He’d finished smoking his pipe. He emptied the bowl and returned the pipe to his pocket, and wasn’t that Cate he heard calling for him?
“Over here!” he yelled, but his voice was as weak as the rest of his body, and the very strain of it set him into a coughing fit. He could use some water. He could use something stronger. Cate would find him. She always did.
He continued to cough. She continued to call for him. Her voice was getting closer. And then he saw her, about fifty yards away on the trail, walking toward him, the sun shining behind her through the branches, and if he believed in God and all that celestial afterlife, he’d swear she was an angel. She was his angel. He had grown sentimental over the years.
And he was her Saint Nicholas. He liked that.
“Over here!” he called again. This time his coughing subsided and she spotted him.
“I’m okay,” he called out to her.
“What am I going to do with you, old man?” She had a bottle of water in one hand, and his pills in another.
He took the water bottle but swatted the pills away. “Don’t need them,” he said.
“Too late?”
“Yeah.”
She sat beside him and laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was it a bad one?”
“I guess it was.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Not anymore. Just tired.”
“Want to sit here a little longer?”
“That would be nice.”
And then, “Cate?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m going to miss you.”
She was quiet and he hoped she wasn’t crying.
“Say something,” he said.
She sniffed and rubbed her nose. Her breathing deepened. “I’m going to miss you, Saint Nicholas.”
He laid his right hand against the side of her face and stroked her skin, still smooth and soft after all these years.
“I was thinking about something today,” Nick said. “And I need to talk to you about this. I need you to be okay with me talking to you. I was thinking about all of the victims, the hundreds and hundreds of victims.”
And then Nick started to cry, and goddamn it if he didn’t cry like a baby, and he dropped his hand from Cate’s face, and she wrapped her arm around him.
“I’m going to die, Cate. And I’m okay with that. I really am. Because you’re going to be there with me. When I go, it will be your face I’ll see. Your voice I’ll hear. I’m one of the lucky ones. But these girls, these women, all these victims, they left this world, they left their lives, with the face of a monster, a killer. His face was the last they saw. It was his voice that they heard. They died humiliated and terrified.”
Cate sat forward. She turned toward Nick and cupped her hands over his bearded cheeks. “I want you to hear me. I want you to listen to me. You have to know you did everything you could. You’re one of the good ones, Nick. You were always one of the good ones. You need to make peace with this.”
And he knew, as he had known before, it wasn’t just he who had given his life to these victims and families. It was Cate also. It was she who had been by his side in the night when the dreams came. Who had supported him through the hours and hours of work. Who had eaten alone and gone to bed alone when he’d been visiting crime scenes and working with detectives. It was she who had awoken by his side when he’d answered the phone at all hours of the night. And the phone still rang. Sometimes a reporter, a blogger, a curious bystander, family members and friends of the loved ones who’d been killed. Just that morning, there had been another call, a message from a young man named Jeffrey. He said he’d been a friend of Erin Parker. Maybe Nick would run a background check on him, like he’d done on Marian. Maybe he’d call the guy in the morning. Tonight he wanted to have that bourbon, cook a steak on the grill, and make love to his wife.
20
PRESENT
August 2017
MARIAN
The Den, Montana
A little over five weeks had passed since Tate’s death. It was the third Sunday in August. Trainer had cooked barbecue chicken and zucchini and baked potatoes on the grill. Marian had made a cheesecake and picked up a couple of bottles of chardonnay. It was just the three of them: Marian and Lyle and Trainer. Jenness wouldn’t be back from Alaska for a couple more weeks. Liz and Dudley were still away on assignments. And the next day, Lyle would be catching a six a.m. flight to Seattle. He would be making one of his semiannual trips to the university, where he’d be in planning meetings the rest of the week.
They sat at the round glass table on the patio off the kitchen. The windows to the house were open and music was playing, an indie alternative band that Trainer had chosen. After Marian had finished eating and was on her second glass of wine, and the music had switched from soft rock to something acoustical, Lyle mentioned the northern spotted owl project in Oregon that would resume in four weeks. “I could use another handler,” he said. “Might be time we put you back on an assignment.” And he wanted to know what Marian thought about that, and she said that was the best idea she’d heard in a long time.
* * *
• • •
Ever since Marian’s fitful run and the strange phone call Trainer had received from Dana Lear, she’d been keeping Yeti and Arkansas with her at night. She hadn’t asked permission. She’d collect them from the barn after Trainer had let all the dogs out one last time, and return them in the morning before Trainer made his rounds. But that night after the dishes were done, Trainer said, “Go on and get your girls. I’m sure they’re waiting for you.”
Marian was surprised that Trainer knew, and her look said as much, and she asked if Lyle would mind.
“Lyle’s got bigger things to worry about than you and a couple of dogs taking pleasure in each other’s company.”
Marian stopped by the barn and retrieved Arkansas and Yeti. She was enjoying a good buzz and felt light-footed on the path up the hill, swinging the remaining half bottle of wine in her hand, the dogs trotting ahead of her toward her hut.
She punched in her key code, then let the dogs in and flicked on the light. She’d left her phone on her desk and saw an incoming call from Jeb.
“I was just checking in,” he said, which he’d been faithfully doing each week ever since Tate had died.
And after small talk, and Jeb saying that Marian seemed to be in a good mood, and Marian saying she was, and her telling him about the northern spotted owl project, and wasn’t that reason to celebrate, she poured wine into a mug and told Jeb to have a drink with her. And she asked him to read her something, because that was how their conversations always went, Jeb reading to her from an essay he’d written. The arrangement had begun a couple of weeks after Tate’s death, when Marian was too sad to talk and wanted only to have someone else carry the conversation and bring her mind someplace new.
After Jeb had finished reading to her about agricultural runoff in an estuary along the central California coast, and he and Marian had discussed the contamination of flounder and sand crabs and other aquatic organisms, a text came in from Tammy: Are you still up? Can we talk? Marian texted Tammy back and said she would give her a call. And so she wrapped up her conversation with Jeb, who knew nothing about Marian’s suspicions of Tate, and when she called Tammy she asked if everything was all right.
Tammy said she was doing okay, that she was just having a bad night of missing her brother.
“Tell me about the dogs,” Tammy said. “Talk to me about the projects.” And so Marian told her about Arkansas and Yeti, who were lying beside her on the bed, and about her upcoming assignment in Oregon. And then she told her about the other handlers and the projects they were on, because she understood Tammy’s need to be distracted with the lives of people other than herself. After they’d been on the phone about a half hour or more, Tammy
said, “Did I ever tell you about the night our mother died?”
Marian listened as Tammy talked about her mother’s illness and her final days in hospice. “Tate was kind,” Tammy said. “I remember thinking my brother is the kindest man I will ever know. And he had so much to take care of. He met with the social workers and the funeral home. He took care of the bills. And when our mother passed, we were sitting by her side, each of us holding one of her hands. I lost it,” Tammy said. “Tate walked around the bed and took me in his arms. I must have cried for hours. He sat there and held me and told me we were going to be all right. I was a teenager, and he was just barely twenty, but he was the one looking after me. And that night, he helped one of the nurses bathe our mother’s body, to prepare her for the crematorium. The hospice said it was custom to include the family, if there was a person close to the deceased who would like to help. Tate was so loving throughout everything, Marian. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
Marian emailed Nick that night before turning in, and she told him about the things Tammy had said, because, despite her having learned of the green loaner vehicle, she did not see how the person whom Tammy had described could have taken the life of another. And these things were on her mind, because in her last video call with Nick, he’d said he didn’t believe Tate had been capable of love. And he’d suggested that Marian had loved the way Tate made her feel. “He would have made a good actor,” Nick said. And yet Marian believed there had been glimpses of Tate that had been real, and might she have loved the man in those moments of truth, and might his behavior the night his mother died be another expression of that truth?
* * *
• • •
Marian awoke a little after five and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Sometime in the night, she must have kicked the dogs off the bed, because they were curled up next to each other on the floor, watching her, and no doubt waiting to see if she was really awake. She rose and dressed quickly in a pair of jeans, a men’s V-neck T-shirt, her canvas shoes, and her fleece jacket. Then she grabbed her laundry bag of dirty clothes. She headed down the hill, the dogs wagging their tails and running ahead of her, her feet slapping against the dry needle duff in the pre-twilight silence. She had a dull headache from the wine the night before, and her neck and shoulders were wound tight with a painful kink below her right ear.
After she brought the dogs back to their kennel in the barn, she headed over to the main house and set her clothes in the laundry room. She’d get to them later. She filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and took a couple of Advil. Then she made enough coffee for her and Trainer to each have several cups. While she waited on the coffee, she stepped into the office off the kitchen and turned on the lamp. Lyle said he’d left her a file on the northern spotted owl project on his desk.
She looked through stacks of papers and reports and several metal file stands until she found the information on the owl project squeezed tight among other folders in one of the stands. Tucked behind the owl project material was a manila folder with large black lettering written across the body of the folder: Add to Archives. Inside the folder was a purple flash drive. Up until that moment it had not occurred to Marian that the Archives folder on the network wasn’t complete, that files were still being uploaded. Did she dare get her hopes up? And yet she felt that jolt of adrenaline. One study, that was all she needed, to place Tate somewhere other than one of the scenes of the crimes, to give him an alibi. She booted Lyle’s computer and entered his password. The desktop came up. Marian inserted the flash drive, double-clicked the icon, and waited for the files to appear. And there it was, the Yellowhead grizzly and black bear study. Tate was on that project. He’d said it was his favorite. “Pure God’s country,” he’d told her. The detection dogs had been part of a comprehensive monitoring program to examine the impacts of human disturbance on grizzly and black bear populations in the Yellowhead ecosystem. The project was conducted in two separate time periods, or tiers. The first began over six years ago in late spring. Three separate dog teams sampled a fifty-two-hundred-square-kilometer area between mid-May, the approximate time the bears would emerge from their dens, and July 31.
Erin Parker had disappeared that same year on July 21. Even if the job had ended a couple of weeks early, Marian had seen firsthand the amount of time and detail involved in closing a work site and packing up. She didn’t see any way Tate could have made it to Stryker Ridge where Erin went missing, on the twenty-first. Marian found a yellow legal pad on Lyle’s desk and flipped the pages over to a clean sheet. She picked up a pen. She couldn’t jot the dates and information down fast enough.
And then there was the second tier of the study, two years after the first. Samples were collected from the same area during the bears’ hyperphagia season, between the first of August and mid-October, the same year Lynn-Marie Pontante had been killed, the young woman from Libby, Montana, who’d disappeared on September 18.
Marian felt euphoric. She raced through each word in the paper, searching for proof that Tate had been on those studies. There were five dog teams, and, as with the project in the oil sands, each team included a handler and an orienteer. And after she’d read through the paper’s results and discussion, there it was, in the fine print under the acknowledgments, at the end of a long list of names, such as Evergreen Pet Supply for providing food, and Alaska Horizon Air, and Parks Canada, and the Wolf Education and Research Center for providing scat samples for dog training—there was the list of names of those who had assisted in all aspects of scat collection using detection dogs: M. Freeman, H. Smith, J. Hartman, S. Marlow, J. Ubigau, P. Coppolillo, A. Hurt, M. Parker, and among others, there was Tate—T. Mathias.
She leaned back in her chair, her heart pounding. “He didn’t do this. My God, he didn’t kill these women.” She began scrolling through the rest of the files for the Yellowhead project. She stopped when she came to a folder titled Study Photos. Her body leaned forward again.
Three photos in, there he was, kneeling beside a chocolate Lab, a cap pulled down low over his forehead, brown hair in wavy tufts over his ears. The picture had been taken six years ago—the first year of the study. The photo had a descriptor tag, as did all the images. The dog’s name was Cavalier. There were a few other pictures also: Tate and another man, whom the descriptor identified only as Tate’s orienteer. They were walking down a rocky trail. A third photo showed Tate loading Cavalier into the back of his silver Xterra.
The gallery of photos from the follow-up study, two years later, also included images of Tate. He was with the same dog. Only this time he was working with a female orienteer: Jenness Cattet. Marian leaned in closer to the screen, her elbow next to the track pad, her chin on her fist. Jenness in olive green cargo pants, a man’s flannel shirt, a blue knit cap, her long hair banded at the nape of her neck, her face tilted toward Tate, her smile broad. Tate laughing, his eyes almost closed. The dog between them.
In additional photos of Jenness, she was with another orienteer, Jamie Gabbey, a woman who looked to be in her midtwenties. The woman was taller than Jenness, maybe around five feet, eight inches, with round, high cheeks and curly, shoulder-length hair the color of hewn pine. Marian remembered something Jenness had said, about she and the person she’d been involved with joining the program at the same time, but Jamie had wanted to farm and had moved to Iowa. It had not occurred to Marian that Jamie was a woman, that Jenness wasn’t heterosexual. Jenness’s sexuality wasn’t something anyone had mentioned; why would they? Marian had been wrong, she realized, to think Jenness had been involved with Tate or was interested in him romantically, and she felt foolish for her petty jealousy.
The soft golden glow of dawn was coming in through the office window above the desk, and the motion light on the barn was on; she could see it if she leaned in over the desk and looked to the left through the window. Trainer would be in soon.
As if on a whim, Marian pulled up the F
inder on Lyle’s computer. She was thinking of other projects Tate had told her about, including the polar bear study in Norway when he’d first seen the northern lights. She’d not found anything about that study on the program’s network, and the flash drive she’d just explored had only contained files on the grizzly and black bear project. She typed in Norway in the Finder’s search option, thinking maybe she would find something on Lyle’s hard drive. Several documents on the polar bear study in the Svalbard archipelago came up. Everything Tate had told her was true: the detonation wires, the guard dogs, the requirement that he carry a gun. The study had taken place from the first of December through February, over seven years ago. The network had only covered projects going back six years, and even those years hadn’t been complete. Marian wrote down the specific dates of the project. Here it was, right in front of her. Natasha Freeman had disappeared outside Helena on December 9, the same year Tate would have been studying polar bears in the Arctic. On the night she was killed, Tate had been over four thousand miles away.
Marian closed the files. She ejected the flash drive and shut down Lyle’s computer. She leaned back in the chair and folded her arms over herself as if she were cold. She stared at the notes she had written down. Her history with Tate was intact. Not perfect by miles and miles. He was not perfect. She was not perfect. They were both flawed, but they had made something.
The door to the mudroom opened and closed. Marian heard the grunt and exhale of air as Trainer pulled off his boots, then his footsteps as he padded across the kitchen on his thick-socked feet.
He stood in the doorway to the office. “Morning, sunshine,” he said. He asked her if she’d like a cup of coffee and she said that would be nice.
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 20