Obstruction of Justice Read Online Free Page B

Collier pulled away from Nina, putting his knees up, one arm hiding his eyes. Nina looked over at the dead man. The technicians seemed to have dumped more equipment than their packs could carry all around the man, some of it on his body, including two black paddles, which they held against his chest....
    "Clear!" Mike shouted, and they all moved back.
    The dead man seemed to leap into the air. Then he fell back, while Mike listened to his chest through a stethoscope. "Again," he said. Dave held the paddles tightly to Ray’s chest, and the dead man heaved up again and again....
    "Oh, God. Ray," Leo was saying. "His wife and kids are up there on the mountain somewhere. Is he ...?"
    "Stay back," Mike said. The technicians continued to work doggedly over the man.
    Finally Nina said, "Where’s the rest of your party?"
    "I don’t know. We got separated when the storm struck. "
    "C’mon, Ray, c’mon," Nina heard Sven say. She couldn’t watch anymore. She could hear them grunt, hear the noise of air artificially expelled.
    "Is your friend hurt?" Leo asked.
    "I don’t know," Nina said, turning back to Collier. "It’s not Anna, Collier. It’s a man. Anna’s been dead for a long time." Collier didn’t respond; he wasn’t moving at all, and a stab of apprehension went through her. "Look," she said, getting Sven’s attention. "I want to take him back up."
    "He’s in bad shape, isn’t he?" said Sven. "Need a hand? If you want to wait, we could come back and take him up in the stretcher."
    She helped Collier to his feet. He followed her lead. "No, we’ll make it up from here. I’m not sure about making it all the way down the mountain, though."
    "We can take two plus one on a stretcher in each chopper," said Dave, still working on the body. "If nobody else is injured, you get first dibs. The three of us can wrestle the stretcher up. Go ahead."
    Leo, who had been watching the proceedings from a few feet away, said suddenly, "Ray is dead, isn’t he? I’ll be damned."
    "Yeah, I guess we’ve lost him," Mike said, rising wearily. "Let’s get him on the stretcher, Dave. We’ll all go up together. Safer going uphill."
    "Collier, come on now." Nina took him by the arm, leading him across the split in the rocks, wondering how he had made it down there in the storm. He stopped on the other side, massaging his temples and eyes with both hands, as if to rub away his confusion.
    Trying to determine the easiest route, squinting their eyes against the treacherous sun, they looked up.
    Standing near the summit above them, still and silent, the dead man’s family was watching.

3
    TWO DAYS LATER, NINA WAS STILL LOOKING AT Tallac, but once again from the safe distance of her office window. Almost all the snow had melted. She remembered that groove, that ledge of light-colored rock, but the avalanche slope near the summit was hidden behind a jade-colored ridge.
    She turned away. She would never feel the same about that mountain.
    Sandy Whitefeather, her secretary, knocked and came in with a new stack of files to supplement the pile accumulating on Nina’s desk.
    "The coroner’s office called," she said without preamble. "There’s a meeting at two this afternoon. They want you to come, along with the other people who were on that hike. They said to tell you it’s not an inquest, just an informal inquiry."
    Sandy set the files down and stood in front of the desk, arms crossed, resplendent in a brilliantly colored Hawaiian shirt over white pants and tennis shoes. A large, formidable woman of indeterminate age, she knew everybody in Tahoe, and nothing fazed her. Her smooth, dignified face and dark hair, which she usually wore pulled back in a severe style, made her look like pictures Nina had seen of Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian queen, but Sandy was actually a member of the Washoe tribe native to Tahoe and the high desert near Carson City. She ran Nina’s schedule. She ran the office. And she wanted to run Nina’s life, but that Nina