Mortal Fall Page 6

  “So, that . . .” I lifted my chin to point at Sam’s open palm, the small card still lying in the center like a dead bug. “It’s just blank.”

  “Yeah, it’s just blank. And I promised . . .” His face suddenly grew even more sad and drooping. “Wolfie was my friend and my research teammate. I know he would want me to get this in that camera if there were wolverines around to capture. Kurtis told me you said he’d already gotten the card, so the camera is empty now. Wolfie said he was getting signals up here. Can I cross the rope and go in and replace it? For him?” his eyes pleaded.

  “I understand, but I can’t let anyone cross right now. You can give it to me and I’ll go back and put it in or you can wait until tomorrow. We should have the trail reopened by tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll come back tomorrow. It’s the least I can do.”

  “And, Sam—” I went and opened the driver’s side door of the Explorer and grabbed my notepad. “You mind if I get your number?”

  He gave it to me and I jotted it down. “You said you spoke to Wolfie the day before he was planning to come up here?”

  “That’s right. In the evening. We met for a beer.”

  “He seem normal to you?”

  “Completely,” Sam said.

  “Not down or depressed or burdened by any particular worries?”

  Sam chuckled. “Wolfie? God no. Other than the fact that he hadn’t seen a wolverine in the wild for a while, he was his usual self.”

  “It seriously bugged him when he hadn’t seen one live in a while?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I was just using that as an example of how normal he was with his one-track mind to locate them. Not just him, our whole team feels that way.” He shrugged. “I know we all sound nuts, but every day in wolverine world is like a powerful drug. It’s an addiction. I don’t expect anyone other than those of us who do the research to understand.”

  But I did understand. I had caught the power of the truth-seeking drug myself. Amid the sad and burdensome world of death and destruction, the quest for what really happened, for the big T can consume you. I felt it creeping up on me when Cathy was asking me for answers, and I had felt it full force on Bear Bait. I could imagine the quest to understand the fierce and relentless wolverine was just as catching—that amid the world of dwindling glaciers and increased rate of climate change was a potent urgency to unravel some of the secrets of one of the most mysterious species in the contiguous states and what it requires to survive.

  “I mean,” Sam continued, “he was telling jokes and was excited to see if the cameras had caught any footage. Told me all about how Jeff’s baseball season was going—that they’d just had a tournament in Sandpoint. He was so proud of Jeff.” Pain filled his eyes at the thought of the boy. “It’s just—” He shook his head. “It’s just so unreal.” He swallowed hard and I could see his Adam’s apple jerk up, then down. “So unfair. So incredibly unfair.”

  I looked around, but didn’t say anything. He was right, there was nothing fair out here at all in these mountains. But there was nothing unfair in them either. Glacier Park spans about sixty miles along the Montana Rockies and every inch of its jutting contours and colorful rock layers hollers stories of a landscape that is billions of years old. The mountains towered above us daily, and you either survived them or you didn’t. Wolfie would have known that better than anyone.

  7

  * * *

  KEN AND I drove back down to headquarters, my third trip down this curving narrow roadway that I knew by heart. This time of the year, the line of cars moves slowly with tourists taking it all in. Plus there’s no cell service in this part of the park, a blessing for visitors—a chance to wean themselves from the rat race. For us, we had the use of the radios, but it was easier to work from a phone at headquarters. I was slightly frustrated but ready to get to the busywork of checking Wolfie’s credit cards, phone records, and to get ahold of the surveillance tapes posted at the entrance gate in West Glacier.

  I thought of the adage that if a murder has been committed, it must be solved within the first forty-eight after it’s occurred or forget it. What they reminded me in DC was that forty-eight hours within the commission of the crime is not exactly true. It’s partially true, but not completely true. It’s more a question of people forgetting how things went down past two days’ time, in any situation, not just crime.

  In this case, I had no witnesses that I knew of anyway. Joe and I had asked the media to press for anyone witnessing the fall or anything strange around the Loop the previous day to come forward with information regarding the incident. But more frustrating to me was not knowing if we were even dealing with a crime. My instincts whispered to me that we were, but so far the lack of evidence suggesting foul play said we weren’t.

  I had already placed a few calls in the morning over coffee and had some faxes waiting for me in the incident room Systead and I had used in the last case. A government pea-green counter traversed one wall of the room with a printer and fax machine smelling of toner and paper dust on one side and an old coffeepot next to the sink on the opposite. A long conference table with metal chairs hogged the center of the room and a gunmetal file cabinet hid in the corner with a wilting ficus on top. I smelled a slight antiseptic tang mixed with the familiar old and dusty scents of the building.

  We’d moved the printer/fax machine into the room at that time and everyone got used to using it where the sink and coffeemaker was, so we kept it there. I felt strange but energized at the same time to be utilizing the room again for something other than a staff meeting. “I’ll need you to check the phone records while I hit the credit card statements,” I said to Ken.

  “Gotcha,” he said. “What exactly am I looking for?”

  I leaned my hip against the counter and thought about that for a minute. I turned my head and set my gaze out the window at a plump robin picking at worms in the lush lawn and wondered whether I had the right guy helping me, then decided I was being unfair. Ken’s day did not usually involve investigative work. It normally consisted of ticketing speeding tourists, responding to petty thefts at a campsite, attending to disorderly conduct reports, keeping people out of dangerous situations, helping someone get into their rental cars after accidentally locking the keys inside. . . . In fact, that’s what my day consisted of now that I was out in the field more.

  “Just look for numbers that are out of the ordinary,” I said. “If they’re not his wife’s or kids’, see who they belong to.”

  “Okay if I grab something to eat first?” Ken looked at me wide-eyed, his hand on his stomach. “I’m starved.”

  “Sure.” I smiled. “Grab a bite, but if I’m not here when you return, after I finish with the statements, I’ve gone to talk to Dr. Pritchard, Wolfie’s research vet.”

  • • •

  There was zero pointing to anything remiss in the Sedgewick family statements. They were good, responsible people who paid their bills on time with the exception of a late payment to an Old Navy credit card that Cathy paid soon after the first notice of delinquency had arrived. Jeffrey’s baseball club and Abbey’s dance studio fees were put on the Visa card. Gasoline purchases were as well and once in a while, groceries. There were some car maintenance fees: thirty-dollar oil changes and $575 to a Subaru dealership repair shop.

  When I didn’t find anything interesting on the statements, I placed a call to Cathy and asked if she could come to headquarters later for a few more questions. I figured a less personal environment might be conducive for her to talk. Then I called Dr. Pritchard, whose practice was halfway between Columbia Falls and Whitefish on Highway 40. It was coming up on his lunch hour, so we arranged to meet at a local pub in downtown Whitefish. It was a popular place to go because they had great sandwiches and a wide selection of microbrews on tap.

  I found parking on the main drag going through the town, which was tough to do in the summer with all the tourists visiting. I could remember a
time in the nineties when you’d rarely find more than ten cars downtown on any given weekday, even in the heart of summer or ski season. Now, people from all over the United States and especially Canada swarmed the place. Many had second homes in the area and others were just visiting the mountains and all the Flathead Valley had to offer in the summer: boating, golfing, mountain biking, fishing, rafting. . . . I stepped out of the car and walked the busy sidewalk until I reached the bar.

  Whitefish was prospering, but it was conflicted about its growth, trying not to seem too contrived and Aspen-like with the influx of wealth, and at the same time, trying to keep from bulging into a basic, midsize sprawl with typical billboards and chain stores that would destroy the very quaintness that lured tourists in the first place. Right now, it was chaos, with roads under construction and the building of banks, office buildings, and new restaurants on several of its corners.

  I looked up and saw the ski hill. Barely even ten minutes and you could be up in the Whitefish Range enjoying the wilderness. I felt an intimate connection to the wilderness surrounding me and thought of how lucky I was to have my job in the park, in spite of the recent tragedy.

  After Lara and I remarried, she no longer wanted to live in Choteau and wanted to return closer to her family, west of the Divide. She had grown up in Hamilton, a town south of Missoula in the Bitterroot Valley, so she began applying for accounting jobs around northwest Montana. Eventually, she was offered a full-time position for the hospital in Kalispell in the Flathead Valley, not too far from my hometown of Columbia Falls.

  I put in for a transfer to Region One, which included the Flathead Valley and encompassed Kalispell, Whitefish, Bigfork, and Columbia Falls. I didn’t really care for returning specifically to my hometown, but Lara wanted to accept the position in Kalispell, and I wanted to make her happy. And I had to admit: I did love the Flathead Valley.

  Then I heard the park was expanding its force, taking new hires and immediately, the Park Police position beckoned me. The salary was about the same as the warden job—nothing to brag about—but one could do a lot worse than having an office in Glacier National Park.

  My best and most memorable days were spent hiking and climbing in Glacier with the group I joined in high school. The sheer geological scale of the continent’s crown jewel brought humbling perspectives and made my adolescent worries seem trivial. Its beauty basically stunned me, and I knew I could easily make Glacier my place of work. I applied, did the extra training, and was a shoo-in with my wardening background.

  Now, looking at the Whitefish Range, where I’d also spent ample time as a teen with my climbing group, the sun spread a soothing warmth across my face and I almost took an extra few seconds just to continue standing there, but then a woman with a stroller came upon me suddenly and I had to step into the shadow of the bar’s awning to get out of the way. I opened the door and slid into the darkness. I could smell beer and french fries and garlic from the kitchen—maybe pickles. Most of the tables were already taken and I saw a hand go up out of the corner of my eye and noticed it was Pritchard waving to me from the bar. I shuffled over and shook his hand.

  Dr. Pritchard looked like he belonged in a GQ magazine: tall with relaxed movements, russet skin, fine features, tousled dark hair, and just the right amount of stubble on his chin and weathering around thoughtful eyes. Rumor had it that plenty of women not really all that interested in keeping a pet got one anyway just to have the chance to go in for an appointment to witness his ridiculous good looks and soothing manner first hand.

  “Tables were all taken,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind the bar.”

  “Fine by me,” I said and took a seat.

  “The pastrami is really good here,” he offered. “I already ordered. If I don’t get back to the clinic on time, I get really behind.”

  “I appreciate you meeting me. I know you’re busy.”

  “You caught me on a good day. Usually, I don’t get a chance like this to break away. There’s always some emergency, but luckily, my partner’s in today.”

  The bartender asked me what I’d like and I ordered an iced tea and took Pritchard’s recommendation and ordered the pastrami. Pritchard introduced the bartender, calling him Will. He was about my height, maybe a little taller, with a full head of dark, Brillo-like hair.

  “So.” Pritchard looked at me when Will walked away, a sadness filling his eyes. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “I know. It’s really strange and sad. I’m sorry for the loss. I know you worked with Wolfie quite a bit.”

  He nodded. “Thanks. Not as much as Sam did, but yeah.” He smiled faintly. “We spent some wild and good times in the park tracking those hardy little creatures.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He thought for a moment, his face pensive, his eyes heavy-lidded. “A few weeks ago. But he left me a message the other evening on my phone. Said he and Ward were meeting for a beer—actually here—and wanted to know if I wanted to join them. I couldn’t, though. I was in surgery late that day.”

  “You call him back?”

  “Yeah, left a message later that night on my way home from the clinic thanking him and hoping to catch him another time.”

  “And which evening was that?”

  “That would have been on Tuesday.”

  “And a few weeks ago?”

  “I went with him to a trap he’d set up the South Fork. A wolverine had taken the bait and he needed me to implant a transmitter.”

  “The South Fork? Outside the park?”

  “Yeah.” Pritchard sat back and let his shoulders sink into the back of the barstool. “It’s a long story, and you probably already know about it, but lately the park’s been less, shall we say, enthusiastic about wolverine research.”

  I actually didn’t know that. “Less enthusiastic?”

  “Yeah, Bowman’s sick about it, but apparently he’s been getting orders from Rick Phrimmer to start phasing out the project. I guess they’re getting flak from Washington—that it’s costing too much and it’s getting harder and harder to get available grant funds.”

  I sat listening. Phrimmer was Glacier Park’s assistant superintendent. He worked with Ford doing mainly administrative duties to support park management and secure new funding for park projects. I didn’t know the wolverine studies were lacking funding, but none of what he said was surprising. I’d done enough work for Ford involving DC’s politics. And all park employees knew that when Glacier was established in 1910, it housed about a hundred fifty glaciers. Now, our warming climate had reduced the number to twenty-five and they were shrinking about four times faster than they were just fifty years before. The last one is expected to disappear in less than a few decades. And as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t something to shrug about. Glaciers cooled air masses and without them, we had an earlier onset of spring and higher soil temperatures on the slopes. Its run-off fed streams important to just about the entire ecosystem.

  “I didn’t know. I thought they were going strong,” Pritchard added. “Could be anything from the fact that Phrimmer has always had a thing against Wolfie to something larger, like the fact that the wolverine is an indicator species and like the polar bear, wolverines—at least to those talking about it—have kind of become a poster child for climate change issues. You know, with their survival so closely tied to the state of snowfields and cooler temperatures.”

  I knew that the wolverines relied on carrion preserved and refrigerated in the ice until it melted in the spring. Then they feasted on it through spring and early summer. Will brought my iced tea and I took a sip.

  “So Wolfie figured if he was eventually going to get shut out of the park, he’d better start setting box traps elsewhere. I believe he’d gotten permission from the station to set them into the Hungry Horse and Bob Marshall Wilderness regions. So far, with Sam’s help, they’ve put them along a twenty-five-mile range along the South Fork.”

  “So wow, Wolfie was
really increasing his research efforts,” I said. “At least while he was still working the park.”

  “Yeah, well, not necessarily for long.” Pritchard frowned. “Like I said, Wolfie and I went to one of the traps where he’d gotten a signal that the trap had sprung.” He shook his head. “And when we got there to anesthetize the animal and implant the receiver, we found the trap rigged with another steel-jawed trap that was obviously put there to kill the animal. It had gotten a healthy female about two or three years old.”

  “You know who set it?”

  “Local trappers. Wolfie said it wasn’t the first time. That it had happened twice before. He was sick about it and said he’d fold the studies before he’d help the local trappers kill more of them.”

  “Just trying to score extra pelts?”

  Pritchard took a sip of his water. “Maybe some of them, but Wolfie thought the whole area was so fired up by some local rumors that our work was just going to be used to throw up state restrictions against trapping or snowmobiling or even mining. You name it. There’s a lot of fear around these parts. I’m sure you know with your job. Basically, Wolfie and the rest of us were coming to terms with the idea that once the glacier studies were over, the chances of being able to study an intact population in an undisturbed setting—unhunted, unlogged, unmined—ever again were unlikely.”

  I nodded. A waitress with short, bobbed hair came over and set Pritchard’s sandwich before him and he thanked her.

  “Had Wolfie begun removing the South Fork traps?”

  Pritchard nodded. “He had, but I’m not sure how many are left. Ward might know. Wolfie hated to give in like that, but he couldn’t bear basically helping the locals kill them. You have to understand that a lot of the wolverines around the park had come to trust our type of traps. They knew they never got hurt and often got a free meal from us. Without our specially constructed log traps, the trappers didn’t stand a very good chance of capturing them. The wolverines were too smart to go into steel jaws after bait unless it was cleverly disguised.”