Book Excerpt: Killer Weekend

July 2, 2007 — -- Prologue

As she stood in her small closet undressing for bed, Elizabeth Shaler was annoyed to find some mud left behind by a running shoe that she now put away. About the size of a dollar bill, the mud covered the carpet and spanned the crack of the trapdoor that led down into the three-foot-high crawl space beneath the house. Liz pulled on a cool cotton nightgown. At her feet, cracks appeared in the mud, then widened and spread. These cracks had nothing to do with where she stood, but were instead the result of upward pressure from beneath the trapdoor.

Liz, just shy of six feet tall and athletically fit, placed her dirty laundry into the wicker hamper and tidied up. Her hanging clothes were organized by color and type, her shoes neatly ordered on the shelves. Had she glanced down she might have noticed the widening cracks in the mud, might have noticed the hatch coming open.

She looked around the bedroom for the biography she was currently reading, only to realize she'd left it in the kitchen.As she headed down a narrow hallway lined with her family's photographic history, behind her the crawl space hatch popped open an inch. From within the darkness there appeared the top of a knitted ski mask, followed by a pair of skittish eyes.

The kitchen and the adjoining living room afforded Liz a spectacular view of the horizon dominated by Sun Valley's rugged mountain skyline, still aglow at 10:10 p.m. She loved this place, her second home, so far from New York and the political life she'd chosen.

She poured herself a glass of water, grabbed the book from the counter, and headed back down the hallway, both hands occupied.Patrolman Walt Fleming groaned.

Earlier in the summer the town had adopted a free bike campaign. Thirty bright yellow bikes had been spread around town as community property, with the understanding no one would steal them. They were used by anyone wanting to pedal from one place to the next. But the instructions on the bikes clearly stated they were to be well cared for and left in any of the many bike stands around town, a policy prone to abuse. Walt—on a bike himself, one of four officers assigned to "pedal patrol"—spotted one of the bikes dumped into some bushes a half block up the hill from the community library.