Full Curl

by Dave Butler

  By 7:00 p.m., they were joined at a shiny, round-topped table by three other conservation officers — two women and one man. Willson slurped a black coffee that made her grimace, while across the table from her, Forsyth sipped tea with a smug I-told-you-so look on his face.

  With the signed search warrants in one hand and a white porcelain mug in the other, Willson urged the officers to lean in close, so that others in the restaurant could not hear their conversation, and then laid out her plan for executing the warrants on Clark and Eastman.

  “Okay,” she said. “We know that Clark is a nervous weasel of a man and that Eastman is a big hothead who’d just as soon fight as talk, so I’ll lead an all-woman team to hit Clark’s place. I’m betting that will make him uncomfortable.”

  As they’d driven down the valley that afternoon, dodging elk on the highway, Willson had originally wanted to visit Eastman herself. Assuming he was the ringleader, she wanted to see him again in person, to see the look on his face when he realized that she knew what he’d done, to ensure he understood that she would be an irritating burr under his saddle, a burr that would remain until she had him behind bars. But on reflection, she knew the revised plan was the right one. Her gut told her that Clark might be the weak link. She wanted to be the one to push him, to crack him open like a walnut.

  She pointed across the table to Jenkins, Forsyth, and the male CO. “That leaves you three to hit Eastman’s place at Ta Ta Creek,” she said. “If you’re okay with that, it’s going to take you about thirty minutes to get out there, so let’s plan to hit the two places simultaneously.” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s say 8:00 p.m.” She reminded them that the warrant expired at 9:00 p.m.

  Willson looked for agreement around the table and saw it in five nodding heads.

  “Good,” she said. “Bill, I want you to call me when you’re in Eastman’s yard, ready to bang on his door. I won’t knock on Clark’s door until I hear from you. When I give you the word, put your phone away and then do it. I don’t want there to be any chance that Eastman might phone Clark … or vice versa.”

  “Got it, boss,” said Forsyth.

  Willson then gave each team a copy of the appropriate warrant and, one more time, led them through the documents, line by line and clause by clause, to ensure everyone was clear on where they could and could not search and what they could and could not seize. She pointed to maps and copies of Google Earth images to reconfirm the locations of their targets.

  “This is a big deal for us,” said Willson, wrapping up the conversation. “I sincerely appreciate your help. Stay safe out there, and let’s do this.” With that, she rose from the table, shook hands with each officer, and then placed her now-empty mug into a plastic bin. She saw the looks of surprise on the faces of other patrons as the six uniformed officers rushed by them.

  Chapter 13

  Charlie Clark lived in a mobile home park on the northwest side of Cranbrook. An older complex, it was a mix of old and new, each home showing varying levels of care. In the shade of some yards, dusty, abandoned toys encircled vehicles up on blocks, awaiting repairs that might never come. In others, solar lights lined neat pathways of gravel and paving bricks. Clark’s yard and trailer were the worst on the street, forlorn and derelict. Neglected would be an understatement.

  Jenny Willson received the call from Bill Forsyth confirming that his team was in Eastman’s driveway. When the illuminated dial of her watch blinked to 8:00 p.m., she banged her fist on the front door of Clark’s trailer. One of the female conservation officers stood on the porch on her right, her hand resting on a 9-mm pistol in a worn leather holster on her hip. The other stood a metre behind them on the bottom stair. Willson knew they made an impressive and intimidating team, particularly in the dark. That was the point.

  Willson banged once more, louder this time. In response, they heard rustling inside, and then a woman in a tattered bathrobe opened the door, slowly, cautiously. The light in the room behind her was on, unlike the porch light, so she was a silhouette with a halo of frizzy hair.

  Willson gave the woman no time to react, opening the aluminum screen door with her left hand and immediately informing her why they were there. “My name is Jenny Willson. I am a park warden from Banff National Park. I have a warrant to search these premises. Is Charlie Clark here? Are you his wife?”

  The woman did not immediately respond, instead using her left hand to turn on the porch light as though its illumination would give her mind time to catch up to what she’d just heard. Her eyes widened when she saw the three female officers on her front porch. “Yes, I’m Wendy Clark,” she said, her voice a gravelly croak. She took the copy of the warrant that Willson pushed toward her and turned into the house. “Charlie, you need to come here right away.” She turned back to the door, swaying slightly, but by then, Willson and her colleagues were pushing their way inside.

  Behind his wife, Charlie Clark had risen from a leather recliner and was taking his first steps toward the door. Also in a bathrobe, he slowed in surprise when he saw the three female officers in his living room. Behind him, Willson saw a television paused in the middle of a black-and-white movie. A table in front of a faded couch was littered with half-empty whiskey bottles and overflowing ashtrays. The room smelled stale and smoky.

  Willson saw that Clark was unsteady on his feet and yet was trying to gain any control he could over the situation. She remembered the same instability from the Banff parking lot almost two weeks earlier — and his claim that he didn’t drink.

  She watched him puff out his scrawny chest, but the effort made him cough. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he asked after catching his breath, his confusion obvious. He obviously hadn’t heard Willson announce herself when his wife opened the door. “You got no goddamn right to do this.” But his eyes widened when he saw Willson. “You …!”

  Willson responded with authority. “Mr. Clark, I see you remember me. Your wife has a copy of a valid search warrant that we have for your house, vehicle, and outbuildings. We do have the right to do this. I want you and your wife to sit here while this officer and I undertake the search. The other officer will ensure you stay in this room while we do what we have to do. If you interfere with us in any way, you will immediately be arrested for obstruction. Do you understand?”

  Clark sat back down on the couch, muttering as much to himself as to anyone else in the room. “This is fuckin’ bullshit,” he said. His bathrobe gaped open as his bony knees splayed, exposing Willson to a view that would haunt her dreams. She quickly turned away, nausea tickling at the bottom of her stomach. Clark’s wife stood, frozen in place, with one hand still clutching the open front door, her eyes wide and her mouth opening and closing as though on a mechanical hinge.

  After pulling on blue surgical gloves, Willson and her partner searched the trailer, each taking one room at a time. They opened drawers in cabinets and dressers, they looked under tables and beds, they peered under and between worn mattresses. Willson opened the sliding closet doors in a guest bedroom and found a cardboard box brimming with sex toys. She pushed back more nausea and kept searching.

  Forty minutes later, the two officers had looked in every corner of the small trailer. They found no elk antlers. The only rifle was an unloaded over/under shotgun leaning in the corner of the closet in the main bedroom — not what they were looking for. They’d found nothing to seize other than a cellphone on the kitchen counter that might hold incriminating photos, emails, or text messages.

  Willson was crushed as she walked down the narrow hallway to the smoky living room. She decided to push Clark, to get him talking before he lawyered up. “So, Charlie, what can you tell me about you killing a bull elk in Banff National Park back in late October?”

  Willson watched a bulb of comprehension, albeit a dim one, light up in the man’s twitching eyes. If he didn’t drink, then she wondered if he was sick, perhaps suffering from mult
iple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, or even ALS. Whatever it was that was afflicting him, it didn’t prevent him from understanding, at that moment, what this search was about. His face jerked and grimaced as if he’d been hit by a jolt of electricity.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Clark said, his mouth a trembling line across his face, a face that in its wrinkles and abrupt movements showed layers of trouble and pain.

  With little physical evidence from the search, Willson refused to walk away from Clark’s trailer empty-handed. She pressed the point. “Would you answer me any differently if I told you we have evidence that you and Bernie were in Banff the night before the elk was shot? I know you remember talking me to in Banff a couple of weeks ago. I know you’ve been there.”

  At the mention of Eastman’s name, Clark’s head snapped toward Willson. “I’m tired of talkin’,” he spat. “You can talk to my lawyer.” He turned his head back to stare at the TV, crossing his arms over his chest as though that ended the matter.

  “Charlie, are you going to let Bernie get away with this?” asked Willson.

  “What in hell are you talkin’ about?” said Clark, his brow furrowing.

  “He bullies you into taking your truck on hunts in the park. He makes you use your credit card for meals and hotels,” said Willson, “so the whole trail of evidence leads us to you and only you. And he’s out there at his place, right now, telling my colleagues that it was all you, and that he had no part in it.”

  “That’s bullshit … do you think I’m stupid?” asked Clark. “Bernie wouldn’t say nothin’.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re stupid, Charlie,” said Willson. “Not unless you let him keep setting you up like this.”

  “C’mon, Charlie,” said Wendy, “don’t let Bernie pin this all on you!”

  Sensing an opening, Willson pushed. “Your wife sees what’s going on, Charlie. Why can’t you?”

  “There are too many women talkin’,” Clark whined. “It’s hurtin’ my head. I got nothin’ to say to any of you. Leave me alone.”

  “Think about what your wife is saying, Charlie,” Willson said. “In a situation like this, the first one to talk ends up in the least amount of trouble. The last one to talk gets the shaft every time. Every time, Charlie. Looks to me like Bernie is giving you the shaft and you’re going to let him keep doing it?”

  Willson saw Clark lean back on the couch and close his eyes. “Get the hell outta my house,” he said.

  “Aren’t you at least willing to tell us who the third man is, Charlie? The guy who was with you when you shot the elk?”

  “I didn’t shoot no elk, and I don’t know nothin’ about anyone who did. I told you to get outta my house.”

  “Well, I guess we’re done in here,” said Willson. “You lost your chance, Charlie.” She paused. “We need to search your truck and the shed behind the trailer. Where are your keys?”

  Reluctantly, Clark grabbed car keys from the coffee table and threw them at Willson. They dropped well short, hitting a stand stuffed with public-television catalogues.

  Willson bent to pick up the wad of keys and then, with the two COs following, crossed the living room, opened the screen door, and headed toward the wooden shed behind the Clarks’ trailer. It was tucked against a sagging fence. One CO shone her metal flashlight at the door of the shed and they all saw the shiny padlock that secured it.

  Willson tried all of the keys on the ring with no luck. She turned to Clark, who was now leaning against one of the posts on the front porch, watching them. “Which one is it, Charlie?” she asked.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he said with a smug smile.

  Willson asked the CO to remove the lock with a set of bolt cutters retrieved from the back of her truck. Just as the lock hit the ground, Clark surprised them all by flying across the yard. He jumped on Willson’s back, screaming and spitting. “You can’t go in there!” he wailed.

  Clark was not a big man, but he was wiry and surprisingly strong. Nevertheless, in the twenty-second struggle that ensued, Clark ended up face down on the ground. His bathrobe was bunched up against his shoulders, his gaunt white buttocks reflecting the trailer’s porch light. Willson’s knee was in the middle of his back as she clicked handcuffs closed around his thin wrists. “Well, Charlie,” she said, barely breathing hard, “you’re going to spend the night with us. You’re under arrest for obstruction of a lawful search.” She handed Clark over to a CO, who got him into the passenger seat of her truck and then stood watch beside the door. Through the window, Clark’s wispy hair was wild and he alternated between mumbling and yelling incoherently.

  Willson pulled open the door of the shed and shone her flashlight into the interior. It looked to her like any other garden shed, filled as it was with lawn chairs, faded gnomes, garden tools, and two large garbage cans. As they did in the trailer, she and the same CO went through the shed methodically, finding nothing of relevance — until they opened the second of the two garbage cans. Under a layer of dry lawn clippings, they discovered the probable reason for Clark’s outburst: two bales of marijuana, wrapped in plastic and secured with packing tape. The smell was unmistakable, but Willson cut open a small corner of each package to be sure. It was dark green, pungent, and valuable. With the contents confirmed, the two officers smiled at each other in the dark. Clark could now be charged with a second offence.

  As they considered their find, Willson voiced what they were both thinking. “Well, shit. We didn’t get what we came for tonight. But we ended up with a hell of a piece of leverage we can use on Clark. Let’s hope the guys at Eastman’s place found something relevant.”

  While one of the COs drove away, taking the handcuffed, dishevelled, and now quiet Clark off to a cell in the Cranbrook detachment, Willson turned to the other CO. “Have you got any connections in the local RCMP drug squad?” she asked. “We can’t seize the drugs without a separate warrant, so we’ll have to wait for them to get one and then get out here.”

  “I sure do,” said the CO before stepping away, her cellphone to her ear.

  Back in her own truck but still sitting in Clark’s driveway, now babysitting two bags of dope in the shed, Willson could no longer contain her curiosity. She punched the number for Bill Forsyth’s cell and heard him answer after four rings. She put the call on speakerphone so when she returned the other CO could hear him, as well.

  “Bill, it’s Jenny. Are you guys done out there?” she asked. “What did you find?”

  “By the time we got to his house down a long driveway,” said Forsyth, “Eastman was out on his front porch, waiting with his arms crossed. From a kennel behind the house, we could hear his cougar hounds baying at the disturbance. It was a bit surreal. The first words out of his mouth were ‘What the hell do you want?’ I told him why we were there and asked him if he would co-operate with us. He flew down the steps toward me without saying a word. I had no idea what he was going to do, but luckily, I didn’t get to find out. Brad intercepted him and immediately put him under arrest, sitting him in his truck in handcuffs. As you can imagine, he wasn’t a happy camper. But there was nothing he could do. His eyes, peering out at us through the window, would have burned holes in steel.”

  “Come on, Bill, tell me. What did you find?” asked Willson impatiently. The young man’s tendency to drone on and on while circling around the point like an airplane in a holding pattern was going to drive her to drink … more.

  “The house is huge, so it took the three of us nearly forty-five minutes to go through it,” said Forysth. “I seized three fully-mounted elk heads, all of which were the right size for the elk in Banff. I remember you telling me that a taxidermist could’ve added the Banff antlers to another skull, so that’s why I grabbed them. There were lots of other mounted heads there, too — mountain goats, bighorn sheep, bears, an antelope, and even a huge, black Cape buffalo. I would have loved to take them all. I a
lso got digital cameras, two boxes of business records from his office, a hard drive, and a laptop. It’s going to take us a while to go through it. We also went through his garage, a hay barn, and two large sheds, but I found nothing there other than tack for his horses and some of his camp stuff.”

  Willson could not hold back the obvious question. “Did you find a .308?”

  “Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that,” he said. “No, not in the house, but we did find two out in the garage, so we grabbed those.”

  “Great! And what about handguns?”

  Forsyth sighed. “Yeah, I found a floor-mounted gun cabinet in his office that was full. And there was a .357 Magnum in there. It was bloody painful to leave them. I did find permits for all of them, so I recorded the serial and permit numbers. I don’t remember the JP saying we couldn’t do that.”

  He finished the story by telling Willson about releasing Eastman from the truck when they finished the search. “He was like a grizzly bear coming out of a culvert trap,” he said. “We just stayed the hell out of his way. He stormed across his yard and threw a feint at the other CO as though he was going to punch him. He laughed like a madman, stormed up onto the front porch, turned and told us to get the fuck off his property, and then went into the house, slamming the front door. We didn’t get a chance to ask anymore questions. At that point, I’m certain he wouldn’t have said a thing. And what about you, Jenny? What did you guys get there?”

  “Well, I was goddamn glad we were wearing gloves when we did the search,” said Willson, the disgust clear in her voice. The CO joined her in the truck, her thumb up, confirming that RCMP members were on their way. “Jesus. My skin was crawling when I left there. I’ll need a hot shower tonight if I ever want to feel clean again.”