Killer View

1

HE SAW HIMSELF AS A CAMERA WOULD, AND OFTEN THOUGHT of himself in the third person, as if an omniscient eye were looking down on him and his activities. It was no different that Halloween night, as he prepared the syringes. He talked to himself-out loud- narrating every carefully conceived action, as if reading from a script. He could picture himself as one of those guys on the Discovery Channel or A & E.

“He moves with the utmost care as he makes his preparations, as skilled a technician as he is a hunter…”

The snow was falling to beat hell, which brought a twisted grin to his scrappy face. Virgin snow-the irony not lost on him, although his education had stopped in the ninth grade and irony, per se, was unknown to him. Fresh-fallen snow erased tracks. No one knew this better than a tracker, and, according to the voice-over, he was among the most accomplished trackers in all of Idaho, all of the West, if you excluded Montana, because there were guys up there who could follow wolves for three hundred miles on foot without a dog. Not him. He used his dogs and their radio collars whenever called for.

“The final preparations almost complete, he anticipates the events in the hours to come with near-military precision…”

On that night, he was scheduled for a twofer, a tricky bit of timing and complicated logistics, especially given the storm. He intended to get an early start for just this reason, the narrator in his head reminding him of the importance of meticulous preparation and execution.

He arranged the five darts and two syringes, methodically checking dosages, storing them in two metal lunch boxes, the kind he’d once carried to school, the kind his daddy before him had carried into the mine. This one was lined with a gray foam rubber, not a white napkin or sheet of paper towel. He double-checked the charge on the Taser, was half tempted to test the thing on one of the dogs, as he sometimes did. But with Pepper’s staying behind, plump with a litter, he couldn’t afford to have another one out of commission for the night.

Next came the firearms: the 22-gauge dart rifle; the MAC-10, with its three-speed taped magazines; the double-barreled sawed-off, for under the seat of the pickup. He was careful to separate the Bore Thunder/Flash Bang cartridges from the 12-gauge shot. The flash bangs performed like stun grenades but could be fired from the sawed-off. He kept the right barrel loaded with one of these in case of a run-in with law enforcement; he’d stun the bastard and then shoot him up with some ketamine and leave him by the side of the road, knowing he wouldn’t remember what day it was, much less the make or registration of the truck he’d pulled over.

He attached the magnetic license plates over the pickup truck’s existing ones-a move as routine to him as brushing his teeth-a necessary precaution when working with his private clients. The plates were registered to a similar truck in Bannock County.

He stuffed some fresh chew behind his molars, hawking a gob of spit onto the garage’s dirt floor. Even after being off of crystal meth for six months, at moments like this he found the allure of it tough to resist.

He checked the straps on the wire cages for the dogs. The snow wouldn’t hurt them any, and he was in too big a hurry to trade them out for the vinyl carriers that were better in bad weather. He put only one of the weatherproof carriers in the back, the biggest he had. He double- and triple-checked its electric mat, a black sheet of heavy rubber, a wire from which ran to a 12-volt outlet installed in the side paneling of the truck bed; it was warm to the touch-a good sign.

The specially outfitted carrier was large enough to hold a mastiff or Bernese mountain dog, or a mature sheep.

Beneath his stubble, he carried a hard scar on his chin, looking like a strip of stretched pink leather, the result of a meat hook slipping when transferring a she-cat from the pickup to the dressing shed. He scratched at it, a nervous habit, the result of too many hours with nothing to do. He spent far too much of his life waiting for others, a disappointing aspect of being a work-for-hire.

But now he had purpose, a higher calling.

It was time to put things straight. There were enough assholes in Washington to fill a latrine. It was about time they remembered him and others who believed in their country.

2

THE MALE CAUCASIAN, TWENTY-FOUR, A SKIER, WAS SAID TO have been missing for over three hours. A man’s panicked voice had made the call to 911: “A friend of mine… He never showed up… We thought we’d accounted for everyone. I have no fricking idea how we missed him but… I think he’s still up there.”

“Calm down, sir.” The county’s ERC operator.

“Calm down? WE LEFT HIM UP THERE. We were skiing the Drop on Galena Pass. He never came off that mountain. He’s out there somewhere. You got to do something.”

Click.

“Sir?”

Blaine County sheriff Walt Fleming had listened to the Emergency Response Center tape several times, trying to judge if it was a prank or not. It wouldn’t be the first time some yahoo had called in a false alarm to Search and Rescue. This one sounded authentic. And hanging up on such calls was, sadly, not that unusual. Guilt could be a powerful motivator. Didn’t need to tell a sheriff that.

A life in the balance.

A snowstorm. A miserable night.

Walt had set Search and Rescue’s phone tree into operation.

Now, standing in blowing snow, in the freezing cold, with only his pale face protruding from the parka, Walt caught his reflection in the glass of a nearby pickup. Where others saw a capable outdoorsman, Walt saw a softness settling in, his desk job taking over. Where others saw a face that could be elected, Walt saw fatigue. No one had ever called him handsome; the closest he’d gotten was “good-looking,” and that from a woman who no longer shared his bed. He blamed his sleepless nights on her: the mental images of her riding his own deputy, Tommy Brandon, flickering through his mind. The two of them laughing. At him. After twelve years of marriage, she’d left him alone with their young twins. And as much as he wouldn’t have it any other way, it wasn’t working. He was failing as a single dad. Barely keeping his head above water as the county sheriff. With the help of only eight full-time deputies, he oversaw law enforcement in a piece of Idaho roughly the size of Rhode Island. Now he faced Galena Summit in a snowstorm when all he wanted was a night playing Uno with his kids, and a decent night’s sleep.

He awaited the dogs. Looking through the heavy snowfall, past the bluish glare of halogen headlights thrown from several pickups and SUVs parked in the turnout, he searched for some sign of the Aker brothers. A freak October storm, the forecast calling for eighteen inches above nine thousand feet. They were now above ten thousand, occupying a wide spot in the road along a series of switchbacks that constituted a part of State Highway 75.

Thirteen inches of fresh powder and no signs of a letup.

The conditions were horrible for an organized search, but, statistically, the probability of the missing young man surviving exposure went from bad to worse after the first four hours. They were now well into hour six, so awaiting first light wasn’t an option.

Walt saw a flicker of headlights and turned to watch a pickup truck make the hairpin turn in a wheel-spinning ascent and pull into the turnout, parking with the other vehicles. Dogs barked from crates lashed to the bed of the arriving truck, which prompted the other canines to compete. Walt couldn’t hear himself think. After another minute, and a lot of peeing, the dogs settled down. Local vet Mark Aker, and his younger brother, Randy, came out of the truck, arguing.

“This coat stinks!” Randy complained, zipping up a winter jacket. “I mean it smells bad, bro-amoxicillin mixed with stale beer.”

“It takes a moron to forget a coat on a night like this,” Mark said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. By now, the others had climbed out of their vehicles.

“No, it takes a moron to be out on a night like this!” Randy replied.

Walt and the Aker brothers went back years. Walt had first met Mark as a teenager, when his family had spent summers and Christmas breaks with his grandparents in Sun Valley. They’d been in a summer camp together, had raised some hell as teenagers on the Sun Valley ski slopes. Now with three dogs at home, Walt basically lived at the vet’s. It felt as if he might as well sign his paychecks over to the Aker brothers. Randy’s specialty was large animals, horses and cattle; Mark’s, primarily cats and dogs. In the glitzy, celebrity-studded Sun Valley community, it was Mark’s practice that had soared. With working ranches giving way to showy estates and ranchettes, Randy’s large animal practice had nearly vanished in the last ten years, causing some envy and friction between the brothers. Things had gotten more cozy between Walt and Mark when Mark had volunteered his services to Search and Rescue, developing an effective K9 unit. Walt felt more like the third brother than a good friend. Hearing that Randy-the wilder of the two-had forgotten his coat came as no big surprise. He’d probably done it on purpose just to frustrate his more responsible brother. If anything, Randy was a professional thorn in his brother’s side. Like most brothers.

Walt and Mark divided up the K9 teams into four pairs. Randy, the odd man out and the most experienced backcountry skier, would work solo, head higher up the road and find his way out to the Drop, from where he would ski the face of the mountain in search of the missing skier. The plan was for him to rendezvous with his brother and Walt midmountain.

The teams headed off without a pep talk or sermon-just a check of avalanche peeps, the radios, and GPSs. Radio checks would be made every fifteen minutes. If the radios failed-and they often did in the mountains-then communicate by flares if the young man was discovered; orange, if you got yourself lost.

Six hours twenty-five minutes.

The ache in the pit of Walt’s stomach had nothing to do with the rope tied around his waist, pulling the evac sled.

Now it was all up to the dogs. Mark released Tango, his bitch German shepherd and the best scent dog he’d ever trained. She would go ahead of them searching for anything human, dead or alive.

Fifteen minutes rolled into twenty. A walkie-talkie check produced reports from everyone but Randy Aker, already out of range.

The terrain proved slow and difficult. Walt was in a full sweat, his parka hanging open. It was twenty-eight degrees out. Snow fell in flakes the size of nickels. Steam rose from his neck and swirled around his headlamp like a halo.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Mark Aker said breathlessly. The falling snow deadened all sound.

“Good a time as any,” Walt said. He knew what Mark was up to: he was trying to keep Walt’s worry at a manageable level.

“We never talk… politics,” Aker said, testing Walt in a way that made him pay closer attention.

“I run for office every four years. That’s enough politics for me.”

“Not those kinds of politics.”

“I don’t pay too much attention to Washington or Boise, if that’s what you mean,” Walt said. “You ever hear that story-true story, by the way-about some budget committee hearing where the congressman from back east had found a line item listing thirty-five hundred cattle guards and made the recommendation to take them off the federal payroll? Someone had to explain to the idiot that a cattle guard is a couple pipes welded together to prevent cows from crossing a fence line on a road, not a person on a payroll.”

“That’s the point, I guess.”

“What’s the point?” Walt asked. “That congressmen are ignorant?”

Mark didn’t answer.

At this temperature, over this amount of time, the batteries in the missing man’s peep-an electronic device used to help searchers locate someone in the backcountry trapped by snow-would fail sometime soon.

It was a human life, and his survival weighed on Walt’s every step in the cumbersome snowshoes.

“We’re going to lose his peep soon,” Walt said, “if we haven’t already.”

“Hypothermia’s the enemy, not the Energizer Bunny.”

“Point taken.” They continued for a few more difficult yards. “Are you going to explain what you mean by ‘politics’?”

But before Aker could answer, both men stopped at the exact same moment.

“Did you hear that?” Mark asked.

“A branch snapping under the weight of the snow.” Walt moved his headlamp around. A badly bent and sagging pine bough shed some snow and sprang up. Others seemed to bend lower with each flake of fallen snow.

The two men moved on, Mark Aker with less grace than Walt. He’d spent too much time in the clinic. He rocked forward and back on the snowshoes, wasting energy. But Walt knew better than to try to tell him anything. Mark was a doctor, after all.

“You’re thinking it was a gunshot,” Walt said. “A rifle. Light gauge: twenty-two-power load or an AR- 15.”

“It didn’t sound like a tree branch to me. Too far away,” Aker said breathlessly, winded by the climb. “But you’re the expert.”

A few nearby branches snapped, surrendering to the snow load.

Hearing this, both men turned their attention uphill. Then Aker trained his headlight directly on Walt, blinding him.

“You’re right,” Walt said, raising his glove to shield his eyes. “That was a gunshot.”

Walt reached for his radio.

3

TANGO BOUNDED TOWARD HIM, THROWING UP THE SNOW all around her.

Mark Aker praised the dog and signaled Walt to stop and be still. In the shifting light from their headlamps, Tango circled Aker, tripping over the rear spines of his snowshoes, and sat down excitedly on his left side. Soaking wet and panting, she sank into the snowdrift up to her chest, her whole attention fixed on Aker.

She’d returned only once, forty minutes earlier. On that visit, she had circled Aker twice and then charged back into the dark, following the dull impressions of prior skiers and her own fresh tracks. This was her message to her handler that she’d found nothing.

At that time, Aker had made a point of asking Walt to bump the location into his GPS, knowing it might prove useful later.

But now, with Tango’s second return, Mark stood perfectly still, waiting to see what the dog had in mind. Tango stabbed her wet nose into his left glove. She sat back down, then stood up and stabbed his glove again.

“She’s found someone,” Aker said, rewarding the dog with a treat from his pocket and lavishing praise on her. Tango immediately ran out ahead of them, stirring up her own tracks. She glanced back, her eyes a luminescent green in the lights, and was gone.

The two men trudged off, impeded by the cumbersome snowshoes and limited by their own exhaustion. Walt reported the news and their position to the others but did not call them back. It was critical they find the missing skier, and, until he had more than a dog’s excitement, he wanted the search continued.

“No word from Randy,” Walt called back to Aker.

“Fucking radios,” said Aker, huffing so hard he could barely get a word out.

Walt pulled ahead of Aker as he followed Tango’s path through the snow. He snaked his way through a copse of aspen, the barren limbs, gray-white tree trunks, and shifting shadows unusually beautiful in the constantly moving light from his headlamp. His breath formed gray funnels. His thighs ached from dragging the sled, from lifting and planting the snowshoes, the effort clumsy.

Tango’s time between her returns warned of a long hike. She would head directly to the target, then return to her handler, before repeating the circuit as often as necessary. She would not stop until her arrival back at the target; then, missing her handler, she would return the full distance, give the hard indicator again, and take off once more. The process, known as yo-yoing, would continue until she led her handler directly to the hard target. Walt calculated that the missing skier was somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes away for her. For a man hiking in snowshoes, it could be double or triple that-an hour or more. He paced himself. Endurance was everything now. Walt was already conserving energy in order to get the missing skier back out of the wilderness.

He came by his wilderness skills honestly, not through textbooks or seminars. He’d grown up in these mountains. With a dad who worked for the FBI and moved the family every two to four years, the Wood River Valley had been his real home. He’d seen it change from a sleepy little destination ski resort into the fashionable, celebrity enclave it had become. And he’d grown with it, finding backcountry skills and survival tactics that had served him well for the past twenty years.

He ate a PowerBar and gulped down some icy water, foregoing the small thermos of coffee-the caffeine was welcome but not its dehydratingeffects. He reviewed the work ahead: medical treatment, if they were lucky; sledding him out; recalling the team; getting back down the snow-covered highway to the hospital. It was anything but over.

When he next checked behind him, he’d lost Mark to the storm, so he waited, as the snowflakes changed from nickels to quarters, suggesting warming. It was the one thing he didn’t need right now. If the snow went to slush, the mountain went to concrete and would be more prone to slides. He switched off his headlamp and peered into the dark, finally spotting a pinprick of flickering bluish white light in the distance: Mark. Moving considerably slower. He was weighed down by more than just the backpack and physical exhaustion; Walt knew something was troubling him. It took him back to Mark’s mention of politics-a conversation that had been interrupted.

Tango streaked past Walt, bounding down the hill for Aker. Wet, and breathing hard, she passed Walt a few minutes later, charging back up the hill. She was still on the target. Walt checked his watch, bumped the GPS, and estimated the missing boy was now less than ten minutes away.

The moment Aker reached him, Walt headed off, following the dog’s zigzag route as it traversed the steep snowfield. He now took a more vertical path, connecting the dog tracks, but climbing more steeply, the steady climb driving his heart painfully.

He pulled a heavy, six-cell flashlight from his pack. Its halogen bulb produced a sterile, high-powered light, which, catching the edges of forest to their right and left, revealed that the snowfield narrowed, ending in a rock outcropping, now a hundred yards straight up.

The Drop.

“Doesn’t… make… sense,” Aker said, huffing as he caught up. “We should have seen Randy by now.”

In the excitement of the find, Walt had forgotten about Randy. “It’s possible he found fresh ski tracks, leading into the trees or something,” Walt said. “We wouldn’t necessarily see him in the trees.”

But he was thinking back to that earlier, unexplained sound, and knew Mark was too.

Now, as they ascended together, Walt’s flashlight suddenly caught the eerie glow of animal eyes at the base of the towering rocks. Tango. Her position there suggested a fall.

“Damn,” Mark said.

“Yeah.”

Despite the drag of the sled, Walt pulled ahead of Aker. People survived falls into snow, he reminded himself, wondering if maybe Randy had fired that shot they’d heard earlier.

Tango bounded from a hole she’d dug deeply in the snow. She raced past Walt to the trailing Mark Aker; then she streaked past Walt on her return.

Walt arrived to her flurry of digging and trained the beam into the hole.

He glanced back at Mark and raised his hand. “Stop there!” he shouted.

Aker ignored him and arrived at Walt’s side just as Walt switched off the flashlight.

But Aker’s headlamp found the twisted human form in the snow. Randy’s head was raked fully around, pointed horribly unnaturally over his back like an owl’s, his open, still eyes crusted with ice crystals.

Walt was the first out of his snowshoes. He jumped down into the pit dug by the dog and quickly searched the body for a gunshot wound. But there was no blood, no wound visible. Yet they’d heard a gunshot; he felt certain of it.

Mark was on his knees, sobbing. The snow fell around him like a curtain.

Walt climbed out of the hole and dropped to his knees to block Mark’s view of the body. He opened his arms and pulled his friend to him. The sobbing came uncontrollably then.

Tango circled them, whining, with her nose to the hole, her innate empathy steering her nearer and nearer to her master until pressing up against him tentatively and then nuzzling in, as if to keep Mark warm.

4

WALT WATCHED THE PICKUP PULL AWAY, SADNESS RATTLING around in his chest. Mark Aker had barely said a word since the discovery of his brother’s broken body. Walt hadn’t been as close to Randy but loved Mark like a brother; now that Randy was gone, Mark’s loss echoed inside of Walt as well.

Walt’s brother, Bobby, had died only a few years before. The tragedy had torn his family apart. Walt and his father, never on great terms, were finally talking again, but it was a relationship often on eggshells. Now, he and Mark shared something unspeakable. Randy, the womanizer, the wiseguy, the irreverant jokester. The brooding, secretive brother, whose name had crossed Walt’s desk recently-a memo that had been subsequently buried into a stack. Did that memo-those accusations-have something to do with Mark’s political reference made only an hour ago? Grief and empathy overcame Walt; he looked away and dragged a glove across his eyes. He still ached over Bobby’s loss. Mark was in for a hellish few years.

He caught Mark’s eye during the loading, his face bathed in the red splash from the taillights; the vet, so used to death, was visibly shaken by rigor’s unnatural positioning of Randy’s arms, angled up over his head. They finally fit the corpse into the bed of a pickup truck, but only after a great deal of wrangling. They covered him with a blue tarp and tied it down with bungee cords. It was the addition of the cords that got Mark crying-the finality of fastening them and the anchoring of the tarp, as if holding down firewood. Death was in the details, and those details racked Mark Aker with heartbreak, anger, and frustration.

“Sheriff?” It was his deputy, Tommy Brandon.

Walt felt as if he’d chugged a soda too fast.

The fact that sheriff’s deputy Tommy Brandon was shacked up with Walt’s soon-to-be-ex wife kept the men at arm’s length.

As far as Walt was concerned, the proper thing for Deputy Sheriff Tommy Brandon to do was transfer to one of the local police or sheriff’s departments. Walt certainly wasn’t going to resign his office simply because his deputy was doing his wife. But, for Brandon, what was the difference? Walt couldn’t fire him without fearing a lawsuit. It was almost as if Brandon was hanging around to torture him. What made things even more complicated and tricky was that Brandon was his best deputy-goddamn him. Losing Brandon would hurt the office. But with every small confrontation, every brush of the elbows, every look that passed between them, it seemed increasingly inevitable and necessary. Even the smell of the man’s aftershave bothered Walt. Hadn’t Gail carried that same smell to bed a few times when they’d still been a family?

Midnight had come and gone: another two inches of fresh powder lay on the roofs of all the roadside vehicles. None of the dogs had picked up any scents. The searchers were warming themselves in the cabs of their trucks behind fogged windshields, awaiting orders.

“Let’s call the search off for tonight, Tommy. We’ll start over in the morning. We’re going to want the original call confirmed. If possible I want to know who made that call, and I want to talk to him personally.”

“Got it.”

“We traded a life for a life tonight and that’s just plain wrong.” For all they knew, the missing skier had found his way home safely.

Brandon moved between the vehicles, speaking with the various drivers. A few minutes later, the pickup trucks began to pull out.

Walt was sitting on the back bumper of the office’s Hummer, a vehiclehe used for search and rescue. He was strapping snowshoes onto his boots as the last of the trucks departed, leaving only Brandon ’s big red Dodge SUV. Everything about Tommy Brandon was big, tempting Walt’s imagination and begging him to hate the guy.

“Sheriff?”

“I’m going back out there, Tommy.”

“Not alone you’re not.”

“I’m not looking for the missing kid, Tommy. I want some photos before everything’s covered.”

“Randy skied off the Drop, Sheriff. End of story.”

As far back as Walt could remember, Tommy had never called him by anything other than his rank. It made the guy even harder to dislike.

Walt told him about hearing the branch snapping, how his first reaction had been gunshot.

The Hummer was idling for warmth, the slap-slap of its wipers rising above the grind of the engine.

“But Randy wasn’t shot.”

“We don’t know anything about what drove him off those rocks. Mark and I had to get the body out. There was no time to look around.”

He dug into the back of the Hummer and withdrew a broken piece of ski and tangled metal edging. It was a piece from the middle of a ski and contained the sophisticated mountaineering binding that allowed the heel to be locked down or the toe to be used as a three-pin binding. The equipment was different than that found on recreational downhill skis. A hybrid system, this gear allowed a cross-country skier to convert his equipment to downhill on a single pair of skis. He passed it to Brandon, who shook the water off-the snow having melted-and studied it.

“So what?” Brandon said.

“The sticker,” Walt said, taking the broken piece of ski from him. He pointed out the ® just below the three pins that secured the toe of the boot.

“It’s a patent, or whatever. So what?”

“It’s not a registered trademark, Tommy. It’s an R, for right-as in right ski for the right boot. They’re paired, same as downhill skis. And this ski was on his left foot.”

Brandon took it out of Walt’s hand and studied it in the light from the car’s interior. “So he got ’em mixed up. It was dark and snowing. Big deal.”

“You’ve never cross-country skied, I see. He’d have known in the first few seconds he had them reversed. The skis don’t track well. They pull to the outside. Drives you crazy and costs you energy. A guy like Randy wouldn’t have reversed them in the first place, but, if he had, he’d have stopped and made it right within the first few minutes. Storm or no storm.”

“Yeah, but maybe it just didn’t bother him, Sheriff.” He looked on as Walt fastened the second of his two snowshoes to his boots. “Or maybe he took them off for some reason. Had to take a dump or something. Put them back on reversed. Jumped off the cliff. Who the hell knows?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Then I’m going with you.”

“No need, Tommy. I’ll be fine. It’s late. Get back and get the paperwork started on Randy. I’ll call you in an hour, if that’ll make you feel better.”

Tommy crossed to his truck and returned with his own snowshoes.

Nothing more was said between the two men for over twenty minutes. Walt navigated a more direct route to the Drop, following the GPS. Both men arrived at the top of the rock outcropping winded and sweating. The storm had covered an area of snow greatly disturbed by dozens of prior skiers.

Walt had been right about the snowfall covering any chance to backtrack Randy’s movements. It was nearly too late already.

Working on his theory that Randy had taken a bathroom break, Brandon followed a set of ski tracks that deviated from the main route into the woods.

Walt was leaning over the rocks, aiming his six-cell down at the hole, some forty feet below, when Brandon called out over the radio.

“Sheriff? Got something interesting here.”

Walt followed Brandon ’s fresh tracks into the quiet stillness of the forest. They curved to the right, slightly downhill, and aimed southwest-toward State Highway 75. Brandon had traveled a long distance. Walt found him at the base of a tree. With the evergreens acting as giant umbrellas, the snow cover here was only a few inches deep.

The area was heavily disturbed.

“You do this?”

“No, sir. Wolves maybe. I think they may have treed him.”

Walt got down on hands and knees. “We didn’t see any wolves, didn’t hear any, and neither did Tango. Could be dog prints just as easily. They’re small for wolves.”

“All the dogs were accounted for.”

“All of our dogs,” Walt said.

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know, Tommy. I’m thinking out loud. Okay?” He snapped at him, realizing too late that either his fatigue or his resentment of the man was working its influence.

Brandon studied the area. “Well, we’re never gonna find a shell casing until spring, if that’s what you’re thinking. I suppose we’d better mark the tree, though.” He took out a knife and carved away a section of bark.

“I’m not connecting the two at all right now,” Walt said.

Brandon shined his light on the animal tracks. They came up through the trees in a direct line, now covering Randy’s ski tracks, but it was clear the two sets of tracks were connected and had been made at the same time.

“I don’t know… A pack of wolves makes sense, Sheriff. Randy would have known what he was up against. And it fits with the skis being reversed. They tree him. His skis are down here. Then they take off and hide. He knows what they’re about and they know where he is. It’s a race. Maybe he tries the radio and it’s no dice. So he has to go for it. Gets out of the tree as fast as he can, puts the skis on the wrong feet. Takes off for the Drop, knowing he can outski the wolves if he can get into some downhill terrain. In the confusion, he picks the wrong part of the Drop to jump from. A lot of kids jump off these rocks, but it’s the west end, not the middle.”

Walt liked the explanation and said so. He ran off some photographs, none of which came out very well. He suggested they backtrack until they discovered where the animal tracks had caught up with Randy’s. “I’ll want some photographs of that as well.”

“I’m going to cross here,” Brandon said, pointing to the course of disturbed snow, “and we’ll parallel the tracks.”

The two separated, staying on each side of the wide path of disturbed snow. Once out of the woods, the tracks became humped with snow left by the storm. Tracking the pattern was not difficult, but it became less and less clear what they were following.

Walt shuddered at the thought of being pursued by a pack of hungry wolves in a snowstorm. He’d searched Randy for a weapon and hadn’t found one, but he could have dropped it during the chase. This would help Walt explain the single report he and Mark had heard.

“If it was wolves,” Walt finally said, “then why didn’t they scavenge on the body?”

“Yeah,” Brandon said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t think of that.”

Walt popped on the six-cell, flooding the area in a harsh light. The mass of tracks they’d been following separated here. There was no question that the animal tracks joined and followed the ski tracks.

“This sucks,” said Brandon, looking down.

Walt crossed the tracks to take a look. A single impression, partly protected by a fallen tree trunk. Its shape and pattern unmistakable.

A snowshoe.

“Motherfucker,” Brandon said. “Tell me that’s you or Mark Aker.”

Walt remained silent as he took a series of photographs, the flashes like small explosions in the overwhelming white. Again, he checked the camera’s screen: none of the shots was any good.

“That could have been left earlier today. With all the snowfall, we can’t say for sure it’s connected to the animal tracks,” Brandon said.

He was right: there was no knowing when any of these tracks had been left. Snow blew and drifted; it fell out of trees; it slid down mountains. A print like this, tucked under a log, could be preserved for days.

Walt snapped more photos, informing Brandon he believed the connection between the snowshoe and the animal prints significant.

“Just so you know,” Brandon said, “even if it takes all night, I’m following these tracks.”

“It won’t take all night, Tommy.” Walt pointed down a slope to where a stream of white light ran steadily along the tops of trees. A car or truck. The sound of the chains clapping against the pavement, a half mile away.

“That’s Highway Seventy-five,” he said. “Ten bucks, that’s where they’re going to lead us.”

5

HIS SELECTION OF A STOOL NEAR THE END OF THE BAR WAS no accident, for it was at the end of the bar where the waitresses refueled their trays. It required patience to wait for the seat right next to the waitress station. Halloween brought out the crazies, and the place was packed. There were two kinds of people who sat at a bar: those waiting for a table or in a hurry; and those with their elbows shellacked to the surface. Thankfully, the two stools to his right were not the thrones of legitimate barflies but only rest stops. Fifteen minutes after he took his place on the third stool, he had migrated to his right and the seat adjacent to the brass bar that segregated the drunken masses from the waitresses.

Reconnaissance had told him that the girl, underage as she most definitely was, was drinking a kir royale-champagne dyed red with crème de cassis. Easy to spot among the beer and vodka of her peers that filled out the tray as the empties returned. Easy to identify, as the bartender placed a fresh one on the bar before turning his skills to the vodka mixes. The decent-looking waitress busied herself with garnishes of lemon and lime; she stabbed a line of three olives onto a yellow plastic stick, dressing the vodka glasses as they surfaced.

The man now sitting on the stool next to her waited for the right moment. The bartender’s head came up. The waitress slipped a wedge of lime on the highball’s rim. The man pointed to a bottle of single malt, his right arm impolitely extended between the two of them. He asked about the cost and quality of the scotch. As they directed their attention to the bottle, his left hand waved over the top of the kir like a magician’s. For anyone looking closely, the champagne briefly fizzed a little more than it had before. A few grains of sediment sank to the bottom of the glass and then vanished.

He was told the scotch was excellent, and cost as much as a tank of gas. He ordered a draft beer, and stayed on the stool long enough to watch the tray make its way through the crowded room, carried high on the end of the waitress’s steepled fingers. Waited through half the beer, knowing that a young woman would go to the washroom when her head began spinning. She wouldn’t tell her older friends anything was wrong. Might not even ask a friend to join her in the washroom. First, she would try to deal with this herself.

That was when he’d strike.

He finished the beer, placed a modest tip on the bar-neither too small nor too large to be remembered-and freed the stool to one of the many waiting behind him. Working through the busy bar took some time. Given his size and the power of his body, he could have made quick work of it, but invisibility mattered more than efficiency. He took his time, finding openings, and squeezing between the crowded tables, reaching the rough-wood-paneled back hallway. The two rest-rooms shared a wall across from a gallery of tintypes of mining camps from more than a century ago. An exit at the end led to the back parking lot. It helped that it was snowing heavily, helped that his pickup was parked less than twenty feet from the door.

He saw it clearly unfold in his mind, like watching a film but with him in it. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to hunt, to stalk, to kill. He celebrated his own brilliance, reveled in the warmth that anticipation raised in his bloodstream. Got high on it. To everything… a time for every purpose, under Heaven.

He admired the tintypes, or at least pretended to: scraggly-looking guys from the 1800s, showing off rows of enormous brook and rainbow trout hanging from laundry lines outside canvas tents. With the alcohol as a catalyst, it wouldn’t take long for her to feel it. A swimming head. An unexpected warmth and euphoria. An unfamiliar lack of inhibition, accompanied by a penetrating relaxing of her muscles.

He stole glimpses of her across the barroom. Each time she laughed, her strapless bridesmaid’s dress slipped a little lower on her chest, revealing the remnant of a summer-tan line. She might have paid more attention to this even twenty minutes earlier. But now, light-headed and prone to laughter, she didn’t know what she felt except a little too good. Less than five minutes later, just before her left breast completely escaped, her forearm caught the dress, and she pinched the fabric below her smoothly shaved armpits and hiked it back up. This moment of modesty triggered something in what remained of her conscious mind, informing her something was wrong. It couldn’t have been more than a glimpse, a flicker, given the dose. But, in that instant, she excused herself, briefly lost her balance, stumbled, burst out laughing, and once again caught the bust of her dress just prior to total exposure. And then, to his pure delight, she headed directly for him.

A syringe occupied each of his coat pockets, making one easily available to either hand. He wasn’t going to need the Taser: she was cranked. She reached to the backs of chairs for support as she negotiated her way through the crowded room. The live band pounded through a John Mellencamp song, loud enough to make it impossible to think. She caught the beat, and, smiling sublimely, swayed her hips side to side, now on final approach.

She was an eyeful. Unblemished skin. Thick red hair held high on her head in an elaborate braid. A body ripe and heavy with fruit. Rendered helpless and without a conscious thought, she grinned behind half-mast eyes. Her round hips punched out the beat.

She tripped once more, as she cleared the chairs and tables, and headed for the hallway, where he waited, licking his chops like the proverbial wolf. This was going to be fun. She crashed right into his arms.

“Whoa, there!” he said.

She laughed, looked up, and bent back, as she tried to focus. Eyebrows arched, and then pinched, as she failed to recognize him. And no memory of how she’d gotten there. “Excuse me,” she said, some drool running off her lower lip.

He held her by the elbow, knowing she probably didn’t feel it. Things would be going spongy now-in crystalline form, this stuff worked quickly.

“No problem,” he said, giving his most reassuring smile.

“Just need the little girls’ room,” she said. She remembered that much but little else.

He took in both ends of the hall. The timing couldn’t have been better: they were alone.

His left hand found the syringe in his coat pocket and slipped off the needle guard.

“Maybe a little fresh air,” he said, guiding her a few feet closer to the exit.

“You think?”

She stopped. Looked up into his face. Tried to concentrate. “Do I know you?”

“It’s cold out. Feels pretty good when you’re feeling dizzy.”

“I am dizzy,” she said. “How’d you know?”

“Been there,” he said warmly.

She wore five earrings up the curve of her left ear, a rainbow of gems: ruby, sapphire, emerald, two diamonds. An ear worth ten grand. She’d be missing those by morning. She glanced at the word GALS on the rough-hewn door as they passed it, then at her escort, and something registered behind her out-of-focus eyes that the train had missed its stop. But nothing too alarming; it must have felt good to have someone holding her up. “Cold air,” she muttered.

“It’s snowing. It’ll feel good,” he encouraged.

She exhaled, suddenly leaning more fully on his arm. Relying on his assistance now, she sagged, her muscles going all creamy, her head bobbing like a marionette’s.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel pretty good already.”

“No crime in that.”

“Real good, actually. Probably too good.” That made her laugh. She cracked herself up, her voice still bubbly and light, as the exit door slipped shut behind her.

He checked the alley in both directions. Hard to see more than ten yards in the swirling darkness. He’d knocked out the only spotlight on his way inside earlier. A streetlamp thirty yards to his right showed a cone of snow, large flakes falling heavily.

The pickup’s tailgate was already down. A half inch of fresh snow had collected there. The door to the dog carrier hung open as well.

“What’s going on?” she said, a fleeting moment of awareness. But then she stuck out her pink tongue and tried to catch snowflakes. She giggled childishly.

“We’re going to have a good time,” he said. “We’re going to party.”

“I like to party.”

One last check in all directions-the snow and the darkness like a privacy curtain. Someone three cars over wouldn’t have been able to see them clearly. He hit her in the left buttock with the syringe.

“Hey!” she said, as if he’d pinched her there.

She weighed about a hundred and ten. He picked her up and folded her in half without straining.

“This is a game,” he said. “You have to be quiet.”

“Shh!” she said, still giggling, as he pushed her inside the carrier and shut its door with a metallic click of finality.

6

WALT HAD FOLLOWED THE DISTURBANCE IN THE SNOW back through a mile and a half of woods, to the two-lane Idaho State Highway 75, wondering now if the plan had been for the storm to cover the tracks, removing the evidence. He feared Randy Aker’s death was anything but accidental. Proving it would be something else, given that the storm had buried even the circumstantial evidence. So preserving what little hard evidence he believed he had became paramount.

He sent Brandon down the snow-covered road on foot to retrieve the Hummer, while Walt kneeled, sweating and shivering in the cold, his winter coat spread out and supported by small sticks to make a tent above a section of the turnout where he and Brandon had carefully uncovered a tire print. They’d gotten lucky: the road had been recently plowed before the car or truck had parked in the turnout; its prints had frozen in the quickly freezing slush left behind by the plow.

By carefully brushing away the light powder, he and Brandon had excavated a portion of the icy tire impression. Now that it was exposed, though, the falling snow seemed to be crystallizing on top of it, adhering to it, necessitating the improvised covering. Alongside the impression were two telltale paw prints-a dog’s. Not wolf, not coyote. Walt continued to gently brush away the powdery snow, exposing three additional animal tracks-also dog prints. No five-legged dogs, as far as he knew, so there were two or more.

He heard the grind of an engine long before he caught sight of the approaching headlights. The snow was really coming down now, the flakes turning larger and wetter. The kind of warm snow that melted as it fell, covering everything in a pasty slush. A tent twig snapped, and one arm of his coat sagged toward the tire impression and, as the wind caught the coat, dragged it in the snow, perfectly erasing two of the dog prints. Walt did his best to shield the remaining three while struggling to support his sagging coat.

He glanced up somewhat desperately at the headlights and saw two people in the cab, and, as it drew closer and parked, he identified the passenger as Fiona Kenshaw. When he thought of Fiona, in his mind’s eye she wore a tight T-shirt and fishing waders; she had her hair trimmed summer short, and she wore no makeup. But as she climbed out of the vehicle, lugging a camera case over her shoulder, he saw she wore a purple downhill ski suit, no hat, driving gloves, and a pair of gray Uggs.

That kind of ski suit was for the Sun Valley set, not Fiona. Maybe it was borrowed, he thought. But even in the headlights, her face was simple and pleasant, with eyes that worked hard to disguise some truth he knew nothing about. Maybe he liked her for this mystery she always carried, maybe for her independence, but he liked her. And, as so often happened in this county, his office relied upon her part-time help.

“Sorry, I was working a wedding,” she apologized, cutting off any comments he might make about how she’d dressed. “A freelance thing. Got here as soon as I could.”

Brandon explained, “We left her car down with my truck.”

Walt directed Brandon to retrieve the blue tarp and tent poles in the back of the Hummer. Ten minutes later, he got his coat back, and, with Brandon holding one of the four corners and Walt the other, with a third corner tied to the bumper of the Hummer, they improvised a tent, under which Fiona went to work.

“You really drive this thing?” she asked him.

“Not often. It was donated by one of our resident billionaires. Comes in handy sometimes.”

“All those toys, and you can’t take your own pictures.”

“I tried. All I got was white on white,” Walt explained. “We’re going to lose this scene fast. I need as much detail as you can get.”

Fiona asked Brandon to hold a bounce screen against his knees, angled to reflect the light off the Hummer’s headlights. She set up a large, battery-powered umbrella flash opposite Brandon and ran off a series of shots. She checked the back of her camera, didn’t like the results, and rearranged the lighting and tried again. Twenty minutes passed doing four different setups. The snowfall increased, and the wind picked up, lifting ghostly white sheets of powder off the pavement and spreading them around. A thin drift blew across the tire print and briefly covered it. Fiona used a soft lens brush to sweep it off, but it was obvious to all of them they were losing the battle.

“These suck,” she said. “No contrast. Bad shadows. You’re not going to like them.”

“I need this,” Walt said.

“Yeah? Well, I need a contrast agent. A dark powder. Hang on.” She hurried back to the Hummer, pulled her purse from the car, and dug through it. “Pays that I was at a wedding and wanted to look presentable.” She held up a compact case. “Face powder. Who’s got a coin?”

She scratched the compressed face powder to dust and blew across it to color the icy tire impression. A few minutes later, she had the shots she wanted and showed them to him on the camera’s small screen, before the three of them took down the rigging and piled back into the Hummer.

“Do I get to know what this is about?” she asked Walt from the backseat.

Brandon looked over, curious as to how Walt would answer.

“It’s a murder investigation,” Walt said.

7

HE HUMMED A LITTLE THEME MUSIC IN HIS HEAD AS A soundtrack. Real life felt like the movies or television only when you added a soundtrack. The cabin was dark and smelled of wood smoke, and other odors not easily placed: cordite, medicines, old dog.

He’d placed her in his only comfortable chair, next to the woodstove. It had a green Pendleton blanket pulled over the cushions to hide the stuffing that escaped its worn pillows. An unusual footstool- woven cane with deer antler legs-held up her bare feet. He’d bound her wrists to the arms of the chair with plastic ties. He’d left her legs free, for obvious reasons.

“You all right?” he asked her. He didn’t care, but he offered his concern as a courtesy.

She giggled-a wet, guttural groan-part of her given to fantasy, part terror. That odd laughing of hers was enough to make him sick. Then again, it aroused him to the point he was needing some satisfaction and that brought him back to the soundtrack, because now he was humming the Rolling Stones. “ ‘I feel great,’” he answered, speaking for her. One of her eyes lifted partially open as he spoke for her, and only then with great effort. The eyeball spun in her head; her lid fell shut, then blinked open again.

The eye surveyed her surroundings, and she tried to sit up. Her left breast popped out of the dress. She looked down at herself, and some drool spilled from her mouth to her chest and slid into the gulf, the fleshy abyss, and was gone.

“ ‘Oops!’” he said for her, now laughing along with her as she made that sound again. “‘Hey, what’s with my arms, anyway?’” he narrated. “‘I mean, I can’t feel anything.’

“Isn’t that right?” he asked her. “Numb as Novocain. The good news is, you won’t want to remember any of this. Good for both of us. Won’t feel hardly anything either, but that’s your loss.” He rubbed his crotch, and then took hold of it and squeezed it like a rapper. “Old Max is dying to meet you.”

His looks must have frightened her on some level, for he was a big son of a bitch, with too much hair and too little grooming.

He waited for her but got only that one wandering eye.

He raised his voice an octave to imitate her. “‘I like to par… ty.’

“We’re going to have fun, all right,” he said.

Ostensibly, he was on contract, but he had ulterior motives, information of his own to collect from her. Had she been horsey, he might have gleaned the information and been done with her. But she was a rare thing of youthful beauty-and the ketamine cocktail would erase any memory of these precious hours. As a survivalist, he knew never to waste anything. Put everything to good use.

“‘Well, what are we waiting for?’” his ventriloquist puppet asked. Her good eye was locked onto the stove, apparently having lost track of him, but he didn’t let that bother him. You didn’t lose track of a man with a near-three-foot span to his shoulders and twenty-eight-inch thighs for very long. You just chose to ignore him. But that wouldn’t last either. Old Max was coming to attention.

A geometric pattern of light rounded the ceiling and fled down a wall like a ghost, and a car engine was heard shutting off. The cabin door opened a moment later, and, with it, came a gust of cold that turned them both that direction.

“Nice,” the visitor said, noticing the gooseflesh on her exposed breast, the tight pucker to her nipple and areola, as he shut the door.

“‘Who are you?’” he imagined her asking.

He’s who you have to thank for this, he answered himself silently.

The visitor was dressed like a shoe salesman. He removed his Eddie Bauer jacket-black suede peppered with melted snow-and stepped away from the door and into the light. He had uncommon good looks, though his face was difficult to read. He might have once been a high school quarterback or varsity pitcher, the kind of guy that didn’t need to drug a girl to get some action. “Stop humming,” he said.

The big man went silent and backed away. He could break this guy with one hand tied behind his back, if he had to, but he wasn’t about to. Both men knew that.

The visitor stepped toward the woodstove, holding his hands out for warmth. “Kira, you can hear me and understand me?”

“Do I know you?” Her words slurred. It was the first time she’d spoken since leaving the bar. “Help me…”

“I will help you. But I need your help first. Okay?” He waited. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. The visitor looked over his shoulder and the big man handed him a syringe from the kitchen table.

“You work at the Sun Valley Animal Center,” the visitor said.

“Do… I… know… you?” she repeated.

“You’re Mark Aker’s secretary.”

“His assistant. Ass-isn’t?” she said, amusing herself. “How do you… know… that?”

The quavering of her voice changed her in the big man’s eyes. She looked so incredibly young and childish, all of a sudden. Just a baby in a bridesmaid’s dress.

“Tell me about the sheep.”

“What sheep? Which sheep?”

“The sheep. The sick sheep. Why are the sheep so sick?”

“Are we going to party or talk nursery rhymes?” She giggled throatily.

“What’s wrong with the sheep?” the visitor asked. “What does your boss think is wrong with the sheep?”

“What sheep?” the narrator inside his head answered. She had said nothing, apparently having lost consciousness, her head now sagging.

“What happened to the partying, anyway? ” the big man wondered.

The visitor lifted her head by the hair, and the whites of her eyes showed. He held the syringe where she could see it. No one liked a needle. The girl’s eyes popped, and she shied away.

“Kira, if you don’t tell me about the sheep I’m going to inject you with this. You will not like what it does. Everything’s going to be a lot more real, more clear, for you, once you’ve had this shot. A lot less fun, I promise. He and I are still going to party with you, Kira, but something tells me you’re not going to like it. You see how big a man he is?” The visitor pointed at him. “He gets sloppy seconds. Think about that a minute.” He waited for some sign from her. Got nothing. “I need to know what your boss is thinking about the sheep,” the visitor said. “I need to know that right now. You can help yourself a lot by telling me.”

Did he really think she heard him? Maybe she could see his lips move. Maybe, even, she recognized every other word. But she was too far down, too far back, to fully understand him at normal speed.

“You know… you are really hung up on these sheep.”

The visitor spun around and looked at him. Only then did he realize he’d spoken it aloud into the room.

“What the fuck did you just say?” the visitor asked.

She came to life again, baaing like a sheep. It saved him having to answer. She laughed gutturally as she surfaced. “You aren’t, like, one of those kind of guys?” She pursed her lips, trying to contain her laughter, but it spilled out of her, along with a good deal of spittle, which the visitor then wiped off his hand and onto his pressed pants. “Can I tell you a little secret?” She egged him closer.

The visitor leaned in to her. The syringe hovered in his right hand, like a preacher’s cross at last rites.

She said, “If a guy wants to visit my kitchen door now and then, that’s okay with me. I even kind of like it. But if he comes around to my front door, he’d better wipe his feet.” She guffawed, rocking up the front legs of the big chair.

“One last try, Kira.” He wielded the syringe impossibly close to her face.

She appeared to lock onto it. Perhaps, for just a fraction of a second, she grasped her situation, understood what was to come.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“The sheep, Kira. What’s wrong with the sheep?” The needle pointed south, aimed directly at her forearm.

“I want to go home.”