Mortal Fall (37 page)

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In the morning, I drove back to headquarters where Albertson was waiting for me. When I walked in, I could smell fresh coffee. Karen had made it and offered me a cup. I thanked her, took it with me and went to find Ken, who was already back at work on the surveillance tapes.

“This is my third time through,” he said when I walked in, leaning back and letting out a long, audible exhale through pursed lips. “I’m not seeing anything at all except the first footage we’ve got on Phillips driving in on the morning of June eighteenth and of Wolfie on June twenty-second, consistent with the time his wife mentioned. The camera isn’t wide enough to get good footage of the vehicles leaving,
so I’ve been trying to magnify the exiting vehicles, but our equipment just isn’t good enough.”

I nodded. “Maybe Gretchen can help us with that.” I made a mental note to call her.

When Shane arrived, it was good to see him and he gave me a big squeeze on the shoulder and a pat on my back. I introduced him to Ken, then showed him to our makeshift incident room and offered him some coffee.

“Nah, man.” He gave us his signature wide grin and patted his belly under his light-beige standard game warden uniform shirt. “I just ate.”

“Did you get anything more out of Dorian?” Shane asked me.

“No, nothing much. So what have you found on your end?”

“So it didn’t occur to me until you told me what Dorian’s girlfriend’s name was—Tammy—when you called me after you arrested him. At first I didn’t think anything of it, just that I didn’t know or care who the hell the guy dated. Then, even though it’s a common name, something about it started to nag at me,” Shane said. “So I did some looking around through some of our files, and bingo, I found who I think is the same Tammy linked to an incident that took place about five months ago on the east side. Not my jurisdiction, which is why I didn’t think of it earlier, but get this: in February, a woman walks into the Browning post office and tries to mail a box to Canada—to Calgary, to a post office address and bogus business named Dante’s Cargo. Anyway, the attendant at the post office noticed that there was blood leaking at the box’s seams, so she took her sweet time with it, went into the back room for a moment and called the police before going back to the counter and taking her payment. Police stopped her on her way out, checked the box, and bingo. Turns out it was a pelt from a freshly killed wolverine that she was sending to Canada. And the lady sending the package—a Tamara DeWitt.”

“Tammy,” Ken said. “Dorian’s partial alibi.”

“Her brother, Darryl DeWitt, is one of the guys who hangs out with Dorian,” I said. I thought of the rundown, boarded-up Winnebago on her property and could only imagine what it contained.

“But that’s interesting. Canada, huh?” Ken added. “I would think they had plenty of their own wolverines around.”

“Doesn’t matter, there’s a demand for wolf and wolverine pelts in many countries. Canada’s no different,” I told Ken, then looked back to Shane. “And?”

“We fingerprinted the box to see if there were other prints because we figured she wasn’t working alone, but only hers came up. She had put a false name for a return address—a Patty Brown, but her ID in her purse said Tamara DeWitt. And, while questioning her, they were able to get her to admit that her brother was in on it. Your Darryl DeWitt at the bar, but no one else. At the time, we had no idea there was a connection between her and Dorian or a connection between Dorian and wolverines. We’ve only been watching him because of possible elk poaching, but we hadn’t caught him doing that yet and haven’t enough reason to search his place for signs of poaching. And, of course, we’ve had our eyes open over his love of weapons, but can’t do anything about that. Until now, that is. Thanks to you.” He bowed his head toward me and removed his light beige matching uniform cap. “By the way, how’s that eye of yours?”

“Better. And worth it,” I said. “We’ll see what the judge slaps on him in Missoula, but I’m pretty certain he’ll end up with a federal crime since he assaulted a federal officer. One very unlucky punch for him, but he knew I worked for the park. Anyway, doesn’t matter how much jail time he gets as long as you now have a reason to confiscate his weapons. That alone is justice. This Darryl DeWitt—” I steered the conversation back to the wolverine pelt. “Interesting that Tammy would rat on her brother, but not Dorian. I’m willing to bet she was seeing Dorian then too, and obviously still is even though he’s two-timed her with Melissa.” I took a sip of my coffee. “They were pretty cozy at the Outlaw’s Nest the other evening.”

“She’s probably good and afraid of the asshole,” Ken added. “He likes his threats.”

I thought of Melissa, had a hard time feeling sorry for her, but a part
of me wanted to. Lara used to say I was a sucker for too many people’s problems—a bleeding heart. I knew that wasn’t true, I just wanted to impose order where I could, help out where I was needed, and it seemed to me that Melissa was so close to getting her shit together, yet so far. Bad habits were working against her. “What were they charged with?”

“Well, since the wolverine is not federally protected, she was only charged with some small-time fines—around twelve hundred, and her brother about eight.”

“I’m going to call the county,” I said. “I want all of Sedgewick’s box traps fingerprinted. I’m sure we’ll find all the standard prints: Ward, Pritchard, Kaufland, Bowman, after we run elimination prints. But now that we’ve got Dorian’s, if he comes up as a match, it’s one more piece to pin on him. And—” I turned to Ken. “I’ll see if Gretchen can get this footage in for a closer look. It would be good to know what time Phillips left on the day of June eighteenth, drove home and safely put his car back in his garage.”

In the back of my mind, when I thought about running prints on the traps, was whether an unknown set of prints might turn out to be my brother’s. Which meant I had an errand to run before I called Gretchen. And it involved going to Lara’s.

39

G
OING TO LARA’S,
I heard myself think. Not—
going to our house—
anymore. My new reality was happening all on its own.

I pulled up, figuring Lara was at work, halfway hoping she wasn’t and partly hoping she was so I could see her and check to see how she was doing. I pulled up and noticed her car was gone. I still had a key, so I parked in the driveway and let myself in. I knew exactly where I was going, to the basement to grab an old box of memorabilia I had tucked away years ago, but I paused in the front door and took in the view.

The living room was much more disheveled than when we lived together, and I wondered if getting rid of me with my itch for order had been a relief, if it had worn on her more than I realized. She had always sworn up and down that she loved a clean, neat place, and at times, I thought she was worse than I about always needing to pick things up instead of sitting down and relaxing, letting it wait. But in our typically tidy living room, a sweater lay lazily across the lounging chair, the silky throws—usually folded neatly over the sofa—were bunched and tangled, one in a ball in the corner of the couch, and the other on the opposite side across the sofa’s arm. Throw pillows usually stacked upright uniformly against the sofa corners were thrown wherever and lying flat. A mess of catalogues, papers, and magazines lay strewn across the coffee table with no rhyme or reason.

Good for her, I thought, to relax into herself. A dose of regret and a little shame washed through me to see her real, unmasked tendencies. I also felt guilty for being in the house without letting her know,
without giving her a heads-up, but it was still my place too, and I really didn’t need permission.

Our wedding photo as well as other pictures of us on various vacations—Kauai, Banff, and Napa Valley—were still on the fireplace mantel. Ellis came sauntering down the hall, meowing at me and rubbing against my leg. When I went to scoop him up, he stretched, then pushed his head toward me so I could scratch it. I scooped him up, and I felt a slight ache sink into my chest as he began to purr when I rubbed my thumb behind his ears. “Yeah, yeah, I know, you miss me, buddy boy. I miss you too, but I’m in a hurry,” I said, and put him back down and headed for the kitchen where the door to the basement was located. I resisted the urge to go upstairs and check our bedroom, part of me expecting to find some strange man’s clothes draped over the chair in the bedroom’s corner.

When I went into the kitchen, I smelled the candles Lara liked to light for dinner, a blend of sandalwood and lavender, and I felt that melancholy ache grow bigger, tugging at me, but then I saw two empty wineglasses beside the sink. I checked the recycling bin and an empty bottle of pinot noir from the Willamette Valley lay on top. That stung. Lara and I had spent our fifth anniversary visiting Oregon’s wine country. I pictured her with some guy, no—actually, if I was to be honest—I conjured an image of her with not just
some
guy, but
a
particular man—Adam. She and Adam sitting on the couch in the living room, giggling and enjoying a bottle of wine from Oregon’s wine country. I shook my head, practically laughing out loud. “Dude, you’ve got issues,” I whispered to myself as I headed down the creaking wooden steps to the basement. “And you’re getting an overactive imagination to boot.”

Downstairs, beside the litter box against the right wall was a stack of shelves holding old boxes full of things we no longer needed, but felt we should keep anyway: old pictures, spare camping gear, college books, the first set of dishes we’d bought, but replaced several years later . . . I found the box I was looking for on the far edge under a plastic
bin full of pictures from Lara’s childhood. I pulled it out, set it on the gray concrete floor and looked inside. Ellis had come down to join me and rubbed against the side of my right hip as I squatted beside the box.

It was emptier than I thought it would be, containing my high school yearbooks, which weren’t very large anyway, my diplomas and graduation tassels, and an ivory elephant paperweight Aunt Terry had given me when I graduated from high school. A picture of my mom, Dad, Adam, and me when I was a little over a year and Adam, five, lay on top of the yearbooks. We were in front of our old fireplace. I had no idea who took the photo, probably Aunt Terry.

My mom looked beautiful, semifaded and delicate with her fine cheekbones and large, haunted eyes. Her hair looked lustrous and full though, not the way I remembered her in her last years before she died, her auburn hair always scraggly and ratty behind her ears.

She was only fifty-four when the accident occurred. It had always been a struggle to get her to take her meds, and she got increasingly worse about it in her early fifties. I was twenty-eight and still living in Choteau with Lara when we got the news. She’d been convinced that her medicine was poison and had been flushing it down the toilet. My dad thought she had skipped a few doses, but claimed to have no idea she’d been avoiding them altogether.

One November evening while he was late at work, she began to think that someone was breaking into the house and called him. He told her to stay put, that he’d be right home. He called the couple next door that sometimes helped in a pinch, to see if they’d go sit with her, but they weren’t home. When he arrived, she was gone and so was her car.

He figured she searched the house until she found the keys that he usually kept hidden in a jar in the kitchen when he sensed she wasn’t quite right, and drove off in a panic. She was last seen heading east out of Columbia Falls, up the treacherous Marias Pass in icy conditions, her car spinning out of control and shooting headfirst over the edge, tumbling some two hundred and fifty feet down to the Middle Fork
River. The people who saw her go over tried to help, but she was too far below. They reported the vehicle had completely submerged and that all they could see were the headlights continuing to eerily glow under the river water while they made calls and waved others down for help.

I’ve quit trying to wonder what she might have been thinking as she headed east, whether she had any idea where she was going, and whether she meant to go over the edge. But I can still picture those headlights. I see them as if I was there. They shine just under the surface into the frigid, crystal-clear water as if to communicate more than the tragedy of the accident, shining past the whole of her sad adulthood to some other dimension, some place where she’s content and looks like she does in the photo.

Afterward, amid the grief, a modicum of relief eventually rose in me that she was finally released from the burdens of her own misfiring brain. In the photo, there still seemed to be a small glint of hope and happiness in her blue eyes. I had a hard time recalling that spark as the years piled up, her depression crushing her—each year comprised of one weighted day stacking upon the next.

Below the picture, I found what I was looking for: an old dog collar, black with white paw prints traveling down the length of it. It had a plastic clasping mechanism, just as I remembered. I pulled it out carefully and inspected it. I put it to my nose and took a whiff, half expecting to smell the dried weed and horse-hide scent of dog fur, but it only smelled like the cardboard it had been kept in all these years.

I could still picture him—a scruffy tan-and-white pathetic thing with droopy ears that wanted to stand up like a German shepherd’s, but folded and fell sideways part of the way up. Adam and I had been walking home from school and stopped at the local park on the way and played for a while. It was winter, so the playground was deserted, and out of nowhere, the dog appeared, skinny and unkempt. Adam went to it, saying he was lost and that we should catch him, so we tried. We called him, but he was jumpy, and ran when we got close.

“I have an idea,” Adam said. “I’ve got some money that I was supposed to give to the office for a field trip, but I didn’t. Let’s go to the hardware store.” He pointed south, where we knew one was several blocks down. “We can get a collar and a leash, and I know they have dog treats there, because I’ve seen ’em on the counter.”