Bitter Truth

by CJ Lyons

  Lucy put the laptop away and climbed down from the passenger seat. Gleason was holding a camera with a short macro lens. “Wolf tracks, six of them that I can count.” He pointed to faint impressions in the dirt beside the creek bank as he knelt to photograph them. “Fresh. From the scat, they were probably here last night.”

  “Did they get your bear?”

  “Nope, but they were ready for them.” He crept around shooting photos, and Lucy stayed behind him, out of his way.

  “Them?”

  “A momma and two cubs. We’re trying to tag and relocate them off private land before they get into trouble with the tourists.”

  “But the wolves are using your traps as bait themselves.”

  “Yep.” He sat back on his haunches, staring at the trap.

  “I thought wolves hunted animals that can’t fight back, like deer?”

  “Usually they do. Sometimes bigger game like elk and moose—I’ve seen them drive an elk into deep water and then circle it, waiting it out from both sides until it’s too weak to fight back. But this…” He shook his head. “It’s…”

  “Fascinating,” Lucy finished for him. “They used our intervention and incursion into their habitat to create a new hunting strategy.” She joined him at the creek bed. “Are you going to move the trap now that you know the wolves know where it is?”

  “If I do, I won’t know where the wolves are or where my bears are; all I’ll have is a trap sitting somewhere safe and sound. And once the wolves find it again, we’ll be right back where we started.”

  “Maybe forget the trap? If the wolves are using it as an unfair advantage, take the bait out and close it down. Then the wolves are wasting their time waiting for a bear who’s never going to come.”

  “Doesn’t solve the problem of the bears encroaching onto human territory—”

  “Or wolves coming so close. Aren’t the Holmsteads llama farmers?” She remembered Judith mentioning that during the flight yesterday.

  “Llamas, alpacas, and goats, a few head of cattle, horses, and this time of year, fishermen and hikers.”

  “It’s like a tasting menu for wolves.”

  “The ironic thing is, humans reintroduced the wolves here back in 1995. They’re only doing what comes natural—it’s not like we have any right to be surprised.” He stowed his camera in his pack and strode over to the trailer that the culvert trap sat on.

  Lucy followed. The metal cylinder had rows of two-inch wide holes perforating the top third along both sides, the inside was smooth of any stray rivets or seams a bear could hurt itself on, and the back wall was solid steel with the lure suspended from a wire arm. She wrinkled her nose. “Smells like fish, bacon, and,” she frowned, “funnel cakes?”

  Gleason laughed. “My own recipe. The scientists over at Glacier have fancy lures, but I can’t afford them. Bears love protein, fat, and they have a sweet tooth. So I use doughnuts soaked in bacon grease, coated in fish oil. Doesn’t turn as fast as using fresh meat.”

  Lucy examined the trap’s door mechanism. The solid metal door stood above the opening like a guillotine ready to drop. “How does it close without hurting them?”

  “When the bait at the rear is triggered, the door closes. This is state-of-the-art, made for us by a guy in Missoula,” Gleason said with a hint of pride. “He worked with our scientists, and even though it looks dangerous, it’s rigged with safety features so the door stops if it meets any resistance like a straggling cub or even a stupid human climbing inside.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “More often than you’d think. Usually idiots trying for a selfie to post online. But with this automated trap, we can save them from themselves.” He pointed inside the front to the ceiling above the door’s opening. “A webcam is activated as soon as the door closes. It also measures the temperature, so we don’t have to worry about an animal overheating. And it notifies me with a text that the trap has an animal inside. All I need to do is go online, check out the camera footage, and I can monitor the animals. If it’s not our target animal, I can open the door with a press of a button on my computer or phone.”

  “I’ll bet you wait a bit on the humans,” she said with a smile. He shrugged, not answering. “Wait—so each of these traps has Wi-Fi?”

  He climbed over some rocks and through the huckleberry bushes to the rear of the trap. Here was a watertight metal box attached to the trailer with wires extending up to the top of the trap, where an array of solar panels connected to a small satellite dish. “We surround each trap with trail cams, and all of them are also solar-powered and connected to the satellite Wi-Fi. Used to be we spent hundreds of man-hours checking traps, even if they were empty—or worse, having animals suffer as they waited for us to make our rounds. Now I can manage them all myself, and our data gets to the scientists immediately.”

  While Lucy applauded the increased efficiency and comfort for both rangers and animals, she was more interested in another aspect. “Is the Wi-Fi secured? Or could anyone use it?”

  She pulled her phone out without waiting for his answer. Sure enough, it had picked up the open Wi-Fi network. “Do you have a map of all these traps and cameras?”

  “Sure, give me a sec.” He finished checking the trap and removed the bait, then pressed a button that resembled a doorbell at the rear of the trailer and the winch released the door. It did act like a guillotine, moving faster than Lucy had imagined, closing with a loud clang.

  They returned to the truck. “If you’re thinking of checking the cameras for signs of Bill, we already have volunteers doing that. No one’s spotted him.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a folded photocopied map. “This is a spare—you can keep it. I updated it last week, so it’s current.”

  She unfolded it. He’d marked traps with circles and cameras surrounding them with X’s. “Would Bill know about these?”

  “Sure. The official map is in the cloud, along with real-time data about each trap.” He wagged his phone. “I like to keep a few paper ones around; guess I’m old fashioned that way.”

  “So anyone could check and see where the cameras are?”

  “Not anyone. We don’t want the general public, especially your young, stupid homo sapiens, to know where our traps are. That’s just inviting trouble. But professionals like law enforcement, researchers, registered trail guides, private landowners with traps on their property, they all have access.”

  He started the truck and they climbed back out of the gully, bumping along the trail. Lucy braced herself with one hand against the door and examined the map with the other. If Bill wanted to be found, he could have gone to one of the traps, used its Wi-Fi to send a message. Or if he lost his phone, he could have simply triggered one of the cameras and they’d have his location.

  Which meant she was right. Bill didn’t want to be found.

  She circled her finger on the map, spiraling out from his last known location. Where he’d actually been seen, not just where his phone said it had been used—like Wash had demonstrated earlier, phones were too hackable, an easy way to misdirect pursuers.

  A sense of calm enveloped her as she focused. This kind of hunt she understood; this kind of search she could help with.

  Not a rescue operation—a manhunt.

  Chapter Twenty

  The water in the puddle ran out the morning of the second day. In addition to thirst, hunger, shock, and pain, despair began to creep into Bill’s awareness. Flies swarmed his open wounds trying to feast on his blood, twice he’d chased off buzzards gawking impatiently that he wasn’t dead yet, and he’d lost count of how many times he’d used his polished handcuffs as signal mirrors thinking he’d attracted one of the search planes only to watch them pass by and turn in another direction.

  No water. No sign of searchers. No choice now but to drag himself out into the open, risk that the cliff wouldn’t give way and tumble him farther down into the canyon. It would mean leaving the shelter that kept him relatively warm a
t night, but it was the only hope he had. Even though his khaki uniform blended in with the rocks, he could use his own blood to make a signal, anything to be seen and noticed.

  Except…he still wasn’t sure who had pushed him off the cliff. At first all he’d remembered was taking pictures with his phone, getting too close to the edge, stepping back—and then a jolt like lightning. But then he could swear he’d felt someone push him. And lightning should have left more marks on his body, like exit wounds.

  Someone had tried to kill him. Would they come back? No, after two days, they had to assume he was dead. Which meant no more dawdling; it was time to move.

  He wrapped his belt around both legs to splint them. The pain knocked him out for, given the position of the sun, a good hour. Now came the hard part—rotating his body free of the crevice so that he could belly crawl and drag his useless legs behind him. All with one good hand. Except he was starting to worry about that left hand—his shoulder had begun to ache, and he couldn’t figure out why. But that was the least of his worries.

  First he lay as flat as possible and did a weird butt scoot, bumping his legs over the rocks, just far enough to free his torso from the space between the boulder and the cliff wall. Then he pushed himself back up against the outside of the boulder, his entire body now in the sun for the first time in two days. His head pounded and he was so dizzy it was a good thing he had nothing to throw up, although that didn’t stop him from dry-heaving, which only added to his agony as his ribs protested.

  Basking in the sunshine, that deserved a brief rest, he told himself, as he choked back the nausea. Just close his eyes for a moment or three.

  The sound of a plane’s engine woke him, the sun now past its zenith. Hell, he’d lost two more hours. At this rate he’d make it around the boulder by next week. But he was more exposed now, with nothing between him and the plane. He fumbled his handcuffs from his chest pocket, polished them on his shirttail, folded them to maximize their surface area, and looked into the sun, trying to catch the light. The sun was so bright he had to slit his one good eye and still saw red, but there was a definite glint reflected from the metal handcuffs—was it enough? Did the pilot see?

  At first he thought the plane was headed right for him. He kept signaling, frantically searching for the best angle, waving his hand overhead to catch the light. They’re coming! They saw it!

  The plane kept coming, closer and closer. Bill let hope drown out his pain and stretched as far as he could, still signaling, waiting for a response. C’mon, give me a little wing-wag, let me know you see me. C’mon, c’mon, just a little closer…

  And then the plane, just like all the others he’d spotted, veered away to the east. Always to the north and the east—as if they were intentionally searching in the exact opposite direction.

  He slumped back, the glimmer of hope doused. Exhaustion overwhelmed him. This was as far as he could make it. He leaned back against the boulder and closed his eyes, the sun casting his vision in red. It wouldn’t take long to get a sunburn, so he added that to his list of things Deena would chide him for when he saw her again.

  Why were they searching in the wrong direction? The best he could come up with was that they were basing the search radius off his last phone call—when he’d left a message for Lucy after he’d left the Holmsteads’ ranch. Damn, he’d sidetracked up to this meadow on his way back to the station, so he’d never had the chance to run a background check on the pair of so-called fishermen camping out by the river on Gus’s land. He hadn’t liked the look of those two—they’d said they were engineers from the oil fields in North Dakota, here on vacation. Which could well be true, but they sure as hell weren’t fishermen.

  Had they followed him? All the way from Gus’s? If they’d wanted to, there were plenty of chances to jump him there—but they’d be the top of the suspect list. But why? He hadn’t seen anything suspicious; if he had, he would have arrested them then and there.

  Besides, they’d only been around for a few days. Which meant they couldn’t have anything to do with his killer—if there actually was a serial killer. So far all the cases he’d dug up could be explained by natural causes or accidents; but wouldn’t that be perfect for a serial killer? Hiding in plain sight, targeting rural areas lacking the forensic resources of the big city?

  And Dr. Carruthers, the coroner over in Idaho County—Judith Keenan had caught him making several mistakes. Mistakes that seemed obvious once she uncovered them. Who knew how many more there were? County coroner—the perfect job for a serial killer. How easy to get away with murder when you’re the one in charge of the death investigations and death certificates.

  But if it was Carruthers, how had he gotten all the way from Grangeville and just happened to track Bill down when he’d gone to scout a new huckleberry site for Deena? No way could he have known Bill was coming here—Bill hadn’t even decided it until the last minute when he drove past the Forest Service road leading up to the meadow. Unless Carruthers somehow tracked his phone? There were all sorts of apps that could do that—some of them you didn’t even need to be near the phone, you just needed the access code. Lord knew, he’d stood near Carruthers enough times at death scenes and in his office. It would have been easy for the coroner to steal his code.

  As the afternoon wore on, Bill stopped sweating despite the heat. His mouth was parched and he’d lost all his spit. Worse, the buzzards had returned—three of them now, cackling like Macbeth’s witches as they paced the boulder over his head.

  Bill didn’t have his phone. He’d lost it when he fell—he remembered it flying from his hand as he spun over the cliff’s edge, his body twisting with the electrical shock. He had the vaguest impression it had flown toward solid ground rather than falling through the air with him. Maybe it was sitting up there, his pretty pictures still filling the screen, just waiting for someone to find it. There was no cell signal out here, but shouldn’t the GPS still have worked? He couldn’t remember if this was one of the dead zones for satellite reception or not.

  Anyway, he had no phone to use to record a last message. He didn’t really want Deena to see him this way, and his voice was gone. So he pried his one good eye open and used his one good hand to fish his notepad with its tiny pencil from his pants pocket, and with a trembling wrong-handed scrawl, began to write a farewell letter to his wife.

  It was short—not because he didn’t have a whole universe to say to her, but because any words that came to mind seemed so tiny and meaningless compared to the way he felt about her.

  In the end, all he managed was:

  Deena,

  The bright star who guided me, kept me warm, saved my soul, and stole my heart. You are my life, my love, my everything.

  I’m sorry, I tried, just ran out of time and luck.

  Love forever, Bill

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As Gleason drove them across the Holmsteads’ sprawling land—past a small air strip, several cabins along the banks of the river, fenced in pastures with llamas grazing on one side of the road and horses on the other—Lucy couldn’t stop wondering: why didn’t Bill want to be found? She spread the large-scale map of the search out over her lap and noted all the grids checked off, all centered around the location Bill’s phone was reported to be at when he’d sent that text to Judith yesterday.

  What if it had all been a waste of time? A misdirection? She focused on where he’d been last seen—the same place his last voicemail to her had originated from two days ago. Three miles west of the text’s location. Three miles didn’t seem like that much, but it translated to a huge swath of land now suddenly on the outer margin of the search area.

  “Gus Holmstead was the last person to see Bill, right?”

  “The last person to talk with Bill,” Gleason corrected her.

  “Wait. Then who saw him last?”

  “Judith Keenan. She was here checking on an animal and happened to follow Bill out. He turned east when they hit the road, and he stopped hi
s car—from the GPS coordinates, he must have stopped to call and leave that last voicemail on your phone. She headed in the other direction, back to town. No one has seen him since.”

  “She didn’t talk to Bill? Ask him where he was going?”

  “No. It was a sheer coincidence she was able to verify the visual sighting—before she came forward, we’d been working from the GPS map the phone company gave us.”

  “Can I see that?”

  “Sure, it’s on the laptop.” He slowed the truck and they bumped off road. Lucy glanced up to see that they were driving down a dry creek bed. The river must have diverted away from it a long time ago because the sandy loam was packed hard. “There’s another trap near the river I want to check.”

  She opened his laptop and clicked on the file for the phone’s GPS map. It showed Bill’s movements—or rather his phone’s—for the past week: a high-density zigzag trail from his home to the center of town—the sheriff’s station—then a kaleidoscope of random curves crisscrossing out from that radius. Calls and patrol routes. The path to the Holmstead ranch was denser, indicating he’d gone out there several times.

  There was an arrow marking where he’d called her from to leave that final voicemail, almost exactly where she’d parked his truck this morning, a spot where she’d fortuitously noted both cell and Wi-Fi coverage, weak as they were. Probably all the spots like that were well known to the locals.

  No readings for over an hour—maybe he’d stayed in the same spot, having lunch? Or turned the phone off so it would charge faster? Or he’d entered a dead zone with no cell or satellite signal. When the signal returned, it was back at the same spot and then moved east along the Magruder Corridor. After almost two miles, it stopped. No more GPS data—the phone had been turned off when the state police asked the cell company to try to locate it. But then the next day there was one data point, another mile farther east and north, in the wilderness area. The timing fit with the text he’d sent. Then nothing.