excess rope, and had probably done so pulling the rope taut with one hand and pressing the rope with the thumb of the other hand, the hand that also held his knife.
And made a small mistake that had given investigators a piece of luck this time, one they hadn’t had before. The knife had been sharper than expected or he had been a little clumsy-he had cut himself and bled on and near the rope. He had tried to wipe it off, but enough had remained on the rope’s surface and on the rocky ground nearby to catch the attention of a crime lab technician.
DNA.
Someone had suggested that it might be the victim’s blood, leaking out. But a frozen body would not drip blood.
Alex wanted to make sure their own lab had what it wanted for processing before mentioning the blood to the FBI. If there was enough for the FBI to run its own tests, fine, but if not, he wouldn’t be placing the sheriff’s department in the position it was in a few months ago.
He began walking back to his car, ignoring the shouts of the press.
He wondered if Ciara was talking to David Hamilton about bloodstains over dinner.
23
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Tuesday, May 20, 9:36 P.M.
As he sat on the steps leading down to the Sandia Tramway parking lot, Frederick Whitfield IV heard his cell phone ring.
“Am I glad I still have my cell phone, or not?” he asked aloud.
He looked at the caller ID display and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening’s dropping temperatures. “Not,” he whispered. He didn’t answer the call.
Hands shaking, he put the phone back in his jacket.
Unlike the hive of activity it had been a little earlier, the parking lot was quiet now. The last tram had come down from the mountain, and only the cars of the moonlight hikers remained.
The Bronco he had stolen was gone.
This was not a surprise to him-not now, anyway. He had been more than surprised a few hours earlier, when he had helplessly watched from the descending tram as a police tow truck took the Bronco away.
He had been totally humiliated when Meghan used karate or jujitsu or whatever the fuck it was on him. Where the hell did that bitch learn how to do that? Belatedly, he remembered that in high school, Gabe had talked about the two of them taking lessons of some sort-she had hurt her brother during practice or something.
Big deal. Frederick also knew all kinds of martial arts moves, but it really wasn’t fair if you weren’t expecting someone to pull that kind of shit without warning. So in front of all those people, she thinks it’s funny to try this fancy crap, and she gets lucky.
Then that little freak who was in the bathroom with her-what was that all about?-nailed him in the kidneys. Kid comes at him from behind, when he’s already down. Really unfair. Totally, totally unfair. They didn’t teach that in any dojo-that much he knew. Leave it to a woman to not understand that this is not the way to fight.
He hadn’t been able to get a good look at the driver of the Suburban, and he wondered for a minute if it had been Gabe Taggert. But he had read the dossier that Everett had prepared on Taggert, and he knew that if Taggert had a kid, Everett would have found him by now, and used him to get Taggert to come back to California.
The reservation book-which he had looked at when he came back into the restaurant, intending to complain that he hadn’t thought this was the kind of place where you’d get attacked on your way to use the restroom-said “Taggert-2,” though, so he was confused. He decided that Meghan was maybe meeting the boy for dinner, as a favor to the kid’s father. Kind of like a baby-sitter or something. Maybe the kid was retarded, and she had to help him use the bathroom. He still couldn’t figure out the bathroom part.
But he was just about positive that the kid’s old man was the one driving the Suburban. Another asshole. Frederick didn’t get a chance to catch more than a glimpse of the guy, just enough to know it was a man doing the driving, a white guy. Maybe Meghan was more like her brother than anyone suspected, and they were a gang, preying on rich people who came to ski resorts. As a rich person, Frederick really resented that kind of thing. There should be better laws-after all, wasn’t it a violation of your civil rights if someone robbed you just because you were rich?
He didn’t think it was an accident that the license plate on the Suburban was too muddy to read. He hoped a cop stopped them for it. Then they’d have to explain why they had his wallet and keys and about why there were all these different people’s driver’s licenses in the wallet, and shit like that. He really, really hoped it happened. He might even call in an anonymous tip. That would teach that little butthole to steal wallets.
He hadn’t known his wallet was missing at first, of course. When he had walked up to the hostess’s stand, he thought he was just going to be complaining about the physical abuse he had suffered, maybe get a free beer out of it. But then the hostess had said, “Oh, Mr. Taggert! I’m so glad you came back. I have your change.”
He had almost forgotten that he had told this woman that he was Meghan’s brother. He smiled a little feebly at her, because he was sore from the pummeling he had been given. Then, to his amazement, she extended a little tray to him, on which he counted a sum of ninety-five bucks.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Taggert?” she asked.
The first and most important intelligence he received from this question was that she didn’t know what had happened to him-maybe not so many people had seen him face planted into the floorboards after all.
The second was that he was, for whatever reason, about to receive a wind-fall. Ninety-five dollars wasn’t even pocket change to someone with his resources, but it was money, and he never held his nose up at money. He was not unaware of the predicament in which the rest of the world found itself, and he knew that in a place like the Peak Experience, this was a lot of change for a guy who had only ordered a beer.
So he said that everything was fine, and took the cash, and reached for his wallet to put it away.
No wallet. A quick check of all of his pockets revealed that his keys were also missing.
The hostess was watching him closely.
For a moment, in his fury, he considered pitching a fit that would allow him to do a healthy amount of venting. He’d say he had been mugged and robbed by professional thieves. Meghan and her gang would be captured and humiliated, as he had been humiliated.
But then he realized that if the thieves were caught, he’d have to explain why he was using a dead man’s driver’s license, had a collection of credit cards in names other than his own, had the keys to a stolen vehicle, and answer any number of other awkward questions that were sure to arise.
So he put the loose bills in his jeans pocket and walked out with what dignity he could muster. He thought he heard some sniggering from the area of the hostess’s stand but didn’t bother looking back. No use being paranoid.
He was feeling fairly stiff and sore by the time he went up the stairs to the tram. He had just reached the entrance when he realized his return tram ticket had been in his wallet. But he lucked out, because the skinny old long-haired dude who was taking tickets said, “Don’t worry about it-I remember you from the trip up. Where’s your girlfriend?”
“She’s hiking down,” he said. “I’m going to wait for her below.”
“You don’t want to take that moonlight hike?”
“I’d love to, but…well, I don’t tell many people this, but I have a rare heart condition. I’ve had to give up hiking.”
“Man, that sucks,” he said, and Frederick felt moved by this show of sympathy-something he found he needed, even under false pretenses.
Seeing his face, the other man added, “I hope she appreciates how dangerous it is for you to be up at this altitude, even to see her off.”
“I don’t want her to know how much danger I’ve been in up here,” he said in all truthfulness.
“That’s beautiful, man. I think I’ll ride down with you, just to make sure you’re okay.”
