“It was. I did the ID. It was awful.”
“He didn’t fall. He was murdered. He was hit in the back of the head with a rock and he fell forward.”
“The FBI has ruled out foul play in his death.”
“I think they will be re-examining that decision.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“I have logic.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What would you say Blake’s pack weighed when he was out that morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t—”
“Guess!” Several patrons looked at Cole as he yelled the word.
“Twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five.”
“What was in it?”
“A first-aid kit, binoculars, food, water, his Nikon.”
“If Blake Foreman fell thirty feet to his death and cracked the back of his skull open, what was between him and the ground when it happened?”
“Nothing was. He fell straight onto the rocks.”
“His pack. His pack was between him and the ground. But when the FBI recovered that bag, was anything broken? The fragile glass in the binoculars? His camera? No case, just a Nikon stuffed into the bag, right at the back. It’s fine. He didn’t fall. He was hit on the head and then the body was arranged to make it look like he fell. He was murdered.”
“So whoever killed Brian killed Blake? Why?”
“Eliminate witnesses.”
“Who could have done this?”
“Good question. I was originally thinking about Rick Turcotte.”
“That could be. But they were friends.”
“Sure they were. But Brian had recently crossed the floor, and Rick felt betrayed.”
“He went off to make that phone call.”
“Sure did. He could have tracked down Blake and bludgeoned him with the rock. Maybe he even hired someone to kill Chip. That’s where the supposition ends. Rick couldn’t have engineered the set-up with Charlie Crowfoot. I mean, he could have paid someone to do all of this, but it’s a huge stretch. Besides, someone else had a much better opportunity to kill Chip, then Brian, then Blake, and to provide a young, impressionable, dependent Charlie Crowfoot with the means to frame me and then take his own life.”
“Cole—”
“You know, Derek, talking with you here, I’ve been thinking about your business model. They say that diversity is the key to a successful business enterprise. Maybe you need a new angle, Derek. Maybe what you need is to branch out. I hear there’s good money to be made in the energy business.”
“Cole, I climb mountains, hump packs, show people around Glacier Park. I don’t know the first thing about looking for natural gas.”
“Oh, but you do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You worked a security detail while you served in Iraq, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I did. So did lots of guys. It was almost a decade ago. I was in the National Guard. I got called up.”
“You went back after your first rotation, you and a bunch of others. Two years doing private security for the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for Energy. You were kind of famous.”
Derek McGrath looked down at his coffee cup. It was empty. He fiddled with it.
“Then you got out. But you didn’t really get out, did you? You just came home and continued to do what you had been doing before, and this time you played for the home team.”
“Cole, you’ve been under a lot of stress. I don’t know what you’re driving at, but you’d better take your foot off the gas before you say something stupid.”
“When you got home, you started doing legwork for HCE on the Blackfeet Reservation. It was a good extension of what you’d been doing overseas. I was told that there is two million dollars missing from HCE’s advertising and promotion budget. Is that what this was about? Mind you, there wasn’t as much wetwork—isn’t that what you call it? When things get messy?—as there was when you were cleaning up after your bosses over in Iraq. Back here, you carried the bag for Senator Thompson. You were the one who was meeting with Blackfeet elders and council members. They’re starving and you were only too happy to promise them the moon. Let HCE frack the shit out of the place and you’ll make sure people like Charlie Crowfoot get jobs driving the high-paid help—all white—out to the well sites. You even promise them a new grocery store and maybe a gymnasium for the high school. But then along comes Brian Marriott. And he starts poking his nose into things, and gets people all fired up about wind power, and it starts to look like HCE isn’t going to have an easy ride, no matter how much graft it pours into the game. So someone—maybe Lester Thompson—tells you to take care of things. Maybe he even spells it out. And you go and clean things up.”
“Cole, you’ve lost your marbles.”
“Have I? I don’t know, Derek—this all makes perfectly good sense to me. First you tried to scare Brian off. You even gave him fair warning. Sent him death threats. He didn’t take the hint. He didn’t back off. You suggested to Joe Firstlight, who you knew was in league with Brian, that maybe the two of them should organize a hike, and then you had Brian right where you wanted him.”
“You’re fucking crazy, Cole.” Derek’s voice was low. He was toying with his cup. The server refilled it, but he didn’t look at her.
“Why kill Chip? And why bring Blake on the hike? That’s what I don’t understand. And why set me up? Why not just push Brian off a cliff and be done with it?” Derek started to stand, but Cole shot out a hand and clamped it down on the guide’s arm. “Where’s your ring, Brian?”
“Get your hands off me.”
“When we were on the hike, you had a ring on. It’s a platoon ring, isn’t it? Same one Lester Thompson wears. I bet it’s the same one his son wears. That’s how you know each other. You served with his son. Where’s the ring?”
Derek had arms like corded steel, and he pulled his hand out from under Cole’s grip. Cole grabbed his coffee and threw it in Derek’s face. Derek seemed unharmed; he grabbed Cole by his injured shoulder in a viselike grip, and Cole felt as if he would faint. Several patrons moved away from the struggling duo as Derek walked Cole toward the front door. Two men jumped out of a GMC Yukon parked in front of the building. Special Agent Steve McCallum drew his sidearm and shouted, “FBI! Hands where I can see them!”
Before the agents could close the distance, Cole felt the barrel of a gun press into his neck. Derek pulled Cole by the shoulder back into the café, and Cole winced, the pain immobilizing him.
“What are you doing? You know you won’t get out of here.” Cole had his eyes closed against the pain.
“Then neither will you.”
“Did Thompson pay you to kill Brian?” They were halfway through the back room of the restaurant now. Patrons gave them a wide berth.
“Lester Thompson had nothing to do with any of this. This was my doing. Me alone. It had nothing to do with Thompson or Iraq.”
“Then why? Why kill all those people.”
“Brian should have minded his own business. He was going to make it impossible for me to branch out. I was at my wit’s end. It went too far.”
They reached the back of the Two Medicine Grill. Cole opened his eyes and felt like he would pass out from the pain in his shoulder. “Why not just do what everybody else does? Just use the system to beat the enviros? Brian didn’t have to die. Those others too. And Charlie Crowfoot? Would you really have killed his family?”
“Cole, I swear to God, when people come between you and your chance to feed your kids, you fall back on what you know. That’s all there is to it. You’ve got to believe me.” Derek’s voice had gone from menacing to almost pleading. He let go of Cole. Cole turned and faced him. They were standing by the rear door of the building. It opened into a small courtyard and then an alley.
Cole said, “Put the gun down, Derek.”
“You’re right, Cole. It all went too far. But
I can still save my own family and yours too. Just let it go. It was all me. I did this. I bought into HCE. I knew Thompson’s son in Iraq. We served in the same unit. When the senator quit politics, I invested everything I had in HCE. Then they got into fracking, and the Blackfeet and you guys started making life difficult. I made the decision to kill Brian. I was the one. Let it go. Please.” Derek shoved Cole against the wall and reached for the back door.
“Derek, stop!” Cole shouted.
Derek pulled open the back door. Through the adjacent window, Cole saw movement; someone was crouched behind a truck parked at the rear of the building. Derek turned and said calmly, “Cole, get down.” Instead Cole lunged at him, but Derek charged out the door. Blinded by the pain in his shoulder and the glaring midday light, Cole tripped on the doorsill and fell into the dirt.
Cole heard a shout. “FBI! Drop your—” The voice was cut off by a single shot. It was followed quickly by half a dozen more, and Derek McGrath’s body fell to the ground beside Cole.
FIFTY-ONE
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA. JULY 9.
BRIAN MARRIOTT DROPPED HIS PACK at the top of the long, steep incline. Several other hikers were already setting up their tents on the hard stone of the plateau. Behind him others were arriving, including his good friend Joe Firstlight and his old buddy Rick Turcotte. Rick stopped next to Brian, breathing hard. “It’s been awhile since we did anything like this, Brian.”
“Rick, I don’t think our hunting and fishing trips to your cabin were anything like this. I seem to remember steak, red wine, and baked potatoes most nights.”
“Still … this really is something.”
“It is.” Brian turned and looked to the west. “You see that cirque over there?” He pointed to the valley on the far side of Waterton Lake, ten miles distant.
“That what ? Cirque?”
“A hollowed-out valley left behind by a glacier.”
“Man, you have changed.”
“I read a lot. You see that? Just thirty years ago, there was a glacier there, five miles long and half a mile thick. Now, nothing.”
“You can’t blame oil and gas companies for that, Brian. I read too. Some people say that this warming is just the natural cycle of the sun.”
“When Glacier National Park has no glaciers left, what are we going to call it? A few more years, and they will be gone. What do we do for water?”
“ARE WE OKAY?” Brian sat down next to Cole at supper. They balanced plates on their laps.
“Yeah, we’re fine. How could we not be?” Cole looked around him at the crepuscular light slipping down the dip-slope mountains.
“I just mean—”
“Look, Brian. There was a time when you and I couldn’t agree on one damn thing. Now we’re working together. Hell, in many ways you’re way out in front of me on this climate-change thing. But from time to time we’re going to disagree. That’s inevitable.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I just don’t like to fight in front of the kids.”
“It’s good for them. Makes them tough.”
“Man, I forgot about your temper.”
“I’m working on it. I see a shrink now.”
“Really?”
Cole sighed. “Yeah, for about the last year. Things got pretty out of control for a while. Bad dreams, drinking, and a downward spiral toward … I don’t know what.”
“We never know what’s going to happen. When my wife left, I thought I’d kill myself.” Cole stopped eating and looked at Brian. “It’s no big deal, man,” Brian continued. “I got over it. The work helped. But I’ll tell you, it’s amazing we survive what we do.”
“Well, we’ll survive our little dustup.”
“I thought I saw Tara Sinclair from the Globe tweeting about it,” said Brian.
“I should have taken their Blackberries. How the hell is she getting a connection up here?”
“You know, I almost called this whole thing off. I got a bad feeling about the trip. Thought it might, you know, go really badly.”
“You’ve done good, Brian. Rest easy.”
“LET ME HELP you guys with that,” said Brian. The three guides were huddled around a pot of hot water, washing cooking gear and discussing the next day’s long, tricky descent toward Crypt Lake.
Brian smiled. “We really appreciate your service.”
“All in a day’s work,” said Derek.
“What do you guys do when you’re not leading tourists around in the mountains?” asked Brian.
None of the men spoke. Finally, Tad said, “I help my dad with his business.”
“What does he do?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. He’s what you might call an entrepreneur.”
“What about you, Blake?”
“I just go and hang out, mostly. I got a place down in Mexico and I do some surfing.” Blake’s eyes shifted from his work to Derek and back. As Blake leaned over to scrub a pot, Brian noticed a ring with an eagle on it hanging from a silver chain around Blake’s neck. It swung like a pendulum in front of Blake, and he quickly tucked it inside his shirt, looking again at Derek. Brian meant to ask Blake about it, but Derek interrupted his thoughts.
“I got wife, kids, the whole catastrophe.” Derek smiled. “Winter, I got my kids in school down in Helena. I guide ski trips when I can, but it’s getting harder and harder.”
“Kids change things. Makes you think about what’s important,” Brian said.
“So listen.” Derek stood up, watching his fellow guides as he did. He extended an arm that invited Brian to step away from the others. They walked for a few hundred feet as Derek spoke. “You told me on the phone that one of the things you really wanted to see while you were here were the northern lights.”
“That’s right, but it’s not really the right time of year.”
“Well, it just so happens that there is a solar flare tonight. I think we might get a bit of a show, but it’s going to be early in the morning. Sometime between three and four.”
“How do you … ?”
Derek pulled out his iPhone. “I am in touch with the wilds.” He smiled broadly.
“That would be great if there was. The others might like to see it too.”
“Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll get up around three and have a look. If there’s anything worth seeing, I’ll get you up, and then it’s your call whether we wake the others. Let’s just keep this between ourselves until we know for sure.”
“That would be great,” said Brian.
“Then we’ll see you tonight. Or tomorrow morning, I suppose.”
“I can’t wait.”
FIFTY-TWO
EAST GLACIER, MONTANA. SEPTEMBER 16.
COLE BLACKWATER SAT IN THE back of the GMC Yukon. “I guess I have Officer White Plume to thank for being alive right now.”
“You do,” said Special Agent McCallum. He was seated next to Cole. In the front, Inspector Reimer of the RCMP had twisted in her seat so that she could join the conversation. They were parked across the street from the Two Medicine Grill. “When he ran your name this morning after the breakin at the Dancing Bears, he called us right away.” McCallum continued, “Let’s go over what happened again.”
Cole sighed deeply and rubbed his face. It hurt. His shoulder hurt. “I’m not convinced that any of this went down the way Derek says it did, but here’s what I think happened. Derek gets back from Iraq and invests his savings in High Country Energy. I guess you can dig through his banking records to find out what’s really at stake. It would have likely been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was probably making a truckload of money doing private security. Everything is going fine for HCE and for Derek McGrath.
“Things are going so well that he decides to start his own guiding business. He likes being in the mountains. He has a family, and life gets busy and expensive. About a year ago, Brian Marriott starts poking his nose where it doesn’t belong. HCE was running a play to drill all these wells along t
he Rocky Mountain Front, and they had the band council in their pocket until Brian comes along and says, ‘Hey, there is another way to make money off the Front: wind farms.’
“Up until that point, all Derek had to worry about was people like Joe Firstlight, who, while he’s a good man, wasn’t going to stop the frackers on his own. When Brian got involved, things changed. He became a threat. Derek invites Brian to come to Glacier to talk about climate change and fracking and wind power, and sets the trap. He starts by trying to scare Brian off the case with the death threats, but Brian is hardheaded. Derek has to come up with another plan.
“He decides to bring in some help. He’s still connected to his old friends in the mercenary business, so he finds Blake Foreman, or whatever his name is, and asks him if he wants a job. He has to make room on the hike for him, so that’s when Chip Prescott bites it. He goes to Chip’s trailer out past Heart Butte and kills him and buries him in the backyard. Killing Chip made it easy to have Blake Foreman step into the trip and not raise any suspicions.
“Next he’s got to set me up. I’ve got a well-documented history of antagonism with Brian. He knows that I’m going to be here for a few days beforehand—I even called him to ask for some suggestions as to where to hike while I was here. Derek goes to his old driver, Charlie Crowfoot, and makes a deal with him. All along, Walter, Perry, and I thought it was Blake Foreman who approached Charlie, but it was Derek. They look a lot alike. Put a pair of sunglasses and a ball cap on them, and to a lot of people they could have been brothers. It was Derek people saw around Browning, not Blake.
“Derek pays Charlie to say he sold me a gun. It’s that simple. He, or maybe Blake Foreman, hikes in from Crypt Lake before our trip and stashes the gun below the ledge where we’ll be camped. They wouldn’t have risked having the weapon in their gear.”
McCallum interrupted. “There wouldn’t have been any risk of traces of GSR that way.”
The Glacier Gallows Page 23
