Dead Man’s Fancy (4 page)

A
t nightfall, Sean Stranahan took his coffeepot and walked the steep, rooted path down to the gravel bar. Upstream, the river was a rope of pulsing phosphorescence, but at his feet the thin water seemed not to move. He played the pencil beam of his flashlight over the current, trying to picture the great seafaring trout called steelhead, lanterns to one another as they ascended the current on their migration from the Pacific.

Earlier that evening, he had sent a fly tied from the dyed feathers of a marabou stork into the elbow of water at the head of a riffle, and a steelhead, attracted by the pulsating orange hackle fibers, or perhaps by the shimmering mylar tinsel, had taken the fly in a quick turn. It had nearly yanked the rod out of his hands before rocketing to midriver to jump, a yard of silver muscle twisting into the air, bulking against the darkness of the pines. Twenty minutes later, when Sean had finally been able to lead the fish close enough to extend a hand, the steelhead had turned with disdainful grandeur just out of reach, its broad tail slapping water onto his face. It had bulled back into the current, keeping him in that place where all fishermen want to be just a little while longer.

Stranahan squatted down to dip the kettle and set it aside. He dug his left hand into the coat of the mixed-eyed sheltie that had followed him from the campsite. “Time for dinner, Choti,” he said. “Trip's almost over.” But he was in no hurry to break the spell the river had cast, and man and dog sat side by side as he played the flashlight beam over the water, through the smoke that had risen over its surface. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he had been looking at water in this way since he was a child. After a while he shut the light off and just listened, internalizing the sound of the current until it was no longer the river he was listening to, but the rhythm of his heart.

—

“W
here are you?”

Stranahan had to smile. No hello, no how are you. Pure Martha.

“Ah, it's called the River of No Return. I just hiked out of the canyon.”

“Well how soon can you return from it?”

“Good morning to you, too, Martha. I called to say hi and see if my tipi was still standing. I didn't know you'd missed me so much.”

“I didn't, but we could use another set of eyes on the ground and you can read sign better than anyone except Harold. See . . .”

As he listened, Stranahan trapped the handset between his ear and his shoulder and used both hands to dig into his pants pockets for more quarters. By the time Martha drew a breath he'd run out of change. He gave her the number taped to the pay phone's instruction card and tapped his boot on the porch of Mother Chukor's Cafe, one of two remaining businesses in the ghost town of Shoup. The other was a general store with gravity fed gas pumps under a hanging sculpture of a steelhead drinking a cup of coffee.

“I know Sam,” Sean said, picking up at the first ring. “Whatever else he might be guilty of, he didn't kill that wrangler. He's got a heart, it's just buried beneath a couple hundred pounds of bluster.”

“Yeah, and he's got a big fist that's imprinted on a dead man's face. I'm heading to the morgue in about an hour. We'll see what Doc says about it. So how soon can that old heap of yours get here?”

“I'm not sure I'm done fishing yet.”

“You're done fishing.”

“In that case, six hours. Maybe by nightfall.”

“Then you're not going to do us any good today. You know how these things go. The first forty-eight hours are critical. This is day three, it was Tuesday this happened. Let me think a second. Okay, here's what you do. The missing woman's name is Nanika Martinelli, goes by Nicki. Her ranch application lists an address outside Libby. Worked for a fly shop called Hook and Hackle. I want you to drive up there and learn what you can. I'll clear it with the sheriff so you can search the residence.”

“What about Sam?”

“What about him? If he's innocent, then you'd be doing him a favor to find out the truth. I don't see a conflict of interest.”

“So does this mean you're hiring me?”

“I'm still hoping she's going to walk off the mountain. But if she doesn't, then yes, a couple days 'til we get this straightened out. It isn't your day rate, but look at the company you keep.”

“I'll still want to talk to Sam.”

“Call him from the road. And when you get back to Bridger, do
me
a favor. Buy a cell phone and resist the impulse to throw it in the drink. This is the twenty-first century.”

“H
ow's the ticker?”

“Ticking.” Doc Hanson rolled his shoulders and twisted his neck from side to side. “I've been up to my elbows in gore all morning. Darned thing is, I knew the table was set too low and didn't reset it, didn't want to spend the time. Now my back's in spasm and I'll pay for it the next twenty hours.”

“If you don't want to talk about your heart,” Martha said, “I'm not going to make you.”

“Four months. That's how long it's been since the stent, but I can't seem to carry on a conversation five minutes before the subject comes up.”

“Then excuse me for caring, Doc.”

“Martha, it's not you. What sticks in my craw are people who are friends of my wife, women who've never carried on a serious conservation with me, asking me about my feelings. How do I feel about coming close to death? How has it changed me? I'll tell
you
how it's changed me, what I don't tell
them
.” His voice became matter-of-fact. “About once a week, two in the morning, I wake up and listen to my heart. Any twinge in the chest wall, any tremor of the intercostal muscles, I dwell on it. Elizabeth's a foot away and I listen to her breathe awhile. Then I move the dog and get up and go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of milk. I have a bucket list under a refrigerator magnet and fiddle with it, prioritizing. I'd like to hike up to the Chinese Wall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness before I pass. That one's at the top, because you have to be in shape. I'd like to see that Grand Staircase Escalante Monument in Utah. And I'd like to canoe the Smith River again, right here in Montana. But you know what I really want to do. I'd like to bring a few days back and live them over again. I figure a man has about six days in his life that are as good as it gets. The day when I was catcher for the All Stars and made the play at the plate that sent us to the regionals, a day in the Mekong when I pulled my best friend out of a firefight where he'd gotten blown up and got him on the chopper. I found I had courage that day. It wasn't happiness so much as every cell in my body was alive. And God bless Elizabeth, but I'd like to relive a night up in the U.P. when I was in med school at Michigan and made love with Vicki Pendergrass under the northern lights. Right there on a blanket on the shore of Lake Superior.”

“I bet that one isn't written on the list.”

“No. That one stays up here.” He tapped his temple. Hanson pulled his glasses down on his nose and looked at Martha. “What is it about us? We get together a few days a year, if that, and I tell you all my secrets and you tell me something, anyway. How's that happen? And then each time, we say we should get together for dinner and share something other than a body on an examining table, then we don't. How's that come about?”

“I don't know, Bob. Maybe we're afraid that if we meet somewhere else, we won't have anything to talk about.”

“I truly doubt that.”

Martha inclined her head. “What do you say we have a look at him?”

Hanson compressed his lips under his bristly salt-and-pepper mustache and nodded. He led her over to the steel examining table and pulled the sheet down. The skull had been sawn horizontally to reveal the brain pan.

“I read your report,” Hanson said. “The facial bruising is consistent with the blow you described. See the dark blue color of it, almost purple? That means the red blood cells have begun to break down. It tells me the blow occurred approximately twenty-four hours before the man's death. A CAT scan revealed no evidence of concussion. Was the man knocked out?”

“Witnesses said he went down and stayed down, but wasn't knocked out.”

Hanson nodded.

Martha set her hands on her hips. “Could the blow have affected comprehension or his stability twenty-four hours later?”

“You mean, could he have fallen onto the elk antler accidentally, as a result of being punched by Sam Meslik the night before?” He answered his own question with a thoughtful nod. “Brain trauma manifests in many ways, instability is common. But in this case there is no physical measure of impairment.”

“What if he reinjured his brain when he jumped off his horse? Harold says the man came out of the stirrups when his horse bolted and that he landed on his feet. If his brain was already traumatized, could jarring it compound the damage so that he'd more or less pass out and lose his footing?”

Hanson frowned, then nodded. “It's possible. It's why you don't send a football player who's suffered a concussion back into a game or allow a fighter who was knocked unconscious back into the ring a week later. But I think you're on the wrong track.”

“No, I'm just eliminating. So it leaves being pushed so he fell on the antler, or did he just trip over his own feet?”

“Let's let the evidence talk before we speculate.” Hanson pulled the sheet down to the line of the man's pubic hair, exposing the gaping wound. The skin was darkly reddened in a softball-sized area surrounding the puncture.

“Okay, Doc. I'll bite. What does the evidence say?”

Hanson's voice assumed a professorial tone. “Typically, one would suspect that head trauma or spinal injury was at least an ancillary cause of death. In a fall, that's the most likely scenario. But that is not the case here. This man died from massive blood loss from a rupture of the common iliac artery, where it is formed by the junction of the external and internal iliac arteries. The antler tine was the sole cause of this poor man's death, the G4 to be precise.”

“I heard Walt refer to it by that designation. What's it mean?”

“G is the section of the Boone and Crockett Club scoring sheet relating to the length of antler tines. Over time, it became convenient for scorers who judged big-game heads to simply refer to the tines as G1, G2, and so on. On a typical six-point bull, the G4 is the fourth from the bottom, usually the longest tine on the antler.”

“I didn't think you were a hunter.”

“I'm not. I was given a lesson by Julie McGregor. She's the game biologist who examined the elk. The head's over in the FWP barn. The length of this particular tine was forty-six centimeters, or just over eighteen inches. It entered through the skin of the back, punctured the thoracolumbar fascia and the internal oblique muscle before punching through the body cavity—that smell is from the ruptured small intestine—and came out through the lower right quadrant of the abdomen, with approximately seventeen centimeters protruding. The abdominal depth is twenty-three centimeters, a little less. He was impaled on the lower section of the tine, more or less wedged down against the base, where the tine reaches its greatest circumference. The puncture wound is nearly eleven centimeters in circumference at the entry point, tapering to just under seven centimeters where it exited the abdomen; that's one hell of a big hole. I'd estimate he died within five minutes.”

“Hmm.” Martha steepled her fingers so that her forefingers rested against her nose, with her thumbs under her chin.

“You look lost in prayer, Martha.”

Ettinger didn't answer. She took her hands from her face. “You're a strong guy, Bob. What if you were to throw me down on an antler tine like the one that skewered this guy? Would I be impaled the way he was?”

“That's the question I posed to Julie when she showed me the head of the bull. She said she'd check it out with Wilkerson.”

“Ouija Board Gigi?”

He nodded.

“Why don't I know about this?” Martha's brow furrowed. “I knew when we stole her from Custer County that she was the best CSI in the state. I didn't know she'd bypass chain of command and go cowgirl three weeks into the job.”

“That's something you'll have to take up with her.” Hanson glanced at the bird call clock on the wall. “You go over to the barn before the chickadee sings, you should catch her. Julie said they'd be conducting their experiments at three o'clock.”

“Then we're done here?”

“Almost. You asked me to look at the right ankle, where you thought he could have been stepped on by his horse.”

Martha nodded. “His boot was cut. I was looking for a reason he'd stumble and fall onto the elk.”

Hanson drew the sheet back over the head and went to the other end of the table. He pulled the sheet to expose the feet. Ettinger stared at the ugly line of bruise over the instep.

“You see there's a corresponding contusion on the outside of the ankle,” Hanson said.

Martha pursed her lips. “If it was made by the horse, the injury would be curved, like a horseshoe. Right?”

“You'd think.”

“Looks like he stepped in a coyote trap.”

“That's what Wilkerson said, too. She said Julie had leghold traps of various sizes in the barn and they were going to see if one matched. If a trap was set by the elk carcass for the wolves and he accidentally stepped onto the pan, then you have a logical reason for him falling onto the antler.”

“So Wilkerson's seen the body?”

“She was here just before you.”

Ettinger drummed the fingers of her right hand on the edge of the table.

Hanson shrugged. “She made an appointment. She went through channels.”

“Not my channel.”

“Can I give you a piece of advice?”

“What? I can see you're going to, anyway.”

“Don't be too hard on her for taking the initiative. This county's grown twenty percent in the last three years. Bigger population, bigger department, bigger workload. You can't micromanage like before. I know it irks you not to have your finger in the gravy, but you've got a good team with Walt taking on undersheriff duty and now Wilkerson, you couldn't ask for better technical support. I'm right if you think about it.”

Ettinger pulled off her blue latex gloves and dropped them in a wastebasket. “You're right. I need to delegate more. It's just, I don't know, a couple nights ago up on the mountain, I felt like a fifth wheel with Jason Kent running SAR and Harold taking over the crime scene, if that's what it turns out to be.”

“Do I have to remind you who found the body?”

Ettinger grunted, conceding the point. “It's just that something happened up there, I don't want to get into it, but it shouldn't have. It
wouldn't
have a few years ago. I lost control for a couple minutes.” She closed her eyes, could hear her scream echoing off the rock walls of Papoose Basin. “I seem to be full of doubts these days, not just professionally.”

Hanson nodded. “Twenty years ago I went through something similar. It's called a midlife crisis. If you're like me, you'll work through more than one of them. I seem to be at the onset of one right now.”

“Thanks for pointing that out to me.”

“You're welcome. You know how I feel about you. I—”

Ettinger held up her hand. “I know. You love me for all my warts and graces. I still think you stole that line from somebody.”

Hanson shook his head. “I'm an original, Martha.”

She was going to say something wry, something that would put Doc Hanson, the old walrus, in his place, when the chickadee on the clock said its name.

—

T
he Fish, Wildlife & Parks barn was wishful thinking—not a barn at all, but a Quonset hut constructed of corrugated galvanized steel, hollow as the empty half of a tin can it resembled. Flick a BB against the wall and it echoed like a gunshot in a limestone canyon. Ettinger heard the voices before she entered, could see two figures at the far end of the building.

“Let's raise the ladder to ten feet and try the mule deer again.” It was Georgeanne Wilkerson, whose breathy, conspiratorial voice was hard to mistake. She tended to speak as if she were in cahoots with you, planning to rob the Bridger Federal Savings and Loan.

“O . . . kaaaay.” Julie McGregor, the Region Three wolf and elk biologist, had adopted the same breathy expansion, full of mystery and derring-do.

Ettinger set her hands on her hips and watched as McGregor took the two forelegs of a field-dressed mule deer buck while Wilkerson held onto the rear legs. They lifted the deer and began to ascend twin ladders that faced sides over the severed head of a bull elk.

“High enough?”

“Let's do a couple more steps.”

“Okay, okay,” McGregor said, blowing like a weightlifter. “On three. One, two, three.”

The mule deer fell through space. The squishing thud that reverberated through the barn was followed by a moment of dead silence. Then a peal of laughter rang off the steel walls. Martha could see two tines of an elk antler poking up through the rib cage of the deer.

“Whoa! That was way cool.” McGregor tossed her head, her mop of hair flying. Wilkerson was laughing so hard she started to cough. The women climbed down from the ladders and high-fived each other over the carcasses.

Martha thought
When did everyone get so young?
She cleared her throat. “Ahem.” The laughter died down as she approached.

“We were just having a bit of fun,” Wilkerson said, still out of breath. She was a pear-shaped brunette, not unattractive, but with a blotchy indoor complexion and small hands that flitted like bats. Her glasses magnified her eyes, giving her a permanently startled expression.

“And you, Miss McGregor, you were having fun, too, it appears.”

The biologist, dressed in a khaki shirt embossed with the head of a grizzly bear over Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, blew back an errant strand of hair that had fallen across her nose. Freckle-faced tomboy to the core, she was a fair-skinned towhead with crinkly eyes that had seen a lot of weather.
Where the hell are her hips?
Martha thought.

McGregor looked down at the mule deer, the elk antlers skewered through it like the tines of a giant fork. “There's been a couple fellas I wouldn't mind dropping onto a sharp G4,” she said. McGregor glanced sidelong at Wilkerson, immediately initiating another round of laughter.