Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

  ‘So let’s eliminate Jim and Athena, at least for the time being.’

  ‘Have you written down Prairie Flower?’ Jake asked. ‘You told me that Radcliffe outed her as non-Native American. He destroyed her carefully constructed persona.’

  Even though I had a soft spot in my heart for Prairie Flower, I surprised myself by defending her. ‘Yes, but I think she’s so immersed in Native American culture that she truly believes she’s part of the Pueblo people. She has an aunt down in Taos, she told me.’ I glanced up. ‘Besides, it doesn’t seem to have hurt Prairie Flower’s business or her reputation, although I could be wrong about that. These are her peeps, after all.’

  ‘How about Randall Frazier?’ Jake asked.

  ‘He’s number three on my list. For motive, I wrote “Belittled research,” although that seems a wee bit thin, even to me.’

  ‘Add “pre-emptive strike,”’ Jake suggested. ‘I heard rumors that Radcliffe was planning to tag along on Frazier’s expedition to the lava tubes at Mount Saint Helens in August. Might have cramped his style to have Radcliffe hanging over his shoulder.’

  I rolled my eyes and added the note.

  ‘As much as I like her, I had to put Cecelia Cloughly on the list,’ I said, looking at the numeral 2 in front of the scientist’s name. ‘Radcliffe didn’t call Cecelia a fraud exactly but he implied that’s she’s lazy and likes to take credit for other people’s work. She’s pretty resilient but I imagine everyone has their limits.’

  Jake nodded in agreement. ‘How about Gregory Gilchrist?’ he asked.

  ‘Gilchrist? Why?’

  ‘Jealousy would be my guess. His girlfriend was flirting outrageously with Radcliffe at the opening reception. After Radcliffe’s presentation they wandered off to the bar together. I saw them there, heads together.’

  ‘Nicole Baker,’ I said, putting Gilchrist’s name at number five on the list. ‘I met her at the reception just before Radcliffe’s presentation. He was complaining about the woman, said she was angling for a job. Wished she would get lost.’

  ‘Perhaps Nicole decided to go the casting couch route and Radcliffe bought into it,’ Jake said. ‘He seemed to be plying her with martinis.’

  I looked up. ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Exactly. If there was any hanky-panky, Gilchrist is unlikely to have approved.’

  ‘Or,’ I said, as a thought suddenly occurred to me, ‘maybe Gilchrist was pissed off because Martin refused to give his honey a job?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘Gilchrist could buy Radcliffe’s show ten times over. Hell, he could afford to buy the whole network. Anyone else on your shortlist?’ Jake wanted to know.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I said, glancing up from my scribbling. ‘How about the no-show? Homer Guthrie? Who better to impersonate Bigfoot than someone who actually looks like Bigfoot? You saw Homer’s pictures, right?’

  ‘I’m ahead of you there, Hannah. Checked with my sources down in New Mexico and Guthrie is exactly where he said he was – Lovelace Rehabilitation Hospital in Albuquerque. After the hip replacement he’s re-learning to walk. Poor man’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘The only one left is Monique Deschamps, but it seems to me that her gripe would be against that guy from the US Department of the Interior and not Radcliffe.’ I folded the oblong of paper into quarters and tucked it into my handbag. ‘Not that it matters, I suppose. The conference is over tomorrow lunchtime. We’re all leaving. By Sunday night I’ll be home in Annapolis, you and Harley will be back in Minneapolis and everyone on our shortlist will be scattered to all points of the compass.’

  ‘The local authorities know what they’re doing,’ Jake reassured me. ‘They have a ninety-percent solve rate. I’m in touch. After everyone leaves, I’ll keep you informed.’

  TWENTY

  Damascas, New York, 1877. ‘Two citizens while looking for a lost cow in a swamp in this township came upon a bareheaded, ragged and bare-footed man, with short-cropped gray hair and a beard. He ran away when discovered, but was captured after a long chase. It was evident that he had been in the forest for some time. He talked wildly, in a language that no one in the neighborhood understood. He was finally taken to the county seat and placed in jail. There it was found his strange language was French.’

  The Evening Gazette (Port Jervis, NY), November 20, 1879

  I’d been looking forward to ‘Sasquatch Speaks: Sierra Sounds’ ever since I’d read about it in the program booklet, so I arrived at the conference room a bit early. After having played hooky for most of the morning, I was pleased to see that Brad Johnson had made an appearance and that he apparently planned to tape the session. I waited quietly at the back of the room until he’d finished installing a fresh battery pack and had lowered his camera to the carpet before approaching, eager to ask him a few questions.

  ‘How are you doing, Brad?’ I asked. Of all the people attending the conference, Brad had to have been the one who knew Martin best. Even if he did seem to be after his former mentor’s job, Radcliffe’s death must still be taking an emotional toll.

  Sure enough, Brad’s face looked drawn and solemn. ‘Thought about hanging it all up after Martin, uh, you know, but until they find out what happened to him, this is all part of the story, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  As I watched Brad check out his equipment, I wondered if it were common knowledge that no bear had been involved in Martin’s death – that he’d probably been murdered by somebody we all knew. I decided to test the water. ‘What do you think happened, Brad?’

  He swiped an unruly lock of dark hair away from his eyes. ‘It wasn’t Sasquatch, that’s for sure.’ He wrinkled his nose as if the very notion stank. ‘And I’m betting it wasn’t a bear, either. That leaves some joker in a monkey suit.’

  ‘Have you studied Jim’s tape?’ I asked.

  Brad ignored my question. ‘It’s tough, you know. Really tough. Martin wasn’t just my mentor; he was my friend.’

  I remembered Carole saying that Brad had graduated from NYU film school, so I wondered if they’d met in New York, and asked him.

  ‘Nah. LA. Where else? LA is where it’s happening. I had an internship at Fox during my junior year.’

  ‘I hope it was better than some internships where they have you answering phones and schlepping coffee,’ I said.

  Brad shouldered his camera. ‘It was super, actually. They had me building and editing marketing presentations. I even had a brief stint working on a promo for The Simpsons.’

  ‘Was Martin working for Fox, too?’

  ‘Met him at a party in Brentwood. He was in the area, chasing down a Bigfoot sighting near Sherman Lake. He invited me to come along. I’ve been hooked ever since.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  The voice belonged to a pleasant-looking young man dressed in a white turtleneck jersey tucked into a slim pair of jeans. Embroidered boats sailed around his belted waist. ‘I’m guessing from the Ask Me ribbon that you’re the one in charge of the setup?’

  Larry Mack, the linguist.

  ‘For my sins,’ I said with a smile. ‘How can I help?’

  He reached into the briefcase he was carrying and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘I’ve got this handout but my plane was late so I didn’t have time to get it photocopied. Can you take care of that for me?’

  As much as I wanted to keep grilling Brad, I found myself saying, ‘Sure, no problem,’ and dashing off to the business center with his handout. I studied its contents as the copies shot out into the paper tray: The Sasquatch Phoenic Alphabet, by R. Scott Nelson, US Navy Crypto-Linguist. In addition to the standard letters and phonemes, Nelson had developed symbols for grunts, whistles, screams, snarls and tooth pops. Fascinating. I couldn’t wait for the print job to finish so I could get back to the session.

  Larry Mack had already started when I arrived so I slipped into the back row, taking a seat next to Leah Solat. I tucked the printouts under my chair.

  What drifted out of the speakers over
the next several minutes was a spooky combination of barks, howls and clicks that sent icy fingers scurrying along my spine. Coyotes baying at the moon, perhaps? Wolves having bad sex? Or was it Wookie-speak, the eerie blend of moans, grunts, ughs, arghs and even purring I associated with Chewbacca vocalizations in the Star Wars films? I’d read that Chewbacca’s voice had been engineered by a student at USC from raw recordings of four bears, a badger, a lion, a seal and a walrus. Is that what was going on here, too? It was downright weird.

  ‘I’d squatch my pants if I heard that in the woods,’ Leah whispered to me in an aside.

  I had to agree. I felt as if I’d stepped into the Twilight Zone.

  At various points the vocalizations would cease and there would be the sound of hollow knocking.

  Next to me, Leah cocked her head, listening carefully. ‘Sounds like a major league slugger taking practice swings at a tree.’

  Thinking about the branch that had likely killed Martin, I shivered.

  Further along on the tape, whatever lurked in the woods began banging rocks together.

  ‘Sasquatch speaks twice as rapidly as humans,’ Mack explained, ‘so we had to slow the tape down by fifty percent in order to transcribe their vocalizations. For translation purposes, we use something called the Unclassified Hominid Phonetic Alphabet invented by R. Scott Nelson. We’ll have handouts for you after the program.’

  ‘You, too, can speak Squatch,’ Leah muttered.

  On the dais, Larry was saying, ‘There is no grammar and no syntax that we know of, but we hope that by applying some transcription standards it will help you report Sasquatch vocalizations with some consistency.

  ‘You’ve heard excerpts from the tapes,’ he continued, ‘so now let’s see what some of the vocalizations look like.’

  He aimed the remote and the screen became densely filled with seemingly meaningless arrangements of letters, reminding me a bit of the DNA profiles we’d seen a day earlier during Cecelia’s presentation.

  NÄR LÄ

  Ü KÜ DZJÄ

  SÏ DZJAÖ GLÖ PÜ MËKH

  RAM HO BÄ RÜ KHÄ HÜ

  FÄ LIP ÄBÄSI ZIS

  ‘What do those dots over the letters mean?’ someone in the audience wanted to know.

  ‘If you follow along,’ Mack said, highlighting letters on the screen with the red dot from his laser pointer, ‘they’re the classic vowel sounds. Ah, eh, ee, oh, oo,’ he drawled.

  To me, it sounded like the chromatic vocal warm-up exercises our choir director put us through before services every Sunday morning. All that was missing here was the earnest but tonally-challenged guy in the tenor section.

  With the transcription still up on the screen, Mack drove home his point by playing the matching audio clip over and over three times.

  I inclined my head toward Leah and whispered, ‘If he plays the tape backward will Paul McCartney still be alive?’

  Her elbow bumped mine. ‘And you accuse me of having no respect,’ she hissed.

  ‘But, what on earth are they saying?’ someone in the front row wanted to know.

  Mack shrugged. ‘Nobody knows. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, then. What’s the point?’

  ‘We know that whales and dolphins communicate with one another,’ Larry Mack said easily, ‘but we don’t know what they’re saying either.’

  As the question and answer session segued into a discussion of humpback whale songs, I noticed that Leah Solat’s thumbs were flying, actively live tweeting back to a colleague at the Bee.

  ‘I thought you’d already filed your story,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Story’s written. Just filling in some last-minute details.’

  ‘Are you going home, then?’

  Leah’s fingers froze. ‘Gosh, no. They’ve asked me to stay and cover the Radcliffe murder investigation. He’d done some filming around our region. Locals knew him.’ She paused and skewered me with her eyes. ‘What do you know about what’s going on?’

  I tried my wide-eyed, innocent look but it wasn’t fooling her.

  ‘You can be honest with me, Hannah. I know you were with Jake when he found Radcliffe’s body. Everybody saw you two down there,’ she paused. ‘Until Jake covered up the camera. Nice jacket, by the way.’

  When I didn’t rise to the bait, she said, ‘My bet? It was a bear. There are cubs around this time of year. Females are fiercely protective of their young.’

  Remembering my conversation with Jake the day before, I said, ‘Do bears pick up branches and use them as weapons?’

  ‘No shit,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t hear it from me.’

  After the session I tracked Brad down as he was packing up his gear. ‘Ü KÜ DZJÄ,’ I said.

  ‘I think you just asked me to marry you,’ he said with a grin.

  Brad was heading for the next session – Monique’s talk about Zana. I was going there, too, so I got into step beside him.

  ‘I’m curious about something, Brad.’

  He brushed his forelock aside and glanced at me sideways through long, dark lashes. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How come you weren’t with Martin yesterday morning? You’d been following him so closely all weekend.’

  Brad shrugged. ‘He told me to get lost. Said he had an errand to run in Sisters. Something to do with a house he and his wife were buying in the Hollywood Hills. Promised he’d catch up with me later.’

  ‘So what did you do instead?’

  ‘Ate another donut, then went up to my room to edit some of the footage I’d recorded. I’m working on a proposal for NatGeo and I want to show them what I can do.’

  ‘Is your special for Don’t You Believe It! still on track?’ I asked, thinking about the conversation that Jake and I had overheard on the patio. ‘After Martin … well, you know, I sorta wondered.’

  ‘I have lots of irons in the fire, Mrs Ives. It sounds crass to say it but Martin’s death opens up lots of opportunities for someone. Why not me?’

  ‘You’ve come a long way in the last few years,’ I said. I stopped then turned to look at him directly as a thought suddenly occurred to me. ‘Say, when you were interning at Fox did you ever work on Planet of the Apes?’

  ‘Ha! I wish. I got to see some post-production on The Bachelorette, though.’ He winked. ‘For my sins.’

  I laughed. ‘Funny, I missed that one.’

  We’d reached the door of the conference room where Monique Deschamps was scheduled to give her talk about Zana in ten minutes. ‘I know you have work to do, Brad, but you knew Martin better than anyone. What do you think he was doing down in the woods yesterday morning?’

  Brad grinned. ‘Easy. Staking out Jim Davis’s camera. He didn’t trust the guy.’

  ‘You think Jim and Athena Davis would perpetrate a hoax?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  It had always been hard for me to picture mild-mannered, slightly henpecked Jim as a murderer and Athena as his Lady Macbeth, both with blood on their hands, but I was curious as to what Brad thought about them. ‘Hardly,’ I told him. ‘Think about it. If the cops seize your tape and you put a copy up on YouTube for free …’

  Brad’s pitying look cut me off in mid-sentence. I was clearly the dumbest broad in all of Deschutes County. ‘Wrong, Mrs Ives. It’s the ticket, the absolute ticket. The vid goes viral. National news, slots on Ellen and Kathie Lee. Speakers fees at conferences like this.’ He jabbed an index finger in the air just short of my chest. ‘Book deals. That’s where the money is. If you manage to capture a Bigfoot, agents will beat down your door in order to wave contracts in your face.’

  ‘If Squatch is real,’ I said.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Or appears to be.’

  ‘Too bad he’s lying low,’ I said, watching Brad’s face closely.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Squatch, of course.’ I made a production of checking my watch. ‘By tomorrow at this time we’ll all be gone. Sasquatch can have the woods back to himself.’ Then it was my turn t
o wag a finger. ‘But you’re a disciple of the great Martin Radcliffe so you know and I know that it’s all a big steaming pile of horse pucky.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tkhina, Ochamchiri District of Abkhazia, Russia, 1890. ‘Russia’s domesticated ape woman, Zana, was laid to rest today near this village … Hunters captured her in the wild, whereupon she was sold, changed hands several times and eventually became the property of a nobleman … Her skin was black, or dark grey, and her whole body covered with reddish-black hair. The hair on her head was tousled and thick, hanging mane-like down her back. Her face was terrifying; broad, with high cheekbones, flat nose, turned-out nostrils, muzzle-like jaws, wide mouth with large teeth, low forehead, and eyes of a reddish tinge’ … Zana was trained to perform simple domestic chores and became pregnant several times by various men. Remarkably, she gave birth to normal human babies, four of whom survived to adulthood.’

  Obituary cited by Dmitri Bayanov. In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Crypto-Logos Publisher, Moscow, 1996, pp. 46–52

  I desperately wanted to talk to Cecelia Cloughly about the Netflix video. I also intended to quiz her, wearing her scientist’s hat, about the Jim Davis tape. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Brad Johnson had, perhaps unintentionally, put his finger on the crux of the matter. As far as Jim and Athena Davis were concerned, it didn’t matter whether the Bigfoot they had filmed was real or not. But for Martin (and now Brad) the big bucks lay only in proving it was a hoax.

  Someone had murdered Martin, I thought, but it wasn’t Bigfoot. Bigfoot, if he existed, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I followed Brad into Monique’s session, ‘Zana: The Last Neanderthal?’ and took my usual seat at the back of the room where I could see Cecelia if she came in. She didn’t disappoint. About two minutes before the session was to begin, the professor wandered by the end of my row, scanning the crowded room for a vacant chair. I hissed for attention, waved and motioned her into the one next to me.

  ‘Can we chat for a bit afterwards?’ I asked as she settled into her seat.