Deadman (22 page)

The day of the outing arrived at last.

18

Rocky Mountain Rendezvous

T
here are certain kinds of winter days in the Ruby Valley that are just awful. Ordinarily winter isn't so bad in the Mountain West, particularly in the sheltered valleys. In fact, it can be beautiful. Low temperatures can be a problem, but except when a cold spell goes on for more than a few days, it's not necessarily awful. Snow can be a nuisance or a threat, but generally is quite pleasant and brings with it recreational opportunities and, most important, is like a deposit in the bank, for summer withdrawal—westerners, particularly those outside the towns, appreciate snow.

The hunters like snow because it brings the elk down from the high country and you can track a wounded critter. The skiers love snow, of course; the cross-country skiers because it opens up a vast back country. Field mice love snow because it hides them from the hawks and the owls, and they can tunnel to their hearts’ content in the dry grass. For the trout, it closes the streams to the osprey and the great blue herons and it promises summer flows. Trappers and snow-mobilers simply love it. The wind . . . well, the wind is never really welcome. The wind is a killer. Cold is tolerable when it is calm. Every knot of wind makes it less tolerable. Fortunately, the valleys don't get much wind.

But an overcast day in November, –10 degrees Fahrenheit, twenty-plus knots of wind, stinging snow . . . nobody loves a day like this. The mobile-home dweller for sure doesn't love it. No mobile home seems quite secure against a day like this. The wind has a way of penetrating through the bales of hay and the plywood skirting to freeze the pipes; the structure rocks in the wind like a sleeping car on the Trans-Siberian Express; it's never quite warm enough, or if you have a woodstove, either it's too hot or—all too frequently—you've got to go out and get more firewood.

That was certainly the way Sally McIntyre looked at it. She got her two preteen kids (Jason and Jennifer) off on the school bus at 7:15, when it was still dark. Then she got ready for work. She was feeding cattle on the Garland Ranch; her ditch-rider job was through for the season. She put on her long johns, an insulated coverall over a wool shirt with hooded sweatshirt and jeans, pulled on her felt-lined Sorel boots and donned a brown duck tin coat. She hauled in more firewood for the airtight stove and set the fire so it would hold for several hours. Her old pickup started readily: She kept it tuned and the battery well-charged (she hauled it inside when the temperature dropped below –15 degrees Fahrenheit); it had an electric engine heater, which she kept plugged into an extension cord. She left it to warm up while she filled a thermos with hot coffee and packed a heavy lunch: two meat loaf sandwiches, an apple, a couple of Snickers candy bars. You burn a lot of calories pitching bales of hay in sub-zero weather.

All morning she hauled hay and spread it in the fields near the ranch house for several hundred cattle to feed on. They looked pretty miserable. It was just damned unpleasant, although the sun periodically broke through, for ten minutes at a time, between snow squalls blowing off the mountains—what she called a dirty sun, its face never really bright. The thermometer never got close to zero, the wind gusted to thirty knots at times and drove the snow like BB shot. But by midday she was finished and she found herself up on the service
road below Garland Butte, not far from where she had found the body in the balmy days of goose summer. She was warm enough, in a general way, but still cold in parts. She had eaten her sandwiches and candy bars while driving between haystacks and feed lots. She had lain in the snow and ice to tighten the chains on the rear wheels of the truck, she had nearly frozen her fingers repairing a gate, and she had gotten a sleeve wet breaking ice in a drinking trough. She was tired and dirty.

There wasn't a lot of snow in the fields, most of it swept into ditches and drifts. She decided to walk up to the hot springs. She found a half-pint of Jim Beam bourbon in the truck and slipped it into the pocket of the tin coat. It was easy walking, even exhilarating to hike into the spitting wind up the long north slope to the copse of pines behind the Humann cabin on Garland Butte. There were ravens scudding before the wind, but little other evidence of life in this bitter season.

The springs, however, were wonderful. They were well sheltered from the wind by the huge trees, but the snow howled above, the wind tossing the tops of the ponderosas. The steam billowed, one moment as impenetrable as valley fog, the next swept nearly away. Chickadees and a small gang of juncos yammered and peeped around the springs. A small, oblivious downy woodpecker worked stolidly about the lower limbs, tapping, listening, tapping.

Sally quickly stripped off her clothes and jumped into the hot water. She immersed herself until her body temperature was sufficiently high, then rose out, steaming, while she carefully folded the clothes and found a place in a cleft that wasn't too damp but still warm from the steam, so that the clothes (particularly the boots) wouldn't freeze while she bathed. Then she sank back into the hot water, lying submerged with her head resting against a convenient mossy rock. Her red hair was frozen where it had gotten wet and she lay back, watching through slit eyes the steam rising up among the frosted green boughs and the snow sifting down as it fell out from the
wind roaring over the tops. Every once in a while she reached out a parboiled arm and took hold of the whiskey bottle. A sip was about a half-shot and it felt warm all the way down. Then she set the bottle back and sank down, occasionally shifting about, sort of walking and dragging on her back, with her hands on the sandy, stony bottom, pushing herself along, to find a still hotter spring. Once she stood up and walked out of the pool entirely, her naked body glowing in the snow as she walked about, cooling off. Then she plunged back in and swam submerged to the hottest part of the pool, to lie awhile and let her hair freeze.

This was bliss, but not perfect bliss. She did not, on this occasion, think about the cowboy, Gary, who had been an object of fantasy on her first visit to the springs. She hadn't seen Gary since before the visit and she didn't miss him. Nor did she think for more than a second about her ex-husband. He had been rather like Gary, all cock and no brains, to say nothing of his being too fond of booze coupled with a tendency to punch women. She thought instead of her children, scrappy and independent, but still childishly loving and an almost continuous delight. She thought about her own mother, now sitting around a trailer park in New Mexico with her fourth husband, a retired mailman. A pretty nice old broad, actually, quite funny if a little boozy. The doctors had removed a breast a year ago, but she still smoked a pack and a half a day. Sally worried about her, but not much.

Finally, sipping whiskey, she thought about the cop who had come from Detroit. Mul, his name was. The rest of the name wasn't so easy to recall: -lyzer, or some such. Nice-looking man, she thought. A little sad in the face, but he looked competent and not mean. A woman wouldn't have to look after a man like that, she thought, and he wouldn't beat on you. In fact, a man like that would probably be a bottom-line plus. He'd bring more than he took. She had invited him, and Jacky, to dinner that time, but she hadn't been too surprised when they hadn't accepted: Jacky was married now, and he must have
realized that the invitation wasn't really meant for him. And if Jacky didn't accept, then it would have been a little obvious if Mul had. She'd been a little disappointed, but not greatly.

She thought about Mul for a good long time, gently scissoring her legs in the warm water. A nuthatch yank-yanked on the furrowed bark of a nearby ponderosa and then a chickadee flew down and landed quite close to her head. For a while she watched a pure white ermine slipping around the gnarled roots that were exposed among the rocks. Mul had asked her to keep an eye on this place, for any unusual activity. She'd heard that the owner, Humann, was still in the hospital. He might never get better, poor devil. That's what they said in the Tinstar Saloon. Got shot in the head by a hitchhiker, they said. Must be pretty tough, she thought, to survive a bullet in the head.

So, when she couldn't take the heat anymore, she got up and slicked the water off her, then dressed before she could get cold. She set off up the trail. She had not actually walked out of the trees when she realized that there was someone in the cabin. She stopped in the trees to watch. Smoke was coming out the chimney and there was a car in the yard, near the garage. It was a blue Ford, and Sally could read the license plate number—the “1” prefix indicated that it had been registered in Butte–Silver Bow County.

Sally stood and watched for a few minutes, but the wind and the snow swirled around the cabin and it chilled her. She was about to go back down the trail when a woman came out of the cabin. From her position she didn't actually see the woman come out, but she heard the front door open and close. The woman, who had blond hair under a wool hat, walked across the driveway toward the woodpile in the shed/garage. She stopped then and turned to look back toward the cabin. After a moment she started back toward the cabin, but Sally heard the front door open and close, and a larger woman soon joined the first woman and they continued on to the shed. The larger woman loaded the smaller woman's arms with wood, then filled her
own arms and followed her back to the cabin. Sally waited a short time, but there was no indication that they were coming back out.

When she got back to the trailer, there were a couple of Christmas cards in her mailbox and the telephone bill. It was still a couple of hours before the kids would be home. She built up the fire and made some tomato soup, using canned tomatoes, which she pureed in the blender, plus some of her own vigorous, garlicky vegetable stock. Her kids loved this soup and so did Sally, though she added a spoonful of hot chili sauce to her bowl. When she had eaten the soup and read the Christmas cards—one of which was from Lake Milling and Feed—she called Jacky at the station.

Jacky Lee was very interested in Sally's observations, not least in the fact that she'd been skinny-dipping in the hot springs. It sounded like something worth doing on a bitter Montana day, but he didn't comment on that. “A blue Taurus?” he said. “That'd be the nurse, Cateyo. She stopped by to get the key to the gate, said she was taking what's-his-name, Humann, up there for a day outing. It's all right. Hell of a day for it. But thanks for letting us know, Sally. I don't know who the other woman could be. Kinda big, hunh?” That didn't sound like one of the other nurses to him. He asked her to describe the woman's clothing. A wool plaid coat didn't mean anything to him, however.

“At first I thought it was a man,” Sally said, “but I could tell by the walk, and then I realized that her hair was either short or tucked into the hat. It was a woman, all right. She seemed in charge. She showed the other one how to hold out her arms, then loaded her up, then sent her off. Not real bossy, or anything, just in charge. The smaller one, the blonde, didn't seem to mind, or anything.”

Jacky nodded, then remembered he was on the phone and grunted. “You still in the same place?” he asked. “I might run out that way, later.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” Sally said. “Will you tell Mul about this?”

“Why?”

“Because he asked you to,” Sally said.

“No, I mean why shouldn't I stop by?”

“Because I've got kids here and they're older now and I don't do that anymore,” she said.

After a long silence, Jacky said, “I'll call Mul.”

It was well after five before Jacky got through to the Ninth Precinct. Mulheisen was not there, but Jimmy Marshall was. Jimmy was apologetic. “I meant to call you,” he said, “but I just didn't get around to it yet.”

“What do you mean?” Jacky asked.

“Mulheisen is on his way to Salt Lake City,” Jimmy explained. “I put him on the plane a couple of hours ago. We got a call from Delta. They booked a ‘Helena Kaparich’ on a flight out of Butte tomorrow, for Salt Lake.” He explained about Mulheisen's theory of false names.

“So she's in Butte now,” Jacky said.

“I suppose,” Marshall said. “Delta didn't have her booked in there, but they suggested we check with Northwest. Northwest didn't have anything on that name.”

“Did you check Horizon?” Jacky said. “That's a little feeder airline, flies a lot of flights in the Northwest.”

Marshall hadn't. Jacky said he'd check. In the meantime, Mulheisen was planning to stay in Salt Lake City, hoping to intercept Helen there. This time he had a warrant for arrest: Frank Zaparanuk in the forensic lab had found traces of Carmine's blood on one of the sawed-off shotguns that Jacky had confiscated from the cabin. This same gun also surrendered some textile fibers that were identical to those used on the upholstery of Carmine's limousine. In addition there were some fibers from clothing. Mulheisen wanted all of the clothing at the cabin seized. With luck, a jacket or a pair of pants would have traces of blood. The shotgun with Carmine's blood on it also had the fingerprints of Helen and Joe on it. This wasn't as conclusive
a piece of evidence as it seemed, but you could sure as hell get a warrant with it. Marshall was busy on the extradition papers now.

Jacky suggested it might be better to intercept Helen in Butte, if possible, since he could guarantee cooperation—the Mario Soper shooting was their jurisdiction, after all. He could work up some kind of preliminary charge relating to the guns they had found at the cabin. Or he might be able, at least temporarily, to detain Helen as a material witness in the death of a man discovered on property where she was a resident.

Marshall agreed with that, but it was up to Mulheisen, who would undoubtedly call him as soon as he reached Salt Lake. “Of course, if she shows up there between now and then, use your own judgment,” Marshall said. “But it might be best to coordinate things with Mul.”

Jacky assented to that and as soon as Marshall hung up he called Horizon. A “Helena Kaparich” had flown into Butte that morning. Kaparich was by no means an uncommon name in Butte, Jacky knew. Ordinarily he wouldn't have remarked it but for the first name and the information from Marshall. But now what? Was the smaller woman at the cabin Helen Sedlacek, and the larger one Cateyo? Sally's observation could have been simply a comparative thing, but it didn't seem like it. Cateyo could never be mistaken for a man, even momentarily, and he didn't recall her wearing a plaid coat. Sally had mentioned blond hair; presumably that would be Cateyo's golden hair. No, the larger woman at the cabin must be a friend of hers, someone helping her with Humann. So where was Helen Sedlacek? Maybe she was on her way up there, or she may have arrived there by now. He supposed he had better go check.