Mortal Fall (7 page)

“What are the chances of finding it?”

“Something this small”—I held up the tip of my thumb—“very,
very, very—did I say
very
low, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. Wondering if he had binoculars too, but not counting on it.” I thought of the ol’ axiom repeated in my courses,
one takes the victim as one finds him
. In other words, don’t try to imagine stuff that isn’t there.

We drove the rest of the way with Ken telling me about the two fall incidents he’d worked since he’d joined our ranks three years ago. One on the east side of the park near Apikuni Mountain where a man fell eighty-five feet and had died, and the other near Allen Mountain where a man had survived a forty-foot fall. He gave me a blow-by-blow detail of the rescue, how the family members handled it and how they considered him a hero.

“Perfect,” I said to him and meant it. It was always great to hear a survival story, and I wished we could have done the same for Wolfie. Of course, I already knew every detail about the rescue because I’d helped him complete and file most of the paperwork when it happened.

I found a parking space in the lot near the Loop, which now reopened for tourists to stop, but the trail was still roped off to the public. We set the rappelling gear up on the opposite side of the ravine near the launch site this time, careful not to interfere with the taped area.

“How long are we keeping the trail closed?” Ken asked.

“If we don’t find the card showing anything interesting or find any other reason to assume this was anything but an accident, we’ll remove the caution tape and the trailhead ropes by tomorrow morning. Of course, we want to hear what the coroner ME has to say.” I felt a small pit in my stomach at the thought of reopening the trail and going back to business as usual because although I had no specific reason yet to believe this was anything but an accident—other than that the victim was an experienced mountaineer—there was still something that felt entirely wrong about the whole thing. When we were done rappelling, I planned to check the victim’s credit cards, cell records, and the lot. “We already have enough photos of these sites from yesterday,” I added.

I stepped into the leg loops of my harness, threaded the waist belt through the buckle, and doubled the line back. I put my helmet and
gloves on and rechecked the anchor and its webbing. Finally, I clipped my carabiners to the belay loop of my harness, screwed the gates to lock them, and leaned back against the rope in my dominant hand near my hip. I slowly backed over the edge and made my way down with the rope sliding smoothly through the belay device, while Ken stayed above to man the lines.

This side of the ravine felt a little trickier to navigate with rock crumbling at my every landing. When I made it near the first slanted outcropping where I figured the victim had hit, I used my brake hand to slow my speed. When I was almost halfway down the cliff, I slid the latch on the belay device for it to cease feeding rope and made very careful, small side steps as close as I could to the area without straining my ropes. I paused to look around.

Small shrubs stuck straight out from the cliff rocks and I inspected them for any sign of the camera card or any additional evidence. I didn’t see anything other than slide marks, disturbed rock, and some blood verifying that the victim had hit the spot first. I had the camera on a strap around my neck making it easy to snap photos.

When I had enough pictures, I opened the belay and continued down. When my feet touched down to solid ground near the spot Ken and I had already climbed to from below, I released my harness from the ropes and began searching that area again. I looked in every bit of brush, around and under large rocks, in the large slope of scree. . . . It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

There were no binoculars and I certainly couldn’t find the miniscule digital camera disk. I searched for another half an hour as the sun began to heat the area. Sweat gathered on my chest and I took a drink of water, then climbed back up to the ropes and clipped them back to my harness and radioed up to Ken that I was ready to go back up.

• • •

When we reached the parking lot and loaded up the Explorer, I noticed a man about my height but a little stockier coming our way. As he got
closer, I recognized him. It was Sam Ward whom I’d also met a time or two because he worked not far from headquarters in an RMRS extension office in Glacier Park. He had assisted Wolfie on the Wolverine project.

“Sam.” I reached out to shake his hand.

“Monty, Ken,” he said as a greeting. “Cathy called me last night. I promised her I’d drive up and check things out this morning. Plus . . .” He paused like he needed a second to take a breath and keep his composure. His eyes were red and his unshaven, rugged face had a look of anguish.

“I’m really sorry, Sam.”

He looked at his trail runners and ground a loose pebble into the pavement with the point of one of them. “It’s, it’s—I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem real.” He looked up at me, his eyes searching my face for some explanation. “Just doesn’t seem possible.”

“I know, I know. We’re trying to make sense of it all.”

He peered over to the Granite Park Chalet trailhead. “I see it’s cordoned off.”

“Has to be until we finish checking things out.”

“But he’s been lifted out of there, right? Cathy said he was . . .”

“Oh yeah, absolutely. We did that yesterday. Keeping the trail closed is just a temporary thing for now. You know, for us to thoroughly investigate the scene.”

“But, but what the hell happened?” He looked at Ken and me, his eyes going back and forth between us.

“He fell, Sam. Off that ridge over there.” Ken pointed to the area. “It happens. You know that.”

“But here—” He held out his hand, palm up. “By the Loop for God’s sake. In mild weather?”

“Perhaps that’s when we’re the most confident,” I said. “When we’re the least careful.”

He lowered his brow sharply as if he wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know, Monty. Something just doesn’t seem right with this.”

“I promise, Sam. We’re doing all we can to thoroughly investigate this incident.”

He looked down at his shoe again, then reached in his pocket and held out his palm. In it was a small memory card and my hopes rose suddenly that he’d grabbed it. “You have the wildlife camera card?”

“Yeah, the replacement,” he said.

“Not the one that’s been in it since the end of May?” The biologists like to keep the cameras on the video setting. Depending on how often a moving object triggers the video, the memory card can run down in weeks.

“No, I spoke to Wolfie the day before he was leaving. He was going to grab the footage, but he said he was out of replacement cards and I told him not to worry about it because I had a package of them in the office and wanted to drive up here anyway. The plan had been for him to take the old memory card the other night so that I could replace it today. That’s what I was going to say earlier, that I promised Cathy I’d look around and that I also needed to replace the card. I just didn’t realize that you’d have it roped off, but it makes sense.”

“So, that . . .” I lifted my chin to point at Sam’s open palm, the small card still lying in the center like a dead bug. “It’s just blank.”

“Yeah, it’s just blank. And I promised . . .” His face suddenly grew even more sad and drooping. “Wolfie was my friend and my research teammate. I know he would want me to get this in that camera if there were wolverines around to capture. Kurtis told me you said he’d already gotten the card, so the camera is empty now. Wolfie said he was getting signals up here. Can I cross the rope and go in and replace it? For him?” his eyes pleaded.

“I understand, but I can’t let anyone cross right now. You can give it to me and I’ll go back and put it in or you can wait until tomorrow. We should have the trail reopened by tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll come back tomorrow. It’s the least I can do.”

“And, Sam—” I went and opened the driver’s side door of the Explorer and grabbed my notepad. “You mind if I get your number?”

He gave it to me and I jotted it down. “You said you spoke to Wolfie the day before he was planning to come up here?”

“That’s right. In the evening. We met for a beer.”

“He seem normal to you?”

“Completely,” Sam said.

“Not down or depressed or burdened by any particular worries?”

Sam chuckled. “Wolfie? God no. Other than the fact that he hadn’t seen a wolverine in the wild for a while, he was his usual self.”

“It seriously bugged him when he hadn’t seen one live in a while?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I was just using that as an example of how normal he was with his one-track mind to locate them. Not just him, our whole team feels that way.” He shrugged. “I know we all sound nuts, but every day in wolverine world is like a powerful drug. It’s an addiction. I don’t expect anyone other than those of us who do the research to understand.”

But I did understand. I had caught the power of the truth-seeking drug myself. Amid the sad and burdensome world of death and destruction, the quest for what really happened, for the big
T
can consume you. I felt it creeping up on me when Cathy was asking me for answers, and I had felt it full force on Bear Bait. I could imagine the quest to understand the fierce and relentless wolverine was just as catching—that amid the world of dwindling glaciers and increased rate of climate change was a potent urgency to unravel some of the secrets of one of the most mysterious species in the contiguous states and what it requires to survive.

“I mean,” Sam continued, “he was telling jokes and was excited to see if the cameras had caught any footage. Told me all about how Jeff’s baseball season was going—that they’d just had a tournament in Sandpoint. He was so proud of Jeff.” Pain filled his eyes at the thought of the boy. “It’s just—” He shook his head. “It’s just so unreal.” He swallowed hard and I could see his Adam’s apple jerk up, then down. “So unfair. So incredibly unfair.”

I looked around, but didn’t say anything. He was right, there was
nothing fair out here at all in these mountains. But there was nothing
unfair
in them either. Glacier Park spans about sixty miles along the Montana Rockies and every inch of its jutting contours and colorful rock layers hollers stories of a landscape that is billions of years old. The mountains towered above us daily, and you either survived them or you didn’t. Wolfie would have known that better than anyone.

7

K
EN AND I
drove back down to headquarters, my third trip down this curving narrow roadway that I knew by heart. This time of the year, the line of cars moves slowly with tourists taking it all in. Plus there’s no cell service in this part of the park, a blessing for visitors—a chance to wean themselves from the rat race. For us, we had the use of the radios, but it was easier to work from a phone at headquarters. I was slightly frustrated but ready to get to the busywork of checking Wolfie’s credit cards, phone records, and to get ahold of the surveillance tapes posted at the entrance gate in West Glacier.

I thought of the adage that if a murder has been committed, it must be solved within the first forty-eight after it’s occurred or forget it. What they reminded me in DC was that forty-eight hours within the commission of the crime is not exactly true. It’s partially true, but not completely true. It’s more a question of people forgetting how things went down past two days’ time, in
any
situation, not just crime.

In this case, I had no witnesses that I knew of anyway. Joe and I had asked the media to press for anyone witnessing the fall or anything strange around the Loop the previous day to come forward with information regarding the incident. But more frustrating to me was not knowing if we were even dealing with a crime. My instincts whispered to me that we were, but so far the lack of evidence suggesting foul play said we weren’t.

I had already placed a few calls in the morning over coffee and had some faxes waiting for me in the incident room Systead and I had
used in the last case. A government pea-green counter traversed one wall of the room with a printer and fax machine smelling of toner and paper dust on one side and an old coffeepot next to the sink on the opposite. A long conference table with metal chairs hogged the center of the room and a gunmetal file cabinet hid in the corner with a wilting ficus on top. I smelled a slight antiseptic tang mixed with the familiar old and dusty scents of the building.

We’d moved the printer/fax machine into the room at that time and everyone got used to using it where the sink and coffeemaker was, so we kept it there. I felt strange but energized at the same time to be utilizing the room again for something other than a staff meeting. “I’ll need you to check the phone records while I hit the credit card statements,” I said to Ken.

“Gotcha,” he said. “What exactly am I looking for?”

I leaned my hip against the counter and thought about that for a minute. I turned my head and set my gaze out the window at a plump robin picking at worms in the lush lawn and wondered whether I had the right guy helping me, then decided I was being unfair. Ken’s day did not usually involve investigative work. It normally consisted of ticketing speeding tourists, responding to petty thefts at a campsite, attending to disorderly conduct reports, keeping people out of dangerous situations, helping someone get into their rental cars after accidentally locking the keys inside. . . . In fact, that’s what
my
day consisted of now that I was out in the field more.

“Just look for numbers that are out of the ordinary,” I said. “If they’re not his wife’s or kids’, see who they belong to.”

“Okay if I grab something to eat first?” Ken looked at me wide-eyed, his hand on his stomach. “I’m starved.”

“Sure.” I smiled. “Grab a bite, but if I’m not here when you return, after I finish with the statements, I’ve gone to talk to Dr. Pritchard, Wolfie’s research vet.”

• • •

There was zero pointing to anything remiss in the Sedgewick family statements. They were good, responsible people who paid their bills on time with the exception of a late payment to an Old Navy credit card that Cathy paid soon after the first notice of delinquency had arrived. Jeffrey’s baseball club and Abbey’s dance studio fees were put on the Visa card. Gasoline purchases were as well and once in a while, groceries. There were some car maintenance fees: thirty-dollar oil changes and $575 to a Subaru dealership repair shop.