The Dante Conspiracy (18 page)

He walked into the bathroom, pulled the cord to switch on
the fluorescent overhead light, used the toilet and then turned on the shower.
He glanced round the room and shook his head. He’d been in America for nearly
eighteen months, and he had still to discover why a room that contained a
shower stall, sink, toilet and even a bidet – everything, in short, except a
bath –
was
 
called
a bathroom.

A little under an hour later, having dressed and breakfasted
on two cups of instant coffee and three
McVitie’s
Digestive biscuits – an English habit he stubbornly refused to break – Hunter
pulled shut the apartment door and headed for the elevator. The
Glock
17 in its belt holster now felt familiar and
comfortable, which it certainly hadn’t done the first few times he’d worn it,
but he had quickly got used to it.

He was also, Hunter realized, as he pulled the dark grey
Ford out into the light early morning traffic in Helena, getting used to
American driving. For some reason, that thought depressed him, and reminded him
that he wasn’t particularly enjoying life.

It wasn’t the actual work, he thought, though he was getting
somewhat bored with the minor narcotics cases that were all that
Michaelson
, the Helena Senior Resident Agent, seemed to
push in his direction. It wasn’t even the mountain of paperwork that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation required from him virtually every time he took
a crap. It probably wasn’t even the fast food – fast it certainly was, but it
wasn’t food in Hunter’s opinion –
that
he ended up
consuming almost every day. And it certainly wasn’t Christy-Lee. She was about
the only thing that kept him going.

It was probably, he thought, just being in America. Hunter
had decided he didn’t like America, and was actually looking forward to getting
back to Britain and Lincolnshire. Now that, he thought, was certainly some kind
of a first – he’d never heard of anybody getting homesick for Lincolnshire.

Hunter pulled out and eased the Ford around a taxi that had
suddenly stopped, double-parking without warning. The driver of a Chevrolet
coming towards him hooted angrily. Hunter grinned and waved. Take it easy, he
told himself, only
another three or four months
to go.
He’d said the same thing the previous week.
And the week
before that, in fact.

In short, whatever sort of time Steven Hunter was having in
America, the one word that really couldn’t be applied to it was ‘good’.

Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Andy Dermott glanced left and right as he eased the big John
Deere tractor through the narrow gateway which led into the top field. The
right hand wheel only just cleared the fence post, and Dermott again reminded
himself that he would have to get the entrance opened up before the crops
ripened if they were going to get the new harvester through.

Dermott had worked the land for nearly thirty years, and had
inherited the farm on the death of his father nine years previously. He was
proud of his small property, eleven hundred acres of good, productive, arable
land that curved protectively around the southeast end of the forest on the
western outskirts of Beaver Creek. The town was small, lying not quite midway
between Helena and Great Falls, just west of the Missouri river and at the
southern end of the Lewis Range, at the very foot of the eastern slopes of the
Rocky Mountains.

Once through the gateway, Dermott looked ahead again, and what
he saw made him bring the tractor to a sudden, shuddering halt. At first he
couldn’t make out what the black, heaving mass was,
then
he realized it was birds – crows, in fact – scrambling on and over something
lying on the ground.

He pressed the horn button three times, and was rewarded by
half a dozen or so of the black birds hopping away and then flapping awkwardly
into the air. He climbed down from the cab and walked over to the shape on the
ground, clapping his hands to disperse the remaining crows.

Dermott knew something of the law and crime scene
investigation, and had served as a temporary deputy to Sheriff Dick Reilly some
five years earlier, so he stopped about six feet away and looked down at the
figure on the ground.

What he saw sent him running back to the John Deere and the
cell phone clipped to the dashboard. But before he made the call to the
sheriff’s office, he locked the cab door and looked all around, and made sure
that the twelve-gauge in the rack behind him was loaded.

Dermott stayed in the tractor’s cab for nearly fifty
minutes, until he saw Reilly’s white Cherokee Jeep bouncing towards him over
the adjacent field. Then he got out, clutching the shotgun, and walked across
to meet the sheriff. He didn’t say anything, just nodded in recognition and
gestured to his right.
 
The two men
walked together across the field towards the body.

They stopped a few feet away, and just looked.

‘Holy shit,’ Reilly muttered. ‘You haven’t touched him?’

‘Nope,’ Dermott replied. ‘I haven’t gotten any closer than
we are now.’

‘Those marks on the ground?’

‘Crows,’ Dermott said, economically. He was tall and seemed
almost too thin for his height, slow and measured in his speech, but Reilly
knew he was by no means slow-witted. ‘Chewed him up pretty good, I guess.’

Reilly nodded.

‘See the bone?’ Dermott asked, pointing.

Reilly nodded again.
‘Difficult to miss.’

‘See the footprints?’

‘I see his prints,’ Reilly replied, looking carefully at the
ground around the body. ‘I don’t see
no
others.’

Dermott nodded. ‘Me neither. That’s the point.’

‘OK,’ Reilly said. ‘Try and keep the birds off of him. I’ll
get the wheels turning.’

Helena, Western Montana

The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains fifty-six
Field Offices scattered across America. These Offices are effectively the
Bureau’s regional capitals; unusually, Montana’s Field Office is out of state,
at the Towers Building in Salt Lake City in Utah.

In all states, authority for local investigations is deputed
to smaller subsidiary offices known as Resident Agencies, each responsible for
a specific geographical area, generally comprising two or more counties.
Montana is usually, from a criminal activity point of view, quiet, the number
of Resident Agencies small, and their areas of responsibility correspondingly large.
Beaver Creek is in Lewis and Clark County, and the Resident Agency responsible
for that county, as well as
Beaverhead
,
Broadwater
, Gallatin, Jefferson, Madison, Meagher, Powell
and Silver Bow, is at Helena, the state capital.

The call from Sheriff Reilly was received just as Special
Agent Kaufmann was closing up for lunch. Some people would have ignored it, but
Kaufmann had never been able to walk past a ringing telephone, so she unlocked
the door and picked up the receiver before the answering machine could cut in.

Twenty minutes later she strode briskly across the street
and into a fast-food restaurant. She walked straight to a secluded booth at the
back, stopped, and looked down at a tall fair-haired man in his early forties,
who was studying a menu with a marked lack of enthusiasm. After a moment, the
man looked up and stared levelly back at her.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Lunch is postponed, Hunter,’ she said.

‘That’s the first good news I’ve heard all week. I still
can’t believe you eat this stuff from choice,’ Hunter said, pointing at the
menu.

Christy-Lee Kaufmann grinned down at him. ‘You’ll get used
to it.’

‘That,’ Hunter replied, as he stood up and reached for his
coat, ‘is what really worries me. OK, what’s up?’

‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ Kaufmann said. ‘And it’s not all
good news – we’ve still got to eat.’

On the way out of the restaurant she picked up a couple of
burgers each, to go, and four cans of soda. Ten minutes later the two of them
were in the Bureau Ford heading north out of Helena for US91 and Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Dick Reilly was short and stocky, broad across the shoulders
and, increasingly in recent years, broad in all directions around the waist, a
legacy of his too-regular coffee and donut stops at the Main Street Diner. His
hair was greying and getting somewhat sparse, and his face was ruddy from
exposure to the sun and wind. He had been sheriff of Beaver Creek for almost
nine years, and in various types of law enforcement for twenty-three years
before that, but the body in the field was a first for him.

He looked carefully around the crime scene once again, as he
had done at least six times since he had arrived there, cataloguing and
searching.

About two hundred yards to the west lay the edge of the
woods which formed a transition between Dermott’s farmland and the Helena
National Forest. The open field in which Reilly was standing extended roughly
four hundred yards to the north, fifty yards to the south and about fifty to
the east. The gate was in the north-east corner, and beside it stood Dermott’s
John Deere tractor and Reilly’s Cherokee Jeep.

As Reilly looked towards the gate, a patrol car lurched into
view, tires scrabbling for grip on the earth, roof lights flashing. The County
Medical Examiner and the police photographer had arrived almost simultaneously
at Dermott’s farm, and Reilly had sent the police cruiser to ferry them out to
the field.

‘Good afternoon, Dick,’ Roy Walters called out cheerfully as
he walked towards the sheriff. ‘What’ve we got here?’

Reilly nodded, and held out his hand.
‘Afternoon,
doc.
A corpse, and I only need you to confirm that officially, but I
don’t want you anywhere near it yet. First we need pictures.’

He gestured towards the photographer. Joe Nyman was a police
cameraman by inclination. He owned the oldest camera shop and picture studio in
Beaver Creek, and had worked with the local police department for nearly twenty
years. Thirty minutes earlier he had been telephoned by one of Reilly’s
deputies. He had grabbed his camera box and closed the store immediately, glad
of the break in his routine.

Nyman walked over to the sheriff and gazed with frank
curiosity at the supine figure, now protected by half a dozen wooden stakes
driven into the ground in a rough circle about fifteen feet in diameter around
the body, and with yellow ‘Crime Scene – Do Not Cross’ tape wound around them.
He put his camera box on the ground, opened it up and pulled out a Nikon.

‘Ready when you are, Dick.’

Reilly took Nyman by the arm and pointed towards the body.

‘No closer than the ring of stakes, Joe. I want general
views of the whole field, then middle-distance pictures of the body from all
sides. Take at least two rolls, duplicating each picture. When you’re done with
that, I want a bunch of close-up shots of the body, from every side, including
the bone.’

Nyman nodded and peered more closely. ‘Is that bone what I
think it is?’

‘We don’t know for sure yet, but Roy will be able to tell
us.’

‘So this might be two murders, not one?’

Reilly smiled for the first time since he had climbed out of
his Cherokee. ‘I guess that’s one way of
puttin
’ it,’
he said.

Fifteen minutes later Nyman stepped back from the body and
replaced the lens cap on his Nikon. ‘That’s it, Dick. I’ll develop the films as
soon as I get back to the shop, and I’ll get the prints to your office no later
than –’ he glanced at his watch ‘– oh, say, about three thirty.’

‘Thanks,’ Reilly nodded and waved farewell as Nyman walked
off towards the cruiser. Then he turned to Roy Walters. ‘OK, doc, do your
stuff. Walk over to him, confirm he’s dead, and then walk back.
Nothin
’ else, and try not to leave any unnecessary prints
on the ground.’

Walters looked slightly surprised. ‘What about the cause and
approximate time of death?’ he asked.

Reilly smiled bleakly and pointed at the body. ‘You and I
already know the cause, Roy, and he’s been dead at least a day. Crows won’t
touch a body ’till
it’s
good and cold, and this guy’s
got no face left. That means he’s been dead awhile.’

Walters nodded, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and a
surgical mask, and walked across to the crime scene. He ducked under the tape
and walked the last few feet with exaggerated care. Then he knelt beside the
corpse and, out of habit not expectation, briefly felt the side of the neck. There
was no pulse, and the flesh was cold but not hard.

‘Rigor mortis has faded, Dick,’ he called over his shoulder,
‘so you’re right – he’s been dead well over twenty-four hours.’

Before he straightened up, Walters looked carefully at the
skull. Like Reilly, he had seen a lot of dead bodies in his career, but never
before had he seen anyone killed quite like this.

The top of the skull had clearly been shattered, and the
weapon that had done the damage was unmistakably a human thigh-bone, driven
vertically downwards, and still protruding like a bizarre and obscene
head-dress from the dead man’s greying hair. From the amount outside the body,
Walters estimated that about six to eight inches of the bone had penetrated and
was still lodged inside the skull.

Death had obviously been instantaneous, but Walters couldn’t
imagine how any assailant could have done it. The dead man was heavily-built
and well over six feet tall – Walters estimated six feet three or thereabouts –
and was lying on his back. That suggested that the blow had been struck from
the front and downwards, and to deliver a killing blow with such a weapon an
attacker would need to be both immensely strong and very tall. Real tall,
Walters thought, like eight to nine feet.