Killer Summer Page 5

  I doubt that, she thought. “Oh, I’ll be there,” she said, smiling.

  14

  But if it’s vinegar,” Fiona said, standing on a small stepladder in the glare of fluorescent lights, her camera mounted on a tripod and aimed straight down, “then why would anyone bid anything for it?”

  Walt had set her up in the Command Center, a room laid out like a college lecture hall that sat fifty. There were half a dozen flat screens suspended from the ceiling and an electronic white board. He carefully rotated the first of the three bottles exactly as Remy had instructed. It, along with the others, remained cradled in gray foam. The initials, etched into the glass below the label, came into view:

  J.A.

  “John Adams,” he said. “The John Adams. The wine was a gift to Adams from Thomas Jefferson upon Adams’s return from Holland, where he’d just secured the financing necessary to save the republic. These bottles celebrate the United States before it existed.”

  “But a million dollars!?”

  “It’s an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar reserve. They could go far higher than a million,” Walt said. “They sell as a single lot. Remy says his experts claim the wine is still drinkable, but to get that price it doesn’t have to be.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “There’s ego involved. Since it benefits the center, a nonprofit, the bids get ginned up to astronomical prices. It’s all about who gets what, who can spend what, not drinkability.”

  “The more I learn about this place, the less I understand.”

  “It’s a pissing contest… Pretty easy to understand.”

  Walt continued rotating the bottles. She fired off shots.

  “Does he get them back after this?”

  “No. It’s on us to protect and transport them. A motorcade for a couple of wine bottles. All because they’re evidence in a homicide.”

  “You think other sheriffs deal with this sort of thing?”

  It was a question his father might have asked. He reacted defensively, muscles tensing, a spike of heat up his spine, then calmed himself down and said, “It is what it is. We have to assume they may try for them again. Wine is like fine art: there’s always a black market willing to pay. These people were obviously well organized, well informed. I’m assuming they have a backup plan.”

  She climbed down the stepladder. He liked the way she moved, enjoyed watching her… hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed it, in fact, until that moment.

  They were interrupted by a deputy trying to suppress his contagious excitement.

  “Sheriff, we’ve got something.”

  Thirty minutes later, Walt was riding shotgun in the Hummer, a vehicle anonymously donated to the Sheriff’s Office by a Hollywood star. Ostentatious and unnecessary most of the time, the Hummer rode high and carried four easily. Its roof rack, light bar, and the whoop-whoop of its siren cleared the three northbound lanes like a snowplow in winter.

  “It’s possible,” he told the other three, all of whom were decked out in SWAT gear, “that the suspects may possess paralyzing gas. They’re to be considered armed and dangerous. I saw two men out Democrat Gulch. Now we’ve added a woman to that. We’re going in small. Don’t make me regret it.” He could have called up the entire twelve-man Special Response unit, but mobilizing the squad took time he didn’t have.

  Brandon raised his voice to carry over the roar of the siren. “How do we know any of this?”

  “Evidence,” Walt hollered back.

  Walt and Fiona had been interrupted by a hyper deputy named Carsman.

  “The traffic cams you asked for,” Carsman had said, poking his head into the Command Center. “We’ve got the wrecker before and after it hooks onto the Taurus.”

  Walt and Fiona had followed Carsman down the hall to the office’s computer lab.

  “We picked up the Taurus and the wrecker heading north on Airport Drive,” Carsman explained.

  The traffic cam archives produced color images shot at two-second intervals. Because of the two-second jumps, cars appeared and disappeared from Main Street.

  “We don’t pick them up again until the south-facing camera at Croy,” Carsman continued. Pointing to the screen, he said, “The wrecker. This is Malone’s Taurus. Now, check this.”

  A woman pushed a stroller out into the crosswalk. The traffic stopped and held as she bent over picking something up.

  “Freeze it!” Walt said.

  “She dropped something,” Carsman said.

  “A driver had come to her aid.” On any other day, this would have been cause for mild celebration: traffic fatalities at crosswalks were a serious problem in the valley. The fact that traffic had stopped for a pedestrian was a relief to see.

  Walt watched the same series several times: the wrecker backing up, the Taurus making the turn attached to it.

  “The traffic cams are, what, two months old?” Walt said. “If they scouted this back in June, they wouldn’t have known about them. That’s probably the only reason we’ve got them on camera.” The system was designed to capture the plates of cars running traffic lights. Within a few minutes, they had the wrecker’s registration, and the Yukon alongside it.

  “The Yukon’s going to be a rental or a stolen vehicle,” Walt had informed Carsman. “If it’s a rental, it’s on a stolen or counterfeit credit card, which won’t do us any good, but run anything you get as far as it takes you. The Yukon’s our lead for now. Call every hotel, inn, and lodge in the valley. With parking being what it is, most require plate numbers at check-in. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Within twenty minutes, the Yukon had been placed at the Summit Guest House, a sixty-room, midpriced hotel on the north end of Ketchum.

  “Room two twenty-six,” Walt now told Brandon from the Hummer’s passenger’s seat. “One night left on the reservation.”

  “And tomorrow night’s the wine auction,” Brandon said.

  “I guess they aren’t sticking around afterward.”

  Brandon soon killed the Hummer’s overhead lights and siren, pulling off Main Street into an office-building parking lot north of Atkinson’s Market, well out of sight of the Summit Guest House. Walt and the three deputies climbed out, one carrying a door ram. The three were armed with semiautomatic rifles, “flash and bang” grenades, tear gas, and other hardware. The group held to a tall wooden fence at the end of the parking lot that screened them from the guesthouse. Room 226 faced west, looking out at Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

  Walt put a man on the back door and sent another to the front. He and Brandon addressed the receptionist and then the manager. The sight of Brandon decked out in SWAT gear and the county sheriff in a Kevlar vest startled the man. He was a tightly wound fortysomething, with thick glasses and a high voice.

  Walt asked that the second floor be cleared, a process that consumed the next several minutes.

  Walt asked for the elevators to be shut down. He and the three climbed the staircase in double time, hurried down the corridor, and regrouped outside of 226. The deputies wore gas masks, helmets, and ear protection.

  Walt used a master card key to crack open the door. The ram took out the inside chain as the door flew open. The three deputies swarmed the suite ahead of Walt, calling out loudly, “Clear!,” as they quickly determined the status of the bathroom, closet, and bedroom. Walt followed inside, annoyed by his bad luck. Then he looked down and saw wet footprints on the carpet.

  He called out a radio code into the room that meant: “Suspect in hiding.” It proved a second too late.

  A door on the bedroom armoire came open, and a naked woman streaked across the small room, dragging a shirt behind her. She grabbed something off the desk, rushed out the open door to the balcony-left open by Brandon-and jumped.

  Brandon was a split second behind her. He leaped over the rail and fell straight down through a canvas patio awning that had supported her weight but failed to support his.

  “I’m okay!” Brandon shouted.

&n
bsp; Walt watched the woman’s bare backside flee across the parking lot. She pulled on the shirt midstride.

  By the time the other two deputies took off, she was long gone. An escape route had been planned. Walt was betting she’d grabbed a cell phone off the desk.

  No one had seen her face, but Walt thought he had a vague idea what she looked like. It was the woman with the baby stroller.

  15

  On a manicured lawn, nestled behind the Sun Valley Lodge and cast against a backdrop of rugged, summer-snowcapped mountains, loomed an enormous white tent. In a darkening sky, fiery pink clouds began to melt and dissolve. Vintners put last-minute touches on their tables in preparation for the wine tasting, a preview of the following night’s auction items.

  The presenters, smartly dressed and deeply tanned, knew one another well. With the preview being as important to them as the rehearsal dinner was to the bride, nerves were on display. It was a matter of honor and company pride to fetch higher bids than the competition, even at a fund-raiser. A few lots would sell with reserves. The most famous of these was the John Adams.

  Walt, Brandon, and a deputy named Blompier delivered the attaché case without incident. The search for the female suspect had failed, adding to Walt’s unease. Although the motel was being watched, Walt didn’t expect anyone to return.

  With the temperature in the low seventies and expected to drop ten degrees every hour for the next three, the Adams bottles had been transferred to a temperature-controlled Plexiglas viewing case. Brandon stood guard immediately behind the case despite Remy having requested something low-profile.

  Guests began arriving.

  Seeing the reverence in the faces of the onlookers as they approached the Adams display, Walt understood how rare such a viewing had to be. To him, they were three scratched old bottles of wine, but he overheard the discussions: the story of Remy’s discovery of the bottles in Paris, the lengthy authentication, marred by some kind of myth straining to be legend… the controversy… and always the astronomical reserve price.

  Walt had posted several deputies: four in uniform outside, two in plainclothes inside. He had the Mobile Command vehicle, the MC, parked nearby, a thirty-foot RV tricked out with all sorts of communications equipment, all of it donated.

  Walt spotted Remy, crossed the tent, and politely ushered him into the grand dining tent, where a sea of bare round tables and a massive stage awaited the following night’s festivities. He handed Remy a stack of nine photographs that Branson Risk had e-mailed to him.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  The photos were dark, the faces distorted by movement. The man in question had been wrestling with the attaché case, which was locked to the Taurus’s seat frame. Two of the nine caught a piece of his face in focus.

  “No,” said Remy.

  “You have to wonder how these people knew what they knew,” Walt said. “They went to a lot of trouble trying to steal that case.”

  “The Adams bottles have been in the catalog for months, Sheriff. Whoever did this has had a long time to plan.”

  “But as I understand it, Branson Risk contained the delivery details to a handful of people.”

  “I’m certain of it. But they are in the business of moving valuable art, are they not? Certainly they must establish patterns to their work, no?” He passed the photographs back to Walt.

  “It still doesn’t explain how they knew which flight Malone would be on or which car he’d rented.”

  “Someone at the airport… a TSA agent, perhaps. The case required all sorts of waivers because of the TSA’s ban on fluids. We did as they asked. If you paid off the right agent, you’d know what’s moving where.”

  “You’ve thought about this, have you?” Walt asked.

  “It’s my million dollars, Sheriff. A man has been killed. Yes, I’ve thought about it.”

  “We are on occasion asked to provide transportation for valuable art,” Walt conceded. “As you can imagine, there’s a great deal of it in this valley. This kind of thing is not entirely foreign to me. But, honestly, we’ve met private, not commercial, jets. I’ve never known of any big-dollar private art arriving on a commercial flight.”

  “That was at my request, I’m afraid,” Remy said. “Your local airport ran out of landing times for general aviation, given the high volume of private aircraft arriving this weekend. That left us the option of landing the bottles privately in Twin Falls and driving them two hours north or flying them in commercially and requiring a nightmare of paperwork. The less they’re moved, the better. I opted for the commercial flight, going against Branson Risk’s recommendations. So the blame falls on me.”

  “And Branson Risk,” Walt said.

  “I’m not convinced this is going to get you anywhere.”

  Walt tapped the top photograph. “I need to identify this individual. I need to know how they could be so well prepared and ready for Malone’s arrival.”

  “You believe they will try again.” Remy made it a statement. “I seriously doubt that.”

  “Tonight, tomorrow night-they’ve spent time and money on this. They’ll make another try. It’ll be something bold, daring, and, they hope, completely unexpected. The way they used the wrecker tells us that much.” He pulled Remy deeper into the tent, well out of earshot. “What if I could have a local artist duplicate the bottles? Copy the labels? Replace the real bottles with fakes?”

  Remy’s eyes hardened. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is an educated crowd, not easily fooled. I guarantee you.”

  “Just a thought,” Walt said.

  “And a ridiculous one at that,” Remy said. “Do me a favor and protect my bottles, Sheriff. Don’t go getting creative. If we need to reinvent the wheel, no one will be knocking on your door. So do what you’re good at and be a presence.” Saliva popped from his mouth with the p in presence. He thumped Walt on the arm playfully. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” he answered rhetorically.

  16

  With Lorraine Duisit on his arm, Christopher Cantell entered the wine-auction preview displaying an invitation that had him as Christopher Conrad, owner of Oakleaf Barrels, a manufacturer of casks and distributor of distillery equipment. He wore black silk pants, a white linen shirt, a hand-loomed sweater of burgundy raw silk and forest green microfibers, and lots of gold bling on his hands and wrists. He had donned a medium-length hairpiece and green contact lenses, easy additions that grossly altered his looks. Lorraine wore a copper satin top over tight-fitting autumn-toned linen pants and Ceylon-white, crystal-beaded Bianca sandals. The pair exuded enough nouveau richness to repel any possible interest in them.

  Cantell left the photography to Lorraine, who, even though she was a natural brunette, could play the dumb blonde with aplomb. She made a point of giggling and jiggling her way around the tent, speaking a little bit too loudly, name-dropping and snapping shots. She made sure to get shots with the golf shop in the background.

  Cantell took note of the large number of drivers and security personnel loitering outside. He was less surprised by the two undercover and four uniformed men, probably from the Sheriff’s Office. He and Lorraine confined themselves to the lots of red wines, tasting several cabernets and pinots, sampled the hors d’oeuvres, then pulled away, keeping to themselves and making a point to stay away from the Adams bottles.

  “This could get interesting,” she said.

  “Already is.”

  “Are you sure it’s enough?”

  “No,” he answered. “It’s a bit far, and may not do the trick.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’m considering Fort Worth,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “People were hurt,” she reminded him.

  “Mild stuff. Outpatient material.”

  “It was a stampede!”

  “I’m only considering… no decision yet.”

  “Hello!” It was a blond woman whom Cantell took to be in her early fifties, th
ough there was no telling with this set: she might have been seventy underneath all the work. “Susie,” she said, extending her telltale hand, her skin like a dried apple.

  “Chris Conrad and my friend Laura,” Cantell said. “Oakleaf Barrels.”

  She tried to look impressed but obviously had not heard of them.

  “It’s like those BASF television ads,” Cantell said. “You know, we don’t make the wine, we make what makes the wine better. In our case, it’s the oak casks. Can’t have a good wine without a properly aged cask.”

  “Oh… of course… How interesting.” She couldn’t have cared less. “Do you know anyone here? May I introduce you around?”

  “We’re just fine, thank you. Looking forward to tomorrow night.”

  Lorraine burst in. “What a lovely setting.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “And how do you fit into all this?” Cantell asked.

  “I’m in real estate,” Susie said. “Along with about half the valley’s population.” She smiled with her big teeth. “I serve on the center’s board. We reap the rewards of all this.” She waved her hand. “It’s so generous of all of you.”

  “Happy to do our part. Will the dinner go off on time?” Cantell asked.

  “Honestly,” she said, lowering her voice, “we typically run about a half hour behind. Ketchum time, we call it.”

  “So dinner will seat around…?”

  “Eight-fifteen, eight-thirty, I would guess. Will you be with us for the dinner?”

  “Oh, we’re in for the whole enchilada,” said Lorraine, “not that you’re serving Mexican.” She hoped for a laugh. “Chris brought his wallet, if you know what I mean.”

  “Isn’t that… delightful,” Susie said. She glanced around, desperate to be free of them. “I expect I’ll see you tomorrow night, then.”

  Cantell offered her his hand, and they shook.

  “It’ll be a blast,” Lorraine said.

  Cantell flashed her a look. “It sure will be,” he said.

  Susie worked her way back into the crowd.