Into Thin Air Read online

  He retrieved the pistol underneath the seat and headed out, the wound in his forehead bleeding down his face, a hot gash of pain. Two miles down the highway, a moving van hauling furniture from Santa Fe crept around a curve. Kurt stepped into its headlights and raised his badge.

  Muffin showed up at the hospital in time to watch the doctor administer the last of four stitches. The deputy’s face appeared drawn from sleep and her hair looked as though she’d walked in through a fierce gale.

  “Your sitter called the night dispatcher,” she said. “She thought something was wrong when you didn’t check in.”

  “Lennon okay?”

  “Sleeping like a hound dog.”

  She bent over to look at the wound. “What’d he use?”

  “Butt end of a pistol, I imagine,” Kurt said.

  “That would be my guess,” the doctor confirmed. He was applying a gauze patch over the stitches.

  Muffin smiled. “My guess is a sap was involved,” she said.

  “Ha ha,” Kurt said. He closed his eyes again and laced his fingers across his chest.

  “What the hell were you doing at the Grottos in the middle of the night?” she asked.

  “It’s complicated,” he sighed. He didn’t want to think about how stupid they’d been. “Find Chip,” he said. “He’s probably still at Shooter’s practicing his two-step. And round up a half dozen of the others.”

  Muffin turned to the doctor. “Shouldn’t he be in bed?” she asked.

  “Of course,” the doctor said. “This is quite a nasty blow.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Kurt said, raising himself up on his elbows. “We’ve got to get back out there.”

  “You need some rest,” the doctor said.

  “Later,” he said.

  For two hours the search party roamed through the shallow caves and deep jagged clefts of the Grottos. They used lamps with the voltage of klieg lights, and the rock formations glistened like veins of silver. They found nothing, not even Kurt’s flashlight or his leather jacket.

  “How was it that the guy could just walk up and crack you?” Muffin asked.

  “It was dark,” Kurt said.

  “My god, Kurt, it’s never that dark. Were you and the doctor a little distracted?”

  They were climbing down a ravine toward the waterfall. Kurt suddenly felt very weak. The anesthetic was wearing off and his head weighed a thousand pounds. He sat down on a smooth ledge of granite, his hiking boots dangling into darkness.

  “I still don’t understand why you two came out here,” she said.

  Kurt leaned back against a boulder. The doctor was right—he needed to sleep. He could have closed his eyes right now and happily drifted off till morning.

  “I think she was testing me,” he said. “She knows more about Quiroga’s death than she’s letting on, but she doesn’t know who to trust. She has a problem with cops.”

  Muffin slid down beside him and turned off her lamp. “Has it occurred to you that this might have been a setup?”

  It had occurred to him, yes. But he wouldn’t let himself believe it. “Setup for what?” he said.

  “Maybe she needed to disappear,” Muffin said. “Maybe she’s dirty in the Quiroga murder.”

  Kurt didn’t want to hear this. He reached into his down vest and found the plastic container of painkillers.

  “This afternoon I got in touch with Quiroga’s newspaper publisher in Buenos Aires,” she said. “Fernando Lugones. Nice guy, speaks the Queen’s English. Omar was his friend and he took the news pretty hard. Lugones had his personnel department fax me some information. Omar Quiroga has a nice fat life-insurance policy, Kurt. Guess who his beneficiary is?”

  He swallowed two pills, his mouth dry as cardboard. “She didn’t have to disappear to collect the money,” he said. “In fact, it would be better for her if she didn’t.”

  Wind whistled through the gorge. Muffin hunkered down in her parka, silent, thinking.

  “So who hit me, then?” he challenged. “Who’d she get to do that?”

  “How about her husband?” she said, unsure now.

  “Her husband is dead,” Kurt said.

  Muffin made a scoffing sound. “Where did you get that?”

  “She told me.”

  The deputy stood up and bounced on her toes, trying to stay warm. “I imagine she told you a lot of things tonight, didn’t she, Kurt?”

  “Her husband is alive?”

  “Lugones knows Dr. Rojas too and gave me the name of the hospital where she’s on senior staff,” she said. “I finally located an administrator who speaks English, and she told me that Dr. Rojas and her husband are on a business trip to the States. ‘Isn’t it nice,’ the woman said, ‘that the two of them could arrange holidays in North America at the same time.’ Imagine the fun vacation they’re going to have now, Kurt. Vegas, Tahoe. Looks like they’re coming into some money.”

  Kurt waited for the drugs to kick in, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. He felt like resting his head on a rock until all of this was over.

  “You know, Kurt, my brothers used to say, ‘Never let the little head do the thinking for the big.’” She casually kicked at a stack of rocks and they skittered into the gully, bouncing and clattering into the dark chasm below. “Is that what you’ve done tonight, Sheriff? Let the little head do your thinking for you?”

  He was too exhausted to feel humiliation. He wanted to go home. “Help me up, Muffin,” he grumbled.

  He held out a limp arm and she regarded it without moving. “Have you compromised yourself in this investigation, Kurt?”

  “Fuck off,” he said.

  The wind was getting colder now, almost two miles above the ancient seabed in the black hole of night. With his last ounce of strength he rolled to his knees.

  “Always the martyr,” she said, looping his arm around her neck. Cheek to cheek, her skin smelled like the brown nut fragrance of soap that hangs from a string.

  At home under warm sheets he dreamed of women. He dreamed about the time he’d made love to Meg in the Grottos, and about Graciela Rojas, that he had found her many years later, living in a small tropical hotel by a lagoon.

  When the telephone rang he woke in a fog of narcosis, disoriented from pills, believing he had dreamed this call. “Graciela,” he said, certain he would hear her voice on the other end. Certain she was calling to tell him she was all right. Waiting for him, somewhere. “Graciela,” he muttered, “where did you go?”

  “Wake up and shake a leg, law man!” a drunken voice howled into the line. “Red alert! Oooga, oooga! Mormon gunboats on Castle Creek! Dive, dive, dive!”

  Chapter seven

  Muffin spent a couple of hours dozing on the living-room couch and came upstairs around seven to check Kurt’s stitches. For a moment, in his drowsy confusion, he thought she might have slept with him. She replaced the gauze, then went down to the kitchen to make breakfast for Lennon and a sick tray for Kurt. Lennon kissed his father and wrestled with him on the bed, asking to see the stitches.

  “Does it hurt, Daddy?”

  “A little,” Kurt said.

  “I’ll give you a magic touch,” Lennon said, placing his spidery fingers over the swollen ridge. This was a ritual Kurt had invented when the child was having trouble adjusting to day care: a magic touch on Lennon’s head every morning to make the day a perfect one.

  “This means you’ll find the bank robbers today,” Lennon said, his fingers lingering a second longer. Lennon thought every criminal was a bank robber.

  At eight o’clock Muffin helped the boy gather up his Key Force vehicles and ushered him out the door for the day-care center. Kurt slept another hour, then forced himself to rouse and shower. He set the Pitkin County Sheriff cap low on his forehead, trying to conceal the wound, and drove down dusty Red Mountain Road into town, thinking all the way about Graciela Rojas. In the brisk morning air his head began to clear and he slowly came to acknowledge how bothered he was by Muffin’s s
uspicions. He wanted to believe that whoever had killed Omar Quiroga was also stalking Graciela and had followed them out to the Grottos. But why had she lied about her husband? How much of her story was true?

  Tired and numb, Kurt pulled into his space at the courthouse and sat staring at the sign that said For Sheriff Only, dreading the morning ahead. He knew that only one thing was irrefutable: he was with Graciela Rojas when she disappeared. Any way you sliced it, he had to be the worst excuse for a cop in the entire state of Colorado.

  In the office Chip Bodine was leaning back in a swivel chair, reading the Aspen Daily News, his Birkenstock sandals propped up on the receptionist’s desk. Omar Quiroga occupied the lead story.

  “The phone’s been ringing off the hook,” Chip said. “They’re starting to hear about this Quiroga thing in the real world.”

  “For Chrissake, Bodine,” Kurt mumbled, “you’re an officer of the law. Get yourself some regulation shoes.”

  Chip lowered his long knobby hands, crumpling the newspaper in his lap, and studied Kurt’s forehead. “One season I had a gash like that,” he said. “Wiped out on a freaking barrel marker.”

  Kurt pressed the flesh between his eyes. “Did the APB go out on Graciela Rojas?”

  “Statewide,” Chip nodded. “So far, nada.”

  Chip Bodine had once been a world-class skier, in the late sixties, early seventies, and had raced on the American team in the ’72 Winter Olympics. His best showing was forty-third in the downhill, placing him behind gaunt, graceless tribesmen from equatorial Africa. He blamed late-night parties, hashish, and a bum knee. The knee required several operations, and he finally gave up the sport to service the escort needs of a succession of aging widows in the Roaring Fork Valley. These days he was keeping company with Miss Norway 1959 in her gingerbread chalet near Buttermilk Mountain. Kurt would have fired him years ago, but Chip was the best snowmobile driver in the Valley and knew every obscure trail within a hundred miles. There was also Wednesday-night poker, which went back twenty years.

  The phone rang. “I’m not here,” Kurt said to Libbie McCullough.

  “At eleven the mayor’s coming by with Nolan Riggs from the Tourist Bureau,” she said, chewing on a carrot stick. “Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office,” she spoke into the receiver.

  “Isn’t there something you could be doing?” Kurt glared at Chip.

  “Like what, Jefè?”

  “Like checking on the prisoners or something.”

  Chip shrugged lazily. “Nobody in lockup except two Brit ruggers the city cops caught pissing in the fountain.” He twined his fingers, stretched, and cracked knuckles. He was the only man Kurt knew who still wore his hair in a shoulder-length braid. “Helluva duke-out getting those shitheads in the tank.”

  When Kurt opened the door to his office, a man was waiting for him in a stenciled folding chair. A frail man with skin so translucent he might’ve been hiding for several summers in a root cellar. He sat patiently with his fingers resting on the kneecap of his crossed leg. There was something fussy and formal and fastidious about his carriage.

  Kurt turned back to Chip.

  “Oh, yeah,” the deputy said. “There’s somebody waiting for you.”

  Kurt gave Chip a chilling smile. “Remind me to replace you, Bodine, when things settle down.”

  He stepped into his office and removed his cap.

  “Sheriff Muller.” The old man stood, offering his damp hand, a specimen of delicate bones. “My name is Hans Gitter and I have come about Omar Quiroga.”

  Another visitor with a foreign accent. Not exactly German. Kurt’s parents had a German accent. This was something close.

  “I am with the conference at Star Meadow,” Hans Gitter said. “Quiroga and I have made friends, yes? We have spent much time together walking the grounds and discussing philosophie. I deeply regret the news of his death.”

  The man had to be pushing eighty. His hair was long and plumelike and white as an egret, with the kind of haphazard, brushed-through care of a tidy old professor who doesn’t see well. His lively blue eyes held moisture, not from emotion but from some physical condition of age. There was a slight tremble about his head and hands. Omar Quiroga’s death had cast a sleepless sorrow across his shrunken face.

  “I have been thinking about it all night, trying to remember if anything he said would be helpful to the authorities.”

  Hans Gitter wore a goatee that matched the faintly yellowing whiteness of his hair, and he stroked it while he spoke. “Then I remembered our sojourn into town,” he said.

  He explained that last Tuesday afternoon the two of them had driven into Aspen to look around the resort village. They strolled along the pedestrian malls, browsed through shops, rode the gondola to the top of Ajax and had lunch in the restaurant, “a most expensive, and most terrible, wurst,” he said. At the end of the day, when they stopped for coffee in the Victorian parlor of a Main Street bookstore, Omar Quiroga noticed a beautiful young woman perusing the magazines.

  “’Twas as if he’d seen a spirit,” Hans Gitter said. His face glowed with the memory of her. “A tall creature with the skin of a Moorish princess. I at first thought Omar was struck by her beauty. But no. He seemed to know her.”

  Hans Gitter explained that Omar rose to speak with the young woman and that there followed what appeared to be an awkward misunderstanding. “They spoke in Spanish, so I did not understand,” he said. “The young woman left the bookstore soon after. When I asked Quiroga what it was all about, he shrugged and simply said he had taken her for someone else.”

  Kurt examined the coffee mug on his desk. It hadn’t been washed in a week. “Long black hair?” he said, pouring coffee from the pot on the hot plate. “A string of dark freckles across her nose?”

  Hans Gitter looked surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. “Do you know her?”

  “Were they speaking Spanish,” Kurt said, “or could it have been Italian?”

  The professor looked insulted. “Spanish, I assure you,” he said.

  “Is that the only time you saw them together?”

  “Yes,” he nodded slowly. “We were virtually inseparable, Quiroga and I. I never saw her again.” His eyes gleamed. “It is the only thing out of the ordinary I can remember from our four days together, Sheriff Muller. Nothing of importance, I’m quite sure. But I thought the authorities ought to know.”

  Kurt thanked him for coming in and offered coffee, but the old man declined with a trembly wave of the hand.

  “Now that you’re here, Professor Gitter, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Not at all.” Gitter smiled weakly. He shifted his thin legs and sat a little straighter in the chair.

  Kurt leaned against a corner of his desk. “What is your impression of Dr. Graciela Rojas?”

  Hans Gitter wagged his head, a gesture of indifference. “An intelligent woman,” he said, pursing his lips. “Very dedicated. I’m sure she’s taking it hard, poor dear. They were very close, you know.”

  Kurt blew on his coffee. “How close?”

  The old man blushed, the first sign of color in his ancient face. “Sheriff Muller,” he said, “discretion prevents me—”

  “This is very important, Professor Gitter,” Kurt said. “A man is dead and I need to know the personal details of his last days here.” He was not going to mention Graciela’s disappearance. Not yet.

  “I assume,” Hans Gitter said, embarrassed by such talk, “that they were lovers, Sheriff.”

  Had she been lying all along? Kurt wondered. “Did Quiroga tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you assume it? Did you see anything to confirm this?”

  “No, I do not have empirical evidence,” Hans Gitter said. “I—” He caught himself, crimson with confusion, his eyes drifting toward the slack hands trembling in his lap. “I—I am not sure why I think it so. Please forgive me, sir. It is the idle assumption of a silly old academic.”

  “
Are you aware she’s married?”

  He was beginning to probe with the persistence of a jealous suitor.

  “I have only just met the woman,” Hans Gitter said.

  The intercom buzzed and both men started. Kurt leaned over and barked into the box. “Libbie, I told you I’m not here!”

  “Sorry, boss,” Libbie’s voice hummed. “Neal Staggs on line one. He says it’s an emergency.”

  Kurt yanked up the receiver.

  “We’ve got a situation out here in Emma,” Staggs said. “I don’t want to cross wires on this one, Muller. Let’s make nice and play it by the book. Townies and Feds on the same team for once.”

  “What’s the deal, Staggs?”

  “One of my agents has been shot,” he said. “We’ve got Quiroga’s killers holed up in a farmhouse. You want in on it?”

  Kurt and Chip Bodine took the cutoff near Old Snowmass and sped down a country road that rose and fell like a dragon’s backbone through tranquil hayfields and the horse-grazing pastures of gentlemen farmers. In the distance they heard staccato volleys of automatic gunfire, the echoes of a small war in a far-off country.

  “Sounds like they started the fun without us,” Chip drawled.

  On a hill overlooking the besieged farmhouse Kurt hit the brakes and the county squad car skidded to a halt in loose gravel. He had never seen anything like it. A helicopter swerved low over the roof, guns blazing, wood shingles dancing like dominoes. Sharpshooters dressed in camouflage took aim from a weathered barn. Round after round exploded against the stone masonry in puffs of white smoke. Windows shattered, the gutter dropped from the roof, the screen door split off its hinges. Kurt couldn’t imagine what had provoked such a vicious attack. He saw no signs that anyone inside was returning fire.

  He knew this farmhouse. He had been here once, years ago, to pick apples in the small grove behind the house. Now the trees struggled to survive, their limbs scrawny and bare and starved for attention. The ranch fence had collapsed from neglect, and except for the beat-up Buick parked next to a dilapidated tack shed, it was hard to imagine that anyone had set foot on the property in months.