Death Canyon (8 page)

As he pulled into the small gravel parking area at the end of the road, Jake could see J.P. perched on top of the wood pile next to his camper smoking a cigarette. The wood was drying out now from the weeks of early summer sun and it was highly flammable.

Smart
.

He laughed aloud at his friend, who was wearing an obnoxious-looking cowboy hat and sitting with his knees to his chest and his arms wrapped around his shins, looking like a devious child.

“Hey, partner! I got locked out! Stupid dog was waiting for you to come home,” J.P. shouted, motioning to Chayote, who was now lying in a playful sphinxlike pose at the edge of the drive. His blue-merle coat offered great camouflage. When Jake shot the mutt a look, it ran off into the woods.

Jake waved and started to walk toward J.P., wondering how he had managed to get locked out of both houses and his own camper.

“I never even knew this thing had a lock, to be honest,” J.P. said as he threw a handful of dry pine needles in the direction of his camper. “I decided to make a spare set of keys to put under this hidey-rock thing I saw on TV last night. It blends right in with nature, man. Au naturel. So, anyway, I collected all our originals and went inside to get the business credit card and somehow managed to lock everything in the main house. I tore apart my camper
to find another set with no luck. Walked out and slammed the door. That must have forced the lock closed from the inside.

“I figured if we had that fake rock, man, we would never get locked out again.” He smiled knowingly. J.P. was not as dumb as he sometimes seemed.

Jake marveled at J.P.'s logic and laughed because there was really no business credit card at all, there was only a debit card in J.P.'s name that drew from Jake's personal account. It was in the kitchen of the main house for emergencies.

In the past such emergencies included: J.P. needing to rent a snowmobile because a winter storm had dumped a ton of snow and J.P. was “so over” skiing at the crowded resort, and a night in a suite at the Four Seasons because J.P. had to convince a woman that he was a famous jazz musician traveling the country.

“Let's get inside, it's getting chilly,” Jake suggested. They headed into the main house.

While Jake started a fire in the fireplace, J.P. ran his hands under warm tap water. After a few moments of that, he dried them off on his shirt, walked to the fridge, and grabbed an ice-cold bottle of beer.

He pulled his sweatshirt sleeve over his hand to insulate it from the cold bottle. Jake gave him a dubious look.

“Could use a glass, you know.”

“What? You want a brew, man?” he shouted into the den, where the fire was now blazing.

“No thanks,” Jake responded. The morgue had put him in no mood to consume anything.

“Did you hear that Marcus Jane bit the dust?” he asked Jake.

Before Jake could answer, his friend spoke again. “Crazy; he was a hell of a skier. Careful, too. Not one of those over-the-top, extreme guys; he just liked to go out and have a good time. Enjoy
nature, you know? I've skied with Marcus plenty of times when he walked away from a tasty-looking slope because things just didn't feel right.

“I guess all the preparation in the world can't prevent every accident,” J.P. concluded.

“I didn't know him,” Jake said, stoking the fire.

“No offense, but Marcus wasn't exactly part of your crowd.” Jake laughed. J.P. imagined himself much younger than Jake, while in reality the two were only three years apart.

“Who'd he ski with? Who was he with yesterday?”

“That skinny Ricker kid who lives south of town. The idiot that nearly killed himself up on Jackalope Couloir two winters ago. Had to get airlifted out because he wanted to impress some girl. Don't know his first name. Same one that was arrested in that wolf hunt protest. Remember that?”

Jake remembered the name now. When there was still some question as to whether a wolf hunt would be allowed in Idaho, Ricker had protested and displayed some threatening signs outside public buildings. The one that made the local paper said, “Hey IFG, How would you like it if we shot
you
for feeding
yourself
!” (
IFG
being Idaho Fish and Game.)

When Ricker was arrested for not having a permit to demonstrate, he had threatened the police and spit on them. That makes the paper in Jackson.

The sign reflected the boiling disagreement over a proper solution to livestock predation by wolves. Ranchers lobbied the Idaho government to open a hunting season on wolves to reduce the numbers. Many disagreed, Jake included. But he knew the ranchers had a valid argument too. Wolf numbers were increasing, and ranchers were losing thousands a year in dead stock.

The dispute was resolved in favor of the ranchers. There would be a short hunting season for wolves. Jake didn't mind the decision, really. Perhaps it wasn't the business of Yankees and California hippie kids to decide the fate of those who made their living from this land.

“And Ricker survived?” Jake asked.

“Sure did. One lucky bastard, man. He already made a statement to the press last night. It made it into the
Daily
today. Kind of disrespectful if you ask me.” J.P. was nothing if not well informed on gossip.

“What did he say?”

“You'll have to check the paper for the exact quote, but something along the lines of ‘If you play with fire, you'll eventually get burned.' ” J.P. shook his head.

“Yeah, sounds pretty inappropriate in the wake of a friend's death,” Jake said.

“I don't think the two were that close, though,” J.P. said, and then changed the subject: “Hey, do you mind if I sleep in here tonight, man? I'll call the lock guy in the morning.”

“Of course not.” There weren't any guests in the main house tonight. June was always slow. By the end of the month, some tourists would filter into the valley as school ended, but July and August were the high season in Jackson Hole.

Jake said good night to his friend and walked back to the guesthouse. It was situated east of the main house, and so as he walked toward the front door, he could see the profile of the ridgeline that resembled a sleeping Indian chief. The sky was fading into night, but Jake could still make out the outline of the chief's nose and forehead. The cliff bands dotted with snow gave the viewer the impression that the chief was wearing a headdress. Often, a pink
haze hung above the skyward-facing man as the sun set behind the Tetons on the other side of the valley.

He went through the back door of the guesthouse as he always did, so he had an excuse to check out the stream that ran behind the old building. Although he couldn't see them in the evening's fading light, he could hear some fish still feeding.

Jake set his keys, wallet, and cell phone on the small table he kept by the back door. He walked into the little, drab room where he tied flies, built fly rods, and tinkered with his fishing equipment. He turned on the radio.

The sun was nearly gone and it was now cool in the house, but Jake preferred not to turn on the baseboard heaters unless it was absolutely necessary. He crossed the hall to take a hot shower. He could faintly hear a news report about the slide and a warning to backcountry skiers to thoroughly assess the snow conditions.

Nobody is actually going to heed the weatherman's advice and collect snowpack data before a ski trip in June.

The odds were too far in favor of the skier. The avalanche was a freak event.

After his shower, Jake put on a pair of fleece pants that he had owned since he was a teenager and a long-sleeved shirt. He returned to his tying room and looked through the plastic shelves of drawers that held hundreds of different fly patterns.

Every summer, Jake would leave dozens of flies on the overhanging trees on the river's edge. A few would even be left in the lips of trout that were strong enough to break the leader that connected the man to the fish and some were mangled by the small pinlike teeth of the cutthroats.

In the spring, Jake would spend a few weeks replenishing his stock. There were certain patterns he preferred to tie, and generally
these were larger and more colorful. He didn't look forward to tying tiny, drab flecks of fish food and thus did so only when it was necessitated by the fishing conditions.

Fortunately for Jake, Snake River cutthroats were a particularly aggressive species and they favored large, gaudy patterns. Folks often referred to the personality of the local fish by proclaiming “they think they're smallmouth bass!” Hyperbolic, sure, but Jake sometimes thought it was an understatement. More like snook, Jackson Hole's resident trout spent their summer days lying against the bank waiting to ambush their prey. They were more like the mammalian predators in the region, gutsy and vicious, than they were like the shy, wary, and effeminate trout of fly-fishing lore. Oftentimes, a fly that landed harshly on the water, drawing attention to itself, was more effective than a “traditional” presentation, where the fly landed softly and quietly.

He looked through the bins of flies for something that was in low supply and that he enjoyed to tie. He was low on a dry fly pattern called a Fat Albert and scribbled that name down on a scrap of paper. Then he scrawled the word “dozen” in parentheses next to it. Jake kept inventory of the flies he tied so that he was never without one he needed. He grimaced when he looked at his own sloppy handwriting—the result of years of dictation recorders and secretarial assistance.

The Fat Albert was a silly-looking thing. Tied with foam and bulky like its name implied, with rubber daddy-longlegs appendages hanging from the hook. It imitated no bug actually found in nature. It was intended to look too good for a hungry fish to pass up. An old mentor of Jake's had once said that casting a dry fly to a hungry fish was like rolling a liquor bottle into a jail cell. This was especially the case with Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout.

It was a strange result of spending too much time with his finned friends, but Jake could see why certain flies looked more edible than others to fish. The Fat Albert was a very edible-looking fly.

Fly tying calmed Jake. It was demanding enough that his mind didn't wander to the nether regions of anxiety, but still dull enough that it never seemed like work. He felt about fly tying what others felt about practicing yoga or listening to jazz. As he trimmed and tied and knotted, he turned up the radio in the small room.

Ugh, political talk radio. The worst.

Jake completed his second Fat Albert and placed it in the section labeled “foam dry flies,” in the third compartment from the back, with its brethren of similar flies. His mind wandered back to the three recent tragedies in Jackson Hole. If he were investigating these deaths in Philadelphia, how would he think the problem through?

Back when it was his job to investigate such things for a living, he would start with some premise—the beginning of a narrative—and work from there. Some said his methods relied too much on inference and imagination, that he wrote a script in his own head and then forced the facts to fit the story.

What his critics didn't expect was that he actually had a knack for thinking like a criminal. His wary mind had prevented several would-be crimes: conspiracies, murders, and acts of terror.

The Zoering-Blotzheim case was a shining example. Dr. Adalwullf “Shadow Wolf” Zoering was an eighty-eight-year-old scientist and Nazi who had lived illegally in the United States from 1990 to 2000. Jake and his unit began monitoring Zoering in the mid-nineties because the U.S. government suspected he was financially backing terrorist attacks against Israel and the United States.

It was what the unit called a “hands off” mission. No contact, only surveillance.

Zoering caught wind of the investigation and fled to France, where he quickly turned himself in and pled guilty to war crimes charges stemming from his participation in World War II concentration camps. He died in a Parisian prison eight days after sentencing.

It didn't quite add up to Jake.

Regardless, he was ordered to fly to France and assist the French authorities with closing the case. Jake stopped in D.C. instead, missing his connecting flight to Paris. He was concerned by some questions:
How did Zoering know we were after him? Why did the case wind down so quietly and conveniently?

Jake spent that evening contacting everyone with knowledge of the Zoering investigation. Finally at midnight, a lead. The home phone number for Agent Carpenter, an FBI liaison, had been disconnected. His superiors reported that he had missed work for the last three days with the flu.

Bingo
. Jake spent the night investigating the agent.

As the sun rose, Jake apprehended Carpenter, who was armed with eighty pounds of C-4 and headed to the district's busiest subway station. Zoering had fled to distract them.

*  *  *

After a few years, his success as an investigator was no longer arguable, and his critics gave up. Jake still neglected to mention to anyone that he actually often created elaborate journals containing nicknames, predictions, and motives. He charted out crime sprees as if they were choose-your-own-ending children's books. All before any hard evidence was found. It almost always worked.

The first assumption here would be that the deaths were not
coincidental. From there, he could rule out natural death since nature acted only on coincidence, unless you believed in divine intervention. Jake did not.

Even in a large city like Philadelphia, three accidental deaths in such a short period of time would catch the attention of law enforcement. Move the location of the event to a low-population area like Jackson Hole and it stuck out like a sore thumb.

So, when one assumes that the deaths are related, the next logical assumption is that the victims must have something in common.