Hunter’s Dance (6 page)

“Friends don't kill people. Maybe you should concentrate on his enemies.” Her voice was beginning to tremble and she brought the quilt up to her chin.

McIntire wasn't at all sure of that. Murder was as likely to be committed by a friend, if not more so. The sheriff asked, “Did Bambi have enemies?”

“If what you say is true—that someone murdered him—he must have had, or
we
must have had. Friends or enemies, maybe sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.”

“Are you saying that Bambi might have been killed to hurt you and your husband?”

“Well, if so, it certainly worked.”

Koski didn't respond, and she went on. “Has the doctor learned anything at all yet?”

“He was still doing his examination when we left. If he finds anything obvious we'll know by this afternoon. He'll be sending samples to the laboratory in Lansing. Those results are going to take a few days.”

McIntire noticed the usually blunt sheriff's avoidance of the word
autopsy
. How long did he think he could shield the family from knowledge of the scalping and the fight with Marvin Wall? If they weren't told soon, they'd hear of it some other way.

Koski changed the subject. “We understand that Bambi drove his own car to the dance. What kind of car is it?”

“He'd have been driving a British sports car. A Morgan.” Mrs. Morlen turned to her father. “It's Daddy's, really. He and Bambi drove it out from Westchester together this spring, and Daddy left it here for him to use.”

Mr. Feldman asked, “Hasn't the car been found?”

Koski shook his head. “Not yet. My deputies are searching the back roads. We need the license number and a description to get the word out.”

“It's a dark green color. It won't be hard to recognize. There aren't many of them around.” McIntire didn't doubt it. “I'll get you the number,” Feldman added, without budging from his daughter's side.

The sheriff leaned back and crossed his legs. McIntire could only imagine what that attempt at a relaxed attitude had cost his back. “Can you tell us about your son, Mrs. Morlen? What kind of person was he? What were his interests? What were his plans for the future? Has he talked about people he might have met around here, other than Ross Maki and this Mr. Carlson? Anything you can tell us will help.”

“Bambi was the kind of son any mother would sell her soul to have.” Bonnie Morlen's voice choked and she buried her head on her father's shoulder. Feldman folded his arms around her and glared, and Koski gave in. “We'll leave you now, Mrs. Morlen. But we'd like to take a look at your son's room, and can you give us directions to the camp where he stayed with Mr. Carlson?”

Bonnie pulled herself free of her father's grasp, but continued to lean against him. “The camp? The cabin? It's…. No, I'm sorry I can't help you. I don't think Wendell knows exactly where it is either.” Her voice choked again. “I'm so sorry. What kind of a mother would let her child go off and live in the woods and not even know where?”

“Bambi wasn't a child, Ma'am.”

“I didn't want to let him go! I did everything to keep him here! But he was eighteen. I couldn't stop him, and Wendell thought it would be good for him. He didn't think there'd be any danger, and it would keep things…. I let my own child go….”

“He wasn't a child,” Koski repeated.

“He was a child to me. And now he always will be.”

The sheriff appeared to be gathering himself to exit his chair. McIntire interrupted.

“Was there some kind of…strife between Bambi and his father?”

Koski's head jerked up, but Mrs. Morlen didn't look surprised at the question. “Maybe a little. Nothing out of the ordinary. I suppose some disagreement between young men and their fathers is to be expected.”

“Was it over anything in particular?”

Feldman coughed. Bonnie hesitated and then answered, “No…. No, as I said, only the usual struggle for independence.”

The sheriff once again prepared to hoist himself to his feet. McIntire kept going. “Is that why Bambi left?”

“My son didn't
leave
. He was only off working. He came home on weekends quite often. What has this got to do with anything? Are you trying to accuse Wendell of driving my son to his death?”

McIntire didn't really know what his questions had to do with anything. “Certainly not, Mrs. Morlen,” he said. “It's only that the more we know about Bambi and the people around him, the easier it will be to find out what happened.”

Bonnie Morlen turned to the sheriff. “I'll show you his room.” She struggled to her feet and, still rolled in her chrysalis, led them down a short hallway to the stairs. With her foot on the first step, she hesitated, then retreated. “Forgive me if I don't take you up. It's the first one on the left.”

Bambi's room had the air of having been readied for a guest who hadn't showed up. It was neat, dust free, and arranged with every comfort a young man could desire, but unused.

A braided rug covered the grey-painted planks of the floor. On pine-paneled walls, a rack of fishing tackle vied for space with a bookcase stacked with boy-oriented classics, Mark Twain and Jack London. In contrast to the unscratched rods, the books were obviously used and, besides the fiction, included a variety of wilderness survival–type manuals.

The closet revealed rows of lovingly pressed chinos and polo shirts. McIntire would bet even the kid's undershorts were ironed. He pulled open a bureau drawer. They were, and each pair was folded in tandem with a dazzlingly white T-shirt. Two framed photographs stood on the chest's top. One was a studio portrait showing a young Bambi, stiff between beaming parents. Next to it was a shot of Bambi, squinting in the sunshine, extending at arm's length a sacrificial offering to the camera god, a shimmering lake trout.

A cursory search of the remaining drawers turned up only a few articles of heavier clothing and a couple of rolls of unexposed film. McIntire turned to the rest of the room. A pair of prints showing Labradors transporting dead ducks hung on either side of the single window. Over the bed's solid headboard was a shelf massed with highly polished trophies accrued in various athletic activities.

“Holy shit! Would you get a load of this?” Koski stood nose to nose with the disembodied head of a sixteen-point buck. McIntire guessed it was love at first sight. Siobhan move over!

Bambi Morlen had apparently not been without a sense of humor. A gilded medal on a blue and white ribbon hung around the severed neck—first place in high hurdles.

Koski removed the sacrilegious object and placed it on the shelf with the rest of the booty. If there had ever been anything of a personal nature in the room, it had fallen prey to Mama's relentless pursuit of domestic perfection. The real Bambi was more likely to be found in that prospector's cabin.

IX

Deep in the wood lay the cottage where the boy lived. A hilly path led to it; mountains closed it in and shut out the sun; a bottomless swamp lay nearby and gave out the whole year round an icy mist.

The camp wasn't hard to find. McIntire should have realized that Koski would have made it his business to know which of the abandoned cabins in his province were occupied, and by whom.

It wasn't hard to find, but that didn't make it simple to get to. The gauntlet of reporters had grown, and Koski was compelled to placate them by agreeing to make a statement back at his office in the Chandler jail. He neglected to mention that he wouldn't be going directly back to that office, a subterfuge that necessitated driving in a manner calculated to leave the trailing press corps well behind before he turned off onto the track that led to the Salmon River. It wasn't easy. The reporters were not faint of heart. McIntire was, and he willed his bacon and eggs to stay down as Koski fishtailed around mud-slicked corners and took ruts, roots, and potholes head on. Geronimo's rhythmic snoring didn't miss a beat. It wasn't much on speed, but the Power Wagon proved its worth. The tortoise trundled in where hares feared to tread. When their pursuers had been left to continue leaderless into Chandler, Koski slowed to an even more sedate pace. They meandered through a maze of twisted tracks and logging roads.

“How the hell do you know where you're going?” McIntire asked.

“I didn't spend the last thirty years sipping tea at the British embassy.”

McIntire hadn't either, but it was a nice thought.

The road came to an abrupt end in a mucky stream bed. A black panel truck was wedged into a semi-cleared spot. Otherwise all was alder brush and stunted cedar.

Koski left his wagon in the middle of the road. He made a careful circuit of the panel truck, Geronimo at his side anointing each tire.

McIntire walked a short distance back the way they'd come. In places, the tread marks of the truck were obliterated, not only by the tracks of the Power Wagon, but by those of a vehicle with a much narrower wheel base. Bambi's Morgan had been here, and gone, since the truck had been parked.

They waded through the mud to the higher ground. A trail took them another quarter mile to a hut of narrow cedar logs, positioned vertically in the Finnish style. It sank into the earth on one side, and its roof was covered with a thick bed of moss. A narrow pillow-ticking mattress, rain-soaked and mouse-nibbled, lay in the weeds outside the door.

The professor was nowhere about, and, after a single thump on the cabin's door, Koski lifted the latch. The interior was too dim to see much and too low to stand upright. They stumbled toward the middle of the room where the roof rose up to meet its center beam. Koski yelped when his head struck a kerosene lantern hung on a nail.

“Good work, Pete, you've found the lights. Got a match?”

The flame flared and smoked. McIntire turned down the wick and let the chimney drop into place. The yellow light revealed a single crowded room, a cast iron stove, unpainted wood table and two chairs, an iron daybed, and a set of narrow bunks built into the far wall. The lower bunk was obviously the source of the discarded mattress. It was heaped only with rumpled clothing. The top one supported a pad similar to the one outside the door, only slightly less chewed, and a rumpled army blanket. The space that wasn't taken up by furniture was filled with what McIntire assumed to be the implements of prospecting, among them shovels, a surveyor's transit, and the now-familiar Geiger counter. Both the table and the rumpled daybed were strewn with maps of every imaginable sort: survey maps, topographical maps, geological maps, maps showing vegetation and soil type, and township plat maps. Mingled odors of bacon fat and unwashed socks hung in the air. McIntire unhooked the lantern and put it on the table.

“All the comforts of home. No wonder the boys kept Mama away.”

A stifled gasp sounded from the doorway. A sturdy-looking man stood in the opening, a pail of water dangling from one hand and a slingshot from the other, looking as if he didn't know whether to bolt or faint. Koski stepped forward before he had a chance to do either.

“Pete Koski,” he put out his hand, “sheriff of this county.”

The professor remained in the sunlight long enough to hang the slingshot on a nail and give McIntire an impression of relative youth, a sunburned nose, and eyes a curious shade approximating turquoise. He shifted the pail of water to his left hand before shaking Koski's bear-sized paw. The shock at encountering them had appeared to pass, and, in the dim light, his eyes showed only curiosity. At the sheriff's introduction, he nodded to McIntire and mumbled “Greg Carlson.”

Koski said, “We understand that you're acquainted with Bambi Morlen.”

“He's been helping me out this summer. What's wrong? Has he gotten himself into some kind of trouble?”

“The worst kind,” Koski said. “He was killed yesterday.”

Carlson's face went from ruddy to pale, and he shifted his stare from Koski to McIntire and back again. His chest rose, popping open the top button of his shirt.

“Killed? He's dead?”

Koski nodded. “I'm afraid so.”

The prospector sagged against the door frame. His eyelids dropped. “Thank you for coming to tell me. This isn't an easy place to get to. Shit! The kid didn't have the brains of a jackrabbit when he got behind the wheel.” He stood upright. “Was anybody else with him?”

“It wasn't a car accident,” Koski told him, “and we didn't come here just to inform you of the death. Bambi Morlen was found dead in the upper floor of the town hall woodshed. He was bound, gagged, scalped, and had a hole drilled in his skull.”

If the sheriff was trying to evoke some stronger reaction with his blunt recital, he got it. Carlson's mouth opened, then closed again. Water began to slop over the edge of the bucket. McIntire took it from his hand and lifted it onto the stove. Koski steered the man to a chair and brushed aside a pile of paper to make a seat for himself on the bed.

“It happened some time during or after the dance at the hall on Saturday night. Were you there?”

Carlson didn't respond, and Koski repeated, “Were you there?”

“Where?”

“Were you at the dance at the St. Adele town hall on Saturday night?”

“No.”

Koski waited, and Carlson finally added, “I'm not from around here. I don't really know anybody.”

“But you probably knew that Bambi was going.”

“I heard about it.”

“Did he talk about his plans? It would be helpful to know who he was with, where he was earlier in the day, anything you can tell us.”

“I don't think I saw Bambi at all on Saturday. Not after we had breakfast. Bambi sometimes goes home on weekends, but he stayed over because they were going to go to that dance. I expected that Ross—that's Ross Maki—would be here sometime during the day, but I was out early and didn't get back to the shack until around five or six. It was dark. It's not like the two of them were working for me or anything. They were interested in prospecting. Like lots of boys, I imagine. I showed them what I could, and they helped me with the surveying. Quite a bit of the time they just went off by themselves. Most of the time it was only Bambi. Ross was needed at home a lot.” He turned to McIntire as if for reinforcement. “They're not kids. I didn't figure I had to be responsible for them.”

“No one's saying you did.” McIntire took the opportunity to put in a few words of his own. “We want to find out whatever we can about who Bambi ran around with. Did he have any other friends that you know of? Bring any other kids here?”

“I never saw him with anybody else,” he said. “Only Ross. They made a pretty strange pair.”

“How's that?”

“Well, Bambi's a kind of snobby, city-type kid and Ross is the typical farm boy, hardly speaks English. Bambi pretty much led Ross around by the nose, in some ways. Could convince him to go along with any crazy scheme that came to mind. But he depended on Ross to do anything that took the least bit of common sense. I suppose Bambi was used to having somebody take care of him. He talked big, but he wasn't too well prepared for real life.” Carlson smiled a feeble kind of smile. “Bambi had a lot of goofy ideas about woodlore, as he called it. Ideas he got mostly from books. When I didn't have work for him, and Ross wasn't here, he spent quite a bit of time poking around by himself, doing woodlore stuff, I guess. I worried about him at first. I couldn't manage to convince him that getting lost was a real possibility and a real danger, and he never bothered to let me know where he'd be. But he always seemed to make it back to the cabin before dark.”

He hadn't made it back on Saturday, and Carlson hadn't sent out any search parties.

“Did you ever visit their homes?” Koski asked.

“Not the Makis. I was invited to the Morlens from time to time. Course they didn't have to twist my arm. What a place. That's the way to live, eh?”

McIntire broke in again. “Makes you wonder why Bambi chose to leave.”

Carlson smiled. “I sure wondered that myself, plenty of times. I suppose if you're used to that kind of life, it doesn't seem all that special. Especially if you can go back to it any time you want. Roughing it can be fun, if it's not compulsory.” He pulled a red bandana from his pocket and rubbed at the grubbiness on his hands. “I think he really didn't care much for fishing, and when he was home his father figured he should spend half the day in a boat.”

McIntire nodded. He could well understand how a combination of boats and fathers could send a young man off to the bush. “Did Bambi say how he got along with his father?”

“Not so well, I think. But he didn't talk much about it.”

Koski took over again. “So you were expecting Bambi to come back here last night? Didn't you wonder when he didn't show up?”

“No.”

The sheriff waited.

“He might have decided to go home, or stayed somewhere closer to St. Adele, Ross' house maybe. Or tied one on and slept if off in his car.”

“Did you go anywhere yourself Saturday, or Saturday night?”

Carlson appeared to be concentrating hard on this one. He didn't look, or smell, like someone whose social calendar was so full he couldn't remember two days past. “No,” he answered. “No, I haven't left here in the last week.”

In a surprising show of tenacity, he dug in his muddy heels and refused Koski's request to look around his cabin. He was sympathetic, he said, but pleaded the necessity of confidentiality where uranium was concerned. If they wanted to search they'd have to come back with a warrant.

The sheriff wasn't too upset. As they hiked back to their car he said, “If he wanted to get rid of some kind of evidence, he's had two days to do it in already. Besides I've got a date with Marvin Wall. And maybe the car's turned up. You ever see a Morgan?”

McIntire shook his head. “Not that I've noticed.” He asked, “What about Ross Maki?”

Koski jumped on it. “Right. Good idea. You know his folks? Why don't you take a run over to the place and see what he's got to say? Once the state police go after these people we won't get a damn thing out of them.”

That wasn't exactly what McIntire had intended. Ross could easily turn out to be more than just a source of information. And if somebody was going to go after him, he'd as soon have it be the state police.