They kissed European style, the county medical examiner and forensic pathologist tickling Martha’s cheeks with the bristles of his mustache.
“You take a month in Rome and now you’re Omar Sharif,” Martha said.
“I was in Tuscany,” Hanson said. “And Omar Sharif, if I recall, was Egyptian.”
“Potato, po-tah-to. You look tanned and healthy, Bob.”
“I feel tanned and healthy.”
“And Sabrina?” Sabrina was the reason he’d taken the month’s leave, his first serious relationship since his divorce.
“Tanned and fingers crossed. The latest CT scan showed no enlargement of the tumor. But lymphoma teases you. You learn to live in the now.” He met her eyes. “I have you to thank for that. It was a big step for me, confessing my admiration for you. Or love, to call it what it really is. And you handled my advances with grace and consideration for my feelings. Then, with Ariana, you opened my eyes to other possibilities.”
“I set you up with a sexual adventuress and you cheated on your wife of thirty years. I could have arrested myself for pandering.”
“I call it an act of mercy, and no money changed hands.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Ariana? We don’t stay in touch, but as far as I know, she still works at the Bozeman Library.” He glanced at the wall clock. “I have a deposition at three. We should get to this, if you don’t mind. But thank you for your concern and for just being Martha. I mean that.”
The heartfelt nature of his compliment caused Martha unease.
“Let’s see him,” she said brusquely.
She always insisted on seeing the body, even if it was in an advanced stage of putrefaction. It made the connection between a name and the person behind it. It made the death personal.
Or it sometimes did. She looked at the cadaver of Wilhelm Winkler and felt nothing. This wasn’t the pipe smoker she had met in the wilderness, with his jaunty hat cocked at an angle and his smell of rough-cut tobacco. This was not a man at all, just a carcass that the innards had been spilled from and samples taken, before the organs were sutured back into the body cavity.
“Cause?”
“Head trauma, cardiac arrest, drowning, blood loss. A perfect storm. Should I pull the sheet back up?”
“Show me the head wound.”
Hanson arranged the position of the body. With the blood cleaned away and the head shaved, she could see the denting of the skull and the purpled bruising around the slitlike wound.
“Looks like one of those little fish tacos they serve at the Bacchus,” Martha said.
“That’s not the analogy I’d use.”
“You know how I talk. It’s a coping mechanism.”
“Morgue humor takes many forms.”
“So what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“You’re asking what the autopsy revealed?”
“I’m asking your opinion.”
“Those are different things. From a purely medical standpoint, it’s hard to say. The coronary could have occurred before his fall, or been triggered by the impact. It also could result from pulmonary edema. The latter is my educated guess, pending lab results. You’re shaking your head.”
“I’m just trying to keep up.”
“Okay, let’s look at the sequence. You say there was blood spatter leading from the stick to the river’s edge. That suggests that the first wound is the pulmonary laceration, the puncture in his chest. He would be experiencing hemopneumothorax, with both blood and air invading his chest cavity. A life-threatening injury, but it would not be immediately fatal.”
“So he staggers around and falls in the drink,” Martha said.
“That’s a reasonable assumption. He would already be in shock. His heart rate would be skyrocketing and he would be losing blood pressure. Losing his footing? In his disoriented state, I would be surprised if he didn’t.”
“So he hits his head on the rock,” Martha prompted.
“Yes, and that’s where it gets interesting. With primary drowning, you inhale a large amount of water and drown in a couple of minutes. But his lungs weren’t full of water. They had some water in them, but they contained bodily fluids as well. What that indicates is that he aspirated a small amount of river water when his face submerged. The body, feeling the effects of dilution of the alveoli, rushed to send more fluids from the bloodstream into the lungs. The accumulation of fluids, including blood from the initial chest injury, prevented oxygen from entering his bloodstream. It’s referred to as secondary drowning, but it’s actually cardiac arrest.”
“Are you saying he would be conscious when he fell?”
“Possibly. There might have been a window when he could even have spoken.”
“But he could have just as easily been pushed and hit his head, leading to the same result. Correct?”
“Or pushed so he fell onto the sharp stick, and everything followed from there. In any case, your killer, if there is a killer, could have watched this man die for some time.”
“Do you see any evidence that would lead you to think that?”
“No. But if he was given a push, there probably wouldn’t be any transference of fiber. Especially if the other person was also wearing waders. Was it raining that afternoon?”
“No. What are you getting at?”
“If the other person was wearing waders and a rain jacket, he would effectively be wearing a body condom, in terms of fiber transference.”
“What about blood? Is there any blood that isn’t the vic’s?”
“None. Wilkerson already performed a DNA comparison. The blood on both the stick and rock is a match. I found dog saliva on the face, but you say the dog found him, so it would be normal to find transfer saliva from its muzzle or tongue. Dogs lick things.”
“You aren’t helping me, Bob. It’s hard to justify contributing the county’s resources to this case without any determination of crime.”
“It’s what it is.”
“It is. Thanks for fitting it in so promptly. I’ll look for the lab report.” She nodded to herself. “We’ll just have to hope for help from other avenues of investigation.” She was thinking of Stranahan.
“There was something, though I doubt it will be of help.” Hanson removed his glasses and used two fingers to hook back his unruly eyebrows. “Intriguing, though.”
Martha raised her own eyebrows. “I like intrigue.”
“I examined Mr. Winkler’s stomach contents—that’s routine to place time of death. He had consumed a thin broth on the morning that he died, perhaps within the hour. It contained a mixture of herbs in suspension with minute solids composed of protein and ash, with small amounts of calcium and phosphate. I had never seen such a composition, so I consulted with an old colleague at the University of Michigan, who specializes in gastropathology. He is Korean, and said he’d found the same combination of substances in several autopsies he conducted when he worked at a hospital in Seoul. The first time he’d encountered the substances, he’d brought in the hospital’s resident pathologist, who’d shrugged and said, “Antler soup. He was just trying to keep his wife happy.”
“You’re saying that Winkler was drinking an aphrodisiac soup?”
“He was drinking what some call the elixir of life. Antler velvet is a traditional Chinese medicine that dates to before Christ. It’s used to treat all kinds of maladies and is increasingly popular in the U.S. with professional athletes, both for performance enhancement and to hasten recovery from injury. Several double-blind studies suggest—mind now, I use the word ‘suggest’—that it can actually work. I’m not speaking of erectile dysfunction, but for other legitimate medical uses. I had my assistant send some links to your e-mail address. They ought to be there.”
Martha fingered her lip. “Next thing you know, they’ll find a medical use for rattlesnake poison. With all the dens in this county, it will be like striking oil.”
“Martha.” Hanson shook his head.
“What?”
“They already have. The compounds in venom are used to thin blood. It can help stave off a heart attack.”
“Humpff. Didn’t help Winkler, though, did it?”
—
The corrugated steel Quonset hut off South 19th Avenue in Bozeman looked more like a helicopter hangar than what it actually was, the crime lab that served much of south-central and southwestern Montana. Recently renovated under the supervision of Georgeanne Wilkerson, the region’s chief crime scene investigator as well as one of the state’s senior forensic scientists, the unit had proved a godsend for several Montana counties, including Hyalite. Prior to its opening, the department had had to collect, label, and transport evidence for criminal analysis to the state lab in Missoula. With the new facility, a simple fingerprint analysis that could have taken weeks unless red-flagged could now be completed in days, or sometimes even hours.
Sean entered the building and had the receptionist ring down for Wilkerson, who greeted him wearing her scrubs and pink plastic Crocs.
She said, “The last time you came by you wanted to talk about semen. You promised we’d talk dirty and here you are with nothing more salacious on your mind than fingerprints.”
“Gigi, you look . . .” He searched for the delicate word.
“Huge,” she said. “Wanna touch?” She took his hand and pressed it against her abdomen.
“I can feel a knob here.”
“That’s a foot.”
“When are you due?”
“Yesterday.”
“No, really.”
“Yesterday.”
“Then I better get in my questions.”
He followed her to her desk, which was pressed up against the arching inside wall. Sean saw the same photo of her and her husband, then boyfriend, kayaking in Alaska. She opened a drawer and fanned several rectangles of paper on her desk, all about the size of playing cards. Each displayed a fingerprint in a contrasting color.
“Before we start,” she said, “I’ll get the bad news over with. I found no usable prints from the letter. I didn’t really expect any. Prints on paper, especially rough paper, are much harder to lift than prints on metal. I tried disulfur dinitride, which is the tried and true, but all I came up with were areas of smudge with a few partial ridge patterns. So the letter this Gillum guy sent to Ernest Hemingway, it’s a dead end. Who is he, by the way? I didn’t have time to look him up.”
“Gillum’s a bamboo rod maker.”
“No. Hemingway. I know the name, but I feel like I ought to know more. Was he a movie star?”
Sean felt suddenly old. He’d assumed that everyone knew Ernest Hemingway, but obviously, with the millennial generation, you couldn’t take that for granted. Wilkerson, he guessed, was in her early thirties. Hemingway had been dead for twenty-five years before she’d been born. He told her, saw the big eyes swim with excitement.
“Cool,” she said.
“Where are these from?” Sean indicated the cards with the fingerprints.
“I used white powder to isolate the prints from the darker surfaces, including the rod and the reel seat, which is mahogany.” She pointed to the dark cards, which had white prints on them. “I used black powder for the ones on the aluminum rod case.” She indicated a lighter card with darker prints.
“Are they a match with the victim?”
“The ones on the rod have up to eleven points of similarity with prints lifted from the victim. This one, on the case, had fourteen. The state legal standard is twelve. So, pretty much bombproof.”
“All Winkler’s?
“Almost. It’s safe to say that he handled the rod.”
“You said almost. Not all?”
“No. There were a few smaller prints, but they were obscured by the victim’s larger prints.”
“That could have been his sister’s prints.”
“Siblings will share points of similarity. I found none.”
“I should have said stepsister. She was Cheyenne.”
“Then that explains it.”
“What about the prints on the reel seat?”
She shook her head. “I can tell you that those were from somebody else, too, but without latents to match them to, about all I can say is that this fella had big fingers.”
“Can you determine how old they are?”
“No, you can’t age fingerprints. You can guess, sometimes, by their orientation and location, and by the pattern of overlap. But Martha didn’t give me the circumstances when she gave me the rod. She didn’t even say it had anything to do with Hemingway.”
“I assumed she had.”
“We’re talking about Martha. Three words and a grunt and she’s out the door.”
Sean laughed. “Our Martha? Do you have time for a story, Gigi?”
“I can make time. Everybody’s saying I shouldn’t be here at all, even though I keep telling them not to worry. If my water breaks, I’ll get the mop.”
Sean told her the story of the rod, gauging her curiosity by the quicker movements of her eyes.
“You said there’s a Web site with Hemingway’s prints on it?” she said when he had finished. Sean recited it from memory as she typed at her computer.
She sat back a few inches. “Now I call that a beard,” she said. She glanced from the computer fingerprints to those on her display card. “The ones I lifted from the reel seat are overlapping, which is a bummer, but I can see similarities. Yes, I can see at least four points of similarity with the Hemingway prints.”
“Let me look,” Sean said.
“You can look, but all you’ll get is a headache. Overlapping prints create an optical illusion. You have to have a trained eye to separate them.”
“Four points, that’s not enough, is it?”
“Well, officially, we don’t engage in probabilities, so, officially, I would have to say that the match is inconclusive.”
“And unofficially?”
“What I see suggests the possibility of a match, but I can’t speculate beyond that. This guy’s been dead awhile, though. Right?”
“Hemingway committed suicide in 1961. The rod was shipped to him in 1933. The prints would have to have been transferred between those dates.”
Wilkerson nodded. “It’s possible. Back in North Dakota I matched prints from an ax handle to a man who had buried the ax in a graveyard in 1946. I know, that’s not much help in this case. I wish I could tell you that Ernest Hemingway held this rod in his hands. I still might, if you can wait a couple days.”
“Oh?”
“The match is inconclusive, as it stands. But we have a machine that isolates overlapping prints. We can match a skeleton image of each print on the reel sent with the actual Hemingway prints.”
“Why a couple days?”
“Because the software’s being reconfigured to include the latest algorithms. It’s still new technology. I could call you with the results.”
Sean handed her his card, the one that read Blue Ribbon Watercolors, and underneath, in discreet script, Private Investigations. He had another card advertising his work as a fishing guide under Sam’s outfitter’s license. That one featured a Royal Wulff fly.
“You owe me a pencil sketch,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“A buffalo in the Lamar Valley. That’s where Chris proposed to me.”
“You got it. What are you going to name the baby?”
“Jessie Rose or Thomas Hart, depending.”
“I thought everybody knew the sex these days.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but I like mysteries. You go now, I have real work to do.”
Sean left her, a woman with real work to do, never mind a baby to be born. He climbed into the Land Cruiser, but stopped his hand from turning the key. If Hemingway’s prints were to have survived the decades, it made sense that they would be found on the reel seat. The first thing a fisherman did after jointing the pieces of a rod was screw the reel onto the reel seat. With the reel foot covering it, prints on the bottom of the mahogany reel seat would be protected from smearing. Maybe the rod had been in storage with the reel already attached. Or hanging on a wall as a decoration.
Which got him where, exactly? He already believed that the rod had belonged to Hemingway. A positive fingerprint match would only confirm it. He thought of Freida Toliver, who quite likely had left her smaller prints on the rod as well. Was she the pilot fish who had unearthed the source of the treasure, and had then led her brother to it? Sean recalled that she had paid for part of the saddle that Etta Huntington sold to her with an elk antler chandelier. Martha had told him that it was a successful business, that Toliver personally installed chandeliers in many of the second homes and log mansions in the valley. Maybe she’d come across the Hemingway tackle in one of those places. If she kept good records, it shouldn’t be hard to compile a client list. He could burn a couple tanks of gas and see where that led. At the least, he’d be driving through country showing the promise of spring, cause enough for celebration.
The buzzing of the phone in his pocket broke his train of thought. He glanced at the number and flipped it open.
“Kemosabe,” Sam said.
“Are you still in town?”
“No, I just got back to the shack. Anyway, this guy I bought the trailer from, we got to talking about outhouses.”
Here we go, Sean thought.
“So he has this book, Grand Thrones of the West. Catchy title. One of the outhouses in the book was his own shitter, had your standard quarter-moon cutout and inside there was a built-in bookcase with stacks of Fly Fisherman, Fly Rod & Reel, all your standard trout porn. And one of those old railroad lanterns was hanging from a cord so you could read if the call of the wild came in the night. I mean, you could unpack your bags and set up house in there, never have to go hunting for a bathroom again.”
Sean waited. This was what you got when you asked Sam a simple question.
“I know, I digress. Anywho, where was I? Oh yeah. The reason I called is, when I saw the magazines, it was like something snapped and I knew who it was.”
“Knew who who was?”
“You know, the client who told me about Hemingway’s missing rod. The name I was trying to remember.”
Sean kept the excitement out of his voice. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, first thing is, it was a chick. She was a journalist for Esquire, I think. I remembered because she had come out here to write an article about Al McClane, the fishing editor of Field & Stream. Told me he was supposed to have been a Cold War spy, that all the fishing trips were just a cover. Talked as if she’d met him before. ‘Al this, Al that.’ He used to rent out a cabin on the Madison. I guided him a couple times. He was so good, it was like he caught trout as an afterthought. Like, he’d be talking to you about wine or some shit—he was a gourmet cook—and then he’d make a cast and catch a fish, and then go back to whatever he was talking about. A fucking trout wizard.”
“How could you forget a story like that?”
“I didn’t forget that story. What I forgot was, this woman had told me this other story about meeting Ernest Hemingway’s son. The oldest one, Jack. She said he was the real fisherman in the family, and it was him who told her the story of his dad’s tackle getting lost.”
“What can you remember?”
“Not a goddamn thing. I was more interested in the Al McClane connection. Ernest Hemingway, that didn’t mean much to me. But she was a looker, so I was probably looking at her boobs while she talked.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember. I drove all the way home, Bridger to Ennis, I just can’t bring it back. I have a vague recollection it was initials, not like a whole name.”
“Do you have guide records going that far back?”
“I was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah, I got my journals. But I’d have to do some digging, ’cause they’re sort of unorganized. Shit, you know me.”
“I do. I’ll be there at eight tomorrow morning to help. Does Molly have coffee or should I stop at Lookers and Lattes?”
“Just because we don’t drink doesn’t mean we don’t drink coffee. But hold off ’til nine. Sarah’s not sleeping through the night yet and sometimes that couple hours, six to eight or nine, that’s the only time we have any peace.”
—
Sean dressed for his date with Martha in clean jeans and a snap-up shirt, what passed for black tie in Montana, and she walked out the door, waving as he drove up. He got out to hold the door for her.
“You’re all tricked out, Martha. I hardly recognize you without your duty belt.”
“I slipped my Walther PPS in my boot.”
She turned her calf, showing him her boots with the roses.
“Armed and beautiful, that’s my girl.”