A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery Read online

  “I’ll be canoeing the Smith for five days starting the morning of the sixth and could use another hand on a paddle. I’ve got the food and the gear. Just get yourself to Camp Baker by ten Wednesday and pack your rod and your raincoat.”

  No “I love you, son.” They weren’t at that point and might never be, but nonetheless, the words sent through the ether on a bent bow with his heart riding on the string.

  Harold geared down to cross a one-lane bridge and found himself in a tent camp populated by the floaters who’d drawn a permit to launch. Camp Baker was run by Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and the ranger, one of those always-smiling men who make you question their sincerity, was busy assigning campsites and getting the floaters on their way. He could use a little help, but the department wouldn’t pony up for another position. A shake of his head, a downward pout of his mouth. The sad state of state affairs. Could Harold give him half an hour? The steady stream would dry to a trickle then.

  Harold changed his clothes and carried his canoe down to the river’s edge. His two dry bags of gear were already packed, his rifle in its case, fly rod, fishing vest, binoculars, ax. He leaned back against a fence post to watch the spectacle. A man with a Jell-O stomach and a face like a beet was loading cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon into an Avon raft, while a woman wearing a camo bikini top raised a skull-and-crossbones flag on the bow. She wore a University of Montana Grizzlies ball cap; he wore a Montana State Bobcats T-shirt. Another couple were helping them load.

  “Things might get dicey, huh?”

  Harold turned his head. Two young women who looked enough alike to be sisters were carrying a canoe up alongside his. The taller of the two, her hair darker by a shade, slapped at her hip, indicating Harold’s gun belt.

  Harold patted the grips of his holstered revolver.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the two couples pushing off their raft.

  “You let a mixed marriage like that onto the river,” he said, “the claws have to come out sometime. Never know when you might need some law and order.”

  “Well, we won’t cause any trouble,” the woman said. She held two fingers together in a mock salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  “You want a hand with your gear?”

  “Sure. A big strong man comes in handy when you’re just a bitty little girl.” The words sarcastic, her smile anything but. She was openly flirting with him and Harold decided to play along. Why not? He had nothing but time.

  The women introduced themselves as Carol Ann McManus and Jeanine Regulio, old college roommates from Duke University, separated now by distance and family commitments. They’d kept in touch, though, and had independently put in for a Smith permit for seven years. Jeanine had finally drawn, and now they found themselves in the doghouse because their husbands, Jeanine’s in particular, refused to understand why they hadn’t been invited.

  “He just doesn’t get it,” Jeanine said. She was the one who’d done the talking to this point. “He thinks I must be turning lesbo. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Harold said. “You just need girl time.”

  “That’s exactly what I told him. So why are you here?” she said. “Is it because of the scarecrows?”

  A perplexed expression must have shown on Harold’s face.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Guess not.”

  It was Carol Ann’s turn to speak. A lanky blonde, she had a sunburn-peeled, not quite straight nose and a space between her front teeth. Her voice had a tinkling quality, like a creek that’s polished between ice banks. “Yeah. Floaters are seeing scarecrows up in the cliffs. The ranger gave us a number to call after the float. You know. If we saw one. To report it so they could take it down. Spooky, huh?”

  She told Harold that they’d been talking to some of the other floaters the night before around a campfire and had learned that a couple of the parties had got launch dates because of last-minute cancellations.

  “Backed out because they were afraid?” Harold said.

  “Yeah. Spooked. The ranger told us they might shut the river down. We could be putting in just under the wire. It is sort of weird.”

  Harold saw the river ranger approaching. “My cue,” he told the women.

  “Thanks for helping us load,” Jeanine said. “Where are you camping tonight?”

  “That’s up to the man.” He gestured toward the ranger.

  “We’re going to be at Lower Indian Springs. If you want to stop by, we have a beer for you.”

  “I might take you up on that.”

  “We don’t bite or anything,” Carol Ann said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Jeanine said. “I’m not making any promises.”

  Harold pushed their canoe off, all of them laughing. He heard Carol Ann say, “I can’t believe you said that.” And turning her head, her paddle lifted, water beaded on the blade, dripping, said to Harold, “I can’t believe she said that.”

  The canoe grew smaller as it turned downriver. Jeanine, in the stern, waved backward over her shoulder.

  “Did you see those arms? I could climb him like a totem pole.” The words floated over the water.

  “Sssh,” Harold heard Carol Ann say. “Sound carries. That’s racist.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  And they were around the bend out of sight, their laughter still carrying above the bickering of the current.

  * * *

  —

  “I think I’ve been objectified,” Harold said. “Must be the gun.”

  The ranger nodded. “Must be,” he said. Then, to himself, under his breath, “Yeah, the gun. I’ve only been packing open carry for ten years. Nobody ever offered to climb me like a totem pole.”

  “The braid then,” Harold said. “Women, they like a braid.”

  The ranger, whose shrinking island of forelock hair had separated from the mainland, nodded, sucking in his cheeks and then puffing them out. “I wouldn’t know about that. But what the hey? We stole your land. Least we can do is lend you our women.”

  Harold thought, Or maybe it’s because you got a 295 70R18 around your middle. Something about the man beyond his offensive remark rubbed Harold the wrong way.

  “You want to come on up to my abode, I’ll show you our sit-u-a-tion.”

  “I was told it had something to do with pictographs. Now I’m hearing scarecrows.”

  The ranger nodded. “May be one. May be the other. May be both. You’ve been out of the loop, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  For six weeks that spring Harold had been aiding an investigation into a poaching ring inside Yellowstone Park, working undercover in a sting operation as a tracker and middleman buyer of grizzly bear gall bladders. Bear gall bladders were worth a fortune in Chinese and Korean traditional medicine markets, and out of the loop didn’t begin to describe the isolation of living the daily terror of being found out by the two men who were the trigger fingers of the ring, brothers-in-law who called themselves “Rural Free Montanans,” which, as far as Harold could discern, meant they didn’t hold jobs—not ones that could stand legal scrutiny anyway—they didn’t pay taxes, and they didn’t believe the laws of the land applied.

  As a test, Harold had been forced to shoot at a grizzly bear, a light phase boar with dark lower legs and a cream chest patch, in the Hayden Valley. He had missed, deliberately, blaming his aim on flinching upon being stung by a wasp. In fact he had been stung by a wasp a half hour earlier and could show the men the welt. That had drawn a long, assessing stare from the elder man, who had cold black eyes and a long face under a graying beard, who wore a head scarf like a pirate and had a claw of a right hand dating to the time when he’d set a rifle butt on the ground with his hand resting over the muzzle, accidentally tripping the sear. The hand had healed with a starburst of raised scar tissue across the palm and cockeyed
fingers, the little one no more than a flipper.

  When the man clenched the hand, a habit he had like a hiccup, the little finger drooped from his fist like a comma. He’d listened as Harold gave his excuse, then finally nodded, and said, “Shit happens.”

  Then he’d said, “Charlie”—Charlie Two Bears was the name Harold had gone by—“thing is, Char-lie,” separating and drawing out the syllables, “if you were to have missed, say, on purpose, I’d have been forced to take the diamond stone to the knife. Wouldn’t have no choice.” He had drawn a drop-point hunter from his belt scabbard, a whetstone from his pants pocket, and began to run the blade across it. “I take pride in being able to separate out the bladder, Charlie. Why, it’s like a’ art, and me, a natural righty turned southpaw. Right-handed, left-handed, I never seen no one could work a blade to compare, except maybe Dewey here.” He nodded toward his brother-in-law, who looked like a garden gnome, short with a barrel chest and few words. His talents, as Harold had witnessed, lay elsewhere.

  “Never done it on a man, though,” he continued. “I’d know the general lay of the land—once you get under the skin, a man, he can’t be that much different—but I’d have to feel around with the blade, could be some co-lateral damage. Puncture the aorta, something like that. Oops. First time for everything though, huh? Next bear, I’m going to count on your aim being better.”

  The man went by Job, as pronounced in the King James Bible, which he often quoted, having claimed to have once been a preacher. Preacher or not, he was one scary son of a bitch. But there had been no next test because there had been no next bear. The wind had changed and the brothers-in-law had disappeared back into the folds of the Little Belt Mountains—it was at a microbrewery in Belt where Harold first met them—though Job was light on the specifics, mentioning only a compound. Harold envisioned one of the nameless under-the-radar shantytowns, where men who held grudges against the government lived among like-minded individuals who took the rifle off the wall any time they spotted a state vehicle.

  The official line, the one Harold had been fed by his supervisor, was that thanks to him they had had plenty to make an arrest, but they were after the men behind the knives rather than the ones drawing them, and they were going to bide their time to find just the right one. That was as much explanation as Harold was given, though it was true that when you busted a ring, you brought everybody in at once or not at all. The brothers-in-law would resurface, they were the kind who always did, and Harold would be called back into the sting. It hadn’t been his cover that was blown, and he still had their trust, as far as it went. Not something he was looking forward to, though, not at all.

  Harold found his eyes wandering and refocused, his ears picking up the sound of the current.

  “Out of the loop’s one way to put it,” he told the ranger.

  “Well, then, what do you know?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Not on My Watch”

  It was Harold’s sister, Janice, who’d taken the call. Harold lived in a renovated barn behind her house outside Pony, and she’d relayed the instructions, which were clear enough, though the mission was vague. Fitz Carpenter, Harold’s supervisor, whom he’d met exactly once, had told Janice that Harold was to car-top his canoe to Camp Baker, the launch site for the Smith River float, and to pack provisions for a week. The assignment was in connection with defacement of native pictographs, which Harold knew to be a federal offense. The ranger there would fill in the details. After his previous assignment, it sounded like a vacation to Harold.

  He told the ranger as much as he followed him up a set of outside stairs that climbed to the second story of the mortar-and-river-stone structure that served as the Smith River headquarters. He found himself in a large room with small windows, a row of file cabinets along one wall, a big industrial green metal desk in front of another. On the wall behind the desk was the tacked-up skin of a rattlesnake that had to have been five feet long.

  “Mr. Friendly there,” the ranger said, “was found right here at the launch, path to the outhouse. Woman from La La Land spotted him, started screaming bloody murder. I hitched on the gun belt, shot him betwixt the eyes. He crawled away, rattled some, died some, then rattled some more. I gave him half an hour, and when I went to pick him up, he struck at me and commenced to rattling again. That’s what I call a reptile. R-E-P-T-I-L-E.” In case Harold didn’t know how to spell.

  Below the snake’s skin was a large-scale map of the Smith River. Harold ran his eyes from bottom to top, south to north, the direction the river flowed.

  “What do the colors mean?” he asked. The map was studded with pushpins in green, red, and yellow.

  “I’ll get to that,” the ranger said. They were on his turf; they would address the sit-u-a-tion his way. “But first I want you to understand what we’re up against, scale-wise. We’re talking about sixty miles of river corridor from here to Eden Bridge, limestone cliffs rising a thousand feet straight up out the water, more caves than you could explore in a lifetime. In ten lifetimes.”

  “Lots of canvas for the artist,” Harold agreed.

  The ranger nodded. “There are more than seventy pictograph sites documented, maybe that many more that aren’t. It’s one of the richest sites of cave art in the entire West.”

  Harold said, “Then that’s your red pins.” There were more red pins than any other color. “And some of these sites have been vandalized?”

  “Well, not exactly. But where you see a green pin right next to a red one, at those pictograph sites floaters have reported finding rocks that are painted with NOT ON MY WATCH.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Are you familiar with the controversy over the Castle Mountain Copper Project?

  “What I read in the papers.”

  The ranger nodded. “Well, every other cabin along the river’s got a sign saying NO SMITH RIVER MINE and NOT ON MY WATCH. And every other vehicle at the launch has a bumper sticker saying the same thing. I’m not supposed to express an opinion, never mind that one arm of the mine’s going to run directly beneath Farewell Creek, which is the Smith’s most important spawning tributary.”

  “What if you were to express an opinion?”

  “Then I’d paint NOT ON MY WATCH on the side of this house in letters ten foot tall. You tell me you’re going to mine twelve million tons of copper and there won’t be any tailings leak for the next million years, even though the lining you seal the poison with is yea thick?”—He spread his thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart—“then you don’t know the history of hard-rock mining in the West.”

  Harold could hear the passion mounting in the man’s voice and tried to steer him back on track.

  “So the yellow pins? Those must be the scarecrows?”

  The ranger nodded. “Nine to date. You see where they are, the significance of the locations?”

  Harold nodded. “They’re all by one of the pictograph sites where the rocks are painted with the sign. The same person who painted the signs is putting up scarecrows.”

  “That’s the way I read it. And they aren’t just scaring birds. They’re scaring the floaters. I had a call this morning from a reporter for the Bridger Mountain Star. I had one yesterday from the Trib. They’re getting calls from the floaters and they’re going to run stories that will go out over the wire and I’m not allowed to do anything but state facts as known. I’m going to look like a bureaucratic asshole and fulfill my ex-wife’s prophecy. She always said that someday I’d make a first-class asshole and she’d get out when I was still only halfway to my destiny.”

  Harold could see the ex-wife’s point but didn’t say anything.

  “Still not sure what you expect me to do,” he told the ranger. He’d pulled his iPhone from a belt holster to take photos of the map.

  “Your job is to catch whoever’s putting up the scarecrows and bring him to justice, whatever
that is. Personally, I’m rooting for the guy. But we have a film crew on location here starting tomorrow. A couple guides are going to float a honcho for the mining company in one boat and the president of Save the Smith in another. They’re going to sit around a fire at night and duke it out, present their cases over the course of their float. They’ll be on the river three nights. I already have the campsites for them reserved, but I guess that’s not going to matter now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Macy, the regional parks director, decided to shut the river down. You’re going to be the last one to put in, except for the documentary crew. They launch tomorrow.”

  Harold nodded. “Who’s making this? The state?”

  “No, it’s an independent television producer. I have her name here.” He fumbled in his pocket for his notepad, recited the names he had written. Saw Harold’s eyebrows crawl a little. “What?”

  “Nothing. I know the guides. Sean Stranahan, I’ve worked with him. I know the other one, too.”

  “Six degrees of Harold Little Feather.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. It’s a small world. Montana, especially.”

  “Seems drastic to close the river. No one’s been hurt or threatened, have they?”

  “No, they haven’t. But Macy, he’s a drama queen. And the department wants to show that they’re on the job, protecting and serving the public. I’ll be left holding the bag, the one who has to tell floaters who didn’t get the word that they have to turn around and go home.”

  “Guess I’ll get to it, then. Might help if I had GPS coordinates downloaded for the sites on the map.”

  “What do you think I was up all last night doing?” The ranger brought a GPS out of a hip holster on his belt and worked his thumbs to get to the map page.

  “You see that all the coordinates for scarecrows are marked with dates. The dates are when we saw them in the course of floating the river, not the time they were first reported by other floaters. So they aren’t in exact sequence. But overall the pattern of discovery is downriver. Those the farthest downriver were found last. What’s that tell you, Harold?”