“I don’t know anybody could ski through that storm,” Lancey said, shaking his head. “Hell, friend, we had twenty inches of snow in thirty-six hours.”
“If we’d had twenty
The sheriff raised his eyebrows.
“I said damn near,” Keegan said.
“Sounds a little like you got a kind of begrudging respect for him,” Dowd said.
“No, don’t get me wrong. I
“You sound a little driven yourself, Mr. Keegan,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Keegan answered with a wry smile.
“Ever read
Keegan smiled. “Which one do you think I am, Sheriff? Ahab or the fish?”
One of the sheriff’s deputies called to him from the truck. “Sheriff, you got a call here. Think you better take it.”
“Excuse me,” Dowd said, and walked to the brown sedan.
He talked on the radio for two or three minutes and then trudged back through the deep snow. He looked troubled. He shifted the cigar to the corner of his mouth.
“Mr. Keegan,” he said. “1 will admit I thought you were nuttier than peanut brittle on the way up here but I think I just changed my mind.”
“What happened?”
“We got a whole family butchered down to Pitkin. Man, his wife, and two high school kids, boy and a girl. Shotgunned.”
“That son of a bitch,” Keegan said angrily. “How far’s Pitkin?”
Dowd looked south, down through the harsh valley.
“Overland? About thirty-five miles,” he said with a touch of awe.
There was a landing strip in Gunnison, about twenty miles from the scene of the murders. Dowd begrudgingly agreed to fly down with them. He sat in the gunner’s cockpit behind Keegan, stiff-legged and hard-jawed as the plane swept down through the canyons, ducking in and out of the tall mountain peaks. The trip took a half hour.
“Hang on,” Dryman said, guiding the plane down through a mountain pass toward the narrow landing strip bulldozed through the snow. “If we skid, we’re up shit creek.”
Dowd braced himself, his teeth set in a grimace, as the plane leveled off and whooshed down on the hard- packed snow.
“Lovely, Dry,” Keegan said with relief as they pulled up to the hangar and stopped.
A youthful police officer named Joshua Hoganberry was waiting for them. His badge was pinned to the crown of a blue campaign hat. It was the only thing he wore that resembled a uniform; he was dressed for the weather.
“Hi, Josh,” Dowd said, introducing the cop to Keegan and Dryman. “Sorry to get you way out here in this weather.”
“That’s okay, Sheriff. We can use all the help we can get. It’s a bad mess we got up there at the Trammel place.”
“Friends of yours?” Dryman asked.
“Why, hell, been knowin’ Lamar since I was born,” the policeman said, obviously still shaken by the Trammel massacre.
“Nice man. Quiet, worked his ass off. Good kids, never any trouble. And his wife Melinda was pretty as spring flowers.”
“What happened?” Keegan asked.
“Bastard just gunned down Lamar and Melinda where they sat. Old Trammel was readin’ the paper. Blew a hole right through it. Shot Byron and Gracie, the kids, in the back as they was running away.”
“Who found them?”
“Was a fluke, really. Doc Newton was comin’ back from deliverin’ the McCardles’ new baby and saw the front door standin’ open. He went in and found them.”
The ranch house was five miles outside of’ town, between Gunnison and Pitkin, a plain two-story brick place sitting a hundred feet or so from the local road that had been cleared by a snow plow. There were two state patrol vehicles and an ambulance parked in a wide space bulldozed out of the drifts when Hoganberry pulled up in the Ford sedan. A footpath was worn through the snow to the front door.
Trammel and his wife were in the living room. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair, the remnants of a newspaper splattered against what was once his chest. His wife lay sideways on the sofa. One shot from the twelve-gauge had blown away most of her face. The daughter lay crumpled face-down on the stairs, a three-inch hole in the middle of her back. The boy was just outside the back door, face-down in the red-drenched snow. The back of his head was gone.
