was, that word that had impacted his life more than any other. Bobby. Gail. His badge. His father. He heard his own breathing through the phone’s earpiece. He said good night, a lump forming in his throat for reasons unknown. Was this the silence about which Fiona had warned? From which he ran? Was he supposed to call her?
Ten minutes later he reached the reinforced entry gate at the base of the Hillabrand estate—two hundred acres of private property contiguous with the Cold Springs run of the Sun Valley ski mountain. Perched atop an 8,000-foot-high mountaintop, two miles up a gravel road, stood Hillabrand’s 10,000-square-foot log “cabin,” a monument to a bachelor with too much money and just enough sense to hire a tasteful architect.
“It’s my fault,” Hillabrand said. He wore a crisply pressed, sky-blue polo shirt, creased blue jeans, and forest green Keens. With his leathery tan, blue eyes, and wry smile, he had to fight off comparisons to Robert Redford. “I got absorbed with work. I’d left all the lights off, so the place was dark as a graveyard—an open invitation, I’m afraid. I heard something . . . and had a look . . .” He led Walt down a confusing set of hallways and reached a hotel-sized kitchen. He pulled back a curtain on the kitchen’s Dutch split door.
“He’d been working on this door. Tried to jimmy it.” He opened the door and showed Walt where a crude tool had been used in an attempt to open the door. “I switched on the outside light. Got a quick look. Six feet, broad shoulders. No face. Only his back. Jeans. Dark sweatshirt. He was gone in a flash. Very fast.”
“Hair color?” Walt was taking notes.
“No. Ball cap, I guess.”
“You must have a weapon in this place,” Walt said. Hillabrand was a former army general who’d retired into an NGO. He employed a security detail of service vets fiercely loyal to him.
“Of course. Did I pursue him into the woods? Come on, Sheriff. Give me some credit.”
“You called your own people first, I take it?”
“You really take a dim view of me, don’t you?” He leaned back.
“No. I called nine-one-one and reported the intruder. I don’t keep a posse around me, you know? Is that what you think? I have staff. Of course I do. But they keep regular hours.”
“Deputy Chalmers will remain with you, preferably in a windowless room—a second-story room will do.”
“You have to be kidding me,” Hillabrand said.
“A man of your . . . position, sir . . . our first job is your protection.” Walt contrasted this with his response to the similar situation at Vince Wynn’s residence. He’d assumed any gunshots had driven the intruder away in Wynn’s case, but he realized he’d made it personal as well, and that was a bad development.
“You think this was . . . nonsense. I thought . . . the Berkholder thing . . .”
“And that may be all it is, but this is the way we’re going to do it.”
Chalmers stood at the ready. Hillabrand motioned for her to follow him, and they left. Walt went out the kitchen door, his flashlight on, trained onto the dewy grass.
Tracking wasn’t a hobby for him, and it wasn’t a professional requirement. It was a study, a science, a passion. He held the Maglite’s bluish halogen bulb close to the lawn and watched as a million pearls of dew lit up and sparkled. In their midst, like a string of lakes, were lightless oval shapes, each a footprint of the intruder. He stayed to the side, following them down the curve of the lawn to the edge of the forest and from there into the ever darker woods, alert for displaced leaves, freshly broken twigs, and the bent shafts of plants and wildflowers. Lower and lower down the hill he went, hunched and attentive, excited by the puzzle solving. There were stretches where he lost all signs of the man, wishing he’d brought Beatrice along with him, instead of leaving her in the Cherokee. Tempted to go back and get her, he doubted she’d pick up a scent from the ground alone, and couldn’t trouble himself to return.
Five minutes stretched to twenty. It was a steady descent, the intruder avoiding and crossing the occasional game trail. It felt as if he knew where he was going, that this was scouted terrain. And as the invisible path that Walt followed stopped descending and began to traverse the north-facing hill,