The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “‘Short people got no business to live.’”

  “Say what, Martha?”

  “Nothing. Old song lyrics. Go on. This is interesting.”

  “Okay, the crosses are self-explanatory. They’re the known fatalities—Clarice Kincaid, Cesar Rodriguez, and, as of yesterday, Buster Garrett. I debated whether to award a cross to the Ross boy. I held off and gave him a sparkly magnet instead, but in my book he’s a probably. Wearing a sheepskin, might as well have advertised himself as a lamb chop. You with me?”

  “As long as you’re going to get around to the VHS receiver we found on the mountain yesterday.”

  “About to. How much do you know about radiotelemetry and GPS tracking?”

  “Give me the 101.”

  Harold scratched at his tattoos, this time the wolf tracks encircling his right upper arm.

  “Okay,” he said. His voice assumed a professional tone. “A VHS collar emits a radio pulse. You have to be within two or three miles for your receiver to detect the signal. Unless you’re in a plane. Then you can pick up the signal from quite a bit farther away. The thing to remember is that in order to track a radio-collared lion, you have to ballpark it first using other methods. And you have to know what frequency the radio is transmitting on. Then, when you get a signal, you use the antenna on your receiver to home in.”

  “And you can’t do that with a GPS collar?”

  “Now who’s getting ahead of themselves?”

  Martha zipped her lips with a forefinger. “My bad. Go on.”

  “The short answer is no. A GPS transmitter gives you a precise location that you can access remotely, but you can’t program the collar to transmit continuously or you’d run out of battery. So you set it to transmit two or three times a day, which will give you about three years of data before the built-in obsolescence. You can catch a wave on Maui, check your email on the beach, and see that your cat was at such-and-such coordinates as of three o’clock Mountain Standard Time. As far as catching the cat is concerned, you can direct the hounds to the last waypoint. That can be close enough, but only if you have a houndsman on call who can get his dogs on a hot track.”

  “Have you located a collared cat that you think is the Bangtail Ghost?”

  “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  “It’s what I’m calling it.”

  “To answer your question, yes and no.”

  “Start with the ‘no.’”

  “No, I haven’t found a cat with either a VHS or a GPS collar that I think is your ghost. But I haven’t gone through all the data yet—that’s what I hoped you’d help me with.”

  “And the ‘yes’?”

  “I think I found the tom. The one that killed the hooker. In fact, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Making of a Man-eater

  Really?” Martha said.

  “You’re skeptical. I understand that. I also understand it’s a moot point and can’t make up for the loss of life. But looking at it glass half full, if I can study a bunch of maps for a few hours and find one killer, I—I mean, we—might be able to find the other, the one that killed the herder and, presumably, Buster Garrett. The one that’s still out there hunting.”

  Martha gestured at the stacks of maps. “Shouldn’t this have been looked into months ago?”

  “As I said, this avenue of the investigation was quashed the day after the big tom was shot. Over my objection, if you want to know. I’m not supposed to be helping you out right now, not without going through the channels.”

  “I know,” Martha said. “I appreciate what you’re doing. It’s just frustrating.”

  “For me, too. But here’s what I’ve managed to dig up so far. With Carson Taylor’s help, I should say. I called him late last night to run some of my theories by him. So when I say something about cat behavior, or how the radio receiver works, it’s not just me talking off the top of my head.”

  “Gotcha. Not talking off the top of your head, what do you got?”

  Harold pointed to the center and right-hand topographic maps on the wall.

  “The dots are waypoints transmitted by a GPS receiver. The blue lines connect the dots in sequential order by time of transmission, showing the pattern of the animal’s travel over time. Take, for example, this map.” He pointed to the middle quad. “It details the movements of a female lion that was in the study for about fourteen months, before she was hit by a car on U.S. 89 near Willow Creek. As you can see, she was a homebody.” He pointed to the maze of zigzag lines connecting the waypoints. “Looks like a Rorschach test or, as you suggested, Martha, something you’d see in a modern art museum. In the winter, she strayed to the southernmost part of her range to follow the elk herds as they migrated to the valley floor, and during most of April and May she was up around the eight-thousand-foot contour and didn’t move far at all, which probably means she had kittens. Her territory covers about twenty-five square miles. That’s typical for a female lion.

  “Now, if we turn to the other map”—he pointed to the right-hand quad—“you see differences right away. One, this lion covers a hell of a lot more territory, roughly eighty square miles in the same time frame that the other covered twenty-five. Second, instead of so much back-and-forth travel, this one makes a circuit in a roughly oval pattern. It’s what’s called a beat. It has two advantages, according to Carson. First, the male can check in on the females that his territory overlaps and make scrapes and scent marks to broadcast his dominance to other males. Second, he doesn’t overhunt any one area. He makes a kill and moves on. What you’re looking at is the travel pattern of a male lion over a six-week period last fall. In the study he’s listed as T-9. ‘T’ because he’s a tom. ‘Nine’ because he was the ninth male lion collared for the study.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was GPS collared in the Bobcat Creek drainage on the Wall Creek game range”—Harold paused to glance at a notation he’d made in a notebook—“May thirty-first, 2014. At the time he was an adult, one hundred forty-two pounds, tooth wear indicating an age of around six. So that would make him about eleven years old this past November, at the time of Kincaid’s death. Past his prime, but still a formidable animal and possibly the dominant male over a large area.”

  Martha began to interject a question and Harold held up a hand.

  “Take a closer look now. What jumps out at you?”

  Martha put her hands on her hips.

  “It’s a clusterfuck,” she said. Then, holding Harold’s eyes and furrowing her brow—“Is that where I think it is?”

  Harold nodded. “The congregation of waypoints, the ‘clusterfuck,’ as you put it, indicates he was in the vicinity of the trailer where Clarice Kincaid was living for four straight days preceding the attack, and he’d visited this location a few weeks earlier as well. Now look at the other waypoint clusters and you’ll see that this is a pattern. Stake out a residence—in this case, a trailer—leave, then return anywhere from a week to a month to maybe even a year later.”

  “How far back did you take this?” Sean asked.

  “I looked at previous maps going as far back as last July. When I’d spot a cluster of waypoints near a residence, I’d cross-reference with ownership maps, find out who was living there. He staked out at least half a dozen residences, ranches, second homes, so on, the common thread being they’re secluded. One of those clusters was up Bear Creek, near the home of Hunter Ross, the young boy who disappeared. Another was an old homestead-era cabin that was part of a dude ranch complex and the owners rented out to seasonal workers. Similar MOs for all. Stalk, linger, leave, return.”

  “He was working up his nerve,” Sean said.

  “He was working up to becoming a man-eater. I also think I might have found the place he crossed over. There was one cabin on the east side of the Snowcrests that he visite
d on five occasions over the last eight months. Resident a Viet vet, PTSD diagnosis, near recluse. When he didn’t come into the town to pick up his disability check, his nephew got suspicious. Filed a missing persons. No remains were found. Dog gone, too. I think there’s a good chance old Broken Tooth popped his cherry on him.”

  “The cat I treed with Buster wasn’t wearing a collar,” Sean said. “What happened to it?”

  Harold nodded. “That threw me, too. Collars issue a fatality alert when the animal stops moving for a long period. Carson said that the mercury that acts as the sensing agent is so sensitive to movement that it can pick up exactly when an animal’s heart stops beating. In this case, though, there was no fatality alert. The collar just quit transmitting. According to Carson, water seeping into the housing could be the cause. Then there’s O-rings rotting, batteries dying, collars tearing off, electronics shorting out. Murphy’s Law. But if you look at the map, you see a congregation of dots right here on these open slopes where the contour lines say the country is fairly flat. There’s no dwelling here because it’s in the national forest.”

  “Those slopes are where the herder pitched his tent,” Sean said.

  “Actually, they’re about half a mile away. Probably where the sheep were at the time. The tom visited this general location three times, the last time about ten days before you killed him. Now what could have happened to make him lose his collar? I think it has to be the guard dogs. He got into a fight with them and the collar was damaged and got torn off.”

  “There were partly healed wounds on his body,” Sean said. “I thought it was from fights with other male lions, but it could have been the dogs.”

  Martha made a sound between a grunt and a harrumph.

  “I’m still not sure how this helps. We’re looking for a different animal for the deaths of both the herder and Buster. Knowing where one cat was at a particular time, one that’s dead and ready to be stuffed, I don’t see how it helps us find the other one. Or am I missing something?”

  “That’s just it, though, Martha. You’re not missing anything. I think it’s all right here in front of us. When you’ve found one, you’ve found the other.”

  That was something to digest, and while Martha waited for Harold to clarify, there was a crunch of gravel outside and Marcus came in the door, a bag of groceries in each hand and a third hanging from his teeth. When you’ve found one, you’ve found the other, Harold had said. In another context, he might have been talking about himself and his son. Put gray streaks in his braid, add thirty pounds, and Marcus was Harold. He even wore a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off.

  For a few minutes the business at hand was set aside and they talked about college—Marcus was in his first year at MSU and had been accepted into the prestigious film and photography school, with an eye toward applying for an internship with Lucasfilm down the road.

  Harold could not be prouder and didn’t try to hide it, and this was Harold, a man who presented to the world the mask of his stoicism and hid everything from everyone, present company included. Marcus asked what they were doing and said “Cool” and offered his help.

  Martha said they’d appreciate his input and meant it, if only Harold would explain how following one cat’s trail was going to lead to another.

  “Okay,” Harold said, “not to belabor the point, but just to make sure we’re on the same page, we know from the maps that the big tom was in the habit of staking out potential victims. We know this because his collar told us so before he lost it. He is treed and killed in early January. Four months later, Cesar Rodriguez is killed by a lion. Obviously the same lion can’t be responsible for his death. But logic tells us the two must be related.”

  He held up a hand as Martha began to object. “First,” he said, “human attacks are so rare that the chances of them being unrelated are slim to none. Carson’s words. Second, the lion chooses to kill someone who has been stalked on prior occasions. How would it know where to find the herder unless it had accompanied the big male when he stalked the herder on prior occasions?”

  “That’s a bit of conjecture, isn’t it?” Martha said.

  “I don’t think so. In science, confirmation is determined by replication of test results. In this case, I think if we find any corroborating evidence that two lions were together in any of the places where the waypoints suggest a person has been stalked, then I think we have to assume that we’ve been dealing with two animals all along.”

  Martha put a finger in the slight dimple on her chin. Worked it around. “Sean, didn’t you tell me that was Blake’s idea, two cats, not one?”

  “He thought the cat that confronted me the night Kincaid was killed might be a female, and that what I heard was the male calling to her after he had made a kill.”

  “But we’re looking for a cat that was accompanying another for a long period of time. Not hooking up for a weekend. That seems to be stretching the bounds of species behavior.”

  Harold nodded. “You’re right, Martha. It is, or rather, it used to be the common wisdom. Carson says that’s changed, ever since everyone and his brother has nailed a game trail camera to a tree. He’s seeing more and more videos of cougars being sociable: adult siblings traveling together, a male lion sharing kills with his mate and cubs, no longer that exceptional. He’s even seen footage of a female traveling with four adult cubs.”

  “Beowulf.”

  “Everyone turned to Sean at the word.

  “Say what?” Martha said.

  “Buster told me that he’d created a monster. Like in Beowulf, he said, as if I should know the story. When I went through his journals, I found that one of his clients shot the toe off a tom lion—this would be two and a half, maybe three years ago—and that the bullet had also broken one of the cat’s teeth. Buster said he knew the cat had survived because he found his track again several months later. He also examined an elk the lion had killed and determined that the right upper canine was missing. Buster was convinced it was that same cat that went on to become the man-eater. That’s why he was so obsessed with getting him. He felt responsible and knew the lion would kill again. You remember this, Martha. I told you.”

  “You told me. It seemed far-fetched.”

  “I’ve never heard of this Beowulf,” Harold said.

  “I know the story.” It was Marcus. “It’s Old English, an epic poem. Like really old. One of the professors talked about it, how there were parallels in the oral histories from our ancestors. Beowulf was a hero from a mythical land called in by the king of the Danes to slay a monster. Beowulf kills him, then finds that his job isn’t finished, because by killing the monster, he has raised its mother from her sleep. He has to kill her, too.”

  “Really?” Martha said. Then, to Sean: “Was Garrett suggesting that this second monster was the mother to the first?”

  “I asked him to be specific, but he clammed up.”

  “Humpff. So what now?”

  Harold scratched his arm. “Well, assuming that the two cats in fact hunted together, related by blood or not, we have to assume that the remaining one will go back to the places where they stalked potential victims, just like it returned to the place where the herder was. We need to warn those residents. And if your nonagenarian shows up, he’ll have a list of places to start searching for scent. Be a long shot, the cat being in any one vicinity, but better than waiting around for it to make another human kill.”

  “We need to get eyes in the sky,” Martha said. “Get Judy McGregor up there with her receiver. Maybe she’ll locate what Garrett couldn’t. Or did and paid the price of his life.”

  “One problem, Martha,” Harold said. “In order to look for a particular animal, you have to know the frequency that the collar transmitter is tuned to.”

  “Oh. Yeah, you said that earlier. So how do we winnow it down, the frequency numbers?”

  “Well,
first we got to find out what cat we’re looking for. We start by going through those boxes.” Harold gestured to four big cardboard boxes stacked against a wall. “Like I said earlier, some cats in the study were fitted with GPS collars. But the earliest ones had VHF, the older technology. No crumb trail, but each folder gives the specifics of the cats that were collared, and at least some of them include the frequencies.”

  “We’re not even through all the GPS maps yet,” Martha said.

  They had started work sitting at the kitchen table, but by the end of two hours they had moved to the pine floor, each surrounded by stacks of paper.

  “Remind me not to come back as a biologist in my next life,” Martha said. “What would you like to come back as, Harold?”

  “Never gave it any thought.”

  “Give it three seconds’ thought.”

  “Maybe a wolverine.”

  “And eat carrion? Yecht. You, Sean?”

  “A cow in India. They’re treated like royalty and you can count on being reincarnated.”

  “Marcus?”

  “I’d like to come back as myself, but better-looking and able to shoot a basketball. Then I could be a proper Indian.”

  “Me,” Martha said, “I want to be a bluebird. Just fly around and eat bugs and be beautiful.”

  They had moved back to the kitchen, where they drank iced tea and ate “wild beast” sandwiches, as Harold called them, slabs of elk slathered in horseradish mayo on homemade sourdough.