Death Canyon (10 page)

“Approved. And I'm flattered.”

Fall weddings are becoming so cliché these days,
she thought cynically.
And what the hell does she mean “you'd approve” of fall? Am I that drab?

Still, Noelle was excited to see her family and she was truly happy for her sister. What she wasn't looking forward to were the comments from the family when she showed up stag.

“Hey, sis, I'm gonna go, though. I will call again soon, it's just that I have to make a zillion other calls. You are just the second to know after Mom.”

“I understand. It's a busy day for you. I love you!”

Noelle sounded genuine at last.

But along with being happy for her sibling there was a tinge of
sadness. Anna was years younger. Their family had always expected Noelle to get married first. For a while, she had expected it too.

Oh well.
Noelle refocused on driving.

The day was warming up. As the sun rose, Noelle was even able to open the windows a bit, although she still ran the heater for her feet. She carefully glanced again at the park bulletin on the passenger seat and read the major points for the second time. Yep, they'd shot a bear yesterday at Gosling Lake.
Probably the wrong one too.

Out of the blue Noelle started to cry, which she hadn't done in a long time.
Is it the bear, or is it Anna's engagement? Stop being so emotional.

Noelle drove back through the northern end of Grand Teton National Park on her way to Yellowstone, without stopping at the gate to chat with the ranger. Her official vehicle granted her ingress whenever she pleased. She drove north still, past Jackson Lake Lodge and Leek's Marina. She hadn't stopped for lunch at the marina in ages. It was one of her favorite spots in the valley and she vowed to stop neglecting it. She looked forward to making the drive to the marina to eat pizza and watch the sailboats come and go.

Noelle did stop at the south entrance to Yellowstone to check that all the roads were open through the north entrance.

“Dunraven is closed, but that's it,” the woman at the checkpoint responded.

Dunraven Pass led to Montana through the northeastern gate. Noelle's drive to Bozeman didn't require her to take the closed pass. It was unfortunate, in a way. That corner of the park was probably its most impressive. There, the land lacked the geothermal features that the central region boasted, but the amount and diversity of wildlife was astonishing.

On her last visit to the Lamar River Valley—the main attraction
in the northeast corner of Yellowstone—Noelle observed a grizzly, two black bears, countless bison and antelope, and a few young bighorn sheep. Although she hadn't seen any wolves during her last visit, the Lamar River Valley always held that possibility as well.

Past the Lamar River Valley sat Cooke City, a tiny town tucked up into the mountains of extreme southern Montana.

The town was a single dirt road with cheap motels, taverns, and gift shops. One of the bars had a few slot machines from cowboy times. Mainly though, the town was wet and snowy and muddy, with its tiny rivulets often splitting the road into small islands.

The sun was up fully now and Noelle climbed out of Jackson Hole and onto the caldera that formed the Yellowstone Plateau. She passed the right turn for Old Faithful. In the time that Noelle had lived here, which wasn't much more than a decade, the turn had changed from a simple T intersection into its current layout—a highwaylike exit complete with entrance and exit ramps. A new visitors' center was also under construction. Progress.

Noelle spotted a herd of mother bison and their young along the Firehole River. The stumbling babies played in the green, soppy grass that was barren of snow year-round because of the river's warm springs. Birds landed on their backs and they bucked them off playfully.

She drove past the Fountain Paint Pot, through Madison Junction, and out the north entrance to the park. Just before 9:30 a.m., she arrived at her old friend's laboratory on the Montana State campus in Bozeman.

Before going in, she stopped at the student bookstore next door and purchased two cups of coffee, adding cream and artificial sweetener to her own and pocketing a few of the station's accoutrements to give Keith some options.

She took a left turn into the stairwell and went down one flight to the basement, where Keith spent most of his waking hours. When she opened the door, the man was wrestling with a large beaker that was overflowing a thick, foamy liquid.

“No! Stay back, Noelle!” he shouted. Keith's hair and beard said hippie, but his attire said scientist. The look on his face was alarming.

Noelle heeded his request, stepping backward away from the experiment.

“I've discovered something here! Something world changing!”

“Wha . . . ?” Noelle was confused. Then it occurred to her. He was playing a joke.

Keith stopped, looked up, and winked at her. “Just trying to bring back some of the old chemistry, that's all.”

Chemistry. Baking soda volcano. Clever.
Keith was from Chicago, and his big-city charm was still there. It stood out more up here in the middle of nowhere. Noelle kept a straight face. She wasn't here to flirt.

“Yeah, the kid that I Big Brother for wants to take me to Dads' Day at his school, and I just really want the other kids to be impressed.” He sounded genuine.

“You are one of the most prominent grizzly and black bear experts in the United States, and you are going to try to impress them with cliché chemistry magic?” The stoicism left her face. She clucked her tongue in mock disapproval.

“You can't take a grizzly into a public school anymore.”

He has a point,
Noelle admitted. “Well, glad, and sort of surprised, to see you have the sense to know so.”

He laughed with her and the two hugged. “So you have a bear tooth to show me, you say?” He gave her a puzzled look, getting down to business.

“Um, yeah.”
Good,
she thought.
Keep it professional.
“I was hoping that you could take a look at it for me. The thing is that I don't really have it . . . on the record, that is; I took it from the scene of the attack without telling anyone. I guess what I'm saying is let's keep it on the down low.”

“Is that supposed to surprise me, Noelle?” He laughed again.

She rolled her eyes, more at herself than him.

“This attack was really bad, Keith. I mean, it looked like the bear punctured the victims obsessively, like the animal had rabies or something.”

“That would be pretty rare up here. Rabies, I mean.”

“It just doesn't seem right, that's all.”

“Have you ever witnessed a bear attack before?”

“Never.”

Keith walked over to her and took the tooth, which she had removed from the envelope.

“This”—he held it up in front of her—“is backed by jaws strong enough to crush through the femur of an elk. Strong enough to crush a human skull. I've seen grizzlies bite through thick pine saplings. And those were just cubs playing, honing their skills.”

Keith reached behind her with the tooth in hand. “It would bite here and here, upper jaw and lower jaw.” The touch of the tooth was cold on her upper neck. “Get the idea?”

Keith's lips were only inches from Noelle's. She stepped back but held his gaze for a second.

Noelle cleared her throat. “But
two
victims were thoroughly mauled—and I mean
thoroughly.
And more chest damage than head and neck. Isn't that a bit unusual? Wouldn't the second victim get the idea that she was in danger and run from the scene?”

“Unless one stayed trying to protect the other. That's the most
likely reason I can think of. It happens. And chest wounds sometimes happen when the vic doesn't roll over onto his or her stomach.” Keith paused. “Or maybe there were two or more bears—is that the sort of speculation you wanted to hear? That this story has a twist?” He smiled wryly.

Noelle knew he was hassling her in good fun, but she was still offended. “I'm being serious here, Keith.”

“Okay, okay.”

Keith took the tooth over to a black lab table and focused a large magnifying light on it. The contrast of the colors made the tooth's virgin white gloss stand out even more than it had last night.

“Mighty clean,” Keith said immediately.

Noelle nodded and studied Keith, trying to gain some understanding of his meaning, and then eventually said: “How do you mean?”

“I mean that I can tell you right off that this tooth probably wasn't hanging out in the mouth of
any
wild animal recently.”

“You're sure?” Noelle asked.

He picked it up. “It should have at least some plaque gunk up on the gum line there. Who knows? It might be fake, and if it's not fake it might have been cleaned and bleached and had some type of sealant applied.” Keith walked with the tooth to another table. Noelle followed.

“I'm happy to crack it open to try and confirm it, but it's unlikely a real bear tooth would be this clean into adulthood, and the size of this canine—that's the tooth type . . . canine—tells us that it is definitely from an adult bear if it is in fact real. Even more obviously, there is no gum flesh left on the roots of the tooth suggesting that it was torn or bumped out of place. This tooth is either a good fake or a great refurb. Either way, a quick chemical test can show you what I mean.”

“The chemical test I can agree to, as long as the cops won't know I messed with it.”

“You're gonna tell the police?” Keith smirked.

Noelle shrugged. “Still plotting my next move.” It was Keith's turn to cluck his tongue.

Keith went to a drawer and picked out a large bone, from a bear's hind legs, as far as Noelle could tell. Then he grabbed a clear condiment squirt bottle filled with blue liquid and a tool that reminded Noelle of the dentist's office—chrome, sterile clean, and with a jagged, hooked end.

He squirted a tablespoon of the liquid into two small plastic cups. “The natural biological matter,” he intoned as he scraped off a bit of the bone's surface, which fell into the cup in the form of a fine powder, “will dissolve easily into the solution.” Sure enough, as he gave the mixture one quick swirl with the tool, the powder disappeared and left no trace. The liquid retained its transparent blue color.

“The exterior on this tooth—or this impostor—or whatever it is, will fail to dissolve in the solution. Instead, it will cloud the liquid and flakes or particles of the solid will remain visible. To dissolve this epoxy or sealant, we'd need acetone or some commercial formula designed for that very purpose.”

Again, the results were exactly as Keith predicted. The coating on the tooth fell in larger, thin flakes into the solution. Despite a few vigorous stirs with a wandlike chrome tool, Keith couldn't dissolve the particles.

“So, this tooth”—he held Noelle's discovery in the air as if he were completing a magic trick—“has some epoxy, lacquer, or finish on it to preserve it and to give that shiny surface. It's likely not real, and if it is, it looks like a human got ahold of it after it was in the bear's mouth.”

“What does that mean?” Noelle asked herself aloud.

“Don't know, Noelle. Above my pay grade. Your guess is as good as mine and mine's not too good.”

“Humor me,” Noelle instructed.

“Gosh—who knows? Everybody whitens these days . . .” He trailed off as Noelle gave him another look.
Get serious.

“Keith, can you buy bear teeth or replicas anywhere?”

“I'm sure you can buy replicas online, hell, probably authentic ones, too. It's hard to imagine something that you can't buy online. That's where I got my Noelle Klimpton blow-up doll. Complete with uniform.”

“Ew! That's not funny, Keith. From what you're saying we have something unusual on our hands.” She stated this more than asked.

“Murder!” He threw his hands up in the air and laughed. “Unless you folks have been doing restorative dental work on some of the bears down there. Or it just fell out of some tourist's souvenir bag.”

Noelle and Keith went to lunch and spent an hour catching up. She'd missed him to some extent, but not enough to tell him that.

Then Noelle thanked Keith, promised to write to him again soon, and put on her jacket. She went to her vehicle and entered the number into her cell phone of the man Keith recommended she call if she couldn't get any traction in convincing the police to investigate this case as a potential homicide. The man, Keith told her, could become indispensable if it turned out that the local police were unable to find any leads on the case.

Directly above the man's phone number on the piece of paper, Keith had scrawled a name: “Jake Trent.”

Jake's cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He shuffled around in the backseat of the cruiser so he could pry the oversized and outdated device from his jeans. It was a local number, but one Jake didn't recognize. He set the phone beside him on the bench seat rather than trying to stuff it back into his pocket. The minimal legroom in the cruiser's backseat would have made it impossible, and the car was warm and stuffy. He was sweating. Sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser when you have no alibi for a man's death wasn't particularly comfortable.

Jake had expected a visit from the police department that day. It seemed odd to him, however, that Chief Terrell had led him to the back door of the cruiser when he asked Jake to come to the station for questioning.

“Is this really necessary?” Jake's voice filtered through the wire mesh that separated him from the chief.

“I told you, Jake. We'll discuss it when we get to the station. You know how these things go. Better safe than sorry.”