Killer Summer

by Ridley Pearson

  A round-faced man, with clear blue eyes and hard hands, Bob had taken a small lumberyard and turned it into a company that manufactured homes of all sizes and budgets. He dressed like a lumberjack, disguising a six-figure income.

  He shook his head at Walt from the summer porch. Beatrice, who’d been heeling nicely, broke away to investigate an empty dog bowl by the porch steps.

  “Damnedest thing,” Bob said.

  “What’s that?” Walt asked, one eye on Beatrice. He didn’t begrudge her the pursuit of food, but it was incorrect to break heel without permission. Like everything else around him, Beatrice needed his time.

  “The only way I can get five minutes with you is to have my place busted into,” Bob said.

  “I thought you were probably still sore over the whooping you took in the tournament,” Walt said.

  “A different third-base umpire and you would be the one that’s sore.”

  “So you’re still sore?”

  “A game should be decided by the players, not the umps.”

  “So let’s have a rematch,” Walt proposed.

  “For the trophy?”

  “I didn’t say that. But bragging rights should be good enough for a losing team.”

  “Losing team? You think?”

  “Why don’t we find out?”

  “Oh, we’ll find out,” Bob said. “Or, more likely, you will.”

  Walt called Beatrice away from the bowl. She’d licked it any harder, the glaze would’ve come off.

  “Such claims are better settled on the diamond.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Bob.

  Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Tuttle was to Walt’s left, consulting two paramedics and overseeing their care of one of Bob’s employees, sitting on the bumper of the ambulance, a blood-pressure sleeve around his left arm.

  “So why am I here?” Walt said.

  “It’s not exactly like we guard this place at night,” Bob said. “You know me, Walt: throw a chain around the gate out front, make sure the keys are out of the equipment, and pack it up home. What’s to steal? A few hand-drawn logs? I don’t think so. Cash? Never a penny on the property. I suppose you might roll a John Deere mower into the bed of your half-ton, but it’s never happened.”

  “Isn’t that the Dodge kid?”

  “Morgan? Yeah. Looking to get a jump on his college loan.”

  “How’s that?” Walt asked.

  “College loan,” Bob repeated, as if Walt hadn’t heard. “He’s been working nights for the past month. Starts over in Moscow middle of August. Wanted to get a nut under him, and I said fine. Why not? If he wants to spend his evenings sharpening mower blades and swapping out air filters, who am I to stop him? I didn’t know that that would mean working ’til one in the morning. Good God, talk about initiative. Walt, the kid’s got a battery in him that won’t die.”

  “So Morgan was here late last night?” Walt said, hoping that might encourage the Cliffs Notes version.

  “He was. Wishes he hadn’t been now, I want to tell you.”

  “Kids?” Walt asked. “Vandals?”

  “Who the heck knows?” Bob said. “Whoever it was fried his ass with a cattle prod or Taser or something. Knocked him flat on his ass, I’ll tell you that.”

  Walt looked around the yard: five acres of piled logs, mountains of split wood, and stacks of scrap. There were a half dozen badly worn-out Caterpillar tractors and forklifts.

  “Damned near stopped his ticker, from what the ambulance boys are saying,” said Bob.

  Walt didn’t like the sound of it. The break-in itself wasn’t all that unusual. The Wood River Valley had seen a sharp increase in vandalism and burglaries over the past few years. But a cattle prod didn’t knock a person unconscious, and a Taser wasn’t exactly a common weapon in the valley. His department had two-the only two he knew of up here.

  “Anything missing or messed with?” Walt asked.

  “Not as if I’ve kicked every tire or anything,” Bob said, “but nothing sticks out.”

  “I’m going to ask him a few questions before they get him out of here.”

  Bob didn’t object.

  Morgan Dodge had an intense face, with brooding dark brown eyes peering through floppy hair. He was trying to grow a mustache, which wasn’t going to work out. He looked like a hundred hungover kids Walt had interviewed the morning after a DUI.

  “You okay?” Walt asked.

  “It’s kind of like a migraine,” Morgan said, “only worse.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Walt said.

  “Not much to tell.” The boy-he couldn’t have been over nineteen-averted his eyes. “Other than I was in the shop, minding my own business, and some asshole zaps me and drags me outside and leaves me there.”

  “You see him? Get a look at him?”

  “No, sir.” Head down, boots swinging forward and back, reminding Walt of his girls on a swing set in the backyard.

  Walt took a second to look around, specifically over at the back door of the shop where presumably Morgan Dodge had been dragged.

  “You didn’t see who did this to you?” Walt repeated.

  “I said I didn’t.” Defensive, a little too adamant.

  The boy’s reaction fed Walt the way a biscuit rewarded Beatrice, who currently was sniffing Morgan’s right ankle.

  “Give us a minute,” Walt told the paramedic.

  Morgan’s head came up, worry in his eyes.

  Walt sat down beside him on the ambulance’s bumper. He allowed a good deal of silence to settle between them, waiting to fill it.

  “Let me guess,” he finally said to Morgan, “it was beer.”

  Morgan looked over at him, puzzled. “What was beer?”

  “No one dragged you anywhere, Morgan.”

  Another long silence, not strictly for effect. He wanted to give the boy a chance to rethink the situation.

  Walt lowered his voice. “A girl? You have a girl here keeping you company? Afraid of what Bob might have to say about that?”

  “No, sir, no girl. What do you mean, I wasn’t dragged? Was too.”

  “Careful, son. It’s dangerous territory, okay? I’m the sheriff. There are actually laws against lying to me. Serious laws. You can get yourself into some big trouble. So I’m going to start again and pretend your headache got the best of you and that you weren’t yourself, okay? You understand?”

  Walt dreaded the day he would need to have a similar conversation with one of his daughters. “I’m your father. You don’t lie to your father.” He wished his girls could stay young forever and not grow up only to make the same stupid mistakes everyone else makes. He missed his girls. The freedom that summer camp had promised turned out to be much harder on him than he’d imagined. The house was too quiet, and all he did was think about what they were doing. The not knowing drove him nuts.

  “Look down there,” Walt said. “Right there, in the dirt. What do you see?”

  “Wood chips?” the boy asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” Walt said, “tell me. What do you see?”

  “Wood chips… sawdust… dirt…”

  “Very good. Now, what about them?”

  “I don’t get it,” the kid said.

  “See how scuffed up things are? That’s because this yard is about six inches deep in wood chips and sawdust. Everywhere you go, you disturb it. Like walking through a light snowfall or something.”

  “So?”

  “So look over at the back door of the shop.”

  Morgan turned his head.

  “You see any disturbance?”

  “No,” the boy said, a little too quickly.

  Walt toed the ground in front of the ambulance’s bumper, drawing a perfect line.

  “If someone had been dragged out that door, son, we’d be able to see it.”

  Morgan did his best imitation of a bobblehead doll. “But I-”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Walt said, “it’s what I do. What you don’t want to do is
lie to me anymore. Don’t try telling me why there’re no lines in the dirt because I know why there’re no lines in the dirt and so do you. No one needs to know anything about this, no one but me, understand? There’s no public record here. You’re not under oath, and I’m not taking notes. But you lie to me again and I’ll punish you for it, son. The state of Idaho will punish you. Now, listen. You’ve got a heck of a year ahead of you. The first year of college is something special, believe me. You’re working hard to make it happen. I respect that. Bob respects that. Don’t screw it up.”

  The boy was breathing hard and fast. Walt thought he might start to cry.

  “Not beer, not a girl… then, what?”

  Morgan Dodge spoke so softly that Walt had to lean down to hear him. The boy’s chin was flat against his chest.

  “N… smok… in,” he mumbled.

  “Didn’t catch that.”

  “No… smoking,” he said deliberately. “It’s a lumberyard.”

  There were NO SMOKING signs mounted everywhere.

  “Bad for your health,” Walt said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Tobacco or something else?” Walt asked. “And remember, don’t lie to me.”

  “A cigarette, yes. I’m not a hempie.”

  “And if you tell Bob…” Walt said, leaving it hanging there.

  “I need this job.”

  “So you were outside.”

  His head bobbed, chin still close to the chest.

  “And you saw someone,” Walt said.

  “A guy jumped the fence over there.” He pointed without looking up.

  “Dressed how?”

  “Hard to see. It was dark, man. I don’t know. All black, maybe. He was dark, that’s for sure.”

  “He see you? Or did you call out, or what?”

  “You kidding me? I freakin’ panicked. The cigarette and all. I’m like GI’ing the thing and trying to stamp out all the sparks and shit. I was so… stupid, GI’ing it right into the chips. I couldn’t tell if it was smoke or dust, but the more I stamped, the more of it there was. I could see myself setting the place on fire and trying to explain it to Bob. And then there’s, like, this noise behind me. I mean, this guy was one fast dude.”

  Or there were two of them, Walt was thinking.

  “Coming up behind me like that. I turned. He had a balaclava over his head. Like a ski mask, you know?”

  “I know what a balaclava is,” Walt said. Inside, he was churning. This was sounding worse and worse. The Taser. The balaclava. A professional. Again.

  “Guy does this Zorro move, and I’m, like, gone, fried. No idea what hit me. I woke up, lying there. No frickin’ clue how long I’d been there. God…” He rubbed his eyes. Walt had been right: he’d been crying. “I mean, I’m not out here, I never would have known anyone was messing around. Probably could have gone right on with my work and nothing would have happened. There are houses behind here, right? Nice homes. I figured that’s what he was after. Not this place. He was just cutting through, trying to rip off one of those houses. But, I swear to God, Bob hears this and I’m gone.”

  “Doesn’t have to hear it from me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You get a look at his face?”

  “Nah. Nothing. It was the balaclava, you know? It was just so out of place. That was all I saw. And then he nailed me. It nailed me, whatever it was…”

  “They’ll want to run some tests,” Walt said. “Just procedure. Nothing to worry about.”

  “And the… you know…”

  Bob was approaching.

  Walt patted the kid on the thigh. “I’ve got what I need. How you deal with it, that’s your choice. But you’re asking the wrong guy if you want me to tell you to lie. Rule of thumb: it never helps anything. My call: it’s better to man up and deal with reality. Lies tend to self-propagate. You know what that is?”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  Walt hopped off the ambulance and took a long look around the yard. The kid’s theory about the houses down along the river was an interesting one, but he wasn’t buying it. One of the Caterpillars? One of the two tractor trailers? He tried to see a use for the split wood or any of the hundreds of stacked, limbless trees. There were several splitters that ran off diesel-powered hydraulics. How did stealing wine involve hydraulics?

  For the first time, there was a tingle at the back of his skull. What if it isn’t about stealing wine?

  Across the yard, he heard Bob blowing a gasket at the kid. Morgan caught Walt’s eye from a distance, clearly blaming him for him being on the wrong end of a rant. Bob steamed off toward the office.

  Beatrice came to a heel and sat down obediently, as if Bob was angry at her.

  Walt was going to have to try to make things right.

  24

  Her father had returned from a massage, and the sound coming from his room of the shower running caught Summer in the gut. A stock-market update was running on the flat-screen television in his room, the female anchor talking about “puts and calls.” For whatever reason, Summer thought about Enrico.

  If she was going to do this, it had to be now, and just the thought of it flooded her with both excitement and dread. Despite being a moron and a loser, her father did his best. She was pretty sure he bent the rules and broke his word from time to time, but only because he was desperate to keep her happy. If it had just been him alone, he’d have bought a Barcalounger and surrendered himself to ESPN for the rest of his days. He sucked as a producer, but as a father he looked after her and cared about her, and would not approve in the least of what she was about to do.

  Enrico, on the other hand, made her feel like she was already out of college.

  She kept one eye on the suite’s living room as she began repacking her suitcase. She left the closet open so that if he happened to come into the room, she could hide the suitcase, hide her intentions.

  She was sweating despite the room’s air-conditioning. Her head throbbed and her stomach felt squeamish. She’d never done anything like this. He would go ballistic. She had no idea what he’d do to her, but she knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

  She flashed back to the voice on the BlackBerry call she’d taken for her father. There was a name attached to that voice-a face, even-but she couldn’t remember it exactly, couldn’t make a name stick to the face. She shook off her wondering and continued stuffing her delicates in the suitcase.

  She trusted he was too consumed in the wine auction and his deals to notice any change in her, because she knew she wasn’t going to pull this off perfectly. She didn’t lie to him and he didn’t lie to her: this was an oath they’d made after her mother died. They were in this together. Only now she was deserting him. It made her feel a little crazy in the head. He didn’t deserve what she was about to do to him, no matter how much he tried to keep her being a kid instead of allowing her to be the woman she was.

  Her hand hesitated, about to deliver a T-shirt to the suitcase. She could have undone this before it ever got started. He begged her all the time to talk, to tell him what she was thinking. But she put the shirt in the suitcase, continuing her packing.

  There was no turning back now.

  25

  Walt heard the aspen leaves overhead, clattering like playing cards raking bicycle spokes. He watched Beatrice zooming around in the leaves on the ground, chasing phantoms and kicking up dust. This was where his heart was, he was reminded, away from town, away from his badge, on a walk with his dog in the backcountry. Gail’s abrupt departure from the marriage had driven him deeply into his work. In an instant, here in the sweet-smelling air, with the wind whistling past his ears, he realized he’d used his work as a place to hide. Leave it to Beatrice to reveal this truth to him.

  Yellow police tape ran tree to tree, enclosing a thicket of golden willow. At the center were two camo-painted ATVs, the geometric shapes seen from the glider.

  “So?” Fiona said, watching Brandon and the two deputies, Tuttle and Blompier
, cut back the willows to make a path to the vehicles.

  It was nice to see Brandon do some hard labor. Tuttle, on the other hand, worked like a maniac, going at the willow with lopping shears like a man possessed. Tuttle had spoken to a man peeing by the side of Deer Creek Road, a man now of interest to the investigation, and he was taking out his anger and frustration at having not written down the Yukon’s plate number on the willow stalks.

  “We want a record of the scene,” Walt answered her, “including the boot print Tuttle found.” He pointed. “Same for the tire tracks. Everything to scale.”

  “I was actually asking what you’re hoping to get from this,” she said, attempting to clarify.

  Walt checked his wristwatch. The second hand seemed to be moving much faster than usual. “Evidence. Something to follow? The auction begins in a little over eight hours. Basically, I’m hoping for a miracle.”

  “You had them on the run. You think they wiped them down?” she said.

  She’d been around his office enough that she was beginning to think like an investigator. He suppressed a smile.

  “We’ll find out,” he said.

  He pulled her aside as a car pulled up behind them.

  Walt lacked a forensics team. On those rare occasions when he needed one, he’d call the Nampa crime lab. But when in a real hurry, he called Barge Levy, the principal of the valley’s Silver Creek Alternative School. Levy held a master’s in science from MIT, and he was something of an amateur lab technician, as close as Walt could get to a local forensics expert. Levy could perform basic tasks, such as fuming, dusting, and lifting prints, as well as the Nampa team.

  Levy walked stiff-legged, the result of two hip replacements. He had salt-and-pepper hair and piercing blue eyes. He used his contagious, self-aware laugh to his advantage, a means to politely interrupt.

  “What goes, boss?” Levy asked.

  “Hate to take you away from summer vacation.”

  “No you don’t.” He let loose a laugh, startling some birds out of a nearby tree. “You want the rest of us to suffer right along with you.”

  “You two know each other…?” he said, gesturing in Fiona’s direction.