There was no wind, but her own speed created one and she felt that freezing rush around her face, felt her hair streaming out behind her like a banner. Her forehead started to ache with the intense cold but she gritted her teeth and ignored it, hunching down in the collar of her ski suit for protection.
She was reeling him in fast now, skiing in a straight line, cutting across the smooth rounded curves that his skis had cut in the snow, traveling maybe half the distance he was and moving a lot faster as well.
He was swinging off to the left, down Calf Roper, to head for Four Points Hut when she caught up with him in a drifting cloud of snow. He looked up, a little surprised at her rapid arrival and violent stop.
“Jess? What the hell are you up to?” she said. They were already too low to access the chutes and as far as she was concerned, that meant a wasted run. They’d have to ride up the chair again. He shrugged, but she noticed that he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Just getting my legs,” he said briefly. He turned away to ski off, but her hand was on his arm and she stopped him.
“Getting your legs? You got your legs twenty years ago! We didn’t sneak off to ski the kiddie runs, Jess. Let’s do some real skiing here, okay?”
She saw his shoulders straighten a little as she said the words “kiddie runs” and he replied with an obvious undertone of anger in his voice.
“Okay fine. Let’s get to the chair.”
He tried to shake her hand off his arm but she held tight. A worried frown creased the skin between her eyes and she pushed her yellow-tinted goggles up to see his face more clearly. His own eyes were covered by dark brown Bolle aviator glasses, which made it difficult to read his expression.
“Jess?” she asked tentatively, her own voice softening with concern. “Is the leg giving you trouble?” He didn’t answer immediately.
“Maybe a little,” he said. She could sense the worry in his voice and she shuffled a little closer to him.
“You know the doc said it’s fine. It’s completely healed. Maybe the muscle tone isn’t back to what it was, but that’s just a matter of exercise. There’s no physical problem.”
He looked at her then and she could see she had stung him. “You’re saying it’s in my mind?” he challenged and she shrugged awkwardly, wishing she could take her earlier words back. How often do we wish that? she asked herself as she tried to pick her words more carefully.
“Well, maybe that’s only to be expected,” she said. “But so far as I can see, there’s an easy way to get rid of any doubt. Just ski the chutes and prove to yourself that you’re okay.”
“As easy as that,” he said in a flat tone. She shook her head in frustration.
“Yes, as easy as that! Jess, what is the problem? You ski like an angel. You know it. I know it. You’ve been skiing the chutes since you were nine years old!”
“Maybe I don’t feel I’m ready for it yet.”
She stepped back, looking at the trees and snow around them as she tried to find the right words. She couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. Skiing had been second nature to Jesse virtually from the time he could walk. The chutes were a double black run, certainly. But to a skier of Jesse’s standard, they should have held no fear.
“This is crazy! You’ve skied in those trees hundreds of times! Thousands maybe! I tell you, there is no problem Jess. You’re fine. You’ve just got to get over it and believe it, that’s all.”
“And what if I try it and I can’t handle it, Lee? What then?”
She shook her head, scarcely believing what she was hearing. “That’s not going to happen. I know it. Sure you might fall, but you’ve fallen in there hundreds of times—and only once was it a problem.” She tried to lighten her tone. “You know what they say, ‘If you ain’t fallin’, you just ain’t tryin’.’”
There was a stubborn set to his jaw. “I’m not ready.”
“Jesse, this is crazy. You’ve got to try.”
“I have tried, goddamn it! And I can’t handle it! I start to panic and I can’t control the skis and I lose it.”
He could see the concern in her face now but he was mistaking it for pity. Once more, she moved toward him.
“Jess, when? When did this happen?”
“It happens every time I go in there. I get maybe one or two turns, then I panic. I lose control.”
“But…” she began, and then stopped, not knowing what to say.
“I figure I’ve got to strengthen the leg so I’ve got confidence in it. Then I’ll try again. When I’m ready.”
She knew that if he did this, if he waited and put the moment off, he would never be ready. His leg, broken the season before, had set cleanly and fully. The doctors had told him that—and, as his occasional employer, they had told her as well. There was no structural problem with the leg. The problem was Jesse’s confidence. And unless he faced his demons and conquered them, he might never regain that confidence.
“You’re ready now,” she told him firmly. “Come on. Let’s ski to the chair, ride up and head across to Chute 2. I’ll be with you. I’ll help you.” She saw his resistance and insisted, “Jesse, you’ve got to do this!”
“And what if I can’t? What if I don’t make it?”
Before she could answer, he continued. “Lee, there are only two things I’ve been good at in my life. I was a good homicide investigator—but I’ve lost that now. And I could ski. Ski patrol was my backup. If I can’t ski the tough runs anymore, there’s no place for me on the patrol. What do I do then?”
She took a deep breath. “Well, if that’s how you feel, maybe you have to find out, one way or the other,” she said.
“Maybe I don’t want to find out! Does that occur to you? If I can’t ski anymore, what do I do?”
“You could always work for me,” she said but he shook his head dismissively.
“That’s a part-time thing and you know it. There isn’t enough serious crime here to justify you taking on a full-time investigator. The county would never stand for it.”
“I’ll sign you on as a normal deputy. I could swing that with the county,” she said. “There’s no call for you to be a homicide investigator.”
“And be another Tom LeGros?” he asked.
She allowed a little heat to enter her voice. “Something wrong with Tom, Jesse? Or maybe it’s me? Maybe you couldn’t work for me.”
“You know that’s not it. And Tom’s a good guy. It’s just, I guess… It doesn’t seem like enough. I’m not cut out to be a small-town cop like him.”
The minute he said the words, he knew they were a mistake. But there was nothing he could do about it. He saw the color flare in Lee’s cheeks.
“Or like me? You saying what I do just doesn’t stack up against life as a big-time investigator in Denver? We’re just small-town cops here in Steamboat, is that it?”
“That’s not what I meant. I—”
“Well, what did you mean, Jesse? ’Cause that’s sure as hell what it sounded like.”
He spread his hands awkwardly, looking for the right words, unable to find them. There was a long silence between them. Then Lee shook her head slowly.
“Well fuck you, Jesse.”
She swung away violently, pushing off and skiing straight down the fall line. Small puffs of powdered snow rose from her stocks as they bit into the ground, hanging in the air behind her. He watched sadly as she disappeared from sight, rounding a grove of trees at the bottom of the run. Belatedly, he took off after her, but she was heading nonstop for the bottom of the mountain and aside from a few fleeting glances, he didn’t see her again.
That night, after she’d cooled down, Lee drove up Rabbit Ear Pass to Jesse’s cabin to set things right between them. She knew he hadn’t meant to insult her or belittle her job and they meant too much to each other to let this drive a wedge between them.
But the windows of the cabin were dark and the door was locked. There was no smoke rising from the chimney and Jesse’s batt
ered old Subaru wagon was missing.
He’d gone. And she had no idea where.
THREE
CANYON LODGE
SNOW EAGLES SKI RESORT
WASATCH COUNTY
THE PRESENT
Jesse stood by the window in his room, the heavy curtains pulled wide open. A three-quarter moon had just soared clear of the mountains that ringed the valley where the hotel nestled.
“Goddamn it,” he said softly, and futilely, to the white land spread out before him. He’d known, after ten minutes of the lesson, that the instructor had sensed his fear. It was obvious, all too obvious. And he’d known that the friendly Utahan had been more than willing to help. There had been no sense of condemnation, no hint of derision. But when Jesse had spurned each tentative approach, Larry had finally given up and retreated into a mechanical dissertation on technique that Jesse knew backward and forward.
Hell, he knew it so well and he’d known it so long that he didn’t even have to think it anymore. It just happened naturally when he was on skis.
Except when it got steep and deep and narrow. Then he started thinking. But the thoughts were dark and dangerous ones.
The chutes on Mount Werner were where the best skiers in Routt County went to challenge themselves. They were steep, deep and narrow and fringed by trees. The trail maps marked them with a double black diamond—the symbol for the hardest trails of all. And they weren’t kidding.
But Jesse had skied the chutes hundreds, maybe thousands of times since he was a kid. In Colorado, kids skied the way kids in other places played baseball—every day. He’d had his share of falls, of course. Nobody who skis ever does it without falling. And the better the skier, the worse the falls can be. He’d broken bones before too. But this had been worse. A whole lot worse.
This had been a greenstick fracture, where the bone, instead of snapping clean, had reacted to the twisting force of the fall and splintered like a green, sap-filled stick.
Jesse lay in the deep snow, waves of agony washing over him like an incoming tide. The sun dropped below the rim of the Yampa Valley to the west and the mountain was in deep shadow. Under the trees, where Jesse lay semiconscious and almost buried in the deep, soft snow, it was almost dark.
In a lucid moment, Jesse realized he was dying. His body had refused to succumb to the inescapable pain of the shattered leg but the cold, the inexorable, subzero cold of the mountain, was gradually winning. He would die here before morning, he realized. Quietly. Unnoticed. Futilely.
He tried to rise and the agony surged again, a savage burst of nausea hitting him in the belly as he felt the entire leg come throbbing to life once more—hurting indescribably badly. Hurting more than anything he could ever have imagined. Hurting so that tears sprang to his tight shut eyes and once again he was a little boy calling for his mom, knowing that only she could ease that pain. He whimpered, not even aware that he was doing so.
“Mom’s here, Jesse,” a voice said inside his head. But it wasn’t his Mom. It was Death speaking, tempting him.
“Just let go and relax, boy,” it said, “and I’ll make the pain go away.” And the temptation to do so was so strong… to just relax and escape that awful pain.
It was full dark when Pete Tolliver, a buddy from the ski patrol, found him.
They brought him down the mountain in an aluminium rescue sled, pumped full of painkillers and wrapped head to toe in a space blanket. An ambulance was waiting on the snow-covered base, by the chairlift, to whisk him away to the medical center.
That had been eleven months ago. Today, structurally, Jesse was sound as a bell. Unfortunately, the surgeon who repaired his leg hadn’t been able to remove one small remnant of the terrible injury. That was a shattered fragment that lay deep in Jesse’s psyche. And it surfaced whenever he faced the sort of steep, forbidding ski run that he once used to take in his stride.
That was why, the day after his argument with Lee, he’d phoned for a reservation here at Snow Eagles, thrown some clothes into a bag, packed his skis and stocks into a canvas carryall and driven to the airport at Halley. He had to know if he could overcome this problem. But he couldn’t do that in Steamboat Springs. It was something he had to do on his own, away from Lee and friends he had known all his life. If he couldn’t solve this problem, he didn’t want to be surrounded by pitying looks and well-meaning attempts to help him face up to the fact.
The trip to Utah, he reflected glumly, had been a failure so far. It had been a waste of money and time. Thinking of the money, Jesse glanced around the expensively furnished hotel room. On a deputy’s salary, he couldn’t really afford to stay in a place like this too long. It was probably just as well he was checking out the following day.
As he thought about it, he decided he might as well head down to the reception desk and settle his bill now. That way he could save time in the morning. As yet he was undecided as to whether he should give The Wall one last attempt or just get back in his rental car and drive to the airport in Salt Lake City. He’d make up his mind in the morning. For now, he’d fix up his bill and make sure there were no loose ends.
He looked at the moon again, and the way it flooded the snow-covered ground around the hotel with a brilliant light. It was a stunning view but it did nothing for his ill humor.
“Goddamn it,” he said bitterly.
FOUR
CANYON LODGE
WASATCH COUNTY
Tina Bowden counted out the last of the bills onto the marble top of the reception counter.
“… one-eighty-five, one-ninety, one-ninety-five, two hundred. There you go, sir.”
She glanced up quickly, smiling. Too quickly for the middle-aged man on the other side of the counter. His eyes were still fastened on the swell of her breasts against the silk blouse she was wearing. Her smile went down to freezing point. There were times when working the reception desk at the Canyon Lodge was a real pain in the ass. She was glad she didn’t have to do it often—only in times like these when the rostered girl was down with the flu and the hotel was a little shorthanded.
The customer was gathering his bills together as she whisked the four fifty-dollar traveler’s checks into the cash drawer.
“Thanks,” he mumbled, knowing he’d been caught. She felt herself wishing that at least he might have had the guts to keep looking after she’d caught him. At least that might have shown some strength of character.
“You’re welcome,” she replied evenly. But her eyes told him he wasn’t. Not now. Not ever. Not in his wildest dreams.
Stuffing the bills in his wallet, he shambled away from the desk. She glanced after him for a second or two: overweight, balding and tending to sweat. And firmly convinced that he was God’s gift to womankind. She tried to picture him naked but the result was just too ludicrous, too unpleasant to entertain. She laughed shortly.
“Excuse me, miss…”
Now he was different. Tall and rangy looking, with high cheekbones, a thin face and a prominent, aquiline nose. The eyes were a very dark brown and there was a hint of humor lurking somewhere behind them. Hair just a little bit too long, and just a little untidy. The jaw was strong and clean-shaven. She guessed his age around the late thirties. He was tanned and definitely not overweight. Wide shouldered and slim hipped, he would have been a classic light heavyweight build if he’d been a boxer, she thought, remembering a former boyfriend from her time in the Marines. A physical fitness and unarmed combat instructor, he’d gauged everyone by the weight division they would have fought if they’d been a boxer.
“Yes, Mr.… ?” She let the word hang there as a question. The man smiled and she liked him even more. The lines around his eyes and mouth crinkled, seeming to accentuate and point to the deep brown eyes. Tina had always liked brown eyes.
“Parker,” he was saying, in reply to her question. He continued. “I’ll be checking out in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. Most of our guests will be doing the same,” she told him and saw one eyebrow
raise in a question mark.
“Is that so? Nothing wrong, is there?” She smiled reassuringly. A professional smile that she allowed just a little personal interest to creep into.
“Not at all. It’s just the way we operate here. Most of the guests come on a week-long package, Sunday to Saturday. We have Saturday as the checkout day and a new group checks in the following day. That way we reduce the congestion at the desk. It also gives us a good break to clean and service the rooms.”
He shrugged. “Sounds logical,” he said.
Her smile widened and he grinned slightly in return, sensing her genuine friendliness.
Having a pretty girl smile at you could go a long way toward chasing away the blues he thought, and took a closer look at the girl behind the desk. Late twenties or early thirties, he guessed, with honey blond hair cut short. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to reach forward and run his fingers through it. Slim, with a good figure, but athletic looking and well muscled, she stood around five seven, he’d guess. Her features and complexion were flawless, which he put down to a life spent in the clear mountain air. The wide-set deep brown eyes reflected the same sense of humor that was present in the curve of her full mouth. He thought briefly of Lee, back in Routt County, and felt a small twinge of guilt.
“Believe me, it is,” the girl was saying, following on from his comment. “I’ve worked other hotels and it saves a lot of friction and delay.” She leaned her elbows on the countertop, adding, with a slight roll of her eyes, “Checkout time can be pretty horrendous, you see. And the last thing a newly arrived guest wants is to be kept waiting to register while our counter staff are tied up explaining items on a customer’s bill.”
“Which he can’t remember because he ordered them four days ago and he was drunk at the time?” Jesse suggested and she nodded.
“Exactly. Have you worked in hotels yourself, Mr. Parker?” She doubted it. He definitely had an outdoors look about him. But she was enjoying talking to him and wanted to keep the conversation going.