CHAPTER THIRTY

Death with Honor

Melvin Kauffeld pinched out his lips, thumb and forefinger on either side of his mouth, studying the photo Ettinger had handed him.

“You see the boil on the side of his neck?”

Kauffeld nodded. “I see it, but no, I don’t recall ever seeing him.”

“Take a good look. This is the gentleman who was going to kill you on Sphinx Mountain.”

He shook his head. “My arrangement was with Wade. This . . . Crawford, he must be twenty years older.”

“Wade, er, E.J. was killed early yesterday morning while he was waiting for you. Weldon Crawford shot him in cold blood. Crawford was actually hoping you would kill Cummings for him; that way he could have kept his hands clean. When you didn’t show up, he became desperate. That’s why he left the message on your cell phone.”

“How do you know about my phone? I didn’t talk to anyone about that.” He looked away from Ettinger, who was sitting across the table from him, to Harriet Langhor, who was leaning on the log rail at the other end of the cabin porch. Langhor stubbed her cigarette out on the rail and sat down beside Kauffeld. “Look at me,” she said, leaning close to him and taking his hand. “I’m the one who found the voice mail on your phone. I played it for Sean Stranahan the morning we went fishing.”

He shook his great head, his jowls sagging. “I trusted you.”

“Didn’t you hear the sheriff, Mel? That man you were trying to protect was murdered.”

He was silent a few moments, looking at her, then away.

When he spoke, his voice had lost its indignation. “The phone message bothered me. It wasn’t Wade’s voice. And I had never given Wade my number. Our arrangement was on paper.”

“We don’t know how Crawford got your number,” Ettinger said, “but we do know that he was in communication with Emmitt Cummings.”

“Have you arrested him?”

“He’s dead,” Martha said flatly. She gave him an abbreviated version of the confrontation on the mountain. “I released a statement to the press this morning. We were hoping you could help us with our investigation.”

“I have no obligation to this man. I’ll cooperate any way I can. Wade, ah, Emmitt—it’s hard to think of him by that name—he never mentioned Crawford. I just don’t know how I can help.” He looked from Ettinger to Walter Hess, who had arrived at the ranch cabin late, after helping with the recovery of the bodies early in the morning.

“What about the bullet, Mel?” It was Langhor.

Ettinger’s eyebrows knitted together.

Kauffeld nodded to himself. “Maybe. I’d completely forgotten. Wade told me, and this was way back when I met him in Michigan, that if I was the one left standing, then I should look in his pockets for a rifle cartridge. I’d be able to pull the bullet out of the case and there would be a note inside it, instructions on what to do in the event of his death. I assumed . . . well, the truth is I don’t know what I assumed. I thought I was the one who was going to die. I never gave the cartridge much thought.”

Ettinger looked sharply at Walt. “Did Sean give you the bullet to enter into evidence?” Stranahan had told them about the cartridge he’d found in Cummings’s front pants pocket.

“He didn’t give it to me.”

“Shit,” Martha said. “We dotted every fucking T but that one.”

“You mean crossed every T.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, Martha, I believe you said—”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Walt, drop it.” She stepped from the table, punching numbers into her phone. She drummed her fingers on the butt of the semiautomatic holstered on her hip. “Sean said he wasn’t guiding today. He must be at his girlfriend’s house. There’s no reception there.” She jerked her head toward Walt. “Can you finish up here? I have to find him.”

•   •   •

“Nice place, isn’t it?” Stranahan said.

Ettinger, hands on her hips, was craning her head to see the cupola on top. “I don’t know. It looks like a grain elevator to me. Anyway, I didn’t come here to admire the architecture. The bullet you found on Cummings’s body, where is it?”

“It’s, ah, Jeez. It must still be in my jeans.”

She followed him inside. “Where’s the missus?” she said.

“If you mean Martinique, she’s over at Jeff Svenson’s clinic. She’s a second-year veterinary student, she’ll have her doctorate in a couple years.”

“Humph,” Martha said. “When I saw her she was nekked under her suspenders. I guess appearances can be deceiving.”

She hadn’t been naked, technically, but Stranahan let it go and got the cartridge and held it out to Martha by the rim. “I tried to be careful but my prints might be on it,” he said.

“I understand the circumstances.” She walked over to the kitchen counter, got her Swiss Army tool out, and used the pliers to pull out the bullet, taking care not to touch the brass casing with her fingers. She set the bullet upright on the counter. She’d lost the tiny tweezers on the tool and asked Stranahan if he had any.

He walked outside and got a similar tool from the repair kit on his raft. “When I was in college we’d always be losing these things,” he said. “You’d use your tweezers to smoke the roach and then you’d be stoned and forget where you put them.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Martha said. She had pinched the edge of a piece of paper inside the cartridge case and was pulling it out. She immediately recognized it as the same unlined, off-white paper in Cummings’s journal. The powder had been dumped and the paper rolled tightly to fit inside the case.

“Are you going to tell me about this?” Stranahan leaned over her shoulder.

“It’s a note Cummings meant Kauffeld to find in the event he was killed up there. Here, help me hold it open.” Stranahan held down the outside curl of the paper with the blade of his tool while Ettinger unrolled it using the tweezers. The paper was two inches square. Four words—Under The White Rock. A set of GPS coordinates: 45 22.812 N; 111 10.932 W.

Stranahan got his Garmin and they walked outside and waited for the GPS to acquire the satellites for triangulation. Stranahan inserted the coordinates and pushed the “Go To” button. The liquid crystal numbers on the screen indicated that their destination was 29.7 miles to the southeast.

“Somewhere along 191 in the Gallatin Canyon, maybe,” Martha said.

“The bridge,” they said as one.

•   •   •

The GPS had registered the distance in a straight line. By road it was forty miles and change. Ettinger’s foot was heavy on the pedal.

“What’s the hurry, Martha?” Stranahan said, looking back to see a river of dust raised over the lower half of the grain elevator. “They’re both dead. No reason to kill us, too.”

“The hurry is because I blew the head off a congressman and I have to give a statement this afternoon. You can bet the Crawford clan is polishing up their incisors. Like Walt says, they only own half of Flathead County and enough cattle to flip Whoppers for every Indian in Delhi . . . well, if Hindus ate beef. The point is I have to have the facts on my side. This man was a national figure. There’s going to be a coroner’s inquest, that’s a given. Yours truly will be grilled like a sirloin steak. Even the FBI could get involved. So I’m nervous, okay? That journal was a help, but it didn’t clear up everything.”

“Okay. Slow down and tell me about the journal.”

Ettinger grunted. “I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t ‘who, what, why, when, and where.’”

“Then just tell me what it is.”

“Well,” she said, and a mile went by and finally she made a clucking sound with her tongue and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “The gist is Cummings had Huntington’s disease, like Kauffeld said. Those pills you found were to control the muscle spasms, which get worse until you lose control of your body. I don’t exactly know how you die, but you’ve forgotten who you are by the time you do. Hereditary, so no doubt someone in his family had it. You get that first twitch, you know the rest of your life isn’t going to be very pretty.”

Stranahan was nodding his head. He said, “He did this thing where he clenched up the side of his face. I noticed it the first time I saw him.”

“I think it was considerably more advanced than that. Anyway, three years ago the symptoms popped up and that’s when the entries start in the journal. At first it’s about suicide, how he’d like to go out. There’s one page where he lists ten methods he was considering; number one was climbing the Chinese Wall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and throwing himself off the cliff. Manly stuff—provoking a charge from a grizzly bear, prodding a den of rattlesnakes. Anyway, skip ahead and the phrase “Death with Honor” starts cropping up, and then there’s this entry marked on the summer solstice, two years ago June. No date, it just says summer solstice. He writes, and this is word for word, ‘It’s done, but he done it, not me. I thought I’d found a man, but I was wrong.’ No name, no detail, nothing about making an arrangement with anyone, none of that, but the entry was written from a really dark place. And the handwriting was almost illegible, letters written on top of each other like he was writing at night without a light. My gut tells me he killed somebody, or maybe some guy he had an arrangement with turned the gun on himself. Either way, this would be a full year before Gutierrez and Webster.”

“Did he mention Sphinx Mountain?”

“Not that time, but in an entry about a month before he writes about riding his horse up on the Buck’s Nest. ‘Took Sally Ann up on the Buck’s Nest, some good flat benches to either side of the ridge, looked as good a place as any,’ words to that effect.”

“I know where that is,” Stranahan said.

“Then you know it’s behind his place. Up on the east side of the Gravellys. What I’m thinking is he did his first one in his backyard, only a few miles away, and then thought better of it and went across the river to the Sphinx for the later ones. So we might have another pile of bones up around the Buck’s Nest, not that it’s of the utmost concern at the moment. The later guys, he goes into considerable detail. He calls them his ‘fellow travelers.’ Gutierrez he met at one of those Living at Last retreats in Fresno, California. Same method he used to meet Kauffeld. He also writes about flying to Portland, where there was a retreat on the coast at Cannon Beach, and down to Taos, New Mexico, but he couldn’t find any takers in either place. Webster, he’d known personally from their hunt together. Seems like they made a pact. Both of them were in the early stages of their illnesses then and decided they’d get back together for the final act if and when it became apparent that time was running out.”

“When does Crawford enter the picture?”

Ettinger downshifted as they neared Four Corners, then ran through the gears as the Cherokee growled its way south up the Gallatin Canyon. “That’s just it,” she said, flicking her nails against her jaw, “he doesn’t. The closest he comes to incriminating Crawford is an early reference to ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ He writes that he took the idea from it. You and I know it was Crawford who told him about the story, but it’s a long way from lending someone a book or telling someone a story to being complicit in crimes that result from it. My suspicion is that Crawford also gave him the money to fly to the retreats. There’s a chance the plane reservations are in his computer. I also suspect Crawford lent him the double rifle to kill Gutierrez. It was his way of living out his fantasy through Cummings.”

“Maybe Crawford isn’t mentioned because E.J. considered him a friend. He didn’t want to implicate him if the journal fell into the wrong hands.”

“At first, yes, I’d say that. But at some point the friend became the accomplice. Once Crawford headed down that road, it was only a matter of time until he killed Cummings. He’d put himself in a position where he had to. We’re talking about a man with political aspirations, maybe the governorship. Cummings knew too much. But this is all conjecture, we have no solid evidence linking Crawford to anyone who died on Sphinx Mountain.”

“Martha, you’re being paranoid. We have a cartridge from a rifle Crawford owned that was in Cummings’s possession. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to match DNA from Gutierrez to the bullet in the root. Those were Crawford’s fingerprints on Cummings’s Bible, that’s more than a maybe, we have Crawford with a rifle in hand in a place that only the killer and Kauffeld knew about, plus he shot a dummy I put up to look like Kauffeld. We might even be able to match Crawford to the voice on Kauffeld’s phone message.”

“What I’m hearing is ‘if, maybe, and might be.’ So you see why I’m anxious to find the rock.”

•   •   •

The rock under the west pylon of the Squaw Creek Bridge was rectangular, heavy enough that Stranahan had to use all his strength to roll it over. Underneath, an inch of sand covered an olive drab ammo box with military stenciling.

“Let me have the honor,” Ettinger said. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

The box contained three items. What looked to be a book was wrapped in layers of opaque plastic grocery bags and bound with rubber bands. A clear plastic Ziploc bag contained a half-inch-thick bundle of photocopied pages of handwriting—Cummings’s journal if the top page was consistent with the body of the package. The third was the thinnest, another Ziploc containing only an unsealed envelope. Inside was a letter written in ink on a single sheet of copy paper.

Fellow traveler,

If you are reading this I am dead by your hand. I want you to know you did the right thing by bringing both of us alive on the mountain. Others will judge us as they will. I’m here to say you did me a favor, pard, and no doubt about it. You gave me some peace the earth wouldn’t and picked up the sword I laid down. Go forward in your own way now and God be with you. I’m giving you my journal. It may give you some comfort to know the pain I have been through and the mental struggle that led to our arrangement. Maybe comfort isn’t the right word but perspective. The big package is a book with some notes and other things inside. I would like you to mail it to the Sheriff’s office in Bridger, along with the cartridge and everything else in this box. As you’ll see there’s nothing will betray you, even your fingerprints unless you have a record. But I have become a victim of some blackmail and this man who is feeding off me has a black heart. He will be punished in the next world but I would not mind to see him have his due in this one, either. I wish you well and thanks for giving this old horse a rest at the end of a long ride.

Dead with Honor,

Emmitt James Cummings

At the bottom of the letter was the address of the sheriff’s office. Seeing her name misspelled at the top of the address—Entinger—brought a grim smile. Martha looked at Stranahan.

“Do we open the package?” he said.

Martha brought her fingers to her throat. “No, I don’t want any chance of blowback. What we do is give it to a crime scene investigator, not Harold, because he was involved in the investigation. Someone with a sterling reputation, like Georgeanne Wilkerson out of Custer County. She’s in Bridger conducting classes this week. Let Ouija Board Gigi cast her spell and open its secrets. Then this afternoon we’ll look at it when there’s no question of tampering and hope it’s what we think it is.”

•   •   •

It was. The dog-eared Grayson edition of Stories for Men that Wilkerson, a sunny speed talker whose eyes were magnified by strong prescription glasses, released to Ettinger after lifting the prints had Weldon Crawford’s name scrawled in a loopy, young boy’s longhand inside the cover. “The Most Dangerous Game” was the fourth chapter of the book. Inserted between the pages were Cummings’s notes detailing his relationship with the congressman, starting with a conversation between the two men in Crawford’s Africa room, where Crawford had first introduced him to the short story. The notes, eight pages of college-ruled paper stapled together, made it clear that Cummings felt honored to be the acquaintance of such an important man, and that while the story was indeed the inspiration that led to the arrangements, Crawford had played no part in Cummings’s first encounter on the Buck’s Nest with a mentally failing World War II veteran. That botched confrontation—for the old man had taken his own life rather than play the game—had gnawed at Cummings’s gut and led to his confession of the incident to Crawford during an evening “when I crawled into the neck of a whiskey bottle.” Cummings wrote that Crawford had “snaked it out of me, the bastard sure knows how to pull a man’s string.” In a sort of joking manner, Crawford had wondered aloud if he should report the matter to the authorities, all the while saying that he probably wouldn’t. He’d let Cummings sleep on the implied threat and then had used the confession to leverage his way into sharing the planning of future arrangements.

“Though I considered him a friend, having none other, he had me over a barrel,” Cummings wrote. As Ettinger suspected, Crawford had funded Cummings on expeditions to at least three Living at Last retreats through the spring and early summer of the previous calendar year, until he found a cooperative party in Alejandro Gutierrez. Crawford had then insisted Cummings use his double rifle, the big .475 No. 2, which he had subsequently sold after its return, getting a retroactive case of cold feet. Cummings, however, had had the foresight to save the fired cartridge case, as well as several loaded ones, as insurance against “eventualities.”

After watching the breath rattle out of the Mexican, Cummings had no stomach for future arrangements, but then by chance he had met Orvel Webster at a gun show in Helena. “Remember what we talked about a couple years ago?” Webster had told him. “Well, it’s time.” And Cummings had agreed, for here was a man whom he did not have to coax, but who was an equal partner in the planning of their arrangement. Cummings found a purity in his confrontation with Webster that gave him the strength to keep it a secret from Crawford, but it did not grant him the fortitude to turn his back on the bottle, or to stave off the depression he’d suffered every winter since Huntington’s had begun to toy with his synapses. He had recurring nightmares about Gutierrez and Webster, whom in retrospect he had come to regard as victims of his own misguided obsessions. In the dreams, the old men tried to rise from their graves and he had to keep climbing back up there and pushing them down and putting more dirt on them. “I don’t know if they were trying to get back at me or just turn their souls loose on that mountain, but I was wearing out boot leather and it wasn’t going to end soon, no sir.”

When Crawford paid an unexpected visit to his summer mansion in February, Cummings was in the depths of despair and once more found himself weakening under the force of the congressman’s personality. He reluctantly agreed to the trip to Michigan, where he met Melvin Kauffeld, being ambivalent about it, but then as the date of their arrangement neared, he found that the preparations lifted him out of his depression. More than that, in Kauffeld he thought he’d found a worthy successor to Orvel Webster, one who might finally grant him death with honor. He had long ago disclosed his physical affliction to Crawford, and Crawford hinted that maybe it was time he let someone get the drop on him in an arrangement. It began to dawn on Cummings that Crawford wanted him out of the picture and would kill him if he had to, that if Kauffeld’s bullet missed the mark there would be another coming, no doubt from one of the big African rifles. “And I’d have welcomed it,” he’d written, “had it come from another man’s barrel.” It was this growing unease and his determination that Crawford get his comeuppance that led him into penning the notes and placing them where Kauffeld would find them in the event of his death.

•   •   •

Ettinger slipped the notes between the pages of the story and sealed the book back into the evidence envelope. She clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back in her office chair. She regarded Stranahan through slitted eyes.

“It must have been a strange relationship,” she mused.

“Well, he was a charismatic man, Crawford,” Stranahan said. “He had a sort of force field that repelled you and drew you in at the same time. You found yourself talking to him even if you didn’t like him. Maybe it was a politician’s trick, but it felt like intimacy. And Cummings was all alone on the planet. It’s an odd couple but I can see it, the two of them sharing their brandies in Crawford’s study with the snow on the sills, finding their common ground in hunting and ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ Oiling the heavy rifles. I can see Cummings taking the concept of death with honor and running with it, turning this adolescent fantasy of Crawford’s into reality. Crawford gave him the seed, Cummings watered it and saw it bloom, then Crawford poisoned the plant when he found out about it; he fed his own sickness with it.”

Martha compressed her lips. “Aren’t we the psychologist?” she said. “I never heard you talk like that before. Makes me wonder if it’s me who doesn’t know you.”

“Well, I’ve had some time to think about it. I’ve also had time to think about something else,” he said, thinking of the something else. He glanced at his watch. “It’s still early. If you don’t need me this afternoon, I’m going to take a drive up the valley.”

“Mmm,” said Martha. “You do that. Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here and deal with the fallout. Do you know how many interview requests Dispatch logged since I gave my statement yesterday? Forty-seven. Washington Post. New York Times.” She rolled her eyes. “The Enquirer. I’m the woman sheriff who gunned down a congressman in the old Wild West. Oh yeah, and with her trusty Indian tracker at her side. Hmpff. I’ll tell you what. Five o’clock comes around, I’m going to drive back to my place and take the phone off the hook. You take care of your business up the valley, why don’t you come join me? I have a feeling I’m going to need a sympathetic ear.” She hesitated. “’Course, you might rather be with your barista. I can’t fill out a pair of suspenders like she can, so I’ll understand.”

Stranahan looked at her.

“That was supposed to be a joke,” she said.

“It’s not going to be as bad as you think, Martha. You’ll end up being the hero.” He stood up. “I’ll bring the beer,” he said.

“Good luck finding those flies, Sean.”

“How did you . . . ?” Sean looked at her sideways.

“Give me a little credit,” she said. “Why else would you be burning thirty bucks of gas on a day you aren’t fishing? Besides”—she waited a beat—“you said it in your sleep when we were driving back from the bridge. You said, ‘The ghost. I know where the ghost is.’”

“What else did I say?”

“I think I’ll save that card for when I want to play it,” Martha said.