Neil McMahon - Hugh Davoren 02 Read online

  The afternoon was waning as I started down the narrow dirt road of Stumpleg Gulch toward Helena. It was late March, the time of year when spring was encroaching but winter still clung to a hold, and the two conspired together to turn the outdoors into a tedious, unwinnable mud-wrestling battle. The roads were covered with a layer of self-perpetuating muck, snow that had melted and refrozen dozens of times and all the dirt that got trapped in the process. If you bothered to wash your vehicle, it would only highlight the greasy black splotches that reappeared as soon as your wheels started turning, like shooed flies flitting back to a picnic lunch.

  The snowfields that blanketed the higher mountains were taking on a worn look, and the buds on the trees lower down were thickening. Patches of ice clung to the shoreline of Canyon DEAD SILVER

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  Ferry Lake, but most of its solid freeze-over had broken up, and its miles-long expanse reflected the slaty gray sky in the afternoon light. Soon there’d come a couple of days when the sky cleared for hours at a time, the temperature climbed enough to make you break a light sweat, and you could almost feel the grass and foliage greening around you. Leaves would start competing with pine needles for sunlight, and insects would start tormenting mammals and delighting fish.

  Then, just about when you figured that winter was done for, you’d wake up early one morning to six inches of fresh snow driven by a howling, subzero wind doing its best to tear your roof off.

  That was a quality of this country that I respected to the point of reverence. If you took anything for granted, you were likely to end up regretting it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Helena had a fair number of stately Victorian houses, most of them dating back a century or more to when the area had been awash with mining money. The Callister home was one of them, up in the foothills toward the city’s southeast edge.

  It was set comfortably apart from its neighbors, with a backyard giving way to forest that thickened as the terrain climbed.

  The quietly elegant old neighborhood looked directly over the state capitol grounds, which were dominated by the grand, high-domed, gray stone main building. Before it stood a statue of ex–territorial governor Meagher, on horseback with sword raised like he was charging back into action in the Civil War.

  His fate remained one of Montana’s fondest mysteries—he’d vanished off a ferryboat on the Missouri River at Fort Benton one night, and was never seen again.

  North of the city, the land flattened out into the plains of the Helena Valley, bounded on the west by the foothills of the Rockies and on the east by the dark springtime glimmer of the Missouri. There was a lot of newer development that wasn’t so attractive, but that was the price of living in a place that was becoming known.

  Out of long habit, I started assessing the condition of Renee’s house while I was still driving up to it. It had suffered ne-

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  glect during the years that the Professor had been in the nursing home. The eggshell white paint was dingy and peeling, the bottom courses of clapboard siding and the front steps needed replacing, and there were other similar concerns common to such places. But by and large, the exterior seemed in pretty good shape. The roofing looked fairly new, and while the foundation was rock and mortar like most its age, there was no visible sagging or other structural damage. The inside might be a different story.

  I parked on the street out front—leaving the driveway clear for the homeowners was another longtime habit—got out of my truck, and walked up the pave-stoned footpath to the house. As I got close, I glimpsed Renee’s shape through a window, hurrying to the door. She must have been watching for me.

  Then, when she stepped out onto the porch, I had an odd instant—a sudden wash of familarity, almost like a déjà vu.

  Maybe it was only because I’d known her long ago. But more than suggesting the past, this had an intriguing sense of here and now. It was a pleasant little shock, gone too soon.

  She was trim, verging on slight, with dark brown hair cut above her shoulders and eyes about the same color. She still gave off the solemn gentleness I remembered from childhood.

  I wasn’t sure whether she was thinking of me as an old friend or a carpenter there to look at a job, so I only offered a handshake. But she clasped my hand in both of hers, fine-boned and warm, then drew me into a light embrace.

  We segued into small talk for a couple of minutes, catching up on our families and a little of our current lives. She was here alone; her mother was ailing and didn’t travel well, and her brother was teaching in Japan and hadn’t cared to make the long journey. Career-wise, she was doing well; she’d gone into science like her father, and was doing pharmaceutical research.

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  She was also wearing an engagement ring that looked like it would add up to a pile of my paychecks.

  The strain she was under showed in her face, and she seemed nervous, like she’d sounded on the phone. I reminded myself that besides her worries, she was probably used to men whose clothes weren’t stained with construction glue and who didn’t drive the kind of vehicle you usually only saw in old Clint Eastwood movies. I changed the subject to the house, trying to put her more at ease.

  “What I’ve seen so far doesn’t look too troublesome,” I said. “Paint and a little carpenter work. I’d say go for it. Jack your curb appeal way up.”

  “Thanks, that’s good to know.” She hesitated. “But there’s another reason I called. Come on, it’ll be easier to explain if I show you.”

  She led me back down off the porch and around the side of the house, across a tree-dotted lawn that I remembered as lush and well kept but now was just a grass-stubbled mud patch, past flower beds gone to ruin.

  At the rear of the property stood a smaller building that the Callisters called a carriage house, but which probably had been quarters for the domestic help. Her father had converted it into his study.

  When Renee opened the door, I faced the most dismal sight I’d ever seen.

  The place had been infested by pack rats. Books, carpeting, upholstery, insulation—anything they could get their teeth into—they’d chewed to shreds and used to build their warrens or just strewn around. Worse, almost every surface was layered with their foul pelletlike dung.

  While I stared, she told me how this had happened.

  During the past years that her father had been in the nursing home, the main house had been occupied by a lowlife shirttail relative. He’d run it into the ground, using it as a crash pad for DEAD SILVER

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  cronies and girlfriends, and when the pack rats invaded this outbuilding, he’d never lifted a finger to stop them.

  Renee had made a game start toward swamping out the mess, clearing pathways here and there and trying to rake it up. But it was unpleasant work, and heavy—a hell of a lot to take on for a woman to cope with by herself, while mourning her father to boot.

  I had to admit, realizing that this why she was courting my assistance was something of a comedown.

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have touched it. I was no prima donna, and I’d done my fair share of grunt work through the years. But by now I was well qualified in a range of skills that were much in demand, from heavy highway and commercial concrete work through any kind of framing—my specialty—to high-end remodels. About all this called for was a flat shovel and a strong stomach.

  Then again, I didn’t know anybody else who’d touch it, either; she’d be stuck with it herself. I decided that a day or two of slogging through rat shit wouldn’t kill me. In a metaphorical sense, I did it often.

  “I could start tomorrow, if you don’t mind me banging around on Sunday,” I said. It would probably take longer, but I could miss Monday out at Split Rock and make that up next weekend.

  Renee didn’t answer. She looked straight at me with her solemn gaze, like she was trying to make up her mind about something. I could just see her front teeth touching her lower
lip. And it seemed to me that her eyes showed more than her earlier anxiety—pain, and maybe even fear.

  Then she threw me a curve that eclipsed everything else.

  CHAPTER 5

  “There’s a lot more to this, Hugh,” Renee said. “I found something really creepy. I don’t know what to do. I need somebody I can trust. But I know it’s not fair of me to ask you. So if you want to leave, go ahead. Just please don’t say anything to anybody.”

  That was a lot to take in during those few quick, breathy sentences.

  I was gun-shy about a lot of things these days and I’d started looking at people more warily, for good reason. But my sense of Renee’s sincerity hadn’t faltered.

  I decided to go ahead, but to step very carefully.

  “I’ll listen, Renee, and I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping my mouth shut,” I said. “I can’t promise more than that.”

  She gave me an anxious smile. “That’s a lot.”

  I walked with her back to the main house, this time noticing the many rock outcroppings on the mountainside that boundaried the property’s rear—the primary homes of pack rats. There must have been a thriving community in there, aggressively expanding its turf.

  Renee had gotten the bigger house pretty well cleaned up from the tenant’s trashing. It was a splendid old place—nine-foot ceilings, oak floors, and the kind of finely wrought trim that had become as extinct as gaslight streetlamps.

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  She left me in the kitchen and went to another room.

  A minute later she came back with a manila envelope and shook out its contents on the table—a dozen bits of ragged-edged paper, ranging in size from a postage stamp to a playing card.

  “I found these when I was trying to clean, mixed up in the rat gunk,” she said, arranging the scraps and flipping some over.

  I was puzzled, and more so when I realized what they were: fragments of photographs. The images were unclear—the colors had faded with time, and the rats had both chewed them up and stained them—but when I started to make them out, the strangeness factor of this day took another jump.

  They appeared to be nude shots of a young woman. In a couple of them, she was wearing a costume—cowboy boots, a fringed leather vest opened to bare her breasts, and, in the only one that showed a complete face, large dangly earrings and a cowboy hat tipped rakishly low above her mischievous smile.

  It was hard to judge their quality; about all I could guess was that they weren’t from a magazine or straight computer down-load—they were printed on photographic paper. There were no markings on the back, no clue as to who the photographer might have been.

  I’d started to understand why this would upset Renee.

  Her father had always seemed a dignified, somewhat austere man, and no doubt that was how she wanted to remember him.

  Finding his study despoiled by vermin had to be yet another blow that she had suffered since coming here—a cruel trick of fate that mocked and underscored his ruined life. Learning that he’d kept a stash of cheesy porn would cheapen his memory further. But the way she was treating this like a nuclear secret seemed a bit overblown.

  Just as I was thinking that, Renee touched the fragment that showed the model’s full face, with the earrings and hat.

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  “This is Astrid,” she said.

  Her words took a few seconds to register, but when they did, they hit hard.

  Astrid was Professor Callister’s second wife, the one who had been murdered.

  CHAPTER 6

  Renee and I talked the situation over for the best part of another hour. After she assured me that she was doing fine and had everything she needed, I headed home. My notion of going downtown had vanished, although I still wanted a stiff drink.

  The afternoon was deepening toward evening as I drove back toward Canyon Ferry Lake. Houses became sparser and traffic disappeared. My truck had been over those roads so many times it practically handled itself, like an old horse heading for the barn. I let it do the work; I had plenty to think about.

  Not surprisingly, Renee clung to the belief that her father was innocent of Astrid’s murder. The job she had in mind for me was tied to that, and was far more intriguing than just cleaning up the rodent superfund.

  It centered on the photos of Astrid. Renee had made the realization that originally, there must have been a lot more of them. Only a few of the fragments that she’d found fit together; when she laid them out on the table, they were like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. She’d gone back and looked through desks and bookshelves and everyplace else ac-cessible, and even raked carefully through the rat debris—that was why she’d cleared the pathways I’d seen—but still came up far short of the total.

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  She suspected that the rest of them might be stashed someplace she hadn’t been able to get to—maybe inside a wall or floor cavity. The rats had found them, chewed them up like everything else, and dropped scraps around haphazardly. She wanted to find the missing fragments in the hope that they might contain some detail, like handwriting or other marks, that would lead to information about Astrid’s murderer—and that this, in turn, would help to vindicate Professor Callister.

  So Renee had asked me to tear into the carriage house structure, in search of the missing photos.

  Several questions hung unanswered. There was no hint as to who the photographer was, but Renee was convinced that it couldn’t have been her father. He’d had no interest in that sort of thing—never had so much as a Playboy magazine lying around. He’d have found salacious photos of his wife offen-sive, especially after her death.

  Then what were they doing in his study? One far-fetched possibility was that they comprised evidence relating to the real murderer’s identity, and for some reason he’d held off revealing it—then had been incapacitated by his strokes.

  Another scenario that occurred to me was even less likely but more disturbing. I didn’t mention it to Renee. Sex killers often kept souvenirs, usually objects with some intimate connection to the victim. They would handle these or otherwise use them to heighten their pleasure in reliving the crimes. During my years as a newspaper reporter in California, I’d become well aware of such instances, and difficult though it was to imagine Professor Callister like that, they’d included outwardly normal, pleasant men who harbored hidden evil sides.

  When I added it all up, my take was that even if I could find more photos, the odds of that helping Professor Callister’s cause seemed slim—if anything, the opposite was more likely.

  Renee was realistic enough to recognize that; while she hadn’t exactly said so, it was why she wanted to keep this secret.

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  Still, I’d agreed to start the job tomorrow morning. I was uneasy about it, for fear that her hopes would get crushed for good. But she was willing to take that risk, and the decision was hers to make.

  I turned off the highway at Stumpleg Gulch and drove the final two miles up the gravel road to my place. The forest closed in thicker as the elevation rose, with the road narrowing to a track that petered out in the mountains just beyond there. Grainy snow crunched under my boots as I walked to my cabin, keeping a wary eye out for the bobcat, with the pistol in my hand. I felt a little silly, but I was glad to have it.

  The fire in my stove had died, leaving the cabin with the peculiar kind of chill that could make a building seem colder than outside. I rekindled it, poured a splash of Old Taylor, and opened a beer chaser.

  I’d been living in California when Astrid was killed, but I had followed the story as well as I could. Not many specifics were released; the era was arriving when everybody was so gun-shy about potential lawsuits and mistrials that authorities stayed tight-lipped.

  I recalled that she and her lover had been trysting in a cabin she owned up in Phosphor County, roughly sixty miles northward of here.
They’d both been shot at close range.

  There’d been a backdrop of bitter political controversy, involving an outfit called the Dodd Mining Company starting operations in the area. Most of the local residents were thrilled at this infusion of lifeblood to their stagnant economy.

  But opposition had also been fierce—and Astrid, a fervent environmentalist, had spearheaded it.

  Of course, there was suspicion that she’d been murdered out of hatred over that, or to get her out of the way, but nothing along those lines was ever established. Ironically, though, the company abandoned the project soon afterward, and the 30

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  Dodd Silver Mine became known as the Dead Silver Mine, or just Dead Silver.

  I was feeling restless, like my place was uncomfortably small. Maybe it was because of my somber line of thought. I got the pistol and walked outside into the last of the twilight.

  Except for the always restless treetops and the barking of a distant neighbor’s dog anxious for dinner, this was about as quiet as a place could get. The air was damp, sharp, and laced with the fine piney smell of smoke from my stove. I could just see the lights of Helena, a bright cluster that thinned out to pinpoints over the surrounding miles of ranch land and forest.

  As a journalist in California, I’d gotten almost inured to brutal crime. But here on my own turf, it felt much closer.

  I’d known Astrid from a distance when we were growing up. She was a year older than me, and I was a relatively invisible kid; my contact with her hadn’t ever gone beyond an awkward smile and “hi.” But I’d been far more aware of her than that, and so had pretty much everybody else.

  For openers, she was a very attractive blond—not a Barbie type, but athletic, vibrant, and a track star and straight-A student besides. She loved attention and she brimmed with self-confidence. There didn’t seem to be any question in her mind that if she wanted something, she should get it, and if she decided something, she was right. Besides her looks and talents, she came from a prominent ranching family, the Seiberts. Modern Montana and feudal Europe might have been separated by hundreds of years, thousands of miles, and a vast gulf of technology, but they had one thing in common—big landowners tended to be aristocrats, and vice versa.