Death Canyon

by David Riley Bertsch

  “Is that supposed to surprise me, Noelle?” He laughed again.

  She rolled her eyes, more at herself than him.

  “This attack was really bad, Keith. I mean, it looked like the bear punctured the victims obsessively, like the animal had rabies or something.”

  “That would be pretty rare up here. Rabies, I mean.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right, that’s all.”

  “Have you ever witnessed a bear attack before?”

  “Never.”

  Keith walked over to her and took the tooth, which she had removed from the envelope.

  “This”—he held it up in front of her—“is backed by jaws strong enough to crush through the femur of an elk. Strong enough to crush a human skull. I’ve seen grizzlies bite through thick pine saplings. And those were just cubs playing, honing their skills.”

  Keith reached behind her with the tooth in hand. “It would bite here and here, upper jaw and lower jaw.” The touch of the tooth was cold on her upper neck. “Get the idea?”

  Keith’s lips were only inches from Noelle’s. She stepped back but held his gaze for a second.

  Noelle cleared her throat. “But two victims were thoroughly mauled—and I mean thoroughly. And more chest damage than head and neck. Isn’t that a bit unusual? Wouldn’t the second victim get the idea that she was in danger and run from the scene?”

  “Unless one stayed trying to protect the other. That’s the most likely reason I can think of. It happens. And chest wounds sometimes happen when the vic doesn’t roll over onto his or her stomach.” Keith paused. “Or maybe there were two or more bears—is that the sort of speculation you wanted to hear? That this story has a twist?” He smiled wryly.

  Noelle knew he was hassling her in good fun, but she was still offended. “I’m being serious here, Keith.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Keith took the tooth over to a black lab table and focused a large magnifying light on it. The contrast of the colors made the tooth’s virgin white gloss stand out even more than it had last night.

  “Mighty clean,” Keith said immediately.

  Noelle nodded and studied Keith, trying to gain some understanding of his meaning, and then eventually said: “How do you mean?”

  “I mean that I can tell you right off that this tooth probably wasn’t hanging out in the mouth of any wild animal recently.”

  “You’re sure?” Noelle asked.

  He picked it up. “It should have at least some plaque gunk up on the gum line there. Who knows? It might be fake, and if it’s not fake it might have been cleaned and bleached and had some type of sealant applied.” Keith walked with the tooth to another table. Noelle followed.

  “I’m happy to crack it open to try and confirm it, but it’s unlikely a real bear tooth would be this clean into adulthood, and the size of this canine—that’s the tooth type . . . canine—tells us that it is definitely from an adult bear if it is in fact real. Even more obviously, there is no gum flesh left on the roots of the tooth suggesting that it was torn or bumped out of place. This tooth is either a good fake or a great refurb. Either way, a quick chemical test can show you what I mean.”

  “The chemical test I can agree to, as long as the cops won’t know I messed with it.”

  “You’re gonna tell the police?” Keith smirked.

  Noelle shrugged. “Still plotting my next move.” It was Keith’s turn to cluck his tongue.

  Keith went to a drawer and picked out a large bone, from a bear’s hind legs, as far as Noelle could tell. Then he grabbed a clear condiment squirt bottle filled with blue liquid and a tool that reminded Noelle of the dentist’s office—chrome, sterile clean, and with a jagged, hooked end.

  He squirted a tablespoon of the liquid into two small plastic cups. “The natural biological matter,” he intoned as he scraped off a bit of the bone’s surface, which fell into the cup in the form of a fine powder, “will dissolve easily into the solution.” Sure enough, as he gave the mixture one quick swirl with the tool, the powder disappeared and left no trace. The liquid retained its transparent blue color.

  “The exterior on this tooth—or this impostor—or whatever it is, will fail to dissolve in the solution. Instead, it will cloud the liquid and flakes or particles of the solid will remain visible. To dissolve this epoxy or sealant, we’d need acetone or some commercial formula designed for that very purpose.”

  Again, the results were exactly as Keith predicted. The coating on the tooth fell in larger, thin flakes into the solution. Despite a few vigorous stirs with a wandlike chrome tool, Keith couldn’t dissolve the particles.

  “So, this tooth”—he held Noelle’s discovery in the air as if he were completing a magic trick—“has some epoxy, lacquer, or finish on it to preserve it and to give that shiny surface. It’s likely not real, and if it is, it looks like a human got ahold of it after it was in the bear’s mouth.”

  “What does that mean?” Noelle asked herself aloud.

  “Don’t know, Noelle. Above my pay grade. Your guess is as good as mine and mine’s not too good.”

  “Humor me,” Noelle instructed.

  “Gosh—who knows? Everybody whitens these days . . .” He trailed off as Noelle gave him another look. Get serious.

  “Keith, can you buy bear teeth or replicas anywhere?”

  “I’m sure you can buy replicas online, hell, probably authentic ones, too. It’s hard to imagine something that you can’t buy online. That’s where I got my Noelle Klimpton blow-up doll. Complete with uniform.”

  “Ew! That’s not funny, Keith. From what you’re saying we have something unusual on our hands.” She stated this more than asked.

  “Murder!” He threw his hands up in the air and laughed. “Unless you folks have been doing restorative dental work on some of the bears down there. Or it just fell out of some tourist’s souvenir bag.”

  Noelle and Keith went to lunch and spent an hour catching up. She’d missed him to some extent, but not enough to tell him that.

  Then Noelle thanked Keith, promised to write to him again soon, and put on her jacket. She went to her vehicle and entered the number into her cell phone of the man Keith recommended she call if she couldn’t get any traction in convincing the police to investigate this case as a potential homicide. The man, Keith told her, could become indispensable if it turned out that the local police were unable to find any leads on the case.

  Directly above the man’s phone number on the piece of paper, Keith had scrawled a name: “Jake Trent.”

  7

  WEST BANK, SNAKE RIVER. LATER THAT DAY.

  Jake’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He shuffled around in the backseat of the cruiser so he could pry the oversized and outdated device from his jeans. It was a local number, but one Jake didn’t recognize. He set the phone beside him on the bench seat rather than trying to stuff it back into his pocket. The minimal legroom in the cruiser’s backseat would have made it impossible, and the car was warm and stuffy. He was sweating. Sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser when you have no alibi for a man’s death wasn’t particularly comfortable.

  Jake had expected a visit from the police department that day. It seemed odd to him, however, that Chief Terrell had led him to the back door of the cruiser when he asked Jake to come to the station for questioning.

  “Is this really necessary?” Jake’s voice filtered through the wire mesh that separated him from the chief.

  “I told you, Jake. We’ll discuss it when we get to the station. You know how these things go. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Have you determined that the man was murdered?”

  “Jake!” Terrell sighed, annoyed. “We’re investigating the possibility, yeah.”

  The cruiser passed over the river on a single-lane bridge. Jake gazed upstream past the boat launch to look for birds and moose. In the distance, perched near the top of a tall cottonwood tree, he saw fuzzy white-black-white vertical dots stacked like a snowman and recognize
d them as a bald eagle.

  Investigating, Jake thought, now looking downstream. He guessed the river was still several weeks away from being fishable. Snowmelt from the high country was still showing its influence.

  If the police were investigating, Jake assumed that something had been brought to the chief’s attention on the case. If not, why would Terrell go to the extra effort? Terrell was a good cop, but Jake doubted that the chief’s deductive powers rivaled his own. Jake settled on the uncomfortable conclusion that there was evidence that the man was murdered and it pointed to him.

  The chief pulled into the police station lot and parked the cruiser outside the front entrance. Jake reached for the interior handle of the car’s door, but quickly realized there was none. This backseat was not designed for convenient exit.

  The chief opened the door for Jake and helped him out of the car. As they walked toward the front door, the chief curled his right hand around Jake’s left elbow—as if to lead him inside as an apprehended suspect. Jake shot the chief a steely glare. The chief let go.

  Inside the police station, Jake was fingerprinted and seated in the interrogation room. He immediately questioned the chief—a role reversal that Terrell was not expecting:

  “What’s going on, Roger? May I ask why you dragged me down here rather than just chatting with me at the house?”

  Terrell started to respond, but Jake cut him off. “And don’t forget to read me my Miranda warning; you should have recited it in the cruiser.” Jake looked toward the wall over his left shoulder and smiled slightly. Very few cops knew criminal law as well as Jake Trent.

  Upon Jake’s insistence, Terrell now did so. Jake interrupted him and waived his rights.

  “Look, Jake, you and I have a couple of problems.” The chief hesitated, not wanting to give away too much information to a suspect.

  “The man you brought in yesterday didn’t drown and didn’t die from hypothermia or exposure. Suffocated, but there was no water in his lungs. It looks like he just had his airway cut off. Lungs stopped taking in oxygen.” Terrell paused, knowing that his next sentence would sever the now tenuous relationship between the two men. “Jake, we think he was murdered.”

  “Wait, you mean he was strangled?” Jake interjected.

  “No . . . not strangled necessarily. The coroner seems to think that something was held against his face to block the intake of oxygen to his lungs—a hand, a plastic bag, who knows . . . a pillow. There is some bruising around his mouth and nose, and his front teeth were loosened from his gums by a pretty considerable force.”

  The chief watched Trent, as he was trained to do, to see if his body language would give him away.

  “I didn’t see any signs of a struggle when I found him. Did you find lacerations or bruises on his knuckles or wrists?” These were usually evidence of the self-defense instincts that kick in when a person is attacked.

  “Smith didn’t mention any,” Terrell responded, referring to the coroner. “But I don’t know how you suffocate without struggling.”

  “Inebriation,” Jake quickly replied, not intentionally aloud, “or the influence of certain drugs. Either could explain it. A large amount of alcohol or drugs can act as an anesthetic. The victim may not have even known that he was being suffocated.”

  “Hold on, Jake. There’s more,” he said, trying to regain control of the conversation. The chief shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “We identified the body. The guy was a young lawyer working for a litigation firm in Boise. Went missing five days ago. Left work one day and never made it home.”

  “You think I’m out eliminating my competition, Roger?” Jake laughed. “It’s a cutthroat business, man, but not literally. I don’t even practice anymore.”

  The chief pressed on. “That’s just it, Jake. This particular lawyer happened to be doing research for a developer working on a project here in Jackson. Finding loopholes, or whatever it is that you people do.” The slight was intentional. “The man was apparently trying to find an argument that would allow the developer to ignore a conservation easement, because it was not properly recorded or something.”

  Shit. Really?

  Jake thought of the argument he was to present to the council later that night. He hoped he would be released quickly and wouldn’t have to explain his absence.

  “Anyway,” Terrell continued, “some guys here at the station—cops, you know, also work as civil servants in other capacities . . . like you. Your name came up right away. They told me you are fighting any development of this piece of land that would violate the easement.”

  “Alleged easement, according to them. And so you think I killed the developer’s lawyer?” Jake asked, indignant. He was starting to wonder whether he should call a lawyer to represent him. No part of Jake wanted to spend any time in the county jail.

  Even the most experienced trial lawyers prefer to hire counsel rather than represent themselves in criminal matters. Perhaps this point speaks to the lawyer’s true opinion of himself—for only the man himself knows the real limitations of his abilities.

  The chief was softening a bit. “I don’t really think that, Jake. What I do think is that any cop worth his wages would consider you a suspect. You can’t argue with that.”

  “I’m not yet in a position to argue, Chief. Let’s get on with the questioning. Oh, and I would like to make a phone call at some point.” Jake’s phone, along with the rest of his belongings, had been surrendered to the authorities at the intake desk.

  “Sure . . . of course. First question is whether you knew this guy, this lawyer—name is Bryan Hawlding. Twenty-eight years old, Lewis and Clark Law School graduate is what our background check says.”

  Jake answered honestly, telling the chief that he knew nothing of the victim. Lewis and Clark, though? Jake thought. That was an unusual choice for a student who wanted to work with a real estate developer. The school had a liberal reputation and a prominent environmental law program. Jake attributed this dissonance to the ever-changing nature of the human mind—he himself had once worked in a field that he now despised.

  “Next, some folks have said that this development issue has really fired you up to, uh, to an extent that they haven’t seen before. What is your beef with the proposed project?”

  “I don’t have a beef, Roger. I wasn’t even familiar with this specific developer until this started. I just happen to think that a decades-old covenant should be honored when there is adequate evidence to support the document’s existence. Call me crazy, but I hope I’m not alone in that view.”

  “Hasn’t the developer offered to spoil the town rotten if allowed to continue, though? That’s my understanding.” Terrell relaxed a little more.

  Jake didn’t answer the question. It was clear that Terrell was uninformed. A moment of silence passed and then Jake spoke.

  “How long are you planning to keep me, Rog? I’m supposed to speak to the council tonight.” Jake took this obligation seriously anytime it arose, although the council was admittedly a “small pond.”

  “That’s up to you. Just a couple more questions, Jake, and you can make that phone call. Can you give me a verifiable alibi that you were not with Mr. Hawlding on the days leading up to when you found him?”

  “I saw a buddy at the boat launch the prior day, ask him. I was on the river overnight. I went fishing alone. Guy’s nickname is Caddy. I don’t know his real name.”

  “How can we get ahold of Caddy?” Jake shrugged in response, so Terrell continued. “Where were you the night before your solo fishing trip?”

  “I was at home the night before; J.P. can vouch for me. Shit, Roger. I was stewing over this development business. Now, would I reveal that to you if I had killed this guy?”

  “Maybe not, but with no alibi, we’ve got to hold you for the time being. Now, since I am in charge around here, I’m going to return your cell phone to you and let you wait this out in here, rather than in the holding cell. Gotta lock the door, though, Jake. Call me
or knock on the door if you need anything.”

  Chief Terrell left the room, and Jake heard the click of the lock. It was the type of dead bolt that required a key on both the inside and the outside.

  A few minutes later, the chief brought Jake his cell phone. He stood in the interrogation room as if he was going to supervise Jake’s phone call, but Jake made no move toward the phone sitting on the steel table and Terrell left with a shrug.

  Jake reached for his phone and flipped the cover open. A missed call; no voice mail. Either that or the phone hadn’t yet received the message. Service delays were common in these parts.

  Jake was happy to have his phone, but he didn’t have anyone to call. He decided against calling a local attorney. It would only draw attention to his situation.

  Surely, accusations of murder wouldn’t boost his credibility in the development dispute. Besides, he felt confident that Roger knew he was not guilty and was holding him at the station only until the circumstances of the man’s murder became clearer. He was being overcautious. If Jake’s name had come up with his deputies, Terrell had no choice.

  Jake’s first call was to J.P., who offered to come over and keep Jake company at the station. J.P. promised to pick up a six-pack. It was clear that he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, but that was fine with Jake.

  The locksmith had come over in the afternoon to let him into his camper, and J.P. requested that the man remove the lock entirely rather than make a key. Smart, Jake thought sarcastically.

  J.P. had some potential guests to call back, so he excused himself from the conversation. This early in the season, Jake wondered what the guests had planned for a trip. The alpine hiking trails were still covered with snow stained pink with watermelon algae, Chlamydomonas nivalis, the streams and rivers high and off-color, and the ski slopes closed.

  Jake briefly thought of Elspet. Perhaps if she had come with him to Wyoming, the two would be awaiting their guests at the bed-and-breakfast right now. He imagined the couple greeting the travelers: Elle engaging them in conversation after dinner about travel, local art, and music, Jake talking fishing, snow conditions, or wildlife. Her dark eyes would enthrall the male half of the visiting couple, and her furtive smile would irritate the woman.