The Glacier Gallows (31 page)

Brian smiled. “We really appreciate your service.”

“All in a day's work,” said Derek.

“What do you guys do when you're not leading tourists around in the mountains?” asked Brian.

None of the men spoke. Finally, Tad said, “I help my dad with his business.”

“What does he do?”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. He's what you might call an entrepreneur.”

“What about you, Blake?”

“I just go and hang out, mostly. I got a place down in Mexico and I do some surfing.” Blake's eyes shifted from his work to Derek and back. As Blake leaned over to scrub a pot, Brian noticed a ring with an eagle on it hanging from a silver chain around Blake's neck. It swung like a pendulum in front of Blake, and he quickly tucked it inside his shirt, looking again at Derek. Brian meant to ask Blake about it, but Derek interrupted his thoughts.

“I got wife, kids, the whole catastrophe.” Derek smiled. “Winter, I got my kids in school down in Helena. I guide ski trips when I can, but it's getting harder and harder.”

“Kids change things. Makes you think about what's important,” Brian said.

“So listen.” Derek stood up, watching his fellow guides as he did. He extended an arm that invited Brian to step away from the others. They walked for a few hundred feet as Derek spoke. “You told me on the phone that one of the things you really wanted to see while you were here were the northern lights.”

“That's right, but it's not really the right time of year.”

“Well, it just so happens that there is a solar flare tonight. I think we might get a bit of a show, but it's going to be early in the morning. Sometime between three and four.”

“How do you . . . ?”

Derek pulled out his iPhone. “I am in touch with the wilds.” He smiled broadly.

“That would be great if there was. The others might like to see it too.”

“Here's what we'll do. I'll get up around three and have a look. If there's anything worth seeing, I'll get you up, and then it's your call whether we wake the others. Let's just keep this between ourselves until we know for sure.”

“That would be great,” said Brian.

“Then we'll see you tonight. Or tomorrow morning, I suppose.”

“I can't wait.”

EAST GLACIER, MONTANA. SEPTEMBER 16.

COLE BLACKWATER SAT IN THE
back of the
GMC
Yukon. “I guess I have Officer White Plume to thank for being alive right now.”

“You do,” said Special Agent McCallum. He was seated next to Cole. In the front, Inspector Reimer of the
RCMP
had twisted in her seat so that she could join the conversation. They were parked across the street from the Two Medicine Grill. “When he ran your name this morning after the break-in at the Dancing Bears, he called us right away.” McCallum continued, “Let's go over what happened again.”

Cole sighed deeply and rubbed his face. It hurt. His shoulder hurt. “I'm not convinced that any of this went down the way Derek says it did, but here's what I think happened. Derek gets back from Iraq and invests his savings in High Country Energy. I guess you can dig through his banking records to find out what's really at stake. It would have likely been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was probably making a truckload of money doing private security. Everything is going fine for
HCE
and for Derek McGrath.

“Things are going so well that he decides to start his own guiding business. He likes being in the mountains. He has a family, and life gets busy and expensive. About a year ago, Brian Marriott starts poking his nose where it doesn't belong.
HCE
was running a play to drill all these wells along the Rocky Mountain Front, and they had the band council in their pocket until Brian comes along and says, ‘Hey, there is another way to make money off the Front: wind farms.'

“Up until that point, all Derek had to worry about was people like Joe Firstlight, who, while he's a good man, wasn't going to stop the frackers on his own. When Brian got involved, things changed.
He
became a threat. Derek invites Brian to come to Glacier to talk about climate change and fracking and wind power, and sets the trap. He starts by trying to scare Brian off the case with the death threats, but Brian is hard-headed. Derek has to come up with another plan.

“He decides to bring in some help. He's still connected to his old friends in the mercenary business, so he finds Blake Foreman, or whatever his name is, and asks him if he wants a job. He has to make room on the hike for him, so that's when Chip Prescott bites it. He goes to Chip's trailer out past Heart Butte and kills him and buries him in the backyard. Killing Chip made it easy to have Blake Foreman step into the trip and not raise any suspicions.

“Next he's got to set me up. I've got a well-documented history of antagonism with Brian. He knows that I'm going to be here for a few days beforehand—I even called him to ask for some suggestions as to where to hike while I was here. Derek goes to his old driver, Charlie Crowfoot, and makes a deal with him. All along, Walter, Perry, and I thought it was Blake Foreman who approached Charlie, but it was Derek. They look a lot alike. Put a pair of sunglasses and a ball cap on them, and to a lot of people they could have been brothers. It was Derek people saw around Browning, not Blake.

“Derek pays Charlie to say he sold me a gun. It's that simple. He, or maybe Blake Foreman, hikes in from Crypt Lake before our trip and stashes the gun below the ledge where we'll be camped. They wouldn't have risked having the weapon in their gear.”

McCallum interrupted. “There wouldn't have been any risk of traces of
GSR
that way.”

“I guess so. But they left their baggie behind. That was their mistake.” Cole shook his head.

“Our lab didn't lift any fingerprints from the bag, but we confirmed traces of
GSR
,” said Reimer. “And the boot print that Walter took a picture of will likely be a match to Derek's boot. We'll have to check that out.”

“I think what happened next is open to some debate,” Cole continued. “Either Derek or Blake must have found an opportunity to steal that shirt from my tent.”

“How did they know it wouldn't be missed?” asked McCallum.

“I told them. I was yammering on one night about how I always bring more clothing than I need. I've had that poly-pro shirt for twenty years and have almost never worn it. They must have picked up on that conversation on the first night of our trip and made their plans accordingly. If it hadn't been that, they would have figured out something else.”

“We can run tests on the shirt to match
DNA
to Blake or Derek,” McCallum said.

“I think Derek got Brian up in the middle of the night. They must have had some conversation the night before, so Brian likely wasn't suspicious. Derek walks him over to the edge of the plateau and then Blake comes up behind him, wearing my shirt, and pops him. Either that or Derek does it himself. We'll never know for sure. Then they throw Brian over the cliff. Blake just has to wait for me to wander off and then he returns the shirt.”

“Why kill Blake Foreman?” asked Reimer.

“I guess to eliminate the risk co-conspirators would pose.”

McCallum said, “There is still no evidence that he didn't just die in a fall.”

Cole told them his theory about the contents of Blake's backpack. “If he had fallen and cracked the back of his head, something in that pack would have been busted.”

“This is all pretty thin.” Reimer was still turned in the front seat.

“We've looked into Mr. Foreman's past pretty extensively,” continued McCallum. “We've cross-referenced dental records, and it turns out that his name wasn't Blake Foreman at all. His name was Chas Carson, and he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and Derek McGrath were in Iraq at the same time, stationed at the same base. It's possible that they met there. It's also just as likely that Derek simply used his network to find Foreman and recruit him for the job.”

“Even if Derek didn't pull the trigger on Chip or Brian, he's guilty of conspiracy, right?” asked Cole.

“Yes. But you can't charge a dead man,” said McCallum. “However, it does wrap up the case. We'll have to look into Derek's banking records, but I don't think we'll find anything.”

“And what about Charlie Crowfoot?” asked Reimer.

“He killed himself,” McCallum stated.

“Yes, but the note. Was he coerced?” asked Cole.

“We'll have our people look at it. They can match handwriting. That might cause us to relook at the case.”

“It might bring some comfort to Charlie's family to know that he didn't commit suicide.”

“Cold comfort,” added Reimer.

“And there is the small matter of what happened outside the court in Calgary.” Cole shook his head. “It feels as though this was a lot of work for one guy who runs a guiding business.”

“You said it yourself,” said Reimer. “This wasn't just a guy who runs a guiding business. He was a mercenary. Who knows what kind of shit he got into overseas? He brought that habit back home with him.”

Cole looked out at the Two Medicine Grill. “You know, he was practically begging me to believe him there in the back room, before he got shot.”

“He committed suicide,” said McCallum.

“What?” Cole looked incredulous.

“He walked out of a hostage situation with a weapon drawn. There were two agents and two members of the tribal police back there, all with cover. He was a soldier. He knew the odds. He fired into the grill of the pickup. He knew we had to drop him. He killed himself.”

“He wanted me to believe him so badly. He said it was for his family, and mine.”

PORCUPINE HILLS, ALBERTA. OCTOBER 8.

THE FIRST SOUND COLE HEARD
when he woke up was his daughter's laughter. It was the most beautiful sound in the world. He lay in bed, the window open a few inches, allowing the scent of autumn leaves to perfume the room. Nancy had her head on his right shoulder. His left still sported an angry-looking scar; the doctors said it might take all winter to rehabilitate the shoulder. He looked at Nancy, her raven-black hair cascading across his chest. He pushed it away so he could see her face. “You look beautiful,” he said.

She opened her eyes and smiled. “What time is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Is that Sarah outside?”

“Yeah, she's playing with the dogs.” Cole kissed Nancy, and she rolled over and carefully climbed on top of him.

“PERRY IS COMING
down from Calgary for dinner?” asked Walter. He stood in the kitchen and Cole and Nancy sat on the couch next to the stove.

“Yeah, he and his girlfriend and her daughter. They should be down late this afternoon. I think we've got everything ready. This is the first Thanksgiving I've been here in almost twenty years,” said Cole.

“I know.” Walter drank his coffee.

“Holy shit,” exclaimed Nancy, and then she put a hand over her mouth and looked around for Sarah or Dorothy. She had her laptop open.

“What happened?” asked Cole.

“Rick Turcotte just resigned.”

“He fell on his sword?”

“It looks like it.” Nancy was scrolling through the
Globe and Mail
website.

“What does it say?”

“It says that the parliamentary ethics commissioner was doing an investigation into what the Opposition is calling Nuke-Gate—”

“Why does everything have to have
gate
after it?” asked Walter.

Nancy answered, “The
FOIPP
info, along with the file that Brian built, was going to rain hellfire on the government. Looks like Rick has taken one for the team.”

Cole's face was set in a dark frown. “I still feel so uneasy about the whole thing with Brian.”

“It's case closed,” said Nancy. “You heard Agent McCallum. The
FBI
has found the email McGrath sent to Brian with the death threats. They have traced it back to that Internet place in Browning where he logged on to send the notes. They tore apart his digital files and found an email account linked to his
IP
address. The only reason they found it in the first place is because he had sent himself an email from that account pretending to be Chip saying he wouldn't be able to work the guided hike in Glacier. That created the opportunity for Derek to bring his friend and fellow mercenary Blake Foreman into the picture. The
FBI
has also lifted a latent fingerprint off the note that he passed to Charlie Crowfoot. They even found ballistic evidence that linked the gun that killed Brian to the one that killed Chip.”

“I don't know . . .”

“Let it go, Cole. It's Thanksgiving. Be thankful.” Walter was washing his coffee cup.

“I am. Very,” said Cole, putting a hand on Nancy's knee.

“Hell, I've even got my old job back,” said Walter. “Mind you, I got one hell of a talking-to before they let me back in the door.”

Sarah charged into the house, two dogs close on her heels.

“Shoes!” Nancy and Cole said at the same time. The girl stopped and used her toes to pull off her shoes. She ran and jumped into Cole's lap.

“God, you're getting too big for this.”

“I'll never be too big,” said Sarah.

“You're right.”

“When are we going riding?”

“Walt?”

“Let's do it. I'll go and get started with the horses.”

“I'll help!” Sarah sprang off Cole. He winced but then smiled.

“Come on, Daddy!”

“Yeah, come on, Daddy,” echoed Nancy.

THEY RODE FOR
three hours, up into the shimmering aspens, their leaves the color of burnt umber and yellow warblers. Sarah rode out front with Walter, with Nancy behind them and Cole riding easily in the rear. They had a picnic lunch on top of the ridge above the house. From the summit they could see the folded earth of the Whaleback and, beyond, the already snowcapped slopes of Thunder Mountain.