The Royal Wulff Murders (14 page)

“Exactly what was it?” she said humorlessly.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

B
y the time Stranahan left the hospital, Sam’s condition had been upgraded from critical to stable. The doctor he’d spoken with had brought his fingertips together as if in tentative prayer, awarded Stranahan his professional smile, spoken briefly, and left. Stranahan had followed suit. He had to attend to Killer and needed a drink, though not in that order.

At the inn, Doris brought Stranahan a Trout Slayer Ale. She took a chair, hooked a leg to pull another closer for a footrest, and shut her eyes tight.

“Long night?” Stranahan asked.

“They’re all long.”

“Want to hear a story?”

“Is the Mississippi nightingale in it?”

Stranahan pursed his lips. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” he said.

A
s Stranahan drove Sam’s rig along the gravel ruts that led to the trailer, he rolled down the window, listening for Killer’s bark and not quite knowing how to handle the beast. But the trailer yard was eerily quiet. Stranahan switched off the ignition and doused the headlights. Five minutes later he was still listening to the ping of the engine as it cooled down.
Woos
, he said under his breath.

Bracing himself, he stepped out of the cab and walked to the door. He knocked lightly.

“Hey, Killer. Killer, it’s just me.” Nothing.

Stranahan turned the doorknob. The door yawned inward with a metallic grating. The pleasures of living in a tin can, he mused. Maybe his office wasn’t as bad as he thought.

He called the dog’s name again, then searched the inside walls for the light switch. Flipped it.

The place was trashed. The kitchen table was ripped from the post that bolted it to the floor. Chairs were overturned. A stack of fly rods leaning in a corner had been tipped; rod sections lay crisscrossed on the floor. Sam had set up a fly-tying desk in a walled-off alcove. Dozens of plastic compartments that held fly-tying materials were scattered on the floor. He picked a squirrel skin from the floor and put it to his nose. It was obvious roadkill, torn and smelly. Stranahan approved. He wasn’t above bagging a little roadkill himself to tie flies with.

He walked toward the rear of the trailer. The bathroom door was ajar. He nudged it with his shoulder and saw the lid of the toilet lying on the floor. The last door must be Sam’s bedroom, he thought. He hesitated. Except for opening the front door, Stranahan had been careful not to touch anything. He knew it was police business now. If he had harbored any doubt about the intention of the shot that had taken Sam down, it was gone.

He turned to find a phone and stopped. A sound? He put his ear closer to the bedroom door. There was an utterance, like a breath. The hair lifted on his forearms. If the person who ransacked the trailer was on the other side of the plank, he could die right here, and for what? Still, he didn’t turn to leave.

Long ago Stranahan had learned that courage could be an unearned commodity, that often those who possessed it simply lacked the common sense to be afraid. Or else they didn’t care, the way that some
combat soldiers came to expect death and thus were immune to the fear of it. He knew that because at times he had suspected he was one of those people, and that had puzzled him. For someone young, he had seen a fair share of death—most important, the early passing of both parents. And had found he could cope while others, like his sister, could not. People had always leaned on him in times of trouble, and rather than draw him into the fold of humanity, it had isolated him and rewarded him a measure of courage that seemed unearned. Was it this feeling of being set apart that led to the demise of his marriage? If he could just follow the thread back far enough, perhaps he might discover why he felt as he did, and why he was instinctively drawn both to gregarious personalities like Sam as well as to those who suffered his own specific malady, such as Vareda Lafayette.

He let out a breath and turned the doorknob. The dog was lying beside the unmade bed, its pupils dilated dramatically. Muscles underneath the skin shivered. Stranahan felt the heart beating in the cavernous chest. He rolled the Airedale onto its back to look for signs of injury, but it was unmarked.

Kneeling, he got his arms underneath and lifted. God, Killer was heavy. The angular head lolled limply, the tongue extended. Stranahan backed out of the room and managed to kick open the unlatched door at the front of the trailer but fell heavily descending the steps, the dog on top of him. His head was swimming a little as he stood up and half dragged, half carried the Airedale to his Land Cruiser.

He gunned the motor and reached inside his wallet. The veterinarian had given him a business card. Ten minutes later, Stranahan was knocking on the door of a ramshackle log home with dark windows.

“I got a sick dog,” he said without preamble when Jeff Svenson opened the door in a T-shirt and boxers. The vet was accustomed to middle-of-the-night emergencies and pushed past Stranahan to the truck without speaking. The two men carried the dog into the converted clinic at one end of the house as Stranahan jabbered away from
the rush of adrenaline, recounting his visit to Sam’s trailer. They hoisted Killer onto a stainless steel table.

“This dog’s been sedated,” Svenson said. “Either Benadryl or diazepam would be my guess, but I’m going to run a blood test because you want to know what he’s got in his system.”

He seemed to see Stranahan for the first time.

“Trouble seems to foller you around,” he said seriously.

When Stranahan said nothing, he added, “You better get on the horn to the sheriff. She’s gonna want to see that trailer.” He pointed a finger at a phone sitting on a medicine cabinet and turned back to his patient.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

H
alf dreaming at six the next morning, Stranahan could feel a gnawing at the back of his head. It felt as if something was eating through his skull. His eyes came open. Underneath the blinds, where the morning sunlight fell in slats across the oak floorboards, a mouse sat on its haunches. It was chewing industriously on a cracker that Stranahan had placed there a couple days before. Its whiskers quivered.

“About time,” he said out loud as the mouse arrowed back into the hole near the corner.

Stranahan decided he would take the mouse’s appearance as a sign of luck. He dialed the hospital and was put through to Sam’s room. Darcy McCall picked up the phone, said Sam was sleeping, his condition unchanged. His next call was to Svenson. Killer was up, baying for his master, and had just breakfasted on two pounds of ground horsemeat. He had a short memory, Svenson said with a laugh. His stomach was what had got him into trouble. The Valium pills that had knocked him for a loop had been ground into raw hamburger. Sean asked if he wouldn’t mind keeping the dog a few hours longer. Not a problem, no sir, was the veterinarian’s reply.

Stranahan got dressed, gassed up his Land Cruiser, and pulled up to the coffee kiosk on the road to the Madison River. Called Lattes and Lookers, it was a bikini barista hut that had drawn letters of complaint in the
Star
’s op-ed page ever since it had opened a month previously. A doe-eyed barista with vaguely Asian features
leaned provocatively out the window, wearing a teddy. Stranahan ordered a latte grande with a double shot, no whipped cream, and paid $3.25 for the coffee and the view. He was running on three hours’ sleep after a wee-hour confrontation with the red-eyed Sheriff Ettinger, whose annoyance at his midnight shenanigans had left him unsettled.

Two hours after sunrise he pulled up to Henry’s Lake. The fly line was right where he’d left it, tied to a log at the waterline. He pulled until it came taut. At the other end was the fly rod he’d dropped into the water. He’d have to use the float tube to retrieve it.

He pulled his waders on, taking more time than necessary. “Just what is it you’re afraid of?” he said out loud. He buckled the flippers and backed into the lake, his heart hammering.

Half expecting the dread of yesterday’s tragedy to come flooding back, Stranahan was surprised to find that the water calmed him. The same male bluebird flitted low above the cattails before disappearing into the house on the fence post. The rifle shots that triggered yesterday’s chaos seemed as distant as the Centennial Mountains that stood impassively behind the southern rim of the lake.

Passing the fly line hand over hand, Stranahan turned his attention to the north. The perspective was quite different than it was from the shoreline, where the sheriff had him try to reconstruct the shooting. The hills where he thought the shot came from looked to be a mile away. If it had been a stray bullet from some gopher hunter… maybe. But anyone intent on doing harm would have to have climbed quite high to sight over the shoreline trees. The range was just too far. No, the sniper must have been closer, perhaps in the field behind the bluebird house. The county road was only three hundred yards distant. Just this side stood an abandoned homestead cabin, its back as swayed as a broke-down horse. Someone could have rested a scoped rifle across one of the empty windows….

Stranahan felt the line stop. He peered down through the soupy
water where the line angled toward the bottom. He pulled it hand over hand until the rod came up, strewn with coontail fronds. The tape that Sam had wrapped on the base of the blank had loosened with the overnight soaking. Stranahan unwrapped it and read, or attempted to read, the two-line inscription in Winston’s signature longhand scrawl. The top line was faint but legible:
THE WINSTON ROD CO. TWIN BRIDGES, MONTANA
.

The second line consisted of an interrupted scrawl: a capital
“M,” a space, then an “f,” another, longer space, followed by three more irregularly spaced letters, an “e,” an “r” and another “e.”

Stranahan knew that the line inscribed the name of the person who had ordered the rod. He’d seen a few Winstons and guessed that the
M
and the
or
would be part of “Made for.” The last letters formed the name of the owner. The three that were legible meant nothing to him, but of those he could make out, only
the “e’s”
corresponded to letters in Samuel Meslik’s name. The “r” certainly didn’t. Stranahan guessed it was no accident that the rod blank looked to have been sanded, and that the sanding had erased more of the letters in the owner’s name than in other words. The electrical tape had disguised an obvious attempt to erase the owner’s name. But to keep the identity from whom?

“From me, among others,” Stranahan said out loud. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be holding the rod of a dead man.

Sam
, he thought,
you got some explaining to do.

Back on shore, Stranahan unlocked the tailgate of the Land Cruiser and shrugged into his fly vest. He’d driven all this way. Why not? Fishing would give him time to mull over the increasingly coincidental events of the past couple of days, plus there was nothing like jumping back into the water where the shark bit you to stimulate the cerebral synapses. His hands trembled as he stripped line from the Winston and knotted on a fly that was a variation on a Henry’s Lake standard—a Halloween leech pattern with a woven orange-and-black
wool body. It didn’t look like anything in nature—ample proof, if proof was necessary, that a trout could be just as gullible as a man.

Or was it the other way around?

It was a cool morning. Stranahan pulled on the chamois cloth shirt Vareda had left for him, finding that it was a little long in the sleeves. He looked at the embroidered monogram. MJB. Had it belonged to an old boyfriend? An ex-husband? He realized he didn’t even know if she’d ever been married. Perhaps MJB was her father. He recalled what she’d said about him: “Papa left his mark on everything he touched in his ever-loving life.” A man who even marked the fins of the fish he caught. A monogrammed shirt would be right in character.

Stranahan thought back. Velvet Lafayette/Vareda Beaudreux had walked into his life cocking an imaginary pistol at her head and telling a story about burying her father that he had initially bought—he smiled at the thought—hook, line, and sinker. Three days later she’d disappeared, leaving thin red lines across his chest from her fingernails, a Maxwell House coffee can, and many unanswered questions.

Was it only coincidence that the water she wanted him to fish had been leaching nutrients from the body of an angler who may have been given a shove into the Hereafter? Who had possibly been fishing with the rod he now held in his hand? Admit it, he told himself: On the morning Sam was shot he was still trying to recapture the sensation of her touch. He was closing his eyes to bring back the lingering scent of oranges.

Uh-huh
, Sheriff Ettinger had said last night as he recounted a story that, under her persistent questioning, began to sound ridiculous even to him.

And you believed her when she said she had driven all the way from Mississippi to scatter her father’s ashes in the Madison River? And why were you chosen to perform this noble deed? What I want to know is how this woman comes to be knocking on your door? You say she
heard your name at a fishing store, but I’m having trouble making that connection. Maybe you could help me out. And while you’re at it, tell me why you wagged your tail so quickly when she asked you?

“She paid me,” Stranahan had said, a response that had made the sheriff narrow her eyes.

“Sure she did,” she had said.

Stranahan lifted his rod tip and had a trout. He played it distractedly—it wasn’t very big—and reached over the side of his tube to release it. The body of the woolly bugger made a neon smear against its jaw, as if the mandible were torn and bloodied. Stranahan flashed to the image of a Royal Wulff dry fly imbedded in a bloated human lip. A mystery within a mystery, and outside the mystery, hovering like a wraith, an enigmatic woman who couldn’t seem to settle on a name.

He slipped the blood-orange woolly bugger from the trout’s lip. As if miraculously healed, the fish slipped back to the smoky depths of Henry’s Lake. If only life could be so simple for him, Stranahan thought.