The Glacier Gallows (18 page)

Charles Wendell was fuming. “I say fuck you, Brian. You're an industry patsy who has infiltrated the environmental movement and is destroying it. I'm going to stop you.”

Brian smiled and shook his head. “See you in a couple of weeks, Charles.”

“Don't count on it.”

PORCUPINE HILLS, ALBERTA. AUGUST 2.

“IS PERRY ALRIGHT?” COLE SAT
on the porch of the Blackwater Ranch, using an ancient cordless phone.

“He's fine.” Walter laughed. “A little strung out, but fine. You should see his car.”

“Whose body is it?”

“No
ID
yet. We've got a real party going on out here:
FBI
,
BIA
, Blackfeet tribal cops, even Glacier County sheriffs. The medical examiner is using an ice-cream scoop to put the body in a bag. Montana State Fish and Game is hunting down the bear.”

“But
nobody
thinks this bear killed whoever it was you found.”

“No way. The
FBI
is going to work with the
ME
on the postmortem, but I'll bet they find a bullet hole in what's left of this guy's skull. If not that, then something else. The body was buried under a few feet of earth and rocks in the backyard. The bear sniffed it out, dug it up, and was feeding on it.”

“You think this is the missing guide, Chip Prescott?”

“I think so. Who else? It was his place. Unless Chip killed someone, buried him, and disappeared himself. Perry is pushing the feds down here to drop the extradition request immediately, but they say this changes nothing.”

“Are you on your way home?”

“Soon. Perry wants to spend some time on this. We might be home tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

“Be careful, Walt.”

“You too. Kiss Mom for me.”

Cole hung up the phone. The screen door opened and Nancy came out onto the porch and sat down. Cole filled her in on the conversation.

“So we've got four bodies: Brian Marriott, the two guides, and Charlie Crowfoot.”

“I'm not convinced that Blake Foreman was a guide at all. It's just too damn convenient. I think Foreman was our guy.”

“I'll make a few calls and see what I can come up with about him this morning. In the meantime, you're going to want to see this,” said Nancy, opening her laptop. “Remember when we were looking at Brian's email? I put some feelers out with a few friends in Ottawa.”

“You still have friends in Ottawa?”

Nancy smiled thinly. “No thanks to you, but yes, a few. Do you remember Nicolas Stanos?”

“The freedom-of-information guy?”

“Yeah. I used him a bunch of times when I was with the
Globe and Mail
to do research. He's got this formula for freedom-of-information requests that he's figured out. He can get just about anything short of the prime minister's personal diary. I asked him to do some broadcast fishing on this file. I hoped to come up with a motive for why Brian was killed. I got this instead.” She pointed to an email from Stanos dated earlier that morning.

Nancy. I've put in a number of
FOIPP
requests regarding your friend Cole and his colleague Brian Marriott. I won't hear anything for at least another few weeks. One thing I did find on the public record, however, was on the federal Attorney General's website. I got a blind hit when using one of my custom data search engines. It looks like the federal Cabinet has waived its opposition to extradition for Mr. Blackwater. This is unusual given that Montana still has the death penalty on its books, even though it's only executed three people since 1976. Normally, Canada wouldn't waive extradition unless Montana agreed not to ask for the death penalty. The Supreme Court has said that Canada must seek an exemption to the death penalty in all but “exceptional” cases. But I don't see that as part of the deal. It
could
be there, but it's not specified. I guess they think this case is exceptional. I've added Cabinet records of this discussion to my
FOIPP
request, but I'm not going to hold my breath. These are usually proprietary. My point is, your friend Cole has been given up by our federal government.

COLE USED AN
old coil of rope that he had strung from one of the barn's ancient rafters to hoist the heavy bag into place. He had climbed one of the wooden ladders fastened to the barn walls, the rope in his hands, and then shimmied along the creaking wood to loop the rope in place. Now it groaned as he pulled on it to suspend the hundred-pound leather bag above the wooden slats of the barn floor. It had taken Cole more than an hour to muscle the bales of hay out of the center of the barn to make a space there. Now they were stacked up around the perimeter like mute spectators.

When the bag was suspended from the rafter, he stood adjacent to the double doors of the barn and blew a coating of hay dust off the metal box that was a main switch for the structure's electricity. He wasn't certain that Walter hadn't disconnected the power to safeguard against fire. He opened the box and punched the switch, and with a metallic snap, the lights burst to life. There were four of them suspended fifteen feet above the floor, their hoods festooned with spider's webs, but the bulbs were still bright and harsh. Cole looked at the space in the center of the barn. He and Walter had torn the boxing ring out and burned it more than two years ago. But its outline was still plain on the heavy wooden floor. This was the demarcation of Cole's rage. This was where it began.

Cole peeled his shirt off. His body was slick with perspiration. He picked up a pair of ancient leather boxing gloves and pulled them on. It felt like he'd had them on the day before, though it had been twenty years. He laced them up, using his teeth to pull them tight.

He approached the heavy bag as if it were a living opponent, his eyes low, his hair wet and dangling in heavy curls over his eyes. The first blow made a sharp crack, and a covey of doves burst from the rafters and flew out into the dark night. Cole threw another punch and then another.

The heavy bag became a faceless man behind the tangled conspiracy to send Brian Marriott to the grave and Cole Blackwater to the gallows. Cole punched until he could no longer feel his hands.

HEART BUTTE, MONTANA. AUGUST 2.

“IT'S GOING TO TAKE SOME
time to determine how long this body has been on site.”
FBI
Special Agent McCallum leaned against a black
GMC
Yukon.

“I think we can be pretty certain that we're dealing with the missing guide here, right?” asked Perry. He, Walter, McCallum, and a member of the Blackfeet Tribal Police stood next to the truck. A hundred yards away, Chip Prescott's trailer was ringed in yellow crime-scene tape.

“We can't say that right now, Mr. Gilbert.”

A helicopter hovered overhead, and on the ground a dozen agents from the local tribal police, the
FBI
, and the Glacier County Sheriff's Office combed the site. An ambulance from the medical examiner's office in Great Falls was backed up next to the trailer, and what was left of the man found behind the trailer was being delicately loaded onboard.

“It's going to take the
ME
a week to piece this together. Maybe longer,” continued McCallum as they watched men in white coveralls load the body. “We'll likely look to our forensic entomologist to determine time of death. I don't think this gets Mr. Blackwater off the hook.”

“Are you kidding me?” snapped Walter. “You've got a man there who was supposed to be a guide on a trip my brother was leading. He's dead. My guess is you're going to find a bullet hole in what's left of his head. Likely the same caliber as the hole in Brian Marriott's head. If you're lucky, you might even recover ballistics from him, or from a tree behind where he was executed. You've got Brian, found at the bottom of a cliff, and you've got a third body that you claim was an accidental death, but that is starting to sound more and more ridiculous. On top of that, your only witness is dead in a Cascade County
Detention Center
. And you want to pin all of this on Cole? You think that a man with no record, with no history of violence other than the occasional bar fight, suddenly decided to plan and then carry out all of this?”

“Walter, this isn't helping,” Perry said quietly.

“What isn't helping is that the
FBI
and the
RCMP
have a theory about this crime that doesn't fit reality. It's cognitive dissonance, plain and simple. You, Special Agent McCallum, refuse to consider any other possibilities other than your own notion that Cole is responsible.”

“Are you done, Mr. Blackwater?” asked McCallum.

Perry watched Walter turn and walk away from the group, then said, “There's one more thing. When we checked in on Chip up at the ranch house, the owner told us that Prescott had paid his August rent in cash. Dropped it off when the old man wasn't around.”

“Cash is pretty hard to trace,” said McCallum.

“Likely the reason that cash was used,” said Perry. “Whoever killed Chip is likely still around. The killer paid the August rent to keep the landlord from driving down here looking for it.”

McCallum scratched his chin. “We'll look into it.”

Perry turned and followed Walter back to the car. Perry had to get in first, shuffling over the center console after entering through the front passenger door. When they were inside, Perry started the vehicle and they sat for a moment.

“You think they're going to try to pin this on my brother too?”

“I don't know, Walter. If this is in fact our missing guide, I'm pretty sure the
ME
will come back and show that he was killed a couple of days before the hike began. Cole was in this area. He was in East Glacier at the time. He doesn't have a very tight alibi. In fact, he was driving around out here one of those days. The
FBI
could
draw a straight line to this trailer.”

Walter shook his head. “It's all purely circumstantial.” He closed his eyes. “When we were in the trailer, did you notice anything odd?”

“No. Just a trailer.”

“I've been on a lot of backcountry trips. I've never been a guide, but I know how to put a pack together. This guy was ready to go. He had his gear all laid out. He wasn't planning on skipping town. He was set to go.”

“So?”

“So if you were looking for a way to get a guy onto the hike who could be the inside man, what better way? Pick a guy like our cadaver back there, who lives in the middle of nowhere, who won't be missed for several days or weeks, and kill him. Plant your man in a location you know he will be noticed by Derek McGrath. You watch McGrath for several days and learn his habits. Not hard to do in a place like East Glacier. Derek learns that one of his guides has gone
AWOL
and there is Blake Foreman, ready to take over at a moment's notice.”

“One thing I want to find out is who sent the email from Chip Prescott's account to Derek McGrath saying that he was sick and he wouldn't be in for work,” said Perry. “There was no computer in the trailer. If anybody has Internet out here, it's satellite. Chip may have had a cell phone, but I didn't see one. He would have had to drive into East Glacier to access email. Or go next door to his landlord's and call from his phone. Easier than making the hour trip to East Glacier, that's for sure.”

“You think that whoever killed Chip sent it from his own Yahoo! account? Can't the
FBI
trace an
IP
address?” asked Walter.

Perry tapped the steering wheel. “They can, but it might be a dummy email account. I don't know what good it will do us.”

“I still think it's worth running down. Shooting Brian created a forensic trail for the
FBI
to follow, from the gunshot residue on Cole's shirt to the pistol he supposedly bought in Browning.

“It all comes down to motive. We learn what the motive was, and we'll trace Blake Foreman right back to whoever he worked for. This was a premeditated murder. Nobody heard a shot that night. That means someone brought along a silencer. Even if one of the hikers was a gun nut and had a pistol in his bag in case of bears or cougars or whatever, you don't bring a silencer on a backpacking trip. The only reason you have one of those is to kill someone quietly. I think we should get back to Alberta.”

Perry put the car in gear. Both men felt suddenly anxious.

Walter was tapping his fingers on the dashboard. “I just hope that if Cole and Nancy are having any luck learning what Marriott was into, they're doing it without tripping the same wire that landed Brian in a body bag.”

WALTER MADE CALLS
as they drove north across the Blackfeet Reservation and through customs at Chief Mountain. They had to tell the story about why the driver's door was dented, but Walter knew the Canada Border Services Agency officer, and they shared a laugh.

They wove their way up the eastern side of Waterton Lakes National Park, the aspen-cloaked hillsides acid green in the August heat. “So I've reached two of the three guiding outfits that Blake Foreman gave as references to Derek McGrath,” said Walter. “McGrath was so desperate for a third man on the trip that he took Foreman's word that he'd been employed as a guide before. Turns out he hadn't. None of these companies had ever heard of this guy.”

Perry added, “I've been in touch with the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum in New York. They haven't had a Blake Foreman in their ranks that matches our age profile. I'm going to have to pass this along to McCallum at the
FBI
and see what he can make of it. I'm also going to ask him if he got a random hit off Foreman's—or whatever his name is—fingerprints. If the guy was in the military or had a criminal record, they should have gotten a match by now. If it's an alias, there won't be anything. He won't have a criminal record or file his taxes in Canada or the
US
, which is what I can get if I call in a few favors,” concluded Perry.