Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (24 page)

“Just get here,” Ettinger said.

•   •   •

“M
ontanan my livelong life and I can't remember driving to a single ranchstead without a dog yapping at me.” Ettinger pulled the slide of her sidearm to jack a shell into the chamber. “I got a feeling we're too late,” she said.

No one answered the knock at Cummings's door. They cleared the one-story cottonwood cabin, Ettinger frowning at the disorder.

“It's been tossed,” Harold said.

“Or maybe he's just a pig.” She worked her chin.

“No, a hand went through it. He was looking for something small, like in a drawer.”

“How can you tell?”

“You want a lecture in crime scene investigation or do you want to get to the Sphinx?”

“You think he's up there, don't you?”

“One way to find out,” Harold said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Scarecrow

S
tranahan checked his GPS. He'd been sidehilling the mountain for ten minutes, had jumped across three creeks that spilled in miniature waterfalls down the slope, and was still a couple hundred yards away from the coordinates marking the X at the center of the second circle. Much closer, he thought, and he could be walking into a bullet. He knew the man lying in wait would give him no more chance than he'd given E. J. Cummings a few hours before.

He carefully toed out onto a shelf of rock and looked down. Two hundred feet below, a cliff face ended in a scree slope, at the base of which a few acres of flat ground were grown up in lodgepole pines. He brought up the binoculars he'd taken from Cummings's camp and scanned the country to the east, almost immediately registered a distant glint that on examination appeared to be a shovel. So the game was on. Or rather, it had been on until Cummings's murder. Now it was a different game, there were different players, and there were different rules.

Stranahan found an elk trail that zagged to the bottom of the cliff. Most of the trees had rusted brown from the ravages of pine beetle infestation. Several rocks studded the bench, the largest a lichen-covered boulder streaked with rose quartz. He took cover behind it and again scanned the country until he was certain that he was alone. Twenty yards from the boulder a tree had toppled over, cracking the lower branches from the trunk with the impact. One of those branches Stranahan wedged upright in a fork of the downfall. Taking off his shirt, he draped it around the branch and then placed the red cap on top. Anyone coming to investigate would have to stalk within sixty or seventy yards before coming into sight of the decoy, and Stranahan paced the distance off and then looked at his handiwork through the rifle scope. It looked like a hat propped on a stick. He went back, wove some pine boughs around the branch to fill out the chest area, and constructed a face from loose bark that was the color of cork next to the cambium of the tree. Then he screened the decoy with branches to deliberately obscure its outline and again paced off sixty yards. It still looked like a scarecrow, but then he knew what it was. It would have to do.

On his way down, he'd noted where elk had pawed a wallow at a seepage spring. Detouring to it, he coated his arms and bare chest with mud that reeked of elk urine. He walked back to the rock and lay prone beside it. He streaked his cheeks with the mud on his arms and then rested the fore-end of the rifle over his daypack and trained the crosshairs on the far end of the bench. Without moving his eyes from the scope, he placed the reed of the hawk call between his lips and blew it sharply.

Silence.

Cheeeeeeee.
The answering call rose and died on the mountain walls. From somewhere to the east, he thought. But not distant. Stranahan felt his heart beat against the floor of the forest.

The shadow shifting at the periphery of his vision was nothing more than a suggestion of movement. There. But gone as quickly as it registered. Sunlight penetrated the canopy of the forest, striping the ground abstractly. Stranahan stared through the scope until his eyes began to water. Very slowly, he set the rifle aside and reached for the binoculars. Mentally dividing the field of view into quadrants, he searched each individually without moving the glasses. In the lower left quadrant, an oblong shape interrupted the downfall littering the ground. He focused on it and it moved, amoebalike, a sack of dappled shadow that, when it stopped, so perfectly matched the pattern of the understory that the edges melted into the background. But the lump was still there, and now Stranahan could see the stick beside it that was not a stick. The shape shifted again, seemed to double up, and just as Stranahan saw the pattern of digital camouflage for what it was, the stick jumped and a fraction of a moment later the concussion of the rifle blast jarred the mountainside.

•   •   •

H
arold Little Feather held up a hand. Ettinger, who was looking down at the blood drop on the leaf at the edge of the trail, took a step and stopped beside him.

“Hold your breath,” Harold whispered. He saw the artery pulse in her throat. Her face began to redden.

Karoooom!
A second shot echoed through the canyon.

He canted one ear toward it, nodded. He'd been holding his breath for half a minute and inhaled, smelling his own dark odor.

“Jesus,” Martha said, her chest heaving. “What kind of gun is that?”

•   •   •

I
n the enclosed area of the bench, the shot was deafening. The sensation in Stranahan's head was the same he'd experienced taking a counter right hand in the quarterfinals of the Lowell Silver Mittens tournament. He'd survived the round and won the fight, but an insect had droned in his head for a week after. At the second shot, Stranahan heard the bullet impact against the decoy and saw it snap backward. The decoy fell out of sight behind the deadfall tree, exactly as Stranahan hoped it would. The man would have to come close to make sure. Now the figure he'd been watching stretched and unfolded until it was upright. A man garbed in military camo began to walk forward, his face hidden by an olive mesh mask with eye cutouts. Forty yards. Thirty. Stranahan felt sweat sting his eyes. His breath was coming in shallow pants.

Ten yards away, the man came to a stop. Stranahan knew the man could see the red hat now, the empty sack of the shirt. The man froze in place with his rifle raised in the direction of the decoy.

“. . . fuck is going on.” The voice was muffled by the mask, a mumble. Then, clearer: “Kauffeld?” Silence. “Who the fuck is out there? Be a man, goddammit. Show yourself.”

Stranahan wanted to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, but didn't dare move.
Just wait him out
, he told himself.

As if hearing his thought, the man turned directly toward Stranahan, the muzzles of the rifle sweeping to cover him and then continuing their arc as he turned completely around, facing the way he had come.

“Drop the weapon,” Stranahan commanded. “Don't turn around. Drop it.”

The man hesitated.

“Drop the weapon now!”

“Fuck you.” But he didn't turn around.

“We have you covered. Drop the weapon.”

“Why you're . . . shit . . . I know your voice, Stranahan. You don't have the guts. I could walk right up and slap your face silly. But that's not what I'm going to—”

The man whirled round and Stranahan, lying prone, saw the blur and fired, the rifle bucking up against his cheek so that he lost sight of the man through the scope. He heard the man's rifle, though, like a detonation, and rose to his knees to see the camouflaged figure bowed forward crookedly, the big African double rifle jammed muzzles first into the ground and the earth cratered around it. The man extended a hand that was a bloody claw toward the buttstock.

“Don't,” Stranahan said.

The man looked up as if seeing him for the first time. He raised both hands and dropped to his knees. Stranahan, his ears ringing, walked up and wrenched the muzzles of the rifle out of the earth. The right barrel had split and the stock was splintered, with a chunk of wood blown out in back of the pistol grip.

“Are you hurt?” Stranahan heard his own voice as if from under water.

“You shot my fucking finger off. I fell on it, the rifle . . .”

Stranahan tossed the rifle aside and slowly circled the man, looking for signs of injury other than the hand. He realized that the bullet from Peachy's Weatherby, after hitting the stock of the safari rifle, must have glanced off course, missing the body. The man's rifle had fired accidentally, the sear tripping as he fell and jammed the muzzles into the earth.

“You're lucky to be alive,” Stranahan said.

The man didn't seemed to hear. “God,” he said. He had gripped his right hand in his left and was rocking back and forth.

“You can take off your mask, Weldon,” Stranahan said. “It's all over now.”

“My lawyer will make you wish you were never born.”

“Where's the other rifle? The one you took from E.J. after you shot him in his sleep.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I came up here when I found out what he was doing. Jesus fucking Christ that hurts. I was . . . I was trying to stop him, but then he pulled down on me and I had to shoot him. He ducked behind the tent . . .”

“So he had a rifle. You're contradicting yourself.”

“No. I mean yes, he had one. I . . . he ran down the hill with it and . . . must have dropped it. I was just trying to stop him, I'm . . . I'm a United States congressman . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Who just shot what he thought was Melvin Kauffeld and fired a weapon at an officer of the law.”

“You're no . . . officer.”

“I am,” Stranahan said. He saw Crawford's shoulders slump. He sat back on the ground. Slowly, as if it took great effort, he pulled the camouflage mask off his face. His hair, which had been parted as if by a razor on each occasion Stranahan had seen him, was stringy with sweat and plastered to his forehead.

His voice was heavy with defeat. “What do you want? Do you want money?” Then he laughed, a bitter bark of a laugh. “You just blew up eighty grand. I could give you the Rigby, see what you can get for it now.” His tone becoming bitter. “Serve you right, you son of a bitch.”

“I'm listening,” Stranahan said.

“Really?” Crawford had seen a ray of light. “There are options here. We can work something out.”

“Tell me what happened. Why did you kill E. J. Cummings? What did he know that was so bad he had to die?”

“What's it matter if I can make you a rich man?”

“You just did your damnedest to kill me. I want to know why. What did E.J. have on you?”

“Have on me? You mean what did I have on him. I knew all about the games he'd played up here, his ‘arrangements.' Hell, it was me who gave him . . .” He stopped. Sweat was beading up on his forehead. His face had turned white. “Jesus.” He clutched at his stomach with his right hand. “The fuckin' bullet hit me, man. I'm leaking blood.” He was pulling up his shirt, digging his fingers into thin rolls of fat sprouted with gray hair.

“The blood's from your hand,” Stranahan said. “You aren't hurt. You're just going into shock.”

“I need a fuckin' doctor. I'm not saying another . . . word. Not until . . . until you get me off this mountain.”

Stranahan sat down on the ground twenty feet away, the bore of the Weatherby rifle pointed at Crawford's chest. He made a show of making himself comfortable. “I got nowhere I have to be,” he said.

“All right, goddammit. It was . . . I showed him the story.”

“‘The Most Dangerous Game.'”

“Yes. When I found out he was sick, I, he . . . how the hell was I supposed to know he'd do what he did? Take it to heart that way.”

“What did you do, give E.J. your rifle so you could live vicariously, be in on the kill while you were drinking whiskey in your mansion?”

“No.” Crawford's voice was indignant. “Hell, no. He knew about the bookcase, he saw me pull it open when he was doing some plumbing and I didn't know he was in the house. Stumbled in on me. I didn't think that much about it. You had to know him, he'd see the devil drop a dime and pick it up for him. The man didn't have a crooked bone in his body. The last thing I worried about was he'd steal a gun. But he'd shot the double, you see, we used to shoot out on my range, and I think, the African connection, the romance of the big gun. He said he was just borrowing it. That was later. I didn't even know it had been gone until he told me, 'cause he replaced it in its case, you see. And then he held that over me. That's why I had to sell it. I couldn't keep a murder weapon in the house.”

“I thought it wasn't murder. Or did your tongue just slip?”

“You know what I mean, a gun that killed somebody. You'd have done the same thing.”

“I'm not the one you have to convince, Weldon. Why did you kill E.J.?”

“I told you. I had to stop him. I didn't hear about the others until after, I couldn't prevent them, but this one, Kauffeld, E.J. got some whiskey in him and one night he talked. Once I knew, the blood would be on my hands, you understand. You got to believe me.”

“And Kauffeld, what made you so desperate you needed to kill him, too? How did he even know you were involved?”

“He's . . .” He stopped and breathed. He coughed, hacking, and at once Stranahan saw that it was theatrics, that Crawford was thinking what to say and anything now would be building a story, not relating one. “I, ah, E.J.”—he coughed again—“he said he'd told him about me, that Kauffeld knew about me. He lied, you see, he told him it was me, that I was behind it, the arrangements. I . . . I'm innocent here. All I did was show a man a book. I couldn't let him . . . Kauffeld, if he ever talked.”

“Well, he has talked,” Stranahan said. “And he's going to talk more. We'll see what he knows.”

“No, no, it would all be lies. We have a deal, I can get you more money by tomorrow than you can make rowing a guide boat the rest of your life.”

“Save the money for your lawyer,” Stranahan said.

“But you— Come on, man. We had a deal.”

“All I said was I was listening. Get up, Weldon. Get up and walk.”

“Be smart about this, Stranahan. It's your word against mine. I'll deny. I'll say you forced me to come up here, that you set it up, all of it.”

“Even your bloody fingerprints on E.J.'s Bible? Are those a lie, too?” It was a shot in the dark. He didn't know if the prints were Crawford's or from Cummings's clutching the book after he'd been hit. But Crawford's shoulders fell at the mention of them. It was as if the life went out of him, that after building a sandcastle of lies and fooling even himself, this one irrefutable piece of evidence had driven like a knife into his deceit and he saw, finally and with utter clarity, that it was hopeless. He seemed to shrink away within the suit of camouflage until it was just the shapeless sack that Stranahan had first seen.