Mortal Fall (3 page)

We’d already wrapped the corpse in fabric and placed it in a maroon body bag. I was still in shock after realizing it was Wolfie. If it hadn’t have been for his large frame and his distinct blond, wavy locks that looked like they belonged on an adolescent and not a grown man, I wouldn’t have had any recognition.

Paul “Wolfie” Sedgewick was a biologist and one of the lead researchers of the Wolverine Research Team. He had been nicknamed Wolvie early on, but over the years, the
v
had drifted to an
f
. It was easier to say Wolfie than Wolvie.

Ken and I had been on the scene for over three hours, photographing the victim from all angles, inspecting rock crumbled away by the velocity of the body crashing against it and skid marks from the sliding. I’d taken notes and we’d tweezed samples from his clothes torn off by some of the more jagged rocks above, at least the ones we could climb to. We couldn’t get to some of the higher points above that he’d potentially hit on the way down, presuming we had judged the launch point accurately.

Joe had radioed down to us that they found a car in the Loop Trail
parking area with a license registered to Paul Sedgewick. His ID was also in the glove box.

Ken and I looked for evidence of suicide or foul play, but saw none. No note on him, no suspicious injuries that might have been from something other than the fall, like a ligature mark or a gunshot wound, but the coroner or pathologist would be able to look more closely.

I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a man with so much experience in the back country could fall this close to the Loop, so near the main and only pass through the park. His team of wolverine researchers had skied all over Glacier Park in the dead of winter, in subzero temperatures and biting wind chill, to set the mini log-cabin traps used for baiting them. Wolverines were the least-known and most elusive animals in the Northwest and cunning and tenacious enough to run off a grizzly bear over a dead carcass with its long claws, sharp teeth, and badass attitude. Wolfie’s team had trekked across large massifs, scaled monumental crags, rambled up high summits, and skied across iced-over lakes tracking the creatures and looking for their dens, hoping to find clues about their behavior and how strong their population is after decades of being trapped in the Northwest.

Ken and I divided the ravine into grids and searched for signs of the animal just in case Wolfie had tried to foolishly climb down to track one. We looked for the telltale triangular-shaped print made from the animal’s five toes, which would splay out when its paws compressed into the dirt or mud, its sharp-pointed claws leading the way. We checked for scat—cylindrical pellets with fur, bones, and feathers from its scavenging. We found nothing along those lines other than Wolfie’s other hiking boot nestled in some bushes lower down.

Had this burly, blond man been so consumed in his research that he’d gotten careless and simply fallen to his death? Or had he been suicidal, drinking, or on drugs? I pictured Wolfie—his long, loose locks blowing in the mountain breeze, his wide grin, and his healthy, weathered, and ruddy skin. I couldn’t conceive of any of those scenarios, but it was too soon to make assumptions.

When the large metal hook from the helicopter finally reached ground, Ken and I moved Wolfie carefully onto the metal litter, hooked up the four lines to the center catch, and signaled for the chopper to lower a bit more. When the hook came into reaching distance, I grabbed it and snapped the catch from the litter onto it and signaled for the pilot to rise. I watched the basket, hanging underneath the chopper like a fly in a spider’s filament, swing away. Slowly, they’d take the body to a gravel pit near McDonald Creek, an opening used for construction vehicles where the coroner waited.

I glanced up to Heavens Peak again, then up Logan Pass to the panorama surrounding it. The Crown of the Continent stood massive and indifferent, beautiful and rugged. A place where time loses its significance and history shoots up out of the ground, its presence overwhelming and demanding, making you feel useless and small. The biologist—trying to understand the near-mythical creature known for its toughness and resilience but threatened by the loss of the glacial snowfields necessary for its winter dens—was now officially done with his research. Officially done with his life, his family. The finality of it was every bit as humbling as the peaks towering above us. I thought of Lara—how our once rock-solid bond had slowly but surely crumbled—and felt a weight fall upon me like a heavy cloak.

I undid the strap under my chin and removed my hard hat to get some air. My scalp was sweaty, the tips of my close-cropped hair gathered into wet points and clinging to the back of my neck and around my ears. For some reason, I suppose in homage, I held the helmet over my chest as if I were honoring the flag. I watched the chopper fly down the line of McDonald Creek, its dark strip of water flickering in sunlight and carving through the countryside at the base of Heavens Peak. I watched it all the way until it grew very small and its roar softened to a faint growl as it went around the bend toward the gravel pit three or four miles down the road.

I put the hard hat back on and let out a groan in the silent contrast. “It’s not going to be easy telling Wolfie’s wife and kids.”

“No,” Ken agreed. “It’s not.”

• • •

Joe was waiting for Ken and me when we came up from the ravine. After we removed our gear, Joe gave Ken instructions to help Karen and Michael lift the anchors and put the rest of the climbing equipment away.

“I’ve already gone over what we think the launch point is,” Joe said after waving me over. I followed him toward the Loop Trail. “But it’s hard to say for sure. I want you to look at it since you had perspective from down below.”

We started toward the trail that sits above the ravine where we found the body. The Loop Trail to Granite Park Chalet, one of two stone chalets in Glacier’s high country, sits above a nearly four-mile steep hike through the remains of a spruce and fir forest burned by the 2003 Trapper Fire. This time of the year, it’s a hot and sweaty hike until you reach higher elevation above the fire zone and reenter the forest, which eventually takes you to a wind-swept subalpine fir and spruce area where the chalet sits and the Highline Trail cuts along the Continental Divide. The Highline Trail sits under a steep rocky rim known as the Garden Wall and takes you about seven miles to the top of Logan Pass. At nine thousand feet, the top of the Garden Wall, built from primordial ocean bottom, forms the top of the rim.

There is also another eleven-mile trail to Many Glacier Campground on the east side of the Divide and a 2.2-mile trail to Swiftcurrent Lookout, a popular place to spot grizzlies or wolverines playing on snowfields in the early summer. I wondered if Wolfie was heading that way.

“We’re not thinking this is the spot,” Joe said when we approached the slick rocks I’d mentioned earlier while standing above the ravine with Joe, Ken, and Charlie. “No slip marks around and the trajectory isn’t right.”

“Yeah, definitely not right.” I looked down the ravine and could easily see it wasn’t the right line for the body to have launched from. The area was marked with tape, though, I presumed, to preserve the mud
already covered with print marks from the soles of many tourists’ boots. Since Logan Pass’s higher elevations had only recently been cleared of its snowpack several weeks before, but had been plowed up to the Loop since late April, many people rode their bikes or drove to the Loop during the spring and hiked the Granite Park Chalet trail as far as they could before hitting snow. “You get some castings from some of these?” I asked anyway.

“Yes. There’s quite a few so it will be hard to distinguish one clean one out of the bunch, and we have no evidence that this was foul play. Since it’s Wolfie though, and very odd that a man of his experience would fall here, I did have one of Walsh’s guys from the county bring the plaster kit and grab as many partials as he could.”

We continued over a bridge with an early-summer crashing stream that would peter out by mid-August. I felt the cool air created by the stream wash over my face and forced down a full breath of it. A little farther up the trail, Joe stopped at a shallow outcropping of rocks where the trail bends right.

The late-afternoon sky held a new cluster of wispy clouds gathered and fraying over Heavens Peak. Something scurried in the brush beside the trail, probably a striped chipmunk. I felt myself flinch slightly and shook it off. I was beginning to feel jittery and tired at the same time from being down in the ravine for hours without food. I’d unintentionally skipped breakfast because of a phone argument with Lara.

Now standing up at the higher elevation and peering down to the area where Wolfie’s body had been made me feel light-headed, like I’d just been in a car or a plane for too long with too much caffeine.

“We think this is it.” Joe pointed. The area had been marked off with yellow tape, and I made sure not to step into the small outcropping.

“Find any evidence?”

“Not much of anything. Those broken shrubs there.” He pointed to the side of the ridge.

“Any blood or fibers from clothes?”

“No, but we’ve got part of a boot print in the dirt on that edge of the
rock leading onto the outcropping. It’s pretty faint, but we’ve got a plaster. Could be any of hundreds of tourists walking by this area. We’re basing it primarily on the trajectory of where the body was.”

I peered down to the ledge Ken and I had climbed up to document. “Yeah, I agree. This looks like the spot.” I searched the ground, noticing the large flat rocks forming a narrow upward scalloping of rock to the lip of the ridge. “It’s almost concave here. He’d have to have been up on the very edge. Maybe scanning for wolverines and somehow just lost his footing, but I don’t see any signs of slippage?”

“No, me neither. You find any binoculars?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t pop off his neck or fly out of his hands and land in some bushes. I can go down again tomorrow and look some more.”

Joe shrugged. “We’ll see what the pathologist finds.”

“Has the family been notified yet?”

Joe sighed heavily. “Not yet. Nobody knows who he is yet except you, Ken, and myself and I’ve given strict orders to Ken to not open his mouth except to chew that damn gum of his. You up for talking to the family?”

“Yes, sir, if I need to be.”

“Just thought you might want to lead this—being recently out of your refresher courses and all. Give you a chance to ask the right questions. See how they feel about an autopsy.”

I wasn’t looking forward to the job at all. I’d only done it once before and my partner had taken care of the hard part while I simply stood by and listened. “I’ll do it as soon as I get back.”

Joe gave me a solemn nod, placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a pat. Joe usually took that god-awful task and had informed more families than I can imagine of the accidental deaths of loved ones in Glacier. I knew part of his enthusiasm to send me to DC for the classes was fueled by his desire to have someone relieve him of that burden. Something left unspoken inserted itself between us—a surrendering—that what had transpired with the Bear Bait case had taken
too much of a toll and he no longer had the resilience to tell anyone of any loss ever again if he could avoid it.

I walked over to the other side of the tape, knelt down, and inspected the edge of the ridge. “Doesn’t really look like much foliage has been disturbed here other than a few broken shrubs. If he’d lost footing and slipped, wouldn’t he have taken more of these plants with him?”

“Maybe, maybe not. These plants are green with new life, they’re moist and resilient this time of the year and would spring back to their upright position in no time at all.”

“A big guy like Wolfie, though? He’d at least have tried to grab onto some. Ripped them clean out. Not just broken them.”

Joe shrugged and I could see he wasn’t interested in being pressed at the moment. “If he didn’t get a good grip, then that wouldn’t have happened.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed. “I’m not seeing much in the way of scuffle marks, but it’s always harder to tell on rock bases. You find any?”

“I didn’t,” Joe said.

“Yeah, well, okay, what next?”

“You visit the family and we wait for the coroner’s exam results. Otherwise, at this juncture, there’s no reason to call this anything but an accident.”

“But you want me to look into it?” I knew any unattended death of an otherwise healthy individual needed to be investigated—that all unobserved deaths were treated as suspicious until shown they weren’t, but I asked anyway just to confirm that he wanted it to be
me
doing the checking.

He nodded. “Find the last person who saw him, who spoke to him. Check credit card spending, possible extramarital affairs, unpaid bills, debt, that sort of thing. You know the drill.” Joe looked me in the eye and it felt strange, as if I hadn’t seen his in a long time. They looked pale and distant, slightly rimmed in raw pink. “If he committed suicide,” Joe said, “something will show. If it was truly an accident, everything will be pretty much status quo.”

3

K
EN AND I
turned off Whitefish Stage Road onto the long gravel driveway between the towns of Kalispell and Whitefish. To the side of the drive, a vibrant yellow field of blooming canola spread picture-perfect until it hit a border of deep-green trees near the Stillwater River. The Columbia Range under a sky so blue it looked artificial stood in the background and completed the country picture, making it perfectly serene.

My stomach tightened and I felt short of breath at the thought of fracturing such a scene—of looking Cathy Sedgewick in the eye and telling her that she would not be seeing her husband, and her children would not be seeing their father ever again. But I had no choice; this was my task.

“Ranch Lane should be right up here,” Ken said, studying the map on his cell-phone GPS app.

I made a right where a small farmhouse with green shutters nestled among tall cottonwoods with deeply furrowed bark. A small porch sat in front with flower boxes below the large windows. Above the slanted porch roof, two windows looked out across the field from the small A-line second story.