Mortal Fall (17 page)

“I swear. No trick. I promise. It’s just for Perry, for Halloween. He really likes her and just wants to spend some time with her.”

“Molly?” I thought of Molly, her long brown hair, her curvy body, her fruity smelling bubble gum. Sometimes she watched TV with Nathan and me and she smelled like sweet apples and vanilla. “Nathan’s sister?”

“Yeah, but we need your, and Nathan’s help.”

“I’ve already got plans for tomorrow. Nathan and I are doing something.”

“Bullshit, you’re just being a candy-ass. What? You two going to go trick-or-treating like little boys?” Adam knew good and well trick-or-treating wasn’t something in our history because Mom always seemed to be off her meds whenever Halloween rolled around and never could get it together to help us create outfits when we were little. When she felt pressured by us to do so, she got nervous and weird, telling us that Halloween was a time for bad people to come out, a time when evil people would do harm to us. She’d sit at the window and stare through a part in the curtain looking for those ill-meaning people until she got more and more nervous, took her imipramine or Haldol, then float to some softer, fuzzier place.

By the time I was old enough to scrape some half-assed outfit together by myself, like the time I borrowed my dad’s overcoat and went as a gangster, I felt too awkward to enjoy going door-to-door and having adults look at me suspiciously, as if I might kick their pumpkins in since I was an awkward preteen and not cute like the little kids.

“Look,” Adam said. “Just hear me out.”

I sat in bed and listened while he made his case: Molly had told Perry that she couldn’t go with him because her parents wanted her to hang with her brother while they went to a Halloween party across town. She wasn’t sure yet what Nathan had in mind to do for Halloween, but whatever it was, she was bound to go along and make sure he stayed out of trouble, even though she admitted that he was way too old to have her looking after him. Her parents—Adam said she
had told Perry—were just nervous since it was Halloween. “So all you need to do is come hang out with us and then she’ll come too. It’s that simple.” Adam smiled at me.

“I’ll think about it,” I said slowly. “But I’m not promising anything.”

“That’s fine.” Adam held up his hand innocently, but his eyes said
if you don’t do what I say . . .
“All right. You think about it.”

I wish I’d never even heard the idea.

19

I
SPENT A GOOD
part of the afternoon at headquarters finding pieces of information on Mark Phillips, both by reading online and by making phone calls to his colleagues. The dates on his mail confirmed that he’d been missing about five or six days, as had the usage of his cell phone. There were only small bits here and there online about maps he’d worked on. Several were topos of Glacier Park and some of both the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat Wilderness areas.

I looked up the organization named on the plaque, Montana Association of Geographic Information Professionals, and double-checked that it was, indeed, Flathead County he was contracted under: Flathead County Geographic Information Systems, known as the GIS office.

Since Ken and I had found the Toyota in Phillips’s garage, I wondered whether he might have a second vehicle that he’d been driving into or near the park the day he died, so I checked his car registration and found that he had the truck in the garage but no other vehicle was registered in his name. Then I checked with his company to make sure they hadn’t issued him one. They hadn’t.

I had also gotten the West Glacier entrance surveillance tapes for the last weeks and had asked Ken to go through them to look for Sedgewick’s Subaru, Phillips’s truck, or any other signs of either victim entering or leaving the park. Unfortunately, not all entrances have surveillance, and anyone accessing the park through the North Fork could easily go undetected.

I grabbed my notebook, and Ken and I headed out to visit Beverly
Lynde, Mark Phillips’s former significant other. Ken loosened his collar and cracked the window just enough to let in some air but keep out the rain. We were lucky it hadn’t snowed and wasn’t any colder, but it was a biting, raw rain, nonetheless, and it chilled me to the bone. Early summer is like this in Northwest Montana: a series of false starts, like tricks played on us all: at times nice balmy weather—eighty degrees—then, a thirty-degree temperature drop to sometimes below freezing, even in late June. If we were lucky, it was only rain sending us huddling into raincoats instead of snow to our down jackets.

“You warm?”

“No, just need a little air,” he said.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You hate this work?”

“No, I didn’t say that. It’s fine.”

“You wish you were in the park, writing tickets?”

“Not necessarily. I was just thinking about these guys, you know.”

I perked up. I knew Ken was loquacious and I had been wondering why he hadn’t said as much as usual in the past few days. I just figured he was perhaps feeling a little out of his league doing investigative work. “What about them?”

“I don’t know. Just so weird—two of them.”

“That just sink in or something?”

Ken shrugged. “No, it’s been bothering me since we visited Wolfie’s wife. I guess it’s harder for you to understand. I mean, you don’t have kids.”

“No, I don’t. I guess I can imagine, though. I did have parents.”

“Yeah, well, of course. It’s just, well, hard to swallow how fragile we all are.” He looked down at one arm and I wondered if he was measuring in his mind all the effort to build his muscles, what it meant in the scheme of a physical world—a body—that could be demolished in the blink of an eye.

We parked and walked up the drive to a small half-wood, half-stucco
house in Columbia Falls off Nucleus Avenue, near the Flathead River. The gardens were well maintained and the lawn nicely cut. Ken stood back while I rang the doorbell.

“Who is it?” The voice from inside sounded high-pitched.

“Park Police Officer Monty Harris. Looking for Beverly Lynde.”

A second later the door opened and a slender, short-haired brunette woman with doe eyes looked curiously at us. I guessed she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore jeans, sandals, and a floppy pale-blue sweater, and her toenails were painted pale green. I couldn’t help but wonder if her feet were cold.

“Beverly Lynde?”

“No,” she said. “She’s not here. She’s at work. Can I help you?”

“You are?”

She gave a tentative smile and tilted her head shyly to the side. “Marisa. I rent a room from Bev. She owns the place.”

“I see. Where does Ms. Lynde work?”

Marisa pushed her hair behind her ear. “In the park.”

“The park? Glacier?”

“Yeah, she drives one of the park tourist shuttles. Has every summer for the past few years. You’ve never seen her?” She looked at my badge.

“No, I guess I haven’t. She’s there now?”

“Far as I know. Said she works till seven tonight.”

I thanked Marisa and we drove back to the park, this time past headquarters in West Glacier, through the west entrance pay gates and a few miles down the road to the new Apgar Transit Center where the free bus and shuttle services ran. The Transit Center was built in 2007 and instituted the shuttle service to accommodate park visitors so they could access most destinations along Going-to-the-Sun Road while reconstruction occurred, an attempt to minimize traffic, parking, and exhaust problems. Hikers and sightseers alike quickly took to the system. We asked the ranger behind the main desk to see the shuttle schedule for Beverly Lynde.

“She’s got number eight.” The woman checking the logbook looked up at me through wire-rimmed glasses similar to mine. She wore the green ranger uniform—army-green pants and a lighter green, almost beige, short-sleeve button-up. “She should be in for a break in about forty-five minutes. Then she has to go back out at the four-thirty run to the Logan Pass visitor center and back. I can call you at your office when she gets here if you’d like, or you can wait.”

Ken seemed happier now after seeing the roommate, Marisa, whom he commented was cute, asked me if I’d noticed her big breasts and wondered if I thought they were real or, as he put it, store-bought. When I said I wasn’t entirely sure, but that I thought they were real, he said he was hungry, so we grabbed some soup at the West Glacier Café. When we came back, we only waited five minutes for Beverly to show, and we watched her pull into the large lot in the white vehicle with
GOING TO THE SUN ROAD SHUTTLE
written across its side and overlapping a graphic design of large peaks.
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK
stood under those words.

She stepped out, and locked it up. She was tall, maybe five foot nine or ten, with a thick braid of reddish-blond hair over one shoulder. She wore a cap, khakis, and a white T-shirt, the shuttle driver’s uniform, and threw on a raincoat as she walked toward us. She angled her head slightly to the side as if tilting it a certain way would make the slanted rain miss her.

I walked toward her and held out my hand and introduced myself and Ken. “I hate to interrupt your break, but do you mind if Officer Greeley and I have a quick word with you. We just have a few questions.”

She looked at us both, her hazel eyes clear and large. “Sure. Have I done something wrong? Is there a report against my driving?”

“No, no.” I held up my hand. “Nothing at all like that. This is about a man you apparently used to date, Mark Phillips?”

“Mark? We broke up over a year ago.”

I held out my hand to motion to the deck with an overhang to the side of the building. “Here, let’s get out of this.”

She followed us over, and I motioned for her to sit on one of the wooden benches reused from native trees in the cleared area. “That’s okay,” she said and leaned against the wood railing instead. “Been sitting a lot already.” I stood against it too, and Ken sat on one of the large rock platforms surrounding a massive log pillar supporting the roof over the deck.

“So what’s this about?”

“Working up here, I’m sure you’ve heard about the two bodies we’ve found below the Loop.”

She nodded, her brow furrowed. “Horrible deal. I had several trips delayed because of those incidents.”

“I’m sorry to inform you that one of them was Mark.”

“Mark?” she put her hand to her mouth.

“I’m afraid so.”

She stared at me, stunned, dropping her hand to her sternum, her mouth open in shock.

“Do you know if he was currently involved with anyone else?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t.” She swallowed hard. “I heard things here and there. That he had a date or two. Oh my God, Mark? Really? Are you positive?”

“Yes, we’re certain.”

She put her head down, cupping her face in her hands, then looked up, pursed her lips and shook it off. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure. Right now, all we can assume is that we had two accidents in the same place.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, but holy shit. That’s insane.”

“You can say that again,” Ken chirped up.

“Ms. Lynde, when was the last time you saw Mark?”

“It’s been a while. Last fall, before the service closed for the winter. He took my shuttle up for a hike. He hiked a lot. That’s how we met. Before they built this place.” She motioned to the building and new parking area. “The old shuttle system we ran out of Lake McDonald Lodge. I was waitressing there back then. He used to come in for oatmeal and
coffee before catching a seven a.m. shuttle to wherever he planned on trekking for the day. He did it every weekend.”

“Did he continue that ritual after you broke up?”

“I think he did. Like I said, just last September he was headed up for a hike—that was a few months after we ended things.”

“So you have no idea what was going on in his life for the past few weeks here?”

“None. But”—she sighed—“I do know his habits. We dated for over six years.”

“What happened?”

She sighed even louder and blew out a large breath. “Mark was a complicated guy. Never happy. I’m pretty sure he was an addict. Always running from himself, could never sit still unless he was making a map or working on something.”

“What was he using?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Some painkiller. I have no idea where he’d get them from, but I’d seen them around. He saw some doctor for back pain he claimed to have, but it didn’t seem to interrupt his lifestyle. I guess he had a bulging disk. Said hiking helped it. Drank a lot of alcohol as well and probably mixed the two. He liked to gamble and was always broke because of it. Loved to exercise like crazy too, not just by hiking. He went to the gym a lot. Superfit. But, you know, I figured he was addicted to adrenaline too.” She glanced at Ken’s muscles and looked away. “I’m not saying everyone fit is addicted to adrenaline or anything,” she added, I presumed for Ken’s sake.

“As far as I know,” I said looking at Ken, “the only thing this guy is addicted to is Juicy Fruit.”

Ken chuckled and Beverly looked confused, even though Ken was clearly working a piece as we spoke.

“Anyway, my point is that you can simply just be an addict about a lot of things and don’t necessarily need just one drug of choice.”

“I’m sure that’s true.” I thought of my dad and Adam too. “So is that why you broke up?”

“Yeah, among other things.” She glanced at the flagpole off to the side of the building, droplets of water clinging to it. “He could really be mean at times. I figured it was all part of his addictive nature. The edginess. And I was lonely with him. He didn’t seem to love or be at peace with himself, so how could I expect him to love me?”

“Sounds complicated,” I said as if I’d never had a hand in that particular game with complicated people, Adam in particular. Probably my father. Maybe Lara too, and I just hadn’t fully recognized it until the past several years.

“He could be a great guy too, really charmed me in the beginning—superbright and enjoyable to talk to, but somewhere along the line, he just kept more and more to himself as if the closer we got, the more he pushed me away. I was always catching him in stupid little lies that I swear he told only out of habit. I wanted to get some couples counseling, but”—she threw her hand up in the air—“I don’t know why I’m babbling on like this. Bottom line is that addicts don’t change. They sacrifice anything and anyone around them to keep their vices.”