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.”