A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  “How’s old Ephraim?” Sean asked when she answered his knock. “Seen him around much?”

  “That old bear,” she said, pronouncing it “bar.” Katie had come from eastern Kentucky and lapsed into the idiom with friends, though she could talk in a flat midwestern accent, sounding like a woman with two masters under her belt, which she had, when assuming her duties as a backcountry park ranger.

  “I haven’t seen the likes of that bar since September last. He got through the hunting season, he’ll show up a few weeks from now, when the hyperphagia kicks in. Fatten himself up for winter.”

  Ephraim was a two-toned boar black bear with coal black body hair and a head the color of rusted needles on a burned lodgepole pine tree. He regularly visited Katie’s cabin in the fall, and twice, when she’d heard the squawking of her chickens, she’d shot his backside with rubber bullets. Sean remembered his huge haunches shaking as he lumbered away, as well as the blue streak of profanity from Katie’s lips that followed him, for the bear had killed six of her best laying hens.

  “I haven’t been here for a while,” Sean said. “You look good, Katie.”

  “No, you haven’t.” A pause. “I do? You said I looked like a wren.”

  “It’s the way you cock your head to the side.”

  “Like when I’m eyeballing some beetle to peck at?” She cocked her head. “But I suppose a wren’s better than a grackle or a magpie. You know what we haven’t done in a while? You and me haven’t got that wolf pack going for a while.”

  Sean smiled at the memory, waking Katie in the middle of the night to howl with the Druid Pack on the skirts of Mount Two Top.

  “We knew how to get them a-going,” she said. “That why you’re here asking all innocent about Ephraim, want to sing with the doggies? Not that I’d have qualms. Just I took you for the faithful type. Now that you’re shacking with Martha and all.”

  “I’m here to ask you about the search. Harold and his son are still missing.”

  She nodded gravely, and when she spoke, the accent had vanished. “I’ve been afraid to pick up the newspaper. Afraid more bodies might have turned up. But no news is good news, huh? I’m on standby to go back up there when the water drops, unless I get called back into Yellowstone Park for a day or two first. We’ve had a development in something going on there. You want to come in, have some coffee? All I got’s instant.”

  Instant was fine with Sean. She opened the door for him. Sean shut it behind them and looked around. A lot of dog pictures on the walls, framed certification papers, a cabinet of trophies, dogs up on pedestals, a “Western Women and Their Dogs” calendar, one year out of date. It was the same calendar Sean had seen the last time he was here. Little had changed. Katie was a one-subject woman.

  They took the cups to her kitchen table, where Sean filled her in on what he’d learned from Martha. Something lit in her eyes when he talked about the bullet found in Harold’s canoe, but she didn’t interrupt.

  “I came to ask about the search,” he said. “Martha wasn’t too clear on what Lothar did or didn’t find.”

  She sipped her coffee, her head cocked thoughtfully. She said that Lothar had picked up Harold’s scent in three locations, starting upriver at Canyon Depth Boat Camp, which was to be expected, because Harold had spent two nights there. The dog also found scent at Sunset Cliff Camp, seven miles downriver, and there was a third hit at mile 32 at a camp called Crow’s Foot. Sean was looking at the map he’d unfolded from his pocket. He noted that Crow’s Foot was only a mile and a half upriver from Table Rock, where Harold was supposed to hook up with his son.

  The river search, Katie said, had started the day after the body had been found, four since Harold and Marcus had last been seen. That was the outside edge of the window for Lothar to be able to pick up a scent. And because the water was rising, the only hits were well back from the banks. There could be many places where Harold or Marcus stepped out of their canoes, separately or together, but any scent they left would have fallen under rising water and been swept away.

  Sean smiled.

  “What?” Katie said.

  “You know how most guys will walk a few feet from the bank to pee? Harold, he’d just step out onto the bank and unzip, pee right into the river. He did that one time Martha was with us, and she just gave him a withering look. He shrugged. ‘It’s traditional,’ he said. Traditional covers a lot of transgressions with Harold.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like him. Sounds like Martha, too. Does she know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “You going to tell her?”

  “Probably, if you tell me something worth telling her.”

  “Probably?”

  “I’m working for her, well, the county.”

  “How’s she swing that? That body was found like a hundred and fifty miles north of the county line.”

  “Yes, but most of the people involved are in Hyalite—me, Sam, Lillian Cartwright, Harold. It’s a joint investigation.”

  “Just checking, see if you’re legit. In case I want to tell you some government secrets or something.”

  “You have government secrets?”

  “I might.”

  “Let me ask you another question. Since Harold and Marcus were both on the river, could Lothar mistake one’s scent for the other?”

  “You mean them being father and son, or them being Native American?”

  “Either.”

  “I see what you’re getting at. Same ethnicity, same smell. It’s sort of a taboo subject ’cause it can be interpreted as racist, but there’s definitely an ethnic component. That doesn’t mean that Lothar would mistake Harold’s and his son’s scents, but they would be more similar than, say, Harold’s scent and your scent. You want to know about smell?”

  Sean sat back in his chair. He was prepared to listen to anyone who thoroughly knew their subject, whatever the subject.

  “A person’s individual odor has four components,” she said. “No, that’s not accurate. Better to say that odor is influenced by four factors. Foremost is genetics. Genetics determine the kinds of oils our skin produces. Everybody has a unique chemistry, but Harold’s and Marcus’s DNA will be more similar to their family’s than to yours or mine. And in turn their family’s chemistry will be similar to other related families, so that there is your tribal component. Blackfeet will smell different than Northern Cheyenne and both will smell different than whites.

  “Then you factor in diet. You go to parts of India where people eat spicy foods, like where I was in Uttar Pradesh for a couple years, their skin is going to smell different than, say, an Eskimo’s who eats a lot of fish. That’s a cultural difference more than an ethnic one.”

  “You smell like what you eat,” Sean said.

  “Yes, but it only goes so far. When I was working on the fish farm, one of the guys I worked with called me Milkshake, because he said I smelled like milk. That’s because even though I ate Indian food, my bacterial makeup was still different than theirs. You inherit a lot of your bacteria from your mother. So you will smell more like her than, say, your father. You still with me?”

  “I think so. There seems a lot to it.”

  “There is. And then some races just smell more than others. Odor is produced when your bacteria breaks down your sweat. If you’re of European or African descent, the result is BO. But many Asian people, especially Koreans, possess a genetic mutation that alters the composition of their sweat. It still gets broken down by bacteria, but it doesn’t hardly smell at all. But your question was could Harold’s odor be mistaken for his son’s. The answer is no. The only thing that could stump Lothar would be if Harold had a twin. The scent of twins is almost identical, even if they live in different parts of the world and eat the local cuisine. Interesting, huh?”

  It was, and Sean said so.

  “When did you work in
India, Katie?”

  “After Colin died. I just needed to get away, so I signed up for the Peace Corps. I got to see a tiger once. It was chasing a sambar deer and when it got away, the tiger roared. This was like fifty feet away, by the fishponds. People think tigers can’t catch fish, but they can. We had one of those game trap cameras and the tiger, he’d come in at night and scoop mahseer fish out of the ponds.”

  She smiled up at him. “You want to know what you smell like? Curry leaves. Sort of a soft spice smell. A bit of swamp mixed in, decaying leaves and roots. A little fecund.”

  “Sounds like a bad wine.”

  “No, it’s a good vintage. It smells good to me. That’s why we hit it off. We smell good to each other. That’s how mates find one another, or should. Today people cover up their scents. Then their attraction becomes based only on the visual, which doesn’t cut it when it comes to biological compatibility. It’s part of the reason for a high divorce rate, let alone fertility issues. Anyway, you have any other questions? I know you want to get going on this.”

  “How about Marcus? Any alerts?”

  She nodded. “One at Canyon Depth, again, no surprise. And one near Table Rock camp.”

  “That’s where he was last seen. Martha said he alerted a couple other times. Or at least he picked something up that interested him?”

  “That Lothar, he’s interested in a thing or two.”

  “Martha said maybe another dog.”

  “It’s happened.”

  “There was a dog on the float. It was Marcus’s.”

  “I wasn’t told that. Was it a dog? Lothar wouldn’t pay attention if it was a bitch.”

  “It was male.”

  “Then that could explain it.”

  “Just to satisfy my curiosity, where did he get interested in the scent?’

  “Let me get my GPS.” She did and showed him two waypoints. The uppermost was at Cow Coulee Camp. Marcus had caught up to the group there, so that explained fresh dog scent in the vicinity. The second, again, was at Table Rock.

  “Not far from where Harold’s scent was found at Crow’s Foot,” Sean said.

  “Not too far,” Katie agreed. “Crow’s Foot, there’s a trail there you take up to some pictographs. They’re under some ledges. A lot of floaters stop along the way.”

  “Is that where you picked up Harold’s scent?”

  “No, more down by the river.”

  “Did you climb up to the pictographs?”

  “Yes. I thought, it’s a natural place for either of them to have gone. And it’s protected there, so a better chance of the scent lingering. No luck, though. Doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Just too much time had passed for Lothar to alert.”

  Sean took a shot in the dark. “You didn’t see a scarecrow at Crow’s Foot, did you?” The map that the ranger had given Harold had not shown a scarecrow at that location, but Harold had been there. He had stopped for some reason.

  No, she hadn’t, but it was rugged country. She wasn’t looking for a scarecrow.

  “What does he actually do there?” she said.

  The question caught Sean off guard. “Harold?”

  “Yeah. Division of Criminal Investigation. What’s that all about?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sean said. “Criminal investigation, I guess.”

  “I heard there was undercover work. Hush-hush stuff.”

  She cocked her head. “I was telling you we have something going on in the Park? It’s a long shot, but it might connect. It’s got to do with a poaching problem.”

  “Isn’t there always a poaching problem in the Park?”

  “Oh, sure. Trophy hunters wanting to get into the Boone and Crockett Club with a big six-point elk and not too picky about where it stands. Wolf haters, they’ll shoot at anything gray. But this spring we’ve found six G-bear carcasses since May first, mostly in Hayden Valley or south of the Lamar River, places like Specimen Ridge, back of beyond country. That’s after the low-elevation ground snow melted but before there would be many tourists to report the sound of a shot. Or tracks to follow once the scent’s blown. Deliberate planning if you ask me.”

  “What were they taking?”

  “Only taking gall bladders. They didn’t even cut off the paws for the claws. Whoever did it was a surgeon. Didn’t make any more cuts than necessary. Imagine killing such a magnificent animal for a few ounces of bile.”

  “I’ve heard about the gall bladders. Can they really be worth that much?”

  “To some old Chinese dude who thinks it’s going to cure his hemorrhoids and erase his hangover? Sure. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars for just one bladder. In Tokyo, powdered bile brings a couple hundred dollars a gram; that’s four times its value for the same weight in gold. That’s even what they call it—the ‘green gold.’ Here, I want to show you something.”

  When she came back, she set a sealed plastic bag on the table between them.

  “I found it yesterday with another ranger. We were visiting the last bear carcass. The bear was actually discovered last month, but the team that investigated didn’t have a metal detector, and you know me, I like to sweep, you never know what you’re going to turn up. This was headwaters of Nez Perce Creek, all that open rolling country. There was a clump of pines about fifty yards away, perfect place for an ambush. I tuned the detector to brass and got a hit right away. It was just under some grass.”

  “Can I open it?” Sean could see through the plastic that it was a cartridge case.

  “Better not. I’m supposed to return it to headquarters in Mammoth, but by the time I called it in last night, they were closed. I’ll send it by courier, then they’ll log it and forward it on to the crime lab in Hyalite. The Park uses the state lab because the federal facility is Quantico, and they got bigger fish to fry. They’d drag their heels ’til Christmas.”

  Sean turned the bag until he could read the caliber designation on the case head.

  PPU

  6.5×54 MS

  “Are you familiar with the cartridge?” he said. “It’s a new one for me.” Something was ticking at the back of his brain.

  “New for me, too. But don’t you see, you said the bullet in Harold’s canoe was two five six caliber.”

  “That’s what Martha told me.”

  “It’s the same thing. Six point five, two five six, no difference. One’s in millimeters, one’s in inches.”

  “Did you just do the math?”

  “I did it in my head as soon as you told me about the bullet in the boat.”

  Sean was impressed.

  “Careless for someone to have dropped it,” Katie said. “Most poachers, they’re pretty careful to pick up spent brass.”

  “Do you think I could bring it up to the crime lab?”

  “No way. It’s got to maintain chain of evidence. But I can call Mammoth, tell them we have a lead and to get it to the lab ASAP.”

  “Okay. That’ll do.”

  Katie held his eyes. “I was going to say, you know, you could have just called me. You would have got the same information. But I guess that’s not true. We might not have got around to the bullet.”

  “No. And I wouldn’t have had this cup of coffee with you.”

  They were out on the porch.

  An awkward pause. How to say goodbye.

  “Eskimo kiss,” Katie said, and rubbed noses with him. She hugged him. “You’ll tell me if anything comes up, I mean about Harold.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  Her eyes were shiny. She looked away and then squatted and rubbed noses with Lothar. “Be gone with you now,” she said, her back to him. “You stay any longer and we’ll be making the wolf pack howl.”

  She stood up as he drove away. Cocked her head, all set to peck a spider.

  * * *

  —
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  Sean was six miles down the road when his phone vibrated in his pants pocket. He pulled to the side, knowing he’d lose the connection once he’d summited Targhee Pass.

  It was Katie, telling him that after he’d left she’d remembered something else. Like the cartridge, it was maybe nothing, but then again, you never know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Price of Admission

  Sam Meslik, his T-shirt reading THE TROUT ALSO RISES, bounced his two-year-old daughter on the great shelf of his shoulder muscles.

  “Six point five by fifty-four MS, what’s that have to do with the cost of corn?”

  “Not sure,” Sean said. “But Katie Sparrow found a six point five case where a grizzly bear was killed inside the Park. It had MS on the case head. Just thought you might know more than she did.”

  “I thought you were looking for Harold. I don’t see the connection.”

  “There probably isn’t one.”

  “If you’re looking for a reason to knock on her door again, Uncle Sam says no. You go once, you come away with a peck on the cheek, no harm, no foul. You go back, she’s exploring your gold molar with her tongue. Next thing you know, your Tony Lamas are at the foot of the bed. Just marry Martha and get bored like all the rest of us.”