Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (6 page)

“Mr. Willoughby?”

“Patrick to you.”

“Patrick, I don't want to make you get out of your chair, but I drove down here from Bridger and lifted about a thousand tufts of grass looking for a fly box that I have yet to see. I'm beginning to wonder if it actually exists.”

“My dear man, if you would look in the second drawer of the desk over there, the left-hand side.”

Sean returned with a vintage Wheatley fly box with a pewter surface. Maybe he had been wrong about Willoughby.

“Take a close look at the flies, Sean. How would you characterize them?”

Sean reached into the breast pocket of his fishing shirt and removed a pair of half-glasses with a 3X magnifying lens that he used to knot Griffiths gnats and other will-of-the-wisp flies to his leader tippet. He carried the box to the fly-tying table and found the switch for a goosenecked lamp. He peered through the clear lids of the spring-loaded compartments, where the dry flies stood at attention on their hackle tips. He took the glasses off.

“They're exquisite. I had no idea that Kenneth Winston—that's the name of the man who lost the box—was such a talented tier. He's a black man who runs a hair salon in the South. Seems an unlikely candidate. You don't see too many black fly fishermen in Montana, or anywhere for that matter.”

“Kenneth Winston is in the upper tier of the best fly tiers in the United States.” Willoughby announced it as a fact.

Sean smiled. So he had been right. He said, “Mr. Winston didn't lose this fly box on the river, did he? That was just the excuse to have me come down here to meet you.” He snapped shut the box and placed it on the coffee table. He waited, listening to the crickets rubbing their legs together outside the cottage. He supposed he should feel like a fool for falling for another of Winston's lies, but whatever the reason for his being lured here, it had to be more interesting than the simple recovery of a fly box. And he
was
interested.

Sean realized, as he took a sip of his whiskey, that he had been leading a largely pedestrian life since the previous summer. He painted pictures and he guided anglers. The day-to-day provided a living, albeit a tenuous one sans health insurance and proper sleeping quarters, but it didn't elevate his heart rate. The bodies on the mountain engaged his fascination, but Martha Ettinger had made clear that his involvement would remain marginal. The one case of investigation he had taken on since the spring had not tested his abilities. He'd solved it with two gallons of gas and a knock on a door. Waiting for Willoughby to explain, he remembered that day.

The client, a trust fund hobby architect named Garrett Anker, was very grateful to discover that his one-night stand had not resulted in a progeny he would be obligated to support. The one-night stand was very happy to inform Stranahan that she had flushed the entire incident from her mind, right down the toilet with the blue strip of her pregnancy test. Why hadn't the bastard called her himself if he was so fucking worried? Stranahan didn't have the heart to tell her that his client had forgotten the woman's name, along with where and how he'd met her. All Anker had given Sean to go on was something a friend had said about seeing him, Anker, outside the Molly bar with a “skank” who was wearing a pink sweatshirt with puppies or maybe kittens on it. The friend had noticed the sweatshirt only because he suspected it concealed a pair of “swinging hoochie mamas.” Anker did recall that the trailer where the woman led him must have been right by the railroad tracks. The trains thundering by literally shook the bed. It had seemed erotic enough at the time, right until she threw up into her toilet. The gagging had made his own gorge rise and he had stumbled out the door to vomit on the grass. From there he could see some lights from a restaurant that looked like a log cabin. It was the only business in the town. “It was nowhere, man,” Anker had said. “I don't know how the fuck I drove myself back.” Sean had thought: Logan, the Land of Sirloin Steakhouse. The second trailer door he knocked on, a woman opened it. She had bloodshot eyes in a smoker's face, the pupils shrinking as she peered skeptically at Stranahan or maybe just at the daylight in general. She said, “Was it you?” Then: “No, I don't get that kind of luck at two in the morning.

“Well, shit,” she had said. “You drove all this way. Come in. Take a load off.” Stranahan had declined the offer, though it looked like the friend had been right about the hoochie mamas. She could have held up a bank with them.

“Sean, you seem to be somewhere else.” Willoughby peered at him with his eyebrows arched.

“I was thinking about the amnesia of alcohol. When I was an investigator, I found I could make a living off it.”

“What exactly did you investigate?”

“Wrath. Greed. Sloth. Pride. Lust. Envy. And gluttony.”

“Ah, the seven deadly sins.”

“What sin is it that caused you to seek my help?”

“Avarice or envy. Possibly both.”

“Why don't you tell me about it? And why the mystery? You could have called. I'm not hard to find.”

“Quite right, maybe I should have. But I didn't know your name until yesterday. And then when Kenneth suggested that we engage your services, I felt I needed to ascertain your suitability for the club. If you agree to help us, it would mean that you would have quite a bit of interaction with the members. We are on vacation here and we—and I speak for all of us—are determined that the problem that has arisen does not detract from our time together. Frankly, none of us with the exception of Kenneth are young. We don't worry the small stuff anymore, or even the big stuff unless it involves a matter of health. I would rather not resolve this issue if your presence proved disruptive.”

“So this evening was an audition. To see if I met your standards?”

“Yes. But to tell you the truth, as soon as I saw the stem of that pipe sticking from your pocket and the bamboo rod I knew you would be the best possible fit.”

“Kenneth,” Stranahan said, as if the word were new to the tongue. “I'm not sure he's told me the truth about anything since I've met him.”

“Kenneth is exactly who he told you he was. When he booked you to fish, that's what he wanted to do, fish. Then when he found out who you were from your friend, Mr. Meslik, we came up with a plan to lure you down here. It was the club's money Kenneth paid you. I thought if we brought you here under false pretense, you deserved to be compensated regardless of the outcome.”

“So those really are his flies in the box?”

“Indeed so. Sean, when I say Kenneth is in the upper tier of our country's fly tiers I mean the top twenty, the top three if you limit the discussion to the Catskill school of tying. If you agree to take our money you will meet a couple of his peers who are much better known. You may recognize the names.”

Sean swallowed the last of his whiskey.

“Let me refill that.” Willoughby came back with the two tin cups. He leaned forward in his chair, his owl-like eyes narrowed as he fixed Sean with a look of scrutiny. No downward glance, no bashful expression now.

“What do you know about collecting fishing flies? Let me put that another way. What would be the most sought-after flies for a collector?”

Sean searched the dusty drawers of his mind for a name. “Dame Juliana Something-or-other. The English nun. Wasn't she the first person to write about fly fishing? Back in the fifteenth or sixteenth century? I remember a rumor about her tying flies with the fur of her cats. I think one of her flies would bring an awful lot of money.”

Willoughby was nodding his head. “One of Juliana Berner's flies would indeed bring a pretty penny today. Unfortunately, the good Dame's existence may be as much a rumor as her method of tying. She is given credit for writing
A Treatise of Fishing with an Angle
in the second edition of
The Boke of St. Albans
, in 1496. But there are no records of her in Sopwell Abbey, where she was supposedly a prioress, so it may well be that Dame Juliana only exists because we want her to. She is fly fishing's Eve, as the historian Paul Shullery said. She gives our sport a tidy source of origin.”

“If not her, then what about some of the fancy salmon flies, or a trout fly tied by someone like Rube Cross.”

“You bring up two distinct categories of collecting. First, collecting with regard to beauty and intricacy of construction, such as salmon flies. A Green Highlander or Jock Scott from a classicist such as Polly Sorenson is a work of art incorporating exotic feathers and requiring several hours to tie. The second category are flies tied by famous fishermen, such as Lee Wulff or Art Flick. Who would you say is the most famous trout fisherman our country has produced?”

“That's easy. Theodore Gordon.”

“You know your history. Gordon, who was tubercular and somewhat of a hermit, took English fly patterns and reinvented them to match the hatching insects in New York's Catskill rivers. Wrongly or rightly, he is considered the father of American dry fly fishing. He was quite secretive about his tying methods, and most of his flies disappeared in the lips of trout or in the trees banking his beloved Neversink River. He died in 1915 in the Anson Knight House, which today is buried several hundred feet beneath the surface of the Neversink Reservoir. If there were any remaining flies in that house they rusted away seven decades ago. His most famous pattern is the Quill Gordon, tied to represent the
Epeorus pleuralis
mayfly. Few of verifiable provenance have ever been offered at auction.”

“If one did surface, how much would you expect to have to bid?”

“Seventeen thousand five hundred dollars,” Willoughby said without hesitation.

Sean took a sip of bourbon, set the cup down, and walked over to the bookcase. On the wall above it, several flies were displayed in shadow boxes under pictures of the men and women who had tied them. He found what he was looking for, a grainy black-and-white photo of a waiflike, mustachioed man standing calf deep in a trout stream, wicker creel on his hip and a cane rod in his hand. Under the photo was an inset for a fly but no fly in the inset, and under the inset the words
#12 Quill Gordon tied by Theodore Gordon, circa 1910.

“How long's it been missing?”

“Since Sunday. There's another fly missing as well.” He indicated a box on the wall near the doorway. It also displayed a photograph, this one of a woman with curly hair. The inset for the fly was empty. “A vintage Gray Ghost tied by its originator, Carrie Stevens from Upper Dam, Maine,” Willoughby said. “She was a self-taught tier of the mid-twentieth century who developed many streamer patterns that are still fished today. This particular Ghost has sentimental value. It isn't as valuable as the Gordon fly, but as it is irreplaceable, the loss is equally disturbing.”

“Did you report the thefts?”

“What good would it do? It would just go into the police log and then the paper would pick it up and maybe our club would come to the attention of someone else with a larcenous heart. We don't like to draw attention here.” Willoughby had crossed over to the bookcase. He handed Sean his whiskey cup.

“You drew someone's,” Sean said.

“We did. We'd like you to find who that was.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Valley Fever

“Y
ou didn't have to come down. It will be in my report in a couple hours.”

“Trust me, Doc, when a cadaver dog sniffs out two John Does buried in Hyalite County, I don't wait for information to cross my desk.”

“I know you don't, Martha. But what you're going to see doesn't wash off in the shower. Put it this way. If you had any romantic plans tonight, you might want to tell your beau to hold the Viagra. You aren't going to be in the mood.”

“I'm a big girl, you know that.”

“Then go ahead and gown up. You know where.”

“You want me to scrub?” Ettinger's voice came from the morgue changing room.

“We reserve that for patients with a pulse.”

Ettinger's feet in the blue paper slippers made no sound on the marble floor. Doc Hanson was bent over two stainless steel trays set on a long counter, at one end of which squatted the matte black microscope that dated to his childhood. In one tray lay a spongy, tube-shaped organ about ten inches long, with a tail-like protrusion. The other tray displayed a puddle of revolting tissue, purple-gray and gelatinous. The antiseptic chemicals that gave the room a tart Mr. Clean scent couldn't overcome the smell of offal.

“Before we start,” Hanson said, “the freezer burn on the epidermal tissues supports a death before freeze-up. Otherwise, the body could not have been buried. Decomposition is fairly minimal. I'd guess late fall. Quite frankly, if it was much older than that, even the bears would have given him a pass.”

“Just so we're on the same page, you're talking about John Doe the first, the body unearthed by the grizzly.”

“I'm sorry. I should have made that clear.”

“Cause of death is gunshot, right?”

“Well, the holes in the skull are consistent with a gunshot wound. But I found no traces of copper or lead indicating passage of a bullet. That isn't conclusive. If the bullet remained intact, it could have passed through without leaving a trace; in fact, one would expect it to. The holes also could have been made by the teeth of that grizzly. Speaking of which, the bear ingested approximately half the chest, much of the buttocks, and the left thigh, so possible evidence sites of other wounds are missing. The skull has the two craters you inadvertently uncovered.” Hanson peered at Ettinger over his glasses. “Next time I trust you'll be more careful.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martha said.

“Would you like to see it?”

Ettinger nodded. “Maybe I'll get a better sense of what this guy looked like when he was walking around.”

“Of course. I'll be just a minute.”

Martha walked to one of the shuttered windows that looked out onto Gallatin Avenue. She pinched back several slats of the blind. Outside, two male finches engaged in a war dance of fluttering feathers, fighting over position at a bird feeder suspended from the limb of a mountain maple.

“Feeling claustrophobic, are we, Martha?”

She released the slats and the rectangle the sun's rays had inscribed on the floor vanished. “Just reassuring myself that life goes on.”

Doc Hanson nodded. “My wife wonders why I insist on being outdoors on the weekends. She thinks we've reached an age where joining a book club or inviting the friends for cards are more sensible options. She thinks canoe trips through the White Cliffs of the Missouri are evidence of a midlife crisis. I tell her I'd rather have a new truck than a Ferrari and I don't need assurance of my virility by having an affair. But I do insist on spending as much time as I can under that big blue dome, whether it's with a fly rod in my hand or a Sawyer canoe paddle. Have you read
This House of Sky
, by Ivan Doig? The title says it. Truest words about this state ever written.”

Suddenly Hanson looked away. He took off his glasses and rubbed a blue latex fist in his eye. Ettinger could see his walrus mustache quiver.

“Are you all right, Doc?”

“I'm just turning goddamned sentimental in my old age. I seem to get on the verge of tears for no reason. I'm sorry, Martha. Where were we?”

“Under this house of artificial light. You were going to show me a skull.”

Hanson indicated a third steel tray that he'd set on the counter. “Better brace yourself,” he said.

It was worse than she'd thought.

“I liked him better up on the mountain, when he looked deader,” she said.

“Strange, isn't it? He still has his skin, what was left of his hair. He doesn't look dead a week, let alone six months.”

“What he looks like is a head on a stake.”

Hanson ignored the comment. “He has good bone structure, his teeth show top-quality dental work, the eyes are wide-set, chin is strong, he has an aquiline nose. You wouldn't think it, but I would guess this was a good-looking man, even distinguished. Moderately receding hairline. Still some brown in with the gray. Good muscle tone. I did some bone measurements. About five-nine, in the neighborhood of a hundred sixty pounds.”

Ettinger swallowed.

“You've seen enough?” Hanson looked over his glasses again.

She nodded. “How about this other stuff? What's up with the goo?”

“The goo, as you so eloquently put it, consists of the pancreas”—Hanson pointed to the tray containing the corrugated, tubelike organ—“and”—he indicated the purple-gray puddle—“what remains of the left and caudate lobes of the man's liver.”

“You could have fooled me,” Martha said.

“Have a look through the microscope.”

“You like to prolong the agony, don't you?”

“What, Martha? Is everything all right?”

Ettinger blew out a breath and chuckled. “Okay. I deserved that. Now, are you going to tell me something that brings us closer to identifying these bodies, or aren't you?”

“The best I can do is point you in a direction you can further explore.”

Ettinger took a seat and bent her eye to the lens. “Is this a biopsy sample?”

“Yes. You're looking at cells from a lymph node near the tail of the pancreas. You'll notice that several of the cells look abnormal. That indicates a cancer.”

“So was it malignant?”

“Without getting too clinical about it, I also found tumors in the liver. Cancer that begins in the pancreas and spreads to other organs is called metastatic pancreatic cancer. It's malignant and it's incurable.”

“How do you know it wasn't liver cancer that spread to the pancreas?”

“Because the cancerous cells in the liver resemble abnormal versions of cells found in the organ of origin, the pancreas. The spread occurs when clusters of cancer cells are carried through the bloodstream or lymphatic tubes to other organs. Pancreatic cancer commonly metastasizes in the liver.”

“I'll take your word. So what's the story?”

“The story is that we're talking about a man, probably in his sixties or seventies, who had a life expectancy of less than a year.”

“Could he have climbed halfway up a mountain?”

“Cancer patients are up and down. That's not intended as a pun. He may have been at a point where the bad days predominated, but on a good day, if he was otherwise in decent health—and from what I can see he was—I would say yes, it is possible.”

Ettinger put her chin in her hand. She noticed that she was no longer smelling offal. It was there only if she thought about it. “So tell me about the other victim,” she said. “I'm assuming it's a he.”

Hanson nodded. “Late middle age. Shorter than the first victim, about five-seven. But powerfully built. An injury to the ribs on the lower left chest quadrant, in fact a rather large hole.”

“Too big for a gunshot wound?”

“Not at all. Gunshot trauma is possible, but after this much deterioration, it may be hard to prove. However, there
is
something about the body I find very interesting, and unlike the rib injury, it's definite.” He led Martha to the examining table in the middle of the room. He switched on the overhead ultraviolet lights and drew back the sheet.

“Mother of mercy.”

“Do you need to take a minute?”

“No, I just have to remember to breathe through my nose.” She studied the naked skull, the careful arrangement of rib cage and bones, including the exposed femur covered in lichen that Sean Stranahan had found. The bones weren't the problem. It was what passed for flesh, a clingy organic gauze that stretched across the skeleton.

“Are you going to torment me, or can we just cut to the chase?”

Hanson was unfazed. “I want to draw your attention to the skin.” He pointed with his probe to a raised, weltlike line on the right upper thigh. “Dermal lesions can be difficult to distinguish after this much decomposition, but”—he moved the instrument—“the spinal column and skull contain evidence of permanent bone damage—right under the probe here, see? These lesions are much more apparent and very telling, if you know what you are looking at. This is unusual stuff, Martha.”

“What is it, some rare cancer?”

“No, not cancer. This damage was caused by a severe fungal infection, I'd bet my license on it. But if I hadn't done my internship at Kern Medical in Bakersfield, I'd be scratching my head.”

“But since you're not scratching your head . . .”

“Have you heard of valley fever?”

“You mean what those girls who go to dude ranches come down with when the local cowboys saddle them up? No, Doc, of course I don't know what valley fever is. In fact, you can just assume that any question you give me, the answer's going to be a ‘no,' so why don't you just tell me what you're going to tell me without the interrogation. The sooner you put the sheet back over this table the better.”

“I didn't know I was interrogating you, Martha. I mean Sheriff.”

Martha blew out her breath. “Do I have to say I'm sorry? It seems like I'm saying it all the time lately.”

“No, Martha, you don't. Just like Warren said, ‘When it comes to you, we take the whiskey with the wine.'”

“How do you know he said that? You weren't there that day.”

“It must have been a bird that told me.”

“Yeah, a bird about five foot ten who calls himself Walt and used to be a cop in Chicago. Maybe that kind of bird?”

“Or another.”

They looked at each other across the pile of bones that was John Doe the second.

“We'd have made a good married couple,” Hanson said. “We bicker like one.”

“Oh, you couldn't have handled me.”

“That's just it. I wouldn't have tried.”

“Well, hell, Doc, where were you fifteen years ago?” Martha felt that they had breached a barrier. For the first time in the decade she'd known Doc, she was really talking to him, not just sparring or extracting information. The bones no longer seemed to be in the room.

“I was already twenty years married,” he was saying. “Either I was born too soon or you were born too late.”

Martha's voice was reflective. “That's the story of life, isn't it? Timing's never been my strong suit.”

“So how are you really doing? Are you happy? Is this thing you have with Harold going anywhere?”

“I don't know, Bob. It isn't so much the cultural difference. Harold moves back and forth from the reservation with a lot less baggage than most Indians. But we've both been divorced and had our share of disappointments. You grow older, you get set in your ways and it's harder to bend. You know what I mean?”

“I do.” He paused a moment. “That Sean Stranahan seems like a fine young man. Calls me ‘sir.' And he's so damned handsome he makes me feel like a cactus. But I can't say I know him.”

“Sean is . . . different. He comes across this one way, friendly and, I'm looking for a word—self-deprecating. He seems so open, but he keeps a lot back. I think there were things in his past that haunt him. I know he was pretty young when his father died . . . but you wouldn't think so when you're around him because he's got this youthful optimism. And he's like a magnet. It's uncanny. I walk out of Law and Justice, go around the block, maybe a dog poops in a yard. Sean takes a walk, a tree falls on someone, he's there in the middle of it, blood up to his elbows. He's just one of those people who open the door and things happen to them.” She stopped, a look of perplexity crossing her face. “Jesus, Doc, how the hell did we get started on Sean Stranahan?” She permitted a smile. “I must be getting to be an old-timer like you, shooting the breeze while people are rotting under my fingers.”

“Martha, I love you for all your warts and graces.”

“Who said that? Some poet I ought to feel bad about not knowing, right?”

“I did. Let's talk about valley fever.”

•   •   •

V
alley fever, Hanson explained, was caused by a soil fungus breathed into the lungs after being stirred up by wind or, particularly, by agriculture. The initial symptoms were flulike—headache, fever, cough, chills, night sweats. Rashes might appear, typically on the legs. In more severe cases, the victim could experience weight loss, expel blood-tinged sputum, and develop severe chest pain, not dissimilar to tuberculosis. In the worst cases of valley fever, the infection spread beyond the lungs to other parts of the body, into bones, the heart, and notably into the meninges, the membranes that protect the brain and spinal cord. The lesions Hanson had found on the spinal column and skull indicated a severe case of spinal meningitis. He showed Martha where the hair clinging to the lower skull looked to have been shaved away. Hanson said the site was where a doctor would typically perform a cistern tap, removing spinal fluid and mixing it with antifungal drugs for reinjection. The drugs were toxic, with the worst being amphotericin B, known as “Ampho the Terrible.” For some patients there was no end in sight for the painful procedures, the chronic pneumonia and tuberculosis symptoms, the aching in the bones, and quality of life greatly suffered. The suicide rate among advanced cases was high.