Crazy Mountain Kiss (4 page)

“Gigi, you look like a Kentucky coal miner,” Ettinger said. “That was . . . way beyond the call.”

“I'll put today in my back pocket for the next time we negotiate a raise,” Wilkerson said. “But it was sort of cool, really. I'd rather get a little dirt on my face than sit in a lab any day.”

“So what's the verdict?”

“She was going down. I bagged threads that look like poly. I'll take some fibers from her clothing once we get her out.”

“Gigi, I wish we had some water here so you could clean up.”

“Just give me a minute to breathe clean air. I think if they lower me on a rope this time I can get far enough down to get a harness on her.”

Martha nodded. Beyond the call didn't begin to describe it. “How does she . . . look?”

“Dead at least a week or the crow wouldn't have had time to build a nest. Birds pecked her eyes and ate away her lips. Her gums are receding. Too bad it's so cold up here or the Calliphoridae would make timing a cinch.”

“You mean blow flies,” Ettinger said.

Wilkerson nodded. “As it is, we'll have to rely on decomposition rate. This time of year the initial process is largely from inside out, from bacteria and protozoa in the body. Her stage falls somewhere along the time line from initial decay to putrefaction. So the odor
isn't too bad. If that guy who found the body had got here a couple weeks from now, the stink would have dropped him flat on the floor.”

“This falls under the category of too much information. Let's get her out and then you can work your magic.”

“I'm just trying to prepare you. A lot of law enforcement personnel think they've seen it all and can handle it, but their experience is usually limited to fresh kills and desiccated remains. It's the in-between vics, the black putrefaction and butyric fermentation cadavers, that give you nightmares.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

 • • • 

T
hey couldn't get her out. The body rocked when they pulled on the harness, but the offending knee wouldn't budge. Wilkerson offered to crawl up from the firebox and see if she could get a harness around the foot belonging to that knee. If they could pull it down until the leg was straight, there was a decent chance the body would follow. Ettinger agreed to the strategy.

Wriggling on her back into the firebox and elbowing up several feet, Wilkerson managed to get the harness over the shoe on the drawn-up foot. When she climbed down, Harold tucked his braid into his jacket and took her place in the firebox, looking none too happy about it.

The first heave yielded a half foot of progress and a sickening crunching sound as the hip dislocated. A shower of ash fell into the firebox. One more heave and Harold was able to reach up and place a hand on either ankle. Both legs were extended now and he wrestled the body down the flue a few inches at a time.

“Her torso reaches the smoke chamber she'll come down all—”

He never finished the sentence, but started choking as a curtain of ash rained down into the firebox. A second's hesitation, then the body cascaded through the ash, falling loose limbed into Harold's arms. For a moment he cradled it, the way a fireman cradles a body from a
burning house. Then he scrambled out from under the weight and backed crablike across the room until coming up against the wall.

“I haven't seen anybody move that fast since Walt stepped on the rattlesnake in Yankee Jim Canyon,” Martha would later say.

But that was later. To a man and two women they just stared at the body, the legs sticking out from the hips in an obscene spread, and the chin resting on the chest so that the hair, matted with soot, fell forward in a wing across the face. Then, as gravity asserted its imperative, the body collapsed sideways, the head and neck coming to rest against the side of the firebox in that awkward position that airline passengers fall asleep against a stranger's shoulder. She stared at them then, from the blackened holes where her eyes had been.

Nobody spoke. Finally Walt asked Harold if it was the Huntington girl. The question was absurd. What they were looking at was recognizable as having once been a human being, but only to the extent of a ballpark age and probable gender.

“I just had pictures and some video,” he said. He shook his head. “Be a hell of a thing if it was.”

“Why do you say that?” Martha asked.

“Because her name was Cinderella.”

Martha knew the name but hadn't made the association with the chimney. She could see the headline, and hated herself for it.

“God have mercy on all of us,” she said.

S
tranahan spotted the familiar figure standing beside the bronze grizzly bear sculpture at the baggage claim and strode over.

“Martha, fancy seeing you here.” He pinched the brim of his cap. It was their way of late, keeping it light while reestablishing a relationship under a new set of rules. “Peachy Morris is picking me up. Who are you here for?”

Martha tapped her badge. “I'm your ride. Plans have changed.”

“Did you think it was time for us to be friends, or are you interested in my services?” That too was their way, the dig, not so subtle.

“The first,” she said. “For Choti's sake.” Martha had boarded Sean's Sheltie while he was in Florida, and the little dog had become fast friends with Goldie. “I figure if they can get along, we can, too. No luggage?”

“Just the carry-on.”

“Here, I'll be your ghillie and tote the rod case.” They'd walked halfway to the Cherokee with
HYALITE COUNTY SHERI
FF'S DEPARTMENT
stenciled on the door when the other shoe dropped. “Maybe a little of that second thing you mentioned.”

Stranahan smiled. He'd known Martha hadn't picked him up to bury a wounded heart. “Is this about the girl in the chimney?”

She nodded, jangling the keys in her pocket. “We got her out yesterday. It's the Huntington girl who disappeared last November, ninety percent chance. She was wearing a rodeo belt buckle her mother identified, and Doc Hanson contacted Deaconess to send
over X-rays taken when the girl broke a forearm bone barrel racing. The autopsy's this afternoon.”

“Bad, huh?”

“The birds had been at her. We think a crow dug out her eyes.”

Stranahan let this sink in. “Is there any reason to believe it isn't an accident?”

“No, but there's a larger question here. Wilkerson put the time of death at two weeks, give or take, which means she was alive for at least five months after the disappearance. So where was she? Not the cabin. Renters come in and out all winter long. Still, you'll want to see it. I thought we could swing by on the way back to the canyon.”

“That's a big swing out of the way and I don't see where I fit in. You said it was Harold's case.”

“It is.”

Stranahan waited.

“Well, the thing is, there's no evidence of a crime. Her dying this way is sensational, so there's going to be press, but unless Hanson determines a cause other than exposure, or forensics comes through with a surprise, our scope of involvement will be limited. Harold's canvassing the valley, but he's knocking on the same doors he knocked on five months ago, and if he doesn't get any traction, it will go on a back burner sooner rather than later.”

Stranahan thought he saw where Martha was going. “And that's not going to wash with the family.”

“In particular, the mother. Loretta Huntington is a formidable woman. She made her name as a rodeo champion, then parlayed her looks into a job modeling ranch wear. That got her a minor television career. But nobody knew her name until she did those Chevy Absaroka commercials. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?”

Stranahan shook his head. “I live in a tipi, Martha.”

“Google her,” Ettinger said. “The husband's a treat. We picked him up on a DUI a week after the girl disappeared and you could say he isn't a big fan of law enforcement. They're using the video as a
teaching tool at the academy—how to deal with an asshole. Pled the whole bereaved bit. Skated because the Breathalyzer hadn't been recalibrated in a timely fashion. Anyway, when the sand ran out on the initial investigation, Loretta hired a private investigator. He didn't get any farther than Harold, but my guess is she'll go that route again.”

“What makes you think she'd hire me? I don't advertise.”

“Because I'm going to tell her to.”

That made Stranahan sit back in his seat.

“Thinking about it, aren't you?”

He nodded to himself. “You don't want a loose cannon, someone you don't know.”

“No, Sean. Because I don't have the resources to hire you myself.”

“Oh.”

“I knew the Huntington girl. Back when I made the mistake of reconciling with Burt, we rented a place up Thread Creek, that's the next drainage over from the old Huntington spread, over by Pony. Four or five years ago now. Cinderella showed up on her horse one day, asking if my son could go riding. I think she was lonely. Her mother had just remarried, they were off honeymooning somewhere. So Cinderella was staying at the ranch manager's house for a couple months. She would have been about twelve. David was starting high school, so she wasn't exactly on his radar. But she looked at him with those hydrangea eyes of hers. You know how girls get around twelve, they start cultivating the dead look. But she had this earnest inquisitiveness that was refreshing. And a beautiful smile. You just wanted to bottle her and carry her around in your pocket. She got a big crush on David and they became thick as thieves. I let myself daydream they might get married someday.”

Martha looked at Sean and lifted one shoulder.
What can you do?

She reached a manila folder from between the seats. “This is a summary of Harold's investigation. The second report's about the groomsman who worked the horses at the ranch; he went missing at the same time.”

“They ran off together?”

“That's one possibility. He was two years older than the girl, eighteen to her sixteen.”

“I remembered reading something in the newspaper,” Sean said. He opened the folder and gleaned the bare bones of the teenagers' disappearances as the skeletons of juniper trees marched past the side window, blackened reminders of last summer's burn up the Bridger Canyon.

Cinderella Huntington had been reported missing from the Bar-4 Ranch at 8:47 a.m. on Tuesday, November 7, about an hour and a half after she had failed to come downstairs for breakfast. Not finding her in the kitchen, her mother had checked her room, then the lot where the ranch vehicles were parked, thinking that her daughter had skipped breakfast and gone straight to school. Like many ranch kids, Cinderella drove a pickup to the gate at the county road, about a mile and half away, where she caught a bus to take her to school in Clyde Park. She'd been driving since she was eight and her mother had to tape boards to the clutch, brake, and gas pedals so her shoes could reach. But her pickup was still in the lot.

Not overly worried, Huntington thought to check the stall where her daughter's horse was stabled. The girl often retreated there after dinner to do homework and usually checked in on Snapdragon before going to school. The horse was asleep with her foot lifted; the electric oil heater Cinderella switched on during cold evenings was unplugged.

While in the stables, Huntington met the horse trainer, Charles Watt, who did not live on the ranch but had a house a dozen miles away up the Brackett Creek Road. He told Huntington that he'd seen Cinderella the previous afternoon, after she'd returned from school and was mucking out Snapdragon's stall. They had said hi to each other and he'd left the ranch to drive home shortly thereafter.

Huntington then roused her husband from bed. Jasper Fey, the girl's stepfather—it was a second marriage for both of them—had driven in to Bridger the evening before, Tuesday being poker night at the Cottonwood Inn. He'd seen Cinderella briefly before leaving the house, told her dinner was in the refrigerator. Six p.m., give or take.
He didn't get home until after midnight and had gone straight to bed. The couple had separate bedrooms, his on the ground floor. Loretta's was upstairs, down the hall from the room where Cinderella slept. Fey told his wife not to worry—wasn't she just saying how unpredictable her daughter had become?

“Teenagers are like terrorists,” Huntington recalled him saying during her interview with Harold. “They live among us and we don't know what they're thinking.” She told Harold they'd had a row over Fey's insensitivity, repeating a remark he'd heard somewhere, probably on the set of the television western he was a technical expert for and that was shot in eastern Montana. The row was just a short exchange of remarks. Fey had grasped the seriousness of the situation and joined in the search, riding the property lines behind the house in his ATV.

Stranahan looked up. “There's no mention of the last time the mother saw the daughter.”

“That's Harold for you,” Martha said. “He likes to bury the lede. It's in there, you'll get to it, but she hadn't seen Cinderella since the previous morning. She left early Tuesday to drive up to Helena to conduct a horsemanship school. She decided to eat dinner there, then waited out a snow squall and didn't get back to the ranch till around eleven. The house was dark. She figured Cinderella was asleep and didn't want to disturb her.”

Stranahan turned his eyes back to the report.

By eight in the morning, Loretta Huntington was thoroughly alarmed. Only one other person who lived on the sixteen hundred-acre property might have seen Cinderella, and that was the ranch manager, Earl Hightower. The girl was friendly with Hightower, who Huntington said was teaching her guitar. Huntington tried to raise him on the VHF handset. Although you could use a cell phone from the main ranch house, which was set on a bench above the river, Hightower's house was tucked back into a cottonwood grove at a lower elevation and didn't get reception. Hightower didn't pick up, so she drove to the house, which was out near the main gate, and found
him in his barn. He reminded Huntington that he'd been out of town the day before to pick up a brood mare from a ranch out of Big Timber. So no, he hadn't seen Cinderella. Questioned more closely about the previous afternoon, he said he'd driven back to the Bar-4 at 5 p.m., turned the horse over to Watt, and then had driven back out the ranch road to his house and had dinner with his wife. Afterward, maybe seven-thirty or so, he took his dog on a walk out to the main gate and back, like he did every night, and spotted headlights turning onto the ranch access. He recognized the truck as belonging to the groomsman, Landon Anker. Anker idled down and they had acknowledged each other by each cocking a forefinger, the ubiquitous Montana salute. Anker came in to do chores once or twice a week after school and again on weekends. Sometimes he'd worked till nine or ten at night. Hightower thought nothing of the brief encounter and no words were exchanged.

They were standing on Hightower's porch during the conversation, when Loretta Huntington saw the ranch manager's face change. Hightower had extended his arm toward the county road, where the low-angle sun glinted off a metallic speck in the distance. The glint was from U.S. 89, in the direction of Wilsall. A car parked at the roadside? Anker's car? His family was from Wilsall. Hightower got binoculars from his house and confirmed that it was a dark-colored truck. Anker's GMC was dark blue. They investigated, found that it was in fact the young man's truck, parked behind a berm in the road, maybe twenty yards off the pavement. The truck was unlocked and the key was in the ignition. The right rear tire was flat. Hightower squatted down and found what looked like the head of a roofing nail flattened against the tread. There was a spare in the bed of the pickup. Hightower climbed into the bed and stood on it. The spare was flat also.

At this point, a logical solution presented itself. Huntington said that on two previous occasions, Anker had picked up her daughter from the ranch early in the morning and they had gone into Wilsall to his parents' house to eat a pancake breakfast prepared by his
mother. That would explain why her truck was still parked in the lot, rather than at the gate. Then, while driving to town they had got the flat and, unable to fix it, had probably walked the last two miles to his house. There were holes in the theory, starting with the fact that if Landon Anker had pulled up to the ranch house at six-thirty or seven that morning, Loretta probably would have heard the motor, or at least the dogs barking, and she hadn't. Then, too, it was unlike her daughter to fail to mention the change of schedule to her. As she confessed to Harold, she was trying to talk herself into believing the best-case scenario. Upon first seeing the truck, she had feared that her daughter had been involved in an accident, or that the two had driven off to go neck somewhere during the night, and as it was cold, had run the motor and asphyxiated on the fumes. She told Harold that Cinderella had a crush on the young man, but that she really didn't know if he returned her affections.

Not wasting time, Huntington and Hightower drove to the Anker homestead, where they found the boy's parents sitting down to breakfast. They hadn't seen their son for twenty-four hours and thought he was at the Bar-4, that he had gone straight from school to work and then had slept in the stables. He'd told them that he was going to give lying in wait for the horsehair thief one more try and they assumed last night was that.

Horsehair thief?
Stranahan put the question to Ettinger.

“It's a separate file,” she said. “Last fall someone cut the tails off a dozen or so horses at the Bar-4. You know, for violin bows.”

“Violin bows?”

“I keep forgetting you're a pilgrim. Belts, horsehair jewelry, violin bows, hair extensions for show horses, a lot of stuff. There's money in it.”

“How much is the tail of a horse worth?”

“I think you can get up to a couple hundred dollars a pound. White's the most valuable. The thefts occurred about a month before Cinderella disappeared. They paid Anker to spend a few nights in the stables after it happened, but no one returned to steal any more hair.”

“Why didn't Loretta Huntington think of Anker right off the bat?”

“Because it was the boy's initiative to spend the night. Neither the trainer or ranch manager had asked him to. After getting over the shock of seeing their horses shorn, they'd realized that horsehair thieves probably wouldn't hit the same ranch twice. Even meth heads aren't that dumb.”