Killer View

by Ridley Pearson

  “If I knew anything about Mark Aker, I’d help you. But I don’t.”

  The two men’s eyes met.

  “No one is going to help you. I’m trying to protect you, Sheriff. Take the trip to Washington.”

  “Protect me?” Walt’s face was scarlet, his voice too loud for the room.

  “The Lon Bernies of this world make their own laws. You and I both know a badge doesn’t mean much in this valley. Ironic since we’ve both served the law ourselves. But it’s different over here. You know that. If it wasn’t for the vehicles, it could be a hundred years ago.”

  “Maybe they buy off the local sheriff, but I’m not the local sheriff.”

  “Worth taking note of.”

  Walt stood, took a menacing step toward an unreasonably calm James Peavy, and caught himself, as Brandon rose off the piano bench.

  Peavy said, “Maybe by finding Mark Aker you find your answers, I don’t know. But by looking for him, you put yourself at risk, Walt. Hear me on this. Hear me good. This valley isn’t a safe place for you. Go home. Keep to your side of the mountains. You’ll find nothing but trouble over here.”

  “But if you’re a victim, why not report it?” Walt repeated, now exasperated. “Since when can someone intimidate James Peavy?”

  Peavy didn’t speak again. His expression suggested not resignation but determination, which confused Walt.

  He walked to the door and opened it for them. As cold a night as Walt could remember.

  39

  THE OUTSIDE OF THE ENVELOPE BORE HIS NAME, HANDWRITTEN in a lovely script, although Walt couldn’t actually touch the envelope, as it was sealed in thick, red-tinted plastic. BIOHAZARD was printed on the front in large letters.

  The desk sergeant explained that the envelope-hand delivered to the office by Fiona Kenshaw-had tripped the electronic sniffer used on all incoming mail.

  Contaminated.

  He was working on forty-five minutes of sleep. He’d showered, shaved, changed his uniform, and had eaten the scrambled eggs Lisa prepared for him. She’d slept on the couch, and had let the girls brush her hair and put it into a ponytail, so that she looked somewhat disheveled, as she washed dishes while Walt ate. It felt weird having her in the house. He hadn’t thanked her. Hadn’t said much at all. They’d met eyes at one point during the morning confusion, just before she’d left. Her eyes had said something about feeling sorry for him while all he felt was impossibly guilty. He’d driven the girls to school, because this was their routine. They’d played a word game on the way-the animal game-and Walt found himself not wanting to stop. Maybe just keep driving, his eyes on the two faces in his rearview mirror. When he’d let them out, he’d run around the car to hug them. Both girls appeared embarrassed by the gesture, though neither complained.

  “Radiation?” he asked his desk sergeant.

  “No! It was indicated as only biohazard,” she said. “The machine doesn’t get specific. If an item alerts for radioactivity, it goes in that box they gave us. Biohazard gets the red bags.”

  After 9/11, the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office had received a threatening letter containing a white substance that eventually came back as arsenic but had been believed to be anthrax. The feds had required the installation of the sniffer-a fifteen-thousand-dollar machine subsidized by the federal government-and it had been SOP ever since to test each piece of mail arriving at the office. The letter, bearing Fiona’s unmistakable handwriting, had been the first ever to trip the sensors, and the desk sergeant seemed more excited than frightened by the event.

  “You want me to issue a BOLO?” asked the desk sergeant. Be on lookout.

  “I’m not arresting her,” Walt said. “She works for us.”

  The desk sergeant held her tongue, but her eyes reminded him it was procedure to arrest anyone suspected of attempting to contaminate the offices. It was also procedure to involve the postal inspectors.

  He answered that look of hers. “This wasn’t sent through the mail. It wasn’t an intentional contamination, and my guess is, it’s one big misunderstanding. Before we call anyone, I’m going to clear this up.”

  “And what do I do with this?” she said, lifting the red bag by one corner.

  “Give it to me,” he answered, accepting the bag.

  WALT HELD a morning meeting with his two lieutenants, during which he passed along the day-to-day so he could continue working on Aker’s abduction. Nancy called Fiona, and, when Fiona arrived, Walt led her outside, and they walked around the block, circumnavigating the former courthouse and city hall, a grand, three-story brick building built in the late 1800s. It now housed the DMV and county records. He didn’t bother with a jacket; it was already in the upper forties. The early bite of winter seemed to be mitigating, at least at the lower altitudes.

  He produced the red baggie from his coat pocket.

  “I didn’t want to discuss this in the office. But can you please tell me why you left me an envelope that tripped our biosensors? You might have warned me.”

  She stopped abruptly.

  “My letter’s a biohazard?”

  “I thought you’d given it to me because you knew it was contaminated, that it was related to Mark’s work somehow.”

  She told him then about being picked up by Sean Lunn at Hillabrand’s. About spotting the dried mud on the Escalade’s step rail. About how the unusually pale color had reminded her of the dried mud on the rape victim’s clothing.

  Walt unsealed and opened the plastic bag, as she explained its contents. He tore open the envelope and saw that it contained both a note and a small amount of a pale brown dirt.

  “Roger Hillabrand?”

  “The mud was on his car. I was going to suggest that you have the lab compare this to what we found on the girl’s shoes.”

  “That’s certainly available to us.”

  “Roger-or, more likely, Lunn-drove that car somewhere near where that girl-”

  “Tulivich. Kira Tulivich,” he provided.

  “-had been.”

  “Ohio Gulch or Triumph,” Walt said. “The two most likely spots in this valley where you’d find contaminants: the dump and the old Triumph Mine. But the fact is that Kira Tulivich was at the wedding at Hillabrand’s. You’re the witness on that. Mud on his rails and her shoes-odds are, it’s from his house, or at least somewhere on his property.”

  “Everything’s frozen solid and covered in two feet of snow,” she reminded him.

  “Maybe not everything,” he said. “You want to help?”

  “Of course!”

  “Can you get yourself invited back up there?”

  “You want me to spy for you?”

  “Once we’ve confirmed we’ve got a match, my guys and I can work Ohio Gulch and Triumph, and we will. But ruling out Hillabrand would be the first step in any kind of an investigation. You start with the most obvious: that she was in those shoes, on his property, the night she was raped. The mud may have absolutely nothing to do with anything, other than she attended the reception. You’re not ‘spying, ’” he said, putting it in finger quotes, “you’re eliminating him from consideration.”

  “I attended the reception and I didn’t come home with any mud on my shoes.”

  “I’m just saying that’s where it starts. If I come at Roger Hillabrand with a request to collect evidence, there will be a line of attorneys at my door ten deep.”

  “Okay. I accept. I’ll spy for you,” she said.

  “It’s not spying. It’s just looking for some mud. He has a pond up there. But this would more likely be around a hot tub or along the edge of a heated driveway.”

  “But contaminated?”

  “I’m not saying I have the answers. I’m just telling you where we start.”

  “I’m not going to find any mud up there, Walt. It’s frozen solid. The Escalade’s the connection. If you ask me, Roger’s guy, Sean Lunn, was at the same afterparty, the same bar-the same something-as Kira was. He probably doesn’t know it, but he’s
the one who can help you. Not that he ever would.”

  “Women’s intuition?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Walt. Roger will never allow it. He’ll stick his boy on the private jet and send him to Brazil for all eternity rather than get involved with something here that can’t possibly do anything but sully his company’s name.”

  “You’ve gotten to know him, I see.”

  “Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”

  Walt felt his face flush. Was he jealous? It struck him that maybe he was.

  She spared him further embarrassment. “How long for the lab to compare the two dirt samples?”

  “Several weeks, I would think. It’s never fast.”

  Her face sagged.

  “But we may not need it,” he said. “We already have a sample of the mud from her shoes. We took it at the hospital. I’m thinking all we need to do is run that sample through our mail sniffer. If it kicks as hazardous, that’s good enough for me: that gives us probable cause. We can send it off to the lab, but we don’t need to wait for specific results.”

  Fiona nodded. “I’ll bring my camera. That gives me the added excuse to look all around. But it can’t be a hot tub. It’s on the Escalade’s step rail. It was thrown up onto the car when the car was going at a good clip. It’s got to be a road or a driveway, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that the contaminants are salts that keep the ground from freezing.”

  “Like I said, that’s Ohio Gulch or Triumph. We’re on it.” Maybe it was the repetition, or her stating so confidently that it was salts keeping the ground from freezing, but, standing there, he suddenly knew exactly where and with whom to begin this discussion.

  He’d nearly had his chance a few nights earlier.

  40

  “DO NOT RAIN,” WALT CHANTED TO HIMSELF, STARING UP through the Cherokee’s windshield. For an area that saw three hundred sun-filled days a year, the skies had picked this particular Monday to threaten, and it was in the low forties-the one time he was out searching for preexisting mud.

  He could remember a time, not long ago, when the road out to the landfill had been a poorly maintained dirt track, leading to a giant, unsupervised pit in the ground. But now he drove on asphalt all the way out to a series of excavations, all surrounded by chain-link fence, monitored by an attendant in an entrance booth.

  “Hey, Ginny,” Walt said, his elbow out the window, the Cherokee perched on a concrete slab, a vehicle scale large enough to weigh tractor trailers.

  “Walt.”

  “Just need a look around.”

  “Not dumping nothing?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “How’re the girls?”

  “Wild. More like teenagers every day.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “How’s your mother doing?” he asked.

  “Same old same old. Nothing going to kill her.”

  “Nor should it.”

  “Second cancer in two years, but she’s still doing her own shopping.”

  “The way it should be.”

  “I hope I’m that strong when I’m eighty.”

  “Right there with you.”

  “Anything new on Mark Aker?”

  “Working on it. Everyone in my department.”

  “Is that what brings you here?”

  “No. I’m just sightseeing.”

  “Yeah. True beauty. And the smell is certainly worth a visit.”

  “An aroma coma. May I pass?”

  “Be my guest.” She tripped a button that lifted the red-and-white-striped barricade, and Walt drove off the scale and onto dirt. The surface was crushed granite, like nearly every road in the county, rock chips and sand mixed with a good deal of clay, the color of coffee with cream. He was no great judge, considered himself mostly color-blind, but the dried mud on Kira Tulivich’s shoes had been a pale pasty brown, almost gray. The dirt he saw here wasn’t close to that color.

  The landfill pits were constantly being dug up, covered over, and redug, bringing every kind of unwanted thing to the surface. He drove into a big, open field of dirt, patches of litter trapped on the surface, leading to a sharp edge, beyond which a well-graded ramp carried the big Caterpillar tractors and loaders fifty feet down into an organized mass of trash and household debris at the bottom.

  A light drizzle struck his windshield, and he cursed aloud in the confines of the car.

  SEVERAL MILES NORTH of Ohio Gulch, Walt arrived at the turn for East Fork, a valley canyon running east of the highway and parallel to a like-named creek. East Fork represented the dichotomy of the valley, a crossroads where the blue-collar community of Triumph, situated on an abandoned mine site, met the multimillion-dollar homes that bordered the creek. The mine had been dug and exhausted a hundred years earlier, leaving behind vast fields of chemically poisoned gravel and clay tailings so toxic that nothing, not a single weed, would grow. The steppes of tailings, each the size of several football fields, rose in three successive levels, thirty to forty feet high, just as East Fork Road left the affluent neighborhoods behind.

  A hippie community had sprung up in Triumph in the late 1960s, squatters willing to risk living on the top tier of the toxic mine tailings. For thirty years, Triumph had been listed as among the nation’s top five most toxic sites on the EPA’s Superfund list. No cleanup money had ever been allocated. Despite health warnings, the residents stayed. As land values escalated, the squatter shacks grew to trailers, mobile homes, and even a log cabin or two. The result was a ramshackle assortment of dwellings whose occupants had reputations as eccentrics, renegades, and, in some cases, outlaws.

  Senator James Peavy’s warning echoed in Walt’s ears, though he was much closer to home: people made their own laws. There were places in this county that a uniform felt more like a bull’s-eye than a designation of authority, and Triumph was one of them.

  The road rose more steeply on the final approach to Triumph. Remains of ancient mining equipment jutted out of the hill. The road ascended to a cluster of dwellings, a desolate, desperate landscape juxtaposed against stunning views to the west.

  As Walt made the drive, he noticed that each terraced steppe changed color. The lowest was a black-gray clay, the middle gray-green, the top grayish yellow. Even half color-blind, Walt saw the similarity to the dried mud on Kira Tulivich’s shoes.

  He drove through the neighborhood carefully. He hadn’t been up here in a while and was surprised to see some decent-looking homes interspersed with the trailers. Wood smoke spewed from stovepipes. A few dogs patrolled.

  Parked next to a broken-down RV he spotted an old beater Subaru that he recognized as Taylor Crabtree’s. Walt’s office had impounded the car twice. Even from a distance, he could see discoloring along the side of the car.

  Now it added up: Crabtree, a repeat juvie offender; his face, a battered mess; now, mud on his car. Walt parked alongside the Subaru. The mud was the same grayish yellow as Kira Tulivich’s shoes.

  Walt saw his own face in the reflection off the glass of the driver door, as he stole a look inside: the dark “snow tan” hid any evidence of fatigue or lines of concern, the sunglasses masked his eyes. Only his cracked lips and stubble beard offered a glimpse into the strain of the past several days.

  Walt squinted, pushing closer to the glass: on the Subaru’s dashboard was a sticker: KB’S BURRITOS. Kira Tulivich had offered only one, seemingly irrelevant piece of information from the examination table: “KB’s”

  Walt broke off a chunk of the mud and bagged it, then slipped the Beretta out of its holster. Walt ducked down alongside the Subaru and triple-clicked the radio com clipped to his uniform’s epaulet. This signaled to his dispatcher a low-voice communication: he or she was to answer in clicks, not voice. Walt reported his location in a whisper and requested backup, using the radio code to signal no lights or sirens. He released the mic’s button and waited.

  Two clicks. Backup was on its way.

  After two minutes passed, Walt lost patience
waiting for backup to arrive. He reminded himself that Crabtree was just a kid.

  He edged around the car, crossed to the RV, and put his ear to the door. If the kid dived out a window or climbed out a skylight, Walt would regret not waiting. But he hammered on the door just the same. “Crabtree! It’s Sheriff Fleming. Open the door, please!”

  The RV moved and squeaked on its springs.

  “Crabtree!” Walt called loudly. “Don’t be stupid.”

  The door swung open.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Crabtree wore blue jeans and the denim shirt from Elbie’s. His hands were stained black from work, his hair a rat’s nest. His beat-up eyes were filled with contempt and soured with distrust.

  “Yeah?”

  “Step outside,” Walt said, backing up. “Okay, now… hands against the RV and your butt back.” Walt frisked him. “Good. Fine.” He holstered the Beretta and asked Crabtree to turn around.

  “I don’t know nothing about any guys trying to get people to join anything.”

  “It’s not about that,” Walt said.

  Crabtree shrugged.

  “Do you know a girl-a young woman-named Kira Tulivich?”

  “Sure I do.”

  The admission surprised Walt. Crabtree was the kind of kid who’d deny everything. “You know her from where?”

  “School. From around. You know.”

  It started to rain again. Walt ignored it. Taylor Crabtree checked the sky a couple times, shedding more light onto his cut-up face.

  “Know her well?”

  “Nah. Just know who she is. Her type and me, we don’t exactly mix.”

  “Her type? You mean she’s older, or pretty, or what?”

  “Rich,” he said. “That’s the way it is at school: us and them. You know?”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Crabtree’s hesitation belied his answer. “I don’t know.”

  “You know what we’re going to do, Taylor? We’re going to put a forensics team from Boise on your car. You ever seen CSI? Like that. They vacuum the car. Develop prints. Lift some. Photograph others. They’ll be looking for hair and fibers that connect back to Kira Tulivich. That mud on the car. All that evidence-some of it you can’t even see-is going to bring you down like a ton of bricks. You want to get ahead of this, now is your chance.”