02 Avalanche Pass Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    T hat 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 battered 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

    J esse 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 thebetter the skier, the worse