Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Montana Metrosexual

S
ean Stranahan winced when his client, sitting on the elevated swivel seat at the front of the raft, came forward with his fly cast. He whistled and slapped a hand to the side of his head.

“Oh, shit,” the client said. “My bad. Did I hook you?”

“Only in my ear,” Stranahan said, forcing a smile. He rowed the raft to a cut bank and told the client, a hairstylist who owned a salon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to hop out and hold the raft steady.

“Careful,” Stranahan said. “Don't move your rod.” He pulled a small nail clipper to the extent of the elastic coil that tethered it to his fly vest and snipped off the leader in front of the two-inch-long salmonfly pattern.

The client, Kenneth Winston, tied the raft to an exposed root. He waded through the shallows to inspect Stranahan's earlobe, from which the fly dangled like a cockroach earring.

“I say, Captain, this could be the beginning of a new fashion trend in angling,” Winston said. Long black fingers pinched the lower part of the lobe. At Stranahan's instruction, Winston passed a loop of monofilament leader material under the bend of the hook. He grasped the ends firmly.

“Steady now,” Stranahan said. “Don't be shy about it. Yank it out quick.” He felt a brief sting as the fingers abruptly jerked the loop of monofilament, backing the hook out.

“Good thing we were fishing barbless.” Winston chuckled. “Here.” He dabbed at a ruby droplet of blood suspending from Stranahan's lobe. “Now you know what it feels like to get your ear pierced.” He touched the diamond stud in his own left earlobe. “You want,” he said, “I could hook you up with one like mine and we could forget about the guide fee. Turn you into a Montana metrosexual.”

“Thanks anyway,” Stranahan said.

“Really, I
am
sorry. I'm a better caster than that. Let me make it up to you. Who cuts your hair?”

“I do,” Stranahan said a little defensively.

“I was afraid that might be the answer. Perhaps we can do something about it. The fishing's slowed down, anyway.”

“Here?”

“Why not? I'm like Paladin in, what's that old TV western,
Have Gun Will Travel
? I'm always packing—in my case, just about as fine a set of Bucchelli barbering tools a man can buy.” He rummaged in his Simms waterproof duffel and pulled out a folding leather wallet, which opened to reveal three neat rows of combs and glistening cutlery.

“These picks and snips are what brought me to your fine state,” the stylist said. He slipped a pair of scissors out of a leather loop. “Every summer I line up workshops near rivers I want to fish. Last year it was Pocatello, because I wanted a piece of that cutthroat action on the South Fork of the Snake. This year you're the beneficiary of my expertise. See, what I do is teach white barbers how to cut hair so a black man doesn't end up looking like a poodle. You get away from cities east of the Mississippi, you'd be surprised how many brothers can't find anyone who can cut their hair.

“Now you”—Winston stroked his pencil mustache thoughtfully as he waded around the boat to examine Stranahan's head from different angles—“I'm thinking an unstaggered part, swept-back wings over the ears. I'm thinking George Clooney, I'm thinking Clark Gable. Something simple, but classic. Your haircut says, ‘I'm a man's man, I wear a plaid shirt, but I can rock cuff links and a tux.'”

So it was that Sean Stranahan found himself getting a hundred-dollar haircut from a man whose business card read “Hot Hands,” while sitting in a swivel chair on the rowing frame of a secondhand raft in the upper reaches of the Madison River. Had someone told him this would be the agenda of the afternoon, he would have said he was crazy.

Or maybe not.

In the fourteen months since he'd come to Montana—“moved” was too strong a word for an artist slash fishing bum slash guide who didn't know which way to turn the wheel after the ink on the divorce papers dried—Stranahan had been duct-taped to a chair, stabbed, and nearly drowned. It was a long story and, to say the least, an interesting chapter in his life. But not an especially profitable one. Like most Montana immigrants, he had found that while he could eat on one job, he needed two more to pay rent and feed gasoline to his rig, a '76 Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser that was as conspicuous in its boxy antiquity, even on Montana back roads, as a rhino in a Thoroughbred paddock. Having once worked as an investigator for his grandfather's law firm in Boston and subsequently done private snooping under his own shingle, Stranahan had picked up a few odd jobs in Montana, operating illegally under an expired Massachusetts PI license. That's what had got him into trouble the summer before. By comparison, painting watercolors for the angling clientele and escorting sports down blue-ribbon rivers such as the Madison were quite safe, if not entirely predictable.

“So what do you think?” Winston had slipped a mirror from a pocket in the leather wallet and held it in front of Stranahan's face.

Sean took a look at the suntanned visage staring back, the dark blue eyes set in ovals of pale skin where his glasses rested, above them his usually unkempt shock of black hair swept back from the temples and knife-parted on the side.

“That's the best haircut I've ever had,” he said, and meant it. “I look like Black Bart . . . whoever Black Bart was.”

“Of course you do,” Winston said. “Considering who cut your hair before, it shouldn't come as a shock. But I'll still take it as a compliment.”

Winston climbed into the seat at the front of the rowing frame, swiveled around to face Stranahan. He smiled. “What do you say we call it a morning? We've seen the sun rise over the mountain, pricked a few lips. Let's just kick back and eat some ribs and drink a little of that Moose Drool Ale you've been talking about.” Unlike most clients, who expected the guide to provide lunch, Winston had let Stranahan know he'd be bringing the vittles, as he called his homemade coleslaw, short ribs, and Cajun spice deviled eggs.

•   •   •

“S
o you want to hear what happened last month at the salon?” Winston asked. He delicately nipped the last meat from a shingle of five-alarm ribs and sucked the bones clean. “Should I toss this on the bank or are we going to pack it out?”

“I'll pack out the rest, but I suppose you can leave that one for the coons.”

Winston tossed the ribs onto the bank.

“There's this guy,” he said, “always hanging around outside the salon. Older gentleman. Sort of a disheveled dignity in his carriage, remind you of Morgan Freeman if he fell on hard luck. So one evening”—Winston held out a deviled egg, Stranahan shook his head—“so one evening everybody's gone but me and I'm about to lock up when in he walks. First time across the threshold. I say, ‘Sir, are you thinking about getting a haircut?'

“He considers the question. ‘No,' he says. ‘I'm
going
to get a haircut. I'm
thinking
about pussy.'”

Winston shook his head. “Gentleman was dead serious. I tried not to laugh, but couldn't, you know. Would have fallen out of the chair if I'd been sitting down.” Winston was laughing.

“Of course I have to tell everybody in the salon. And ever since, we'll be snipping away, any time of the day, and somebody will say, ‘Sir, are you thinking about getting a haircut,' and the whole place falls apart.”

Winston wiped a hand across his eyes. “Oh man. The human comedy, you know. The things people do.” He took in a deep breath and exhaled. He looked at Stranahan, shook his head. “Great day to be alive,” he said. “Great
place
to be alive.”

Stranahan tied a new salmonfly imitation onto Winston's monofilament leader and added a golden stone dropper. He looked doubtfully at his client.

“Try to direct your casts at the fish from now on,” he said, mock seriously.

“You got it, Captain,” Winston said, and they pushed on down the river.

An hour later, a mink, slipping like oil through the rose bushes along the bank, came upon the discarded ribs. He cautiously sniffed at the bones. He hesitated. The scent was enticing, but he preferred raw meat to cooked, hot blood to cold. He continued on his way.

CHAPTER TWO

Ursa Major

T
he grizzly sow wasn't picky. She'd attempted to dig up the human body earlier in the spring, when the surface of the earth at nine thousand feet was as hard as a pool table slate. Her two cubs were no bigger than furry basketballs then. Now, grown to the size of border collies and with as much restless energy, they watched with twitching noses as their mother wrenched the decomposed body from the earth. Though it could only charitably be called flesh, even one putrid mouthful was worth a dozen mountain voles and had the great advantage of staying still. She greedily tore at the tatters of clothing, exposing the sickening parchment of the skin. She bent her head to jerk out a section of haunch.

Suddenly she swung round to face downslope, one huge foreleg poised on top of the rib cage, which cracked abruptly under her weight. She lifted her nose, questing, then with a woof bounded into a screen of undergrowth, closely followed by the swarming, up-and-down shuffle of her cubs.

•   •   •

H
arold Little Feather was the first to crest the rise of land. He'd heard the bones cracking, which from a distance sounded like a small-caliber rifle shot, and had climbed with great caution until reaching the lip from which the timbered bench lowered into view. Immediately registering the mangled remains of the body, he turned and put a finger to his lips. Sheriff Martha Ettinger, a few steps down the ridge, raised her eyes.

Little Feather pressed down with his hand.
Stay low
. He tapped his nose. “Bear.” Just mouthing the word.

Ettinger signaled the recovery team below her to stay put. Katie Sparrow, twenty feet down the slope, squatted to place a reassuring hand over Lothar's neck. The wind, which had been drifting uphill when the sow caught the dreaded human scent, had changed its mind, and the odor of the bear was thick in the nostrils of the shepherd. Katie could feel the cabled neck muscles quiver under her hand.

Kneeling behind her, Sheriff's Sergeant Warren Jarrett drew back the bolt of his .338 Winchester Magnum to chamber a cartridge. He hadn't wanted to pack the nine-pound rifle up the mountain, but protocol dictated a heavy-caliber weapon in areas of high bear activity. The modified Mauser action, worn slick after thirty elk seasons, made a barely audible click as the bolt closed on the round. Doc Hanson, the Hyalite County medical examiner, was the straggler of the group. Having struggled with the altitude all morning, he placed his hands on his knees to breathe deeply. The hairs of his walrus mustache, more salt than pepper, drifted slightly with each exhalation.

Martha Ettinger popped the safety tab off her canister of UDAP pepper spray. Impatient by nature, she looked hard at the back of Little Feather's head, as if she could will him to turn around and explain the holdup.
Is the bear in sight? What about the crack that sounded like a gunshot?
She hated not knowing. She wrinkled her nose at the cloud of odor invading her nostrils—the sour dog smell of the bruin coupled with the putrid tang of the decomposed body.

Ten minutes passed, a heartbeat at a time.

Finally, Little Feather turned and hooked a finger. Ettinger climbed up the ridge, gave him a
what's up
? look.

“Bear excavated the body, winded us, left. Probably halfway around the mountain by now. Was best to stay patient, make sure he was gone.”

“Ursa Major or Ursa Minor?”

Little Feather picked up a stick and walked forward a few steps, tapping it on the ruptured earth.

“Not a black bear,” he said. “Griz. Sow, she's got a cub. No, two cubs. Good thing about the wind giving us away. Come on her unawares—well, you know how perturbed mama grizzly bear can get.”

“Should I call up the troops?”

“Bring them to the lip. No farther 'til I work out the tracks. Probably only human print is Katie's yesterday. Still, I'd like to be sure before everyone mucks it up.”

They'd been conducting the conversation in whispers, not so much because of the bear but because it was the way hunters communicated, and this was a hunt in the sense that they were working out tracks, trying to solve a riddle etched onto the surface of the earth.

Ettinger turned and called down the hill. “Come on up.”

The words sounded jarringly loud and she immediately regretted them, feeling as if she had breached an unwritten code of conduct. She turned back to Harold to gauge his reaction, and as she did there was a popping sound from the screen of brush to her left. She knew it was a bear chopping its teeth before she saw the head bulge out from the tangle of downfall. In the time it took her to shift her eyes to Harold, the bear was on him and Harold was down as if struck by a bat, the bear shaking him, issuing horrible grunting sounds as it worried his left arm. Ettinger fumbled the canister of bear spray out of the holster, inadvertently pressing the trigger before it was withdrawn and spraying the ground in front of her. The cayenne mist brought her to her knees. But then Katie was flashing by, right through the red cloud from Martha's canister to empty all eight ounces of her own spray into the face of the bear. Below them, thunder crashed as Warren Jarrett shot his rifle into the air as a diversion.

And like that it was over. The bear, a blur, then a crashing in the underbrush, gone from sight. Martha gasping. Katie flat on the ground, having inhaled enough pepper spray to discourage an elephant. Little Feather lay curled on his side, his right hand behind his head in a protective posture and his left hand a bloody claw of fingers, sticking out at a grotesque angle from the forearm.

Warren Jarrett took the last steep steps at a run. He instantly inventoried the carnage and had just started for Little Feather when he was brought up short by a rasping sound. One of the grizzly cubs had started backing down a lodgepole pine tree thirty yards away. He could hear the mother chuffing from somewhere beyond the tree, encouraging the cub. Jarrett froze, knowing that if he put the cub back up the tree, the sow would return and then God knows what would happen. The last thing he wanted to do was have to shoot her and orphan two cubs. The cub reached a fork in the lower limbs of the pine and stopped. Again, Jarrett heard the chuffing.

“Come on, little bear. Come on,” he said under his breath. He deliberately kept his head down, not looking at the cub.

Again came the rasping sound. Jarrett, his eyes watering from the cayenne mist that permeated the air, didn't look up until the cub had reached the ground and shambled off, encouraged by more chuffing from its mother. Jarrett took the remaining five step to Harold Little Feather and bent over him.

Doc Hanson arrived on the bench, his legs shaking and his breath stentorian.

“My God, Warren. Is everybody all right?”

•   •   •

L
ater, much later after the Air Mercy chopper had evacuated Harold Little Feather to Hyalite Deaconess and he'd been the beneficiary of a blood transfusion, the puncture wounds to his upper chest drained and dressed, his broken radius set, his left shoulder relocated into its socket, his body pumped full of antibiotics, and his condition downgraded from serious to stable, Hanson would live to regret the comment. The four who had accompanied Little Feather on the body recovery, plus Janice Inderland, Harold's sister from Pony, and Sean Stranahan, who had befriended the Blackfeet tracker the previous summer, were crowded into room 223B. Seven hours had passed since the bear attack and the gray mood had just lifted, as Harold emerged from a drug-induced stupor to utter labored words of thanks to those who effected his rescue. The crowded room smelled herbally of smoke. Janice Inderland had burned a braid of sweetgrass and conducted a smudge ceremony to cleanse her brother's body of bad spirits.

The nurse, a hips-forward, severe-looking woman who clipped her words, had to shush them twice. Under ordinary circumstances she would have booted them out, allowing no more than three or four visitors at a time. But the patient was Native American. Chanting, sweetgrass incense, and standing room only were cultural norms that the hospital staff recognized.

Martha Ettinger added her signature to those already decorating the cast on Harold's left forearm and hand. She hesitated, then followed her scrawl with an X in the red felt marker. Harold squinted at his arm.

“Is that a kiss you put on it, Martha? How about one for my cheek.”

Martha kissed him brusquely, then tossed her head back to cover up the burn in her face.

“Picture this, Harold,” she said. “Old Doc here's last to arrive on the scene. There's blood over a ten-foot radius. There's bodies on the ground, two of 'em aren't moving. Then there's this human skull the bear dug up like something out of a nightmare, staring up with empty eye sockets. And Doc says—what was that you said, Doc? Oh yeah: ‘Is everybody all right?'”

The coroner tugged at the wings of his mustache, his cheeks bright cherry. He muttered something about the power of positive thinking.

“Don't let them get to you,” Harold said thickly. “I know who kept the blood from leaking out of me. I get to thinking straight, I'll give you a proper Blackfeet name. Right now I want to know what happened up on that bench.”

“Well, I believe the sow would have taken off,” Warren Jarrett said, “but one of her cubs went up a tree. When Martha called down for us, she read threat and reacted. Just being a grizzly. If Katie hadn't come through—”

Little Feather cut him off. “No, I mean the body. What did you find out?”

“We didn't find out anything. We haven't been back,” Ettinger said. “If I can clear my morning, we'll make another climb tomorrow. But it's a cold case, literally. Doc thinks the body's been buried since freeze-up last winter.”

“The mountain might tell you something, you let it talk to you.”

“Maybe, but without you, who's going to know what it says?”

“Take Sean. He took the man-tracking school I taught up in Great Falls. Come to game sign, he's damned near savvy as I am.”

“I'll consider it.”

The nurse's Crocs clapped down the hall.

“Everybody out,” she said. “You know the visiting hours. You can come back tomorrow.”

She flared her nostrils at the smoke scent. “You want to chase any more spirits, make your fire outside. This man was dying, I'd make an exception.”

She smiled with her eyes at Harold, shifting gears. “How are you feeling?” Her voice, minus the edge, had gone up an octave.

“Like a man who made the mistake of climbing into bed with a she-bear. You think you can put a little more of that white man's candy into the drip?”

Outside the hospital, Ettinger and Stranahan lingered until everyone else had left. They had been bumping into one another and lingering right through the March thaw, through the April rains and the pale leaves of June, without either of them working up the nerve to acknowledge the arithmetic of coincidence.

“Good thing Nurse Ratched threw us out,” Martha said. “The smoke was getting to me.”

“I think she has a soft spot for Harold,” Sean said. He leaned back against the driver's side door of his Land Cruiser.

“I can't blame her.”

“I know you can't.” The words were out before Sean could stop them. Martha's reaction was to pull her head back, as if dodging a blow.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry. It's none of my business.”

A silence fell between them. It was a small town. Like everyone else, Stranahan had heard the talk. There had been talk, just the other day, about Martha and Harold being spotted in the Painted Horse Cafe, their heads bent to each other. There had been talk, last autumn, about a horseback hunting trip up along the Two Medicine River that each had mentioned without mentioning the other, one and one making a suspicious two, and there had been a lot of talk in the spring about Harold's rehiring onto the county force as deputy and resident CSI. The fact that Harold was Indian with a strong face and an ebony braid just added spice to the conversation. “She been touched by a feather,” was the way some people put it. Stranahan didn't know any more about Martha and Harold's relationship than anyone else did, and had told himself the same thing he'd told her, that it was none of his business. Except it was. It was hard to fathom where he stood with Martha without knowing where she stood with Harold.

He stared off at the southern horizon, the sun pegged high this close to the solstice, despite the evening hour, the ridges still carrying puzzle pieces of snow on the north slopes.

“So how about it?” Martha said, bringing him back to the present. “You want to climb a mountain tomorrow? Or do you have a client?”

“I do and I don't.”

“Good. Oh-six hundred. Parking lot at Law and Justice.” She strode off toward the white Jeep Cherokee parked a few cars away.

Stranahan smiled at her back. Typical Martha.

He called after her. “So does this mean you're going to deputize me?”

Ettinger gunned the Cherokee to life. She regarded him from the open window.

“Nah. I can't have you getting a bigger head than you've got. And last summer, that was a breaking crisis. I don't have the authority to deputize a citizen unless it's a breaking crisis.”

“You're the sheriff, Martha. You can do anything you want.”

Ettinger fought back her own smile and drove off, leaving Stranahan to glance once again at the sun.

“Time to go fishing, Rusty.”

He smiled to himself. Naming your truck was one thing, a western eccentricity and no more said. But talking out loud as if it could hear, that was the mark of a man who needed a woman.