A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  “Are you bored?”

  “A little. I mean, I love Molly, I’d be a derelict without her. You know that better than anyone. Hell, if she hadn’t made me go to the dentist, I’d still be scaring children. And then this little girl here”—he swung around to show Sean the child’s face, shrouded in copper-colored curls—“she’s all the reason I need for living. But I miss getting into a little trouble as I go downstream. You know what I mean, Kemosabe? You settle down, all of a sudden you start living your life at one remove. You retreat into your own little world. Like wearing reading glasses. Everything more than an arm’s length away is out of focus. Safe, but not exactly exciting.”

  He went into his mudroom to fish a couple cold ones from a defunct top-loading washing machine that was filled with ice.

  “Better than a fucking igloo,” he said.

  They took the beers to the porch, where Sam waved a hand at the swallows that were dive-bombing for chukar breast feathers wafting across his fly-tying table.

  “Get lost, little darlings, line your nests with somebody else’s feathers.”

  He drained the can in one swallow, said “Ah,” said “Six point five by fifty-four, interesting cartridge, hmm,” and looked away for a moment.

  “Austrian design,” he said. “First unveiled in 1900 at the Paris World’s Fair. Rifles made by Mannlicher-Schönauer, there’s where the MS comes in. Distinctive rifles. Forward bolt, full-length stock, rotary magazine, short barrel.

  “Six point five seems small for grizzly bear.”

  “You’d think so, but it shot a long hundred-seventy-grain bullet with great sectional density, a real penetrator. Karamojo Bell, the old ivory hunter, shot about five hundred elephants with it. But it’s a fairly small caliber and with a muzzle velocity of twenty-three hundred feet per second, there’s not a lot of muzzle blast. You aren’t saying ‘Here I am, come and get me’ each time you pull the trigger, the way you would with a .300 Weatherby. No, you think about it, it’s a good poacher’s choice. Compact. Lightweight. Quiet, accurate, effective.”

  “But six point five is uncommon?”

  “Depends on what you’re asking. If you’re asking if the bore diameter is uncommon, then no. You’ve got your 6.5 Creedmoor, your .260 Remington, .264 Winchester Mag. There’s a lot of cartridges that shoot the same bullet. But if you’re asking about the Mannlicher round specifically, then I’d have to say yes. The rifles turn up at gun shows now and then, always a couple on the website listings. Bring a couple grand depending upon condition. But there aren’t too many floating around on this side of the pond.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I owned one. Oak leaf engraving on the bolt, nice rifle. I used to do a lot of horse trading. It went off on somebody else’s horse. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago.”

  “Whose horse?”

  He shrugged. His daughter bounced. “A woman. She wanted a deer rifle that wouldn’t kick her fillings loose. A looker, maybe early sixties. Real style about her. Her husband was on the way to the promised land. Cancer, I think. She’d be on the downslope herself now. Marnie Post. Yeah, that’s the name.”

  “Is it possible that it could have been the rifle that fired the case Katie found?”

  “Well, one thing, a rifle doesn’t fire a case, it fires a bullet, but I know what you’re saying and there’s an easy way to find out. But you’re probably pissing in the wind.”

  A moss green Subaru Forester scattered gravel as it came up the drive. Molly stepped out, two bags of groceries in her hands. She gave Sean a peck on the cheek, Sam one, took her daughter, and went into the house, followed by Sean with one of the bags.

  “When are you going to make Martha an honest woman?” Molly, straight to the point, setting the milk on the top shelf.

  “Always the same question,” Sean said.

  “That new deputy lives up by Three Forks, he looks at her the way men looked at me in my mermaid days. You think she’ll wait forever, she won’t.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Molly.”

  She shrugged. “That’s right. Keep it lighthearted. Just don’t come moping around here when she moves on.”

  “Maybe it’s her who’s not sure.”

  “If you believe that, then you’re as hopeless as the rest of your gender.”

  Sean found Sam in a nook off the fly shop that he had turned into a reloading room, with a heavy pine bench dominated by a squat, insect green RCBS reloading press. The surface was scattered with tools and measures, bullet boxes, powder cans, with reloading dies stacked like books on a wall shelf. The wood surface of the bench glinted with brass shavings from case trimmings. Sam reached down a plastic box marked 6.5×54 mm and opened the lid to a mix of reloaded cartridges and fired brass that had yet to be resized and primed for the next loading. He extracted one of the fired brass cartridges and bent a gooseneck lamp over it, showing Sean the rim and the dented primer.

  “Anybody watches TV knows that you can identify a gun by a fired bullet, because it retains rifling marks and no two groove patterns are alike. But you can make the ID from a fired case as well. The dent the firing pin makes in the primer is peculiar to the rifle and there are other marks. Your girl Friday, Wilkerson, she wouldn’t even have to strain those Olive Oyl eyes of hers.”

  “And these were loads for your old rifle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you give them to the new owner?”

  “Same reason I never shoot bullets reloaded by someone else. If the gun blows up, you don’t want to be the one who provided the ammo.”

  “Do you mind if I send one of the fired cases to Katie?”

  “Not at all. I haven’t been out killing grizzly bears. The only thing I’ve been shooting lately is blanks.”

  Sean’s look was quizzical.

  Sam lowered his voice. “Molly wants another kid, doesn’t want them to be more than a couple years apart. I do, too. What the hell? As soon as you have the one, your freedom’s fucked anyway, so why not make her happy? But my salmon aren’t swimming upstream as fast as they’re supposed to.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam.” What else is there to say?

  Sean thought about Molly’s comments. There was a part of him that wanted to settle down, to have the kids, coach Little League, be a man of the hearth, as the French put it. It was a part of him that had been growing. But Martha already had two sons. Maybe she wouldn’t want more children. They had never discussed it, had never got any further than Martha’s mention of a ring when they’d gone camping.

  “Why the fuck did you come here, anyway?”

  Sean put the lid back on his thoughts. “I wanted to borrow a couple of kayaks. The two sit-on-tops with the luggage straps.”

  “So you’re going back up to the Smith, look for Harold?”

  “If he doesn’t show up before I get there.”

  “See, this is what I mean by losing your freedom. I like Harold, except when he pulls his ‘I’m-an-Indian’ face, that stoic shit. It’s just an excuse for not being engaged. I’ve called him on it, too. But sure, I’d like to go back up there and help you find him. But I can’t do that and stay married to Molly, and I don’t want to be one of those divorced dads whose kids only think of him as a gift fairy.”

  “Rock and a hard place,” Sean said.

  “Well, it’s something to think about if you’re considering tying the knot. Who’s the other kayak for? No, don’t tell me. It’s her, isn’t it? She and Harold were sharing the sheets back when, she’s going to want to get in on it.”

  Sean sought to veer away from any more discussion of Martha or marriage or, for that matter, sharing sheets with Harold. He asked Sam what he’d got in return for trading the Mannlicher rifle. The big man picked up a cartridge case from the reloading bench and rolled it in his fingers as he groped through the cobwebs.

  “It�
��ll come to me,” he said.

  Sean followed him outside to the big barn where he stored his boats.

  “You want to hitch up the trailer?” Sam said.

  “I’m going to car-top them. I’m not sure where this thing’s going to take me and might get off on some twisty roads. I don’t want to be worrying about a caboose.”

  They cargo-strapped the kayaks to the roof rack of the Land Cruiser and stored paddles and life jackets. Sean was ready to go.

  “Hey, I got it,” Sam said. “What she traded for the Mannlicher. It was a Brittany. Starter dog. I called her Samantha. Hunted her first time for sharp-tails and, dumb fuck that I am, I neglected to buckle on a skid plate. She got all torn up by some barbed wire and it got infected and I had to put her down before a single feather fell out of the sky. No wonder I couldn’t remember the trade. I might as well have given that rifle away.”

  “Do you think she’d still have it?”

  “How the hell would I know? But something to keep in mind. You find a spent cartridge under a tree, you think it was ejected when the shooter worked the bolt to chamber another round. But a Mannlicher has a rotary magazine. The empty case just revolves to another position in the magazine. So if it was found on the ground, it was dropped there on purpose, or else it fell out of someone’s fingers when he was loading or reloading. Understand?”

  Sean understood.

  “You’ll be looking for the old Lazy L place up Bear Creek. You know, the ‘L’ laying down short side up, like it’s asleep? Cute. I don’t think Marnie’s sold out to the Californians yet.”

  * * *

  —

  She hadn’t sold out, but she had got rid of the rifle after her husband passed. The outfitter who leased the hunting rights had taken it off her hands for a song. This was before a banker from Pittsburgh had put a bullet through a hindquarter of one of her horses, mistaking bare aspen branches for antlers and thinking he’d shot at a bull elk. Luckily, the bullet had missed an artery. The damage bond the outfitter put up for the lease paid the vet bill, and the mare came out of the ordeal with a scar and a jumpy disposition. But it had left a bad taste and she had shut down the operation. Now she only let a few friends and family on during the elk season.

  As she talked, Marnie Post drew lines in the pollen covering her porch with the toe of her boot. She was a tall, hips forward, still-elegant woman wearing jeans, an untucked pink shirt decorated with white horses, too-bright dentures that matched the color of the horses, and she answered the first of Sean’s questions working her toe against the porch floorboards and the next on the linoleum floor of her kitchen, where she set a cup of ranch coffee before him that had no more kick to it than stained water. Sean blew the steam off. As a veteran of knocking on doors in rural Montana to ask if he could fish, he understood that the price of admission was, as often as not, coffee so hot it could scald your lips, and simple conversation over a cup of it. Or two. Or three. Depending on how many children’s lives you were going to hear about.

  A half an hour later she was showing him “all the horseflesh I have left,” her two remaining horses that were grazing in a pasture behind the house. Marnie tuck-tucked with her tongue and both of the horses ambled over to visit, the half-thoroughbred mare that had taken the bullet and a mountain horse with white stocking that Marnie said she rode up on the trails. Flies buzzed at their nostrils.

  “You ride alone?” Sean asked her. He fed the apples Marnie Post had given him to the horses. He rubbed his fist against the mare’s bulging jaw muscles.

  Marnie Post shrugged. “I don’t have anybody to ride with me, now that Martin’s gone.”

  Sean was past being astonished by the number of people he met, many of them octogenarians, who lived in drafty old farmhouses with no neighbors for miles, and who, like Katie Sparrow, had nothing but the dog and the barn cats for company. Or the occasional bear, come autumn. Or horses. Or children who visited twice a year wanting the best for old mom, not to mention all the money they’d pocket by selling the place once they gained power of attorney.

  “Maybe you could find me a fella,” Marnie Post said, taking Sean’s arm for support as they crossed an irrigation ditch bridged by an old barn door. “That’s what I really miss, just Martin walking by my side like you are, somebody to look at the birds with and talk to. But most of the men my age are looking for someone to take care of them, and I’ve been nurse enough for any woman’s lifetime.”

  She squeezed his arm and crinkled up her eyes, the skin of her cheeks thin and finely wrinkled, as if it was waxed paper that had been balled up in a fist and then spread back out. “You want to hear what my three requirements are?”

  They were confidants now, walking a fence line to nowhere in particular. Sean looked east to the great limestone reef of Sphinx Mountain, where he’d almost died once. It seemed like twenty years ago, but couldn’t have been more than five. One thing about etching PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS into the frosted glass of his studio door, it had put him on the road to an eventful life. He was on a road now. True, it was a detour from the one he’d taken only a few hours before, when he’d agreed to search for Harold. But the question was, were the two roads diverging? Or were they parallel tracks? His instinct told him the roads had the possibility of bleeding into each other at the horizon. The cartridge case that he had in his pocket shot the same caliber bullet as the one found in Harold’s capsized canoe in the Smith River. It was an uncommon round, too uncommon to ignore the possibility, and Sean, who was always certain and often right, didn’t believe in coincidences any more than Martha Ettinger did.

  He lowered his gaze from the peak.

  “No walker, that’s my number one,” Marnie Post was saying. “Any man of mine’s got to be able to get around. No oxygen tank, can’t be trailing that through the grass. And no catheter. His plumbing’s got to be in working order. You get a thirty-below night, you want to get as close together as God made a man and woman to be. Yes, even at my age.” She laughed and squeezed his arm. “You’re going to leave here thinking, ‘What will this old bird say next?’”

  Sean didn’t leave her thinking about what she might say next. He left her while pondering the name of the outfitter who had bought her rifle, which he had inked onto the back of his hand. He rolled the cartridge Sam had given him in thoughtful fingers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Harold’s Mark

  The steel Quonset hut outside Bridger that served as one of Montana’s two forensic crime labs looked more like a place to judge cattle at a 4-H event than run a fingerprint analysis. In fact, the first time Sean had visited it, the hut was an uninsulated storage facility for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and confiscated game animals were gutted and hanging from rafters, ready for public auction. That day he had found the Region 3 elk biologist, Julie McGregor, helping Georgeanne Wilkerson, the county’s top crime scene investigator, drop a skinned deer carcass onto the antlers of a six-point bull elk, to measure how far the tines penetrated. They’d haul the deer up a ladder, poise the carcass over the elk’s head, and when Julie said “One, two, three,” they’d let it drop, then howl like schoolgirls when the carcasses smacked wetly together.

  As McGregor was part of the FWP team that investigated game poaching, Sean had called her on his way down the valley. She met him in the parking lot behind the building.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what’s new?” she said.

  “What’s new?”

  “I got knocked up. Yep, bun in the oven, preheated and timer set. Seven months and counting.”

  “Good for you, Julie.”

  “I know. I feel like a princess. And a biologist. I’m not sure you can be both at once.”

  “You’re living proof,” Sean said, and she smiled like Christmas morning. They went into the lab, where they found Wilkerson at her desk, wearing latex gloves and looking red-eyed behind her gogglelike round glasse
s. The two women air-hugged, Wilkerson careful not to touch anything with her blue-sheathed fingers.

  “Dropped any deer lately?” Julie asked.

  “Those were the days,” Wilkerson said. She placed a clean Mason jar upside down over the object she’d been examining, a tooth chip, she told them, and smiled the tired smile of the regional laboratory chief she’d recently become. It was a mantle of authority she wore heavily. Though both were average-sized women with short-cropped hair, there the outward similarity ended. Julie was tomboy head to toe, with freckles and a sun-peeled nose, smooth hard muscles, and leather hands, where Georgeanne, whom everyone called Ouija Board Gigi, had an indoor pallor, a slight build, and didn’t look as if she’d possess the hand-eye coordination to swat a fly. One thing they did have in common, Sean suspected, was that neither had worn makeup in her adult life, if you discounted the camo face paint that Julie used when she hunted whitetail from her tree stand.

  “Did you get the package the Park sent?” Sean asked Wilkerson. He’d called Katie Sparrow from the road, who’d assured him that the cartridge had been overnighted from Park headquarters to the regional crime lab.

  “Not in the a.m. drop, but we’ll see if it’s here now,” Wilkerson said. She tapped an extension on the desk phone. Yes, it had arrived.

  “While we wait, show me what you got from Sam Meslik.”

  Sean handed the cartridge case over. Wilkerson frowned at it.

  “I’m not familiar with the caliber, but that’s neither here nor there.” She bent a magnifying lens over the rim.

  “Distinctive primer indentation with a shallow sickle mark. Six parallel striations made by lateral movement when the bolt closed over the case head. Mark closest to the primer indentation is boldest, third mark shortest. Concentric breech marks. Pronounced. Don’t you just love old firearms, they’re so”—she searched for the word— “idiosyncratic.”

  She put the glass down. “This one’s going to be a lead pipe cinch, one way or the other.” The smile, not so tired now. “What have you been up to, Julie?”