Into Thin Air

  Into Thin Air

  Books by Thomas Zigal

  Hardrock Stiff

  Pariah

  The White League

  Thomas Zigal

  INTO THIN AIR

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1995 Thomas Zigal

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-756-3

  For my mother and father

  This is a work of fiction. For the sake of the story I have taken occasional liberties with the geography and history of Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. All characters and incidents are a product of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, or to persons living or dead, is coincidental.

  —TZ

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  About the Author

  Chapter one

  His deputy was waiting for him at the top of the trail. Muffin Brown was in her late twenties, the only daughter of a large Wyoming ranch family and the only female in uniform in the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department. She had waded into the river and her jeans and cowboy boots were soaking wet, her khaki shirt mud-stained to the third button. “Far as I can tell,” she said, “there’s one big hole just behind the left ear. Looks like an execution.”

  They trotted down the path to the water’s edge, where the blanket-draped body lay on a clay embankment.

  “Who found him?” Kurt asked, looking over at the small band of tourists, silent and tense, shading themselves under a canopy of narrowleaf poplars.

  “The little boy spotted him first,” Muffin said.

  The child was sitting next to his mother on a fallen tree trunk. She held him close, her arm around his slender shoulders. He looked five or six, Lennon’s age. Kurt wondered how he would explain something like this to his own son.

  He knelt down and lifted the blanket. The body had been in the Roaring Fork overnight and the keen blades of river rock had carved up the man’s softened flesh. Kurt winced. Ten years a sheriff, but he still hated this part.

  “Looks Spanish to me,” Muffin said.

  She told him that the onlookers were architects in town for the annual Design Conference and that they’d hiked down to the river to check out a sound sculpture in the poplar grove. They were listening to the breeze whistle through the artist’s hidden reeds when the boy noticed a jumble of limbs and loose clothing in the water. The body was still trapped in the boulders when Muffin arrived.

  Kurt dropped the blanket over the dead man’s face and stood up. Jesus, he thought, the Tourist Bureau is going to love this.

  He looked over at the boy and his mother. “Radio Chip and tell him to bring a body bag,” he said in a quiet voice to his deputy as he moved toward the gathering.

  He greeted the architects with a friendly nod, then bent down to speak to the child. “I understand you’ve been a real hero today,” Kurt said. He could see both terror and excitement in that small heat-flushed face. He didn’t envy the mother—the nightmares she would have to soothe.

  “Was that guy murdered?” the boy asked, his eyes wide with wonder.

  Kurt smiled at him. “We don’t know yet,” he said, unpinning the sheriff’s badge from his chest and fastening it to the boy’s T-shirt. “Here ya go,” he said. “You deserve to wear this today, my friend. You’re the best cop around.”

  The boy pulled away from his mother and said, “Wowww, awesome, Mom,” grabbing a wad of shirt to examine the badge.

  “I’ve been wondering about Tommy, the Green Ranger,” Kurt said, pointing to a Power Ranger on the T-shirt. He watched the program at suppertime every evening with Lennon. “Is he ever going to get his full powers back?”

  “Next season,” the boy assured him.

  Kurt tousled his sweaty hair, stood up, and turned to the others. “If anybody knows anything about this, I want you to wait around till my deputies get back and give them your statement,” he said. Pro forma. He could see that they were all still unnerved by the incident, having trouble meeting his eye. “Otherwise, we’re done here. You can go have a drink.”

  He shook the boy’s hand. “You take it easy now, champ,” he said. He hadn’t made up his mind yet if he would tell Lennon about the body in the river. He was always torn between telling him everything, so the child would be prepared for this world, or telling him nothing, so he could enjoy his innocence a few years longer.

  Kurt waited for the last couple to straggle off, then walked back to sit on a stump by the broken body, marking time until his deputies returned to help him carry the corpse up the trail to the EMS van. There wasn’t much he could do but watch the summer melt whirl around smooth limestone boulders. A few yards upstream a fat magpie danced in the wet sand, scratching for food. He closed his eyes and listened to the rush of water and tried not to think about this dead man beside him, who he was, what had happened to him. He tried not to remember the twisted spines of those two hikers caught in a Christmas avalanche near Pearl Pass. He tried not to see the lifeless, fractured face of his brother Bert, the way he had looked four summers ago after nine hundred feet of rock.

  After delivering the body to the morgue in the basement of the county courthouse, Kurt went upstairs to the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. His receptionist, Libbie McCullough, was eating blackberry yogurt and speaking on the radio mike to one of the deputies in the field. She pointed the spoon at an attractive Hispanic woman sitting in an armchair between a pair of tall, untended plants. “Zhish lady needs to shee you,” she said with a full mouth. He could tell by Libbie’s furrowed expression that matters were delicate here.

  “Hello,” said the woman, rising from the chair. “You must be Sheriff Muller.” She extended her hand. “My name is Dr. Graciela Rojas,” she said with a Latin accent.

  “Please come in,” Kurt said, opening the door to his private office, a small Victorian box with a window overlooking the prim courthouse lawn and the marble statue of a Civil War soldier no one had ever heard of. Above the tourist shops and cafés loomed the verdant north slope of Ajax, the mountain his father had helped groom into submission nearly forty years ago. This time of year you couldn’t distinguish the wide green ski runs from a fairway out on the golf course.

  “Forgive the mess,” he said, unfolding a metal chair stenciled PROPERTY OF ST. MARY’S BINGO for her to sit on. “I’m working on a new filing system. Would you like some coffee?”

  She glanced at the dark murky liquid settled at the bottom of a glass pot on the hot-plate burner and declined. “I have come about a friend,” she said.

  She was hi
s age, mid-forties, the colorful Guatemalan dress just loose enough to conceal a body no longer taut and girlish. She was letting the gray have its way, a thick shock of hair choosing its own shape in the unfamiliar crackling air of this climate. He recognized the small inevitable signs of wear, deeper laugh lines and an unavoidable heft. The same things he noticed in the mirror every morning.

  “My friend and I are attending the Global Unity conference at Star Meadow,” Dr. Rojas said, placing her hand-woven cloth bag in her lap. “He has not been at the seminars all day. It is not like him. I went to his room this afternoon but he was not there. No one has seen him since last evening.”

  Kurt sat on the edge of his desk and looked at her. “I was afraid you were going to tell me something like that,” he said.

  Her skin was the creamy brown of a criolla, a trace of the Europeans in her distant ancestry. He suspected she enjoyed the privileges of the ruling elite in her native country.

  “His name is Omar Quiroga. He is a well-known journalist in Argentina,” she said. “Tomorrow evening he is to speak on the Dirty War and los desaparecidos. The disappeared ones.”

  “Are you a physician, Dr. Rojas?”

  She looked surprised. “Yes, I am,” she said.

  “Then I take it you’ve seen a dead body before.”

  Her eyes were bright, beautiful, almost golden, filled with concern. “Many,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Would you come with me, please.”

  She examined the victim with cool, professional detachment. She probed the dark pulpy hole behind the ear, lifted the eyelids, checked the gold caps of his teeth. Then she combed back the man’s wet black hair with her fingers and stared for a long time at the ruined bones of his face, her hands resting there in a tender caress.

  “I am nearly certain,” she said, her voice quavering.

  “I’ll send for his dental charts,” Kurt said.

  She nodded, then turned away. Her body began to shake.

  “Come,” he said, taking her arm. “Let’s talk about this somewhere else.”

  They walked a block to the Hotel Jerome, where an assistant manager named Torben Rasmussen offered them the small, elegant tearoom for their private use. Torben was with the Mountain Rescue team that had secured Bert’s body to a helicopter stretcher and hauled him up from Maroon Bells. Every Christmas Kurt sent each of the men a bottle of good Scotch.

  “How well did you know him?” he asked the doctor when they were seated. A waitress brought them coffee from the hotel bar.

  “For many years,” she said, daubing her eyes with a tissue. “We studied at university together. I knew his wife since we were convent girls. She is one of the missing, you see. Seventeen years now. There are so many.”

  Kurt doled sugar into his cup with a tiny silver espresso spoon that felt ludicrous in his huge hand. “You said he was well known in his field.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “He has won many prizes. He wrote about the military junta and how they tortured him. Omar always said they should not have let him get away. Through his writing the world has come to know the horror of those years in our country.”

  Summer tourists strolled past the beveled window, a vastly different crowd than the skiers. Less beautiful, less pampered, less trouble.

  “Are there other Argentines out at the Meadow? Somebody who might hold a grudge?” he asked.

  She shook her head. The coffee lay untouched in front of her. “Only the two of us,” she said. “But I cannot imagine it. Not someone in the conference. It is a gathering for world harmony, you see.”

  Kurt knew all about Star Meadow. His wife had taught yoga there, attended their every seminar in healing and massage. Star Meadow became her sanctuary from the tensions of a failing marriage.

  “Is there someone we should call? Does he have family back in Argentina?”

  “Yes,” she said, staring somberly at the white tablecloth. “I will call his poor mother.” She peered up at him. “He is not the first son she has lost.”

  Chapter two

  Star Meadow lay hidden twelve miles northwest of Aspen in a peaceful grassland valley, an ancient alluvial outwash between eroded peaks of basalt lava and a range of gray-green shale pinnacles. The remote retreat had been founded by a wholesome Hollywood celebrity named Matt Heron and several white-bearded gurus who made use of the pastoral tranquility for their Conferences in Coexistence, as they called them.

  “Have you met Heron?” Kurt asked, driving his dusty ’63 Willys Jeep across a wooden bridge. In the distance they could see the multicolored roof of the conference center, a huge canvas tent shaped in oblique cones like the habit of some obscure order of nuns.

  “Yes,” said Graciela Rojas. “He seems sincere.”

  Kurt hadn’t been to the Meadow since those dismal days of the custody hearings, when he himself delivered the subpoena to the actor. Desperate to hold on to his little boy, Kurt had tried to prove in court that his wife was an unstable New Age zombie who had been seduced by Heron and his coven of Aquarian Svengalis. He felt a pang of regret even now, three years later, remembering his feeble accusations against a woman who deserved better.

  “Is this the same river?” she asked, looking out the roofless Jeep at the water foaming below the bridge.

  “Yes, it is,” Kurt said. The same icy water that flowed from a source lake high up near the Continental Divide, wagged through Aspen, and emptied into the Colorado River forty miles down-valley. “We figure someone took your friend up the Pass, above town, to a place called the Grottos. It’s rugged rock, and pretty isolated. The river cuts a gorge through it. If I was going to dispose of a body, that’s where I’d do it.”

  “Then it wasn’t done here at the Meadow,” she said in a voice still husky with emotion.

  Go easy, man, he told himself. Slow down and go easy with her.

  “No, not the disposal, Doctor,” he said. “This is downriver from where we found him.”

  If they dumped him here, he thought, the body would be in the Colorado by now.

  The Jeep bumped along a weather-pitted dirt road through the cool cavern of shadows created by towering pines. Soon they emerged into stark sunlight and green rolling pastures, the road directing them toward the little village of solar-heated cottages and geodesic schoolrooms.

  “I’ve got to let Heron know I’m here,” Kurt said. “Then I would appreciate it if you’d show me the room where Quiroga was staying.”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor said.

  A sign with woodburnt lettering pointed the way to the SENIOR FACILITATOR’S SPACE, a glaring white igloo-shaped dome with a pinewood wraparound deck.

  “You must be the facilitator’s facilitator,” Kurt said to Heron’s receptionist, a pretty young Indian woman wearing a lightweight sari. She sat in a lotus position behind a floor-level lazy-Susan table scattered with used teacups. The office walls were papered with slogan posters—SAVE THE WHALES, SAVE THE BABY SEALS, SAVE THE SNAIL DARTER.

  “Terribly sorry,” the woman said in a British accent, “but Mart is in conference just now.”

  She was playing with a Rubik’s Cube. Kurt had a strong hunch her job did not require dictation.

  “Tell him Sheriff Kurt Muller is here on official business,” he said.

  The fact that he was in uniform, wearing a baseball cap embroidered with the county sheriff’s insignia, made no difference to the woman. “He has left strict instructions,” she said, her long brown fingers twisting and clicking the small plastic squares.

  There was always an air of superiority about these Star Meadow people. “Don’t bother to buzz,” Kurt said, walking past her through the reception area to slide back a beaded curtain.

  In the adjoining room, a spare meditation chamber bathed in white radiance from the skylight, four men sat on velvet cushions, conferring with knitted brows. Matt Heron looked up, startled by the intrusion, his mouth parting in surprise.

  “Sorry to barge in like this, Heron,” K
urt said, “but I need to talk to you right away. It’s serious.”

  Tugging nervously at his blond mustache, the actor simply stared at Kurt, dumbfounded.

  “It’s about one of your guests,” Kurt said.

  “Yes,” Heron said. The ever-present boyish cheer had disappeared from his tanned face. “You must mean Omar Quiroga.”

  Kurt studied the others, their eyes skittering about uncertainly, exchanging glances. He recognized them all. The Tibetan monk who was Heron’s spiritual adviser, the martial arts instructor who kept the actor fit between movies, the button-down tax accountant who had rescued him from an Oklahoma land investment scandal. Captains of the Star Meadow board deep into crisis management. They already knew that the man was dead.

  “This is a police investigation. I need a key to his room,” Kurt said. “It’s easier than kicking in the door.”

  The body had been IDed barely an hour ago, Kurt mentioned the man’s name to no one except deputies Muffin Brown and Chip Bodine, and yet these people were already preparing a public statement.

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” Heron said, something defiant, almost victorious, in the glint of his Arctic-blue contact lenses. “Someone has beat you to it.”

  Graciela led the way to the dormitory, a long narrow log construction with solar paneling and a glass picture window facing the mountains. Stationed at the sliding door to Quiroga’s room stood a tough grunt wearing a blue blazer, polished loafers, and menacing sunshades. His sandy hair had thinned prematurely, showing a pink scalp pimpled with sweat.