The Wild Inside (19 page)

I nodded.

“So.” Ford’s eyes narrowed under the shadow of his hat. “Let’s just say it’s in the park’s best interest to keep Lou Shelton on our good side because he’s this close”—he held up his fingers like he was about to pinch some salt—“to making a deal with the park.”

“You mean a willing sale?”

“Precisely. With a life-estate agreement. So, of course, I’d never interfere with your work, but if you can try to not upset him in the meantime, that would be in all of our best interests.”

“I’ll try not to anger him, but when it comes to finding out who did this, a life-estate agreement’s not going to keep me from doing what I need to do.”

“Of course,” Ford said. “But remember, the department isn’t going to be too happy with you if you prevent them from getting their hands on shoreline property.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said with mild sarcasm, fighting the urge to tell him to get the hell out of my business.

“You’re welcome. And now, just as you said”—he smiled—“back to work then.”

• • •

He left me standing there. I stood on the path, not moving because I was gathering my wits before heading back in, but then I heard it. It wasn’t a very loud sound, but deep, and gruff. I knew instantly what it was. I turned and saw the twenty-by-twenty cage. He rocked from side to side and was looking in my direction. His silver-tipped hair thick and full—a heavy coat of armor against the oncoming winter. He grunted again, and the sharp taste of fear stabbed the back of my throat. I fought a childish urge to run.

Just like at a zoo, I told myself. Not the wild. In a heavy-duty cage sturdy enough to hold a grizzly in the headquarters district of West Glacier so he can crap a piece of evidence out. That’s all. My breathing quickened in spite of myself. Not the wild, I repeated. The image of Oldman Lake with its stunted and wind-deformed high-line trees surrounding its deep-green water flashed in my mind. “Not the wild,” I whispered it out loud.

But still, it was Glacier, and all the things that made her Glacier: white jagged peaks draped with golden morning fog; aspen trees with bone-white bark; crystal-clear frigid streams moving silently over large pastel-colored rocks; foamy, roaring waterfalls; red-rocked gorges with intricate curved patterns; cold, cold air—somehow crisper and more raw and desolate; and exquisite beauty surrounded me and seemed to mock me, whisper to me that I was somehow inadequate, incapable of solving a case while in her embrace.

I shook off the feeling and walked closer to the cage. I could feel my pulse in my ears. The bear stood on his hind legs and lifted his nose to the air. The sharp stench of wild animal seemed to cover me and nausea began to build in my gut. I stopped. A silky black raven flew by and cawed. I felt dizzy, like things weren’t real and I was in a movie montage. I reached for a quarter in my pocket but realized I hadn’t grabbed my coat. My hands shook.

Really—the bear was beautiful, with its full silvery coat, thick oval-shaped ears, and long, concave jawline. Suddenly, there were
too many layers: Ford’s presence fueling my anger, Glacier’s breeze hitting my face, the case presenting many avenues, Monty and Smith feeling like unexpected friends, the ephemeral nature of the light, and under it all, a primitiveness locked deep inside of me scratching to break free . . . And here before me, less than thirty yards away, a magnificent, deadly grizzly bear grunting, sniffing my human odor, trying to make sense of me, trying to make sense of its cage. Its relentless presence filled the air.

It occurred to me—broke through the fog in my head—that I could simply walk away, not just from the cage, but from the case entirely, and go back to Denver. Tell Sean to send someone else to solve a case about an animal-torturing meth head. And although I’m certain I didn’t define this with clarity at the time, something inside of me screamed that if I did, I would never be able to work another case in my life. And if that happened, I would be as caged as that bear by my own fear. In retrospect, I can describe this as if everything fit neatly into a pattern as perfect as the circular swirls of red rock around the Sun Rift Gorge on the east side of Logan Pass. But at the time, it was blurry and just a sharp sensation, like being deprived of air. And when that happens, you fight for it.

I wish I could say that the moment was a pivotal turning point for me. That I strode right up to the bear, inspected him calmly as he roared. That I smiled into his long snout and hot breath as if I were John Wayne. But I didn’t. As anticlimactic as it sounds, I wasn’t ready and probably never would be, not without completely faking it. I knew I couldn’t quit the case, but I wasn’t ready to face a grizzly bear that had only days before eaten a human being. I stood and fidgeted, then turned back. And when I did, I saw Ford standing in the parking lot, his hand with his car keys frozen before the lock as he stared at me, squinting as Lou Shelton had, like some quintessentially wise mountain man. When I think about it now, I’m sure his look was one of amusement—his brow furrowed as he watched me flustered on the
trail and wondered why I wasn’t going anywhere when I had so much work to do.

But to me, at the time, all I could see was that he was peering at me as a man who’d conquered great patches of wilderness in his own life, like a man who could see right through me as if I were a fraud, as if bravery was only stitched to the fabric of my DOI cotton-poly-blend shirt . . . and as if I had a neon sign above my head flashing the word
coward
over and over again.

12

I
CALLED SEAN, WHO
seemed a million miles away in a world so separate from Glacier Park that it suddenly made me think of my apartment in Denver and that I still needed to ring Rexanne, the landlady, to check on my plants sometime near the end of the week. I was lucky that she liked me because she was very helpful for a guy with my travel schedule. She watered my ficus, my jade, my coleus, and my weeping fig anytime I was gone for more than a few days, and sometimes in the dead of winter, she would make sure my heat was up from sixty to sixty-nine if I told her when I was returning. Unfortunately, I felt that some long shadow had marked me the day I set foot on the McGee Meadow path and that I would be in Glacier for longer than half a week.

“Systead,” Sean said. “It’s about time I heard from you. Guess you haven’t been missin’ those good ol’ heart-to-hearts with Uncle Sean now?”

I chuckled. “I always miss those.”

“Well, you’ll be missing them forever if you don’t get your act together.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” My half smile faded.

“Bad joke. I just mean that part of your job is reporting to me, or did you forget that?”

“No, I didn’t.” I was loitering around the entrance to headquarters and had to back away from the door when it opened. Karen Fortenson and a male ranger I hadn’t seen before came out the door laughing about something. I tipped my head and Karen held up her hand in a
small wave and the other ranger tipped his head in return. “Look, it’s just been busy here. No witness, no weapon, no ballistics, but time-consuming because we’ve got several leads.” I shuffled over to my loaner SUV and leaned my hip against the hood.

“That so? Well, while you’re in lead creek without a paddle, I’ve got the superintendent breathing down my neck about every move you make.”

“I’ve gathered. And he called you about letting the grizzly go, which would guarantee a lack of ballistics?”

“Of course he has. And he’s probably going to call me next to see if you wiped your ass this morning.”

I laughed. “About the bear?”

“What about it?”

“You backed him that it should be let go even though it’s probably carrying the slug?”

Sean laughed. “I wouldn’t exactly call it
backing
him. I don’t need to remind you that I back
my
men as long as they don’t do anything stupid, and you haven’t. Yet.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You’re very welcome,” he said facetiously. “Look.” He changed his tone to be more serious: “I told Ford what you already know—that the final call on a federal bear belongs to the super, but that it would be highly unusual for the super to not be helpful in an investigation.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m no bear expert,” he continued. “But there’s a ton of pressure coming from the park to release it so that it has a healthy hibernation. Plus it’s not like this Victor Lance was a senator or something.”

“Probably had better ethics than a senator,” I mumbled.

“I caught that. And you’re probably right,” Sean said. “Look, Ted, I’m no idiot, I know getting that slug can play a crucial role in nailing your perp.”

“Absolutely,” I stressed. “If I get it, we can define the weapon and
we can check the lands and grooves, even if it’s something totally generic like a Smith & Wesson and trust me, in this neck of the woods, everyone and their brother has one and not that many are in the ATF database. So at least if we have a slug we can still get a match if we come across the gun.”

“And if you were really lucky, the gun was purchased recently from a firearms dealer, so that its serial number is in the ATF database. You might even find it was purchased by someone who’s in
leadville
right now.”

“I thought it was a creek?” I smiled.

“Creek. Ville . . . who gives a shit?”

“You’re right.
If
they purchased from a registered dealer.” Montana has no gun registration laws, but firearms dealers were required to run checks, and that meant the purchased gun’s serial number would go into the ATF database along with the purchaser.

“Hmmm.” I heard Sean flipping pages and figured he had some type of file before him. I waited for him to continue. “If we put this bear down to search his stomach contents, there’s a chance you won’t find anything, and even if you do find it, it’s unlikely that the firearm hasn’t been disposed of, right?”

“Can’t say that. You know how many people hang on to their guns—keep ’em in their house even after a murder for Christ’s sake. Although, you’re right about disposing it. It’s fairly common around here for people to toss ’em into the rivers. It’s a quick way to get rid of the evidence, and we’ve got some of the county guys with underwater detectors lined up to search the corridors as soon as they’re done with the job they’re on.” For some reason, my knees felt a little shaky, and I was glad I was leaning against the SUV. I wasn’t just kissing ass. The chances were slim that we’d find the gun in the rivers or some characteristic in the bullet that would magically point me in the right direction. However, it has happened. The third case I solved involved a late-nineteenth-century buffalo rifle that only a select few in the county had registered. Once I identified all the owners, it was easy to see that one of the teenagers on
my suspect list had had his grandfather’s model in his possession at the time of the murder. It wasn’t hard to get him to confess. But the bottom line was that no detective worth their salt would let a bear free with a potential slug in its digestive system. “Seems like the park would rather save this bear than find who did this.”

“Right you are about that. If he weren’t such a promising specimen, it might be different. Also, people come to Glacier, in part, because they know the grizzlies are there. The murder, well, probably a fluke tied to some meth deal. I’m sure they think this nasty business will all pass before spring.”

The logical part of me agreed, but the detective in me cringed. It didn’t matter who the victim was, my drive to solve the case surged through me like electricity. “So we aim to please the park?”

“Come on, Ted, how long’ve you been with us?” He tsked several times. “You got any other stupid questions?”

I didn’t answer.

“The way I see it, we stall the bear committee and Ford for as long as possible to see if he eventually craps the bullet out.”

“That’s been the plan all along,” I said. “It’s not unreasonable to think he won’t pass it. It’s just a question of when he’s ready for hibernation, and Ford’s worried that we’re messing with his instincts, that his body’s delaying his natural instincts because he’s caged, which also delays his digestive system.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. Just play the game, will ya. And I’ll do the same. Would it be the worst if we end up letting him go with a collar? That way, if we get into a bind, we track him down and get him then. With a collar on, we can’t go too wrong. Then, everyone’s happy.”

“He’ll be in the high country, and you know as well as I do that he’ll most likely head for a north-facing slope with lots of snow, which will make it too difficult to get to him even if we locate the signal, which we’d be unlikely to do if he caves with the first blizzard. And if he craps it out in the woods, we’ll never find it.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what happens in the next few days. Why can’t they give him some ex-lax or something?”

“Against park rules. It’d mess with the hyperphagic state he’s in, and they can’t have him completely losing his energy supply and changing the metabolic process in his gut before hibernation or he won’t make it through the winter.”

“Christ.” Sean chuckled. “So tell me—how strong are your leads?”

I spent some time going through the five in detail: Stimpy, Leslie, Leslie’s boyfriend, Lou Shelton, and Rob Anderson with the animal cruelty situation. When I finished, I heard him sigh.

“Well, at least you got some stuff to work with. Of course, you know which one of those my bets are on.”

“Yeah. It’s the obvious.”

“It’s unlikely someone in the meth ring will have a registered weapon.”

“Yeah, but I try not to make too many assumptions. It gets me in trouble every time.”

“Just keep the pressure up, Systead, and your head out of your ass and you’ll get to the heart of this in just a few more days. By that time, the bear will have shit the slug out and you’ll have cinched the case.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, maybe a little too tentatively and hoarsely. I wasn’t comforted, but I forced a little humor in spite of myself: “And by the way, I did take care of it this morning.”