Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (7 page)

“So exactly how does this point me in the right direction?” Martha said. “I was hoping for a relationship between the victims.”

“There is one. They were both older men who could still get around, but had nothing to look forward to but pain and suffering.”

“So you're thinking this was some kind of suicide pact? A burial ground for the walking dead, like an elephant graveyard kind of thing? That sounds macabre.”

“I'm just pointing out that their conditions and outlooks on life may have been similar.”

“I wish there was more.”

Doc Hanson smiled. He felt guilty, but couldn't help saving his most important discovery for last.

He said, “I told you I interned in Bakersfield, California. The only reason I know so much about valley fever is because the infections are specific to the Southwest. Bakersfield has the highest incidence, but clusters of infection also occur in Tucson and Phoenix. There's a very good chance that your victim contracted valley fever in or around one of those three places.”

“It would be nice if we could narrow that down.”

Hanson held up a hand. “I'm not done. Valley fever is still fairly rare, given the incidence of exposure to the fungus. No matter where they live, almost everyone who seeks treatment for an advanced case sees the same doctor, Boyd Mathis. Boyd is the chief of infectious diseases at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield. He was one of my supervisors when I was in residency. The man we're looking at is probably in his records.”

Martha let the information sink in.

“Doc,” she said, “I could kiss you but I'm not going to.”

“I still might make you change your mind about that,” he said. “Valley fever is much more prevalent among blacks and Latinos than the Caucasian population. The strands of this man's hair lack pigment at the temples, but on top of his head they are jet black with perfectly round structure. That's a very common hair type for many Latinos.” He held up a finger. “Nothing definitive, understand, we also can have jet black hair, but in whites the trait is recessive. And valley fever only discriminates to a degree. Particularly the elderly, asthmatics, and people who have suppressed immune symptoms are vulnerable, regardless of heritage. But the nature of the disease, its locale, and the hair make it fairly likely that this man was Latino.”

Martha stroked her fingers down the left line of her jaw. “Can you put a date of death on this guy?”

“Assuming he was underground the entire time? You take into consideration rates of decomposition of bone, organs, and dermal tissues, seasonal temperature swings and so forth, it points to sometime last summer. Boyd treats a lot of people, but he might remember a late-middle-aged Latino patient who disappeared last summer. I could give him a call.”

Martha moved her fingers to her throat, feeling for the pulse. It was a habit she had when she felt scared or inadequate, but as she had become more certain of herself, she also sought the reassurance of her heartbeat when she was excited, when she felt on the cusp of discovery. If she could ID this body, the dominoes would start to fall. It was like hunting elk, finding a fresh track after days of old sign. The elk might be miles away, but it was there, standing at the end of its tracks. You just had to work out the trail.

“What are you thinking about, Martha?”

“Come here,” she said. “I'm going to plant a wet one right on the corner of that mustache.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Quest for Metal

S
tranahan stumbled to his desk for the phone.

“Who is it?”

“It's Katie Sparrow.” A moment of silence. “You know, Katie the dog handler.”

“Yes, Katie.” Stranahan glanced outside his gallery window, a wafer of pearl showing above the Bridger Peaks. The old cottonwoods on the grounds of the cultural center were frozen in silhouette, the night still grappling for purchase.

“I know it's early—”

“Five a.m.,” Stranahan interrupted.

“—but you didn't seem like the kind of guy who sleeps in.”

“It's no problem, Katie. What's up?”

“I got to thinking, you and me, we make a good team. I got today off and thought maybe we could climb the Sphinx. I have an idea how we could find a bullet up there. You could meet me at the trailhead up Bear Creek in an hour or so. Unless you're guiding, I didn't think about that.”

“I'm not guiding. What did Ettinger say?”

“I didn't call her. I thought just you and me, a couple enterprising civilians, we could go on a treasure hunt. It's not like it's a crime scene with ribbon around it.”

“Actually, it is.”

“You know what I mean. The trail's cold. Martha's going to work the forensic end, but with Harold in the hospital there's no reason for anyone in the department to make the climb again. So whatcha think? You wanna?”

Stranahan thought a second. Sam had booked a guide trip for him tomorrow and he'd been invited to dinner at the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club later that evening, to meet with the other members who would be flying in. The only mark on his calendar today was a date at seven with Martinique.

“Yeah, I wanna.”

•   •   •

“S
o what's your bright idea, Katie?”

The dog handler was sitting in the cab of her pickup at the trailhead at the Bear Creek Forest Service Station, Lothar riding shotgun. The skirts of the mountain slept in the deep shadow cast by the Sphinx's subordinate sister, a towering eruption of striated limestone known as the Helmet.

“It's in my pack.” Katie rummaged around behind the seat of the F-150. Sean glanced at the protruding handle of the black metal tool.

“What's that, a metal detector?”

“It's a Bounty Hunter Tracker. I went out with a guy who fancied himself a treasure hunter. He was always looking for battlefield bullets, like in the Powder River country, or up in the Bear Paws where Chief Joseph surrendered. After that last little incident that we won't go into, he didn't have the nerve to come back and ask for it. He knew Lothar would rip his throat out.” She clicked her fingers and the shepherd bounded out of the truck.

“Rip his throat out?” Stranahan said.

“As in kill the motherfucker.”

“You sound dangerous to be around.”

“Not as dangerous as Julie Godfrey.”

“Who?”

“Julie Godfrey. She's the wife of that asshole we were looking for when Lothar found the body. You didn't hear?”

Stranahan shook his head.

Katie reached down and scratched Lothar's ears. “You're anxious to go, aren't you boy? Let's get going. I'll tell you up—”

The shepherd barked, then bolted from Katie's feet and raced up the trail.

“Whoa!”

The dog abruptly obeyed, but his nose was still pointed away. His whole body quivered.

“Heel.” In three seconds Lothar was back at Sparrow's feet, his head bowed and his tail down.

“Bad dog.” And to Stranahan. “It's all in the tone. That counts more than the words.” She spoke to him in a tone that said he was the one who had chased the cat up the tree, not the shepherd. For that was what had happened. Lothar had treed a large, long-haired cat that was now peering down at them with alarmed eyes from twenty feet up a Ponderosa pine.

“How the hell did a cat get out here?” Stranahan said.

“'Cause somebody got tired of him and didn't have the guts to pull the trigger. So they drove him up here and threw him out. It happens every day. Get tired of your cat, throw it to the coyotes. Get tired of your dog, throw it to the wolves. That's folks for you. That's why I stick with animals.”

She directed her speech at the shepherd. “Except for you, lover. A Class Three ought to know better than to chase a cat. You're in the doghouse.

“Come on,” she said to Stranahan. “Let's get up there before the sun gets too hot. That cat's not going to come down until we're gone.”

This early in the summer, the path up the Trail Fork of Bear Creek was a slog, requiring four creek crossings in the first two miles. It was cool and misty in the timber as Sean and Katie navigated puddles looking at their boots, while the shepherd, chastised, obediently followed at Sparrow's heels. Lothar's tongue was hanging out by the time they reached the trail junction in the big meadow from which a hiker has his first glimpse of the Helmet's red pinnacle, and farther east, bulking immensely against the skyline, the limestone extrusion that is the Sphinx.

At the junction, Sean and Katie took the 326 trail to the left, which ascended in switchbacks for another three miles before reaching a saddle between the two great mountains. To the right of the saddle, a shoulder of the Sphinx rose in a series of small benches to the timberline, above which the slope inclined steeply toward the peak. It was on one of the upper benches, grown over in scattered pines and strewn with great rocks, that the grizzly had unearthed the first body. The crime scene tape had torn in the night wind and was strung across the ground.

“Spooky, isn't it?” Stranahan said. They were sharing one of the sandwiches he had made and swapping swigs of iced tea from Katie's Nalgene bottle.

“Nah, it's just woods.” Katie released the drawstring of her pack and extracted the metal detector. She pressed a keypad and pointed the four-inch-diameter coil at Sean's jaw. The detector buzzed, picking up the fillings in his teeth.

“Yeah,” Stranahan said, “but can it find a bullet buried in a tree trunk? I thought these things could only isolate metal if it was buried shallow, a few inches under the ground.”

“Well, you figure the bullet makes a hole going into the tree, right? Unless the tree healed up, you'd have a clear path to the bullet.”

Stranahan looked skeptical. “Didn't they already use a metal detector the day we found that bone?”

“They only used it where the bodies were buried. Come on,” Katie said. “I thought you were an optimist. Have a little faith.”

She started fiddling with an adjustment device on the tool. “This is your basic model,” she said, “but I can tune it to discriminate metals. Like, if you know the bullet you're looking for has a copper jacket, you can weed out other metals. That can save a lot of time at an urban crime scene. But I figure up here there's not going to be a lot of trash, so we'll just set it to all metals.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Hey, I brought the detector. I'm going to leave it to you to come up with the plan.”

“There's too many trees to try to search every one, so I think we should start here at body one and conduct a diameter search, working out, say, thirty yards or so, then move on to body two and do the same thing.”

“Let's do it.”

Two hours later, they had exhausted Stranahan's plan, including broadening the search area to a fifty-yard diameter around each burial site, and had found only one piece of metal, a discolored gold band that had prompted them to utter the same words—“wedding ring.” The ring had been buried under several inches of loose duff at the base of a spruce tree, on the upper-level bench where they had unearthed the second body.

“Were either of those guys wearing rings?” Katie said. She blew a sweat-damp strand of hair out of her eyes.

Stranahan shook his head. “I'm not even sure the second guy had fingers.”

“It's something, though. See, this wasn't for nothing like you were thinking it was going to be.”

In fact, Stranahan was thinking about dinner with Martinique. It was already early afternoon and they'd need to get going fairly soon if he was to make it back in time. He slipped the band over his ring finger and slipped it off.

“He had big fingers,” Katie said.

“Like a rancher,” Stranahan said.

Katie drew a dog biscuit out of her shirt pocket and snapped off an ear for Lothar. She snapped off the other ear, cracked that one in half, and handed a piece to Stranahan.

“Come on, take it. They're gourmet.” She popped her half into her mouth.

Stranahan bit off a corner. A little dry, not much flavor. But it wasn't bad.

“I suppose you've heard they call me ‘Dog Breath,'” she said, “'cause I eat biscuits. I say if you really want to find out, all you have to do is kiss me.”

It was an awkward moment, for they were standing far enough apart that one or the other would have had to step closer to be in range of a kiss, and as the moment passed, Katie made light of the situation by saying, “You know, in the interests of science and all.”

“Oh,” Stranahan said, “I doubt you'd have anything to worry about.”

“You ever want to find out for yourself, I promise I'll keep my dog from tearing your throat out.” Now she was teasing him.

“So what was it you were going to tell me about Gordon Godfrey's wife? Before Lothar chased that cat up the tree?”

“Oh, that. If I tell you, it might put you off kissing women for good.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay. So, Julie finds out her husband was cheating on her with the woman in West Yellowstone, right? He's buying her flowers, sleeping on the couch like a good boy, promising it was nothing and will never happen again, he's just been under all this stress. Yada yada. And after a few days pass, this would be the day before yesterday, she acts like she's going to give in and they share a bottle of wine and he thinks, you know, makeup sex, he's going to get lucky. What he doesn't know is that Julie went to the antique store in Ennis and bought the biggest branding iron on the wall. It was from a ranch called the Triple Star R and it's got three stars circling a capital letter R, the whole thing being like, yea big.” She made a circle the size of a soccer ball with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands.

“How do you know all this?”

“One of the neighbors breeds Aussie shepherds. She's friends with the woman. Do you want to hear or not?”

Stranahan faced both hands up—
go on
.

“So anyway, they drink another bottle of wine and she takes him to bed and they do the nasty, 'cause she knows it will make him pass out afterward. Plus like she's feeling sorry for him knowing what's going to happen and he deserves a goodbye fuck, the fucker. Once he's snoring she turns the main water supply off in the basement. Then she builds a fire in the woodstove and sticks the iron in it. She leaves it there while she drinks another glass of wine and contemplates the shitty state of her marriage. When it's glowing a bright red she straddles good old Gordon and brings her hands over her head and hesitates—the heart or the belly? She decides belly 'cause she's afraid he'll have a heart attack if she aims high.”

Katie made a downward stabbing motion with one fist on top of the other. She made a sizzling sound.

“He sits bolt upright like someone stuck an adrenaline needle in his heart. I mean, you can imagine. Then he starts running around the house, screaming. He turns on the shower, figuring to stop the burn with cold water, but there's no water. And the wife, standing at the door, says, ‘Gee, Gordon, I wonder what happened? Somebody must have turned the water off.' By now he's like making animal sounds and people on the block are turning on the lights, wondering what's going on. They see this naked man running in circles around his yard, keening like a skunked puppy. Finally he finds a little ditch that's damp 'cause it rained the day before and he flops himself down in it. Somebody 911s and when the medics arrive they see this guy with his bare butt sticking up and a bunch of people standing around in PJs.”

Katie paused. “Anyway,” she said, “she branded the bastard. She says the thing she'll never forget was the smell. When she stuck the iron on him it smelled like the neighbors were having pork barbecue.”

“Jesus,” Stranahan said.

“I knew I shouldn't have told you.”

“What happened to them?”

“He's up in Deaconess. Julie was arrested, but old Gordon said he didn't want to press charges. If he did it would be public and everybody in town would know. But pretty much everyone does anyway. So”—she bent down and rubbed her face against the muzzle of Lothar—“are we done here? Those clouds look like hail to me. I don't think we're going to find a bullet.”

“I have one more idea,” Stranahan said. “So far we've just searched the vicinity of the burial sites. But where the second guy was buried, it's so thick up there you can't see the spot until you're standing on it. But that aspen stand on the left is more open. Maybe that's where the shooter saw him, and he shot him and the guy ran into the timber where he died. The bullet would be buried in the open ground, the one place we really haven't looked.”

“You're thinking like an elk hunter,” Katie said. “Not a murderer.”

Stranahan shrugged. “It wouldn't take long to sweep it.”

“You just want more of my company, admit it.”

“Humor me, as Martha would say.”

“She's a piece of work, isn't she? I thought she'd be like, more human once she was getting laid regular. But Harold doesn't seem to have made much of an inroad. She's still wound tight as a tick.”

Stranahan didn't want to talk about Martha and Harold. “If you don't mind my asking,” he said, “what's under your shirt that you're always rubbing between your fingers?”