by Dave Butler
“Not a lot. It’s called a trattoria. To be honest, I have no idea what that means, but I do know two things: one, it’s a lot better than a pizzeria, and two, it has, in my humble opinion, the best food and wine in town.”
At the urging of the hostess, Willson agreed to share a bottle of Argentinian Malbec with the two men. Her first sip was a long one, and she sat back in her chair, content to listen to King and Canon talk about commercial photography. Based on many hours of listening to her friend, she knew it was a rapidly evolving field, and with millions of people around the world taking millions of pictures every day, the competition was fierce. Despite that, Canon’s work was in constant demand.
“I received an intriguing request for you, Jim,” King said. “The client wants you to shoot new Ferraris with captive cheetahs at a safari lodge in Namibia. I expect you’ll like it because the car company is in partnership with a local conservancy. Interested?”
Willson saw Canon’s face light up. “Count me in,” he said.
Their server, a much pierced and tattooed young woman, approached their table to take their order.
“Hi, I’m Melissa. What can I get you for folks?”
“Well, what do you recommend?” replied Canon.
“If I had to choose one thing on the menu, I’d order the bison stroganoff. It’s strips of slow-cooked, range-fed bison, in a rich red wine and mushroom sauce, on a bed of fettuccine noodles. And it would go well with your Malbec.”
Willson, Canon, and King simultaneously nodded in agreement. They’d all get the stroganoff.
“Are you a local, Melissa?” Willson asked curiously, intrigued by the tattoos.
“Nope,” she said. “I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo and came here to ski for the winter before I head to the University of Calgary to start my master’s.”
The three gaped at her.
“I know,” she said with a grin. “I get that reaction a lot. People don’t expect it when they see my tats and piercings. Hey, let me get that order in for you.”
The evening wore on, and between mouthfuls, Willson watched Canon fill many pages of his ever-present moleskin notebook with suggestions from King. She understood Canon well enough to know that his creative mind was already planning how to tackle the challenges King laid out for him, even as King was still talking. Willson occasionally envied Canon’s life of travel and diverse projects. While it was standard commercial work that paid his bills, she’d heard him talk of shooting locations on assignment for travel publications, normally to accompany articles prepared by contract writers. But at other times, he worked with finicky ad agency art directors, capturing images of models or products in exotic places. It was his stories of those exotic places that most fascinated Willson; he brought out the travel bug in her.
They again chatted with their server as she handed the dessert menus to each of them. “If you want something light,” the young woman said, “try the spumoni ice cream.” She continued with a sales pitch she’d obviously perfected on other diners. “But I really suggest the wild huckleberry cheesecake.” She drew out the word really, making it sound like something illegal or immoral, or both.
In the end, the three ordered the ice cream. As Willson shifted in her seat, she was bumped in the shoulder by a man passing behind her. When she saw Canon’s eyes widen, she turned in time to see the man, clearly unsteady on his feet, heading toward the stairs behind her.
“Jenny,” whispered Canon across the table, “that’s the guy!”
“What guy?”
“One of the two guys I saw in Wilcox Pass.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“I am. And there’s the other guy who was with him that day, at that table there.” Canon gestured to a far corner of the room where a large man sat at a table for two. They saw him wipe his face with a linen napkin, stand, and then stumble toward the stairs, joining the other man.
“Jesus,” said Willson, twisting in her seat to grab her coat. “You stay with Bob, Jim. I’m going to follow these guys, see if I can get their names.”
“Not likely,” said Canon. “There’s no way I’m letting you go out there on your own, no matter what you do for a living.”
Willson realized that chasing after two men in the dark, both of them apparently drunk, wasn’t a great idea, at least not without backup. And her friend did deserve to be a part of this. “Maybe you’d better,” said Willson. “Stay here, Bob. We’ll be right back. Let Melissa know that we’re not skipping out on paying. And don’t eat my dessert.”
Willson and Canon sprinted down the stairs, skirted a fallen plant that the two men must have bumped into and knocked over in the entryway, and then caught sight of them crossing Banff Avenue toward the Visitor Centre. A taxi travelling slowly southbound swerved around the men, the driver hammering his horn in protest.
They caught up to the two men as they exited a brick walkway into the parking lot adjacent to the Bow Valley Credit Union.
“Hey, guys,” called Willson, “hold up a minute.” She saw the big man turn toward her, while the smaller man stumbled into the side of a car.
“What the fuck do you want?” said the big man.
Willson flashed her badge at the man. “I’m a national park warden. Can I see identification for both you guys?”
“I’m not showin’ you and your boyfriend nothin’.”
“You’re required by law to show me identification on my request.”
The man took a shaky step toward Willson. She shifted one step back to stay out of the reach of his big arms and his even bigger fists, fists that were clenched at his side like two hams.
“Fuck you, lady ranger,” the man said. “Are you and your friend gonna make me … or what?”
Willson could see that this was going south in a hurry, and she didn’t want Canon to get into a fight. Her friend could take the big man, she had no doubt of that, but he might get hurt in the process. Egos and testosterone were never a good combination. With some karate training under her belt, she could do her part, but battling it out with a giant in a dark parking lot was stupid. And she had no handcuffs, no radio or cellphone to call for reinforcements. As well, her car was parked blocks away, so she couldn’t follow them, and at this point she had little to arrest them on other than a refusal to identify themselves … and an oblique link to poached park animals.
“Jim,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “have you got a cellphone on you?”
“Nope,” he said quietly, while they watched the big man weave in the darkness like a punch-drunk boxer. “I left it on the table in the restaurant.”
“Shit,” she said. “We’re going to have to back off here, or one or both of us are going to get hurt.”
“C’mon, Jenny,” said Canon, “I can take this guy.”
“Nope, I’m not going to risk it. You’re a civilian and this guy is bigger than I am. We’re going to stand down here.”
Willson raised her hands, palms open. “Okay, guys, why don’t you go on your way.” She focused her attention on the big man. “You look like you had a fun evening. Is your friend good to drive?”
The smaller man responded to Willson’s question while moving forward to grab the big man’s elbow. “I’m good. I don’t drink no more, although I know it don’t look like it. C’mon, Bernie, let’s get outta here.”
Willson watched the big man shake off his friend’s hand and then stagger away. “Fuckin’ wardens,” he muttered.
Willson and Canon watched the two men climb into a blue pickup truck, the small man in the driver’s seat, the larger wedging himself into the passenger seat. The engine started as though in pain, and then the truck careered down the alley paralleling Banff’s main street. Willson heard a crash and assumed they’d demolished either a garbage can or a fence.
Standi
ng in the now quiet parking lot, Willson turned and smiled at Canon.
“Why the hell are you smiling, Jenny?” he asked. “You let them go. Those were the two guys we were looking for.”
“I’m smiling for two reasons. One, because it was the smartest thing to do — it could have ended badly. And the second reason? Because I got a name for one of them and the licence plate of their vehicle. There’s no way that shit-box of a truck’s a rental. It belongs to one of those guys, and I’ll soon have more information to work with, information that I didn’t have a few moments ago.”
She wrote the licence plate number on the palm of her left hand and looked back to where the pickup had disappeared down the dark alley. She heard a dog bark under the sky filled with stars, an exclamation mark to what she’d just witnessed.
“Time to celebrate with a scotch, Jim.”
Chapter 10
March 30
Jenny Willson had nothing good to say about the park warden office in Banff National Park. It was an ugly building located in an equally ugly industrial compound east of town, a part of Banff that most tourists never saw. Unlike the park’s administration building, which presided over Banff like an imperial castle at the south end of the main street, the dumpy warden office shared its space with gas pumps, a warehouse, and a fenced compound filled with machinery and maintenance vehicles. To the north was a helipad and hangar where the red-and-white rescue helicopter, supplied by Alpine Helicopters from nearby Canmore, sat at the ready during the summer months.
Down the hallway from the spartan reception area, Willson sat at a grey metal desk in her equally spartan office, peering at a computer. Piles of files, notebooks, and a well-thumbed copy of the Criminal Code of Canada surrounded her. As she did every Monday morning, Willson had already reviewed a stack of reports prepared by seasonal wardens for the weekend shifts. She’d paused and sighed when she read the description of a double fatality the night before — a carload of local teenagers driving well over the speed limit had skidded into a copse of pine trees on the road to the old hot springs. It was all tragedy and no opportunity for learning. As court warden, she’d also prepared the paperwork for two court cases coming up later that week; she would drop them off at the Crown counsel’s office after lunch while in town.
It was 9:30 a.m. and the weather was cold and blustery. Willson was catching up on email, the morning’s second cup of bad coffee in hand. She was no fan of texting, tweeting, Instagramming, or Facebooking, so email was her one surrender to the world of social media. And it was a reluctant surrender at best. Scrolling through her inbox, she saw a message from the RCMP crime lab in Calgary. She opened it, her anticipation rising. It was a brief note from a civilian lab technician. It was the long-awaited report on the bullet they’d carved out of the shoulder of the bull elk she’d found on the 1A Highway nearly five months ago. She clicked on photographs of the slug — both the whole piece of lead as well as close-ups of its markings — and read the conclusion that the projectile was a .308-calibre bullet. Willson swore when she saw that it had no matches in the national database.
Even though she had expected the report to be clinical, Willson was disappointed. She knew that the .308 was a common bullet for North American hunters. There were hundreds of thousands of them produced each year, and they could be fired from many different rifles. So without something to compare it to, such as the rifle used to shoot it, she had little to go on. But after seeing the two men in Giorgio’s the night before, she wondered if either of them owned a gun that would fire a .308 cartridge. Wouldn’t that be interesting.
She yawned and rolled her shoulders. Since finding the slaughtered elk, she hadn’t slept through the night. Each time she was in a new investigation like this, her nights were filled with sheet-twisting, ceiling-staring, pillow-punching periods of consciousness, her mind a blur of possibilities and pathways, with shadowy perpetrators lurking out of her reach. She was tired from the previous night, when she’d repeatedly jerked awake from dreams of chasing shadowy men down shadowy alleys, running but never catching them.
And the long phone conversation with her mother, just before she was headed to bed, hadn’t helped her insomnia. The phone had rung when she was sitting in her favourite reading chair, willing her eyes to stay open so she could finish the last chapter of a novel. The chair sat under a lamp in the living room of the old house she rented from Parks Canada. The house was on a quiet part of Cougar Street, near the railway and the strip of forest between it and the Trans-Canada Highway, only a ten-minute walk from her office. She loved the house and had twice saved it from the wrecking ball by surreptitiously siccing the local preservationists on her bosses. She was only a renter, but felt that the house had become hers and that, in turn, she had become part of the house. With the old walls popping and cracking around her in the cooling evening air, she’d simply listened to her mother talk about her father.
It had been twenty-two years since he’d died and it was still painful for both of them. While Willson had come to terms with it, at least on the surface, the loss remained a constant focus for her mother, an unhealthy focus that seemed to have become a barrier between her and the rest of the world. Willson knew it was unhealthy, knew her mother needed help, but just didn’t know how to make that happen, particularly at a distance. She felt guilty and frustrated at her inability to fix her mother’s challenges.
When she did finally sleep, her father appeared in the background of her troubled dreams, his eyebrows bushy, his eyes a deep blue, his insistent voice telling her to keep trying. “C’mon, Jenny,” he said, “you can do it. Where there’s a Willson, there’s a way.”
She wondered what the dream meant, what some new-age shrink would tell her about her childhood, or her relationship with her father, or who she was in a previous life.
A phone rang on the desk beside her, derailing her train of thought.
“Willson, Warden Office,” she answered.
“Jenny, it’s Brad Jenkins. We haven’t spoken in a while, and I wondered if you’ve got any news on the poaching investigation.”
“Hey, Brad,” said Willson, her heart momentarily fluttering. She clenched her fists, frustrated with her inability to control her emotions. “I was going to call you this morning once I got through this mound of paperwork. I have a question for you.”
“Go for it.”
“Do you know a guy from Cranbrook … Charles Clark?”
“Yeah, I know Charlie Clark. Why are you asking?”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s a sad little man who’s an assistant guide for an outfitter named Bernie Eastman. What’s he got to do with this?”
For a moment, Willson pondered this latest news. An assistant guide, working for a guide-outfitter … a hunting guide … a guide by the name of Bernie? Now this was interesting.
“Bear with me for a second,” said Willson. “Give me a description of Clark and Eastman, would you?”
“Clark is barely five feet tall, no more than a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, with brown scraggly hair and a face that looks like one of his parents was a ferret. I’ve never seen him without a baseball cap. And he’s meek, mild, seemingly afraid of his own shadow and wobbly on his feet.”
“And Eastman?”
“They’re complete opposites,” said Jenkins, “like Arnold Schwarzenegger hanging out with a thin Danny DeVito. Eastman’s a big man, probably two hundred and seventy-five pounds, nearly six and a half feet tall, with a bushy beard and a bad temper.”
“Huh,” was all Willson said.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re asking about them, Jenny? Or are you going to keep me in the dark? Are they involved in the elk poaching?”
“Sorry, Brad,” said Willson. “My mind is racing here. Let me take a step back. I was out for dinner in Banff last night with Jim Canon and his photo agent, and we almost got into
it with two guys outside the restaurant, both apparently hammered, but one claiming he didn’t drink. Guess what? Jim’s certain they were the two guys he saw on the trail in Wilcox Pass shortly before the ram was shot.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“I shit you not. Jim was sure of it.”
“So did you talk to them?”
“We did. We followed them from the restaurant to the parking lot and tried to get identification from them. That didn’t work, and I decided not to push it. But I got the licence number of their truck, the same colour of truck that Jim saw in the parking lot that day. When I ran the licence plate first thing this morning, it came back to Charlie Clark.”
“Holy shit,” said Jenkins. “Talk about good timing and even better luck.”
“And Clark called the other guy Bernie before they left, so it’s gotta be them. So tell me more about this Eastman character.”
“Eastman lives on a ranch in Ta Ta Creek near Kimberley. I’ve been to his place a couple of times. He operates north of there in the Purcell Mountains, in a guide territory where he pays the government for the exclusive right to guide non-resident hunters. He’s a pain in the ass to deal with. He’s a bully, plain and simple. All our guide-outfitters are real characters, but out of all of them, Eastman is the only guy I can think of who might get wrapped up in something like this.”
Willson’s mind raced with the news from Jenkins. What the hell was a Kootenay-based guide-outfitter with his own licensed territory that was probably full of wildlife doing in the national park? What was going on? Her thoughts leaped ahead. If she could tie Clark and Eastman not only to the poached elk in Banff, but also to the dead ram in Jasper, she’d have the start of one hell of a case, instead of being at what appeared to be a dead end. She remembered that neither the RCMP nor the wardens had stopped any vehicles matching Canon’s description on the night the elk was shot, nor even a night or two before. As a good investigator, she automatically jumped to the next obvious step.
“Brad, these guys may have stayed in Banff overnight. Not just last night … but around the time the elk was shot. If they were scouting prior to that, they might have stayed a night or two in town and/or they probably ate in a restaurant somewhere. It’s unlikely they stayed here the night after they shot the elk because the risk would be too great. I’m going to canvass the local hotels, motels, and restaurants to see if they have any record of them.”