by Neil Mcmahon
The afternoon was deepening toward evening as I drove back toward Canyon Ferry Lake. Houses became sparser and traffic disappeared. My truck had been over those roads so many times it practically handled itself, like an old horse heading for the barn. I let it do the work; I had plenty to think about.
Not surprisingly, Renee clung to the belief that her father was innocent of Astrid's murder. The job she had in mind for me was tied to that, and was far more intriguing than just cleaning up the rodent superfund.
It centered on the photos of Astrid. Renee had made the realization that originally, there must have been a lot more of them. Only a few of the fragments that she'd found fit together; when she laid them out on the table, they were like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. She'd gone back and looked through desks and bookshelves and everyplace else accessible, and even raked carefully through the rat debris-that was why she'd cleared the pathways I'd seen-but still came up far short of the total.
She suspected that the rest of them might be stashed someplace she hadn't been able to get to-maybe inside a wall or floor cavity. The rats had found them, chewed them up like everything else, and dropped scraps around haphazardly. She wanted to find the missing fragments in the hope that they might contain some detail, like handwriting or other marks, that would lead to information about Astrid's murderer-and that this, in turn, would help to vindicate Professor Callister.
So Renee had asked me to tear into the carriage house structure, in search of the missing photos.
Several questions hung unanswered. There was no hint as to who the photographer was, but Renee was convinced that it couldn't have been her father. He'd had no interest in that sort of thing-never had so much as a Playboy magazine lying around. He'd have found salacious photos of his wife offensive, especially after her death.
Then what were they doing in his study? One far-fetched possibility was that they comprised evidence relating to the real murderer's identity, and for some reason he'd held off revealing it-then had been incapacitated by his strokes.
Another scenario that occurred to me was even less likely but more disturbing. I didn't mention it to Renee. Sex killers often kept souvenirs, usually objects with some intimate connection to the victim. They would handle these or otherwise use them to heighten their pleasure in reliving the crimes. During my years as a newspaper reporter in California, I'd become well aware of such instances, and difficult though it was to imagine Professor Callister like that, they'd included outwardly normal, pleasant men who harbored hidden evil sides.
When I added it all up, my take was that even if I could find more photos, the odds of that helping Professor Callister's cause seemed slim-if anything, the opposite was more likely. Renee was realistic enough to recognize that; while she hadn't exactly said so, it was why she wanted to keep this secret.
Still, I'd agreed to start the job tomorrow morning. I was uneasy about it, for fear that her hopes would get crushed for good. But she was willing to take that risk, and the decision was hers to make.
I turned off the highway at Stumpleg Gulch and drove the final two miles up the gravel road to my place. The forest closed in thicker as the elevation rose, with the road narrowing to a track that petered out in the mountains just beyond there. Grainy snow crunched under my boots as I walked to my cabin, keeping a wary eye out for the bobcat, with the pistol in my hand. I felt a little silly, but I was glad to have it.
The fire in my stove had died, leaving the cabin with the peculiar kind of chill that could make a building seem colder than outside. I rekindled it, poured a splash of Old Taylor, and opened a beer chaser.
I'd been living in California when Astrid was killed, but I had followed the story as well as I could. Not many specifics were released; the era was arriving when everybody was so gun-shy about potential lawsuits and mistrials that authorities stayed tight-lipped.
I recalled that she and her lover had been trysting in a cabin she owned up in Phosphor County, roughly sixty miles northward of here. They'd both been shot at close range.
There'd been a backdrop of bitter political controversy, involving an outfit called the Dodd Mining Company starting operations in the area. Most of the local residents were thrilled at this infusion of lifeblood to their stagnant economy.
But opposition had also been fierce-and Astrid, a fervent environmentalist, had spearheaded it.
Of course, there was suspicion that she'd been murdered out of hatred over that, or to get her out of the way, but nothing along those lines was ever established. Ironically, though, the company abandoned the project soon afterward, and the Dodd Silver Mine became known as the Dead Silver Mine, or just Dead Silver.
I was feeling restless, like my place was uncomfortably small. Maybe it was because of my somber line of thought. I got the pistol and walked outside into the last of the twilight. Except for the always restless treetops and the barking of a distant neighbor's dog anxious for dinner, this was about as quiet as a place could get. The air was damp, sharp, and laced with the fine piney smell of smoke from my stove. I could just see the lights of Helena, a bright cluster that thinned out to pinpoints over the surrounding miles of ranch land and forest.
As a journalist in California, I'd gotten almost inured to brutal crime. But here on my own turf, it felt much closer.
I'd known Astrid from a distance when we were growing up. She was a year older than me, and I was a relatively invisible kid; my contact with her hadn't ever gone beyond an awkward smile and "hi." But I'd been far more aware of her than that, and so had pretty much everybody else.
For openers, she was a very attractive blond-not a Barbie type, but athletic, vibrant, and a track star and straight-A student besides. She loved attention and she brimmed with self-confidence. There didn't seem to be any question in her mind that if she wanted something, she should get it, and if she decided something, she was right. Besides her looks and talents, she came from a prominent ranching family, the Seiberts. Modern Montana and feudal Europe might have been separated by hundreds of years, thousands of miles, and a vast gulf of technology, but they had one thing in common-big landowners tended to be aristocrats, and vice versa.
According to the teenage grapevine, Astrid had brought the same attitude to romance. If she liked a boy, she didn't hesitate to let him know it in the most time-honored and convincing way. But she'd be equally quick to dump him and move on to the next one who caught her fancy. By the end of high school, she had already junked a string of young hearts and left them abandoned along the road.
Clearly, getting married hadn't ended her amorous penchant. She'd been trysting with a lover at the time of her death-a powerful motive for murder, at the hands of a jealous husband. Physically, Professor Callister was capable of the crime; he'd been a hardy woodsman and hunter.
Back inside, I poured another drink, then picked up the phone and called Madbird. I'd told Renee I wanted to bring him in on this, if he was willing-that his experience and way of thinking would bring insights I'd never see on my own, and that I trusted him more than I did myself-and she was fine with it.
When he answered, his gravelly voice had an edge that startled me. He was always a little gruff, but not like this.
"I was going to run something by you, but maybe this isn't a good time," I said.
"It ain't you-I'm just pissed off. Me and Hannah"-his longtime live-in girlfriend-"got some stuff to give Darcy for her new apartment, and she was supposed to come by and decide what she wants. We drug it all out and cleaned it up, and she never fucking showed or called."
"Ouch."
"I should of known better. She's pulled shit like this before."
It sounded like the cumulative strain of worry and annoyance was getting to Madbird, and that didn't happen easily.
"So I'm glad for a excuse to quit thinking about it," he said. "What's going on?"
I gave him a quick description of the chaos in Renee's carriage house.
"Pack rats, hey?" he said, with
his tone back toward normal. "I had a old Ford Bronco a while back. One night, three o'clock in the morning, my dogs start going apeshit. I look out the window, the rig's on fire. Turns out one of them fucking rats chewed up the wiring harness. Melted the dashboard out."
"I wish they'd done the same thing to that carriage house," I said. "This job's going to be ugly, and I'm not asking you to work on it-I'd just appreciate you thinking about what I told you. Let me know if you have any notions."
"Right off, the way it sounds, I wouldn't bet you're going to do any good," he said.
"I hear you."
"I remember them murders. Ten, twelve years ago?"
"Right around then."
"I suppose you ain't doing it for the money."
I'd been thinking about my reasons, enumerating them. I was drawn to Renee and wanted to help her through this trouble. I'd respected her father, and I'd even admired Astrid for her brash allure. The damage they'd all suffered made my heart ache. And I was pissed that someone might have gotten away with the crime. I knew it was naive to imagine I could make a difference, but as long as I admitted that, I felt free to try.
"It comes with a story," I said, and gave him another quick rundown-this time about the photos.
Roughly ten seconds passed in silence.
"Well, Sunday morning, I can't show up too early," Madbird finally warned. "I got to go be a altar boy."
"Huh. I thought you'd moved on to hearing confessions."
"Only from women. I got a special clientele. That's in the afternoon, so I'm gonna have to take off early, too."
"A lot of people would be surprised to find out you're so devoted to caring for lost souls."
"Hey, call me Mother Mag-dah-kee." That was his real, Indian name. It meant "bird of prey."
I smiled. "I'll see you when I see you."
7
I was left with a Saturday evening to kill. Earlier today, I'd figured I'd grab some dinner downtown, but after I left Renee's it had slipped my mind. I foraged through the refrigerator and found the chunk that was left of the weekly pot roast. I usually cooked one every Sunday and lived on it for lunch sandwiches, chili, stew, and other spinoffs. This one came from an elk Madbird had shot last fall, and was about as good as meat could get. I decided to make my own style of Stroganoff. I stirred a splash of red wine, a lot of garlic, and dashes of this and that into the oniony drippings, and put the pan on the stove to warm. With sour cream added at the last, poured over sourdough toast, it would be redneck gourmet.
Then I turned on the computer I'd bought myself last Christmas-my major concession, to date, to the twenty-first century. I'd learned basic skills during my journalism stint, but I'd phased out of that a decade ago, and I had a lot of catching up to do. It was a no-frills Compaq desktop, but at first I'd felt like a Neanderthal piloting an F-16, and I still spent a fair amount of time trying to extricate myself from blunders I didn't have a clue how I'd made. But by now I could get around reasonably well on the Internet, which was my main interest. It wasn't much of a substitute for a warm and breathing companion, but an agreeable time-passer for a solitary night, and it spurred me to dig into matters I was curious about but otherwise wouldn't take the time to pursue.
I spent the next couple of hours, with a break to savor my elk concoction, trying to refresh my memory about Astrid Callister's murder. I didn't really learn anything new. The online archives of Montana newspapers didn't go back that far, and I wasn't able to find much on the national archiving services I tried. There were a few breaking stories on the crime itself, but nothing about the follow-up investigation. I decided I'd stop by the Independent Record when I got a chance; probably they'd have their older records on microfiche.
I'd fallen into that near-trance state of being like a lab animal trained to press a bar for a pellet of food or a jolt of pleasure to the brain. I kept clicking my finger, dancing the arrow across the screen, hoping for my own little reward in the form of a morsel of intriguing information.
Then, on a whim I hadn't even realized was in my head, I typed the name Seth Fraker into the search window.
About four hundred entries turned up, fewer than I'd expected. Most involved minutes of the current legislative session or other business where his name was attached in some perfunctory way. He was also mentioned in political websites, occasional news articles, and a few blogs, although he didn't seem to generate much interest with those. There were a couple of photos and snippets of personal information. His looks defined the term "clean-cut." He enjoyed wholesome sports like skiing and boating, and had played on the golf team at Arizona State. He believed piously in God, his country, and, of course, family values.
The single factor that at first seemed to stand out was his claim to be a moderate in a Republican party that generally leaned far to the right. But even that started looking like just a way to play it safe. I didn't see any record of him taking a strong stand on any controversial issue, or even speaking out. In a couple of instances when he was pinned down by questions from the press, he'd hedged, saying that he was still giving the matter serious thought. But his voting record was straight party line.
None of that was surprising or interesting, and my brain and vision were dulling toward slumber. But my robotic finger kept clicking the mouse, and after a few more pages, I caught an entry that opened my eyes again.
It was in French, apparently from a newspaper on St. Martin, in the Caribbean. The heading read only Le St. Martin Courrier, and was dated way back in February 1997.
Tragique noyade accidentelle au Lagon Blanc… La victime se baignait toute seule le soir et a disparu…malgre l'insistence de son ami M. Seth Fraker qu'il a fait tout effort pour la sauver…
I'd studied French through high school and some in college; my grasp of it had never been anything to brag on, and like most of my other formal education, had suffered with the passage of time. But I got the gist.
A woman had drowned in a tragic accident, while swimming alone at night in White Lagoon. A man named Seth Fraker had tried to save her.
My first hit was that this was unrelated to the Seth Fraker I was checking out-that it referred to another guy who happened to have the same name.
Still, I opened the file.
The Courrier was a small weekly that billed itself as "The Voice of French St. Martin." It had a semi-tabloid presentation, with graphics that tended toward garish and catchy headlines, the lowdown that you wouldn't find in the mainstream press. In fact, most of it consisted of ads; the news was limited to a roundup of a dozen items from the previous week, none much over a hundred words. The drowning story was one of those, and, at least via my clumsy translation, as tame as hand creme.
Guests had been staying at a seaside villa. Late in the evening, they'd noticed that a young woman, one Lydia Korzina, had slipped away. They found her clothes on the beach. Seth Fraker had swum into the night-bound lagoon and searched for her until police arrived. Her body was recovered next morning. She wasn't a St. Martin resident-it was thought that she was originally from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Authorities were trying to locate her family.
That was all.
I clicked on the link to the newspaper's website to see if there was a follow-up story, but got a "can't be displayed" message. The same thing happened when I tried a general search. At a guess, Le St. Martin Courrier was defunct. I took a stab at penetrating the archives of the island's major paper, the English language Daily Herald, but the names Seth Fraker and Lydia Korzina turned up nothing. I drew another blank going through the remaining entries on Fraker. Maybe there was information in there, but I wasn't the guy to find it.
But why would there be? If it even was the same Seth Fraker, he had simply happened to be present when a sad accident occurred, long ago and far away. There was no hint of scandal; his political opponents surely would have brought that to light.
Although one bit of nuanced phrasing, in such a brief account, struck me as a little odd-Fraker "insisting" that
he'd made every effort to save her.
As if maybe there'd been a suggestion otherwise.
8
Madbird pushed my old worm-drive Skilsaw horizontally across a plaster wall in the Callisters' carriage house, with a sound like a freight train braking hard along a mile of rusty track. Sparks flew out in sprays when the blade hit lath nails, and clouds of stifling white dust billowed forth, hanging in the air like they had a half-life. I followed along behind him, digging my hammer claw into the plaster and ripping out chunks.
By now, it was early Sunday afternoon. We'd already checked the obvious places where the photos might be hidden, then sifted through the toxic Zonolite insulation in the attic. Next came the walls. Since it was impossible to guess where somebody might have eased a piece of siding loose and slipped something inside, we'd decided to open them up-carve channels that later could be filled with drywall, taped, and textured to match the plaster. There was an additional benefit: The ancient knob-and-tube wiring was a fire hazard, and this would clear pathways for rewiring.
Besides the main room that the Professor had converted into his study, there was also a small bathroom and an unimproved back area. The rats hadn't left a square inch of it untouched. Cleaning up the mess just so we could walk around, every bit the ugly job I'd warned Madbird about, took us half the morning. We'd managed to tear up the sodden carpet and drag it into the yard, then mucked out the rest with shovels. A couple of armchairs and a small couch were far beyond saving, so they'd gone, too. The resulting heap of trash would damn near have filled a Dumpster.
I'd never dealt much with pack rats before. Between my tomcat and predators like a resident badger family, my premises stayed pretty clear of varmints. But I knew other people besides Madbird who'd had run-ins with them, and as often as not come out second best.
