The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “That could help with an aerial search.”

  “It could.” Martha fingered her chin. “The mystery is how Garrett knew to tune to that frequency.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a mystery, Martha. I didn’t have time to go through many of the files, but Garrett was listed as the houndsman for some of the captures. Either he or the biologist would have programmed in the frequency before fastening the collar. Garrett could know either way. . . . You look like you’re somewhere else.”

  “I’m just picking at a nit. Someone, some thing, lit a fire under Garrett’s ass, one that was hot enough that he went looking for the cat in the dead of the night. If he was called out by somebody who said he knew where the cat was, then it’s logical to think that someone had picked up a signal on a receiver and knew it was the ghost because, like Garrett, he knew the proper frequency to tune in to. That means this person’s name could be in the study and staring us in the face. Are you following me?”

  Sean was. He felt tumblers begin to move in his head, not yet clicking into place, but beginning to fall into a loose magnetic alignment. “I’ll drive into town and get the boxes,” he said.

  “No.” Martha shook her head. “We’ve had a long day. The boxes will be there in the morning, and we have other priorities.”

  “You told me the only thing on the agenda tonight was onion soup.”

  “That was before Harold blindsided me about running for sheriff.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to let that ruin your day.”

  “I’m a woman. It’s my prerogative. I just want to go to bed and have you hold me while I fall asleep. Some nights a dog to curl up with isn’t enough.”

  So they went to bed and Sean did as he was told. But as Martha’s breathing steadied and deepened, he lay awake, unable to stop the tumblers in his head from turning. At four in the morning, he finally said the hell with it and eased his dead arm from under her side. He wrote a note on the kitchen table—“It has to be in the boxes.” And looked up from his pen as she padded into the room in her slippers.

  “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I’m driving to the studio. I can’t sleep.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to leave.”

  “You know me.”

  “I do know you. That’s the problem. If we’re going to have a proper marriage, then you can’t go off in the middle of the night without telling me. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  “It’s not the middle of the night and I was leaving you a note. See?” He showed it to her.

  “Were you going to kiss me before you left?”

  “I was going to blow one because I didn’t want to wake you up. Am I in some kind of trouble here?”

  “Are you?”

  “Oh, come here.” Sean kissed her. “Is this going to become a regular thing, sharing plans and kissing each other every time one of us opens or closes a door?”

  “You disapprove because you think it compromises your independence?”

  “No. It’s just new. Other relationships, we didn’t kiss each other every time we turned around.”

  “How many times did you turn around in those relationships before you were out the door?”

  “When you have your working face on, you don’t exactly invite kissing, you know.”

  “Now you’re saying I look hard. I have to look hard or I couldn’t do the job. Men would walk all over me. You have no idea what it’s like being a woman in this job.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t. That’s my point. I’m one of maybe forty female sheriffs in the entire country. You could fit all of us in a two-door garage. Just remember, though, when the clock strikes five, I’m Martha. I hang the gun belt up at the door.”

  “The first time I kissed you, I had to tell you to take it off.”

  “It was our fourth kiss, and I took it off, didn’t I?”

  “You took everything off.”

  “If that’s the worst that can happen, then what’s to worry about?”

  She had him there, and he kissed her again and walked out into the night, and either they’d made up or they hadn’t.

  “Too many rules to the game,” Sean said, when Choti came to his whistle. He climbed behind the wheel, she turned around twice in the passenger seat before shutting her eyes, and they drove away with the road ahead bathed in the lambency of a three-quarter moon.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK AT HIS STUDIO, Sean made himself a cup of instant and finished tying the Sunray Shadow. “I’d eat it,” he said aloud. Then he withdrew the folders that he’d transferred to the whiskey drawer. Working on Harold’s assumption that you find one cat, you find the other, he began leafing through the folders for a male lion that had originally been radio-collared and then a number of years later been treed again and fitted with a GPS collar. It was slow going, but he finally struck gold, in a very literal sense. The folder he turned in his hands was for the male mountain lion that was identified as T-9, the big tom that killed Clarice Kincaid. There was a notation that the cat had originally been radio-collared as a three-year-old in the Gold Creek drainage of the West Pioneer Mountains, entering the study under the name Simba. The second capture, when he was fitted with the GPS collar, had occurred in the Madison Range in 2014, when he was six. No mention of a broken tooth. That must have occurred later.

  The logical reason for the venue change was that lions are territorial, especially males, and that a larger tom had driven the young Simba from his original range, and he had traveled east to establish a home of his own.

  Sean felt a thrill race up his spine as his mind made a connection. Fly tying requires steady fingers and Sean had them, but as he pawed through the remaining folders, he noticed a tremor. He was halfway through the folders in the last box when he found what he was looking for.

  A female lion, also estimated at three years of age and given the name Zahara, had been treed and radio-collared in the East Pioneers, in the Lacy Creek drainage. Sean tapped up a USGS quad on his laptop. Lacy Creek fed into the Wise River no more than five miles from Gold Creek, where Simba had been fitted with his collar. The interval between the two captures was three days. The lions were of similar age. Was he looking at brother and sister? It seemed likely.

  Sean shook out the contents of the folders for both cats. There were several photographs. One showed a younger Garrett, wolfishly masculine, a hound’s butt intruding into the lower right corner of the frame, the tranquilized male lion lying at his feet. Another showed the female having a blood sample drawn by a kneeling man wearing a green-and-black-checked shirt. The last photo was of a woman taking the man’s place and fitting a collar. She also was wearing a green-and-black-checked shirt. Sean didn’t have to turn the photos over and read the notations to know he was looking at younger versions of the lion couple, as he’d come to think of them, Drick and Scarlett Blake.

  On the back of one photo were jotted details of the female’s capture.

  Zahara

  April 11, 2011

  Lacy Creek, junction with Skull Creek, East Pioneer Mountains

  Biologist, D. Blake

  Accompanied, S. Blake

  Hounds, B. Garrett

  VHS frequency 22

  Sean pushed back in his chair. “You’re the guy who doesn’t play well with others,” he said under his breath.

  So Buster Garrett and Drick Blake, Scarlett as well, had been present at the capture of the young cats, both of which, if Sean’s thinking was right, had gone on to become man-eaters. Had the two cats been together all along? If so, had the female become injured and the male provided for her until he was killed? Had killing one monster in fact loosed another, as told in the poem?

  Sean knew that the coincidence of Buster Garrett and Drick Blake sharing
the cats’ history could be just that, a coincidence. It didn’t mean they were guilty of anything except a desire to join teams and rid the countryside of a menace. Who had called who on the day that Buster Garrett died didn’t really matter, though, Sean thought, of the two, it was more likely that Blake had placed the call, telling Garrett that he had located the cat. Garrett had the hounds. Plus he was the loner, and Sean saw no reason for him to ask for Blake’s help, or anyone’s, and take a chance on losing the cat while waiting for it to arrive.

  Another possibility, that the mysterious second man was not Blake, could not be dismissed. In that case, Sean was trying to force pieces into the wrong puzzle.

  One thing he did know. He wasn’t going to find answers to his questions tying flies.

  Mindful of his recent admonishment, Sean punched in Martha’s cell number, though a glance at the graying sky told him that she’d be feeding chickens or mucking out Petal’s stall after turning her out to pasture, and it wasn’t her custom to buckle her phone onto her duty belt until she’d traded her overalls for her khakis.

  He waited until the answering service kicked in and left a message, telling her where he was headed and why, adding a postscript not to worry, that he wasn’t. He left an identical message on her office landline, minus only the “I love you.”

  Blake might well be a vain man, Sean thought, an arrogant, condescending, overbearing man. Even a zealot. His sister had called him mad. But Sean had not seen him as sinister, and on his visit to the yurt, he had been drawn in by the force field of the man’s undeniable charisma. Blake’s offer to help hunt down the man-eater had come across as genuine.

  No, Sean thought, the worst thing Blake could be guilty of was cowardice, if in fact he had fled from the ridge when Buster was attacked. That he had not reported the incident meant to Sean that he’d been embarrassed to do so.

  So he told himself as the day came to life, and so what if the telephone wires were strung with blackbirds that should have arrived weeks ago and stared with cold pebble eyes as the Land Cruiser passed, heading west with the light?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Secrets of the Heart

  When Martha drove in to work that morning, a blinking light on her office phone vied for attention with a manila envelope and a white cardboard box on her desk. Martha opened the envelope first, which carried the letterhead of the county coroner’s office. It was the preliminary report on Buster Garrett’s cause of death, strangulation from a crushed windpipe—no surprise. Ancillary to the primary cause was blood loss due to puncture wounds consistent with those from a cat’s teeth. Measurements of the bite marks indicated an animal with a skull the approximate size of a grown mountain lion’s. A formal autopsy, conducted by the medical examiner, Bob Hanson, was scheduled for the following day.

  Martha put the letter back into the envelope and turned her attention to the box, which was from the regional crime lab and carried its seal. She used the blade of her Swiss Army knife to slice through the tape. Inside was a note from Georgeanne Wilkerson, saying that the enclosed items were personal belongings found with or near Buster Garrett’s body. The box also included the claw pendant Sean had found near the sheepherder’s body and the bullet he’d found under the skin of one of the guard dogs. Each piece of evidence was encased in its own resealable bag. Martha was free to open and examine the effects in any order, as they had been fully processed, with a noted exception. She was to call the lab before opening the sealed bag marked #7.

  Martha pulled on blue latex gloves and followed the protocol. The first bag held Garrett’s wallet, which he wore Western-style, on a chain affixed to his belted jeans. The wallet was bloodstained and contained Garrett’s driver’s license, credit cards, medical insurance information, currency. It also included two facing photographs in a plastic sleeve, with a frosted surface meant to keep the photos from slipping out of the wallet. One was a sepia-toned snapshot of a woman with severe features standing under a cracked cowboy hat by a sign that read GARRETT CATTLE STATION. The land behind her was desolate and faded nearly white. Garrett’s mother? The other photograph showed Garrett’s wife standing with what Martha presumed were Buster’s two sons, the boys wearing Little League uniforms that read ACE HARDWARE BLUE JAYS.

  Another bag contained the lion’s claw pendant and another the bullet. An enclosed note supported Sean Stranahan’s conclusion in the field. The rifling marks on the base of the bullet were a match with the bore peculiarities of Garrett’s .45/70 rifle.

  None of this was anything to elevate the blood pressure. The box was now empty but for item #7. It was a matchbox, about three inches long by an inch wide, with a sliding cover. A snarling red lion, similar to the one on the Scottish national flag, was embossed on the cover. Through the clear plastic, Martha could read the lettering.

  WILD AND FREE SYMPOSIUM

  NORTH AMERICAN FELID SOCIETY

  WORKSHOPS, CONFERENCE, BANQUET

  SALT LAKE CITY CONVENTION CENTER

  SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

  AUGUST 24–AUGUST 27, 2018

  Martha shook the box to see if she could hear matches shifting. She couldn’t, and she called Wilkerson’s number. She twiddled her thumbs one way, then the other, until Wilkerson picked up.

  “What’s with the box, Gigi? Can I open it or not? I have gloves.”

  “Good morning, Martha. No gloves necessary.”

  “Why don’t I hear matches shaking?”

  “Because they’re flammable and we have travel restrictions. And they aren’t what’s notable.”

  “Isn’t that for me to decide?”

  A beat of silence. “What side of the bed did you get up on?”

  “The wrong one, like most mornings. Sorry, Gigi.”

  “That’s okay. We love you for all your warts and graces, as Bob Hanson says.”

  “Kind of him. I’m sliding the cover back now.”

  On the white inside of the box was a heart outlined in blue ink, with an arrow through it. It was signed with the letter S. The S was scrolled, like calligraphy. Underneath was a number—407.

  “Where did you find this, Gigi?”

  “It was in the butt stock of Buster Garrett’s rifle. You know how you can remove the butt plate and ream out the stock to lighten up a gun or change its balance point? Well, it looks like he used a drill bit to make three overlapping cavities. The opening was just long and wide enough to fit the matchbox. I got a confession. I would have never have noticed it, but the screws holding the plate on were marred by the wrong-size screwdriver. I got curious and unscrewed the plate. I’m guessing 407 is a hotel room number. And whoever drew the heart was who was waiting for him in bed. Looks like Garrett wasn’t getting all of his pussy out of trees.”

  The remark struck Martha as crude and out of character for Wilkerson, but, she thought, possibly accurate.

  “I got a number for the North America Felid Society,” Wilkerson said. “Guess who was listed as a speaker last year?”

  “Scarlett Blake,” Martha said.

  “She’s one of the weirdo lion people?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “No, it was Buster Garrett. He spoke about the role of the houndsman in predator studies.”

  Martha let this sink in. “Did you specifically ask if either of the Blakes was there?”

  “No. I had no word from your office that they were of interest. This is my argument against strict compartmentalization. We need more back-and-forth with your people.”

  “This isn’t the time to get into that. Who did you speak to?”

  “A woman who lives in Salt Lake. She was the program organizer. You think Garrett was having an affair with this cat woman? Scarlett starts with an S.”

  Martha grunted. Buster Garrett and Scarlett Blake? They were an odd couple at first glance, at second glance, too, but both were wildlife advocates, even
if Buster’s advocacy sometimes came with a bullet. Sean had told her about the friction between Scarlett and her brother. Perhaps Buster was an escape, or a way at getting back at her brother’s own indiscretions. Or maybe it was just old-fashioned romance. The heart wants what the heart wants.

  All speculation, and Martha speculated while she waited for someone to pick up the phone. The organization woman said hello. Yes, she told Martha, Scarlett had been both a presenter and a panelist. Everyone knew her—she was a rock star in the world of wildlife advocacy. Wore her scars like jewelry. And no, her brother had not attended. He was invited, but the organizer’s understanding was that he had a conflict with a conference of the World Wildlife Federation held in Berlin. Couldn’t really blame him. The WWF had a lot more trees to shake money out of than the Felid Society.

  “How about Buster Garrett?” Martha asked her.

  “Oh, he’s a controversial figure, that one. But as he points out, houndsmen need lions in the hills or they’re out of a job. The real enemies are the only-good-cat-is-a-dead-cat people. The ranchers, mostly.”

  “Would Garrett know Scarlett Blake?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody.”

  Martha asked what hotel the presenters had stayed at and thanked the woman for the information.

  “If I can be of any more help . . .”

  Martha saw that she had not yet picked up her messages and tapped the button. The first was from Cecil Flowers, saying he was at a rest stop on the Colorado/Wyoming line and should arrive the day after tomorrow. Did she get the perfume?

  “Yeah, and you owe me fifty bucks, mister,” she said to the room.

  She punched in the second message and listened to Sean’s voice. An odd tingling sensation flushed over her face, as if her skin had contracted around a thousand pinpoint icicles. The tight feeling left and she replayed the message just to hear his voice again, then switched off the phone with his last words echoing—“Don’t worry. I’m not.”