Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (8 page)

“That's my sweetie,” she said, pulling out a worn brass locket. She opened it so Stranahan could lean close and see the photo.

He was embarrassed. The man in the picture was young, hardly more than a boy. He'd heard that Katie Sparrow had had a boyfriend who drowned in an avalanche. The story was that watching the avalanche dogs work as they looked for the body was what had spurred her interest in search and rescue, and she'd become a handler as a result.

“I'm sorry, Katie, I didn't know.”

“It's okay. It was a long time ago. Colin's my good-luck charm. He keeps me safe when I'm in the mountains. Him and Lothar.”

“He looks like a nice young man.”

“He was a sweetie,” Katie said. She offered up a smile, her eyes far away for a moment, and dropped the locket back under her shirt.

•   •   •

F
ifteen minutes later, Sparrow's detector buzzed as it passed over a knuckled aspen root that had spread into the open area, twenty feet from the treeline.

She swept it back—
buzz
—and forth—
buzz
.

“Jiminy Crickets.” She fell to her knees and began to dig into the root with the knife of her multitool.

“I'm shaking,” Katie said. “Feel.” She put Stranahan's hand on her arm. “We might really have something here, you know it?”

After a minute she sat back. “Damn, that root's tough as bear hide.”

Stranahan, squatting beside her, said, “Can you see a place a bullet might have gone in?”

“There's a bunch of scars. But they're all healed up.”

“Can you fine-tune the detector to get a more specific location?”

“Not really. It's getting me within a few inches. Maybe we should dig around and expose the whole root.”

“Do you have a saw on your Leatherman? We could cut out a cross section.”

“That's a good idea,” Katie said.

Ten minutes later, she handed Stranahan a ten-inch section of heavy root. It was as big around as a softball. She passed the detector around the root to make sure the metal that set it off hadn't passed through to lodge in the ground. The signal indicated it was there, buried in the root. Katie took the instrument and turned the discrimination adjustment so that it would only react to copper. The coil passed across the root, passed back, nothing.

She squinched up one side of her face. “Most bullets have copper jackets,” she said. She adjusted the dial to isolate lead. Again, nothing.

“Then it's not a bullet,” she said. “Goldang it. I was sure we'd found one.”

“Keep fiddling with that thing.”

A minute later she had isolated the source of the reaction. It was steel.

“Bullets that don't expand have steel jackets. Like military bullets, right?”

“Yes.” Stranahan's voice was skeptical. “But even steel-jacketed bullets have a lead core. The detector should have picked it up. But it could still be evidence. As much as I'd like to dig it out, I'm thinking we're already in trouble for climbing up here on our own. We probably should hand it to Martha as is, rather than dig into it and take a chance on damaging something.”

“Now you sound like Warren Jarrett,” Katie said. “I've been on like a hundred searches with him and I swear the man has a balance scale in his brain. He balances everything out before making a decision. I can't remember a single time he didn't do the prudent thing. It drives me crazy.” She made a face. “But yeah, you're probably right. You're going to have to take it in, though. I got to wear my pointy hat for the next four days.”

“I'll give you full credit. It was your idea.”

“You're such a stand-up guy. Isn't he a stand-up guy, Lothar?”

“Now you're teasing me.”

“You know you like it. Come on, let's get off this mountain before it rains.”

CHAPTER NINE

A Night in a Grain Elevator

“M
y name is Doris. I'll be your server tonight.” The woman who had bustled over to the corner table in the dining room of the Cottonwood Inn extracted a pencil from the tangled curls of her hair. She cocked it over an order pad.

“Well?”

“Aren't you supposed to list the specials?”

The woman looked at Stranahan and pulled half her face into a frown. She said, “I'm sorry, I forget my manners. For the appetizer tonight we have sautéed turkey gizzards in a red wine reduction. The dinner special is a rattlesnake sashimi wrapped in lightly steamed poison oak leaves, served with a bitchin' hot wasabi.”

“Bitchin'?”

“That's what it says on the blackboard. I'm just the messenger.”

Beside Stranahan, Martinique shifted in her chair, her lustrous hair swinging forward over the musculature of her shoulders. She looked curiously from one to the other.

“Aren't you going to introduce me to this tall drink of water next to you, Stranny?” the waitress said.

“Doris, this is Martinique. Martinique, Doris. Doris is the first person I met in Bridger. She thinks she's my mother.”

“That's because you need one,” the waitress said. She pressed the hand Martinique offered between both of hers, leaned down close to her, and whispered, “He thinks he's doing okay, but I grew up on a sheep farm and I know a lost lamb when I see one.”

Sean acted as if he hadn't heard. “Doris, Martinique is studying to be a veterinarian.”

“Good for you. I never knew what a people doctor was until I had my first baby. If somebody got sick, we just called the vet.”

When Martinique lowered her head to look at the menu, Doris got Stranahan's attention, rolled her eyes to the side, and mouthed the word “wow.” She took their orders, stuck the pencil back into her hair, wheeled on her heel. When they were alone, Martinique said, “Thank you for taking me here. This place is really beautiful.”

Stranahan told her that when the Cottonwood Inn had been built in the 1920s, it served as a gateway hotel to Yellowstone Park, a ninety-mile stagecoach ride up the Gallatin Canyon. Located on a spur of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, it had been constructed in Spanish style with arched windows and Polynesian mahogany woodwork and had once been named the country's most romantic inn by a bed-and-breakfast association. Which was ironic considering that for most of its history it also had been a whorehouse.

Stranahan stopped, realizing that he was talking just to talk. The fact was it had been years since he'd had an actual date with a woman and he was searching for topics to fill gaps in conversation. The evening hadn't started that way. When he'd knocked on the door of the converted grain elevator out on the road to the Bear Trap, Martinique had greeted him with a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth while her fingers sought the snap breast pocket of his print cowboy shirt, the only shirt besides threadbare Sears work shirts that Sean owned.

“What's this?” he'd said, patting the pocket.

“That's your twenty. You never got your coffee or your change.”

The inside of the grain elevator was poorly lit and haphazardly furnished. Martinique had told him that a couple from California were planning to renovate the interior next year, making it into a five-story dream house; they had given her lease of the place through January.

An old Formica table with mismatched art deco chairs and a sofa constituted the living and dining quarters. There was a dish of dry cat food with “Attack Cat” scrawled on the side, a water bowl, a litterbox. The only wall decorations were a calendar four months out of date—a snowy landscape photo with a fluffed-up cat sitting atop a weathered fencepost—and a framed photograph of a man and a gangly girl of ten or so standing on a cold-looking beach, “Say cheese” smiles on their faces. The man was holding a bucket; the girl had a shovel in one hand and was extending her other arm, holding what could have been a chip of driftwood.

“Your father?”

She nodded. “I grew up in Grays Harbor. That's a razor clam.”

“Idyllic.”

“It really was.”

But she hadn't elaborated and a few seconds ticked away and then a few more and the silence became heavy. Suddenly they were awkward with each other.

“You promised me cats,” he had finally said.

“They're on the bed in the loft.” She glanced up, then drifted a hand in the air.

“It's not much,” she said, assessing the living space. “But all I do is work and go to class.” She turned away to pick up a shawl lying on the sofa and for just a moment her shoulders sagged. The smile she gave Sean on turning around was one of her brave ones.

The awkwardness had continued while they drove to the inn, and now it was there when they were finishing dinner. At his prompting, Martinique had opened up about her background, telling him that she was one-quarter Fulani on her father's side; his father had been a French diplomat who married a Fulani woman from Senegal, Senegal having been a French protectorate. Her mother was a U.S. citizen of Welsh heritage, born into an extended family of Olympic Peninsula loggers. She said if you added up the missing fingers at a family reunion, there would be enough to make two hands. After high school, Martinique had enrolled at UW, but had left to take care of her father when he became ill. The roundabout route that found her in a bikini in a coffee kiosk and in a bad relationship that made her reevaluate her life wasn't worth going into. She had moved to Montana at a friend's prompting and decided to establish residency, go back to school, and apply to the WICHE program that allowed Montana students to pay in-state tuition at veterinary schools in the Northwest. She'd been accepted at OSU and would be moving to Corvallis, Oregon, to complete her studies next February.

But speaking had been an effort. She had wound down and hadn't seemed interested in Sean's story about moving west. He'd been tempted to fill the void by talking about the mystery piece of metal in the root. But that was police business and he could envision Martha Ettinger's reaction to the disclosure, having withstood his share of withering looks from the sheriff in the past year.

He decided on a more circumspect disclosure, told her he'd been painting and had seen a cat up at the edge of the wilderness. “Like the one on your calendar,” he said. “But it was feral and its hair was matted. It had a wild look in its eyes.”

It was maybe a Maine coon cat, she said. “Poor thing.” Then her shoulders dropped as they had back in her apartment and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the irises were glistening. She said, “I'm so sorry for not being good company. I shouldn't have come out tonight. But you were nice and I thought maybe it would do me some good and help give me the strength to face the next few days . . .” She sighed and put a crumpled napkin to the corner of her left eye.

“After I saw you yesterday, Ichiro had a seizure. I took him to Svenson Veterinary and he said I'd done all I could, giving him the fluids, but his kidneys were finally shutting down. Now he won't eat and he had another seizure this morning. And I don't know what to do, have the doctor put him down or just try to keep him as comfortable as I can while he dies. He'll try to hold on, cats that have bonded with you try to hold on, he could live for another three or four days. I was up all last night with him and I don't know if I can take it. So I want you to take me home. I never should have left him, even if it's just a couple hours.”

“Yes, of course,” Sean said. He placed bills on the table to cover the dinner and Doris's tip and Martinique leaned against him as they walked to the Land Cruiser.

When they got to the grain elevator, she asked him to come in while she checked on the cat. To get to the loft, she had to use the outside stairs, and she was back after a couple minutes to say that Ichiro was sleeping. “All he does is pull himself to the cup of water on the bedstand to drink. He's just going on instinct, trying to dilute the poisons building up in his body. I could give him more fluids, but it would be cruel. It would just draw out the suffering. I'm going to ask you a big favor, Mr. Sean Stranahan. I'm going to ask if you will sleep on the couch tonight. I'll lock Mitsy and Miss Daisy down here where they can sleep with you. Ichiro needs to be alone, and I need to be alone with him. Do you think maybe you could do that for me? I don't have a sleeping bag or anything . . .” She took a big breath, her shoulders falling as she exhaled.

“I have a sleeping bag in the rig,” Sean said.

So he lay on the couch with a gray tiger cat in the crook of his knees and a sealpoint Siamese stretched across his neck. He didn't get much sleep and was up at five, having to meet his clients at the Ennis Café in an hour. He was quiet dressing and was lifting the tailgate of the Cruiser when Martinique appeared at the door in a flannel nightgown.

“He's getting weaker,” she said. “He wants to be on the floor, so that's where I slept with him. I'm not going in to work. Could you stop by the kiosk and tell Kristin? She'll get a substitute.”

“Sure. I have a day float and then I have something else up the Madison. I could stop on my way back, but it could be really late.”

“I'd like that. I'll put the key under the mat . . . or here, just take it.” She tucked the key into his shirt pocket and kissed his neck, the gestures not so different from when he had knocked on the door last evening, when she'd kissed the corner of his mouth and it was money she put in his pocket. But there was no space between them now and she clung to him afterward in the half-light of dawn, smelling like Martinique.

CHAPTER TEN

“A Theft of History”

S
tranahan was picking up his raft trailer at Sam's place when his cell vibrated. He'd resisted getting one for more than a year, Montana being a state where you could cross three county lines without passing in range of a tower. But now that he worked on call, taking on clients for Sam, he'd had to cave.

“You have some explaining to do.” It was Martha Ettinger.

Stranahan put the phone on speaker and set it on the ground. He had dropped off the package with the desk sergeant at the Law and Justice Building last evening, after the sheriff had gone home. He'd been expecting the call.

“Didn't you read my note?” He dropped the tongue of the trailer over the ball hitch.

“I did. And I quote: ‘Katie Sparrow and I used a metal detector to find these items near body removal sites on Sphinx Mountain. Unidentified piece of metal buried in root.' End quote. There seems to be something missing here, like permission from the appropriate legal authority.”

“As I recall, you told me I could go to Canada if I wanted. All I did was broaden a search we'd already initiated. But Katie gets the credit. The trip was her idea. And the metal detector.”

“I'll have a word with her when she comes off park patrol.”

“So what was in the root? The metal detector isolated steel.”

“That's police business.”

Stranahan hooked up the safety chains under the chassis of the Land Cruiser.

Finally: “Where are you?”

He told her.

“Come to my office tomorrow morning. Don't bother to dress. I can find a state-issue jumpsuit in just your size.”

•   •   •

T
he Oglethorpe twins, proprietors of a Ford dealership in Petoskey, Michigan, traded bad casts and finished each other's sentences all day. They gave Stranahan a fifty each for the tip, not bad considering that neither had felt the rod bend since the elder brother—by seven minutes—boated a fifteen-inch brown on the first cast of the morning. It was the closest Stranahan had come to taking a skunking, at least in a professional capacity, and he came off the water knowing a hell of a lot more about the woes of the auto industry than he had at the launch. He hand-cranked the raft onto his trailer and was parking on the grass behind the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers clubhouse a little past six.

“No trouble finding the place?” Willoughby asked, coming around the corner of the cabin.

Stranahan shook his head. “That's a heck of a house I passed driving off the bench.”

“It makes our place look like a shotgun shack. Please join us for drinks on the porch.”

Two men rose from Adirondack chairs as Sean climbed the steps. Jonathon Smither was darkly tanned with white teeth and a hail-fellow-well-met smile that went with a two-handed handshake. Ruggedly handsome with dark hair parted to the side, he looked like a '60s cigarette model hunkered before a campfire, rough hands cupped to the flame of a match. Sean placed him in his midforties. By comparison, Robin Hurt Cowdry was sunburnt, sandy-haired, and very slender. Both his voice and age were hard to place.

“Robin is from Zimbabwe,” Willoughby said. “He runs a safari outfit in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. The African artifacts you saw in the clubhouse are his.”

“Have you met Joseph Keino?” Sean asked. “He's a Kenyan who owns a bed-and-breakfast in Bridger; it's called the Aberdare.”

“I know that old Kikuyu camel thief. I traded him an ironwood sculpture of a Cape buffalo last year for a fine-condition Masai shield. Got the better of him for once.”

Stranahan remembered the night he had spent in the little cottage behind Keino's Victorian inn. Vareda Beaudreux, the Mississippi riverboat singer with whom he had done some bartering of his own—his heart and his reason for an awful lot of trouble, he thought wryly—had pinned a note for him under the buffalo's hooves while he slept.

“I saw that sculpture,” he said.

“Small world,” said Cowdry.

The last club member Willoughby introduced Sean to was bent forward over one of the fly-tying benches at the long table indoors. He peered at Sean through magnifying lenses folded down over his glasses and inclined his head. Returning his attention to his vise, he put a half hitch on a half-tied salmon fly and with some effort rose to his feet.

He said, “I used to be able to tie a fully dressed Green Highlander in just over two hours. Now it takes all afternoon. Strange thing to do, don't you think? Spend that much time on a single fly when you may only have a few years left.” He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop.

“Now there, Polly. We'll have none of that talk in here.” Patrick Willoughby shook his head.

“Patrick thinks that if we don't mention the elephant in the room—I'm talking about COPD—then it doesn't exist. I knock on wood because a few years is the hopeful outlook for someone at my stage of the disease, given that I have complicating factors that already impaired my lung function.” He was a kindly man with thinning hair who looked to be considerably older than the other club members, but to Stranahan he appeared very fit, except for the apparent arthritis in his knees and a slight laboring of his breath.

“Do you know what COPD stands for, Mr. Stranahan?” the man said.

“I don't.”

“Be glad that you don't.” He measured Stranahan with slightly wavering hazel eyes. “So you're the private detective Kenneth Winston found. Now Kenneth, once he gets his materials sorted and matched, he can tie a Highlander in an hour and a half and better than I can in four.”

“Polly, that's simply not true,” Willoughby said.

“I'm afraid it is.”

“Polly Sorenson is the foremost dresser of classic salmon flies on our side of the pond,” Willoughby said to Sean. “When that Highlander you're looking at is finished, it will sell for five hundred dollars and reside in a glass display case.”

“That's nonsense, this one's going to catch a trout in the Madison River,” Sorenson said. He looked at Sean with a mischievous twinkle. “These old Victorian patterns were designed to catch the eyes of fishermen, not fish. But I've found the wings slim down in water to resemble small baitfish and will snag the occasional trout. Of course, you destroy the value the first time the feathers touch the water. As I am a house husband, what the French call a man of the hearth, as opposed to Tennyson's vision of the sexes—‘man for the field and woman for the hearth, man for the sword and for the needle she, man with the head and woman with the heart.'” Sorenson paused. “Where was I? Patrick, help me here. I've lost the thread.”

“You were talking about how you are a man of the hearth.”

“Oh, yes. My wife does not approve of me fishing with flies that could contribute to our retirement. As far as she's concerned, when I cast one into the river I might as well say goodbye to five suppers at a Parisian bistro. Which”—again, he rapped on the tabletop—“I still hope to enjoy someday.”

Dinner was a bourguignon of elk rump and morel mushrooms, courtesy of Jonathon Smither, who told Sean he had burned out as a crime reporter for the
San Francisco Examiner
and now wrote a series of mystery novels featuring a sleuth who was a “nose” for a perfume company. He traveled the globe, bedding beautiful women and solving crimes with his superior olfactory organ. The books sold particularly well in France. “God bless a country that isn't ashamed of its noses,” he said, touched glasses with Stranahan, and refilled his wineglass.

None of the members seemed the least interested in broaching the subject of the missing trout flies, at least not until after the evening hatch. Sean wadered up and fished with Smither for a while, or rather Smither insisted that Sean have the honor, and whistled appreciatively when Sean made a perfect parachute cast that dropped a PMD cripple into the feeding lane of a butterfat brown trout. But shortly after he released the fish, a cold wind whisked down the valley, blowing froth off the tops of the riffles and tilting the wings of the delicate mayflies that sailboated on the surface. Stranahan hiked upriver by himself as the sun dipped, swapped out the cripple for a streamer fly, and took a heavily striped rainbow that walloped the river with its tail. He had hooked and lost an even better one when Patrick Willoughby walked up the bank.

“I've had my eye on you. What are you using?”

Stranahan held up the slim marabou streamer. “I hope I haven't broken a club code by fishing wet,” he said.

“I won't tell if you won't,” Willoughby said.

Stranahan adapted himself to Willoughby's hitching gait as they walked back to the clubhouse, accepted a whiskey and branch water and sipped it on the porch while the others trickled back, shucked waders, put their feet up on the rail, and, except for Sorenson, lit cigars. Theirs was the easy camaraderie of men who had nothing to prove and talked without weighing the impact of the words. The proposition they put to him, punctuated by the glow of the cigars, wasn't long in coming. The club would like to hire him for a week and invite him to use the clubhouse as his base. Willoughby had not volunteered the details of the theft on Sean's first visit and filled in the blanks. The Quill Gordon dry fly had been presented by its originator to Roy Steenrod, Theodore Gordon's friend and frequent fishing companion on the Neversink River, and had been in a private collection for nearly seven decades. In May, it had been offered through Gray's Auctioneers in Cleveland, its provenance having first been authenticated by the curator of the American Fly Fishing Museum in Manchester, Vermont. Willoughby, acting on behalf of the club, had raised the paddle and purchased the fly in its shadow box display frame, draining the club coffers to the tune of $17,500. The hammer price was more than triple the estimate, but, as Willoughby put it, “all of us but Kenneth would be fertilizing Kentucky bluegrass” if they had waited for another to come onto the block.

Who else had bid? Stranahan wanted to know. Willoughby said both the Federation of Fly Fishers and the Bud Lilly Trout & Salmonid Initiative at Montana State University in Bozeman were aware of the Gordon fly and had expressed interest in its acquisition, but only as the beneficiaries of donation. The three bidders who pushed the price had used agents, preserving their anonymity.

“I see where you're going, Sean,” Willoughby said, “but as much as a private collector might have wanted the fly, do you really think anyone would follow me out to Montana and break into the clubhouse?” He shook his head, his jowls wagging.

Sean had known avarice to take many forms, with consequences ranging from petty theft to murder, but didn't push an argument.

“What about the other fly, the Gray Ghost? You mentioned it had sentimental value.”

“Yes. Carrie Stevens gifted the fly to my father only months before her death. She had written to him that this particular fly had two additional feathers in the wing with a blue tinge, which made it more attractive to landlocked salmon. The letter is in the box. Sean, you can't buy that kind of provenance.”

Stranahan asked Willoughby to take him through the days leading up to and following the thefts. Willoughby said that he had packaged the majority of the club's fly collection and sent it via UPS to a friend in Montana for safekeeping until his arrival the previous week. The half dozen frames displaying the most valuable and rare patterns, including the Quill Gordon and the Gray Ghost, he had wrapped in bubble wrap and put in his carry-on, not trusting them to checked luggage. After Sorenson had picked him up at the Bozeman airport and they arrived at the clubhouse, he had hung the frames on the wall overnight and then the next afternoon taken them apart, removed the flies, and placed them in a large fly box that he kept zipped in his wading jacket.

“Why not leave them in the display cases?” Sean asked.

Willoughby seemed embarrassed. “The truth be told, I wanted to touch the flies, particularly the Quill Gordon,” he said. “I suppose it would be the same for a concert violinist given the opportunity to cradle a Stradivarius. Not even dreaming of playing it, mind you, the way I would never dream of fishing with a fly tied by Theodore Gordon. But Polly and I were alone here. It was two days before Kenneth flew in and nearly a week before anyone else arrived. We'd be fishing, buying groceries in West Yellowstone, we'd be in and out. I just figured the flies would be safer on my person. We were going to have a ceremony when everyone arrived and hang the cases in their place of honor.”

“What if you'd fallen in the river?”

Willoughby said the box was sealed inside two Ziploc bags. He laughed. “I thought if I drowned, then at least I'd be leaving the flies for posterity.”

Stranahan turned his attention to Sorenson. “So you examined the flies also?”

Sorenson nodded, the flip-up magnifying lens attached to his glasses reflecting bright moons of light from the porch lanterns. “Yes, but my priorities were different than Patrick's. It was the Ghost that held my interest. Carrie Stevens accented the heads of her streamer patterns with a few turns of red thread, and I wanted to put the fly under a magnifying glass to examine the wraps. It was her signature.”

“Did anyone else see them?”

Sorenson seemed to hesitate and Stranahan gave him a questioning glance. But before he could probe further, Willoughby spoke up. “Kenneth came in Saturday. He saw them. As a tier of the Catskill school, he was probably more excited to examine the Gordon than I was.”

Stranahan probed for detail. When exactly had Willoughby discovered that the flies were missing? Willoughby said that would have been Sunday, when he'd had the urge to examine the Quill Gordon in natural light. He'd taken the box from his vest and opened it on the tying table.

“And there's no possibility Kenneth took them?” Stranahan thought that a storyteller of Kenneth Winston's caliber would have no trouble feigning surprise over a couple missing flies that his own larcenous fingers had filched the night before, while Willoughby slept.