The Royal Wulff Murders (2 page)

The client’s reel screamed. The bloated corpse took line, steadily, implacably, in the manner of a large carp. Leaning hard on the oars, Sam closed the gap between his boat and the body. Calmly, in a voice that had coaxed a thousand neophyte anglers, he instructed his client to drop the long-handled net over the dead man’s head. The catch so enmeshed, he angled his ClackaCraft downstream at the pace of the current, fanning the oars gently toward a bay at the bank.

“We got him!” The client beamed.

Sam thought, “Holy shit.” But he made a mental note to convert all his monofilament leader material to Orvis Super Strong in the future, just the same. The eight pound tippet had held like a stout steel cable.

“I’ll tell you what, Buddy,” Sam muttered as he stepped out of the
drift boat and gingerly lifted the meshes of the net over a hank of flowing hair. “You may not be God’s gift to trout fishin’, but you just got yourself a whopper of a story.”

Sam worked the hook from the waders, then rolled the body faceup. For the next few moments neither man spoke. The client, his florid face suddenly ashen, leaned over the gunwale and threw up, starting with the tin of kippered herring he’d had for a snack after Sam’s bankside lunch. He was a big eater and it took a half-dozen heaves to get it all up.

Rainbow Sam just stared. It wasn’t only the ruptured left eye socket, from which a splinter of stick protruded like a skeletal finger, that riveted his attention. It was the lower lip, grotesquely swollen and purple as a plum. He bent down for a closer look. In the center of the lip was a trout fly. It was a Royal Wulff, a hair wing dry fly pattern about the size of an evening moth. Tied on a size 12 hook, Sam decided. The barb was buried in the flesh; from the hook’s downturned eye dangled a strand of monofilament leader material.

“Ah, shit,” Sam said, having recovered from the shock of the mutilation. “I think I know this kid. Goddammit anyhow.”

For the angler was a very young man, little more than a teenager, Sam thought. He had floated past where the kid was wade fishing only a few weeks before, on a stretch of river not far upstream. He remembered the occasion because the fisherman wasn’t cut from the same khaki-and-GORE-TEX cloth that stamped most Madison River pilgrims. Sam disapproved of anglers who dressed like pages out of catalogues. They projected a
GQ
quality that might serve one in good social stead at an upscale fishing lodge, while emphasizing particulars to which trout paid no attention.

By contrast, this man’s waders were stained and patched and he fished without a vest, let alone one sporting the obligatory ten pockets. “How are you doing, Mr. Sam?” the young man had called out that morning as Sam glided by. And Sam, momentarily taken aback
before realizing that the angler had read his name from the logo stenciled on the bow, had tipped his cap in reply. It was a grace note in the day, considering that wade fishermen and boat anglers competed for the same water. Tensions could become strained on a popular river like the Madison.

“Now why the fuck did this have to happen to a nice kid like that?” the fishing guide muttered to himself.

He waded ashore, sucking the back of a tooth.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to call the sheriff. Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.” Sam’s client, having clambered out of the boat, was sunk to his knees in the shallows, a string of drool hanging from his stubbled chin. A few feet away, a school of tiny fish flashed under the yellow wash of vomit. The man nodded dumbly.

Rainbow Sam climbed the steep riverbank. For just a second he took in his surroundings, the river reflecting lavender evening clouds and the deeper purples of the mountains, its current running between banks of wild roses. It was part of what attracted anglers from around the world to the Madison—the setting and the water quality, a champagne of intoxicating clarity that poured in one effervescent riffle from Quake Lake to the small fishing town of Ennis. And then, too, there were the trout, with their ruby stripes and polished flanks, as hard as metal and as perfect as God ever made.

Well, Sam thought, this poor bastard has caught his last one.

He noted the nearest residences: a log mansion sporting panoramic riverfront windows and, just upstream, a chinked-up homestead cabin with a rusted half-ton in the drive. He spat, automatically registering the twenty-first-century-Montana paradox: Big Sky native cheek by jowl with summer gentry—which house being the eyesore depending upon your point of view. Well, one ought to have a phone, anyway. He cinched the belt around his waders and began to
walk.

CHAPTER ONE

S
ean Stranahan leaned back in the swivel chair in his studio, paint-stained Crocs up on his desk, a tumbler stenciled with the emblem of The Famous Grouse in his right hand. A half-finished trout fly, a caddis pupa imitation resembling a wingless moth, was gripped in the clamp of the tying vise in front of him. His eyes, fatigued from the close work of fly tying, drifted to the newspaper open on his desk, then to the fluttering leaves of the aspens outside the window. He took a sip of tap water from the tumbler. The afternoon was beginning to ebb and he’d have to make a decision soon if he was going to go fishing. A smile played across his lips. That is, he thought, if it was still safe to drive to the river. His eyes returned to the story in the paper.

“Body Found in Madison River,” ran the headline. Rainbow Sam was quoted in paragraph four. He said he hadn’t seen skin that white since swimming with the Polar Bear Club in Lake Superior. Initially, he had said since peeling the D cups off a biker chick at the Harley rally in Sturgis, but when the reporter reminded him that the
Bridger Mountain Star
was a family newspaper, Sam had come up with the tamer quote. Details were sketchy. The body of an early-twenties white male, clean shaven, shoulder-length blond hair, had been discovered half a mile below Lyons Bridge at 7 p.m. Wednesday by fishing guide Samuel Meslik. Cause of death unknown, pending autopsy. No mention of a trout fly, nor of a stick jammed into an eye socket.

Stranahan turned to the sports page and found the box scores of the Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader, which the teams had split. He had moved to Montana from a chapel town in Vermont near the Massachusetts border only three months earlier. He really didn’t care about baseball, especially when the Sox were eight and a half games back at the All-Star break, but found himself reaching for that toehold on the past nearly every time he opened the newspaper. Beth loved the Sox. He pictured her sitting in the kitchen of their farmhouse, drinking coffee from her favorite eggshell mug, her reading glasses pulled down on her nose.

He folded the paper and laid it on a corner of the desk.

The phone rang. Welcoming the distraction, he picked it up. Maybe this was a print catalogue, calling to tell him that one of the watercolors he’d submitted had been chosen for a limited edition release.

“Stranahan.”

“Why do you have to answer the phone like that?” It was his sister, who lived not far from Stranahan’s old home in Vermont. “Why can’t you use the Christian name Mom and Dad gave you?”

Stranahan sighed. “Contrary to popular opinion, I am a businessman. The way to deal with a publisher, not that I am overwhelmed with experience, is to answer tough, then soften up. It creates an illusion of intimacy.”

“Tough?” she said. “You’re not tough; you just look like you are. Oh, Sean, when something happens like it did to you, people start letting themselves go. Appearances count in this world. You’re over thirty now. How are you going to pull yourself up if you’re sleeping on a couch? If Beth knew what she’d done—”

Stranahan interrupted. “I don’t want to talk about Beth. It’s not her fault.”

He glanced at his cluttered studio, watercolors hanging on the cracked plaster walls, fly-tying feathers decorating the floor—the
place looked like the dirt ring in the aftermath of a cockfight. His eyes settled on a tea saucer he’d scattered with breadcrumbs beside a mouse hole in the baseboard.

“Are you still there?”

“Really, Karen, I’m fine.” He tried to put a positive note in his voice. “The Trout Unlimited banquet’s coming up. I have a painting in the auction. My work will get some exposure, and a couple more sales or a limited-edition contract and I can move into a proper place. All I really need to do is get back to work.”

“What happened between you and Beth—it’s not too late.”

“Stop,” Stranahan said, firmly but gently.

“But…”

“I’ll call you soon. Say hi to Carl and the twins.”

“I love you, too, Sean. Even if you didn’t say it first.”

“Ditto.” That started the trill of laughter he’d intended and he replaced the receiver halfway through it and stared out the window of the studio.

In the three months since he’d said good-bye to New England, Stranahan had done a lot of staring: out the truck window; at the forested ridges that defined Bridger, the Montana town where he had settled—stopped might be a better word; into hazy middle distance; at the door of his office. He didn’t know what he was looking for exactly, only that he thought he’d know it when he saw it. And talking with his sister reminded him that a good part of him was still mired in the East. He had wanted to ask Karen if she had seen Beth around town but had been afraid of the answer. Maybe she was with the lawyer who had handled the divorce, Ken Whatshisname. What a milquetoast name, Ken. The man even looked like a Ken doll, his blond hair holding the tooth tracks of his comb. Who put sticky stuff in their hair anymore? In Vermont?

Stranahan heard steps in the hall. His pulse quickened. The steps ceased in front of the door. He could imagine someone reading the
etched letters on the frosted glass window—
BLUE RIBBON WATERCOLORS
. Underneath, in a discreet script that he devoutly hoped would be overlooked by all passersby, were the word
s
“Private Investigations.” If Beth ever saw that door, Stranahan thought, she’d laugh him out of the building. True, he’d worked as an investigator for his grandfather’s law firm in Boston during college summers, but that had mostly been punching numbers on a phone. Later he’d done divorce cases, repossessions, assorted minor-league snooping for a couple of years in his late twenties, out of an office of his own, before devoting himself to painting full time. But when Stranahan applied for gallery space at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center in the spring, the building manager had said that while he was
eminently
qualified—that was the word she used—the center already housed a number of painters and she liked her tenants to represent a variety of interesting occupations.

“Well,” Stranahan had said, wracking his brain for résumé credits, because the cultural center was nonprofit and the rent was ridiculously cheap, “I’m a licensed private investigator in Massachusetts.” He winced at his words, even though the lie was only one of tense.

The manager, an outdoorsy, gap-toothed blonde in her forties, had tapped the eraser of her pencil against her front teeth thoughtfully.

“That’s an interesting combination,” she’d said. “The way you look, that dark knight thing that makes a woman look at you twice. Um-hmm, you know what I mean”—she’d looked him up and down frankly—“I like that a lot. Just don’t bring any guns in here.”

Stranahan stared at the reverse lettering on the glass, trying to resolve the indistinct human shape in the hall. Whoever it was seemed to be dressed in patterned clothes, but the glass distorted shapes grotesquely. The person had been standing outside his door for half a minute. Making up his mind? Her mind? To knock and ask him what? For a painting? Or for the goods on a rotten husband? He was about to get out of the chair and save his visitor the agony of
decision when the footsteps sounded again, fading down the corridor.

“There goes money,” Stranahan said out loud. And under his breath, in spite of himself, “Or love.” Talking to himself was a habit he had picked up since the divorce, when the moorings started to shake.

He glanced out the window at the declining day and came to a decision. Picking up a scratched pair of dollar-store reading glasses, he turned his attention to the half-completed fly in his vise. He added a few hackle fibers from a Hungarian partridge to simulate legs, then completed the size 14 pupa with a whip finish and painted a coating of clear nail polish to freeze the thread. He gave it a minute to dry before opening the jaws of the vise and sticking the fly into a patch of sheep’s wool on his Red Sox cap. Then he picked up the fly-rod case hanging from its carry strap on an old-fashioned hat rack and went out the door, down two flights of steps, and into the angled sunshine of a July afternoon.

His ’76 Land Cruiser, which, during the weeks of his cross-country journey, had served as his home—the studio, he reminded himself, was a step up in that regard—squatted heavy and boxlike under the spreading ash trees along South Gallatin Avenue. He rolled down the windows to let the breeze in and stuck the rod case in the back beside his easel and paints. He shut the liftgate and straightened up.

Turning, he caught sight of a woman walking up the street toward him. She had auburn hair and wore a sleeveless, flowered dress that clung to her body in the heat. The vitality of her stride was reminiscent of a teenage girl’s, but she had seen more of life and he placed her as being roughly his age. She looked vaguely familiar. The woman gave him a passing smile and, stopping a few steps beyond, raised her right arm, cocked an imaginary pistol at her head—Stranahan saw a flash of gold ring—and dropped the hammer with her thumb.

She muttered, “Just like me. I’m always forgettin’ somethin’,” and started back toward him.

“At least you know which way to go to find it.”

She paused, lifting her eyebrows in a question.

“Oh,” Stranahan said, “I get in the truck, half the time I don’t know which way to turn the wheel.”

She chuckled. “Honey,” she said, “men never know where they are going. You’re just one who has guts enough to admit it.”