“Radiation?” he asked his desk sergeant.

“No! It was indicated as only biohazard,” she said. “The machine doesn’t get specific. If an item alerts for radioactivity, it goes in that box they gave us. Biohazard gets the red bags.”

After 9/11, the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office had received a threatening letter containing a white substance that eventually came back as arsenic but had been believed to be anthrax. The feds had required the installation of the sniffer-a fifteen-thousand-dollar machine subsidized by the federal government-and it had been SOP ever since to test each piece of mail arriving at the office. The letter, bearing Fiona’s unmistakable handwriting, had been the first ever to trip the sensors, and the desk sergeant seemed more excited than frightened by the event.

“You want me to issue a BOLO?” asked the desk sergeant. Be on lookout.

“I’m not arresting her,” Walt said. “She works for us.”

The desk sergeant held her tongue, but her eyes reminded him it was procedure to arrest anyone suspected of attempting to contaminate the offices. It was also procedure to involve the postal inspectors.

He answered that look of hers. “This wasn’t sent through the mail. It wasn’t an intentional contamination, and my guess is, it’s one big misunderstanding. Before we call anyone, I’m going to clear this up.”

“And what do I do with this?” she said, lifting the red bag by one corner.

“Give it to me,” he answered, accepting the bag.

WALT HELD a morning meeting with his two lieutenants, during which he passed along the day-to-day so he could continue working on Aker’s abduction. Nancy called Fiona, and, when Fiona arrived, Walt led her outside, and they walked around the block, circumnavigating the former courthouse and city hall, a grand, three-story brick building built in the late 1800s. It now housed the DMV and county records. He didn’t bother with a jacket; it was already in the upper forties. The early bite of winter seemed to be mitigating, at least at the lower altitudes.

He produced the red baggie from his coat pocket.

“I didn’t want to discuss this in the office. But can you please tell me why you left me an envelope that tripped our biosensors? You might have warned me.”

She stopped abruptly.

“My letter’s a biohazard?”

“I thought you’d given it to me because you knew it was contaminated, that it was related to Mark’s work somehow.”

She told him then about being picked up by Sean Lunn at Hillabrand’s. About spotting the dried mud on the Escalade’s step rail. About how the unusually pale color had reminded her of the dried mud on the rape victim’s clothing.

Walt unsealed and opened the plastic bag, as she explained its contents. He tore open the envelope and saw that it contained both a note and a small amount of a pale brown dirt.

“Roger Hillabrand?”

“The mud was on his car. I was going to suggest that you have the lab compare this to what we found on the girl’s shoes.”

“That’s certainly available to us.”

“Roger-or, more likely, Lunn-drove that car somewhere near where that girl-”

“Tulivich. Kira Tulivich,” he provided.

“-had been.”

“Ohio Gulch or Triumph,” Walt said. “The two most likely spots in this valley where you’d find contaminants: the dump and the old Triumph Mine. But the fact is that Kira Tulivich was at the wedding at Hillabrand’s. You’re the witness on that. Mud on his rails and her shoes-odds are, it’s from his house, or at least somewhere on his property.”

“Everything’s frozen solid and covered in two feet of snow,” she reminded him.

“Maybe not everything,” he said. “You want to help?”

“Of course!”

“Can you get yourself invited back up there?”

“You want me to spy for you?”

“Once we’ve confirmed we’ve got a match, my guys and I can work Ohio Gulch and Triumph, and we will. But ruling out Hillabrand would be the first step in any kind of an investigation. You start with the most obvious: that she was in those shoes, on his property, the night she was raped. The mud may have absolutely nothing to do with anything, other than she attended the reception. You’re not ‘spying, ’” he said, putting it in finger quotes, “you’re eliminating him from consideration.”

“I attended the reception and I didn’t come home with any mud on my shoes.”

“I’m just saying that’s where it starts. If I come at Roger Hillabrand with a request to collect evidence, there will be a line of attorneys at my door ten deep.”

“Okay. I accept. I’ll spy for you,” she said.

“It’s not spying. It’s just looking for some mud. He has a pond up there. But this would more likely be around a hot tub or along the edge of a heated driveway.”

“But contaminated?”

“I’m not saying I have the answers. I’m just telling you where we start.”

“I’m not going to find any mud up there, Walt. It’s frozen solid. The Escalade’s the connection. If you ask me, Roger’s guy, Sean Lunn, was at the same afterparty, the same bar-the same something-as Kira was. He probably doesn’t know it, but he’s the one who can help you. Not that he ever would.”

“Women’s intuition?”

“Don’t patronize me, Walt. Roger will never allow it. He’ll stick his boy on the private jet and send him to Brazil for all eternity rather than get involved with something here that can’t possibly do anything but sully his company’s name.”

“You’ve gotten to know him, I see.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”

Walt felt his face flush. Was he jealous? It struck him that maybe he was.

She spared him further embarrassment. “How long for the lab to compare the two dirt samples?”

“Several weeks, I would think. It’s never fast.”

Her face sagged.

“But we may not need it,” he said. “We already have a sample of the mud from her shoes. We took it at the hospital. I’m thinking all we need to do is run that sample through our mail sniffer. If it kicks as hazardous, that’s good enough for me: that gives us probable cause. We can send it off to the lab, but we don’t need to wait for specific results.”

Fiona nodded. “I’ll bring my camera. That gives me the added excuse to look all around. But it can’t be a hot tub. It’s on the Escalade’s step rail. It was thrown up onto the car when the car was going at a good clip. It’s got to be a road or a driveway, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that the contaminants are salts that keep the ground from freezing.”

“Like I said, that’s Ohio Gulch or Triumph. We’re on it.” Maybe it was the repetition, or her stating so confidently that it was salts keeping the ground from freezing, but, standing there, he suddenly knew exactly where and with whom to begin this discussion.

He’d nearly had his chance a few nights earlier.

40

“DO NOT RAIN,” WALT CHANTED TO HIMSELF, STARING UP through the Cherokee’s windshield. For an area that saw three hundred sun-filled days a year, the skies had picked this particular Monday to threaten, and it was in the low forties-the one time he was out searching for preexisting mud.

He could remember a time, not long ago, when the road out to the landfill had been a poorly maintained dirt track, leading to a giant, unsupervised pit in the ground. But now he drove on asphalt all the way out to a series of excavations, all surrounded by chain-link fence, monitored by an attendant in an entrance booth.

“Hey, Ginny,” Walt said, his elbow out the window, the Cherokee perched on a concrete slab, a vehicle scale large enough to weigh tractor trailers.

“Walt.”

“Just need a look around.”

“Not dumping nothing?”

“No, ma’am.”

“How’re the girls?”

“Wild. More like teenagers every day.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“How’s your mother doing?” he asked.

“Same old same old. Nothing going to kill her.”