Mortal Fall (13 page)

“Where?”

“The Outlaw’s Nest in Hungry Horse.”

“You jones’ing for a beer?”

“No, I want to talk to the manager of the bar, Melissa Tafford. I’m hoping she knows a local who goes by Rowdy.”

“Rowdy?”

“Yeah, you heard of him?”

Ken shook his head. “Not sure I want to.”

• • •

We drove through the town of Hungry Horse, past the dilapidated larger-than-life cutout sign of a white horse, past the huckleberry ice cream stands selling huck pies and ice cream made from huckleberries frozen from the summer before, since the berries weren’t ripe until July at the earliest. We passed the east side turnoff to the Hungry Horse dam clogging and creating the large reservoir up the South Fork drainage and parked at the Outlaw’s Nest. Only a few cars sat in the lot since it was a Sunday. As we entered, the scent of bleach from either the late-night or early-morning cleaning detergents hit me. I figured they must need some heavy-duty supplies to get up all the spilt liquor from the night before.

“I see you have a different sidekick.” Melissa lifted her chin toward Ken when we approached her at the bar. “What happened to the other one?” She was referring to Systead on the Bear Bait case. We had pressed Melissa several times for information on her meth-dealing boyfriend during the investigation.

“Went back to Denver.”

She shrugged, a good-riddance look on her face. “Well, whatever brings you here, don’t bother asking, ’cause I can’t help you. Stimpy and I broke up months ago.”

“I see.” I refrained from commenting that—for her sake—it was probably for the best. “Well, this has nothing to do with him. Just need a little help.”

She set two mugs under some taps and pulled the handles, the golden liquid filling each. When they were full, she tipped the foam, then added a little more. She looked better than she had the previous fall, her face softer and less angled. Maybe she’d stopped using if she and Stimpy were done. She grabbed a mug in each hand and walked over to a table with two middle-aged guys in jeans and T-shirts. While we waited for her to return, I read a poster that had been taped to the wall to our side describing a local band, the Woodtics, who would be performing in the Outlaw’s Nest on Thursday, the thirtieth.

“I’m looking for a guy named Rowdy,” I said when she returned. “Know him?”

She shrugged.

“I guess that means you do.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t say no either.”

“Yeah, I know of him. Everyone around here does. He’s been around these parts longer than the mountains.” She flicked her hand in the air. “What do you want with him? He doesn’t bother anyone.”

“Not entirely sure,” I said. “Just trying to figure out why a guy who fell in the park might have had business with him.”

“That guy that fell? The wolverine research guy?”

“Yeah, why would he have business with your Rowdy?”

“I have no idea.” She looked around as if she wanted to make sure no one could hear her, wiped the counter with a dirty-looking rag, and pursed her lips.

“Nothing? No idea at all?”

She bit her top lip and shook her head.

I stayed quiet and studied her, watching as she wiped the counter before her, then tossed the rag over the side of the sink. I’ve found patience works best in situations like these. Ken took a seat at the bar and made himself comfortable.

Finally, she said, “All right”—she pointed in my face, one eye narrowed—“not because I like you, but because if I
had
to like one of you, I’d like you better than that Systead jerk.”

“I appreciate the compliment.” I smiled.

“But you didn’t hear any of this from me.” She looked around carefully again.

I held up my hand as if under oath.

“All I can tell you is that a few weeks ago, a group of guys got together in here and they were all riled up because that wolverine guy had made some comment in the local news that wolverines might need more protection in the backcountry. And you know, we’re sick of being told what we can and can’t do with our land. More protection for some stupid animal nobody cares about anyway means less hunting, snowmobiling, ATV’ing,” She tilted her head to the side, her eyes hard and set.

“Which guys were in the group?”

“Can’t say. Can’t really remember.”

I knew she was lying, but I knew I couldn’t push her if I wanted any more information about Rowdy. “Rowdy was with this group?”

She nodded. “Yeah, they bought him whiskey and wanted his advice about something because he used to be a game warden. They had some questions about trapping or something. About filing complaints.”

There were a total of about seventy-five game warden personnel
for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and I since used to be one of them, I was well aware that most of us knew or had at least heard of each other no matter which region we worked.

But Rowdy? I’d never heard of a Rowdy before. “What’s his last name?” I asked Melissa.

“No clue. Don’t make a habit of learning everyone’s names in here.”

“He go by another first name?”

“Probably. Sounds like a nickname to me, but I wouldn’t know any other.”

“So they wanted to file a complaint?”

“Not sure. Or deal with a complaint made against them or something. But more than anything, they just wanted to talk, you know, to try to be organized.”

“Organized?”

“Yeah, have some kind of a strategy for how to protect the land around here from people like you who work for the state and the feds. Can’t say I blame ’em.” She picked up the dirty rag again. “Now, if you don’t mind, I gotta clean that table.” She motioned to one that had been sitting with empty beer bottles since we’d come in.

I nodded and thanked her for her time, and Ken and I left her to her quiet Sunday in the gloom of her dingy bar.

13

G
RETCHEN CAME THROUGH.
Wilson had both autopsies finished by the next morning, and I left at six a.m. to get to the Forensics Science Division of the Montana Department of Justice’s State Crime Lab for a nine a.m. viewing.

Wilson greeted me in powder-blue scrubs and galoshes and took me back to the autopsy suite. He knew that I had worked with Systead on the last case from the park and sighed. “The body’s been badly eaten. Just like last fall. And, as you know, animals are hard on bodies. Often, all the fleshy meat is gone and parts get torn off, carried away, buried, or covered with dirt, leaves, and twigs. I’m surprised you found it,” he said as I followed him down the hall.

“It was a stroke of luck.”

“Well, when you really think about it, how often do you come across a deer carcass?”

“Almost never, unless it’s road kill.”

“Exactly.” He grabbed a face mask and handed it to me. “So, with as many deer as there are around here and with as many predators of deer, you’d think you’d come across one more often, but you don’t, right?”

“Right.” He wasn’t telling me anything I wasn’t familiar with.

“Well,” he added,“trying to find human remains in the woods is just as difficult.”

I thought of Nathan Faraway again, and a memory of the officer talking to my parents in our small house in Columbia Falls, essentially
conveying the same sentiment, flashed in my mind. As we entered the suite, the smell of disinfectant blended with the stench of the remains in the refrigerated air, and I tried to shake the feeling that the specter of Nathan seemed to be following me quite a bit lately.

Before us, two bodies lay on the dissecting tables under long-armed lights that looked like the kind seen in a dentist’s suite. One was Paul Sedgewick, or Wolfie, the already severely torn skin peeled away from his crushed skull. His crooked body lay opened from groin to shoulders to reveal broken ribs, fat, and muscle. The other was in a feeble state of disarray on the dissecting table: bones and scant, rotting flesh that appeared blackened from the enzymes in the bacteria eating away at the leftover flesh. I figured Victor Lance from Bear Bait must have looked similar to this the previous fall—a smattering of pieces put back together, definitely like something’s leftover meal. I felt only a little queasy, and was once again grateful we’d done numerous stints in my recent classes in the autopsy units.

“We’ll start with the victim you found first.” He gestured to Wolfie. “Entomology will clarify even more, but I can say for sure that he has been out there less time than the second one you found. This one died less than forty-eight hours before you found him at the bottom of the ravine. His manner of death is consistent with trauma from the fall. We got lucky with him that no third parties or animals got on him. Paul Sedgewick. I think you’ve ID’d him correctly. Odontology verified that the dental records are a match.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“His growth plates are fully fused, so I had known he was over twenty-five before we got the confirmation.”

“Yeah, born in 1969.”

“And time of death?”

“Definitely within thirty-six hours of when he was last seen. In this case, I’d say he’d been out there at least twelve to seventeen hours. I’ve based that on the stage of rigor in the large muscle groups of the lower
extremities and stages of lividity. And of course, I’ve taken recorded temperatures from the area for Wednesday night into consideration.”

“His wife last saw him around six p.m. on Wednesday.”

Wilson gave a quick nod in agreement. “That fits. The earliest would have been 6, 6:30. I’m thinking between 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday.”

“We’ve got a toxicology screen taking place and other than that, it’s your basic fall. Judging by the state of his skull, you were probably correct in assuming he hit head first.”

“Is it possible the head was hit on a second or third hit and not the first?”

“I’m taking an educated guess that his head hit first, his ankles on a later one due to the severity of the crushed skull, but you can never say for sure with a fall like this.”

“Any signs of foul play?

“Not that I can determine, but it’s very difficult to conclude something like that on a specimen that is in this kind of shape. This one,” Wilson pointed to the other meager pile of remains on the second table. “Even worse shape. Male also. From the pelvis and the size and shape of the forehead on the skull.” He pointed to the narrow pelvis first, then the skull. “He was the first to die for sure. Ribs tell me he’s over twenty-five as well, but most of his ribs have been destroyed by a mountain lion.”

“Lion for sure?”

“The puncture wounds in the flesh that’s left on the arm and between the ribs indicate it’s a feline larger than lynx or bobcat. I know it’s strange. I’ve only seen it once before—a lion feeding on a dead carcass. Usually, they like their prey alive. They’re stalkers, hunters. This one must have been young and hungry.”

I fidgeted. Again Nathan’s small, round face flashed in my mind and an anger at my brother—a fury I hadn’t felt so strongly since I was young—surged through me like a drug and made me feel flustered
and light-headed. To think that Nathan might have been stalked that night by the stealthiest hunter of the woods—a lion with sharp vision and graceful, undetected moves, an animal capable of leaping great distances—because of Adam’s cruel trick made me shudder. I shook off the image of Nathan’s slight frame being crunched in a mountain lion’s steely jaws and chalked it up to the fact that I was still a little nauseous standing before these corpses with the smell of decay and disinfectant permeating my senses.

Wilson gave me an
Are-you-okay look
, tucking his chin in. I could tell he was used to this scenario and made a habit of checking to see if anyone was going to faint on his table.

I gave a small nod to signal I was fine.

“Again, entomology will clarify the gestation and that should narrow the time of death to at least the correct day or two.” Wilson pointed to one intact rib. “This is the fourth rib, and we usually can get close to the age by looking at the third, fourth, and fifth ribs through the amount of pitting and the condition of the edges. With this fourth one”—he motioned his finger along the rib’s edge—“I see just enough pitting to suggest he’s past his twenties, possibly into his early forties, but probably not late forties or over. I’m guessing he’s in his midthirties to early forties. I see no arthritis at all in the joints that are left, which also suggests he’s either around or under forty.”

“DNA?” I asked.

“Yes, we were able to get some from the eye sockets. Hopefully it’s not contaminated from the lion. It’s possible he’s in CODIS.” He was referring to the Combined DNA Index System, the FBI’s program of support for criminal justice DNA databases. “But I wouldn’t get your hopes up because we’ve soaked the hand with the fingers—the one with the watch still on it—in glycerin and been able to get some pretty accurate prints, but there’s no matchup with anything on WIN AFIS.”

WIN was a consortium of state and local law enforcement agencies that used a shared network and Automated Fingerprint Identification
System so law enforcement services could search criminal and civil fingerprint records of member agencies. So far, Alaska, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming used the WIN AFIS service bureau containing millions of print records and a growing number of palm prints and other record types.

“And he’s not in the system?”

“Nope. So, as I said, chances of being in CODIS are slim too.” If there had been no prints supplied for WIN, then he’d never been arrested and the chances of DNA samples were slim, unless a sample had been collected from some other crime.

“What about the watch or the tattoo?”

“Ah, yes. I was saving the best for last. So, this tattoo here—we couldn’t have got any luckier, unless, of course, he was in the system and we already had a match. But without that, the tattoo is a very, very good lead. A bison and an arrow . . .”

“Yeah, almost looks Native American.”

“Yes, it does, but it’s not. Or, I should say, he’s not. He’s definitely Caucasian. The tattoo is done in a very simple, minimalistic form with only one color of ink. I’ve given it to our chemist to check out the pigment to see how much carbon it contains. I think with a little luck”—he lifted his head to me—“we should be able to track down the artist. Judging by the look of it, I’m guessing he’s local. Plus there’s always broadcasting the tattoo and watch over the media and seeing if it sounds familiar to anyone. The watch is nothing special and won’t tell us anything. Your basic Fossil, could even be ordered from Amazon. There is a serial number if you want to track it.”