In Harm's Way (30 page)

“Recognize that truck? Traffic cams, Gilly. Did you know Ketchum has traffic cams now?”

Menquez’s face went a pasty gray. He looked at Walt and back to the overhead screen as Walt played the clip again.

“You see the time stamp?” Walt asked. “Days before you claimed to have found the SUV. There’s a time stamp on the withdrawal as well.”

Menquez licked his dry lips. He looked like a beached fish.

“We can get you into treatment, Gilly. We can do that
before
all this comes out, so the Service will foot the bill for it. You’ll come out clean and sober and on your feet, and maybe you even keep your job.”

“I got kids. A family. I needed that money. I wouldn’t have taken it.”

“You’ve been drinking up your paycheck, Gilly. I see this all the time. This is nothing new to me. Let me help you.”

“I didn’t mean to screw things up for you. I found the truck. I swear I was going to tell you. But there was the wallet on the floor. The guy had written his PIN number on a piece of paper tucked into his wallet. I mean, how stupid is that? It’s like he was asking me to do it.”

“I need you to run it down for me. I need every detail exactly as it happened.”

“Including the bat?” Gilly said.

Walt felt a bubble in his chest and did his best to suppress his surprise.

“How come no one found that bat?” Gilly asked. “That wouldn’t have nothing to do with you, would it, Sheriff?”

Walt wasn’t going to answer that. “Every detail,” he said.

“Including the bat? Or am I supposed to leave out the bat? Then again, maybe this is up for negotiation. Maybe both of us have something the other guy wants. Maybe we both got something to hide. Maybe this works out for the both of us.”

“I need to know exactly what you did,” Walt said. “The chain of evidence is corrupted. It’s not going to hold up in court, but
I need this evidence
. Do not play with me, Gilly.”

“But then that bat’s going to need explaining. That’s evidence too, right?”

“You let me worry about that.”

“I imagine you are worried about that.”

“You don’t want to go there.”

“We’re already there—you and me. I’m not going anywhere but to treatment and jail, isn’t that right, Sheriff? Or maybe you’re buying me my next drink and we get all chummy-like.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

“I saw you go to the back of the Jeep just when everyone showed up. I didn’t see you take nothing
out
of the Jeep, so maybe you put something in. You want to talk about evidence, Sheriff?”

Walt pushed the legal pad toward Gilly. “I’ll give you thirty minutes. Every detail exactly as it happened. What you found, when you found it, what you did.”

“I’m going to include tossing that bat into the woods,” Menquez said, taking a deep breath. “That’s right: it was lying there on top of the wallet. Didn’t see the blood on it until I moved it. But when I did, I chucked it out of there. That goes down here,” he said, tapping the pad, “unless you tell me otherwise.”

“Did you see who drove the SUV?”

“No. Engine was cold when I found it.”

“You said there was blood.”

“A stain on the bat. I know dried blood when I see it, Sheriff. You track poachers for thirteen years, there’s not much you haven’t seen.”

“The bat and wallet were on the floor. Anything else? Was there anything else of value in there?”

“Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t.”

Walt sensed there wasn’t. He pushed the pad even closer to Menquez. He needed a few minutes to get in front of the baseball bat as evidence. He hoped Boldt would answer the phone. “Exactly as it happened,” he said. He stood and headed to the door.

“Whatever you say, Sheriff.” Gilly Menquez gurgled up a laugh.

 

 

“B
eggars can’t be choosers,” Walt said. He’d placed the call from his office phone where there would be a record of it. He felt like a juggler who kept adding balls to the circle he kept alive in the air. There was a limit to it all and he was quickly approaching it.

“They developed prints,” Boldt said, half apologizing. “Three different sets. Last I was told, those prints were being run through ALPS. Not sure of the hang-up. Let me put you on hold.”

The phone line went dead in Walt’s ear. Thirty seconds gave way to a minute. Closer to two minutes before the line popped and Boldt returned. “The delay was with ALPS. Their e-mail went down. They’ve had the results, we just never got them. My guy made a call just now. No hits, I’m afraid. The guy said he can and will e-mail them some other way. I’ll send them along when I get them.”

Walt thanked him, and asked for the bat to be returned by overnight courier. “And all the paperwork, please.”

“Chain of evidence.” Boldt didn’t miss much.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You spoke with Matthews.”

“Smart lady.”

“Hang on,” Boldt said. “I just got them.” Walt heard a keyboard tapping, and a moment later an e-mail notice popped up in the lower corner of his screen.

“That was fast,” Walt said.

“She shared your conversation with me. I hope that’s all right?”

“We’re in this together,” Walt said.

“You get anything back on the blood evidence?”

“Never went to the lab. Wynn’s lawyer, Evers, put a noose around it. The shoes are still in limbo. We’ll be lucky if we get them before the next millennium.”

“It’s got to be either your case or mine,” Boldt said. “He didn’t cut himself shaving.”

“My deputy got a little overzealous. If they take a deposition, we’re going to lose the evidence.”

“Blood shadow,” Boldt said.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“You’re going to lose the blood evidence
on
the shoes,” Boldt explained. “But then there’s the matter of the shoes themselves.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“That’s ironic,” Boldt said, “because I think you may have just saved me. Do me a favor and send across the manufacturer and shoe size, will you please?”

“Happy to do it.”

“And if nothing else, convince the judge that it’s worth holding Wynn in town until the evidence is sorted out. I may need him to claim those shoes and I don’t want him going anywhere. I don’t want someone doing it for him.”

“I’ll make a couple calls. You going to let me in on this?” Walt asked.

“You’ll be the first to know,” Boldt said.

They ended the call and Walt opened the e-mail that included nine attachments, all high-resolution scans of latent fingerprints. The Automated Latent Print System was a national fingerprint database for felons in all fifty states. The fact that these prints had not kicked out identities didn’t tell the whole story. Most states, including Idaho, also maintained databases of fingerprints of state health workers, teachers, law enforcement officers, politicians, judges, attorneys, and even some ministers and priests. There were national databases for federal employees as well. With the push of a button, Walt could initiate additional database searches. The searches would then generate candidate lists and the results would be scrutinized by hand by latent print experts. The results could take anywhere from hours to days, sometimes weeks, depending how Walt labeled the request, and the workload at the facility. Potential homicides moved to the top of the list. Aggravated assault would move a request down the list.

Two people lived on the Engleton property full-time. One was a small woman just twenty-one, the other a part-time fishing guide who had single-handedly rescued a drowning child from a raging river.

Walt typed up the request in the frame of the e-mail message set to be forwarded to several departments, both state and federal. His finger hovered over the enter key.

“Kevin’s here.” Nancy’s voice, coming over the intercom.

Walt pulled his hand away from the keyboard and into his lap. He pushed back his chair, the wheels squeaking.

W
alt watched as his nephew worked on a Mac laptop on the opposite side of his desk. The physical similarities to Walt’s dead brother—the high cheekbones, the nearly permanent five o’clock shadow, the perfect teeth, a darkly brooding rugged handsomeness—reminded Walt how much he missed the beers on the back porch, the softball games, their shared dislike of their father. He’d tried to step in to fill the void for Kevin after Bobby’s death and would always wonder how much that had affected the failure of his own marriage. He and Kevin had been through some challenging times together. Looking at him now, his intense concentration, the singular focus, reminded Walt of Bobby even more.

Alongside the laptop lay a scaled color printout of a human skull, with curved arrows indicating a region on the top of the skull that looked like a jigsaw puzzle. There were measurements written in McClure’s hand at the blunt end of the arrows, while their sharper ends pointed to the area of impact that had resulted in the death of Martel Gale.

“Regulation baseball bat is forty-two inches,” Kevin said. He sat on the guest side of Walt’s office desk, facing his uncle on the other side of the open screen.

“Okay.”

“I’m doing this two ways—with and without a choked grip. Come on around.”

Walt came around the desk and leaned in behind Kevin, his left hand on the boy’s shoulder. The screen showed two animated figures, looking like mannequins against a plain background. Several boxes spread around the screen outside the center window held software tools, including one that contained two other, much smaller mannequin-like figures.

“On the right is your victim,” Kevin said. “All six-foot-four and a half of him. A frickin’ giant. On the left is the giant killer. The bat is to scale and I Googled the average arm length for specific heights. You gave me five-foot-four, so this guy on the left is five-foot-four. So check it out.”

He set the screen into motion. The figure on the left—not “a guy,” but Kira Tulivich, in Walt’s mind—hoisted the baseball bat and, in frame-by-frame slow motion, brought it down onto Gale’s head. Kevin used the mouse to draw an arrow at the area of impact and then pointed to the printout to his left.

“Not even close,” Walt said.

“He’s too short,” Kevin said, referring to the Kira figure. “This guy was hit way up on top of his head. Even if I set it so he doesn’t choke up,” he said, adjusting the bat in Kira’s hands and animating the action for a second time, “the bat hits the skull in about the same place, the problem being this guy just isn’t tall enough to reach the top of the victim’s head. So what I did was put him up a single step. Seven inches. Because maybe the guy with the bat’s standing on a step when he connects with this guy.” He repositioned the smaller figure. “And though it’s better, it’s actually
too
high, too tall. I mean if the victim is at the perfect distance away . . . sure. It can be made to work this way . . .” He moved Gale forward and this time, when animated, the bat landed squarely on the top of Gale’s head. Walt shuddered, able to see beyond the world of computer-realized mannequins. “But if it isn’t absolutely the perfect distance, what happens is a length of the bat connects from the back of the skull to the front, making like a trench instead of a pit.”

“So, no good,” Walt said.

“It takes a perfect storm,” Kevin said. “That’s all I’m saying. A step height and the perfect separation between the two. My guess, you could run this a dozen times and you’d be lucky for it to come out right once or twice. It’s not a high-percentage shot.”

“And the high-percentage shot?”

“That’s different. Two options.” Kevin replaced the Kira figure with another, taller figure from the toolbox. “Six foot. Six-foot-one. Wouldn’t matter if it was two-handed or one. The length of the guy’s arms more than compensates. Slightly choked-up on the bat . . .” He completed setting up the scene and put the new figure into motion. The bat was lifted high in the air and came down squarely with the end of the bat impacting the top of Gale’s skull—exactly as McClure had suggested. “That’s a frickin’ bull’s-eye.”

“Six foot. Six-foot-one,” Walt said, his voice giving away his relief.

Kevin looked over his shoulder and into Walt’s face. “What’s up with that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I didn’t say it was the only option, did I?” When Kevin got behind a computer he became arrogant. Walt considered reprimanding him but didn’t want to get into it with him. “Here’s the thing I forgot: tiptoes. When you really whale on a bat—” He scooted out, stood up, and demonstrated, rising to his tiptoes as he swung high overhead. “Okay?” Slipping back into the chair, he manipulated the laptop to replace the taller assailant with a slightly smaller one. The figure rose up onto bent feet and the bat came down, the impact perfectly reflecting Mc-Clure’s notes. Kevin highlighted some areas and made the assailant stand once again.

Walt returned to his earlier thought: there were only two people living on the Engleton property. A minute earlier Kevin had all but ruled out Kira. “How tall?” Walt choked out.

Kevin moved the cursor arrow to the top of the head of the assailant figure, and steadied it there. A yellow box popped up alongside the arrow containing the measurement: 172.7 cm.

“Inches?” Walt asked dryly. He already knew the answer—his height when wearing a pair of boots.

Kevin asked the software for the conversion. A new number filled the box: 68 in.

“Five-foot-eight,” Kevin said. “Or more precisely, five-foot-eight on tiptoe—six foot, six-foot-one.”

Walt remembered kissing her. Coming slightly off his heels to reach her lips.

 

 

H
e thanked Kevin and politely asked him to leave, telling him he thought he could get him some compensation as a consultant, and Kevin saying how he didn’t care about getting paid when they both knew otherwise. The kid was carting bags at the Sun Valley Lodge and delivering room service. How long was that going to last?