Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (9 page)

“Mr. Stranahan”—it was the first time Willoughby had referred to him by his surname—“the members of the club are beyond suspicion.”

Sean backed off. “Show me the box,” he said.

During his exchange with Willoughby and Sorenson, neither Jonathon Smither nor Robin Hurt Cowdry had uttered a word. They seemed as entranced by the mystery as Stranahan was. He watched as the long ash on Cowdry's cigar dropped onto the porch floor. And why wouldn't he be concerned? Sean thought. As the five club members had contributed equally to the fly's purchase, each had lost an investment of more than three thousand dollars.

•   •   •

T
hey gathered around the tying table, Willoughby's Wheatley fly box opened under the intense halogen eye of a goosenecked lamp. The box layout was similar to the one belonging to Winston that Sean had seen on his first visit, with lidded compartments on one side and steel clips to hold wet flies and streamers on the other.

The club president pointed to the only empty compartment. “That's where the Gordon was.”

“It was the only fly in that compartment?” Sean asked.

“I didn't want to crowd it and mash the hackles. The Gray Ghost was in one of the large clips, this one to be precise.” He tapped a clip with his forefinger.

Sean scanned the box. Most of the compartments contained several flies. Together with the flies in the clips, the box could easily hold a couple hundred. “Are any other flies missing?”

“None of the collectibles. About the rest, I couldn't say. I don't count them each time I go fishing. But if more than a couple dozen were gone, I'd like to think I would notice.”

“What about the rest of you? Has any gear disappeared, not just flies?”

“What are you getting at?” Jonathon Smither said.

“There are two ways to look at this,” Sean said. “First, as the theft of two valuable flies. If that's the case, someone had to know what he was looking for, have a good idea where to find it, and then—and this is key—be able to recognize the flies when he saw them. It limits the scope of the investigation to people who would know their value. Besides Kenneth Winston and the four of you in this room, and maybe the mystery bidders for the Quill Gordon, I don't know who that could be. Once Patrick transferred the flies from their display frames, which identified them as antiques, they become trout flies like any other. You see what I mean?” He went on, “But if you look at this as part of a larger-scale burglary—rods, reels, fly boxes, cameras . . .” He shrugged. “Then the flies become part of the haul and whoever took them doesn't know what he has.”

Willoughby shook his round head. “I must be getting old,” he said. “I honestly never considered the angle that the specific flies weren't the target.”

“But why just take one or even a couple dozen flies out of a box?” Cowdry asked. “Why not take the whole box?”

Sean frowned. “Maybe because a missing box would raise more suspicion, although that points to theft of a very petty nature. But to get back to my original question. Have any of you suspected that any of your gear was stolen since you built the clubhouse?”

Nobody had. Then Sorenson, even as he was shaking his head no, said in a reflective voice, “But the damnedest thing happened last summer. I put my Orvis in the rack on the porch and the next morning it was gone. I thought I must have broken it down and cased it, and you guys were hurrying me along—it was that day we fished Willow Creek—so I grabbed my six-weight Sage and got in the car. Then when we got back, I found that the Orvis was in the rack, all strung up and right where it was supposed to be. How had I not seen it there in the morning? Honest to God, I thought I was having a senior moment. I didn't tell anyone because it was embarrassing.”

“We're all getting there,” Willoughby said.

Sean didn't know what to think about Sorenson's story. Who would steal a rod only to replace it in the rack the next day? But the incident called into question the vulnerability of the cottage, which was only a short distance from the riverbank. Was it customary for the members to leave six-hundred-dollar graphite rods in an outside rack overnight?

Willoughby spoke for the group. “I know it looks like we're inviting someone to steal, but honestly we haven't had a problem. It's against regulations to fish this stretch from a boat, so there aren't many floaters, and anyone who hikes this far from the public access doesn't strike me as the kind of man who would swipe someone else's gear. And you've seen how hard it is to drive in here.”

The latter remark was in reference to the two locked gates that led to the development, which until a dozen years ago had been a sprawling ranch. Stranahan had been loaned a key to the first gate, three road miles downriver at the entrance to the development, and given a four-digit combination to the second lock on the spur road that led to the clubhouse.

“You never left your vest hanging outside on one of those pegs, did you?”

“Oh, gosh no. Whenever I wasn't fishing, I hung it on the chair you're sitting on. I was careful to lock the place when I left.”

“Did you ever return and find that it was unlocked?”

“No. I would have noticed that.”

“Who has keys?”

“All of us here. Then there's the caretaker of the development, who used to be the ranch manager back when it was one. His name is Emmitt Cummings. These are mostly summer homes, so someone has to be able to get in if there's a fire or gas explosion or something of that nature. The only other person who has a key is Geneva Beardsley from Ennis. She's the cleaning person who opens the place up before we fly in and closes it back up in the fall. Her husband is sort of a jack-of-all-trades, keeps up the grounds, drains the pipes before the cold weather sets in. The inside of this place falls well below zero in the winter. You can leave whiskey or a bottle of vodka in the liquor cabinet, but last winter we forgot a couple bottles of zin and there wasn't enough alcohol to keep them from exploding.”

“It was Maryhill Proprietor's Reserve, too,” Jonathon Smither said.

“Jonathon has an interest in a couple Argentine wineries. You could call him the club's sommelier. The wine you had with dinner was a Malbec.”

“From the Lujan de Cuyo in Mendoza Province,” Smither added.

“Sean,” Willoughby said, “at the risk of coming across as self-satisfied bastards, we're all of us comfortably well-off. We're not concerned about the monetary loss. This is not a theft of money. It is a theft of history. Come stay with us this week. You'll get paid for having a good time, if nothing else. Meals and drinks included.”

“And if you need to get your mind right, we have some wicked bud, mate,” Cowdry added.

“Christ, Robin.” Willoughby shook his head. “Sean's going to think we're a bunch of old hippies.”

“And that would be wrong?”

“I like to think of us more as Renaissance men.”

“You had me at ‘wicked bud,'” Stranahan said.

He had one more question about keys. Was there a hidden spare? Willoughby said he'd show him on his way out. He led him around the side of the clubhouse, past a woodblock used as a base for splitting firewood. The key was under a glass electrical insulator in the shape of a bell. The insulator was on top of the electrical meter, a little above head height. It was maybe the third place a prospective burglar would look for a key, after lifting up the front doormat and turning over the big stone beside the steps.

“I know,” Willoughby said. “It probably expands the pool of suspects, huh?”

To anyone with half a brain
, Sean thought.

Instead, he just said good night and walked to his Land Cruiser, his mind already having traveled sixty miles up the road, to a grain elevator with a cat calendar on the wall.

•   •   •

A
s he pushed open the door, Stranahan saw that the lamp on the end table was on, with the shawl Martinique had worn to the Inn draped over the shade. She was in her print nightgown, sitting at one end of the couch with the two cats, Mitsy and Miss Daisy. Her sad smile told him that Ichiro's suffering was over.

“He died a couple hours ago. I gave him some kitty Valium and he was peaceful, he just slipped away. I hoped maybe you could help me bury him tomorrow, maybe take a drive somewhere in the country.”

She patted the couch. “Come sit with me. I can't go back up to that bedroom tonight.”

“I'm sorry it's so late,” he said.

“That's okay. I should be exhausted, but it's a relief now that it's over.”

She rearranged herself so that she was leaning into him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about your day.”

Sean did, feeling the comfort of her body pressing softly into him and the rhythm of her breath, and realized that what Martinique offered was a tranquil envelope of life that he had never really known. He had been caught in the snare of infatuation before, and in the course of his troubled marriage the phases of deeper love had opened like doors before him, and had shut behind him, isolating him in rooms that more and more he'd just wanted to escape from. By comparison, Vareda Beaudreux, the riverboat singer he'd fallen for last summer, was a burning fire; her passion was the tail of a comet that he was still riding. But Martinique, Martinique was a warm scent and a slow heartbeat and a window wide open.

Martinique turned her face up to kiss him, and kissed him warmly and then more urgently as she twisted into his lap and pressed her breasts against his chest.

But when she pulled back to look at him there were tears in her eyes.

“I'm afraid I'm going to ask you to go home,” she said. “There's part of me that wants to love you all up, right here on this couch. It would be an affirmation of life that I really need. But this isn't the way for us to start, with me crying and you wondering what kind of crazy you've gotten into. You come back tomorrow morning, though. I'll make you breakfast.”

•   •   •

S
ean was in time for last call at the Cottonwood Inn. He took his draft beer to the pool room, empty except for Sam Meslik, who was practicing rail shots on a battered Brunswick.

“Kimosabe,” Sam said. “Doris told me you were here last night with a lady friend. Said the two of you looked like Branga-Fucking-Lina. I didn't have the heart to tell her she sold mochas with her ta-tas.”

“How do you know who she was?”

Sam cocked his face sideways, his head down over the cue. “Bro, there can't be two Martiniques in the state of Montana.
If
that's her name.”

He rammed the two-ball into a side pocket.

“I got to go drop a few buckeyes,” he said. He ambled off to the men's room.

When he returned, Stranahan picked up the conversation in stride. “I'm going to disappoint you, Sam,” he said. “All I've been doing is sleeping on her couch.”

“Why don't you just borrow an apron and wash her dishes?” He lined up another shot and handed Sean the cue. “Get your head down over the ball. Now stick your butt out. Farther. Farther.”

Sean raised his eyebrows.

“What?” Sam held up his hands. “I just thought the position ought to come natural for you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Bullet and the Betrothed

“I
told you to be here this morning.”

Sean glanced at the clock on the wall of Ettinger's office. Eleven fifty-four.

“It is morning, Martha.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was helping a friend bury a cat.”

“Uh-huh.” Ettinger looked at him with her mouth downturned.

“I think I know that look,” Sean said. “So, did you cut that piece of metal out of the root?”

“First things first.” She unbuttoned the breast pocket of her khaki shirt and withdrew the ring Katie had found with the metal detector. “Take a look at the inside of the band.”

He canted the ring to catch the light. The etching was shallow, but clear.
For Fidelia. From This Day Forever.

“It's pronounced Fie-de-leya,” Ettinger said. “Spanish origin.”

“So we're looking for a guy who had been married to an Hispanic woman?”

“We don't know if the ring belongs to the body, but if it does, then yes, probably.” She told him about the hairs Doc Hanson had examined.

“Katie and I weren't wasting our time up there, were we?”

“No, you weren't. But next time, go through the channels and call me first. Okay?”

Sean nodded. “It was covered by a couple inches of dirt. On the upper bench where we found the second body.”

“Why do you suppose the ring was buried?”

“Maybe the man knew he was about to die and didn't want whoever killed him to have it. Or maybe it was a farewell gesture, he kissed the ring and buried it as a way of saying goodbye to his wife.”

Ettinger, nodding, set the ring on her desk and reached into her pocket for the bullet. She flicked the nose of the bullet with her forefinger. It spun around on the desktop. When it stopped, the nose pointed at Sean's heart.

“Pure steel?”

“Steel jacket. Lead core. The detector only registered the jacket.”

“Hmm.”

“That's what I told myself when Doc cut it out.”

“It's an awful big bullet.”

“I hunt elk with a .30-06,” Martha said. “The diameter of the bore is .308. The bullet weight is 180 grains.”

“And this?”

“Four eight eight. Five hundred grains. No deformation, even after hitting the root. It's a solid, like an armor-piercing bullet.”

“What's it from?”

“Without the cartridge case it's hard to say. You'd think a heavy handgun, like a .44 Magnum. But the diameter doesn't exactly match any handgun caliber and the bullet is way too heavy. Walt thought it might be from a military rifle. A long-range sniper gun with a tripod, like you see in the movies. But they weigh about thirty pounds. Not the kind of gun you carry up the face of a mountain. But we haven't had much time to look into it.”

“I was hoping maybe there would be some residue on it, like skin tissue,” Stranahan said.

“Doc managed to scrape some matter out of the grooves at the base of the bullet and sent it to the lab. The bullet also could have transferred tissue as it went through the root.”

“So with a little luck you'll have DNA?”

“So with a lot of luck we'll have DNA.”

“Why tell me? You made it clear my part in the investigation is over.”

“Yet here we are with a ring and a bullet you dug up. Take me through it from start to finish.”

Ettinger put her fingers to her throat as she listened. “What an enterprising young woman our Katie is,” she said. She put her hands behind her head and leaned back, staring at her office door. Stranahan glanced at her wall calendar. Not cats. Dogs.

Ettinger refocused.

“When I say we haven't had much time to look into this, I mean we don't and we aren't going to. Walt's flying back to Chicago for his sister's wedding at the end of the week. Warren's off starting the Fourth for the next five days. Harold's on indefinite leave. I want to put names on those bodies, and I want to put a name on who put them there, and I can't do that with a skeleton crew. I wondered if you wanted in.”

“I thought it had to be a breaking crisis before you could deputize me.”

“I'm not deputizing you. I'm hiring you as an outside investigator for special projects. There's a discretionary fund I can dip into that I've never dipped into. We can't match your day rate, but I think we could work something out to your satisfaction.”

“There could be a conflict.” He told her about the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club.

“The ‘Case of the Missing Ghost,'” she said. “It sounds interesting.” The tone of her voice said it wasn't.

“It's important to them.”

“All right. Here's what you do. Go on down there this week, find your precious Ghost and that other fly . . .”

“Quill Gordon.”

“Quill Gordon. You're what, fifteen, twenty miles from the base of the Sphinx? If you can get free, hike back up there and have another look around. Use your imagination. I don't expect you to find anything, but then you found the bullet, so . . .” She shrugged. “Then check back with me after the Fourth and we'll go to work, just us probably and Harold once he's up and around. He was released from Deaconess this morning.” She pursed her lips and looked off for a second. “I don't know that it's relevant, but the bodies, they were older gentlemen. Doc says they had terminal illnesses.”

She held up a hand as Sean began to speak. “I'll tell you about it next week. Hopefully, we'll know more then.”

“I was going to ask if you have any advice about finding the trout flies.”

“Sure. If what this guy—”

“Willoughby,” Sean prompted.

“Will-oh-bee. If he's telling the truth, then it sounds like an inside job. For some reason, one of the members isn't as far above reproach as Willoughby thinks he is. Maybe the barber fellow. Or Willoughby himself could be guilty.” She fingered her jawline. “He could have acted as agent for a third party. Buy the fly, say he lost it, and then get paid back the dollar amount by whoever he turned it over to. Walk away with the shares his buddies put into the purchase. Fourteen, fifteen grand, it isn't chump change.”

“I think it's more likely he lost the flies out of his box and is just too embarrassed to say so.”

“Could be,” Martha said. “If that's what happened, then your flies are blowing in the wind, like the song says.”

“Or . . .” Sean sat back in the chair, compressed his lips.

Martha flicked the backs of her hands at him. “Shoo,” she said. “Do your thinking on somebody else's dime. I'll see you next weekend. But give me a call if you find anything up on that mountain.”

•   •   •

W
hen Stranahan left, Ettinger steepled her fingers and rested her chin on them. She looked at the blinking light on her phone. A message had come in while they were talking. She cocked her finger like a gun and punched the button, then grimaced when she heard the voice of Gail Stocker, the cops reporter at the
Bridger Mountain Star
.
Did she have the autopsy results? Had they revealed any clues to the identity of the bodies?
Stocker was a snip of a woman, barely five feet tall, but she was a badger once she got her teeth into a story. Martha had grudging respect for her, but she hated dealing with the press. She knew the questions that would be asked and always jotted down notes to set the parameters of her responses. Then she'd go off point and say something stupid. Either she said something she regretted or she grunted and stonewalled, neither of which endeared her to the public. She slid the autopsy report out of the top drawer of her desk and reluctantly picked up the phone.

“So these guys were pretty sick, huh?” Stocker said after Ettinger had filled her in.

“They had terminal diseases, yes.”

“So what's the cause of death?”

“That's yet to be determined.” She had withheld mention of the bullet and any trace DNA evidence that might have clung to it. If there was a killer out there, she didn't want him destroying evidence.

“But you said the one guy had a hole in his head that is consistent with a bullet wound.”

“No, I said he had pieces of skull missing that might have been caused by any number of things and which may or may not have been the cause of death. You're the one who introduced the word ‘bullet.'”

“But you aren't ruling it out?”

“We're not ruling anything out at this point in the investigation.”

“Including suicide? It sounds like these guys might have been looking for a way to check out. Maybe they had some kind of deal going where they buried each other.”

“That's speculating.”

“If you're holding something back, we can talk off the record.”

“All I know for sure,” Ettinger said, “is there's a couple of . . .” She paused, thinking back to her conversation with Stranahan about the missing trout flies. “A couple of old gray ghosts up there haunting that mountain, and I'm not going to be satisfied until we've put them to rest.”

In the newsroom, the reporter jotted in her notebook.
Gray Ghost Murders? Ghosts of Sphinx Mountain? Mystery of the Gray Ghosts?

Ettinger hung up the phone, not realizing that she'd just provided a headline for the next day's front page.