Dowd braced himself, his teeth set in a grimace, as the plane leveled off and whooshed down on the hard-packed snow.
“Lovely, Dry,” Keegan said with relief as they pulled up to the hangar and stopped.
A youthful police officer named Joshua Hoganberry was waiting for them. His badge was pinned to the crown of a blue campaign hat. It was the only thing he wore that resembled a uniform; he was dressed for the weather.
“Hi, Josh,” Dowd said, introducing the cop to Keegan and Dryman. “Sorry to get you way out here in this weather.”
“That’s okay, Sheriff. We can use all the help we can get. It’s a bad mess we got up there at the Trammel place.”
“Friends of yours?” Dryman asked.
“Why, hell, been knowin’ Lamar since I was born,” the policeman said, obviously still shaken by the Trammel massacre.
“Nice man. Quiet, worked his ass off. Good kids, never any trouble. And his wife Melinda was pretty as spring flowers.”
“What happened?” Keegan asked.
“Bastard just gunned down Lamar and Melinda where they sat. Old Trammel was readin’ the paper. Blew a hole right through it. Shot Byron and Gracie, the kids, in the back as they was running away.”
“Who found them?”
“Was a fluke, really. Doc Newton was comin’ back from deliverin’ the McCardles’ new baby and saw the front door standin’ open. He went in and found them.”
The ranch house was five miles outside of’ town, between Gunnison and Pitkin, a plain two-story brick place sitting a hundred feet or so from the local road that had been cleared by a snow plow. There were two state patrol vehicles and an ambulance parked in a wide space bulldozed out of the drifts when Hoganberry pulled up in the Ford sedan. A footpath was worn through the snow to the front door.
Trammel and his wife were in the living room. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair, the remnants of a newspaper splattered against what was once his chest. His wife lay sideways on the sofa. One shot from the twelve-gauge had blown away most of her face. The daughter lay crumpled face-down on the stairs, a three-inch hole in the middle of her back. The boy was just outside the back door, face-down in the red-drenched snow. The back of his head was gone.
“My God,” Dowd breathed.
They searched the house methodically, one room after the other. In the downstairs room, Keegan spotted a bloody towel in a trash can in the bathroom. There was a half-filled glass of water and an empty packet of B-C powder on the night table near the bed. Keegan wrapped the glass and empty B-C packet in the towel and stuffed them in the pocket of his coat. When he went back outside, Dowd and Hoganberry were standing on the front porch.
“Kind of blows up your theory about him killing Soapie to set himself an alibi, don’t it?” Dowd said, lighting a cigar. “He must’ve known we’d pin this on him sooner or later.”
“Not at all. I told you, he’s resourceful. All he has to do is get out of these mountains and he’ll vanish. He made it this far. Obviously he was hurt in some way. The Trammels helped him and he repaid the kindness by killing them.”
“Why? We all know what he looks like.”
“To give himself time, Sheriff. He probably figured it would be four, five days before anybody found the Trammels. By that time he planned to be long gone.”
Keegan stared out across the rugged landscape, its hidden dangers buried beneath two feet of snow.
“My guess is he skied down into Pitkin. Probably before that second snowstorm. There’re no tracks around.”
“Well, if he did he’s still there.”
“Let’s check it out.”
“I can tell you right now, they ain’t been any strangers down in Pitkin, sir,” Hoganberry said, stuffing a pinch of tobacco into his cheek. “I live there. If you fart at dinner everybody knows it before you finish dessert.”
“Then he went south, down through that forest.”
“He must be one hell of a skier,” Hoganberry said.
“He got here from Aspen,” said Keegan. “Thirty-some miles—in a blizzard. What’s south?”
“Salida. Over the shelf there, maybe twenty miles. He’d have to go southeast to get around Antero Peak. It’s fourteen thousand feet. By road, close to forty miles.”
“How big’s Salida?”
“Well, it’s a pretty fair-size town for these parts,” Dowd said. “Three, four thousand people maybe. Even got themselves a little airport there, ‘bout the size of Jesse Manners’s place.”
Keegan stared at the sheriff.
“They’ve got an airport there?” he said. “Any planes down there?”
“Why, that’s what an airport’s all about, Mr. Keegan,” the sheriff said with a smile.
“I mean, could he charter somebody to fly him up to, say, Denver?”
“That’s Billy Wisdom’s outfit,” said Hoganberry. “Hell, for the price he’d fly you to the moon. Used to be a barnstormer.”
“Phone lines working between here and there?” Keegan asked.
“Let’s talk to Mr. Wisdom.”
Hoganberry drove them back out to the strip at Gunnison. Dowd had made arrangements for one of his deputies to drive down from Aspen and get him. He’d had enough flying for one day. Keegan and Dryman were flying on south to Albuquerque.
“Well, I got to admit, John Trexler had us all fooled,” Dowd said. “Skis thirty-five, forty miles through a blizzard, murders a whole family, skis another fifteen miles and hires crazy Billy Wisdom to fly him down to New Mexico.”
“And disappears like a drop of water on a summer sidewalk,” said Keegan.
“Wouldn’t you know he’d fly three hundred miles south instead of doing the obvious and going to Denver,” said Dry- man.
“I should have figured it,” said Keegan. “He’s never done anything obvious yet.”
“If I were a bettin’ man I’d put my money on you, Mr. Keegan,” said Dowd. “You hang on like a damn pit dog.”
They pulled into the small airport. As Keegan and Dryman were about to get out of the car, the sheriff turned to them.
“Mr. Keegan?” he said. “It’s been a pleasure, although an exhausting one.”
“Thank you, sir. The pleasure was ours. You’ve been a lot of help.”
“One other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll make you a deal.”
“A deal?” Keegan asked, curiously.
“If you’ll send me copies of the blood report from that towel and the fingerprints off the glass, I won’t arrest you for stealing my evidence,” the portly sheriff said. “We don’t have any heat in the jail right now, be awful damn uncomfortable. Besides, I don’t know anybody south of Denver would know what to do with a fingerprint if they found one.”
“Thanks, Sheriff.”
“Good luck to you. Hope you find that son of a bitch.”
“Oh, I’ll find him. Count on it.”
Keegan looked out over the snow-drifted vista, beyond the mountains. Somewhere out there, Siebenundzwanzig was on the run. Now he knew someone was after him. By now, he had probably changed identity again. But Keegan was undaunted.
“Run, you bastard, run,” he said to himself. “I’ll be right behind you all the way. Don’t even stop to take a breath. If you do, you’re a dead man.”
Two days later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.
Keegan sat in the back booth of The Rose. The table was covered with newspaper and magazine clippings. As he read them he moved them from one pile to another. There was a space for a third pile—possibilities—but that space was empty. He had hired two clipping services to scan periodicals, one east of the Mississippi, the other west, looking for murders, offbeat crimes, anything with the number 27. Each day thick envelopes would arrive and he would go through the clippings, looking for something, anything, that might give him a clue to the whereabouts or exploits of 27.