Killer View

14

ROY COATS LEFT THE DOGS BEHIND THIS TIME. HE DIDN’T need to track some guy through a snowstorm. He didn’t need a cage to hide a girl.

Pulling a sled, he rode the snowmobile, a Yamaha Phazer, several miles up Sunbeam Road, pulled it into the trees, and locked and chained it. To some, this was the middle of nowhere-fifty miles past Galena Summit in a national forest of four million acres, so vast that it included the one-million-acre River of No Return Wilderness Area, the largest wilderness in the continental United States. He could have called upon the others to help him, but he was the best shot. He pursued this alone.

During the “work” on the girl, with the client in the other room cleaning himself up, Coats had made promises to her that he’d be gentler than the visitor had been. He’d won a moment of compromise on her part. She’d mentioned the doc’s frequent trips to a cabin in Challis. She didn’t know anything about any sheep but knew he’d been hauling mail-order gear up there. Coats had still done her, but he hadn’t yanked her hair or slapped her around the way the client had.

Now, he snowshoed the final mile, following nothing more than his internal compass, working from memory, having viewed a topographical map only once. He ascended a steep mountain ridge, holding just below the tree line, and then dropped down into thick forest, as the cabin came into view.

He picked up the fresh tracks of an elk herd and stayed among them for the sake of covering his own prints in the snow. He carried a CheyTac Intervention M-200 slung over his right shoulder. The weapon carried a Nightforce scope, which could be upgraded all the way to a digital device that plugged into a PDA and gave the weapon an effective range of twenty-five hundred yards-well over a mile-that accounted for wind speed and atmospheric pressure. The newspapers called it a sniper rifle. To enthusiasts like himself, it was an antipersonnel rifle, providing long-range, soft-target interdiction. He’d replaced the muzzle brake with an OPSINC suppressor. It wouldn’t scare a chickadee in the next tree over, if he had to use it.

His choice was not to use it, because it would be one hell of a tricky double shot. He had it sighted for two hundred yards. If needed, his target would never have a clue to his position. The target would not hear a thing until the wet thwack of his own shredded flesh. Thankfully, the contracted inventory included only the adults, and excluded any children. He didn’t have any desire to chalk a kid.

Tied onto the left side of his day pack was a D93S cartridge-fired rifle that he often employed in his private client work. With his special loads and the four-power scope, he could accurately project a dart from one hundred twenty-five yards. A single-shot rifle, it weighed eight pounds but was worth every ounce. The D93S was his weapon of choice for the work that lay ahead, but it was the CheyTac that made him feel secure.

He rubbed his sore knuckles through the glove, mulling over his recent mistakes. How he’d killed the wrong brother was beyond him- the dogs didn’t make such errors. He pushed that from his mind and stayed with the elk tracks, huge half-moons the size of horse hooves. As hard as it was to get past his mistakes, they had given him time to rethink his own priorities. He had his own uses for the doctor.

He climbed a tree to verify his position, keeping the pack and both rifles with him. From his position thirty feet up, he had an unobstructed view of a cirque of rock to the south, bejeweled and glistening in the spectacular afternoon sunlight; to the east, a semiforested expanse that trailed down toward the small town of Challis, just the roofs of a few small buildings visible. Dead center, looking southeast, stood a small log cabin in a sea of white, alone at the top of an escarpment, looking to him like a mole on a man’s bald head.

Carefully scanning the area with a pair of binoculars, he spotted the elk herd slightly north, watering at a spring above the bald man’s left ear. A mighty herd at that-thirty to fifty head. He located the herd’s only buck, carrying a monstrous twelve-point rack that he’d have loved to have on the wall of his own cabin. But that was for another day.

He returned to the snow and moved deeper into the forest, working his way silently to the very edge of the trees, less than fifty yards from the front of the cabin and the apron of snow that surrounded it. The snow was deep, so he climbed fifteen feet into a lesser tree and found a perch. He sighted the CheyTac and strapped it to a branch so that it was firmly locked onto the lower-left corner of a window to the left of the cabin’s front door. At this distance, he could have shot a screw out of the door hardware, if he’d chosen to.

Next he readied the dart rifle directly alongside the CheyTac, slinging a pouch at his waist carrying four extra darts. It was a double shot: the CheyTac would shatter the window so the dart could travel through smoothly and on target, a difficult, technical shot that only made it all the more attractive to him.

He had no plans to kick in the door. Playing Bruce Willis was definitely Plan B. Patience was a hunter’s true gift. His best tool: the ruse. He doubted he could coax the good doc to come outside onto the porch, but that was why he’d brought the two rifles. The double shot would do the trick.

He rechecked the sights of both rifles-the CheyTac was strapped in place, the dart rifle free. He spent fifteen minutes getting the setup just right: the CheyTac would be triggered with his left hand; the D93S aimed and fired from his right. He’d have just the one chance because of the single dart. After that, like it or not, he’d have to pull a Bruce Willis on the cabin. The narrator inside his head favored this second option. The hunter opted for the first.

With a piece of Velcro holding the barrel of the dart rifle in place, Coats produced a double-reed elk bugle from his pack and held it to his lips. The bull elks bugled when in rut, and, though the season had just passed, the snow had come early, and it was not impossible that a male might still be out here, sounding his call. A vet would know this. Only the most effective bugling would ensure success.

But he was a professional hunter. Few understood the art of duplicating the wailing oboelike sound of an adult bull elk as he did. He believed any vet, any hunter, would be drawn by the chance to see a bull elk up close. There were few animals as beautiful and regal.

The procedure took some practice: sound the bugle; secure the device in his belt, reach for the D93S, and pull his eye to scope. Bugle, belt, rifle, scope. He waited. He tried another dry run. It took five seconds for him to get the bugle stashed and his eye to scope. It would take a person in that cabin at least a few seconds to get to a window upon hearing it.

Bugle, belt, rifle, scope.

He was ready.

He let out an enormously loud bugle, quavering with tremolo- more of a shriek than a cry. His eye focused on the cabin window… waiting… waiting.

No one came.

Another try: a second loud bugle-a trill up and down an out-of-tune scale, a screech, like fingernails on a blackboard.

Eye to the scope.

Light shifted on the far side of the window. It was an incredibly subtle change, but something was moving inside the cabin. Coats exhaled and then drew in a deep breath, his index finger moving from the trigger guard to in front of the trigger.

Demonstrating the patience of a martial arts master, our hunter slows his bodily functions in apprehension of the shot.

Steady.

His trigger finger never falters as he holds himself as still as a statue.

Another change of light. A slight movement of the curtain.

There! The curtain was pushed aside. Seen through the scope, the hand looked gigantic. A head moved into the frame: a man. Middle-aged. He could see the day-old whisker stubs on the man’s cheeks.

Aker.

The scope’s crosshairs stopped a few centimeters from dead center. He trained this magnified empty space on Aker’s chest, his own heart thumping wildly. His left hand came up and found the CheyTac’s trigger. He had yet to breathe, still working on the same breath. He squeezed: left, then right.

The CheyTac’s recoil ripped it off the limb, but that scraping sound was the only noise it made. The D93S popped, sounding like one strong handclap.

Through the scope, he saw flashes of blinding light as the window shattered. Pieces of glass rained down both inside and out. The curtain fluttered.

Then nothing.

No indication of success.

No indication of failure.

Nothing.

He jacked the CheyTac into place, ready to unload the magazine, if need be. If he’d missed with the dart, if the doc made a run for it…

He waited. One minute… Two…

He had no choice.

Time for Uncle Bruce.

15

THE BARREN, SNOW-COVERED HILL ROSE STEEPLY FROM THE locked gate like a bubble of shaving cream. A primitive road had been cut into the winding hillside, jutting out like a frown. Walt saw what might have been tracks-it could have been game or people-but there was too much drifting snow to know for certain.

The top of Mark Aker’s four hundred acres abutted the western edge of the Challis National Forest. A quarter mile to the west ran Yankee Fork Road, a dirt track, snowed in for the winter, that connected the town of Challis to the abandoned mining town of Sunbeam. To the east were a few sprawling ranches. This was God’s country, the last vestiges of community before the National Forest spread north and east for hundreds of square miles.

“No sign this gate’s been opened recently,” Brandon complained. “You still want to go through with this?”

A sharp but distant rifle report sounded. Small-gauge, Walt thought, as he connected the sound to the one he’d heard the night of the search: like a limb snapping. If anything was the Wild West, it was Challis, Idaho; the sound of a rifle, even out of hunting season, would normally have been of no interest. The reverberating dull echo prevented Walt from determining the direction of origin, but its proximity to Aker’s cabin put a spur in his backside.

“Hurry!” It had taken him all morning to round up Brandon and to make the three-hour drive. The sound of a gunshot fueled his impatience.It made sense that Mark might hide his family here-with the property listed under Francine’s maiden name there was little chance it would be connected by others to Mark-but maybe they hadn’t been the only ones to figure it out.

They vaulted the gate. Walt pulled his snowshoes through and was strapping them on as Brandon beat him to it and started up the unplowed road.

Walt charged off and quickly caught up, the technique more familiar to him. Larger and heavier, Brandon sunk down more deeply and couldn’t find a rhythm to his mechanics. Within a minute or two, Walt found his pace and passed Brandon. Brandon then leaned into the hill and regained lost ground, pulling even with Walt. It didn’t escape Walt that they were acting like schoolboys, but it didn’t slow him any either.

After a quarter mile of climbing, steam pouring off them, and just as they rounded the last of three ascending turns, the buckle on Walt’s snowshoe popped loose and he went down into a face-plant.

Brandon glanced back but didn’t slow down.

Walt sat up and tried to make sense of the equipment failure. He couldn’t find the buckle. He knotted the straps together, as tightly as possible, and took a few steps. It held.

Ahead of him, Brandon was closing in on the tiny cabin. It had a covered porch that wrapped around two of its sides. A stovepipe jutted out of the roof, no smoke coming from it. The one window on this side was blocked with a curtain.

“Hold up!” he hollered to Brandon. Procedure dictated they approach the structure with one man covering.

But his deputy took this as Walt’s attempt to fix the race and continued ahead.

“Stand down, Deputy!” Walt tried again.

Brandon glanced back, grinned, and then bent over to loosen the snowshoes. He came out of them fast and climbed up onto the porch, banging a shoulder into a wind chime. Light flashed from the spinning metal, and the tinkle of bells carried on the wind.

A spurt of blood burst from Brandon ’s shoulder, and the exterior wall of the cabin splintered with a thwack. He spun, reached out, and pulled down the wind chimes with him as he fell to the deck.

“Tommy!” Walt dove into the snow, rolled onto his back, and dumped his gloves in order to lose the snowshoes. He fumbled with the straps, finally kicking the snowshoes loose. Beretta in hand, he belly-crawled toward the cabin. “Stay down!” he shouted. “And don’t move!”

He stole a glimpse up the hill toward the woods, believing the shot had come from somewhere out there. Fresh tracks led through the snow in that direction. Then he lowered his head and continued his belly crawl, staying below the snow’s surface. He crawled… paused… listened. It felt as if the cabin was moving away from him; as hard as he crawled, he didn’t seem to get any closer.

“Fuck!” It was Brandon, from the porch.

“Stay down!” Walt shouted.

“I’m hit.”

“Stay down and don’t move.”

“Shut the fuck up! I’m hit.”

“I’m coming.”

“The fuck you are. He’ll pick you off.”

There’d been only the one shot. It offered two possibilities: a shoot and run or a shoot and hunt to the death.

Walt needed cover: he saw the move, as he finally drew closer. He jumped up onto the deck, spun, back first, to the house, tucked himself into a ball, hands over his face, and vaulted backward through the window. The glass exploded and rained down around him. He hit a table, caught a lamp with his toe, and brought both down on top of him. He scooted away from the glass, came to a standing position, and rushed the front door.

The other window was shattered too, glass on the inside. Had that happened when Brandon had been shot? He didn’t recall the sound of breaking glass, only the bells of the wind chime. He reached the open window and peered out past the jagged frame.

Brandon lay below him, faceup. The man’s glove was gripped high on his left arm, which was blood-covered and still oozing.

“You okay?”

“Dandy,” Brandon answered with a grimace.

“I’m going to pull the door open. We’re going to do this fast, on three. You with me?”

“Three,” Brandon said, and he started to slide on his back toward the door.

“Shit!” Walt said, as he yanked open the door, reached out, and found the man’s right shoulder. He dragged him-the man was heavy-through the door and slammed it shut.

“Motherfucker hurts!” said Brandon. “Goddamn it!” He ran through every expletive he knew, as Walt opened the jacket and worked it off the man’s left arm. As wounds went, it was pretty awful. The bullet appeared to have missed the bone, but the exit wound was twice the size of the entrance, leaving a hole the size of a golf ball. The bleeding was severe, possibly arterial. The wound wouldn’t kill him but the blood loss might. With Brandon compressing the wound, Walt stripped a shoelace out of the man’s boot.

“No,” Brandon said.

“I’m going to tie it off.”

“The hell you are,” Brandon said. “Once we do that, we can’t go back. The toxins’ll kill me if we loosen it, and, if we don’t, they take the arm. Fuck that. Compression for now. We only go to tourniquet if I pass out and you see no other choice.”

“There is no other choice.”

“I’m not losing my arm, Sheriff. Nice try.”

“Tommy!”

“No… fucking… way. I’ve done the course, Sheriff. I’m not losing this arm unless I have to.”

Walt looked around the room, as if someone might arrive to help him.

“You’ve got to go after him,” Brandon said.

“The hell I do.”

“Yes, you do.” Brandon couldn’t point, so he shook his head in the direction of the door.

It took Walt a moment to see the plastic dart canister wedged into the intersection of the wall and floor.

“They got him, Sheriff. That’s what we heard with that first shot. We’re maybe, what, fifteen, twenty minutes behind him?”

Walt processed everything Brandon was saying and his eyes were telling him. “Darted him inside the cabin? I don’t buy that.”

“Who the fuck knows? That’s a dart, and, unless I’m mistaken, no one’s home.”

“You’re bleeding out.”

“I can get down the hill. It’s easier than going up.”

“Bullshit.”

“Give me the keys.”

“This isn’t going to happen, Tommy. I’m going with you.”

“We’ll use the radios,” Brandon said. “I’ll keep talking. As long as I’m conscious, you keep heading up there. I go silent, then, sure, come back and be the hero.”

“Give it a rest. There’s procedure, Tommy. I’m evacuating the wounded.”

“You’re pursuing the hostage. The first twelve hours, Sheriff. You know the drill.”

“If someone took Mark, they’ll be on snowmobile. I’m on foot, Tommy.”

“And when I get down to town, I’ll send a deputy up Yankee Fork on a snowmobile looking for you.”

“Got it all planned out, do you?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Mark’s a vet. The dart could be his,” Walt said.

“Could be.” Gripping his arm tightly, Brandon said, “I’ll need help with the snowshoes, and you’ll need a pair of gloves.”

“We’re going to clean and wrap the wound,” Walt said. “We can get a lot of compression with the wrap.”

“Well, fucking hop to it!” Brandon said. “He’s got a head start on you.”

Walt passed him the keys.

16

WALT FOLLOWED THE TRAIL OF PACKED SNOW FOR ONLY the first fifty yards, then gave one final look back at Brandon before cutting to his right and entering into a stand of towering lodgepole pine that formed the southwestern boundary of the National Forest. He had first learned to track in Boy Scouts; but where other kids picked up footballs or soccer balls, Walt had spent his school-day afternoons in the wilderness with his head down. A man named Jeff Longfeather, a Blackfoot Indian who worked as a farmhand for his maternal grand-father, had seen the boy’s passion and had taught him the natural state of indigenous flora and fauna, the different ways and speeds that mud dried, the forces behind impact prints. Taught him the feeding, watering, and mating habits of big game. How to bugle an elk to within fifty yards. How to construct a blind. To survive in the woods for days at a time, eating pine nuts and edible roots, and burying his own scat. In the process, Walt had come to respect the environment in ways that wouldn’t be popular for twenty more years, but his reverence had paid off. Jeff Longfeather turned a wet-behind-the-ears Boy Scout into a fine tracker who could stalk a bull elk or deer for days without revealing himself. Walt had not stayed with scouting, but he’d visited the family farm weekends and school holidays and had come to view Jeff as something of an older brother, spiritual adviser, and mentor.

He disappeared now into the woods, his mission twofold: to track the man who had kidnapped Mark Aker, for there was only one set of snowshoe tracks coming and going, and to make certain no one tracked him.

Brandon ’s ramblings crackled on in his earpiece, as his deputy descended from Aker’s cabin toward the Cherokee. The reception wasn’t great, but he continued to hear Brandon ’s voice, which was all that mattered.

The snowpack was thinner inside the woods, most of it caught by branches. He doubled back on his own tracks, removed the snowshoes, and climbed rocks to break his own trail from being followed. He climbed trees for surveillance and never left the confines of the forest, even when the tracks he was following reached across acres of snowfield. He located and climbed two trees that had clearly been used to scout the cabin; they’d been climbed by a strong man with a good-sized leg spread-a man with coarse black hair, judging by the strands he found stuck to the pine sap. At the top of one of the trees, he found a rubbed spot on a stout branch that suggested an object had been braced there-a rifle or monocular-the location offering an unobstructed view of the cabin’s porch.

Brandon had not been shot from such an elevation, but the dart on the floor of the cabin lingered in Walt’s mind.

What was Mark involved in? Why would anyone want, first, to try to kill and then, later, kidnap a local veterinarian? If he’d been willing to shoot Brandon, why not Mark Aker? Why the dart?

Being up a tree helped with radio reception. Brandon had reached the vehicle and felt able to drive himself into Challis. They signed off, with Brandon promising Walt a snowmobile on Yankee Fork Road in short time.

Walt returned to the snowfield and stayed parallel to the tracks. Jeff Longfeather had taught him about time and patience; where possible, he stole into the center of the well-traveled elk trail and reestablished the snowshoe tracks-the man was pulling a heavy sled. Mark? He’d clearly made good time, establishing himself in Walt’s mind as big and strong. He was also an expert with a sniper rifle, keeping Walt mindful of his cover.

An hour and a half passed before his radio barked again. The Challis sheriff and a deputy were waiting nearby on Yankee Fork Road.

Walt discovered some cigarette ash, dancing on the snow. The butt had been GI’d, or packed out, leaving only the rolling worms of ash as evidence. The man towing Mark had paused here, had come back to the sled and done something-had administered more drugs, maybe, or delivered a warning. Walt followed the tracks and soon met up with two men on snowmobiles. They wore sheriff patches.

A track of a snowmobile towing a sled was evident. It headed not toward Challis, as he’d expected, but deep into the National Forest.

Introductions were made. Steam poured from Walt’s clothing. The two eyed him apprehensively; he sensed reluctance in them that he didn’t understand.

Riding a snowmobile would chill him down quickly, so he took a moment to strip down to his bare chest and change into a fresh Capilene undershirt. He redressed in his uniform shirt and zipped up his jacket, shifting on his feet to get his body heat back. The conversation never stopped as he caught up the Challis sheriff, a man with whom he’d had a major falling-out over the killing of a wolf a year earlier. There was no love lost between them, and he thought that that explained their mutual reluctance.

The Challis sheriff established that they’d crossed no fresh snowmobile tracks. “This guy’s headed back the way he came.”

“But what’s out there?” Walt inquired.

“Not much. Not for a long ways, anyway,” said the sheriff.

“Sunbeam or Clayton, I suppose,” the deputy said with a bit of a twang. His face barely showed out of the tightened hood and ski goggles. “Nothing else between here and there but a shitload of snow.”

“And your odd summer ranch on grandfathered parcels,” the sheriff added. “Would be a hell of a lot faster to head back to town and drive down to Clayton than punching through on Yankee Fork Road.”

“But the only sure way to know where he’s going is to follow the snowmobile track,” Walt said.

“Can’t argue with that,” the sheriff said. “I’m just saying there ain’t many places a fella can meet up with Highway Seventy-five, and Clayton’s the most likely of ’em.”

“But not the only one,” Walt said.

“I think we established that,” the sheriff said indignantly.

“You mind if I borrow one of your machines?” Walt asked. “I’ll follow on the trail while you get your guys down to Clayton. It wouldn’t hurt to roadblock Seventy-five at the turn to May.”

“Radios won’t do shit in there. You’ve got maybe a mile of coverage. Nothing more.”

Walt tapped his pack. “Satellite phone,” he said, raising a snarl in his counterpart. The Challis sheriff’s office wasn’t at the forefront of technology. “My deputy has the number.”

“You sure you want to do Yankee Fork Road?” the deputy asked one final time. “There ain’t nothing out there for thirty miles, Sheriff.”

Walt saw red. He didn’t like his decisions being questioned. He’d had that a lot over the past six months. People had expected him to fire Tommy Brandon. Myra had expected him to dump Gail’s clothes out the front door.

Minutes later, he found himself riding the snowmobile at forty miles an hour, following in the tread impressions that played out before him. It wasn’t until he caught a glimpse of himself in the snowmobile’s vibrating rearview mirror that he understood the reluctance he’d seen on their faces: mucus from his nose had frozen in twin lines on his upper lip; his eyebrows were white with frost, as were his eyelashes and some hairs on his neck and lower ears; his cheeks were an unnatural red, and some drool was frozen to his chin. He looked like a wild mountain man.

He rubbed his face clean with his glove. You couldn’t tow a sled at the speed he was going, which meant he was making up time. But he was riding fast, and often blind, into the path of a sniper who wasn’t shy about shooting cops.

He began slowing down at every curve and wishing the snowmobile didn’t whine like a chain saw, announcing his approach.

17

INSPIRED BY THE PANORAMIC VIEW OF PRISTINE WILDERNESS, the soundtrack from The Sound of Music played in his head-no narration, just the gentle strains of Julie Andrews’s bell-like voice.

He took something of a risk in leaving the vet down there in the sled, as he climbed a mountain ridge overlooking a long bend in Yankee Fork Road. Strong winds had blown away the snow, leaving scrabble rock and patches of ice, which he negotiated with care.

The ascent is carried out with precision, the timing critical, as he leaves his captive bound and unconscious far below. To make even the slightest mistake now can cost him everything, and so he goes about his mission with great care.

He loved grenades. It was well worth the climb to achieve the godlike sense of power associated with kicking an avalanche. He carried the CheyTac, as a measure of precaution: he could shoot the eye out of an eagle at half a mile with the thing. But it was the two grenades that really warmed his nut sack.

He stopped several times to catch his breath in the thin air. Looked down at the snowmobile and sled, a quarter mile beyond the turn. No one was going to come down this road, unless they were after him, but, if anyone did, he’d covered the unconscious vet with a blanket to hide the sled’s contents.

People had seriously misjudged the man. They took him for a hick and an incompetent. But in doing so they had allowed him to overhear the girl’s interrogation. They had given him a way out of this mess. The doctor was the witnesshe’d longed for. A simple double cross and his mission-his message-was saved.

He sat down on a rock to quiet himself. It wouldn’t do to handle grenades in this state. He smoked a cigarette and took in the scenery. His plan was a simple one: as a precaution, he would kick an avalanche and cover the Y in Yankee Fork Road, making it impassable. Snowmobiles would be blocked by a giant wall of ice and rock and, to the right, a precipitous drop-off. No one would get through here except on foot.

He heard a buzzing in his ears as he removed the concussion grenade from his satchel, pulled the pin, and heaved it well out into the snowfield. Moments later, he heard its soft cough. Watched as the center of the slope calved and caved simultaneously, an enormous shelf of snow sinking and breaking free from the uniformity above. Snow rippled as the newly created shelf pushed against the snow below, looking like age lines on an elderly face.

The sounds came next: a deep groaning, like the awakening of some great beast. This was interrupted once again by the buzzing whine of an insect, the contained anger pulsing past his ears.

The crack in the slowly shifting shelf of snow widened.

Then he saw what appeared to be a little black bug shooting along the road, and the insect sound took on an entirely new meaning: a snowmobile.

It was barreling down Yankee Fork Road, coming from the direction of Challis. Alone. It all but ruled out the cops; they always traveled in pairs or groups. No, this was some poor shit out on a nature ride who’d chosen the wrong day and the wrong route.

All at once, the snow slid in a massive, beautiful display of the raw power of nature. It was like a dam bursting.

He gloried in the moment, feeling the earth shuddering at his feet, hearing that sound, now more like a jet taking off.

It buried the buzz of the snowmobile, wiped out the soundtrack, silenced the narrator.

It moved first as a unit, as if the whole side of the mountain were falling. But then inertia and momentum collided, and a central chute rose, in a massive upheaval, a wide river of flowing snow, rock, and ice, gorging out the center of the slide and sucking more and more snow and debris down with it. Two huge trees at the edge of the far hill snapped like matchsticks and were carried down, swallowed whole.

And there, still unaware, came the black bug of the snowmobile, curving slowly around the long bend, headed directly into its unforgiving path.

18

IT BEGAN AS A SHUDDER, AS IF HE’D PUSHED THE SNOWMOBILE too hard, had thrown a belt or burned up some bearings. Walt felt it first in his legs, then his waist, and finally some spinal signal reached his brain that told him to look to his left.

His greatest fear was death by fire, with asphyxiation a close second. This included drowning. But more than drowning, being buried in an avalanche. He’d led enough Search and Rescue teams, both successful and not, to know the horror stories, and to see the results firsthand. If you were lucky enough to survive the churn-and few were-then you found yourself in a sea of blackness, disoriented and buried alive. Death came slowly: as your body chilled into hypothermia, your own breath contaminated what little air existed in your icy tomb and you suffocated, thrown first into hallucination, and, finally, a lung-bursting death.

His first thoughts, as he saw the mountain collapsing toward him, were not thoughts at all but images. He’d pulled out bodies, the faces frozen in looks of madness-terror-ridden masks of inescapable panic.

Then, for just a fraction of a second, above the fluid hillside cascading toward him, he made out the silhouetted shape of a man standing on the distant ridgeline. It might have been his imagination or wishful thinking: wanting to attribute this devil’s work to a man instead of synchronicity, his being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was too big a slide, traveling too fast down the hill, to try to cross its path. The one bit of luck working for Walt was that he’d slowed considerably as he’d headed into the curve, cautious of the range of the sniper’s rifle. He was not quite midslide, an area that looked to cover about two hundred yards. The first boulders of snow tumbled onto and across the cut of the roadbed, itself already buried in four feet of fresh snow. He jacked the handlebars, threw his left leg out, and gassed the accelerator, fishhooking the snowmobile into an about-face and cutting a deep rut that threatened to swallow the machine. Ironically, a snowmobile only worked well in deep snow if moving; if stopped or slowed significantly, it bogged down and was stranded.

The time consumed in turning it around cost him. More chunks of snow-two and three feet across-bounded on the road; the tremendous grinding sound of the slide overwhelmed him and literally shook the mechanized sled beneath him.

The avalanche came down the hill not as an arrow but as a snake’s tongue, its forks faster and more charged than its center. Beyond the road’s man-made, twenty-foot-wide patch of level track, the hill dropped away again precipitously, covered with trees and rock outcroppings.

He wasn’t going to make it: the snowmobile had slowed as a result of the turn and the rush of snow now coming down pushed across the road as a unit, shoving Walt and the snowmobile sideways out in front of its headlong force. He had to make it at least another sixty yards to clear the turn and it wasn’t going to happen.

Walt tugged on the handlebars and jumped the sled off the road. The snowmobile plowed into a drift, and Walt came fully off the seat, attached only by his bloodless grip. Behind him, the roar was unlike anything he’d ever heard: the open throat of a monster. The vehicle pulled up and out of the drift; Walt slammed back down onto the seat and twisted the accelerator, the full force of the avalanche now only yards behind him-a rising wall of debris shoved ahead of its unchecked force. Above the din, he heard the explosions of trees succumbing. The speed with which it now traveled dwarfed his own; one glance back told him as much.

There was no outrunning it.

At an incredible speed increased by the pull of gravity, he slalomed the sled down the hillside, narrowly missing tree trunks and dodging rocks. He tried to back off the accelerator, but it was no use: the whole hillside was moving out in front of that force, like he was riding a carpet being tugged out from under him. With the snow that carried him now itself in motion, the steering became unresponsive; he was no longer in control of the vehicle-the movement of the snow dictated his direction.

He faced a huge snow-covered rock to his right and a stand of massive trees straight ahead. He goosed the accelerator, yanked on the steering yoke-and nothing happened. The snowmobile carried him, as if on tracks, right for the tree trunks.

He leaped free and rolled, scrambling for the lee behind the rock outcropping. It was like swimming in sand. The crush of the avalanche lifted the snow beneath him and he rose like riding a wave. It firmed as it rose, the packed mass out in front, shelving up from under the fresh powder. He came to his knees like a surfer, measured his speed against the fixed position of the intractable rock outcropping, and dove.

Never the most athletic person, Walt nonetheless managed the perfect jump. Now behind the enormous rock that towered some twenty feet overhead, he scrambled on hands and knees to hide in its lee.

The snowmobile crashed into the trees. Walt reached the shelter of the rock face, hugging himself to the stone and gripping it with both gloves. It divided the avalanche, the ice and snow flying past in a deafening roar that terrified him more than the snow itself. Some rocks and chunks of ice flew overhead but landed beyond him, the outcropping fully screening him from the downthrust of the slide. It seemed to last an hour; in all, it was just over four minutes.

Walls of snow now rose fifteen feet on either side of him as the avalanche advanced down the hill. He thought he would be buried. And then, without warning, it stopped. As still as concrete.

All sound seemed to stop along with it, replaced by the quiet calm of a winter forest. Some wood creaked. He heard the chittering of a squirrel followed by the irritated call of a western magpie.

He slid down to a sitting position on a slight cushion of snow in the protection of the rock and gave a prayer of thanks.

Then, suddenly, he heard the distinctive buzz of a snowmobile.

It was running hard, traveling away from him, fading slowly behind the frantic pulse of blood in his ears.

19

WALT CALLED OUT ON THE SATELLITE PHONE AND A CHALLIS deputy picked him up on Yankee Fork Road an hour later. Once in town, the Challis sheriff vented his frustration over Walt’s destruction of their property and the dispatching of his men on what turned out to be a wild-goose chase: no one towing snowmobiles or matching Aker’s description had been turned up at the now-defunct roadblocks. Walt’s promise to replace the destroyed snowmobile failed to gain him much ground. The wolf incident a year earlier lay between them.

Brandon had been driven to a hospital in Salmon, Idaho, which, as far as Walt was concerned, was the kiss of death, given the community’s isolation. The polio vaccine was considered advanced medicine in Salmon. Brandon ’s only hope was that Salmon probably saw plenty of gunshot wounds.

Walt and the sheriff organized a team of four to revisit the Aker’s cabin and collect evidence. There was much to be done, from photographing tracks, the broken window, and the cabin’s interior to searching beneath the trees for shell casings. Walt called in Fiona’s services and waited the two hours for her arrival.

It was agreed that Walt and Fiona could initially work the cabin.

Instead of snowshoeing up, everyone teamed up on snowmobiles. Fiona climbed on behind Walt. Her gloves were too thick for the strap on the seat behind him, so she ended up wrapping her arms around his waist, and she and Walt bounced their way up the road.

He leaned over his shoulder and shouted above the machine’s roar. “Everything we have points to a kidnapping.”

She shouted back. “This thing just gets crazier and crazier.”

Walt hadn’t told her about the avalanche, only the possible abduction and Brandon ’s shooting, which seemed enough information to process.

A few minutes later, they entered the cabin, and Walt propped the broken door shut to try to contain some of the warmth from the propane heater.

They circled the cabin’s main room, Walt pointing out areas he wanted photographed.

They hadn’t been inside but a few minutes when she asked, “Do you know a guy named Roger Hillabrand?”

“I know of him, sure. Extremely wealthy. Well-connected.”

“I met him at a wedding I was shooting.”

“And I need to know this because…?” Having worked the floor for one full turn, Walt directed his attention to the furniture and the walls.

“No reason. Just wondered.”

“I don’t believe that,” he said from the opposite side of the room.

“No reason,” she repeated.

“Women don’t mention other men for no reason.”

“You’re the sheriff. That gives you an insider’s position when it comes to people like Roger Hillabrand.”

“He’s not a serial killer,” Walt said. “That I’m aware of.”

“Thank you.”

“Now you’re mad at me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“If you want me to be jealous, I’m considering it.”

“Furthest thing from my mind, I promise you.” She hesitated. “Why would I want you to be jealous, anyway?”

“My mistake,” he said.

“It most certainly was.”

“Government contracts. Like Halliburton. That kind of thing. Iraq. Afghanistan. Domestic work as well. Site clean-ups. Nuclear facilities. He attends the Cutter Conference-that’s how I know all this. Has a very… professional… security detail around him.”

“Was that sarcasm or cynicism?”

“Ex-military. All of them.”

“Is that so unusual?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact it is. Ex-cops is more typical. Big-city cops: New York, Chicago, Miami. Those are the guys these guys hire. They’ve got the résumé, and they maintain good contacts. An effective security detail needs access to other law enforcement. Hiring military discharges gives you brawn but no brains, in terms of connections.”

“Discounting the Pentagon.”

“Knowing someone in the Pentagon doesn’t tell you who you can trust in the NYPD to get your guy across town safely.”

“But nothing bad? Roger, I mean. Does he have a reputation?”

“As a ladies’ man? A drinker? A gambler? Not that I’ve heard, no. But he’s in that upper echelon of power brokers, and, from what I’ve learned, they all dip their toes in that water, whether they’re known for it or not.”

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Over here,” he said. She crossed the room and studied where he was pointing. Four pushpins framed an empty space on the wall. Three more pushpins were on the floor. They’d missed those pins the first time around, something neither mentioned but both were thinking.

Fiona readied her camera, changing some settings.

“Something was pinned up here. A photo maybe. Or a calendar. Or…” He reached out and gently moved a red pushpin, tilting it. A small triangle of torn paper swung down from where it was stabbed by the pin. There was a light green border on the white paper, along with a series of numbers.

“Money?” she said.

“If I had to guess, I’d say maybe a map. A topo map.”

“Don’t you have to guess?” she asked.

“As little as possible,” he answered. “Those numbers on it will help us identify it.”

The cabin was constructed of three-sided logs, with the milled face on the interior. Walt pointed out three distinct pinholes at the center of the four others, which, to him, represented corners. He told her he wanted a lot of coverage on these, including a way to reconstruct it to scale.

He pocketed the torn corner of paper, protecting it in an evidence bag, and left her to work.

They were thirty minutes into it when Walt stomped his foot down onto the area rug in the small bathroom. His ear had picked up a difference in sound and it did so again. His thumping brought a curious Fiona. He peeled back the area rug, which was tacked on one end but loose on the other.

It covered a hatch that had a recessed handle carved out of the top. He pulled out the Beretta for good measure, signaled Fiona to step back, and yanked it open. His penlight led the way as he climbed down into the dark. He found a light switch, and a compact fluorescent glowed.

It was a small, square space, eight feet by eight feet-two sheets of plywood on each wall. It had been dug into the earth but was built only with wood, not concrete.

Mark had installed the equipment for solar power down here: an inverter, a battery bank. There was a French-made instant-hot-water device, an air pressure tank, and a composting toilet that smelled of peat moss. And two lawn chairs. A portable radio. Five-gallon jugs of spring water. A variety of freeze-dried foods. A camp stove. Two sleeping bags-though not enough room to unroll them.

Steep ladder steps led down, ending near the battery bank.

Fiona clicked off several shots by lying down on the floor above. “A safe room?” she asked.

“Looks that way. Not originally, of course. But he’d made it into one. Check out the bolt,” he said, indicating the open hatch.

She photographed the three large steel bolts on the underside of the hatch, making note of the steel plating that had been installed on not just the hatch but across most of the ceiling of the room.

“Jesus,” she said. “Built for an invasion.”

“Francine could have been down here,” Walt said, noticing a partially eaten protein bar.

“When?” Fiona asked.

“When Tommy and I arrived. I never had time to look around. Tommy was shot and… the shooter… And we both took off. Shit! Francine could have been down here the whole time.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I fucked up,” he said.

“Your deputy was shot.”

She was making excuses for him and he didn’t like that.

“It’s pretty crowded down here. Let me get out, and then why don’t you take pictures of everything you can?”

“Everything?”

“Cover it. I’m going to alert the Challis deputies to be looking for a set of tracks leaving the area. If Francine was here, she’s gone now. She’s had several hours’ head start.”

“But why would she take off?” Fiona asked.

“It’s bulletproof; it’s not soundproof. It’s conceivable she heard her husband go down. Heard someone take him away. Can you imagine that? Then we arrive. More shooting. I’d have taken off too.”

“God…” she said.

“Work it like the crime scene it is,” he instructed, as he climbed out of the space.

She was lying on her stomach on the floor above as Walt climbed the ladder. When they were face-to-face, Walt paused, and, for a moment, they both just stared. “Hillabrand does have a reputation,” he said, in more of a whisper. “He’s supposedly a good guy, someone who doesn’t throw his weight around and who gives back to the community, which is more than you can say for most of the people up there in his income bracket. The Semper Group does billions a year.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Her breath smelled sweet, like chocolate.

LEAVING HIS CHEROKEE for Brandon to use, Walt rode with Fiona. The long drive through Stanley and back over Galena Pass forced the memory of Randy Aker’s broken corpse back on him, as they passed the turnout where the tire tracks had been found. Twice he caught himself falling asleep but woke up, despite Fiona’s encouraging him to rest.

She dropped him at his house.

Lisa had been with the girls since the close of school. Nikki had a runny nose, Emily a stomachache. Walt promised Lisa a bonus for her overtime-a false promise, they both knew, but his intention seemed to mean a great deal to her.

The clock on Mark Aker’s abduction was running. The blood on the dart’s needle could be used to confirm blood type, but Walt wasn’t waiting. The sled had carried weight. That was enough for him. Lisa agreed to drop the twins off with Myra on her way home. They’d spend the night there. He battled his guilt. He’d fought like hell for joint custody, but, with no legal opinion yet returned, he proved his own worst enemy. It would appear he had little to offer the girls beyond an unreliable schedule and multiple handoffs to a variety of caregivers. Not the most stable environment. If he’d caught Gail treating them this way, he’d have brought it as evidence against her. She might do the same to him. He had to work out a balance.

He had just come out of a hot shower when he heard the crunch of breaking glass at the back of the house. It didn’t sound like a window; more like a lightbulb, on the back porch. Still dripping wet, he slipped into some workout pants, grabbed the Beretta, and headed stealthily through the house, working his way quickly to the kitchen. He sneaked a look out onto the back porch, surprised to see the light working, then cut quickly to the door and yanked it open, keeping himself shielded behind the doorjamb. With the gun now in both hands, he broke outside for a better look, immediately hopping to his left when his right foot took a shard of broken glass.

Footsteps in the snow. Walt hadn’t shoveled the back path since the storm and he’d had no reason to be back there. He pulled the shard from the ball of his foot and headed down into the snow in his bare feet. He couldn’t take the cold for more than a couple of seconds, but it gave him a chance to follow the tracks with his eyes out into a stand of aspen that separated him from his neighbor’s house. A silhouette flickered there, tucked into the trees.

“Hey!” Walt called out.

Whoever it was took off at a run. Walt made it about ten yards in that direction before his frozen feet stopped him. A short adult, or someone young.

He returned to the porch and studied the broken glass there. It was thin glass, smashed around a cylindrical plug of milky ice. He avoided it, returned inside, and came back out dressed for the cold.

Had his visitor dropped it? Stepped on it?

He had returned wearing a pair of evidence gloves, collected the pieces of glass into a paper bag; the plug of ice went into a Ziploc. Handling the tight curve of the pieces, he tried to fit them together in his mind’s eyes. A test tube?

Mark Aker, he thought.

How long had it been out there? Had it arrived frozen or had it frozen on its own? Had the freezing of the contents broken the glass and then someone had stepped on it or had his visitor just now crushed it accidentally? Most important: what was its significance?

Mark…

The lack of any note or instruction confused him. Had his visitor been interrupted and a ransom note gone undelivered?

His cell phone rang from inside the house, and he ran to answer it.

The hospital lab: the blood recovered from the dart, a dart carrying a barbiturate cocktail typically reserved for bull elephants, had come back a match for Mark Akers: O positive. Adding to the lab’s confusion was the fact that the chemical composition of the dart’s drug matched another they’d processed earlier in the day: that of the patient Kira Tulivich.