Free Fall (28 page)

"This is what I'm talking about with the dichotomy it's almost schizophrenic. On one hand you have this girl who just seems to float along through life pursuing what she loves and ignoring everything else, and on the other hand, you have a woman who has this unhealthy relationship to men in general. The diary doesn't go back very far, so I don't have anything on her childhood. I'd be very interested to meet her father."

"Dead," Beamon said.

"No living relatives at all to speak of."

"Well, maybe there's something there. Her ideas on death are kind of unusual. There's no mention of God or religion, more a philosophy of death being a part of the cycle of life."

Beamon shrugged.

"People love writing philosophical crap about death. But we all react the same when we're faced with it."

She flipped to another page and slid the diary over to Beamon. The writing was almost illegible. The letters were large and imprecise, consisting of shaky lines and large streaks of ink.

"She's in a tent here, Mark.

Somewhere in Asia. Her friend is dead, and it's her expectation that she's not far behind. I'd say that she was being faced with it."

Beamon read what he could in the dim light. Carrie was right. It was a farewell. The overall theme was simple. No regrets. He wondered how many people could say that same thing sitting alone in the frozen darkness waiting for the Grim Reaper to ski up to them.

"So what we're seeing here," Carrie said, "is the part of Darby Moore that could have committed this crime. There may even be a clue as to what drove her over the edge."

"Really?" Beamon said, a little too enthusiastically.

"That'd be great."

Carrie looked at him strangely for a moment, then flipped to a page toward the end.

"She goes on a trip with two men and suffers from a horrible feeling of powerlessness. It's here that the earlier passages come together in a picture of a woman who is obsessed with dominance."

Beamon skimmed the section of the page that had been highlighted.

Carrie was right--Darby seemed to write about her feelings in a casual, good-natured tone, but they were clearly there and definitely strong. He flipped back a page and skimmed it.

Chris and Fred have completely dominated me this entire trip and there's just nothing I can do about it.

Chris and Fred. Beamon scrunched up his face and slid the diary back onto the table. Chris and Fred ... "Is something wrong, Mark?"

"No. I'm okay, go on."

"The indifference--no, that's the wrong word--acceptance of death I don't think is important in and of itself. Just because you've faced death before doesn't mean you'd find it easier to kill someone. But when you combine it with her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, you may have someone capable of something like this ..."

Beamon closed his eyes and let out a low moan. When he opened them again, he said, "What if none of that powerlessness stuff was there?

What then?"

"I don't think you can just ignore the entire side of her personality that would "

"Humor me."

She was silent for a moment.

"Okay. I would say it was very unlikely that she could do something like this. She loves life, has no violent fantasies that she expresses in writing, and most importantly, had never allowed her feelings for Tristan Newberry to progress. If anything, I think she'd have been happy for him if he found another woman."

Beamon's beer bottle was empty, so he reached across the table and started in on her glass of wine.

"I was reading about this climbing route that just got done. It overhangs like fifty degrees. The crux the hardest move is one where you have half of the first digit of two fingers in a tiny hole, your feet are on two things the size of nickels stuck to the rock and you have to jump for a hole that will only fit one finger."

"Really? That doesn't sound possible, does it?" Carrie said slowly, obviously wondering where this sudden change in subject was going.

"Darby's friends Chris and Fred were the ones who finally did it.

They're considered two of the most powerful climbers in the world.

Either one of them could do multiple pull-ups off a single pinky."

Carrie stared at him for a moment.

"Physical power. Are you saying that Darby is writing about physical power?"

Beamon put his head in his hands and stared down at the table.

"There are entire books written on it. Magazine articles. Studies.

Climbers are obsessed with it. Getting strong enough to make it to the next level."

Carrie flipped through some of the marked pages in the diary, quickly scanning each one and finally stopping at the last sticky note.

"Men have no respect for a woman's power. They have to be shown over and over again and then still make excuses and deny it. What's wrong with them?"

She read and then dropped the copied diary on the table.

"I feel really stupid."

"You feel stupid? I've been thinking about this thing twenty-four hours a day for the last week. Shit."

"If she didn't do it, then who did? And where is she? Do you think someone might have her?"

"I know for a fact no one does," Beamon said.

"Or at least no one did as of a few days ago."

"Then what?"

"I don't know," he said through a mouthful of thumbnail.

"Maybe she and Tristan were attacked and she got away. Then she found out she was a suspect and just kept on running." That theory didn't work on an impressive number of levels.

"Or maybe the person I'm working for killed him and he's got to get to her to keep her quiet."

"What would make you say that?"

"I'm being paid too goddamn well. Good guys are notoriously cheap.

Shit." He leaned back and forced a smile, despite the growing feeling that this situation was going to get his ass shot off.

"Never a dull moment, huh? How's Emory?" ark Beamon climbed the stairs as quietly as he could without actually looking suspicious. The building was silent around him, as he'd expected. It was one o'clock in the afternoon and the apartment complex he was in screamed low-income working class. Anyone who was making enough for mom to stay home with the kids was living a few blocks north, and the temporarily or terminally unemployed were spread out to the south.

At the top of the stairs, Beamon turned right and quickly found the door to Tristan Newberry's apartment. There was no police tape--again, as he'd expected. Bonnie Rile in Fayetteville had warned Tristan's parents and the landlord about entering the apartment, but had taken the perfectly reasonable position that there was no reason to rush out and search it.

Beamon looked around him at the empty hall and reached into his trench coat for the half-sized crowbar propped under his arm. He shoved one end between the door and jamb and leaned his body weight into it.

The old wood gave easily but not without a protest that echoed through the hallway. He slipped through the half-open door and forced it closed behind him, cursing his lack of skill with locks. If he was going to keep doing this kind of thing, he was going to have to find someone to teach him a little finesse. Perhaps that was the bright side to his impending imprisonment--a chance to learn from the pros.

The apartment was pleasantly messy and just a bit dirty, with worn, mismatched furniture strategically placed to make the most of the limited space. The living room and kitchen were more or less combined into one open area with only two doors in it, the one he'd just come through and one at the back through which he could see the edge of an unmade bed.

The question now was what the hell was he here to find?

He'd started this case calculating an eighty percent chance that Darby had just gotten plain pissed off and killed her boyfriend. God knew that statistics supported the fact that if you were going to be hacked to pieces, it was going to be done by someone who loved you.

He'd given half of the remaining twenty percent to the possibility that Darby was currently the love slave of two guys named Clem and was residing in a shack somewhere deep in the woods of West Virginia. Her visit to Wyoming seemed to debunk that theory.

The last ten percent, as it always was, had been reserved for the "something else" category: papal conspiracy, spontaneous combustion, or whatever.

But now where was he? There were at least two private investigations into this incident that he knew of, he had mysterious out-of-state cops sniffing around for Darby, he had a diary that suggested Darby's relation ship with Tristan Newberry was more warm than hot, and a murder weapon that may or may not have been hers. His "something else" cate gory had ballooned to a healthy seventy percent.

The shaky theory that this was about Tristan and not Darby was about all he had left. As it turned out, finding a girl with tentative human relationships and the ability to live for six months on thirty-eight cents and a couple of fruit roll-ups wasn't as easy as he'd hoped.

Beamon decided to start his search with the refrigerator. As he'd suspected, it contained the remnants of a six-pack. He doubted Tristan would miss one little beer, so he took one and tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the top.

Setting the beer down on the counter next to two breadcrumb covered dishes, Beamon slipped on a pair of brand-new latex gloves. It took less than a minute to find a combination corkscrew bottle opener in the bottom of one of the kitchen drawers. He carefully wiped off any prints he might have left on the bottle and opened it. The beer smelled bitter one of those goddamn micro brews but it was better than nothing.

He noted the empty wine bottles next to the two plates and the similarly crumb-covered cutting board, and tried to reconstruct Darby and Tristan's second-to-last evening together.

Darby had probably just popped in unannounced. That fit with what little he knew of her personality. Besides, an anticipated visit from an old girlfriend would have rated a better dinner and at least a partial tidying of the apartment. So she'd showed up and they'd cracked open a couple of bottles and gotten fairly drunk, based on the fact that they were both as skinny as rails.

As near as he could tell from talking to various climbers in West Virginia, the two hadn't arrived at the New River Gorge till around three the next day, so they probably spent the night in this apartment and slept off the alcohol before driving off in Darby's van.

Beamon walked into the even messier bedroom and found long dark hairs on one of the pillows on the bed. He reached for one, but then stopped himself. He had no access to a lab anymore. He'd just have to assume they were Darby's. He grabbed hold of the blanket and was going to pull it back, but decided that looking for sex stains on sheets was a little lower than he was willing to stoop at this point. Wouldn't prove anything based on the pictures he'd seen, there would have been any number of women willing to generate stains with Tristan Newberry.

Beamon stepped over two bath towels lying on the floor and stopped in front of a collection of framed pictures on Tristan's dresser. The theme seemed to be outdoor adventure: him with groups of similarly athletic looking people standing on top of mountains, in forests, alongside kayaks, on skis. Darby was in three of the seven, but in only one was she even standing next to Tristan.

On the edge of the dresser was a pile of cards that looked like they'd been recently emptied from Newberry's wallet. A library card, a social security card, a Blockbuster Video card, a punch card from the Sub Czar promising a free sandwich, a national park pass. All things he wouldn't have needed on a long weekend excursion to West Virginia and wouldn't want to lose. Beamon did the same thing himself when he went on trips.

He opened the drawers of the dresser and pawed through them, but found nothing more interesting than an unusually thick stack of postcards held together with a rubber band. Most were from foreign countries, depicting spectacular vistas and partially covered with brightly colored stamps.

Beamon read through them quickly, finding that most concisely related an adventure the writer was embarking on or had just completed.

He separated out the four from Darby. The messages were short and not particularly personal generally reports on the quality of climbing where she was. Gasherbrum sucked. Lost some of my nose but still have all my fingers. Could have been worse was about as sappy as she got, supporting Carrie's theory that the relationship between them wasn't exactly what one would call frenzied.

Beamon wandered back out into the living room and sat down at a computer set up in front of the only window in the apartment. He pulled up the answering machine software and found no messages. It took a few minutes, but he managed to find the message-recording screen and hit Test.

"This is Tristan," a young, cheerful voice said from the two speakers set up alongside the monitor. It was kind of startling. The only contact with Newberry that Beamon had was looking at pictures most of them depicting not Tristan Newberry but what was left of him.

"I've got the ringer off because I'm not feeling well. I'll get back to you as soon as I can." An obvious plant, in case the office called while he was off climbing.