‘I think it feels like snow tonight,’ Stuart said as they walked home in the chilly dusk. After three more steps, he said, ‘Don’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ Alice’s mind wasn’t really on the weather.
‘Forecast was pretty firm for snow this weekend. We didn’t get any today but I’m betting on tonight.’
‘You sound like a guy who’s got his ski boots ready.’
‘Better believe it. Judy too. All we need is a little cooperation from Mother Nature.’
‘In Montana? Surely you jest.’ She stomped through a drift of dead leaves that the afternoon wind had piled against the Hendersons’ retaining wall, enjoying the crackle. ‘You know, I made a list of those questions we asked each other when we were showing off for Mort this morning.’
‘Is that what you think we were doing? I’m not sure I’m ready to cop to that.’
‘Ready or not, that’s what we did. And Mort called it, didn’t he? We were trying to show him we work so well together he couldn’t possibly fire one of us – namely me. Thank you for your help with that, by the way.’
‘You’re welcome. We have been doing pretty well on the story of the dead man, haven’t we?’
‘Sure. But what I’m trying to say now is that all those questions are still valid.’
‘So?’ Stuart’s mind was not really on the corpse.
‘So I know it’s not our job to figure out why that body showed up after the fire, but I just realized you might have part of the answer to one of those questions and not know it.’
‘Why me? You’ve heard everything I have.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not the one with the camera. Think about it, Stuart. The section of highway that the helicopters used for a runway, that was on the upwind side of the fire, wasn’t it?’
‘The one Jonesy talked about? Sure, it had to be. They wouldn’t land on the side where the fire was raging.’
‘Right. So you got on and off your rides on the north side of the fire, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Kind of north by northwest. That little flat place where the county road turns off the highway.’
‘Up there above Grizzly Gulch. Near Robbins Pass.’
‘Close. Couple of miles, I guess.’
‘And while you stood around and waited for rides on the whirly-birds, I bet you took plenty of pictures.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I mostly do when I stand next to a fire – take pictures.’ Hungry and chilly, they both had their coat collars turned up and were striding along briskly toward warm houses and food. But when he realized what she was asking, he turned to face her so abruptly she ran into him and let out a little yelp.
‘You’re thinking about that pickup, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. All those fire pictures you were evaluating at that point – you were looking for the most awesome views of fire, weren’t you? It’s not likely you paid much attention to random vehicles that wandered in and out of the shots, is it?’
‘Well, now … that’s very astute, Alice.’ The street lights were coming on all over town. Burgeoning light enhanced his craggy features as he turned away. ‘Now go to the head of the class and stop talking about it, please. We’ve been working like donkeys all week, and we just finished a twelve-hour shift on a Saturday. Give it a rest.’
‘I will. I am. All I’m saying is you weren’t looking for pickups at the time you took those pictures, and the rest of us only saw the pictures you decided to send us. There could be …’
‘Hundreds more shots! Dozens of pickups! And they’ll all stay safe and warm in the camera till Monday.’
‘Well, of course! Fine! Have you heard me suggest we should run right back to the newsroom and look at those pictures tonight?’
‘No, and I’m not going to, because you know good and well that if you said anything like that I would whip out my handy earbuds.’ He actually had a set in the big cargo pocket of his car coat. She watched in amazement as he pulled them out and held them up in the dim yellow light. ‘And render myself deaf to anything but the Chainsmokers until we reach your front door.’ He showed all his teeth in a wolfish grin.
Alice’s laughter made a happy, inappropriate sound, along the cracked sidewalk of this stormy block of Veronica Street. ‘What a wonderful pocket. What else do you have in there? Chainsaw? Hedge trimmer?’
‘Sure. Can of paint thinner.’ Stuart nodded. ‘Case of porcelain door handles.’ They turned and walked again toward home, as companionable as before. But some new level of understanding had been reached. Stuart could be pushed too far.
‘What I’ve actually got,’ he said, after a companionable silence, ‘is all day tomorrow off. Think of that! I told Mort, “Don’t call me, no matter what catches fire.” I’ve got a date to spend the whole day with the coolest woman in Clark’s Fort, and I’m hoping if I can have that – one whole happy day playing in the snow with Judy Nolan – maybe I’ll be able to rouse my brain enough by Monday to go back to selling ads for low-rise jeans.’
‘That sounds like a plan,’ Alice said. But in a new, sad place that she had just found growing in her own brain, she thought, Hastings is gone and it’s never coming back. How am I ever going to wrap my brain around that?
At that moment, a big gust of wind blew their hair straight up. As it settled, they heard an alarming roll of thunder. Stuart said, ‘Oh, now, wait a minute … thunder?’
A light fall of sleet began. He pulled the hood of his parka up and fastened the cord. Alice fished a woolen watch cap out of one of her pockets, pulled it on, tied a wool scarf over it and tucked the ends in her collar.
The sleet made a scraping noise that drowned out their voices as it struck the Dacron outer layer of their padded winter coats. To keep the tiny ice pellets out of their eyes, they both bent their heads, reducing visibility to a few feet ahead. Unable to talk anymore and almost blinded by the storm, they stumbled toward home, cold, hungry and getting very tired. Alice reached her gate first, muttered, ‘Night,’ and groped for her key.
She looked back as she unlocked her door. The sleet was falling faster and in bigger chunks. Her street was disappearing into a white-out, and Stuart was running for home.
Inside, in the mud room that her foyer became in winter, she disposed of wet garments over hooks and benches. In the living room, she lit a gas fire in the fireplace and huddled in front of it until she stopped shivering. When she was warm enough, she opened a can of clam chowder and ate the whole thing with corn bread and a bottle of Sam Adams on a tray in front of the fire. As soon as she finished eating, she put on bed socks and an ancient flannel nightgown with sleeves so full she could keep her hands inside them. Picking a novel she’d always meant to read off the shelf in the hall, she settled into bed, propped on several pillows, and was asleep before nine o’clock.
Urgent bathroom calls woke her just after seven. A strange, dirty golden radiance filled the bedroom, the sun coming up behind a heavy snowfall. Besides not drawing the drapes, she saw, when she went to make coffee, that she had forgotten to lock the front door. But she had slept in perfect safety – her front door was totally blocked by a drift almost as high as a man’s head, up the front steps and across the porch. And, in fact, a man’s head was sidling up the front steps alongside it, wearing the plaid woolen cap with earflaps that Jamie Campbell always wore on Montana snow days. He carried a white baker’s box in his right hand. The jolly red pom-pom nodding up the steps behind him adorned a ski cap worn by his son Stuart, who carried the family snow shovel.
Snow continued to fall on this tableau, and the drift was still growing, thanks to a snarky cold breeze that lifted the new snow and curled it along the top of the drift – and into her foyer, as long as she held the door open.
‘Morning, Alice,’ Jamie said. ‘Got the coffee pot on yet?’ His eyes wandered cheerfully around the frame of the doorway she stood in, avoiding details of the flannel nightgown that, except for a lost button, was every bit as good as it had been when she’d ordered it from the Vermont Country Store five years ago. A dutiful brother-in-law, in his other persona as a skillful money manager, he knew every last detail of Alice’s financial situation and did his level best to know nothing else about her, especially anything that could be discerned through the one missing button on the front of her gown.
‘Coffee’s cooking,’ she said. ‘Shall I take that?’ She reached across the snow drift and took the wonderful-smelling box of pastry from him. ‘Won’t you come in?’
‘In about ten minutes,’ Jamie said. ‘Soon as we clean up this mess you made on the porch.’ He was like that – jokey and given to nudges. His family gatherings often erupted into roars of laughter. Betsy was patient about it; she knew all her friends’ husbands and felt she had the pick of the pack.
Alice went back inside and dressed in warm clothes while Stuart shoveled the drift off her porch and Jamie, using the blade he’d installed on his Jeep, cleared her sidewalk and driveway. She’d laid three places on the gate leg table in the library by then, and they enjoyed the apple turnovers and coffee, looking out the window at the relentless storm.
‘I won’t be surprised if we set some records today,’ Jamie said. ‘If it keeps snowing like this, by the time we get through with Judy’s place and then my two aunts, it’ll be about time to do my own house again.’
‘What about the plans with Judy, though?’ Alice asked Stuart.
He lifted his shoulders in a sad shrug. ‘The road to the ski hill is closed. Too much snow – they say they won’t try to clear it till the storm’s over.’
‘I see.’ She brought a bus box and began clearing the table. Stuart got up and helped. When Jamie started to get up and clear his own place, she put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Sit over there in my easy chair while we clear this up. Give your back a break.’ Betsy had told her about his new brace. Too many hours at the computer were taking their toll.
By the kitchen sink, stacking plates, she asked Stuart softly, ‘Aren’t there other things for boys and girls to do together on a Sunday when the ski hill is closed?’
He gave her the skinned-knee look that had persuaded her to edit his paper. ‘Dad likes to be the family helper,’ he said. ‘He’s so good to everybody, I don’t know how to refuse to tag along.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He helps me all the time. But, surely, in the whole Campbell/MacKenzie clan there must be some other able-bodied young men who could assist in his good works?’
‘Plenty. But they try to dodge the duty because Dad’s kind of … hard to help.’
‘In what way?’
‘Maybe a little … overzealous? Kind of a caped crusader?’
‘Ah.’ She sighed. ‘Even as a frequent beneficiary, I can see how he might be a little … taxing.’ She raised both hands in a teacher’s time-out gesture and considered before she said, ‘Call Judy from here, to explain what you need her to do, then go sit with your father and call her again. Pass the phone to him so she can say “I’m so very sorry but I overslept, can you please drink another cup of coffee before you come to my house, so I can be dressed properly to receive you?” Judy will do that if you ask her, won’t she?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good. I think your father will find it touching that your girlfriend wants to make a good impression. While you do that, I’m going to call your mother and ask her to fix this day for you.’
‘She can do that?’
‘Watch and learn.’
‘You’re not going to go all Lucy-and-Desi on me here, are you?’
‘Nothing even remotely tricky. Your mother will tell him the truth about some problems she usually keeps to herself, like being stuck at home with three teenage daughters on a snow day. It will be a genuine distress call; I’m sure you’re not the only Campbell who had other plans for today. Now, hurry and make the call. Keep it short or he’ll be out here saying it’s time to go save the world.’
Alice loaded the dishwasher and made a fresh pot of coffee while Stuart called Judy. Having no choice but to eavesdrop in the small space, she heard the girl’s first pleased reaction to the news that their plans were back on, sort of. There were quick, puzzled questions after Stuart said there was a job to be done first, and a lot of giggling while he explained the problem and told her the plan. When the conversation devolved into muttered endearments, Alice leaned across the dishwasher and pointed to her watch. One minute later, Stuart put the phone in his pocket and headed for the library, and Alice called Betsy on her landline.
She called her again to say thank you as the two men stomped off her clean-shoveled porch.
‘On the contrary,’ Betsy said. ‘I’m about to take a nice nap, for which I thank you very much. Jamie said he’d blade off the hockey rink, and the girls are calling all their friends to go skating. What are you going to do with this long, quiet day? You got plenty to read?’
‘Just starting a novel,’ Alice said. She didn’t want to explain the price she had demanded of Stuart.
‘As soon as you finish shoveling out your girlfriend,’ she had told him, ‘can you go get the camera out of the newsroom and bring it to me?’
Stuart looked up incredulously from lacing his boots, rolled his eyes to the sky and muttered, ‘Jesus, you have gone over to the dark side, haven’t you?’
He laced ferociously to the top, created an elegant bow and said, ‘But you don’t need the camera. I put all the fire pictures on a thumb drive. Made two copies, actually, so I can work on the story at home.’ He sent her his blackest glare. ‘You sure you remember how the review button works? I kill people who lose any of my pictures, you understand that?’
‘I know how to work a thumb drive, for heaven’s sake. Show some respect,’ Alice said.
‘Oh, you’re going to play the aunt card now?’
‘No. I’m going to play the card that says everybody else in the family is getting what they want today and now it’s my turn.’
‘Oh, God’ – his ferocity wilted – ‘you’re absolutely right.’ He straightened, not easy with one foot bare and one booted. Leaning forward from the waist, he kissed the hem of her sweatshirt. ‘Beyond any question, madam, you are the best editor I have ever hired.’
Alice laughed. ‘Also the only one.’
‘The best except for that one regrettable flaw: a tendency to carp about small details.’
Jamie poked his head in, earflaps swaying. ‘You going to be ready any time today?’
‘Only one boot to go, Batman. Coming right along.’ To Alice he said, ‘I’ll stop at home right after Judy’s place and fetch your thumb drive, OK?’
‘You won’t forget?’
‘The force be with you, O hard-charging paradigm.’
In the next few hours, after Stuart followed his father out and later ducked back in with the gadget she’d requested, Alice discovered that even very good pictures can become tiresome if there are too many of them. She didn’t know which files to look for and had to scroll through all the views of smoke and flame before she found the series Stuart had taken while he waited for his helicopter ride over the fire. There were thirty-two pictures in the set, taken from the ground around an arc of about two hundred degrees on the northern edge of the fire. No pickup appeared in any of them.
After that, she clicked her way, aghast, through the long, devastating string of raging over-the-fire pictures that he had taken from his perch behind the pilot. She’d seen four or five of these before – the ones Stuart had selected to send down – but they still took her breath away on second viewing.
Having all day to look, she scrutinized every one thoroughly, hoping to glimpse a dirty farm truck. She never did, but examined so many steeply banked turning shots into the very teeth of the beast that she suffered vertigo a couple of times and had to go stand on the porch for a while, staring at the motionless horizon, to combat nausea.
She kept at it, scrolling patiently through scenes of devastation until she arrived at a clear, peaceful picture of a wood-stake and barbed-wire fence. She knew where she was then – Stuart had stood in the middle of the gravel road and shot a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, turning five degrees to the right between each click.
Starting at the easternmost edge of the north side of the fire, he had turned toward its center, taking pictures consistently across the front of the inferno and out along the smoky edge to where the fire was pushing through the rocky entrance into Grizzly Gulch. Stuart’s turning camera left the fire there and continued its circle, across a ridge and down into mostly clear air again, around him on the graveled road.
The pickup appeared in the twenty-third shot – a dark shape coming up out of a smoky draw, on a distant two-track along a fence. It drove west along the bumpy track, travelling a little faster than the camera, outlined against the flames as it crossed the picture. Its full profile showed in eight frames – a dark, dirty-looking farm truck with a long bed and dual wheels on the rear, just as Jonesy had described it.
In every shot, the truck got closer to the right edge of the picture but no closer to the camera, still a distant shape with no detail. In the next two frames, the truck turned a little more southerly, disappearing fast. But maybe if it turns just a little more left … Then smoke obscured it for two frames. The last clear glimpse Alice got was tantalizingly close to a full rear view – she could see the license plate but could not make out the numbers.
She copied all the truck views into a separate folder, sent them to Stuart and herself in an email, then attached that to an email to Sheriff Tasker as well, with a message that read, I believe this is the truck that Jonesy told us about last week – link to the Guardian story attached. Too bad the license is too far away for the numbers to show. Do you think there’s a chance somebody at the dealership could ID the truck? I’m of course available to talk about this if there’s anything I didn’t make clear.
She signed off and went into the kitchen, looking for a snack – it wasn’t quite lunchtime but, working so hard with the pictures, she had burned up the calories from Jamie’s pastries. She was holding the refrigerator door open, reaching for an apple, when the phone rang.
‘Alice?’ Jim Tasker said. ‘Is somebody playing a trick on me or did you just send me an email?’
‘No tricks, just me. I didn’t expect to get an answer till tomorrow, though. Do you always go to your office on Sunday? Even in a blizzard?’
He laughed. ‘Makes me sound like a fanatic. No, I just got sick of looking at the weather and decided to go out and see how it felt. We haven’t had a blizzard like this for quite a while, have we?’
‘Years. I can’t remember the last one.’
‘I had to put chains on my van to get out of my driveway …’ He paused and they both chuckled. ‘But then getting to my office was easy. Most of downtown has been plowed, but some of it’s already drifting shut again. Well, I guess you know that.’
‘No, I’m at home.’ She explained about maneuvering Stuart into bringing her the thumb drive. ‘I just got thinking about that helicopter story, and decided to pass some of this long day looking at pictures.’
‘Good for you. I see what you mean about the license plate.’ He paused, then cleared his throat. ‘Uh … the projector I’ve got here might be able to show us the numbers. You want to see?’
‘Oh … you mean you’ve got one that enlarges …’
‘Yeah. Mine’s pretty old – it only goes to the power of three. If that’s not good enough, though, they’ve got one at the crime lab in Missoula that’ll probably show you a fly on the wall a block away.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I forget the exact numbers but it’s pretty damn good. Are you doing anything right now?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve still got my chains on. Why don’t I come and get you and we’ll see what we can see with the projector I’ve got here?’
‘Well … fine. I’ll put my boots on.’ The snow had finally stopped falling, she saw when she poked her head out, and it wasn’t all that cold. She put the watch cap back in her pocket, came back inside, brushed her hair and put on lipstick. Storm’s over, no use going around looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.
Tasker pulled into her clean-shoveled driveway, hopped out and trotted up her clear-and-dry front steps. He was reaching for the doorbell when she opened the door. ‘You made good time,’ she said. Very good, Alice. You just won the banality prize.
‘Nothing to stop me,’ Tasker said. ‘Everybody’s inside watching games on TV.’
All along the street, though, as they drove back downtown, warmly clad people were coming out of houses pulling on gloves, opening tool sheds and sweeping off steps. Every so often, the sun broke through the clouds and reflected so brilliantly off the fresh snow that the few drivers on the streets slowed to a crawl, waiting for snow-blindness to pass. The day was taking on a giddy holiday feeling; people called to each other as they flung snow off their walks. Down the block, a mother with two small children was teaching them how to make snow angels.
When the sheriff’s van took an unexpected turn off Veronica Street onto Sullivan, he said, ‘Hope you don’t mind, I have to go this way to pick up my pizza. Will you have a slice? Must be almost lunchtime.’
‘Oh, that sounds good,’ she said. No use telling him she’d abandoned a half-eaten apple to go look at pictures with him. ‘I’m surprised Carlo got open so fast.’
‘Yeah, he’s an animal for work. I can see his chimney from my front window, and when I saw smoke come out I remembered I didn’t get much breakfast, so I phoned him and said, “Carlo, are you really going to open?” He said he came down to check on the place and found half-a-dozen hungry strays hanging around the front door, hoping he’d show up. He said, “I can’t deliver to most places yet but people are calling in, saying they’ll come on skis to get it, so why not?” He’s got the only food place open in town right now, he’ll probably have a banner day.’
‘But you get yours at the back door?’ she asked, as they stopped in the alley.
‘I kind of have special needs.’ He set the brake but left the motor running. ‘You be OK here for a minute?’ He scooted in the back door and came out with a flat box.
The sheriff’s office felt dark and dismal after the brilliance in the street. Tasker busied himself adjusting the thermostat and turning more lights on. Alice wondered, How long does he sit in this drab place alone before it occurs to him to turn up the heat? It reminded her of something she had often thought about her husband – that he enjoyed comfort but was not very good at arranging it for himself.
Tasker got the projector out of a cupboard, muttering to himself about cords. When he had it set up he pulled down a screen on the wall facing his desk. He’d already uploaded Alice’s pictures into his computer; now he hooked the computer up to the projector. He pulled another chair alongside his own, put up the first picture and asked Alice, ‘Is this an OK height for you?’
When she assured him she could see the whole screen, he put the warm pizza box and a stack of napkins between them and said, ‘Let’s chow down while we watch these pictures. I’d like to look at a few of his smoke-and-fire shots first, so I can get the lay of the land.’
They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, gobbling pizza and watching the fire eat its way up a slope of Meredith Mountain. Alice thought happily, How’s this for best use of a snowbound Sunday? She felt proud of herself for finding something to move the case along. Also, she privately admitted, it was fun to sit close to a nice, quiet man who seemed to want her there.
On the first picture, it was obvious that even at the lowest power she could see much more detail than she had in the digital archive. The first enlargement was worlds better, and the second showed so much more detail that Alice’s heart picked up speed again.
‘Hey, you know, this might actually work,’ she said, and they grinned at each other. ‘You want to go to number 189 now.’ She watched as Tasker scrolled through the pictures, slowing as he got into the 180s. Then the nose of a well-used Ford pickup came up out of a draw, travelling east to west on a bumpy farm track along a fence.
Alice read aloud an excerpt from Jonesy’s story, as she’d written it up for the Guardian last week, ‘A standard heavy-duty Ford pickup, dark blue or black. Long bed, probably three-quarter ton, dual wheels in back. Small load, though. Maybe a few hay bales covered in a tarp.’
‘Sure fits the description, doesn’t it?’ Tasker said. ‘So dirty, you can’t tell the color, but dark, for sure. This side view – we can’t see the size of the load. Club cab. How many people in it, do you think?’
‘Hard to say. Two at least but it could be three. Go slow,’ Alice said. ‘It turns, in a minute. There, stop there. See the license plate?’
‘I think I see the buffalo skull. Can’t read the letters and numbers before and after. Looks like it’s all smeared with mud, doesn’t it?’
He got up, rummaged in a drawer and came back with a magnifying glass. ‘Let’s see if I can …’ He tried standing beside the light stream, holding the glass in front of the numbers, but always got too much of himself between the light and the screen. While he was contorted across empty space, peering through his spyglass, his phone rang.
Alice asked him, ‘You want me to answer it?’
‘Uh … no, I better do that.’ He straightened with a grunt, came back to the desk, grabbed the ringing phone and said, ‘Tasker.’
Alice heard Stuart’s voice say, ‘Hey, Sheriff. I see your lights on. Any chance my aunt is hiding out in your office?’
‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ Tasker said drily. ‘But you can ask her if you like.’ He handed the phone to Alice, not looking amused.
‘I go to all that trouble to get you a day alone with your girl,’ Alice said, ‘and now you call me anyway? What’s wrong with your brain?’
‘I am alone with my girl. But she’s a lot like you, Alice – she goes ape over pictures.’ Alice heard a giggle and a slap, and then he added, ‘I happened to mention to her what you were doing today and she lit up like a candle and demanded I find you. Isn’t that ironic?’
‘Highly. What does she want?’
‘She wants to know if you’ve seen any sign of the dark pickup we were all talking about after—?’
‘We’re looking at it.’
‘Alice, really, no joke?’ His voice had changed; he was excited. ‘Is it heading for Grizzly Gulch like Jonesy thought?’
‘It could be. Hold on.’ She put the phone against her shoulder, looked up at Tasker and said, ‘Is it all right if I …?’
He took the phone away from her and said into it, ‘Are you ready to swear you do not have Mort Weatherby in your vehicle?’ Alice heard laughter and a denial, and then Tasker said, ‘You can each have one slice of pizza if you’re hungry, but the next one’s on you.’
There was another outburst of hilarity and then they were both in the doorway. Judy was wearing a glamorous red fox hat and holding a pizza box.
‘We were hoping you might be hungry,’ she said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Tasker said. ‘Here, Stuart, help me with chairs …’
Alice told Judy what they were looking at and they all settled in, but with the newcomers on the inside seats now, next to the pizza boxes. They ran the sequence through again, from the beginning, so Judy and Stuart could see the truck emerge out of the draw, traverse the screen and disappear into smoke.
‘I know exactly where that is,’ Judy said.
‘Yeah, well, so do I,’ Stuart said. ‘I took the picture. But it doesn’t tell us where the truck came from, does it? Or where it’s going.’
‘I can make some pretty good guesses on the first question, though,’ Jim Tasker said, staring at the screen thoughtfully. ‘I know that stretch of two-track – it just runs along the back of some pasture land. There’s no driveways opening onto it until it gets almost down to Owl Creek. That’s where it joins County Road Ten, and even then you’ve only got, what? Three or four ranch houses between there and the highway.’
Stuart turned a tricky smile toward the sheriff and asked, ‘Any chance that an enterprising sheriff could maybe drive down that two-track and find the guilty pickup?’
‘Well, not today. There’s two or three times as much snow up there on the mountain as there is down here. County roads won’t be cleared for a couple of days, and nobody’s ever going to plow the two-track. Any red-hot reporters who happen to be within hearing distance of my voice right now should remember that we don’t know the truck in this picture is doing anything wrong.’
‘Maybe not,’ Stuart said. ‘But wouldn’t you like to meet the owner that takes his pickup for an innocent spin into the middle of a forest fire?’
‘Yes, I would,’ Tasker said. ‘And I’m so grateful to this lady who spent most of Sunday finding these pictures that when I find out who that owner is, if I decide to take him in for questioning, I will give her the story first. Otherwise, of course, you all understand I can’t discuss any of this with you.’ He stood up, nodded, smiled. ‘Thank you, Alice.’ He shook her hand.
‘My pleasure,’ Alice said. She looked around for her coat, unsure of herself suddenly, feeling she’d taken a misstep somewhere. But as long as she was already standing, she added, ‘Stuart can take me home.’
‘Right now, if you want me to,’ Stuart said, standing up. He put his slice back in the box and closed it. ‘But, Alice? You never found the second series of pictures, huh?’
‘What?’ They were all looking at him now.
‘When I got back on the ground,’ Stuart said, ‘the incident commander told me I’d have to wait a while for my ride back to Base Camp – all the vehicles were in use. But I looked and saw I had plenty of room left on my memory card, so I shot another round like that first one we looked at. You didn’t find it?’
‘Never even looked.’ She looked at the sheriff. ‘You got time to look for it?’
‘Sure!’
They went back to the computer and clicked ahead to the next folder.
After that, for some time the room was filled with the sound of four people chewing on fresh pizza slices, while the clicker slid the pictures along.
‘There!’ Stuart said at the first clear picture of a pasture fence.
He had made the second round exactly the same as the first, with a five-degree turn between each shot, but this time the turns were counter-clockwise. And the pictures were shot an hour and a half later, so the light was brighter and trickier on the first half of the series.
There were six smoky views, then five where the camera was pointed right into the sun, which washed out the images, if any. One more five-degree turn, though, and the full picture reappeared in glorious color, with the front bumper of the dirty old pickup just nosing into the right side of the frame. All the pizza-eaters stopped chewing and said, ‘Whoa!’ or some such noise.
They all sat still while gooey pieces of meat and cheese slid off their slices, and Stuart ran the series, which proved to be the previous views of the fire in reverse order. The dirty old truck came bouncing down out of the smoke and fire at what must have been reckless speed, bumping along the distant two-track that was being consumed, now, by the raging fire. A couple of times fire leaped up right in front of the vehicle, forcing it to veer out of the tracks and onto the even bumpier terrain to the driver’s left. But he kept going, over boulders and a couple of logs, bouncing on and off the trail – the fence posts behind him were all on fire now – and finally the truck disappeared into the draw they’d watched him come out of in the earlier series.
A collective sigh came out of the watchers. Then silence held for a long moment, until Stuart said, ‘Looks like the lucky bastard made it home.’
After another few seconds, Alice said, ‘Well, now we know how the victim got up there.’
‘And why he was there instead of in the mine,’ Tasker said. ‘That’s been driving me crazy ever since we found him. I kept asking myself, “Why did they drop him there? Why not in the mine where we’d probably never have found him?” These pictures do seem to answer those questions.’
‘That must have been where the truck was headed,’ Stuart said, ‘in the first series we watched. Don’t you think? But by the time they got up there, the fire was getting into Grizzly Gulch, and the incident commander ordered everybody off the mountain.’ He looked at Alice. ‘Doesn’t that sound right?’
‘That’s what everybody says happened.’
‘So they just dropped the body and ran, like everybody else.’
Silence again, till Judy said, ‘Who’s “they”?’
There was a great shuffling of feet, nobody meeting anybody’s eyes, till Tasker said, ‘Whoever owns that pickup, I guess.’
‘You recognize it?’ Stuart said.
‘Looks like trucks I see around town every day,’ Tasker said.
‘Well, we’ve got distant views of both sides now,’ Alice said. ‘Did you say the crime lab has a good enlarger?’
‘Yes, I did,’ the sheriff said. He stood up, suddenly more authoritative, and distant. ‘And if this turns out to be the truck that makes the case for this department, I’m afraid all this casual detective work has got to stop – we don’t want to poison the tree that holds the fruit, do we? I’ll take a couple of copies of shots from this side of the vehicle and send them to Missoula for enlarging.’
‘Better take a copy of that license plate, too,’ Alice said. ‘You might get that enlarger to show you the numbers.’
‘And the people in the truck,’ Stuart said. ‘Can we try that?’
‘Yes. Um …’ Tasker said. When they were all looking at him, he said, ‘I don’t want you to publish any of this information yet. Do you understand? Stuart? Alice?’
‘I understand, all right,’ Stuart said. ‘But I work for Mort Weatherby. So do I have to ask, Alice? What do you think?’
‘I don’t think we have to ask. If the sheriff says he can’t let us publish it we won’t, of course. But I think we have to tell our employer that we’ve happened on some information so sensitive that the sheriff has said we’re forbidden to say it out loud until he arrests the killer of the roasted man.’ She looked around. ‘Can we all agree to that?’
Tasker looked at Judy. ‘You on board?’
‘Sheriff,’ Judy said, giving him her Valkyrie look, ‘you tell me where we stand, and I’ll be there.’
He smiled at her and said, ‘Good girl.’ They filed out of his office, no smiles now, just quiet goodnights. It was dark outside, and very cold between the snowbanks.
‘What a strange Sunday,’ Alice said, as they drove down the big horseshoe of Sullivan Street and turned onto Veronica. ‘Every time we made a plan, we changed it.’
‘Ah, well, we can go skiing some other Sunday,’ Stuart said. ‘We will, won’t we, kiddo?’ He smiled at Judy, beautiful in her fake fur hat.
‘Sure,’ she said, smiling back. ‘Maybe even together.’