01 Storm Peak Read online

  Murphy frowned angrily as he studied the photo of the thin-faced deputy sheriff.

  “I’m the expert,” it seemed to be saying. “I know what you do and why and how you do it. And I’m going to catch you. ”

  Well, thought Murphy, that’s as may be. But perhaps that smug expression might change if things didn’t seem quite so cut and dried.

  Perhaps it was time to change things up a little.

  The forecasted storm front had unexpectedly veered away swinging south to Nevada and Arizona. Jesse stood by the open window of his small hut and looked across the brilliant expanse of sunlit, snow-covered country below him.

  He’d lain awake till one o’clock the previous night, struggling with his thoughts, trying to find a common link somewhere between the three murdered men. Striving for that one minor detail that could open the case up like a flower greeting the sun. It was there somewhere. He knew it was. Knew it had to be. And he knew, because of his failure to find it, that he was looking in the wrong places, for the wrong thing.

  Finally, just after one, he’d dropped off to sleep. And promptly dreamed that he’d solved the whole thing. Gloomily he remembered the rush of exultation he’d felt when he’d suddenly realized that the three men were all former comrades in the Special Forces in Vietnam and they’d been involved in a heroin-smuggling operation from that country into Steamboat Springs. It all fell neatly into place and he remembered Ned’s words of congratulation—and the specially warm feeling that had come over him as Lee had walked up to him, kissed him gently on the lips and said, for him alone to hear, “I always knew that it’d be you.”

  He frowned at the words she’d used. They didn’t fit entirely into the picture that had formed. He wondered why he’d thought about Lee like that. Wondered why he’d felt so damn good about it when he had.

  Around about five, he woke, still feeling good about Lee. Then he remembered in a rush that he’d cracked the case.

  He actually sat up and was reaching for the phone before he realized that he’d dreamed a variation on the plot of a Mel Gibson movie.

  Depressed, he made coffee and sat by the window, waiting for the sun to rise. He didn’t trust himself to sleep again, in case this time he dreamed that the three murdered men had conspired to steal a Maltese Falcon and Humphrey Bogart had come back from the dead to kill them.

  There was a thought drifting around the back of his mind, just out of reach, tantalizing him. Something Ned had said the previous day had triggered it. He searched back into his memory. It was something about gas mains. The gas main had exploded in ’94 and people had lost money.

  Gas mains. Gas. Explosions. What was the link? He cudgeled his brain but nothing came.

  Main.

  Main Street, USA.

  Main chance.

  Maine. A state in the northeastern United States.

  Mainlining. What junkies did when they shot up straight into a vein. Vein rhymes with main. Rhymes with pain.

  The rain in Maine stays mainly on the plain. Except there aren’t any plains in Maine.

  Maine!

  That was it. The memory was stirring now. Lee had said they were all killed in Steamboat. There was something about Maine that fit to that thought. Damn! What was it?

  Jesse didn’t have a computer and now he cursed the fact. There was a case he vaguely remembered. A case in Maine, some years before. He remembered because the Denver PD had been contacted to see if they had any information on a suspect in that case.

  He didn’t have a computer but there was one in the conference room he’d been using and it was permanently linked to the internet. He reached for the phone, realized there’d be nobody on duty in the office. He could call Lee again but he remembered her frosty reaction last time he’d woken her.

  No. To hell with it. He’d drive to town, let himself into the offices and do a Google search. He might as well. He’d never get back to sleep now anyway.

  Hurriedly, he began dragging his clothes on.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lee woke late. She was bleary-eyed and bad-tempered. It had been after two in the morning before she got away from the scene of the 7-Eleven breakin. That would have made it a late night in anyone’s language. But for some reason, she hadn’t gone straight home.

  She’d meant to, sure enough. She’d climbed into the Renegade, turned the heater up full and headed it back into town. But as she drove, she could see Jesse, standing in the falling snow beside that ridiculous little beat-up car of his, that tired grin creasing his face, shoulders hunched against the cold. He looked so damn … vulnerable, like a little boy.

  And somewhere along the way she realized she’d driven right through the town and found herself climbing the series of hairpin bends up Rabbit Ear Pass, the tail of the Jeep sliding and mushing around as she went. And, eventually there she was, pulled over to the side of the road outside Jesse’s cabin, wondering should she go on in?

  There’d been a slight curl of wood smoke blowing away from the pipe chimney from his wood-burning stove, but no lights showing. Hell, that was no surprise. It was after two-thirty in the morning. She wondered now if she would have gone in had she seen a light on. Wondered what she would have said if she had. Wondered what she would have done.

  And then, damn it, she wondered what the hell she was doing, wondering about all these things. Jesse was a friend, for crying out loud. A good friend. An old friend. And that was all there had ever been to it.

  Except that once. But they never talked about it and she sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one who did it first.

  She skipped breakfast. She’d send out for coffee and a doughnut from the Book Store Coffee Shop. The shower cleared her head a little, if not her thinking, and she dressed in a hurry and drove to the Public Safety Building. Jesse’s battered little Subaru was in his parking spot when she arrived. In fact every parking spot was filled except her own.

  “Good thing it’s not an election year,” she muttered to herself.

  When she reached her office, she was a little surprised to find Jesse waiting for her, a thin sheaf of papers in his hand. There was a bird-dog eagerness about him.

  “About time,” he said cheerfully. “Where the hell you been?”

  She eyed him balefully. “Don’t start with me,” she warned and he backed off, holding his hands up defensively.

  “Okay! Okay!” he said. “Just I thought you’d like to know before I told Ned, is all.”

  Suddenly he had her full attention. She wondered had she missed something? God knows her brain was still on half-charge after the late night she’d put in.

  “Told Ned what?” she asked, and he grinned at her.

  “It’s Steamboat,” he said with devastating simplicity. So devastating that it totally evaded her.

  “It’s Steamboat?” she repeated, her voice dripping sarcasm. “What, precisely, is Steamboat?”

  He was grinning still, obviously enjoying her puzzled reaction. She thought somebody should warn him that grinning was not a good idea with a woman who had been awake until close to five and who was armed.

  “The victim,” he said. “Steamboat is the victim.”

  Mayor Ned Puckett leaned forward, elbows on his desk, and frowned in concentration.

  “Let me get this straight, Jesse,” he said slowly. “You’re saying somebody is going around murdering people because he’s got some kind of a grudge against Steamboat Springs?”

  “I’m saying it’s a strong possibility, Ned,” Jesse replied. “And the only one we’ve got so far.”

  Ned shook his head doubtfully. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  “It makes sense all right,” Lee put in. “It isn’t rational and it isn’t sane. But it does make sense.”

  Puckett looked at the two of them. He started to say something, realized he had nothing worthwhile to say and changed his mind.

  “Look at it this way, Ned,” Jesse began in a reasoning tone. “When you can’t see a possible moti
ve or definite link in a case like this, one way to treat it is to look at the results.”

  “The results, you say?” Ned said thoughtfully. He was still far from convinced on this line of reasoning.

  “That’s right,” Jesse said patiently. “If you can’t see what caused the actions, you look at what result they’ve had-and what possible benefit that could be to anyone.”

  “Well there’s no goddamn benefit to anyone here!” Ned erupted angrily. “People all over town are losing money faster than snow melts on a hot spring day!”

  “Exactly!” Lee cut in on him. “Don’t you see? That’s the result of all this. People in Steamboat Springs are losing money. Now ask who that’s going to benefit.”

  “Well, it’s already benefiting the people in Vail and Breckenridge for starters!” Ned replied with some heat. “They’re booked to capacity with all the people who’ve canceled here. But I don’t hardly see as how we can blame them for all this.”

  “Got to admit, though, Ned, it’s a great way to take revenge against this town—if you had hold of a grudge.”

  Again the mayor looked from one to another. He spread his hands helplessly. “A grudge? What kind of a grudge could you have against a town?” he asked angrily.

  Jesse shrugged. “Might be our man is a former employee. Someone who was sacked and felt he got a raw deal.”

  “But … to go around … killing people because of it? Nobody’s that crazy, are they? It just ain’t important enough to kill folks over.”

  Ned was obviously upset, Lee thought. He’d trained himself years ago to eradicate words like “ain’t” from his politician’s vocabulary

  “On the contrary,” Jesse said. “A fellow up in Maine did exactly that five summers back. Been nagging at me since yesterday that there was some kind of connection I was missing.”

  “You telling me some fellow in Maine went around spiking people with one of these here … stabbers or whatever you call them?”

  Jesse shook his head. “Not the same MO,” he replied, “but similar circumstances. He was fired from one of the marinas. Sort of guy who’ll never admit he was in the wrong.

  “Two years later he comes back and sets in to burning down vacation houses all over—with their residents still inside.”

  “Jesus,” Ned breathed, horrified at the thought of it. “He must have been crazy.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture, Ned.” Lee put in dryly. “Let’s figure a guy feels he’s got a bad call here. Hates all of us. So he decides to hit us where it hurts.”

  “Isn’t hard to figure where that would be,” Jesse said. “That gas main explosion in ’94 got plenty of coverage—and so did the fact that folks around here were hurting with the loss of business.”

  Ned shook his head, beginning to believe that what he was hearing might just be true.

  “That’s for damn sure,” he said. He looked at Jesse thoughtfully. “So, Jess, you think this idea of yours might just make some sense?”

  “It’s happened before, Ned,” Jesse told him. “It’s a good bet it could be happening again.”

  “You don’t mean the same feller?” Ned began but Lee cut him off.

  “Not the same guy. They caught him. He’s still in an asylum. But the idea makes sense the more you look at it. And the more you see how much of a problem it’s causing the town.”

  Ned nodded thoughtfully, pushing the idea around, looking at it from different angles. Lee and Jesse were right. It did make sense. It made as much sense as anything else, he thought. In fact, he amended, there wasn’t anything else on the table to consider.

  “So,” he said, “where do we take it from here?”

  Jesse crossed one booted foot over the other, leaned back in the hard chair.

  “Hard work time,” he replied. “We start going through employment records. See if there’s anyone who’s been fired in the past few seasons who has any history of violent crime.”

  Ned rolled his eyes at the thought of the task. “Jesus! That could be hundreds of people! There’s sixty, seventy restaurants and bars in this town alone!”

  Lee shook her head. “Murders have all been on the mountain,” she pointed out. “Maybe that’s significant. We’ll start with records from mountain staff, ski patrol, ski school. People involved with the mountain itself.”

  “Expert skiers,” Jesse put in. “I figure if this guy is going to take the chance of killing someone on a chairlift and escaping on skis, he must be confident of his own ability. So we’ll check them first.”

  “Then what?” Puckett wanted to know.

  “Then,” replied Jesse slowly, “we hope we get lucky.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Since he was twelve years old, he had hated people having authority over him-hated the humiliation in being subservient to someone else’s wishes.

  Authority was a sham, a lie and a con. It was a sick and evil joke perpetrated by people who had power but had no intention of using that power to help those under them. Authority was supposed to be partnered with responsibility. There was supposed to be a duty of care, an obligation to protect those under your care.

  But it never happened that way. He had learned early that those in authority would slide away from the responsibility side of the equation, covering their betrayal with a selection of nice sounding, glib phrases that were no more than excuses for their treachery.

  His father was the first of many to betray him.

  He was a wealthy man, but his wealth wasn’t due to any effort or ability on his part. His own father had left him a successful chain of clothing stores that spread across four states. As time passed, this inherited success became an affront to his own ability and worth—possibly because he failed to grow the chain any further. The repeated attempts he made were failures and he dealt with failure in his own way. He punished his son for it.

  Aged twelve, Matthew, as he was then called, became the target for a series of brutal, sadistic beatings. The fact that they coincided with his father’sincreasingly frequent business setbacks was lost on him. All he knew was that the man he trusted and looked up to had turned on him, seemingly overnight. The attacks were unpredictable but they came more often as the years passed. His father, failing to find satisfaction in his business career, found it instead in the physical domination and punishment of his son. And the small boy, who had once loved and respected him, grew to fear and hate him instead.

  In some ways, his mother’s betrayal was even worse. She did nothing to protect him from the attacks. It wasn’t that she feared her husband. She feared the loss of her comfortable lifestyle if she opposed him—because she knew that if she intervened, her husband would cast her aside.

  She resolved the situation in what was, to Matthew, a typically cowardly way. She arranged to have the boy packed off to an expensive boarding school. The problem wasn’t recognized or resolved. It was simply swept aside.

  “We gave him the best education money could buy,” she would claim in later years.

  But in truth, she gave nothing. She bought. Money gave her authority and she used it to palm him off on other people, placing him in the care of strangers who didn’t care. Who didn’t know him, didn’t love him. In effect, she passed her responsibility and authority on to strangers.

  And they, in turn, abused the trust given to them, betraying him with false words and promises they would later recall from and deny.

  He was one of the youngest boys in the school. He was a year younger than the stated minimum age but his parents’ wealth made up the difference. And he was a small boy—although you’d never guess that now to look at him. Small, weak and immature compared to those around him. The combination made him an obvious target for bullies, and there were plenty of those available. For a while, he suffered in silence. Then, lonely, confused and able to stand it no longer, he had taken his troubles to a teacher—one of the few who had shown him any attention and whom he trusted.

  That trust was misplaced.

 
; The teacher had taken him aside and told him that the solution to his problem lay in his own hands.

  “If I were to punish them, Matthew, the problem won’t be solved. They’ll simply come after you again. You have to understand that bullies are cowards. If you stand up to them and fight back, they’ll leave you alone.”

  He wondered briefly why, if bullies were cowards, they wouldn’t fear punishment from a teacher. Surely his punishment would be more painful than any that Matthew—small, weak, friendless Matthew—could inflict. But he trusted the teacher and next time the bullies confronted him, he defied them.

  The result was the worst beating he had received from them. The teacher, seeing the bruises, smiled encouragement at him.

  “They’ll leave you alone now,” he assured him. “They know you won’t take it anymore.”

  But they didn’t. The pain, the beatings, the mental torture doubled and redoubled. And what made it worse was the fact that now he knew the teacher didn’t care. Knew he wouldn’t do anything to stop it.

  He realized he was on his own. And the only way to stop the bullying was to be worse than the bullies themselves, to assume power over them. That’s how it worked. That’s the way it would work for him.

  In wood shop he selected a two-foot piece of solid hardwood timber, using the lathe to taper it so that at one end it was a comfortable fit for his hand, while at the other, the main weight was concentrated. He could have simply stolen a baseball bat from the gym but there was something satisfying in constructing his weapon of revenge with his own hands. He hollowed out the thicker end, drilling a half-inch hole to a depth of about eight inches, then filled the gap with lead shot, topped up with rubber glue to form into a solid mass and hold it in place. The club felt good in his hands. There was a satisfying heft to it with the natural weight augmented by the lead shot. But it still needed something extra. He solved the problem simply by driving several bullet-headed nails into the wood, leaving them protruding half their length, so that, at the thick end, they stood out like small spikes.