The Royal Wulff Murders

VIKING

For the most important people in my life—
my wife, Gail; my son, Tom; my daughter, Jessie.

And for my mother,
Beverly.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming.

—John Steinbeck,
America and Americans

E
very writer faces a day when he has to stuff his manuscript into a box and work up the nerve to hand it to someone. And then hope that he or she tells him honestly that no, he would not have been better off starting campfires with the paper. For me, the person I trusted with the box was Dominick Abel, my literary agent. It was Dominick who coached me through the drafts that helped form my story into this book. And it is thanks to Dominick that you hold it in your hands,

I also owe a big debt of gratitude to Kathryn Court, president and publisher of Penguin Books, who believed in my work, and her more than able assistant, Tara Singh, who put up with my endless tinkering of the final draft.

I carried around the kernel of an idea for
The Royal Wulff Murders
for a couple of years before sharing it with Elliott Anderson over a beer at BO’s Fish Wagon in Key West. Elliott didn’t live to see the published work. But his encouragement, in that great gravel voice of his, is not forgotten.

The early chapters of this book were coaxed into life in a converted garage office heated by a woodstove. It’s a great place to write—old fishing lures hanging from the latticework, apple tree blossoming outside the window, Pearl, the Wonder Cat, curled on my desk, eyeing the finches on the feeder. But when Pearl died, the office became too lonely to bury myself in seven days a week, and the next winter too long, so I completed some of the later parts of the book among
good company in warm cafés. I want to thank Jen Vero at Sola Café for having the best laugh in Bozeman, and Jess Wilkerson, Pam Butterworth, and Tiffany Lach for making me feel welcome and special. I owe big thanks to Bruce Muller at the Home Page Café, who’d rather be back in his native Zimbabwe than running a café (any man who has hunted down a man-eating lion tends to feel cooped up indoors), and his wife, Frankee, Montana’s only certified tea master, who makes the best pot of Darjeeling outside Darjeeling. At the Home Page, strangers became acquaintances, acquaintances friends. They created an atmosphere of fellowship I have come to treasure, and include Pard Cummings, Ginny Arnold, Jen Waters, Lawrence Stuemke, Whitney McDowell, John Glover, Chuck Stafford, Arnie Duncan, John Neustadt, and Alex Komsthoeft. Steve Pieczenik deserves special mention for his irascible good nature, his encouragement, and his professional advice. It was also here that I met with one of the founders of the Whirling Disease Foundation, Dave Kumlien, who was kind enough to answer my questions and bring me up to date on the problems of invasive species that threaten our trout rivers. Any errors of fact in the book are entirely my own.

I’d also like to thank Bill Morris, Steve Dunn, Keith Shein, and Bob and Duncan Bullock, best friends who kept prodding me to finish the damn novel. And my high school teacher Mary Coleman, who so many years ago was the first to assure me that I had the ability to write.

As always, the deepest thanks are reserved for my family. My wife, Gail Schontzler, my best and most honest critic, not only helped make the book better, but her love and support made the endeavor possible in the first place. My son, Thomas McCafferty, was the person I trusted with the initial draft, and he made many valuable suggestions. My daughter, Jessie Rose McCafferty, often sat across from me, writing her own novel at stream-of-consciousness pace while I laboriously plodded to get in my 800 words. She would give me a look as if to say “Get on with it,” and I’d
have to put the sentence I was writing in my head onto the screen where it belonged. I’d also like to thank my brother, Kevin McCafferty, who forces a fly rod into my hands now and then and whisks me to a river to renew my spirits.

My father, Keith McCafferty, once said he’d do anything for me on the condition that I escape the polluted steel-mill towns and impoverished Appalachian hollows of my boyhood, where the sun was always obscured by haze and fish turned belly-up in creeks that ran red with mine tailings. He instilled in me the love of nature and trout streams. My mother, Beverly McCafferty, gave me the love of books and made sure I became the first person in the family to graduate from college. Without their guidance, I would be working in a steel mill or digging coal, if I was lucky, or otherwise buried in those great mountain folds that have been so abused by the profiteers, and where so many dreams have perished.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A
s I write this note, I am sitting in the old Explorer alongside a riffle of the Madison River where I imagine Sean Stranahan fishes in the last chapter of
The Royal Wulff Murders
. I use the word “imagine” because the Madison Valley on the page is not exactly the Madison Valley of Montana. It has been altered to suit the story, although the character of the river and its fishing are accurately represented. Similarly, the characters in the book, while fictional, are cut from the collective cloth of my neighbors. Montanans are a self-reliant people who by and large have resisted cultural homogenization and who speak their minds colorfully, often with absolute strangers.

One thing that I have not fictionalized is the danger that invasive species pose to thousands of trout streams throughout the West. The plot of this story is not only plausible, it has precedent. Several years ago a private hatchery operator pleaded guilty in federal court to deliberately planting trout infected with whirling disease into waters in New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.

I do not flatter myself to think that I speak for all trout fishermen, but one thing we can agree on is that our fisheries are under attack on fronts ranging from agricultural dewatering and mining sludge to New Zealand mud snails and headwater logging. It’s not the angler who kills a trout for dinner who is the problem; it is the angler who sits idly by while others pillage the resource with impunity. Al
McClane, the late fishing editor of
Field & Stream
, wrote, “A mountain is a fact—a trout is a moment of beauty known only to men who seek them.” If we do not bestir ourselves by joining organizations such as Trout Unlimited and Montana River Action, our trout will disappear, moment by beautiful moment.

Prologue

Chapter One: Blue-Ribbon Watercolors (and Private Investigations)

Chapter Two: A Stick in the River

Chapter Three: Back Casting

Chapter Four: The Woman Who Sang Old Standards

Chapter Five: Awakening

Chapter Six: The Scream

Chapter Seven: The Color of Blood

Chapter Eight: Stone by Stone

Chapter Nine: A Light in the Window

Chapter Ten: A Scent in the Forest

Chapter Eleven: Rocky Mountain South

Chapter Twelve: A Can of Worms

Chapter Thirteen: First Water

Chapter Fourteen: Damsels in Distress?

Chapter Fifteen: In Hot Soup

Chapter Sixteen: “We Meet Again”

Chapter Seventeen: Killer

Chapter Eighteen: Hook, Line, and Sinker

Chapter Nineteen: Dead Man Talking

Chapter Twenty: Fishing for a Commission

Chapter Twenty-One: The Red Canoe

Chapter Twenty-Two: Salt and Pepper

Chapter Twenty-Three: Muddy Water

Chapter Twenty-Four: Three Dollar Bridge

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Proposition

Chapter Twenty-Six: Wild West

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Antelope Dawn

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Victoria’s Secrets

Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Montana Tail

Chapter Thirty: Blue Slipper, Moonlight River

Chapter Thirty-One: Fish Chasing Their Tails

Chapter Thirty-Two: Dagger in a Dead Man’s Heart

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Smoking Hat

Chapter Thirty-Four: In the Crosshairs

Chapter Thirty-Five: Black Masks

Chapter Thirty-Six: Lothar

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Playboy of King Salmon Drive

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Tawdry Aubrey’s Sons

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Ghost Village

Chapter Forty: A Shot of Salt

Chapter Forty-One: A Shaft of Steel

Chapter Forty-Two: Spirit of the Bear

Chapter Forty-Three: The Lady of the Lake

Chapter Forty-Four: Two Medicine River

Chapter Forty-Five: The Trout

T
he fishing guide known as Rainbow Sam found the body. Or rather, it was the client casting from the bow of Sam’s drift boat, working a fly called a Girdle Bug in front of a logjam that parted the current of the Madison River. When the float indicator pulled under the surface, Sam winced, figuring a snag. The client, whose largest trout to date had been the size of a breakfast sausage, reared back as if to stick a tarpon.

The body submerged under the driftwood shook free of its tether, bobbed to the surface, and floated facedown, the hook buried in the crotch of the waders.