the FBI agent had made. To have his affair with Phyllis exposed would most likely mean the end of his marriage, and to be branded a suspected traitor would surely destroy his career. He had no doubt that the threats would be carried out if he ever mentioned anything at all about the envelope.
Still stunned by the memory of his interrogation, he shook his head in an attempt to wipe it out of his mind. He looked up just as Lori came down the mountain, and fixed a smile on his face when she approached.
'There's eleven inches of new powder on top of the mountain,' she said, eyes dancing, waving at the boys.
'It's wonderful.'
'Aren't you glad I talked you into this?' Randall asked.
'Very,' Lori said, brushing his cheek with her lips.
'It's your turn on the slopes. But you'd better get up there before the storm closes in. I'll take the boys back to the lodge and get something whipped up for lunch.'
'I'll be back in an hour,' Randall said, reaching for his skis.
'It's dinner out tonight, just you and me. I've made reservations and the lodge has found us a sitter.'
'This is a lot of fun,' Lori said.
'That's what I wanted to hear,' Randall said. He kissed his pretty wife, wondering why he'd been so stupid about Phyllis Terrell. He watched her gather up the boys, and ski them off to the lodge, a short distance away.
Randall turned his attention to the mountain. A good, hard run was just what he needed. Work up a sweat. He got in the lift line and a woman joined him on the chair.
'Have you skied Red River before?' she asked.
Randall nodded and looked at the woman. Rather ordinary in appearance, he guessed her to be about his age.
'Several times.'
'Some people who just came down the mountain said the Cat Skinner run is excellent. Have you done that?'
'It's rated difficult,' Randall said, nodding.
'Are you a good skier?'
'I am. But I've never skied here before and I'd rather follow someone down who knows the terrain. Would that be an imposition?'
'Not at all,' Randall replied.
The woman flashed a big smile.
'Super.'
They got off the lift. Randall waited while the woman adjusted her bindings.
People flowed around them and skied off.
'New equipment,' she explained apologetically as she buttoned up.
'Cat Skinner is to the left,' Randall said.
'Lead on,' the woman said.
'Get me pointed in the right direction and I'll beat you to the bottom.'
Randall smiled at the prospect of some friendly competition.
'We'll see about that.'
A third of the way down, Randall Stewart picked up good speed. He caught some air on a small bump and the woman stayed right with him.
The woman took a quick look back. No one was behind her. She ran Stewart off the powder and into a tree. The glancing impact sent him careening, spinning wildly on his backside, his left ski twisted awkwardly under his body. He slid to a stop and tried to get his leg untangled, but the pain was too intense.
The woman reached him as he lay in the snow under some trees out of sight of the run.
'Jesus, why the fuck did you run into me?' Stewart asked, panting from the pain.
The woman took a handgun from inside her parka, bent over, slammed it full force against Stewart's forehead, and heard his skull bone shatter.
That should do it, Agent Applewhite thought, as she watched Stewart's breathing slow and finally stop.
The snow fell harder now as the cloud dipped over the mountain. Soon their ski tracks would be completely covered.
She turned away from the body and continued her run down the mountain, feeling a rush of adrenaline as she cut through the fresh powder.
Chapter 8
Detective Bobby Sloan returned to headquarters, took possession of an empty office assigned to the crime prevention unit, and spent the rest of the morning and part of the early afternoon going through the paperwork in Father Mitchell's briefcase, viewing some of the videocassettes found in the locker at the college, and sampling excerpts of what looked to be at least ten hours of audio tapes Mitchell had also stashed in his briefcase.
In a general way the video- and audiotapes Sloan previewed explained a good deal about Mitchell's research. The priest had been probing into intelligence matters. But it was hard to see what his focus was.
Mitchell had conducted interviews about the U. S. Army School of the Americas, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the National Security Agency, the U. S. Army Intelligence and Security Command-Sloan now knew what INS COM stood for-and a host of other agencies that included the departments of state, treasury, and defense.
A number of interviews touched on a government institution he'd never heard of before, a Joint Military Intelligence College that offered undergraduate and graduate spy-craft degrees to care fully selected military and civilian intelligence personnel.
It was all eye-opening, informative stuff about the scope of government intelligence operations. But it was also all over the map, and Sloan couldn't get a handle on what the priest had been trying to accomplish.
However, he was willing to bet the farm that Mitchell's murder was directly tied to his research. That at least gave Sloan a start on figuring out the motive for the killing.
Mitchell had kept copies of some important personal and professional documents in the briefcase. His army retirement papers showed that his last posting had been at the School of Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia. There was a letter from the secretary of the army to Mitchell's mother, expressing condolences regarding the death of the priest's brother, another letter from a U. S. embassy official that reported the colonel had been attacked and killed by bandits, and a copy of the resignation letter Father Mitchell had submitted to the college where he'd been teaching. The priest had quit his job a month after his brother's death.
Sloan pawed through an envelope stuffed with credit-card, hotel, and airplane-ticket receipts. Mitchell had been doing some whirlwind traveling during the last three months, taking short trips to places like San Antonio and Tucson, and many longer jaunts to Washington, D.C.' and Georgia.
Sloan arranged everything by date to get a clear picture of Mitchell's schedule, then totaled up the charges, which ran over five thousand dollars. Bobby wondered how the priest had been able to pay for such travel on a retired major's pension.
Sloan fanned through a pocket notebook filled with the names and addresses of people Mitchell had kept track of. He'd known a hell of a lot of folks scattered all across the country. Some addresses correlated with the places Mitchell had recently visited, some names had stars or checkmarks next to them, and some entries had been crossed out.
Bobby put the notebook aside and went through two correspondence files from the briefcase. One held six years' worth of letters Mitchell had written to the secretary of the army requesting more specific information about the death of his brother under the Freedom of Information Act. Each request had been turned down. All Mitchell had received for his efforts was an official army criminal investigation report that basically repeated the facts contained in the letter from the embassy.
The second file contained letters to the Armed Forces Records Center in St. Louis demanding the release of his brother's military service records.
Those requests also had been rejected. There was, however, a recent letter from a former officer who'd
