Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (26 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Death with Honor

M
elvin Kauffeld pinched out his lips, thumb and forefinger on either side of his mouth, studying the photo Ettinger had handed him.

“You see the boil on the side of his neck?”

Kauffeld nodded. “I see
it
, but no, I don't recall ever seeing
him
.”

“Take a good look. This is the gentleman who was going to kill you on Sphinx Mountain.”

He shook his head. “My arrangement was with Wade. This . . . Crawford, he must be twenty years older.”

“Wade, er, E.J. was killed early yesterday morning while he was waiting for you. Weldon Crawford shot him in cold blood. Crawford was actually hoping you would kill Cummings for him; that way he could have kept his hands clean. When you didn't show up, he became desperate. That's why he left the message on your cell phone.”

“How do you know about my phone? I didn't talk to anyone about that.” He looked away from Ettinger, who was sitting across the table from him, to Harriet Langhor, who was leaning on the log rail at the other end of the cabin porch. Langhor stubbed her cigarette out on the rail and sat down beside Kauffeld. “Look at me,” she said, leaning close to him and taking his hand. “I'm the one who found the voice mail on your phone. I played it for Sean Stranahan the morning we went fishing.”

He shook his great head, his jowls sagging. “I trusted you.”

“Didn't you hear the sheriff, Mel? That man you were trying to protect was murdered.”

He was silent a few moments, looking at her, then away.

When he spoke, his voice had lost its indignation. “The phone message bothered me. It wasn't Wade's voice. And I had never given Wade my number. Our arrangement was on paper.”

“We don't know how Crawford got your number,” Ettinger said, “but we do know that he was in communication with Emmitt Cummings.”

“Have you arrested him?”

“He's dead,” Martha said flatly. She gave him an abbreviated version of the confrontation on the mountain. “I released a statement to the press this morning. We were hoping you could help us with our investigation.”

“I have no obligation to this man. I'll cooperate any way I can. Wade, ah, Emmitt—it's hard to think of him by that name—he never mentioned Crawford. I just don't know how I can help.” He looked from Ettinger to Walter Hess, who had arrived at the ranch cabin late, after helping with the recovery of the bodies early in the morning.

“What about the bullet, Mel?” It was Langhor.

Ettinger's eyebrows knitted together.

Kauffeld nodded to himself. “Maybe. I'd completely forgotten. Wade told me, and this was way back when I met him in Michigan, that if I was the one left standing, then I should look in his pockets for a rifle cartridge. I'd be able to pull the bullet out of the case and there would be a note inside it, instructions on what to do in the event of his death. I assumed . . . well, the truth is I don't know what I assumed. I thought I was the one who was going to die. I never gave the cartridge much thought.”

Ettinger looked sharply at Walt. “Did Sean give you the bullet to enter into evidence?” Stranahan had told them about the cartridge he'd found in Cummings's front pants pocket.

“He didn't give it to
me
.”

“Shit,” Martha said. “We dotted every fucking T but that one.”

“You mean crossed every T.”

“That's what I said.”

“No, Martha, I believe you said—”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Walt, drop it.” She stepped from the table, punching numbers into her phone. She drummed her fingers on the butt of the semiautomatic holstered on her hip. “Sean said he wasn't guiding today. He must be at his girlfriend's house. There's no reception there.” She jerked her head toward Walt. “Can you finish up here? I have to find him.”

•   •   •

“N
ice place, isn't it?” Stranahan said.

Ettinger, hands on her hips, was craning her head to see the cupola on top. “I don't know. It looks like a grain elevator to me. Anyway, I didn't come here to admire the architecture. The bullet you found on Cummings's body, where is it?”

“It's, ah, Jeez. It must still be in my jeans.”

She followed him inside. “Where's the missus?” she said.

“If you mean Martinique, she's over at Jeff Svenson's clinic. She's a second-year veterinary student, she'll have her doctorate in a couple years.”

“Humph,” Martha said. “When I saw her she was nekked under her suspenders. I guess appearances can be deceiving.”

She hadn't been naked, technically, but Stranahan let it go and got the cartridge and held it out to Martha by the rim. “I tried to be careful but my prints might be on it,” he said.

“I understand the circumstances.” She walked over to the kitchen counter, got her Swiss Army tool out, and used the pliers to pull out the bullet, taking care not to touch the brass casing with her fingers. She set the bullet upright on the counter. She'd lost the tiny tweezers on the tool and asked Stranahan if he had any.

He walked outside and got a similar tool from the repair kit on his raft. “When I was in college we'd always be losing these things,” he said. “You'd use your tweezers to smoke the roach and then you'd be stoned and forget where you put them.”

“I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that,” Martha said. She had pinched the edge of a piece of paper inside the cartridge case and was pulling it out. She immediately recognized it as the same unlined, off-white paper in Cummings's journal. The powder had been dumped and the paper rolled tightly to fit inside the case.

“Are you going to tell me about this?” Stranahan leaned over her shoulder.

“It's a note Cummings meant Kauffeld to find in the event he was killed up there. Here, help me hold it open.” Stranahan held down the outside curl of the paper with the blade of his tool while Ettinger unrolled it using the tweezers. The paper was two inches square. Four words—
Under The White Rock
. A set of GPS coordinates: 45 22.812 N; 111 10.932 W.

Stranahan got his Garmin and they walked outside and waited for the GPS to acquire the satellites for triangulation. Stranahan inserted the coordinates and pushed the “Go To” button. The liquid crystal numbers on the screen indicated that their destination was 29.7 miles to the southeast.

“Somewhere along 191 in the Gallatin Canyon, maybe,” Martha said.

“The bridge,” they said as one.

•   •   •

T
he GPS had registered the distance in a straight line. By road it was forty miles and change. Ettinger's foot was heavy on the pedal.

“What's the hurry, Martha?” Stranahan said, looking back to see a river of dust raised over the lower half of the grain elevator. “They're both dead. No reason to kill us, too.”

“The hurry is because I blew the head off a congressman and I have to give a statement this afternoon. You can bet the Crawford clan is polishing up their incisors. Like Walt says, they only own half of Flathead County and enough cattle to flip Whoppers for every Indian in Delhi . . . well, if Hindus ate beef. The point is I have to have the facts on my side. This man was a national figure. There's going to be a coroner's inquest, that's a given. Yours truly will be grilled like a sirloin steak. Even the FBI could get involved. So I'm nervous, okay? That journal was a help, but it didn't clear up everything.”

“Okay. Slow down and tell me about the journal.”

Ettinger grunted. “I'll tell you what it isn't. It isn't ‘who, what, why, when, and where.'”

“Then just tell me what it is.”

“Well,” she said, and a mile went by and finally she made a clucking sound with her tongue and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “The gist is Cummings had Huntington's disease, like Kauffeld said. Those pills you found were to control the muscle spasms, which get worse until you lose control of your body. I don't exactly know how you die, but you've forgotten who you are by the time you do. Hereditary, so no doubt someone in his family had it. You get that first twitch, you know the rest of your life isn't going to be very pretty.”

Stranahan was nodding his head. He said, “He did this thing where he clenched up the side of his face. I noticed it the first time I saw him.”

“I think it was considerably more advanced than that. Anyway, three years ago the symptoms popped up and that's when the entries start in the journal. At first it's about suicide, how he'd like to go out. There's one page where he lists ten methods he was considering; number one was climbing the Chinese Wall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and throwing himself off the cliff. Manly stuff—provoking a charge from a grizzly bear, prodding a den of rattlesnakes. Anyway, skip ahead and the phrase “Death with Honor” starts cropping up, and then there's this entry marked on the summer solstice, two years ago June. No date, it just says summer solstice. He writes, and this is word for word, ‘It's done, but he done it, not me. I thought I'd found a man, but I was wrong.' No name, no detail, nothing about making an arrangement with anyone, none of that, but the entry was written from a really dark place. And the handwriting was almost illegible, letters written on top of each other like he was writing at night without a light. My gut tells me he killed somebody, or maybe some guy he had an arrangement with turned the gun on himself. Either way, this would be a full year before Gutierrez and Webster.”

“Did he mention Sphinx Mountain?”

“Not that time, but in an entry about a month before he writes about riding his horse up on the Buck's Nest. ‘Took Sally Ann up on the Buck's Nest, some good flat benches to either side of the ridge, looked as good a place as any,' words to that effect.”

“I know where that is,” Stranahan said.

“Then you know it's behind his place. Up on the east side of the Gravellys. What I'm thinking is he did his first one in his backyard, only a few miles away, and then thought better of it and went across the river to the Sphinx for the later ones. So we might have another pile of bones up around the Buck's Nest, not that it's of the utmost concern at the moment. The later guys, he goes into considerable detail. He calls them his ‘fellow travelers.' Gutierrez he met at one of those Living at Last retreats in Fresno, California. Same method he used to meet Kauffeld. He also writes about flying to Portland, where there was a retreat on the coast at Cannon Beach, and down to Taos, New Mexico, but he couldn't find any takers in either place. Webster, he'd known personally from their hunt together. Seems like they made a pact. Both of them were in the early stages of their illnesses then and decided they'd get back together for the final act if and when it became apparent that time was running out.”

“When does Crawford enter the picture?”

Ettinger downshifted as they neared Four Corners, then ran through the gears as the Cherokee growled its way south up the Gallatin Canyon. “That's just it,” she said, flicking her nails against her jaw, “he doesn't. The closest he comes to incriminating Crawford is an early reference to ‘The Most Dangerous Game.' He writes that he took the idea from it. You and I know it was Crawford who told him about the story, but it's a long way from lending someone a book or telling someone a story to being complicit in crimes that result from it. My suspicion is that Crawford also gave him the money to fly to the retreats. There's a chance the plane reservations are in his computer. I also suspect Crawford lent him the double rifle to kill Gutierrez. It was his way of living out his fantasy through Cummings.”

“Maybe Crawford isn't mentioned because E.J. considered him a friend. He didn't want to implicate him if the journal fell into the wrong hands.”

“At first, yes, I'd say that. But at some point the friend became the accomplice. Once Crawford headed down that road, it was only a matter of time until he killed Cummings. He'd put himself in a position where he had to. We're talking about a man with political aspirations, maybe the governorship. Cummings knew too much. But this is all conjecture, we have no solid evidence linking Crawford to anyone who died on Sphinx Mountain.”

“Martha, you're being paranoid. We have a cartridge from a rifle Crawford owned that was in Cummings's possession. If we're lucky, we'll be able to match DNA from Gutierrez to the bullet in the root. Those were Crawford's fingerprints on Cummings's Bible, that's more than a maybe, we have Crawford with a rifle in hand in a place that only the killer and Kauffeld knew about, plus he shot a dummy I put up to look like Kauffeld. We might even be able to match Crawford to the voice on Kauffeld's phone message.”

“What I'm hearing is ‘if, maybe, and might be.' So you see why I'm anxious to find the rock.”

•   •   •

T
he rock under the west pylon of the Squaw Creek Bridge was rectangular, heavy enough that Stranahan had to use all his strength to roll it over. Underneath, an inch of sand covered an olive drab ammo box with military stenciling.

“Let me have the honor,” Ettinger said. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

The box contained three items. What looked to be a book was wrapped in layers of opaque plastic grocery bags and bound with rubber bands. A clear plastic Ziploc bag contained a half-inch-thick bundle of photocopied pages of handwriting—Cummings's journal if the top page was consistent with the body of the package. The third was the thinnest, another Ziploc containing only an unsealed envelope. Inside was a letter written in ink on a single sheet of copy paper.

Fellow traveler,

If you are reading this I am dead by your hand. I want you to know you did the right thing by bringing both of us alive on the mountain. Others will judge us as they will. I'm here to say you did me a favor, pard, and no doubt about it. You gave me some peace the earth wouldn't and picked up the sword I laid down. Go forward in your own way now and God be with you. I'm giving you my journal. It may give you some comfort to know the pain I have been through and the mental struggle that led to our arrangement. Maybe comfort isn't the right word but perspective. The big package is a book with some notes and other things inside. I would like you to mail it to the Sheriff's office in Bridger, along with the cartridge and everything else in this box. As you'll see there's nothing will betray you, even your fingerprints unless you have a record. But I have become a victim of some blackmail and this man who is feeding off me has a black heart. He will be punished in the next world but I would not mind to see him have his due in this one, either. I wish you well and thanks for giving this old horse a rest at the end of a long ride.