Crazy Mountain Kiss (22 page)

“What's he doing?” Martha said.

“He has his hand on the hood, probably checking to see if it's warm. We've been here how long, a couple hours, it should be cold.”

“That V6 block is cast iron. It stays warm a long time.”

“You're a pessimist, Martha.”

“Now what's he up to?”

“He's got the light on the note.”

The figure moved back to the truck and the truck crawled up the road and stopped with the headlights illuminating the cabin. The man walked to the door. A pause. The door opened and a light shone
inside. Then he walked back and shut off the truck. He let himself into the cabin.

“I thought you said they changed the combination,” Sean said.

“That's what the woman I spoke to at the office told me. Once a month.”

“I wonder how he got the new combination?”

She ignored the question. “Ready?”

Sean patted the bear spray on his belt holster.

“I can sign off on a concealed-carry permit for you,” Martha said.

“I don't want to wear a gun.”

“Just don't spray that thing in my direction. Will Choti stay here?”

“If I tell her to.”

Angling toward the cabin, they kept to the treeline, then strode quickly across the open ground, the patchy snow crunching but not a thing to do about it. They were at the east wall, where the ladder stood against the roof shingles. Martha's breath made puffs that ascended the rungs. She held up a finger as a light appeared in the window of the cabin, then moved away. A glance at the truck. Martha raised her eyes. Sean shook his head. He didn't recognize it. Martha made a fist. Sean nodded and stepped onto the porch, making as little noise as possible. He was cocking his hand to bang on the door when they heard the voice.

“From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. I surrender.”

Sean opened the door and saw Harold Little Feather sitting in one of the cabin's four chairs. He raised his palms. His revolver rested on the scarred wood of the tabletop.

“Jesus, Harold, what the hell?” Martha replaced her Ruger in the holster.

“The note was a nice touch,” Harold said.

“That isn't your truck outside.”

“My sister's. Mine's up on the blocks, got to swap out a U-joint.”

“Walt tell you where to find us?”

“Walt told me.”

“Then you know why we're here.”

He nodded. “The man I believe you're waiting for isn't coming.” He struck a match on his thumbnail. “Not tonight.” He moved the match to a candle sticking out of a Mateus wine bottle. “Not unless he starts breathing again.”

C
harles Watt's house was a ramshackle affair, ranch style if you had to put a name to it, with a clapboard addition thrown up and smoke curling out of a masonry chimney. About a mile off the Brackett Creek Road on a two-track, tucked into the pines.

“House smells like a den of dead snakes,” Walter Hess said by way of greeting. “Inside is a sty.”

“That's the XY chromosome working for you,” Martha said. “Harold, why don't you see what's to be seen on the premises.” She inclined her head toward Walt. “Let's have a look at the body.”

“What about me?” Sean said.

“You can do the sketch. Harold ought to have forms in his truck.”

Martha tapped her foot for the minute it took him to find the pad, and then Walt led them around the house to a woodshed made of bleached-out boards.

“What the hell's it roofed with, license plates?” Martha said.

“Yup. I saw one dating to '47. He's tucked back in the corner there, behind the cordwood.”

Martha put her hands on her knees to get a perspective. “I'd say he's dead all right.” The body looked misshapen, the mouth an obscene oval with the tongue protruding. The loose jowls and the upper part of the exposed neck were a blotchy purple-brown.

“Dog was guarding the body when I got here, lifting his hackles at me. Two fingers to the carotid and called it in. Hanson's on his way. I roused Wilkerson. She's going to hitch in with Doc.”

“Doc, huh? Doc hasn't been to a crime scene in over a year, now that we got a pathologist on call.”

“Didn't you hear? Our dutifully elected death pronouncer had a near-death experience. Ash branch came down when he was backing out of his driveway. Sardined him in his Prius.”

“Is he okay?”

“They had to use the Jaws of Life to pry off the lid. But he'll be fine. Don't you read the police reports?”

“That comic strip? No.”

“I thought we needed a medical examiner. It was my call. I called it.”

“You did good, Walt.”

“I got the kids sitting in my truck, the little lying sacks of shit. You want to talk to them?”

“If we're done here, and I think we are. Harold's lead investigator. That's my call. I don't want to disturb the scene until we can put some better light on it and he can do his thing.”

Walt nodded.

“Sean, you can stay, but no walking around. Got it?” She didn't wait for an answer.

The kids, brothers named Dumpfy, Paul the older, Peter the younger, had been staying with an aunt while their parents were back in Nebraska for a funeral. They'd told Walt they had been horn hunting.

“Like for sheds?” Martha said, after summoning them from the truck.

“Dropped antlers,” the older brother said. He looked to be twelve or so, a rangy-looking kid with stringy black hair and a meager mustache. “You can get six dollars a pound when the Koreans come to town. They prop up their peckers with the soup.”

Where do they learn to talk like that?
Martha thought. Boys grew up so fast now, they scarcely had childhoods. “Straight from the tit to the whorehouse,” as Walt put it. It made her think of David, who
would arrive now in less than two weeks. So many regrets from her past, but not her sons, only the little she saw of them.

“So.” She came back to the present. “Find any?”

“We found a mossy mule deer antler, but you can't get no money for it.”

“How did you come across the body? Were you snooping around the house?”

“No, we never,” the younger boy piped up. “We followed the dog.”

“That's right,” chimed in Paul. “He was nipping at our pants and running toward the house, and then when we didn't follow him, he did it again.”

“Where did this happen?”

Both boys pointed to the crest of a ridge behind the house.

“Where's your aunt's place?”

“You got to hike down the road. You can't see it from here.”

“So it was like Timmy and Lassie.”

The boys looked at each other. “We don't know no Timmy or Lassie.”

“Of course you don't.”

There wasn't much more to get out of them. They'd seen the body from twenty feet and had never stepped a foot closer.

“I called out, ‘Are you dead?' and he didn't answer,” Paul said.

“And that's when you went into the house and used the phone to dial 911?”

“Yeah.”

“Was the door opened or closed?”

“It was closed but it weren't locked.”

“Didn't call your aunt first?”

“No. It's after dinner.”

Paul the older looked at Peter the younger. Peter said, “She's in her cups after dinner.”

Paul clarified. “That's what she calls being a pass-out drunk.”

Martha cocked a finger at Stranahan's Land Cruiser and told the
boys to wait there. She led Sean aside. “Like hell they were horn hunting. It was past dark when they called it in. They were looking for stuff to steal. Still, you got to give them credit for making up the story. Used to be you'd badge them and they'd pee their pants. Now they've all got attitude from watching TV.” She told him to take their boot impressions and drive them home.

By the time Stranahan returned, the aunt having greeted him at the door with eyes as hard as shooter marbles—“the fuck you say” the first words out of her mouth, even before the slurred “whoareyou”—the crew was waiting for him to sketch the body. He fished the charcoal pencil from his shirt pocket and worked while Martha held a flashlight on the pad.

“I never could understand why they still want in-situ sketches,” she said. “We have photos from every angle imaginable.”

“It's because sketches are more accurate, especially with regard to dimension.”

“Humpff.”

When he'd finished, they carried the body to a bit of flat ground. Sean took the legs, Harold the arms, while Martha held the head from sagging. It wasn't much different than carrying a gutted deer from a pickup bed to hang it in a barn. That same dead slack weight. Walt had found a more or less clean sheet in the house and they laid the body on it, face up, then studiously avoided looking at it.

“Okay, while we're waiting you might as well tell us what you got?” Martha said.

“Contrary to popular opinion,” Harold said, “I'm not one of those trackers who can follow a housecat over slide rock. There are some scuff marks, made with a rubber heel or maybe a cane with a rubber tip, but I didn't find a cane inside the house. Footprints”—he shook his head—“maybe when it's daylight, but the floorboards of the porch are a poor surface for impression and the ground is hard.”

“Walt says there's blood on the porch.”

“I was getting to that. You turn off your flashlights, I'll show you.”
He flicked a Carnivore tracking light to its tracking mode, activating the red and blue LEDs that would highlight spots of blood, making them appear to levitate.

The crimson trail of blood drops led from the front door, down the steps of the porch, and then around the house toward the woodshed.

“I'm guessing the victim was inside and our perpetrator waited for him to open the door. The tails of the drops mark the direction of travel. Since there isn't any blood leaking from the vic, it's got to be from who grabbed him. He overpowered Watt on the porch and carried him back to the woodshed.”

“Carried him?” Martha said. “Watt's not a small man.”

“I would have noticed if he'd been dragged.”

“How do you know he waited for Watt to come outside? Why couldn't he have been lying in wait before Watt drove up the drive and took him on the way in?”

“Because Watt had fired up the woodstove.”

Martha mentally slapped herself for the question. She hated appearing dumb in front of Harold.

“So where was he killed?”

“There are three or four clusters of blood drops, indicating the person carrying Watt stopped. The one by the door I showed you, and there are other places en route to the shed. Hard to say exactly when the man expired.”

“How about inside the house?”

“I'll let you see for yourself.”

Walt's description of the place was an understatement. The floor was not a space so much as a network of trails between piles of refuse—magazines, pizza boxes, discarded clothing. Half a dozen ashtrays overflowed with butts. The dog, a sad-eyed beast of indiscriminate heritage, was cowering under the footrest of a recliner in front of a TV set.

“You don't look like Lassie to me,” Martha said. She extended a hand and the dog let her scratch his ears.

Harold pointed to a pile of blankets near the fireplace. “You'll
understand why he slept here when you see the bedroom. It's just feces and piss. He must lock the poor mutt up when he's gone.”

Ettinger wrinkled her nose in response.

“Strange thing is,” Harold said, “I was here twice last fall, first when I got the call for the horsehair thief and then when Cinderella disappeared. House was in order first visit. Man presented himself like a human being. Second time, the place was okay, him not so much. Seemed distracted. Jumpy eyes. In retrospect, maybe he was high.”

“So what do you have to show us? I don't want to spend any more time in here than necessary.”

“A couple things.” He led them to a rolltop desk that looked incongruously patrician amid the chaos. One drawer was open and Harold stepped aside so they could see. Inside were a dozen corner-cut plastic bags, three secured by twist ties with what looked like sugar crystals inside. There were crumpled balls of tinfoil and what Walt identified as an insulin needle with the needle broken off.

“Meth head,” Walt said. “A newbie. Only newbies smoke. Give him a couple more months and we'd find spoons and a syringe.”

“If he isn't shooting, what's the needle for?” Martha said.

“It's called a keister feast'r. You dilute the crystals and use the insulin needle to inject the meth into your rectum. Mark my word, you'll find some lube in the bathroom.”

“That's disgusting. I don't understand how people operate using this shit. Watt trained horses for half a dozen ranches.” She shook her head. “How could a woman ever let a man like that touch her?” She was thinking of the video of the tryst in the cabin.

“Junkies wear ties to offices every day, Martha. Every day.” Walt nodded.

“You said two things, Harold.”

“It's in the addition.”

He was turning that direction when Stranahan said, “He's the horsehair thief. That's what you found. Watt's the one who cut the tails off the horses.”

Harold had stopped and now all eyes were turned to Sean.

“How did you know?” Harold said. “He's got a footlocker filled with it.”

“Because the dog didn't bark in the nighttime.”

“Say what?”

“It doesn't matter. Watt knew people who showed horses. They pay money for extensions. It was an inside job, just like you thought it was.”

Walt tapped the back of his neck. “Man had to feed the monkey. It's your classic escalation. You go through your money, you steal the stuff close to home first, the safe stuff, then you park behind the 7-Eleven and pull on the ski mask.”

“Well I'll be damned,” Martha said.

A light swept across the windows, illuminating ceiling cobwebs.

“Here's Doc. That's Wilkerson's Subaru coming up the track.”

 • • • 

F
irst thing I'll make clear,” Hanson said, “is that this isn't a proper surface for an examination. The body's been contaminated by direct transfer from the sheet. Couldn't you have found anything cleaner? We're going to need to run an extension from the house and hook up any lamps you can find that work. I'm not going to conduct an examination in the dark.” He hadn't made eye contact with Ettinger since his arrival and she shook her head, a gesture he caught.

“Be a pro, Bob.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Help us out here. Please.”

Harold had a bemused smile. “Worse than a couple nanas squabbling at a Lame Deer basketball game.”

Georgeanne Wilkerson put on a cheerful face, helping with the positioning of the lighting—they found a stand-up lamp with a 60-watt bulb in the living room—and showing how the helpers were to hold their flashlights while Hanson conducted his examination. Hanson stood in resolute displeasure of the situation, then sighed and
pulled on his latex gloves. He squatted, catcher-like, and began to pass his hands over the victim's limbs while speaking into a recorder. “Onset of rigor in the small muscles of the neck. Subpericardial petechiae in the eyelids, in the sclerae, and other parts of the face due to ruptures of the microvasculature.”

“Tardieu spots,” Wilkerson explained. “They can indicate death by asphyxiation.”

“He was strangled?” Martha said.

She shook her head. “You would see ligature marks or contusions where the thumbs pressed. Palpation of the tissues might reveal crushing of the larynx or hyoid bone.”

The medical examiner cleared his throat. “May I continue? I really don't appreciate you talking over the recording.”

Wilkerson faced her hands in an
I back off
gesture.

Hanson continued his examination. “Intensive hypostatic congestion of the lower face and neck.” He paused his recorder. “That's the purpling effect. It's caused by postmortem pooling of the blood, also indicative of asphyxia. I'm”—his mustache began to quiver—“I'm just an emotional old fart. I'm sorry, Gigi. Martha.” He regarded them with watery eyes. “My only frustration is with myself.”

He started to unbutton Watt's shirt, exposing the skunk stripe of chest hair. He pulled the shirttails out of the pants.