The Royal Wulff Murders (22 page)

Stranahan laughed as he snapped the phone shut.

“You know, it’s easy enough to test the theory,” he said. “Just match a bullet from one of Gentry’s rifles to the one taken out of Sam.”

Ettinger scratched at a mosquito bite on her cheek.

“What do you think?” Stranahan asked.

“I think there’s a problem you haven’t thought about. It’s called a search warrant. I can’t see Crazy Conner—pardon me, Judge Conner—hearing what you just told me and then dipping his quill in the ink bottle.”

“I thought of that,” Stranahan said.

“And?”

Ettinger answered her own question. “The antelope.”

“The antelope,” Stranahan said.

“Maybe the bullet exited,” Ettinger said. “Even if it didn’t…” She frowned. “Coyotes? Eagles? There might not be anything left.”

“Then again there might be,” Stranahan said.

“Say there was and we found the bullet and that bullet matches the one we took from Meslik; there’s still no proof it was Gentry killed the antelope.”

“No, but your Crazy Conner, he might not laugh so hard if you had a bullet to match the one found in Sam’s chest. He’d sign the warrant. Then you could get the gun and do a match. You could prove if it was Gentry’s rifle.”

Ettinger nodded. She turned the key and the engine came to life.

“Where are we going?” Stranahan said.

“We’re going to Law and Justice, pick up the Meslik bullet from evidence. Then you and I are going to find that antelope. If I order the techs to drive eighty miles on a goose chase, I’ll never live it down. All we have is proximity, a shot near the river, and another up the road at the lake. But if I come back with a matching slug…”

She noticed the expression on his face. “What? You have a better idea?”

“No. I’m just surprised. I’ve been thinking along the same lines you have, that Beaudreux’s murder and Sam’s shooting are connected. Gentry throws a wrench into that theory. I thought you’d be more dismissive.”

“What else have we got?” Ettinger said.

She eased her foot off the clutch.

“Vareda?” Stranahan said.

“Don’t worry. My deputy will drop by the inn and have a cup of coffee with her this morning. I can talk to her when we get back.”

She pulled alongside Stranahan’s Land Cruiser.

“Throw your fishing gear in the back,” Martha said. “Waders, too.”

“What for?”

“Humor me, Mr. Stranahan.”

“W
here’s the Cherokee?” Stranahan said. They had crossed the bridge over the Madison outside Ennis, an hour passed in mostly silence as Stranahan leaned his head against the window and fitfully dozed.

“Cherokee?”

Martha was momentarily taken aback, her mind flashing to Harold Little Feather. Little Feather wasn’t Cherokee. He was Blackfeet.

“You were driving a Cherokee at Ennis Lake.”

“Oh. The Jeep? It’s in the shop.”

“How long have you lived here? Montana, I mean.”

“Native born,” Martha said. “But now that you’re awake there’s something I want to talk to you about that’s more interesting than my upbringing.”

She fished inside the breast pocket of her uniform and handed Stranahan a small plastic fly box. Two trout flies stood on their hackle tips in side-by-side compartments, the Royal Wulff taken from Beaudreux’s lip and the one she had snipped from Sinclair’s fly rod.

“Do you tie flies, Mr. Stranahan?”

“Since I was five.”

“What’s your opinion of these?”

“They’re Royal Wulffs.” Sam had told him about the Wulff in Beaudreux’s lip with the heavy curl of leader attached. One of the Wulffs in the box had an inch of leader attached, too thick for the size of the fly.

“I know what they are. What I’m asking is were they tied by the same person?”

Stranahan reached behind the cab seat and fished for his vest. He unzipped a pocket and got out the magnifying glasses he used to tie on tiny flies.

“Can I take them out of the box?”

Ettinger grunted her assent.

Stranahan examined the flies. Both had bucktail tails with collars turned from medium ginger rooster neck hackle, better than decent quality. White calf tail wings, the one with the leader attached pinkish tinged. Stranahan knew what that was. The thin red bodies were bracketed by several turns of peacock herl. Standard black nylon thread for both, 6/0 probably. Lacquered heads.

“Neither’s tidy enough to be commercial,” he said at length. “But for home ties, the proportions are similar and they use the same materials. Except for the bodies. The bright one’s floss, the other is wool. Of course, the tier could have run out of red floss and substituted wool, or decided to experiment. Only other difference is the hackle is wound shiny side forward on this one, and this one it’s shiny side to the back.”

“Would a Wulff you tied look different?”

She said it in the flat tone he remembered when she’d interrogated him at the lake.

“Ah.” He smiled. “That’s why you asked me to bring my gear. And I thought we were going fishing.”

She didn’t return the smile.

“Okay.” He opened one of his fly boxes and extracted a Wulff.

Ettinger pulled to the side of the road and took off her sunglasses.

“Pretty scraggly,” she said.

“I prefer to call it personal flair.”

“Good thing you have it,” she said. “One of these flies was found in the lip of the poor sap your buddy fished out of the river. The pink
stain on the wing is blood. But I bet you knew that. Your friend Meslik has a big mouth.”

“You’re looking down the wrong road,” Stranahan said.

“Really? What road should I be looking down?”

“You should be asking me if the fly in Beaudreux’s lip was from his own box. If he was hooked with his own fly. I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that he was.”

“How’s that?”

Stranahan parted the hackle fibers on the blood-stained Wulff to reveal two strands of pheasant tippet, golden with barred tips. Then, ignoring the question in Ettinger’s eyes, he rifled through the pockets of his vest for the Wheatley fly box Vareda had given to him, the one belonging to her father, and showed her an identical Wulff behind one of the little plastic lids.

“Those little strands of barred feather, that’s the tier’s signature,” he explained.

“Whose? The dad or the son?”

“Vareda said they were her father’s flies. He probably gave his son a box of them. Wasn’t he wearing a vest when he drowned?”

The sheriff pressed her lips together.

“No, he wasn’t. And he didn’t have a fly box in a shirt pocket or wader pocket either. He had a couple flies stuck in a piece of sheepskin, that was it.”

“That’s odd,” Stranahan said.

“Yes it is.”

U
nder the best of circumstances, dead antelope stank. Rainbow Sam had gone into detail with Stranahan about the odor when they met at the banquet. You open up an elk, he’d said, it smells the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. Antelope smelled like sagebrush dipped in cat guts. The best you could say about them was that they tasted so much better than they smelled. In fact, according to Sam,
antelope that hadn’t been run before they were shot, building up lactic acid in their muscles, were the best of all game—the meat fine-grained and tender, marrying perfectly with a mint jelly sauce or a creamy béarnaise.

But not even the most pungent of sauces could resurrect this one. Dead three days in July, the stomach had bloated to twice its normal size. Still, the body remained intact except for exposed tissue around the eyes, anus, and bullet hole, where magpies and jays had buried their beaks into what could only charitably be termed flesh. In fact, it was the flock of jays whirling above the kill that had led Ettinger and Stranahan to it in the first place. Ettinger took a camera from the glove compartment and snapped photos from various angles.

“Looks like you’re in luck,” Stranahan said. The bullet had entered the chest as the antelope stood head-on and had not exited.

“What do you mean ‘me’?”

Ettinger handed Stranahan latex surgical gloves and snapped another pair onto her own hands. She drew the folding knife from her belt holster.

“Keep her spread-eagle.”

Stranahan positioned himself.

“Brace yourself,” she said, and inserted the point of the knife below the breastbone. A hiss of gas groaned from the body, ending in a drawn-out flatulence. Instantly the air was fetid with rancid body acids. The bullet, after wrecking the chest cavity, had worked back into the paunch, spilling green clumps of digested grass that smelled like silage.

“Don’t you dare puke on my shoes,” Ettinger said.

Ettinger cut around the diaphragm and half spilled, half dragged the ruptured spleen, liver, kidneys, and stomach onto the ground.

“Our bullet’s somewhere in that mess,” she said. She looked up, blood and offal from the elbows down.

“Look at me,” she said seriously. “I mean it. Look at me.”

“I’m looking.” Both had become dead serious.

“Do you have anything to do with this? Anything that’s happened these past few days, starting with your Southern belle?”

“All I did for her was some fishing.”

“But what you’ve done isn’t the same as what you know, is it, Sean? This isn’t a game.”

Stranahan held her eyes.

“I think you’re doing your thinking from the waist down. You’re over your head and maybe you don’t know it.”

“Is that all?” Stranahan said.

“That’s all.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Let’s find that bullet,” Stranahan said.

A half hour later, Ettinger scraped the mangled remnants of a rifle bullet from the lining of the paunch. The front of the bullet had mushroomed to double diameter. Most of the exposed lead had fragmented, but the copper base was intact, the groove marks created by the rifling in the bore clearly visible.

“What caliber do you figure?”

“.243 or .257,” Ettinger said. “That reminds me. I got a call from a Centennial County deputy in Idaho yesterday. They found a kid who said he was shooting gophers near the shore of Henry’s Lake the day you were there with Meslik. He was shooting a .222. Not the caliber of the bullet that hit Meslik. So that clears up the first two shots you heard.”

“What was the bullet in Sam?”

“A .243.” Ettinger unbuttoned her shirt pocket and drew out an evidence bag containing the bullet taken out of Sam. She touched the base of it to the base of the bullet from the antelope. “What do you think?”

Stranahan squinted. “The diameter’s close.”

“I agree. But even if it’s the same caliber, it doesn’t mean the bullet was fired from the same rifle. The .243 is a popular cartridge. But every rifle leaves marks on the bullet that distinguish it from bullets fired from another rifle, even if they are the same caliber.”

Sean nodded. He understood that rifling marks were as individual as fingerprints.

“How long will it take ballistics to establish if these two bullets were shot from the same rifle?”

“State lab’s in Missoula, four days if I red-flag it. But we have a technician in Bridger who can make a comparison that’s 90 percent certain of standing up.”

“So if it turns out the gun belongs to Gentry and he shot Sam because of some prior altercation about trespass…”

“Which doesn’t seem sufficient motive to me,” Ettinger interjected.

“…how does that relate to the Beaudreux killing?”

“Damned if I know,” Martha admitted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

O
n the drive back, Ettinger was silent until she pulled to the side of the road downstream from Lyons Bridge.

“Do you know where we are?” she said.

“Back to square one,” Stranahan said. He knew damn well that she knew he knew. “That logjam is where Sam found the body. He showed it to me on the way to Henry’s Lake the morning he was shot.”

“Did you walk down to the river?”

“No. He just pointed.”

She switched off the engine. “Pull on your waders.”

It was a five-minute hike. They stepped over a fence and stood on the lip of the bank. Ettinger, arms akimbo, nodded to herself.

“What do you think? The location, I mean.”

Stranahan looked back at the highway. Only a narrow slice of asphalt was visible. He could hear a car coming up the 287, a flash of red—it was gone. A driver who turned his head toward the river would have a few seconds at most to register a fisherman there, let alone see what he was doing.

“Just what I told Sam,” he said. “Or maybe he told me. The word that comes to mind is ‘secluded.’”

“What’s that tell you?”

“You’re testing me?”

“No, I’m asking your opinion to see if you come up with the answer I did.”

“Well, it’s a good place to dump a body… at night. This is a popular river. A guide boat comes down every fifteen minutes on a slow day. Damn risky in daylight. But just for argument’s sake, why couldn’t it be an accident? The guy falls in upriver and gets caught in the logjam?”

Ettinger hadn’t told Stranahan about the broken stick found below the body that matched the stub in Beaudreux’s eye. She said, “We have reason to think that didn’t happen. No, I think the body was taken here after dark and dragged to the logjam.” Without further ado she started wading toward midriver. Stranahan was surprised at how deftly Ettinger moved, for the current was strong and the footing suspect. The dark seam near the island was crotch-deep. Stranahan found himself beginning to float a bit; he crossed at an upstream angle and caught up with Ettinger in the eddy at the tail of the island.

“What do you want me to see?” he said, breathing audibly.

“I don’t want you to
see
anything. There’s nothing to see. The body was carried out to this island and wedged under the logjam at the top of it.”

Stranahan sighed. “It’s another test, right?”

“Oh, I thought it would be obvious to a bright fella like you.”

“What’s obvious to me is the guy had to be damned strong,” Stranahan said, a note of resentment in his voice. “Some guys couldn’t even wade out this far, let alone drag a body. Maybe your killer had help.”