Death Takes a Honeymoon (12 page)

“Look, Muffy, I’m going out to the base and sneak a peek at that locker. Don’t worry, I’ll be discreet. I bet there’s nobody around this late, anyway.”

I clutched the phone in vexation, as if clutching B.J. to give her a good shake. There was bound to be someone around this late, a dispatcher or a security guard or...a murderer?

I stood up, hearing my own gasp in the silence. Never mind flowers. B.J. had no idea that Brian’s death was anything but accidental. She didn’t know that somewhere in the Valley tonight, someone was at large with murder on his mind. Or hers? In either case, the someone could very well be at the smoke-jumper base.

I knocked over the stool on my way out the door.

Chapter Fourteen

“HELLO?” EVEN MY HALF WHISPER SOUNDED LOUD.
“HELLO?”

B.J. had been right after all. There seemed to be no one around, although a couple of cars, including hers, were still out in front of the ready shack. Out past the grassy field where the baseball game would be, a Douglas D3 and a Twin Otter, the jump planes, stood silent and unattended.

I passed the office and pushed open the front door of the ready shack, flinching as it squeaked. Most of the lights were off, and I left them that way. Once my eyes adjusted, I could get by on the faint glow coming through the uncurtained windows.

I’d already decided what to say if I ran into anyone: I was checking out the facilities for the bachelor party. True, eleven P.M. was an odd time to be doing so. And the game wasn’t until Thursday, so this inspection could easily have waited for the light of day. But I’d bluff my way through that if I had to.

And what if I ran into Danny or the Tyke? Could I bluff them?
Don’t think about it. Just get B.J., get the necklace, and
get out.
I took a few reluctant steps into the ready room, the dispatch area where the jumpers meet for briefings and suit up for fires.

“B.J.?”

To my right, behind the dispatcher’s desk, a large whiteboard gleamed ghostly pale in the dimness. It was marked up with names and notes, all circled and arrowed into hieroglyphic columns that I couldn’t quite read. Facing the desk were a few disorderly rows of plank benches, and beyond them stood a metal rack with a row of helmets making bulbous silhouettes along the top. Below the helmets I could see four Kevlar flight suits with high Elvis collars, waiting on the speed racks for jumpers to step into them and race out to the planes.

But I didn’t see B.J., and I didn’t see any lockers. Why on earth hadn’t I asked Dr. Nothstine exactly where they were? I tried to reconstruct the one base I had visited, in Boise. Office, ready shack, parachute loft, computer center, gym...

The gym! Physical conditioning was so vital to the job that each smoke-jumper base had its own workout facilities, with weight-lifting machines, cardio trainers like bikes and rowing machines, and showers. Surely showers meant lockers?

I cut behind the dispatch desk and through to the next area, which turned out to be the sewing room. It housed a central row of tables, their surfaces littered with fabric and yardsticks, tangles of strapping, piles of buckles. Along the sides were ranks of ironing boards and heavy-duty sewing machines, each with its own work light, swivel chair, and wall bracket holding oversized spools of thread.

Smoke jumpers have time on their hands between fires and they employ it well, making almost all their own gear except the parachutes themselves. And they repair all the gear, chutes included. Besides being brave and strong, the warriors of fire are excellent seamstresses.

With the work lights off and the equipment idle, this site of industrious activity felt eerie and abandoned. The heat of the day still hung in the air but I shivered anyway, and stood motionless a moment to listen. Silence. Then I hurried past the sewing machines into the next area—and stopped in my tracks to gaze around in wonder.

In the dusky gloom, the space before me seemed to be hung with vast filmy curtains. Suspended parallel to one another, they made wide aisleways along the floor. Even before I looked upward, the vault of open space high above my head made itself felt on my oversensitive skin.

I was in the parachute loft, where the chutes are spread on long rods and winched up for inspection. Forest Service parachutes are round, with the classic dome-shaped canopy. But I knew that the BLM used these “square” chutes, which aren’t square at all but rectangular, like hang gliders.

What I didn’t know was how huge a parachute is, close-up. As I made my way cautiously down one of the aisles, the silken rectangles created walls on either side of me, soft walls that swayed and billowed gently. In the hush they made a faint whisper, even fainter than my own.

“Hello?” A noise, sudden and furtive, came from nearby. Very nearby. “Who’s there?”

Somewhere to my left, screened from my sight, a soft object dropped to the floor and was snatched up again. Someone was in the loft with me, and I was dead certain it wasn’t B.J. Time slowed. I drew a guarded breath.

If I can’t see him, then he can’t see me.
For a long moment I strained to listen, hearing nothing but the hollow thudding of my own heart. I turned to retreat, taking one stealthy step and then another, trying not to run.

Then I heard rushing footsteps, and I ran. Ahead of me, a bulge in the silken wall thrust into my path. I dodged around it, but a veiled hand caught at my shoulder. I wrenched away, lost my bearings, and when my sandal caught in the lower edge of a parachute I stumbled and lurched forward.

As I fell, my foot came out of the sandal and my fingers scrabbled in vain down the smooth fabric to the floor. I found myself on hands and knees, gasping and winded, shrinking away from the expected blow.

It never came. The footsteps hesitated, moved away. I slumped there in relief.
Thank heaven.
But then relief gave way to a reckless determination to learn the identity of my attacker. I guess adrenaline makes you stupid.

“Hey!” I yelled angrily, clambering to my feet. “Hey, stop!”

I’d barely gotten the words out when the walls came tumbling down. A creak of pulleys, a hissing slither of rope, and I was shrouded in what seemed like acres of thin, tough fabric. The more I flailed about, blind and panicky, the more I felt myself entangled like a doomed fly in a spiderweb.

And then I stopped flailing as fear coursed under my skin like a hot, prickly fluid. The footsteps were coming back. From a different direction? Hands grabbed at me, I struggled in darkness, the darkness parted as the fabric lifted and I saw...

“
B.J.?
What do you think you’re doing?”

“What do you mean, what I am I doing?” Her eyes were round. “I was just coming up from the gym. Who were you hollering at?”

“Brian’s killer. Come on!” I rushed for the building’s exit, but the intruder had vanished into the warm, still night. I heard a car moving away in the distance.

Swearing in frustration, I turned around, thinking B.J. was right behind me. But she wasn’t there, and I heard her voice, quavering oddly, from back inside the loft.

“C-Carnegie? W-what?...”

I was at her side in seconds. She stood with a fold of the fallen parachute in her hand, gaping down at the floor. A humped form lay at her feet, half concealed by swaths of fabric. I gaped at it myself, and a roaring darkness filled my eyes and ears. My thoughts slowed to a crawl and then ceased altogether.

The form was a man, a heavyset man in a gray uniform with a shield-shaped badge sewn to the front pocket. I studied the badge in numb detachment. It said “Wood River Security Services,” but as I watched, the W and the S were obscured by a liquid stain creeping slowly across the man’s chest. The stain showed black, but in brighter light it would be red, the unmistakable red of fresh blood. I took a long, shaky breath and forced my gaze to the other side of his chest.

The man was dead, of course. How could he be otherwise, with the ax head of a Pulaski biting deep into his heart?

Shock plays tricks with the memory. The main thing I would remember about the next few hours was Howard Larabee’s left eye. Larabee was the city of Ketchum’s chief of police—“The assistant chief’s on maternity leave, if you can believe such a thing”—and he seemed to be one of those people who are born indignant and never find reason to change.

Larabee’s posture was rigid, his voice was grating, and his wiry gray hair seemed to coil furiously above his pinched and resentful face. As B.J. and I sat in his office, I noticed a photo on the desk of a high-school boy posing proudly with a cello, apparently at a recital. He was slim and blond, and very handsome in an elfin sort of way.
Must take after his mother.

There was nothing elfin about the chief’s left eye, which blinked and jumped and quivered to a hypnotic degree. It was difficult not to stare, especially while I was busy lying. But even in shock, even in a police station in the middle of the night, I knew enough to trot out my story about scouting for the bachelor party. And to keep mum about Julie Nothstine’s theory that Brian Thiel was murdered. Partly because I’d promised her I would, but mostly because I knew how bizarre it would sound.

And Dr. Nothstine might be wrong, anyway. Once in the past I’d told the police more than I meant to, thus putting an innocent man and his family through hell, and I had no desire to repeat the experience. But I didn’t think she was wrong.

“A
bachelor
party?” grated Larabee. He said it as though he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his life, but apparently that’s how he said almost everything. “Why on God’s green earth would you have a bachelor party at the smoke-jumper base?”

“Because Sam Kane’s son-in-law is a smoke jumper,” said B.J. easily. B.J. is a beautiful liar, and she drops names with the best of them. “The wedding’s Saturday up at White Pine—you know, Sam’s new resort? But maybe you haven’t heard about it.”

“Of course I have!” Larabee sat up even straighter, if that was possible. “So the two of you heard someone moving around in the parachute loft, but you didn’t see them? What about voices? Could you tell how many there were, men or women, anything?”

I shook my head. “Just footsteps, but it sounded like a single person.”

“Doubtful,” he huffed. “These junkies are different than most, they’re working as a gang.”

“Junkies in Ketchum?” I said. Larabee and B.J. both stared at me, the naïve city slicker. “I mean, it’s such a small town, somehow I thought—”

“Drugs are a serious problem in rural areas,” said Larabee, his eye shimmying double time. “Mostly heroin and methamphetamines, though we don’t see a lot of meth labs in Blaine County. It’s usually imported. We’ve had a string of robberies lately, addicts looking for cash and goods they can pawn for cash. Last week a computer-store guard in Hailey was severely beaten, almost died. Lots of computers at the smoke-jumper base.”

Aha.
No wonder he accepted my story, with a crime wave already in progress. This homicidal assault fit right in with it. Larabee had us sign our statements and then informed us that our vehicles had been ferried into town by a patrolman. The clear implication was that we should get into said vehicles and go away. So we did.

Back at the house, B.J. erupted out of her car and slammed the door. “Carnegie, what the hell is going on? Did you say Brian’s
killer
? I didn’t mention that to Howard, but—”

“Good,” I said, fumbling with my key, irrationally anxious to get inside. The lasagna smell still hung in the air, domestic and comforting. “Because I don’t want to tell them, not yet.”

B.J. was right on my heels. “But why—?”

“Long story. Hang on.” I made straight for the kitchen, picked up the stool I’d knocked over, and tugged open the fridge. As I did so I observed, as if from a long, muffled distance, that my hands were trembling. In fact, all of me was trembling.
Delayed reaction. Interesting.
I scanned the shelves. Beer, two-percent milk, beer, V8, beer. “Don’t you have any wine?”

“In the door. Here, let me get it. You go sit down.”

B.J. produced a bottle and a couple of mismatched glasses, and soon I was curled in a corner of her couch, swigging cheap Chardonnay and breathing deeply. She waited a few moments, topping me up, before she spoke.

“Better now?”

I swallowed and nodded. “Much.”

“Good. Now tell me everything, right from the beginning. What have you been doing all day?”

So I told her, touching lightly on Cissy’s lunch and Shara Mortimer’s dismissal, and even more lightly on Jack’s behavior up at White Pine. What I related at length was Dr. Nothstine’s theory about Brian’s murder, the impromptu dinner party at her trailer, and my indecision about Todd Gibson as a possible suspect.

“He’s such a likable guy, but you should have seen his face when he screamed at the cat. And if he didn’t do it, then either Danny or the Tyke—”

“For God’s sake, Carnegie!” B.J. broke in. “These people are
smoke jumpers.
They’re bonded together like family. You’ve heard them; they call each other ‘bro,’ the men and women both. ‘Bro’ as in ‘brother.’ For one jumper to kill another is just unbelievable.”

“Dr. Nothstine believes it. And if Brian’s death was an accident, then who killed that guard?” I realized, with a sick twist of guilt, that I hadn’t even asked the man’s name. “And might have killed me if you hadn’t come up the stairs when you did.”

We looked at each other wordlessly, then B.J. topped up both our glasses.

“Cheers, Muffy,” she said weakly.

“Cheers.” We sipped in silence for a while, and my mind strayed, irrelevantly, to her original quest. “Did you find Brian’s locker?”

“Yeah, but there’s a big old padlock on it.”

“I know. I’ve got the combination.”

“You do? Why didn’t you tell me? We could go back and...” Her face changed comically as she realized what she was saying, and why we weren’t going anywhere near the jumper base tonight. “I guess that’s not such a good idea.”

“Not so good, no.” I swigged more wine. I like wine much better than beer. “Actually, it’s a dreadful idea.”

Her snort turned into a giggle. “Horrible.”

“Appalling.”

“Atrocious.”

We were both giggling now, then laughing, uncontrollably, deliriously. I slumped farther into the couch and sloshed some wine on the cushions. B.J. relieved me of my glass and we both slumped over, cackling like madwomen. By the time we subsided I was half asleep. Talk about a long, strange trip. I heard B.J. getting up, then felt a blanket settle over me, light and soft.

Within seconds I was dead to the world. So to speak.