Mountain Rampage (21 page)

“They'll put out an arrest warrant for Clarence,” Chuck said. “For me, too.”

“Clarence didn't do anything,” she pleaded. “Neither did you.”

“He slept with her, Jan.”

“He
what
?”

“He slept with Nicoleta. Earlier in the summer. He was the first of many, sounds like.”

“He slept with the murdered girl?” Janelle repeated in disbelief.

“You know full well what he's like.”

She rose, crossed the room, and plopped into one of the kitchen chairs. She propped her elbows on the table, using both hands to push her hair away from her face. “What else do you know that I don't?” she asked.

Chuck left the couch and slid into a kitchen chair opposite her. “He's being as open as possible with the cops. That's why they haven't taken him in yet. But the longer things go with no other suspects…”

“They're wasting their time on him.”

“Add his having slept with her to the discovery of his knife with the blood, and it's a wonder he's not in custody already.” Chuck reached across the table, offering Janelle his hand. “We have to get some sleep. We'll figure things out in the morning.”

“We really can't leave?”

“If Clarence runs, he's all they'll focus on.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and took Chuck's hand. He pulled her to a standing position and they climbed the stairs to the loft together, her arm tight around his waist, drawing him close.

Chuck spent much of the night staring out the skylight, cursing himself for his inability to sleep as Janelle tossed and turned beside him. Finally, just before dawn, his eyes closed and he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

Rays of morning sun angled through the skylight when Janelle shook him awake. He sat up, groggy and confused, and squinted at the bright yellow rectangle of sunlight on the wall.

In an instant, everything came flooding back. He snatched his phone from the bedside table. It was after ten o'clock. He had voicemail from Kirina asking where he was, from Professor Sartore demanding that Chuck check in with him yet again, and from Parker, who said he'd thought of something he wanted to tell Chuck.

“I've got to get going,” he told Janelle, swinging his feet to the floor.

“Breakfast first.”

“No time.” He waved his phone at her.

He dressed, splashed water on his face, and ran his fingers through his hair, pressing it into place.

He opened his laptop on the kitchen table and skimmed the emails piling up from the students' parents. The field school blog, though filled with excited chatter by the students, contained no new information. The
Estes Park Trail-Gazette
website offered little solid news in its lead story beyond the murdered cashier's full name, Nicoleta Barstolik, her age, twenty-two, and her nationality, Bulgarian.

Janelle looked over Chuck's shoulder at his computer screen until he closed it. “You really have to go?”

He rose and turned to her. “You shouldn't stay here either.
I'll leave the truck for you. In fact, there's something I'm wondering if you could do for me.”

He went outside and returned with the baggie of black material he'd collected from the mine shaft. Janelle held it in her hand while he explained, “There's a research librarian, Elaine, the one I talked to yesterday, who wants this. I'm wondering if you could—”

She cut him off. “Let me get this straight. We've got a murder, Clarence under suspicion as Jack the Ripper, cops all over the place—” she waved the bag in Chuck's face “—and you want me to deliver a bag of dirt to some librarian for you?” She stopped, her eyes lighting on the baggie in her hand. She turned the bag, studying it. “What is this stuff, anyway?”

“It's from the mine. The librarian wants to see it.”

“Because…?”

“She thinks she might know what it is.”

“And this has what to do with the murder, exactly?”

“I've been wondering about the timing of the blood on the ground and finding the hidden shaft in the mine the very next day.”

Her mouth turned down. “This is just something to keep me and the girls busy, isn't it?”

“And away from the cabin,” he agreed, content to follow Janelle's lead. “You've probably seen her down there. She's the one with the cane.”

Janelle gave the bag a shake. “This doesn't matter. Don't you see? The only thing that matters is getting out of here.”

“The only thing that matters is making sure Clarence doesn't get locked away for something he didn't do—which is exactly what will happen if we leave today.” Chuck took hold of Janelle's free hand with both of his. “Tomorrow. Twenty-four more hours.”

She pulled her hand away and tossed the bag on the kitchen table. It landed with a wet
plop
and slid a few inches, leaving a
skid of black on the tabletop. She went to the sink, rinsed her hands, and turned to Chuck as she wiped the outside of the baggie clean with a paper towel. “Okay,” she said, worry in her eyes. “I'll run your errand. I'll drop off your bag. Then the girls and I will ‘lay low' in town. I won't make any trouble for you.”

“Jan.”

“I'll do whatever you say.”

“
Janelle
.”

“But I want one thing in return,” she said. She threw the wadded paper towel at him, her arm a flash of motion. He caught the towel against his chest as tears sprang to her eyes. “I want you to get down there to Raven House and look after my little brother.”

T
HURSDAY

T
HIRTY
-F
OUR

Chuck walked straight to the conference center. He fingered his phone in his pocket. Sartore wanted him to call, but he had nothing new to report. The professor could wait.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on Parker's office door.

Parker stood at his office window with his back to Chuck, his binoculars to his eyes, the case open on the windowsill beside him. Chuck recognized the binoculars as Brunton Epochs, a technological marvel in the way they amplified available light to provide crisp, clear views, particularly at dawn and dusk.

Parker lowered the binoculars and turned from the window. “Thought maybe you'd gone into hiding.”

“I'm tempted,” Chuck said. He looked past Parker at the sunny day outside. “This summer was supposed to be easy. A vacation.”

“Like you need one with your career—work when you want, as long as you want, on the jobs you want.” Parker set the binoculars on the windowsill and dropped into his seat behind his polished desk.

Chuck let his gaze roam around the well-appointed office. “You haven't got a lot to complain about yourself.” He rounded Parker's desk, picked up the binoculars, and focused through the window on the dormitories. As he watched, a kitchen worker in a white apron emerged from the rear of Falcon House and walked up the sidewalk toward the cafeteria building.

“You re-opened the dining hall?”

“People have to eat.”

Chuck swept the binoculars past the string of commercial buildings lining Elkhorn Avenue and stopped at the Stanley Hotel, its clapboard walls blazing white in the morning sun. The hotel sat at the head of a sloping lawn on the far side of town, nearly two miles away. Tourists, ant-like in the binoculars' viewfinder, made their way up the broad stone stairway to the famously haunted lodge.

Chuck returned the binoculars to the sill and took a seat in front of Parker's desk. “Must be quite the view at night.”

“A view's only worth so much.” Parker shifted his weight in his chair. “I've been doing this for ten years, and I'm still not sure I'm cut out to be a desk jockey.”

“How many employees are you in charge of?”

“More than a hundred, and they're every single one of them trouble—the ones in Falcon House most of all. The local workers go home at night, but with the dorm, it's like sitting on a volcano all summer.” He aimed a thumb out the window. “I look over there when I'm working late, and they're scurrying around like mice, coming and going in their junker cars, lights flicking on and off in each other's rooms, slipping outside to get stoned.” He whistled through his front teeth. “The things I've seen.”

“Why don't you do something about it?”

“What is there to do? They're good kids for the most part. Adventurous, which is why they signed up to come over here in the first place. And they're hard workers, I'll grant them that. It's when the sun goes down, that's the problem—” he looked at Chuck over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses “—whether they're mine or yours.”

Chuck let Parker's insinuation pass. “You said you'd thought of something.”

“Right.” Parker sat forward. “Not sure if it means anything, but…I came back up here the other night, after dinner, to do
some work—the story of my summer, every summer. Anyway, I was up here pretty late.” He paused. “It was two nights ago.”

“The night of the blood.”

“And the night of your brother-in-law's knife.”

Chuck dug his fingernails into the supple leather arms of his chair as Parker continued.

“The view from up here is pretty…all-encompassing.”

Chuck pointed at the high-tech Bruntons. “Especially with those.”

“It's fun, actually, a lot of the time, looking around with them. People going in and out of the Stanley, cars coming down Trail Ridge Road.”

“And here in the resort, too.”

“It's good to keep an eye on things. And, like I said, the things I've seen…but all of it, you know—” he waggled his hand “—consenting.” He looked away.

“Go on,” Chuck urged.

The resort manager's eyes came to rest on the wooden bear sculpture in the corner, the creature's gouged-out eye sockets staring back at him. “It's not what I saw. The problem is what I didn't see.”

T
HIRTY
-F
IVE

“What
didn't
you see, then?” Chuck asked, playing along.

“I didn't see Nicoleta's roommate, Anca.”

Chuck pressed his hands to his stomach, containing himself. It had been Anca who had come after Clarence in the Falcon House hallway.

Parker continued, “There's no smoking in the dorms, as you know. And of course, with the drought, there's pretty much no smoking allowed anywhere. One spark and—” he puffed his cheek “—
poof
.”

“But people still smoke.”

“We can't prohibit it. You know the buckets, right?”

Chuck nodded. Red metal canisters, open at the top and filled with sand, were bolted waist-high to the light poles lining the sidewalk in front of the dormitory buildings. Smokers were to stay within ten feet of the buckets, and to put their butts out in the sand.

“Every night at ten o'clock,” Parker said, “the TV goes off in the front room of Falcon House and she comes out for a smoke. Every single night.”

“You do work late, don't you?”

“Never past midnight. My wife won't let me. But we're talking about Anca, not me.”

“Nicoleta's roommate,” Chuck confirmed.

“Ten p.m., on the dot. Except for two nights ago.”

“I'm not really sure—”

“Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with anything,” Parker said. “But she never showed. I mean, it's gotten to the point where, when I've been working this summer, I've started anticipating ten o'clock. I know she'll come out, have her smoke, go back inside. When she goes through her routine, it's like everything's okay in my world. I can keep working, go home, whatever,
but the earth's still turning, I'm going to make it through another summer season, know what I mean?”

“Except for two nights ago.”

“It was odd, that's all. I was sitting right here.” Parker turned ninety degrees to a small computer table with a keyboard tray and oversized monitor, demonstrating how easy it was for him to glance out the window while he worked. “Ten o'clock came and went. Ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty. I finally went home, but it was unsettling.”

“Somebody doesn't smoke a cigarette, and you call that ‘unsettling'?”

“I know. Believe me, I get it. You're not sure what to make of it, and neither am I. But I can tell you this, Chuck: five hours after Anca's a no-show, the cops were scooping up a bunch of what apparently is human blood, just back of where she usually has her smoke.”

“And twenty-four hours later, her roommate is dead, in almost the same place.”

“Which is why I wanted you to know, seeing's how it's your brother-in-law's knife the cops are parading around.” Parker stopped, but it was clear there was something more on his mind. “He's got a real obvious body frame, your brother-in-law.”