Dead Man’s Fancy (14 page)

“That's right,” said the man seated next to him. He had a cane and didn't stand. “Kill 'em, let God sort 'em.”

“We
are
targeting all the wolves in the area,” McGregor continued. “But the only member of this pack fitted with a radio collar was the female omega from the Snowcrest Seven group and she was shot in April, probably by a spring bear hunter. We found her remains in the Papoose drainage. So this bear hunter or whoever he was that shot this wolf, illegally I might add”—she swept the rows with her light gray eyes—“destroyed our ability to locate the pack through radio telemetry. Instead of being able to zero in on their location, we have to search for them through thousands of acres of rugged country.”

“If you won't kill them, we will!”

Ettinger beckoned McGregor by curling her fingers and took the microphone.

“Who said that? Jerry, was that you?”

A man dressed in muddy Carhartts stood up and said, “Hell yes, it was me.”

“And just how do you propose to do that?” Ettinger said. A note of exasperation crept into her voice. When he didn't respond, she added, “You're still outfitting out of the Douglass place, aren't you?”

“I am.” He paused. “For what elk are left. Our hunter success rate dropped to eighteen percent last season and this one isn't going to be any better. Not unless we kill these damned wolves.”

“Look,” Ettinger bubbled her exhalation, which the mike caught and exaggerated. She pulled her head back a few inches. “I know we got a wolf debate going on in this state. And I know what side most of you come down on. Jerry, I'm pretty sure where you stand.”

At last, smiles from a few of the faces she could see, though not from Jerry's.

“I'm Montanan just like you are,” she said. “I grew up hunting, branding, pulling calves. I'm not the enemy here. Rest assured that we are not targeting just one wolf. What I'm asking you to do, all of you, is to help me. Not by pounding your shovels. All the shovel pounding in the world isn't going to bring that woman back to life, and it sure as hell isn't going to kill any wolves. If our wolf hunting seasons these past three years have taught us anything, it's how difficult wolves can be to kill. Last year we sold twenty-four thousand wolf licenses for a six-month-long hunting season and we couldn't meet the quota set by FWP, which was two hundred twenty wolves. If a bunch of people with rifles take to the hills, those wolves will disappear pronto. So I'm asking you, Jerry, I'm asking all of you to go back to your homes and let us get on with our job. You got your work to do, I got mine. Thank you. Now if you have any questions, Julie and I will do our level best to answer them.”

—

S
tranahan had about as much patience for public gatherings as Sam Meslik did. When it became clear that the rest of the meeting was going to be more about venting than having a productive discourse on the wolf situation, he caught Sparrow's eye and met her at the buffet table at the back of the room. He noticed the empty chair where Sam Meslik had been sitting. It wasn't like Sam to leave without talking to Sean, but then, Sean thought, it wasn't like Sam to have attended in the first place.

“You want a cup, Katie?” He was pouring coffee for himself.

The diminutive dog handler, who had worked with Stranahan on several search operations in the past, shook her head.

“Not unless you want to stay up all night with me and bake dog biscuits. I can guarantee you they taste better than one of those cookies. Whatcha think?” She rolled her eyes at the Keebler assortment on a silver cookie tray. “They could have at least had some Pepperidge Farm.”

“Is that really what you're doing tonight, baking dog biscuits?”

She shrugged. “I live in West Yellowstone. What else is there to do on a Tuesday night?”

“You keep teasing me like this, someday I'm going to say yes.”

“Promises,” she said.

He'd almost kissed her once, when they were talking about her nickname, Dog Breath, which had been pinned on her by the search-and-rescue team for her habit of eating dog biscuits when working a trail. “I say if you really want to find out, all you have to do is kiss me,” she'd said. They'd been standing on a mountain where bodies had been unearthed and Sean had been involved with Martinique, or he would have bent down—the difference in their heights was almost a foot—and rendered his opinion.

A smile brightened her face; she peered at him with her head cocked expectantly, like an inquisitive wren. “You know it's going to happen, you and me. You're going to get past this long-distance relationship you're trying to float and find out what you're missing is a woman who knows her way around a male animal.”

“You mean Lothar.”

“I think you know who I mean.”

“Is that why you met me back here, to talk about baking dog biscuits?”

Stranahan tried to keep his tone light. He liked Katie; he enjoyed flirting with her and seeing her smile. She'd pulled through a dark time and still wore a locket with a photograph of the young man she was going to marry, before he drowned in an avalanche. Now she was facing life with an upturned face and laugh lines that were just going to deepen. And God knows, Sean thought, I need what she's offering. But he wasn't ready to give up on Martinique, even if he'd begun thinking of her more in the past tense than the present. And how would Ettinger take it? They were more to each other than either would admit. Martha was always in the back of his mind. A maybe, a someday; they were ships in the night.

“No, I wanted to ask you if you knew about the woman we fished out of the hot pot this summer. The Jane Doe.”

“Back in August, right? I read she was in a coma.”

“Friday the thirteenth. She'd filled out the register at a trailhead in Gibbon Meadows, wrote that she was going on a day hike, a bad idea 'cause it's bear-y in there, but folks put a pepper spray on their hip and think they're invincible.”

“If she filled out the register, then she must have put down a name.”

“Well, it's not for sure it was her who signed the register. Somebody did who didn't put down a name, which happens all the time. Everybody else who signed that day we've accounted for.”

“Is the park holding something back?”

Katie lowered her voice. “I shouldn't be telling you, but Martha, she was talking to me before the meeting, she talks to me now you know, I think she's got a self-confidence issue. I know that doesn't sound like the woman you and I know—anyway, we were talking and she told me what happened to you up in Libby.”

“Tell me about this woman you found.”

“Well, that's just it, there isn't much to go on. Who she is and how she got up there are big black holes right now.”

“I don't see what this has to do with Nicki Martinelli.”

“It doesn't directly, except that Martha said a guy on a motorcycle was looking for her, that you'd spoken to some fly shop owner on the Kootenai. And the Kootenai guy said the guy had a girl with him who had red eyes.”

Stranahan paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips. “Orange eyes.”

“So what I'm saying is, this girl had 'em. She'd managed to crawl part way out of the pot and she had the eyes.”

“How tall was she?” The Hook & Hackle owner had called the woman he'd seen a “bitty thing.”

Katie indicated the top of her head, which was a hair more than five feet above the convention room floor. “Short black hair with some dyed blond streaks. She had a nose stud, a tongue stud, a bunch a tats—you know, a Goth.”

“You saw her?”

“Oh, yeah. I got the call and went in there with the geyser watcher who'd found her. She looked like something out of a horror movie. Her eyes were like a branding iron just before you—” she jabbed with her fist. “
Psssss
. Turns out they were contacts. Her real eyes are pale green. So I thought if you're interested, I could take you in there. Not that you'd find anything with this much time passed, but I've read about you detective types and know how you are about seeing the scene. Now that everybody's looking for a wolf, the county doesn't need me for the missing person and I'm off park patrol for the next couple days.”

Stranahan heard himself say “What time?” He'd spent the afternoon with Asena, taking notes while she translated the journals. The journals were a fascinating account of a trapper's life among the mountains whose names Alfonso Martinelli had co-opted for his daughters, and had provided Sean with two possible leads. But that could wait. The girl was a start toward finding Amorak—if, that is, she was the same person who'd been with him earlier in the summer.
Don't get your hopes up,
he told himself. But how many women could there be with eyes the color of a branding iron?

K
atie Sparrow lived in a Forest Service cabin on Cougar Creek, a few miles north of West Yellowstone. The cabin was on federal land, and the National Park Service had taken over the hundred-year lease, as there was a housing shortage inside the park. A summer place, uninsulated, but Katie had replaced the barrel stove with an efficient woodstove and routed vents to the bathroom and bedroom. They drank coffee and ate some kind of a venison hash Katie reheated and cracked a couple eggs over, not Stranahan's idea of breakfast, but better than the dog biscuit of hers he'd sampled last summer. Her manner was direct and friendly, but the underlying flirtation was absent and Stranahan felt relieved. It was one thing to tease each other in a public meeting room; standing under her roof, the same conversation might have been awkward.

They were going to take Katie's park vehicle, so Stranahan got his daypack out of the Land Cruiser and climbed into the shotgun seat alongside Lothar. At the park's west gate, Katie took the lane reserved for official vehicles and kept up a mile-by-mile commentary as they headed for Madison Junction.

“You look to the left there across the river, that knob with the burned lodgepoles on it? Guy last year was parasailing and landed in a tree. Naked as a jaybird, waving it like a flag. I cited him for a trespass violation
and
indecent exposure. He blamed the wind for blowing him the wrong way.”

They drove a few minutes, crossed a bridge, now the Madison was on their right. At a bend in the road past the Mount Haines overlook, Katie pointed to a roadside rock. “Remember that camper at Madison Junction last summer who got hit by the car? Everybody wondered what he was doing five miles away walking at night. Turns out he was dressed in a suit made out of craft fur and was jumping into headlights from behind this rock, trying to create a Bigfoot sighting. They took him to the clinic in West. I cited him for being a road hazard while he was lying on the gurney with a broken hip. Darwin Award. You can't make this shit up.”

At Madison Junction, Katie took a left and they began to climb along the Gibbon River. Traffic had been light, but here the cars were backed up. “It's a critter fuck,” Katie said, and pulled to the side.

“What do you think it is?”

“Wolf. There's been three spotted here the last couple days, worrying the bones of a bull elk.”

“I've never seen a wolf,” Stranahan said.

“Here's your chance.”

But it was not to be. By the time Katie and Sean drew up to the cluster of bystanders, some of whom were carrying cameras with lenses the size of Montana zucchinis, the wolf had moved into the pines. Sean got a glimpse of one long rear leg and a grizzled gray tail. They walked back to the car and didn't stop again until they reached the trailhead in Gibbon Meadows.

—

“T
he thing about this girl,” Katie said as they began to hike, “is that I might have seen her before the accident. I'm not sure, but I think so. I was on patrol up in the Lamar Valley. This would have been June, when the elk were calving. That's when you get your wolf wackos showing up. They dress like wolves, dance around, howl even though they're not supposed to. Mostly they're just looking with spotting scopes, but sometimes I have to shoo away people who've hiked too close to a kill. Two of the groups are professional outfits that bring tourists in vans. The khaki brigade I call them, all these people who wear safari clothes—you get your dreadlocks and Tilley hats side by side.”

“Can you remember who she was with?”

“You're thinking that guy on the motorcycle, but no, I'm not even certain the Lamar is where I saw her. But we could go up there after. There might be someone who remembers her better.”

A mixed herd of bison, twenty or so, which had appeared as black slugs on a tan hillside when they started hiking, were close enough now that Stranahan could see the flies buzzing around their nostrils. Two of the bulls, thin flanked with all their weight in the forequarters, had squared off and were short charging, disappearing in a swirl of dust each time the massive, wooly heads butted together. Stranahan heard them roaring. They sounded more like lions than buffalo.

“We'll give them a little room,” Katie said, swinging off the path. “This is the tail end of the rut. You get too much testosterone in a herd, bad things can happen. Same with folks.”

They rejoined the trail in the trees and then, coming out of the trees, entered what appeared to Stranahan as moonscape, a slope pockmarked by miniature eruptions of ocher mud, the ground hot underfoot, steam issuing from cracks in the earth. The Talking Cluster included half a dozen murmuring hot pots, a mud volcano named the Spitting Toad and connecting sheets of thin, clear, moving water pinpointed with algae and with banks limned in a fantastic tapestry of lemon- and green–tinted swirls. The Jane Doe had fallen into the aptly named Cobalt Necropolis, a nearly circular hot pot with a rim painted gold, tan shallows abruptly plunging into two blue underwater pools that, each being approximately six feet long and as wide as a man's shoulders, did indeed resemble resting quarters for the dead.

“Lothar, heel,” Katie commanded. She explained to Sean that most tourists who died in the park's hot pots had plunged in to rescue dogs. “You can see why the press release mentioned the Talking Cluster but not the Cobalt Necropolis. That would be just too . . . I'm looking for a word.”

“Macabre,” Stranahan said.

“Yeah, that's it. Isn't he smart, Lothar? I wish I was that smart.” She bent down to put an arm around the neck of the shepherd. Pointing, she said, “The girl's body was right about there, before the watcher fished her out. He said her legs were still in the pot. There were some marks in the marl where she'd tried to claw her way out. Of course there aren't any tracks now, but the first time I was here it looked like she'd marched right down to the edge. Not running, but more weight on the toes, moving pretty fast. It's like she went into the pool on purpose. The only other tracks were the watcher's.” She shook her head. “Why don't you put your thinking cap on and stay here while I hike into the woods. I drank too much coffee this morning.”

When she and Lothar had gone, Stranahan stared into the pool, its two-hundred-and-thirty-degree depths hinted at only by the thinnest layer of steam. Had the woman been attracted by something in the pool and approached too closely, or was she retreating? If so, what had scared her? Or had it been, as the tracks hinted, a suicide attempt? The face of the water gave him nothing and he half heard, half sensed movement behind him. Turning, he saw a man approaching in a halting gait, a walking stick tapping in front of him. A folding chair was lashed with a bungee cord to his backpack.

“I didn't know I'd be having company this morning,” he said pleasantly.

“I'm here with the park ranger who investigated the accident.”

“Oh, who's that?” He nodded. “I know Katie. I'm the one who found the poor thing.” He was on the lee side of fifty, Stranahan decided, and a veritable giant. He offered a hand the size of a bear paw. Like Bucky Anderson, he seemed to have been born with a smile, but unlike the manager of the Culpepper Ranch, the giant's handshake was tentative, as if he knew his power and was careful exercising it. The eyes behind the smile held the saddest look Stranahan had ever seen.

“I'm Robert Knudson, but everybody calls me Geyser Bob.”

He inserted a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and offered Stranahan the pack. Stranahan declined.

Chewing, Knudson told him how he'd been visiting the Talking Cluster and found the body. He'd been planning to sit by the Cobalt Necropolis, which erupted only a half dozen times each year. It had been thirty-two days since the last eruption and he was hoping to be the first person to record the activity on a high-definition camcorder. He explained that geyser watchers were mostly retired people who did the Park Service a favor by cataloging geyser activity—this much Stranahan knew. It was about nine a.m. when he'd found the girl. He described her position, also nothing Katie hadn't already told him.

“I feel like I'm the responsible party. Perhaps if I'd come earlier, we would have spoken and her moment of crisis would have passed.”

“What makes you think she tried to commit suicide?”

“It's hard to fall into one of these things by accident.”

Stranahan asked him how long he was planning to stay. He said until about six o'clock. It wasn't a good idea to walk out after dark.

“Must get lonely sometimes.”

“Oh, I'm never bored. I sit here and write my memoir. It's called ‘The Madman of Minnetonka.' Minnetonka is in Minnesota.”

“You don't strike me as a madman.”

“It was my ring name. I'm a retired mathematics teacher, but I used to be a professional wrestler. I'm thinking the subtitle will be ‘Always the Heel, Never the Face.' My signature move was the pancake. I'd get the other wrestler in a bear hug and fall on him. I broke two of Gorilla Monsoon's ribs doing that. He was a sweet giant, almost as big as Andre.” He lifted his chin, looking past Stranahan with his sad eyes.

Katie was walking out of a copse of aspen, trailed by Lothar. The gold leaves, the cobalt sky, the even deeper hue of the pool, it was hard to believe this had been a scene of tragedy.

“Hi, Bob. Come to keep her company again, have you?” Katie accepted the stick of gum he offered and sat on the ground with her arms hugging her knees. “There's an elk wallow just over that rise. It's all tracked up by a grizzly. A boar by the size of the prints.”

Knudson nodded soberly. “I'll be careful.”

He gazed into the depths of the Cobalt Necropolis. “It looked like the poor girl just walked right in. A person would have to be desperate.”

He shook his head as he unfolded his chair and pulled out a black bound journal. Sticking two sharpened pencils behind the stub of a battle-scarred ear, he settled his bulk into the chair, the straps creaking from the abuse. “I just cannot understand it.”

—

O
n the way back, Katie squatted by the trail as they waited for the herd of bison they'd seen earlier to mosey a safe distance away. “Imagine spending your life waiting for geysers to erupt that almost never erupt,” she said. “It would be like marrying a man who can't get it up unless you catch him on the lunar eclipse.”

“Yet he seemed like a very solid fellow.” Stranahan lowered his binoculars. “He might be the first person I've met since moving here who speaks in complete, thoughtful, grammatically correct sentences.”

“Uh-huh.” Katie ran a chapstick across her lips. “I haven't met a geyser watcher yet who wasn't a sparkplug short of a slant six.”

“That sounds like something Martha would say.”

“Where do you think I got it?” She stood and dusted her pants. “Come on, let's get on up to the Lamar.”

—

T
he Lamar Valley is America's Serengeti—a vast sea of grasses that bleach tan under the summer sun and roll like wheat with the autumn wind. From the sapphire ribbon of the river, the eye stretches nearly a mile to the slopes that flank Specimen Ridge. In the valley and on the slopes and on the benches above roam great herds of bison. Here, too, Stranahan knew, ranges the famous Yellowstone elk herd, trampling ground where the blood seeps deepest in June, when the cows give birth and the wolf packs pour out of the hills to run down their prey, enacting a dance of death that continued uninterrupted into the early twentieth century, when wolves were eradicated by gun and cyanide stick, only to begin again with their reintroduction. It was not so very different from the spectacle of the Tanzanian plains, which Stranahan longed to visit, where lion prides stalked migrating wildebeest and the crocodiles polished their teeth at the river crossings.

On this September afternoon, the people gathered for a glimpse of the ancient struggle would have looked at home in either venue.

“Yep,” Katie said, as they swerved into a pullout behind a blue van with Simpson Wildlife Tours painted on the side, “it's the khaki brigade. If that girl hung out here looking for wolves, these folks will know about it.”

A slim man bent to a spotting scope spoke without moving from the eyepiece. “I'll be with you in a second. Let me get this in focus and . . . okay, we got, yes, I think so, the beta female and the omega male, he's a shade darker. They're lying down just below that burned patch on the hillside. Everybody have a look. Be careful not to touch the focus.”

The man turned a foxlike face to Katie. Certainly he remembered a punk-looking woman with orange eyes. He'd seen her on several occasions, back in June during the calving season, and yes, she was in the company of a man riding a motorcycle. “Those damned two-strokes that make all the racket.” He shook his head. “They ought to be outlawed, just like the two-stroke snowmobiles. This is a place of worship. Even prayers should be whispered here.”

When Katie asked what the man looked like, an expression of distaste crossed his face.

“He wore contact lenses that made him look like a vampire. Paraded around like he owned the valley. The way the girl kowtowed to him was sickening.” He cocked his head so that they would follow him out of earshot of his clients. “He'd walk up behind her when she was bent to the scope, pump his pelvis up against her rear, not making a show of it but casually, like a dog lifting his leg. I told him this was not the place for that kind of behavior, that he was upsetting my clients. He just stared with those red eyes and shrugged. I complained to the Park Service but nothing came of it. I lost repeat clients because of that man; it was very off-putting.”

No, he didn't know the man's name.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Katie said.