The Aspen Account (6 page)

As he leaned back against the bar, he again caught sight of the young woman as she rose and walked toward the stairs to the club’s basement rooms. Turning at the stairs, she looked at him and gave a little grin as she beckoned him with two slow curls of her index finger. Then she turned and disappeared down the stairs.

He finished his drink, grabbed another, and went down the stone staircase into the enormous dungeon below the main dance floor. The only illumination came from the spinning strobe lights mounted on the ceiling. Through the darkness, he saw her in the middle of the small dance floor, flanked by a hundred silhouettes. As he approached shyly from the side, he watched her dance with a slow seductiveness that was as aloof as when she had been sitting by herself. Her head was lowered so that her hair continued to veil her face.

She stopped dancing when she saw him. Lights flashed, illuminating their faces at random intervals, allowing their eyes to meet between intervals of darkness. Smiling playfully, she moved in closer and began dancing against him until one of his legs rubbed between her thighs. He couldn’t always see her in the moving shadows, but he could feel her. He wrapped an arm around her lower back and pulled her close, and they moved together in a lazy dance.

Her scent intoxicated him, as if she existed solely to seduce him. Something about the blend of isolated strength and solitary vulnerability reminded him of himself. The idle thought came to him that he was feeling pretty drunk. He leaned in and kissed her before she had a chance to resist. But the moment his lips touched hers, their tongues entwined. She pulled him off to a small brick alcove. 

“What’s your name?” he managed to yell over the music.

“Alaska.”

“I’m Michael.” He paused, bemused. “What’s your
real
name?”

She had a mysterious smile and a sly look in her eye—a gamer.

“Nice to meet you, Michael, but now I have to go.”

“Wait. Can I at least get your number?”

“No, but you can tell me yours and maybe I’ll remember it.”

“I’ll write it down,” he said.

“No, just tell me. If I can’t remember it, then I must not have been that interested.”

After he told her his number, she leaned up on her toes and kissed him one last time. Then, as she pulled away, she bit his lower lip, hard enough to hurt, before running up the staircase.

He watched her disappear around the corner of the passageway. Reaching a finger up to his lip, he brought it back down to see a trace of blood. He shook his head. Definitely a gamer.

Making his way back to the main dance floor, Michael grabbed his jacket from the coatroom. Outside, he found the city’s outlines pleasantly blurred by the alcohol and a pale blanket of snow, with more drifting down in great, feathery clumps from the dark orange clouds that reflected the city lights. He was surprised at the sudden metamorphosis. Only three hours ago, the skies had been empty and the cold ground gray in the moonlight. How quickly the world could change the moment he looked away.

Shuffling through the snow, he quickly covered the four blocks to his apartment building. He went straight to his balcony, where he looked out at the hazy skyline through the storm. A smile crept onto his face, and he started to laugh—laughed because he had met a beautiful woman tonight and because he had gotten drunk in a church.

And then, just as suddenly as it had come, his laughter turned to despair, like the laughter of a prisoner overcome by solitude. He didn’t know how much longer he could continue to work for the firm, but Glazier had made it clear that he couldn’t leave. He had come too far in the past few years. He had found himself an opportunity to atone for his grandfather’s failures. How proud the old man would be if he could see him right now. Michael prayed that he was doing the right thing. How would he ever salvage his career and his father’s respect if he was wrong. Even Glazier, his own handler, might crucify him if he couldn’t pull this off. Gazing out at the snowy night, he realized that he had never been more terrified of what the future held.

9

AS SARAH PULLED her jeep into the two-car parking area behind Kurt’s house, the headlights shot through the low chain-link fence, casting a prisonlike shadow that moved across the back of the small white house. The dark neighborhood was quiet, especially in this snowy back alley she had just driven down. She held a big metal flashlight but didn’t turn it on for fear of being seen. It hardly mattered, though, for anyone within earshot would have heard the metallic shriek as she pushed the gate open. Using the spare key that Kurt had given her at Christmas only a month ago, she opened the back door and entered her dead brother’s house.

The inside looked different somehow, as if someone had been here since Kurt’s death. Moving through the darkness, she used her cell phone’s display to cast a low blue light across the kitchen. She still wasn’t comfortable using the heavy flashlight or turning on the house lights. Her pupils had adjusted to the sparse lighting, and using anything brighter would make it impossible for her to see out the windows, and very easy for anyone outside see her. In the darkness, she felt safe.

She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but it was clear that Kurt had recently found something while working at the accounting firm. He had only one computer—the one assigned to him by the accounting firm—so anything he had kept on it would be out of reach because the firm had reclaimed it. Her only hope was that any information he may have found was hidden somewhere in this house.

As she moved through the dark house, the cell phone’s soft blue light captured the outlines of objects tied to her memories. On the wall was a triumphant shot of her and Kurt with five friends at the snowy summit of Kilimanjaro, taken two years ago. On the coffee table was a small plastic Statue of Liberty she had given him as a joke during her first year at Columbia, to remind him that he
still
had never been to New York City. She wanted to take these things with her, for they were now remnants, mementos, of who her brother was to her. 

Her brother and she had always shared a sense of responsibility to be at the top of whatever careers they chose—in light of their parents’ professional successes, how could they do less? And they had been well on their way. She had felt a balance in her life as her journalism career progressed almost as she had imagined. But now, with Kurt’s death shaking her beliefs, her life felt off balance and out of her control for the first time. 

She forced herself to push aside the pain and anger and disbelief so she could get on with the search for answers. She checked his desk first. Holding her phone an inch away, she scanned each paper in the desk but found nothing relating to his work. Then she moved to the bookshelves, passing the phone’s light across the spines. As a kid, Kurt had sometimes taped things inside books, so she pulled every one from the shelf and flipped through it, searching with fingers as well as eyes for any little thing. It took her fifteen minutes, and she found nothing.

Outside, a dog started barking. A car passed, flooding the room with light, and dropping instinctively, she felt a stab of fear when a human silhouette filled in the window, distorted by the moving light. But once the car had passed, the object seemed to vanish. 

She remained motionless, crouched on the floor in the dark and staring with wide eyes at the window across the room for thirty seconds before telling herself it was nothing more than an illusion, a trick of the eye and her own fears.

When she moved back through the dark living room and into the back half of the house, it hit her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it until now. The little house had a one-room cellar beneath the kitchen, accessible only through a hidden staircase under a floor hatch that Kurt covered with a rug. If he had wanted to hide anything in the house, it would be the perfect place. 

She went to the kitchen and pulled the rug aside, revealing the four slits in the floor that outlined the entrance to the little tornado shelter beneath the house. She grabbed the recessed ring handle and pulled the trapdoor up. As it opened, the two-by-four hinged to the bottom of the door banged against the side of the entrance. It seemed as loud as a gunshot.

After the fright passed, she put a hand on either side of the open square in the kitchen floor and carefully stepped down onto the steps into the pitch-black void below. The open-tread wooden stairs creaked and bent with every step until, at last, she touched the hard concrete floor at bottom. She had left the heavy trapdoor propped open above her for fear that closing it might somehow trap her under the house. Now, down here, she could use the heavy four-cell Mag flashlight. She found herself in a six-by-ten concrete cubicle, something like a prison cell, containing the water heater for the house, and a rickety unsanded wooden shelf along one wall. The concrete walls reached only five feet up before opening to a large crawl space that ran beneath the rest of the house. Pointing the flashlight beam onto the bookshelf, she saw a dozen finance and accounting books with hundreds of colored legal flags sticking out between the pages. Bingo. 

She reached for the nearest three-ring binder on the shelf, but before her fingers touched it she heard a sudden creak from somewhere above in the house. The jolt of fear made her bobble the flashlight, nearly dropping it in her haste to flip it off. She crouched in the darkness under the stairs, listening and waiting. A heavy creak came from the wooden floor above her . . . then another. There was definitely someone else in the house with her. 

She had never checked the bedroom. She had been so anxious to check this storage space, she had made the terrible mistake of not checking every room in the house before cornering herself in the cellar.

The creaking stopped at the top of the stairs. Whoever it was now stood at the open trapdoor directly above her. She could feel eyes peering down into the darkness. She froze, terrified that her slightest move would give her away.

A dark boot lowered gently onto the top step. Then the other boot took the next step. And there they stopped. Wellingtons—suede, maybe—with jeans stacked low over the instep. How many blows would she get in with the Maglite before the guy overpowered her? She fitted her right hand around the lens section, designed to double as a club handle. On the next step, slip out right and swing the heavier, battery-weighted end into his shin—catch him above the boot top. If the blow sent him tumbling to the concrete floor, find the head and knock him senseless or worse. And if he didn’t fall, the pain reaction would bring his head down close enough for a piñata swing to smash his nose, blinding him with his tears. Then yank the bottom foot to send him sprawling, clamber up onto the steps from the side, get the hell out, drop the trapdoor, and pray he came alone . . . Shaking from the adrenaline, she felt the immediate reality of mortal danger—something she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

The live threat took the next two steps, then hesitated. This was it. She couldn’t believe this was really going to happen.

“Sarah?” a voice whispered. “You down here?”

“Andy?”
 

“Yeah.”

“Oh, fuck, man!” She stepped out from under the stairs and flipped the flashlight beam onto his face. He looked as terrified as she felt. “Holy crap, Andy! I almost beat your head in with this! In fact, I think I just might, God damn it!”

Andy stuck his hands out. “What? You called and asked me to come over here.”

She shook her head. “I asked you to park on the street and watch for anything as I came in the back. Neighbors, police—anything. You were supposed to be like a lookout, a backup, while I entered the house.”

“I thought I was supposed to come in when I got here.”

“No,” she said, the tension falling off her in great waves of relief.

“This is a cool room,” he said, taking the rest of the stairs. “Little creepy at night, though.”

“Christ, my heart’s still racing!” she said, taking a deep breath. She pointed the beam of light toward the bookshelf. “Well, since you’re here, you can help me carry this stuff up to my car. I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“A bunch of accounting books Kurt flagged. Those look like they’re about fraud. And it looks like he’s put some stuff in those three-ring binders. He must have spent a lot of time on it, and he obviously wanted to keep it hidden.”

“Well let’s get it and go,” Andy said. “This place is creeping me out.”

They carried everything up the wooden steps and made three stacks on the kitchen floor, then lugged it all out to the car. All the while, Sarah felt like a grave robber, stealing from the dead. But as Andy dropped the last stack on the backseat, her guilt morphed into anger at her brother for not being careful enough to avoid whatever killed him. Then her rage seemed to feel around until it found its true object: Kurt’s killer. And somewhere in this pile of neatly flagged financial documents lay a clue to just who that was.

10

SATURDAY NIGHT, MICHAEL was sitting on his balcony drinking a beer. The city lights below him expanded toward the dark horizon, like a luminescent reef in an otherwise dark ocean. He had been thinking about the information on Cooley and White he was compiling for Glazier, and also Kurt’s unorthodox testing order at X-Tronic. He had just gotten back from Kurt’s funeral in Boulder only hours ago, and he just couldn’t shake the feeling that his friend had been doing some strange things at X-Tronic. 

Taking a long swig of beer, he felt the vibration of his cell phone and answered. He could hear loud electronic music in the background. 

“Hey! Remember me?”

His pulse quickened as he recognized Alaska’s voice. “Hi! Of course!”

“I’m at a club called the Rise. Come try to find me.” Then the phone went dead.

The Rise was by Coors Field in lower downtown, only a couple of miles from his apartment. He needed to get his mind off everything that was stressing him out, and this mysterious, quirky, gorgeous woman was a godsend.