The Royal Wulff Murders (24 page)

Stranahan switched the dome light on in the Land Cruiser and fumbled for his
Montana Atlas and Gazetteer.
He glanced at the grid map on the cover and leafed to page fifty-five. In twenty miles the 434 would T-up with the Montana 200. This was one of those lost parts of the state with so little traffic that drivers waved to each other
for the company. He decided he couldn’t stay a set distance back but would have to seesaw, fade out of the truck’s rearview mirror now and then. It was going to be tricky.

He held back as the truck slowed at the intersection. It turned left. As the truck geared down to cross Rogers Pass, Stranahan decided to pass it. If the driver had noticed him turn off at Wolf Creek and questioned the coincidence, passing him would ease his mind. Besides, he wanted a peek at this man.

Stranahan closed on the truck halfway up the grade. Drawing parallel, he glanced sideways without turning his head and saw a shadow figure under a ball cap; then, as he passed and pulled back to the inside lane, he checked his rearview and caught the silhouette of a dog sitting upright in the truck’s passenger seat. It must have been lying down when the truck had crossed the bridge back in Cascade.

Now there could be no doubt that this was the same truck Vareda’s brother had followed. Stranahan accelerated up the hill and left the truck behind. He fingered a pen from the dash and jotted the license plate number on his map. Stranahan crested the divide, where dark forests closed in from either side. He pulled off onto the first two-track he came to, nosing the rig back into a stand of dwarf pines. He switched off the headlights.

Stranahan’s fingers beat a tattoo on the steering wheel. Wherever the truck was headed, it wasn’t the Madison River; it would have continued south on the highway if that was the target. So where? A river to the west? He reached over the truck bench for his fly vest and took out the LED headlight he used when night fishing. He shone it on the map. Route 200 continued on through Lincoln, which rang a distant bell. Oh, thought Stranahan, that’s where Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had lived. Recluse country. He followed the thread of road farther where it paralleled the Big Blackfoot River nearly all the way to Missoula.

Waiting for the truck to catch up, Stranahan thought again of the
big trout he’d caught at the access in Cascade. A dollar bill was six inches long, give or take, and he placed it four times against the butt of his fly rod, turning it over and over, and still was an inch short of the imaginary mark he’d made when measuring the trout. A twenty-five inch brown. Except for the cuttbow he’d lost at Henry’s Lake the day Sam was shot, it was the biggest trout he’d ever hooked.

A blush of light brought color to the pine needles screening him from the road. Then the headlights of the hatchery truck beamed up to the tree tops and glanced away as the truck passed, following the downhill grade toward Lincoln. Stranahan waited until it was out of sight before turning back onto the blacktop.

F
orty minutes later, Stranahan turned into a campground along the Big Blackfoot River. He drove past a darkened trailer, then a family tent with a campfire out front, voices piercing the darkness. He idled along to an empty site and shut down the engine.

A quarter mile back up the river, the hatchery truck had turned off the road onto a steep grade that led to the riverbank. Stranahan had been too close behind to do anything but sail innocently past. He had found the campground by providence. He got his binoculars and started hiking upriver, easy going through a stand of stately Ponderosa pines, then not so easy where a fisherman’s trail wound through a willow jungle. Feeling his way through the snarl, he found himself at a gravel bar where the river made a sharp bend. Just upstream he could make out the shape of the truck. He heard the yapping of the dog and a sharp reprimand from the truck driver, whom Stranahan could see as a shape moving in the bed of the pickup. Sean brought up his Zeiss Jena binoculars. The glasses had been commissioned by the East German army for picking out would-be émigrés attempting to climb the Berlin Wall. A gruesome relic of the Cold War, but the superb optics gathered light from the night sky.

The truck driver was using a hand net to scoop from the drum tank. After each scoop, he dumped the contents of the net into what looked like a five-gallon bucket. The man clambered down from the truck and, awkwardly holding the water-laden bucket, shambled to the river, where he dumped the bucket—a quick phosphorescent waterfall. The hat obscured any distinguishing facial characteristics the binoculars might have illuminated, but Stranahan had seen enough.

As he hurried back to the campground, he heard a sharp whistle—the driver calling to the dog—then the cough of the engine. He knew by the time he reached the Land Cruiser that the hatchery truck would already be on the road. Back toward Cascade, mission accomplished? Or farther on to the west and south? This could be just the first stop. Several of the state’s better trout streams were only a few gallons of gas away, the nearest of them the Clark’s Fork and its blue ribbon tributary, Rock Creek. Stranahan picked up his pace.

But as he reached the outskirts of the campground, he was startled to see headlights dipping off the road to search through the campground. The guttural vibrato of the motor told him it was the hatchery rig, and for a heart-pounding moment Stranahan thought the driver must have made the tail and was looking for him. But then the headlights arced away and the engine shut down. The truck had turned into an open site. Now the driver was getting out, stretching. A flashlight beam poked around. A whispery voice said, “This place looks all right, what do you say, boy?” He saw the darting of the dog at the man’s feet. The truck driver was just looking to set up a camp.

Stranahan found himself at his rig, unsure of his next step. He could stay put—God knows some sleep would do him good—but then what? Follow when the man left? Come morning, the chances of him being spotted were much higher. Also, he was down to a quarter tank of gas. He checked the atlas again. The campground was thirty miles from Milltown, where state route 200 rejoined the highway
outside Missoula. There would be a service station at the junction, and a phone booth. He could gas up. The sheriff had given him her cell number. He could put off a decision until he called her.

He turned the key to the Land Cruiser, snapped on the low beams, and motored slowly through the campground. Maybe he’d catch a better view of the truck driver. But the man was puttering with his back to the road, putting up a tent, the dog a few yards away, digging industriously at the base of a tree. Stranahan started by, then, without really thinking it through, stopped with the motor idling.

“You need a hand with that tent?” he called out.

The man straightened up, and Stranahan felt his face flush from the adrenaline rush.

“Thanks just the same,” the man said. He bent back to his work.

Stranahan took his foot off the clutch. He drove out of the campground and made a left onto the blacktop. The truck driver had never turned, never offered anything but his back and his voice, which Stranahan hadn’t recognized. But he wasn’t thinking about the man. He was thinking about the dog that had stopped digging for just a moment, and lifted its head.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“H
ello.”

“It’s Sean Stranahan. I know it’s late.”

He gave her the short version.

“It’s the same truck Beaudreux told his sister about?”

“The dog, the live well… hell yes.”

“Let me get a pencil.”

Silence on her end of the line. Stranahan looked around. He was standing in a phone booth with a hinged door around the side of a service station casino, semis snoring in the back lot. A trucker walked by, shirttails over his gut, fingernail flicking a cigarette. He stopped in a pool of neon light to fire up another.

“Okay, give me the plate number,” Ettinger said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. That’s a Great Falls prefix.”

Stranahan thought about telling her about the dog, but he could guess her reaction: “Everybody who’s got ten acres owns a dog like that. You’ve got too much imagination, Sean.” And she would be right.

He could hear Ettinger’s sigh on the end of the line.

“So what’s this fishy business all about?” she said at length.

“That’s the question I’m asking myself. I have an idea, but I need to talk to someone who knows more than I do.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not you, someone who knows fish diseases. Look, you told me to follow this guy… no, you listen,” he said. “In as many words you
did tell me. So I just spent fifty bucks on gas I can’t afford, and I’m two hundred miles from Bridger, and, dammit, I ought to be able to ask somebody a few questions. You owe me that much.”

“Are you done?”

“No.”

They talked another five minutes. Ettinger couldn’t understand why the man would set up a tent, risk being seen the following morning. Maybe, Stranahan said, he was just going to rest a couple of hours, time it so he drove back to the hatchery before dawn, during the period of least traffic. Stranahan ran out of change. Ettinger called him back.

“Okay, you promise,” she said. “You’re not going to follow that truck any farther, right? You drive back here, ask your questions, then you come straight to me. Noon latest. Got that?”

“I got it.”

Stranahan said good-bye and went to put down the receiver.

“Sean?”

“I’m still here.”

“I spoke with Vareda Beaudreux when I got back this morning. We ran her through the system and she checks out—she’s who she says she is, the drowned man’s older sister, she doesn’t have a record. I spoke with the coroner. Her father turned toes up on the Madison July twenty of last year. He was fishing, it was heart failure, no foul play suspected. But to tell you the truth I didn’t get too far with that woman. Ask her to spell her name and she acts like you’re digging for the secret of her soul. I’m sure it must add to her appeal, men like you who want too much mystery in their lives. Anyway, she said if I talked to you to tell you she was going to be singing in the Blue Slipper tonight.”

“Where’s the Blue Slipper?”

“It’s in Missoula.”

Stranahan let the silence string out. Missoula was five miles west on I-90.

“You weren’t going to tell me?” he said.

“I just did.”

“Thanks, Sheriff. Good-bye.”

“You’ll call tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

Stranahan set the receiver down.

“Trouble with the law, huh?” The trucker, waiting to use the phone.

“Something like that,” Stranahan said.

P
arking on the grass lot by the Blue Slipper, a riverside honky-tonk in Missoula’s old downtown, Stranahan walked past an old-fashioned carousel, the fiberglass horses asleep on their sticks, then pulled open the heavy door to the club. For just a moment he could hear the rippling of piano keys playing off the vast murmur of the river current and heaved a sigh—he’d been half holding his breath thinking that she wouldn’t be there, half holding his breath thinking she would.

A kid wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt shook back a lion’s mane of dreadlocks as he accepted Stranahan’s $5 bill. Vareda was singing a Johnny Mandel standard, “Where Do You Start?”

He found a seat at a back table facing the elevated stage and ordered a draught beer. After a time he shut his eyes and let Vareda’s voice wash over him. It was a largely college crowd and when the song ended, a lanky young man dropped to his knees in an attitude of supplication before being yanked back up by the girl beside him. Vareda didn’t notice; her head was bowed and she seemed lost to the world. For his part, Stranahan enjoyed the anonymity, allowing himself to float above the scene before being brought back to earth as the waitress set the frosted mug on the table. As he raised it to his lips, Vareda lifted her eyes from the piano and looked at him. Then she turned away, saying, “I really need an accordion for this one,” as the first chords of “Crescent City” dropped from her fingertips, her voice dipping into Creole French for the refrain,
Tout est en son temps
—
everything
will happen in time
. Stranahan listened to the lyric without illusion. He knew that what they had together ran deeper than simple infatuation, but he also knew it could never weather the petty grievances of a normal life. He could regard Vareda Beaudreux with a coldly measured eye if there was reason to, now or down the line. There was a measure of regret in his knowledge.

She walked over when the set ended. Without looking down she squeezed his hand in a stay-where-you-are gesture, then walked to the bar where she accepted an envelope from a ducktailed man who wore a disco shirt patterned with electric guitars.

“Follow me,” she said. “It’s about fifteen miles.”

They walked to Vareda’s car.

“This place is a bit of a dive, isn’t it?” she said. “I thought the West would be, I don’t know, windswept streets or something. Meadowlarks singing.”

She still wasn’t looking at him.

“You seem, I don’t know… distant,” Stranahan said as she fumbled for her car keys.

“It’s just it takes me a while to come down after I play. And I didn’t expect to see you tonight, so you don’t seem quite real yet.” She put the back of her hand against his cheek. Then she broke away and climbed into her car.

The taillights led Stranahan south through a seemingly endless strip of gas stations, big-box stores, and fast-food joints. Then the broad sparkle of the Bitterroot River was under the span of a bridge. Beyond the river was the countryside, the lights scattered and the ebony canines of the Bitterroot Mountains jutting from the valley floor.

The Civic’s turn signal flashed. Stranahan followed the dipping taillights along the riverbank and then upstream toward a cluster of window lights. Ahead he could see two boxlike structures shaped vaguely like mobile homes.

Vareda turned off the dirt track well short of the lights and parked by the river. By the time Stranahan pulled alongside she was out of the car, fumbling with the long string of buttons that ran the length of her dress.