Dead Man’s Fancy (21 page)

“That's a depressing perspective,” Sean said.

Fen raised his head slightly.

“Say you're born without an abundance of either charm or money? How can you ever hope to rise through the ranks?”

“Through guile and perseverance,” Fen said. “Even the lowly omega occasionally becomes an alpha if he plays a smart hand.” He nodded in agreement with himself.

Stranahan instinctively recoiled from self-satisfied people, who in his experience were usually overcompensating for feelings of inferiority. But then he wasn't here to like the man, he was here to find out what had happened to Nicki Martinelli.

“I keep thinking about that woman who was eaten by the wolf,” he said. “Sooner or later it was bound to happen, I guess. I remember what you said at the feeding, about wolves in the park losing their fear of people. You add in grizzly bears, it makes sleeping in a tent a mite spooky. Sometimes I wish I had a gun.”

“Fen's not afraid of wolves.” Deni turned to Amorak, her eyes big. “Tell him about the wolf when we met, that big black one where you found the den. He just walked right up to him like unarmed.”

Fen shot her a look.

Stranahan scraped onions and potatoes onto a sheet of aluminum foil, acting as if he hadn't caught the rebuke. He dredged the trout fillets in a cornmeal and flour mix and placed them in the skillet. The flesh, colored orange from a diet of freshwater crustaceans, hissed and began to turn pale at the edges.

“But you were so—” She censored the rest of the comment. Stranahan could feel the weight of Fen's eyes on her.

“Just how does one walk up to a wolf?” Sean put nonchalance into his voice.

Amorak stared at Deni a long moment, then remembered his manners. “Remember what I said about the alphas?” he said. “They control through a projection of leadership.”

“So you just have to be the bigger alpha.”

“Exactly. I find that's true of everything in life. Anything you want, you can have just by looking at it, if you look at it in the right way.”

“Sounds like something a man could put to good use in a singles bar.” Sean smiled at Deni, who had retreated into her shell. “Or maybe to get back in the good graces of someone who left you. My girlfriend, she's gone away to vet school and I get the distinct feeling she's no longer enthralled with me.”

Fen nodded. “Even if they run away, they always come back. You see, at a psychological level, you're still there. The alpha is the heroin on the table. An addict can walk out of the room, but she never locks the door behind her.”

“You have anyone like that in your life?” Stranahan made the question casual as he served helpings on paper plates. It was easier to ask prying questions while your attention was on the work your hands were doing.

“You know,” he added, “someone who left you, then came back?” Stranahan thought of Nicki, stumbling down the mountainside in panic, running toward the comfort of the drug Fen represented.

“You ask the wrong question.” The voice had changed. It was still quiet and measured, but with a darker undercurrent. “The question isn't would she come back. The question is would I take her back. She would have to pass a test.”

“What kind of test?”

“One to see if she was worthy.”

Something in Fen's voice told Stranahan the subject was closed. He'd hit a nerve. “We're ready here,” he said.

Deni came to small life again as they sat before the fire, the wondrous quality returning when she found that Sean was an artist. She had always wanted to paint. She thought she might have the talent. Stranahan told her to hold the thought. He found his spiral-bound sketchbook on the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser and settled on one of the pencil studies he'd done at Mule Shoe Bend earlier in the day—the Methuselah bison with his robe of snow, jets of steam issuing from his nostrils. He tore it out.

“It's for both of you,” he said.

“Wow,” Deni whispered. “That's good. Isn't that good, Fen?”

Fen murmured in the affirmative. He didn't like not being the center of attention.

“I know,” Deni said, “let's have s'mores. I just love s'mores.”

Fen took the sketch and ducked into the tent. Then he climbed down the high bank to the river, a flashlight beam marking his progress.

“He keeps his stash under a rock,” Deni said.

The beam was working its way back. Amorak sat down before the fire and smiled into Stranahan's eyes as he pulled a baggie of weed from his shirt pocket. He rolled a slim joint, lit it with a butane lighter and toked. He passed it to Stranahan. Stranahan hadn't smoked for years. He pulled on the joint so that the tip went cherry red, but kept most of the smoke in his mouth. He passed the joint to Deni, who extended her hand from a blanket she'd pulled around her shoulders. Stranahan exhaled very slowly while making a show of looking at the stars. He wanted to keep his wits about him.

“Alaskan Thunderfuck,” Fen said. “From the Manatuska Valley. I been there once. Valley of the fucking wolves.”

The s'mores were excellent. They were maybe the best thing Stranahan had ever eaten. So much for keeping it in his mouth, he thought. He felt himself drifting; there really were a lot of stars. You could get dizzy watching them. He examined the sky in that questing way that
Australopithecus
must have, when there were no words to adequately describe it. There were still no words. He felt himself swimming upward as if the sky were a heavenly water, the stars just beyond his fingertips, and then slowly he drifted back down.

Fen was saying something about wolves. Stranahan looked across the fire to examine the man's face, dancing in the light from the flames. Two people had mentioned that his face was beatific, and for the first time Stranahan saw that, for Fen glowed as if lit by a positive life force, the way that women who are pregnant shine with health. The unwashed hippie countenance bled into the periphery to reveal the most beautiful face Stranahan had ever seen. No, not beautiful, but . . . radiant. He felt himself trembling toward it, as if being pulled by a pulsating magnet. He had enough sense to shift his eyes to Deni, to regard her as the distilled water that acts as a control in an experiment. She caught his eyes and her smile was beautiful, but it was a human beauty. She remained recognizably tethered to earth.

“Deni is attracted to you, too, Sean. Would you like to go into the tent with her?” Fen's eyes vibrated from one to the other. “You'll find her able to accommodate any position in the
Kama Sutra
. She is a compliant if inexperienced lover, aren't you, my sweet? I will be happy to stay here by the fire.”

Here was the tribal chief with the camp as his kingdom, offering his woman as a gesture of hospitality. Stranahan could sense Deni stiffen in her chair. This was not part of the bargain she'd agreed to when accepting the colored contact lenses. She pulled the blanket closer.

Stranahan understood that the casual nature of the offer was not aboriginal largesse, but a display of Fen's dominance over both of them. A pounding of the chest. Suddenly, he wasn't so stoned.

“Deni is very desirable.” His eyes held Fen's. “But I am committed to another. Like the alpha wolf, I'm monogamous.”

Fen nodded his head. “I respect your decision, but the sentiment is misplaced. It's a fallacy to believe that wolves are faithful and that only alphas mate. Other pack members may copulate and bear the fruit of sex, but they lack the family support to successfully rear the pups. What the alphas possess is the necessary devotion of the pack to bring pups to maturity. ‘It takes a village' is the expression humans use. This girlfriend—you speak of her losing her attraction to you, yet you remain faithful. In wolf society, if the female alpha strays or dies, the male wastes no time grieving his loss, but quickly replaces her with another.”

He flicked the ask from the roach into the fire.

“Sean, you asked if there was a woman in my life who left and came back. In fact there was one, I will admit she enchanted me more than any other, but in her devotion she was unreliable. She was like this campfire that bows to the wind, one way and then another. A person who shows you two faces. An alpha has no time for an unsteady flame.”

“What happened to her?”

“Gone. I was going to feed her to the fire, but she slipped the net. I misjudged her state of mind. It's not a mistake I'll make twice. In the meanwhile . . .” He relit the joint and pulled smoke into his lungs. He exhaled. “As you can see, I've moved on.”

He stepped around the fire. Deni had retreated into the folds of her blanket, holding it pinched to her throat. She seemed to shrink away from his attention, but he caught her eyes and after a few seconds the fingers holding the blanket relaxed and the blanket fell away. Fen bent and kissed her neck, bit it lightly and tugged, so that the flesh pulled taut. He released his hold and smiled with his teeth bared in the firelight. He said, “You are quite delicious, my darling. The spirits are quiet tonight. Let's show our guest how we say goodnight to them. You would like that, wouldn't you?”

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Good,” Fen said. He retreated to the tent and Sean looked at Deni, but she didn't meet his eyes. He was entirely sober now and saw, with a shiver of clarity, that this young woman would never ascend to the level of alpha, would never graduate to the red contact lenses and that she would be discarded in favor of another in Fen's quest to find the perfect mate.

“This man's dangerous,” he wanted to say to her. “He'll discard you like the others. Come with me now and escape.”

But he knew if he said anything, she would repeat it and Fen himself would disappear, and with him the chance that he would pay for his . . . what exactly? Serial humiliation of young women. A sin, if not exactly a crime. Or something much more sinister?

Fen was returning from the tent with what looked like a buffalo horn. He walked to the bank and raised the horn. The first mournful note startled Stranahan. The voice rose, held, then fell in three parts. The plaintive nightsong of wilderness, gone from Montana so many years and now returned to enrich the landscape. In the vacuum, the silence was that of the earth stopped turning. Then, far away, the first answer. They came from nowhere and from everywhere then—haunting, infinitely sad. A lament, sung in minor key.

“The Electric Peak Pack. They're hunting,” Fen said.

E
xcept for the stale taste of smoke in Stranahan's mouth, the night might have been dreamed. By long habit, he was up in the predawn, frying bacon, flipping an egg in the grease, having his first cup of cowboy coffee sitting before a star fire. He kicked at the unburned ends of the sticks, pushing the burned ends together to encourage the flames. He had a second cup as the heavens paled. The witches' hat in the distance slumbered on.

An hour later, Stranahan saw movement in the camp. He watched Deni walk to the outhouse, her blanket dragging on the ground. Fen stepped with his back to Stranahan to the high bank, brought his hands to the front of him. His urine flow steamed. Deni walked back, her head down in the blanket. No fire, no breakfast. The motorcycle engine caught and sputtered. It fired and settled to its basso rhythm. As it passed Stranahan's camp, Fen gave him a thumbs-up. Deni had her arms wrapped tightly about him and did not look over. It did not surprise Stranahan that she had not been left behind in camp, where he might pay her a visit. Fen's moment of munificence had passed.

Stranahan waited until the sound of the engine died away before walking to the tent and untying the flap. Sleeping bags, wadded up clothes zipped in pillow covers, flashlights. A teen vampire novel on her side, a pocketbook
Kama Sutra
on his, opened to the Splitting Bamboo. A bottle of Astroglide shaped like a wave. Very little else, but then it was a motorcycle camp. He backed out of the tent and scribbled a note on a paper plate.

Great time last night. Good luck finding a place. I have to go back to Bridger. Sean.

He slipped a card from his wallet, the one that identified him only as a painter, and wrote his cell number on it. He pinned the card and the paper plate to the picnic table with four bottles of Moose Drool, then packed up his own meager camp, intending to drive into West to verify that the motorcycle was parked at the wildlife center. On his way, he stopped at a bear-proof garbage can and tossed in a bag of trash. Something was sparking at the back of his mind, an association like last night's stars, just out of reach. He let out the clutch and slowly motored toward town, passing on his left the entrance road to the county dump.
That was it!

—

B
ob Jacklin was at the vise in his fly shop, turning out a Platte River Special. He looked up from under his magnifying glasses.

“Bob, do you know what day they collect trash at the wildlife center?”

“I'd assume Tuesday. Same as here.”

“Thanks.” He hadn't asked why, and Stranahan was grateful. He wouldn't have known what to answer.

Martha picked up on the first ring.

“If I was to tell you there's evidence of murder or kidnapping in the Dumpsters outside the Paws of Yellowstone Wildlife Center, how soon do you think you could get a search warrant from Judge Conner?”

“You better back up,” she said.

Stranahan listened to the silence on the line after he finished.

“Mm-hmm.” More silence. “It's certainly an interesting theory.”

“It's more than a theory. This guy tears out Nicki's hair. He mixes it into the venison at the Center, feeds it to the wolves and collects the scat, then plants the scat at the Palisades as evidence that she was killed by wolves. Her body is presumed eaten, people stop looking for her.”

“So do you think she's alive?”

“I want to think she's alive. I think there's a good chance that she is, that he convinced her to run away with him and she consented to him pulling out her hair. But I can't dismiss the possibility that he killed her and buried the body. Either way, the hair in the scat closes the case. It's a perfect crime.” “

“Why do you think we'll find more hair in the Dumpster?”

“A half a dozen wolves produce a lot of scat in the course of a couple days. It makes sense he'd just collect the scat that had visual evidence of hair wound into it. The rest would be tossed into the garbage. Amorak told me he cleaned up after the wolves, and when I stopped at the garbage can at the campground and then saw the sign to the dump a couple minutes later it clicked. The next collection is tomorrow morning, though. We'd have to get the warrant today.” Stranahan paused. “Another thing. My guess is if you talk to the scat analyst, he'll tell you that he told Amorak about the signpost. The guy was camping right across the river from the Palisades. It's natural they would have bumped into each other. The signpost is what gave Amorak the idea of planting the scat. He knew where to plant it so it would not only be found, but also be found by the one person who knew what he was looking at.”

“Uh-huh.” Stranahan could visualize Martha kneading her chin. “I'll talk to our scatman later this morning. We'll see what he says.”

Stranahan could read the doubt in her voice.

“Amorak had the means, Martha. He had the opportunity, he had a motive.”

“What's his motive again?”

“Nicki haunted him. He was crazy about her. And she had rejected him. Last night he told me he wouldn't take her back unless she passed a test. He was speaking hypothetically, but she's who he was talking about. If she passed the test, maybe she's alive. If she didn't, she's dead.”

“What about the other girls? Does he kill them, too?”

“I don't know, but it's a pattern either way. He picks up a stray, he feeds her this wolf bullshit, and when she doesn't live up to his ideals, when she doesn't graduate to the red contact lenses, he casts her aside and finds the next. I think he could have pushed the girl into the hot pot, I don't know what he did with the rest. These are the girls in the missing posters that nobody misses.”

“Humpff.”

“It's your county, Martha.”

“Meaning what? I should care more? I'm not like a tin star on FX. I have to follow rules.”

“Do you think Crazy Conner will okay the warrant?”

“Learn your law. I don't need a warrant to go through the center's garbage. I just need them to sign off. Why refuse? It would look like they were hiding something.”

“I hadn't thought of that. But if you ask and the information is passed to Amorak, he might run.”

“Leave that part to me. He won't know, I promise.”

“What should I do?”

“Just keep your phone on. And stay in cell range for once, damnit.”

—

“Y
ou gotta be kidding.” Julie McGregor blew back an errant bang of hair. She looked from Stranahan to Martha Ettinger. “You aren't kidding.”

“The two big sacks are mostly bear shit,” Stranahan said, “maybe with a little wolf mixed in. It's really just the one bag.”

McGregor hefted it. “Well, I'm not doing this alone.”

“You won't be,” Ettinger said, “Wilkerson's on her way and Stranahan's volunteering. This kind of work's right up his alley.”

“Can you stay?”

“I'm the sheriff. I don't do wolf doo-doo.”

When Ettinger had gone, McGregor said, “I take it this was your idea.”

She heard him out and said, “Give me a real wolf any day.” She told Stranahan to take a chair at the steel examining table, undid the tie on the bag, made a face and they bent to work. Wilkerson joined them straight from her shift, still wearing her lab coat.

“Better double glove,” McGregor told her.

For an hour they dissected scat, the steel probes separating hair wrapped around bone chips. Most of it long, coarse and banded with tan tips—elk hair.

“Where does the center get its carcasses?” Wilkerson asked Stranahan.

“Hunters and game processors. It's all donations.”

“And this guy put the girl's hair inside chunks of meat and fed it to the pack.”

“That's what I'm thinking.”

“How ingenious.”

“Hey.” Wilkerson had picked out a reddish hair from the curlicued end segment of a wolf scat. Her big eyes were swimming. “Would you look what we have here?”

By the time they had worked through the bag of wolf scat, they had isolated fourteen samples of human hair ranging from a half inch to eight inches long, most wound so intricately with the elk hair that they were not apparent until the dissection of the scats. The color was the same as the hair taken from the scat at the signpost at the Palisades, and at least six of the samples contained intact follicles.

“I better call Martha,” Stranahan said.

“What do you think she'll do?” Wilkerson said.

“This tips the scales, whether you can get DNA from this hair and compare it to the samples we took from the Palisades or not. Amorak's working at a place where they're dumping wolf scat with human hair in it. You put that together with the two of them having a prior relationship, him camping across the river from where the scat was planted, what he said to me last night—it's strong circumstantial. Martha will haul him in for questioning.”

“Don't forget the girl in the hot pot,” Wilkerson said. “The roommate you interviewed can ID this bastard.”

“Yeah.” Stranahan's voice was doubtful. “But we have nothing to tie him to the scene. I think the best chance for arrest is to build a case for murdering Nicki Martinelli. But as Martha reminds me, I don't know the law.”

“The more sticks you stack, the stronger your house, but what do I know? I'm just a lowly CSI.”

“No, you're Ouija Board Gigi,” Stranahan said. “Someday you're going to have to tell me how you got that name.”

“Can you sing?” McGregor said. “We're going to play Beatles: Rock Band at my house tonight. You should come. He should come, shouldn't he, Gigi?”

—

S
tranahan didn't end up playing Beatles: Rock Band. Instead, he stood alongside Harold Little Feather, watching through a one-way window as Undersheriff Hess conducted the interview. Hess would not have been Stranahan's first choice and he said so.

“I'd do it, but he'll recognize me and turn hostile,” Harold said.

“You're an Indian. You all look alike.”

Harold smiled. “Don't worry about Walt. He knows what he's doing.”

Hess introduced himself and finished the preliminaries. He asked the man's name.

“Fenrir Amorak.”

“Like the wolf in Norse mythology.”

“Fenrir is a wolf of Norse mythology. Amorak's an Inuit legend.”

“Another wolf?”

“That's right.”

“What's the name you were born with?”

“It no longer suits me. That person no longer exists.”

“Isn't it James Todd McCready? We know . . .” Walt reiterated what Stranahan already knew from talking with Mrs. Oddstatter and later with Ettinger.

Sean felt his phone vibrate. He walked away a few feet and opened it. It was Ettinger. He listened a minute and shut the phone.

“Like I said,” Amorak said when Walt had finished, “it says nothing about who I am now.” He sounded bored.

“That person who no longer exists,” Walt said. He looked down at the sheet of paper on the table. One by one he ticked off McCready's laundry list of misdemeanors, his sexual assault and the parole violation.

Amorak shrugged.

From behind the glass, Stranahan could see Walt lean forward and place his hands around either end of the table.

“Do you know why you're here?” he said. “I find it odd that you haven't even asked.”

Most detainees brought their head back when the interrogator leaned forward. McCready only smiled. “Did someone plant weed in my panniers? That's what I figured the deputy was looking for when he date-raped my bike.”

“This isn't about marijuana.”

The silence was prolonged. “Whatever, it was an illegal search.”

“It's because we found human hair in the Dumpster where you work. It was in wolf scat.”

Again, a long pause. “Really,” Amorak said. He leaned forward and spread his hands so that they were inches from Walt's, mocking him. “I wouldn't know anything about that. A lot of people work there . . . Walter.”

“The hair, we believe, is from a young woman of your acquaintance, Nanika Martinelli. We'll have DNA confirmation soon.”

A line of concentration drew Amorak's eyebrows into a single line. “I don't think I know that name.”

“We can produce a witness who said you were looking for Miss Martinelli this spring.”

“I don't think so.”

From behind the glass, Harold glanced at Stranahan. “Fly shop owner on the Kootenai,” Sean whispered. Harold nodded.

Amorak had pulled back into his chair. He'd given up trying to stare down Walt.

“Nan-ee-ka.” Thinking about it. “Oh, you must mean Nicki. I haven't seen her in forever.”

“How long is forever?”

Amorak shrugged. “Two, three years.”

“Two or three?”

“Maybe two.”

“Why were you looking for her?”

He flashed up his palms. “In the area. Just wanted to say hello.”

“What area would that be . . . Todd?”

Now the look of worry was hard to misinterpret. Stranahan wondered how many places Amorak had searched for Nicki besides Libby. The harder he'd looked for her, the harder it would be to dismiss as just wanting to say hello.

“Up at her dad's old place on the Kootenai. I'd heard he'd passed. Wanted to see how she was holding up.”

“Just neighborly concern?”

“That's right.”

Walt glanced at his notes. “You want coffee. I'm going to get a cup.”

“Don't touch the stuff,” Amorak said. As Walt stood, he leaned forward to tower over Amorak, establishing his authority.

“You got back problems, Walter? You look like you could use some stretching exercises.”

Back behind the glass, Walt shook his head. “Tough nut. Martha get back to you?”