Sea to Sky (15 page)

“You’ll go spend time with your mother,” said the old man. “She works part-time at the old folks home, but Monday is one of her days off.” He was hailed by a customer in the plumbing section, and excused himself to go help out.

Sorry stroked his moustache as he watched his father walk away. He’d taken off the Angels jacket, and wore a red cotton sweat shirt above a pair of worn khaki pants. He still had a firm stride, but there was a small hitch in his gait. He remembered his mother saying a few years back that the family doctor had warned them the old man would need a hip replacement one day.  He wondered when the old man was planning to retire — he must be pushing seventy — or if he had someone to spell him off in the store, but he was afraid to bring it up. A small shiver ran up his spine when he remembered his father’s set jaw and blazing eyes the last time they’d spoken about it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he muttered to himself. He didn’t want his father to think, even for a second, that he would consider moving back to Yreka and taking over the store.

As if he’d been reading Sorry’s mind, after the old man rang the plumbing purchases through the till, he sat back down on the stool, picked up his coffee, and said, “I’ve been trying to sell the store.”

“And?”

“No luck. The real business goes to the Lowes in Medford or the Home Depot in Phoenix. Nobody wants to buy a small town family business anymore.” He swept his right arm toward the back of the store. “Old building. A pile of obsolete inventory. Not an easy sell.”

Sorry looked around at the mismatched shelving units with narrow aisles between them, the uneven floors covered with faded lino tiles, and the old light fixtures hanging from the low ceilings, with a sense of familiarity in spite of the years that had passed since the last time he’d been inside the store. “What are you going to do?”

“Sell the land. Being here on Main is worth something, at least.” The old man took a sip of coffee, then winced and shook his head. “Nothing lasts forever. Not even Hank’s Hardware.”

His father’s wounded smile was such a downer, Sorry had to bite his lip to keep from saying something. He wasn’t sure what that would have been, but he hadn’t stopped in his old home town to be put through some kind of emotional wringer. Just then another customer showed up at the till, and Sorry sighed with relief. He had to get out of here, fast.

When the customer left, he said, “How’s the road out to the barn?” Sorry’s parents had a small acreage up Greenhorn Road with a kitchen garden, chickens and, last he saw, a Jersey cow and a couple of horses.

“I’d park next door at the Lovetts’ place, if I were you. Remember Ernie Lovett? He was a couple years behind you in school. He and his wife live there in a double wide and he parks his eighteen wheeler out in front of their machine shed when he’s in town.”

Sorry nodded. “Sounds good. Mr. and Mrs. Lovett still there?”

“The old Mrs. died about ten years ago, but George married again. The new wife had to put him in the home.”

“She won’t know me.”

The old man snorted. “She’s friends with your mother. Alice will know who you are, you can bet on it.”

Sorry walked out of Hank’s Hardware into a cool grey morning. Maybe it would be the last time, he thought. They would probably tear the old place down, but he couldn’t summon any real emotion. It was still just a lousy little hardware store in a lousy little northern California town. The thought of staying here made him feel so claustrophobic he wanted to scream and run. It would be like a prison, he reflected as he climbed back into the truck, wondering why he should feel that way when a few thousand other souls were content to call it home.

He thought about how life had continued on here in his home town without him, and had the weird feeling that in spite of being away, he was still a part of the town, a piece of him stuck solidly in its history, his picture in dozens of high school yearbooks, his name still coming up over tea or coffee or cans of Budweiser. Hank and Susan’s boy. Too heavy to play baseball, but was a pretty good fullback on the high school football team. Ran off and joined a biker gang. Lives up north, in Canada.

The kid that got away.

C
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    NINE

Hunter grabbed a coffee and breakfast sandwich on his way to the detachment to meet Staff Sergeant Shane Blackwell. It was still dark, with just a hint of grey dawn in the eastern sky. His thigh muscles were a little stiff from his skiing on Saturday, but he knew that once he got out there, he’d forget about it. Murder investigations had always had that effect on him. He’d get so caught up in his work, he’d forget to eat, forget to sleep, forget that his wife and kids were waiting for him. That thought brought him up short. Was there something he should remember today? All he could come up with was that he was supposed to call Meredith Travis later, to see if she’d learned anything at the conference.

Shane was in his office, working at the computer, when Hunter arrived.

“A whole shitload of emails overnight,” he said. “Got to go through them in case there’s something important, but most of them are crap. CYA stuff.”

“CYA?”

“Cover Your Ass. Nobody wants to be told they forgot to pass on important information to somebody who could use it. You never know what’s important or who’s somebody, so everybody gets everything.” He typed furiously for a few minutes. “Almost done. Help yourself to coffee.”

Hunter declined. One coffee was enough before a long chairlift ride in frigid temperatures.

To reach the Harmony chairlift, they had to take the gondola to the Roundhouse and ski back down.  They rode up in the gondola with Whistler staff, both of them silent, listening to the mostly young people around them talk among themselves. One young man was speculating on how the dude who’d murdered the guy on the Harmony chair had managed to get away.

“He had to of jumped, dude. There was lots of soft powder. Who’s going to remember seeing some dude planted on the slope? He just would of had to time it right.”

His buddy came back with, “Get real, dude. Too risky. He must’ve timed it right at the top, hit the snow and pushed off before anybody caught a good look.”

“I could do it, dude. I could jump. Ride the Harmony with me next day off and I’ll show you.”

Shane and Hunter exchanged looks.

“Bullshit, dude,” said the buddy.

There were lots of whispers they couldn’t catch, along with frequent glances at the stern unfamiliar faces of Hunter and Shane. Hunter wasn’t sure if it was just because they weren’t regulars on the pre-opening lift, or if it was because they looked like cops.

Shane was a good skier in spite of his size and weight, and Hunter had to work to keep up with him on the way to the Harmony base. It was an amazing feeling, skiing down just after sunrise. The mountain was massive and quiet and very, very cold, and they were two small almost hairless beings, just a few inches of man-made insulation away from freezing to death. It was humbling and exhilarating at the same time. They could see fresh tracks. Someone — several someones — had been down the run ahead of them.

Shane had arranged for the same lift attendants who were there on Saturday to be present this morning. The attendants who’d been at the top of the lift that day were waiting for them at the base as well. They’d been interviewed on Saturday by the local officers, but Shane wanted to conduct a more in-depth interview personally on site. He and the first liftee went into the hut, leaving Hunter and the others outside.

Besides Hunter, there were four young men and one young woman left outside, all wearing jackets and toques with the Whistler-Blackcomb logo. The woman and one of the men sat on one of the quad chairs, now stationary, and sipped out of steaming thermal mugs. Hunter could smell the coffee as he approached, and he wished he had one. He inhaled deeply and asked if there was a coffee maker in the hut.

“Kettle and instant, if you can drink that stuff,” said one of them, making a face. “Powdered cream, and no sugar left.”

“I’ll wait then,” said Hunter with a smile. “Seems like a great job for a skier, being on the mountain every day. What’s it like?” he asked.

The answers were more reserved than he expected. “It’s okay.” “Good. It’s a good job, if you like to be outside.” “Yeah. I like it.”

“Which of you were up top Saturday?”

A young man with a blond pony tail hanging below the back of his black toque raised his gloved hand. He had a reddish beard and moustache. “Me and her,” he said, pointing to the woman, who had her feet planted on the platform trying to stop her companion from making the chair swing back and forth.

She was tall with nose and cheeks already rosy from the cold. She stopped in mid-sip and looked up when mentioned. “Did you want to talk to me?” She had an accent, Australian maybe.

“Just wondering who first noticed that the victim hadn’t gotten off the chair. Or what happened that the lift wasn’t stopped when he didn’t get off? Isn’t there some kind of auto shut off?”

The two of them looked at each other, then the young man nodded to the girl. “You talk,” he said.

“No safety gate on the lift, not here. As for not noticing sooner … .” She gave a small shrug. “Shit happens,” she said. “A couple of boarders got tangled up just below the dismount area. I was trying to help them get up and out of the way, and Brad was being accosted by a pair of cougars. Right Brad?” She grinned up at the bearded liftee.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Clients,” he enunciated forcefully. “They were mature female
clients
, Megan.” Then to Hunter, “It just happened that we were both preoccupied. Besides, it’s not all that unusual for someone to just go up and down a lift for the ride. It’s not usually a guy with skis on in snow season, but it happens. And no, we didn’t really notice the other guy dismount. Just another skier, nothing special about him to notice, I guess.”

“But someone was on that chair with the victim? And you think it was a male.”

Brad rubbed his neck. “Just an assumption, I think. I’ve tried to remember for sure, but I can’t really. Maybe someone got off and maybe it was a male, or that’s what’s stuck in my subconscious. I’m not a hundred percent sure — not even fifty percent. You remember?”

Megan shook her head. “When I heard you yell at the guy, I looked first at you, then at the lift, and by the time I looked around, I wouldn’t have been able to tell who had just gotten off.” Then to Hunter, “Sometimes there’s a few clusters of people at the top. You know, a few boarders waiting for their mates, people chatting about whether to go down Harmony Ridge or the Saddle or whatever. Then they head off in ones and twos. Hard to know who just arrived and who was straightening their gear before pushing off.”

“We both tried hard to remember, but there’s up to four people getting off every six seconds or so.” He shrugged. “Wish we could be more help.”

“You yelled at the guy?”

“I yelled at the guy on the lift. Something like, ‘Hey! You okay? Need help getting off?’ But by then it was already too late for him to get off. Nothing to do but let him ride back down.”

Hunter wondered what the killer had planned to do if he and the victim were noticed. Unless the killer had jumped off the lift somewhere en route, he — or she — had to have been pretty confident he could ski out of there fast enough to avoid being caught. Or maybe he reasoned that no one at the top would think to follow him. Why would they even connect the skier who didn’t get off with the one who did?

He turned away and looked up the line of chairs hanging still and silent from the cable every forty feet or so, diminishing in size up the mountain until the last ones were mere black dashes in the white distance. Maybe the killer hadn’t taken such a risk after all. But something was now clear. It had to have been someone familiar enough with Whistler Mountain to know his way around the slopes.

And someone who knew the chairlift had no safety gate at the top.

Meredith was happy with her choice of outfit for the opening day of the conference. The conference package they had sent to her had suggested attire be ‘business casual’, which was comfortable enough and gave her a chance to adopt a suitably businesslike persona. She wore grey slacks, black patent low heeled pumps, a tailored blue linen blouse and a royal blue blazer. Her earrings were small silver hoops. She had considered carrying her laptop, but opted for a zippered binder of black leather. She had taken care with her makeup. She held a half full cup of coffee, but had no intention of drinking. She didn’t want her lip gloss to lose its shine. People, especially men, were much more likely to respond to attractive members of the species.

She hovered near the table that held urns of coffee and hot water, chatting off and on with arriving conference attendees, peering at their name badges to see if she could identify anyone from Blue Hills Industries or their two main competitors, Cameron-Watts or Hildebrandt Metals. Her main interest, however, was Brent Carruthers, but she’d take what she could get during the opening presentation. Her goal was to get some kind of off-the-cuff reaction to Mike Irwin, something that wouldn’t be possible for a police interrogator. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled at a nervous-looking young man dressed in a suit that was too big for him. He looked almost shocked but returned her smile, then started to blush before ducking his head and hurrying past. She couldn’t read his name tag but took him for a rookie in the industry.

In spite of what she’d told Rayne, she wasn’t terribly worried that the police would find any evidence to connect her with Mike Irwin’s murder, so she wasn’t just pursuing this to help clear herself as a suspect. In fact, she was still on her client’s payroll. Irwin’s death didn’t entirely solve the problem. What Irwin had already done could still have expensive consequences for her client, so there were secret connections to uncover and potential threats to neutralize. But Rayne could come in handy as a second pair of ears and eyes, and perhaps to keep her apprised of what the RCMP were discovering in their investigations.

Meredith recognized one of the men who had been with Irwin that night in the Chateau Grande Montagne lounge, the one who had been drinking the Stella Artois. He was wearing a dark green sweater over a knit shirt. He looked average: average height, average build, middle age, his face was too fleshy to be handsome, with round cheeks and a double chin that made his eyes and nose look too small. He approached the table, put a briefcase down on the floor beside his foot, and picked up a cup and saucer from the table. He was filling the cup with coffee from the urn when Meredith stood beside him and accidentally on purpose knocked over his briefcase.

“Oh! I’m sorry. Is that yours?” She gave him a glossy smile, tried to look a little shy to make herself more approachable.

He put down his cup and bent to pick up his briefcase, placing it next to his other foot before turning to take a good look at her. “It’s okay,” he said. “Almost need three hands in a place like this.” He reached to pick up his cup again.

She read his name tag. “Nice to meet you, Todd Milton from Cameron-Watts Aerospace in Irvine.” Bingo! She held out her hand, trying not to seem too excited. Not only was this guy with Mike Irwin on Friday night, he was also working for Blue Hills’ biggest competitor.

“Make that four hands,” he said with a grin, giving her hand a firm shake and peering at her own name tag. “Stella! One of my favorite names. What does Tamblyn-Brown do?”

“Retail light fixtures. They have a factory in New Jersey, and are now looking for a California location — and I’m new to the job, as well.” She gave him her best dewy-eyed stare, finally releasing his hand. “I’d love to know more about what Cameron-Watts does. Aerospace sounds way more impressive than home lighting.”

“Have you found a seat yet?” he asked. His small eyes looked shocked and eager at the same time. Meredith was sure he wasn’t used to having attractive women come on to him. “Let’s sit together and I can give you some tips, if you’re just starting out.”

They made their way, carrying white cups balanced on saucers, to two chairs a few rows from the back of the large room. She tucked her binder under her chair, then smiled at him as she wiggled her hips to inch herself backwards on the vinyl seat.

“So, tell me about working in aerospace,” she said. “Is there money to be made?”

He nodded, lips pressed together as if he had a secret, then said, “Not so much just from your regular paycheck, maybe. But there are bonuses.”

“Bonuses?” She looked up at him from under her lashes. “What kind of bonuses?”

He didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be assessing her, then changed the subject. “So tell me about your experience, so far. Just graduated? First job?”

“I’m flattered,” she said, batting her eye lashes. “I’m older than you think. I have a Masters degree in Business Administration, and spent over six years gaining experience on the marketing side of things. The company I worked for had quality control issues, and I worked closely with the factory to rectify the problem by finding better suppliers for the components. It worked, and I liked it, so I changed direction. How about you?”

He nodded, his double chin undulating like a squeezed water balloon. “Good move on your part,” he said, “if it’s big money you’re after.”

“Really? I thought marketing had a lot of potential.”