01 Storm Peak (3 page)

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Authors: John Flanagan

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: 01 Storm Peak
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Lee turned to the small group of lift attendants staring at the dead body.
“Nobody here seen this guy before?” she asked. They all shook their heads, looking at the chalk-white face on the floor as if, by looking again, they might suddenly remember that he was known to them.
“Hundreds of people through here in a day,” said Hostetler, unnecessarily. Lee nodded agreement.
“Yeah, I know, John. It was just a long shot that someone might have noticed him earlier.” She looked at the body critically. “Not that there’s anything about him you might remember,” she added.
Nor was there. Alexander Howell, in life, looked to have been a most unremarkable person. Average height. Thinning brown hair. Average clothing—Levis, a plaid shirt and a now blood-soaked parka. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and Nike sneakers. You could see thousands of Alexander Howells in a day and not remember one of them.
Not until he turned up dead, of course. That gave him a certain individuality. A celebrity that he’d never known in life.
She crouched once more and resumed her study of Alexander Howell. The sightless, surprised eyes still told her nothing.
She’d heard once that if you looked hard enough into the eyes of a murdered man, you’d see the image of the murderer reflected there forever. Not once in the four times she’d inspected a body had she found it to be true.
Gently she turned the head to one side, allowing the light to fall on the wound under the chin. Hostetler stooped beside her.
“Knife maybe, Sheriff?” he ventured. Lee shook her head uncertainly.
“Mighty narrow blade if it was. More like an ice pick. Something like that,” she replied. Hostetler frowned as if, somehow, the idea of being killed by an ice pick was more unsavory than if the deed were done with a knife.
“Ice pick, you say?” he said, shaking his head.
Her deputy, Tom Legros, sauntered back from the phone in the office. “They’ve got him booked in there at the Overlook sure enough, Sheriff,” he reported.
Lee turned the face again, looking for signs of any other injuries. There were none that she could see.
“Anyone with him?” she asked, without looking up.
Tom shook his head, then realized she hadn’t seen the negative answer and said, “Nope. He’s on his own. Booked in for the next four days, they said. They’re booked out down there,” he added irrelevantly.
“Well, they’ve got themselves a vacancy now,” said Sheriff Torrens, and the three men all nodded. Alexander Howell, naturally enough, didn’t respond.
TWO
J
esse Parker hunched on his stool in the Tugboat Saloon and shoveled another handful of cheese and nachos into his mouth.
“Hear about the ruckus last night up on the Silver Bullet?” Todd said to him as he passed two margaritas to a pair of bottle blondes farther down the bar.
Jesse never failed to be fascinated how the barman could keep up a conversation while he served three other people. Never missed a beat either. He nodded. “Guy found dead, as I understand.”
“Stabbed,” Todd amended. “Knifed once and that was it.”
“They know why he was killed?” Jesse asked.
Todd shrugged, moving down the bar to pull two draught Buds in response to a call from a couple of Australian tourists.
“Those guys sure like their beer,” he commented as he returned, then, in answer to Jesse’s earlier question, “Why not ask the sheriff? There she is now.”
He nodded his head toward the door. Jesse turned in his seat and saw Lee Torrens entering from the cold night outside. The tall sheriff swiped a few errant snowflakes away from her jacket, then took it off and hung it over the back of a chair as she sat at a table. A few people around greeted her. She nodded in response. Then, looking around the smoky room, she caught sight of Jesse watching her. She raised her eyebrows in greeting and nodded at the empty chair beside her. The meaning was clear.
Jesse picked up his half-empty Moosehead and slid down from the tall barstool.
“Catch up with you later, Todd,” he said. The barman nodded and grunted. Carrying his beer, Jesse picked his way through the crowded room to Lee’s table. She was studying the menu and didn’t look up when he dropped into the chair she’d indicated.
“You should know that by heart,” he ventured. She grinned crookedly, admitting he was right.
“Guess I keep hoping they’ll surprise me one day” she said. Without even looking, she handed the menu back over her shoulder to a waitress. One thing you could always depend on in the Tugboat, there was always a waitress standing behind you to take the menu, take your order or take your money. They liked to move you in, get you fed and move you out fast.
“Give me a half-dozen wings,” she said. “And a Coors Light.”
The waitress slid the menu under her arm and wrote rapidly on her order pad.
“Got it,” she said.
“And bring me a bunch of paper towels,” she added. She smiled up at the girl.
“Got it,” the waitress replied again. There was no answering smile. There was no time for that in the Tugboat. You wanted smiles, go someplace else. She hurried away.
“So how’s the case going?”
He didn’t need to say what case he was talking about. With a dead body found in the trash container on the gondola, it was unlikely that he’d be talking about any other case. Lee shook her head doubtfully.
“Damned if I know, Jess. All we got is a body and a name. No reason. No motive. No suspects. No murder weapon.” She slumped back in the wooden chair, stretching her long legs out under the table.
“Don’t even know for sure what the murder weapon was,” she concluded. Jesse frowned.
“Way I heard, it’s a stabbing. You’re looking for a knife, aren’t you?”
Lee shrugged. “Strange kind of knife. Long, long blade. Very narrow. Went in up under the chin, through the tongue and the roof of the mouth, then into the brain. Could be an ice pick, although I’ve never seen one quite long enough to do the job this one did. Some kind of sharp, heavy duty spike, maybe.”
Jesse looked at her curiously. “Up under the chin, you say?”
She nodded, demonstrating with the forefinger of her right hand, pressing it into the soft flesh on the underside of her chin.
“Right about here,” she said. “Went straight in here and continued right up into the brain. Doc says death would have been almost instantaneous.” Jesse was nodding to himself, looking thoughtful. She continued. “Painful as all hell, but just about instantaneous.” She shook her head, baffled. “That’s another thing, Jess. Would have taken some considerable force to get that spike up through all that tissue and into the brain.”
“That’s true enough,” Jesse agreed.
“So how does someone make sure they can swing up under the chin hard enough and fast enough and be that accurate? Tell me that.”
“I don’t follow you,” Jesse replied. Lee made a small gesture with her hands palm up.
“Well, think about it: you want to ram a spike up under someone’s chin, right through their mouth and into their brain, you’ve got to take quite a swing to do it, haven’t you?”
She was interrupted as the waitress leaned between them to set down the plate of wings and Lee’s beer. Absently, Jesse took one of the wings and began gnawing on it. The subject matter of the discussion didn’t seem to affect his appetite. But he’d spent eight years as a homicide detective in Denver and he’d heard and seen plenty worse things in his life. Lee turned to the waitress before she could make her high speed escape.
“Paper towels?” she asked. The waitress slapped her thigh in annoyance.
“Forgot ’em. Be right back, Sheriff.” She darted away into the crowd and the smoke haze that filled the Tugboat. Jesse finished his wing, reached for the single paper napkin that had come with Lee’s cutlery. Her look forestalled him.
“That one’s mine,” she said. He shrugged and licked the extra sauce and juice from the ends of his fingers. Lee picked up a wing and went to work on it herself.
“You were saying?” Jesse prompted her.
“Oh, yeah. Well, as I say, it’d take some force to do that, but the killer got it right first time. There was just one wound. One puncture. That’s it. Now you’d expect, with a violent movement like that, it could take two or maybe three attempts to get it right on the spot, and on line. I mean, this guy must have been really swinging that spike, you know?”
Jesse nodded again. “Could be first time lucky?” he suggested. Lee gave him a pained look and he continued, “Or it could be something else entirely.”
Her expression changed quickly to one of interest. “You got an idea on this at all?” she asked.
Jesse nodded. “Could be. Any chance I can get a look at the body?”
“Got it down at the Public Safety Building,” she said. “In the morgue there.” She started to push her seat back but Jesse laid a restraining hand on her arm.
“Finish your wings first,” he said. “He isn’t going anywhere.”
THREE
T
he Public Safety Building was on the corner of Eighth and Yampa, almost opposite the Steamboat Yacht Club. On the drive in, in Lee’s Renegade, Jesse remained silent. She glanced across at him once or twice, seeing the line of his jaw highlighted in the passing lights of other cars. She still wondered about Jesse. He hadn’t been the same since he’d come back from Denver two years ago. When you caught him in an unguarded moment, like now, there was still a residue of pain in his eyes, like you’d find in the eyes of an animal caught in a trap.
There was some considerable history between Jesse and Lee. They’d grown up together, mostly on her father’s spread west of Hayden. It had been in the Torrens family for four generations and it was one of the best ranches in the county.
By contrast, Jesse’s pa had a small spread on poor hardscrabble land twenty miles away. He ran a few head of cattle and his wife tried to grow crops for sale. But the land could barely support George Parker and his wife, let alone their three boys. As a result, Jesse had taken a job on the Torrens spread when he was twelve, spending his time before and after school riding, herding, cleaning out barns, mending tack, fencing and branding. He and Lee, an only child, became inseparable.
Inevitably, as they grew older, their relationship turned into something more than friendship. They were both attractive, healthy young people, constantly in each other’s company, and it happened without either of them even realizing that it had.
When he was eighteen and she was seventeen, there had been a brief and intense physical relationship between them, clandestine and highly satisfying to both parties. Then Jesse, appalled that he had, in his own eyes, betrayed Martin Torrens trust, ended it. He mumbled apologies to Lee and resigned, unable to meet her father’s gaze. Martin, of course, was no fool and had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. In fact, he would have been delighted to welcome Jesse into his family. But the boy was young and Torrens felt he should see something of the world before he settled down. Above all, he didn’t want Jesse to feel he was trapped into a permanent relationship with Lee. Gravely, he wished him well and let him leave and Jesse headed for Denver, where he joined the Denver PD.
Lee was devastated. The following year, in an unthinking counterpoint to Jesse’s move, she became a deputy with the Routt County Sheriff’s Department. Reece Colson, the county’s long serving sheriff, soon began referring to her as “the best man I’ve got.” Lee could ride, ski, shoot and track better than any of the men on the force. She was an ideal choice as a law enforcement officer in the vast open spaces and wild mountains of Routt County.
When Reece hung up his star and gunbelt in 1991, Lee was long established as his principal deputy, with an impressive record of arrests. She was a natural successor to the slow talking, heavily built sheriff. She won the election without any competition, and had continued to do so ever since.
As sheriff, she had learned the details of the tragic shooting in Wheat Ridge. She’d watched unhappily as Jesse returned to Steamboat Springs and settled into his current, directionless life. By winter he worked on the local ski patrol, refusing to take any position of responsibility or any organizational role. In the summers, he worked on construction projects or as a casual ranch hand around Yampa Valley. She and Jesse were still friends, of course. But there was a guarded reserve about him now in all his relationships. Nobody was allowed to get too close. Time after time, Lee yearned to take him in her arms and tell him everything was all right and help him get back on track. She could see a fine man drifting aimlessly through his life. She knew he’d been one of Denver PD’s brightest homicide detectives. Now he was barely one rung up from a ski bum, hiding from the world. Worse, she thought, he was hiding from himself.
Jesse sat silently. But his brain was racing. The wound that Lee had described had rung a bell with him. He’d seen wounds like that before. Still, he’d wait till he’d had a good sight of the corpse before he committed himself. Maybe he was wrong.
He sensed the occasional glances Lee shot his way as they drove. He smiled ruefully to himself.

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