Eight
W alt awakened in his daughter Emily’s bed to the ringing of the phone in his own bedroom. For the second night he’d avoided that mattress.
He dragged himself out of the stupor of two hours’ sleep, managing to answer the kitchen phone before voice mail picked up.
“It’s Kathy. I’m sorry to call you at home, Walt.” Dispatch. Walt pulled himself into focus. “I tried both your cell and pager first.”
“Go ahead.” He rubbed his face to clear his thought. It didn’t work.
“Stuart Holms called at five fifty-six A.M.”
Walt checked the kitchen clock: seven minutes had passed. “Go on.” Maybe he wouldn’t need the coffee. Just mention of that name had jolted him awake.
“He was a little abusive, sir. Bossy. I told him nine-one-one took the emergency calls. He told me to go to hell.”
Walt knew Stuart Holms by reputation. This didn’t surprise him. “What emergency?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. That’s what I’m saying. Demanded to speak with you personally.”
An alarm sounded in Walt’s head: He didn’t know Stuart Holms personally.
“He sounded upset,” she went on.
Fifteen minutes later, Walt was refueling the Cherokee, wearing a fresh, starched blue uniform shirt and sipping hot coffee from a travel mug. He called the number Stuart Holms had left with dispatch, but had only reached an assistant who said Holms needed to speak with Walt “as soon as was humanly possible.”
Yet it was Holms himself who met Walt at the front door to the colossal modern home out the Lake Creek drainage. Nestled at the base of the mountains, it felt to Walt like a museum of contemporary art. Holms led him to a caf'e table with a view of an enclosed garden through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. They were waited on by a slim woman in her thirties who had a French accent. Stuart Holms ordered Walt a sausage omelet, toasted bagel with cream cheese, coffee, and orange juice. He took smoked salmon, capers, and guava juice for himself.
Dressed in blue pajamas, Holms wore a terrycloth bathrobe and sheepskin moccasins. He looked younger than Walt had imagined him. His name had been in the business pages for decades.
He focused intently on Walt and spoke in a croaking voice that needed more coffee.
“I apologize for the secrecy, Sheriff, but there’s no such thing as privacy, and I need to keep this private. I called you because this home is in the county, not the city, and I’ve had it on good authority that you’re a hell of a lot more trustworthy than the Ketchum police chief.”
“I don’t know about that. What’s the nature of your complaint?”
“Not exactly a complaint. More like a report. It’s Allie-Ailia-my wife. She failed to come home last night.” He looked to Walt for some kind of reaction. “This is entirely out of character, and I’m worried. If I raise the alarm it’ll be over the wire services before I’ve had my morning swim. With Patrick’s conference and all…No need to spoil his party.”
“A guy like you? You’ve got your own people,” Walt said.
“You want my people to handle it, they can, I suppose,” Holms said.
“Does she carry a cell phone?” Walt asked.
“Last I saw her, she’d gone for a run. This was a little after five, yesterday evening. She missed the luau.”
“You’ve tried her cell phone?”
“I called it, only to hear it ring down the hall. It’s on her dresser. Damn awful feeling, that is.”
“Five P.M. yesterday,” Walt stated. “How ’bout the staff?”
“Did she sleep somewhere else? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? With someone else? You think she’s going to slip back into her room and come out yawning as if she overslept? I don’t think so.”
The food arrived.
Walt took down the particulars as he ate. Stuart had expected to see her at the C3 luau. He’d left word with the staff that she was to call him the moment she returned home. Upset with her, he’d headed home, had taken a sleeping pill, and awakened at 5 A.M. to find her room still empty.
Walt polished off the omelet. He thought of his own wife-nearly mentioned it.
“Fabulous omelet,” Walt said.
“That’s Raphael, my chef.”
“An artist.”
“I’ll tell him. He’ll be pleased.”
“We usually give it some time before investigating reports of missing persons, but we can act on this if you like. My question is: What kind of press can you tolerate? If we take this, it’ll mean some phone calls, questions being asked. It’s going to be pretty clear, pretty quickly, what’s going on. I wish I could change that, but it’s going to get out.”
“I want her found.” He didn’t touch his own plate-an artful display of smoked salmon and a bagel.
Walt ran through what his deputies referred to as her 411. “She drives a pale green Volvo SC- 90,” Holms told him. Then he reached into his robe’s pocket and passed a five-by-four card across the table. It included the vehicle’s registration number, her age, weight, and the clothes she’d last been seen in-a gray, zippered shell, a white jogging top, and blue shorts. A recent photo had been digitally printed in the lower corner.
“I have very competent staff.”
“What about your own detail?” Walt asked again.
“We use a company for overseas travel. Yes. New York. Washington. L.A. But not up here. Raphael goes with us everywhere. A few assistants. That’s all.”
Walt studied the photo, remembering where he’d last seen this same woman: on the balcony with Danny Cutter at his brother’s cocktail party.
“Yes, there’s an age gap, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Holms said. “But I’m only sixty. And a young sixty at that. She’s beautiful, and outgoing, and a wonderful conversationalist who likes to talk. Find her, Sheriff.”
“Her favorite places to run?”
“The bike path. Adam’s Gulch. Hulen Meadows. Lake Creek. Over the saddle and into Elkhorn. She varies it.”
Walt wrote these down on the back of the same card.
“It’s a lot of ground,” Walt said.
“That’s why you’re involved.”
“We’ll get started,” Walt said. “And we’ll keep it under the radar as much as possible.”
“If you start asking around, Danny Cutter’s name is going to come up. That’s not news to me, and it’s behind us. Just so you know.”
“Okay,” Walt said, though his voice belied him.
“Ailia and Danny are to be partners in a company I’m helping him finance. Those fences are mended.”
Walt faintly nodded, wondering why, if they were mended, Holms felt obligated to mention them.