The Aspen Account (7 page)

Twenty minutes later, Michael was standing in the growing line outside the Rise. The three-story building’s exterior was smooth concrete, with huge panes of dark glass outlined by blue neon lights. The faint, thumping techno bass beat blared suddenly louder every time one of the three burly bouncers opened the doors to let someone in.

Inside, he checked his jacket and made his way out to the main dance floor without even stopping at the bar. He searched the bobbing, swaying strobe-lit faces in the dark, then walked through both levels of the club, but she was gone—left before he could arrive, or perhaps was lying the whole time. 

Feeling like a sap, he made his way to the bar and got a vodka tonic. Then, drink in hand, he walked  past a wall of distorting mirrors toward the main dance floor. Though miffed that she had suckered him with a false tryst, he was still determined to get his twenty dollars’ worth. He stepped into the crowd, wending his way to the center of the floor.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Turning around, he found himself staring into her eyes. She had been here all along, watching him.

“I couldn’t find you!” he yelled over the music, as if they were a hundred miles apart.

She reached up, cupped the back of his neck, and pulled his lips to her. Then she slid her mouth past his cheek until he felt her warm breath just below his ear. “You told me you have an amazing view of the city from your apartment.”

He nodded as his eyes gazed out at the dark shadows and silhouettes pulsing under the strobe light behind her.

“Show me.”

Michael’s hands moved across Alaska’s pale-silk skin. He would let her moan softly for a moment before kissing her lips, silencing her again. In the dim glow of city lights through the window, her soft breasts shrank as she stretched her arms above her head to grab the headboard.

Kissing her, he forgot what she looked like and who she was; he could think only of how her body felt. Her aggressiveness excited him. She had come on to him so quickly . . . everything happening so fast. He loved it, and the consequences be damned.

Afterward, she turned away from him. They were exhausted and satisfied, but with the heated excitement over, they found they had nothing left; they were strangers again. Michael tried to be sensitive, gently stroking her back, but she didn’t respond, ignoring him even when he asked her a question. She pretended to be asleep.
Warm women sleep close to a new lover; cold women turn away.
He wondered what secrets she was keeping, and this made him think of his own. At last, she turned and rolled toward him to nestle in his arms. It was as if she had read his mind, as if she knew him better than he knew himself.

11

SUNDAY MORNING, AND it felt strange to have someone sleeping beside him in his apartment. He had been so buried in work, it had been a while since he brought a woman here.

Standing in the doorway to his bedroom, he watched the slow rise and fall of Alaska’s  naked back. Now, with the fevered urgency of first sex behind them, he found himself wanting to learn everything he could about her. He hoped he could convince her to spend at least part of the day with him.

Leaving the doorway to step out on the apartment’s sunlit balcony, he couldn’t help feeling impatient for Alaska to wake up and join him in the cool air outside.

Michael watched as Alaska wielded the brush over the big canvas in bold, waving strokes. They had spent much of the day together, rambling in the city and learning about each other. She had brought him to a friend’s small gallery on Santa Fe, in Denver’s art district, to show him the space upstairs where she was allowed to work. She repeated the movement over and over until he saw the developing outline of a weeping willow on an otherwise desolate snow-swept mountainside. The scene was unrealistic, of course—not even a bristlecone could survive in such a harsh environment. But he loved the image.

“Where’s that supposed to be?” he asked.

“Near Aspen. North of my dad’s house.”

“You said he was a folk singer, right?” Michael asked, grinning.

“Careful,” she said, her eyes still on the painting. “He’s not, and he’d kill you for saying such a thing. In fact, I might do it for him. I said he was in a metal band in the late seventies and early eighties.”

“Did they have any success?”

“Moderate success. A few albums that sold okay. Had some groupies, did some U.S. tours, but nothing huge. That’s how he met my mother. Made some good cake back then, but my parents went through money pretty fast. They were young—I think a lot of people would have made the same mistakes in their situation.”

Michael was silent. Considering his family’s own past, he didn’t have a lot of room to criticize someone else’s fall from grace. Looking at that graceful willow gamely sticking it out on a freezing, snow-covered crag, he found himself imagining the source of her inspiration.

“Your pop seen any of these paintings?” 

She turned away from the canvas. “He hasn’t seen any of my paintings in years—lost his sight when I was fifteen.”

“Aw, Jesus . . . I’m sorry. What happened?”

“He used to love working on cars. He was under the hood of his ’seventy-seven Firebird one afternoon when the battery exploded. Sprayed battery acid in his face and blinded both eyes.”

“That’s horrible . . . I can’t begin to imagine it.”

“Yeah, it’s been really tough on him,” she said.

“Hard on everyone, I’d think. You, your mother.”

“Actually, my mom divorced him before the accident. I was ten when she left us. The band had all but vanished by then, and so had most of the money. She’s remarried now with two kids and lives with her new family in France. So she’s basically out of the picture. I’ve only seen her once in the past ten years. I think she’s embarrassed of her old life. And now it’s been too long since she was part of our life. Seeing her again would be difficult for everyone.”

She had grown up witnessing her father’s continual decline. Michael got it, knowing what he did of his own grandfather’s downward arc.

“How about you?” she said. “You’ve heard my depressing life history; now it’s your turn.”

Michael smiled. “How about I tell you over dinner?”

“Only if it’s sushi,” she said, lifting the brush and dabbing it in the palette.

“I know a place,” he replied.

Watching her so quickly reabsorbed in her work, he was captivated. Alaska was the antithesis of all the hard-edged, business- and career-obsessed women Michael met every day. She lived outside the world that most people were happy to strap themselves into. She was alive, exotic, free.

With everything he was trying to do for Glazier, Michael knew that one of the stupidest things he could do right now was fall into a serious relationship.
It’s just for a day,
he told himself. But he was tired of waiting for the happiness that ought to be in his life by now. He was ready to fall in love with someone—really ready, for the first time, to open up his life and make room in it for someone. Few people could imagine how crazy things had been these past four years, and it would take a special woman indeed to accept him for the life he had chosen after all was revealed. And Alaska just might be that woman in a million who could accept what he really was.

“Like it?” she asked, putting the brush down on the palette.

“No . . . I love it. You’re amazing.” 

Be smart,
he told himself.
Just one day.

12

SARAH MATTHEWS SAT in her cubicle, staring blankly into her computer. It was early Sunday evening at the
Post
. There hadn’t been many people on the newsroom floor all day as she finished scanning through the accounting books and binders from Kurt’s house. She had been reviewing them all weekend, pausing only Saturday afternoon to go to Boulder for the funeral. Seeing the pale, lifeless face in the casket had been the bucket of cold water waking her up to a world without her brother in it. She had hated being exposed to everyone at the funeral. She wanted only privacy to deal with the loss she still could not comprehend. After a few hours with extended family at her parents’ house after the funeral, she had excused herself—“not feeling well”—and driven directly back to the
Post
to continue her work.

Now she had finished going through everything. She wasn’t exactly sure what Kurt had been working on, but she had identified two main topics he had flagged or highlighted the most: revenue accounting and fraud. She could tell by his notes that he had discovered something suspicious through his work. Next to one highlighted paragraph in an accounting book about fraud was written in red ink, “
Ways to inflate profit margins!
” A few pages later was the note “
Motivation for fraud.
” And the note that had really caught her eye was in another book where he had written, “
Ways to manipulate revenue recognition! Must look at original software revenue contracts!!!
”

She looked through the Cooley and White work schedule Andy had gotten her. Kurt had worked on the
X-Tronic
audit for the six weeks before his death. Her blood boiled as she connected his numerous notes of suspicion to the fact that he had been working on the software company’s audit before dying in the “ski accident.” Her journalist’s instincts had kicked into high gear, and at this point she had all but convinced herself that Kurt got murdered because he had found something wrong at X-Tronic.

She now looked at the Cooley and White schedule to see who else was on the X-Tronic job. The first thing she noticed was that a Michael Chapman had been placed at X-Tronic just after Kurt’s death, apparently as his replacement. The name seemed somehow familiar, but from where? On a hunch, she opened her e-mail account and found the last mass mailing Kurt had sent out—about a hut snowshoeing trip he had been trying to organize. Scanning down the list of recipients, she nodded when she saw “[email protected].” Kurt rarely hung out with people from the firm outside of work, so he wouldn’t have included this Chapman guy on the e-mail unless they were good friends. And now Chapman was Kurt’s replacement on X-Tronic.

Her cell phone rang. 

“Sarah, are you at home?” her mother asked.

“No, at work.”

“Can you talk?”

Sarah took a deep breath and let it out. “For a minute . . . I have a lot work to do.”

“I’m worried about you, honey. Are you all right?”

Sarah felt the tears well up at the sadness and worry she could hear. “I’m okay.” She didn’t want to say much more—just hearing her mother’s voice was threatening to break her composure.

“We’d like to see you sometime. It’d be nice if you could come up to Boulder when you have a chance. Your father and I would really love it if you could stop by for dinner some night this week.”

“I know, Mom. I’ll try, but I’m just really busy right now. I’ll come up to see you guys as soon as I can.”

“Honey, you’ll give us a call if you need anything, okay? Anything at all.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Silence weighed heavily between them as they both considered anything else they wanted to say. Kurt, as her older brother and her parents’ firstborn, had always been the energetic jokester and lighthearted charmer of the family. He had played the vital role of connector, pulling the family together whenever they had problems. And his death had left a void, separating the rest of the family with a sadness they each refused to share.

“We love you,” her mother said in a tone that sounded more like a reminder than anything else.

“I love you guys, too.”

The call ended. She dropped the phone back in her purse and thought about her mother’s concerns. Why was it so hard to go home after Kurt’s death? She knew that a family was supposed to come together after a tragedy, but her brother’s death had split her from her parents. She used to believe that her life was being directed by fate, that because of her parents’ career successes, she, too, was destined for great professional achievement. She had once dreamed she would write an article or book that might somehow change the world, but now it seemed that fate had destroyed those ambitions forever. She didn’t want to go home, and she no longer cared about changing the world. She just wanted to work on discovering whatever story Kurt thought he had stumbled upon—it was the only thing that made her feel better.

The newsroom was too open and desolate for her to work in any longer. She packed up her laptop, shoved all her hard-copy files into a weathered valise, and sent a text message to her editor saying she would be working from her apartment for the next few days, that she needed to avoid any distractions from work. 

She needed answers on what was wrong at X-Tronic—what Kurt had found. She had gone down this path as far as she could on her own, and she needed help if she wanted to keep going. As a journalist, she was no stranger to the
need
to unravel a mystery once it was introduced to her, but finding the real reason her brother had died was now an obsession she was willing to risk her future for. And she planned to start by e-mailing this
Michael Chapman
tomorrow morning.

13

MICHAEL PRESSED THE call button at the front door of the Victorian apartment building in Denver’s Upper Heights district. After getting the mysterious e-mail Monday morning, he had replied immediately to set up a meeting for this evening. Now he had just gotten off the phone with Glazier, and they both were eager to see what he might learn.

“Hello?” a voice asked through the speaker.

“Sarah Matthews? It’s Michael Chapman. You e-mailed me.”

“Yes, please come up.” 

Hearing the buzzer, he opened the door. He was surprised at how nervous he felt about seeing Kurt’s sister. He knew from Kurt that she was a reporter for the
Post,
and though he had seen her at the funeral a few days ago, they had never met.