Points West (A Butterscotch Jones Mystery Book 5) (3 page)

“The killer for sure,” the Bones
predicted.

“Maybe.
Probably,” I said.
“Stoddard brought him? He’s expensive. I wonder why he used him and not Danny.”

“Probably because Brian had something to blackmail Stoddard
with and could get a free ride. He did stuff like that all the time—free food,
free clothes,
free
drugs.”

“He sounds like a really repulsive man.”

“Believe me, he was.”

I shivered. It was getting really cold and I was tired of
looking at the body of a very bad person.

“So, do you want to report this? Or do we find a deep ravine
to drop him in?” I asked.

That Chuck paused to think about this option told me how far
he had come from the upright officer I had met a year before.

“Better to bury him. Or burn him. You don’t want animals
feeding on his carcass. It might kill them too if he was poisoned like I
think.” Doc grunted. “Another thing, I found this in his coat pocket.”

I was half expecting some ampule of drugs, or maybe some
bullets, but Doc held out a small pink stick. It was a portable memory drive
for a computer. Chuck and I were all too familiar with them since the mess with
my father.

“Oh hell,” Chuck said, taking the two-inch-long piece of
trouble.

“Look, we can leave him out here for a couple of days. At
this point it won’t make any difference,” Doc said. “You go find your other
corpse and figure out what the hell he was doing in McIntyre’s Gulch. We can
decide what to do with the body after we have all the facts.”

“Okay,” Chuck agreed.

Sometimes the Mountie still surprises me.

Chuck was happy to make it back to Butterscotch’s cabin. It
was small and plain, but it had a fire in the hearth and a dog—well, a wolf—on the
rug in front of it. And there was a warm bed where they could grab a couple
hours of much needed sleep before sunrise.

He needed to do some thinking, of course. For starters, what
the hell had Brian been doing in the Gulch?
The fake name,
buying a coat instead of packing or going home to get one.
It looked
like someone on the run. But he wasn’t a kamikaze, no suicidal missions for
him. So either he hadn’t known that there was danger waiting here or….

Or he had faced something even more dangerous back in the
city that made the risk worthwhile.

Once upon a time, Chuck would have marched into the office,
stomping confidently and demanding explanations.
But not
anymore.
These days a little soft-shoe was in order when approaching the
brass. In fact, a lot of times it was wise to walk on tiptoes.

Enough, he’d think more clearly after he had rested. Instead
of speculating he would relax and enjoy the mellow lemon smell in the air that
somehow reminded him of his mother.

“Want some hot chocolate?” Butterscotch asked.

Hot chocolate sounded perfect.

“Yes, please.”

Chuck sighed happily and the chair, which was very old,
creaked in its joints as it settled with him. In every way that mattered, this
was home. He really needed to work on Butterscotch so she would agree to share
it with him. Yes, his career and his father were in Winnipeg. But the career
had soured and his father had been sufficiently taken with Butterscotch and the
Gulch that he might even want to come and live there himself, at least in the
summer. With his wife gone, there wasn’t that much to keep him in Winnipeg.

Yes, he really needed to work on Butterscotch.

“Here you go. This will warm you up. I added a little
something extra.” She pressed a cup into his hand.

Butterscotch kept a small cache of brandy for him.

Chuck sipped and marveled at the silence. Of course there
were sounds—snowy clumps of melting ice falling onto the roof, heavy wind gusts
that made the bare trees moan.
Max snoring by the fire, which
popped and sizzled happily.

But there were no city noises. No sounds of traffic on the
ground or planes overhead. There were no church bells tolling the hour, no
sirens disturbing the peace. It was easy to believe that the Rapture had come
and taken all the other people away.

The idea was oddly appealing. It would just be him and
Butterscotch—and Max—for the rest of their lives….

“You’re dropping off,” Butterscotch said, laying a hand on
his shoulders and then kneeling down to help him take his boots off. “Come to
bed now. Everything will look clearer after you’ve had some sleep.”

“Okay.”

It had been a long day but Chuck felt happy as slumber
pulled him away from the waking world. Bad as the situation with Brian
potentially was, he was still with Butterscotch, so life was pretty good. And
in the Gulch he didn’t dream, even with his brain full of undigested
information that needed sorting out. It was great to sleep without subconscious
commentary.

*
 
*
 
*

We ate a hearty breakfast. It doesn’t do to overload on fat
and carbs, but we were going to be out in the cold and expending a lot of
energy. That made sausage and French toast with berry jam a good choice.

The lack of snow and wind was a real help in finding the
trail. In the slanting light of early morning we were able to clearly see the
tracks left by the snowmobile. It seemed that we wouldn’t need Max’s keen nose
for tracking but he came with us anyway. I don’t go into the wilds without my
dog. We blame the bears for a lot of things they don’t do, but they are there
all the same and very dangerous. I watched them kill a man. He was a bad man
who deserved to die, but still. No, I wouldn’t ever go into the woods without a
rifle and Max as a guide.

*
 
*
 
*

“Hello, Big John,” Horace Goodhead said loudly into the
phone. As was often the case, their connection was poor. He called anyway
because he was growing fond of the girl he hoped his son would marry. “I don’t
suppose Butterscotch is in the pub?”

“Horace, is that you?” Big John shouted back.

“Yes, it’s me.” Horace wiggled his toes in his slippers. He really
needed to get dressed but some days there just didn’t seem to be any point.

“
Madainn
mhath
.”
Horace knew this was Gaelic and assumed
it meant good morning or something like that. “Nay, Butterscotch and your boy
have left just this morning to go into the woods. We fear there is another
victim of
bear attack
.”

“Bear attack!” Bear attack sounded significant, like code
for something else, though Horace couldn’t imagine what it could mean beyond,
well, a
bear attack
. The rest of what
Big John had said finally penetrated his bemusement.

“Chuck’s with Butterscotch, is he?” His son hadn’t mentioned
any plans to visit her when they talked yesterday.

“Aye.
He came as soon as he heard
about the attack. They’ve gone hunting.
Took her wolf with
them too.
It’s very worrisome, these bear attacks, and we need to get to
the bottom of it before it attracts outside interest.”

“I can imagine.” Bear attacks! And Chuck—his tidy, city-bred
son—was out hunting them. An idea formed in Horace’s mind and he acted without
reflecting. “I don’t suppose Danny Jones is in Winnipeg.”

“As it happens, aye, he is.” Big John’s voice held a smile.

“Would he perhaps like some company on his return trip?”

“If it’s your company, he might. Let me give you the number
for the airfield.”

“I have it, thanks,” Horace said, feeling kind of giddy. He
was going off to help his son hunt bears. It would be like Christmas part
two—father and son working together again!

“It may be that there will be another passenger with Danny.
Because of the attack maybe,” Big John warned. Again this sounded significant,
though Horace couldn’t imagine why the man wouldn’t just come out and say what
was on his mind.
Unless he had guests in the pub.
With
it being the only phone in the village one had to be discreet when others were
nearby. Of course, he wouldn’t want to scare people, especially tourists, with
talk of bear attacks, though he had mentioned that straight up. So it was
probably something else.
Something to do with the other
passenger.

Horace’s brain began to run riot.

What could there be about the passenger that might disturb
other people? Maybe—maybe it had something to do with diseases in the bears.
There had been some rabid skunks attacking people last fall outside of Toronto.
Rabid raccoons too.
They ran right up to people in the
park and savaged their dogs. Did bears get rabies? He’d never heard of that,
but it would explain these out of season attacks. At least, they had to be out
of season because bears hibernated in the winter. Rabies!
Or
something even worse?
AIDS?
Ebola?
Of course Big John wouldn’t want to start a panic if some special animal expert
was coming to examine the bears.

And Chuck was out there!
With
Butterscotch.
His heart clutched, stuttered, and then resumed beating.

“I’ve got to go, Big John, but I’ll be seeing you soon.”

“I’ll have Judy make up a room for you,” Big John said and
hung up the phone.

We had no trouble following the trail to the scene of the
crime. There was also no question that there had been violence done. The snow
was disturbed, churned up in waves, some bloody, some very bloody. Thank
goodness the air was cold or the smell would have been unbearable. As it was,
the odor was still repulsive. We hadn’t expected this. A corpse with a bullet
hole fit our scenario, not one in shreds.

Max stood stiff, his hair bristling.

“It’s like the Incredible Hulk and Godzilla had a
fistfight,” Chuck said.
“My God!
Is that a hand?”

“You’re almost right. It was bears. And wolves, but they
came later.”

“What? Oh—you mean it was really bears, not
bears
.”

As I mentioned we use bears as an excuse for all kinds of
suspicious deaths involving outsiders.

“Yes. They’ve been at the body.
Which is
kind of odd.
It’s a bit early for them to leave the den. I wonder what
drew them out.” I looked at the hand at Chuck’s feet. It was still more or less
in its glove. It was small and the glove was bright pink, so I was guessing the
body had been a woman and not a male dwarf with bad fashion sense.

“I wonder if this is the owner of that memory stick.”

Chuck glanced at me but made no effort to answer. Nor did he
pull out any of his ubiquitous bags and load up the hand as evidence. I
recognized what he was doing. Chuck wouldn’t touch anything until he had
reconstructed everything in his mind.

“Want me to take pictures?” I asked.

“No. You keep watch. I’ll do it as I go.” Chuck patted his
pocket, making sure the camera was in place.

*
 
*
 
*

Chuck knew that he was a competent detective, a good one
even, and he performed competently in his job.
In the city.
But for all his recent adventures in the wild, he found it much harder to do
his job out there in the heart of darkness. The Mountie wasn’t fey, but he
thought the echoes of the grunts and snarls of violence lingered in the frozen
air and it was frightening enough to raise the small hairs on his neck.

The Mountie shook his head. Such thoughts just wouldn’t do.
He needed to concentrate on the evidence and not be distracted by fear of bears
and wolves and blizzards. Max would warn them if any animals approached, and
Butterscotch was carrying a shotgun that she was more than able to use if
anything attacked them. He needed to forget the outside stuff and retreat into
his mind, because it was with his brain and its gift for intuition—not
microscopes and forensics—that he would understand what had happened here.

“It’s okay,” Butterscotch said softly. “Do what you must.
Max and I are keeping watch for you.”

So great was his trust that Chuck let go of his worries and
began to pay attention to the snow. He sorted out tracks and started to
reconstruct what had happened.

First he found the second set of snowmobile tracks and
discovered the woman’s snowmobile just off the trail, half hidden in some
bushes. It had been trashed, the seat ripped off completely and the gas tank
punctured. But it hadn’t been dragged anywhere, so this was probably where the
woman had waited, concealed by shrubbery. Maybe she had had food with her and
that was why the bears attacked the snowmobile.

He looked around and sighted on the largest tree. Men being
men, that
would be where Brian stopped to relieve himself.
And likely where he was shot. A still target was easiest to shoot.

He followed a second set of tracks toward the pine. Chuck
pushed through the snow and peered at the tree’s trunk. From the look of the
reddened bark, Brian had also leaned against it after he was injured. Fifty
feet away from the hidden snowmobile was frozen proof that he had been
answering the call of nature and that was why his coat had been taken off. Fifty
feet was a long distance for an amateur but nothing for someone who was used to
shooting at immobile targets at a range.

“This is the usual route between McIntyre’s Gulch and Seven
Forks? This is the way Brian would have had to come?”

“With a snowmobile?
Yes. Veer off
this trail and you’ll fall in a ravine.”

So it made sense that someone who knew the road would hide
their snowmobile in one of the few stands of shrubs and then lie in wait there.
Was she local and therefore knew the route from Seven Forks? Or had someone
told her about the trail?