Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (23 page)

“It was the first time.”

“Did he mention where he was going?”

“Like back to Sphinx Mountain? No, nothing like that. I tried to call him back a few minutes ago. I'm worried about him.”

“Oh, I wouldn't be,” Ettinger said. But she could feel the artery throbbing in her neck. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I think I'll take a coffee after all.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Loose Ends

S
tranahan wiped the sweat from his face and squatted to examine the leaf. The spot of blood was the size of a dime. He placed it on his palette as being the same hue, but a half shade darker than the Indian paintbrush that bloomed along the trail. Dry but not dry dark. He glanced at the GPS readout on his Garmin. He had passed the trail junction and was exactly .46 miles west and a little south of his objective, the slope of timber encompassed by the second circle on the map. A fifteen-minute hike, twenty when you took into account the contour lines, indicating an uphill grind at the end.

One thing Stranahan had learned from Harold Little Feather was that the tail of a blood drop points in the direction of travel. The tail pointed downslope, toward the Trail Fork of Bear Creek, not far from where he'd fished it the day he'd hiked up here alone. Looking toward the creek, he spotted a clump of grass with a single crimson stalk. The blood trail could have been left by a deer that had escaped a mountain lion, all but one of its claws. Or it could be from a squirrel dripping from the jaws of a pine martin. Or—Stranahan swung the Weatherby rifle off his shoulder—it could be human.

He dialed the variable scope down to two, its lowest power but with the widest field of view. Forty yards to the creek, the bottom so overgrown with thistle and chokecherry that he could hear but not see the water. Stranahan kept the muzzle up, so as not to tangle in the brush. Twenty yards below him the slope became convex, the country it concealed inching into view as he stalked down the hillside. Stranahan stopped. Ahead of him the undergrowth was flattened over a considerable area, as if a heavy animal had fallen. A sour dog smell invaded Stranahan's nostrils and he felt his insides contracting. He trained the muzzle of the rifle on the flattened brush and said, “Hey, bear.” Nothing. He glanced down, found a rock, and heaved it into the creek bottom. It made a hollow cracking sound as it smacked onto the loose shale on the bank.

Stranahan pushed through the branches. Thorns wicked as a goshawk's talons tore at his skin. Something wet and cold traced his cheek and clung there. It was a finger of clotted blood, suspending from a thorn. Wiping it off his face and looking straight ahead, he almost stepped on the dog. The animal was on its side, its eyes staring ahead, its upper body matted with blood. Its flanks were shivering and Stranahan could detect shallow breathing. For a moment his hands relaxed their grip on the rifle. Bad enough, but he had expected far worse. Breathing deeply, he glanced around before bending to examine the dog. A dark bird fluttered its wings a few feet away. Or was it a bird? As the shape resolved into focus, Stranahan saw that the “bird” was a strip of cloth dangling from the branch of a willow that shielded the creek. He fingered it—charcoal-colored denim, purple wet with blood. He felt a constriction in his chest and parted the willows with the rifle barrel. He thought he was prepared for what lay crossways to the current, changing the song of the creek. He wasn't. When his stomach was empty, Stranahan forced his way upstream and with his back turned to the mangled remains washed his mouth out with water.
Christ.
He steeled himself and turned around.

You couldn't even call it a body. The lower half at best, backside facing up. The jeans were ripped and one foot had been bitten or hacked off at the ankle. Sean patted the back pockets for a wallet, noticing the left one had a ring worn in the fabric in the shape of a snoose container. He rolled the body over. A belt buckle glinted under the gray coils of eviscerated intestines. Stranahan felt his gorge rise and turned his head. He patted the right front pocket, felt something hard, and fingered out an unfired rifle cartridge nearly five inches long. He glanced at the numbers stamped onto the base—.475 No. 2 N.E. It was the caliber that matched the bullet he and Katie Sparrow had found in the tree root. He pocketed the cartridge and patted the other front pocket. Nothing. It didn't matter. He'd seen the buckle before, big as an elk's hoof, the bucking bronc embossed in copper on a pewter background. It was Emmitt Cummings's belt.

When he returned to the dog, its up eye was swimming in the socket and for a second focused on him. Stranahan unwrapped a space blanket he carried in his daypack and gently tucked it around the dog's body. The dog was small with a collie face and a white coat puzzled by sable and iron gray patches; the eye staring at him was blue. Despite the dog's being covered in blood, there was no obvious indication of injury. He left it and climbed back to the trail. He looked uphill—the direction from which the wounded man must have stumbled down to the creek. On the other side of the meadow and about three hundred vertical feet above it was an outcrop of white rocks he'd noted on that earlier trip. Stranahan crossed the meadow and began to climb, only the occasional blood drop to keep him on course, his finger on the button safety of the Weatherby. The snort froze him. It didn't
sound
like a bear, but he was taking no chances and slowly began to back down the slope. The snort came again, loud in the enclosed space of the trees. Stranahan felt the tension flood out of his body. This wasn't the cough of a grizzly bear readying to charge, but a phlegmy vibrato whinny. Less cautiously now, he climbed, arriving at a bench of more or less open ground above the rocks. The brown eyes of a horse regarded him with wild trepidation. It backed warily away, a rope lead dragging between its hooves.

“It's all right, Sally Ann.”

His eyes took in the camp: a canvas A-frame tent, mildew-spotted, probably as old as the man who'd pitched it, a fire ring of blackened stones with the butts of two handrolled cigarettes in the ashes. Thumb-thick kindling was neatly stacked to one side. A blackened iron cook pot suspended over the fire from a stick driven into the ground at an angle. A pack saddle was draped over a lodgepole stringer; hanging off one of the pack forks was a jute coffee bean bag half filled with oats. It was an organized camp. Stranahan's eyes caught a gleam of light. Twenty yards from the tent, on the lip of the rock outcrop, a pair of binoculars suspended from a branch stub under a Ponderosa pine. The duff under the tree had been heaped up to make a soft seat. Stranahan set the rifle against the tree trunk and sat and brought up the binoculars. He looked down at the trail winding in and out of sight below him.

From this vantage, the watcher would have had a clear view of anyone turning onto the trail that led to the saddle between the mountains. The observation post had been picked with care and for a minute Stranahan was puzzled. Why hadn't Cummings seen him coming up the trail yesterday? Then he remembered that it was raining and the meadow at the trail junction was smothered in fog. Cummings could not have seen him from this vantage, and in any case, he was expecting Kauffeld, if he came at all, to be guided by the coordinates marking the second circle on the map. Cummings might well have waited for him there, while Stranahan, along with Ettinger and Jarrett, was waiting at the other location. No wonder he hadn't come to the call.

Since stepping onto the bench, Stranahan had not noticed any blood, but then his eyes hadn't been on the ground. As he made a second tour of the camp, the chestnut quarterhorse clopped along a few yards behind him, keeping its distance but obviously wanting the assurance of companionship. Stranahan spoke to it in low tones and approached the tent. One front flap was loose, the other held open with a string tie. A single ray of sunlight bisected the interior shadow of the tent. Stranahan puzzled over it, arriving at the conclusion that it had to be admitted by a hole in the back of the tent, since that side faced the sun. He suspected what he'd find before he found it, the shot spray of blood on the interior tent wall. There was more blood inside the entrance and a long smear on the open side of the tent flaps. A military surplus sleeping bag was soaked through. A leather rifle scabbard embossed with roses lay beside it, but no rifle. There was nothing else in the tent but a Coleman lantern tipped on its side, a leather-bound Bible, the cover smeared with bloody fingerprints, and a pair of reading glasses. Stranahan pulled the sleeping bag aside and found a vial of pills.
XENAZINE
(
tetrabenazine
). Prescribed to Emmitt James Cummings. “To suppress chorea and associated involuntary body movements.”

Stranahan tried to picture how it happened. Cummings had been in the tent when the shot was fired—that much was obvious. Probably early, dawn or shortly after. Wounded, he had struggled out of the bag and fled across the bench and down the hill. Running would account for the scarcity of blood drops, the skin and clothing shifting over the entrance and exit holes in his body. Where Stranahan had seen the matted grass was where the man had fallen. Then he had got up and made it as far as the creek. There he'd died, or possibly been followed and shot again by his murderer. The grizzly had come along later, following her nose for the windfall as she'd done once before on Sphinx Mountain. She had a long memory and an appetite made ravenous by the cubs depending on her. She had probably knocked the dog aside as it sought to defend its master. Then she'd dismembered the body and carried half of it away, possibly as a reaction to having been blasted with pepper spray in the vicinity only two weeks before.

Ever since floating the river with Melvin Kauffeld, Stranahan had been shifting pieces of a puzzle in his head. He had made them fit well enough that the watcher's identity didn't come as a surprise. In fact, he'd counted on it. It was one reason he had not called Ettinger before driving to the trailhead. Cummings he read as a man who lived by a code. Cummings wouldn't shoot a man in cold blood.

The puzzle piece that he'd had to force into place was the voice mail left on Kauffeld's phone. Although muffled, it didn't drawl like Cummings's voice and the fact of it seemed out of character. It was a transgression of the arrangement, and the taunt at the end—“Be a man”—seemed out of character. It betrayed desperation, a last attempt by the caller to meet up with a man who at that point obviously wasn't coming.

He's tying up loose ends
, Stranahan thought.

He ducked out of the tent and moved into the cover of the trees, where he sat down. He'd been up since five and the day was catching up to him. The horse clopped up and showed him the dominoes of her teeth and then put her big tongue on his head.

“I'm sorry, girl,” Stranahan said, reaching up to stroke her cheek, “but he isn't coming back.” He was thinking of the one time he'd met Cummings. Cowboy through and through, not the western cliché but something better: a man of clear and shrewd eyes, as forthcoming and kind as he was stoic and tough-minded, as gentle with his animals as he was hard on himself. It was a lot to infer from a twenty-minute conversation, but Stranahan felt an empathy toward Cummings that he knew was not shared by Martha Ettinger. Ettinger saw the world in black and white. Cummings's “arrangement” with Melvin Kauffeld and the ones who preceded him were shaded a gray that she couldn't come to terms with. But Stranahan accepted the apparent contradictions. As far as he was concerned, any crimes perpetrated from this camp were set in motion by consenting adults and paled in malice compared with the one that had been committed here only a few hours ago. Cummings had not died in a fair fight, but had been shot through a tent wall while in his sleeping bag. The shooting was an act of cowardice perpetrated by someone who was now, very probably, lying in wait—he punched buttons on his GPS—exactly .43 miles due east. That man would be waiting to align his sights on a man who wore a red hat. Stranahan was unsure what threat the man in the red hat represented to the killer. His understanding was that there had been no communication between Cummings and Melvin Kauffeld that hinted at the involvement of a third party. But maybe Cummings's killer couldn't take that chance.

Stranahan knew that if he turned and hiked back the way he had come, the man who lay in wait would walk out of the mountains free from the consequences of his actions. Stranahan had noted the license plate of the champagne-colored Toyota Highlander that was parked at the trailhead when he arrived. Presumably the owner could be traced and the vehicle would place him on the mountain on the date Cummings was shot. But unless a bullet could be found, and a rifle found that shot it, there would be no evidence of murder. And Stranahan doubted there was a bullet. If it remained in the body, it was probably in the upper half that had been carried away by the bear. Quite possibly it was now inside the bear's gut system. It would be excreted on a distant slope of mountain, just another hunk of lead to poison the earth.

“I'll be back, old girl.”

Stranahan stood. He lifted the bolt of Peachy's rifle, pulling it back just far enough to show the glint of the cartridge. No time to regret not having test-fired the weapon before driving to the trailhead. He replaced the bolt and thumbed the safety off. He slung the binoculars hanging from the tree branch around his neck. Then he started off on a contour that would take him into the country inscribed by the red circle on the map, his focus narrowing as he lost himself to that throbbing pulse of blood that is the hunting instinct, still intact under the pallor of modern skin.

•   •   •

H
arold Little Feather felt the phone vibrate in his jeans pocket. He shifted his hips and reached it, keeping his left hand on the wheel.

“Martha, my dear.”

“I forwarded the website for Cummings's outfitting business to the Langhor woman. Kauffeld ID'd the photos as the guy he knew as Wade. I got Crazy Conner to sign off. I'm on my way with the warrant right now.”

“I'm just past the turnoff to Pony.”

“Then I've got you by twenty miles. There's a pullout where you can see the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail. Up on the pass?”

“The path of the great white snake. I always spit out the window driving by. We should go in my truck, don't you think? It's unmarked.”