The Royal Wulff Murders (8 page)

“I’m relieved to hear that,” Stranahan said. But he was looking at her back and she let herself out without turning around.

S
tranahan had played the conversation over in his mind when he had driven up the Madison Valley the afternoon before. A part of him had suspected all along that the story about the trout was bullshit, or at least was parenthetical to the real reason she’d knocked on his door. Dutifully looking for a car with Mississippi plates, he’d checked every river access from Valley Garden to the West Fork Campground, where he’d thrown up his tent to spend the night. This morning, he had worked from the West Fork to the Route 87 bridge, which crossed the Madison three miles below the Quake Lake outflow. He had hiked the bank all the way to the lake outlet before starting to fish, to fulfill the second part of his verbal contract with Velvet Lafayette, or Vareda Beaudreux, or whoever she was.

So far, he had failed miserably. He’d caught only two small trout before being interrupted by the sheriff, and another two, slightly better fish, in the next hour. Each he’d brought quickly to hand, examined its fins for scarring, and released. He’d seen nothing unusual and hadn’t expected to. Before the onset of whirling disease, a parasitic infection that had decimated the population of rainbow trout fifteen years earlier, the upper Madison had been home to more than three thousand trout per mile. It still nourished a little more than half that number. The chances of catching fish that another
angler had caught and marked a year previously seemed ridiculously remote.

L
ike any good artist, Stranahan was a sensualist. For two summers during his college years, he had worked as a driller’s helper, taking core samples from sites where the Massachusetts Highways Department sought to build bridges. J.D. Harris, his boss, was a rough, exuberant man who had hands like hams from wielding drill casings all day long, but he could lay two fingers against a rotating drill rod and tell you exactly what the bit was coming up against two hundred feet down.

Something like this sense of touch Stranahan carried to the river. It was a subtle form of expertise that the writers of the fishing manuals overlooked. They reduced fly fishing to a nuts-and-bolts proposition, leading their readers to believe that the man who had the highest modulus graphite rod, the line with the slickest space-age finish, the invisible fluorocarbon tippet, and the perfectly tied fly would so overwhelm a trout with technological superiority that it would open its mouth in defeat. Stranahan knew that success rested upon touch more than it did on technology, and that technique took a backseat to concentration and desire. You fished a river by feel and your heart rode with the fly. The minute you let your mind wander, you were lost.

He fished methodically back toward the bridge, taking at least one trout from every third or fourth pocket where the river paused long enough to catch a breath. None had a V cut from its adipose fin. But as he squatted down to bring a fine rainbow of seventeen inches to hand, he saw a glint of light in the distance. He had waded out to a gravel bar and was facing the west bank. The light flashed and vanished. Then it flashed once more, seeming to originate from one of the cabins on the bank, although “cabin” was hardly an adequate word to describe the colossal log structure, with its wraparound deck sporting
enough rough-hewn patio furniture to stock the lobby of the Old Faithful Inn.

No doubt some millionaire Californian owned the place. He would keep binoculars on the sill to track the flight of osprey or spot bighorn sheep on the opposite mountainside. The light was probably the reflection off the lens. Even if someone was watching him, and Stranahan had an uncomfortable feeling that someone was, there was no harm intended—just someone fishing vicariously through the successfully bent rod of a passing angler.

Stranahan released the trout, trying to shake off the thought that there might be more to Velvet Lafayette’s story than she had told him. He headed downriver with a brusque step. If one needed an excuse, the next decent riffle was around the bend, anyway. He felt supersensitive to his surroundings, the melody of the current more insistent now that the shadows were lengthening. He rounded the bend and felt the constriction in his chest ease. Tan caddis flies swarmed from the willows as he pushed through branches toward the river. The mucky earth that sucked at his boots held a faint smell of mint. Stranahan stepped quietly into the water and began to cast.

CHAPTER TEN

T
he host of the Beaver Creek Campground, a gaunt giant with the pinched face and corrugated cheeks of a Depression-era farmer, opened the door of his trailer at Martha’s knock and said no, there were no abandoned cars in the campground.

“Anyone who hasn’t paid up?”

“Everybody’s square, Sheriff,” he said seriously. Hair the color of an orangutan’s sprouted from the V-neck of his undershirt and he had a faint, hoarse voice, thrown like a ventriloquist’s, so that it seemed to emanate from somewhere else. His eyes were rheumy, the pupils blurred. Martha found she had a hard time looking at him.

“I have half a lung,” he said, as if sensing her thought. “That’s what you get after thirty years in a West Virginia coal mine. Whisper’s best I can do.”

“I can hear you fine,” Martha said.

Walt walked up from the Cherokee, where he’d been stretching his legs. “Maybe you have someone who’s paid up but the campsite seems to be abandoned, never see anyone around? Car might have Mississippi plates.” He was thinking of the hat Ettinger had found at the logjam. “Anytime in the past week or so.”

“I’ll look.”

The man disappeared into the trailer and came back holding a clipboard. A Manx tabby cat darted out the door and underneath the trailer.

“That’s Suzy,”
the man croaked, his lips barely moving. Martha had to resist the urge to look past him and search the cluttered interior of the trailer for the source of the voice.

“Nice cat,” said Hess. He squatted down and clucked to the cat.

“Well,” the man said, scratching a stubble of salt-and-pepper beard that seemed incongruous with the flame thatch that flourished on his chest. “D-24’s been quiet. I take a drive around, once in the morning to catch the late arrivals, make honest men of them”—he rubbed his fingers together to indicate payment—“and again about eight in the p.m. Haven’t seen anyone there now in, I don’t know, five-six days.”

“Is there a car?” Hess asked.

“Last I looked.”

“You get worried when a camp seems to be abandoned?”

“Well…”

“Just a little?”

“Sure. I suppose.”

Martha frowned at Hess.

“What’s the name on the register?” she asked the host.

He looked down the list. “Bill Johnson. Dillon, Montana. No street address. Occupants, one. Filled out the register Tuesday night, paid up through the weekend. Subaru, Montana plates, Bridger prefix. Sound like your fella?”

“This Johnson, what’s he look like?” Ettinger said.

The gaunt man shook his head.

“Came in after dark. I usually take a stroll around the loops about ten, you know; the doctor says it’s good for my heart long as I don’t push it. There was a fella setting up a tent. I got the double vision half the time so I seen two of him, but I wouldn’t recognize him if he knocked on this door. I just collected the money in the envelope. He paid cash, I suppose that’s unusual. One night, two nights, no. But six nights, nine bucks per, that’s fifty-four dollars. And left me a tip
at that. Three twenties.” He raised a pair of eyebrows as thick as scrub brushes.

“You have the ticket?”

“I’d have to dig for it.”

“We’ll check out the campsite while you do.”

“One thing I remember,” he said, “he was dang sure comic; didn’t seem to know what end of the tent was what.”

S
ite D-24 was secluded in the pines on the lip of a high bank. A small girl, her ringlets of blond hair catching the last of the sunlight, was dancing on the picnic table. She jumped down at the Cherokee’s approach and dashed along a faint path toward the only other campsite within view, where she disappeared behind the flap of a khaki tent trailer.

Martha and Walt clambered out and took in the camp. A Subaru sedan with a paint-peeled hood was parked in the gravel tongue; a small dome tent was staked down by the table where the girl had been dancing.

“Why don’t you take a walk next door, Walt, see what that girl was doing here. And see if anyone’s noticed anything or seen anyone while you’re at it,” Martha called after him.

“Okee-doke.”

Martha stood with her hands on her hips, looking down a valley of lupine and Indian paintbrush toward Quake Lake, its shoreline in purple shadow. The bare bones of lodgepole pine trees stuck up like porcupine quills from the surface where the Madison had flooded after the earthquake.

She felt the fine hairs on her forearms erect with goose bumps.

“This place gives me the willies,” she said under her breath.

She told herself to calm down. She had moments like this when she felt scared and inadequate, like she was still a child. She would become dissociated from her body, wonder who this woman was who
wore the uniform and packed a pistol on her hip. From habit, she placed her left hand against the side of her neck and felt her pulse beat against her fingers. Strong and steady.

Refocusing, her eyes glanced from the tent to the picnic table, from the fire ring to the car. The car and the table were coated with a fine pollen. The girl’s shoes had beaten a tattoo on the middle boards of the table. The fire ring contained a few chunks of charcoal; a depression in the middle of the ring showed where someone had doused the fire. Everything had a long disused look. She peered at the windshield of the car. On the dash was a green card that might be the stub of a camping permit, but the refraction of a light through the tinted glass made it impossible to read.

Walt’s approach interrupted her appraisal.

“Nope,” he said when Martha lifted an eyebrow. “Girl’s mother says she’s a, quote, ‘Razzle Dazzle.’ That’s some sprite dancin’ group and she just loves to shake her booty—that’s the mom’s word, not mine. Their picnic table’s too cluttered, so she come over here. I asked her if she’d seen anyone here, says she hadn’t and they been camped three days. The girl’s name is Mary Beth. Her eyes got big as saucers when she saw my piece. Good thing I didn’t draw the bowie.” Walt patted his hip. “She didn’t open her mouth the whole time I was there.”

“Can’t say I blame her.”

Walt twitched his nose. “I think I smell somethin’ in the trunk of the car,” he said. “I think I smell enough to take a closer look.”

“That the Chicago way, Walt?”

“Nope. That’s just the way it is. You play by the book, nobody gets to eat beans in the Big House. Besides,” he said, “didn’t that camp host say he was worried?” Hess gave her a wink and a grin.

“You son of a gun,” Martha said.

She walked over and pulled the zipper of the tent flap. Peering inside, she saw a rumpled sleeping bag. Piled beside it were the bare bones of a camping outfit—Coleman stove, cook box, cooler, a tipped-over
lantern. Using the side of her thumb, she snapped open the latch of the cooler and peered inside. An open package of hot dogs, a mustard bottle, and an empty Pigs Ass Porter beer bottle floated in a pool of water. A couple of blue plastic ice bags, the ice melted, eddied around the edibles. She wrinkled up her nose.

She knelt inside and patted her hand over the nylon tent floor. “There’s not enough level ground for a chipmunk to lie down on,” she said.

Backing out of the tent, she crooked a finger at Walt, then pointed to the frame of the car.

“Okay, we’ll do it your way. I think circumstances are suspicious enough. You think there might be a hide-a-key?”

Walt knelt down on the ground and grappled under the radiator.

“Ah-ha.”

He stood up beaming, pinching the edge of a magnetic box between his thumb and forefinger.

“Let’s work this with kid gloves,” Ettinger said. “I don’t want that latent fella bellyaching about smeared prints. And don’t walk around except on this patch of grass. Maybe we can coax that crime scene examiner, the Blackfeet Indian guy with the girl’s name, Little Feather, something or other Feather”—she knew the man’s name and puzzled at her reluctance to let on to Walt—“get him to come down from Browning. He might be able to find some footprints or tire tracks from another vehicle.”

“Whatever you say, Marth.”

Walt pulled latex surgical gloves over his hands. He turned the key in the lock and opened the passenger door. He withdrew the card from the dash.

“What’s it say?”

Walt peered at it, holding it at arm’s length. Ettinger impatiently plucked it from his fingers.

“Buy yourself some reading glasses, for heaven’s sake.”

She examined the card. “Bill Johnson,” she said. “Same name as the
register. Same dates.” She walked around the back of the car and checked the number on the stub against the license plate. It was the same, also.

“Check the glove compartment for the registration.”

Walt rummaged for a second.

“Anything?”

“Montana map, pack of No-Doz. No registration or insurance card. There’s a rain jacket in the backseat, fly rod case”—he shook it—“feels empty. You want me to pop the trunk?”

Martha nodded thoughtfully. She bent over to peer inside the passenger door as Walt walked to the back of the car. Her mind was turning cylinders, trying to get some tumblers to fall.

She sniffed, then used the blade of her Swiss Army knife to crack open the ashtray.

“Doc said the victim wasn’t a smoker. There’s nothing in the ashtray, but I think somebody had a smoke. Put your nose in here, Walt.”

Walt shook his head. “I can’t smell anything, but that don’t mean squat. I lived too long in the city to have much nose left.”

Martha eased the door shut with a bump of her butt and smiled sourly as Walt poked the key into the trunk’s lock. She noted bright scratches on the bumper where it looked like someone had taken a key or the back of a knife and scraped off a couple of stickers.