Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (4 page)

“A park ranger is federal, we're county. It's complicated. Do you want her help or don't you?”

“Sure I do,” Sean said. “Maybe she can help me figure out what I'm looking for.”

“That's your problem. The only reason you're here is because Harold asked.”

“Something you've made clear,” Sean said.

“Martha, I have to say something.” Warren Jarrett was pulling on latex gloves. “I know your ways well as anyone. I know your manner. Every one of us respects the heck out of you, so we take the whiskey with the wine, as my grandmother used to say. Myself, I wouldn't have you any way but what you are. But today's a little rough, even by your standards. You're treating Sean like he's the guy put the body into the ground. What's eating at you?”

Ettinger made a bubbling sound with her mouth and blew out a breath. “I'm sorry I've been short with you. With all of you. I've been mad at myself since Harold got mauled. If it means anything, I've been even shorter with myself.”

“What the hell, Martha?” Walt said. “It wasn't your fault there was a bear in the woods.”

“No, but when I called down to Katie and Warren to come up, my voice triggered the attack. If I'd just been quieter, the sow would have moved off. And then when she charged, I couldn't even get my damned spray out of the holster. I'm the reason Harold's where he is and not here where we need him. Warren, you said it yourself. The sow read my voice as a threat and it triggered her attack. And the damned thing is, I knew as soon as I spoke that it was a mistake.”

Jarrett shook his head. “No, you're wrong there. As long as that cub was in the tree, mama wasn't going to leave. There's a better than even chance she would have attacked even without the provocation of your voice. We got too close, that's all.”

Ettinger made a show of pulling at the cockleburs that had hitched to her pants cuffs. “Thanks for the support. I mean that. I just wish it made me feel better. So what do you say, let's get to work. I'll try to keep my tongue in my mouth.”

“About time.”

“What was that you said, Walt?”

“I said it's time to work.” Both he and Jarrett had carried heavy backpacks containing the gas probe and power pack, as well as tools and evidence bags for the remains of the corpse. Walt unzipped his pack and rummaged around.

“Walt, while we get to work, you consider this,” Martha said. “The Cubs aren't going anywhere but the sewer, this season or any other.”

“How 'bouts if they're a .500 ball club at the All-Star break, you buy me the bison porterhouse at Ted's Montana Grill.”

“And if they aren't?”

“If they aren't, I'll buy you frog food over to that French joint in Bozeman. All the foie de la grass and pig intestines you want to eat.”

“You have a deal.”

Sean looked at Katie. “I'd like us to have some time looking before Lothar tracks it up.”

Sparrow stood up and pressed her palm down. The shepherd immediately obeyed the down stay.

“Your wish is my command, sire.”

She smiled, her eyes shining, letting him glimpse the young girl in her, the one who had disappeared for years and just recently come back.

•   •   •

W
hen Sean Stranahan was a little boy, he loved tracking animals second only to fishing. Both offered the intense pleasure of immersion in the moment, of seeking a treasure that in one case was buried beneath the reflective surface of the pond at his grandfather's house in upstate Massachusetts, and in the other behind the wall of birch and maple trees that rimmed it. He could still recall the moment, when tracking a deer, that he had spotted ivory fingers poking above a bush. The buck whitetail, oblivious to the boy's presence, stepped into the open, his antlers tall and heavy. He tensed, his nose questing for scent. Sean was so close he could see the expression of the deer's face change when a shift in wind brought the human scent to him. The buck had wheeled and bounded away, waving its white flag of a tail.

Sean had run back to the farmhouse with his heart pounding. But when he told his father and grandfather what had happened, he watched their faces change to incredulousness, just as he had seen the deer's face change when it scented him. Clearly, they didn't believe that a seven-year-old had tracked a deer for a quarter of a mile, especially without snow on the ground to show the hoofprints, and their indulgent smiles told Sean that his description of the buck—“bigger than that one on your wall, Grandpa”—was a product of the vivid imagination for which he had often been scolded. He had walked away muttering to himself, “But it was a ten pointer. It was.”

After that, the thrill of finding a flesh-and-blood animal standing at the end of its tracks was his secret alone. Harold Little Feather was surprised that Sean's skills had not been learned with a rifle in his hands, but instead with the aid of an instinct at once as powerful as the hunting impulse and uniquely human—simple, burning curiosity.

“So whatcha looking at, bunch a woodpecker holes?” Katie Sparrow peered at the lower trunk of a Ponderosa pine. The cambium under the bark, oozing sap, looked as if it had taken a charge of buckshot.

“They were made by a three-toed woodpecker hunting for bark beetle grubs. Either a three-toed or a black-backed.”

Katie rolled her eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing. I'm impressed. You impress me, sir.” She smiled widely.

“
You're
in a good mood today.”

Sean had worked a search with Katie the summer before and remembered her as being cordial but distant, preoccupied with the working of her dog. Her manner was friendlier now, almost flirtatious. There could be other people around and she would find his eyes and arch her brows in bemusement, creating a bond of light intimacy.

“You don't know what you're looking for. Admit it,” Katie said.

“No.”

“I thought so.”

“What would
you
be looking for?”

“Besides tracks?”

“Besides tracks.”

“A bullet hole.”

“Ah.”
Why didn't I think of that?
Stranahan asked himself.

“You figure,” Katie said, “that if the guy in the ground was shot, then maybe the bullet went through him and hit a tree trunk. Or maybe, if there was more than one shot, there could be more than one hole in more than one tree.”

“We don't know that he was shot. And even if he was, he could have been killed somewhere else and the body carried here. The bullet could be in the wall of a garage for all we know.”

“Um-hmm, um-hmm. But short of draping the carcass over the saddle of a horse, how do you get him this high up the mountain? See what I'm saying? It doesn't make sense he was killed anywhere else. And if I was the one who pulled the trigger, I wouldn't spend a lot of time dragging the body around. I'd get him in the ground soon as I could.”

“Which means,” Stranahan continued the thought, “that the bullet is close by, if it was a through and through.” He looked around. “There are an awful lot of trees.”

“That's my point,” Katie said. “A bullet couldn't go very far without hitting one. How about you look for tracks and I stay in line behind you, looking at wood? Work a zigzag pattern, keep heading uphill. That's how I work Lothar. But I'm just along for the ride. It's your show.”

“No. That sounds good as anything else. It's a long shot, though.”

“Well everything's a long shot, this far after the event. But I'd rather be with you up here than sifting bones down below with that crew.”

They worked in silence for a time, Sean, his stick tapping the ground, Katie following. They were out of sight of the bench, the intermittent voices of the team fading behind them. Above, the slope climbed steeply into an area Katie identified as a microburst, where gusting wind had rendered the pines a haphazard pile of matchsticks. Every step was up and over deadfall.

Looking at the back of Stranahan's head, Katie said, “Somebody made you a little more human than last time we met on a mountain. Did you get a haircut?”

“Yes,” Sean said, “a client. It's a long story.”

“I can listen to a story and look at trees at the same time.”

“So, this guy's a barber, a hairstylist if you will.” Sean told her about his client, then began to tell the stylist's story about the man who wanted a haircut, his eyes never leaving the ground.

Katie interrupted him. “Who's Morgan Freeman?”

“He's a famous actor. You don't know who Morgan Freeman is?”

“No, I don't have a TV.”

They had lipped onto a bench much smaller than the lower one, just a place where the slope caught its breath before angling up sharply. Sean was bent over, studying an oddly shaped stone with a pocked surface. The stone had lichen growing over it, pinpoints of scarlet and gray.

“What's that?” Katie came up alongside him.

“I thought it was a rock, but the more I look at it . . . Could it be the end of a bone?” He tapped it. “It's got knuckles like a femur.”

Katie nodded. “About the right size to be human. But look how old it is.”

“If the rest is underground . . . What are we looking at, Katie?”

“Part of that guy?” It was a question. “Maybe the bones were buried in different places and the frost heaved this one. I don't know. It's weird.”

“There were two femurs back on the bench.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Then . . .”

They looked at each other for a moment. The moment stretched. The fog covering the mountainside had become a presence, the pines seeming to lean forward to listen.

Sean's voice was a whisper. “Is this a graveyard?”

Katie Sparrow turned down the hill and brought two fingers to the corners of her mouth, breaking the eerie stillness with a shrill whistle.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Price of a Fly Fisherman's Soul

F
or years, Sean Stranahan had told anyone who cared to ask that the reason he went fishing was to think. On the river, thoughts didn't pile on top of each other the way they tended to on land. Rather, his mind became elastic, adapting itself to the creative demands of catching trout. Sean would never make an important decision without turning it over first with a fly rod in his hands. But lately, it seemed, he came to the river for the opposite reason. He fished to erase the burden of thought, to immerse himself in the moment, and to find recognition in his reflection on the surface of the water—to see there the boy he had been. For the wonder of a trout had nothing to do with its spots or the sheen of its flanks, but its ability to pull the angler back though time until he was no longer what the world had made of him, but who he was when that world was new.

On this evening, stopping to fish the Bear Trap Canyon of the Madison River on the drive back from Sphinx Mountain, Sean tried to relax into the rhythm of casting, to let the tension in his mind ride out through his hands while his heart hitched a ride with the fly. He tried to put behind him the long hike back to the trailhead, carrying an evidence bag containing bones from the second gravesite. But a vision kept coming back. It was the first skull that the recovery team had unearthed. When Ettinger gingerly examined it, her latex-sheathed thumb poked through the crust of soil to reveal a nickel-sized hole in the temple. Turning the skull over, her fingers scooped dirt from a second hole, this one as large as a beefsteak tomato. She had glanced up at the gathered heads of the crew, her expression grim.

“Gentlemen, something bad happened here,” she had said.

Stranahan had thought yes, and more than once, and months or perhaps even years apart, if the eroded bones of the second body were an indication.

He felt his line tighten. He'd been pulsing a slim marabou streamer fly through a current seam that held fish in high water, and this one was out of the river as soon as it felt the steel. It ruptured the quicksilver surface, then ruptured it again, and once more. He let the trout have its head, listened to the click of the old Hardy Perfect reel as the line sung out, and after a couple short runs was able to lead the trout into a shallow cove.

“How 'bouts you let an old hound have the honor.”

The man walking up the bank was backlit in the slanting rays of a dying sun, his face cast in shadow, but Sean would have known the lumbering gait anywhere.

“Sam. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I had an afternoon float from Papoose to Palisades and got to the ramp late. Saw your rig. Figured you were such a fuckup you might need my help.”

The big man stepped into the water in his sneakers and bent over, ringlets of coppery hair falling forward and his silhouette stretched thin as a heron's. He deftly unhooked the trout and kissed it on the nose, sending it on its way without ever lifting it from the water.

He grinned, straightening up. Now that he was facing the sunset, Sean could see the grooves in the front teeth where Sam Meslik had nipped the tag ends of a few thousand leader tippets, too impatient to use fingernail clippers. Meslik, who was known in the angling community as Rainbow Sam, had given Sean his start in the profession—it was under Sam's outfitter's license that Sean guided—and he was Sean's best friend west of the Battenkill River in New York State. That's the way he thought about it. All Stranahan's reference points were mountain ranges or trout streams.

Sam sloshed out of the water, muttering something about his “goddamned Reebok shoes.”

“Took your bud out this evening,” he said, “the black barber fella. Good angler, had me laughing to split a gut. Offered me a haircut. Told him I was like Samson. I'd lose my strength if somebody cut my locks.”

“Why didn't he book me?” Stranahan said. He made a face as if he was hurt. He was a little hurt.

“His flight was canceled, so he didn't know he could go 'til this morning. Told me he tried your cell. But I think he just wanted somebody who could actually put him into some fish.”

Stranahan nodded. “I was out of reach this morning.” He wanted to tell Sam about the discoveries on Sphinx Mountain, but knew Martha Ettinger would frown upon it, even though the cops reporter at the
Bridger Mountain Star
would have the story in the morning.

“Did Mr. Winston tell you about the guy who came into the salon to get a haircut?”

“He tried to. I told him the last time I heard that joke it was a Swede farmer walking into a car dealership. ‘Are you thinking about buying a Cadillac?' says the salesman.”

A short silence.

“Sean, you're such a gullible trout. You were had, my man.”

Stranahan nodded up and down, then shook his head. “I'm a rube,” he said.

“Come on, rube. Let's go shoot eight-ball at the Inn. Maybe some cowgirl will like that haircut so much she'll have a wardrobe malfunction.”

•   •   •

T
wenty-four hours later, no wardrobe malfunctions but a persistent seam leak in the crotch of his waders, Sean Stranahan was standing behind an easel in his studio at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center, exercising his second love on a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch canvas. The previous summer, a vintner from California's Santa Ynez Valley had hired him to paint eight watercolors and four oils for his riverfront mansion on the upper Madison. No pens being handy, the contract was signed in Montana fashion with a handshake and a tumbler of whisky—Johnnie Walker Black Label, as Stranahan recalled. Richard Summersby would be arriving at his summer residence on the first of July, leaving Sean little more than a week to complete the last of the paintings, which was slated to hang in the master bedroom.

He dipped his paintbrush into a Mason jar of turpentine and stirred it absently, the paint thinner clouding while he stared at the canvas, a riverscape of British Columbia's Copper River dressed in the rich palate of autumn. The angler in the painting was casting a Spey rod in a run called Silver Bear, gold rocks reflecting light from the riverbed, the broken teeth of the Telkwa Range buttressing the horizon. In the interests of verisimilitude the man did not have a fish on. In steelhead fishing you almost never do. It is like an agnostic's prayer in that regard, hoping that there is reason to hope.

Sean knew this firsthand, for Summersby had paid for him to fly to BC the previous September. Sleeping in a rental car and fishing with an old single-handed eight-weight fly rod, he had hooked exactly one steelhead in four days casting. It had bulked out of the river, flipped upside down, and smacked the surface with a tail as wide as a bear's paw. There are some fish that your heart knows you'll never land, that are placed in the path of your fly only for the memory. It was such a fish.

Recalling the sinking sensation in his chest when the leader parted from the fly, Stranahan touched the tip of a #2 Filbert brush onto the sienna and cadmium yellow mix on his palette. He had poised it to add a dab of color representing a rock on the riverbed when there was a rap at the door. The travertine floors of the cultural center echoed as loudly as marble, something Sean knew all too well, for the futon in the corner served as his bed. But he had not heard the faintest footstep and was so surprised by the knock that he inadvertently jabbed the canvas, fortunately in the exact spot he'd intended to.

“Come in.”

Kenneth Winston entered. “Captain,” he said.

Sean switched his brush to his left hand and came around his easel extending his right. The slim hairstylist was wearing cherry red sneakers; perhaps that's why he hadn't heard him arrive.

“Sam told me your flight was canceled, but that was yesterday,” Sean said. “I thought you'd be in Louisiana by now.”

“Well, so did I. So did I. But here I am, still in White Castle.”

“White Castle?”

“You know, the Caucasian Kingdom.”

“Ah. Well, what brings you to my door? For that matter, how did you find me? I'm not in the book.”

“Sam Meslik told me a little about you on our float yesterday. Sounds like you've led quite the life since moving here.”

“I won't argue,” Sean said. “But hey”—he raised a finger—“I don't know if I ought to be talking to you after you pulled that joke on me, took advantage of my naivety. Don't look innocent. You know what I'm talking about. ‘Sir, are you thinking about getting a haircut?'”

“Oh now, where's the harm? All I did was tell a little story, and as I recall you laughed hard as I did. I wasn't taking advantage of you, it was just part of my effort to make your day enjoyable. You want to know what a man's true worth is, money aside? It's how many people did he make happy. Saint Peter asks for my credentials at the Pearly Gates, I want to be able to say that I put a smile on someone's face every day.”

Sean had to smile. “So what can I do for you, Kenneth? You didn't come to book me tomorrow, did you? I'm free. Have boat, will fish. You buy the gas, bring some more of those ribs, this time we forget the guide fee.”

“No, I'd like that, I really appreciate the offer, but I'm on my way to the airport. I'll be in Baton Rouge in time to get lucky or watch Conan, depending on the whim of the wife.”

“Well, sit down then.” Sean dropped his brush into the jar of turpentine and took a chair opposite Winston. He put his hands behind his head.

Winston was examining the canvases on the walls. “You are a fine painter. Very fine if I say so, and I do.”

“Thank you. But you didn't come here to look at art.”

“No, I didn't.”

Sean followed Winston's eyes as they roamed over the room, his gaze falling on a tea saucer by a small hole in the corner of the wall.

“Are those crumbs I see? Sean, tell me you're not feeding a mouse.”

“I'm not feeding a mouse.”

“Yeah, and I'll bet it doesn't have a name, either.”

Sean brought his arms from behind his head and leaned forward, his elbows on the desk.

“Okay, okay.” Winston held up his hands. “I'll come right to the point. I lost a fly box out of my vest last night, after fishing with Sam Meslik.”

“Sure it didn't fall out in Sam's truck? You could hide a dead Doberman in there and not smell it for a week.”

“Well, that's the thing. Sam gave me a ride back to my rental after we fished, and there were a good three hours of light left so I drove up to Three Dollar Bridge to see if there was a hatch. I had the vest on, I was wearing it. I didn't open the box but I patted the outside of my pockets, you know how you do that to make sure everything's there”—Winston waited for Sean to nod—“and I remember feeling it there, the shape of the box.”

“But you never unzipped the pocket to look at it.”

“No, I was fishing caddis pupa and I keep them in a small box in the right lower pocket. The box with all my good dries is in the left, so I never had occasion to open it.”

“When did you notice it missing?”

“Only about an hour ago. I was packing up.”

“So what are you thinking? The pocket was unzipped and you dropped it along the river?”

“I must have. I fished until dark, about ten I'd say, and I was at least two miles below the bridge. When I waded out of the river I took a leak before hiking back up.”

“And you have to take your vest off to pull down your waders,” Stranahan prompted.

“You got it, Captain. I'd have hung it on a bush if there was one. But I don't think there was. I think I just laid it in the grass.”

“So where exactly were you?”

“You know that log mansion that's on the west bank, set back in the creek basin? There's a break in the bluffs. Not the first break but the second. It's maybe the third house you see when you hike down the river. You really can't miss it. There's a little cottage below it, a couple hundred yards away, that's closer to the river.”

“You mean that old homestead cabin that's held together with baling twine and prayer.”

“I think somebody must have fixed it up. I was fishing below that cabin, maybe a five-minute walk.”

“So you're asking me to go down there, huh?”

“I'd do it myself if I had the time. I called the airlines soon as I saw it was missing and tried to change my flight. But it's getting close to the Fourth, all the flights in and out of Bridger are booked. And I have to open the salon tomorrow.”

“What kind of box is it?”

“It's a Wheatley. Early twentieth century. I found it in an antiques store in Kemnay, Scotland. Cost me sixty pounds. It's worth at least three hundred dollars to a collector.”

“I can see why you want it back.”

“It's not just the box. I must have two hundred dries in it—PMDs, tricos, Callibaetis, you name it.” Winston shook his head. “Each fly worth about three bucks if you bought them at a shop, plus the box, I got more than a thousand dollars lying on the riverbank. But what makes me sick is I tied those flies. When I think of the man-hours I spent putting together that box, you can't put a figure on it.” Winston took in the disorder of Stranahan's tying desk. “You roll your own, you know what I'm talking about.”

“I suppose it would be too much to ask that you put your name on the box.”

Winston sighed. “I've thought about it, one of those little waterproof tape labels. Good intentions, you know.” He shrugged. “I'll pay you, of course. What's your day rate?”

Sean waved a hand. “Tell you what. You front me fifty dollars for gas, another fifty for taking me away from my brushes, and I'll drive down this afternoon. There's a good chance nobody's hiked that far from the bridge today, so if the box is there I ought to be able to find it.”

“I really appreciate it.”