by Kyle Mills
2
“PUTTING’S NOT GOLF,” MARK BEAMON SAID,finally nudging his ball the last three inches to the hole. “Guess that’d be, uh, seven?”
“Try eight,” the man with the scorecard said. “If you didn’t swing so hard, you wouldn’t have to try to improve your game with creative math.”
Beamon hiked up his red-and-green-checked pants and dunked his hand into the cup. “I don’t think you appreciate the subtle genius of my game, Dave.”
“Oh, but I do, Mark. That genius is the reason I haven’t had to pay for a drink at the clubhouse since you moved to Arizona.” He nodded toward a tall, squarely built man standing at the edge of the green. “You’re up, Jake.”
Beamon slid his putter into his bag and dropped into the driver’s seat of the cart to watch Jacob Layman, his new boss, putt. It was an easy shot and Beamon tried to will it in, but the ball broke right and missed by a good three inches.
Another brilliant plan shot to hell, he thought as he watched a flush grow slowly out of the man’s polo shirt.
Layman was apparently from a “good” Virginia family—whatever that meant. He’d attended the right prep schools and had enjoyed a successful, if not exceptional, career in the FBI.
Because of this, and despite the fact that he wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, Layman had risen to a respectable height in Arizona’s social circles. It was a position that, through incessant name-dropping, he never let anyone forget.
Enter Mark Beamon, an overweight and poorly dressed product of the Texas public school system. Favorite pastime: drinking and eating too much at parties, then insulting the guests.
But Beamon had spent his career riding herd over some of the FBI’s most complicated and visible cases. His face had been on TV, in magazines, and all over local newspapers. It was the kind of career that made you powerful friends.
Despite his somewhat intentional lack of social graces and the fact that he’d only moved to Arizona a month ago, Beamon had already been befriended by some of the most powerful people in the state. Suddenly he was what his secretary called an “A” party guest.
Initially, Beamon had accepted his new stature with good humor. Why not? Sure, the people could be a little phony and dangerously boring, but the food was good and the booze was free. He’d started to rethink things, though, when he’d noticed a rapid cooling in Layman’s attitude toward him.
At first he’d thought his new boss had found out that some of his people were bypassing him and coming to directly to Beamon for advice on tough cases—a practice Beamon strongly discouraged. But then it became clear that it didn’t have anything to do with the job. He just felt that Beamon had overstepped his natural-born social status.
And so here they were.
A few years ago, he would have ignored the situation and eventually paid for his refusal to play the game. But now he was the new, improved Mark Beamon. He’d cut his smoking in half, taken Up a sport, made a valiant and modestly successful attempt to replace bourbon with beer, and promised himself that he would suffer no more concussions from beating his head against the Bureau’s political brick wall.
Today’s golf excursion included the mayor of Flagstaff and the star of a Fox crime drama filmed in Tucson, neither of whom had been particularly excited by Beamon’s insistence that his new boss round out the foursome.
And now Layman was having what was probably the worst game of his life.
Beamon twisted around and tossed his empty beer can in the cooler bungee-corded to the back of the cart, then pulled out a full one and popped the top. “Make it up on the next one, Jake,” he said as his boss slammed his putter into his bag and slumped into the seat next to him.
Somehow it didn’t look like Layman was going to remember this as the peace offering he had intended.
Beamon jumped on the accelerator and hurtled down the cart path, ignoring the cold wind penetrating his golf shirt and trying to forget that the man sitting next to him was probably trying to figure out a way to work the word “asshole” into his next performance appraisal.
When they arrived at the next hole, Beamon grabbed his driver and went to stand at the tee, leaving Layman to sulk in the cart. As their partners pulled up, the unmistakable chirping of a beeper started in earnest. Layman looked down at his hip and the mayor toward his bag, but Beamon was already holding his up like a trophy. “Mine.”
He dropped his driver, walked back to the cart, and began digging through his bag for his cell phone. With a little luck, terrorists had taken a stadium full of college students hostage. Otherwise, he was probably going to have to shoot himself in the foot to get out of the last six holes.
3
EXCEPT FOR THE ODD GOLF TRIP TO PHOENIX, the reality of Arizona just wasn’t living up to the fantasy.
Mark Beamon unconsciously lifted his feet as his car plowed through a six-inch-deep snowdrift that washed up under the chassis and lifted the vehicle off the ground. Fortunately, the drift wasn’t much wider than it was deep, and he managed to correct a minor fishtail and keep control.
“Goddammit!” he said to the empty car. “It’s not supposed to snow in Arizona!”
He had been the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, ASAC, of the FBI’s Flagstaff office for about a month. And in that month he’d learned something. It did snow in Arizona. Hell, it blizzarded in Arizona. The pictures he’d seen on TV of a guy sipping a margarita in the shade of a twenty-foot-high cactus had probably been taken in California. Or maybe the southern tip of Saudi Arabia. Still, all in all, he had to admit that it wasn’t a bad gig—he finally had his own office to run and he had some good kids working for him. Now if he could just keep from screwing it up.
Beamon slowed the car to a crawl and flipped on the interior light. The high-end houses in this Flagstaff neighborhood weren’t visible from the road, hidden by dense pine forests and the four-foot snowbanks piled up on either side of the quiet street. According to the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a blank scorecard, though, he wanted to take the next turn.
He aimed the car at a narrow break in the snowbank to his right and started up a long winding drive. He knew he was in the right place when he crested a small hill and saw the tops of the snow-covered trees fading from red to blue and then back again.
It took only a few moments to come upon the source of the light show—two police cruisers wedged between three unmarked cars in the driveway of a large log home.
He grabbed a piece of gum from the package sitting next to him on the passenger seat and shoved it in his mouth next to the two in there already. He’d read somewhere that your sense of smell was supposed to go as you got older, but he hadn’t been so lucky. There was something about the stench of day-old blood that made him more nauseous every year. Gum was his latest attempt at a remedy.
Beamon slid his vehicle to a stop and stepped out, feeling the cold air penetrate his sweater and thin golf pants. He’d come directly from the course, a two-and-a-half-hour drive that rose thousands of feet from the mild red desert of Phoenix to the snow-covered forests of Flagstaff.
Beamon waved at two approaching policemen and ducked into the back seat of his car. He pulled out his newly purchased goose-down parka and slipped it on.
At the party celebrating his promotion and transfer to Arizona—and after no less than eight bourbons—he had donned all of his winter clothes at once and performed an elaborate striptease on his friend’s dining room table. His wool overcoat had been the first article to be thrown into the cheering crowd. In retrospect, probably not such a great idea.
“Can we help you, sir?” one of the two troopers said, taking a sip from a styrofoam cup. His next breath came out like thick steam.
“Maybe.” Beamon held up his right arm, displaying a large price tag hanging from the bright red sleeve of his new jacket. “Either of you guys have scissors?”
The cop with the coffee pointed back down the half-mile-long driveway. “Sir, this is a police matter. I suggest yo
u get back in your—”
“Mark!”
Chet Michaels danced through a tangle of police line tape and deep snow as he made his way down from the house. “It’s okay, guys. This is my boss.”
The two cops mumbled an apology and started back toward their squad car.
“Sorry to drag you away from your golf game, Mark, but I thought you’d want to see this.”
At twenty-five, Chet Michaels had come into the Bureau as one of its youngest agents—an honor he’d earned by graduating from college at nineteen and passing his CPA test on the first try. By all reports, he’d also been one hell of an athlete—a wrestler—but it was a tough mental image to conjure up. The combination of his carrot-red hair and the bumper crop of freckles across the bridge of his nose made him look about as threatening as a cantaloupe.
Beamon took off his plaid golf cap and was going to toss it back into the car, but thought better of it. The sun had dropped behind the mountains and the stars were starting to appear in the deep blue of the sky. It was going to be another cold one.
“Believe me when I tell you that this is the bright spot in my day, Chet,” Beamon said, motioning toward the house and letting the young agent lead.
A yellow rope cordoned off the steps climbing to the front door, forcing them to skirt around through a deep snowbank. Beamon was still wearing his golf spikes—great for traction but a little weak in the warmth department.
“Don’t think you’re gonna get much in the way of footprints, Chet,” Beamon observed, trying unsuccessfully to stay in the depressions made by the feet of the people who had gone before him. “It hasn’t snowed for a couple of days and it looks like a football team’s run up and down these steps ten times.”
“You’re probably right, but we thought we’d bring in some people to look at it anyway.”
Beamon shrugged as he stepped through the front door and into the house. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out, so he tucked the price tag into his sleeve and watched Michaels cross the entryway at a slow run and disappear through a set of hand-carved double doors to the left.
All that energy, Beamon thought, shaking his head. He tried to remember the excitement that had gripped him on his first big case, but the feeling was gone. He could recall the details like it was yesterday, filed away in his mind for future reference, but the emotional charge of being twenty-odd years old and out to save the world had shorted out a long time ago.
Beamon reached into the collar of his sweater and pulled out a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. They fogged up instantly, so he let them dangle from his hand as he looked around the entryway.
The walls were constructed of large logs, probably almost a foot and a half in diameter. They’d been haphazardly stained a deep natural brown, giving them a casual worn look that complimented the flagstone floor. An elk-antler chandelier provided a soft light from above that was periodically overpowered by camera flashes emanating from the next room.
Beamon walked across a faded Navajo rug and stopped in front of a small antique table. It was covered with photographs of every size and shape conceivable, each with a simple frame of either gold or silver.
His glasses still hadn’t quite cleared, so he hung them around his neck and bent forward, bringing his nose to within a few inches of the pictures.
It looked like sort of a family history. The photos in back were all faded black-and-whites, their subjects uniformly dressed in well-starched suits or dresses with petticoats, and all staring out from the frames with the same stern expression.
Beamon took a step back and jumped forward in time. He picked up the eight-by-ten photo on the edge of the table and brought it up close to his face.
He recognized the man in the tan sweater as Eric Davis. They’d met briefly at a cocktail party a few weeks ago. Beamon didn’t remember meeting the tall, heavyset woman standing at his side but guessed that she was his wife.
Beamon’s eyes wandered down to the girl sitting in the leaves in front of the couple. The blonde of her hair was the product of a calculatedly obvious dye job, contrasting with the dark, uneven tan of an athlete. There was a slight glint on her left nostril that Beamon guessed was a nose ring.
She was a pretty little thing, probably sixteen or seventeen—though that was really just a wild guess. By design, he really hadn’t spent much time around children.
“Mark, I keep losing you. They’re in here!” Michaels said, reappearing suddenly in the doorway to the living room.
“All right, all right,” Beamon said, putting the picture back on the table. He turned toward the young agent. “Lead on. I’ll stay with you this time. Promise.”
He followed Michaels into a large, roughly octagonal room surrounded by windows that must have been fifteen feet high. The ceiling rose and disappeared into shadow at the top of an enormous log pillar that, until tonight, would have been the focal point of the room. Beamon shoved his hands into the pockets of his parka and looked down at the new focal point.
Michaels stood next to the two bodies with the proud expression of a sculptor showing off his most recent work. “We assume that these are the remains of Eric and Patricia Davis. The maid who found them IDed them from their build and clothes. Obviously, she can’t be a hundred percent sure, though.”
Beamon nodded, letting his gaze linger for a moment on the shattered head loosely connected to the body of a plump woman in a thick off-white sweater. He crouched down, careful not to dip the end of his new coat in the puddle of curdling blood at his feet.
It didn’t look like their faces had been damaged by the bullet impacts, but the dried blood and brain tissue clinging to their skin had subtly distorted their features. Beamon wouldn’t swear to the fact that they were the couple in the picture, but it was probably a pretty good guess.
“Mr. Davis was forty-four years old, Mrs. Davis was forty,” Michaels started, reading off a small pad of paper he had pulled from his pocket. “Apparently Mr. Davis owned a number of car dealerships.”
“Biggest dealer in Arizona,” Beamon said.
“Excuse me?”
“Someone told me he was the biggest dealer in Arizona. I met him at a party a couple of weeks ago. Briefly.” Beamon stood and carefully stepped over the puddle of blood at his feet. The plastic spikes on the bottoms of his golf shoes that had served him so well in the snow were proving to be a little treacherous on the polished oak floor. He crouched down again and examined the scene from a slightly different angle.
The Mrs. looked like she’d gotten it in the back of the head. The blood had pooled and dried, leaving something that looked like a large scab over her hair. Beamon couldn’t see if there was an exit wound because of the body’s position.
Eric Davis’s body was a little more perplexing. Based on its condition and the pattern of the splattered blood, it looked like he’d taken his bullet right under the chin. Beamon pointed to the broken window. “Did the bullet break that window? It looks like it should have gone straight up.”
“Oh, I think it did. Looks like a piece of Mr. Davis’s skull broke the window.”
“Lovely,” Beamon said, standing up and shoving another piece of gum in his mouth. “What about the girl?”
“Jennifer Davis is fifteen years old. Blonde. Tall—about five-eight or -nine. According to one of the neighbors we talked to, she was competing in a bike race near Phoenix yesterday afternoon. They—the neighbors—were down there watching the race and went out to dinner with them afterward. The Davises would have returned here around ten o’clock.”
Beamon flopped down on the sofa and stuffed a fifth stick of gum in his mouth. “So what happened here, Chet?” he slurred.
The young agent looked confident. He’d obviously learned enough about Beamon in their month working together to know the question was coming and to prepare an answer.
“They were waiting for them.”
“Who?”
“The perpetrators.”
“Why?”
“Why doesn’t he just park it?” Beamon broke in.
“The Davises would have been suspicious if there was a strange car in their driveway. And you can’t park on the street ‘cause of the snow.”
Beamon raised his eyebrows and rocked his head back and forth in a calculated effort to make the young agent nervous. Michaels was probably right, but he needed to learn to work under pressure. Besides, what was the fun of being king if you couldn’t torture your subjects occasionally?
“Okay, Chet. Go on.”
His body language had its intended effect, and Michaels started to sound a little hesitant. “Uh, yeah. So, anyway, they—the Davises—come in through the garage and are ambushed in the kitchen.”
“I see.” Beamon stood up and walked through the open French doors that led to the kitchen. There was a light haze of fingerprint dust in the air and a man in a blue suit was hunched over the sink, working furiously with a soft brush.
Beamon pointed to a picture lying in a halo of glass on the floor, then rapped on the kitchen table, which had been pushed haphazardly against the wall. A broken dish lay at the base of the refrigerator.
“I’d say the hypothesis that the Davises met our friends in here is a reasonable one,” Beamon agreed.
Michaels picked up where he had left off, looking relieved. “Okay, so they all reconvene to the living room, where the perpetrators line Mr. and Mrs. Davis up against the wail and execute them. Then they call their accomplice on their cell phone and have him pick them up.”
Beamon peeked through the pantry/mudroom and out through the open door to the garage. “What if it was a car they recognized? Someone they knew?”
“Excuse me?”
“The Davises pull up and someone they know is in their driveway. They all chat while Jennifer takes her bike off the top of the car and then one of them pulls a gun. They come through the garage into the kitchen, and Mr. Davis makes a grab for the gun. There’s a struggle that he ultimately loses. They drag them into the living room and shoot them.”