The Royal Wulff Murders (15 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
he pine snags jutting from Quake Lake cast shadows that lanced across the surface. Martha Ettinger followed Harold Little Feather’s eyes as he gazed at this reflective pool, oblivious to her presence. The Blackfeet tracker stood with his hands folded across his belly, his black braid falling down the back of his khaki shirt. He hadn’t said one word since they had turned into the campground, and Martha thought better than to interrupt him. She had once seen Harold Little Feather turn his heel on a crime scene because the investigating officer wouldn’t shut up.

“How can I hear the dead man talking when you’re blabbering at the mouth,” he’d said, and had kicked the mud from his cowboy boots against the step-up of his truck and gunned it for Browning. The department had disciplined him, Martha recalled, but his punishment hadn’t been as severe as the officer’s; he’d been saddled with the moniker “Dead Man Talking” ever since.

Little Feather squatted down. He plucked a stem of grass and stuck it between his teeth. He motioned Ettinger down beside him.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “See how the valley runs down to the lakeshore? Monkey flowers, alpine phlox, purple lupine, paintbrush that cutthroat orange. You get a different view down here. Wildflower colors bleed together. A lower line of sight. Like hunting elk. You bend closer to the ground, you can see under the tree limbs, spot that big bull before he spots you. You hunt, Martha?”

“Uh-huh,” Martha muttered.

“What’s your rifle?”

“Ought-six, pre-sixty-four Model seventy Featherweight.”

“Good gun.” Little Feather squinted against the sun. “You a tracker?”

“I can track an elk in snow.”

“Then you know how a bull minds his head. Walks around where the trail goes between tree trunks so his rack doesn’t catch.”

She wanted to say
What are you getting at, Harold
, but held her tongue. After all, he’d driven all the way from the reservation as a favor to her, slept in his jeans on her couch, and helped feed the animals before making the trip to Quake in the Cherokee. A freelancer now and horse trainer on the side, he wasn’t even officially on the department’s payroll.

Martha raised her eyes. A Steller’s jay, iridescent purple-blue with a midnight head, flicked overhead and perched on a lodgepole snag at the edge of the campsite.

“You’re getting restless,” Little Feather said. “You’re thinking, He’s an Indian, he’s on Indian time, so I’ll just shrug my shoulders. But let me ask you something: When you’re tracking an elk, what’s the most important skill?”

“Patience,” Martha said. Her voice betrayed her own impatience.

“Same with the human animal,” Little Feather said. “When do you need the most patience tracking an elk? Powder snow or hardpack.”

“Powder.”

“Why?”

“’Cause the prints aren’t clear, it’s hard to figure out which way the elk’s going. Usually, you can tell because he drags his feet as he’s stepping out of the track, but in powder it’s a tough call.”

Little Feather nodded his head and Martha felt herself flush with pride, then silently chastised herself for seeking a man’s approval. After all the years… she closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.

Little Feather went on as if he hadn’t noticed.

“So how do you tell?”

“I follow the tracks either way until they go underneath a tree, where the snow is thin. Then I can see the hoofprints. Or sometimes, if you whisk away the loose snow on top with your glove, you’ll see where the track cuts into packed snow underneath.”

“You sure you don’t have any Blackfeet blood, Martha?” Little Feather smiled.

Martha felt herself swell again.

“Now here’s the question I’ve been getting to. Where do you find the best track, the track that’s so clear-cut you can spot imperfections in the hooves, where you can ID the elk’s fingerprint so if you find his trail again someday, you know him by his name? Take your time, imagine you’re up in the doghair. There’s a foot of snow. You’re following the trail….” He fell silent.

Martha felt again the cold-blued steel of the Winchester’s floor plate through her fingerless gloves. She shut her eyes, following a gypsy meander of elk tracks in the forest gloaming. Where did the tracks really pop out at you? She thought back to her last elk, a raghorn bull that had bedded twice on the north slope of Mizpah Creek after she picked up the track.

“In its bed,” she said suddenly, startling herself. “Where it has lain down to rest.”

“Bingo,” Little Feather said. “The elk’s body compresses the snow, its heat melts it a little, then when it stands up, its hooves cut down. Elk leaves the bed, snow freezes back up like cement, tracks are sharp as a knife. Now, with all the foot traffic around this campsite, where do you think we might find a clear track of the fellow that drove the Subaru?”

“Under the tent,” Martha said.

“What do you say we have a look? You say it rained last week; if the ground was softened, then there might be an impression.”

They had carefully emptied the contents of the tent earlier; now
Little Feather and Martha each took a corner and folded the blue nylon up and over. The earth underneath was damp from condensation. Tufts of grass had yellowed. Millipedes were rolled into tight balls. Little Feather squatted with his back to the sun, reached for the belt knife in the sheath on his hip, held it gleaming, and traced the outline of a bootprint with a steel tip.

“Big fella,” Martha said. She felt the skin pucker as the fine down of her forearm hair lifted in the breeze.

S
itting in the passenger seat on the drive back—Harold had asked for the wheel because he said driving helped him think—Martha sought to make conversation. But Little Feather cut his replies short and she backed off. She liked Harold but felt the gap in culture each time they met on the job. He’d saved her butt way back when, though… how long had it been, eight years? She’d been up against it with the sheriff—she’d made deputy only a few weeks before—when she went over his head and pressed the DA to indict a realtor who’d been accused of sexual assault. The alleged victim, a woman of less than sterling character who led with her 36 Ds, said the man had tried to rape her in an apartment he was showing. It was a his-word/her-word deal, but Martha believed the woman, and Harold had made her case by matching a footprint on the woman’s blouse with the accused’s Florsheim shoe.

Ettinger felt the car slowing, heard the click-click of the turn signal.

“Harold?”

“You have time,” Little Feather said. “I’d like to take a look where that fishing guide was shot on Henry’s Lake. Any chance it’s related to the body found in the river?”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Martha mused. “You shed some light on that one, I’d appreciate it. But it’s in Idaho; there’s a jurisdiction question.”

“Look at this wide open country. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Fifteen minutes later Martha was standing on the shoreline where she had interviewed Sean Stranahan the day before.

“Someone’s been out in a float tube this morning,” Harold said. “See here, the print of the fins, where he backed into the lake. And over there, that’s where he came out.”

“What’s that have to do with Sam Meslik’s shooting?”

The tracker shook his head.

“I’m just making an observation. Like someone in the checkout line at the market reads the
Enquirer.
Because it’s there, you know.”

“You ever hear of Sherlock Holmes, Harold? You’re starting to remind me of him.”

“Who’s he?”

“British detective, back in the nineteenth century.”

“Was he good?”

“He was a fictional character.”

“Oh.” Harold’s voice was uninterested.

Martha felt like a fool. She made her tone businesslike.

“Give me your reading of the shooting here. I told you what this Sean Stranahan said. You think it was intentional? Or just some gopher slayer with bad aim.”

“He hit what he pointed his rifle at.” Little Feather’s voice was definite.

“How can you be sure?”

“Lay of the land.” He swept his hand at the field where an abandoned homestead cabin baked in hard sunlight. “If he shot and missed a gopher with his rifle pointed in this direction, the bullet would hit the ground, not the lake.”

“Maybe it ricocheted.”

“No chance. A bullet has to be moving at a low velocity to ricochet. Gopher hunters shoot .222s, 220 Swifts. Bullets leaving the muzzle at 3,500 feet per second plus. They disintegrate on impact. Gopher, he’s a red mist with a tail.”

“So, he shot from where? The cabin?”

“Could have. It’s two-fifty to two-seventy-five yards. You got a good scope, that’s reasonable range.”

“What about the first shots? Stranahan said they happened an hour before the one that got Meslik.”

“Can’t say. Maybe a different guy? Maybe he
was
a gopher hunter.”

Martha set her arms akimbo. She drew a line in the sand with the point of her boot.

“You going to scratch your name, or are we going to go look at that cabin?” Little Feather said.

“S
omebody’s been here last couple of days.” Little Feather had stopped thirty feet from the cabin.

Martha wiped the sweat from her brow.

“Shadow in the grass. See it?” He pointed by lifting his chin.

“No.”

“Grass is bent; you’d notice in low light. The angle of the sun emphasizes the shadow.”

They approached the sagging structure.

“We’re not going to find a print if he was just using it for cover,” Little Feather said. “Have to hope he went inside.”

Martha waited impatiently at the open doorway.

“You need a flashlight? I’ve got one.”

“Nope.” Harold ducked past her into the gloom.

Martha looked south to the Centennial Mountains, the isolated range of Big Bad Wolf teeth that formed the Continental Divide. She hated standing with her hands in her pockets.

She heard a murmur from the cabin.

“Harold?”

“Come in, stay along the left wall.”

She moved up beside him, the warped boards creaking underfoot. The walls were covered with newspapers, peeling and yellowed. Curious,
she stepped past a rusted box spring and sought out the date at the top of one of the few paper sheets that was intact.
November 26, 1920.

“They used them for insulation,” Little Feather said.

Martha didn’t respond but turned her attention to the empty window facing the lake. A mist of windblown pollen had settled on the floorboards in the shape of a tapered rectangle. Shoe prints were isolated on the dust as clearly cut as ballroom steps painted on a dance floor. Martha reached for the point and shoot in her pocket.

“Looks like someone walked to the window and looked out, then backed away,” Harold said. “Didn’t shoot from here; there’d be superimposed tracks if he spent any time and the dust on the sill would be disturbed. The shot that hit that fishing guide was taken outside, prone position, a solid rest over his hat or maybe his boot—that’s what I’d do. We’ll look for a spent shell, something dropped out of a pocket, but if he’s even half smart we won’t find anything.”

He noticed Ettinger looking down at the tracks.

“To answer your question before you ask, this is about a size nine, narrow width. Old cowboy boot, heels worn down from a pronated stance. Is it the same guy who left the track under the tent? That one was a boot, chain-link design like you find on a Bean hunting boot or a rubber-bottomed wader. Point is,” he went on, “you buy waders or hip boots, the sole is oversize. That’s a twelve track under the tent, but the same man could wear a ten street shoe, or a nine.”

“You’re making things difficult for me,” Martha said.

“Your people have been making things difficult for my people since Meriwether Lewis shot that Blackfeet boy on the Marias River. What’s that been, two hundred years?”

Martha felt her face redden.

“Hey, I’m joking,” Little Feather said. “About that lunch you promised me? I hear the Continental Divide in Ennis makes a shrimp etouffee brings tears to your eyes.”

M
artha felt giddy as a girl when the big tracker pulled out the chair for her by an outside table. True, it was early afternoon and both were dressed in work clothes, but this was as close to a date as she’d had in several years. She hadn’t meant it to be. She’d asked Harold to lunch as thanks for taking the time to help her at the campground. But subconsciously, she knew, it was not that innocent.

They talked over the day. Agreed that neither held any stock in coincidence, that there had to be a thread that linked the three points of the triangle formed by the river, the campground at Quake Lake, and Henry’s Lake. Martha noticed that Harold leaned closer than he needed to to talk to her and she caught herself adjusting her posture, dropping her eyes, pulling back an errant strand of hair that had fallen across her face.
Fluttering like a damned fool girl,
she thought.

The conversation drifted to hunting, the different places they had been.

Harold was saying, “My brother Howard and I have a lodge up for a couple weeks in elk season, up in that Badger–Two Medicine country. Sacred hunting grounds. We pack in with horses November second.”