“That was a little girl and a dog on Christmas morning,” Jane groaned. “And if we don’t get up and get in there
right now
, they’ll be back, I promise you.”
Wolf struggled out of bed, crawled into some clothes, and moaned. “Do I have time to brush my teeth?”
“Not a chance,” Jane said, zipping up her jeans. “We’ll be attacked again. Come on.”
When they arrived at the tree, Sara was separating the
pres-ents into three piles, while Flaps helped by sniffing everything carefully. Sara’s was the biggest pile. She tore into the packages, shrieking with delight at each gift, no matter what it was. She danced around the room wearing Wolf’s gift, a small sheepskin coat and matching snow boots.
“Those are for when you’re in Santa Fe,” he said. He opened one of his own presents—a photograph of the three of them with Flaps and the snowman that had been taken only the day before.
“That’s for when we’re not here,” Jane said.
Maria cooked a grand Christmas dinner, and they ate formally in the dining room, stuffing themselves with the traditional dinner. After lunch, Wolf and Jane left Sara playing with her new Nintendo game and Flaps methodically removing the skin from one of her new tennis balls. They napped for most of the afternoon, and when Wolf woke, it was time to visit Mark Shea. He got out of bed, taking care not to wake Jane; he was on his way out of the house when the phone rang. He grabbed it before it could wake Jane.
“Hello?” he said.
“Wolf, it’s Mark. I want to ask a favor.”
“Sure, Mark.”
“I remember your telling me you owned a pistol.”
“That’s right.”
“May I borrow it? Would you bring it with you?”
Wolf was very surprised. Mark was a vigorous opponent of the right to handgun ownership; he and Wolf had argued many times about the gun control laws. Wolf resisted the urge to tease him now about his stand. “All right, Mark. I’ll bring it with me.”
He went to the study, opened the safe, checked to be
sure the pistol was loaded, put it into his coat pocket, and left the house.
New snow had fallen during the night, and Wolf drove carefully through the nearly deserted streets. Everybody was doing what he had been doing, he reckoned—sleeping off Christmas dinner. He drove north through town and out onto the Taos Highway. When he turned left onto Tano Road, he noted how few tire tracks had marred the new snow; by the time he reached the turnoff to Mark’s house, there were only the tracks of a single car. It was dark as he swung through the open gates to Mark’s compound, and his lights illuminated the single set of tire tracks that had turned into Mark’s place.
The only light in the compound was from the outbuilding that was Mark’s professional suite, and Wolf turned toward it at the fork in the drive. The big house, off to the right, looked empty, haunted. The tracks preceding him stopped next to Mark’s Range Rover, which was covered in a fluffy layer of new snow, but there was no other car. Wolf left the Porsche and trudged to the front door, following another set of footprints that seemed to be going the other way.
Wolf rapped sharply on the door and opened it. “Hello? Mark?”
Music was playing quite loudly. Vivaldi,
The Four Seasons
. There was something in the air, too, a familiar scent.
Wolf was swept back in time; he was twelve or thirteen. He’d gotten his first gun, a .22 rifle, for Christmas, and he was out in the woods at the edge of his hometown of Delano, looking for rabbits. First, though, he’d wanted some target practice. He’d found some bottles and lined them up against a mudbank, then fired his new rifle for the first time. The smell of gunpowder had filled the woods, a smell he came to associate with afternoons in the fields and
mountains around his home, hunting with a friend and a dog. The smell was here now and was entirely pleasant, until he realized it was out of place.
Wolf looked around and saw no one. The music became an irritant, and he went to the stereo in the bookcase and switched it off. It was then that he heard the noise, and it made his hair stand on end—a rasping groan. He walked around the sofa and found Mark Shea, lying on his side, trying to get up.
“Mark!” Wolf managed to say. He went to his friend and turned him over onto his back. The front of his white shirt was a mass of blood, and turning him over revealed an expanding pool of red on the carpet.
Mark’s mouth moved, but no sound came out, except the rasp.
“Hang on, Mark,” Wolf said, grabbing for the phone. With one hand he dialed zero, while with the other he loosened Mark’s shirt collar.
“Operator.”
“Get me the police; this is an emergency.”
The operator was matter-of-fact. “May I have the number you’re calling from?”
Wolf struggled to remember the number and couldn’t. “I can’t remember it. Please connect me with the police—no, with the sheriff’s department.” Mark’s house was outside the city limits, in the county’s jurisdiction.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I must have the number.”
Frantic, Wolf looked at the telephone in his hand, but there was no number on it.
“Listen to me, you stupid bitch,” he said, “a man is badly hurt, and I want the sheriff’s department right now, do you hear me?”
“All right, keep your shirt on,” she said sourly.
At the moment he was connected, Wolf remembered Mark’s number.
“Sheriff’s department.”
“Hello, I need an ambulance and the police here right away. A man has been shot.” He recited directions to Mark’s house.
“Your name and number?” the deputy said.
“My name is Willett.” He rattled off the phone number. “Please hurry and get here.”
“Is the man badly hurt?”
Wolf wanted to say that he was probably dying, but he didn’t want Mark to hear that. “Yes, very.”
“We’re on the way.”
Wolf hung up and turned his attention back to Mark. His eyes were glazed. “Mark, can you hear me?” he asked.
Mark’s eyes came back into focus, and he seemed to recognize Wolf. He nodded.
“Can you tell me who did this?”
Mark’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Wolf couldn’t read his lips.
“Try, Mark, try hard. I can’t do anything to help you, and I have to know who did this.”
Mark did try harder, and this time Wolf could understand the words. “She…did…” he managed to say.
“Who, Mark? Who did it?”
Mark tried again and failed. His eyes began to lose their focus. He jerked in a sharp breath and it came out in a rattle. Wolf saw his pupils dilate. Mark Shea was dead.
Wolf could hear a distant siren—no, two sirens. He sat back on the floor and took his friend’s hand. He was still sitting there when the sheriff and the ambulance arrived.
E
d Eagle was dozing when the phone rang. He groaned with the effort of answering it. “Hello?”
“Ed, it’s Wolf Willett.”
“Merry Christmas, Wolf.”
“Not anymore. I’m at Mark Shea’s place, and he’s been shot.”
“How bad?”
“Dead. He was alive when I got here; he died a couple of minutes later.”
“Were you first on the scene?”
“Yes. We had an appointment at six o’clock.”
Eagle glanced at his watch: ten past six. “Have you called the police?”
“The sheriff. I can hear the sirens now.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Eagle said. “Wait until I arrive before you talk to them.”
“All right, but hurry.”
Eagle grabbed a coat, headed for the BMW, then
changed his mind and got into the Bronco; with new snow on the ground he might need the four-wheel drive. He drove faster than he ever had in snow, and he nearly lost it a couple of times. It was dark now, and his headlights brightly illuminated the white road ahead of him.
Tano Road was treacherous, and he could see that other cars ahead of him had skidded. The sheriff’s cars, he thought; they had been in a hurry too. He skidded through Mark Shea’s gates and drove toward the flashing lights. Three sheriff’s cars and an ambulance were there when he pulled up in front of the psychiatrist’s office.
“Just hold it right there, Mr. Eagle,” a deputy said, moving in front of the door and holding up a hand.
“Fuck you,” Eagle said, shouldering the man aside. “My client’s in there.” He strode into the office. Half a dozen men were gathered around the sofa at the end of the room, all looking down. Wolf Willett was one of them. So was the sheriff, Matt Powers. Eagle nodded at the man. “Matt,” he said.
“What’re you doing here, Ed?” the sheriff asked. “This is a crime scene, and you’re not welcome.”
“Let’s start all over, Matt. I represent Wolf Willett, and he’s not talking to you until I say so. Am I still unwelcome?”
The sheriff looked at the floor again.
“Yes, I am,” Wolf replied.
“All right, Matt, Mr. Willett is going to answer all your questions, and I’m going to be here while he does it.”
The sheriff glowered at Eagle. “Okay. Let’s all go sit down over here.” He directed Wolf to a sofa at the other end of the room.
Eagle ignored them for the moment and went to look at Mark Shea’s body; he was appalled at the amount of blood on the floor. He turned and joined the sheriff and his client.
Wolf began telling his story, and Eagle listened closely,
ready to keep him out of trouble, if necessary. It was not necessary; Wolf was lucid and articulate. He stopped at the point when he called the sheriff’s office.
“So,” the sheriff said, “Dr. Shea said that ‘she did it’?”
“Not exactly,” Wolf replied. “I said, ’Mark, who did this?’ and he replied, with some difficulty, ’She did.’ There was a pause between the two words; he was struggling to say it.”
Eagle broke in. “So he didn’t actually say that a woman shot him?”
“Sounded like that to me,” the sheriff said. “Mr. Willett asked him who did it, and he said, ’She did.’”
“Maybe,” Wolf said. “How can we be sure exactly what he meant?”
“Why were you coming to see Dr. Shea?” the sheriff asked.
“We talked yesterday, and Mark asked me to come over at six; said he wanted to talk to me alone.”
“Did he give you any indication what he wanted to talk about?”
“He said he wanted to tell me some things, wanted to get something off his chest, words to that effect. He sounded worried and depressed. That was very unusual for Mark.”
“Sheriff?”
The group on the sofa turned and looked at the deputy standing in the doorway; he was gingerly holding a rifle.
“We found this in the snow, a few yards off the front walk; looks like somebody slung it over there.”
“Bring it over here,” the sheriff said, and watched the deputy as he approached. “Looks like an old Winchester,” he said, looking at the rifle without touching it.
“It’s a Model 73,” Wolf said. “Mark bought it late last year—a Christmas present to himself, he said.”
The deputy sniffed the barrel. “Been fired,” he said.
The sheriff turned back to Wolf. “Mr. Willett, do you
have any objection to a test to see if you’ve recently fired a weapon?”
“None at all,” Wolf said. “Under the circumstances, I’d be grateful for such a test.”
“We’ll do that in a few minutes,” the sheriff said. “Do you know if Dr. Shea owned any other firearms?”
“No, he didn’t—not to my knowledge, anyway. He had an absolute hatred of handguns; he signed ads in the
New York Times
, he wrote letters to Senate committees—he was very strong on handgun control.”
“And yet he bought a rifle.”
“It was only a decoration to him, I think. I doubt if he ever fired it; I’m astonished that he would even have ammunition for the thing.”
“He owned a rifle, but he didn’t shoot,” the sheriff said, as if such a thing were unheard of.
“Lots of people in Santa Fe have western relics—like that,” Wolf said, pointing.
The others turned and looked at an old silver-trimmed saddle, resting on a sawhorse across the room.
“He didn’t ride, either,” Wolf said.
“I see,” the sheriff replied.
Wolf spoke again. “There’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Just as I left the house to come here, Mark called and asked if I still owned a pistol—asked me to bring it with me.”
“Did you ask him why?”
“No. I planned to when I got here.”
“Did you bring the pistol?”
Wolf dug the automatic out of his pocket and handed it over.
The sheriff sniffed at the barrel. “Doesn’t seem to have been fired recently.”
“It’s never been fired at all,” Wolf said. “I bought it at a
gun shop out on Airport Road right after I built my house here. I’ve never had occasion to shoot it.”
The sheriff expertly fieldstripped the weapon and checked it carefully; he reassembled it and handed it back to Wolf. “It’s as you say. There’s still some packing grease in the barrel. How did Dr. Shea know you owned a pistol?”
“We were arguing about gun control once, and I told him I owned one,“ Wolf said. “But there’s something else: When I drove out here, there was only one set of tracks ahead of me from the time I turned onto County Road 84. The tracks turned into here, and there was a set of footprints between the parking place and the front door.”
“Let’s have a look,” the sheriff said. He led the group outside and played a flashlight around. “Shit,” he said. There were now many tire tracks and footprints around the house, where his department’s cars and men had left them.
Wolf took the flashlight from the sheriff and pointed it at Mark’s Range Rover. “Look over here,” he said, leading the group to the parking area. He pointed. “The tracks weren’t
to
the house, they were
from
the house. Somebody walked out of the house—only one set of footprints—got into a car parked here, and drove away.”
The sheriff took the flashlight back. “We’ve got a good print right here, from when he got into the car.” He called out to a deputy. “Jack, get over here and take a cast of this footprint, and measure it. I want one of the tire track, too.” He turned to the others. “I got me a good footprint man.”