Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  “So you can use that on snow, huh? Like when you’re skiing? I heard Darby’s a hell of a skier.”

  “Fuckin’ amazing, man. She’s good at everything—climbing, skating, telemarking, kayaking—.”

  Beamon smiled.“Impressive. Where is it all?”

  “What?”

  Beamon reached over to the desk behind him and handed Jared a stack of ads and photos he’d torn from various magazines. The young climber shuffled through the pictures of Darby in huge parkas, on skis, in tents, astride expensive-looking bicycles.

  “She’s got more toys than any human being I’ve ever met,”Beamon said.“Where you figure she keeps them? Not in her van.”

  Jared dropped the stack onto the chair next to him.“I dunno.”

  Beamon looked at his watch. Another two hundred and eight dollars and thirty-three cents were gone. That was forty-five attorney minutes.

  “Bullshit, Jared. Didn’t we agree that we both wanted Darby found? That that’s what would be best for her?”

  The young climber’s face hardened.“You agreed, man.”

  “You say she didn’t do it, Jared. You sound pretty sure. Help me find her and let’s find out if you’re right. What’re you afraid of?”

  “You want me to help you find the psycho that killed Tristan and kidnapped her, fine. You want me to help you dig into her life, no way.”

  “What can it hurt?”

  “Darby has the best judgment of any person I’ve ever met If I’m wrong and for some reason she’s running—from you, maybe—I’m not going to sit here and second- guess her.”

  “You realize what kind of consequences that could have for you?”Beamon said, staying intentionally vague. He was on too thin ice to be making threats. The sheriff was still under the impression he was working for the FBI.

  “You want to do something to me,”Jared said, just as Bonnie Rile peeked her head through the door.“Then fuckin’ do it.”

  Beamon took in a deep breath and let it out as the sheriff stepped silently into the room.“Okay, Jared, fine. Why don’t you go across the street and grab a sandwich. I’ll be out in a few minutes and I’ll give you a ride back to your campsite—we can talk a little more in the car.”

  Jared didn’t move from his chair, instead he sat looking around the room uncomfortably.“You know, I didn’t really bring any money with me,”he said finally.

  Beamon rolled his eyes and pulled put his wallet. He handed the young man a ten-dollar bill.

  “I could really use a beer after this,”Jared said.

  “Jesus.” Beamon sighed, digging out another ten. He held it out, but pulled it back when Palermo reached for it.“In most of the pictures from those magazines, Darby doesn’t have any scars around her nose. Where’d she get them?”

  “Pakistan.”

  Beamon pulled the ten in a little closer to his chest.“Care to flesh that out a bit?’

  “She was on Latok II when a storm hit. There were four people going for the summit that day, but she’d decided to sit it out in high camp ’cause of the weather report. So these guys call down to camp on their radio. They’re freezing, exhausted, and one of them took an express down a chute and was dead. Darby geared up and walked off alone into the storm. She got two of them down to camp, but the other one couldn’t walk. Even his friends told her not to go back up after him, but she did….” His voice trailed off and he suddenly seemed to be somewhere else.

  “You’ve got me on the edge of my seat,”Beamon prompted.“What happened?”

  “The guy died, man. She tried to drag him down, but she was too spent. By the time she got back into camp, her nose was so frozen she ended up losing some of it.”

  Beamon picked up one of the newer photographs and looked at it.“Doesn’t look that bad….”

  “One of the guys she saved was, like, a millionaire, and he said he’d pay whatever it cost to get it fixed. So she went in and got surgery and they reconstructed it pretty well. But then they told her it was going to take two more surgeries to make it perfect, you know. So she bagged it.”

  “Huh?’

  “She bagged it. Said the surgeries were a pain and it was good enough to keep the rain out after the first one.”

  “Are you finding answers, Mark?”Bonnie Rile said after Palermo had disappeared through the door with his newfound wealth.

  “Finding questions.” He paused for a moment. ’Tell me. Were Darby’s prints on the ice axe?”

  The sheriff shook her head.“No, they found the pattern of her gloves.”

  Beamon pushed himself up on the table behind him and glanced up at a zippered nylon case in the sheriff’s hand. By the way she was holding it, it was something important She didn’t seem to be immediately forthcoming though, so he didn’t press.

  “This is it, huh?”Beamon said, motioning around him.“This and the stuff that was still in the van when I saw it.”

  “All her worldly possessions,”the sheriff said in a disgusted tone.“You wouldn’t believe these people, Mark. Vagrants with ropes. Gypsies. That’s all they are. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  Beamon shrugged.

  The sheriff walked past him and took a photo of Darby climbing in shorts and a halter top off the desk.“I’ll bet you don’t think she did it, do you? Men don’t want to believe that a cute little thing like this could do something so horrible and violent. It skews their entire outlook on life. Scares them.”

  Beamon grinned. He just couldn’t help liking this woman. She had a nutty obnoxiousness that really appealed to him. If his clock weren’t ticking so loudly, he’d find out if she played golf.“Maybe it does scare us, Bonnie. But on this one, I’m inclined to agree with you. From what little I know about this girl, I expect she’s capable of just about anything she puts her mind to.”

  He watched as she ceremoniously unzipped the bag in her hand and pulled out a thick hardback book. The jacket was painted with flowers, but there was nothing written on the front or the spine. She opened it to the first of many pages marked with sticky notes and began to read.“Men have no respect for a woman’s power. They have to be shown over and over again and then still make excuses and deny it. What’s wrong with them?”She flipped to another page.“Sometimes I think men never grow up but are in a perpetual stage of preadolescence. Speed on the playground and accuracy with a ball gets replaced with contests of power that they wrap everything they are up in and try to drag me into.” Another page.“Just how horrible is death? There’s that flash of fear when you realize it’s coming, and then there’s just nothing. There’s the pain of a person’s friends and relatives. If there’s any guilt to be felt, I suppose it should be for them.”

  The sheriff looked up from the pages.“Believe me, I could go on. It gets worse toward the end. There’s a passage about a trip she takes with a guy named Fred and how he makes her feel like she’s nothing.”

  Beamon held out his hand and she placed the book in it.

  “So we seem to have a strong woman, who, at the beginning of her diary, feels at least equal to the men in her life,”Bonnie said, as Beamon flipped though the marked pages.“Then toward the end, she starts to think that it’s all an illusion, that she is being dominated like the rest of us.” Beamon looked up at the word“us,”but it didn’t slow her down.“Add to that her kind of apathetic attitude toward death, and I’d say you’re right. We have a woman capable of just about anything.”

  Beamon closed the book and stared at the delicately painted roses on the cover, thinking about their strange contrast to the book’s contents. Psych evaluations weren’t his strong suit, but even he could see that the journal entries seemed to mesh with the physical evidence. Maybe the heroic stories he’d heard about Darby Moore weren’t so heroic after all. What had been her motivation? To save people from death—a state she didn’t seem to feel very strongly about one way or another? Or was dragging helpless men down mountains just a monstrous power trip?

  It also se
emed to refute Jared’s theory about the method of Newberry’s death. Dropping him wouldn’t have been very satisfying. No, you’d want to look him in the eye before you put your ice axe in it.

  “Look at the end,”Bonnie prompted.

  Normally he wouldn’t bother. He’d send the diary off to the FBI shrinks and they’d write him a nice one-page summation of the mind of Darby Moore. But unfortunately, he wasn’t in the FBI anymore.

  He flipped to the back and found the pages full of short, nonsensical sentences.“Snoopy pain wants Polly Renaldo Mr. Freeze sex tick lollipop the Godzilla Tiny Tim, V9 Track,”he read aloud.“What the hell does that mean?”

  “Wouldn’t you just love to know? Some kind of code?”

  “Maybe,”Beamon said, handing her back the diary and pulling his worn address book from his pocket.“Look, Bonnie, I’m going to give you a couple of addresses.” He scribbled Carrie’s on a pad lying on the table next to him. Under it, he jotted down a short note:“Killed her ex- boyfriend, Tristan, with an axe. Yes?”

  He hesitated for a moment before tearing the paper off the pad and handing it to the sheriff. There were a number of profilers who owed him favors. Why wasn’t he sending it to them?“Could you FedEx a copy to this address? It’s a friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist. I’ll have her send you anything she comes up with.” He continued to flip through his address book, finally finding the second name he was looking for and jotting it and a fax number down. Under that he wrote:“Phil, what do you make of this? Mark Beamon.”

  He handed the paper to the sheriff.“Fax the pages with the nonsensical stuff on them to that number. It’s a friend of mine at the NSA. Guy’s a genius—if it is a code, he’ll figure out a way to crack it.”

  “And you’ll let me know, right?”

  “Of course.”

  She seemed satisfied with his answer and left the room to carry out his instructions. After the door had swung shut behind her, Beamon looked around him at the cluttered room. He couldn’t believe that he was standing in the middle of nearly all the worldly possessions of a human being and had absolutely no idea who she was.

  He walked over to a small bookcase against the wall and started looking through a box of photographic slides, occasionally holding one up to the light to see more clearly. They were beautiful. Fog drenched jungle-scapes. Cliffs glowing with the setting sun. Tribal women weaving baskets. Children with deep brown skin working fields with primitive tools. Every now and then, he would come upon a poorly centered or out-of-focus picture of a smiling Darby Moore—obviously taken by one of the natives. Who the hell was this girl? That was the three-hundred- thousand-dollar question.

  The sun temporarily blinded Beamon as he stepped from the sheriff’s office, so he heard the commotion before he saw it.

  “The only mistake Darby made was that she didn’t just walk right by your frozen ass and go straight for the summit!”Jared Palermo shouted.

  The reply was just as forceful, but Beamon couldn’t quite make out the thickly accented English. He held a hand up and blocked out the glare of the sun. It seemed that Jared had been able to decipher the young blond man’s reply, because he took a wild swing at his head. The blow glanced off harmlessly, prompting a scream from an old woman who was watching the drama unfold from only a few feet away.

  Beamon trudged slowly down the steps while Jared got ahold of the back of the man’s neck and started to line up a blow that couldn’t miss. His opponent barely deflected the blow with his forearm, lost his balance, and they both went down into the grass. The fact that Jared landed on top seemed to delight the group of shabby but athletic-looking young spectators on the sidewalk.

  Shouts of“kick his ass, Jared!”had already started in earnest by the time Beamon reached the two flailing young men. He grabbed hold of Jared’s hair and pulled him off, allowing the other young man the opportunity to jump to his feet and cock a fist back. Beamon pointed at him threateningly.“Back off, asshole.”

  “I was only defending myself,”the young blond man said, dusting himself off. Beamon couldn’t place the accent more precisely than somewhere in Europe, but could at least understand what he was saying now. Whoever he was, he was another climber—skinny and rock-hard beneath utilitarian clothing and a sun-bleached ponytail.

  “I should have known he would do this,”the European said.“I’m sorry you had to be involved, sir. I knew Tristan and liked him very much.”

  Jared tried to jerk forward toward the man, but Beamon clamped down a little harder on his hair.

  “And I knew Darby,”the European continued when he saw that Jared was well under control. Beamon noticed a darkening in his tone at the mention of her name.

  “Fuck you,”Jared said.

  “Because I was right, Jared?”the European said, his confidence obviously building.“Because I knew her when no one else did? Now people will see her for what she is.”

  This time Jared ignored Beamon’s grip on his hair and launched himself forward. Beamon got his free hand around Jared’s arm and used his superior weight to slow him down enough for the European to jump out of the way and start running across the street toward a large tan sedan.

  “I’ll see you in the mountains, you Eurotrash piece of shit!”Jared yelled to cheers from the gathered crowd. The car started moving the moment the young man jumped in, but still allowed Beamon a brief glimpse of the driver. Mid-fifties, balding, suit and tie. He had the look of an ex- cop and seemed an unusual companion for a twenty-something European climber.

  “What the hell was that all about?”Beamon said as he dragged Jared back toward his car. The small crowd they passed through took the opportunity to pat Jared on the back and offer a few encouraging comments.

  “Vili Marcek,”Jared said as they cleared the crowd, anger still audible in his voice.“Darby saved that son of a bitch’s ass a couple of years back. Ever since, he’s done nothing but dis her and try to convince everybody that his fat wasn’t pulled out of the fryer by a woman.”

  Beamon let Jared go and walked around to the driver’s side of the car, suspecting that he’d just seen the competition for his hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar finder’s fee. Normally he wouldn’t have been worried, but the gentleman behind the wheel of that tan sedan was obviously no idiot. Beamon had never heard of Vili Marcek, and even if he had, it would have never crossed his mind to hire a climber who hated Darby to help track her down.

  twenty

  Grant Templeton put his face in his hands and sucked in a loud breath. This kind of stress couldn’t be good for him in the long run. His wife was starting to complain about the shower drain not working, and he was being forced to cover up that the problem with the drain was that his hair was falling from his head by the handful.

  When he finally dropped his hands, David Hallorin and his Leprechaun-like symbiant, Roland Peck, were staring at him as if he were insane. But he wasn’t insane, he reminded himself. He was bulletproof.

  With two good job offers on the table, he had spent the last few days quietly distancing himself from the disjointed and directionless campaign that had sprung from Peck’s paranoid-schizophrenic mind. He was planning on walking out of this office for the last time at the end of the day. Hallorin didn’t know it yet, but there was no fucking way Grant Templeton was going ride this ball of flame down to the ground.

  Templeton looked up at the television built into the wall and the frozen image of Hallorin in the last of four new commercials Peck had nightmared up. The first three had consisted of old speeches by Hallorin juxtaposed with unfortunate and best-forgotten speeches by other politicians from roughly the same time frame.

  The one they’d just finished watching—the fourth—started with Congressman Stanley Brathe preaching on, family values, then cut to Hallorin describing the rampant hedonism of men in power. It concluded with a brief clip of Congressman Brathe entering a minimum-security prison in New Jersey, where he was scheduled to spend the next three to five years.

  “L
et me get this straight,”Templeton started, aiming his comments at Peck. He’d thought he would enjoy the sense of freedom his recent job offers had given him, but in the end, he just wanted to get the hell out.“You want to run a series of ads that basically tell the American people ’I told you so’? You realize that this is crazy, right? Every poll says that the point has been conceded and that our problem is image. Any ads you run now should have Senator Hallorin frolicking with puppies and children, preferably backed up by a soothing classical piece.”

  Hallorin and the Freak continued to stare blankly at him but he was on a roll, so he decided to keep going.“I mean, if you have to do something this … bizarre, at least make Taylor the whipping boy in one of them. I mean, everything we have says that the undecideds are between us and him. If you still want to try to squeeze a little life out of this campaign, you might be able to get some mileage out of that.” Templeton knew what their reaction would be. Despite the raw passion with which Hallorin hated his Republican opponent, for some reason he insisted on publicly portraying a dogged respect for the geriatric son of a bitch.

  Silence descended on the room as Templeton fell, uninvited, into a chair in front of Hallorin’s desk and began mentally composing his resignation for the thousandth time. He’d been rehearsing it since about two weeks into this godforsaken campaign, using it as psychological Zantec when things got ugly. Now, finally, it was for real.

  “Mohamed?”Hallorin said to him finally, completely ignoring everything he’d said and moving on to the next subject. Dead man talking.

  Templeton dug a crinkled piece of paper from his pocket and looked down at it. Phillippe Mohamed had recently replaced Louis Farrakhan as the leader of the Nation of Islam, and for obvious reasons, he was not a huge fan of the David Hallorin machine. Templeton knew that he should just hand over the name and phone number of Mohamed’s aide and walk away, but this was just too absurd not to comment on.