The snow had been falling on and off all night, dusting the tops of trees and coating the roads that snaked through the mountains. With the moon and stars hidden, there was no light. The only sounds were an occasional stir of wind and the soft thump of snow dropping from a branch.
There was no sunrise, just a gradual glow in the eastern sky that made it possible to see the edges of the tall Adirondack peaks and gave the snow a bluish cast. What breeze there had been faded and vanished. Everything was perfectly still, a winter landscape frozen in time by an artist’s brush.
Suddenly, a gunshot. It came as a roar rather than a crisp crack. A shotgun rather than a rifle. As the first sound faded, new blasts came back from the mountains, echoes bouncing off a dozen different mountain faces until they were soaked up by the trees. Then, as quickly as it had been shattered, the silence returned.
High up in one of the craggy peaks lights flashed on to reveal a house, a soft structure of wood and stone designed to blend into the mountains. Then came a scream. A woman shrieked hysterically.
Before long, the pastoral scene came to life. At the base of the mountain, other lights came on. One showed the outline of a rustic inn. Others, some distance away, brought out the silhouette of a small town. A car moved carefully up the mountain slope, invisible except for the headlight beams that traced a road and poked out over bottomless ravines. When it came closer to the house, its engine noise began to vibrate through the silence.
Sometime later the snow stopped and the sun appeared through the overcast as a blotch of light. Then another car started up the mountain. Its headlights were on even though they were probably unnecessary. The blinking red and blue lights on the roof weren’t needed, because there were no other cars to warn. But they served to announce an emergency somewhere up ahead.
Sergeant Pete Davis was the only one responding because he was the only law-enforcement officer in the area. The town of Mountain Ridge in the Adirondack Park didn’t have much crime other than hunting out of season or fishing without a license. Occasionally a fistfight would break out in one of the area taverns, but all that demanded was that he push the drunken brawlers apart and sit between them for a few minutes. Nothing that he would call a crime.
This was different. The caller had told him that a woman had been killed, blown apart by a shotgun in the hands of an intruder. Her husband had been wounded. Killed! That meant murder, and as far as Pete Davis could recall, no one had ever been murdered around Mountain Ridge. And an intruder? Pete knew almost everyone who lived within fifty miles, most on a first-name basis. All of them felt free to walk on other people’s property, but there was no one who would break into a home, much less shoot anyone. He didn’t know the people who owned the big chalets on the moun-taintops. But they were all big wheels from Boston, Albany, and New York, not the kind of people you would catch breaking and entering. He had called a nearby doctor, who shared his own amazement at the report. “Murdered? You sure it isn’t some sort of hunting accident?” But he would get up there as quickly as he could to take a look at the wounded victim. He had treated gunshot wounds before. Hunters were usually more apt to shoot themselves than the deer they were tracking.
The police officer turned into the driveway, noted the tire tracks even though they were nearly buried, and saw the German sedan parked close to the front door. When Sergeant Davis climbed out of the Jeep, a man who seemed perfectly composed opened the front door and stepped out to meet him. They exchanged nods of greeting. Then Pete stepped inside the house and turned into the living room. He stopped abruptly, gagged on the taste of the coffee he had downed before leaving, and turned his head away from the scene. But he had to look back. He was a policeman, and this certainly seemed to be a murder.
At the end of the room, behind the open steps that led to the second floor, the wall was spattered with blood—hundreds of tiny droplets, as if there had been some sort of religious sprinkling. The middle steps were splintered, one even cut in half. At the foot of the stairs was a woman in jeans and a blouse, her arms and legs splayed, her bare feet pointing upward. There was a puddle of blood big enough for her to have drowned in. But what made the policeman sick was that her neck ended in shreds of skin and bone. There was no face, no hair, no head at all. It was her head that was splashed on the steps and on the wall in tiny gobbets of blood and gore.
More blinking lights came, now accompanied by sirens that wailed through the valleys. They were followed by helicopters: two with television news logos circled over the house, pointing cameras into the windows; three in state police colors landed officers and then flew out to search the countryside. Uniformed troopers rushed in and out the front and back doors. First the house and then the surrounding grounds were marked off with yellow tape. A cordon was formed to block all unauthorized entrance.
An ambulance was waved through, and after a few minutes a man was brought out on a gurney. The ambulance pulled away with its siren screaming and lights flashing. Later, a panel truck made its way up the mountain to claim a body bag. It was in no hurry when it left.
At the base of the mountain, outside an inn, men and women wearing press passes were demanding access to the site. If television stations could fly over the crime scene, then all journalists had to be given access, they argued. They howled when the troopers blocking the base of the road ignored them. All they could do was swarm like bees around each official vehicle that came down the mountain. But even then their shouted questions weren’t answered.
One reporter jumped up onto the running board of the ambulance and looked through the window. “It’s him—Andrews,” he shouted back to the others.
“What about Kay Parker?” someone demanded.
Then the panel truck reached the inn. Reporters knocked on the windows, and the driver nodded his response to the question they were all shouting. “It’s her!” one of them screamed, and they all rushed back to the inn to file their stories.
Socialite Kay Parker, the darling of New York charities and art foundations, had been brutally murdered. Her husband, communications czar William Andrews, was wounded. Police were searching for an intruder who had broken into their posh mountain getaway.
For days thereafter, the mountain wasn’t allowed a moment of peace.