The Royal Wulff Murders (3 page)

She swung on by him. “You have a good day now,” she said. She left a scent hanging in the air, like oranges.

CHAPTER TWO

T
he sheriff of Hyalite County, so-named for the opal ore that studded the volcanic peaks south of Bridger, placed her hands on her hips and said, “Hmpff.”

“What we have here,” Martha Ettinger said, looking from her deputy to the logjam in the river where Rainbow Sam’s client had hooked the corpse, “is a case of simple drowning. Or not. Enlighten me, Walt. Humor me with some of that big-city cop perspective.”

It was Thursday morning, the day after the body had been discovered. The previous evening there had been scant opportunity to search the area where the angler had received his prodigious strike. By the time Ettinger and Deputy Walter Hess had taken statements from Sam and his client—a banker from Atlanta named Horace Izard III—then waited for Doc Hanson to drive in from Bridger, pronounce the bloated, trout-belly-white body dead, and arrange for transportation to the county morgue, it was nearly dark. Ettinger had wanted to wade out to the logjam herself, but neither she nor Hess had packed waders with felt soles, which were necessary to keep one’s footing on the treacherous boulders. Sam had offered his services and, when they were politely declined, his waders. Client Izard had seconded the offer, but as neither man had been able to hit a toilet bowl with any consistency in more than a decade, owing to an inaccuracy of aim by the appendages their bulging stomachs concealed from view, and as both wore a twelve shoe, their waders were comically large. It
had been decided that Walt, who was only marginally taller than Martha at five-foot-ten, would venture out in Izard’s waders, which looked more hygienic than Rainbow Sam’s, despite traces of vomit.

The deputy hadn’t taken a dozen steps before Sam had snorted, raised his eyes to Martha, and said, “Your deputy’s goin’ right in the drink.”

Walt made it a little more than halfway to the logjam, shuffling carefully in the clown-foot wading boots, before slipping on a rock and taking a header. Rainbow Sam, who moved well for a big man, ambled casually downriver, waded out in his jeans, grabbed Hess by the collar, and, for the second time that day, dragged a waterlogged body to the bank.

Back on shore, Hess had thanked Sam sheepishly and grinned at Martha, who raised her eyes in exasperation.

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” she said.

Sam wondered if there would ever be a time when he didn’t have to deal with morons in the water.

P
ut on the spot, Walt grimaced, spit a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth—he’d been a Chicago cop, taking a dip of snuff was a Western adaptation—and said, “I see it like this, Marth. Our John Doe here, he’s out of state, reads
Fly Fisherman
and
Field & Stream
like they was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, buys hisself a fly rod…”

“Which we haven’t found.”

“Which we haven’t found. Anyways, he has this rod but never learns how to cast. He’s fishing, hooks hisself in the lip on his back cast, slaps his hand to his mouth, and falls into the river. He gets washed into a logjam and poked in the eye by a stick, starts swallerin’ water, and next thing you know he’s fishing that great trout stream in the sky.”

“We don’t know for sure yet he drowned,” Martha pointed out.

“No, but them’s the odds.”

“Walt, did you, like, forsake the English language when you came out here, or were you always this much of a hick?”

“I fancy myself sort of the American Crocodile Dundee,” Walt said, deadpan. He slapped the foot-long bowie knife strapped to his waist.

Martha blew out her breath.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. That’s the scenario I come up with, too. But I’ll take exception with the nonresident assumption. He’s casually dressed, his waders are patched up; it makes me think he could be local. Plus, the guide says he saw him here a few weeks ago, so if he was on vacation it was a long one.”

“What bothers me,” Walt said, “is how come no fishing license? No wallet, for that matter. No car. Leastwise, none nearby.”

“And no rod and no fishing vest,” Martha added. “Plus, the wader belt he’s wearing is inflatable but he doesn’t pull the cord to inflate it. If he falls in, you figure first thing he does is reach for the cord. It smells, doesn’t it? Let’s go have a look at that logjam. Maybe his wallet and his license washed out of his pockets and got caught in the jam.”

“Not likely. If you remember, Sheriff, he was wearing one of those shirts with zipper pockets and they were zipped. I checked.”

“Humor me, Walt. And do me a favor. This time, try not to fall in the river.”

The logjam had formed itself into long commas of debris around an exposed boulder in the middle of the river. The body had become wedged underneath the mass of roots from a tree that had washed down during high water. Ettinger and Hess searched this area first.

It wasn’t easy. The current swirled around the boulder, scouring out a pocket of deep water that pressed against the roots and threatened to upend the sheriff and her deputy with each mincing step they took. Bending down to look under the tangle, Hess took in a few cups of the Madison over his waders and whistled.

“Hooey, Marth, that’s cold as my ex-wife’s udders!”

Ettinger harrumphed. She had spotted something blue back under the root ball and was reaching as far back as she could, her arm immersed in the icy water and her wader top within an inch of the surface. The tips of her outstretched fingers grazed across what felt like fabric. She pinched her fingertips together, but the cloth pushed away.

She plunged her arm farther under, the water seeping into her waders. “Mother”—she felt her nipples stiffen and sucked in an involuntary breath as the water sloshed against her chest— “of”—she grabbed the cloth—“mercy!” she exclaimed, shuddering as icy water seeped underneath the wading belt and tingled against her belly.

“Aha!” She withdrew her arm triumphantly.

“Looks like Mr. John Doe lost his hat,” Hess said. He waded over to examine the ball cap, which Ettinger pinched between her fingers.

“
MOCCASIN HOLLOW SEMEN SALES. JULEP, MISSISSIPPI
,” Walt murmured. “Foreigner, just like I said.” Above the brim was a stitched emblem of a Jersey bull, walking on his hind feet, approaching a cow who looked coyly over her shoulder at him.
WE STAND BEHIND OUR PRODUCT
, read the back.

“Amusing,” Martha said. “Very amusing.”

She turned the hat over. Inside the crown, a small square of sheep’s wool, attached by two safety pins, held four trout flies.

Ettinger said, “You ever know a fisherman to wear one of these patches
inside
the hat? I thought the whole purpose was to dry the flies, so you pinned it to the outside.”

“Don’t reckon I do,” Hess said.

Ettinger withdrew a submersible point-and-shoot from the breast pocket of her khaki shirt. She snapped a photo of Walt holding the hat and another of the logjam. Then she withdrew a ziplock from her wader pocket and sealed the hat inside it.

Hess shook his head. “This ain’t no crime scene, Marth,” he said.

She ignored the comment and stuffed the ziplock inside her wet shirt. “We’ll have a closer look-see later.”

For the next twenty minutes they searched the tangle of branches that formed the logjam, Hess on one side, Ettinger on the other. They found nothing else.

“What do you say we go back?” Hess said.

“Let’s give it another few minutes.”

“Marth,” Hess said, “just what is it we’re looking for? ’Sides the rod?”

“Think, Walt.”

Walt went back to searching.

“I’m waiting,” Ettinger said.

“I’m thinking,” Hess said.

A minute later Hess straightened up. “Is this what we’re looking for?”

Ettinger waded around the downstream side of the jam and bucked the current to come up alongside the deputy. A willow tree had been swept against the logjam, its branches partially submerged. Walt was pointing to the end of a half-inch-diameter branch that had broken off short near the trunk. The stub was splintered, and clinging to it was an inch-long thread of fleshy tissue, pale as a blanched earthworm.

“That looks like eye matter to me,” Ettinger said. “But this is
downstream
from where what’s-his-face, Izard the Third, hooked the body. If our theory about him drowning holds up, how could he poke his eye out with this branch and end up twenty feet upriver?”

“Maybe that Southern gentleman and the guide were wrong about the position of the body.”

“What about the hat, then; why was it upstream?”

“It came off his head and he swept on past it and ended up here.”

“That fishing guide was pretty positive about the body’s location, Walt.”

Hess rubbed his forehead with a sunburnt hand.

“Then how in God’s name…” He stopped. “Aw, Marth, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“Now
you’re
thinking,” Ettinger said. She took a snapshot of the tree limb, then fished around for another plastic bag in her wader pocket. Clasping the bag between her teeth, she opened the saw blade of her Swiss Army knife, grasped the stick a foot below the break, and started to make sawdust.

CHAPTER THREE

I
n Sean Stranahan’s philosophy of life, any man who had a fly rod, a quarter tank of gas, and four decent tires was never too far from home. So while it may have been true that he wasn’t sure which way to turn when he left the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center, the fact remained that no matter which point of the compass he headed for, he’d be home in time for an evening caddis hatch. Within thirty miles of Bridger ran four of the greatest rivers in trout fishing lexicon: the Yellowstone, the Gallatin, the Madison, and the Jefferson. He settled on the Madison’s Bear Trap Canyon because he loved the barren hills and because the newspaper story on the man who had apparently drowned in the Madison’s current—albeit a good sixty miles upstream—exerted a perverse magnetism.

At the river, clouds of caddis flies pulsed over the willows like dust swarming through shafts of sunlight in a musty room. Stranahan knotted the fly he had tied in his studio to the point of his leader. He worked the fly line out in tight loops, then dropped it gently to the surface. Immediately, the current swept it in a bow downstream. He flicked his wrist to roll a loop of line upstream, erasing the bow so that his line was straight and the fly, which imitated the immature stage of the insect, drifted naturally beneath the surface. Manipulating fly line was second nature to Sean, as was tightening it when the first fish took and then letting the trout run freely to jump once, twice, three times before it sulked in the current. Stranahan worked the
trout in and cradled it underwater while removing the hook. The iridescent violet, ruby, and silver sheens trembled as the small rainbow trout twisted, catching angles of light. He released his hold and the trout arrowed away into the current.

He looked across the river. It always looked different after he had caught his first fish, more potent somehow. Although it had taken him time to adjust to the steeper gradients of Western rivers, Stranahan could now read the tapestry of currents as naturally as a field general interpreted military maps, and plan his campaign accordingly.

Fishing was something he was very good at and had been since he was a boy, armed with a pole and a bobber, dunking worms for bluegills in the pond at his grandparents’ farm in western Massachusetts. Whenever the family arrived for a visit, Stranahan would immediately snatch his pole and a rusted gardening trowel from the trunk of the car, then jog straight to the pond to dig for bait. His mother would call to him to show a little more courtesy for his grandmother and grandfather, who would come out of the house waving, but his father always said, “Let him go, Marge; it means so much to him.”

But if afternoons of dancing bobbers proved to be the most joyful and innocent of his childhood, the magic of fishing that transformed his life was experienced in darkness. After dinner, his grandpa and father would drink George Dickel and smoke pipes out on the porch. Sean would sit on the railing, listening to the crickets rubbing their legs, watching the weeping willow in the yard for the first lantern of light from the abdomen of a firefly. He would tap his foot impatiently on the peeled-paint floorboards, waiting for his father to tap out his pipe.

It had become a father-son ritual. His dad would take the pipe from his mouth, examine it—while Sean held his breath—and put it back between his teeth. The sigh escaping Sean’s lungs, which would become an irritating habit that Beth commented upon more than
once, was incubated on those interminable evenings. At last his father would knock the pipe on the porch rail, watch it with a critical eye until it lost some of its heat, and replace it in the pocket of his shirt. Then from his pants pocket he’d withdraw his car keys, which he’d casually toss over.

“How about getting the tackle box out of the trunk?” he’d say. “Unless you’re too sleepy to fish. If you’re too tired, Grandpa and I can go alone.” His father and grandfather would exchange winks. “How ’bout it?”

Sean had never been too sleepy to sit in the bow of the old wooden rowboat moored at the dock. His father manned the oars, positioning the oldest and youngest generations of Stranahans to cast toward the indigo shoreline, where the cannibalistic bass—the big game of the pond—hunted frogs and bluegills as well as the young of their own kind. Sean’s favorite plug was a Crazy Crawler, a treble-hooked contraption with hinged metal wings that opened and closed like a wounded bird as it was reeled across the surface. He would never forget the first time a bass inhaled the lure, shattering the moonstone surface of the pond. The jolt of the strike had taken Sean completely out of the current of ordinary life and into a dimension of sensation and urgency, where time was measured in heartbeats and minutes passed that could never be recaptured in the imagination—minutes that could be relived only if you were lucky enough to catch another.