Blood Lure (34 page)

The secretary’s sandwich reminded Anna it was lunchtime but she was too preoccupied to take time hunting and gathering. Back in Joan’s office she made do with candy. She was going to owe the researcher a bag of gummi bears before the day was through.

To impose order where none naturally suggested itself, Anna rearranged her papers atop those left by Joan Rand: Carolyn Van Slyke’s autopsy report; the list of items found on the body, including the coat with McCaskil’s topographical map in the pocket; then what information they had on Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Bill Fetterman; Anna’s much-doodled-on notes tracing Fetterman to Fetterman’s Adventure Trails; and, last in this papered line of thought, the 10-343 connecting a truck and horse trailer abandoned near the northwest corner of Glacier to the defunct business on Highway 41 outside Tampa, Florida.

Too much for coincidence, not enough for sense. Could the truck and horse trailer belong to McCaskil or have been borrowed or stolen by McCaskil? Sure. But then why was his own legally registered vehicle parked in a frontcountry parking lot? Who was Carl Micou? Did McCaskil have a confederate and, if so, a confederate in what?

None of this brought Anna any closer to a connection between McCaskil and the murder victim; still, she was pleased with herself. The morning had not been wasted.

Back on the phone, she reconnected with Francine Cuckor. Ms. Cuckor had her own brand of professional ethics. She’d been only too happy to share in gory detail the fact that her boss had had sex with all creatures great and small. When asked to say yea or nay to names of clients, she got cagey. Eventually Anna was bumped upstairs to Claude Winger, a junior partner in the firm.

It was not advisable to spin tales for a past master at the art of professional dissimulation, so Anna told him, as her father would have said, “the whole truth, nothing but the truth and damn little of that.”

“I’m Officer Anna Pigeon investigating the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Could you answer a few questions for me?”

A pause, then a careful voice as devoid of regional inflections as that of a radio announcer said, “Ask your questions.” Anna noted the lack of commitment to answering them.

“We have a couple leads, both weak at this point. We’re trying to establish any prior connection between Mrs. Van Slyke and our possible suspects,” Anna said, using frankness like bread upon the waters.

It was not returned tenfold. “And you want me to . . . ,” the voice came back.

“Answer a few questions, if you would.”

“Ask your questions.”

There would be no softening up or slithering around Claude. Anna cut to it. “Has or was Carolyn Van Slyke working on any case involving a Bill McCaskil, Will Skillman, Bill McClellan or Bill Fetterman?”

“We can’t divulge any client information.”

“The fact that a person has engaged the services of an attorney does not fall under attorney-client privilege,” Anna said. So often the attorney, doctor, priest and whoever-else client privilege was claimed for wasn’t for the protection of clients. It was claimed, legally or not, because people were either too lazy to bother giving information to help out the police, or harbored vague worries that to cooperate would open up their own activities to scrutiny. Anna suspected Claude claimed it as a matter of course to avoid involvement and work. She thought of threatening to subpoena his files but knew it was an empty threat. The rank-and-file investigated and reported. It wasn’t for the likes of her to go throwing around legal ultimatums. Claude Winger would know that.

She waited through a clearly audible sigh breathed out in an office in Seattle. “I’ll put you through to the secretary. Give her the names. She will tell you if any of them have engaged the professional services of Carolyn Van Slyke in the past year. She won’t go back further than that and she will not tell you anything else.”

“Thank you,” Anna said but he’d already put her on hold. Minutes later, when she was beginning to think she’d been put on hold to grow old and die, Francine came on the line. Winger had evidently spoken to her firmly. She was businesslike to the point of rudeness. Anna read off her list of names, adding Carl Micou as an afterthought. She was answered by the huffy snicking sound of fingernails on a keyboard.

“No persons by those names have contacted Ms. Van Slyke in her professional capacity,” Francine said mimicking an automaton.

Had the sentence with its convoluted precision come from someone else, Anna might have suspected them of hiding something. From Francine it just sounded petty and pompous.

“Thank you,” Anna said again and pulled her soul back from the black and voice-filled void of the telephone to Joan’s homey office.

No cheese down that hole,
Anna remembered one of her field rangers, Barth Dinkins, saying. “No cheese,” she said aloud.

Carl G. Micou, registered owner of the abandoned truck and trailer, the man who’d given the Florida motor vehicles department the number of Fetterman’s Adventure Trails as his home number, remained a mystery. Anna turned back to her electronics.

Mentally apologizing to Joan for a phone bill she would probably have a devil of a time getting her department reimbursed for, Anna called Information and, throwing caution to the winds, charged the extra fifty cents and let them dial the Tampa Better Business Bureau for her. A pleasant young man, at least he sounded young and handsome and virile but may well have been a nasty old poop with a nice voice, told her Fetterman’s Adventure Trails was a licensed business owned and operated by Woody Fetterman. Fetterman’s Adventure Trails had operated at the same location for twenty-six years. The only address for Woody was that of Adventure Trails. There had been no complaints against Fetterman’s from either the buying public or other businesses. Fetterman’s Adventure Trails had recently closed its doors but he did not know why. He suggested she call the Tampa tourism department, as he thought Adventure Trails was a theme park with rides and so forth. They might be able to help her.

The department of tourism could tell her little more. The woman who answered the phone offered to send Anna a brochure, then couldn’t find one. They’d gone out of business, Anna said, possibly the brochures had been thrown out. That was probably it, the woman agreed. She wrote down Anna’s address at Glacier anyway, promising to send it along if she found it. Anna would have been touched by the desire to please if so long on the phone finding out so little hadn’t made her crabby.

An hour’s work had provided her with one first name, if “Woody” was legit and not a nickname. Maybe Woodrow. Since Woody had been in business in the same place for twenty-six years he was no fly-by-night. It had been in the back of Anna’s mind that Fetterman of Fetterman’s Adventure Trails and Bill McCaskil might be one and the same. Twenty-six years, changed that. She couldn’t see McCaskil quietly running a business while being indicted and arrested repeatedly for fraud under a handful of other names.

McCaskil was from the Tampa area—or had been there as a teenager. He could’ve seen the name Fetterman on his way to work or school every day and remembered it when he needed an alias. If it wasn’t for the name cropping up again by way of the owner of the abandoned truck, Anna would have chosen to believe that.

“Woody Fetterman.” Anna wended her way through the phone lines to the Tampa courthouse, records department. Yes, there was a certificate of death for a Woodrow Fetterman. He had died at age eighty-one of natural causes six weeks before.

Another possibility exhausted. Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Fetterman was not the Fetterman of Adventure Trails. He was not connected with Carolyn Van Slyke by way of divorce. According to Lester, McCaskil hadn’t known her before they met at Fifty Mountain Camp.

“Damn,” Anna whispered. The truck and the trailer. The name Fetterman. McCaskil and his aliases. Another possibility entered her mind and she went back to the 10-343 report. Carl G. Micou was born August 4, 1938, considerably older than McCaskil. Still, “Micou” could be one of McCaskil’s aliases. Perhaps it wasn’t listed because it was unknown or not yet used at the time William McCaskil was indicted for real estate fraud.

She spent forty more minutes on the phone and eventually ended up back at the records department in Tampa. The search took longer this time but Mr. Micou’s death certificate was found. He had died of congestive heart failure in April of 1995, nearly six years ago.

“His truck is still alive,” Anna said wearily.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Thanks.” Dead men, dead ends.

Sprinkled around the edges of Joan’s office was all the information that, by any wild stretch of the imagination, could pertain to the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Anna had already run to ground what little Fetterman, Fetterman and Micou had to offer. She’d verified that Lester’s wife was indeed the queen of sluts. Swiveling Joan’s chair slowly she let the other bits and pieces slide by: the army jacket with the topo and the file card. Anna rolled over and, without touching it, reread a copy of the card found in the pocket of what would undoubtedly be Bill McCaskil’s coat. “B & C” was written in a loose hand across the top. Below those initials were numbers, measurements by the look of them: 12 11/16, 17 13/16, 30 12/16. The last, 30 8/19, was underlined in heavy ink.

When they caught McCaskil, if she were around, Anna’d ask him what the numbers meant. Probably nothing. His waist size. Who knew? She examined the photocopy of the topo. It had been reduced in size till it fit on two fourteen-and-a-half-inch sheets of paper taped together. Most of the type was too tiny for eyes that had seen more than forty years. There was nothing new since she’d looked at the original, no nifty clues pencilled in the margins, no big red X where the body had been found.

Anna rotated the chair another quarter turn and glanced briefly at her notes on Rory Van Slyke. Rory’s dad was an abuse victim. Rory’d gone missing for thirty-six hours. Rory’d turned up having lost a sweatshirt and gained a water bottle, probably his dead stepmother’s. Anna’s mind drifted and she let it. No lunch, half a bag of gummi bears, her blood sugar was sufficiently screwed up her mind might actually go someplace interesting. It didn’t. It merely cast back to the night on Flattop when Joan had divvied up the scattered remnants of the bear-ravaged camp, the ones she and Anna had stuffed unceremoniously in a sack before jaunting off with Harry in search of the lost boy. It was then Anna’d noted the extraneous water bottle in the bag beside the strange stick she’d picked up just outside the camp.

Rory had denied any knowledge of that stick, Anna remembered, just as he’d denied knowing how the water bottles had proliferated. A foot long, worn smooth, of hardwood, not pine or aspen, unweathered, Anna and Joan had known it was carried in recently so when they’d found it they’d saved it. Rory said he’d never seen it. Anna hadn’t thought much about it at the time. It was a stick of wood not a stick of dynamite. Now she worried it around because it fit neatly into her collection of bizarre things that didn’t fit.

Anna had kept the stick. Force of habit caused her to pack it out as she would any piece of litter. Unless the house had been burglarized by beavers it was probably on the floor of Joan’s spare room, where it had been dumped when she unpacked before the last foray into the wilderness.

Thinking about it, she picked up a ruler, close in length to the mystery stick, though a good deal skinnier, and began to fiddle with it. If Rory had not been lying about the stick then it had been dropped in the little meadow by someone else on or about the time they’d been camped out there. Not more than a day or two prior to their arrival. Wood, even hardwood, weathers quickly out-of-doors.

Experimentally Anna waved the ruler about, trying to ascertain the possible uses for a finished length of hardwood, several times the thickness of a ruler, packed into the backcountry. Perhaps a woodcarver, seeking his muse in the mountains, might carry in a prize piece of wood. If she remembered right, the piece she and Joan found had been battered and worn smooth with much handling. Perhaps a woodcarver who went for long periods of time between artistic inspirations.

To the detriment of the ruler’s edge, she drummed it lightly against the chair arm as she thought. The minor cracking sound as she played startled her. Before and, she thought but wasn’t sure, during the attack on their camp by the bear, she’d heard the crack of wood on wood. That same sound had awakened her from her troubled sleep in the rocks on the flank of Cathedral Peak. Both times she’d written it off to twigs snapping under the weight of real or imagined marauders. Whacking the chair’s arm again she noted the distinct quality of the sound.

So what? So somebody was banging pieces of wood together while a bear ransacked the camp or, even less likely, while a bear thoughtfully returned Anna’s water bottle to her. Did Rory hear in his dreams the crack of wood before his mother’s water bottle was left beside him the night he’d been lost? Why? A signal? Nervous habit? Voodoo ritual?

“Damn,” Anna repeated to herself. All roads led to blasphemy. She put the ruler back where she’d found it.

The rest of the reports had little more information to be wrung out of them. The lab report on the blue stuff sack had yet to be returned but she expected no surprises. From her intimate and prolonged traverse across the alpine talus with its moth-bearing rocks, she had no doubt the traces on the bag were just as Joan had said: rock and moth-wing dust. The bloody traces within might be other than that of Carolyn Van Slyke, but Anna doubted it. The lab report on the peanut and biscuit fragment would probably be equally unenlightening. Most often things were precisely what they appeared to be.

Because she was there and could think of nothing better to do, she filled out a BIMS, a bear incident management systems report on the sow and two cubs she’d seen feeding in the cirque below Cathedral Peak. After she’d finished, she thumbed through BIMS submitted since she’d come to Glacier. She didn’t know what she hoped for.