Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (12 page)

PART TWO

THE ARRANGEMENT

Three times before, the watcher had experienced the disturbance in the bloodstream that accompanied the sight of his brother man on the field from which one or the other would never emerge. He had come to think of these encounters as the “arrangements.” But when the hiker had stopped in the meadow to break down his fly rod, the watcher, focusing his binoculars, saw that the hat that the man removed and hung from the trail post was the wrong color and that his hair was black, not the gray curls that framed the face of the simian man he'd observed at the bridge. Now that the watcher knew he'd been mistaken, the hands on the binoculars were quite steady. The fish that thrilled his veins had stopped swimming.

Although the distance from his vantage at the top of the rocky outcrop was too far to note a person's facial features, something about the hiker struck a chord of familiarity with the watcher—the posture perhaps—and for a moment this bothered him. Then he thought no, it didn't matter, for whoever this man was, his presence in the country was innocent. People hiked the Trail Fork nearly every weekend. But the country was big, an accordion of ridges in an evergreen sea, and the small timber benches where he had already buried two bodies were invisible until you were standing on them. The watcher doubted that more than two or three people set their boots on that shoulder of the mountain in a given year, and they were hunters climbing through snow, not hikers in July.

And so what if someone heard a shot today? Shots meant nothing in the high country. They were as common as thunderclaps, forgotten before their echoes rang into silence off the walls of the Sphinx.

The watcher placed a hand over the back of the dog that curled by his side. The sun was up and a few minutes after the hiker had continued up the trail and was out of sight, the watcher stood, moved into the shade of a Douglas fir tree, and sat back down, the dog following. Three hours passed. The shadow moved away from him and he felt sweat bead at his temples under the brim of his hat. He got up, stretched, and sought the shadow. He knelt on one knee and wiped the sweat with the back of his hand. His eyes were drawn to a yellow butterfly that was spotted like a leopard. It was beautiful and he smiled, surprised for a moment that he still had that capacity for wonder. The butterfly flew away.

By the time he raised the binoculars, the dark-haired man had emerged onto the trail and looked to be swiftly striding in the direction of the trailhead. He was leaving. He glanced at his watch. The man with whom he had the arrangement was late. But he might still be coming. There might still be time for death with honor.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Realm of Gods

T
he young couple who had backpacked to the top of Sphinx Mountain had planned the trip to coincide with the woman's peak hours of fertility. If they conceived a boy in this realm of gods, they would name him Arden, which in Greek means “to lift up high.” If they conceived a girl, they would call her Skye.

The man had packed a double-wide sleeping bag and they were zipped snug together at sunset, their tongues tasting each other's freeze-dried dinners—Mountain House Turkey Tetrazzini for him, Chicken Saigon Noodles from Backpacker's Pantry for her—when the shot rang out. Because they were from California, the echoing
kerrawang
that rang back and forth between the walls of the mountains came as a shock. At least to the young woman. She broke off the kiss and jerked her head up.

“What the hell was that?”

“Nothing,” said the man. “It's Montana. People hunt here.” He'd already had to calm her down once, when they heard what they thought was a wolf howling. He put his hand on her neck to pull her down on top of him.

At the second shot, the woman sat bolt upright.

“I'm calling 911,” she said.

“The echoes make it sound closer than it really is.” After climbing some forty-four hundred vertical feet, class three difficulty at that, he was seeing the mood slip away.

“I don't care. I'm calling.” She reached for her backpack and fumbled for the cell in the top pocket.

“You'll never get reception.”

“Hello. This is Mandy Clark . . .”

The young man sighed.

•   •   •

M
artha was in bed with Sheba, the brittle-whiskered Siamese, on one side of her and Goldie, her Australian shepherd, on the other side, when the phone rang. Sheba stretched her claws out and kneaded them into Martha's side.

“Ouch, goddammit.”

She reached for the phone, heard the voice.

“Walt, what the hell are you doing in the office? I thought you were flying to Chicago tomorrow morning.”

“Well, this is morning, if you want to be technical about it. It turned into today about, ah”—she heard him fumbling with something—“an hour ago. Now Chicago time, that's central—”

“Walt!”

“Yeah, okay. Here's the thing. I'm not in the office, but Judy, she worked evening shift and got a call about nine forty-five. Some woman who was camping in the Madison Range 911'ed to report rifle shots.”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“That's exactly what I told myself, but then Judy said where and I thought I oughtta call. This woman, she was backpacking up on Sphinx Mountain. She and her fella, they're spending the night on the peak. Could be anything, but, you know, that's no more'n a half mile or so from the bench where we found those bodies. As the bullet flies, that is.”

“Jesus. Why didn't Judy call me right away?”

“She's off last week, remember? Out of the loop. A shot in the mountains, it's just a notation in the log. I wouldn't be too hard on her if I was you.”

Martha was thinking, why would Judy be telling Walt about a shot in the mountains after he left the office? It dawned on her.

“Are you sleeping with Judy? For Chrissakes, Walt. You're her boss.”

There was a silence. She could hear Walt breathing.

“It just sort of snuck up on us.”

Martha told herself to focus. “What exactly did this backpacker say?”

“Just what I told you. She heard a couple shots before dark and got worried.” His voice rose an octave. “Was there anything else, Judes?”

Martha heard a female voice. She couldn't imagine anyone in bed with Walt. It was simply unimaginable.

“She said they'd heard a wolf howling earlier. You want, I could call in to Dispatch and get that number for you. The woman told Judy they'd be up there all night.”

Martha thought,
He's still there, too. Whoever put those bodies in the ground, if he's killed again, then he's got the shovel out. He's digging the grave. He's got the blood on his hands right now
.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Houndsman

“H
ey, Irish. It's for you.”

Stranahan faced his cards down on the fly-tying table and reached for the receiver that Jonathon Smither extended.

“It's a woman,” Smither said, and raised his eyebrows. “Calling this late at night? Booty call. Got to be a booty call.”

He pulled the phone back just out of Sean's reach and grinned, a big wolf grin.

“Tell her to come on down,” Robin Hurt Cowdry said, his voice slurred. “I'll bet her for her clothes. If it's that barista of yours, there shouldn't be too many layers to peel.”

Sean hadn't spoken to Martinique since they had buried the cat in the countryside. She'd been melancholy and they'd parted with no definite plans. Maybe it was her. He found that he wanted it to be her. He wrenched the receiver from Smither's hand.

“Hello.”

“Your friends have loud voices.” It was Martha Ettinger.

“We were just playing poker.”

“Are you sober enough to drive?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Sure.”

“Do any of your buddies have a gun? I know you don't.”

Sean repeated the question to the table, everyone gathered there but Polly Sorenson, who had gone to bed after losing a Silver Doctor salmon fly, the equivalent of a high-dollar chip had they been playing for money instead of intricately tied feathers.

“I'm always packing,” Smither said. He looked at the surprised faces at the table. “Somebody's got to protect you assholes from the natives.” Were they all so old they didn't remember that he'd brought a shotgun last year to hunt pheasants? It was in the eaves.

•   •   •

S
tranahan drove the last five miles with the running lights, the mountains bulking in the foredistance, erasing constellations as he drew closer. He wiped the sweat from his palms as the engine ticked down at the trailhead. Ettinger had been brusque on the phone, sketched the details in thirty seconds, the possibility of another killing, the fact that he could beat her to the trailhead by forty minutes and she wanted him there to take note of any vehicle leaving the scene. The shotgun was a precaution. Under no circumstances was he to play hero by trying to detain anyone from driving away. She said she'd meet him there and hung up before Stranahan could tell her that he'd been hiking the trail himself only a few hours before.

He switched on his headlamp and jotted down the plate numbers of the two vehicles in the campground and those at the turnaround, the same Dodge pickup and Volvo wagon that had been there when he had driven out that afternoon. Returning to his rig, he slipped the Beretta over and under from the mutton-lined leather case, jointed the barrels onto the action, and dropped a couple shells into the chambers. He walked up the trail a few hundred yards to the first creek crossing, which consisted of a single log hewn flat on top, and edged back into the trees. He sat down on soft duff under the branches of a spruce, wrapped his hands around the barrels of the shotgun, and listened to the silence settle about him. He was close enough to the trail to get at least a vague impression of face and stature, should anyone pass by in the dark.

The night was chill, and after twenty minutes he started to shiver. He stood up to get his blood moving and heard a faint yelp—a dog? He sat down out of sight of the trail and waited.

And got nervous. Had it been a dog? If it was, it would scent him and investigate, likely as not followed by its master. He tried to think of excuses for being found there. A twisted ankle? No, he was too close to the parking lot. It would be tough to explain his presence, even if he ditched the shotgun. He could retreat farther from the trail, but that meant giving up any chance of seeing the hiker clearly enough to identify him later.

He heard the yelp again. Now he was sure it was a dog. Making up his mind to leave, he took the trail at a trot and arrived at the turnaround five minutes later with a plan. Opening the hood of the Land Cruiser, he used a box-end wrench to loosen the cable nuts on the battery terminals, hefted the battery out, and replaced it with a half-dead battery that he'd been hauling around in the back of the rig, meaning to get it charged up at the Exxon station. He tightened the nuts to secure the cables to the posts of the old battery, covered the good battery with his sleeping bag, and got behind the wheel.

He didn't wait long. When the flashlight beam bobbed into sight and swept over the vehicles at the trailhead, Sean cranked the ignition without putting his foot on the accelerator. The motor ground away without catching. He tried again—
urr, urr, urrrrr
—and climbed out to peer under the hood. The skin on his back crawled as the light swept over him from behind, illuminating the engine block.

He turned around, said, “Must have left the dome light on. I keep trying it every hour, trying not to run it down any more than it is. If you could give me a jump I'd be obliged. I've been here 'bout half the night.” Falling into the drawl that came so naturally in barbed-wire country.

He tilted his head so that his headlamp flashed on the face of the man who approached him. The face was canyoned with shadows where the light glanced across at right angles. It was a lived-in face, skeptical, the eyes unfriendly slits under a felt Stetson. The man's cheek muscles flexed, pulling up the corners of a mustache gone to seed, the kind he'd once heard a woman call a “molest-stache.”

“You picked a bad place to run out of juice. A fella could wait here a while, all right. Shit, let me get this pack off my back. And take the goddamned light off my face.” The voice was as hard as the expression.

Sean said, “Sorry,” and watched the man's back as he walked to the pickup. He was followed by a hound with a triangle silhouette, its deep chest tapering to a belly no thicker than an Irishman's wallet. The stout, short-barreled bolt gun strapped on one side of the man's backpack shone dully in the lambency.

Just stay calm
, he told himself. Knowing, for reasons he had never understood, that the admonition wasn't necessary. He had always managed to keep his heart in his chest when the world around him began to spin. As a reaction to potential danger, it wasn't exactly the same as absence of fear, nor was it courage. Courage, in Stranahan's book, required an active summoning of will in a situation where the natural response was flight. Sean's composure was innate and required no summoning. Percy McGill, the retired Boston police detective who had headed investigations for Sean's grandfather's law firm, had witnessed the character trait on several occasions. “Most guys”—he'd jabbed a finger at Sean's chest—“it takes them years on the beat to grow your kind of nerve. But by then they have the experience you don't. Nerve without experience, that buys a man his tombstone.”

Sean heard the engine start up. The truck idled down, coming to stop a few feet from the Cruiser's front bumper. The man brushed aside Sean's offer of help and hooked up the cables. “No offense, but I don't know you from Adam. I seen a battery explode once. Took a man's face off, half of it, per' near. You just turn the key when I gun the engine.”

Where the hell was Ettinger?

Sean turned the key and the engine coughed and caught.

“So who am I thanking?” he said.

The man threw the cables into the back of the pickup and stood by the open driver's side door, the dog at his feet.

“I gotta hit it,” he said. “My hound here, he took after a lion and I spent half the goddamn night running him down, trying to get to him before a wolf did. I caught up to him down at the crick, I come this close to putting a bullet in his head. And this dog, this is a dog never done a wrong thing in his life before.”

Sean reached down to pat the dog's head. His arm was trapped in a vise grip halfway through the movement.

“Son, don't you never put your hand to a lion hound lest you have a mind to lose it. Judge here, he's a Walker dog and got a mild temperament, but if this was my ridgeback, my kill dog, Bear—Bear'd take that hand right off'n you.”

The man whistled the hound into the cab and climbed in behind it.

“I heard a couple shots earlier,” Sean said. He hadn't, but Ettinger had told him about the 911 call. “Was that you?”

“You're full of questions, aren't you? But yeah, I emptied a couple trying to pull Judge off the track.” He touched the brim of his hat. “I hope you learned a lesson tonight,” he said.