Mortal Fall Read online

  We didn’t actually have all that much in common. She liked the outdoors, but wasn’t crazy about it like me. But we were chemically attracted from the get-go. A numbers person, she was logical and reasonable, but she could be spontaneous and bubbly too. She surprised me on one of our early dates—a picnic by the Teton River—when she stripped off her clothes and went skinny-dipping. And she talked about her large family of eleven with great respect and love. That alone intrigued me—that so many siblings in the same household remained caring and warm in spite of everyone’s individual complexities. We were married two and a half years later. I was twenty-six. She was twenty-five.

  When we tied the knot, Lara knew I didn’t want to have children and that was fine for the first seven years until it just wasn’t fine anymore. Call it instinct, call it hormones, or even call it the seven-year itch—either way, she changed her mind. Just like that. I don’t want to sound coldhearted; I agonized over it because I love Lara, and it’s not like I don’t understand the drive to bear children that can grip a woman as her life priorities change. But I have my reasons for not capitulating. When paranoid schizophrenia runs on one side of your family, I figure not having children is the responsible thing to do since it tends to be a genetic problem.

  In addition to being somewhat bullheaded, I’m a good risk manager ninety-nine percent of the time. But there’s that one percent when I’m too driven, too intense, to not take a few chances. Apparently even I can’t escape my DNA, which consists of large doses of impulsive behavior, especially on my father’s and brother’s side. So, around nine thirty, when my lonely evening began to linger a little too long, the cabin’s steady hum of solitude began to get a little too persistent, and thoughts of Lara kept pushing their way in, I welcomed the buzz of my phone. The biologist Kurtis Bowman called to tell me where the wildlife camera near the Loop was located. I tried to tell myself it could wait until morning, that I was tired and needed a good night’s sleep, and it certainly didn’t make sense to take the drive up to the Loop at such a late hour.

  But dead bodies stay with you, clinging like leeches to all attempts at normalcy, and I kept seeing Wolfie’s mangled features and purple skin. I got up and went over some of my notes from the day, but Ford saying that he wanted the trail reopened quickly made me antsy. Thoroughness requires time and if I left the task until morning, I might not have enough to get everything I needed done.

  Eventually I couldn’t resist throwing on my uniform gear belt, which I’d begun wearing since I’d been back in the field, but usually didn’t wear when investigating in public outside the park. It contained my sidearm, handcuffs, Counter Assault spray for bears, pepper spray for humans (which is smaller with a different concentration), a Taser, and my impact weapon (an expandable baton), all concealed in small, nifty leather compartments with fold-over pocket flaps. I threw on a light windbreaker, grabbed my keys, and took the forty-five-minute drive up to the Loop in the ten-thirty twilight as remaining crimson embers clung to the peaks above. I wanted to get my hands on that memory card.

  I reached the Loop around quarter after eleven. The parking area was mostly deserted since we had cordoned it off earlier and because traffic decreased dramatically at night. Five parked vehicles stood empty and ghostly in the dark. They most likely belonged to tourists leaving them locked while they hiked to either backcountry campgrounds near Granite Park Chalet or to the other side of the Divide to the Many Glacier area. I parked close to the Loop trailhead where Joe and I had walked earlier, killed the engine, locked my car, and grabbed my flashlight.

  The night air was cool on my skin and I could hear the flowing water from McDonald Creek, but other than that, a quiet solitude permeated the area. I shone my light ahead of me and walked onto the well-maintained trail, careful not to stumble on protruding rocks, exposed tree roots, or loose shale. The sound of my scuffling boots was amplified by the still night air.

  The summits of Heavens Peak and the others at the top of Logan Pass shimmered like jagged fangs in the pale silver moonlight casting across the tips. The light from the three-quarter moon illuminated part of the cloudless sky dotted with glittering stars though it hadn’t come fully into view above the tall peaks. In another hour, it would be a little brighter. But now, if I turned my light off, the trail would be pitch-dark.

  Carefully, I made my way around the bend, over the footbridge, around the seep, and finally past the launch site Joe and I had examined earlier. Bowman had said to go about thirty yards past the footbridge and up around the bend to the right. The camera was mounted six or seven feet above the ground on the trunk of a tall lodge pole pine, so it would have a broader view of the landscape it was pointed toward. He said the tree would be obvious because it was the last pine on the boundary of the burn line from the Trapper Fire near a cluster of aspen trees and the only pine near them.

  I stopped when I thought I’d reached thirty yards and illuminated each tree. The burned trunks left standing like spears stood high and eerie in the dark. Despite his claim that the tree would be obvious, it took me a good ten minutes checking out each pine tree in the area. Thank goodness they were all on the side of the trail away from the abrupt ledge, but the slope was still relatively steep and it was no easy task navigating the thick summer regrowth brush and the burnt, fallen logs that crisscrossed like hard bones.

  Finally, my light caught a glint of metal or glass among a copse of aspen trees I had already passed. I backtracked to the lone pine. I was almost there when I heard scuffling sounds to my right that made me stop dead in my tracks. I shined the light in that direction but saw no glowing eyes. I lifted the flap over my bear spray and took it out to be safe, but all went quiet again. I briefly thought of my one-time partner, Ted Systead, whose father had been killed by a grizzly in Glacier in the eighties, then shook it off, knowing how rare such incidents were and how the forest was alive with all sorts of small furry sorts: chipmunks, skunks, weasels, ground squirrels, marmots, pine martins, lynx . . .

  I certainly hoped it wasn’t a mountain lion or a grizzly. There are very few creatures that aren’t afraid of grizzlies, the wolverine being one of them. Even though my coworkers and I were well aware of the fact that grizzlies wanted nothing to do with us unless they needed to protect their young, it would be foolish not to fess up to the real and primordial fear one feels when traipsing through grizzly country.

  Glacier has about 350 of the great bears, more than one for every five or six square miles, but it was important to consider that whatever it was—even if a bear—it was equally, if not more, afraid of me—some strange and unwanted guest trekking through its home in the peaceful, spectacular night.

  I started walking toward the tree again with my light in one hand, my spray in the other, thankful the camera was within reach and required no climbing up its narrow trunk. I set the spray back in its holder, held the flashlight up with my left hand, and reached for the camera with my right. It was a motion-detection camera, a rectangular-shaped unit a little bigger than the size of a postcard mounted on a slightly larger piece of wood, which was strapped to the trunk of the pine. It had a latch that swung open to the inside of the unit where the batteries and memory card were housed. It took me some time to find the small mechanism that popped open the small latch and while I fiddled with it, I heard more of the same scuffling sounds to my right up the ridge. My pulse skyrocketed until I realized they were coming from farther away.

  I found the latch on the lower right corner, slid the switch, and held the flashlight under my armpit. I used both hands to open the mechanism containing the small digital video card, but when I couldn’t see it, I grabbed the flashlight again and looked more closely.

  The card was gone.

  6

  * * *

  I WOKE WITH THE sun at 5:40 and waited an hour to call Joe. I needed to tell him that the video was already gone and that I planned to make another evidence-gathering trip down into the ravine to see if I could find where it may have been
flung, assuming Wolfie had already grabbed the memory card from the camera before his fatal fall.

  Joe said it was fine and to take Ken along again. Then I texted Bowman with the same information. I went to make coffee and realized I didn’t have enough to make a strong, full-size cup, so I had a bowl of Cheerios and pulled out my notes from the day before. I spread them on the card table in the small oak-paneled kitchenette. While investigating, I had scratched the essentials in a pocket-size notebook that I could access quickly. The morning hours gave me the opportunity to write my notes and descriptions in a spiral-bound notebook.

  For no particular reason, several notes stood out to me:

  No real signs of foul play or struggle // Face lacerated and skull fractured—Was this consistent with a fall head first or had the body hit leg first—femurs severely fractured as well // binoculars? // Wildlife Memory Card? // ripped shorts and pockets from the rock while falling // Lip and concaved ground near launch area.

  I also made a list of the things I needed to do: check Wolfie’s credit cards, phone records, and get ahold of the surveillance tapes posted at the entrance gate in West Glacier, one of the few entrances that actually have surveillance cameras.

  I called Ken and told him I required his help again anchoring and assisting the lines while I went back into the ravine and met him at headquarters with two cups of coffee that I’d fetched at the Glacier Café facing the entrance to West Glacier before the west entry to the park.

  “Thank you very much.” Ken gave me a wide grin and grabbed the to-go cup. I could tell he’d gotten over whatever shock and queasiness he was fighting yesterday because his energy was ramped up and he’d returned to his usual talkative self. “Good deal that we have another cloudless, dry day to tackle this,” he added.

  “Definitely a good deal,” I said. “Might want to use your sunscreen.”

  “Nah, man, I like the mountain sun. Plus we get so little the rest of the year.” Ken looked at the tan he’d accumulated on one thickly muscled arm and clicked his tongue with pride.

  I wasn’t about to give a lecture on high-elevation sun and the dangers of skin cancer if he didn’t get that by now. “Mighty nice of you to bring this,” he added, lifting the cup in a cheers gesture and took a sip.

  I nodded you’re welcome and we headed into headquarters to the equipment room and grabbed all the rappelling gear and the camera we’d used the previous day.

  • • •

  Ken sat big and burly in the passenger seat, the top of his head nearly brushing the roof of the SUV. I kept my attention on the curving narrow road while he asked me questions as we headed back up to the Loop.

  “So you think he’d already grabbed the memory card, then fell?”

  “Yeah, that’s what makes most sense. I’ve got a call in to Bowman to double check that none of the other biologists have been up there in the last few days to fetch it and he just hadn’t heard.”

  “What are the chances of finding it?”

  “Something this small”—I held up the tip of my thumb—“very, very, very—did I say very low, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. Wondering if he had binoculars too, but not counting on it.” I thought of the ol’ axiom repeated in my courses, one takes the victim as one finds him. In other words, don’t try to imagine stuff that isn’t there.

  We drove the rest of the way with Ken telling me about the two fall incidents he’d worked since he’d joined our ranks three years ago. One on the east side of the park near Apikuni Mountain where a man fell eighty-five feet and had died, and the other near Allen Mountain where a man had survived a forty-foot fall. He gave me a blow-by-blow detail of the rescue, how the family members handled it and how they considered him a hero.

  “Perfect,” I said to him and meant it. It was always great to hear a survival story, and I wished we could have done the same for Wolfie. Of course, I already knew every detail about the rescue because I’d helped him complete and file most of the paperwork when it happened.

  I found a parking space in the lot near the Loop, which now reopened for tourists to stop, but the trail was still roped off to the public. We set the rappelling gear up on the opposite side of the ravine near the launch site this time, careful not to interfere with the taped area.

  “How long are we keeping the trail closed?” Ken asked.

  “If we don’t find the card showing anything interesting or find any other reason to assume this was anything but an accident, we’ll remove the caution tape and the trailhead ropes by tomorrow morning. Of course, we want to hear what the coroner ME has to say.” I felt a small pit in my stomach at the thought of reopening the trail and going back to business as usual because although I had no specific reason yet to believe this was anything but an accident—other than that the victim was an experienced mountaineer—there was still something that felt entirely wrong about the whole thing. When we were done rappelling, I planned to check the victim’s credit cards, cell records, and the lot. “We already have enough photos of these sites from yesterday,” I added.

  I stepped into the leg loops of my harness, threaded the waist belt through the buckle, and doubled the line back. I put my helmet and gloves on and rechecked the anchor and its webbing. Finally, I clipped my carabiners to the belay loop of my harness, screwed the gates to lock them, and leaned back against the rope in my dominant hand near my hip. I slowly backed over the edge and made my way down with the rope sliding smoothly through the belay device, while Ken stayed above to man the lines.

  This side of the ravine felt a little trickier to navigate with rock crumbling at my every landing. When I made it near the first slanted outcropping where I figured the victim had hit, I used my brake hand to slow my speed. When I was almost halfway down the cliff, I slid the latch on the belay device for it to cease feeding rope and made very careful, small side steps as close as I could to the area without straining my ropes. I paused to look around.

  Small shrubs stuck straight out from the cliff rocks and I inspected them for any sign of the camera card or any additional evidence. I didn’t see anything other than slide marks, disturbed rock, and some blood verifying that the victim had hit the spot first. I had the camera on a strap around my neck making it easy to snap photos.

  When I had enough pictures, I opened the belay and continued down. When my feet touched down to solid ground near the spot Ken and I had already climbed to from below, I released my harness from the ropes and began searching that area again. I looked in every bit of brush, around and under large rocks, in the large slope of scree. . . . It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  There were no binoculars and I certainly couldn’t find the miniscule digital camera disk. I searched for another half an hour as the sun began to heat the area. Sweat gathered on my chest and I took a drink of water, then climbed back up to the ropes and clipped them back to my harness and radioed up to Ken that I was ready to go back up.

  • • •

  When we reached the parking lot and loaded up the Explorer, I noticed a man about my height but a little stockier coming our way. As he got closer, I recognized him. It was Sam Ward whom I’d also met a time or two because he worked not far from headquarters in an RMRS extension office in Glacier Park. He had assisted Wolfie on the Wolverine project.

  “Sam.” I reached out to shake his hand.

  “Monty, Ken,” he said as a greeting. “Cathy called me last night. I promised her I’d drive up and check things out this morning. Plus . . .” He paused like he needed a second to take a breath and keep his composure. His eyes were red and his unshaven, rugged face had a look of anguish.

  “I’m really sorry, Sam.”

  He looked at his trail runners and ground a loose pebble into the pavement with the point of one of them. “It’s, it’s—I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem real.” He looked up at me, his eyes searching my face for some explanation. “Just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I know, I know. We’re tr
ying to make sense of it all.”

  He peered over to the Granite Park Chalet trailhead. “I see it’s cordoned off.”

  “Has to be until we finish checking things out.”

  “But he’s been lifted out of there, right? Cathy said he was . . .”

  “Oh yeah, absolutely. We did that yesterday. Keeping the trail closed is just a temporary thing for now. You know, for us to thoroughly investigate the scene.”

  “But, but what the hell happened?” He looked at Ken and me, his eyes going back and forth between us.

  “He fell, Sam. Off that ridge over there.” Ken pointed to the area. “It happens. You know that.”

  “But here—” He held out his hand, palm up. “By the Loop for God’s sake. In mild weather?”

  “Perhaps that’s when we’re the most confident,” I said. “When we’re the least careful.”

  He lowered his brow sharply as if he wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know, Monty. Something just doesn’t seem right with this.”

  “I promise, Sam. We’re doing all we can to thoroughly investigate this incident.”

  He looked down at his shoe again, then reached in his pocket and held out his palm. In it was a small memory card and my hopes rose suddenly that he’d grabbed it. “You have the wildlife camera card?”

  “Yeah, the replacement,” he said.

  “Not the one that’s been in it since the end of May?” The biologists like to keep the cameras on the video setting. Depending on how often a moving object triggers the video, the memory card can run down in weeks.

  “No, I spoke to Wolfie the day before he was leaving. He was going to grab the footage, but he said he was out of replacement cards and I told him not to worry about it because I had a package of them in the office and wanted to drive up here anyway. The plan had been for him to take the old memory card the other night so that I could replace it today. That’s what I was going to say earlier, that I promised Cathy I’d look around and that I also needed to replace the card. I just didn’t realize that you’d have it roped off, but it makes sense.”