The Royal Wulff Murders (33 page)

“That’s what I’m saying,” Stranahan said. He told her what McNair had said about the key unlocking the land. “Well, this is the key,” he said. He thought a second, then added, “Maybe Missouri River Pisces
is going to get a contract to help with the stocking. Then they’d be making money two ways.”

“It sounds like a stretch,” Ettinger said.

“It is. But it’s how someone could make money with minimum risk. Thing is, there not only has to be prior knowledge that the trout fishing will come back, but also that the recovery will happen within a reasonable time frame. It can’t take a decade or more like it did on the Madison. Then you’d just be paying property taxes and sitting on land you couldn’t sell. You’d bleed to death.”

There was silence on the line.

“You think this is another of my hunches, right? But remember—”

“No,” Ettinger cut him off. “No, I’m thinking about something else I found out. I think you’d better meet me.”

“I can be at your office first thing in the morning,” Stranahan said.

“No, tonight. Drive out to my place. It’s the old homestead up Hellroaring Creek with the weathervane on the gate. We can link into the Law and Justice computer system from here.”

S
tranahan ran his hand down the spine of Sheba, the longhair Siamese that had hopped onto the cherry table in Ettinger’s kitchen. The cat rubbed its brittle whiskers on Stranahan’s coffee cup.

“Was that your horse I saw driving in?”

“That’s Petal. She’s like a stone that changes color when you put it in water. She’s white until it rains, then these big gray spots show up.”

Stranahan had never seen Martha out of uniform and felt slightly awkward with her in the intimacy of the farmhouse. He sipped his coffee and looked past the kitchen into the living room, the chinked log walls nearly black.

“It was built in the 1880s by a Presbyterian minister,” Ettinger said. “He was fleecing his flock, money from the men and the clothes off the women. When one of the husbands found out, he shot him.”

“The Wild West,” Stranahan said.

“Maybe then. Now it’s just peaceful. It’s only a few miles out of town, but I’m connected to the earth here. I can feel what it was like to live in a simpler time.”

“I hear you,” Stranahan said.

Ettinger smiled rather embarrassedly, as if to say, “This is who I really am.”

Her voice didn’t have the brusque tone he was used to. She was dressed in jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt, like a French sailor’s shirt. The color brought out the azure hue of her eyes. When Ettinger saw him looking at her, she dropped her eyes to the table, then tried to cover up her discomfort by reaching for the cat and putting it off the table.

“So,” she said, the professionalism back in her voice. “The man on the phone.”

“The man on the phone,” Stranahan agreed.

“He’s the one we’re really after. McNair’s only a pawn in this.” She waited for Stranahan to nod. “Whether this is the kind of land grab you think it is or something else, two men dead, trout chasing their tails, this is the guy who works the strings.”

Stranahan nodded again.

“So, I put Judy on the family. My instincts tell me that’s where it starts. She got through to a corrections officer name of Yuto, up in Kuskok Bay. That’s the town where the brothers moved after their mother left. Yuto’s been around forever. He says that the aunt the boys went to live with wasn’t much of a step up from the mother. Her name was Aubrey—Aubrey Anne Archer. The guys at the department called her Tawdry Aubrey. She bartended commercial fishermen places, guys who get drunk and fight because it’s four men to a woman and they can’t get laid. The aunt takes advantage of the equation in time-honored fashion. She hooks. Not formally, just by emptying the wallets of a string of boyfriends when they come ashore. According to Judy’s source, each one of these guys
really thinks he is her boyfriend, that he’s helping her out, her suddenly having to support a couple of boys. Which is the point I’m coming to. Because she’s working on her back in the evenings, the kids have to raise themselves. Apple being ten and Jonathon three years older, it’s Jonathon who raises Apple. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Maybe,” Stranahan said without conviction.

“You will. The boys, it turns out, are opposite sides of the coin. Jonathon becomes captain of the hockey team, senior class president, Captain von Trapp in the
Sound of Music
. Apple develops sort of a hero worship for him, but has none of the charisma and even then he’s getting into fights, getting into trouble. By all accounts, Jonathon is protective of Apple and a good influence. A father figure to a boy who has no father, or mother for that matter. Understand, we’re looking at this from twenty-plus years out. We could only locate a couple classmates who recall anything about Apple and they were dismissive; to them, he was just the short guy who trolled along in his big brother’s shadow.”

Ettinger cocked her head. “Listen,” she said.

Through the screen door Stranahan heard it—“whoo…‌ooo… ooo… ooo.” Then again.

“That’s a great grey,” Ettinger said. “I hear him about twice a week. A horned owl isn’t as regular, it doesn’t have that deep timbre in its voice.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a bird woman,” Stranahan said.

“Oh, I’m lots of things.”

She came back to the subject. “Anyway, jump forward a few years. Jonathon enrolls in community college. He’s eighteen, can legally move out of the house. He moves into a place with two friends. Apple’s still at home, a freshman in high school. We can date the
Playboy
subscription to this time, because the address on the magazine is where Jonathon was renting. Without the older son’s presence, Apple’s
grades drop, he gets in fights, truancy problems”—Ettinger shrugged—“he drops out of school in the tenth grade.”

“Why did the older brother leave the house?”

“One of his old roommates says it was a girl. Jonathon had a girlfriend and he needed somewhere to be with her. Actually, he’d had a serious girl earlier who had drowned in a lake. The rebound girl, her name was Barbara Rouse.”

“More the reason to harbor a resentment toward women,” Stranahan said. “Apple is deserted by his mother, neglected by the aunt, then abandoned by the one person he looks up to. And a woman is to blame for that, too.”

“It gets worse. According to the friend, it’s the Rouse girl who lures Jonathon away to Washington. She has relatives in Olympia and encourages him to apply to Evergreen State. Jonathon gets accepted, he joins her in the lower forty-eight, and Apple levels off about a rung up the ladder from the bottom of society. He becomes the kind of person I make my living off of.”

“Does he have a record?”

“Disorderly conduct. Disturbing the peace. Fighting. But understand, this is Alaska. You have to do something pretty bad to get into the system. If everyone who gave someone else a black eye was deported, there wouldn’t be anyone left to catch king crab.”

“Why didn’t Apple follow his brother to Washington?”

“That’s a good question. We have no record of Apple leaving Alaska until he came here. We also have no update on the brother. Evergreen State has him attending for the fall of ’eighty-seven, spring of ’eighty-eight. I had Judy people-search a few databanks. Nada.”

“How about the girlfriend?”

“Barbara Rouse—R-O-U-S-E—graduated from Evergreen in ’ninety. Her parents live in Bellingham. Judy got a phone number and left a message.”

Ettinger drummed the fingers of both hands on the edge of the table. She pushed back in her chair.

“So that’s where we stand. I don’t know how this ties in with your property theories.”

“Neither do I,” Stranahan said. “But when you were talking, it crossed my mind that the brother might have had something to do with McNair coming to Montana. Something got him out of Alaska and the brother was the most important person in his life. Did you think of that angle?”

“Sure. Also that the motive behind the move was to run away from something in Alaska. That might be more likely.”

“How about the hatchery?”

“Walt made a couple calls, but something came up and he had to drive down the county. So that’s on the back burner till tomorrow.”

“What about McNair? Is anyone still looking for him?”

“Karl Radcliffe is going to take his Piper Cub up at dawn, see if he can spot smoke. But we pulled just about everyone else. We postered the trailheads to warn hikers there was a fugitive at large, but there’re going to be people who ignore it, so spotting a campfire won’t mean much. We’ve had people go to ground in the mountains before and what happens is they come out on their own. They get hungry. Even this time of year, unless you can catch trout in the cirque lakes, you’re down to throwing rocks at squirrels and eating serviceberries. He could be anywhere now. Down in the valley, out of state, anywhere.”

“So now what?”

“Punch the keys, make the phone calls. We’ll know more tomorrow. But it isn’t TV. Things take time. Even the bloodwork on the boot, which is flagged, is going to be another week.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You’ve done plenty already. Where’s your Miss Beaudreux, by the way?”

“Halfway to Mississippi would be my guess. She came through Bridger to pick up her brother’s ashes the day before yesterday, when I was out with Search and Rescue.”

Ettinger shot him a quizzical look.

“I called the funeral director. That’s how I know she picked up the urn.”

“So you haven’t heard from her?”

“Not since Missoula.”

“And you really want to keep helping with this?”

“What do you think?”

“Then keep working the property angle. But take some time off to breathe a little.”

“I am. Remember Ventura, that movie guy who’s Tony Sinclair’s neighbor? I’m going fishing tomorrow night with him, if he remembers. I’d forgotten about it till I saw the boat trailered in his drive the other day.”

“We tried to talk to him,” Ettinger said, “but he left for California before the shit came down. You see him, ask him about McNair, anything he knows beyond that he was persona non grata in the neighborhood.”

Stranahan told her he would and a minute later got up to leave.

“Oh shit,” Ettinger said. “I almost forgot. I asked you over here to look at a couple pictures,” she said, leading him into the main room of the old cabin, where she had a computer set up on a butcher block made from the cross-section of a tree trunk.

“Doug fir,” she said. “I got it at a farm auction. Said to be eight hundred years old, but I haven’t gotten bored enough to count the rings. Here, this is what I wanted you to see. It’s a page from the Kuskok Bay high school yearbook. Yuto got it from one of Jonathon’s classmates and scanned a couple pages.”

Stranahan bent to peer at the postage-stamp-sized headshots on the screen.

“It’s from ’eighty-six,
the year Apple was a freshman, before he dropped out.”

She hit the plus sign to enlarge the section with Apple’s photo. It showed a blank expression, dark eyes set in deep sockets, and a shock of unruly black hair. It was recognizable as McNair only if you knew that first.

“The dead look,” Ettinger said.

“A mug shot,” Stranahan agreed. “But that’s just being a teenager.”

Ettinger backed out of the page and clicked on another attachment to the e-mail.

“Jonathon, his senior year.” Ettinger enlarged the photo to graininess.

The young man smiled knowingly at the camera. A bang of jet black hair combed to the side fell heavily over the left eye, which was noticeably puffed. It gave the face a lopsided look.

“Looks like he was in a hockey fight,” Stranahan said.

“His expression says he won,” Ettinger said. “Cocky bastard. Look how he lifts his eyebrow for the camera. Got that bemused look down. But I can see what the girls saw in him. You get the hair off his face, he’s a good-looking boy.”

“I can’t see too much family resemblance besides hair color, can you? But it’s a bad shot to make a comparison with.”

“We’ll have the book tomorrow. Yuto says there are several more photos of the older brother, team shots and so on, so we should have something clearer to work from.”

She walked with Stranahan to the door.

“Thanks for coming over.” She switched the porch light on for him.

Stranahan noticed the softness had come back into her voice. She looked tired in the light, and Stranahan instinctively reached out and took her left shoulder in his hand and gave it a squeeze. He felt the urge to lean in closer, but didn’t. There was an awkward moment, then she bridged the space to kiss him lightly on the cheek.

“Thanks
for standing beside me this past week,” she said.

Stranahan idled down the drive with the windows open. When the great grey hooted, he stopped and shut the engine off. The voice echoed into silence, leaving the undertone of the current. The owl was the sonorous heartbeat of the night, the river song its breath, and these sounds resonated in Stranahan’s chest long after he had retired to the futon in his studio, as the bass notes of nature do with those who sleep alone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

A
t 8 p.m., the surface of Quake Lake shimmered with gold coins. The flat stone Stranahan skipped blinked away into the distance. He arched his back to get the kinks out after the drive up the Madison Valley.

It had not been a productive day. He’d spent the morning talking with real estate agents and coming up against a wall, learning nothing more than he already knew. In the afternoon he’d met with Sam, who had introduced him to an asthmatic rail of a man named Hoss Borger, a retired fisheries biologist who volunteered at the Anglers Against Whirling Disease Foundation. Borger sat down in Sam’s kitchenette with his lips compressed as Stranahan talked about the possibility of someone transmitting whirling disease into Montana rivers.

The biologist hit his inhaler before he spoke.

“It shakes your faith in mankind,” he said in a rasping voice.

Borger said more—about tubifex worms, sporoplasm infection, avenues of transmission—skimming a surface with which Stranahan was familiar. He did clarify a point. Stranahan had heard that the disease could be transmitted by anglers who dirtied their boots in an infected river, then released sediments when stepping into another. That had struck him as a flaw in his theory. If spreading disease was as simple as traipsing around with mud on your boots, why go to the trouble of transporting fish in an aerated tank. Why take the risk? Borger assured him that introducing diseased fish
into a river was by far the most certain conduit for infection. Then he passed the buck, offering the number of a biologist who specialized in disease control.