Mortal Fall

by Christine Carbo

  “And who’s that?”

  I ignored his question. “Right now, I’m trying to see how strong that connection is—if it holds water.”

  “So no hard evidence yet?”

  “Not yet, sir, but I’ve got latent prints being processed as we speak.”

  “Which will tell you what exactly?”

  “Whoever was tampering with Sedgewick’s traps.”

  “Still nothing conclusive there.” He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “And when will you get this information?”

  The fingerprint scanning, identification, and comparison process was actually not a quick one, like on TV with its shiny, omniscient computer databases. It took time and effort to lift the latent prints, trying to get a full, unsmeared set. And the more of them on the traps, the more layered and confusing they would get. “Tomorrow,” I said, because I knew Ford was at the end of his patience. “I’ll get them by tomorrow.

  Ford stood up and looked out his window, then turned to both of us. “The rest of this week.” He looked us both in the eyes. “Then the two of you go back to the field.”

  “I think,” I said, “it would be a mistake to drop this investigation and simply peg these as accidents just because it’s the park and that’s what we’re used to around here.”

  “I’m not saying we should drop anything, and I’m definitely not saying we shouldn’t investigate all avenues.”

  “And that takes time and resources, sir.”

  “And if you feel that strongly, then maybe we need to get the DOI guys in here. Have them go at it more thoroughly.”

  I knew he didn’t want that. He had hated every minute of it when the DOI sent Agent Systead in for the Bear Bait case. He acted as if aliens had come from outer space and taken over his park. He was just bluffing me. I knew he’d like nothing more than to call these accidental falls and move on with the happy, bucolic summer life of Glacier. “It would take Ken and me more than the rest of a week to get those guys up to speed,” I told him. I felt fortunate that I had spent quite a bit of time around him in the past, working on research efforts for the park inholdings. He trusted me and respected me to some degree, even if he was irritated to lose me to investigative services.

  “Harris, look, you know these cases go on for years sometimes. Remember that missing hiker from 2006?”

  I knew exactly whom he was talking about; we all did. A young man of twenty-four who was an experienced outdoorsman had trekked into the backcountry and never came out. We searched extensively for over a month, and the family came from different parts of the United States and holed up in local hotels to wait for us to find him. They held out hope that he would come out of the woods one day, but after months of no sign, no body, we encouraged them to go back to their lives.

  Then one day, years later, Charlie Olson, the same guy who called us about Sedgewick from the Loop, had a hiker approach him one afternoon and say that he’d come across a small scrap of yellow clothing and two, very small bone fragments: the phalanges from the top of a foot and part of a clavicle. Charlie brought the pieces to us and sure enough, in our reports, we found that the young man was wearing a yellow windbreaker. We sent the fragments to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Center in Texas for identification and a match was made.

  “But with all due respect, sir, there was no body with that case. It was a missing persons. With these, there are two bodies.” I held up my fingers. “In the exact same area within a week of each other. It would be foolish to not investigate this fully.”

  “I told you.” He slapped his palm on his desk. “I’m not saying no further investigation. Of course it stays open as all the inconclusive ones do until proven otherwise. All I’m saying is that this may drag out for years, just as many others have. Bit by bit, you may be able to work through this, just not on full-time duty every day in the middle of tourist season when we need officers in the field. People need to feel like they’re safe out here and that there’s not some killer interested in shoving them off a cliff. I tell ya, the media would like nothing more than if that were the case—give ’em something to report and stir into more of a frenzy than they already have. So the rest of the week, Harris. Then I put out a statement. We good?”

  Ford watched me with a sharp glare. Eventually, I nodded reluctantly.

  “Good then.” He hit his desk again as Ken and I stood to leave. I would speak to Joe next week if I needed to, but I had no intention of discontinuing this investigation even if it required taking no days off and working every scrap of available time when not out in the field.

  But in spite of my stubborn persistence, I couldn’t help feeling a sinking sense that this case was lost just like that twenty-four-year-old hiker, and I was never going to make heads or tails of all its inconclusive pieces. I pictured the officers working Nathan Faraway’s case, how at one point their supervisors probably called them in and said it was time to not only finish cutting bait, but to quit the fishing altogether, leaving a case unsolved for life—and leaving shocked families with no answers in their wake.

  • • •

  I didn’t say a word to Ken on the way back to the incident room. As soon as we got inside, I shut the door to block out interruptions and called Gretchen to see how close she was. She said Wendy, the latent print examiner, was doing overtime trying to lift all the prints off all the traps.

  “I’ve been helping her,” Gretchen said. “But this stuff takes time, and it’s about as fun as it sounds—trying to find prints that are suitable for comparison and matching the knowns to the unknowns. Trish and I will be in tomorrow morning to get all the ten-prints from everyone who’s handled the traps. I’ve called everyone on your list for them to stop in and get scanned.”

  “And after you get those?”

  “We’ll need several more hours to make the comparisons. With any luck, I’ll have some answers for you by afternoon.”

  I hung up and found Ken looking at me. He leaned against the counter with one leg crossed before the other, his head tilted to the side, his lower lip tucked under his front teeth pensively and his arms folded in front of him.

  “What?” I asked.

  He let his lip slowly pop out from his top teeth and pulled a piece of gum from his pocket and unwrapped it. “I’ve been working this with you. Diligently doing everything you’ve asked.”

  “So? Is that a problem? You in a rush to get back to your routine, like he wants?” I motioned toward Ford’s office down the hall.

  “No. No, it’s not that.” Ken began chewing his gum and tossed the tiny piece of crumbled foil into a bin by the counter.

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s just that if I’m going to help you”—he lifted his hand toward me—“I should know more. You know, be more involved.”

  I eyed him, slightly perturbed that he was giving me grief not two minutes after getting it from Ford.

  “You weren’t the only one at the bottom of the ravine that day,” Ken said, still by the counter, but now he had his feet planted firmly apart and his broad shoulders squared. I could see he meant what he was saying.

  I looked out the window and tugged at my shirt to loosen my collar. Guilt shot through me suddenly at his reference to the Loop, how he’d been there all three times, either rappelling down with me, or holding my lines. I knew I’d been unfair to him lately—keeping information to myself and treating him like little more than my errand boy. He was a gregarious type, all right, but he also didn’t seem to mind staying busy as long as he got to go home on time to his family and ate lunch before getting too hungry. Perhaps I had misjudged him. “In what way?”

  “For starters, who were you talking about in there?” It was his turn to throw his hand in Ford’s direction. “Who exactly has a connection to both victims? Or was that bullshit to buy some time. Keep the boss away?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t want Ken to know about Adam’s connection to Phillips, and I was still angry that he’d t
old who-the-hell-knows about me calling him for a ride home from the bar after Lara’s party.

  “Was it a load of crap? Or do you really have someone connected to both victims?”

  “I do,” I finally said, low and quiet.

  Ken cleared his throat. “And are you going to fill me in about this person?”

  “I will,” I said after thinking about it for a minute. The bottom line was that if I was going to get on top of the case, I would continue to need Ken’s help. If he wanted to act more like a partner to me and less like my minion, so be it. I could respect that. I could take my hat off to that. “I haven’t said anything because it’s complicated.”

  “Yeah, so? The whole damn case is complicated. You think I’m not smart enough?”

  “I don’t mean that kind of complicated.”

  “What kind, then?” Ken waited.

  “Remember what Dorian said about my brother?”

  “With the poaching ring and all?”

  “Well, he also knew Mark Phillips. It was years ago, at Glacier Academy, so I figured it was a long shot, but so far, my brother is the only connection we’ve got between Wolfie and Mark Phillips.”

  “But does he have motive on both ends?”

  I nodded again. “I’m afraid he does.” I filled him in on Adam’s days at the academy—leaving out what Diane Rieger had told me—and about the fight with Phillips the year before. I told him I was waiting to see if his prints turned up on any of the box traps.

  Ken stared at me with wide eyes. If it were me listening to the story from a fellow officer talking about his own brother, I would be surprised too. In fact, I’d probably let loose one of my signature whistles, so I made the statement on Ken’s behalf: I whistled, long and low.

  “No shit,” Ken said in reference to it. “But you don’t know. It’s all completely circumstantial at this point.”

  “No, I don’t. We have nothing conclusive yet.”

  “Still.” Ken stood up and started to pace the room and chew his gum more vigorously. “Surely you know your brother. Could he? I mean, would he?”

  I looked down at the floor. It seemed like a trivial question on the surface, but it hit me like lead. To say yes was to cast out my brother, almost irrevocably. Language has the power to define. To say yes meant something I had not had time to come to grips with, might never have time to come to grips with. I could wrap my head around the fact that my father was an alcoholic and my mother was a depressed, paranoid schizophrenic. Adam—he could be violent. He could be temper driven. He could steal, poach, lie, and cheat, and I wouldn’t like it, but I could wrap my head around it. But as strained as Adam and I were, I could never accept that one of my own family members could kill another human being, regardless of how much mental illness lay snared and twisted in the strands of our DNA.

  Ken had quit chewing his gum and the room was silent. I could hear a songbird in the distance and the low murmurs of a car motor. A lone butterfly flitted by outside the window. I had no reason to bare such information to some gum-smacking, just-along-for-the-ride newbie, but then it hit me: I was a newbie too, at least on the lead-investigative homicide front, and if I was going to succeed, I needed help. And for some reason I wanted to talk to Ken at the same time that I wanted to keep my tangled family life completely in the dark. I liked Ken, and I wanted to trust him, and I wanted to say something for my own sanity—for the order of things in my own head. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “What makes a person cross that line? I’m pretty certain my brother has crossed many lines in his life, and if that’s what makes someone capable of murder, than yeah, yeah, I can see it, right?”

  Ken stared at me, still not chewing.

  “I mean, my brother has no one, no wife or kids to care for, no major responsibilities, no sense of how rules keep us all in check. He abused drugs and alcohol as a teen, was a bigger bully than you can imagine. Cross one line here, another there . . . a little temper, a little fight, a bigger fight . . . A small thought of revenge growing bigger and bigger in one’s head until it becomes an obsession. . . .” I put my forehead in my hands and when I looked up, Ken was taking a seat again.

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t draw the line somewhere. Rules or no rules, most people would never go as far as killing someone unless they’re completely unhinged or sociopathic.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you with any kind of certainty whether he is either one of those. I simply have not spent enough time with the guy in our adult years to even know.” I thought of a time when one of Adam’s classmates had announced to the rest of his class that our mom was crazy. Adam followed him and some of his friends to the movies the following weekend, found a seat behind the boy in the dark, and dumped a small can of yellow paint over his head.

  “But what about a motive—just going to the school where Phillips worked is no motive.”

  “No, but what if Phillips strong-armed him, did things he shouldn’t have and gave him reason to hate, reason to harbor a grudge?”

  “You have any proof of that?”

  I didn’t answer, and Ken must have sensed my reluctance to say more—to dip into darker waters.

  “Okay then,” Ken said, not one to invite awkward moments. “We keep working.” He chewed his gum vigorously now. “Get the prints and go from there. I mean, even if his prints are on the box traps, what does that prove?”

  “Nothing in terms of Phillips, but it does prove that he tampered with federal traps, then we know he’s lied because he told me he’s never seen them, and that’s enough to bring him in for questioning on two fronts: hindering a federal investigation and tampering with federal property. It might shake him up a bit.”

  “Like I said then, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  I looked at Ken, rejuvenated to hear it said so simply. Yes, keep working, cross bridges one at a time, my mottos exactly. It was refreshing to hear him take the directive for a moment. “I apologize,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For not treating you more like a partner.”

  “It’s no biggie. I know you’re making the decisions here, but I just want to know where the hell we’re steering this thing.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, then couldn’t resist as long as we were clearing the air—“and Ken, next time I call you for a ride, don’t tell a grape on the grapevine.”

  Ken’s mouth fell open. “I—”

  I held up my hand. “I don’t want to know and I don’t care. I probably shouldn’t have called in the first place. My mistake. I just didn’t think I’d have to deal with it when talking to Joe.”

  “Charlie.” Ken shook his head in disappointment. “Can’t keep his mouth shut. The only reason I told him was because—”

  “Like I said,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to know, and I don’t care about that, but this, Ken—what I just shared with you—this or anything else on this case that’s confidential gets around to Charlie or anyone else, then I start caring.”

  “Got it, Harris,” Ken said. “I got it.”

  42

  * * *

  WHILE WORKING ON my couch that night, I became suddenly exhausted and lay down on my side, thinking I would snooze for only twenty minutes or so because it was early, only nine o’clock and I had a lot I wanted to accomplish before going to bed. I lay my head on the rough-textured throw pillow and pictured Dorian’s grin, Adam’s flat stare, and my mother’s smile. My thoughts slid to her for no logical reason, and I found myself going down a hole trying to figure out when I first realized that something was wrong with her.

  Of course, I couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment in time. It was a gradual dawning with no sudden epiphany, an accumulation of things, like watching other friends’ moms when I’d go to their houses to play—how their mothers didn’t sleep the afternoon away; stare into space with glazed, terrified looks; or go into manic sessions of full-speed, seventy-mile-per-hour stories that didn’t stop and had no rhyme or reason t
o them, then get angry that no one understood what she was trying to communicate—that we were in grave trouble and needed to stay locked up in the house with her or else something bad would befall us.

  It might also have been the whispering of my kindergarten teachers to my father when he brought us to school, complaining that we were coming late, disheveled, and in clothes that didn’t fit. When we were younger, my father hadn’t made any money yet in construction and sometimes we’d go without much in the way of healthy meals. They’d wonder if we had had breakfast, and my father, tense-jawed and in a hurry to get to work, constantly angry and frustrated, mumbling under his breath: “I can’t do it all.”

  I drifted into a restless sleep of jumbled images of snickering, pointing teens and Nathan and I running away from them under a swollen moon, trying to find our way home, getting lost at every turn and going deeper and deeper into woods snarled with thick underbrush and hard, reaching roots that grabbed at our ankles and tripped our sneakers. When I finally thought I saw my house, it wasn’t our home at all. It was the county jail and when I peeked in, I saw Dorian and Adam both shackled to their chairs in an interrogation room, laughing and conspiring. Dorian spotted me, pointed to the window where I looked in, and when Adam turned and saw me, they both began to laugh—mouths wide open like black holes—their heads tilted back. They laughed so hard it sounded like roaring ocean waves, the undertow dragging me backward while I tried to stay standing, tried to figure out what was going on, but couldn’t make sense of it all.