blamed his sleepless nights on her: the mental images of her riding his own deputy, Tommy Brandon, flickering through his mind. The two of them laughing. At him. After twelve years of marriage, she’d left him alone with their young twins. And as much as he wouldn’t have it any other way, it wasn’t working. He was failing as a single dad. Barely keeping his head above water as the county sheriff. With the help of only eight full-time deputies, he oversaw law enforcement in a piece of Idaho roughly the size of Rhode Island. Now he faced Galena Summit in a snowstorm when all he wanted was a night playing Uno with his kids, and a decent night’s sleep.

  He awaited the dogs. Looking through the heavy snowfall, past the bluish glare of halogen headlights thrown from several pickups and SUVs parked in the turnout, he searched for some sign of the Aker brothers. A freak October storm, the forecast calling for eighteen inches above nine thousand feet. They were now above ten thousand, occupying a wide spot in the road along a series of switchbacks that constituted a part of State Highway 75.

  Thirteen inches of fresh powder and no signs of a letup.

  The conditions were horrible for an organized search, but, statistically, the probability of the missing young man surviving exposure went from bad to worse after the first four hours. They were now well into hour six, so awaiting first light wasn’t an option.

  Walt saw a flicker of headlights and turned to watch a pickup truck make the hairpin turn in a wheel-spinning ascent and pull into the turnout, parking with the other vehicles. Dogs barked from crates lashed to the bed of the arriving truck, which prompted the other canines to compete. Walt couldn’t hear himself think. After another minute, and a lot of peeing, the dogs settled down. Local vet Mark Aker, and his younger brother, Randy, came out of the truck, arguing.

  “This coat stinks!” Randy complained, zipping up a winter jacket. “I mean it smells bad, bro-amoxicillin mixed with stale beer.”

  “It takes a moron to forget a coat on a night like this,” Mark said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. By now, the others had climbed out of their vehicles.

  “No, it takes a moron to be out on a night like this!” Randy replied.

  Walt and the Aker brothers went back years. Walt had first met Mark as a teenager, when his family had spent summers and Christmas breaks with his grandparents in Sun Valley. They’d been in a summer camp together, had raised some hell as teenagers on the Sun Valley ski slopes. Now with three dogs at home, Walt basically lived at the vet’s. It felt as if he might as well sign his paychecks over to the Aker brothers. Randy’s specialty was large animals, horses and cattle; Mark’s, primarily cats and dogs. In the glitzy, celebrity-studded Sun Valley community, it was Mark’s practice that had soared. With working ranches giving way to showy estates and ranchettes, Randy’s large animal practice had nearly vanished in the last ten years, causing some envy and friction between the brothers. Things had gotten more cozy between Walt and Mark when Mark had volunteered his services to Search and Rescue, developing an effective K9 unit. Walt felt more like the third brother than a good friend. Hearing that Randy-the wilder of the two-had forgotten his coat came as no big surprise. He’d probably done it on purpose just to frustrate his more responsible brother. If anything, Randy was a professional thorn in his brother’s side. Like most brothers.

  Walt and Mark divided up the K9 teams into four pairs. Randy, the odd man out and the most experienced backcountry skier, would work solo, head higher up the road and find his way out to the Drop, from where he would ski the face of the mountain in search of the missing skier. The plan was for him to rendezvous with his brother and Walt midmountain.

  The teams headed off without a pep talk or sermon-just a check of avalanche peeps, the radios, and GPSs. Radio checks would be made every fifteen minutes. If the radios failed-and they often did in the mountains-then communicate by flares if the young man was discovered; orange, if you got yourself lost.

  Six hours twenty-five minutes.

  The ache in the pit of Walt’s stomach had nothing to do with the rope tied around his waist, pulling the evac sled.

  Now it was all up to the dogs. Mark released Tango, his bitch German shepherd and the best scent dog he’d ever trained. She would go ahead of them searching for anything human, dead or alive.

  Fifteen minutes rolled into twenty. A walkie-talkie check produced reports from everyone but Randy Aker, already out of range.

  The terrain proved slow and difficult. Walt was in a full sweat, his parka hanging open. It was twenty-eight degrees out. Snow fell in flakes the size of nickels. Steam rose from his neck and swirled around his headlamp like a halo.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Mark Aker said breathlessly. The falling snow deadened all sound.

  “Good a time as any,” Walt said. He knew what Mark was up to: he was trying to keep Walt’s worry at a manageable level.

  “We never talk… politics,” Aker said, testing Walt in a way that made him pay closer attention.

  “I run for office every four years. That’s enough politics for me.”

  “Not those kinds of politics.”

  “I don’t pay too much attention to Washington or Boise, if that’s what you mean,” Walt said. “You ever hear that story-true story, by the way-about some budget committee hearing where the congressman from back east had found a line item listing thirty-five hundred cattle guards and made the recommendation to take them off the federal payroll? Someone had to explain to the idiot that a cattle guard is a couple pipes welded together to prevent cows from crossing a fence line on a road, not a person on a payroll.”

  “That’s the point, I guess.”

  “What’s the point?” Walt asked. “That congressmen are ignorant?”

  Mark didn’t answer.

  At this temperature, over this amount of time, the batteries in the missing man’s peep-an electronic device used to help searchers locate someone in the backcountry trapped by snow-would fail sometime soon.

  It was a human life, and his survival weighed on Walt’s every step in the cumbersome snowshoes.

  “We’re going to lose his peep soon,” Walt said, “if we haven’t already.”

  “Hypothermia’s the enemy, not the Energizer Bunny.”

  “Point taken.” They continued for a few more difficult yards. “Are you going to explain what you mean by ‘politics’?”

  But before Aker could answer, both men stopped at the exact same moment.

  “Did you hear that?” Mark asked.

  “A branch snapping under the weight of the snow.” Walt moved his headlamp around. A badly bent and sagging pine bough shed some snow and sprang up. Others seemed to bend lower with each flake of fallen snow.

  The two men moved on, Mark Aker with less grace than Walt. He’d spent too much time in the clinic. He rocked forward and back on the snowshoes, wasting energy. But Walt knew better than to try to tell him anything. Mark was a doctor, after all.

  “You’re thinking it was a gunshot,” Walt said. “A rifle. Light gauge: twenty-two-power load or an AR- 15.”

  “It didn’t sound like a tree branch to me. Too far away,” Aker said breathlessly, winded by the climb. “But you’re the expert.”

  A few nearby branches snapped, surrendering to the snow load.

  Hearing this, both men turned their attention uphill. Then Aker trained his headlight directly on Walt, blinding him.

  “You’re right,” Walt said, raising his glove to shield his eyes. “That was a gunshot.”

  Walt reached for his radio.

  3

  TANGO BOUNDED TOWARD HIM, THROWING UP THE SNOW all around her.

  Mark Aker praised the dog and signaled Walt to stop and be still. In the shifting light from their headlamps, Tango circled Aker, tripping over the rear spines of his snowshoes, and sat down excitedly on his left side. Soaking wet and panting, she sank into the snowdrift up to her chest, her whole at
tention fixed on Aker.

  She’d returned only once, forty minutes earlier. On that visit, she had circled Aker twice and then charged back into the dark, following the dull impressions of prior skiers and her own fresh tracks. This was her message to her handler that she’d found nothing.

  At that time, Aker had made a point of asking Walt to bump the location into his GPS, knowing it might prove useful later.

  But now, with Tango’s second return, Mark stood perfectly still, waiting to see what the dog had in mind. Tango stabbed her wet nose into his left glove. She sat back down, then stood up and stabbed his glove again.

  “She’s found someone,” Aker said, rewarding the dog with a treat from his pocket and lavishing praise on her. Tango immediately ran out ahead of them, stirring up her own tracks. She glanced back, her eyes a luminescent green in the lights, and was gone.

  The two men trudged off, impeded by the cumbersome snowshoes and limited by their own exhaustion. Walt reported the news and their position to the others but did not call them back. It was critical they find the missing skier, and, until he had more than a dog’s excitement, he wanted the search continued.

  “No word from Randy,” Walt called back to Aker.

  “Fucking radios,” said Aker, huffing so hard he could barely get a word out.

  Walt pulled ahead of Aker as he followed Tango’s path through the snow. He snaked his way through a copse of aspen, the barren limbs, gray-white tree trunks, and shifting shadows unusually beautiful in the constantly moving light from his headlamp. His breath formed gray funnels. His thighs ached from dragging the sled, from lifting and planting the snowshoes, the effort clumsy.