Dead Man’s Fancy (11 page)

S
wimming with salmon wasn't the only protest Nicki staged. She also organized a sit-in to protest the cutting of old-growth pines in the Cariboo Mountains, where she climbed two hundred feet to sit in the topmost branches of a tree that blocked the logging road being cut by the dozers. She'd stayed aloft for five days without food and finally had to be forcibly evacuated by a man who descended on a ladder lowered from the belly of a helicopter. After he'd buckled her into a safety strap and given the thumbs up for the pilot to pull them aloft, she kissed him on the cheek, a moment caught by the long lens of the camera belonging to the same photographer who'd snapped her with the salmon. This time his dramatic photo could be printed without editing.

Both demonstrations had the intended result of infuriating Alfonso's superiors, and when Nicki stole a wolf pelt from the barn, spray painted it red and donned it in front of the district office, the best wolfer in the predator control program found himself out of a job. Had this happened five years earlier, Alfonso Martinelli would have traveled back north to trap, but his firing coincided with the population surge of wolves in Montana, after the reintroduction program that started in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. With sport hunting outlawed until the species met federal recovery goals, the only wolves that found themselves at the end of a legal gun barrel were those that killed livestock. Suddenly, Montana found itself in need of men with Alfonso Martinelli's particular set of skills. And so the geography changed, with Nicki gaining dual citizenship in the bargain, though her sentiments remained the same.

Her old group, the misfits and the outcasts, were persuadable kids of a kind you might find anywhere, guilty of nothing but civil misconduct. To a person, the primary motivation was a desperate, ringing loneliness. All they really wanted, Asena told Stranahan, was a group to belong to and a flame to gather around; Nicki was that flame.

But now she was a flame that burned alone, without her older sister to contain the fire. Two years out of high school, Asena had enrolled in an up-province college, hoping to become a guidance counselor. Having lived so long without parental supervision herself, she wanted to work in the school system with children who had similar holes in their lives.

“I wanted Nicki to live with me, but Daddy had the law on his side. He didn't want to be alone, and I can't blame him for that. The idea was that she would join me in B.C. after her high school graduation and she did, she and Daddy visited me every winter, but that first year in Montana was hard on her. Libby wasn't Kamloops.”

Stranahan made a sound between a grunt and a laugh.

“This isn't funny.”

“You're right, it isn't. It's just I know what you're talking about. I wasn't there two hours before I got shot at.”

“But—”

She stopped, and a perplexed look came into her face. “Wait. It was you who went to Libby to look for Nicki? The sheriff just said ‘somebody.' Somebody checked the cabin. I assumed ‘somebody' was some deputy. I wasn't told about any shots.”

“Last Thursday night,” Stranahan said. “I should have told you, I am telling you. Look, this isn't what you think. We're not trying to hold back information.”

“Not trying to hold back information,” she said, her voice striking a sarcastic note. “Of course not.” Then, in a dead, flat tone: “I want you to tell me everything that happened there. All of it.”

He didn't omit anything. The lantern had extinguished and with only the convex contours of her face illuminated by the fire, it was difficult to gauge Asena's reaction. When Stranahan finished, he handed her the wolf book.

“Is that Nicki's?”

“I . . . don't know. It could be. It's her kind of book.”

“Because if it was her in the cabin that night,” Stranahan went on, “then it means she's alive and we're looking in the wrong place.”

“Yes, I see that.” Again, a slow and measured tone.

“If she was in hiding, I can understand her lashing out at who she believed was an intruder. But what I can't understand is why she'd go away and then come back later and fire shots at me.”

“No, I don't understand that, either. That . . . doesn't sound like her.” She paused. “This man on the motorcycle who was with the girl with the orange eyes, up there in Libby, did he have strange eyes, too?”

“The fly shop owner didn't mention anything.”

She was silent for a long time. “Still, it's him,” she said, as if she were speaking to herself. “It has to be him. He takes out the contact lenses when he doesn't want to attract attention. He's followed her here. He's the one who's taken her away.”

“Who is he?”

“He calls himself Amorak.”

“Was he her boyfriend?”

“No. He was a monster.”

—

A
sena told Stranahan that Nicki met the man called Amorak during the spring of her senior year. By then a new group had formed around her: the Clan of the Three-Clawed Wolf. She had designed T-shirts for the members with bloody paw prints encircling the chest. Twice that winter, the clan had been disbanded for demonstrating against the vermiculite mine, and though the offenses were not particularly egregious, during the same time period the county experienced a spike in after-hours break-ins, with thefts that included electronics as well as cash. Two members were caught and charged, which made Nicki a pariah in the eyes of the city's arch-conservative fathers, though she wasn't implicated in the burglaries. It was on a day in May that a man had approached her. He'd seen her wearing the T-shirt and without preamble told her she was the alpha he'd been looking for, that she should come with him and they would lead the pack together. Nicki later told Asena that she'd tried to run, but had found she couldn't move. The man had red eyes that seemed to vibrate. It was as if he looked right through to her soul.

Amorak—Nicki never knew his full name, or even if the name was real—was on the surface one of those drifters who hover in the satellite systems surrounding schools, handing out reefer and roofies for a dollar here, a favor there, a tentacle of the drug trade that stains all rural communities where kids complain of having nowhere to go and nothing to do.

“My sister had never really had a relationship,” Asena said, her voice dropping into a lower register. “Guys trailed around, but real boyfriends?” She shook her head. “I'm sure she was a virgin. This . . . Amorak. I've done research on cult leaders, how they project an aura of elitism and bend people to their obsessions. One day Nicki and her clan were planning their little sit-ins. The next day they were members of a cult, doing what one person told them to do. He,” her voice cracked, “he made her do things.”

Stranahan waited.

“Nicki had an outfitter tent that our dad used to use on his trapline. Amorak would have the clan sit in a circle inside the tent while the two of them . . . did it. In a wolf pack, only the alpha male and alpha female can have sex. Nicki was the alpha female, he was the alpha male and the rest were subordinates. He gave them all contact lenses. The alphas wore red lenses. The betas had orange ones and the lowly omegas had yellow. That's how he established the pecking order, by eye color. Imagine a half dozen people with orange and yellow eyes howling at you while you're . . . intimate. And there were other things. I think she was part of something awful. I don't know what, but it haunted her. I could hear it in her voice on the phone.”

It was quiet in the tipi. The fire had died down; the only light came from the bed of coals, a gray, red-rimmed pool. Stranahan could barely make out her silhouette.

“What happened to Amorak?”

“He came in and out of her life. She'd know when he pulled up to the cabin because he drove a motorcycle. He tried to flatter our father, but Daddy saw right through him. But there wasn't anything he could do. Amorak would show up and she'd put in her contact lenses and fall right back under his spell. She didn't have her group then, they'd disbanded and she was on her own, working at the fly shop and the grocery store. Then one day about two years ago he left and never returned. Daddy had gotten sick and Nicki had that to deal with. It was easy to treat Amorak as if he'd been a bad dream. But now with him looking for her in Libby—I know my sister and I can't see her getting lost in the woods—I can't help but think he's taken her. He used to tell her that he couldn't live without her, that he'd kill them both rather than let her go—”

Stranahan stopped her. “There's another possibility, one you might not want to hear.”

“I know what you're going to say, that she's gone off with him.”

“He had such a hold on her before . . .”

“You're right, of course, but that's what I want you to find out. Everybody's looking for her. But maybe the way to find her is to look for him.”

“I'll talk it over with Ettinger,” Stranahan said. “If she isn't convinced it's a good use of the county coffers, then I'll be free to work on your behalf. How can I find you, say tomorrow around noon?”

“I'm driving back to the ranch tonight. Your search-and-rescue people want to brief me on their progress tomorrow, but I don't see how you can call it progress when there's almost no one left looking for her.”

Stranahan put a hand on her wrist as she reached for the coffeepot. “You don't want coffee at this hour. Why don't you stay here? Use my cot. I'll sleep in the Land Cruiser.”

“I wouldn't want to impose.”

“No, it's fine. I enjoy sleeping in the back of a car—Cadillac camping we used to call it. In the morning we'll both go down to the ranch. I'd like to check in with Jason Kent myself.”

He showed her how to fasten the front flap from the inside and went out to his rig. He was back within a minute.

“Your sister, why did she call her group the Clan of the Three-Clawed Wolf?”

He could hear her pumping up the lantern. There was a hissing pop as the mantles caught from a match, then a soft glow, and the tipi, under the stars that peppered the sky, became a molten gold.

“When we were little girls,” she said presently, “our father trapped a wolf that lost two of its toes. The toes were in the trap, and he brought them home and strung them on elkskin laces to make necklaces, one for each of us. He said it would instill us with the wolf's courage. A lot of people wouldn't understand that coming from a trapper, but he was a complicated man, he loved wolves in his own way. Here, I'll show you.”

She removed the sticks and beckoned him inside. She undid a button of her shirt and pulled the talisman out. The claw was mahogany colored with a translucent tip that showed the bloodline in the lantern light.

“I never take it off. I have all these little white scars where it's scratched my chest, but I don't care.”

Stranahan felt awkward standing so close to her but she made it easy, just reached out and hugged him to her. Her hat tipped back and he felt her hair, silky on the side of his face.

“I'm so happy you didn't get shot,” she said, her arms squeezing him tight. “I'm so relieved.” She disengaged and there was another awkward moment, and then Stranahan said goodnight and walked to his rig.

—

H
e'd been asleep awhile before the Bronco started up. He decided against trying to stop her.
It will only drive her away
, he thought, an ironic choice of words that weren't lost on him as the engine rumble faded. He rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't quiet his mind. It was on toward dawn when he heard a rapping on the window. He hadn't heard a car drive up so he must have been asleep after all. He rolled down the window to regard Martha Ettinger's tight-lipped smile.

“That's the second time in a week a Montana sheriff has interrupted my beauty rest,” he said.

“Get up.” It was cold enough to see her breath. “There's someplace you and I need to be.”

Not another word passed between them until they were in the Cherokee, driving through Bridger on their way to the Madison Valley. Ettinger had pulled over to a coffee kiosk and they were waiting.

“Do I ask why you're sleeping in your rig?” she said.

“Asena Martinelli came over last night. I said she could sleep in the tipi, but she got up and drove away in the middle of the night. She told me an interesting story.” He reached for his wallet and began to tell her the story.

“What is it with you?” Ettinger said. “You meet a woman and can't go a day before she jumps into your bed.” She looked at the five-dollar bill he proffered as if it carried a smell. He folded it away.

“You saw where I spent the night and it wasn't my bed. Are you going to let me talk?”

She sipped her coffee and let him talk as the Cherokee wound through the Beartrap Canyon, the junipers blackened from a forest fire, the rusted needles fallen away to leave gnarled, grasping silhouettes patterned against the hillsides. They began the climb over the Norris Pass.

“So what do you think?” Stranahan said.

“It's an interesting theory.” She tapped her fingers distractedly against the steering wheel.

“What's wrong with it?”

“Nothing. It's just that it doesn't look like this Amorak or anyone else may have been the cause of her disappearance. Why I dragged you out of your lair this morning—there's no delicate way to put this—but Nicki Martinelli, she may have been eaten.”

H
arold Little Feather was waiting at the boat launch, leaning back against his pickup, his arms crossed over his chest. He chewed a stem of grass and looked up. Fall skies were the deepest blue. Why was that?

A thin line of dust showed to the east, up on the bench at the highway turnoff. He spat out the grass. “'Bout time.”

It was a short trip in his canoe. The Palisades of the Madison, a half-mile-long series of cliffs over which the Shoshone had herded buffalo to bone-cracking death, stood sentinel over the west bank of the river. By noon hawks and eagles would soar above it, riding thermals. About a quarter mile downriver from where Harold launched the canoe, opposite the Wolf Creek Campground, an old johnboat was pulled up on the bank. A game path, worn deep by the hooves of elk, followed a rift in the cliffs from the river to the escarpment, allowing the winter herds to pass back and forth across the river. Other animals used it as well—bear, deer, lion, wolves.

Martha Ettinger hopped out of the canoe and stood with her hands on her hips. The scat analyst who had rowed the johnboat across at dawn motioned them to follow. They climbed to the top of the cliffs, Stranahan feeling the sweat pop out on his forehead from lack of sleep, Little Feather with his eyes on the ground out of long habit.

The scat analyst pointed with a stick.

“I see it,” Martha said. “You found this when exactly?”

“About seven this morning,” the man answered. His name was Jake Thorn and he looked about twenty, the same age as Martha's youngest son, David. Looked like David a little, brown hair, David's serious plain face, but not his eyes, which were blue like hers. It had been six months since she'd seen her son.

“I check a few dozen signposts on a rotating basis,” Thorn said. “Record hair samples—I string barbed wire at bear crossings to snag the hair. It gives us an idea of their movements. And—”

Martha interrupted. “What's a signpost? Back up.”

“Lions and especially wolves, the alphas, will deposit in a prominent place, it's like their calling card. It's a warning to other males that they're intruding on their territory. Any place that's used regularly, we call it a signpost. Most of what I do is wolf scat analysis because Fish, Wildlife and Parks is trying to get a handle on diet. We know they take down deer and elk all winter, but in the summer and fall the data points to smaller prey—gophers, marmots, trout, anything they can catch. They even eat berries. I check this post every week because the break in the cliffs is a natural funnel. A lot of game comes through. Ergo”—he smiled—“mucho shit.”

He said it in a way that made Martha shake her head. Crude.
A guy like any other
, she thought.
Reptiles. Shake a stick and they coil up like snakes.

She'd heard enough and squatted down by the curl of segmented poop. It was about ten inches long and had been deposited on a small rock shelf.

“So wolf, huh?”

He nodded.

“Have you found wolf poop here before?”

“I've found it half a dozen times since I started working out of the ranch last April.”

Ettinger grunted. She shot some photos of the scat and then asked Stranahan for his Swiss Army knife. Hers had lost the little tweezers. She gently tugged at a strand of reddish hair, but it wouldn't come free and she didn't want to break it.

“Wound tighter than a hair in a biscuit,” she said. “It's human?”

Jake Thorn said, “That's why I called. I knew you were looking for that girl. I'm no expert on human hair, but I've seen a lot of hair in a lot of scat and nothing like this before. Could be a cocker spaniel. But you look at the way its wound around the stool. I've never seen a dog hair this long.”

“Did you know her, Nicki Martinelli?”

“One of the deputies talked to me about her when she went missing. They talked to everybody at the ranch.”

“I asked if you knew her.”

“Sure.”

“Then why did you call her ‘that girl?'”

“I don't know.” The timber of his voice had changed.

“She was an attractive young woman,” Ettinger said. “Did you go out with her, spend any time?”

“She was seeing the head wrangler.”

“That's not an answer.”

“No. I mean, she's pretty, and she was really nice. I wish . . .”

“It's okay to have been attracted to her. She's young, you're young.” She was giving him an out.

He smiled, shrugged, frowned all at once. “Nicki was a ten. Everybody had the hots for her. Even Bucky, who's got to be like twenty years older.”

“Bucky Anderson, the ranch manager?”

“Yeah, he flirted with her in the game room, just attention, you know. Put his hand over hers, bent over her teaching her how to hold a pool cue.”

“No, I don't know.”

“Hey, I don't want to cause any trouble. I know he's getting hitched to the missus.”

“This is just between you and me.”

“No, really, there was nothing. All the guys hit on her.”

“How's that? She'd only worked at the ranch a couple weeks.”

“I . . . it was nothing, really.”

“What was nothing?”

“I asked her if she'd like to check scat with me, run the loop I make up in the basin. She was really into wolves.”

“So the two of you, up on that mountain . . .”

He looked sheepish. “Hey, she brushed me off. She wanted to be”—he made quote marks with his fingers—“friends.”

“And that didn't sit too well.”

“No, no. I respected it. Getting your rocks off at the ranch isn't too hard, you get a lot of cougars. It wasn't like I was desperate.”

Martha shook her head. “Did you take her here, too?”

He swallowed his Adam's apple. “I wanted her to see wolf scat, and we didn't find any up at Papoose. So yeah.”

“Did you find some?”

“Not that day, but . . .” He stopped.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing, just, when we got here, she seemed nervous. Like something about this place haunted her.”

“What haunted her?”

“I don't know. It was just a feeling I got.”

“Why didn't you tell me any of this twenty minutes ago?”

“I . . . I just thought, if you thought I liked her, maybe you'd think something happened, that I was involved in this. Her disappearing and all. Really, I hardly knew her.”

“Okay, I believe you. You did the right thing, calling this in. Let's move on. Where do you do the scat analysis?”

“At the ranch. Mrs. Culpepper set up a place for me, wrote me a check. I've got a microscope, a mass spectrometer. Anything I'm not sure of I send to Julie McGregor at the FWP lab in Bridger.”

“I know her.” Ettinger straightened up. “No offense, Jake, but I'll take the sample to her when we're done here.” She caught Harold's eye. “We'll back out and let you do your thing.” She beckoned to Stranahan and Thorn, and they followed her down the steep path to the riverbank. Thorn shrugged off his backpack and put it in the johnboat.

“How old do you figure that sign is up there?” Ettinger asked him.

“It's pretty dried out. I'd say three or four days.” His voice hadn't changed, but his body posture betrayed his discouragement, now that it was clear he was being forced out of the picture.

“Help me with something, Jake. How many people know about this spot?”

“The signpost?”

She nodded.

“Julie does. I e-mail her a report each week—depositor species, GPS coordinates of the samples, measurement, analysis of content. It's pretty detailed.”

“Who besides Julie?”

“There's my blog.”

“So your data's online?”

“Sure. The more people who are interested in our work, the more funding we get.”

“I thought you worked for Mrs. Culpepper and FWP.”

“It's a joint program with a consortium of environmental groups, her nonprofit's just one. Sierra Club, Montana Wilderness Association, Greater Yellowstone Coalition—there's about fifteen altogether. The study is funded by the consortium, so it's partly through membership fees, but people can donate directly to my work. That's why I write the blog.”

“I see. And the coordinates of the samples are in the blog?”

“No, the blog's more general. I take people through my day, discuss the merits of the work, what it can teach us about predators, that kind of thing. I've mentioned this river crossing before as a grizzly corridor. We have a collared bear that uses this path every September. He comes down out of Bobcat Creek on the game range after dark, fords the river and scarfs apples from an old homestead orchard up Wolf Creek.”

Ettinger nodded. “But you've never blogged about this specific signpost for wolves.”

“No.” He was shifting his weight from one foot to another and Martha caught it.

“Ever show this place to anyone besides Nicki Martinelli?”

He shook his head. “Maybe I've said something in casual conversation, but I've never actually taken anyone up there.”

“Is there something else you want to tell us, or do you just have to pee?”

“I got to bleed my lizard.”

“You do that.”

She looked at his back and muttered “reptile” under her breath. “Confirms my theory.”

“What's that, Martha?” Sean smiled at her.

“Nothing.” She took off her hat and scratched her scalp. She turned to see a thin line of dust where a motorcycle was leaving the campground, the guttural pops dying in the distance. “So what do you think, Sean? You saw what I did. If that's human hair, it kind of blows the sister's story out of the water. I'm trying to keep an open mind. But a long red hair in wolf scat only a few miles from Papoose Mountain, the right time frame, wolves in the basin the night she went missing. We'll wait for the lab, but . . .” She shook her head. “You said you were going to meet the sister this afternoon?”

“A few hours from now. At the ranch.”

“Don't tell her about this. I want to make sure first.”

Stranahan nodded. “Why were you so interested in the blog? Do you think there's a possibility this is a hoax?”

“I'm just trying to find any reason not to jump to the logical conclusion. Wolves don't kill people. Not in the lower forty-eight they don't. Not on my watch.”