Into Thin Air Page 2

  “Hold it,” he said stiffly. “Nobody’s permitted in here.”

  Kurt turned to the doctor. “It’s one of those days when everybody’s got an assignment,” he said.

  He stepped closer to the FBI agent and stared down into the sunglasses. “Go get your boss,” he said. “I want to know why you boys are noodling around in my jurisdiction.”

  “Hello, Muller,” said a voice behind the dark glass door. “It’s funny how people keep getting blown away in your quaint little valley. Goes to show you, nobody’s safe anywhere nowadays. Not even in Nirvana.”

  Kurt hadn’t heard that voice in three years. Which wasn’t long enough. “What are you doing here, Staggs?” he asked. “Who said somebody got blown away?”

  A figure moved behind the glass. His white shirt shone in the darkness. “Let’s not bullshit each other,” the man said. “We know you’ve recovered the body.”

  Kurt breathed on the stocky agent standing guard. “It’s amazing how word gets around.”

  Ever since the Erickson case Kurt had suspected that the Feds might be wiretapping him, monitoring radio dispatches, opening mail. Ever since Chad Erickson jogged out of the health club one crisp winter morning and sat down to start his Jaguar, and a crude projectile concealed under the seat reamed him from asshole to eyeballs and seared up through the ragtop roof without so much as a powder burn.

  Federal Agent Neal Staggs slid open the door and stepped into the fading alpine light. He was well over six feet, a lanky man with short graying hair and a faint razor burn on his long neck. A semipro golfer, an upstanding member of his church, a former basketball star at some private college back East. He exuded the smug self-righteousness of an altar boy.

  “You must be Dr. Rojas,” he said, coming out to greet her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances.”

  Graciela shook his hand. “Everyone is being very kind,” she said, regarding Kurt with a tired smile. “I am in good hands.”

  Staggs glanced at Kurt. “The sheriff does his best,” he said.

  Kurt’s record with the Feds, and Neal Staggs in particular, was less than sterling. The first time the Bureau had sent Staggs out from Denver was when Ted Bundy jumped from the window of the county courthouse, while in Kurt’s custody, and escaped into the mountains to kill again. And then there was the coke dealer Chad Erickson, with his five-million-dollar home in Starwood and his squadron of private planes. Erickson had promised federal prosecutors the names of his Colombian drug contacts, and the Feds were furious when his brains spewed through the roof. They accused Kurt and his department of everything from foot-dragging the investigation to harboring the identity of the killers to outright perpetration of the murder.

  “Please come in and have a look around, Sheriff,” Staggs said, extending his arm toward the door. “The Bureau is always happy to share its information with the locals.” With a brisk nod Staggs dismissed the agent sticking his nose in Kurt’s sternum. “We just wish the locals would occasionally return the favor.”

  Kurt knew what he would find in the room. Three Brooks Brothers suits, one dusting for fingerprints, one gingerly lifting objects with tongs and placing them neatly in labeled plastic bags. What he didn’t expect was that the third man would be sitting at a typing desk reading through Omar Quiroga’s personal notebook. Nor did Graciela Rojas.

  “What are you doing?” she said, rushing to the agent. “This is not your property.” She snatched the notebook from his hands and swept it against her chest. “I expect this from the thugs in my country, señor, but not from you. You are abusing someone’s privacy.”

  The agent removed his reading glasses and stood up, a graying elderly man with shoulders rounded from decades stooped over small-print documents in bad lighting. He looked more like a librarian than a cop.

  “It’s okay, Bill,” Staggs said, waving the man off.

  Graciela Rojas clutched the notebook defiantly. She turned to Kurt, outraged.

  “Dr. Rojas,” Staggs said, “I’m sure I don’t have to remind you how controversial your colleague’s writing is. We’d like to know if he incriminates someone in this journal. Perhaps something he planned to say in an upcoming speech. Anything to go on,” he said. “We all want the same thing here, ma’am. To apprehend the killer. But to do that we’ll need your full cooperation.”

  Slick as owl shit, Kurt thought.

  “Now, please,” Staggs said, stepping toward the woman, “give us a chance to do our work.”

  Graciela sighed deeply, her upper body sagging on her hips. She looked again at Kurt.

  “I’m afraid he has a right to confiscation,” Kurt told her. “That is, of course, if this is the scene of the crime.” He cocked his head at the agent. “You found blood here, I take it, Agent Staggs.”

  Staggs’s forehead wrinkled in three long deep lines.

  “Because if it didn’t happen here,” Kurt said to Graciela, “these gentlemen know they have to get a court order to monkey around with what’s on the premises.”

  Staggs raised his chin slightly and studied Kurt through narrowed eyes. “Let’s talk outside, Sheriff Muller,” he said.

  They walked toward a duck pond set back near a small stand of shedding cottonwoods. A pair of mallards, male and female, dibbled for food in the algae scum, their white tails high in the air as their heads bobbed underwater.

  “What kind of shit are you pulling here, Muller?” Staggs fumed. “Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”

  “Tell me what you’re doing here, Staggs. I like to be informed when somebody comes digging around in my backyard.”

  “I don’t owe you any explanations, ace,” Staggs said. “This guy is big. We’re talking embarrassing international incident here. Bleeding hearts whining on every fucking network in the hemisphere. We can’t afford to wait around for some Podunk hippie sheriff to pull his head out his ass and get the job done.”

  Staggs withdrew a handkerchief from his suit jacket and wiped his sticky lips. The altitude, Kurt thought. The man is dehydrating. He and his boys wouldn’t survive a good jog up here without a gallon of Gatorade.

  “No, Muller, not this time,” he said. “You try to stonewall this investigation, I’m going to bury your butt in a federal pen.”

  Kurt listened to the ducks quacking in the quiet afternoon. Mates for life. Just last night he’d read the Zoo Book on ducks to his son. ‘How come you and Mommy aren’t for life?’ Lennon had wondered aloud.

  “I guess I’m just the curious kind, Staggs,” Kurt said. “When the math doesn’t add up, I get stubborn. You give me some clean numbers, I’ll make sure the Rojas woman doesn’t become a problem.”

  Staggs stopped dead in his tracks and dug his hands in his pants pockets, rattling change. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Quiroga buy it in his room?”

  Staggs shook his head.

  “Any idea where?”

  “I thought that was your department, Sheriff.”

  The sun had dipped low toward the peaks, and long jagged shadows stretched across the grassy meadow behind the geodesic domes. Kurt breathed in the cool thin air. Sometimes he wanted to quit this foolish job and take Lennon traveling. To the rain forests of the Northwest, the gentle beaches of the Caribbean, the great cities of Europe. Anywhere but this confining little valley.

  “There’s one thing that bothers me, Staggs,” he said.

  The agent reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “What’s that?” he said.

  “You haven’t asked to see the body.”

  Kurt turned and walked back to the dorm, where he found Graciela sitting on the carpet, legs folded underneath her dress, the notebook resting in her lap. The older agent crouched near her, waiting silently, patiently, for the woman to give it back The two other agents went about their routines in a studious quiet.

  “This man says that since I am not Omar’s wife or next of kin, I cannot legally remove his papers,”
she said, peering down at the journal.

  Kurt lifted his cap and scratched his matted hair. “These guys know the law,” he said.

  Bitterness darkened the corners of her mouth. “You must forgive me if I am not very trusting of their methods,” she said.

  Kurt knelt beside her, his old ski knees cracking. “I understand,” he said. “But these gentlemen are right. Maybe there’s something helpful in those pages.”

  It was clear that Graciela needed time to weigh everything carefully. She didn’t move for several minutes, her gaze fixed on some vague patch of carpet. The older agent relaxed on his heels; Neal Staggs leaned against the oak paneling, arms folded, waiting.

  Kurt watched the professionals at work, the fingerprint man dusting the chrome door-handle of the refrigerator, his colleague examining several blank postcards of snowy Aspen spread on a coffee table. He wondered why these men had shown up to turn over a man’s room even before Kurt and Graciela Rojas knew he was dead.

  Something underneath the refrigerator, behind the agent’s polished wingtips, caught Kurt’s eye. He could see it from his squatting position, a shard of glass lodged far back in the dark inch of space below the motor guard.

  “Will you please see to it that this is given back to me?” she said to Kurt. The doctor had finally emerged from her shell of silence. “I want to make certain it is returned to his family.”

  “You got it,” Kurt said.

  He squinted at the object. It looked like the broken stem of a wineglass.

  “You must promise me,” she said. “I am putting the notebook in your hands.”

  Kurt nodded slowly. “I’ll get it back for you,” he said. “You can count on it.”

  He glanced over at Staggs. The man touched the tip of his index finger to his tongue and scratched a mark in the air. I owe you one.

  You son of a bitch, Kurt thought. What little you’ve told me is a lie.

  Chapter three

  Kurt radioed her from his jeep. “Deputy Brown, please go to where I usually am this time of day and wait for my call. Give me twenty-five minutes. Do you copy?”

  “What was that all about?” Muffin asked when he telephoned from the pay phone outside the Conoco station on Highway 82.

  “It’s no longer a paranoid joke that the Feds might be tapping our phones,” he said. “When I got to the guy’s room, the suits were all over it. Somebody had done a quick-and-dirty. Probably the Feds themselves.”

  She was sitting in the office at Lennon’s day care center. “Why would they do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “They know a lot more than we do. They’re not even interested in seeing the body. My guess is they already know what they’ll find.”

  Muffin shook the snow scene in a glass paperweight on the director’s desk. “Jesus, I don’t want to guess what that could mean,” she said. “Is the doctor with you?”

  “They kept her for questioning.”

  “Think she’ll be okay?”

  “Nothing I could do about it,” Kurt shrugged. “They are, after all, the highest authority in this great land of ours.”

  He asked if she had time to take Lennon home and stay with him till he got back. He needed to pay a visit to Miles Cunningham.

  “Miles?” Muffin laughed. “I thought that crazy man checked into Betty Ford.”

  “When you get a chance, call Wing Taylor out at the hangar and ask him when he logged in a private plane full of suits. I want to know what time those guys came in today.”

  Miles Cunningham was a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist whose stark images of violence still haunted the American conscience. In Mississippi, a battered black boy hanging from a tree limb. In Vietnam, an acne-faced American teenager reaching his amputated arms to caress a dying buddy. In El Salvador, a hillside repository of bones. Miles had been beaten in Bogalusa, stabbed by an army bayonet in Manila, shot and left to die in the jungles of Angola. His body bore the scars of his relentless investigations. But now, at age fifty-five, fatigue and a gnawing despair had driven him to a shambled, reclusive life in a cabin on Castle Creek, near the rotted timber ruins of the old mining town of Ashcroft.

  Kurt stopped at the metal gate and waited for a voice from the Jack in the Box drive-thru intercom attached to a fence post. Video cameras tracked the Jeep from three different locations—an aspen tree, a birdhouse high atop a leaning pole, the busted out windshield of a rusted VW microbus up on cinder blocks.

  “What do you want, you toad?” crackled the puppet head, its plastic smile leering malevolently.

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Miles,” Kurt spoke at the puppet.

  “Where were you last night when I fucking needed you, law man?”

  Miles phoned Kurt two or three times a week, usually around four a.m., to rave paranoid hallucinations brought on by recreational drugs.

  “Miles, there are no Mormon gunboats on Castle Creek,” Kurt said.

  Last night the man had called screaming, ‘Mormon gunboats at three o’clock! Dive, dive, dive!’

  “The fuck you know,” the puppet growled. “They’re laying back there by the old sled-dog kennels, docked in the brush, biding their time. They know we’ve grown weak and decadent. No sense of vigilance anymore. Mark my word, law man. They’ll take the town like Hitler took Paris. Three or four shells on a boutique and you’ll present ’em with the keys.”

  “Miles—”

  “They’ll turn our women against coffee!”

  “Miles, listen.”

  “They’ll lay waste to our discos, searching for the tablets!”

  “Miles, goddammit!” Kurt shouted. “Shut the fuck up and listen to me! I need your help. There’s been a murder.”

  The Jack in the Box puppet stared back silently, fixed in a timeless sneer. Wind quivered the aspen leaves, an intricate dapple of green. Kurt could hear the creek swishing nearby. Moments passed, enough time for Miles to fill another drink.

  “Would you like some fries with that?” the puppet finally spoke.

  “Miles, open the fucking gate.”

  The electronic lock clicked and the gate swung back in a wide arc.

  “Drive on through, please,” the puppet said.

  In the rocky plot of yard, three surly Dobermans nosed around in a heaping landfill of Wild Turkey bottles, several of them lined in a row for target practice. Kurt cut the engine and honked his horn, but the dogs straightened like regal doormen and bared their teeth at him.

  “I hope for your sake you’re packing heat these days,” said a voice through a crack in the cabin door. “It’s the only way you’re going to get past security.”

  “Miles,” Kurt said, “come out and get your dogs.”

  “Are you insane?” Miles said. “I don’t mess with those beasts. They’d like to rip my jugular and tinkle in the wound.”

  The three dogs lowered their ears and pranced toward the Jeep. The roof was down, the windows open.

  “Miles, they’re your dogs. Do something with them.”

  One of the animals strutted over to the passenger window and sprang up on hind legs, its muddy paws scratching at the metal finish. Another one circled around to Kurt’s door, growling, its purple gums exposed, teeth as sharp as band-saw blades. Kurt’s hands began to tingle. He reached slowly under his seat and unsnapped the holster.

  Suddenly Miles appeared on the porch with an AK-47 and sprayed the air with bullets. The noise sent the dogs howling off toward the woods. Even after he stopped shooting, the roar still echoed through the hills. Smoke and the bitter smell of cordite wafted over the yard.

  Kurt swallowed hard. “Wouldn’t it be easier,” he said, “to try a rolled newspaper?”

  Miles dropped the weapon to his side. Shell casings were scattered across the wood porch like a child’s messy jacks. “I thought about that once,” he shrugged, “until they ate the paperboy.”

  The interior of Miles’s cabin resembled an antiquarian bookstore kept by a doddering, piss-stained old O
xford man with food bits in his beard. Footpaths burrowed through shoulder-high mounds of yellow newspapers and tattered books, a maze of bewildering turns and random cul-de-sacs.

  The place stank of putrefying garbage. A filthy sofa draped with a filthy sheet occupied a small clearing near the stone fireplace, the floor around it cluttered with crushed Coke cans, potato-chip bags, nubby cigarette butts, and more empty Wild Turkey bottles.

  “Want a drink?” Miles asked, collapsing onto the cushions. He reached into a champagne bucket, scooped out a handful of watery, rust-colored ice, and dumped it into a plastic souvenir cup from his fraternity days at Yale.

  “You look like hell, Miles.”

  “Divorce will do that to a man,” Miles said, pouring Wild Turkey. “I expect a modicum of sympathy from a fellow traveler, Muller.”

  Kurt had lost count of how many years Miles had been divorced from his third wife. It was so long ago Kurt couldn’t remember her name.

  “You ought to move into town for a while,” he said. “The solitude is not helping.”

  “The fuck you know.” Miles picked up a remote-control device and changed channels on three TV screens suspended near the ceiling. New views of the front gate and his property line down near the creek. “I’m fast at work on my memoirs.”

  In the two months since Kurt had last seen Miles, the man’s appearance had slipped another meter in the glacial decline that had steadily eroded his past twenty-five years. He had lost more hair on his oversized, baby-pale head; another tooth was notched with dark sugar-rot. The odd twisting of his mouth when he talked, the stiff angle of his neck, were all more exaggerated, more eccentric, the tics of unrepentant physical neglect. It was impossible to imagine how Miles Cunningham had looked in his twenties, when he was apparently quite the ladies’ man, magna cum laude Ivy League, a streaking young comet in the galaxy of photojournalism.

  “Have you ever heard of an Argentine writer named Omar Quiroga?” Kurt asked, noticing that Miles had removed the matted photographs and framed magazine covers, evidence of his old life, to free the cabin walls for gun cabinets and rifle racks. The place looked like the bachelor game room for an Afrikaner soldier of fortune.