Killer Summer

14

But if it’s vinegar,” Fiona said, standing on a small stepladder in the glare of fluorescent lights, her camera mounted on a tripod and aimed straight down, “then why would anyone bid anything for it?”

Walt had set her up in the Command Center, a room laid out like a college lecture hall that sat fifty. There were half a dozen flat screens suspended from the ceiling and an electronic white board. He carefully rotated the first of the three bottles exactly as Remy had instructed. It, along with the others, remained cradled in gray foam. The initials, etched into the glass below the label, came into view:

J.A.

“John Adams,” he said. “The John Adams. The wine was a gift to Adams from Thomas Jefferson upon Adams’s return from Holland, where he’d just secured the financing necessary to save the republic. These bottles celebrate the United States before it existed.”

“But a million dollars!?”

“It’s an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar reserve. They could go far higher than a million,” Walt said. “They sell as a single lot. Remy says his experts claim the wine is still drinkable, but to get that price it doesn’t have to be.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“There’s ego involved. Since it benefits the center, a nonprofit, the bids get ginned up to astronomical prices. It’s all about who gets what, who can spend what, not drinkability.”

“The more I learn about this place, the less I understand.”

“It’s a pissing contest… Pretty easy to understand.”

Walt continued rotating the bottles. She fired off shots.

“Does he get them back after this?”

“No. It’s on us to protect and transport them. A motorcade for a couple of wine bottles. All because they’re evidence in a homicide.”

“You think other sheriffs deal with this sort of thing?”

It was a question his father might have asked. He reacted defensively, muscles tensing, a spike of heat up his spine, then calmed himself down and said, “It is what it is. We have to assume they may try for them again. Wine is like fine art: there’s always a black market willing to pay. These people were obviously well organized, well informed. I’m assuming they have a backup plan.”

She climbed down the stepladder. He liked the way she moved, enjoyed watching her… hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed it, in fact, until that moment.

They were interrupted by a deputy trying to suppress his contagious excitement.

“Sheriff, we’ve got something.”

Thirty minutes later, Walt was riding shotgun in the Hummer, a vehicle anonymously donated to the Sheriff’s Office by a Hollywood star. Ostentatious and unnecessary most of the time, the Hummer rode high and carried four easily. Its roof rack, light bar, and the whoop-whoop of its siren cleared the three northbound lanes like a snowplow in winter.

“It’s possible,” he told the other three, all of whom were decked out in SWAT gear, “that the suspects may possess paralyzing gas. They’re to be considered armed and dangerous. I saw two men out Democrat Gulch. Now we’ve added a woman to that. We’re going in small. Don’t make me regret it.” He could have called up the entire twelve-man Special Response unit, but mobilizing the squad took time he didn’t have.

Brandon raised his voice to carry over the roar of the siren. “How do we know any of this?”

“Evidence,” Walt hollered back.

Walt and Fiona had been interrupted by a hyper deputy named Carsman.

“The traffic cams you asked for,” Carsman had said, poking his head into the Command Center. “We’ve got the wrecker before and after it hooks onto the Taurus.”

Walt and Fiona had followed Carsman down the hall to the office’s computer lab.

“We picked up the Taurus and the wrecker heading north on Airport Drive,” Carsman explained.

The traffic cam archives produced color images shot at two-second intervals. Because of the two-second jumps, cars appeared and disappeared from Main Street.

“We don’t pick them up again until the south-facing camera at Croy,” Carsman continued. Pointing to the screen, he said, “The wrecker. This is Malone’s Taurus. Now, check this.”

A woman pushed a stroller out into the crosswalk. The traffic stopped and held as she bent over picking something up.

“Freeze it!” Walt said.

“She dropped something,” Carsman said.

“A driver had come to her aid.” On any other day, this would have been cause for mild celebration: traffic fatalities at crosswalks were a serious problem in the valley. The fact that traffic had stopped for a pedestrian was a relief to see.

Walt watched the same series several times: the wrecker backing up, the Taurus making the turn attached to it.

“The traffic cams are, what, two months old?” Walt said. “If they scouted this back in June, they wouldn’t have known about them. That’s probably the only reason we’ve got them on camera.” The system was designed to capture the plates of cars running traffic lights. Within a few minutes, they had the wrecker’s registration, and the Yukon alongside it.

“The Yukon’s going to be a rental or a stolen vehicle,” Walt had informed Carsman. “If it’s a rental, it’s on a stolen or counterfeit credit card, which won’t do us any good, but run anything you get as far as it takes you. The Yukon’s our lead for now. Call every hotel, inn, and lodge in the valley. With parking being what it is, most require plate numbers at check-in. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Within twenty minutes, the Yukon had been placed at the Summit Guest House, a sixty-room, midpriced hotel on the north end of Ketchum.

“Room two twenty-six,” Walt now told Brandon from the Hummer’s passenger’s seat. “One night left on the reservation.”

“And tomorrow night’s the wine auction,” Brandon said.

“I guess they aren’t sticking around afterward.”

Brandon soon killed the Hummer’s overhead lights and siren, pulling off Main Street into an office-building parking lot north of Atkinson’s Market, well out of sight of the Summit Guest House. Walt and the three deputies climbed out, one carrying a door ram. The three were armed with semiautomatic rifles, “flash and bang” grenades, tear gas, and other hardware. The group held to a tall wooden fence at the end of the parking lot that screened them from the guesthouse. Room 226 faced west, looking out at Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

Walt put a man on the back door and sent another to the front. He and Brandon addressed the receptionist and then the manager. The sight of Brandon decked out in SWAT gear and the county sheriff in a Kevlar vest startled the man. He was a tightly wound fortysomething, with thick glasses and a high voice.

Walt asked that the second floor be cleared, a process that consumed the next several minutes.

Walt asked for the elevators to be shut down. He and the three climbed the staircase in double time, hurried down the corridor, and regrouped outside of 226. The deputies wore gas masks, helmets, and ear protection.

Walt used a master card key to crack open the door. The ram took out the inside chain as the door flew open. The three deputies swarmed the suite ahead of Walt, calling out loudly, “Clear!,” as they quickly determined the status of the bathroom, closet, and bedroom. Walt followed inside, annoyed by his bad luck. Then he looked down and saw wet footprints on the carpet.

He called out a radio code into the room that meant: “Suspect in hiding.” It proved a second too late.

A door on the bedroom armoire came open, and a naked woman streaked across the small room, dragging a shirt behind her. She grabbed something off the desk, rushed out the open door to the balcony-left open by Brandon-and jumped.

Brandon was a split second behind her. He leaped over the rail and fell straight down through a canvas patio awning that had supported her weight but failed to support his.

“I’m okay!” Brandon shouted.

Walt watched the woman’s bare backside flee across the parking lot. She pulled on the shirt midstride.

By the time the other two deputies took off, she was long gone. An escape route had been planned. Walt was betting she’d grabbed a cell phone off the desk.

No one had seen her face, but Walt thought he had a vague idea what she looked like. It was the woman with the baby stroller.