Killer View

by Ridley Pearson

“I’m not saying anything.”

  “ Taylor…help yourself out here. You can do this. It’s the right thing to do. Forget about you for a minute. Think about Kira. You’re helping Kira. You want to help Kira, right?”

  The look on his face showed anger and frustration. Walt knew all about both. “What?” Walt said.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You have to tell me.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Okay, how about this? We start the clock right now. Anything you tell me for the next five minutes is off the record. It never happened. I never heard it.”

  “That’s a cop game. You ever seen Law and Order? I know all about cop games.”

  “Four minutes,” Walt said, looking at his watch. “No tricks. I give you my word.”

  Crabtree looked Walt up and down. Something about Walt’s promise resonated.

  “Coats isn’t there much. He hunts with the dogs, I think. Maybe has some other place. Not there much at all. But the dogs… a lot of them stick around. And there’s this girl… watches the place for him. Takes care of the dogs. Smoking-hot, this girl.” He dared a glance at Walt, who tried to convey no opinion in his expression. Crabtree was apparently going to leave it there.

  “A good-looking girl,” Walt said.

  “Asked me to take care of the dogs for her one time her mother got real sick and she couldn’t stick around. I said sure. And she gave me a key.”

  Again he paused. Again, it seemed as if he wasn’t going to continue.

  “A key to Coats’s place.”

  “Correct,” Crabtree said.

  “And you helped her out by feeding the dogs. Does this connect with Kira, Taylor? I’m a little short on time.”

  “I put a pair of webcams in there.” His head was hung in shame.

  Walt’s heart raced in his chest. He looked around for a glass of water. There wasn’t one.

  “Inside the house.”

  “His cabin, yeah.”

  Walt’s jaw dropped. He sucked up his surprise, cleared his throat, and tried to sound as normal as possible. But, inside, he was both churning over the invasion of privacy and jumping at the thought that Taylor Crabtree might have witnessed the assault. Depending on if he ever found Mark Aker, depending on his condition, proving the abduction could be difficult. But a witness to a sexual assault, a rape, tried and convicted in Blaine County, could put Coats away for most of his adult life. It would be a poor trade-off but one that Walt would be happy to have in his back pocket.

  “ Taylor, I understand that your concern here is prosecution over the existence of the webcams. It’s a legitimate concern, given your being expelled from the Alternative School for the same offense. If we charged you, a judge wouldn’t like that at all. But I can guarantee you-guarantee, Taylor -that that will not be the case here. If you witnessed what I think you witnessed, those charges will never be filed. Not only that but others will be lessened or eliminated. But most of all, I need you to be honest. Do you get that? Absolutely honest. The slightest embellishment will hurt everything.”

  The boy nodded. “I have hours of DVDs,” he said.

  “Of?”

  “The girl. In the shower. Dressing. Undressing. In bed. She had a boyfriend who… you know. He came over a lot when she was there. And they… you know.”

  “You recorded it,” Walt said, his voice shaking slightly. He couldn’t hold himself back. “The assault, Taylor? Crab? Did you record the assault?”

  “I didn’t burn it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m not exactly what you’d call a techie.”

  “It’s on my hard drive. I’ve got like fifteen hours on my hard drive.”

  Fifteen hours. “Including the assault.” Walt made it a statement.

  Crabtree nodded, clearly ashamed. “How do you think I got in there to get her? You think I was going to take on those guys?” Walt noted the plural. “But they took a break. Jesus… the things they did to her. Poor Kira. But I got her out of there and into my car. And I was in such a fucking hurry, I planted my face into the car door as I opened it. I was carrying her. Bashed my face into the door.” He reached up and touched it. “It fucked me up bad. Was me who needed the emergency room. Drove like mad. Got her to the hospital. They never figured it out. That it was me helped her. Yesterday, when you came by, I wasn’t afraid of your cop car-”

  “The pickup trucks.” Walt remembered them.

  The kid nodded again. “I keep expecting a knock on the door and someone crushing my head in. Coats is fucking out of his mind. He’ll kill me, he figures out it was me. All I want is those cameras out of there. They’re still in there. Get it? He’s gonna find them at some point and then I’m, like, totally fucked.”

  “I can probably help you there,” Walt said, his head spinning from the information. “The night of the assault, Coats had company?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A black Escalade? The guy’s in his late thirties. Pretty buffed out. Dresses well.”

  The boy looked stunned. “How could you know that?”

  “It’s my job, Taylor,” Walt said, and then mumbled to himself: “It’s my job.”

  53

  “WHY AM I BEING MADE TO WATCH THIS?” FIONA ASKED, standing alongside Walt in the sheriff’s office command center. The door was shut and locked, the television’s sound turned down low, so that Kira Tulivich’s agony remained contained within those walls.

  “I’m sorry,” Walt said, “but you’re my photography expert.”

  “They should be hung. No, castrated with a kitchen knife, then pulled, limb from limb, drawn and quartered. And even that would be too good for them.”

  On the screen, Coats and an unidentified male took turns violating Kira Tulivich. The horror played out in the grainy black-and-white of Taylor Crabtree’s webcam, his computer having been confiscated from the RV he used as shelter.

  “You may be able to spot a frame we could enlarge or something, to give us a better look at the second man.”

  “It’s not that at all, is it?” she said accusingly. “What is it with you, Walt? Always having hidden agendas. Never admitting them. Why don’t you just come out and say you think it’s Sean Lunn?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Oh… give me a break.”

  “Is it?”

  “That’s what I think, yes. Does anything I see here confirm it, make me absolutely certain? No. But you won’t even speak his name.”

  “I can’t,” Walt said, winning a surprised look from her.

  “You need me as a witness?” she speculated.

  “I need to identify the second man. Yes. That could prove extremely helpful.”

  “So you don’t mention his name because, if you did, it could be construed later that you led the witness.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head back. She had an elegant neck, long and regal. “I confuse the professional with the personal, don’t I?”

  “It’s easy to do.”

  “So why don’t you?” she asked.

  Tulivich was held in place by Coats. She let out a horrible scream. Fiona looked away. “Well, if anything will put you off sex, this will.”

  “I want them both to pay for this, Fiona. Not just Coats. Coats…I’m going to take care of Coats.”

  “Do you have him?”

  “No.”

  “Know where he is?”

  “No. We do know the Bureau had a confrontation with a man believed to be a member of the Samakinn-an extremist group, part Ted Kaczynski, part Aryan Nation. A second suspect, a woman, is in custody. She’s a meth addict and is proving difficult to deal with. We have a description of a man that’s close enough to Coats to do the trick. It’s all very fluid.”

  She dared to look at the screen again. “Jesus… I can’t take any more of this. That poor girl.”

  Walt had not taken his eyes off the screen. “Yeah
. How ’bout there?” he asked. He used the keyboard’s space bar to stop the video. Used the mouse to back up the footage. “Is that a mirror on the wall? Is that his face in the mirror?”

  “It’s too grainy,” she said. “You’ll never get anything. This is incredibly low resolution, Walt. Really poor. Even with enhancement, you’re going to need a shot that’s very strong.”

  They watched another thirty seconds, Fiona needing to look away repeatedly.

  “Wait!” she said.

  Walt paused the video.

  Fiona leaned forward and pointed not at the man’s face, but the pants crumpled at his knees. “Look. The back belt loop. It’s ripped. Attached at the top but not the bottom.”

  Walt craned forward. “How did you ever see that?”

  “I was trying not to look at what was going on.”

  He played a short segment repeatedly. Sure enough, the belt loop flapped loose. It was seen only briefly, but there it was on video.

  Walt said, “It’s not enough to win a warrant. I can’t say because of that it’s Sean Lunn. I need to see Sean Lunn in those pants. That would give me probable cause for a wider search. It’s not much, even at that.”

  “But you’re going to search the cabin, aren’t you?”

  “Awaiting a warrant. The judge is golfing down in Twin Falls. It’s still warm enough down there to keep the courses open. One of my guys-we’re working on a phoner warrant.”

  “Am I coming along?”

  “That’s the third reason you’re here and why I asked you to bring your gear.”

  “I’m still mad at you, you know?” She said this proudly.

  “I know.”

  “Roger hasn’t called.”

  “I may have been wrong about him,” Walt said. It came out as a confession, which was not the way he meant it.

  “Your timing could be better.”

  “I’m a work in progress, Fiona. I don’t have any of it figured out. But losing Mark like this… I know it all has to do more with friendship than we think. More than I understand, at least. It’s what’s important at the end of the day. Right? I need to find him. Dead or alive, I need to know. I don’t understand exactly. I screw up a lot of stuff, but I intend to keep working on my friendships. Starting with you. At some point. I don’t want you mad at me.”

  She glared. A hostile, unforgiving look that showed Walt just how far he had to go.

  “Okay,” he said. “I get it.”

  “You know why I really hate you?” she whispered.

  “I didn’t even know you did.”

  “It’s because I can’t stay mad at you.” She pushed her chair back. “You’d better turn that off because I’m leaving the room.” Standing by the door, she dug around in her purse and came up with a business card. “Sean Lunn,” she said, waving it. “The night he was trying to talk me onto the corporate jet. Said to call if I needed anything. So I’ll call him. The thing about men? They pretty much wear the same thing all the time. What do you want to bet he shows up in those same pants?”

  “You’d do that?” Walt asked.

  “I thought you said it’s all about friendship?” she questioned.

  “I thought you hated me.”

  “You’re not a very good detective, Sheriff. I’m sorry to have to tell you.”

  54

  THE WARRANT WAS CALLED IN FROM THE TENTH GREEN by Judge Dan Alban. Within twenty-five minutes, Walt had six of his eight available deputies in strategic positions surrounding Coats’s house, including a sharpshooter positioned up a hill among the ruins of the defunct mine. This kind of deployment wreaked havoc on his department, as it left only two on-duty deputies to patrol a county roughly the area of Rhode Island.

  The house was situated so that its detached one-car garage blocked it from view of the other houses and abandoned RVs scattered around the sterile wasteland of pale gray mine tailings. It stood off on its own, out of sight, surrounded by an abnormally high post-and-rail fence topped with a single strand of taut razor wire. The front gate carried two inauspicious signs: BEWARE OF DOG and NO SOLICITING.

  Walt and his deputy, Bill Noland, led the way as they pushed through the gate and approached the house at a run. Noland, who was in his late twenties, carried a four-foot stun stick for use on the dogs, if necessary. Walt carried a “flash and bang,” a white-phosphorus stun grenade. Both men also had their Berettas out and at the ready. Behind them came two more men, one carrying the ram, a three-foot, seventy-pound steel maul capable of disintegrating most doors.

  Walt tried the doorknob: locked.

  The ram took out the hardware and the door swung open. Walt tossed the grenade inside and his team turned their backs. The flash and bang would momentarily blind, deafen, and typically physically stun anyone within the confined space where it detonated.

  His team charged through the door, led by Noland. Walt brought up the rear. The space was small-a living area, a bathroom, and a single bedroom. It all looked familiar to Walt from the webcam video.

  “Clear!” his men announced as they inspected the closets and rooms. They moved on to stun-bomb a crawl space, the hatch for which was found cut into the floor in the bedroom closet. It too proved to be empty.

  By the time his men reconvened in the central living area, Walt had the two webcams in a pouch on the inside of his windbreaker.

  “We’ll get that door closed as best as possible. Bring in Fiona and forensics. We’ll watch the road-both directions-and keep the house under round-the-clock surveillance. Questions?”

  “Sheriff?” It was Noland, calling from the galley kitchen.

  Walt faced the refrigerator, where a number of postcards, bill reminders, and hand-scrawled notes had been attached with various pieces of a magnetic poetry set.

  | energy | and | persistence | conquer | all | things |

  “It’s Benjamin Franklin,” Walt said, consumed by the subtext: Roy Coats was a determined man.

  “Not that,” Noland said. He pointed to a photocopied collage of snapshots. Handwritten at the bottom, it read: “Thanks for the guiding. Happy hunting!-Ralph.” The center picture showed three men with rifles in their hands, standing in front of a rustic cabin. The cabin was small, with an outbuilding on the right in the photo. Walt picked Coats out immediately, recognizing him both from the driver’s license photo he’d pulled and by the fact he was the biggest among the three: a burly man with a full beard who looked as if he hadn’t showered for weeks. The rifle he held was smaller than those held by the others, a modified.22-a dart rifle, Walt guessed. The small-gauge rifle Walt had heard on two separate occasions, losing a friend both times. The center photograph was surrounded by five other snapshots, three of which featured the cabin or what appeared to be its outbuildings. In each of the three, the landscape rose in the background; and, in two of these, the background was jagged mountains.

  “Plain-sight search,” Walt told his deputy. “I want any other photographs of this cabin we can find.” He tapped the collage. “I want property tax records for every county in the state, starting with ours and working out through connecting counties, cross-checked for anything owned by Coats. Get on the horn and get that started. It’s damn good work, Noland.”

  “Yes, sir.” Noland hurried off, a slight spring to his step.

  Walt studied each of the photos carefully. When combined, they presented about three-quarters of a panorama. But it was the two that showed the distant mountains that most captivated him. His index finger traced the line of the peaks against the cobalt blue sky. There were ranges he knew the look of by heart, though admittedly only from one or two angles, typically from a road or similar perspective. Put him on the opposite side of the same range and he wouldn’t recognize it. It didn’t come as a surprise that he couldn’t identify this particular range, though it was certainly a frustration.

  Again, Walt traced the silhouetted line in each of the photos where the mountains met the sky.

  “Maps!” Walt called out, a little
too loudly for the small space. He stood and addressed his small team. “I want any maps, any photos. We’re abandoning plain-sight search. I want everyone wearing gloves. We toss the place, but neatly, gentlemen. Carefully. And put back everything the way you find it.”

  He caught himself holding his breath as he watched his men take to the search, a little too eagerly as always.

  Coats stood in the center of the middle photograph.

  55

  WALT DIDN’T LIKE TO THINK THAT CHANCE PLAYED A ROLE in his work. He’d spent too much time in continuing education seminars, field exercises, and classrooms to put much credence in the flip of a coin or happenstance. But, more than that, it was the issue of control. He’d been trained to control the investigation, not to allow the investigation to control him. So as he entered the women’s side of his decrepit jail-two cells on the northeast corner of the small cellblock-and found Taylor Crabtree engaged in a video game, he fought to accept that a possible solution to this investigation could just materialize out of thin air.

  A local film star had donated his son’s outdated PlayStation and a dozen games for the entertainment of the inmates. Crabtree was engaged in combat with guns blazing, a pair of headphones over his ears. Walt could hear the dull zing and pop of explosions through the headphones. He caught a glimpse of the screen, a small computer monitor. It showed a landscape like Afghanistan, rugged high desert; it showed a distant mountain range, angular against a bomb-flashing sky.

  The thing was: that landscape looked impossibly familiar. Not all that different than many parts of Idaho.

  Walt grabbed the cell bars with either hand.

  He knew how to find Coats’s cabin.

  THE COMMAND CENTER ’S scarred oval conference table held four computers, including the one confiscated from Crabtree’s RV. Walt studied the intent faces of the four boys at the keyboards: Crabtree; Walt’s nephew, Kevin; a boy of sixteen named Wilder; and one other, Jason. Jason and Wilder had been recruited from the Alternative School by Crabtree; he knew them to be serious gamers.