The Royal Wulff Murders (30 page)

S
tranahan’s first thought was to scream. But the closest house, Sinclair’s, was at least one hundred yards away. He had gone fishing and might still be out. His wife could be home, but Eva was deaf. Ventura, who owned the only other house within shouting distance, had told Stranahan that he’d be out of state, so probably only McNair would hear him. Then McNair would come back to silence him. Screaming would lose him what little time he had to gather his wits.

He glanced around, his eyes drawn to the knives driven into the pinups. The blade that had whizzed over Stranahan’s head stuck out of the wall only a few feet away. Was there a chance?

Stranahan jerked up, almost losing his balance. A weight inside his head shifted, making him nauseous. He concentrated on breathing. The nausea passed.

You’re going to get one chance
, he told himself.
Don’t fuck it up
. He hopped over to the pinup. McNair had not affixed a handle to the blade that pinned the brunette’s breast to the wall. Bending down, he clamped his teeth around the steel tang. He pressed his head down. The point was driven into the unpainted fiberboard that was tacked over the old chinked logs. It didn’t budge. He let go with his teeth and pressed the tang down with his chin. Then he nudged the tang upward with the top of his head. Up, down, sideways. The blade was getting loose. Again he took the tang in his teeth. He tugged. The blade came free so suddenly his teeth almost lost their grip.

Now what? He had the knife, but could he position it to cut the tape on his hands? He scanned McNair’s work table, his eyes drawn to the bolted vise. If he could clamp the blade into the vise, then he could back up to it and slice through the tape that bound his hands.

He hopped to the table, trying to focus but unable to help thinking about the time ticking away. He knew he had at most a few minutes before the door swung open and McNair barked that guttural laugh….

Stranahan studied the vise. The jaws were ajar a quarter inch or so, about the same width as the knife tang. A stroke of luck. He rotated the knife in his teeth until the blade edge faced up. Bending, he tried to nudge the tang into the jaws. The jaws were too tight. He pushed his chin against the steel rod that acted as the vise handle and inched it left. He knew if he opened the jaws too wide, it would be impossible to close them while holding the tang in position with his teeth. He tried to wedge the knife into the gap. Still too tight. He tried a third time. The tang inched partway down into the jaws and stopped. Stranahan gingerly released his grip with his teeth, praying the knife wouldn’t fall out. Quickly, he bent to press the handle to the right with his chin, pressing as hard as he could to tighten the jaws of the vice.

“Now for the easy part,” he muttered out loud, and winced. His
teeth ached. Stranahan backed up to the table and tried to lift his bound hands high enough to reach the upturned blade. He couldn’t quite reach it. He noted a sawed section of two-by-six on the floor. He swiveled his boots back and forth, toeing the board closer to the table. Then he turned and hopped up onto the board backward. It made him just tall enough. Lifting his wrists behind his back, he positioned them over the upturned blade by feel.

He sawed down with his wrists, not knowing if he was cutting tape or flesh. A searing pain like a paper cut made him wince. Fuck it, he thought, the worst that could happen was he’d slit his wrists and bleed to death. If he didn’t get free, he was going to die anyway. He was sure of that much.

He sawed his wrists back and forth. With a jerk they broke apart. Swinging his arms out in front of him, he saw blood dripping from his wrists onto the floor. At least the wounds weren’t spurting. Working with nearly numb hands, he got the knife out of the vise and cut the tape at his ankles. He lurched toward the door, his right hand tightly gripping the tang of the knife. He stopped to listen. Nothing. He pushed the door open and stepped outside. Stranahan’s feet felt like wood blocks as he stumbled around the far corner of the workshop. He could see lights in Sinclair’s house, beyond it more lights in Summersby’s. The dull sheen of Sinclair’s pond, where the antelope had been shot, was in a line with the two mansions, only a few hundred feet away. Now Stranahan could hear McNair’s voice raised in the cabin. He patted the pocket of his vest. The fish were still there, but the pepper spray was gone. McNair must have found it.

Stay on the phone
, he thought to himself.
Keep talking
.

Trying to pick up his pace, he caught one foot on the other and fell heavily. He pushed back up with his arms and shuffled forward. He could feel sharp pain as the circulation in his feet was restored.

Behind him, he heard a door open, then shut. McNair, coming from the cabin.

Stranahan panicked. Sinclair’s house was still too far away.

“God-dammit.” He heard the snarl of McNair’s voice.

Only a few more steps to the pond. Stranahan stumbled down the bank, his shoes sticking in the muck, then waded into the water. He sank up to his neck. He could hear McNair banging about in the workshop, then the searching beam of a flashlight.

He tipped his head back until only his nose and mouth were above the surface. If McNair came his way, shone the light over the pond, he’d try to sink to the bottom. Then it would come down to how long he could stay down, as opposed to how long McNair searched.

But the flashlight beam was moving away, bobbing as McNair sprinted up the road. He thinks I’ve run back to the pond where he found me, Stranahan thought, where I caught the trout. But almost as soon as that occurred to him, the flashlight beam swung around. McNair was heading toward him again. Stranahan could hear the man cursing: “Fuck, fuck, fuck” as the beam shone around. He was maybe fifty yards away, then thirty… twenty.

The flashlight beam raced across the sage, flared on the far bank of the pond. Stranahan took a deep breath and ducked underwater. Reaching down, he felt into the mucky bottom for something to hold on to, to keep himself from floating to the surface. His left hand clasped around what felt like the branch of a log. He opened his eyes in the stew of algae and saw, diffused, the flashlight’s beam on the water surface. His chest felt tight. He let out a few bubbles of breath, clamping down on the reflex to breathe. Deliberately, he started to count.

Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one…

The light on the surface was gone, the water black. One hundred twenty-two, one hundred twenty…. Stranahan burst to the surface, gasping. Taking huge gulps of air, he craned his neck, looking for the light. There it was, by the door of McNair’s cabin. The man was heading into the house. For what—to get a rifle? Stranahan waited a minute,
pondering the odds of making it to Sinclair’s house before being shot down. He thought he heard McNair’s voice. Was he talking to himself, or on the phone again? Then he was coming out, his silhouette bulked by something he was carrying. It looked like a bag or suitcase, something blocky. But not, thank God, a rifle. Stranahan heard a clang as McNair pitched something into the bed of his pickup. Then he heard the engine turn over. The black beetle of the truck turned out the driveway, motoring with the lights out. Within a minute the sound faded.

Stranahan lunged out of the pond.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“T
here he stood, bleeding all over my porch, a goddamned knife in his hand. I thought he—you’re stepping in it, Sheriff.”

She stepped to the side.

“Like I told you on the phone, muck up to his waist, he was shaking so bad he could hardly stay on his feet. A trout fly sticking in his lip. Lucky it didn’t have a barb. I backed it out easy enough. Wrapped up his wrists, don’t know how much blood he lost but it stopped with pressure. I said I’d drive him to the clinic in West Yellowstone but he’s stubborn, just kept telling me to call you.”

Tony Sinclair closed the door after Martha Ettinger.

Stranahan was sitting at the dining room table, his swathed wrists up on the distressed wood tabletop.

“Not going to drip blood on Mr. Sinclair’s fine furniture, are we?” Ettinger said by way of greeting.

“No. Afraid I ruined one of his cowboy shirts, though.” Stranahan’s lip was twice normal size, his voice a mumble.

“Not going to die on me?”

He shook his head.

She took the chair opposite.

“Give me the ten-minute version first.”

He dabbed his lip with a bag of ice cubes that Sinclair had given him.

“Humph,” Ettinger said when he finished. “You’re certain those trout you caught had whirling disease?”

“No, but they fit the description. They’re still in a bag in the pocket of my vest.”

“We’ll have someone test them at the Bridger hatchery tomorrow.”

“What about McNair?” Stranahan asked. “Did you get him?”

“We had deputies at Ennis and the 191 T-junction north of West soon as Mr. Sinclair called. I asked the Idaho sheriff to post someone at Last Chance with a vehicle description, but by the time I made the calls, response time after that”—she shrugged—“he could have slipped the net.”

The kitchen phone rang.

Sinclair picked it up. “For you, Sheriff.”

“Really?… Where?” She listened. “What, rolled over?… ’kay… I know where it is…. Yeah, the house is next door. I’ll get what I can find. I’ll meet you there in twenty.”

She set the phone on the cradle.

“We got the truck,” she said. “Guy camping up Beaver Creek saw it swerve in front of his car to turn up the forest road. It was out of control. Driver flipped him the finger and the camper called it in, bless his offended little heart. Walt says the truck rolled over five miles up the logging road heading for the Hilgard Peaks. He’s up there with a couple SAR now.”

“SAR?”

“Search and Rescue. Katie’s on the way from West and she’s got Lothar ready to go. You feel up to a manhunt, Stranahan?”

“I’m ready.” On the tabletop was the bloodstained knife blade with which he’d cut his wrists free. He picked it up.

“Mr. Sinclair, I thank you for your help tonight. A deputy will be by to take your statement. Please give my apologies to your wife. You two must be getting tired of our intrigue.”

“Not at all,” the man said as Ettinger and Stranahan passed him. “Summers in Montana are more exciting than I thought they’d be.” But he was talking to the door.

Outside, Stranahan saw the lights flashing from the county rig parked at McNair’s cabin. Ettinger walked right by the Cherokee, striding toward the lights.

“I thought we were going to where the truck wrecked,” Stranahan said.

“We are. We’re just going to avail ourselves of some of Mr. McNair’s unmentionables first.”

“Lothar’s a tracking dog?”

“Now you got the picture.”

A deputy stood outside the door. He had McNair’s heeler dog, was stroking its head.

“Heeler’s are a one-man dog, but this one’s dead calm,” he observed. “Door was unlocked. He was sitting on the couch, come up to sniff my hand.”

The place was a sty.

“Men live alone, they tend to become feral,” Stranahan noted.

Ettinger grunted. From a pile of clothing on the couch she chose a wadded up T-shirt that wasn’t too matted with dog hair and sealed it in a plastic bag. She paused at a gun cabinet with a glass front. There were indents in the rack for five guns but only four stood at attention. Stranahan examined the engraved numbers on the barrel of the lone scoped rifle in the rack to see if it was a .243, the caliber Sam had been shot with.

“.257 Roberts,” he said. “Maybe he took the .243 with him.”

“Did you see him carry a rifle to his truck?”

“It was dark. He had something that looked bulky, but I don’t think it was a rifle.”

Ettinger dug her fingernails into her scalp. “You didn’t happen to see if he had a gun rack in the cab?”

“No, I can’t swear that I was ever even inside the truck, but I don’t know how else he got me to his shop. But gun rack, no gun rack, doesn’t
mean much. McNair could just as easy keep the rifle on the back bench wrapped in a blanket.”

The sheriff blew out a breath. “He’s armed, you can count on it. We’re wasting time. Let’s get up there.”

T
wenty-five minutes later, the Cherokee’s headlights lit up the roadblock. There were three vehicles—Walt’s county rig, a Chevy Diesel 4x4 with an ATV chained in the bed, and a white F-150 pickup.

“That’s Casper. Katie’s truck,” Ettinger said.

As they got out of the Cherokee, Walt detached himself from the group of figures clustered around the hood of the big diesel and came up, his headlamp glancing up brilliantly into Stranahan’s eyes.

“Turn that damned thing off,” Ettinger said.

“McNair’s truck’s down yonder.” Walt switched the light off and pointed down the hill toward the creek. “Looks like he came to the turn and slid over the edge. I was presupposing when I told you it turned over. Warren figures it just tipped on its side and stopped when it come up against the bank.”

“Did you search the vehicle?”

“Only the outside. Didn’t open the door. Didn’t know if you’d be calling in Little Feather to do an evidence search and work the track.”

“Harold went back to Browning,” Ettinger said.

“Well, we don’t need an Indian to foller this son of a bitch. We got the dog.”

“Did you happen to see if there’s a gun rack.”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“There’s a two-gun rack in the cab. No weapons in evidence. I put the page out to the hasty team at SAR and they’re geared up. But nobody’s coming from the civilian side till you say the word.”

“I can’t say the word if we think he’s armed, you know that.”

“I do know that. That’s why I called Katie instead of the other K nine. She’s a park ranger so that makes her law enforcement.”

“So there’s just us five, then.”

“Six, counting your buddy here. Who shouldn’t be here, I might add.”

“Mr. Stranahan’s part of the investigation. I deputized him on the drive over.”

Walt briefly raised his eyes to acknowledge Stranahan.

“Okay. Six then,” he said.