Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The Graveyard

T
he warning shots that crashed off the limestone walls of Sphinx Mountain echoed into silence. Warren Jarrett ejected the last of the three spent cartridges, pocketed the brass for reloading, and removed his foam earplugs.

Sheriff's Deputy Walter Hess, whom Martha had drafted for the recovery after Doc Hanson begged out of making a second climb, took his fingers out of his ears.

“Ought to do the trick,” Hess said.

Stranahan and Ettinger followed suit, lowering their hands from the sides of their heads.

Jarrett said, “I'm betting that sow never came back. But better to play it safe, let her know we're up here.”

“We don't want no déjà vu,” Hess agreed. He turned to Martha. “That means—”

“Yeah, Walt, I know what déjà vu means. You've told me before.”

“Well aren't we Miss Testy?”

She exhaled. “Damn that's a hard climb to revisit on a day's rest. Warren, take point with that blunderbuss of yours until we lip over.”

A few minutes later the team reached the elevation where the slope flattened into a bench, a half acre of scattered trees and conglomerate boulders that were cordoned off with marking tape. All eyes immediately sought the backpack that Jarrett had suspended from the limb of a Douglas fir tree the day before yesterday. In it were the two plastic evidence bags, one containing the rib cage and skull that the bear had excavated, along with tatters of rotted clothing and the few odd bones that had been strewn across the bench, the other a jellied mass of dark tissue and organ matter. Doc Hanson had been in favor of packing the remains down in the Air Mercy flight for examination at the lab, but Ettinger had been adamant about studying the crime scene, if indeed a crime had been committed, with the evidence intact. Hanson's objection, that a bear had already disrupted the scene, fell on deaf ears.

Ettinger's hands went to her hips.

“Doesn't look like anything's been disturbed.” She swept her hand, the gesture taking in the extent of the bench. “Okay, here's what we're going to do. Warren, Walt, take down the pack and put those bones back exactly where we found them. Here's the surface scatter sketch we made yesterday.” She fished in her breast pocket for the paper drawing and handed it over, along with a half dozen prints developed from the scene photos she'd taken with her digital. “Then we stand back, eat our lunch, and let Sean work the bench.”

She looked at Stranahan, one eye lifted as if appraising a plug horse with rain rot scabbing its coat. “Though what you think you're going to find this long after that man went into the ground is beyond me. But I'm going to humor Harold and let you have your shot. That tape marks the boundary of our involvement yesterday. The chopper landed in the meadow I pointed out to you down at the trail junction; they took Harold down to it in a game cart with a motorcycle tire—you can see the tread mark from here.”

Stranahan nodded.

Martha went on: “Beyond the tape, anything farther up the mountain, anything to north or south, none of us went there. Once you've cleared the area inside the tape, we're going to go in with the gas probe to outline the position of the body before the bear dug it up, grid it off and collect any evidence still buried. Between you, me, and the walls of this mountain, I think if we learn anything at all it's going to be at a forensic level. Still, let's treat it as a crime scene with the blood still wet. Okay, any questions?”

“How far afield should I conduct a search?” Stranahan said.

“Go from here to Canada if you want to.”

Walter Hess pinched his Adam's apple. “Jeez, Marth, that's like two hundred miles, give or take.”

“Oh come on, Walt. It's called hyperbole.”

“Just saying it's a far distance, that's all.”

Martha looked at him—he had to be kidding, right? She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.

“I'll try not to get lost,” Sean said.

While the bones were repositioned, the atmosphere on the mountainside changed. A cloud had been hanging on the peak when the team left the trailhead, the temperature dropping during their climb, producing an upslope fog as the air cooled to the surface dew point. One minute it was crisp, clear, cold where the sweat had dried on Stranahan's shirt; the next minute he was enveloped in mist. The boulder where the bear had dug up the body shone dully, like a tombstone. Sean glanced at the skull, encrusted with dirt, a few strands of gray hair over one eye socket. A chill flushed through his veins, sifting the hairs on his forearms.

“Give a fella the willies,” he heard Hess say behind him.

Sean tapped the ground with a stick, emulating Harold Little Feather, who claimed that isolating a track by tapping next to it helped focus the concentration. The soil, still damp from early summer snowmelt, offered a yielding surface for tread impressions, and Sean easily isolated several distinct patterns. The heavy impressions of the bear, where they had not been tramped over by the recovery team and later the EMTs, were unmistakably grizzly, the front claw indentations a full three inches beyond the toe pads. The ground, a tone darker where Little Feather's blood had seeped into the soil, smelled of sheared copper. He noted Lothar's paw impressions and suspected the corduroy ribbing pattern beside a rending in the earth was where the tracking dog had lain down, marking the position of the body before the bear had unearthed it.

Stranahan focused the camera that had been in Little Feather's effects when he was admitted to the hospital.

“What do you think you're doing?” It was Ettinger, standing impatiently at the edge of the bench, a half-eaten elk meatloaf sandwich in her hand.

“Being thorough.”

“Be thorough faster.”

Sean ignored her and snapped close-ups of the individual tread marks. Little Feather had once told him that Martha worked a case like a dog worked a deer bone, gnawing constantly until it was gone. “But you watch that dog,” he'd said, “you'll notice sometimes he'll lay his head sideways to get more leverage, like so”—he mimicked a dog gnawing a bone with his incisors—“and he'll have his eyes closed. Dog's got focus, but at the cost of his vision. Martha, she's always gnawing that bone. I'm not saying she's not a good investigator. But her strength is her focus. You want to complement her work, you keep your eyes on the edges of the case. You might pick up a detail she's being too Martha to notice.”

“Now what?” Ettinger flicked a bread crust to a gray jay perched on a spruce branch. The jay, waiting for a shot at the bones, hopped onto the ground and pecked at the crust, nervously jerking its head.

Stranahan had removed a clipboard from his pack and was sketching the imprint of a sole with an air bob tread onto a standard print form. He used a tape to take measurements and made a notation on an irregularity in the tread, where one bob had failed to leave a mark. He glanced at the jay, which an old-timer would call a whiskey jack, then caught the eyes of the sheriff. She gave him a taut smile.

“When we get back,” Sean said, “I'm going to need the boots worn by everyone who tracked up this place, including the Air Mercy crew. For matches, so I can rule them out.”

He sketched for another thirty minutes, filling out six more print forms with impressions that ranged from entire tracks to half a heel from a cowboy boot.

“Five of you from Tuesday, plus the two EMTs. The pilot stayed with the chopper, you said. That makes seven on this plot, if I counted right.”

“You counted right,” Martha said.

“Then I have at least a partial from everyone. If there's another track here, I can't find it.”

“What did you expect? There probably hasn't been anyone up here in months. You're just going through the motions.”

“Is there anything about the bones I should know, besides their positions?”

“No sign of foul play, if that's what you're getting at. But the skull's caked with soil so we won't know until it's cleaned. And the rib cage is a partial. He could have been shot in the chest and the bullet could be in the guts of that grizzly for what we know. Doc says there's freezer burn on the upper surface of the chest. You dig down very far, the ground never freezes solid, so that means he was probably buried face up, sometime before the freeze last winter. Victim was male. Doc thought past sixty. We have teeth and we'll have DNA, no problems there.”

“We just need a missing person,” Warren Jarrett pointed out.

On the hike up the mountain, Ettinger had mentioned that a records search failed to reveal anyone missing in the Madison Range, body unrecovered, since the late 1960s. The closest match had been a ranch hand who had disappeared in the Tobacco Root Mountains while hunting elk, but that had been in 2009. Too distant, too old, plus the hand had been in his twenties.

Stranahan was studying the remnants of clothing that clung to the rib cage. The victim had been wearing a wool jack shirt in a camo pattern. No other clothing but a dark, solid-colored undershirt; Sean guessed spun polyester. There was a femur naked but for a wrap of skin, crinkled like elephant hide. What looked like the other femur, a part of one, lay alongside. The pelvis had been cracked by the teeth of the grizzly. Smaller bones were scattered. Radius? Ulna? Metatarsals? He didn't know his anatomy well enough.

“No hunter orange,” he commented.

“No hunter orange, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a hunter,” Martha said.

“No,” Jarrett said, “he could have had an orange vest and the bear ran off with it before we arrived. Or ate it. We've known that to happen.”

“What, bears fancy orange?” Martha looked skeptical.

“'Member the mountain lion attacked that mushroom picker up at Hungry Horse Reservoir?” Walt said. “He pounced on the fella, ripped off his backpack, and took off with it like he was toting a bowling trophy. Guy didn't have a scratch.”

“There's another possibility,” Stranahan said. “He was bowhunting. You don't have to wear orange in archery season, but you do wear camo.”

“I ran that by Doc,” Martha said. “Bow season closes early October. He thought there would be more decomposition if the body had two months to age before the ground got cold.” She squatted down, her elbows on her knees. She made a steeple with her fingers and scratched her chin.

“Katie, you haven't said a word.”

Katie Sparrow was sitting with her back to a tree, dwarfed by the shepherd that sprawled across her lap. She looked up, shrugged, and kissed Lothar playfully on the nose.

She said, “I empty my head when I run dogs. Most handlers try to get inside someone's mind. What's this guy thinking, where is he going? But lost people, they're lost in the first place because they aren't thinking logically, and then when the panic sets in, they're running wherever their feet take them. The panic is predictable, but where the panic leads them is unpredictable. But the dog doesn't care what a guy's thinking. All he cares about is the scent. The scent tells the truth. So when I'm up here, I try to be like a dog, stick to the grid, just work out the tracks. Me and Lothar, we let you guys do all the figuring.”

“Well, thank you for that insight,” Martha said. “That's more sentences strung together out of your mouth than I think I've heard before.”

“Glad to be of help.” The woman smiled, wrinkling the corners of her eyes. She bit the ear off a dog biscuit.

“But if you had to guess?” Martha persisted. The sheriff had worked a dozen missing hunter/missing hiker SARs with Sparrow and knew the petite handler possessed a keen mind. She seldom offered an opinion, but what little she did say was carefully weighed and logically presented.

Sparrow sucked at the water hose of her Camelback backpack. “I think you're looking at murder. Either that”—she capped the hose intake—“or it was a hunting accident. Someone fired at movement, took the fella for an elk. Then panicked and buried the body. The other possibility is a bear. Bears will bury a carcass. But I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I've been around bears all my life and haven't known one yet to bury a carcass and not come back for the rest of it. Not if undisturbed. And if this bear killed him late fall, early winter, he's trying to fatten up for hibernation. He'd have eaten him up, bones and all.”

“Warren?” The sheriff's sergeant was the most practical person Martha had ever met.

“I agree with Katie. If a bear buried this man, he'd have been recycled through its gut system eight months ago. I think we ought to be careful exhuming the rest of the body. I think we should bring in the roots from a radius around it. If somebody cut clean through them with a shovel, then we get Harold back on his feet and he might be able to confirm it from the scarring.”

“That's a good point.”

“What about me? You didn't ask my opinion.” It was Walt, an injured note in his drawl. The former Chicago policeman had affected western speech patterns and mannerisms since moving to Bridger five years previously. It was his cowboy boot, a crocodile Tony Lama, that had made the heel imprint Stranahan found at the scene.

“Okay, Walt, I'm asking.”

The deputy looked at his watch. “It took almost three hours to climb here, it's going to take another two to work the body, and then we got to hike down with the evidence. I'd like to be back for supper. Its chili night at Josie's and ESPN's got the Cubs at Wrigley. This is going to be their year.”

Ettinger slowly nodded her head. “You know, you're right, Walt. We're thinking when we should be working. Sean, you're free to roam. Do you want Katie's help? Otherwise, she's going to just sit here and further her unnatural relationship with that animal. I can't have her probing and sifting evidence. It's against policy.”

“I thought if she was law enforcement, that was okay.”