Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [136]
“Well, uh, of course…I told them…the story of what happened, obviously. I’m just wondering. I mean, exactly what did you tell them?”
“Exactly?” said Muldaur, still posing as Hugh. Rachel, who was almost as tall as her husband, gave him an indulgent look. “Exactly? That would be good…to know exactly. Wouldn’t it?”
“I think so,” said Stephens.
“Okay. We’ll tell you what we said. Exactly.” Muldaur stepped back and crossed his arms.
After a few moments, Stephens said, “Well?”
“You first.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You tell us what you said—exactly—and we’ll tell you what we said. Exactly.”
“Well, I, uh…you know. I told them what happened. You know…pretty much…yeah, I told them the whole story from beginning to end.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Muldaur, turning his back on Stephens and walking away. Zak and Rachel followed.
Stephens called after the trio. “We’ll have to get together in a week or so. You know. Talk things over. Compare notes. Go out to dinner with our wives.” He looked at Zak. “Bring your girlfriend.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, right?”
“Well, fine. Yeah. How about you?” Stephens looked at Muldaur.
“I don’t fucking think so.”
The next day fire crews on the mountain recovered six corpses. Within twenty-four hours the medical examiner’s office determined that Chuck Finnigan’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his death would have qualified him as a drunk driver if he’d been in a car. Scooter and Fred Finnigan had been drinking all day, too, because they were both legally drunk when they died almost eight hours after Chuck.
The case against Zak and the others crumbled after the autopsy results. The prosecutor’s office said it came down to one very coherent story matched up against another set of stories that had already diverged in several instances and was obviously heavily influenced by alcohol. He didn’t believe a jury was going to buy their claims. The prosecutors said if they’d been inclined to prosecute at all—which they weren’t—they would have built a case against Jennifer Moore and Kasey Newcastle, the only survivors from that camp, for accessory to murder. But they didn’t.
61
A lot of things happened in the next few years.
Zak continued to work alongside Lieutenant Muldaur on Engine 6 until five years later, when Muldaur retired and he and Rachel moved to Montana to bike, ski, and take up fly-fishing.
Giancarlo Barrett was introduced to trail running, and while he never announced that he was quitting the bike, he parked it in the back of his garage—and several years later, when he realized both tires were flat and the shocks were leaking, gave it to the Goodwill. It didn’t surprise Zak that Giancarlo never wanted to ride a bike again. Zak never saw Stephens after that morning in the hospital. Zak continued to ride and sometimes to race. He got married. They had two children, both girls. Ten years after that weekend in the mountains, when the girls were in first and second grade, they received word his wife’s brother had died.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in autumn when Zak found himself sitting in a large Episcopal church in Clyde Hill. The trees all across the city were turning colors. Hard feelings in the Newcastle family had decreased to the point where Zak almost felt comfortable sitting in the same pew with Mr. and Mrs. Newcastle, Nadine on his left, their two children on the either side of them.
Zak listened to the priest and then to the speakers, who, one by one, extolled the virtues of the deceased Kasey Newcastle. After college Kasey worked for his father for a couple of years, then got an offer to run a consortium of real estate companies back east. He’d worked and lived in New York City, marrying and divorcing once while amassing more wealth in just a few years than his father had in forty. Then one rainy night in Connecticut a semi crossed the centerline and plowed into Kasey’s luxury SUV, and despite all the best safety systems he’d died on the spot.
Zak wondered sometimes whether Kasey ever got over losing five of his best friends in one day under circumstances