Dead Man’s Fancy (20 page)

“D
o you have a badge?”

The name tag on her drab green shirt said she was Marsha Siegel, from New York. Short, layered hair swept to one side, a rather horsy face, strong jaw, brown eyes with a starburst of china blue around the pupils, bosomy but solid enough under the uniform, a woman who'd stand a strong wind.

The cabin sat on the outskirts of West Yellowstone. Garbage was strewn across the front yard.

“Bear problem?” Stranahan said.

“I should have known better. Carrie used to take it out in the morning. I thought just this once I could get away with putting it out a couple nights before the collection.”

“Carrie's who I want to talk to you about.”

“I know, I was told to expect someone. But not without ID.”

“Now you're being New York on me,” he said, his smile not working. He produced his card. “Call the number on the back and ask for Martha Ettinger, she's the Hyalite County sheriff.”

“No, come in. I'm just being a hardass. The woman I talked to yesterday made me feel I'd done something wrong because I waited so long before calling. I told her a story to get her off my back, but the truth is I thought Carrie had run off with that man she was seeing. Correction, I was hoping she had. Don't get me wrong. I didn't want anything bad to happen to her, but he creeped me out.”

She led him into what passed for a living room: a sofa, a stuffed chair heaped with magazines, a coffee table with an ashtray and a lipstick-stained roach. Someone had made a scaffolding of plastic straws.

“Forgive the mess,” she said. She scooped up the ashtray and a pair of tweezers from the table and left the room.

“I guess that's what you thought it was,” she said when she returned. “One of the girls I work with brought it last night. I don't partake so I hope you aren't going to arrest me.”

“I'm not, but you shouldn't leave that stuff lying around when you expect company.”

“I know. It's more like something Carrie would do. She just didn't care.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, she was just up for stuff. If someone said ‘Hey, let's skinny dip in the park and get loaded and suck face,' she'd strip and pucker up. But I don't judge her, with her having no family but a grandma. She just didn't have any direction.”

“How did you two meet?”

“We were both seasonal at the park. Look, I'll be straight with you, but it's got to go both ways. When I asked what happened to Carrie, I was told it looked like an accident. But if it was an accident, then why are you here? Her boyfriend, if that's what you can call him, I know that's who you think pushed her in. But I only met him like three times. He'd drive up on his motorcycle. Soon as he brought out drugs I walked right out the door.”

“Did he ever threaten you?”

“No, he was more the ignoring type. But that's another form of threat, isn't it? One time he came in and I left. I walked up to the Book Peddler and got a mocha and came back in a couple hours, his motorcycle is still in the yard. I told myself, ‘Hey, it's my place, too.' Caffeine courage, the city runs on it. Hah.” Her voice was derisive. “I come in and he's snorting coke off her nipples. He doesn't even look up. It's like
so
Wall Street. Carrie says you want some, it's okay. It's barely been stepped on. She buttons up, like that makes a difference. I came out here figuring
Sound of Music
, get some fresh air, maybe meet some WASP-y guy. If I wanted people on a couch doing drugs I could have stayed in Queens. I tell you, I could have fuckin' screamed.”

“Did he have a name, this boyfriend?”

“Carrie called him Fen. She said she met him at the Trophy Room Lounge down in Last Chance. He told her he lived in a tent, that before that he lived in a wolf den he'd found in the park. Weird stuff. But he never said anything to me. Usually, she'd just hear the bike and be out the door. That time on the couch was the only time he was here more than a few minutes.”

“Did she talk about him?”

“No.” She reconsidered. “You know, I'm thirty. That's older than most park personnel. She was just a dumb kid from the sticks. One night I was up front with her. I sat her down, I said, ‘Carrie, this guy is bad news.' Me telling someone else that for once. You gotta love it.” She laughed. “‘You got your life ahead of you,' I told her. ‘You're smart, you're pretty'—okay, neither was exactly true but I'm trying here—but nothing gets through. She said the same thing Clarence Clemons said about Bruce Springsteen. ‘It's like following Jesus.' And that's the strange thing. He did give off a vibe. It was like”—she shot out her arms and did a zombie walk around the sofa with her eyes half closed—“Follow me and I'll take you to the Promised Land, even if it's just a tent.”

She completed the circle and stood before Stranahan. “So, are you going to arrest this guy?”

“Right now we just want to talk to him. There's no proof a crime has been committed.”

“I don't know about that. Out here anyone who says ‘Ouch, my aching back' can get a medical marijuana card, but I bet they draw the line at blow. Okay, I'm getting really uncomfortable here. Where did you park?”

“Out front.”

“Is it a cop car?”

“No. It's an old Toyota Land Cruiser.”

“Yeah, but you look like a cop. You have that bearing. You leave, I'm going to kiss you on the step, okay? I mean, if somebody's watching, you're either a cop or my boyfriend. Just in case he hears about you being here, I want anybody who's seen you to think, well, she's just hitting some guy.”

“It's been more than a month since you saw this man.” He waited for her to nod. “And you really think he's someone to worry about?”

“I read murder mysteries. I know I'm a loose end. That's what Carrie said once, FYI, but I'm not sure she meant him. The girl said some random things.”

“Marsha, I'm not looking for this man because he might have hurt your roommate, though if he did, he'll be brought to justice. I'm here because he's a person of interest in another woman's disappearance, a tall woman with red hair.”

“I never saw him with anyone but Carrie.”

“I'll tell you something that wasn't in the papers. Carrie was wearing red contact lenses when she was found. Does that mean anything to you?”

She exhaled audibly. “She had contacts, but they were orange, not red. Well, yellow. Then she got the orange. She hated them because they made her eyes itch. But every time he came for her, when I was here at least, she put them in. The idea was that she would graduate to red lenses when she was fully accepted as his mate. Like the way you go through belts in judo.”

She put her head down and breathed in and out. “Goddamnit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get hired on by the park? It's just . . . I shouldn't have to go through this. Why did everything turn to shit?”

“It's okay. You're doing the right thing. What else did she say about him?”

“Nothing. I've told you what I know. Now go, please just go.”

“I can call a deputy of you'd like. He can give you advice if you're really worried.”

“I already know not to jump in any hot pots.” A shudder ran up through her. “Do you think she's going to come out of this and be okay? I'd go see her, but it's a lot of gas to drive to Billings.”

Stranahan said, “I don't know. Coma victims, sometimes they can hear people even if they can't respond. One of the reasons we couldn't ID Carrie is because no one reported her missing. I don't think she gets any visitors. It could mean a lot if you visited.”

“It would be the right thing to do. A person doesn't want to go through life with regrets, that's what my mother always says. Of course that's why I'm here, 'cause I didn't want to regret never seeing the mountains, and look where that's got me.”

“One more question and I promise I'll leave. Would Carrie have had any reason to hike into a remote place to see a hot pot?”

“No, but she didn't have a car and there were days off when she hitched around the park, you know, just to see the wonders. That's something a lot of us do. I don't mean stick out a thumb, but get a ride with another employee or a regular, like a bear researcher or an artist. But she never mentioned going to any hot pots. If she had, I'd have known it was her who they'd found and reported it.”

On the porch, she put her arms around Stranahan's neck. She kissed the corner of his mouth. A peck.

I must not be much of a boyfriend
, he thought. He started to smile and she tilted her head up and this time it was a kiss that would pass muster to anyone watching.

“One more for the road?” he said. That got the hint of a smile, but only the smile and not a kiss, and when she turned to go back inside he was watching a worried woman.

S
tranahan picked up a few essentials at Cal and Jan Dunbar's grocery, drove another two blocks and found a parking spot in front of Bob Jacklin's Fly Shop. He went inside to pay his respects. Jacklin, who dressed like he was on safari and retained more enthusiasm for teaching the sport than most men half his age, represented the last of the old-time trout shop owners in West Yellowstone. A gentleman and one of the early proponents of catch-and-release fishing, he was a pivotal figure in the westward expansion of the sport.

Stranahan introduced himself and said he'd like to buy a fly. “Not a commercial tie, but one from your own fingers. I'm starting a small collection, just flies from friends and a few of the pioneers of Montana fly fishing.”

“What pattern would you like?” Jacklin asked.

They traded yarns while the old master's fingers married dubbing, hackle and a slim strip of bicycle inner tube to fashion his signature stonefly nymph. Ten minutes later, Sean walked outside to a falling barometer. He placed the plastic cup that held the fly on the dash of the Land Cruiser and slid the bill Jacklin had refused to accept back into his money clip. In the distance to his left, he could see the entrance stations at Yellowstone Park's west gate, where Carrie Harding had worked. On the other side of Yellowstone Avenue, across from the fly shop and about two hundred yards away was the Paws of Yellowstone Wildlife Center. From where Stranahan stood, the motorcycle in the lot looked like a toy. He fished for his binoculars. Harold had said the gas tank was red. It was, and he traced his fingers across the spider vein cracks on the dash.
Be patient
, he told himself.
Wait the bastard out and follow him
. He glanced at his watch. It was not yet eleven. The center didn't close until six. Far too long to be sitting in a car, looking out a window.

He had the right man, didn't he? The memory of the lion's eyes was vivid. In the instant that Stranahan's headlamp flickered out and the world went black, the emerald pools had been replaced by the red eyes of the man who'd fed the wolves at the wildlife center. The steps to that conclusion had raced through Stranahan's synapses in a heartbeat—one pulse of blood and he had flashed on the girl Harold described in the Lamar Valley, the one with the itchy eyes, and then the wolf keeper, who had kept rubbing his bloodshot eyes when Stranahan visited the center. Also, the keeper had introduced himself as James, and McCready was J. Todd. J.—for James? The connection was tenuous—he could hear Martha Ettinger saying
Humpff
—but the motorcycle strengthened it. So did the trout bones found in the scat at the Palisades. Wild wolves don't catch many trout in the fall, but the wolves at the center were fed them, along with the deer and elk meat.

The one unassailable fact pointing to Nicki's demise in the teeth of the wolf had been the scat with human hairs in it—how had Martha put it, “wound tight as a hair in a biscuit”? How could Martinelli's hair pass through a wolf's gut and she still be alive? He'd been working on the answer since the moment the headlamp died.

—

W
ith time to kill, Stranahan flashed his park pass at the gate and drove a half hour to Mule Shoe Bend on the Firehole River. He tied on two flies, a partridge and orange and a starling and herl, old-fashioned soft hackles that imitated nothing precisely, yet suggested many aquatic insects with their breathing hackle fibers, and sent them into a foamy riffle. Mule Shoe Bend was one of Stranahan's favorite escapes, a place where one wandered among intermittent geysers and steaming fissures in the earth, where an angler had to be careful not to lead trout into the trickles of near boiling water that fed the river, or he would cook his catch without ever removing it from the water.

In an hour the soft hackles underwhelmed, coaxing a few small rainbows to Stranahan's hand, along with one precocious brown trout that was scarcely as long as his middle finger. It was beginning to snow. With the first flakes, a regatta of blue-winged olive mayflies set sail on the surface, trout slashing for them as the flies were buffeted by a breeze. Stranahan switched to a dry fly, sharpened his curve cast skills and took a couple better brown trout, keeping one eye on a bull bison that was shambling down the riverbank. When the bull had closed to fifty yards, its back and humped shoulders looking like they were dusted with flour, Sean put the fly in the keeper ring and retreated up the bank. Reluctantly, he consulted his watch. Time to pencil a few quick sketches of the bison, then back to town.

He found a parking spot in front of Eagle's, where a black-and-white photo in the window showed tourists on wooden skis, standing on snowdrifts that reached the top of the store's doors. He pulled on a sweater. Maybe he wouldn't be able to survive a Montana winter in the tipi, after all. Twice he got out to wipe snow from the windshield, but then it had let up and he was hugging himself at a quarter past six when the motorcycle started up in the lot of the wildlife center.

He turned the key and . . . nothing. Not even a click. He'd been dealing with a worn ignition switch for some months, either that or there were grounding issues with the coil, but this was the first time the spark plugs had failed to fire. He glanced up to watch the motorcycle cross the intersection and head north up 191, the main drag through town. It was gone. Stranahan laughed mirthlessly. He tried again. His shoulders sagged. He took the key out, reinserted it. The engine promptly turned over and he made a right-hand turn at the corner. How much time had he lost? West Yellowstone consisted of only two real blocks, and he was through the outskirts, passing the giant Smokey the Bear with the fire danger arrow pointing to low, the needle of the Cruiser creeping up to fifty, but the motorcycle was nowhere in sight.
Damnit!

Stranahan had assumed the driver would head for a campground. Which were the closest? Rainbow Point on Hebgen Reservoir and Baker's Hole on the Madison—he'd be coming to the turnoffs in a few miles. Stranahan pressed the pedal to the floor, his head humming. In five minutes he'd turned onto the gravel access road to Rainbow Point, an infamous campground where a man from Wisconsin had been pulled out of his sleeping bag and eaten by a grizzly bear a couple decades earlier. The only vehicle to pass since the snowfall had four tires. Stranahan made a three-point turn and continued north on the highway. He idled down to a crawl at the right turn to Baker's Hole campground. He let out a long breath. His fingers had been gripping the steering wheel so tightly he could feel the blood run out of them now that the tension eased. A snaky tire track led down the middle of the road. The hare had gone to ground.

—

T
he outback tent was pitched like a witch's hat on the riverbank. Stranahan crept around the campground loop past yawning sites and a cement outhouse; the place was deserted save for the tent. The motorcycle was parked alongside, tilted on its kickstand. A slight woman wearing an oversized check shirt was standing at the picnic table, pumping the fuel tank of a Coleman stove. She shot him a cursory glance. No sign of the man. Stranahan parked in a site farther downriver and made a show of pulling gear from the Land Cruiser. He didn't have long to wait. A man was walking back from the outhouse. It was the wolf keeper, his ponytail escaping above the adjustment band of a baseball cap. Stranahan walked to the self-registration box and filled out a permit for one night. He walked back. Now what?

Do what any fisherman would do who found himself at sunset on a trout stream.
And why not?
The fly rod is one of the world's great icebreakers. In Stranahan's experience, you got a “how's fishing?” at the very least. Often enough you were offered a beer and a chair by the fire. Occasionally, you made a friend for life. Stranahan put on his best smile as he walked past the tent, his waders squeaking. The man's nod was unencouraging. Apparently, he was not a fly fisherman. Stranahan hiked upriver and slowly worked back down with a sink-tip line and a dark spruce streamer fly. He knew that big fish were turning out of the Grayling Arm of Hebgen Reservoir every evening to ascend the Madison toward their spawning grounds. He wanted one, not for himself, but as a letter of introduction.

It could not have worked out in more timely fashion. He was passing the fly through a seam of current directly in front of the peaked tent when a heavy brown walloped the surface, jumped clear, fell back and jumped once more before bulldogging down, the head shakes labeling it a male. Stranahan led the trout into the shallows. He resisted the temptation to turn around.

“Are you going to let that fish go?”

“I was,” Stranahan said. Now it was okay to turn. The man and woman were on the bank, looking down at him.

“We live pretty close to the bone,” the man said.

Stranahan was not a catch-and-release purist, though he seldom kept a river trout unless it was deeply hooked and bleeding from its gills. This one was a fine male with a hooked jaw. He reached for a stone. “Sorry, old boy,” he said under his breath and smacked the trout on the back of its head. He smacked it again and it quivered out straight. Using the sheathed knife on his neck lanyard, Stranahan inserted the point into the trout's vent, ran it the length of the belly, sliced open the hard V of flesh under the lower mandible, gripped it between his thumb and fingers and in one deft motion shucked the trout's gills and intestines. He ran his thumbnail to clear the blood line in the body cavity and scooped up the innards and gills and heaved them into the current, protocol in grizzly country to keep from luring bears into camp. Hooking two fingers under the gill plates, he carried the trout up the bank.

“You wouldn't have a beer, would you?” he said. He nodded toward the woman, who told him to drape the trout across two paper plates on the picnic table. The man cracked open a PBR from his cooler and handed it to Stranahan.

He said, “We sure appreciate it. I got work in town but we're trying to save money to get a place this winter. Most campgrounds shut down in October.” His voice was measured and quiet, incongruous to the intensity of his expression. He seemed to be staring at Stranahan.

Stranahan said, “I live in a tipi up near Bridger. Come December, I'm not sure what I'm going to do myself. Do you have anything to go with the trout?”

The woman, or girl, she couldn't have been much over eighteen, had opened the metal bear-proof box next to the camp and carried a crate of food to the picnic table. She started pawing through it. Stranahan caught the glint of a nose stud. The scraggly tips of the straw-colored hair escaping her watch cap were dyed a dirty maroon.

“We got SpaghettiO's,” she said in a voice that reminded Stranahan of a girl speaking to a kitten. There was a shy, wondrous quality about her, as if she were noticing the brightness of the world for the very first time.

“Why don't you let me make dinner?” Stranahan said. “I have spuds and green beans. I'll bring over my lantern and we'll do up a feast.”

“You seem familiar,” the man said. His eyes seemed to pierce Stranahan.

“You do, too,” Sean said. “Hey, aren't you the guy who feeds the wolves at the wildlife center?”

Now the man was nodding. “I knew I'd seen you. I don't forget faces.” But the suspicion had gone and his eyes, close up, were green, like the cat's eyes but minus the radioactive throb.

“That was an interesting talk about the wolves. I'm Sean.” Stranahan turned over his palm as if to say, “I'd shake your hand but it's covered with fish slime.”

“Fen,” the man said.

Stranahan looked at the woman, who had kept her head down since he'd climbed up the bank. Her irises were pale gray, the whites bloodshot.

“I'm Deni.” A peek at him, the eyes glancing up and then the glance averted.

Stranahan walked to his site to shed his waders, wondering just what it was he was trying to accomplish. He'd wanted to see the man up close and now he had and, except for the expression, there seemed little remarkable about him. The animal attraction that had evidently captured the imagination of Nicki Martinelli was only hinted at, but then Stranahan wasn't the intended prey. He stacked food and a box of wine into his cook box, trapped his folding chair under his arm and hooked the handle of his lantern with a finger. He struggled back to the couple's picnic table, where he poured the wine into Dixie cups.

He raised his cup in salute and busied himself with the dinner preparations. Without looking up, he said, “So how do you like working with wolves, Fen?”

The man barked a laugh. “You mean toss them meat and carry their crap to the Dumpster. But wolves are very interesting.”

“How's that?” Stranahan started slicing potatoes.

“Their family structure. Hierarchy isn't based on strength. The alpha male and female don't dominate the other members of the pack physically. Instead, it's a leadership role, based on personality and attitude. What we would call charisma. If there's enforcing to be done, it's done by a beta. The alphas stay above the fray. As in nature, as in man, or so it should be.”

“What do you mean?” Stranahan chopped an onion to fry with the potatoes and set them to sizzling in a cast-iron skillet.

“I mean that leadership is an innate trait, and in an ideal society those who possess this quality should prevail. True leaders are literally born to lead. Unfortunately, we live in a culture corrupted by money. The have-nots in terms of personal magnetism can become the haves by purchasing power. Take where I work, the resident naturalist is the owner's son-in-law, even though I'm the one with the degree.”

Deni, Stranahan saw out of the corner of his eye, had brought her head out of her shell and was paying her alpha rapt attention. She smiled shyly over at Stranahan, as if to say,
Isn't he wonderful?