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tentatively and then nuzzling in, as if to keep Mark warm.

4
    WALT WATCHED THE PICKUP PULL AWAY, SADNESS RATTLING around in his chest. Mark Aker had barely said a word since the discovery of his brother’s broken body. Walt hadn’t been as close to Randy but loved Mark like a brother; now that Randy was gone, Mark’s loss echoed inside of Walt as well.
    Walt’s brother, Bobby, had died only a few years before. The tragedy had torn his family apart. Walt and his father, never on great terms, were finally talking again, but it was a relationship often on eggshells. Now, he and Mark shared something unspeakable. Randy, the womanizer, the wiseguy, the irreverant jokester. The brooding, secretive brother, whose name had crossed Walt’s desk recently—a memo that had been subsequently buried into a stack. Did that memo—those accusations—have something to do with Mark’s political reference made only an hour ago? Grief and empathy overcame Walt; he looked away and dragged a glove across his eyes. He still ached over Bobby’s loss. Mark was in for a hellish few years.
    He caught Mark’s eye during the loading, his face bathed in the red splash from the taillights; the vet, so used to death, was visibly shaken by rigor’s unnatural positioning of Randy’s arms, angled up over his head. They finally fit the corpse into the bed of a pickup truck, but only after a great deal of wrangling. They covered him with a blue tarp and tied it down with bungee cords. It was the addition of the cords that got Mark crying—the finality of fastening them and the anchoring of the tarp, as if holding down firewood. Death was in the details, and those details racked Mark Aker with heartbreak, anger, and frustration.
    “Sheriff?” It was his deputy, Tommy Brandon.
    Walt felt as if he’d chugged a soda too fast.
    The fact that sheriff’s deputy Tommy Brandon was shacked up with Walt’s soon-to-be-ex wife kept the men at arm’s length.
    As far as Walt was concerned, the proper thing for Deputy Sheriff Tommy Brandon to do was transfer to one of the local police or sheriff’s departments. Walt certainly wasn’t going to resign his office simply because his deputy was doing his wife. But, for Brandon, what was the difference? Walt couldn’t fire him without fearing a lawsuit. It was almost as if Brandon was hanging around to torture him. What made things even more complicated and tricky was that Brandon was his best deputy— goddamn him. Losing Brandon would hurt the office. But with every small confrontation, every brush of the elbows, every look that passed between them, it seemed increasingly inevitable and necessary. Even the smell of the man’s aftershave bothered Walt. Hadn’t Gail carried that same smell to bed a few times when they’d still been a family?
    Midnight had come and gone: another two inches of fresh powder lay on the roofs of all the roadside vehicles. None of the dogs had picked up any scents. The searchers were warming themselves in the cabs of their trucks behind fogged windshields, awaiting orders.
    “Let’s call the search off for tonight, Tommy. We’ll start over in the morning. We’re going to want the original call confirmed. If possible I want to know who made that call, and I want to talk to him personally.”
    “Got it.”
    “We traded a life for a life tonight and that’s just plain wrong.” For all they knew, the missing skier had found his way home safely.
    Brandon moved between the vehicles, speaking with the various drivers. A few minutes later, the pickup trucks began to pull out.
    Walt was sitting on the back bumper of the office’s Hummer, a vehiclehe used for search and rescue. He was strapping snowshoes onto his boots as the last of the trucks departed, leaving only Brandon’s big red Dodge SUV. Everything about Tommy Brandon was big, tempting Walt’s imagination and begging him to hate the guy.
    “Sheriff?”
    “I’m going back out there, Tommy.”
    “Not alone you’re