The Aspen Account (29 page)

As Michael removed the radio and gun from the police belt, he turned back toward the shop to see the old woman speaking frantically into the phone. She was squinting in a vain effort to see the details of his car.

He ran to the Volvo, and within seconds he was on the street and picking up speed. As he left Glenwood Springs, he heard the police radio crackle beside him on the passenger seat. “Officer down! I repeat, we have an officer down at the corner of Sixth and Laurel! White male suspect on the loose. Consider armed and dangerous. I repeat, an officer is down!”

*     *     *

As Michael drove past the town of Basalt, snow fluttered in the Volvo’s headlight beams like a swarm of luminescent white moths. Aspen was only a half hour away. He spotted a fast-approaching vehicle in his rearview mirror. The headlights disappeared as he rounded a bend; then they reappeared before vanishing again. Eventually they appeared again and remained in his mirror, gaining on him fast.

He glanced at the gun lying on the passenger seat and wondered just how far he would go to avoid being captured. The silent police radio was beside the gun. The last communication he had heard was that of the on-site officer informing the dispatcher that they were going to examine the store’s surveillance cameras to identify the vehicle type. Then the officer had informed all units that the suspect was in possession of a stolen police radio and that all further communication would be coordinated through cell phones. That was the last word from the radio. Michael was a little surprised that the police hadn’t used that knowledge to feed him misinformation to help catch him. At least, that was the sort of tactic he had learned at the academy in Alabama. By now they would have contacted the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Denver. He could only hope that the storm currently hammering Denver would delay the marshals’ response.

His attention turned back to the headlights that were now right behind him. He waited for sirens and flashing lights. Twenty minutes had passed since he left Glenwood Springs, and he was certain the police would have identified his vehicle by now.

Suddenly, the car veered to the left and shot past him—a red Ford Blazer full of college students, with snowboards clamped to the roof. Just as he rounded the next bend, he saw the Blazer’s brake lights redden the snow kicked up behind it. Then he saw the reason it was slowing: a hundred yards beyond, a Highway Patrol cruiser was parked on the highway with lights flashing. Flares glowed along the snowbanks. He was trapped. Already too close to the roadblock to turn around without attracting suspicion, he could only proceed toward the police car. All his efforts had been futile. He would never reach Aspen now.

The Blazer stopped fifty yards from the roadblock. Michael was slowing the Volvo when the Blazer suddenly sprang to life, spinning around, accelerating, whipping past him. Immediately the officer rushed to his car and speeded after the Blazer. Michael watched the flashing lights fly past him in pursuit. The cop must not have noticed that he was driving a Volvo. He thanked the drunken college students for foolishly trying to avoid a DUI and, in the process, pulling the officer away from the checkpoint. He crawled the Volvo past the now unmanned flares. He should be in Aspen in ten minutes.

48

“HOW THE HELL did this happen!” Glazier’s voice rang through the corridors of the U.S. Treasury Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. “I was just with him in Denver yesterday!”

“Get me someone from State and someone from Justice,” he snapped at Shannon, his assistant. “I want to talk to the ground man, the U.S. marshal they dispatched. They’re not declaring open season on one of my agents. I want the governor of Colorado on the phone in the next two minutes—make it happen!”

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Jack Willis hurried down the hallway toward the Financial Forensics and Fraud Investigative Division. His round spectacles and thick, curly hair were a messy counterpoint to the dark three-piece suit. Arriving just in time to hear the end of Glazier’s rant, he put a pudgy hand on the big man’s shoulder. 

The irate Treasury agent whirled around. “Jack!” he said. “Aspen’s gone off the reservation. He’s on the run, and everyone in Colorado with a badge is looking for him.”

“Aspen?” Willis said, already considering the implications. Like Glazier, he knew the code name for each of the twelve undercover Treasury agents placed inside various accounting firms across the country.

“Yeah. He’s gone off the grid. No one on my team’s heard from him in almost a day, and now we’re getting reports there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”

“An
arrest warrant
?” the deputy secretary repeated, trying to digest this new and worrisome development.

“For murder!” Glazier emphasized. “They’re saying he killed Lucas Seaton! They’re also saying he tried to kill a cop in Glenwood Springs.”

“Jesus Christ, Troy!” Willis breathed. “Where do we think he is now?”

“We don’t know, sir. His last known location was in Glenwood Springs. God knows what’s happened to him in the past twenty-four hours. The authorities are saying he killed Lucas on the ski slopes in Vail.”

“Just like—”

“Right. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Revenge?”

Glazier shook his head. “He’d been working this case for months. It’s taken him over two years to get deep enough into the firm to get this assignment—he sure as shit wouldn’t jeopardize the investigation now.”

“Well, I would say it’s jeopardized now.”

“I never should have left Denver,” Glazier muttered. “I’m going back to Colorado tonight.” He turned to Shannon. “Have a chopper meet me on the roof, and have a jet waiting when I get to Andrews.”

“I’ll do what I can from here,” said Willis.

Glazier leaned back into the conference room to grab his case, then bolted for the elevators.

“Troy!” Shannon yelled at him, holding her cell phone to her ear. “All runways are currently closed in Denver. The entire mountain region is under a massive winter storm. They’re not letting any air traffic in. All flights have been grounded, and most of the highways are closed. No one’s getting in or out of the state.”

“Just have that jet ready. And tell the pilot he’s going to have to find a way to set us down in Denver—I don’t care if it’s on the damned interstate.”

“Troy!” the deputy secretary yelled after him.

Glazier turned to look at his boss.

“Do you think you know where he’s headed?”

Glazier nodded as the elevator doors slid open. “He was last spotted outside Glenwood Springs. I don’t know what happened to him in Vail, but I think he’s headed for Aspen—I think he’s going after Don Seaton!”

49

MICHAEL DROVE PAST the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport, past the boutiques and taverns lining the mountain town’s quaint snow-covered streets. After crawling sedately through town to avoid any chance of getting stopped, he drove another ten minutes along winding mountain roads to the Seaton estate. But instead of stopping, he kept going past the driveway until he found a service road a half mile up. Parking the car, he threw on his coat and began bushwhacking through the snowy wilderness.

Don Seaton sat staring into the fireplace, his gaze lost somewhere between the fire and the stones. He slumped in the leather chair, a half-empty glass of Scotch in his hand. Raising the glass again, he downed the contents and went on watching the wood shrivel into black pellets before peeling away from the logs and falling into gray ash below the grate. Another log popped, spitting embers up the chimney. Impulsively, he hurled the tumbler into the fire, shattering it.

With restrained anger, he got up, pulled a bottle of Glenury Royal off the bookcase, and poured two fingers into a fresh glass. He approached the window of his study, took a drink, and looked out at the snow circling the front drive of the mansion. Less than an hour had passed since the Denver homicide detective telephoned to inform him that Lucas had been killed. “His neck was snapped,” the detective had told him. “There’s an investigation under way. Your son Lance was questioned earlier. We’re following up on some leads and will call you if anything develops.”

Seaton would wait till morning to visit the coroner’s office in Vail—a snowstorm was moving through the central mountains, making travel impossible for the next twelve hours. He didn’t mind the forced delay. Even though he had stopped loving his sons the day his wife died, he needed a night to beg her forgiveness for his failure as a father before he could face the reality of his son’s corpse.

Michael reached the edge of the clearing behind the estate. The wide courtyard that he remembered from the party a month ago was now silent as a tomb. At the far left, light escaped through the small windows of the back kitchen. The door was again slightly ajar, and he recalled Lance explaining how the cook couldn’t stand the unventilated heat of the mansion’s old kitchen without cracking at least one window or door.

He scanned the backyard once more. Nothing moved—he was alone. But something was unusual—some lingering tension, some sense of commotion within the mansion. Too many lights were on, the house too active at this late hour . . . News of Lucas’s death must have beaten him to the estate.

He sprinted toward the mansion, his boots crunching through the crusted snow. Hidden spotlights suddenly illuminated the area, but they caught his image for only an instant before he reached the mansion and leaned against the dark wall. Inching along in the shadows, he peered around the kitchen door. A plump man was sprinkling something into a steaming pot. The man’s back was to the outside, making it easy to slip into the kitchen and turn up a narrow staircase leading to the servants’ passageway. He was halfway up the stairs when the backyard spotlights turned off.

Inside the darkened servants’ passageway, he could hear sounds all around him. The mansion was filled with activity. He slipped past a door with light seeping from underneath, then another, and reached the end of the narrow hallway. He was about to turn around in the darkness and find a way to the main hallway when he heard the distinct sound of glass breaking. He leaned his ear against the end wall and listened to the faint clank of two glasses hitting, as if someone were toasting or pouring a drink. Kneeling on the wood floor, he felt a slight recess under the panel and realized that he was in front of a hidden doorway to one of the main rooms. Carefully, he returned his ear to the wood and listened to the sounds inside the room.

The Siberian husky ran through the trees behind the mansion, with Marcus walking after it. It snuffled along beneath the trees, pausing, sniffing, then leaping through the snowbanks.

Marcus had used the dog as an excuse to get some fresh air. He had been with Seaton when the phone call came from the Denver detective. Despite the snowstorm that was crawling west through the mountains, he had insisted he could push the Hummer through the roads to Vail if necessary. But his boss had declined the offer and retreated to his study. 

Walking through the snowy woods, Marcus hadn’t taken long to conclude that Lucas’s death meant nothing to him. The only thing that concerned him was Mr. Seaton’s safety. But one thought had bothered him: Lance and Lucas were always together. How could Lucas have died alone? The investigators claimed that Lance had given them a statement about Lucas’s death before leaving the police station in Vail. Since then, Marcus had tried in vain to phone Lance, and no one else had heard from him in almost two hours. Lance seemed to have vanished, which made Marcus very nervous.

As Seaton’s head of security and as his personal bodyguard, Marcus was constantly turning every situation over in his mind, searching for the hidden threat. When the twins had increasingly concealed their business activities from their father, it was Marcus who convinced Seaton to pay for a thorough background check on the twins’ lives during their college years: obtaining confidential school records, interviewing old acquaintances and professors under false pretenses, and even discovering certain buried campus police reports. His findings had revealed enough concerns that he began having the twins watched occasionally.

He would never forget the look on his boss’s face when he had presented him with the files from the investigators and advised the billionaire that his own sons now posed a potential security threat.

Marcus came to a sudden stop in the trees, instantly on full alert. He stared at the tracks in the snow: size eleven or twelve hiking boots—one man, running. Still deep, even with the wind pushing fresh powder along the forest floor—the tracks were fresh. He looked back in the direction the tracks came from: disappearing into the woods that stretched away from the estate, perfectly in line with the direction of the service road a half mile behind the property. Of more immediate concern, however, was where the tracks were headed: directly toward the mansion. He looked just in time to catch the faint glow of the backyard motion lights a hundred yards away, the instant before they turned off. He bolted toward the mansion, unholstering his gun as he ran.

50

WITH HIS EAR against the doorway, Michael again heard the crash and tinkle of breaking glass, then a murmuring voice, which he recognized as Don Seaton’s. 

“I couldn’t do it without you,” he heard Seaton say. “I never really tried. I failed you. Forgive me.”

Michael was almost certain Mr. Seaton was alone, and the old man’s mumbling seemed to carry a note of inconsolable sadness. Suddenly he saw a strange reflection off the wall in front of him. Was the door opening? He leaned back from it, watching the narrow slat of light at the bottom, waiting for it to grow, but it didn’t change. No, he realized, the light was coming from behind him. Just then he heard a sound in the passageway and turned to see a small flashlight beam shine brightly in his eyes. He tried to stand up, but before he had gotten to his feet, a heavy blow to his chest sent him flying backward. His body broke through the hidden doorway and came crashing into Seaton’s study.