Mortal Fall (8 page)

When I didn’t find anything interesting on the statements, I placed a call to Cathy and asked if she could come to headquarters later for a few more questions. I figured a less personal environment might be conducive for her to talk. Then I called Dr. Pritchard, whose practice was halfway between Columbia Falls and Whitefish on Highway 40. It was coming up on his lunch hour, so we arranged to meet at a local pub in downtown Whitefish. It was a popular place to go because they had great sandwiches and a wide selection of microbrews on tap.

I found parking on the main drag going through the town, which was tough to do in the summer with all the tourists visiting. I could remember a time in the nineties when you’d rarely find more than ten cars downtown on any given weekday, even in the heart of summer or ski season. Now, people from all over the United States and especially Canada swarmed the place. Many had second homes in the area and others were just visiting the mountains and all the Flathead Valley had to offer in the summer: boating, golfing, mountain biking, fishing, rafting. . . . I stepped out of the car and walked the busy sidewalk until I reached the bar.

Whitefish was prospering, but it was conflicted about its growth, trying not to seem too contrived and Aspen-like with the influx of wealth, and at the same time, trying to keep from bulging into a basic, midsize sprawl with typical billboards and chain stores that would destroy the very quaintness that lured tourists in the first place. Right now, it was chaos, with roads under construction and the building of banks, office buildings, and new restaurants on several of its corners.

I looked up and saw the ski hill. Barely even ten minutes and you could be up in the Whitefish Range enjoying the wilderness. I felt an intimate connection to the wilderness surrounding me and thought of how lucky I was to have my job in the park, in spite of the recent tragedy.

After Lara and I remarried, she no longer wanted to live in Choteau and wanted to return closer to her family, west of the Divide. She had grown up in Hamilton, a town south of Missoula in the Bitterroot Valley, so she began applying for accounting jobs around northwest Montana. Eventually, she was offered a full-time position for the hospital in Kalispell in the Flathead Valley, not too far from my hometown of Columbia Falls.

I put in for a transfer to Region One, which included the Flathead Valley and encompassed Kalispell, Whitefish, Bigfork, and Columbia Falls. I didn’t really care for returning specifically to my hometown, but Lara wanted to accept the position in Kalispell, and I wanted to make her happy. And I had to admit: I did love the Flathead Valley.

Then I heard the park was expanding its force, taking new hires and immediately, the Park Police position beckoned me. The salary was about the same as the warden job—nothing to brag about—but one could do a lot worse than having an office in Glacier National Park.

My best and most memorable days were spent hiking and climbing in Glacier with the group I joined in high school. The sheer geological scale of the continent’s crown jewel brought humbling perspectives and made my adolescent worries seem trivial. Its beauty basically stunned me, and I knew I could easily make Glacier my place of work. I applied, did the extra training, and was a shoo-in with my wardening background.

Now, looking at the Whitefish Range, where I’d also spent ample time as a teen with my climbing group, the sun spread a soothing warmth across my face and I almost took an extra few seconds just to continue standing there, but then a woman with a stroller came upon me suddenly and I had to step into the shadow of the bar’s awning to get out of the way. I opened the door and slid into the darkness. I could
smell beer and french fries and garlic from the kitchen—maybe pickles. Most of the tables were already taken and I saw a hand go up out of the corner of my eye and noticed it was Pritchard waving to me from the bar. I shuffled over and shook his hand.

Dr. Pritchard looked like he belonged in a
GQ
magazine: tall with relaxed movements, russet skin, fine features, tousled dark hair, and just the right amount of stubble on his chin and weathering around thoughtful eyes. Rumor had it that plenty of women not really all that interested in keeping a pet got one anyway just to have the chance to go in for an appointment to witness his ridiculous good looks and soothing manner first hand.

“Tables were all taken,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind the bar.”

“Fine by me,” I said and took a seat.

“The pastrami is really good here,” he offered. “I already ordered. If I don’t get back to the clinic on time, I get really behind.”

“I appreciate you meeting me. I know you’re busy.”

“You caught me on a good day. Usually, I don’t get a chance like this to break away. There’s always some emergency, but luckily, my partner’s in today.”

The bartender asked me what I’d like and I ordered an iced tea and took Pritchard’s recommendation and ordered the pastrami. Pritchard introduced the bartender, calling him Will. He was about my height, maybe a little taller, with a full head of dark, Brillo-like hair.

“So.” Pritchard looked at me when Will walked away, a sadness filling his eyes. “I just can’t believe it.”

“I know. It’s really strange and sad. I’m sorry for the loss. I know you worked with Wolfie quite a bit.”

He nodded. “Thanks. Not as much as Sam did, but yeah.” He smiled faintly. “We spent some wild and good times in the park tracking those hardy little creatures.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

He thought for a moment, his face pensive, his eyes heavy-lidded. “A few weeks ago. But he left me a message the other evening on my
phone. Said he and Ward were meeting for a beer—actually here—and wanted to know if I wanted to join them. I couldn’t, though. I was in surgery late that day.”

“You call him back?”

“Yeah, left a message later that night on my way home from the clinic thanking him and hoping to catch him another time.”

“And which evening was that?”

“That would have been on Tuesday.”

“And a few weeks ago?”

“I went with him to a trap he’d set up the South Fork. A wolverine had taken the bait and he needed me to implant a transmitter.”

“The South Fork? Outside the park?”

“Yeah.” Pritchard sat back and let his shoulders sink into the back of the barstool. “It’s a long story, and you probably already know about it, but lately the park’s been less, shall we say, enthusiastic about wolverine research.”

I actually didn’t know that. “Less enthusiastic?”

“Yeah, Bowman’s sick about it, but apparently he’s been getting orders from Rick Phrimmer to start phasing out the project. I guess they’re getting flak from Washington—that it’s costing too much and it’s getting harder and harder to get available grant funds.”

I sat listening. Phrimmer was Glacier Park’s assistant superintendent. He worked with Ford doing mainly administrative duties to support park management and secure new funding for park projects. I didn’t know the wolverine studies were lacking funding, but none of what he said was surprising. I’d done enough work for Ford involving DC’s politics. And all park employees knew that when Glacier was established in 1910, it housed about a hundred fifty glaciers. Now, our warming climate had reduced the number to twenty-five and they were shrinking about four times faster than they were just fifty years before. The last one is expected to disappear in less than a few decades. And as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t something to shrug about. Glaciers cooled air masses and without them, we had an earlier onset
of spring and higher soil temperatures on the slopes. Its run-off fed streams important to just about the entire ecosystem.

“I didn’t know. I thought they were going strong,” Pritchard added. “Could be anything from the fact that Phrimmer has always had a thing against Wolfie to something larger, like the fact that the wolverine is an indicator species and like the polar bear, wolverines—at least to those talking about it—have kind of become a poster child for climate change issues. You know, with their survival so closely tied to the state of snowfields and cooler temperatures.”

I knew that the wolverines relied on carrion preserved and refrigerated in the ice until it melted in the spring. Then they feasted on it through spring and early summer. Will brought my iced tea and I took a sip.

“So Wolfie figured if he was eventually going to get shut out of the park, he’d better start setting box traps elsewhere. I believe he’d gotten permission from the station to set them into the Hungry Horse and Bob Marshall Wilderness regions. So far, with Sam’s help, they’ve put them along a twenty-five-mile range along the South Fork.”

“So wow, Wolfie was really increasing his research efforts,” I said. “At least while he was still working the park.”

“Yeah, well, not necessarily for long.” Pritchard frowned. “Like I said, Wolfie and I went to one of the traps where he’d gotten a signal that the trap had sprung.” He shook his head. “And when we got there to anesthetize the animal and implant the receiver, we found the trap rigged with another steel-jawed trap that was obviously put there to kill the animal. It had gotten a healthy female about two or three years old.”

“You know who set it?”

“Local trappers. Wolfie said it wasn’t the first time. That it had happened twice before. He was sick about it and said he’d fold the studies before he’d help the local trappers kill more of them.”

“Just trying to score extra pelts?”

Pritchard took a sip of his water. “Maybe some of them, but Wolfie thought the whole area was so fired up by some local rumors that our
work was just going to be used to throw up state restrictions against trapping or snowmobiling or even mining. You name it. There’s a lot of fear around these parts. I’m sure you know with your job. Basically, Wolfie and the rest of us were coming to terms with the idea that once the glacier studies were over, the chances of being able to study an intact population in an undisturbed setting—unhunted, unlogged, unmined—ever again were unlikely.”

I nodded. A waitress with short, bobbed hair came over and set Pritchard’s sandwich before him and he thanked her.

“Had Wolfie begun removing the South Fork traps?”

Pritchard nodded. “He had, but I’m not sure how many are left. Ward might know. Wolfie hated to give in like that, but he couldn’t bear basically helping the locals kill them. You have to understand that a lot of the wolverines around the park had come to trust our type of traps. They knew they never got hurt and often got a free meal from us. Without our specially constructed log traps, the trappers didn’t stand a very good chance of capturing them. The wolverines were too smart to go into steel jaws after bait unless it was cleverly disguised.”

I remembered hearing from Bowman how fierce a wolverine in the mini log-cabin traps could be. Researchers basically had to rig a long pole with the needle attached on the end in order to poke them with the sedative. “What will happen to the studies now?”

Pritchard lifted a shoulder. “I’d like to think we can continue. That Ward will take the reins, but I don’t know. I mean, I just help with the implants. The first time they tried to implant the GPS chip into a young wolverine they’d caught, he ended up dying because it was subzero temps and the pup’s body temperature dipped too low because they gave a little too much tranquilizer, a mixture of diazepam and midazolam.” Pritchard sighed. “Like I said, Wolfie was upset, he swore he’d never do an implant again without the help of an experienced vet. I use ketamine and Domitor. It seems to work well. Anyway, I do what I can,” he said humbly. “But I have a family and a practice. Sometimes he has to use Doc Kaufland if I’m not available.”

I jotted Kaufland’s name down and looked at my notes. “You mentioned Phrimmer earlier? That he had a thing against Wolfie?”

“Oh yeah, that. Well.” Pritchard half-smiled. “Small town, right. But, apparently Phrimmer’s wife, Kate, you know her?”

“Sure, I’ve met her several times, here and there, but mostly when she came to headquarters to visit Rick.” I thought of the petite redhead, no more than five feet two. Freckled and feisty. I remembered seeing her all dolled up at some holiday party back in December. I went alone. Most coworkers knew Lara and I had split, but she hadn’t and she had asked me why she didn’t come. She looked sincerely upset that things were in such a state for us.

“Well, then, do you know she used to date Wolfie years ago?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Yeah, I mean, who knows?” Pritchard rolled his eyes. “I don’t gossip much, but Wolfie said it himself, he was kind of laughing about it, but I don’t know, I sensed a seriousness there.”

“Laughing about what?”

“That he didn’t know if it was DC that really wanted the research to end, or whether Rick was simply sabotaging things, still carrying a grudge after all these years because he used to date Kate before he met Cathy, and apparently Kate always felt like Wolfie was the one that got away. Supposedly drives Phrimmer nuts.” Pritchard had barely taken two bites from his sandwich when his phone buzzed. He looked at it and bit his lower lip. “I’m sorry,” he said, then excused himself—said that he needed to take it because it was the office.

When he hung up, he apologized but had to get going—his partner was elbow high in some other emergency and the dog he’d operated on in the morning that was doing fine when he’d left was now exhibiting labored breathing. He then asked Will to bring him a to-go box and tried to leave a twenty on the bar. I handed it back, insisting I wanted to pay for lunch. I handed him my card and told him to call me if anything else that might be pertinent to wrapping up the investigation came to mind.

Before he walked off, he tilted his head and squinted at me. “You really believe this was an accident?”

“I can’t say just yet.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Know how many really dangerous slopes we’ve attempted trying to track those animals? Crampons, ice axes, ropes . . . You name it, just praying the slope would hold. We weren’t idiots, but we did tempt fate more than a time or two. It just doesn’t make sense.”