The Wild Inside (2 page)

For me, opportunity and preparation hadn’t intersected for some time, and I happened to be on our supervisor’s shit list and three-strikes-you’re-demoted-back-to-trafficking policy. On my last case, I irritated some higher-ups in the FBI because my experience in background analysis came in a little too handy, and I ended up discovering some unsavory ties between the coal industry and a Virginia politician teed up to be appointed secretary of the interior. Sean told me I was getting older, losing my edge, and should know better than to poke around where I don’t belong.

“He just said something ’bout a potential homicide victim and a mauling. Wants you in his office in five to fill you in.”

“Why didn’t you say so earlier?” My chair squeaked as I stood and slid the Vermont quarter into my pocket.

• • •

I caught the next flight out from Denver, leaving by 9:20 a.m. and arriving in Glacier Park International Airport an hour and a half later. It was 11:30 when a park ranger pilot named Moran, who didn’t look more than twelve with chubby, pink cheeks like a baby, fetched me at the airport in a park helicopter used for backcountry searches.

By car, we were thirty minutes away from the West Glacier entrance, by helicopter, five, and since local crime scene investigations had already been on scene for a few hours, every minute counted. My supervisor, Sean Dewey, had informed me earlier that one of the two local FBI guys stationed in Kalispell had been called in to meet the chief of the Park Police and the county sheriff, but had deferred the case to us since the local FBI guys were knee-deep in some type of
militia-band drama. Not to mention that they rarely dealt with homicide anyway.

I know it’s confusing, but the way it works is this: when there’s a life-threatening incident or a possible homicide in a national park, the National Park Police, which is federal, comes in and preserves life if there are survivors; then the scene. But to preserve the scene, they typically need help, so they call the county sheriff’s office, which has concurrent jurisdiction with the part of the park it contains. Ultimately though, the feds have preeminent jurisdiction, so if the FBI or DOI think they need us, we come.

I threw my bags in the side storage panel of the copter, let the pilot lock it up, and hopped in. Just like in Denver, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky in the Flathead Valley, just a dim haze from the locals burning their fall slash piles that paled the azure sky. Smoke—house fire, campfire, slash burning, chimney—it didn’t matter. The smell of it would forever trigger something inside me. And campfires—I would never enjoy them the way most do. I shooed the pinprick of agitation away like an annoying fly. An eerie sense of calm lingered in the air, like this was just some fall day in which I was going fishing with some buddies, the tall peaks of Glacier looming in the distance, marking the presence of some ominous and separate world.

“Ready, sir?” The pilot looked at me after I slammed the door. He placed his headset over his navy cap, tentacles of fiery orange hair curling out from under, then handed me a pair.

“You new?” I asked as he finished his preflight.

“Been here two years.” He smiled. “In my thirties,” he offered as if he read my mind. “Been flying since I was twenty-one. For the Army. Finally got out after serving my last tour in Afghanistan and got lucky enough to end up here.”

“Busy summer with the centennial year?” I changed the subject, not wanting to talk about anything on the personal side.

“Yeah, hugely busy. Over one-point-eight million. Absolutely nuts.”
He flipped a few more switches and a high-pitched whine rang out as the rotors started. “Felt like I was working for friggin’ Walmart. Thank goodness the place died right after Labor Day.”

“Yeah, population growth—it’s a bitch,” I said into my mouthpiece against the escalating roar. “Happening even out in proposed wilderness.”

Moran didn’t respond, and we both sat for an instant before he began working the panel before him, as if he were pausing to think the same thing as me—that things
dying
for the fall meant the place was quiet and still enough for a crime like this one to go undetected. I peered across the airfields toward the highway while the rotors swung into full power. I knew the place too well: the highway billboards, the storage-unit business with the gimmicky windmill in front, the marble and tile store just past it, the feed and farm place where we’d buy deworming medicine for our dogs and cats because Ma thought it too expensive at the vet’s and would do it herself. And, of course, the gateway to the park to the north. The Columbia Range to the southeast and the Whitefish Range to the west subsided into lower-elevation hills framing the park’s luminous mountain caps. Their greenish-blue, tree-covered ridges contrasted with Glacier’s treeless jutting peaks. People describe them as beckoning, like jewels, but, really, they don’t beckon. If anything, they guard. They warn.

“The ranger that came across it,” Moran said as we ascended. “She’s pretty shaken.”

I nodded. “Where’s she from?”

“Pennsylvania. Been here for years, but has never seen anything like it before.” He let out a small nervous laugh that I couldn’t really hear but could see by the slight shake of his shoulders. “Not like these anyway.”

“Sounds like it’s a new twist for all of us.” From my chest pocket, I pulled out my notepad, where I’d scrawled details down during my meeting with Sean and found the ranger’s name along with the chief
of Park Police, Joe Smith. “So, this ranger? Karen, Karen Fortenson—experienced?”

“Oh yeah. Probably mid- to late forties. Nice gal. Came to work Swift Current Lodge as a teenager. I think she’s been here as a ranger since her early twenties.”

“How soon did Park Police get it sealed off after she reported it?”

“Within thirty, thirty-five minutes.”

“So no one else got near the scene besides this Karen and Joe Smith?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How soon was the county forensics office called in?”

“As soon as your boss gave Smith the go-ahead.” Moran flipped a switch on his panel. “Around eight thirty. They arrived ’bout forty minutes later.”

I nodded. Working regionally, of course, meant we came in late and irritated everyone with our usurpation of the case. But the beauty of it was that there was less waiting for the details since much of the analysis was taking shape and much of the evidence would be getting photographed, logged, and bagged. In the park, where every raccoon, mountain lion, coyote, raven, and eagle wanted to get the remains when mama or papa griz was done with his or her share, the quicker an expert got on it, the better.

“We’re touching down in West Glacier, and we’ll drive from there.” He banked sharply so that we could land a few miles south of West Glacier. As we descended near a group of tall cottonwoods, the vicious wind rattled the branches so thoroughly that yellow leaves filled the air like confetti, and I have no idea why, but for some reason, perhaps because of the frenetic energy the helicopter created, I thought of the televised New Year’s Eve ball-drop in Times Square. We were a long way from the swirl of energy created by New York City’s population, DC’s, or even Denver’s, and I found myself remembering the overpowering need I had felt after my marriage fell apart to leave this area—to go to a city where I could become anonymous, as if my life was a child’s
Etch A Sketch toy and I could shake the slate clean, the drawing dissipating into a creamy fog of filament, and start over again.

• • •

Before we moved to Montana, we lived in Gainesville, Florida, and my father, Dr. Jonathan Systead, worked for the University of Florida as a pathologist. He came home every night smelling of formaldehyde and the mysterious tang of other important laboratory smells that the humid Gainesville air seemed to intensify in his clothes. One Saturday, a sunny fall day in late November—I remember it because it was the day after my twelfth birthday—my father took me to work with him.

The laboratory was smaller and more cluttered than I recalled. The last time I had been to work with him was when I was five. But it didn’t matter, it still felt like a place where only intellectual and important things happened, even though I couldn’t fathom what those would be. I only knew, as most young boys believe, that my father was the most important piece of the puzzle to whatever discoveries were being made.

In my memory, the room takes on a chiaroscuro effect—a narrow space filled with black microscopes, white rows of shelves with tall textbooks, old petrified bones, and joints on display, stained coffee cups on Formica countertops left from other students working under my dad’s tutelage. A yellowing model skeleton dangled in the corner, and dark refrigerators hummed quietly in the background. My father sat me down on a black vinyl swivel stool, and I began spinning around and around until he said, “Ted, stop that. Not in here.” I stopped and rested my bony elbows on my lanky thighs.

My dad turned the knob on a microscope and looked intently into the eyepiece. “I’m looking at what’s called a frozen section,” he said. “It’s a very thin slice off of a brain.”

“A human brain?”

“Yes. But I don’t have a good sample here, so I’m going to need to get some more.”

I hopped up from the stool and went and peered over his shoulder. “Who did you get the brain from?” My dad wore a white lab coat and thin latex gloves. He slid open the lid of the cold, glass machine that he called a cryogram. From the large blade in the center, he scraped a minuscule portion of white matter off a section of brain—frozen to a white cauliflower color.

“Someone was killed,” he said. “Usually, we put the organ in formalin to preserve and study it. But with this one, the police were in a hurry to understand the pathologies associated with it, so when we did the autopsy, we cut a portion of the brain out and froze it in liquid nitrogen so we could study it immediately.” We went back to his microscope with his sample on a thin glass slide, and I watched him grab another to prepare the specimen. When he was ready, he dimmed the lights.

“Why such tiny scrapes of it?”

“To learn about the body. Smaller segments teach about larger systems. I study these shavings to learn about pathologies, diseases—things that go wrong in the brain.
Mortui vivos docent
.”

“What?”

“
Mortui vivos docent
. The dead teach the living.”

“Oh.” I could tell he was going to that place in his mind where things got mysterious and too complicated for me. I figured he’d be silent now, lost in thought, when he surprised me. “School going okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I looked at the shelf of textbooks, most of them with the words
neuro
and
anatomy
in the titles. Not that I needed to avoid his gaze; he was intently staring at his samples. I was no good in science. In fact, I had just gotten a slip from my teacher that day saying that I’d gotten a string of Cs and needed a parent’s signature confirming they were aware of my grades. I still had the folded note burning a hole in my pocket. I began to swing again, side to side this time instead of all the way around.

“Good, well, I need to tell you something. Your mother and I have
made a big decision.” He glanced at me for a second, then back to his work. “We’ve decided to move.”

“Move?” I said. “Where?”

“Montana.”

“Montana? Isn’t that really far away?”

“Yes. In fact, where we’ll be going is less than an hour from the Canadian border.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I began to swing faster and farther to each side, my hands tucked under my thighs. My dad wrote something in a notebook beside his work, then placed the pencil back on the page and looked back at me. “I’m not kidding.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and placed his forehead back against the eyepiece. The little bulb under the slide projected upward, illuminating his forehead like a sliver of moon. “It’ll be great. There’s skiing, sledding, ice-fishing, snowball fights with your sisters . . .”

“But why?” I blurted.

“Many reasons. But mainly, we’ve always wanted to live near the mountains.”

“But,” I said again.

He lifted his head, his mouth lax and partly open, his eyes wide, filled already with other thoughts about his work. I didn’t finish. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t leave my friends. How I was finally getting a little cool in sixth-grade middle school and that I didn’t want to leave the beaches, swimming, and surfing. I wanted to yell at him, but I knew there was no use. Arguing with him was pointless when he sat that way, speaking slowly in his white lab coat, his eyes buzzing with curiosity and showing flashes of how his brain tick-tocked with all the important mysteries of the human body. I took my hands out from under my legs and began using my arms to swing, pushing off the counter next to me and splaying my feet wide.

He didn’t look up. I swung faster, not knowing what to do with his news until my right foot hit the cabinet under the counter so hard that
he startled and banged his nose against the eyepiece. “Ted,” he barked. “How many times do I have to tell you not to do that?”

I looked down at the white floor, sulking about having to leave my buddies and the heat—the smell of Coppertone still thick in my olfactory memory bank. I was unaware that moving would bring consequences far more complex than the trade-off of beaches for mountains, surfing for skiing, and suntan lotion for long johns.

• • •

It shouldn’t have surprised me that Eugene Ford was there when we landed in West Glacier, because it’s business as usual for me to talk to the park superintendent whenever I enter their arena. But for some reason, it felt absurd that I should meet him not two minutes after having my feet on Glacier Park’s soil. Moran introduced me to Ford and a Park Police officer, both looking stiff in standard gray-and-green Park Service garb. I already knew they called him Gene, even though in my fourteen years of service for the department, I’d never met him. In fact, Glacier was one of those parks that had the least amount of homicides of all the parks in the Northwest, so I’d only been needed on some small-time poaching issues early in my career, but his name loomed large in my family’s history. In those days, I’d caught earfuls from my mother on him—how he’d lied to the press and blamed my father for being careless, that it all could have been avoided with more careful camping habits.