The Bangtail Ghost Read online

  “You’re supposed to be smart,” he told it. “What should I do?”

  The fox began to walk across the field in a pattern that resembled a big question mark. Every dozen feet it would put its nose to the snow and cant its head. Then it would slowly bring its hind feet forward, so that they could act as springs, and it would jump straight up into the air and, jackknifing down, plunge headfirst into the snow, until only its tail was visible. Each time it dove, it came up with a mouse in its jaws and wolfed it down. Then it looked back at Sean, as if seeking his applause.

  Well, that’s what I’ll be trying to do, too, Sean thought. Walk a question mark with my ears cocked and my nose in the wind, ready to take the plunge.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Little Black Book

  At the trailhead, Sean saw that the crime scene tape had been taken down and a heavy chain looped through the rusted tongue of the trailer and padlocked to a pine tree. The only rig at the trailhead was a black Toyota Tundra with a camper shell parked in a sea of dog tracks. Sean heard a voice, more of a human bark than a decipherable word, and the houndsmen came into view, a pair of skinny longbeards who looked like Confederate soldiers stepping out of a sepia-toned photograph. One was staggering under the weight of the dead hound on his shoulders. The dogs, three not counting the dead one, were of a type—deep-chested, built like triangles with waists that tapered to fists. They had their tails down, their heads down, their ears down, each in its own gloom of exhaled breath. As they approached, one of the hounds uttered a low growl and the man carrying the dog said something to it in what could have been a foreign language—“Har now, har.”

  Sean said he’d heard what happened and sure was sorry.

  “Not as sorry as I am,” the man said. He knelt down to take the hound off his shoulders and laid it on the snow. Sean could see the claw marks deep across the dog’s muzzle and forehead, half the face peeled away from the bone. The houndsman tried to place the loose skin back in position, but the dog was stiff with rigor mortis and his hands were trembling. He gave up and came up to his knees, his eyes far away.

  The other man turned to Sean and said, “Ike’s taking it mighty hard. Dog like Blue, he never done a wrong thing in his life. Just a shame is what it is. A lion, he’s no more dangerous than a house cat, ’less you back him into a place he can’t see his way out but take a swipe. Something about this one, though—the dogs were off the whole durned day. Following ladylike, when they should have been bawling, should have been hammering that track. They knew this was a bad-un.”

  Ike stood up and nodded. “They weren’t but half what a hound ought to be. I blame myself for not pulling them off.”

  “Did you get a look at it?” Sean asked.

  The question was ignored as the two men lifted the dead hound and placed it inside the camper. Ike followed after it. He leaned back against a hay bale, putting his hands around his knees. Two of the Walkers joined him, burrowing their noses under his bent knees and his arms. The other man, who’d introduced himself to Sean as Jedediah, shut the camper shell lift gate and climbed into the cab of the truck with the remaining hound sitting shotgun. He ran bony fingers over the dog’s copper-colored ears. He turned the key and powered down the window.

  “You asked if we saw the lion. No, sir, we didn’t.”

  “Do you have a card, a way I can get in touch?” Sean said. “I’m helping the sheriff on this one.”

  “This one being exactly what? Ain’t no mystery here. Cat got her. You can take it to the bank.” But he rummaged in the glove compartment and found a card. He inked a line through the phone number, updated it, and handed it through the open window. It had DUSAN BROTHERS OUTFITTING written in a banner. The card advertised elk, deer, bear, and lion hunts.

  “We don’t message the way the young-uns do. You got to call the number.” He shook his head. “I suppose you think we’re shirking our end of the deal, not follering through. But the cat, once he got cornered in the cliffs and fought his way out, he’s got his big-boy britches on. He got a taste for it now. If we put the pack back on him, why, it would be a sin is what it would be. Wouldn’t be fair to the dogs. You think that’s a coward’s way out, it ain’t. Just survival smarts is all. You go on and tell your woman sheriff she can make reparations as she sees fit.”

  “How much was a dog like Blue worth?”

  “You can’t put a dollar tag on a dog like that.” He powered up the window.

  Sean watched the truck grumble away with its priceless cargo and stood there thinking, as the mountains filled back up with their brooding silence. He found the key under the chopping block, where Martha had told him it would be, and let himself into the trailer. He glanced around to take inventory, but there wasn’t much to see and it took him all of thirty seconds to conclude that Sam’s assertion of the woman being a prostitute was probably correct.

  The techs had stripped the bed, leaving a bare double mattress that mice had nipped, exposing the ticking. A gauzy curtain hung from faux wrought-iron curtain rods in the shape of arrows. If that wasn’t enough to hint at the bed’s broader purpose, the twinkle lights suspended from the curtain rods served as confirmation. It was a love nest—that was the pretty way to put it. Sean noted a small portable generator with an extension cord that would reach the plug-in for the lights, or anywhere in the trailer, for that matter. He switched on the lights and watched the colors pulse over the bare mattress.

  Out of idle curiosity, he picked up the coffee cup on the small nightstand. He read the words stenciled on the cup. THINK ONLY OF THE PAST AS ITS REMEMBRANCE GIVES YOU PLEASURE.—JANE AUSTEN, 1775–1817.

  He picked up the paperback beside it, which continued the theme. Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, by Stephanie Barron. A work of fiction, with Austen as a sleuth in Georgian England. Sean hadn’t known who Austen was when he’d noticed a copy of Sense and Sensibility on the Ponderosa pine stump that served as Martha’s home desk. He’d made the mistake of admitting his ignorance. Martha had responded by pressing his wrist against the stump and whacking him across the knuckles with a ruler. He had half of Pride and Prejudice under his hat by the following weekend, and as a bonus to not getting smacked again, had found he was enjoying the novel. Austen had a wicked wit, once you got past the suffocating veil of manners.

  Sean flipped through the novel. There was a postcard bookmark, a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, one of her sensuous desert landscapes called Red Hills and Bones. O’Keeffe was one of Sean’s favorite artists. On the back of the postcard were a few words written in a masculine hand:

  MY BONES ACHE FOR YOUR TOUCH. ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS ASK AND I’LL BE THERE.

  W.

  No postmark, no address, no name. The card commemorated an O’Keeffe exhibition three years ago at a gallery in Santa Fe.

  The book was furred from use and several pages had stuck together. Sean fingered them absently. Two of the pages seemed a little thick. He ran a fingernail between the stuck pages and peeled them apart. Between the pages were two paper-thin sheets of onionskin written on with a pencil and cut to fit inside the page margins. The secret compartment, for that was most assuredly what it was, was almost unnoticeable, even with the book in hand.

  Sean plugged in the lamp that squatted on the Formica table. He put on the dollar-store magnifying glasses he carried for tying on tiny mayfly imitations while trout fishing. The writing on the onionskin was in two hands, the first notations printed, only the last few entries on the mostly blank second sheet in longhand, the tiny letters precisely drawn, suggestive of calligraphy.

  He read the first three lines of notation.

  10/27–8 P.M.—PATRICK—IMP

  10/28–7 P.M.—ANON—6 P.M.—BHB

  10/28–10 P.M.—RAY—SP

  There were thirty-three entries over a span of four weeks, starting the last weekend in October. Sean knew that Saturday had been the ope
ning day of the elk season. The largest number of entries for one day was four, and there were days in the middle of the week not awarded a notation. It was a little black book. The names, Sean intuited, were those given by the hunters playing hooky from their marital vows. The letters were cryptic. Shorthand for specific sex acts? He would need a key to break the code, but was pretty sure he had the gist.

  Sean replaced the pages and put the book in a resealable plastic bag. He smiled, thinking of the last entry.

  11/23–8 P.M.—LENNY—BHB

  “Lenny Two J,” Sean said under his breath. “You naughty boy.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wearing Her Colors

  He almost talked himself out of going. The boot prints made by the WHART team were clear, both going to and returning from the kill site. There would be nothing left on the ridge but blood, and no reason for a cat already traumatized by hounds to return. Not to mention it had a full belly. Still, it was an opportunity Sean might not have again, and if nothing else, he wanted to test his courage.

  No, he thought, testing his courage wasn’t the real issue. What he wanted to do was feel the darkness surround him so that he could experience, as much as was possible, what the woman must have felt before she died. It was something that Martha had taught him by her example. She always attended the autopsies, gathered the backgrounds of victims, and, as much as was possible, walked in their final footsteps. It was what made them human to her. You joined teams with the dead, she’d once told him. You wore their colors. They walked with you, and the better you understood their terrors, the harder you worked for them, and the more likely you were to discover the truth.

  And yet, as he slung his .300 Savage rifle from his shoulder and began to hike, it was not trepidation that he felt. Part of the reason was that until yesterday, his only previous experience with a mountain lion had been anything but terrifying. Even in the creeping shadows, thinking back to it brought a smile. A young woman Sean knew had knocked on the door of his art studio with a proposition. Her boyfriend’s birthday was coming up, and she wanted to surprise him with a painting of herself in her birthday suit. She’d heard that the studio next door was rented by a wildlife photographer who kept several animals, including an otter and a mountain lion, that he rented out to other wildlife photographers on shoots. Did Sean think the photographer might agree to taking photos of her with the cat, and then Sean could paint her from the photos? She wasn’t getting any younger, and her body was never going to look better than it did now. Besides, it would be a hoot and her boyfriend would love it.

  Sean had approached the photographer with her proposition and the day arrived. The photographer walked the cat up the stairs of the cultural center on a leash, its paws padding the halls at midnight. The woman arrived a few minutes later. Her eyes got big when she saw the cat, but she had armored herself with a belt of Yukon Jack and did not express second thoughts.

  “Just don’t give me cockeyed nipples,” she told Sean.

  The idea was that Sean would sketch as the photographer shot photos. There were two hiccups to the plan. The first was that the cat became interested in the crease of skin above the line of the woman’s trimmed pubic hair, and started to run its rough tongue where it didn’t belong. She tried to be a good sport about it, saying, “If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have got a Brazilian.” But she was clearly shaken up. The other problem was that the cat wouldn’t face the photographer. Normally, give it a pellet of dried duck meat and it was as shameless as a Victoria’s Secret model, but on this occasion it was more interested in the woman than the camera.

  Then Sean had a brainstorm. Another artist at the cultural center sometimes entertained his son with videos on his computer. The doors were thin enough for Sean to hear the songs of the old Disney classics, and if he’d heard Baloo sing “The Bare Necessities” once, he had heard it a hundred times.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said, and ran down the stairs to the center’s office, letting himself in the door with a key he’d wheedled out of the manager. He found the master key that unlocked all the building’s shops and galleries. Five minutes later he had inserted the DVD into his laptop and was fast-forwarding through The Jungle Book, pausing when he got to the first scene that was full of monkey calls and other jungle sounds. He cranked up the volume, the mountain lion swiveled its head to look dead into the lens of the camera, pulling its upper lip in a silent snarl, and the shoot was deemed a success, even if the woman emerged from the ordeal looking shell-shocked. Her expression in the oil Sean painted was Come hither, the lion’s was Stay back or I’ll bite, and Sean was happy with the outcome. He’d finished the painting and the young woman would be by to pick it up.

  Thinking back to that incident had taken him as far as the top of the ridge. Sean surveyed the scene for a long minute: the bloodstained tracks of the WHART team, the heaped-up branches that had covered the kill. After scraping the snow off a big pine tree with his glove, he sat down with his back to the trunk and piled up branches to the height of his chest. Some thirty paces in front of him was where the lion had eaten its victim. To his right, the wall of the canyon into which the hounds had followed the cat fell steeply away, and beyond the opposite canyon rim were the cresting ridges of the mountain range. Snarled on the crags, a sunset worthy of Charlie Russell’s paintbrush deepened—brilliant streaks of orange becoming fire, becoming burgundy.

  Then, with the snuffing of the last candle of the twilight, the night closed upon him. Trees faded to black, and all the world became engulfed in a vast, echoing silence. Sean had warmed himself climbing to the ridge, but that warmth left him now, and, shivering, burying his face in his coat collar, he took the cold deep into his bones. The fear he sought settled over him like a dark cloud, and as he became afraid, he was able to make the bones and flesh and blood of the victim into a whole person, whereas before he had not been able to see beyond a mangled corpse.

  When the time had passed that the cat might return, or rather when he assumed it had, for Sean had no experience in such matters, he got to his feet and stretched, whirling his arms, trying to bring blood back into fingertips. In the three long hours he had sat motionless, he saw one living creature, an ermine whose slender body, pale in the moonlight, looked to be writing letters on the snow in a disappearing ink.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Preempting the Blues

  You must be going to a cut,” the man said, as he used steel tongs to drop doughnuts into a white paper bag.

  Martha looked at him. Grady McSweeny was tall and angular, had mutton-chop sideburns, and wore an apron over a blousy painter’s shirt. An Irish flat cap in green and red tartan perched at a rakish angle on his head.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Paper said you always stop for doughnuts and coffee at my place on your way to the morgue. ‘Never go to an autopsy on an empty stomach’—I believe that was the quote.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “Are you?”

  Martha’s “humpff” was a reluctant yes.

  The newspaper story had run two months before, after Martha had announced her run for a third term as Hyalite County sheriff. The hook was that she was one of a handful of female sheriffs in the entire country who had actually been elected, not appointed interim after a husband’s untimely demise. Martha had been unguarded, not Martha being Martha at all, and Gail Stocker, the reporter for the Bridger Mountain Star, was five foot nothing and looked harmless enough, which of course she wasn’t.

  “Never trust a woman who wears a felt fedora,” Martha muttered under her breath.

  “What was that?”

  “One more cinnamon sugar cake,” she said.

  The tongs reached. “Who’s under the knife? That unlucky woman the cat dragged in?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Martha said. Not twenty-four hours had passed since she and Sean had tak
en up the blood trail, but the story had already been on the front page of yesterday’s afternoon paper. Which perturbed Martha, but gave her no reason to lie.

  “You know, during the hunting season I open at five,” McSweeny said. “Died down now with Sunday being closing day, but if you’d been here earlier, the line ran right out the door. Sold more doughnuts than I did all last weekend. You’d think the woods would be empty, but that’s where they were headed. Seems like everybody wants to be the one kills that cougar.”

  “Seems like,” Martha agreed. “I’m just hoping they don’t kill each other.”

  McSweeny folded the bag and rang her up.

  “I heard somebody shot a dog,” he said. “Heard the bullet passed through and hit a house.”

  Martha nodded. “Sharon Bower’s place up Eagle Creek Road. Candy, her chocolate Lab.”

  “Chocolate Lab doesn’t look anything at all like a mountain lion.”

  “No dog does.”

  “I heard Buster Garrett’s going to run it. Put his hounds on the scent.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Buster Garrett. He was in earlier.”

  “It’s like Grand Central Station here.”

  McSweeny handed her the doughnut bag and her change, which she dropped into the mason jar on the counter. The words on the jar read ALMS FOR THE WICKED.

  As well as making the best doughnuts in town, McSweeny was the president of the local chapter of the Libertarian party. He also took pride in being a member of a warlock and witches’ coven, leading séances every first Thursday of the month. An invitation to a séance was considered a social coup in three counties. Clothes were rumored to come off, shenanigans to ensue, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. Martha didn’t care what happened at their séances as long as they were consenting adults and trying to bring the dead to life, rather than the other way around. Still, you couldn’t make this stuff up.