Crazy Mountain Kiss (27 page)

Y
ou sure we aren't trespassing?” Katie Sparrow raised her eyebrows.

Stranahan used the cheater stick to open the gate and dragged the barbed-wire fencing to the side so she could enter. The shepherd had already wriggled under.

“This is Bar-4 property,” he said. “I have permission.”

“Then why did you park back in the trees?”

“Like I said when I called, I'm following a hunch. If it turns out I'm right, then I'll tell you everything.”

Katie nodded as Sean struggled to reclose the gate.

“So you got three guys in a truck,” Katie said, picking burrs off her pants cuffs. “How do you know who's the real cowboy?”

“The one in the middle,” Sean said. “He never has to get the gates.” He grunted with satisfaction as the wire loop dropped over the post.

“We're looking for a body or I wouldn't be here with Lothar.” It was a statement.

“We're looking for a body.”

“Why don't you just say it's Landon Anker?”

“Okay, Katie. It's Landon Anker.”

“What makes you think he's here?”

“The ranch manager said something about burying the deadstock in the northeast corner. It would be someplace they could get to with a tractor and backhoe attachment. My guess is these tread marks are going to lead to it.”

“What makes you think the body is with dead animals?”

“Something somebody said.”

“That doesn't sound like a hunch.” Katie blew at a strand of hair that had fallen across the bridge of her nose. “I just don't want to be overstepping Martha. Last time we did that, I caught hell.”

“We aren't. But if it turns out I'm right, she'll be the first to know.”

Katie, who spent most of her time in the company of dogs, kept up a running commentary as they hiked. For a while it was about a guy she'd gone out with, a fellow park ranger who raised Lothar's hackles each time he stepped out of his car, which meant the relationship was pretty much a nonstarter. She was thinking of putting an ad in the personals and had written her profile, which she pulled out of her breast pocket and handed over.

SWF, 28, AL, NS, SOH seeking SM, 25–40, NS, NBG, FST, EMP for long walks, singing in the rain, dancing in the dark. No beards, PBR breath, MOM tats, or caps worn backwards. RU out there?

“I'll need a translation,” Sean said.

“Single white female, animal lover, nonsmoker . . .” She jerked the paper from his hand. “SOH is sense of humor. Seeking single male, nonsmoker, no beer gut, full set of teeth, employed, ta-da ta-da. No beards, no Pabst Blue Ribbon breath, ‘Mom' tattoos or caps worn backwards. I was going to add no cowboy hats and shitkicker boots, but then I would have eliminated every man in Montana.”

Sean had to laugh. “You didn't mention your sex move.”

She strode ahead of him. “I'm saving it for you.”

 • • • 

F
or a mile or more the tracks rose gradually, then dropped into a fold of the hills. Metal glinted in the low angle of the sun. They were standing before the farm machinery graveyard Sean had seen with Etta on their ride to the high country—tires that would never roll,
coils of barbed wire that would never make a fence, an old square hay baler that would never bale hay.

“We called it a John Deere graveyard on the sugarbeet farm,” Katie said.

Sean picked up a bag of golf clubs. Wilson Ultras. He remembered seeing the photograph of the golf hole on Earl Hightower's wall.

“I guess somebody hit into the water too many times,” Katie said. “If there's a putter around here, it'll be bent like a pretzel.”

“This doesn't look like a burial ground,” Sean said. He set down the bag. “Let's keep following the tread.”

They followed the tire tracks over another rise, a pair of vultures circling high, and there it was, though burial pit was an optimistic definition for the acre of mounded earth grown up in sage and sedge. The spadework, or rather backhoe, had been slipshod, cavernous rib cages visible among assorted bones, a cow skull with bits of hide clinging, a calf, the region of its anus eaten away, eyes and gums carried off in bird bills. In one corner of the burial ground, the earth was recently disturbed, the tracks of the tractor frozen in the mud. Stranahan thought it must be where Hightower had buried the colt that had died of colic.

Katie told Sean to stand back and spoke quietly to Lothar. She unsnapped his leash and he began to range back and forth with his nose to the ground.

Katie said, “He doesn't turn back to look at me, did you pick up on that? That's a criterion for a good search dog, he knows what he's supposed to do. Some dogs, they have a good nose but you have to babysit them. Really, the nose is overrated. You can have a dog with a fantastic nose who has no gift for the work and vice versa. You really can't train for interest.”

Sean looked up as shadows striped the ground. Blackbirds passing in a flock, the angle of the sun casting their shadows on the face of the slope.

“He's got it,” Katie said. “That's his alert.”

Sean watched as Lothar stood stiffly, his tail curled. He circled himself, then lay down where a horse hoof attached to a string of cannon bone stuck above the ground. Lothar extended his head along his forepaws, showing his soulful eyes as they approached.

“You're a good dog, yes you are,” Katie said, her voice rising an octave. She dug her fingers into Lothar's heavy coat. He looked up expectantly as she pulled a biscuit from her pocket and broke it into three pieces. “One for you”—she fed Lothar's eager canines—“one for you”—she handed a piece to Sean—“and one for me.” She sat down and patted the ground beside her. “Come on, you can do it. It's a tradition.”

Sean sat down and chewed the biscuit. It wasn't the first of hers he'd tasted, and it wasn't the worst. He washed it down with water from the bottle in his pack and replaced the cap, finding that his hands trembled with excitement.
You bastard,
he thought,
you followed through
.

“Katie, what are the chances that Lothar made a mistake, that he's just reacting to the horse carcass?”

“No way. Decomposing human remains carry a signature scent.”

“Could anything else draw a false positive?”

“Hunch-uh. Lothar tested at ninety-six of a hundred in the SAR trials in Pocatello. That means he could identify carpet squares as marked or unmarked with only four mistakes. It was his fifth straight blue ribbon.”

“So even if the human body is buried beneath the horse, Lothar would alert just to the body.”

“You betcha.”

So much for Jasper's perfect crime,
Sean thought.

“It's an old burial from the look of it.” Katie stroked Lothar's head. “I'll never have another dog like you, no I won't.”

Sean did the math. More than five months had passed since Anker disappeared.

“Okay, give,” Katie said.

He decided to level with her. It took a while, long enough for the sweat to dry on his clothes and a chill to take its place.

“So what are you going to do? Call Martha and get a warrant to exhume?”

“The ranch is in Etta Huntington's name. I'm sure she'll give permission, but they might want the warrant to be safe. If this goes to trial, you need the I's dotted.”

Katie nodded, her jaw working.

“What I'm wondering,” Sean said, “is will there be evidence to link Jasper Fey to the body. He's too smart to have kept the clothes he wore that night, so there goes fiber, and I don't know what else there could be.”

“Well blood, duh,” Katie said. “Maybe he was cut. But you'd need to talk to Wilkerson, she's the one who'd know about transfer.”

“Even if they lifted Jasper's blood, I don't think it's enough to build a case.”

“What about the show? He's on record suggesting this as a good place to ditch a body. Seems incriminating to me.”

“I still think we'd need something solid.”

“You have the pictographs.”

“We can't even prove Cinderella was the one who painted them. And they're subject to a broad interpretation. Maybe if we had the testimony of the mountain man, if Cinderella had talked to him . . .”

He was thinking out loud now, the way Martha did, and remembering something she'd said. Perps got caught either because they talked or they got nervous and did something stupid. Jasper Fey wasn't a career criminal. He'd be nervous, all right. And he'd already committed one act of stupidity by burying the body in a place he'd suggested to the director of a television show. The question was, could he be persuaded to do something else, something that stamped his ticket to the state prison in Deer Lodge.

“Katie, what do you know about entrapment?”

“I know poachers claim it when we trick them into shooting at
animal decoys.” She shrugged. “It's on the books as a defense in Montana. I had to look it up when a guy shot at an elk deke, but then his lawyer said the deke was across the state border, like by ten feet. So the lawyer said Montana law didn't apply, that it didn't matter that he was inside the park when he fired. But the judge convicted his ass anyway. Why? What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking that if Jasper Fey was caught digging up this body, it would be pretty damning. But would it be entrapment if he was doing it because someone let it slip that we were on to him?”

“I don't know, but if a judge says that falls under the legal definition, then any evidence brought to light by the action could be suppressed.”

“How do you suppress a body?”

“Well, maybe not the body, but evidence on the body could be suppressed as having been produced during the entrapment. You could get the DA's case thrown out.”

There was another side to that coin and Sean thought about it. If he pulled Martha in and they exhumed the body, but found no forensic evidence to point a finger, Jasper Fey would skate. He might be suspected in the cover-up, from his suggestion about the burial pit, but a good lawyer could provide an alternative explanation. The simplest was that Fey had told Watt about his idea and Watt had taken his old buddy's suggestion as his own. Watt was the murderer. Fey was guilty of nothing more than giving voice to an idea.

He thought aloud. “If a concerned citizen was to see suspicious behavior and called it in, and law enforcement caught said person in the act . . .”

Katie shook her head. “That would be different. Only an agent for law enforcement can entrap somebody. But don't quote me.”

Sean took a shallow breath. He'd been breathing through his mouth since they'd found the burial pit, probably the stench from the calf was getting to him, though he wasn't eager to test the theory. Katie wrinkled up her nose.

“Let's back off,” she said.

There was nothing more to learn anyway, not without a shovel, and as they hiked to the road their shadows elongated and crept up into the higher ground, as if they were giants stalking the earth with a prehistoric wolf following, the grasses gone gold and the clock ticking down like the beating of a heart.

W
hen Stranahan returned, the last of the light had drained from the slopes. He sat in the John Deere graveyard, a discarded truck tire for cover, feeling the gloom settle around his shoulders and thinking about what could go wrong.

When he'd dropped Katie at her rig, his first call had been to Sam, who had readily fallen in with the plan Sean outlined. It was sixty minutes from Sam's fly shack on the Madison to the Cottonwood Inn, where, according to Etta Huntington, Jasper Fey was a regular at the Tuesday poker table. It was a house game, the dealer from the Inn skimming a percentage of the pot. Anyone with forty dollars could buy in, even a fishing guide who'd worn grooves in his teeth from biting monofilament tippets. Sam ought to be settling his bulk into the chair at the green felt table any minute now. But would Fey be there? And if he was, how would he react when Sam mentioned that he'd heard something about the disappearance of Landon Anker, that the body was buried up around the Crazies and he knew a fella who knew a fella who knew where?

“I wouldn't want to be the one letting the ghost out of the ground,” Sean could hear Sam saying. “A man would need two hookers and a fifth of Jack to get through the night after seeing something like that.” And he could see Sam brushing off questions about how he knew, though everyone would know how, the fact that Sean guided for him common knowledge in the valley. And that would give the rumor credence, because they'd heard his name in association with Martha Ettinger's. It was three degrees of Sean Stranahan.

He drew the SPOT Messenger from his pants pocket and stared at its face. The personal locator beacon, the size of a flip phone, had been a gift from Martha Ettinger, who said she was tired of relying on intuition to know when he was in trouble somewhere off the grid. Popular among elk hunters, the SPOT pinpointed location using satellite telemetry. At the press of a button, the unit would send a “Help” signal, along with GPS coordinates, to a central data-gathering facility, where the alarm would be relayed to the relevant search-and-rescue agency. It also had an “I'm Okay” button that sent an email with GPS coordinates imprinted on a Google map to the four addresses registered with the subscription service—in Sean's case, that was Ettinger, Harold Little Feather, Katie Sparrow, and Sam Meslik. When Katie received the “I'm Okay,” which Sean would send when and if Fey arrived at the scene, she would phone Martha and Harold and tell them to saddle up, metaphorically speaking.

Not lost on Sean was that this was the second night in four days that he'd staked out a location, hoping for someone to incriminate himself. On the prior occasion Martha had chided him about packing nothing more potent than pepper spray, and he had nothing more lethal with him now. He wouldn't need it, not as long as he stayed out of sight, but still, it worried him. Lots of things worry you when the night sucks the light out of the sky, coyotes howl from a canyon in the Crazies, and you've been shivering for an hour.

He switched on his headlamp and ran it across the debris, looking for a weapon. He thought about the bag of golf clubs and cursed himself for having toted it to his truck earlier. Sean didn't play golf, but Sam was threatening to take up the game and Sean thought he'd appreciate the clubs. “What I wouldn't give for a two-iron,” he said aloud, and thought he heard something in the tailing silence of the words. An echo? No, it was no echo.

There—a staccato, rattling sound. It grew louder before fading, then was louder again; it was as if someone had rotated the volume knob of a radio, one way, then the other. Now it had dialed down. Stranahan put his ear to the ground. Silence. He rose to a crouch, and
as he reached up to flip off his headlamp, already worrying that it could have been spotted from the distance, the beam glinted off a curved piece of metal. It was an old iron hay hook, partly buried and as long as his forearm. The wooden handle had been eaten into an hourglass shape, possibly by a porcupine, but the hook was still a hook, hard and sharp and curved like an eagle's talon. Sean pried it from the earth. Better than nothing. He switched the light off and waited.

When he heard the rattling start up again, there was a throaty quality beneath it and Sean knew it was the rumbling of an engine. It was to his north, along the route he'd hiked in with Katie, probably following the same tracks. He guessed it would be the tractor with the backhoe attachment he'd seen outside the stables. The one he'd heard Jasper call the Praying Mantis.

At first it was just a shadow on a shadowed land, a difference only of darkness. Then, the steady creeping of a silhouette. Stranahan told himself he had nothing to worry about. There was no reason for the tractor to turn into the graveyard of machinery; there was no body buried here. But it would pass within stone-throwing distance on its way to the burial pit, some fifty yards farther along the side slope.

He looked at the SPOT, knowing he should have sent the signal as soon as he heard the rattle. But he had wanted to make sure. The unit didn't have an LCD screen like a GPS, just an orange plastic face with buttons, and in the darkness he couldn't see the buttons. If he was more familiar with it, he could have sent a message with his eyes closed, but he'd tested the unit only once, the day after Martha gave it to him. Now he'd have to wait until the tractor rattled out of sight before risking his headlamp.

The tractor crept inexorably along the tracks, complaining about its age, it drew abreast—and passed by. Sean let out a held breath as it climbed a rise where it imprinted against the sky, the backhoe attachment arched, its articulated neck and toothy head in silhouette. The cloud cover had dissipated and for a moment Sean saw the figure
of a person in the tractor seat, or rather a shadow wearing a hat, before the tractor dipped out of sight into the burial pit.

Sean flicked on his headlamp and pressed the “I'm Okay” button of the SPOT. Now it was a matter of waiting until the unit acquired satellites to triangulate his position. It was a clear enough night, what was taking so long?

“Come on.”

There it was, the blinking green light that meant the message had sent.

When he switched off his headlamp, he could see a milky glow over the burial pit. Fey must have switched on the tractor's headlights. It was making a different sound now, a mechanical, waterfall-like sound that he supposed was the engagement of the backhoe. The bucket should be scooping up the horse carcass, cracking bones, its hungry maw digging deeper to unearth Anker's body. Then what? Would the steel beast carry off the body to bury it somewhere else? Probably. Fey would just have to hope no one noticed the disturbed ground until it grew up in sage and spring grasses. But it couldn't carry away all traces of the decomposition, or could it? Sean tried to picture Fey's hands working the levers. Gruesome work. Two hookers and a fifth of Jack work.

The waterfall sound stopped and there was an undertone of the tractor at idle. Sean heard a scurrying sound, a patter of feet. He jerked his head around, straining his eyes in the darkness. A fox? One of the coyotes he'd heard? And something else, a sharp note from the direction of the burial pit. Could it have been a shout? No, probably just a clutch disk slipping. Whatever it was, it wasn't repeated, the waterfall sound resumed, and Sean heard no more pattering of feet.

He got up and stretched his legs. He'd seen what he'd come to see. Now it was a matter of waiting for the cavalry. He looked down toward the valley, trying to conjure headlights out of the blackness. But it had been less than half an hour since he'd sent the signal. Martha was thirty-five miles away, Harold another thirty to the west. It could be a
while. In the meantime, he'd remain out of sight and follow the Mantis from a safe distance. He'd been holding the hay hook in his right hand and slipped it over his shoulder—the gap was just wide enough to do so—and shrugged his jacket on over it. Now he'd have both hands free. He took a step and felt the point dig into his scapula. He began to unbutton the jacket. It was a stupid idea. If he fell, he'd gaff himself like a fish.

He looked toward the pit; the pool of milk cast by the tractor headlights was steady. Once more the motor was at idle. He'd unbuttoned three buttons when again he heard the scurry of feet.

“Stop it. Don't turn around.”