Mortal Fall (34 page)

Now, I couldn’t even trust her. Our relationship felt broken, and I pictured shards of glass scattered across that country road we parked on. Trust no one. Period. Something coiled tightly inside me. I thought of Gretchen’s help—how she’d come to my rescue twice—and how unprofessional I was behaving by getting her involved. I would put a swift end to that. “No,” I said sharply. “I got this, Joe. I got this. Ken’s fine. I’ll let you know if I need any more help.”

The sunlight coming through the window bared down on me, stinging my chest and thighs. A sharp glint caught Joe’s left cheekbone—sharp, bony, and pinkish from high-altitude exposure—the skin slightly lax with age and stress. “I’ll tell Ford the situation’s under control, that we need some more time. But I’m telling you, I won’t get much from him.”

“Does it matter? Even if he releases that the case is closed to the press, you’ll let me still work it, right?”

“Ultimately, Monty, you know he has the final say. Last thing he’ll want is to call them accidents and have you discover something down the road and make his organization look foolish. And that’s exactly what I’m going to tell him to buy you more time. But you better hurry; the clocks definitely ticking.”

I stood, relieved to step out of the critical sun and into the cool shade of the room just two feet off to the side. “I’ll hurry, sir. It’ll happen. Go be there for your family.”

Joe stared at me silent and motionless for a moment, then dipped his head and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and looked back to me with deeply grooved lines between his brows, he said, “I’m counting on you with this.”

35

S
OMETIMES, WHEN I’M
driving in Glacier, the peaks surrounding me like a cocoon and Lake McDonald spreading before me with its ultrablue water, the sunlight filters through tall pine branches and flickers upon my windshield, spiking the light and offering it up like spun dreams. Something about the softly dancing light will make a memory, some incidental event from my past enter my mind whether I want it to or not. If there’s nothing pressing going on, I’ll let the memory trickle in, no harm in that, even if my past isn’t completely torn from a Brady Bunch script. If there
is
something pressing going on, like my job, I push those thoughts away. But lately, I was having a hard time accomplishing that with all the crap with Adam and Glacier Academy hitting me straight on and out of nowhere.

One event in particular kept poking at me as I drove around McDonald Lake on my way back from an incident that Ken and I had been called to right after my meeting with Joe. We had to leave the investigation alone for a few hours to direct traffic on the Going-to-the-Sun Road near McDonald Creek because a young boy—around nine—had fallen in and nearly drowned. Thankfully, a firefighter had been visiting the park and had jumped in to rescue the boy and helped resuscitate him. He saved the boy’s life. I had helped direct traffic until the ambulance came and left, then headed back toward Lake McDonald Lodge to meet Cathy Sedgewick, where we had agreed to meet because she was meeting a friend who worked there. The memory coming to me on my way to the lodge to meet her was of a cool, late fall day, not long
after I had started third grade. Adam, Nathan, and I had been walking home from school. I was jumping over all the cracks in the sidewalk, trying not to hit any of them.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back
, when we reached our driveway. The house stood quiet, all the curtains drawn, and a stray, plastic bag flitted around the dead lawn.

“Better pick that up,” Adam had said, “or Dad’s gonna get mad that there’s trash in our yard.”

I went and picked it up and when I came back, my mom came out frantically, shooing Nathan off, telling him to go home quickly. She ushered us in, whispering loudly, “Get in here. Get in here or they’ll see you.”

“Who’ll see us?” I asked.

She looked at us frantically, her hair a rumpled mess and her sweater on inside out. A film of sweat lined the skin above her upper lip. “The CIA. Come on. Get in.”

Once we were in, she parted the curtains slightly and peeked through several times, checking to make sure we were safe. After we set our backpacks down, she came over to me and put her arms around me and hugged me. She smelled of sandalwood and something imperceptible, the bite of something sharp—perhaps fear. “You stick with your brother, okay, Monty?” She whispered into my ear. “He’ll take good care of you.”

“And you, Adam,” she said, still crouched by my side and looking at him. He refused to look at her, just stood with his arms crossed and his upper lip stiff, staring at the ceiling, the anger coming off him in waves. “You protect your younger brother, okay? He trusts you, Adam.”

Adam didn’t answer and Mom kept saying, “Okay, Adam, okay? Will you do that for me?” But Adam wouldn’t give her anything but a seething silence, until finally, I yelled at him. “Adam, answer Mom. Just answer her.”

Adam glared at me, then walked away into the kitchen.

“He will,” my mom said. “He’ll have to. There are a lot of bad people out there, Monty. Do you understand?” I nodded that I did. I squirmed
away from her grip, urgent and strong, and went upstairs.
He trusts you, Adam
. I looked back as I climbed the stairs to see Mom go back to her spot by the window.

Now, with the light flicking across my face like the reflection from spokes of a cycling wheel, I tried to remember, tried to feel whether or not there was a time when I really did trust Adam.

• • •

“You were adamant that this was not suicide,” I said to Cathy Sedgewick after we had walked down toward the lake, past a rock wall and found a bench to sit on below the front of the old lodge built in 1914. “What’s changed your mind?”

“Nothing’s changed my mind. I still don’t think he was suicidal, but I don’t know, I lay there in bed at night looking into the dark and doubt starts to creep in. What if I didn’t know my husband as well as I thought I did?”

I tapped down the irrational voice inside my head that said,
What if he didn’t know his wife and partner as well as he thought he did?
I waited for her to continue, taking in the peaceful scene around us: the flowerpots with bright-red geraniums, the tourists canoeing out in the still, deep lake, the birch tree to our side providing shade in the perfect eighty-five degree weather. I could smell the scent of dried pine soaking in the generous sun from the surrounding forest as well as the still damp leaves on the forest floor, vital with regeneration. Patience, you know. It works.

Cathy still looked grief-stricken, her face pale with dark rings under each eye. I felt guilty for thinking of there being a possibility of her and Ward having an affair and on some level, knew my suspicions were only borne from my own dysfunctional sense that it was beginning to feel impossible to have a healthy, happy home life. I stared at her. She contrasted sharply with the happy tourists mulling about, and I thought of the traumatized face of the mother whose boy just nearly died in the frigid, swift, and powerful water roaring down McDonald
Creek. So much beauty in Glacier, so many happy families mulling around in the summer, but how many of them had deep, angry cracks running right through the center of their happy existences?

“And, so,” she continued. “I started to search everything of his: his shorts and jeans pockets, all his drawers—I mean, I know you guys already did that, but I live there, and I was climbing the walls, so I just searched everything for whatever I could. Then I looked through all the jackets in the closet hallway, and well . . .” She held out her hand with a small slip of paper. “I found this in one of his fleece jacket pockets.” She held it in front of me.

I took it from her fingers and unfolded it. It was a bank deposit slip.

“The back,” she said.

The number 7-63512A was written on it. “This is a license plate number,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah, I thought so too, but I have no idea whose or why Paul would have written it down, but it’s definitely his handwriting.”

I looked at it and thought about the reasons someone would write down a license number: if they’d had a fender-bender, if someone was frightening or bugging you somehow—someone you’d gotten into an argument with, if someone were following you. . . .

“Cathy,” I said. “Can you think of anything at all that Paul might have mentioned to you about his work or his trapping that bothered him or had him worried?”

“No.” She shook her head. She sounded like she was going to cry, her voice sad and resigned. “I keep going over and over it in my head, but there was nothing unusual. If you’ve found anything, it’s news to me. We were plugging along as usual.”

I looked out across the lake to Howe Ridge, scarred from wildfires, then peered toward the towering mountains beyond the lake’s headwaters, their reflection making shadowy, kaleidoscopic designs. I could feel a private little satisfaction looking at that view, that even with some of the trauma, this was not a bad way to make a living. Finally, I
said: “I don’t know how to say this without upsetting you, but was your husband angry at you or distrustful of you in some way?”

She put her hand to her chest and sat up straight, scooting away from the back of the wood bench. “Me? Distrustful? Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

“I’m just checking all possibilities.”

“No, you’re not. You’re thinking something. You found something to make you think that . . .”

I help up my hand to calm her. Her eyes were wide and scared. “I just know that there are a few things, mostly about his research, that Paul was not sharing with Sam. And, well, now there’s something else here. Not sure what it means, but”—I shrugged—“I’m going to find out.”

“Look—” Cathy turned to face me, her knees bony and pointing at my legs—“if you’re implying something here, you need to say it.”

Again, I held up both palms. “I’m not implying much. I’m curious though, as to why your husband, who seemed to tell you and his closest buddy everything, suddenly quits doing that.”

She cocked her head sideways, her mouth angry, her nostrils flaring, and stood up and faced me. “I can see where you’re going with this, and you’re dead wrong. You think Sam and I have something going on, that’s what this is about, am I right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t need to. Look, Sam and I have
nothing
going on. He’s like a godfather to our kids, he’s been a close friend to both of us, and he’s been coming over a lot to check on us. That’s all. If you want to make more out of it than that, then you’re wasting your time and barking up the wrong tree. And frankly, if that’s all you’ve got so far, then I’m more than a little worried about your handling of this investigation.”

“Cathy. Sit. It’s not all I’ve got by any means, but I’m being careful. If I didn’t ask why Paul was keeping some things to himself, then I wouldn’t be fully doing my job now, would I?”

She stared at me for a moment until the anger in her face eventually
eased and she sat back down. I slowly relaxed again as well, relieved to hear her defend herself and restore my initial impression of the Sedgewick family’s seemingly sacred bond.

“Now,” I said, holding up the slip of paper. “When did Paul last wear the fleece you found this in?”

36

T
HE LICENSE NUMBER
turned out to be Dorian’s, so the following day, I tucked away my irritation at Ken and pulled him off his task of looking through all the surveillance tapes for signs of Phillips, Dorian, Adam Harris, or anyone else looking suspicious. After all, I knew he meant no harm, and I wanted him to assist me in questioning Dorian again.

We drove to the Columbia Falls police station where Dorian would be held for one more day before being transported to Missoula to appear before the judge. He had been assigned a regional defender named Carson Halloway from the Public Defender’s Office with the state of Montana. I didn’t expect to get much from Dorian, even without an attorney present. With an attorney, I knew it was an even slimmer proposition.

In the interview room, Dorian looked blank as cardboard. He stared at his hands like he had nothing better to do. His attorney, Mr. Halloway, was young, thin and gangly as a teenager in a navy suit that made him look like he was about to go to a high school debate meet any minute.

“Mr. Halloway.” I offered my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Same.” He shook my hand.

I introduced him to Ken, then turned to Dorian in his orange prison wear. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Dorian.” He gave me a bored glance, then looked away. “Well.” I hooked my foot around a chair, pulled it out and took a seat. Ken followed. “Let’s get down to business
then. I’m sure you’re a busy man.” I smiled to Halloway. I was seated on his left, so my bad eye—with its now purple-and-yellow rainbow of bruises spreading across the socket—faced him. I had made sure to wear my contacts so the frames of my glasses wouldn’t hide the bruising created by his client.

“Yes, let’s do. As I’m sure you’re used to, Mr. Harris, my client, Mr. Dorian here, has been instructed, of course, to let me do most of the talking. But if there’s nothing off-kilter or accusatory in your questions, then I will be more than happy to instruct Mr. Dorian here to answer them.”

I nodded and pulled out my notebook. “I have very few,” I said. “Just several important ones.”

“Such as?” Halloway asked.

“My partner and I would like to know how much contact Mr. Dorian had with Paul Sedgewick before June twenty-second?”

“My client claims that he has had no contact with Mr. Paul Sedgewick.”

“That’s interesting, because we have witnesses claiming that he and Paul Sedgewick got into an altercation at a bar called the Outlaw’s Nest in Hungry Horse the week before we found him at the bottom of the Loop in Glacier Park.”

“If you have witnesses, we’d sure like to see a list of their names, because of course, as you know, word of mouth can often be simply hearsay in small towns such as Hungry Horse.”

“I’m aware of this, but we also have evidence that the victim, Paul Sedgewick, wrote down Mr. Dorian’s car license number. So . . .” I turned to Dorian, holding up a plastic bag with the slip of paper with the number on it facing him. “Why would Sedgewick have done that?”