Wild Montana

by Danica Winters

  “She lost the baby. She was on a mission in northern Washington. The guy she was after was a militia member. They were trying to talk him down and he went berserk—she took a hard hit. I’d told her that she shouldn’t go out there, that she shouldn’t put her life—and the baby’s—on the line. She wouldn’t listen.”

  “I’m so sorry, Casper.” She instantly regretted asking him to share. From the pinched look on his face, it was easy to see why he was always finding ways to avoid his past.

  “Don’t be sorry, Lex. I killed him. I killed the man,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “When I got to him, he didn’t even have a gun. He was defenseless...just like my baby had been. And I gunned him down.”

  “How did you...”

  “Stay out of jail?” he said, finishing her question. “The FBI kept my name out of the press and me out of trouble, saying it was in self-defense. But in truth I was pissed. I meant to kill him. He had bombed people, he killed my child—but in the end, I was no better than him.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  He nodded as his eyes welled with tears he fought to keep in check. “They told me I was a loose cannon—a liability. Truth is, I am. I can’t stand by and just let the people I care about get hurt.”

  “You didn’t let her get hurt. She made a choice and tragedy struck. You can’t carry that weight. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I can, Lex. I will carry that forever. I’m a monster.”

  “You’re not a monster, Casper. You took a bad man off the streets. It may have been against the law, or outside what the FBI wanted you to do, but sometimes there’s a gray area between what is right and what is legal.” She moved her hand into his, stroking his fingers like they were those of a child. “You did what you thought was right. From what you told me, I think you were justified.”

  “Justified or not, you need to stay away from me. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You have to focus on yourself. You don’t want me in your life. I only bring pain.”

  “Lucky for you, pain is something I’m used to,” she said, thinking back to her days when she’d lived with her biological parents. She could still see the crack pipes, stained with brown, on the only table in their house.

  No matter how strong he was, she saw him for what he really was—a broken man. With each other’s support and honesty, just maybe they could grow beyond their pasts.

  Chapter Nine

  The mobile home was tucked into the back of a park, out of sight from the road and hidden by a flurry of overgrown trees. If it hadn’t been for a small white arbor, complete with the drooping, tired heads of the last-of-summer flowers, Casper wouldn’t have noticed the house they were looking for.

  Getting out of the car, they made their way up to the small porch, the steps sagging with too much age and too little care.

  “Why don’t you wait back here? We don’t know what we’re going to find. This woman has a reputation that could make her dangerous.” He stopped himself from saying, and I don’t want you to get hurt.

  No doubt by now Lex had to know that he was always protective of the people he cared about, and the more time they spent together, the more he cared about her.

  Lex moved to speak but stopped and nodded, staying at the bottom of the steps. “Be careful.”

  Contented warmth spread through him, the kind that followed on the heels of realizing that someone cared and appreciated the way that he felt. Maybe there could be something more to what they had besides a simple friendship and passing work, but he hated to get his hopes up.

  He knocked, the sound echoing through the thin, flimsy door. A dog started to bark from inside the place, followed by the sounds of a woman yelling for it to shut up. There was the metallic clang like that of a recliner being put down and then the steady thump of footfalls.

  “Who in the hell is it? If you’re selling something, I have a gun and I ain’t afraid to use it,” the woman yelled, her voice hoarse and raspy like that of a longtime smoker.

  She threw open the door, letting it slam into the wall next to her. A small, mixed-breed dog that looked more like an overgrown ferret came running out and started to jump around Casper’s feet.

  He leaned down to pet the dog, and for a moment it was quiet as it sniffed him, and then it started its high-pitched bark again. The dog jumped on him, bumping his hand like it wanted to be pet, but it skittered away when he moved to touch it.

  “Burt, leave ’im alone,” the woman ordered, but the dog didn’t listen. Instead it continued its dance between wanting love and wanting to defend.

  The woman’s hair was pulled up into a clip, wild with little brushing and infrequent washing, and as she stepped toward him he could make out the strong odor of cigarettes mixed with the stench of poor hygiene. He had envisioned the woman to be tough, but she looked tough for all the wrong reasons. The expression “ridden hard and put away wet” came to mind.

  “Miss Trainer?”

  “Who’re you?”

  “My name is Casper Lawrence. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about a recent disappearance in Glacier National Park.”

  She frowned like she had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t know nothin’. Why’re you here? How did you find me?” She stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind her, blocking their view from whatever else lay inside. Her slew of questions made him wonder if she was the kind of woman who frequently had people looking for her.

  “Like I said, we just want to ask you a few questions,” he said. “Do you know of anyone who has gone missing in the last few weeks? A man?”

  She looked toward the dog that had run down the stairs to sniff at Lex. For a minute the animal was quiet. “I don’t know about no man and nothing about the park.”

  He nodded. “What do you know about the local motorcycle clubs?”

  Her body went stiff and her nostrils flared. “Look, if you don’t got no warrant, and I ain’t under arrest, I don’t gotta answer nothin’ about the Keepers.”

  “That’s true, Ms. Trainer, but the last thing we want to do is come back and bother you again. We were just hoping you could be helpful and we could be back on our way. However, if you don’t wish to help us, I’m sure that we could make a return visit—one that involves handcuffs. Don’t you think we could avoid all that? I just have a few little questions. Nothing that’s going to get you into any kind of trouble.”

  Ms. Trainer reached down and instinctively ran her hands over her wrists, like she was recounting the last time she’d been shackled. “I don’t have anything to do with the Keepers.”

  The mere fact that the woman called the MC by its shortened moniker made it clear that she was lying. Very few people had heard of the club, and even fewer knew it by that name.

  He took out his phone and pulled up the picture with her and Peter Kagger. “If that’s true, Ms. Trainer, then why are you in this picture with the secretary of the club—a man who currently sits in a Canadian prison for his implication in a series of crimes involving the MC?”

  She paled. “That...that was a long time ago.”

  He tapped on the date. “According to this, this picture was only taken a few months ago.” He looked toward Lex, who was scratching away behind the ears of the now-quiet dog. “Lex, do you think a few months is a long time?”

  She glanced up at him. “Well, Casper, it depends on what we are talking about. A few months isn’t long in terms of a lifetime, but it’s a long time if it’s hours spent in prison.”

  “You haven’t been in prison lately, have you, Ms. Trainer?” he asked, not even attempting to mask the implicit threat that lay just under the surface of his words.

  “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

  He waved her off. “Of course not. Lawyers only make things more complicated f
or both of us. When you lawyer up it’s hard to say how things will go, but I can guarantee that it wouldn’t be as friendly as it is right now. It’s my hope that you can make this easy—on both of us.”

  “Fine. I dated that guy. It wasn’t a major thing. When he came to town, we got together,” Ms. Trainer said, but from the way her eyes lit up as she spoke about the man, he could tell she wasn’t telling him the truth.

  “How often did he come to town?”

  “Well, he’s from Alberta. I guess I saw him a few times a month. When he could make it down.”

  “Why was he coming to the United States?”

  She clapped her hands, calling the dog, but the dog ignored her.

  “Ma’am?” he repeated, though he knew full well that she was just trying to think up some kind of convenient lie.

  “He came down to see me. It’s what people do in a relationship. Isn’t that right, Lex? Ain’t that what people do when they are dating?” she asked, motioning with her chin toward Casper.

  Lex jumped slightly at the sound of the woman saying her name, or maybe it was the question, he couldn’t be sure. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lex said, visibly taken aback at the woman’s assumption that they were dating.

  “You guys aren’t an item?” She gave him an assessing glance. “You know, you can fake a lot of things, but you can’t fake when you like someone. I see how you keep looking at her, Agent Lawrence.”

  He felt the warmth rush to his face, but tried to dispel it along with thoughts about how much he cared about Lex, and how she felt in his arms. He wasn’t here to talk about his relationship or be interrogated by the woman they had come to question. She was the one under observation, not them.

  “It’s hard not being around someone you care about—which makes me wonder why you and Peter weren’t together all the time.” He attempted to steer the conversation back to the task at hand. “Based on this photograph I would guess that this man was someone who you cared deeply about. Why else would you have stood beside him on the court steps?”

  Ms. Trainer studied her feet. “What does my relationship to Peter have to do with a missing person in the park?”

  He smiled at her admission that there was more between her and the man than she’d wanted to say. “We believe that the man who went missing was a member of the same MC as Peter. We were hoping that perhaps you could help us shine a little more light on his identity.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  Did that mean she knew the man whose remains currently resided at the Missoula Crime Lab?

  “We took a picture of his bike. I was hoping you could tell me whether or not it belongs to him.” He carefully sidestepped around the man’s name, hoping that she would inadvertently take the bait and supply them with the information they needed. He pulled up the picture of the bike as it was being loaded onto the flatbed.

  She sucked in a breath. “Son of a—”

  “Is this his bike?”

  She looked up at him with eyes wide with shock, and at their centers he was sure he saw the fires of anger. But why would she be angry at seeing the picture?

  “Sure, that’s Razor’s bike. Where’d you find it?”

  Razor? Was that the name of the man whose body they found? He needed more than the strange nickname to go on.

  “We found it at the trailhead where it was believed Razor started his hike into the park.”

  He carefully avoided telling her that the man he was asking about was likely dead—he didn’t want to create a situation that would raise alarm within the biker community any more than he was likely to already be doing. If they knew the man was dead, none of them would help their cause, but if they thought the man was simply missing, they were far more likely to aid in the investigation.

  “Do you know why he was hiking through the park?” Lex asked, stepping up onto the bottom stair. The dog was now in her arms and licking her face.

  “Burt likes you,” the woman said. “He don’t like nobody but me—couldn’t stand Peter. What did you do to him, feed him some uppers?”

  Lex laughed, and the soft sound nearly made Casper forget what they were doing. He loved that laugh, that simple sound that made his heart reawaken.

  “Wait—he did like Billy. One time he let him pick him up, but that was a couple of years ago,” Ms. Trainer continued.

  “Billy?” Lex asked with a confused look.

  “Razor,” the woman replied, but any softness she had shown when she looked at her dog was quickly replaced by an air of suspicion. “Who did you say you were?” she asked Lex.

  “My name is Alexis Finch. I’m a park ranger and I’m working with Agent Lawrence on this investigation.”

  “I thought you were just looking into a missing person’s case.” The woman glared at him like she was trying to weigh and measure him for truth.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Missing person’s case. We’re hoping that this investigation will take a happy turn and we can return Billy to his family.”

  The woman’s scowl deepened. “You say his family?”

  “Why yes, ma’am.” As he spoke he could feel the sand of her acceptance shifting under his feet.

  “You need to leave,” she said, charging down the steps and pulling the little dog out of Lex’s arms. “Don’t you be coming back. If you got something to ask, you can ask my lawyer.” She stomped up the steps, went inside and slammed the door behind her.

  He could hear the click of the lock as she slid it shut. The dog started barking again, but instead of wondering if the dog was defending her, he suddenly wondered if the dog was really begging for them to take him home.

  “Do you think the dog was named after Burt Reynolds?” she asked with a laugh.

  “He was just furry enough to be him. But definitely the ’70s version, not the current one,” he joked.

  He helped Lex into the car and took one look back at the vegetation-covered property before he got in and started to drive. He picked up his phone and dialed the medical examiner. After being handed off by a secretary, the medical examiner, Les Traver, answered.

  “How’s it going?” Casper asked as he steered the car back toward the park’s entrance. “Have you had a chance to go over that Glacier Park body case yet?”

  There was a rustle of fabric as Les must have moved the phone. “Actually, I was just going over the report. Interesting stuff.”

  “Did you find anything usable?” he asked, taking her hand. Her fingers were cold.

  “There was a small imperfection on the man’s right zygomatic arch. There was evidence of calcification, so he must have had some sort of injury to his cheek prior to his time of death.”

  Casper squeezed Lex’s fingers. Between the wound and what Lois Trainer had given them—now they would only have to track someone down who could give them the man’s full name and a positive ID.

  “Have you had any luck in identifying the man?” Casper asked.

  “We’ve started to look into dental records, but so far nothing has matched. You?”

  “I’m not sure, but we have a lead. We are thinking he went by an alias ‘Razor,’ first name Billy, possibly William. He was involved with a motorcycle club called Hells Keepers.”

  “Great.” Casper could hear Les scratching something on paper. “We can use that.”

  “If I find out more, or have a positive ID on this guy, I’ll let you know.”

  “’Preciate it,” Les said. “By the way, did you get a chance to really look at the remains?”

  “I was involved in the recovery, why?”

  “Did you look at the skull, particularly the left orbital cavity, near the sphenoid bone?”

  “His eye socket? What about it?”

  “Yes, his eye socket, near what
would have been his nose.” Les gave a light chuckle at Casper’s unscientific terminology. “Inside of it was a small hole.”

  He thought back to the grizzly prints that had littered the ground in and around the area where they had found the parts of the body. He had seen hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths and murder scenes, but Casper cringed at the thought of what this man’s last moments must have been like with a bear possibly breathing down his neck.

  “Is the hole consistent with an animal attack?”

  “Based on the margins, it’s clear that this was definitely a penetrating trauma of some sort, likely perimortem. At first, based on the coroner’s report and how he documented the scene, I believed it was consistent with the type of injury that you would find in a bear attack.”

  “But then?” Casper pushed.

  “When we looked closer, there were no other abrasions or marks on the bone—like what you would see caused by the animal’s incisors. I ordered a set of X-rays of the skull and foot, and we found something interesting.” Les paused. “We found what looks to be a fragmented bullet. Small caliber, in my humble opinion, something similar in size to that of a .22.”

  “Are you telling me that this guy didn’t die from a bear attack?” He felt the air seep from his body as he thought about all the things that this could mean.

  “Due to the amount of damage that was done to the brain by the round, I believe that it was the cause of death. However, I can’t rule out that this man was attacked. It just may not have been the final blow.”

  A wave of chills charged down his spine. This man may have had a horrific death—the kind of death that they made movies about. Casper glanced toward Lex, who was staring at him with a horrified look on her face, as though she could hear exactly what was being said.

  “Based on the fact that there was no exit wound, when this round penetrated the skull it didn’t enter at a high velocity.”

  “Which means—”

  “He didn’t shoot himself. There had to have been someone else who pulled the trigger.”