The Royal Wulff Murders (25 page)

“Come on, Mr. Stranahan, get those clothes off.”

“Here?”

She pulled the half-unbuttoned dress over her head and shook out her hair, her form pale in the moonlight but for the black strips of her underwear.

“Do I have to help you, sir?” she said, her voice falling into the now familiar mocking tone that always seemed to come at such unexpected moments. She ducked back inside the car, reaching over to swing open the passenger door.

“Leave your truck here. Hurry now.” Then, in her Southern voice, “Oh my, I do have a handsome man.”

When Stranahan was down to his shoes and shorts and was sitting beside her, she turned the key and pulled back onto the ruts.

“It wouldn’t do any good to ask what we’re doing?” he said.

“I thought you were a detective.”

She said nothing else and a quarter mile up the road pulled the car around in back of the first of the trailer-shaped structures, which Stranahan could now see were railroad boxcars that had been converted into guest cottages. Mountain chic.
Where did she find these places?
Vareda was out the door and running down the bank, the shine of the water only a few yards away.

She waded out to her waist and dipped under, otterlike, to reemerge facing him. Water streamed off her hair and the swells of her body.

A few moments later Stranahan was beside her; the cool smoothness of her skin was in his arms as she locked her hands around his neck and just looked for the longest time into his eyes. Then abruptly she shuddered against him and kicked free, swimming into the deeper current of the pool.

“It was just so smoky in there tonight I had to get in the water. When I was a girl we swam every day in Bayou Pierre.” Her voice floated out in front of him as the current took her downstream.

“Aren’t there alligators in Mississippi?”

“Not in Bayou Pierre. We have moccasins and alligator gars, they’re big. But the only thing I ever worried about was snapping turtles. I’d have dreams one had me by the toe and was pulling me under.”

He started to say something, but she cut him off.

“Ssshh, now. Just float. Isn’t it wonderful?”

It was like nothing he’d known, floating cool down the starlit river, the current softly bickering with itself, the mountains hung in the distance. Then the sound more insistent as the river took a bend in a rush, waves standing high to one another and Vareda’s head bobbing, going under to surface and under again and Stranahan following, trying to keep his mouth shut against the rising turbulence. Stranahan kicked at an angle until he was out of the tongue of writhing water and then, verging on panic, craned his head around, his eyes straining into the darkness.

“I’m here,” she said, her voice in back of him.

He swam to where she was kneeling in the shallows.

“I’m a little crazy,” she said in a breathy whisper.

“I won’t argue.”

“I’ve always been a little crazy.”

“Come on,” he said, “we’re almost to my truck. We can stay on the inside here, out of the current.”

“Not yet. No, you come here to me. It’s soft here. It’ll be all right. See, I can lie down.”

Stranahan bent to kiss her lips, tasting the river that swept by them. She fitted her body to him.

“Now I have you.” The river rose and fell behind them. “It’s just you and me now.”

A coyote broke its voice in the distance. Quickly it was joined by another.

“They’re crazy, too,” she breathed in his ear.

L
ater, she spoke from the bed in the darkness of the boxcar.

“Why is it you can ask me about Jerry, dig into me like that sheriff did with her questions, but then I ask you what you were doing tonight and you tell me you can’t say?”

“It’s better you don’t get involved. The farther you stay away from this, the better it will be.”

“I just saw what used to be my brother. He was in a
drawer
. How could I not be involved?” She had turned away from him to stare out the window, a shoulder of mountain under a slice of moon.

“I’m asking you to trust me.”

After a while, she said, “So what do I do? I have to go through Bridger again to pick up Jerry’s ashes.”

“I could do that for you. Do you want me to scatter them in the river, too, if I ever find those trout your father marked?”

“After what happened to him? God no. No, I’ll take him back to Mississippi. When we were kids there was a willow tree that made shadow lines on the grass; he thought they made a map that would lead him back to our house. It was his favorite place. If that tree hasn’t been swallowed up by the bayou, it’s where he’d want to be.”

“Do you want your dad’s ashes back, too? Maybe they should be together.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Her voice was far away. “Everything’s unreal now.”

She was silent. He could hear her breathing. Then she reached for him through the darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

S
tranahan found Rainbow Sam attacking the chaos in his trailer. He was wearing boxers and a Moose Drool T-shirt stained under the arms. His left arm was still in the sling. Peeking above the bandages was a tattoo of a fly-fishing Mickey Mouse, a good one on the line. The big man’s body odor was hard to ignore.

“How’s the man?” Stranahan asked. He noticed Killer curled in a dog bed under the foldout table. “How’s the man’s best friend?”

“Good and not half bad,” Sam said. “I got to wear this damned sling for a month, though, so I don’t rip the stitches in my chest. Fuckin’ inconvenient. Can’t row my boat. I had to turn a booking over to Peachy Morris, who’s good people, but I’m still gonna lose the client. Peachy couldn’t catch koi in a Japanese garden.”

He shrugged. “Sorry about the mess, but nothing you haven’t seen, huh? What do you figure the bastard was after? Only things of value are my boat and my gear and he didn’t take that. Scattered my sticks”—Sam pointed to the stack of fly rods in the corner by his fly-tying bench—“a fuckin’ miracle none got broken. I got a mudroom where I hang coats and shit. He trashed that worse than anywhere else.”

“You mind if I look at it?”

“I cleaned it some.”

They went to the room—wool jackets sagging off wall pegs, stained parkas, a pair of camouflage duck-hunting waders. Hung from an elk’s rack were hats you could wring enough grease from to fry fish.

Stranahan was suddenly woozy.

“Hey,” Sam said. “You don’t look so hot. You got to buck up, man, either that or take a nap.”

“I know. It’s a long drive from Missoula and I haven’t slept in two days. Some coffee might help.”

They returned to the main room, where Sam set a kettle on the burner. Stranahan sat at the table, disturbing Killer, who whimpered, arched his back, turned a circle, then lay back down with his head propped on Stranahan’s shoes.

“So what’s so important you drove all the way from the ’Root to see me?” Sam set the two cups on the table.

“I wanted to ask you more about whirling disease, how much you know.”

Sam grimaced. “Too fucking much. I’m a consultant to the AAWD. That’s the Anglers Against Whirling Disease. We were federally funded till the money dried up. There’re still a few fisheries biologists involved, not much paid staff; some guides like myself volunteer. We’re valuable ’cause we got our fingers in the water, so to speak. What’s it to you?”

“I promised the sheriff I wouldn’t talk about anything she’s investigating,” he said. He sipped at the coffee. “She’s just covering bases. You understand that guy you found was Vareda Beaudreux’s brother. He’d done hatchery work before, the word came up.”

“No, how would I know that? It wasn’t in the paper. Your squeeze, huh? I’m sorry to hear that.”

He held up his big hands.

“Hey, I’m not asking for quid pro quo here. I’ll tell you anything you want, bro. But I thought you had a pretty good grip on WD last time we talked.”

“Go over it again. Figure I don’t remember anything.”

S
am scratched a finger under his cast and rearranged himself in his chair.

“It’s caused by a parasitic spore, a tiny form of animal, really. Because it’s an invasive species, the native trout, the rainbows and the cutts, don’t have any natural resistance. Instead of acting as a host for the parasite and staying healthy, the way the system’s supposed to work, the spores eat holes in the skeletons of the fish. Throws ’em off balance. The poor bastards chase their tails until something eats them, a bird, a bigger trout. It can be transferred by mud, ’cause that’s where these little worms live that carry the spores in part of the life cycle. Or it can be transferred by a bird that’s eaten an infected fish and drops a turd into another river.”

“How come you only hear about it in Montana? Wouldn’t it be in other rivers out west?”

“Don’t think it isn’t.”

The difference, Sam explained, was that Montana was strict about its wild trout program. Other states could mask the problem by supplanting depleted fisheries with hatchery trout.

“Here’s the kicker,” he said. “The disease affects the fish when they are little, right? In the wild, they don’t survive. But in a hatchery environment, you can baby them through the worst phase of the disease until they are big enough to fight it off on their own. Then you can go ahead and plant them into a river. Not in Montana, that would put you in the pen. But some states, if a river isn’t certified as whirling disease free, then the state can buy infected fingerlings from a hatchery and dump the fuckers into it.”

He thumped his fist on the table, causing Killer to jump.

“That’s like saying you got six people HIV positive in Bridger, it’s no longer an AIDS-free town, so shit, why bother testing blood bank donors before suckin’ the juice out of their veins and pumping it into the public? I exaggerate.”

Stranahan’s hand shook on the coffee mug. His mind was racing, not just from caffeine.

“Why would a hatchery raise diseased trout?”

“One, it’s a fucking pernicious disease. Once you got it in the system, whether it’s a river or a hatchery, you can’t get it out. You have to rotenone all the fish, bury them, sterilize the joint. In Colorado, there’re sixteen hatcheries run by the Division of Wildlife, guys who are supposed to be on the ball. Eleven tested positive for whirling disease. It’s a big-time problem.

“Two”—Sam held up two fat fingers—“you can’t study a fish disease unless you got fish to study.”

Sam said that the Anglers Against Whirling Disease worked with a number of hatcheries to learn about the infection process, how water temperatures affect it, how the disease affects different races in a species. Conceivably, a strain of trout could be developed that was resistant. Some already showed promise. Down the road, a depleted river might have a sustainable wild trout population again.

Sean was impressed by Sam’s encyclopedic knowledge, but not surprised. Fly fishermen were a forward-thinking group. They tended to look deep beneath the surface of their sport and were well aware of environmental factors that affected it.

Sam went on. “Montana, though, we still got a hands-off policy. We can try to control environmental factors, but we’re not going to experiment with planting hatchery fish, not yet anyway. That’s a death sentence for any wild trout that remain. We’re gonna keep that cat in the bag as long as possible. Take a wait-and-see attitude and give the native populations a chance to build up resistance.”

Stranahan had one more question.

“Let’s say you have a hatchery that’s raising trout that carry whirling disease, either by accident or design. If those trout were dumped into rivers that aren’t infected, what would happen?”

Sam sat back in his chair.

“That’s not funny, bro’. Tell me you’re not saying somebody is dumping sick fish into our rivers.”

“I’m just saying, ‘What if?’”

Sam made a face. “It’s strange you should mention this,” he said, “’cause it’s happened. Back in ’08, a hatchery operation illegally released diseased fish in Arizona, figuring once the rivers lost their disease-free status, then it could legally profit by selling diseased fingerlings to the state to stock the same rivers. The owner was convicted but pled out and probably got nothing but a slap on his pecker.

“But to answer your question, it would depend on the river. You take Rock Creek; WD put a big hurt on the rainbows in the canyon stretch, but brown trout from downriver moved into the niche. Overall population stayed the same, but now you got browns where there used to be rainbows. Other rivers, though, the browns don’t fill the niche, so the river ends up with empty rooms that weren’t there before—that’s what happened to the Madison. Same with the Gunnison in Colorado.”

“Who would stand to benefit?” Stranahan asked.

“What? If whirling disease wiped out a river?”

Stranahan nodded.

“I don’t know, but some sure would stand to lose. Fishing’s a bigger business than most people think. Montana alone, we’re talking five hundred million a season in license sales, outfitting industry, tourist dollars going into motels, fly shops, restaurants. They call this the Treasure State ’cause of copper and gold, but today the gears run on trout slime.”

“Could a hatchery benefit from bad fishing?”

“Worst case scenario? Fish, Wildlife, and Parks could throw in the towel, start a stocking program. A hatchery could see some dough that way, especially if it had an inside track on supplying the state.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm fucking what?” Sam said. “Don’t give me all this ‘What if’ bullshit. Something’s going on here. Something bad. Am I right?”

“I told you I can’t talk about it,” Stranahan said. He decided not to
press any further. “Look, I got to go. I’m supposed to see the sheriff today.”

“Yeah, okay, don’t tell me. Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.”

Stranahan held his eyes a minute, then saw Sam’s face crack. They both laughed.

“Hey,” Sam said. “I have a sport booked for tomorrow. Half-day float. I haven’t palmed him off yet. What do you say we take him down the river? You row, I guide. Split the take.” He rubbed his fingers together.

Stranahan shook his head. He had forward momentum now and hated losing it.