By the time he got a look at the meadow, it was empty. The BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it and it stopped. Starlight gave the grassy field a blue hue, its abandoned campsite like a scar in the distance. Walt reached through the chokecherry, taking hold of a clump of field grass, the ripened seeds falling away; seeds he’d recovered from Gilly’s pants cuff. The cheat grass played out in the driest portions of the meadow in oblong shapes: kidney beans and a hook nose. Walt broke out and entered the meadow but stayed low and held to the boundary of where the forest formed a wall of shadow.
He clicked his tongue once and Beatrice came padding up behind him faster than he could have expected. A single hand motion, and she heeled. Given his angle, Walt was able to look behind, struck by a darker swath in the still sea of grass: a person, alone, moving from very near where Walt had crouched and in the direction of the abandoned lean-to and campfire. He stayed perfectly still as his eye sought other anomalies. He easily spotted the beaten-down path used by the occasional hiker, the path he and others had used to approach the campsite. He could imagine Gilly there now, having picked up on some markers in the woods, following expeditiously, the way of any tracker. Excited. Driven forward with purpose. Given the line leading that direction, he pictured Menquez’s killer somewhere up near the lean-to, or by now well beyond, following the trail that led up and over the ridge and into Greenhorn Gulch.
Walt caught the flicker of headlights through the trees below and to his right. The ambulance, he thought. He faced a choice of trying to start Beatrice on the scent again or heading out on the same trail on which he and Brandon had followed the amorous backpackers. He tried to think like his adversary, or if not think, react like him. What would the headlights mean to him? Danger, or curiosity?
The man had revealed himself as brazen, staying at least some of the time in a tree house within a matter of yards from two women. Did his clubbing Martel Gale suggest an attachment to Fiona? Had Walt perhaps been in store for the same outcome when Kira had interrupted his peering inside the cottage windows? Would the arrival of headlights arouse curiosity? Could the killer resist the gravitational pull to see if his kill had been discovered, and if so, the reaction?
Walt resorted to what had gotten him here, to the one thing he could trust. He pulled the tissue from his breast pocket, placed it for Beatrice to sniff, and commanded once again, “Find it.”
49
“You can’t go up there!” Fiona called out as the ambulance driver put his foot on the ladder’s first rung.
“Excuse me?” the man said.
The man’s partner, the medic, approached from the far side of the ambulance. “Lady, we’ve got a shift change in forty-five minutes. We’ve been on twelve hours. We’ve been instructed to do a job here and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere.”
“To recover a body,” she said, an educated guess on her part. Walt had said his people were on their way. He’d warned her to stay put. But she had to know. Given the ambulance had arrived under no siren or lights, given that Walt had left the area immediately after coming out of the tree house-for she’d watched the whole thing-added up to the obvious.
“And you are?” the ambulance driver inquired.
The medic was new, or he’d have recognized her. “Me?” About to give her name, she revised her answer. “Crime scene photographer. You can’t go in there until I’m through, and I haven’t started.”
“You can identify yourself?”
“Wait here,” she said to the medic. “Don’t move,” she instructed the driver at the base of the ladder.
Stall, she thought. She returned with her camera bag and her wallet, displaying her sheriff’s office ID.
“You want to take some pictures, go ahead and take them. But you’ve got five minutes.”
“More like a half hour,” she said.
“I told you, we got a shift change in forty,” he said. “Listen, if this was a big deal the place would be lousy with deputies-am I right? It’s a body bagger, that’s all. We got the call, we do the job.”
“And I’ve got to do mine.”
“And I’m giving you five minutes. Four, now that we’ve used one jawing it to death. Hold up,” he called out to his buddy. The driver stepped away from the ladder.
Fiona slung the camera bag over her shoulder, walked to the ladder, and climbed.
With each rung she feared what she might find.
50
With the advent of a siren coming closer, but still far in the distance, Walt’s blood pressure rose. He had specifically ordered otherwise, and it was only as the siren passed and faded to the north that he realized the cruiser was on another call. Beatrice loaded herself with cheat grass as she spun her loops in the meadow, snorting and hurrying to pick up the lost scent, Walt looking on from a distance, not crowding her, but prepared to follow. As he looked up, he saw thousands of acres of national forest, acres that by now the mountain man knew well, had exploited for the past few months. It gave the man a decided advantage, whereas Beatrice provided Walt a counterpunch.
Hindsight was nobody’s friend, least of all his. He could see now the unspoken pressure he’d put on Gilly Menquez to deliver; he would have to live with the outcome, while Gilly would not. Could begin to see how he’d allowed the evidence to form unwarranted suspicions, wondering how much of his own feelings had colored those suspicions. Standing alone in the meadow, he felt an urge to cry out, a need to beg forgiveness, though from whom he couldn’t be sure.
He withdrew his BlackBerry and checked the missed call. Dispatch. He double-checked his radio; still not working even with the added elevation. He called in, his temper getting the better of him.
“Emergency Services,” answered the outwardly calm woman’s voice.
“It’s Fleming. Where’s the backup?”
“We have an ambulance on site, Sheriff. As to the patrols… It appears all but Huxley rolled to Carey on that drowning. Huxley was the other side of Galena. He’s on his way south to your twenty.”
Budgetary concerns had lowered his swing shift to six officers in four cruisers. He cursed the commissioners for pulling the dollars out from under him, and his own deputies and dispatch for allowing a patrol void to occur. It wasn’t the first time a group of bored deputies had bunched up.
Walt’s office rang the Ketchum Police Department as well. “Ketchum?”
“Four-car pileup with fire and injury at the saddle intersection. Two patrols on site. We need your ambulance up there A-SAP. I called them off just now.”
Walt hadn’t seen the headlights leaving, his attention on Beatrice. “I need backup, Gloria.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I need those areas blocked and searched as we discussed. This is a homicide suspect, Goddamn it,” he flared, revealing a rare display of emotion. “I want every on-call deputy up here. I want anyone and everyone we’ve got, right now. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
“Copy that. Initiating the call tree.”
It was a not-too-subtle stab at Walt by a very alert dispatcher. Gloria knew her stuff and he’d been wrong to dress her down. All that had been required of him was to order the call tree instigated. His outburst hadn’t helped anyone.