Free Fall (25 page)

"Ready to be impressed?" He handed it to her.

Each month, Climbing contained a feature about people who built their own climbing walls. This particular article featured a picture of a woody in a barn in Wyoming and named Darby Moore as one of the builders and Lori Jaspers as the owner. It occurred to Beamon that if Darby had bothered to help build the thing and had no fixed address, there was a fair chance that she used Lori's house as a base.

In fact, the possibility that she could be there right now had crossed his mind a few times, though it seemed unlikely. She had no transportation and no money--nothing but what was on her back. It was more likely that she was holed up with someone in or near West Virginia.

The question that Lori Jaspers might be able to answer was where and with whom.

Darby Moore scooted forward a few inches until her eyes cleared the floor of the hayloft and she was able to see down into the barn. She felt a deep pang of guilt as she watched her friend Lori hand a crumpled piece of paper back to the man standing in front of her. She hadn't thought they'd be able to find this place. She'd been stupid. Now her friends were involved.

"So what?" she heard Lori say.

"So, I figure this is probably where Darby keeps her stuff. Maybe I could take a look," the man replied what had he said his name was?

Mark Beamon? It seemed like she'd heard the name before, but couldn't remember where. Maybe one of the men who had attacked her and Tristan had said it while she was semiconscious in the back of their van.

Darby watched Beamon make an effort to fold his arms across his chest, only to give up when the ridiculously thick red parka he was wearing wouldn't allow it. She ducked back a few inches when he turned his head in her direction and scanned the wall of the barn beneath her perch.

His face wasn't familiar, but that didn't surprise her. There had been at least three men hidden by the dark at the New River Gorge. And the men who had been with Vili Marcek in Utah had been too far away for her to see clearly. For all she knew, this Mark Beamon was the one who had killed Tristan.

She moved further back from the edge and buried her face in the straw, breathing in the comforting scent. She hadn't even been running for a week and they were already within thirty feet of her. Wasn't she clever?

It would be nothing more than dumb luck if she made it out of the country.

Darby looked up when her friend spoke.

"Do you have a warrant?"

"I'm not a cop," was the man's reply.

"Fact is, I'm currently in the process of being fired from the FBI."

"Well, then, you're trespassing. Why don't you get the hell off my property before I go get my shotgun."

Darby felt her heart jump at her friend's tone. She hadn't told Lori or the others anything. She'd left them defenseless, with no idea what kind of people they were dealing with. This was all her fault.

The man thrust his hands deep into his pockets and turned slightly, giving her a better view of his face the left side of it, anyway. His expression was thoughtful, not threatening. He wasn't what anyone would call a handsome man, but there was a strange humor that seemed permanently set into his face, even as a scowl spread across it. She had to remind herself again that these men had been born to lie and that what she was seeing was just a mask. The man standing two feet from her best friend would undoubtedly kill any person in this room if he thought it would get him closer to the file.

"Tell you what," Beamon said.

"Why don't you call the local police I'm sure you and your friends are real popular with them. You tell your story and I'll tell mine. Then maybe we'll call the West Virginia cops and get some of them out here.

Look, we can turn this place into Grand Central Station, or you can just give me a quick tour of Darby's stuff and I'll walk out of here without another word."

There was nothing she could do. If the police came, Darby would never be able to get her truck out. She'd be trapped.

Lori started arguing again, louder this time, and Darby took the hint.

She was going to have to bring this man up to the loft, but she was going to do it as slowly as possible.

Darby slid back away from the edge and began crawling silently toward the window that opened out into space at the other end. She was still ten feet away when she heard her friend tell the man that the things he wanted to look at were in the hayloft.

Darby picked up her pace, struggling to keep the dry hay from crunching beneath her knees. Behind her, she could hear the creak of the ladder as it was weighted. The window was only a few more feet.

She took a quick look behind her and then leaned out the opening and grabbed the rope hanging from the wooden pulley above. She had no idea how old the rope and the beam that held it were, but there wasn't time to worry about that. A fifteen-foot fall, unless she made too much noise hitting the ground, wouldn't be fatal.

The pulley creaked a little, but the noise just blended into the other sounds made by the old barn. She started lowering herself down the rope hand over hand, just as the man's head came up over the edge of the loft.

She'd been too slow. She was in plain view now if he should bother to look to his right. Darby took a deep breath and was about to let go and take the fall to the ground when she heard Lori yell up to the man from below.

"Her stuff's off to the left!"

His head turned away and gave Darby enough time to make a quick descent of the old rope as he clambered the rest of the way up into the loft.

That was another one she owed Lori.

Darby ran through the shallow snow to the remnants of a truck halfburied in a stand of tall, dead weeds. She'd be safe there until this Mark Beamon got what he wanted. Hopefully, it wouldn't be long; the wind was already starting to cut through her light fleece jacket.

When he was gone, she'd leave. She'd drive to western Wyoming or Idaho and find an old fire road she could camp on until it was time to go to LAX and catch her flight to Thailand. Then she'd have time to think.

That's all she wanted: a little time to breathe and think.

"This is it?" Beamon said, using his toe to nudge a pile of T-shirts that looked like they'd never been worn.

"Yes," Lori answered. He looked up into her face, wishing that he could figure out a way to get her to open up. He could see that it was hopeless, though. He wasn't going to break this case and collect his cash with the help of any of Darby's friends.

Beamon knelt down in the hay and began to dig through the boxes and stuff sacks stacked along the wall. There wasn't much of interest mostly athletic gear, mostly unused. Everything seemed to be accounted for the bike was there, so were the skis. Summer and winter clothing, backpacks, various sleeping bags apparently designed for different temperatures.

Very little of a personal nature, though. No pictures or address books.

Nothing that would tell him if she had friends on the East Coast. The only printed materials were a bunch of maps and climbing area guide books too many to give any indication of where she might have gone.

Beamon pushed away a box containing a pair of ski boots and uncovered two ice axes. He lifted them, one in each hand and looked them over closely. They looked to be exactly like the one that had killed Tristan Newberry. Both were equally chipped and gouged from what looked like a significant amount of vigorous use. The pictures he'd seen of the actual murder weapon had shown similar wear beneath the blood and hair clinging to it.

"Do you climb ice, Lori?" As far as he knew, the exact method of Newberry's untimely demise had not yet been leaked.

"Um ... yes."

"How many of these do you have?"

"I've only got two hands," she said, still insisting on an adversarial relationship.

"So you don't have a spare that you use sometimes."

She shook her head, obviously perplexed by his line of questioning.

"Spare picks?"

Beamon nodded, noting that the serrated blade at the end of the handle was removable. He'd finally gotten in touch with Black Diamond, the manufacturer that supplied Darby with her ice equipment, and confirmed that they had given her precisely two carbon fiber Black Prophet ice tools, but that if she wanted another one they'd be happy to provide it to her free of charge. Where'd the third axe come from? If he'd learned anything about Darby Moore since he'd started this thing, it was that she wasn't in the practice of buying things she could get for free.

"Fine," Beamon said finally, dropping the axes back into their box.

There was nothing there that could help him. He turned and started back toward the ladder.

Two of the five men who had been in the barn when he'd come in had apparently taken his temporary absence as their cue to leave.

Beamon paused in front of the woody and surveyed the three remaining brave souls as Lori Jaspers made her way down the ladder behind him.

Brave souls. More likely three young men who were currently squatting there and had nowhere else to go.

"Okay, guys, here's the deal," Beamon said to them.

"I need to find Darby Moore. If she killed Tristan Newberry, then she should be brought before the courts, right? He was a nice guy and didn't deserve to die. If she didn't, then running is just making her look guilty..."

He surveyed the blank faces in front of him and decided that he was glad he wasn't playing poker with this crew.

"Anything you could tell me, in the long run, is going to help your friend." And his legal defense fund.

Dead silence.

He really needed his job at the FBI back. This crap of not being able to haul people off and beat them with rubber hoses really put a kink in his investigative style.

"Don't everybody talk at once." He waited for a few more seconds.

"Okay. One more question. Absolutely no reason not to answer this one.

Has anybody been out here looking for Darby since this happened? Other than me."

Nothing again. In fact, he wasn't dead sure any of the remaining men could even speak English. Not one of them had uttered a word since he'd arrived.

"Come on now. How about a guy named Vili Marcek?"

That got him a little further. There was a glimmer of a reaction from each of them, but it faded quickly.

"Come on, now. You all know damn well that he's no friend to Darby.

What could it hurt to tell me if he's looking?"

"That prick called here a few days ago saying he wanted to come here and go climbing," the young man in the middle said. His accent was obviously French, though easy to understand. He looked around at Lori and the other two who, based on their expressions, had known nothing of the phone call.

"What?" he said with an exaggerated shrug.

"I told him that if Lori saw his face she would use a pitchfork on it."

So there it was. The competition was still running about one step ahead of him. And that was starting to piss him off. It wasn't just the money, it was the goddamn principle.

Beamon ran his finger down the Yellow Pages to the second of only two banks listed in the miniscule phone book. He dialed the number and kicked his stockinged feet up on the uncomfortable-looking bed next to him as a phone on the other end of the line started to ring. According to the guy at the gas station, this was the best hotel the town had to offer. If that was true, Beamon wasn't excited about the prospects for a nightlife. It looked like his immediate future included about ten Old Milwaukees at a place that encouraged two stepping and was frequented by people who said things like "Howdy partner."

Unfortunately, though, there were no flights out until morning.

"Hello, the Community State Bank."

"Hi. I'd like to check the balance on my account, please."

"I'll transfer you."

He looked around him at the worn-out little motel room again while he waited. Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents a night. An unlimited expense account for the first time in his life and the priciest room in town cost less than a decent bottle of Scotch.

The phone clicked a few times and another woman's voice came on the line.

"Account number, please."

It seemed logical that if Darby Moore kept her stuff here, she'd use a local bank to hold what little money she accumulated. Of course, it was possible--likely maybe--that she just kept it in an old sock in her glove compartment. Normally his ability to get into his adversary's head was his greatest skill, but this girl was eluding him. Half vagrant, half world class athlete, all nasty temper. He hoped that Carrie could find something useful in the girl's diary.

"I'm afraid I don't have my checkbook with me," Beamon said, trying to sound apologetic.

"Who am I speaking to, please?"

"Darby Moore." Thankfully, the name was fairly androgynous.

The sound of fingers on a keyboard.

"Mother's maiden name?"

Occasionally, the long shot came in. At this point, the other bank had told him that there was no account under that name.