“So what’s the problem with Investigative Services?” Martha asked Harold. “I remember writing your letter of recommendation. You clearly wanted the job.”
“I did, but I didn’t know how much of it would be wiping the scum off my boots. Going undercover is a lose-your-soul proposition, and to what end? Put a dent in drug distribution? Poaching? Human trafficking? People selling their bodies for meth, their children’s bodies, their children’s children’s? You take one black heart out of the equation and another starts to beat. The Smith thing last summer exposed me. Too many people know my face. I go underground again, I could be stepping into a bullet.”
“And police work is different how?”
“It’s a different degree of hope. You wear the badge. You’re up front about who you are, what you believe in. Sometimes you can make a difference.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been giving it some thought.”
“What would you do instead? Come back to the county? I’m sure we could find a place for you.”
“I thought maybe run for office.”
“What office?”
“I thought maybe sheriff. It’s a position I’d be qualified for.”
“You’re kidding.”
The table went silent.
“Like I said, I’m just thinking about it. I want to give back to my people. What I really want to do is find out what’s happening to all our women. Indian females disappear at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in the country. Being an Indian sheriff, I could shine a light on the issue, maybe get a grassroots movement going, get the media involved, solicit funding for an investigation. And I’d be seen by the Native community as a role model. It could give kids hope that they weren’t helpless in their own lives.”
“You’d run against me,” Martha said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’d run for the office. It wouldn’t be against a particular person.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s how I see it.”
They sat there, the silence working into the corners of the room. They were no longer friends at a table.
“Well, shit,” Martha said at length. “What a hell of a time to tell me.”
“What time would be better?”
“No, you’re right. There’s no reason you shouldn’t run. I just . . . I don’t know. Thanks for telling me, I guess.”
“Like I said, I’m just thinking down the road, different possibilities. Wouldn’t change anything between us.”
“That’s naïve. Of course it would.” She turned to Sean. “If Harold ran against me, who would you vote for?”
“Before or after we’re married?”
She gave him her dead eyes.
“I’d have to vote for my wife.”
“Good answer. You got anything stronger than coffee, Harold? I feel like I need a drink.”
“No,” Harold said.
“That’s right. You don’t drink. Only your friend’s blood.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
A Body to Die For
The sun was riding its downward slant when they left Pony, the shadows dark on the hood of the Land Cruiser as they approached the T-junction with Highway 287.
“Can you believe that Harold?” Martha said.
“Like he said, Martha, it isn’t personal.”
“Sure feels like it.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
She grunted.
“I think Harold got a dose of mortality last summer. He thought he was never going to see his son again. You can’t go through something like that without it changing you.”
“I understand, but what’s it have to do with him running for sheriff? And hell, if he’s dead set on it, then run in Glacier County, where he has roots and there’s an Indian voting base.”
“Sheriff’s safer,” Sean said, not listening. “Than undercover, I mean.”
Martha looked to knock on the closest wood, not finding any. “Harold scared? I never thought I’d see the day.”
They drove in silence, gloom all around, streaks of dirty snow clinging to life in the barrow ditches, fields of tan stubble. Depression country. Eat-the-barrel-of-your-gun weather. Every now and then, someone did.
“So where to?” Sean asked. “It’s just after three.”
“Home, I suppose. No, the office first. I’ve got an hour of catch-up to do. Maybe two. You mind waiting for me?”
“Your two hours have a way of turning into three.”
“We go home, I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I want details.”
“Onion soup, that’s the detail. Will you or won’t you?”
“What?”
“Can’t you follow a thought for two seconds?”
Sean smiled. “I’m just trying to get a rise. No problem. I’ll drop you and go to the studio. I can get started on the rest of the boxes.”
The cardboard boxes in question were in the rear cargo hold. They were three of the four that contained data that Carson Taylor had collected on the cats in the early years, those that had been fitted with VHF collars. They had managed to get through only the first box by mid-afternoon, all the time Harold could spare, having to change hats and drive up to Helena for a four o’clock meeting with state honchos. Martha, as always, was balancing too many plates to take the time, so Sean had volunteered. He didn’t have high expectations that the data would lead anywhere, but he’d have a look.
But when he climbed the stairs to his studio, he found that the boxes would have to wait. He had no sooner cleared the fly-tying table to make space for them when he heard steps ringing in the hall. The cadence was unfamiliar, and when the steps stopped at his door, he preempted the knock.
“Come in.”
A young woman stepped inside. She shut the door and turned to face him. In her teal puff jacket, loosely woven cashmere cap with blond fringe to match her hair, and glistening Chapsticked lips, she looked like a ski bunny, albeit one who had taken a few falls, in life as well as on the slopes.
For a long moment Sean couldn’t place her.
She took off her hat and shook out her hair. “Connie Carpenter. You know, ‘The Bare Necessities’? Me in my birthday suit? I left a message I’d be by.”
“I haven’t checked in a while. I’m sorry. It’s been a long time, Connie. I thought you’d changed your mind. I just . . . Did you get your hair cut?”
“Yeah, and highlighted. But that doesn’t let you off the hook. I guess you weren’t looking at my face so much that night.”
“If all I looked at was your face, you’d think I didn’t find the rest of you attractive. I had to fall in love with your body to do the painting justice. It isn’t the same as sexual attraction. There’s an objectivity. You think in terms of body line and shading, not flesh and blood.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like a lot of gobbledygook to me.”
“You got me, Connie. I peeked.” He smiled. “I have the painting right here.” He found the nude study in a stack of framed canvases in a corner of the studio. “I hope you like it.”
“Thanks for not hanging it on your wall so just anyone could see it.”
Sean propped the painting on his easel.
She drew her right thumb and forefinger across her lower lip.
“You don’t like it?”
“No. It’s great. I look great. Thanks for evening up my muchachas.”
“Think your boyfriend will like it?”
“My ex-boyfriend. No, he’s not going to have a chance to like it. He’s not going to get to see it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No reason to be sorry. He’s a jerk. You know what he did? He held a level under my nipples to show me how uneven they were, said I should get a boob job to correc
t it and while I was at it to add another cup size. Bastard.”
“If you don’t want it—”
“No, I like it. Even if I can’t, like, hang it up just anywhere.” She took her purse off her shoulder and set it on his table and got out a checkbook. “Another thousand to settle up?”
“Yes, that sounds right. You’re a very attractive woman, Connie. Some guy will come along who deserves to see it.”
“Oh, he will. Some guy always comes knocking. My problem is the ones I open the door for are the wrong ones. You know what some guy said to me? After I found out he was engaged? He said that he felt like we’d been married in a previous life. Like that made it okay to cheat on his fiancée, because he’d loved me first. I had to give him credit for originality. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of lines.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I guess that’s my fate, huh? I never seem to learn.”
She wrote the check. When she placed it on the table, she saw the Montana FWP label on the top cardboard box with the grizzly bear logo.
PUMA STUDY—VHF COLLARS, GAME TRAP VIDEO, PHOTOS, MISC.
August 2009–August 2011
She raised her eyes to Sean’s. “What’s this about?” she said.
Sean saw no reason to lie. “Information about mountain lions in a study.”
She nodded. “My old boyfriend, this was before the asshole, he ran lions with his uncles.”
“What was his name?”
“Dusan. Danny Dusan.”
Sean nodded. “I met them, the brothers.”
“What are you doing with this stuff, trying to find the Bangtail Ghost? Or shouldn’t you be telling me? I mean, you being a dick and all.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m helping the sheriff’s department do some data crunching. Not as exciting as chasing lions.”
“Yeah, they’re still pretty pissed about their dog being killed. It was worth like a couple thousand dollars. Danny says it’s in a chest freezer in his father’s basement. Like the whole dog. They’re going to give it a burial next week. Shoot off guns. Pretty redneck, if you ask me.”
She looked up at him. “Strange, huh? I mean, you were sketching me from right where you’re standing and I had, like, a mountain lion tenderizing me with its tongue. My heart was pounding like you wouldn’t believe, but I wasn’t really afraid of it. Just excited. I went home and I didn’t sleep for one minute. My heart just kept racing. It wasn’t until later I thought, if it had decided to kill me, who was going to stop it? I don’t remember you having a gun or anything.
“Now there’s this mountain lion that’s terrorizing the whole valley and nobody wants to even open their door and here I am, living out of town in this old cabin on the ranch where the cowboys used to bunk, the ceiling’s, like, so low you duck, and you have to park sixty-eight steps from the door. I know, ’cause I count them every night when I walk. I don’t know whether it’s best to keep the light on the porch on and use my flashlight, or sneak back and forth in the dark, or maybe just get another boyfriend. Jeremy was an asshole, but he had a shotgun. When I’d drive home after dark, he’d meet me and be my escort to the door. He’d kid me about having a body to die for, the cat choosing me ’cause I would taste the sweetest. But it wasn’t funny. I was scared.”
“Maybe you should think about renting someplace closer to town. One thing we’ve found out, this cat likes to haunt secluded places where it’s stalked people before. We’re still going through the data to locate those places. You haven’t seen tracks where you live, have you?”
“No. Some guests on a horse ride saw two lions up behind the property line. That was last summer.”
“Together?”
“I think so. Why?”
“We’re looking into the possibility that there were two cats all along. I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but the danger’s real. This lion that killed Buster Garrett and the sheepherder, the one they call the Bangtail Ghost, it isn’t going away. Really, you should think about moving.”
“Would that I could, you know. The board comes with the job. I can’t afford any other place.”
Sean thought, How can you afford the painting I made of you?
She seemed to sense the question.
“No, don’t you worry your head. I had a little bit of a windfall, like found money, and someday you’ll be famous and I can say I was the hot babe in an original.”
“If you change your—”
“Nope.” She took two steps forward and put a forefinger to his nose. She was one of those women who are academically pretty at ten feet, but exert a magnetic attraction that increases as the distance closes.
“I’m a good judge of character, Mr. Sean Stranahan, my love life excluded. And you’re a good person.” She smiled up at him. “Hey, I have an idea. Maybe you could be my boyfriend, just until they catch the cat. You’ve already seen what you’d be getting.”
She looked down at the table. Sean saw the color come into her cheeks. He thought she’d been kidding. Now he wondered if she had only been half kidding.
“I’m flattered you think of me that way,” he said. “If I didn’t have a fiancée . . .”
She laughed. “Story of my life.”
The awkward moment passed.
“That guy who said you’d met in another life,” Sean said. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him to walk and keep walking, or I’d tell his wife-to-be in the present day.”
A few minutes later, Sean heard her walk and keep walking, her right hand clutching the painting he’d bubble-wrapped for her, her footsteps ringing off the travertine tiles.
“Be careful” were the last words he’d said.
“Yeah, sure,” the last he’d heard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
West with the Light
Sean used his fly-tying scissors to slice open the packing tape on the top box. He didn’t open it at once, but shifted his eyes to the half-tied fly in his vise. The pattern was called a Sunray Shadow, an Atlantic salmon fly that called for a Colobus monkey wing. Sean didn’t have any monkey hair, preferring his monkeys alive and in trees rather than skinned for fly-tying materials. Instead, he used a substitute he got from his barber, who saved him long locks of hair cut from Asian customers. The black hair, unlike Caucasian hair, was round and strong, and would undulate in the water like a small eel. The fact that Sean had never fished for Atlantic salmon had nothing to do with selecting the pattern. That was part of why you tied the fly, not to catch the fish but to take the journey, in this case to the Gaula River in Norway, which Sean had fished many times in his mind, able to picture it from internet videos.
He picked up his thread bobbin to wrap on the wing, then set it down. No, he’d save finishing the fly as a reward after wading through the data. He blew bits of feather and fur off the table and lifted out the contents of the box, which consisted mostly of manila folders, along with several bulky VHS tapes. Sean opened the top folder. In contrast to the lions in the GPS studies, which were identified by a letter indicating sex, either a T or an F, followed by a number, the lions in the VHS study were identified by names. The first, a 160-pound tom, was named Gorgeous George.
“Hello, Gorgeous,” Sean said.
* * *
• • •
FROM THE CONTENTS OF the folders, Sean learned that the lion study had begun as a shoestring project in 2009, when the first cat, a three-year-old female called Precious, had been collared in the Bridger Mountains. Each collaring team consisted of one or two houndsmen and a biologist, and in a few cases, a veterinarian. For the earliest collarings, Carson Taylor, who headed up the project, acted as both biologist and veterinarian, tranquilizing the cats, lowering them safely from the tree, taking blood samples, and fitting the collars. All but two of the seventeen cats fitted with VHS collars had been treed with the help of either Buster Garrett
’s hounds or the Walkers run by Ike and Jedediah Dusan.
The folders, one for each cat, included time, place, and details of capture, fading snapshots of the cats, both in the tree and on the ground as they were being collared, and the names of the participants, including, sometimes, the hounds.
That the cats were given names proved annoying, as most had later been recaptured and fitted with either a new radio collar or the more modern GPS technology, and from that point forward they were known by letter and number. In some instances the changeover was noted in the paperwork, but not always. Sean was marrying threads of information, trying to match names to numbers, when his phone buzzed.
It was Martha, calling to say he could pick her up.
“I’m barely halfway through the first box,” he said.
“Well, I just got done. See you in ten.”
“Yes, dear.”
There was a heavy silence on the line.
Then: “I’m going to choose not to have heard that.”
“Yes, dear.” This time he only mouthed the words.
“I can read your lips over the phone.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” he said.
“You should be.”
She was standing outside Law and Justice when he picked her up ten minutes later. She planted a quick kiss on his cheek and they were off.
“You can be difficult to read, you know that, Martha? Are we okay?” He really didn’t know.
One of her secret smiles. “Nobody can ruin my day, not Harold Little Feather, not even you.”
* * *
• • •
HE WAS CLEARING the soup bowls before the subject of the lion came up again. “I got a call back from Wilkerson on the blood that was dried on the VHF receiver,” Martha said.
“Was it Garrett’s?”
“Some was. Some was someone else’s, which means he wasn’t alone up there, which we already know. No DNA matches in the data banks. Whoever Garrett was with, he, she, didn’t have a record. Gigi asked if I had taken down the band number that the receiver was tuned to. I had to admit I’d dropped the ball there. So she gave me the frequency, twenty-two. It was programmed into the receiver.”
The Bangtail Ghost Page 21