The Royal Wulff Murders (29 page)

Stranahan felt his face flush, then a sensation like an ice cream freeze in his brain. The pond, the tire tracks, the bucket. McNair’s cabin was only a few hundred yards away. If he owned a ten-acre plot like his neighbors did, then the property would include the pond. Sheriff Ettinger had mentioned checking bodies of water in the area, but this one would be invisible from the access road. A perfect place to do—to do what?

“Just maybe drown a man,” he heard himself say.

A rolling shadow climbed the ridge Stranahan was sitting on. He shivered, as much from unease as from the chill. House lights flashed on in Summersby’s place, then in Sinclair’s and Gentry’s. McNair’s cabin remained swallowed in darkness. Stranahan started to switchback down the ridge, thinking of his next move.

Back at the trailhead, he shrugged into his fishing vest. He grabbed his fly rod—it would provide an excuse should anyone inquire about his presence—and locked the Land Cruiser. A tide of anxiety rose inside him. For the first time since moving west, he regretted not carrying something to protect himself with.

Years before, when the investigative footwork he did for his grandfather’s law firm danced into corners of Boston’s Southie, before the yuppie restaurateurs turned grit into glitter, he’d asked Percy McGill if he should apply for a concealed weapons permit. McGill, the former police detective who headed investigations for the old man, was a hirsute Black Irishman who wore sport coats tailored to conceal the suede shoulder holster he wore over his cream linen shirts. In the office, the holster invariably hung from the hook of an old-fashioned hat rack under McGill’s Panama fedora. He’d answered Stranahan’s question by stepping to the hat rack and pulling his 9mm Beretta from the holster. Silently, he proffered the piece, holding it by the barrel.

Stranahan had felt the cool steel, the authoritative compact weight.

“Now aim it at my heart,” McGill had said.

“But…”

“Full clip, nothing in the chamber. Aim the gun.” McGill stood up, offering the broad expanse of his chest.

Again, Stranahan had hesitated.

“I could have shot you five times by now. Raise the damned gun.”

Stranahan brought the Beretta to bear, holding it at arm’s length with his left hand cupped under the grip. McGill gave him his dead look, his cop eyes. Stranahan felt his heart beating and smelled the sweat and cologne from McGill’s body. The muzzle wavered.

McGill reached out and took the gun from Stranahan’s hand.

“In real life,” he said quietly, “pointing a gun at a human being is the most serious thing you can do. It has consequences. You’re a good kid. You handle yourself okay. I’ve seen you stand up to people. I was surprised, frankly. But you don’t have any police training and I think a couple years from now you’ll be doing something else. You’re too smart to run down boulevard scum all your life. But…”—he cocked his head slightly—“if you pack a gun, and you ever get in a situation where you have to pull it—that’s a line you don’t want to cross. You can go to court with a chance of doing time. It’s legitimate self-defense, you’ll still have to live with what you did. It will change you. It’ll distance you from your wife, your kids, your good mother. Not to mention that old man who loves you like the son he lost.” He pointed at the door to the next office.

McGill holstered the handgun. Then he reached out and clasped a hand across the back of Stranahan’s neck.

“Come on, let’s go down to Louie’s and get a coupla meatball sandwiches. Lunch’s on me.”

Stranahan had never thought about buying a handgun again.

Still, it would be good to have something. He unlocked the rig, found the canister of pepper spray he carried in grizzly country, and zipped it into a pocket of his fishing vest. Then he made a makeshift sheath for his pocketknife from a scrap of cardboard and duct-taped it firmly
to his calf. He opened the blade, stuck it securely into the sheath and pulled his sock over it. He felt a bit foolish, and it was going to hurt like a son of a bitch pulling the tape off his calf.

He locked the rig and struck out along a game trail following the course of the creek, the circle of his penlight penetrating the tangled branches of the willows.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

T
he pond hid in leaf shadow, its surface still but for a riffle of pewter at the inlet.

Not sure what he was looking for besides footprints, Stranahan began to circle it, shading the penlight lens with his handkerchief to dampen its glow. The white object turned out to be a Styrofoam cooler. Stranahan lifted the lid. A half dozen empty Coors Light cans eddied in a few inches of melted ice. Stranahan dipped a finger into the water. Cold. Someone had been here earlier today.

Near the earthen dam that funneled the pond’s outlet, a trail disappeared into a copse of aspen. Stranahan found a flattened bit of ground with tire tracks in hardened mud, commas of rut where a vehicle had turned around. Someone had parked here several times in recent weeks. Stranahan knew it would be easy enough to match the tread to a vehicle, although if it identified McNair’s Sierra Classic, what would it mean? A man was entitled to visit his own property. But if it matched the hatchery truck?

Stranahan heard an owl hoot behind him. As he turned back toward the pond, he felt a presence. He became aware of a lifting sensation, as if the gravitational pull of the earth had been momentarily suspended. Instinctively, he backed into the trees. He was turning to leave when a shuffling noise caught his attention. There was a trilling purr as a raccoon, silver in the moonlight, emerged from the brush and lumbered down the bank. It was followed single file by
three kits. The raccoons stepped into the shallows and hunted around, digging with their forefeet. When the larger raccoon flipped something onto the bank, the kits pointed their black masks at it, then dove in as one. In the ensuing tug-of-war, one kit emerged with the morsel and galloped up the bank, closely followed by the others. A crawdad, Stranahan figured. Now the mother raccoon had caught something else. This time Stranahan distinctly saw a torpedo shape glistening from the coon’s teeth. A fish shape, about six inches long. The raccoon dropped it on the bank, where it was descended upon by the kits.

In the next twenty minutes, this scenario was repeated half a dozen times. Stranahan knew that raccoons were proficient anglers, but surely trout were more difficult to catch than this. He watched, baffled. Then, an explanation dawned and one more puzzle piece locked into place. He felt a flush of excitement.

The raccoons were leaving. Stranahan unhooked the woolly bugger from the cork grip of his fly rod, walked down to the bank and flicked the fly into the pond. He twitched it, felt a minute tug, then another. A shiver of wavelets popped up as the fish fought over the fly. Stranahan retrieved the woolly bugger. It was too big for the fish’s mouths. He substituted a small wet fly, tying it on by feel because he didn’t want to use the light more than necessary. Immediately he hooked up and skittered a small trout to his hand. He put the barrel of the flashlight in his mouth and twisted it on, but even without it he could tell that something was wrong with the fish. The head was lopsided, with a deep cavity under one eye. The rear third of the body was black. Stranahan had never seen a fish infected with whirling disease before, but it didn’t take a book to confirm his suspicion. He whacked the fish on the back of its head with a stone.

Stranahan patted the pockets of his vest. Finding a ziplock bag that had once protected a disposable camera, more recently a bologna sandwich, he slipped the fish inside. It wanted for company only as
long as it took to make another cast. A few minutes later there were five in the bag, all showing posterior discoloration, while one also had a misshapen mandible. One fingerling infected with whirling disease in the Madison drainage wasn’t an anomaly, but a pond teaming with them? Now, Stranahan thought, the sheriff would have to act.

“Time to vamoose,” he muttered aloud and, reeling in the line, heard the owl hoot a second time. He turned his head toward the sound. As he did, a blur shot toward him. He went down hard with the impact, his head smacking the water. He felt a viselike grip on his legs and struggled to turn his face up to breathe. For a moment he surfaced, sputtering, then felt his legs hoisted into the air and went under again.

He kicked frantically. His chest seemed ready to explode. An image of childhood flicked in his head, over and over, like a flashcard. He was running down a hill, his feet tripping forward so fast he was almost falling, tripping and falling toward a redbrick house, but the house was getting farther away, then farther….

He swelled up out of the darkness, hearing a choking noise. He was on wet ground, his body convulsing. The pain was unlike anything he’d known, his chest breaking in half with each cough. He was swimming in and out in flashes; then a shot of light bounced off his head, and, mercifully, the noise of his body began to recede away.

W
hen Stranahan came to, he was staring at a naked woman. She was a platinum blonde, without a pore or hair follicle on her body. The polished finger of a knife protruded from her navel. His eyes came into focus. He saw that the woman was a
Playboy
centerfold, tacked up on the wall of what looked like a workroom.

He lifted his head off his chest and spat, a thin stream of blood running down his chin onto his soaked fly-fishing vest. His lower lip burned like hell. Touching it with his tongue, he felt a lump. He tried to reach a hand to his face, but it wouldn’t move. His hands were
bound behind his back with something tight and sticky—duct tape? His feet also were bound and he was sitting on a chair, the chair backed up to a work table mounted with a heavy vise.

Hearing a keening whine behind him, he swiveled his head. The chair creaked under his weight. Apple McNair was hunched under a naked lightbulb that illuminated a grinding wheel, his face set in a tight-lipped grimace behind a shower of sparks.

“I see you’ve come around,” he said, his eyes fixed to the wheel. “Twasn’t sure you would.”

McNair held a blade about six inches long up for critical inspection. He dipped the blade into a bucket of what looked like motor oil and wiped it with a rag.

He said, “D two seems to hold the heat longer than stainless. Why, I don’t know.”

He took the tip of the blade between his thumb and first two fingers and abruptly jerked his arm toward the wall behind Stranahan. There was no time to duck, just an instant shivering in the air. Stranahan turned to see the blade, trembling silver, neatly incising the airbrushed nipple of another centerfold, an amply endowed brunette playfully wielding a pitchfork in a hay barn.

“Oh, do me again.” The obscenity of McNair’s falsetto voice rang through the shed.

Stranahan felt the hairs lift at his temples.

“Look,” he mumbled, the words stinging as he tried to speak around the swelling in his lip. “There’s been an ’um mithunderstanding. I was coming back from fishing the river and I’d noticed the pond earlier. I was just going to ma—make a few casts.” I’m sorry for trethpassing. I didn’t know it was your land.”

McNair snorted. “I seen your rig. Ask me, Sheep Crick trailhead’s a strange place to park if you’re fishing the Madison.”

“Not if, if you want to fish the Quake outlet. It’s longer to hike up from the bridge.”

“You poking around the crick with a flashlight. I got eyes. I seen you from the house.” His voice was flat. “You ain’t here to fish no river.”

McNair’s head was cocked. His mouth sagged open, forming a black oval hole in the beard. There seemed to be a question in his eyes.

He doesn’t know who I am, Stranahan thought suddenly. He never got close enough to look at me at Henry’s Lake the morning he shot Sam, and he can’t remember me from Summersby’s party. He tried to recall the night. He’d introduced himself to McNair after nightfall, on the dark end of the porch. They had been two shadows talking. Stranahan had recognized the heeler dog only because it was sitting under the porch lamp.

As if the man could read his mind, McNair pushed up his safety goggles and looked hard at Stranahan. Below the simian shelf of his forehead, his right eye roamed.

“I seen you before,” he said. “I know your voice.”

There was a buzzing sound. McNair pulled a cell phone from his jeans pocket and turned his head.

Stranahan heard him say, “Yeah.”

“Did you figure out who he is?”

The masculine voice at the other end of the line sounded metallic. The cell was on speaker phone.

“He just swum to. We getting round to it.”

“Get around to it, then,” the man said. “Find out why—” His voice abruptly stopped.

“Is this on speaker?”

Stranahan saw Apple McNair mouth the word “fuck.”

“Shut your phone,” the voice commanded. “Go into the house and wait for me to call you on the landline. This has got to be fixed, you understand me? We’re going to fix this. Do it.”

McNair snapped the phone shut. His grimy beard jutted at Stranahan. The voice dropped in register.

“Make yourself comfortable.” He barked a guttural laugh, but his face had taken on a petulant, childlike look. He’d been chastised in Stranahan’s presence and couldn’t meet his eyes.

“It doesn’t have to go this way,” Stranahan said. He forced himself to speak through the pain and enunciate clearly.

The man acted as if he hadn’t heard.

“Kidnapping’s a serious crime. Cut this tape off and we’ll call it even. Nobody has to get in this deep over a few fish, especially if it’s your feet to the flames and someone else is calling the shots.”

“Fish?” McNair’s voice was quizzical.

“The trout in the pond. I caught a couple. It’s doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

“The fish is the key that unlocks the land,” McNair said cryptically. He nodded to himself. “Don’t you know that?”

He walked past Stranahan, his face in profile, but his near eye, the roaming eye, rolling over to regard him from the corner of the socket. A frown tugged the man’s brow into three deep folds as he shut the door behind him.