Mortal Fall (42 page)

“Okay, okay.” I rubbed the back of my neck and took a long, deep breath to try and find logic. “Maybe I am, so here’s the deal, forget about my brother. This isn’t about him. Clean and simple: you changed your mind about having children and when you couldn’t persuade me to come to your side of things, you wanted to split. So here we are, and I, well, I still haven’t changed my mind.”

“Because you won’t even consider it, Monty. You made up your mind when you were young and because you are who you are—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, like I was saying, because you like everything neat and squared away, all the answers in place, you think that the whole baby issue is simple—a readable case of genetics—and you’ve put that aside, nice and neat and squared away in your mind and you won’t even consider it. But there are two of us and marriage requires compromise and sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice if it’s coming from my end, not yours.”

Lara’s back arched off the couch, rigid and ready to fight, and her mouth twisted in disgust at what I’d just said, but she didn’t have a retort.

“How do you know what I’ve considered and what I haven’t?” I said, trying to make myself sound calm and together, before she racked her brain for some lame example of sacrifice on her end. “I’ve spent months alone, Lara. You think this has been fun? I’ve had plenty of time to think through all our issues, just as you wanted, and guess what? No matter how I thought it through, it just didn’t work for me. I still feel the same way, and, well, you know that. You’ve known it all along, so the ball’s in your court. It’s simple, stay with me as we planned when we got married or move on. But either way, I’m not doing this anymore.”

“So my indecision is going to become your decision?”

“Yes, yes.” My head was bobbing up and down ridiculously fast. I hadn’t been this direct with her since we split up, with this kind of impatience and anger fueling me. I’d always been straightforward, but the patient and understanding one no matter how clean I tried to be. And I certainly hadn’t planned on saying any of these things to her this evening. Now, I felt like I was flying a jet and about to release a bomb right onto our marriage for good. It made me feel strange and scared—almost dangerous and slightly off-kilter, like my mind was shifting, floating with hypoxia, and I was just going to go with wherever it went whether I had planned to or not.

Lara held her brow in an angry pinch, her eyes narrowed and on fire. “Fine.” She stood up and gripped her keys. “Fine, Monty.” She went to the door.

I stood up and watched her open it. Moths danced in the cone of light on the porch behind her and for a second I felt dizzy, watching wings of papery white flit behind her head like a halo. “You don’t think it,” she said. “But I’ve sacrificed plenty.”

“Oh, what?” I heard myself throw out a quick and knifelike sarcastic laugh. “That you held off on going out and getting yourself pregnant? Is that your sacrifice?” I knew I was being a total asshole, and
I couldn’t help it. The months of waiting for her to decide had piled up on me and created something with teeth, and I wanted her to feel the bite of pain I’d been feeling all along—that she seemed to so easily sidestep all the time, just like Adam always did when we were younger.

Lara glared at me one last time, slammed the door, and ran to her car. I watched her through the window as she backed out and drove away, her taillights like angry eyes in the night.

43

I
GOT UP EARLY
with the chorus of noisy birds, showered, shaved, and made some instant oatmeal and coffee. I didn’t ring or text Lara, even though I thought about it. I felt horrible about the way I had treated her after she took the time to drive all the way out to see me, but a part of me felt justified and the iron fist of stubbornness still had me in its grip. I surprised myself that I had pushed the divorce issue as I had, knowing that there were things couples couldn’t ever recover from once you went down certain paths. It made me feel shaky, but when I shaved, my hand was steady and sure.

Ken was ready and waiting for me when I got there, sipping coffee that Karen had made and staring at his computer. He smiled as I came in and set my carrier case on the table. “Gretchen just sent this to me.” He flicked his computer monitor with a fingernail.

“What’s that?” I had had enough coffee at my dorm, but I grabbed a cup from the cabinet and filled it anyway out of habit.

“She was able to enlarge the footage so we can see the exiting vehicles.”

“Yeah? Find anything?” I walked over and peered over his shoulder at his screen at a magnified view of the back of a Toyota. The license plate was blurry and grainy, but the numbers could be made out. “The numbers match. So it looks like our boy Phillips did leave on the evening of June eighteenth.”

“Yeah, at least his truck did. I guess there’s no way to tell if that’s him or not in the driver’s seat.”

“No, Gretchen said there’s just not a clear enough shot, so it’s just a shadowy blob—the back of his head. If that’s him, he most likely hiked a full day on June eighteenth, a Saturday, drove to the Loop, took the shuttle to the top as our driver indicated, then hiked the Highline Trail back to Granite Park Chalet and back down to the Loop to his car and drove out. Unless, that is, that’s not him in the vehicle and someone else.”

“If it’s someone else, shouldn’t we be able to find some fibers in the car?”

“We should, but it would be a long shot. It could be fibers from anyone—a mechanic or friend or girlfriend who might’ve driven it. But you’re right. It’s worth a look. I’ll have Gretchen get someone on it right away.”

“Is it possible he went over the cliff on a later date?”

“Wilson said entomology shows five to seven days, so he could have come up a day later, this time with someone else, but I’m betting that’s unlikely. Everyone we’ve spoken to that knew Phillips claims he usually hiked on Saturdays. He was expected at work on Monday, so I’m thinking he wasn’t planning, at any rate, to go hiking the next day as well. So someone else must have driven him back up that same night or the next day, and if that’s what happened, that person could be our killer.”

“Unless that person drove him, dropped him off, then he simply fell.”

“Makes no sense.” I was pressing my lips into my knuckles, thinking. “This has been all over the news. If someone innocent gave him a ride or brought him up, they would have come forward by now. And why would he go back to the same hike unless he lost something and was going back for it. And if that were the case, wouldn’t he drive there in his own vehicle, look around for it, then get back to work? Not leave it sitting in his garage?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Makes no sense.”

“No, someone most likely drove him up, and it’s possible they went in the North Fork entrance where there are no cameras.”

Ken nodded that he agreed.

“Good work,” I told Ken. “And just to make sure, I’d like for you to double-check the footage from the time he drives out of the park for the next two days for any other suspicious cars or signs that he’s with someone else. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth continuing to go over even though it’s tough to discriminate the passengers in the vehicles.”

“I’m on it.” Ken turned back to his screen, looking pleased with himself for the work he’d accomplished. I went over to the sink, dumped my coffee, and watched the black liquid splash against the porcelain sink, staining it a brownish black, the color of dried blood.

• • •

I left Ken at headquarters to scour the videos again for any sign of suspicious vehicles and headed to the county offices in Kalispell to see what Gretchen had found. I parked in the large courthouse parking lot and stepped out onto the hot pavement. I had picked up some tuna salad sandwiches at a deli to bring to Gretchen and Wendy, her print examiner, and went in to their offices, signed in at the front desk with a receptionist behind glass, and waited for her to get ahold of Gretchen so she could come out and fetch me. She handed me a visitor’s badge to show I was official. I clipped it onto my shirt pocket, took in the cool air-conditioning of the county building, and waited.

When Gretchen walked up, I felt the same frisson of excitement I’d felt around her when she touched my arm in the restaurant the other day. Her smile and bright eyes lit up the room. I could feel my stress abate, my shoulders melting back down into a comfortable position.

“What do you have there?” She gestured to the bag I brought.

“Tuna salad sandwiches.” I held it up. “That work for you?”

“Absolutely.” She smiled. “Come on back.”

Gretchen was dressed in her white lab coat. I followed her through a secure door, down a long hall, and into a room with computers, monitors, and large rectangular machines with piping connected to them for chemical analysis. I’d been to the lab once before, but they didn’t
have as much equipment then. “You’re almost catching up with the Crime Lab in Missoula,” I said, motioning to the new equipment.

“Nah, we just got a little extra funding for a few new pieces to help us out in a pinch. We still send the majority of our samples to Missoula. Wendy,” Gretchen called over to a brunette behind a computer screen, and she stood up, came over and Gretchen introduced us. “Wendy does all our latent print work,” Gretchen said.

I shook Wendy’s hand while Gretchen told me that she’d worked on the fibers out of Phillips’s Toyota all morning while Wendy worked on the prints. Then, she said to Wendy, “Monty brought us tuna salad. Eat first or after?”

“If we could just go through what you’ve got,” I said, “then I’ll get out of your hair and get back to work and you two can eat whenever you please.”

“Aren’t you going to join us?” Gretchen asked.

“No, I already ate while I was waiting for you to finish these.”

“Fair enough.” Gretchen walked me over to her desk. “Have a seat.” She waved to a chair beside it. Wendy thanked me for bringing lunch and went back to her workstation, saying, “Holler if you have any questions.”

“We’ve pulled a total of eleven good prints from the traps,” Gretchen said while opening her file. “There may be more, but we can’t get a decent read of a few of them. Of the eleven, three of them belong to your biologists: Kurtis Bowman, Sam Ward, and Paul Sedgewick; and two of them to your veterinarians: Dr. Kaufland and Dr. Pritchard. And all of their prints are on all of the traps.”

“And the other six?”

“Well, I know you can guess one of those.”

“Dorian?”

Gretchen gave me a pronounced nod. “That’s right. So”—she looked down at her paper again—“we’ve got Dorian on three of the six traps.”

“What about the others?” I could feel the tension creep back into
my shoulders, my neck muscles stiffening, and my breath begin to quicken as I did the math. There were five sets left. The bright lights of the fluorescent strip lighting above stung my eyes and reminded me of how little sleep I’d gotten after Lara left.

“Well, there are four unknowns, not a match to the elimination prints and not in the system. Sam Ward informed me when he came in for his that there were other people who had helped on the project since the traps had been constructed, including the guy who built the traps, so I’m guessing they belong to those individuals.”

There was one identified set left and the look on Gretchen’s face said it all. She looked up from her paperwork, her eyes wide, her expression tentative, her chin slightly tucked down, as if she didn’t look fully up at me, it would lessen the blow.

“The last one?”

“It matches one of the prints from the collar you gave me.”

I felt something thick and murky rise up in me, but I forced myself to sit still. I realized my mouth was hanging open, so I shut it to make a clean and neat line, not pressing my lips too tightly together, and I know that sounds easy, but it wasn’t. It took effort and control because my pulse was quickening, my jaw tightening, and I felt various small muscles I couldn’t even pinpoint twitch in my body as I sat rigidly and motionless before her.

She put out a large exhale on my behalf and ran her fingers through her hair. “You going to be all right?”

“Yeah, why?” I asked stupidly.

“I’m guessing I know whose prints those are?”

“You’d be right about that. But, yeah, I’m fine. Really. In a way, it’s a relief to have some verification. To not think I’m crazy here and imagining he’s involved in stuff just because I have a few bad childhood memories.”

“That’s true,” Gretchen said.

I thanked her and stood. “I’m going to need to get on this. Any way you can rush the prints on Phillips’s Toyota?”

“I already lifted some this morning and gave them to Wendy. I’ll call as soon as anything is verified.”

“Enjoy your lunch.” I pointed to the paper bag.

“You sure you don’t want to join us?”

“No, I’m good. But thanks.”

“Okay, but let me know if I can help in any way.”

I didn’t look at her, just began to head toward the door.

“Hey,” she said, and I turned. “Did you hear me?”

“I did. I’m sorry.”

“No, sorry,” she held up her hand. “I just wanted to make sure it sunk in. I’m here if you need anything, okay? Even if it’s just an ear.”

“Thank you, Gretchen. I appreciate it.”

In a way, it was a relief; one with a sharp edge, but still a consolation. At least I was right not only in my argument with Lara about him still being toxic and bad news, but in the information I’d shared with Ken. It was a small, bitter solace, but it helped nonetheless because at least I had confirmation that I wasn’t just seeing only what I wanted to see with this case. Any good detective takes that into consideration, and even Mack in DC covered it in his class:
Don’t ever let your personal shit cloud the facts before you
.

It wasn’t as strong a link as you’d hope for, but with two victims and no certainty of anything, this was the strongest connection I was probably going to get. I had someone with ties to both men, and evidence that he’d had his hands on the federal box traps used by Wolfie.

When I stepped out into the late afternoon, I felt the heat rise up from the sidewalk. A diesel truck stood by the side of the building, its hot, strong-muscled fumes strangling the air. I strode to my car, got in and felt the air from the inside engulf me. My car felt confining and savagely hot, but comforting in its own strange way. I turned the ignition, rolled the windows down, and considered what to do next while waiting for it to cool off.