The Royal Wulff Murders (28 page)

“Let’s try giving them a proper breakfast first,” Sam said, handing DiBacco the streamer rod. “Cast to the bank, strip that double bunny in darting pulses.”

The tire baron was a B-plus angler and Sam netted three browns for him before the sun set fire to Specimen Ridge in the Gravelly Range. The wind picked up, gusting down the coulees that cut through the escarpment. Stranahan felt cold air kissing his scalp.

“My hat!”

The angler, measuring the distance with false casts, dropped the fly and stripped, missing the half-sunk fedora by a yard. Sam reached
across Stranahan, grabbed the six-weight from the client’s fist, and shot a fore cast worthy of a permit tailing in the Marquesas. He snagged the fedora and pumped it in, the soaked felt putting a bow into the rod.

He snorted. “This hat fights better than any trout you’ve hooked, Frank. You’re letting us down.”

Stranahan wrung out the hat and stuffed it into his gear bag. Sam fished a hand up under the stern, found what he was rummaging for, and wedged a ball cap down on Stranahan’s brow.

“That one won’t blow off. Looks solid on you too, bro.”

A half hour later, a bend in the river revealed the logjam where Sam had found the body.

The fishing guide checked his watch.

“PMDs ought to be starting up,” he said, referring to the hatch of mayflies that bring trout to the surface on many fine July mornings in Montana. He directed Stranahan to pull over to the logjam and drop anchor.

“Frank, why don’t you switch to that four-weight with the parachute dry there—yep, the one with the calf wing and purple body. Work into position at the tail of the slick. Bugs will start popping any minute now.”

As the client waded away, Sam and Stranahan found a log at the side of the jam to sit on.

“I know you been here with the sheriff, so you know we hooked the body at the head of the jam. Don’t really know what else to show you.”

“Well, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Stranahan said, taking off the hat Sam had lent him and scratching his scalp. He turned the hat in his hands, then stared incredulously. The front of the cap was embossed with a rainbow trout. Above the trout, letters in a stitched script spelled
MISSOURI RIVER PISCES
. It was the name of the hatchery where Beaudreux had worked.

“Sam”—Stranahan’s voice was deliberately restrained—“where did you pick up this hat?”

Sam’s look was evasive. “Client give it to me.”

“Really? Who was the client?”

Sam muttered “fuck” and spat into the water.

“Okay, you got me, it wasn’t a client. I found it on the dead man’s stick.”

Stranahan frowned.

“The fucking Winston.” He shrugged. “You know, the rod I found in the riffle.” He pointed upriver. “The strap had been cinched down ahead of the reel, you know, with the rod sticking out like a ponytail. When I picked up the rod, the hat come up with it. So what? The guy my client hooked didn’t have a hat on. Figured it was his.”

“Well, it isn’t.” Stranahan told him about the bull semen hat Sheriff Ettinger had found under the logjam. Ettinger had said they’d found strands of Beaudreux’s hair clinging to the sweatband.

“So whose… ?”

Stranahan could see the light flick in Sam’s eyes as his expression changed. The guide grimaced, showing the sharp V notches in his teeth.

“This is the hat the guy who killed him had on? Tell me I’m wrong, bro.”

Looking upriver, Stranahan could picture a man—a short stocky man, in Stranahan’s vision—walking the body down the riffle in the dark, clamping the rod under his arm because he intended to place it with the body. But why take off his own hat and cinch it around the cork? The breeze turning the aspen leaves inside-out gave him the answer. Hadn’t his hat blown off only an hour ago? Certainly McNair—Stranahan had finally put a name to the killer—had understood that the hat could link the hatchery to the body if he lost it, so he had attached it to the rod, cinching the adjustable strap just ahead of the reel. No doubt he figured to remove it once he got to the logjam. Or
maybe the hat the victim was wearing had washed off and floated away, to lodge under the logjam, and that had reminded McNair he’d better be careful of his own hat. But then he’d tripped up, entirely plausible given the conditions—slippery streambed, dead of night, trying to guide a water-soaked body down the river. He’d lost his grip on the rod, lost his hat attached to it in the process. In the dark, he’d been unable to find it.

Sam was saying something, but to Stranahan the words were white noise, like birdsong. His mind raced. All along he’d figured Sam’s cabin was trashed because someone was looking for the rod. But McNair wouldn’t care about the rod; the rod belonged to the victim—it wouldn’t incriminate him. It was the hat. The hat implicated the hatchery. DNA testing, if there were hair follicles on the hat, could tie McNair personally to the victim. Perhaps, Stranahan thought, the man had returned to the river in the morning, risking the exposure because he wanted to find the hat. He could have arrived in time to see Sam, already there with the sheriff….

Yes, that’s the way it could have happened. It would explain why Sam’s trailer had been ransacked, why his truck had been followed the morning they went fishing in Henry’s Lake. It would explain the shot at the lake. It also would explain the imprint of a size nine cowboy boot inside the old homesteader’s cabin near the lake. It fit together.

“You look like a man with a turd that’s been prairie dogging and finally got it to drop.”

“What?” Stranahan spun back to his surroundings.

“You know, prairie dogging, popping its head in and out.”

“Popping its—Jesus. You’re a sick man, Sam.”

“So what gives?”

Stranahan looked back up the river.

“Sam,” he said, “I have a serious question for you. What did you do with the hat after you found it?

“I put it on my head, man…. I dunno, I think I did. Yeah, I did. I’d left mine in the boat. Why?”

So, Stranahan thought, if someone had been watching, he’d seen Sam take the hat as well as the rod.

“Why didn’t you give it to the sheriff?”

Sam shrugged.

He said, “With her deputy falling in the drink and my client going ‘Europe’ all over my boat, a regular fucking Ringling Brothers, I forgot, I guess. I didn’t mean to, swear to God. I just stuffed it up under the stern and put my own hat back on. Forgot all about it till yours blew off this morning.”

“Show me.”

Sam showed him a recess under the aft decking.

“That’s like a secret compartment,” Stranahan said. He remembered seeing Sam’s boat in his yard the morning they’d left to fish Henry’s Lake—whoever had trashed the trailer had undoubtedly searched the boat, too. The compartment could explain why he hadn’t been able to find the hat.

“It’s just a recess where the flotation foam didn’t get blowed in,” Sam said. “So what?”

Stranahan tried to deflect the question with one of his own. “You ever hear of this Missouri River Pisces?”

“No bells,” Sam said.

Suddenly there was a yelp from Sam’s client, who had hooked a rainbow trout that made three jumps in succession, the first one higher than the client’s head.

“You got yourself a Michael Jordan, Frank,” Sam shouted, and after the fish was landed, photographed, and released, the question on Sam’s lips was at least temporarily forgotten. Three trout later, when the PMD hatch was petering out, the anglers piled into the drift boat to continue downriver. Sam didn’t mention the hat again until they reached the Palisades take-out.

“Don’t suppose you could maybe keep this hat thing under your hat, so to speak?” he said. “Sheriff’s already pissed that I didn’t hand over the rod. This was an honest oversight, I swear to God.”

“I can’t do that, but she’ll understand,” Sean said.

“That’s an outright lie, my man. But you do what you got to.”

Stranahan shuttled Sam to the put-in at Lyons Bridge, where he picked up his trailer rig. As the dust it raised settled back to the ground, Stranahan faced another of those moments when he had reached a crossroads and didn’t know which way to turn the wheel. To the west was Vareda, who had done a lot of talking with her eyes the night he had spent with her in the boxcar but had never once broached the subject of when they might meet again. She would have to return to Bridger for her brother’s ashes before driving back to Mississippi, and she was still on a long tether with Martha Ettinger, but…

But nothing, Stranahan thought. Missoula was two hundred miles west. He turned his attention to the north and Bridger, four walls hung with unsold paintings, and a crumb dish in front of a mouse hole. That life seemed beside the point now. But to the south—to the south was the cabin belonging to a short, stocky man who had a heeler dog that had one blue eye and one brown eye. It was scarcely fifteen miles away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

B
y the time Stranahan neared the Grizzly Bar, the adrenaline flush was fading. Taking his foot off the accelerator, he let the Cruiser coast. There was a phone booth outside the bar where he could call Ettinger. Surely, the hat would be the last piece of evidence she’d need for a warrant. But then, looking at it from her point of view, he realized that without genetic confirmation, which would take days, and then only if there was evidence to test, the hat did not connect the body to McNair. It was Stranahan’s recognition of the dog that turned the compass needle in the direction he was headed, and that—well, that and a buck ninety-five would buy you a shot of espresso without the steamed milk.

Stranahan put his foot on the pedal and continued south. At the gate across the road leading to the riverfront development, he faced a decision. He could pay a visit to Summersby, which would get him close to his quarry, but then what? He didn’t intend to confront the man. That could lead to destruction of evidence, as Ettinger had pointed out. No, what he wanted to do was watch McNair’s property from a vantage where he wouldn’t be observed or have to explain himself, and, as his eyes lifted to the skirts of the mountains, it dawned on him how he might do that.

A
mile past the gate to the river houses, Stranahan turned on to the Forest Service access road leading to the Sheep Creek trailhead. The road
climbed through a sage plateau for a couple of miles before reaching the turnaround. Stranahan rummaged for his water bottle and binoculars; then, on second thought, grabbed his damp felt hat and an old UMass sweatshirt. Who knew how long this might take? Skirting the trail, he crossed an irrigation ditch that siphoned the water in Sheep Creek and started to climb the facing slope to the south. Stranahan remembered Summersby telling him that on crisp autumn evenings he could hear elk bugling from this slope. By the time Stranahan reached a saddle in the side ridge, he was lathered in sweat. Putting his back to a windfall and folding the sweatshirt under him, he gulped lungs full of thin air, waiting for his heart rate to go down.

He lifted the binoculars, centering the range-finding crosshairs on the chinked cottonwood logs of McNair’s cabin. He could see the converted garage that served as McNair’s knife shop, his rusted Sierra Classic in the yard. No sign of life, though.

Stranahan raised the glasses, bringing into view Sinclair’s log mansion and, just beyond and downriver, the home of Richard Summersby. Ann, Summersby’s wife, was sitting on the porch where Stranahan himself had sipped whiskey only a few nights ago—it seemed like a few years. She turned the page of a book and Stranahan lifted the glasses and looked farther downstream at the manse belonging to the taxidermist, Gentry. A rifle bench rest, constructed with weather-buckled plywood, glinted with pinpricks of light—empty brass shell casings reflecting in the sun, Stranahan surmised. Nothing stirred. He brought the glasses back to McNair’s cabin, then looked at the house upriver from it. This was a log home built in similar architectural style as Sinclair’s but with a blue roof rather than a green one. A gleaming Adirondack guide boat trailered behind a Ford Expedition told him the house belonged to Lucas Ventura, the movie producer and hotshot angler Stranahan had met at Summersby’s party. Ventura had invited Stranahan to go fishing with him in the guide boat—when was
that? Saturday coming up, a week away. Well, thought Stranahan, some other time, some other life. But he could understand Ventura’s pride in the craft, with its arched spruce ribs, beautifully flared gunwales, and the tapering blades of the long oars that were strapped inside the hull.

In the sky, the sun moved with majestic lethargy toward Lobo Mesa in the west. A shadow darted up the mountain under the wings of a hawk. A mule deer doe and two fawns walked out of the draw below, contoured the hill, disappeared.

At 7 p.m. Tony Sinclair walked out the front door of his house. He pulled on waders hanging from a wall peg, circled an aerosol can of mosquito repellent around his head, and picked across the cobbles of a dry river channel toward the sapphire ribbon beyond, holding his fly rod backward so it wouldn’t catch the brush. Stranahan pulled on his sweatshirt and stretched, his butt and legs aching from the surveillance. Just what in hell did he figure to accomplish up here, anyway?

Standing up brought into view the irrigation ditch he’d crossed earlier. It sucked two-thirds of the water from the creek; now Stranahan noticed that the other third formed a narrow stream that drained the escarpment all the way down to the river. The stream was obscured by a line of brush, but here and there pools gleamed like string lights, shards of brilliance in the otherwise dark monotony of the landscape. Below the last drop in elevation was a larger pool—a beaver pond? It was all but obscured by a stand of aspens and red willow. From the downstream edge of the pond, the creek flowed weakly across the sagebrush flat before emptying into the river through a ravine that separated McNair’s cabin from Ventura’s mansion.

A rim of algal scum bordered the pond. From the access drive to McNair’s cabin, faint tire tracks led to a copse of trees below it. The color white caught Stranahan’s eye. Through the lenses it looked like a bucket, turned upside down on the bank of the pond. A seat to take when you wanted to drown a worm and fish, but fish for what?