Mortal Fall Read online

  I grabbed my radio and pressed Talk. “Chief, you read?”

  “Yep, please report.”

  “Deceased. Judging by the color of the blood and his eyes, looks like he’s been here at least since yesterday. Rigor mortis has set in as well and it doesn’t appear to have begun to wear off. Doesn’t appear to be chewed on though, so no animals have been around yet.”

  “Bonus,” Joe said, and I could hear him sigh like he didn’t want to be doing this so early into tourist season, which really fires up around the Fourth of July.

  “We’ll look around, take notes and photos,” I said. “I’ll let you know when we’re getting closer to being done down here.”

  We signed off, and l looked up at the clear cloudless sky. “Since he’s not alive,” I said to Ken, “and no rain in the forecast, there’s no major rush in getting him up. Let’s study the area as carefully as we can.”

  Ken took out a tissue from his pocket and plucked his gum out with his thumb and forefinger. He briefly looked at it with disgust, then wrapped it in the tissue and placed it back in his pocket. I didn’t bother to tell him he’d be better off continuing to chew it or to grab a new piece because it helped minimize the full onslaught of death’s odor. I wasn’t much older than Ken, but I had gone through some recent forensics schooling while he’d had very little, just the initial training program—stuff like criminal investigations, park and recreation law, criminal procedure, and penal law. I was certain Ken had only been on one or two death scenes before, and only as a bystander, although he’d been on plenty of Search and Rescue missions. Fortunately, I had recently spent hours in Georgia going over forensic analysis with a cadaver before me.

  After my time with Department of Interior agent Ted Systead on Bear Bait, I’d decided I wanted to enhance my knowledge of investigative services. I’d always been a fully-trained, permanent full-time law enforcement officer since I’d been employed by the park, but since I’m a good organizer and notetaker, I’d been pulled into administrative duties with the super. And before becoming a Park Police officer, I was a game warden in eastern Montana close to the Divide.

  But I hadn’t been on a crime case in a long time until the Bear Bait case popped up. After it, my hunger to be involved in investigative services deepened, and I’m sure it was no coincidence that my desire to plunge into something wholly absorbing coincided with being separated from my wife, Lara. I admit I have a propensity for a bit of tunnel vision, for working feverishly on things that catch my interest. Lara would tell you that it was a problem at times—how I could tune out our lives and escape into the pull of a new task. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.

  So once I caught the investigative bug, I no longer wanted any part of the administrative duties I’d been mixed up in for the past few years. I asked Joe, and he agreed to send me to a refresher course in Brunswick, Georgia, on Crime Scene Investigative Procedures, Evidence Collection and Analysis, and another on Modern Forensics.

  I removed my pack and pulled out another pair of gloves for Ken, some evidence markers, and my notepad while he grabbed the camera.

  “Here we go,” I said, ready to put my recent training to work. “We’ll see if I can do this without taking forever.” I kneeled down again by the body and pressed my forefinger into the blotched and bluish-purple skin of his arm. The skin was cold, still in the shadows and, of course, the algor mortis—the death chill—well underway. The flesh stayed purple. I noted that and said to Ken, “Looks like hypostasis has spread evenly and isn’t responding to pressure.”

  “Huh?” Ken mumbled.

  “The discoloring of the skin—you know, the livor mortis.”

  “Yeah, right,” Ken said. He looked away, to the cliffs above us. A hawk sailed by.

  “Probably means he’s been out here for more than ten to twelve hours,” I offered. “After five or six, the lividity blotches start to merge, but the skin still goes white when pressed. After ten, give or take depending on temperature, it stays this bluish-purple color. And,” I noted, “rigor mortis hasn’t yet begun to wear off as it does about thirty-six hours after death. Although with the cold last night,” I reconsidered, “what was it? Maybe forty-five, forty-eight degrees?”

  “ ’Bout that,” Ken agreed.

  “Might’ve slowed both processes down quite a bit. The coroner or pathologist should be able to tell us more, depending on how far this goes.” Often with accidents like these, an autopsy is done regardless—just to be thorough because with a fall, it’s always harder to know if foul play occurred. Of course, the family’s wishes would be respected, but we’d request an autopsy, get the ducks in a row. Better safe than sorry.

  Ken, now a little green around his mouth and white in the face, scrunched up his nose and stared at me with a slightly dazed expression. “You want me to take photos of the body now or after you inspect it and take your notes?”

  “Now would be good.” I backed away and motioned with my gloved palm to signal all yours, and he snapped away. Flashes disrupted the shadows in the ravine until Ken stopped, moved the camera away from his face, swallowed hard, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his uniform shirt. I could still hear his breathing, heavier now. “You okay?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You sure? Here.” I held out my hand. “Why don’t I take the rest of the pictures and you can scoot over there and check out that disturbed rock up there. I think he probably hit that ledge.” I pointed about thirty yards above us. Glacier is known for its sedimentary rock, which is crumbly and unstable. “See it?”

  Ken looked up, squinting into the sun now moving slightly farther to the west, shining directly on where I was kneeling and exposing the victim from the waist up. “Yeah, I see that. Right.” He handed me the camera. “Probably a good idea.”

  “Check for blood, disturbed dirt, you know, scrape marks from sliding, clothing, that sort of thing, but don’t touch anything. And, Ken,” I said, “might want to grab another piece of gum.”

  He looked at me confused, and I waved him on. I didn’t want to deal with him getting sick on me. Then I turned back to the victim, brought the camera to my eye, and focused on his hair and face again. I found myself tilting my head to slightly alter my perspective. Slowly, I lowered the camera from my eyes. “Ken,” I said. “Mind coming back over?”

  He shuffled back. “Yeah?”

  “Past the swelling, past the distortion. . . . Doesn’t this guy, I mean, call me nuts, but doesn’t he look familiar to you?”

  Ken took a step back, also tilted his head to the side and squinted, his thick, sunburned neck bunching on one side.

  “The hair especially,” I said. “I swear I know this man.”

  Ken brought his head back to straight, his beefy shoulders tensing and pulled in his chin like a turtle. “Yeah, you’re right. Shit. You’re right. I think, oh God, I think it’s Wolfie.”

  “Wolfie,” I repeated, under my breath. “Yes,” I nodded. “Damn, that’s it.” I grabbed my radio to call Joe and recalled the last time I saw the man. I was with Lara, my now-estranged wife, and he was with his wife and kids—all bright smiles while eating dinner at the Pizza Hut in Whitefish. “I guess we can’t be sure, but, holy shit, yeah, I think it’s him.”

  2

  * * *

  THE ROAR FROM the helicopter filled my ears and rattled my bones. Small green leaves, dust, and white feathery filament from the cottonwood trees flurried madly as the chopper hovered above like a parent waiting impatiently for Ken and me to complete the long-line retrieval. Bright orange ropes with carabiners and a litter—a metal basket used to place the body in—dangled above us.

  We’d already wrapped the corpse in fabric and placed it in a maroon body bag. I was still in shock after realizing it was Wolfie. If it hadn’t have been for his large frame and his distinct blond, wavy locks that looked like they belonged on an adolescent and not a grown man, I wouldn’t have had any recognition.

&n
bsp; Paul “Wolfie” Sedgewick was a biologist and one of the lead researchers of the Wolverine Research Team. He had been nicknamed Wolvie early on, but over the years, the v had drifted to an f. It was easier to say Wolfie than Wolvie.

  Ken and I had been on the scene for over three hours, photographing the victim from all angles, inspecting rock crumbled away by the velocity of the body crashing against it and skid marks from the sliding. I’d taken notes and we’d tweezed samples from his clothes torn off by some of the more jagged rocks above, at least the ones we could climb to. We couldn’t get to some of the higher points above that he’d potentially hit on the way down, presuming we had judged the launch point accurately.

  Joe had radioed down to us that they found a car in the Loop Trail parking area with a license registered to Paul Sedgewick. His ID was also in the glove box.

  Ken and I looked for evidence of suicide or foul play, but saw none. No note on him, no suspicious injuries that might have been from something other than the fall, like a ligature mark or a gunshot wound, but the coroner or pathologist would be able to look more closely.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a man with so much experience in the back country could fall this close to the Loop, so near the main and only pass through the park. His team of wolverine researchers had skied all over Glacier Park in the dead of winter, in subzero temperatures and biting wind chill, to set the mini log-cabin traps used for baiting them. Wolverines were the least-known and most elusive animals in the Northwest and cunning and tenacious enough to run off a grizzly bear over a dead carcass with its long claws, sharp teeth, and badass attitude. Wolfie’s team had trekked across large massifs, scaled monumental crags, rambled up high summits, and skied across iced-over lakes tracking the creatures and looking for their dens, hoping to find clues about their behavior and how strong their population is after decades of being trapped in the Northwest.

  Ken and I divided the ravine into grids and searched for signs of the animal just in case Wolfie had tried to foolishly climb down to track one. We looked for the telltale triangular-shaped print made from the animal’s five toes, which would splay out when its paws compressed into the dirt or mud, its sharp-pointed claws leading the way. We checked for scat—cylindrical pellets with fur, bones, and feathers from its scavenging. We found nothing along those lines other than Wolfie’s other hiking boot nestled in some bushes lower down.

  Had this burly, blond man been so consumed in his research that he’d gotten careless and simply fallen to his death? Or had he been suicidal, drinking, or on drugs? I pictured Wolfie—his long, loose locks blowing in the mountain breeze, his wide grin, and his healthy, weathered, and ruddy skin. I couldn’t conceive of any of those scenarios, but it was too soon to make assumptions.

  When the large metal hook from the helicopter finally reached ground, Ken and I moved Wolfie carefully onto the metal litter, hooked up the four lines to the center catch, and signaled for the chopper to lower a bit more. When the hook came into reaching distance, I grabbed it and snapped the catch from the litter onto it and signaled for the pilot to rise. I watched the basket, hanging underneath the chopper like a fly in a spider’s filament, swing away. Slowly, they’d take the body to a gravel pit near McDonald Creek, an opening used for construction vehicles where the coroner waited.

  I glanced up to Heavens Peak again, then up Logan Pass to the panorama surrounding it. The Crown of the Continent stood massive and indifferent, beautiful and rugged. A place where time loses its significance and history shoots up out of the ground, its presence overwhelming and demanding, making you feel useless and small. The biologist—trying to understand the near-mythical creature known for its toughness and resilience but threatened by the loss of the glacial snowfields necessary for its winter dens—was now officially done with his research. Officially done with his life, his family. The finality of it was every bit as humbling as the peaks towering above us. I thought of Lara—how our once rock-solid bond had slowly but surely crumbled—and felt a weight fall upon me like a heavy cloak.

  I undid the strap under my chin and removed my hard hat to get some air. My scalp was sweaty, the tips of my close-cropped hair gathered into wet points and clinging to the back of my neck and around my ears. For some reason, I suppose in homage, I held the helmet over my chest as if I were honoring the flag. I watched the chopper fly down the line of McDonald Creek, its dark strip of water flickering in sunlight and carving through the countryside at the base of Heavens Peak. I watched it all the way until it grew very small and its roar softened to a faint growl as it went around the bend toward the gravel pit three or four miles down the road.

  I put the hard hat back on and let out a groan in the silent contrast. “It’s not going to be easy telling Wolfie’s wife and kids.”

  “No,” Ken agreed. “It’s not.”

  • • •

  Joe was waiting for Ken and me when we came up from the ravine. After we removed our gear, Joe gave Ken instructions to help Karen and Michael lift the anchors and put the rest of the climbing equipment away.

  “I’ve already gone over what we think the launch point is,” Joe said after waving me over. I followed him toward the Loop Trail. “But it’s hard to say for sure. I want you to look at it since you had perspective from down below.”

  We started toward the trail that sits above the ravine where we found the body. The Loop Trail to Granite Park Chalet, one of two stone chalets in Glacier’s high country, sits above a nearly four-mile steep hike through the remains of a spruce and fir forest burned by the 2003 Trapper Fire. This time of the year, it’s a hot and sweaty hike until you reach higher elevation above the fire zone and reenter the forest, which eventually takes you to a wind-swept subalpine fir and spruce area where the chalet sits and the Highline Trail cuts along the Continental Divide. The Highline Trail sits under a steep rocky rim known as the Garden Wall and takes you about seven miles to the top of Logan Pass. At nine thousand feet, the top of the Garden Wall, built from primordial ocean bottom, forms the top of the rim.

  There is also another eleven-mile trail to Many Glacier Campground on the east side of the Divide and a 2.2-mile trail to Swiftcurrent Lookout, a popular place to spot grizzlies or wolverines playing on snowfields in the early summer. I wondered if Wolfie was heading that way.

  “We’re not thinking this is the spot,” Joe said when we approached the slick rocks I’d mentioned earlier while standing above the ravine with Joe, Ken, and Charlie. “No slip marks around and the trajectory isn’t right.”

  “Yeah, definitely not right.” I looked down the ravine and could easily see it wasn’t the right line for the body to have launched from. The area was marked with tape, though, I presumed, to preserve the mud already covered with print marks from the soles of many tourists’ boots. Since Logan Pass’s higher elevations had only recently been cleared of its snowpack several weeks before, but had been plowed up to the Loop since late April, many people rode their bikes or drove to the Loop during the spring and hiked the Granite Park Chalet trail as far as they could before hitting snow. “You get some castings from some of these?” I asked anyway.

  “Yes. There’s quite a few so it will be hard to distinguish one clean one out of the bunch, and we have no evidence that this was foul play. Since it’s Wolfie though, and very odd that a man of his experience would fall here, I did have one of Walsh’s guys from the county bring the plaster kit and grab as many partials as he could.”

  We continued over a bridge with an early-summer crashing stream that would peter out by mid-August. I felt the cool air created by the stream wash over my face and forced down a full breath of it. A little farther up the trail, Joe stopped at a shallow outcropping of rocks where the trail bends right.

  The late-afternoon sky held a new cluster of wispy clouds gathered and fraying over Heavens Peak. Something scurried in the brush beside the trail, probably a striped chipmunk. I felt myself flinch slightly and shook it off. I was beginning to f
eel jittery and tired at the same time from being down in the ravine for hours without food. I’d unintentionally skipped breakfast because of a phone argument with Lara.

  Now standing up at the higher elevation and peering down to the area where Wolfie’s body had been made me feel light-headed, like I’d just been in a car or a plane for too long with too much caffeine.

  “We think this is it.” Joe pointed. The area had been marked off with yellow tape, and I made sure not to step into the small outcropping.

  “Find any evidence?”

  “Not much of anything. Those broken shrubs there.” He pointed to the side of the ridge.

  “Any blood or fibers from clothes?”

  “No, but we’ve got part of a boot print in the dirt on that edge of the rock leading onto the outcropping. It’s pretty faint, but we’ve got a plaster. Could be any of hundreds of tourists walking by this area. We’re basing it primarily on the trajectory of where the body was.”

  I peered down to the ledge Ken and I had climbed up to document. “Yeah, I agree. This looks like the spot.” I searched the ground, noticing the large flat rocks forming a narrow upward scalloping of rock to the lip of the ridge. “It’s almost concave here. He’d have to have been up on the very edge. Maybe scanning for wolverines and somehow just lost his footing, but I don’t see any signs of slippage?”

  “No, me neither. You find any binoculars?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t pop off his neck or fly out of his hands and land in some bushes. I can go down again tomorrow and look some more.”

  Joe shrugged. “We’ll see what the pathologist finds.”

  “Has the family been notified yet?”

  Joe sighed heavily. “Not yet. Nobody knows who he is yet except you, Ken, and myself and I’ve given strict orders to Ken to not open his mouth except to chew that damn gum of his. You up for talking to the family?”