Killer View

by Ridley Pearson

  “You were or were not on official business?”

  “Was not. I’m out of uniform, Mr. Amish. I’m coming out of a marriage, which I’m sure you’re able to confirm, and,” he said, lowering his voice, “I was trying to get into something new, if you catch my meaning. I was going for the wow factor: Top Gun meets National Geographic. If I hadn’t made her sick, if you guys hadn’t interfered, I might have had a chance.”

  “I doubt it,” said Amish. “Not your chances but the story.” He shifted some papers. Guys like him did that just as a matter of habit. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Fleming.”

  “Not so far as the crow flies.”

  “Your towplane pilot reports you requested a release over Craters of the Moon. You strayed quite far from that release point.”

  “Have you ever seen the park from the air? The huge flows of lava, like somebody spilled black ink and it froze in place. You want to impress a woman, Mr. Amish, show her Craters at sunset. Land in Arco. Buy her a steak at the Mel-O-Dee and have the towplane waiting to fly you home. Knocks their socks off, and, if you’re lucky, other pieces of clothing as well.”

  Amish fought back a grin. For a moment, Walt allowed himself to believe he was regaining some credibility. But it was a grin of satisfaction, as it turned out, not one of agreement.

  “Ms. Kenshaw is your department’s contracted photographer, Sheriff. She boarded your romantic escapade with two camera bodies, five lenses, a light meter, and a variety of filters. And, oh… infrared capability. You flew into our airspace and stayed off com for twenty-seven minutes before being forced down by the Air National Guard. The only photographs on her camera are of what appears to be an assault-a young woman, badly beaten, and some colorful clothing. A prom? A wedding? They’re dated less than a week ago. So what you’re telling me is you brought her up on this ‘date’ to photograph the sunset and she got, what, so caught up in your smooth talking that she forgot to shoot any photographs?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “We are.”

  Walt wondered if she could possibly hold up under the scrutiny and realized he should have created a story for them both to stick to. Amish likely knew of his attempts to reach the director by phone. Even so, proof was proof. No matter what Amish believed, he could not prove intent. “The glider’s not much different than a parasail. You’ve never had parasailers over your airspace?”

  “We’d rather work with you than against you,” Amish said. “We’re all on the same side here.”

  “I’ll take that to mean you don’t want me calling the vice president about it,” Walt said.

  “I’m aware of your relationship with Vice President Shaler. I’m aware of your service record. You’re something of a hero, Sheriff. I get that. Doesn’t make my job any easier.”

  “You’re retired military,” Walt said. “That’s a burn wound on your neck-chemical, maybe. Desert Storm, I’m guessing. There were compounds used in that war that few of us ever heard about, weren’t there? You don’t strike me as military intelligence, Mr. Amish. You have field experience, I’m pretty sure. Marines, maybe.” There was a flicker in the man’s eyes that was his tell: an ever-so-slight lifting of the eyelids that Walt guessed he’d worked hard to control. “Your boss worked under George the First when he headed up Langley. Your boss’s boss I’m talking about: Roger Hillabrand. He was a Marine, wasn’t he? A big player in Desert Storm. Hired his men to work for him, once he entered the private sector, and formed the Semper Group. So you’re long on loyalty, short on questions. We can spend three or four hours in here and all I’m going to do is lose my chance at Ms. Kenshaw. These are tricky waters because your boss’s boss has a personal relationship with Ms. Kenshaw-and if he had anything to do with our grounding, if any phone calls were exchanged, this is going to look personal. Mixing business with pleasure. Using his power… to derail any attempt at a date. I thought I could take off the uniform, fly her up over Craters, and make a good impression. Maybe score a few points. But maybe Hillabrand thought different. This could be embarrassing. You called in the Air National Guard, Mr. Amish. Over a woman. Why don’t you release us and let me try to salvage what I can of an evening gone horribly wrong and we’ll both forget all about this?”

  “Your glider will be impounded until further notice. Our people will take it apart-piece by piece, if we have to-in order to determine there were no cameras hidden in it. I can only assume you think you’re doing good, Sheriff. But we both know that do-gooders typically do more harm than good.”

  “I was out on a date. I was trying for some romance. You want to arrest me for that? Guilty as charged.”

  Amish’s eyelids flared again. His jaw clenched, as he fought to keep his mouth shut. But Walt egged him on with a shit-eating grin intended to make the man feel as small as possible. Interrogations could go both directions.

  “This facility is under constant surveillance,” Amish said proudly. “We are watched”-he pointed to the two cameras in the room-

  “recorded, scrutinized, and investigated. We are held accountable to six different federal departments. We report to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I know it’s easy to see a place like the INL as a conspiracy in progress, given the materials we work with and the secretive nature of the research conducted here. On-site protests and demonstrations remind us of this on a regular basis. We offer up a fine target for the Greens. But this lab lit the first city in the world with atomic-powered light. The nuclear submarine engine was developed and tested at this facility. Critical situations like Three Mile Island were successfully resolved because we had a working facility in which to simulate repairs. This place matters. And if you work here, you can’t pick your nose without a Senate subcommittee hearing about it. We are not a rogue facility. No matter what people like Sheriff Walt Fleming think. There is nothing here that’s going to help you with this murder investigation of yours.” He answered Walt’s expression: “Read the pages, Sheriff.”

  Walt wanted to take a swing at the guy, more out of frustration than anger, but it wasn’t going to happen. Amish’s confidence was disconcerting. There was a knock on the door followed by the arrival of a man who leaned into Amish’s ear.

  Amish said, “You’ll go home tonight, but we’re not done here. We’ll report this violation to some of those six departments, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from more than one of them. This was a stupid stunt to pull, Sheriff. You’ve fooled no one.”

  If he was being sent home tonight, then they hadn’t found the photographs.

  He waited another hour to be released and around nine P.M. was led outside to a vehicle that drove him and Fiona back to the Arco airport, where the towplane waited.

  They didn’t speak while in the car and under escort. After having been dropped off, the shuttle vehicle then leaving the airstrip, Walt turned to her.

  “So?”

  Her lips pursed. She tugged the strap of her camera bag higher onto her shoulder. “I made the call. You know?”

  “E-mailing the photos, you mean? Yeah. That was incredibly fast think-”

  “The other call,” she said. “How do you think we got off so easily?”

  “Hillabrand?”

  She nodded spitefully.

  “But… they didn’t have us on anything,” Walt protested. “Why drag Hillabrand into this if they were going to release us, anyway?”

  “Let me get this right: you’re mad at me for getting us out of there?”

  “I’m not mad at you. But they had no evidence.”

  “They had us locked up in interrogation rooms. They had my phone. My phone, not yours. All the photographs were on my phone. Besides, don’t give me that: it’s why you brought me along, right? We established that earlier.”

  “It’s not why,” Walt countered. “I hadn’t even thought about Hillabrand until you brought him up.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “It is! I asked you along because I needed phot
ographs shot. If we hadn’t been forced down, I’d have gone in there on foot tonight. To that construction work. But, listen, I never once considered using your… relationship… with Hillabrand to my advantage-our advantage. Your mention of it actually amused me, Fiona. You don’t know me very well if you’d think I’d do such a thing.”

  “There is no relationship with Roger. Just FYI. I’d say that pretty much just came to an end tonight. I felt like a teenager calling Daddy. Who knows what he thought. Ten minutes later, we were released. You can thank me later.”

  She hurried off toward the towplane, where the pilot was standing by. Walt packed in with her behind the pilot, and they sat pressed shoulder to shoulder for the short thirty-minute flight. She never said a word to him. He tried twice to break the silence but failed. At the FBO in Sun Valley, she marched to her parked Subaru, climbed in, and drove off without looking back.

  Walt arrived home, depressed, and wondering if the INL would take legal action. Hillabrand being dragged into it complicated matters.

  He parked the Cherokee out front as he almost always did, despite a garage around back. He liked the police cruiser being seen sitting in front of the house. He hurried up to the front porch, concerned-but not overly so-by the front porch light being off and the rest of the house being so dark. He always encouraged Lisa to keep several lights on.

  He managed to key open the door in the dark and flip on the lights.

  “Lisa?” he hissed softly.

  The couch was empty. He usually found her dozing there at this hour. She’d probably fallen asleep next to one of the twins while reading a bedtime story.

  “Lisa?” he repeated more loudly.

  His chest tightened.

  He hurried through the house, carefully opening Emily’s bedroom door first. Empty. Then Nikki’s. Empty. He checked the face of his cell phone: eleven messages. He had assumed them all to be work related; consumed with the events of the evening, he’d planned to answer them once he got home.

  He tried the master bedroom.

  Dark and empty.

  He had the phone to his ear now, the first of the messages replaying. With no way to skip messages, he was forced to endure the mundane while anticipating the worst.

  Finally, he heard Lisa’s voice, bordering on hysterical: “Walt? It was Gail. She was… I don’t know… I’ve never seen her like that. She said you two had an agreement about no women. I thought she meant me. I tried to reason, but she just stormed right past me, saying how she was the mother. The girls are fine. She has them. Please call me. I didn’t know what to do, Walt. I didn’t know what to do.”

  He threw the phone. It skipped off the dining-room table and hit the window and broke the glass.

  Walt hurried to the door; he knew exactly what to do: get his children back. He caught himself on the threshold, reconsidering. The girls had had enough for one night. Gail wouldn’t have taken them to Brandon ’s-that was indeed the agreement.

  He stepped back inside, slammed the front door shut, and locked it. Switched off the light so he didn’t have to see how empty it was without them. He heard the sounds of his own labored breathing. He extracted a single truth from the depths of his depression: they’d crossed a barrier, arriving at a finality to the truce that had been maintained for far too long.

  47

  THE HAILEY LIBRARY HAD BEEN A SUPERMARKET IN ITS former life. Walt came here often enough with the twins, but he still couldn’t shake the memory; he expected to smell fresh coffee and doughnuts. Instead, he passed the front desk and a table displaying NEW ARRIVALS. There was an end cap on the nearest stack devoted entirely to Hemingway. Walt wished the fame and lore of Hemingway could have been attributed to the work of the great writer when he’d lived in the valley, but, instead, most of the fame of the place came from the fact he’d died here. Being known as a place where a famous writer ate the wrong end of a shotgun was nothing but trouble for the county sheriff. Others had come here for like purpose. Not so great to be the trendy suicide locale.

  He’d never paid any attention to the library’s conference room. It held an oval table that sat ten, with just enough room behind each chair to slip past. There was a pull-down whiteboard at the end of the room, carrying notes written in pink marker that appeared to have something to do with a book sale fund-raiser.

  He didn’t appreciate being made to wait, but Danny Cutter had sounded frantic on the phone, and Walt made it a point to tread lightly with the billionaires and their families. And so he waited. Five minutes melted into ten.

  Finally, the door opened.

  Danny Cutter had that tanned, outdoorsy thing working for him. He wore blue jeans, a pressed white shirt, and an Orvis outdoor coat, black fabric with a brown leather collar and trim.

  “Sorry I made you wait,” he said, shaking hands with Walt only after he’d locked the conference-room door and twisted the blinds closed. “I thought if someone followed me, they wouldn’t see you entering after me, and that just felt better.”

  “Someone’s following you?”

  Cutter shook his head with a look of disgust. “Who knows?”

  “Sit,” Walt said.

  Cutter took the chair next to Walt and spoke quietly. “You know about the charges at the hotel? The violation of my parole? Chuck Webb said you knew about it, said it could have been worse-much worse-and that I had you to thank for that.”

  “Wouldn’t know what he’s talking about,” Walt said, stone-faced.

  “Someone called it in to the Sun Valley police. Said I was drunk or stoned or both. So I ended up under suspicion, and they required a blood test because of the parole and I had coke in my system-coke I have no memory of doing, I might add. And that puts me in violation.”

  “Chuck told me most of this,” Walt allowed. “I didn’t know the blood workup was back.”

  “None of this matters to you, I know, but the blowback that followed is what counts.”

  “What kind of blowback?” Walt asked. He was feeling edgy all of a sudden, like the room was too small.

  Cutter glanced nervously toward the locked door. He lowered his voice, forcing Walt to concentrate on his every word.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this. I know that. You, of all people. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. But the thing is, they warned me if I violate the NDA I signed I’m shit up the creek. The way my probation reads, you’re supposed to be informed of any possible violations, so I’m taking a big chance, Sheriff. That’s my point: a very big chance.”

  “Slow down, please. You signed a nondisclosure agreement?”

  “I’ve been bought off. Fifty thousand dollars plus all legitimate expenses arising from the contamination. I was told that if I accepted the money, the parole violation would eventually be dropped, that Trinity could return to production in as little as two weeks, and that I’d be reimbursed for lost inventory and gross revenue for the period in question. All I do is show them our books for the past three months and they’ll average my revenue stream.”

  Walt couldn’t help but remember the stench of the burning sheep and Peavy’s reminder of the loss of money that any mass grave would mean for the rancher.

  “Who offered you this?”

  “No idea. A call to my cell phone. A private number. I tried to trace it. I even called my brother-he owns the cell company, after all. Dead end.”

  “A hoax,” Walt proposed.

  “The next day, five grand was in my checking account-my personal checking account, not my company account. I checked with the bank: the deposit was cash, made through an ATM. Totally untraceable.” He glanced back at the door again. “Second phone call said the five grand was just to prove the offer was for real.”

  “The terms? What did they want from you?”

  “They’ll provide a script for me. I’m to stick to the script.”

  “And the CDC?”

  “Dr. Bezel’s report will apparently support whatever it is I’m supposed to say.”

  Walt attemp
ted to process all that he’d been told. Who could control the CDC like that? “Why me, Danny?”

  “Why you?” he blurted out, laughing and grimacing at the same time. “I’m already in violation of my parole-this coke thing-which, incidentally, was a total frame job. I’m not saying I expect you to believe that, but the way it happened-”

  “I believe it,” Walt said, interrupting. “Tell me about the payoff.”

  “I’ve told you everything. Two calls. Sign the NDA. The five grand up front. It all goes away.”

  “Who can promise such a thing?” Walt blurted out.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I signed. Are you kidding me? You know the hit I’m going to take? My inventory destroyed. My line shut down. I’m not insured for this kind of thing. Who is? I was sunk. I mean totally screwed. And then this phone call. Fifty K, on top of costs. And they made it clear that if business is off for a while because of this, they’ll take care of me.”

  “But… why tell me?” Walt repeated.

  “I’ve got to be breaking a dozen laws, right? I had a chance to think about it and I came to you. As sweet as this deal is, if it means another twenty months in prison, I’ll pass, thank you very much.”

  “It’s nothing my office would have anything to do with, beyond the parole violation.”

  “But that’s the point: it’s a clear violation of my parole, right? Doing anything like this?”

  “Enlisting in a cover-up? Yeah. That would be federal time. But it’s apparent that whoever is making the offer has a long reach. It could be genuine. And, how do I say this?” He paused. “You aren’t the only one to receive such an offer.”