“Besides getting pregnant and throwing up? We’ve been capturing bighorn from the Beaver Creek herd and airlifting them up to Bear Creek. Talk about a rodeo.”
They talked about the rodeo of sheep catching as they waited for the cartridge case. When it came, there was no knock at the door, there being no door. A young man in scrubs handed over a sealed envelope with a diagonal strip of evidence tape across it. Wilkerson opened it and shook out the cartridge case onto a sheet of lab paper cornered into her blotter. She placed Sam’s case beside it. They were identically proportioned, though Sam’s was age-darkened and the one found in the Park had blotchy discoloration from exposure.
“The cases are of different manufacture. One is Norma, one PPU,” she said. “Both show evidence of being resized. Note the dimpling in the shoulder area on the one from the Park. That’s caused by using too much lube during resizing. Usually those marks disappear with the pressure of firing, but not always. And on this one”—she tapped with a steel tool that looked like a dentist’s probe—“that hairline crack in the neck indicates metal fatigue. It’s been resized once too often and is ready for the trash bin.”
“Does it make a difference that they’re from different brass manufacturers?” Sean asked.
“It shouldn’t. The marks caused by firing or chambering will be the same.” She examined them again with the heavy lens and then, expressionless, passed the lens to Sean.
He saw the striation marks she’d mentioned and compared them to the marks on the case Sam had given him. They were similar. So were the breech marks that resembled the concentric rings left on the surface of a pool when a trout rises.
“Gimme,” Julie McGregor said.
She looked for a minute, set the lens down, and beamed her smile. “I think you got yourself a bingo.”
“No question then, right?” Sean asked.
Wilkerson nodded. “I’ve sat as a firearms expert in the witness box with a lot less. Do you have an ID for the person Sam sold the rifle to?”
“It was a ranch owner in the valley. But it’s the guy she sold it to who’s of interest. He was the outfitter on her place. A Rayland Jobson. Have you heard of him?”
Neither Wilkerson nor McGregor had, though the elk biologist was nodding to herself.
“A lot of poachers are outfitters. That’s the way some of them get their start. They know all the access points and where to find the trophies.”
Wilkerson’s eyes behind the thick glasses settled on Sean. “You inquired about the possibility of tying this case to a bullet found in the canoe that Harold Little Feather was paddling up on the Smith River. I can’t do that. Number one, it’s in evidence at the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. Number two, it wouldn’t tell me the story you want to hear. I can match the slug to the rifle, and I can match the case to the rifle, but I can’t match the slug to the case. The bullet doesn’t transfer distinctive marks to the case when it’s fired, and vice versa. But”—her eyes went away as she thought—“say this Jobson got rid of the rifle. You could still link him to it through Sam and the ranch owner; you could prove he had possession of the weapon in such and such year. It’s circumstantial, but it’s a brick in the case for the prosecution if you had other compelling evidence. It would help string him up by his turkey neck. Sorry, but I’m always thinking like a D.A. Occupational hazard.”
“How do you know he has a turkey neck?” Julie McGregor fingered her own neck.
“Everybody has a turkey neck after a six-foot drop,” Wilkerson said.
* * *
—
“She forgets we’re not a hanging state anymore,” Martha Ettinger said. “The last one dropped in 1943. Phillip Coleman, aka Slim Coleman. Murdered a couple at their home, spared the child who found the bodies. Converted to Catholicism after the arrest, then he fessed up to another robbery-murder for which he got twelve whole cents. Makes you long for pioneer justice.
“So what were you doing talking to Wilkerson? Why are you here, for that matter? I didn’t expect to see you until there were developments. Were there?”
She pushed her wineglass away with her first two fingers. Sean took the empty glass and set it with his own on the counter. He’d driven straight over from the crime lab, just in time for a glass of red and Martha’s spaghetti with venison meatballs.
His back to her, he put the question that had brought him to her door.
“You’ll want the evidence summary,” she said.
She brewed two cups of tea and they retired to her home office, a desk computer on a five-hundred-year-old sawn Ponderosa stump illuminated by track lighting. She tapped her way to the report that had been forwarded to her from the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office and ran her eyes down it.
“Two fifty-six caliber,” she said. “Minimal fragmenting. One hundred thirty grains retained weight. Passed through the bow decking, penetrated the waterproof boat bag with Harold’s gear, put a hole in the stock of his rifle, which was in a scabbard lashed to the middle thwart, and came to rest in a stack of firewood on the boat bottom. Penetrated four three-inch-thick pine splits before running out of steam. As I told you before, somewhere along the way it struck human flesh. Trajectory angle estimated at thirty-seven degrees indicates a shot from above and downstream of the canoe, assuming the canoe was going downriver at the time of the shot. The good news, if it can be called that, is the trajectory suggests that the person the bullet struck was in the bow seat. That tells me two things. One, that Harold had a passenger. Two, it suggests the passenger was the one who was hit.”
“Harold could have been in the bow.”
“Possible. But it was his canoe. I can’t see him letting anyone else sit in the stern. Can you?”
Sean closed his eyes. He could picture it, the shooter lying on a ledge, in the shadow of the cave mouth perhaps, the scope of the Mannlicher to his eye, waiting for Harold’s canoe to round the bend upriver, waiting until it came so close he couldn’t miss.
“It could have been Marcus in the bow,” he said. “He could have wrecked his own canoe so they were traveling together.”
“You’re right, it could have been. But if it was, it still doesn’t explain why his canoe disappeared. There’s a photo of the bullet.” She clicked an attachment.
The bullet resembled a much-scaled-down mushroom cloud from the explosion of an atomic bomb.
“Is two fifty-six caliber the same as six point five millimeter?” Sean asked. He already knew it was, just wondered if she did.
“Yes,” Martha said.
“Can you do the conversion that fast, or is it in the report?”
“I’m good with numbers.”
“I didn’t know that about you.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know. It’s sort of your choice,” she said, the last part under her breath.
There was a moment of silence, not altogether comfortable.
“Sorry,” she said. “Why are you interested?”
“You’re going to say I’m stretching, but I think the rifle that shot that bullet is the same rifle that shot a grizzly bear in Yellowstone Park this spring. Katie Sparrow found a cartridge case near the carcass that was six point five millimeter. I took it to Wilkerson and she matched it to an old handload Sam Meslik had. It used to be his rifle, a 6.5×54 Mannlicher-Schönauer. He traded it to Marnie Post for a bird dog, and she sold it to the outfitter who guided hunters on her ranch up Bear Creek. Guy named Rayland Jobson. I was hoping you had some background on him.”
“Sure.” She wrote the name down. Now there was a different kind of silence, and a bemused look on Martha’s face when she lifted it.
“Katie, Sam, the widow Post, Wilkerson. You’ve had a busy day. You’re going to have to explain this very slowly.”
He did, as Martha listened with her hands laced behind her head. When he finished, she frowned at him but said nothin
g. She looked at the clock on the wall. A long minute passed. Then, the three-note hoot of a gray owl in the canyon.
“He’s late this evening,” she said. “Used to be you could set your watch by him. Okay,” she said, turning to face him. “I give up. What’s the connection to the bullet in Harold’s canoe with the cartridge case Katie found? I mean besides the caliber. There are a lot of calibers that shoot a six point five bullet. Heck, my son David has a .260 Remington I got him for his eighteenth birthday. Are you accusing him of shooting at Harold’s canoe?”
“No. But I told you I went to Katie’s house. After I left, she called and said she’d thought of something else, something about the place where she’d found the case.”
He fingered his phone from his pocket and clicked on the email attachment he’d had Katie send to him. It was a photograph showing three parallel lines.
“What am I looking at?” Martha said.
“Those are cuts made in the trunk of a limber pine tree a few feet away from where she found the case. Katie said they were about a half a foot long and a couple inches apart. She guessed they were carved by a knife blade. They’re hard to see now because they’re shallow, but you can see where the bubbles of sap formed in the deeper parts of the wounds.”
“I see that. If there was one more slash I’d say it was a bear made it. Or a lion.”
“Three slashes on the diagonal. Have you seen that before?”
Sean saw the dawn of understanding. Then her eyes swam away.
“Harold,” she said softly.
And for several moments she was somewhere else, far to the north, up in the Two Medicine country. It was a November day, snow falling straight down, and she was riding Petal, her gloved hands blocks of ice on the reins. Harold had invited her to join his hunting party, which included his brother, Howard, and Howard’s wife, Bobbie. Harold said he’d leave his blaze on a tree where she should take a spur trail to the left, that the tipi was pitched on a bank over Badger Creek. But she’d seen his horse before she saw the blaze, the big paint ghosting through stunted aspens, the rider obscured until the horse stepped into an opening, steam columning up from its nostrils. Harold sat on the horse with his hair falling over his shoulders. Martha had never seen him without a braid and he looked wild to her, his hair blowing, three charcoaled black lines striping his cheeks. Later, in the tipi—the second tipi, the one he hadn’t told her they’d be sharing—she’d stood awkwardly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and gone rigid when he’d kissed her. She’d turned her head away. Then something had broken inside her and she’d turn and pressed herself against him and opened her mouth with a hunger that had been building for weeks. For months.
“We’ll have to be quiet,” she said. Ever Martha. And had been. Ever Martha.
Afterward, she’d lain naked beside him under an elk robe and traced the lines on his cheeks with her fingertips, there being just enough moonlight bathing the walls of the tipi to see the marks.
And she’d thought, What the hell are you getting yourself into, Martha May?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Masterpiece
During the hours he thought he might be dead, he remembered Jewel MacAllen saying that he’d felt the same way at times, like he was a bird looking down at the earth, and that he’d touch a tree to reassure himself that he was still grounded and alive. But in the cave there were no birds, nor trees to touch, nor sky to look down from. There were only the rock walls blackened with the smoke of long-dead fires, and stalactites formed drip by drip over the course of millenniums, bats hanging from them like fig clusters.
The tether was a chain of metal links about the size of the rusty chains that suspended the swings he remembered as a child, the broken set in his auntie’s yard. One end of the chain had been passed through a two-inch-wide slit cut through the skin on the thin part of the ankle in front of the Achilles tendon. It was the same cut Harold had made dozens of times in order to pass a rope through the hocks of a buck deer to hang it by its hindquarters for skinning. When the clawlike right hand had jerked the first link through the slit, in one side of his ankle and then out the other, the pain had seared so sharply that he gasped, and for long moments couldn’t breathe back in. Then more of the chain had been pulled through, link by agonizing link, the man who pulled it keeping up a running commentary.
“What do you think, Charlie, do you want one more? No, I keep forgetting, your name isn’t Charlie is it . . . Harold?”
Or, sometime later, “How about you, Dewey?” speaking to the gnomelike man who sat cross-legged at the far end of the cave. “What’s the verdict? One more link, or two?” And the small man replying, “How many more you got?” And then laughing, a slow, tenor laugh, “Ha, ha, ha?” ending on a quizzical note, as if he’d forgotten what was amusing. And all the while pressing the muzzle of a revolver to Marcus’s ear, the boy sitting on the hard rock with his head hanging down, his hair covering his face.
And so the links were jerked through the slit, Harold’s nerves screaming, until by the time that the chain had been pulled through to half its ten-foot length and both ends padlocked to an iron ring, he was mercifully only semiconscious, though that had as much to do with being smacked into submission by a stone earlier as the pain from the chain. He did not hear the blows of the flat of an ax that drove a railroad spike through a circular opening in the iron ring and into a crack in the rock wall. Nor did he see the men leaving, the tall man he’d known as Job, followed by Marcus, shuffling, stumbling, finally the gnomelike man trailing a wake of body odor, who spit on Harold as he passed by.
An hour later, the daylight that seeped into the cave from some unseen recess had been replaced by a darkness so absolute that Harold could have been soaring through a black hole in space, and sometimes felt he was. Then, swimming back from that fathomless ether, he had envisioned his son’s face, the finely sculpted cheek that was his own blood, and then, without his bidding, the vision changed, the head turning to reveal the grotesque swelling where Marcus had been struck unconscious with a river stone, perhaps the same one that had been used on him, though the details of his capture were written in a disappearing ink that he had yet to find the catalyst for. The hand that held that stone was the one that had pulled the links of the chain, and Harold remembered it well, had come to despise it apart from the man to whose arm it was attached. The starburst of scar tissue, the flipper of a little finger, the claw of hand clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, as if it was in spasm, a body dead, but the hand yet to receive the message.
Is he alive? Is Marcus still alive?
It was all Harold thought about, for after Marcus had been led from the cave, Harold had not seen him again. When the vision of his son began to reel away from behind Harold’s eyes, he pulled it back with an effort, and then it paid out again like rope, Marcus’s face turning over and over until it was as small in the distance as a locket photograph, where it held for a few beats of Harold’s heart, and then was gone.
* * *
—
Harold, lucid now, his pain a dull throb, looked around the walls of his confinement. He judged by the relative light that it was middle of the day, and glanced down at the lines he’d scratched onto the rock floor with a piece of charred wood. The lines told him that he was in the sixth period of a paler gloom. His stomach could have told him as much. Except for a few pieces of venison jerky and an apple that he’d shared with Jewel MacAllen, Harold hadn’t eaten anything of substance since launching his canoe at the camp below the homestead at Tenderfoot Creek.
He had relived the day many times, but now did so again, beginning with finding MacAllen at the homestead. Taking him down the river with him had been a gamble. He could have left him with MacAllen’s promise that he would do no more mischief among the cliffs, for the man’s eyes had admitted to being the Scarecrow God, taken pleasure in it, even if his words hadn’t.
But Harold hadn’t trusted him to leave of his own accord, and felt that Jewel’s volatile nature could escalate a confrontation should someone else cross paths with him. In that case Harold would be morally responsible for the consequences. Then, too, Jewel’s words before the lantern had flickered out had haunted him.
“They’s something else. I can take you there, but you ain’t going to like it.”
Take me where? Not like what? Jewel would not elaborate.
“What-chew think I got around in, in them swamps?” he had said, when Harold had gone over with him the rudiments of handling a canoe paddle the next morning. “You best worry about your own paddle. I’ll take care of mine.”
And he had been true to his promise, his facility with the ash blade better than adequate in a river that didn’t suffer fools under the best of conditions, and conditions were far from good and deteriorating hourly as upper-elevation snow melted from the south slopes of the Big Belt and Little Belt mountain ranges.
Two Creek, Sheep Wagon, Sheep Creek, Cow Coulee where the helicopter had picked up Bart Trueblood, all the boat camps in the next sixteen miles, even Sunset Cliff, the most majestic of all with its rose-colored rock buttresses and resident pair of golden eagles riding the thermals—it all swept by in the periphery of Harold’s vision. All his concentration was needed to navigate the current, Harold saying “hup” when he wanted MacAllen to dig his paddle in on the other side, Jewel pointing out barely exposed boulders that Harold would not have been able to spot from the stern in time to avoid collision.
And all the while Harold was thinking of Marcus; Marcus, whom he had sent down ahead of him, thinking at the time that it was the safe thing to do; Marcus, whom he’d told to wait for him at Table Rock, which they ought to make by late afternoon at the current rate of flow. They were still a mile or more from the destination when Jewel had said “Pull over here,” indicating the west bank of the river. Harold J-stroked to spin the canoe and nosed it upcurrent into a cove in a willow-choked bottom.
A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery Page 18
