Free Fall (27 page)

Anything would be more dignified than the mittens Carrie had given him for Christmas.

He balled up his fist and put it through a small pane of glass in the door, flipped the deadbolt, and slipped inside. The kitchen he entered was about what he'd expected. The Bosdale family had apparently spent a great deal of money in an attempt to keep the original turn-of-the-century feel of the house and to camouflage any modern-day necessities. Useless artifacts and antiques cluttered every wall and corner, making him feel as though he was walking through a Civil War garage sale. The air smelled vaguely of mold and earth, but it didn't feel as dead as he would have expected in a house that had been closed up for months.

He had no idea what he was looking for as he walked quietly up the stairs, down the hall that ran the length of the second floor, and into the bathroom at the end. It, like the rest of the house, had a cartoonish antiquity to it and was devoid of personal effects. He turned a faucet handle and nothing came out.

Beamon started back down the hall, stopping in a small room that looked like it belonged to a young boy. What made it stand out was the unmistakable smell of paint and completely unmarked walls. If the local cops had been right and the Bosdales hadn't been around for months, it seemed kind of strange that they would bother to have a contractor come and paint a single tiny bedroom... No. He was letting his imagination run away with him. There was no evidence of Newberry having been moved postmortem. Hell, the chances that this house even figured into his case were almost nil. He was here purely out of desperation and the fact that he didn't have anything to go home to.

After a brief inspection of the two other bedrooms, Beamon took a quick turn around the ground floor. It was similarly semi renovated and pretty much empty of anything but old furniture, with the notable exception of a small office behind the living room. It alone seemed to have been spared the ravages of twentieth-century power tools and overeager decorators. The walls were cracked and discolored, and the oak floor had been worn away in the pattern of a century of foot traffic. The furniture was modern and electronics were all state of the art.

Beamon sat down in the expensive-looking leather chair behind the mahogany desk that dominated the room and started opening drawers.

Once again, nothing very intriguing general office supplies, mostly. No documents of any kind. There was a pad of stationery on the blotter with a company name on it: Deritech, Inc. Beamon pulled out his glasses and looked at the address: Lewiston, Maine.

What was Darby's connection to this town? he wondered, leaning back and putting his feet on the desk's carefully polished top. It wasn't between Fayetteville and Wyoming. And any local climbers serious enough to be friends with her would most likely be known by the cops.

Why would she detour here? Was it as simple as hitching a ride on the first car that would stop for her and going in whatever direction it took her to put miles between her and the murder scene? Somehow he doubted it. The further he got into this, the less it looked like the simple answer was going to be the correct one.

Why the out-of-state trooper? State cops didn't normally do that kind of investigation. And the story that she was wanted in another state was bullshit the information he had suggested that she had only been arrested once in her life, for disturbing the peace.

He smiled, remembering the old police report he'd read. Darby had apparently been in the habit of picking up extra cash by getting into pull up contests with macho types in bars. Sometimes there would be a significant number of bets that she undoubtedly couldn't cover. She'd let her opponent go first, and then he'd have to watch that cute little thing desperately fight her way to ten or twelve repetitions, or whatever it took to win by one.

About two years ago, that little money-making scheme had backfired when she unknowingly challenged a Navy SEAL who was home on leave.

He and his friends figured they'd been had when the cute little thing cranked off forty-seven to beat him. In the disturbance that ensued, Darby and a friend of hers were the only two people arrested.

Beamon turned a crystal paperweight over in his hands and went back to trying to sort out the increasingly bizarre facts of the case. Why were so many people interested in one dirt-poor girl with connections to nothing but a lover's quarrel turned ugly? He put his full mind to that question for the fiftieth time since he'd started this thing and came up with the same result: nothing.

It was time to shift gears he was getting nowhere. There were two people involved in this crime: a killer and a victim. What if he discarded the theory that people were interested in Darby Moore? What if it was actually Tristan Newberry who had captured everyone's imagination?

Mark Beamon stopped in the doorway and surveyed the halffull restaurant bar The light was dim, but he was still able to pick Carrie out of the crowd. She seemed completely absorbed by the television bolted to the wall across from her, and Beamon followed her gaze to the glowing image of Robert Taylor. He was speaking to a small group of elderly people, wearing a tasteful sweater and no tie. The sound was off, but he was undoubtedly trying to convince them that he had the power to turn America's culture back into that of a black-and-white sitcom. It was Carrie's one quirk--she actually followed and bought into all this political bullshit. The woman dressed up to vote.

Fortunately, the circus that had been this year's presidential election was starting to die down at this point. The press was already treating Taylor like the new chief executive, and even hard-core liberals seemed to be okay with the selection, though they were trying not to be too obvious.

In the end, they were just grateful that David Hallorin hadn't been able to get his campaign out of the cellar.

Beamon wandered to the bar, keeping out of Carrie's line of sight.

"Light beer," he said to the bartender.

"Whatever you've got."

The man dug a Budweiser out of the cooler and twisted the top off.

"Do you have a table? I can have a waitress bring this over and put it on your bill."

Beamon answered by digging a five out of his pocket and slapping it on the bar. He wasn't quite ready for Carrie yet. The phone conversation he'd had with her earlier that day had been filled with unusual and uncomfortable silences that he'd expected but hadn't been prepared for.

It seemed as if almost overnight the casual ease of their relationship had been replaced by tension and awkwardness. He asked himself for the thousandth time if he'd done the right thing. And for the thousandth time, the answer was that he didn't know.

Beamon took a few sips of his beer and watched Taylor shake the wrinkled hands of his audience with the exaggerated warmth achieved only by the most accomplished politicians. When the scene cut to a commercial and Carrie's attention turned back to the glass of wine in front of her, Beamon started slowly weaving his way through the tightly packed tables toward her.

"Carrie," he said putting a hand on her shoulder and then quickly slipping into the chair across from her. He hoped that he had made the maneuver look effortless, but in actuality he had carefully designed it to put enough physical distance between them to solve the "to kiss or not to kiss" conundrum.

"How are you?"

"Fine," Carrie said with a hesitant smile.

"The question is, how are you?"

"Good. I'm good."

Another one of those silences.

"What's going on with the FBI?"

He shook his head.

"I still have some time to think about it. Until I make a decision, I don't think they're very interested in talking to me."

She nodded, then they stared at each other for a while. Finally, she moved her hand across the table to a stapled stack of papers bristling with sticky notes. Darby Moore's diary.

"What did you make of it?" Beamon said, more anxious to end the excruciating lull in their conversation than to actually hear her analysis.

"I take it that this was written by the girl you're looking for?"

Beamon grabbed a menu and buried his face in it.

"Darby Moore.

What do you think about pizza?"

She ignored the question.

"You think this girl killed her ex-boyfriend Tristan Newberry?"

The fact was, he was beginning to wonder. There were too many unlikely players and non sequiturs in this case. He was here hoping that Carrie could convince him again that this was just a simple case of love gone wrong.

"You tell me."

"I'm a psychiatrist, Mark. Not a profiler. You must know twenty people who could have done a better job on this than me."

Beamon dropped the menu and spread his hands in an innocent gesture.

"This is my private sector debut, Carrie. No more FBI to back me up.

You have a bunch of letters after your name, so you came to mind ..."

That, of course, was a complete lie and there was part of him that hoped she knew it was. Besides, the profilers he knew didn't have any advantage over her in brainpower that he could see.

"Okay," Carrie said, centering the copied diary in front of her.

"I've got sections marked in here if you want to read them later they're categorized as Miscellaneous, Tristan, Power, and Death. Stuff I figured you'd be interested in."

He nodded vigorously as he tried to flag down a waitress.

"There's a very unusual dichotomy, here ..." The way she dragged out the word unusual seemed to indicate that it was a euphemism for bananas.

Carrie was about to tell him precisely what he wanted to still believe but couldn't: the girl was a little wacky and just snapped.

Happened every day. To normal people ones with homes, spouses, kids, jobs. People who wore watches and knew what day it was. Right?

"At times, her writing can be very lyrical," Came started.

"She describes amazing adventures and seems very positive even in the face of hardships that would probably kill you or I. What she has to say about the places she goes and the people she meets is very insightful and sometime kind of... beautiful."

"I saw a bunch of her photographs from Borneo," Beamon said.

"They were spectacular. People, landscapes, architecture. Really amazing."

"That doesn't surprise me." Carrie turned to one of the many marked pages in the diary and read a brief but touching passage about the sound and smell of the rain in the jungle. When she was finished, she turned the entire document around so that Beamon could see the water smudges in the blocky handwriting.

"She was actually sitting in the rain while she wrote?" Beamon said.

"No, that's the interesting part. She was looking out the window of a hut in the middle of nowhere. The smudges are from sweat she'd been horribly ill with some kind of jungle fever. Despite that, though, she sat up and wrote this passage."

Beamon finally captured a waitress and pointed to the vegetarian pizza.

Their normal compromise.

"I don't know, Carrie," he said as the waitress hurried off.

"You should have seen this kid, Tristan. He was killed with an ice axe looked like he'd been run over by a rototiller. Doesn't sound like the work of a twenty-seven-year-old girl who likes to write about the sound of the rain."

"I'm going through the positive stuff first. You never let me finish."

"Sorry."

"There are a few mentions of Tristan in here, but not really that many.

She writes about him only in contexts by that I mean, she'll write about a trip that he was on or something they did together. She felt very close to him and there was a real affection between them. They definitely slept together and he was apparently quite gifted in that area, but no real passion comes through. It's like they knew that their lives would never mesh, and so they never really let themselves sink too deeply in their feelings for each other."

"Uh huh," Beamon said, and finished his beer with a final gulp.

"As far as her lifestyle goes," Carrie continued, "she seems to have only one true passion: climbing. I'll tell you, after reading everything she wrote about it, I'm dying to try it."

Beamon rolled his eyes.

"Money, a home, long-term relationships they don't seem to be a priority for her. It's interesting, a lot of her friends are a little dishonest in the way they support themselves without working not stealing per se, but scamming. She'll have none of it. You know why?"

Beamon shook his head.

"Because she feels sorry for us. People who work their lives away and never have a chance to really pursue the things they love. She thinks that it would be unconscionable for her to take things from a group of people who have only things."

This was all very educational, but he was more interested in the lurid details they were his last hope.

"I haven't really looked at that thing, Carrie, but the sheriff who found it read me a bunch of stuff about a weird inferiority complex she had."

Carrie flipped a few pages and read aloud. ""Sometimes I think men never grow up but are in a perpetual stage of preadolescence. Speed on the playground and accuracy with a ball gets replaced with contests of power that they wrap everything they are up in and try to drag me into."" She looked up at him.