Martha had asked how he was sure that Harold wasn’t the floater. He’d said two reasons. One, Harold was six feet one, give or take, according to the records forwarded from her own department. The medical examiner’s best guesstimate was that the John Doe was at least two inches taller than that, unless he had a squashed head, “like a shriveled pumpkin or something.” The other thing, Cashell told Martha, was that the floater’s skin didn’t contain much pigment.
“He’s an albino?” Sean asked.
Martha shook her head. “No, but close. Albinism is a spectrum. Cashell said the dead guy’s skin had melanin, just not a lot of it. The clinical term is ‘leucistic.’ It was a detail they were keeping under their hats to separate out the crazies who would claim responsibility.”
“Have you had any? Crazies?”
“What I’m trying to tell you, if you’d quit interrupting, is that Harold has become a person of particular interest in this crime. Right now it’s a suspicious death, but it’s going to elevate to a murder investigation, pending the autopsy report.”
Martha remembered how Cashell, in talking about Harold, had begun his finger countdown. Along with his son, Harold was the last person known to have been on the river after its closure. That was one finger. He was deliberately in pursuit of someone who could be dangerous. That was the second finger. Harold was armed with a rifle, finger number three. The fourth finger pointing to his possible, if not probable, involvement was proximity. His canoe had been found no more than two hundred yards below the John Doe.
Martha stopped stirring feathers and raised her eyes to Sean’s, then tapped her fingers the way Cashell had, adding up the circumstantial evidence.
“He doesn’t believe in coincidence any more than I do,” she said.
Martha had told Cashell that under no circumstances could she imagine Harold killing anyone without provocation. Not to mention cutting a man’s head off. A justifiable shooting in self-defense, that was another matter.
“We’ll find him,” Cashell had replied. “Dead or alive, we’ll find him. And if I had to put money on it, I’d say dead.”
“What do you mean by that?” Martha had asked. “You don’t even know if it was Harold’s DNA on the bullet.”
“I was there and you weren’t. It’s hard to believe that a person could make it through the canyon alive under those water conditions. With or without taking a bullet. That’s what I mean.”
Silence fell across the fly-tying table, stretching into the corners of the room.
“He’s right, you know,” she said in a voice that was barely audible.
Sean had to agree. The simplest and most likely reason that Harold and Marcus had disappeared was that they had drowned, their bodies wedged between boulders or caught in submerged tree roots. They would surface eventually, just as Harold’s canoe had, just as the man with the hole in his chest had. And Marcus’s canoe would surface sooner or later, as well.
“You said the floater was six-four?” Sean asked.
“Why is that important?”
“Harold said the scarecrow maker was probably tall.”
“You think it’s him?”
“I think it’s possible, and you’re going to get mad again, because I forgot to tell you something.” He told her about the photograph Harold had showed him, the one under glass at the homestead, and the evidence suggesting that someone had been living there.
“Harold thought it was the scarecrow guy. It makes sense, Martha. Maybe Harold caught up to him. His plan was to stake it out another night.”
“What if he did?”
“Think about it. Both the body and Harold’s canoe were found way downriver. At least sixteen, seventeen miles. They could have been traveling together.”
Martha worked her chin with her fingers.
“That’s a stretch.”
“You’re right. It is. Was there a search? For Harold, I mean.”
“Such as it was. The water was too colored to see anything that was under the surface. They did get a jet sled in there from a private access. They got clothing samples and had a search dog go up and down the banks.”
“Who was the handler?”
“Katie Sparrow.” They had both worked with her before.
“She find anything?”
“Her dog gave an alert at Canyon Depth Camp. But that’s where Trueblood got bit, so it doesn’t mean anything. And at Sunset Cliff.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, either,” Sean said. “We all stopped there to eat after getting him into the chopper.”
“I think there was another hit downriver. Hawk’s Foot? Something Foot. It’s up from Table Rock, not too far, I think. And maybe a couple more nearby. But you can ask her yourself if you want to. It’s as good a place to start as any.”
With that, she placed a manila envelope on Sean’s fly-tying table.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thunder and Lightning
After Martha’s steps faded, Sean turned his attention to the sheet of paper in the envelope. It was identical to others he’d signed that stipulated the terms of his employment for the Hyalite County Sheriff’s Department. The inherent contradiction of the phrase “independent, cooperative investigative services” brought a thin line of irony to his lips. Sean had worked for the department on several occasions, and though it paid barely half his day rate, traveling expenses were covered, and to a certain degree it meant the county had his back. The fact was he’d have looked for Harold regardless of financial remuneration. Or, for that matter, any measure of safety or cooperation a piece of paper might grant him.
Sean scanned and printed out two copies of the contract, buttoned one into his pocket, filed one in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk behind a fifth of the Famous Grouse, and locked the original in his safe. He turned his attention to the fly in his tying vise, an Atlantic salmon pattern called the Usual Suspect. He looked critically at it, then dabbed lacquer to freeze the thread on the head and let it air-dry while he packed his Land Cruiser for a trip of indeterminate duration and, as yet, unknown destination. All he knew was his first stop. An hour after tucking the fly into his breast pocket, he idled his Land Cruiser down a steep grade on the right bank of the Madison River, some four miles below its confluence with the West Fork.
The cabin was tucked into an alcove of aspens whose leaves reminded Sean of money fluttering after a safe was blown, though he’d never seen money fluttering, nor, for that matter, a safe being blown.
Choti bound out the door of the Land Cruiser to greet the dapper-looking man who’d stepped onto the porch. The man was wearing a grass Stetson with a Mississippi gambler’s brim and a rattlesnake skin hat band complete with head and rattles. He squatted down to greet the dog, then straightened, shaking his head.
“Every time you darken our door,” he said, “I start wondering how to spend the money I’ll take from you at the table.”
“But we don’t play for money, Ken.”
It was a fact. The members of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, a loose-knit group of anglers that included several of the most heralded fly tiers in the world, played poker for exquisitely tied flies, some worth hundreds of dollars.
“You make my point for me,” the man said. “Not only are you an honorary member, which means you drink our whiskey but don’t pay dues, the flies you bid aren’t worth more than the hooks they’re tied on. Yet still we invite you to the table.”
“What are friends for?” Sean said. He offered his hand, which Kenneth Winston took in long fingers that were as black as the ebony keys on a piano.
“Watch the hand,” he said. “It’s insured by Sotheby’s.” His hands were, in fact, insured, though not by Sotheby’s and not because of their dexterity at tying flies. They were insured because Winston had become a sought-after hairdresser who ran several salons in Mississippi, and whose name had been men
tioned on the red carpet at entertainment awards shows by grateful actresses. Sean went easy on the grip and ducked inside, where Patrick Willoughby, the club president, was padding about the alcove kitchen barefoot, building a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
He turned his owl eyes on Sean. “Strict doctor’s orders,” he said, “minus the bacon, hold the mayo.” He smiled, arching eyebrows that escaped the upper rim of his round-framed glasses. “We haven’t seen you since before your float. Sounds like you had an adventure.”
“What did you hear?”
“We’re rather hermetically sealed here, but the headless body has been the talk of the valley. The scuttlebutt is that it’s the man who built the scarecrows.”
“That’s one possibility. But there’s a more urgent matter. Do you think you can spare a few minutes after dinner? I’d like to pick your brain.”
“Do I sense that a game is afoot?”
“It’s no game, but I might ask you to look after Choti for a week or so.”
“My boy, you may pick away. My consultation fee, alas, has risen—bison burgers and Scotch ales at Trout Tails upon your return. We have made the acquaintance of a young woman, one Shirley Metzinger, who makes excellent use of a vulcanized tail.”
“I thought Trout Tails was out of business.”
“New owners.”
Beer and burger establishments came and went in the Madison Valley. Even tiki bars where mermaids wore seashell tops had a hard time staying afloat, or aswim, as Willoughby put it, after Labor Day.
They were three for dinner, four for poker when Max Gallagher drove back from fishing a spring creek up the valley. A crime novelist, he was granted trespass rights because the property owner was a fan of both his books, which featured a “nose” for the perfume industry who moonlighted as a detective, and his dark rapscallion looks. Not to mention his willingness to return her advances on the occasions she found herself in need of reassurance that the opposite sex found her attractive.
As Gallagher put it: “My virtue is a small price to pay for a reliable mayfly hatch.”
Gallagher had been at rock bottom the last time Sean saw him, having put his profits up his nose, but was clean now and in good spirits. A production company belonging to a well-known character actor had optioned his series. The actor longed to be a leading man, not to mention he had a serious proboscis that wouldn’t need prosthetic enhancement to fit the character.
They toasted Max’s success, they toasted a reliable mayfly hatch, they toasted the actor’s nose, and the moon was sitting on the shoulder of Specimen Ridge when Sean and Willoughby retired from the card table to chairs on the porch. There they sipped bourbon with a splash of spring water from the creek that crooked to the river. Mayflies swarmed the porch light.
“What do you think?” Sean said. He had told the gist of the story earlier in the evening.
Willoughby laced his fingers across his midsection. When Sean had first met him, the club’s president was an enigma. A psychologist by training, he had served as a naval officer during the Vietnam War and had subsequently served four presidential administrations as a terrorist profiler and hostage negotiator. One of the more delicious rumors was that his primary occupation had been that of a Cold War spymaster who dangled his assets on strings, like a deadly spider, working out of dingy hotel rooms in places like Cairo and Istanbul. He still received the occasional call from the Continent and would excuse himself from the table to conduct a long conversation in German or French.
Sean knew Willoughby as the best criminal psychologist he’d ever encountered, and without making a point of it had come to rely on his wisdom, especially on investigations that led him into the complex recesses of the human mind.
He was addressing the subject now in a roundabout manner, which was as much talking to himself as to Sean. Sean caught himself tapping his foot, anxious to be going, but Willoughby would not be hurried. Looking at the sky, where the moon had become obscured by a shoal of indigo cumulonimbus, he slowly nodded the orb of his head.
“I was sitting here last summer, August twenty-first, the solar eclipse. An hour before noon, if memory serves.”
“I was beside you,” Sean said. “Ken and I were both here.”
“Indeed you were. I fear for our country, Sean. That chill and dimming of the light that lasted but several minutes is to me the harbinger of a national eclipse which I fear may be far darker and colder, and much longer in duration.”
His eyes, the pupils dilated from contemplating the night sky, narrowed as he observed the flies swarming the light.
He continued. “There exists today a fundamental division between those who seek to preserve the natural world for the enjoyment of their children and the health of the planet, and those who will put it in peril for whatever value they can extract from it, and who would just as soon give their sons and daughters money as wonder. What is happening on the Smith River is a microcosm of the opposing philosophies of the age. Realists versus head-in-the-sands. Haves versus have-nots. The drill bits of industry against those who can only fight back with reason, heart, and scientific consensus. It is trench warfare with no quarter given, no soccer match on the battlefield Christmas Day. I fear the ditches have been dug too deeply now for the combatants to climb out in the hope of finding common ground.
He pulled his glasses down his nose. “Please forgive my ramblings. Despite my former stock and trade, I am not a pessimist. I am instead that most hopeless of intellects, a pragmatist.”
They sat in silence. The insects that swarmed the electric light now included miller moths that danced like clumsy ballerinas compared to the stately hovering of the mayflies, and when Willoughby began to speak again, he was looking beyond them, where the swollen cloud tips heralded rain.
“The story you have told me tonight,” he said, “is set against the ticking clock of the mine issue. It would be imprudent to dismiss the possibility of a connection to your friend’s disappearance.”
“Part of me wants to drive up there right now and join in the search.”
“I thought it had been suspended.”
“It has, but it will be resumed when the water clears. Is it arrogance to believe that I can contribute?”
“Sean, it’s always helpful to have someone who knows the missing person and can make an educated guess about what he may or may not do in a given situation.”
“Harold calls it tracking tendencies.”
“An apt description. Still, I’m not sure that is the wisest use of your time. And time is very much of the essence if he is in fact alive. I suggest that you begin at point last seen and work back upriver, rather than downriver, where the searchers concentrated their efforts.”
“To Camp Baker.”
“And beyond. Stories have deep roots.” He sipped from his cup. “The future can be found in the past; that is the first lesson of history.”
Sean had been fingering the fly in his pocket and now held it to the light. He’d meant to bid it in a hand of poker but had thought better than to lose it. He squinted at it, admiring the russet fox fur wing that glowed with translucence.
Willoughby peered through his glasses.
“Ah,” he said. “The Usual Suspect. One would assume from the proportions that it is a British tie, but it originated in Swedish Lapland. A very popular pattern there. I didn’t know you were planning a trip.”
“I’m not. But if I tie the fly, I can fish the river, at least in my imagination. It’s a lot cheaper than shelling out five hundred dollars a day for a beat on a salmon river. Have you fished in Sweden, Pat?”
“Indeed.”
Sean was not surprised. In Patrick’s semiretirement, he only took consulting contracts in places that offered trout or salmon to the fly.
“The largest salmon I ever hooked was in the River Byske, on a size-four Thunder and Lightning. It took me thr
ough three sets of rapids. Thirty pounds, and still carrying sea lice. I had to go swimming twice to unwrap the line around rocks.” He nodded at the memory.
“By the way, what is Martha’s take on this? She and Harold were an item, were they not? Before you were involved, I mean to say.”
“She’s upset, naturally. If I can get traction, I think she’ll take time off and accompany me.”
Somewhere in the darkness, a nightjar churred.
“I used to love the songs of birds,” Willoughby said. “But for a long time after Marlene passed, their song only reminded me of my grief and isolation. I shut the windows to their music. Now I leave them open again. That is a good sign, I suppose.”
There was nothing to say for this and they sat in easy silence, the river below them as black as the basalt stones it had been sanding for eons.
“There’s one problem with the strategy you propose,” Sean said. “The last place anyone actually saw Harold was fifteen miles below the put-in at Camp Baker. If I start there, how do I get back upstream if something points in that direction?”
A smile played across Willoughby’s lips. “You told me something I’ve not forgotten, that when you take on a case, it’s like stepping into a new river to go fishing. You’re neither at the beginning nor the end of the river, and because you don’t know in which direction the fishing will be better, you go both ways until you figure it out. Also, you keep trading one fly for another until you find the pattern that works. Sean, you are the best trout fisherman I have ever known. I have every faith that you will find your way to the heart of this matter.”
Sean tucked the Usual Suspect back into his pocket. “I just hope I won’t be too late.”
Willoughby stood. “Get some sleep. In the morning I will fortify you with biscuits and gravy like my mother made. Any soldier of mine goes into battle refreshed and well fed. The rest, well, as I said . . . I have every faith.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Green Gold
Katie Sparrow lived in a one-hundred-year-lease Forest Service cabin some few miles west of West Yellowstone, alone if you narrowed the definition to human company. She’d been engaged once, to a young man who’d died in an avalanche while skiing, and it was watching the dogs search for him that gave her the idea of becoming a handler, to provide a service that might save lives after losing the love of hers. Sean knew her to have little use for the male of the species after Colin’s death, beyond their basic utility to scratch a biological itch. He had once provided such a service—he never deluded himself into believing it was much more than physical, though she had flirted openly with him for years. Part of their compatibility was his acceptance by the graying-at-the-muzzle shepherd who greeted him with a wet nose on the porch of the cabin. Lothar, Katie’s Type I trailing dog, was her litmus test when it came to men. Nobody got beyond the porch if he raised the hackles on Lothar’s neck.
A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery Page 15
