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.