Peter Heller - Celine

“She wasn’t satisfied with the determination of the Park Service,” Travers said. “Neither was I, to tell you the truth.”

“How do you mean?”

Travers looked at the bridge, the creek. “Well. In law enforcement we are all a little turfy, that’s a fact. The park is federal, of course, and they assumed jurisdiction. They had legitimate grounds. Lamont’s truck was parked”—he turned and pointed at the opposite side of the road, a turnout of gravel just east of the bridge—“there. The bridge is the park boundary. The entrance gate is a mile and a half south but the actual border is here. Chicksaw, the tracker, determined that Lamont had been dragged—or run—into the park. So.”

“There were drag marks?”

“Possibly. I’ll show you in a minute.”

Celine studied the bridge. “Which way was his truck facing when you found it?”

“West.”

“Huh?”

Sheriff Travers looked at her with a dawning admiration. She was sharp, no doubt.

Celine said, “He was returning to town after shooting pictures with the biologists at the base of Druid Peak. That’s what Gabriela told us. The report concluded that he had likely seen an animal that aroused his curiosity, probably said bear, and he had gotten out with his cameras—they found two cameras and a handheld flash, all shattered, in the trees somewhere there, correct?” Travers nodded. “So his truck should have been facing east, toward town, don’t you think? I mean, I’m driving along, there, toward Cooke City, I’m hungry after a long day, probably pretty thirsty, too, I see a bear in the road, he’s magnificent, I have no shots of a bear at night, I pull over fast, grab cameras, and run.” She turned back to the sheriff. “Wouldn’t I?”

The sheriff made a check mark in air. “Problem One.”

“There were no photos of a bear in the cameras, were there? I mean Mr. Night Bear, our suspect? If there were, you wouldn’t be so uneasy about the final determination.”

Travers made another tick with his finger.

“You can’t give us the report, can you?”

Another tick. “I’d lose my job. Of course, I’m going to lose my job in December anyway. It’s called retirement.” He smiled. “I’m actually term-limited. Six terms is the limit.”

“Wow.”

“It’s the termination-without-pension thing that scares me. Why I can’t give you the report.”

Celine nodded. “Is Chicksaw his real name do you think?”

The sheriff laughed, an easy gut laugh that made Celine trust him more. “Absolutely not. I think trackers have tracker names, noms de guerre, the way writers have pen names.”

Celine smiled at the French.

“I think the man is from New Jersey. One of the first disciples of that guy in the Pine Barrens.”

“He gave Gabriela the feeling that the tracks didn’t add up.”

“Problem Four. It’s pretty technical, you should talk to the man. I believe he’s in Red Lodge now. We have used him in many investigations over the years. It’s not woo-woo. The man is a scientist.”

“It rained that night?”

“Rain during the afternoon, then snow.”

“There was blood?”

“On a tree. A dense old spruce. Quite a lot of it. Blood smeared on the bark. Under those thick limbs, the only place it would be protected from the elements for a little while. In the woods, when it’s been raining, that’s where you go to get your dry tinder, the dead twigs under a spruce like that. So how did the blood get on the tree? Did the bear rub him up and down on the trunk?”

“What else?”

“We found a shirt, most of it, ripped and also bloody. Also a boot, with tooth punctures and blood. Drag marks.”

Celine winced.

“I can’t give you the report, but I can give you this.”

He handed her a manila folder. She turned her back to the freshening wind and opened it. Pete came close and blocked the wind and looked over her shoulder. It was a photocopy of an article from a National Geographic dated July 1977. The title was “Bear Attacks!” You don’t say. Celine and Pete both flinched, which Travers noticed. Two-thirds of the way through the second page was a circled paragraph: Searchers found only Leichmuller’s right boot and a torn piece of his wool shirt. The boot bore punctures from canines and the shirt was saturated in blood.

The sheriff said behind her, “He photographed for the magazine, didn’t he? During that period? He would presumably have had them lying around.”

Pete and Celine glanced at each other.

“Why would a successful National Geographic photographer at the acme of his career stage his own death?” She was asking as much to gauge Travers’s knowledge of the wider context as to hear his opinion. He would not be able to tell her, of course, but she might get a lot from his reaction.

“You tell me,” he said. Completely neutral. Unreadable. He watched her carefully. She got the strong sense he was trying to read her expression as closely as she was trying to read his. He was no fool. Much of the investigating they were now doing, he may have already covered twenty-three years ago. Had he looked into Lamont’s travels? His international connections? Maybe.

“How long was the search?”

“Ten days. Neither long nor short. The Park Service called it on account of weather.”

“And this guy”—Celine palmed her phone and lit the small screen—“Farney. The enforcement ranger, he signed the certificate of death.”

“He made the determination of death. The judge in Livingston signed the certificate. There were several factors. A warm front came through and it rained heavily the afternoon just before he went missing. That evening the temperatures dropped into the teens, and then it snowed. He was badly mauled, clearly, if not dead. I’m speaking now in the terms of the report. The determination was that had he survived the initial attack and somehow escaped the bear, he would not have survived the successive nights of snow and freezing temperatures. A reasonable conclusion when you are in the last fiscal quarter and your budget is wearing thin. Search-and-rescue operations are expensive.”

Celine detected a certain dryness in the sheriff’s tone, even irony. “Gabriela said something about the kindness of the ranger. ‘Taking pity on her’ were the words she used. Signing the certificate so she could move on.”

“Seven years is a long time to wait, I guess.” The sheriff turned away from them and spat. Downwind. “The judge in Livingston went along with it. The hearing took twenty minutes.”

“I gather, Sheriff Travers, that you don’t think it was kind at all.”

“Do you?”

Travers gave them his card with his cell number penned on the back and drove into town to meet the wildlife officer. Celine and Pete got back into the cab of their truck and sat for a while with the engine and heater running and watched the first scattered snowflakes hit the windshield softly, splaying into tiny stars before they beaded and ran.

“I got the sense he was relieved,” Pete said. “To talk to someone about it. Someone who clearly didn’t buy the party line. What did you say to him when you walked up to his truck before he left. When he rolled down his window?”

“I asked him if he got the sense at all that there was more than just investigative process or budgetary considerations that went into calling off the search and signing the death certificate. He had both hands on the wheel and he stared straight ahead for a full half minute before he answered me.”

“I saw that,” Pete said. Of course he did.

“Finally he said, ‘I’ve known Tim Farney since he was practically a kid. He played halfback for Shields Valley when I was linebacker for Gardiner. I was always taking him to the ground. And he always got up and rubbed the grass off his neck and said, “Nice grab, Cam. For a fat man.” Something like that. And he had an eighty-watt smile. He was my friend. When I asked him why he signed the certificate so fast when there were so many anomalies, he got a look I’d never seen before. Hard and tight. “Because I did,” is all he said. Period. Case closed. He’d never talked to me like that.’”