Trapline (3 page)

five:
monday, early morning

Duncan Bloom stared at
his newspaper's website. The first bit of instant history was in the books.

“Dem. Senate Candidate Lamott Shot Downtown.”

It was 2:38 a.m., a grueling fourteen hours since the shooting. The cops had so little information that most of his first piece was all from eyewitnesses inter-mixed with reaction from political and civic leadership.

The newspaper had thrown everything at it that they could, but the big boys from New York and L.A. were already here or on the way, landing now at Eagle-Vail or DIA, speeding along the interstate with all their presumptive access and armies of producers, fact-checkers, investigators, and sources.

A bottle of red wine served as dinner and drinks in one convenient container, supplemented by a package of gas station peanuts, hours ago, and a granola bar grabbed from the abundant stash of supplies where the police set up shop at the train station. Given the paucity of edibles in his carriage house, rented from an active, bright-eyed widow, the wine would have to do.

It was three blocks straight up Lincoln Avenue to the scene that was now putting Glenwood Springs on the national news map. Bloom lived at 10th Street and Lincoln. The floodlights and police were buzzing around 7th Street, by the river, and up in the woods to the east of Lincoln Avenue on the base of Lookout Mountain. From the window over the kitchen sink that faced north, the glow that rose from the police encampment looked like premiere night in Hollywood. The people who lived in the houses smack next to the scene would need sleeping pills tonight. For Bloom, sleep wasn't on the agenda.

Bloom scrolled to a number on his cell phone and hit redial. The big boys were coming, but Bloom wasn't about to choke on their exhaust. This was his story, this was his town. He'd been right
there
for Chrissakes.

The moment Lamott fell defined surreal. He stewed about those split, fragmented seconds over and over. He had already played them in his mind a thousand times. He relived them as he interviewed witnesses. He relived them as the cops interviewed him. He was treated like any other witness put through the drill at the train station. Bloom knew four shots for sure, but there might have been more. How did he know if the first shot didn't miss the bridge? He didn't. Trudy Heath was at a nearby interview station, being grilled at the same time.

“Officer DiMarco,” said the voice, no tinge of excitement.

“How ya doing?”

“Better question for you. Not every day you're kneeling over a man with bullet holes.”

“All instinct,” said Bloom. “Who's running the show?”

Deputy Sheriff Randall DiMarco was the nephew of Bloom's landlord and had been an even-tempered source. In Denver, it had been a challenge to get to know cops as individuals. Up here, it was possible.

“State moved in—CBI, FBI, governor's office, you name it. We ran the show for about the first six minutes.”

“Are you where you can talk?”

“In my cruiser, taking a break,” said DiMarco.

“Out at the scene?” said Bloom.

A radio squawked on DiMarco's end. “Does it matter?”

“I'm sure it's a cluster fuck,” said Bloom.

On the TV, one fuzzy, over-enlarged video from a cheap camera caught the attempted assassination. A teenage girl had been standing on the train station platform and accidentally recorded the moment. She'd been shooting a video of her sister. You could make out Lamott and his entourage on the footbridge, then a minute of posing for pictures and then the ugly inevitable. Some video editor had highlighted Lamott with a circle of light and Bloom could see himself, a vague figure moving toward Lamott as he went down.

“What about the photographer?” said Bloom.

“Which one?” said DiMarco.

“The professional.”

“You think you've thought of something we haven't?”

Bloom sipped his wine. It was his fourth glass but he felt oddly sober.

“Did those shots have anything interesting in the background? Are you looking at those?”

DiMarco slurped a drink, likely a Diet Mountain Dew, snapped his nicotine gum. “I gotta get back to looking around in the dark for nothing.”

“So they showed something.”

“I don't know every detail of the investigation.”

“You would have heard a tidbit if it was good,” said Bloom.

“It's possible,” said DiMarco. “But I didn't. Are we off the record or on?”

“Off,” said Bloom. “If I need something to quote, I'll tell you.”

The Garfield County Sheriff's office seemed competent and most of his encounters with individual cops had been civilized.

“If anyone has picked up a trail, I haven't heard,” said DiMarco.

“Don't you think you'd have something to go on by now, some breadcrumbs?”

“Don't mention food to me,” said DiMarco. “And I'm not exactly in the inner loop.”

Bloom pictured the Lookout Mountain trail in mid-August. It was no hot spot like Hanging Lake, halfway up Glenwood Canyon. No signs drew tourists. The barely-marked trailhead started behind a house with a clothes line and small flower garden.

“That trail heads up over the top,” said Bloom. “To the east.”

“Don't try to play cop,” said DiMarco. “Right now the cops and detectives in Glenwood Springs outnumber the citizens of this hamlet about two to one. We've got angles coming out the wazoo.”

A jolt caught Bloom like one of those flash headaches that make you wince and then goes poof.

Through the mayhem of the last twelve hours, he had forgotten the phone call.

“Hang on,” said Bloom.

“I'm hanging,” said DiMarco. “But actually, I've gotta go.”

“No,” said Bloom. “I might have something.”

“Don't jack me around.”

“I'm not,” said Bloom, his mind flashing back and his whole body coming alive like he'd touched an electric fence. “I had a wacko on the line this morning. This guy wanted to double-check the times of Lamott's schedule for the day. Said he was a freelance photographer.”

“Time was this?”

“After I got to the office. Little after ten.”

“He was focused on the footbridge?” said DiMarco.

“Everything, really,” said Bloom. “Start to finish, the whole campaign stop.”

“How long was he on the phone?”

Bloom stood up, energy rekindled. The work phone stored records of inbound calls.

“A minute, two maybe,” said Bloom. “Hard to remember but not long.”

“The voice?” said DiMarco.

“Deep,” said Bloom. “But chit-chatty like an excited tourist.”

“Name?”

“I don't remember it or if he said.”

“Hang on a second,” said DiMarco.

They had printed details of Lamott's planned campaign stops in the paper. Not much had changed in terms of timing or logistics. Was there some other detail the caller had been after? Bloom wracked his brain. The swirl of events was thick. Bloom recalled the routine note-taking prior to the shot and his brief chat with Trudy Heath. That calm moment put the alluring Allison Coil, Trudy's pal, back in his thoughts in delicious fashion. Then there was Lamott's canned speech and he had followed Lamott up on the bridge. And then everything was a blur and he was swallowed whole by the whale-sized moment and plunged into a dark, busy blur of questions, digging and writing that had consumed the last eight hours. He knew it was the biggest news event he had ever covered. The steps were all the same as every other story, but the intensity factor was off the charts.

“Your office closed?” said DiMarco.

“I can get in.”

“You going to need us to have a warrant?”

“We're cooperative,” said Bloom. “If there's nobody down at the office, I'll call and check with the upper-ups. I suppose this can't wait until morning.”

“No,” said DiMarco. “Time is the enemy. And she's growing fangs.”

six:
monday morning

Morning cracked open the
day.

Allison walked the well-worn path from her A-frame across the open field to Trudy's place, tucked next to a grove of trees but in a spot that could catch sunlight during the day, at least in the summer. Colin led the way on the narrow, winding path that cut through the field.

A finger of smoke rose from Trudy's chimney. There wasn't a hint of a breeze. The agenda was simple—lead authorities to the torn-up body near Lumberjack Camp. Sulchuk and the others all had commitments and couldn't return to the site.

They had managed to raise a cell and contact the police around 8 p.m. The 911 dispatcher had been thorough and detailed when Allison made the report, passing her off to someone to go over all the particulars again. The cop mentioned the shooting in Glenwood Springs and that explained why they were so short-handed. Allison couldn't imagine it. The news explained her dispatcher's somewhat harried state. The half-corpse was bad and unsettling enough—
Allison still felt certain that the mountain lion scenario held no credibility—but trying to imagine the attempted assassination was a double whammy.

“Smell anything yet?” said Allison.

“Bacon,” said Colin. “The fake stuff.”

“I'd eat a picture of bacon,” said Allison.

“I'd eat the camera before it took the picture,” said Colin.

Regular grocery store trips had not yet become part of their domestic—Allison hated the word—routine.

“One of us is going to have to maybe settle down and get that damn little house in order,” said Allison.

It was a running joke. Theirs was a match made deep in the woods and it worked. One of the reasons was that they both shared the notion that keeping house, cleaning house, repairing house, enjoying house, or thinking house was low on the list of priorities. It was nice to have a bed, for all the reasons it was nice to have a bed. In fact, the loft bedroom and spectacular views of the broad field and mountains to the east were now permanently part of the imagery that went with the memories of making love with Colin. The bed had become theirs, not hers. Beds were good things and Allison was also generally in favor of a roof, especially in winter, but all the rest of what came with the term “house” was vastly overrated.

Especially if you had a neighbor and friend whose talents in the kitchen were both innate and refined.

The kitchen hummed. Two cats lay about, completely unexcited by the guests. Batter bolstered with fat blueberries dripped from a spoon in gooey dollops onto a cookie sheet. Trudy aimed each dollop with care.

“Scones,” said Trudy when Colin asked. “To go with poached eggs and broiled tomatoes.”

“No bacon?” said Colin. Trudy shot him a look and a smile. “What I meant to say was
yum.
”

Colin liked to balance his intake of organic ingredients with a healthy portion of animal fat. You can lead a cowboy to bean sprouts, but you can't make him chew.

Trudy poured coffee and they quizzed her for her version of events. Allison shook her head repeatedly, finding it hard to imagine being so close to the shots.

“Couldn't sleep,” said Trudy. “I kept thinking about all the little things I could have done. You know, to make it all come out differently.”

“The cop sounds out of line,” said Colin. “Way out of line.”

“That was the capper,” said Trudy. “He probably thought he was helping me. Maybe he knows something, but he was so dire.”

Allison recalled the timid woman she had met when Trudy was still married to George Grumley, who ran a wicked world of rigged hunts behind Trudy's back. Allison had knocked on Trudy's door the first time they met and had found a meek flower child with little experience in the big wide world. In the end, Trudy had played no small role in helping learn the truth about her husband's racket and it all came out, including his role as a double murderer, when the sheriff and the prosecutors were finally done. Trudy had shaken the experience like a snake shedding a skin. She would always broadcast more femininity than Allison—her curves were better—but she'd added confidence to the mix and the time she spent in the fields and gardens had added a glow to her beautiful skin, which she tended carefully with organic sunscreens. Trudy was wary of synthetics at every turn. The face Trudy once kept hidden behind too-long hair was now open to the world. She had lost a bit of the flower child earth woman and had gone with a look that was sleeker, but she still oozed all things wholesome and healthy.

They sat at a breakfast booth with oak benches and matching shoulder-height backs and a table worn and stained with character. There was room for six, three to a side, but Allison and Colin sat close, thigh to thigh. Over Trudy's shoulder, a greenhouse jutted out and away from the house, bursting with herbs and plants.

A small TV on the kitchen counter was tuned to CNN and Allison could see the images from Glenwood Springs and what appeared to be a well-seasoned, well-travelled male reporter recapping the news. The sound was low but from the occasional word she picked up there didn't appear to be any fresh developments.

“Candidate's Condition Stable” said the banner at the bottom of the screen.

In Trudy's organic food, plant, herb, and cat emporium, the television stood out like an electronic pimple, but Allison knew Trudy liked to stay up on all the news. She was a reliable source of information on pending issues from Denver to Washington. Trudy's updates about the world gave Allison a fleeting sense that she didn't live completely in a black hole.

“Kerry London,” said Trudy.

“What?” said Allison.

“You're staring at him,” said Trudy.

There was something oddly familiar about the reporter.

“Strange to see Glenwood Springs on national news.”

“And Kerry London too,” said Trudy. “He goes everywhere and now he's right here. He's sort of the master of disaster—earthquakes, hurricanes, and, you know, chaos. He always seems calm. Worried, but calm.”

“And familiar,” said Allison. “But back to you. I can't imagine you do anything but operate by the book.”

“If
you're
in trouble,” said Colin, “every business in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties needs to be checked. There are Mexicans everywhere, and most of them do the work Americans don't want to touch.”

“Maybe,” said Trudy. “But he scared me, made me feel bad.”

“Hell, he's the one who is probably scared,” said Colin. “The cops I've known don't mind blaming others.”

Colin had taken out his atlatl, a foot-long beauty he had been refining all summer. He was making a grip with leather shoelaces, wrapping the leather tightly. The shaft of the weapon glowed with a golden sheen from the steady polishing and sanding. The notch was perfect. Colin could whip an arrow at such speed that she couldn't follow its flight. He had fashioned three perfect oak arrows with duck feathers for stability. The points were honed to an exquisite sharpness, like X-Acto blades. She liked watching Colin bear down on a problem, refuse to give up, and make the step-by-step improvements until everything was just-so. In other words, perfect.

“I've got to re-check the whole staff,” said Trudy. “Maybe it's a good
thing. For my own reassurance.”

“You're going to let someone go?” said Colin. “Just because their paperwork isn't all together? If you do, they'll find work somewhere else is all, somewhere right down the street, most likely.”

“I keep having images of a raid of some sort, like that nasty raid at that meat packing plant a few years back, the one that was in the news for weeks,” said Trudy. “They had all the buses waiting, went in and snatched workers right off the line, shipped 'em off.”

“That was in Greeley,” said Allison. “Kind of an ironic location. I guess the Utopian vision isn't working out.”

“It's not like it's okay to be here if you're not legit,” said Colin.

Colin put his atlatl aside, mopped up a bit of egg yolk with a last bite of scone. Trudy looked lost in thought. CNN switched to a volcano erupting in Chile, hundreds dead in the resulting mudslide that buried a rural village.

Allison itched to get going. She had lost a day of scouting and prep work. There were tents to clean, camp gear to sort out, authorities to escort to half-corpses.

Some thought chewed in her guts, but it remained safe and secure in that part of the so-called brain where good ideas turned to mush. Whatever the notion, it may as well have been written in the most impenetrable code ever devised by the CIA and buried in an ironclad vault with no doors a thousand feet down on the dark side of the moon. Allison had tried concentrating on it. She had tried ignoring it. Why they hadn't yet invented some sort of implant to record every thought—some device you could rewind in case you missed something—was another indication of a world gone lazy. Whatever the idea, it had to do with confirming her point of view about the half-corpse: no mountain lion was involved in his demise.

Allison's cell phone chirped. She didn't recognize the number.

“Allison Coil?”

The voice was male, young and chipper.

“Yes,” she said.

“Brad Marker, Garfield County Sheriff.”

She glanced at the wall clock over Trudy's sink. One minute before 7:00 a.m. Five stars for promptness.

They discussed meet-up times, horses, pack mules. Marker's team would be six all together, including the county coroner and a wildlife officer from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who would also bring a houndsman and his three best Treeing Walkers. Allison would charge the standard daily fee for the horses and, with a thumbs-up from Trudy, provide lunch for the whole crew. They'd put that on the bill. Marker had some experience riding. He was just leaving New Castle, where he lived. They had two hours to get ready.

Allison checked her watch. By the time they got back to the half-corpse, it would have been exposed to the elements for an additional twenty-four hours.

“Now what?” said Trudy. “What happened?”

Allison gave Trudy the highlights. Trudy was rapt, uttering only an “oh my” at a couple of appropriate moments.

“So where are the rest of the legs?” she asked.

“Probably a pile of shit in the woods by now,” said Colin, always cutting to the chase.

“If it was a cat,” said Allison.

“It's still a possibility,” said Colin. “If he was slight and not too tall, a mountain lion—a hungry mountain lion—might have taken the chance.”

“Not exactly the kind of reassuring story you want to see out there right before all your hunters start arriving, is it?” said Trudy.

“It won't take them long to clear the mountain lion scenario,” said Allison. “And they'll figure out the name and if he was alone in the woods.”

“He must have been alone,” said Colin. “Nobody has reported anything.”

“Haven't heard anything,” said Trudy. “Maybe it's not news until it's been a couple days. Unless it's a child that's wandered off. “

“Think for sure it was not a child,” said Allison.

“Thanks for that,” said Trudy.

“And I still don't get what makes you so sure about what it's not,” said Colin.

The look from Colin suggested she dial up a dose of humility. Colin, no doubt drawing on the experience of his extended family of outdoorsmen, had more experience in the woods. Maybe she didn't want to think about a mountain lion around her camps—a lion with a taste for human would complicate matters considerably. By day's end, they'd have a better idea. Maybe she should back down.

“Just going on everything I feel,” she said. On the other hand, maybe she should stick with her guns. “And what I saw.”

“You're guessing,” said Colin. “Not like you.”

“No squabbling,” said Trudy. “I won't have it.”

“I wouldn't call it a guess,” said Allison.

“Well, you're jumping ahead.”

“You'll see,” said Allison. “Wait. Observe. Discover.”

Of course it was absurd that the former city girl was attempting to school Daniel Boone Jr. His faint, fake smile said he knew it.

“You can show the cops all the ways you're right, but it sounds like I'm staying here today,” said Colin. “I see that worried look in your eye.”

“All the prep for the hunters coming in,” said Allison. “You know.”

“We went over the list three times yesterday,” said Colin. “Think I got it. Clean, fold, straighten, organize, clean, count, sort, and clean some more. And feed the horses.”

“And don't forget to clean,” said Allison. “Sharpest outfit in the West, that's what we want.”

Trudy stood. “I suppose I've gotta get down to Glenwood and go through my records. Make sure the paperwork for my crew is copacetic.”

If everyone was as respectful of the law as Trudy, there would be little need for policemen, prosecutors, judges, or tax auditors. Trudy was a speed-limit queen. She did well with boundaries.

At the rate Trudy's business had bloomed, the center of gravity in the culture might be shifting. You didn't just buy Trudy's products, you bought into a culture of eating well, of doing things the right way. A bottle of anything from Down to Earth in your grocery cart was a signal to yourself and the world that you understood that eating well was an active choice and that it went hand in hand with the idea of community togetherness. Like Birkenstock sandals or Tom's of Maine toothpaste, the product shined a light on the user as a thoughtful citizen of the planet.

“I know you'll square things up right with your business, even if there is a problem,” said Allison. “And I doubt there is one.”

“What if I have to let somebody go—just because their paperwork isn't right?”