Dead Man’s Fancy (18 page)

F
rom the vantage at the turnoff, the ranch house looked to be built of Lincoln logs, with a green-colored roof and a barn with Ringling Feed and Seed painted in peeling block letters. Someone had spray painted a
W
over the
S
—Feed and Weed. The mailbox read Oddstatter. Stranahan left the motor running and got out to stretch.

The Shields Valley was the lost Montana the Madison had been thirty years ago, before the ranches got subdivided when the owners grew old and their children opted out of the life, leaving behind the fence spreader, the posthole digger and the antiquated notion that a day begins at dawn. The entrance road was potholed from summer rains and the baked ruts showed the tread of every tire that had made the turn. Stranahan did not see a motorcycle track.

He climbed into the Land Cruiser and motored back the way he'd come. At a bridge he strung his four-weight, tied on a grasshopper fly and began false casting as he hiked down to the river. Stranahan had never fished the Shields and was surprised to find it was a cutthroat stream. It took him three or four fish to get used to the way cutthroat trout rose to the fly in a lazy roll, a yellow coin turning over, as if they had all the time in the world to eat lunch. In all he took a dozen fish in two hours, none big and all within earshot of the road should a motorcycle grumble past. It didn't.

In rural Montana, you seldom get as far as knocking before a door opens, friendly and occasionally not friendly ranch dogs having made the announcement of the visitor in no uncertain terms. The Oddstatter place was as silent as a winter night. Stranahan rapped again.

“Hold your horses.”

The woman who opened the door wore a hooded UM sweatshirt tucked into overalls. Late fiftyish. Her voice came from her chest.

“You're going to ask me if you can hunt, I'm going to tell you no. It's nothing personal, it's just the way it is. If I gave every man permission they'd be parked from here to Wilsall.”

“I'm not a hunter,” Stranahan said.

She seemed to see him for the first time. The crow's feet grew deeper at the corners of her eyes.

“Then what are you, some kind of communist?” Her face wasn't flat so much as wide, with high cheekbones. She'd been pretty once, Stranahan realized.

He smiled at her effort at humor. “Actually, I'm looking for someone.”

“There's no one here but me and the mister.”

“His name is Todd, Todd McCready. He told me if I got out this way to look him up. He had a motorcycle I was interested in buying.”

“When would that be?”

“Just a couple weeks ago. I met him in Yellowstone Park.”

“You better come in and talk to Rayland.”

The kitchen Stranahan followed her into had a long unchanged look, everything vintage from the baked enamel coffeepot on the soft-shouldered gas range to the maple kitchen table and mismatched ladderback chairs, in one of which sat a man with a haggard face not unlike a bloodhound's. He looked up so he could see Stranahan from under his heavy-rimmed glasses. Stranahan said hello, noticing a cane hooked within reach on a kitchen cabinet drawer.

“This man's asking after Todd. He wants to buy his motorcycle.”

To Stranahan she said, “Todd's Rayland's sister's boy.”

Stranahan felt the walls draw in, the uncomfortable silence.

“He doesn't want to talk about him,” the woman said. In a louder voice, “You don't want to talk about him, do you, Rayland?”

The man's eyes swam behind the glasses' lens.

“You want to show this man your trains? I'm sure he'd like to see them.”

The man reached out to hook the cane and got slowly to his feet. He was taller than Stranahan, even stooped over, spare but big boned with squared-off shoulders and a prominent Adam's apple. His hands were liver spotted and had abnormally long fingers. He shuffled toward a back room, tapping the cane.

“He'll show you his engines,” she said to Stranahan. “He files them out of brass, people come from all around since they did that story in
Montana Quarterly
. Once he gets talking, you can ask him about Todd again. But he won't know any more than I do. We haven't seen that boy in at least three years. Four? Maybe four. He used to work the haying season. We took him on as a favor to Knute, that's Rayland's brother-in-law. That motorcycle you're looking to buy was a month's pay for the last summer he worked here; I know, I'm the one found it in the
Mini-Nickel
.” She looked past Stranahan's shoulder. “Go on now, he's waiting on you.”

He found Rayland Oddstatter in an unfinished addition to the house with taped drywall, and a full-sized Ping-Pong table minus the net, upon which was spread an elaborately detailed papier-mâché mountain range. Two HO-gauge model trains were chugging around and through the mountains, past tiny ranch houses with miniature wooden cattle in the flatlands and the figures of elk, bears and mountain goats in the high country. Stranahan recognized the odd tilting canine teeth of the papier-mâché mountains. They were the western front of the Crazies, the panorama visible from Shields Valley Road. He recognized the ranch house he was standing in.

“You ever seen anything like that before?” the man said. Oddstatter was sitting before a bench-mounted vise and had a bastard file in his fingers. The cowcatcher of an old-fashioned steam engine was emerging from a solid block of brass clamped in the vise. His voice had a rasp.

Stranahan made appreciative comments.

“That there boy,” the man said with his eyes on his work, “that Todd gave my sister a heart attack with his carrying-on. We shoulda' bid him riddance after the first summer. Never done a lick of work he wasn't sitting on a tractor seat. He was good around motors, I'll give him that. But my daughter could fork more hay in an hour than he did all day. He's the one defiled my barn. I got nothing good to say about him.”

But he had more to say about him, haltingly drawn forth as Oddstatter's memory searched its dusty drawers, and when Stranahan rose to leave and glanced at the wall clock, which was set inside a leather yoke strung with cobwebs, he was surprised to see that nearly an hour had passed.

The woman saw him out to the porch.

“He tell you what you want to know?” she said. Her cheek muscles drew up, but it was not the same smile he'd seen before. Her eyes were hard as obsidian. “'Cause it isn't about buying a motorcycle.” When Stranahan didn't answer, she said, “He had no reason to give you this address. None.”

“You're right,” Stranahan said. “He didn't. I'm sorry to have bothered you, but I thought he might be traveling with a young woman, someone who is with him against her will or at least her better judgment. I found your place from the DMV log. His motorcycle registration listed your address.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Stranahan held her eyes. “I don't know what you know about the past few years of that man's life, but he's done worse things than spray paint a barn.”

Mrs. Oddstatter—she had never offered a first name—relaxed her tightly compressed lips.

“This young woman,” she said, “would she be your wife? Or your daughter? Todd likes them young. He'd take a truck into town and bring in girls on a Friday night, take them up to the barn loft. I caught him once coming out with the daughter of a woman I know. Dewy as a newborn lamb and not a lick smarter. It was statutory rape's what it was.”

“The woman I'm looking for is the one who disappeared from the Culpepper Ranch in the Madison Valley.”

“She was killed by wolves.” She stated it as a fact.

“It's possible she wasn't.”

“So what are you, some kind of environmentalist thinks wolves eat daisies, so there's got to be another explanation?”

“I work for Martha Ettinger, she's—”

“Martha. I know Martha.”

It was the magic word. Stranahan could tell by the change in her voice.

“She's one of my best friends,” he said, pushing the connection.

“I don't know what he told you in there,” the woman said, gesturing toward the house, “but Todd called here this summer, June, maybe July. I remember the river was over its banks.”

“He came here?”

“No, he called, what did I just tell you? I didn't say anything to Rayland because it would trouble him. Todd . . . has a way of getting something on you. He'd work on a person, taunt them into doing something they didn't want to. Oh he's got his country manners—yes, ma'am, no, ma'am—but underneath he's a stinker. I used to give him a few dollars once a year, for his birthday.” She lifted one side of her mouth, a smile of irony. “But I hadn't heard from him for a long time. Tell you the truth I was hoping he'd left the state or crashed that bike.”

“What did he want this time?”

“It was always the same thing. I never gave him more than a couple hundred.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It doesn't matter one way or another.”

Stranahan could see she wasn't going to be persuaded. “Look,” he said, “this woman's life could be at stake. You sent this man money, he had to have provided an address.”

“I wired it Western Union.”

“What town?”

“West Yellowstone. But he wasn't living there. He was living in a campground, he said what one. Told me to come visit him. Imagine that,” she shook her head, “me old enough to be his mother twice over. I don't remember the name, but I know where it is. I used to cook on the Armitage place and it wasn't too far from there; that's where I met Rayland.”

“Do you have a map?”

“No, I have something that's just as good, though.”

—

“T
his is where Rayland keeps his mountains.”

She had led Stranahan to a horse stall in the back of the barn, which was immaculately swept and ordered, a hallmark of Scandinavian tending. A stack of four-by-eight fiberboard shelves on a roller system reached from the floor to head height. Each of the six shelves was labeled with half a Montana mountain range. Stranahan's eyes scanned from the top down: Snowcrest East, Snowcrest West, Bitterroot East, Bitterroot West, Gravelly/Madison East, Gravelly/Madison West. She drew out the shelf labeled Gravelly/Madison West. It was similar to the papier-mâché construction of the Crazy Mountains in the hobby room, but smaller scaled and missing the animal figures. Mouse droppings had collected in the valleys and creek drainages.

“Rayland makes them in halves so you can get them through the doors. Then he'd papier-mâché over the joint and paint it so you didn't notice. He has one for every place he lived. This was the first. You see how he's gotten better.”

“He's quite an artist,” Stranahan said.

“When I first met him, those hands of his, you'd never think he'd have a talent.”

“You seem much younger than your husband.”

“You mean I look sixty 'stead of seventy-five. Rayland just got . . . used up. He used to be something, though. He was the first real man I ever knew. It gets lonely when someone close to you starts pulling away. It's like living with a shadow.” A flicker of smile. “I don't need to be telling you this, young man like yourself.”

Stranahan was willing to listen to anything as long as she pointed her finger, which presently she did.

“These cliffs by the river,” she said. “I can't remember the name.”

“The Palisades,” Stranahan said. He felt himself exhale. Finally, the track he'd been looking for, one that hadn't been made by a wolf.

“No word since that phone call?”

“No. And I don't hope to talk to him again.”

He reached into his pocket and held out a brass carving of a coal car that the old man had given him.

“I can't take this,” he said.

She took his hand and closed his fingers back over the coal car. The pads of her fingers were as coarse as sandpaper.

“Why do you think I had him show you his trains?” she said. “You kept him company. That means something. No, you take it. Just come back and visit us sometime.”

B
ack in Wilsall, Stranahan got a bar of reception on the phone he'd bought that morning and left a message for Ettinger, telling her where he was headed. So McCready had camped at the same fishing access where he and Martha crossed the river in Harold's canoe to meet the scat analyst. Had the analyst, what was his name, Thorn?—had he met McCready and showed him the signpost? Or told him where he could find wolf scat? For that matter, was it possible that both were involved in Nicki's disappearance?

He tried Ettinger again, and this time she picked up. She'd received his message and had news of her own.

Fifteen months earlier, a Lincoln County deputy had picked up one J. Todd McCready for distributing alcohol to minors and found he was wanted in Washington State for violating the terms of his parole. He was extradited and served ten months in the Cedar Creek Corrections Center before his release the past May.

“That's just one month before he showed back up in Libby,” Stranahan said. “What was he paroled for originally?”

“Sex without consent.”

“Rape?” Stranahan pulled to the side of the road.

“He had intercourse with a woman when she was passed out and she pressed charges three days later. So there were the usual questions. Was he also asleep as he claimed? Did they have carnal knowledge of each other before? Why did she wait so long? Et cetera. Evidently, the woman was the more persuasive and he served six months of a two-year sentence, was released for his stellar behavior and failed to report.”

“So he's in the system under his original name.”

“Yes, but with an asterisk. He filed a petition to change his name the day after his release.

“I didn't know a felon could do that.”

“He can as long as he's not trying to defraud anyone or duck an outstanding violation. McCready got the court order, so as of June seventeenth he really is Fenrir Amorak.”

“Then how does he have a Montana driver's license under McCready?”

“A person who's petitioned for a name change has to apply for a new driver's license within thirty days of receiving the court order. Maybe he never did that, or said he lost it and now he's got driver's licenses under both names. Now quit asking questions and listen a minute.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Judy did some digging. Parents are Knute and Margot McCready. Grew up on the family ranch near Whitefish, attended UM, bachelor's degree in zoology. Worked for two years in Pullman, Washington, at the animal research center there, I wrote down the name but now I can't read my writing. Anyway, arrested for possession with intent to sell, charges dropped. Drifted around a few years. Pops up in Bellingham, possession. Pops up in Tacoma, distributing alcohol to minors, community service. Got a job as a janitor at the Seattle Zoo and was there almost five years, maybe he straightened up. After the termination of his employment, there's a year gap before he's sent up for the rape. He goes in, he comes out, he falls right off the map. Doesn't show up in Libby until '09, when he gets a bullshit medical marijuana card from a quack. This would be about when he meets Martinelli. He's in and out of her life for about three years and manages to stay under the radar until he's picked up for the violation of parole. He goes behind bars for the second time and gets out in May and that brings us to the present.”

“He worked summers on the ranch in the Shields.”

“So you said in your message. It all fits. Generally speaking, when you look for monsters you find bottom feeders who deal drugs and live off girlfriends or relatives. Which as you know isn't enough to haul him in for, especially when the evidence says the person you suspect him of kidnapping was eaten by a wolf.”

“Oddstatter said McCready's behavior gave his sister, McCready's mother that is, a heart attack.”

“Judy's trying to reach the parents this morning. That's all I know and I gotta go. The wolfer snared another member of the pack and I got wolf lovers parading in front of Law and Justice, demanding that we let it go. Actually it's just an idiot wrapped in a coyote skin who howls when people walk by to show his pain.”

“The wolf is alive?”

“For now. But it will be euthanized to check for human DNA in its digestive tract and teeth. Get this, the demonstrator's a law student from Boise State who came in by Greyhound to satisfy a class requirement. Says he's supposed to see how far he can take his protest without getting arrested. So far all he's learned is that howling at people can get you punched in the face. The wife of one of our repeat offenders dared him to open his mouth once more and she broke his nose.”

“I'll let you get back to your work, then. Is it McCready, or do we call him Amorak?”

“Amorak.”

“Well, the odds are he isn't at the campground anyway. It was back in June when he told Mrs. Oddstatter that's where he was staying. I doubt he's a guy who lets the grass grow under him.”

—

E
ttinger had lied to Stranahan about her schedule. There was a storm gathering over the wolves, but it was on the horizon. A delegation from the Ranchers and Hunters for Taking the Wolf Out of Montana had requested a face-to-face, but that wasn't until midafternoon. She drummed her fingers. Her eyes fell on the box of journals. She'd meant to call up some of the names Alfonso had listed in the category of “Ranchers Who Cried Wolf.” Someone—Alfonso?—had circled that list. Why?

A rap on the door brought her eyes up. Erik Huntsinger, one of her junior deputies, was holding a FedEx envelope.

“What do you got for me, Hunt?”

The padded envelope was from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department and was addressed to Sean Stranahan, care of Sheriff Martha Ettinger. Martha pulled the envelope tab. A note on department stationery:

Sean:

I located that letter. Instead of e-mailing a scan, I thought you'd get a better sense of the tenor and content if you had the original. The letter is not evidence in an open investigation, but I've found it best to preserve chain of evidence to be on the safe side. None of the recipients came to harm as a result of this letter, at least not in the weeks following the postmarked dates. It should be evident, but I would point out that the entirety of the letter is written in human blood.

See you on the Kootenai? The fishing holds up into November if you get the chance.

Tight lines,

Carter Monroe

Sheriff, Lincoln County

PS: Here's the list of men and women who reported receiving letters.

Ettinger ran her eyes down the list. Most were hunting outfitters. Two were FWP commissioners. One biologist. One local legislator. Thirty-two names and addresses. She used her penknife to open the evidence bag, pulled apart the seal and shook out a simple manila envelope. Postmarked from Missoula, Montana, it was addressed to Corwin Ackerson, Ackerson Hunting Outfitters, 33 Ruby Ridge Road, Bonner's Ferry, Montana. No return address. Ettinger used a fingernail to extract a single sheet of heavy stationery, which was impressed with a burgundy wax stamp, a howling wolf in silhouette. Below the stamp, centered on the sheet in forward slanting, rather florid script, was a poem stanza:

And the blood of the wolf will rain from the skies

And all the rivers will run red with blood

And the blood of the man who cast aspersion upon the wolf will flow with the river

And he will die

The dried blood was brown, but the effect was startling enough to draw a low whistle from Martha's lips. She resealed the letter in the evidence bag.

“Listen up, Hunt. I've bookmarked a page in this journal. It's got a green circle around it, a list of names of Montana residents called “Ranchers Who Cried Wolf,” probably from the western half of the state. Run them through the search engines and see if anyone's been a victim of harassment or assault. Also, all the people listed on this sheet of paper.” She pushed over Monroe's note. “How's your schedule?”

“I have to testify on a DWI after lunch.”

“Then you better get a move on.”

She paused. Something had been nagging at her ever since her conversation with Stranahan. She shooed the deputy out of her office and punched in Stranahan's cell number. Out of range. She squared her hat on her head and left word with Walter Hess as she passed the undersheriff's office.

“Aren't you going to go see the wolf that ate Little Bo Peep?” he said.

—

D
riving ninety, Ettinger caught up to Stranahan's lumbering Land Cruiser outside Norris.

“Was I speeding, officer?” He stepped out and leaned back against the hood. When he'd seen the flashing lights, he'd pulled over into the drive of a business that sold handcrafted chicken coops.

“Who the hell buys these things?” Ettinger said.

“Gentlewomen farmers, I suppose.”

She put her hands on her hips and drummed the butt of her revolver.

“Remember when we were looking at the wolf scat up at the Palisades? The analyst went off to ‘bleed my lizard,' as he so eloquently put it.”

“Vaguely,” Stranahan said.

“Well, I heard a motorcycle start up in the campground across the river. I watched the line of dust as it drove toward the highway.”

“You remember that?”

She cocked a finger at her temple. “It's in the hard drive. I got a memory like a bear trap.”

“Was it a four-stroke? Most Honda's are four-stroke.”

“It . . . was . . . a . . . motorcycle.”

“So maybe he
is
there. You chased me down out of concern for my well-being, I'm touched.”

“No, there's something else. We can talk in the car.”

“Yours or mine.”

“Mine.”

“Mine's unmarked,” Stranahan said.

Ettinger tossed a fly-rod tube into the backseat of the Land Cruiser, and Stranahan cocked an eye as he turned the key.

“In good time,” she said. She was picking at her badge. Stranahan saw her glance at the speedometer.

“I could get there quicker on a horse.”

“Relax, Martha.”

“That's what both my husbands told me. Walt thinks I've got ADD, says there's a pill for it. 'Course you got to consider the source. That man talks so slow half the time I've forgotten the point before he finishes a sentence.” She blew out a breath and they drove in silence, passing the turnoff to the Sphinx Mountain trailhead where last summer's drama had played out, resulting in Ettinger's fifteen minutes of fame.

“I still see that bastard in my dreams.”

“Who? Crawford?”

She grunted in the affirmative. “So how do we approach Amorak?”

“You're asking me?”

“I'm asking you.”

“I don't think we do. This isn't the kind of guy who's going to see your badge and pee his pants. I'd like to trail him, see if he has a job somewhere, let the string pay out until we're sure one way or the other if he's in contact with Martinelli. But it seems a hell of a coincidence that he's camped directly across the river from the cliffs where the scat analyst found the wolf poop.”

“It does at that. Pull over to the side of the road. I want to show you something.”

She showed Stranahan the letter. “I take it you knew about this.”

“Not much. Carter told me. He said the letters were sent to—”

“I know who they were sent to. What I don't know is what this has to do with Martinelli.”

“She was in her Clan of the Three-Clawed Wolf stage. Because they fancied themselves ecowarriors, the department looked at her group for being behind the letters. Amorak, specifically. There was no follow through. No arrests were made; no one who got sent a letter was hurt.”

“Maybe it's nothing,” Martha said. “I have someone checking the names to see if anyone's come to harm since. But if his was the blood behind the pen, then that's another reason to be careful. Anyone takes a blade to himself . . .”

“You really were worried about me.”

Ettinger took off her hat. “Do you have another jacket? I don't want to look official.”

—

W
ith October on the horizon, only two of the twenty sites at Palisades Campground were occupied. No motorcycle in either. As Stranahan circled the loops, a truck pulled into the campground, stopping in front of a canvas wall tent. Two bow hunters, dressed head to toe in camo, had arrowed a raghorn bull and they had the head and one hindquarter in the bed of the pickup.

Stranahan idled the Land Cruiser as Ettinger rolled down the window.

“Where did you get lucky?” she said.

One of the men pointed across the river. His shirt, his pants cuffs, his boots and his knees were stained dark with blood. “Up Bobcat Creek. We got the rest hanging.”

“You're aware a hunter was mauled there last season?” Martha said.

The hunter nodded. “The guy who got his jaw chewed off by a G-bear. It's not an image you get out of your head. We'll be careful packing meat, trust me.”

Stranahan leaned across Ettinger. “We're looking for a man who was camping here. Maybe riding a motorcycle.”

“Sure.” The hunter nodded at his partner, who spoke for the first time. “We called him Tarzan. He had one of those outback tents you hang from a tree branch.”

“Tarzan, huh?” Martha said.

“Every night he'd wade across the river and climb the cliff. Then he'd howl like a wolf. Very realistic. You could set your clock by it.”

The first hunter nodded. “Nine o'clock sharp. He got wolves going a couple times, which was pretty cool. But he left a few days ago.”

“More like a week,” the other said.

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. He didn't talk to us.”