It was mid-afternoon by the time Chance drove out to the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks office on Meadowlark Lane. The office manager had said, “Wait right there,” and disappeared to find one of the wardens before Chance could protest. The Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officers shared a building with the bigger and better outfitted U.S. Forest Service, and it might be awhile before she or one of the wardens returned from the bowels of the building.
Chance eyed the pelt of a mountain lion that lay draped over a chair in the corner. He had seen a lion in the backcountry several times, but never up close. He wondered if he dare sneak behind the counter for a closer look. You could never tell what kind of mood these game wardens might be in.
Proudly displayed around the office walls were mounts of animals that had been poached and subsequently recovered by the game wardens—an antelope, a mule deer, a mountain lion, a peregrine falcon, and an elk with a gigantic rack. Chance thought about the grizzly that had been shot near Mill Creek last month—turned out to be the Standard’s front-page story the next day.
In the minds of some, killing a human being could be justified far more easily than slaughtering wild game out of season, let alone shooting an endangered animal. Sure, game regulations could stir a heated debate, but no one could doubt the wardens’ dedication to the animals they protected.
Chance looked at his watch. He had been waiting for a good ten minutes and no one had appeared. Apparently, the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officers could be as hard to track down as a lot of the animals whose welfare they were charged with guarding.
Still, he thought that asking for a comment on Lowell Austin’s death might make for some colorful quotes. Chance had spent a good part of the previous evening at the Idaho Statesman website, reading the news articles covering Austin’s trial and its aftermath. The game wardens’ murders had changed forever the way they would do their jobs. Idaho wardens wore side arms from then on. No more forays into the wilderness without fear of confrontation from humans. Chance wondered if that was when the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks had decided to adopt similar practices.
His thoughts were interrupted by Sam Waldau who wandered into the office, looking like a bear that had been awakened unexpectedly from hibernation. Sam had spent years working part-time for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks during hunting season until he had finally gotten on full-time. He rubbed his beefy forearm and said, “What?”
Chance ignored the typical Butte guy bluster. “Hey, yourself. Thought you might have a comment about the guy who died in that plane on Sunday.”
Sam motioned behind the counter to a chair in the office that the three wardens shared. “Why?” Sam looked genuinely befuddled. “Is it somebody I know?”
“I thought you might have heard,” Chance said. For once, the jungle drums were beating slowly.
“I been out on the Big Hole all weekend keeping track of flatlanders.”
“It was in the Standard this morning. But let me be the one to fill you in. A Cessna 180 crash-landed into a house on Washington Street. The one fatality was a guy by the name of Lowell Austin.”
“No shit,” Sam said. His voice a whisper, he sounded genuinely astounded. “I heard they thought he’d go back to California where they caught him when he escaped that time.”
Cole Sheehy, Sam’s office mate, appeared. He tended toward the tall, silent type, but in this case, he joined the conversation. “Why the hell didn’t he stay in Idaho?” he mumbled. Chance and Sam nodded.
“Probably met somebody from Butte doing time,” Cole said with an ounce of sarcasm. “He was out of prison a week, wasn’t it? Think he was headed to Butte?”
Chance had wondered about this himself. Initially he had assumed Austin was on his way to Butte when the pilot had problems with the plane, or landed to refuel. But if Kev had seen the trio rendezvous at the airport, Austin must have already been in Butte, if only for a short while, and had gone up in the plane after he arrived. “I’m still trying to figure that out. The guys at Silver Bow Aviation say the plane flew into Butte on Saturday, but whether Austin was a passenger then, I haven’t asked yet. That’s my next stop.”
“Well, if he was coming to Butte because he has friends here, they better never cross my path.” The gruff voice of Hoyt Rawlins interrupted the conversation. Hoyt was the warden sergeant, a man who clearly seemed to prefer the company of animals to people. Nobody bucked him. “That bastard should have gotten the death penalty the first time around. He flat out murdered two wardens, hid their bodies, and then got off with manslaughter. That’s the jury system for you.” Hoyt ducked under the counter gate, grabbed his cowboy hat off a hook on the wall, and went out the door without saying goodbye.
“Hoo, hoo,” Cole said with a big grin. “Trust Hoyt not to sugarcoat it.”
“Should have asked him if he saw Austin at the airport,” Sam said. “Hoyt flew down to Dillon on Sunday to check out this tip somebody called in about a poachers’ camp.”
Chance hadn’t expected much sympathy from the wardens or anybody associated with the agency. Even if Austin’s crimes had been committed long before any of these guys were in uniform, their outrage was still intense, even if not personal. Could it be possible that one of them might be involved with Lowell Austin’s death?
* * *
Chance walked into Silver Bow Aviation ten minutes later, still pondering the possibility that Hoyt Rawlins might have seen something or someone at the airport on Sunday. He poked his head into the office, then the pilot’s lounge. As usual, the place was empty. A raspy voice crackled over the office radio console, making Chance jump. “Butte area traffic, this is Sky West 147 approaching from the south 7 miles out,” the pilot announced. The customary afternoon commercial flight from Salt Lake was inbound.
Butte didn’t have enough air traffic to warrant a radio tower. Pilots quietly and calmly relied on their own communication—an arrangement that might terrify the average plane passenger like Mesa. But no pilot, especially a commercial one, would approach even a small airstrip without announcing the plane’s arrival on the appropriate local frequency.
Chance could see how someone like Hoyt Rawlins, who had been flying planes for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks ever since he had been transferred to Butte, could waltz through here and fly in and out unnoticed. More than a few local pilots even fueled up their own planes and simply left a note for Tyler to charge the gasoline to their account.
Chance opened the door that led into the hangar where Kev was working on the Beechcraft 99 cargo plane that made regular contract flights to Billings for FedEx. “You talk to the police yet?” he asked after saying hello.
Chance had tried to call Rollie Solheim for information about the coroner’s report but couldn’t get through. At the previous day’s press conference, Rollie had volunteered nothing about the possibility that the plane had other occupants.
“They were in here this morning,” Kev said, in a voice tinged with irritation. “Making a lot of noise and acting like I ought to know who the bastards were.” Kev leaned into the engine cavity, busy with a socket wrench.
“I hear Hoyt Rawlins flew out early Sunday morning,” Chance said quietly. “You know Hoyt, right?”
“Big guy. Doesn’t say much. I like him,” Kev said, “and I didn’t see him on Sunday either, okay?”
So much for speculation about Fish, Wildlife, and Parks on a vengeance mission.
Tyler appeared from behind the Beechcraft. “Hey, man. How’s she going?” They left Kev mumbling over the engine and went back into the pilot’s lounge.
“I’m still picking over this plane crash.” Chance knew his excuse to Mesa was just that. He had no burning ambitions as a journalist—he was just out-and-out curious.
“Cops were here this morning asking about it. Turns out some company in Kansas or some damn place owns the plane. They wanted to know if anyone here had seen it touch down.”
“What did the pilot’s log say?” Chance asked. He had tried to get a look at the log himself, but Rollie was having none of it. He was saving everything for the FBI evidence team that was expected at any moment.
“Rollie said the last entries was four days ago,” Tyler said.
Which was not exactly unheard of. A pilot’s log was supposed to be a record of a pilot’s hours in the air, which included stopovers and fueling locations. But no one official ever checked it. More than once, Chance had written down his log entries on the back of an envelope or a map and transferred them to his log later. But he figured whoever was flying this plane had no intentions of keeping the logbook up-to-date.
Tyler walked over to the window that looked out over the runways. “Wonder what they do to you if you walk away from a wreck like that?” Tyler said almost to himself. “Nobody around here would pull that kind of stunt.”
FAA regulations required the reporting of any kind of mishap in an airplane, even one where nobody was injured, let alone dead. “Maybe the pilot didn’t really go biking in Canyonlands after all,” Chance said, theorizing out loud. “The Outward Bound story could be a cover while he was making a run for it, and now he’s busted. He could have been headed to Canada. You know, absconding with the company’s payroll.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to own up to what happened is more likely,” Tyler said.
“I can see why,” Chance agreed. “Did you hear who the dead guy is?”
Tyler walked over to the pop machine, shaking his head as he went. He took a key from his pocket, opened the machine, and took out a can of Bud Lite, one of several he had stashed behind the cokes to keep cold. “Want one?” he asked Chance.
Chance shook his head. “Lowell Austin.”
“Don’t know him,” Tyler said. “Should I?”
“Fitz will know.” Tyler’s dad, Sumner Fitzgerald, was an orthopedic surgeon with a deep and abiding love for flying who had started Silver Bow Aviation when Chance and Tyler were teenagers. “Austin led the FBI on a wild goose chase for nearly two years back in the eighties,” Chance said. “All over the Sawtooths. People had to have helped him out for him to avoid capture for that long. Then when they finally did catch him, he got off with voluntary manslaughter when he flat out shot these two game wardens. Sounds like he pissed off a lot of people.”
“You think he crashed that Cessna?” Tyler said with a sly grin.
“Well, he was sitting in the front seat. They’re doing an autopsy to figure out what killed him for sure. But what I’m wondering is who else was in the plane.”
“Whoever it was, I’m surprised somebody didn’t see them hightailing it,” Tyler said and took a long pull from the Bud.
“Somebody did. This little old lady up in the Virginia Apartments saw two men near the plane just after it crashed. She didn’t actually see them get out of the plane, but I doubt it was anybody snooping around, or if they were, they weren’t talking about it when I showed up ten minutes later. That time in the morning on a Labor Day weekend, the neighborhood was pretty well emptied out or asleep. I woke up about seven to go biking, and I bet you I didn’t see three cars in 45 minutes.”
“I sure as hell wasn’t around,” Tyler said and leaned on the edge of the desk.
“Whoever they were, they apparently escaped without a scratch. At least they weren’t hurt bad enough to need help.”
“Pretty goddamned amazing, if you ask me,” Tyler said. “Walk away from something like that. Must be Irish.”
“Must have been scary.” Chance still had dreams about crash landings, though he had never made one. Fitz, ever vigilant of impending or imagined disaster, had schooled them all on what to do in such an emergency, but Chance had managed to avoid catastrophe.
“Remember all those emergency landings your dad used to make us practice over by Rocker.” Fitz had taught his son and a couple of his friends to fly, Chance included. Their lessons usually took place west of town over empty, sagebrush flats far from any buildings.
Fitz had seemed like a fanatic about pilot preparedness in Chance’s sixteen-year-old reasoning. But looking back now, he appreciated his instructor’s wisdom, if not his humor.
Fitz had made them work off the cost of flying lessons by requiring them to be at his beck and call for the bulk of their teenage lives. Chance had done every odd job at Silver Bow Aviation from clean out the toilets to paint the tie-down lines on the tarmac every spring.
Tyler smiled. “Used to scare the shit out of me, flying under those utility wires.”
Chance laughed. “You never said anything—you or Hardy.”
“I think Hardy enjoyed it. He’d probably do it for fun now.”
“Maybe. I don’t think he does much flying down in Moab. Even he’s not dumb enough to go barnstorming when he hasn’t been in the saddle for six months. He’s back in town by the way. Saw him yesterday.”
“So I hear. He was at the Hoist House knocking ’em back ’til the wee hours Saturday night, according to Colleen.”
The Hoist House had always been one of Hardy’s favorite hangouts. The bartenders were always women, and he was always the recipient of more than his fair share of free drinks. Tyler’s sister, Colleen, known to have a ten-year crush on Hardy, tended bar there on weekends.
“He usually stops by here at some point,” Tyler said in a sullen voice, as if he were jealous of Hardy’s attention elsewhere.
“Speaking of which, how many other planes stopped over on Sunday and Monday?”
“I don’t know, a couple, I guess.”
“Kev said all along there were three guys boarded that plane on Sunday morning.” Chance felt badly that he wondered if Kev was seeing double. “So, how did they get to the airport?”
“Maybe they all flew in together,” Tyler said. “Kev wouldn’t necessarily have seen them if they came in early. He comes in late half the time when I’m not around to ride his ass. Maybe they walked over to the Copper Baron and stayed there for the night. Then walked back over in the morning. You check over there?”
The Copper Baron Hotel sat directly across the highway from the airport, a five-minute walk at most. The commercial crews always stayed there, some fly-throughs too. “Reporter from the Standard printed the dead guy’s prison mug shot from the prison press release off the Wire Service. Nobody at the front desk recognized him from the photo.”
Noah Gilderson had been quick to think of that idea, even if it hadn’t gotten him anywhere. At least it had eliminated one possibility.
“Could be that one of them is local,” Chance said. “If they drove to the airport, then they left a car here unless they somehow managed to retrieve it after the crash. Did you notice a vehicle parked overnight?”
“I was out at the lake all weekend.” Tyler’s family owned a cabin on Georgetown Lake where he and his latest girlfriend, Rachel, spent every spare moment. Tyler had long ago mastered the art of relaxation.
Chance and Tyler walked over to the window that overlooked the parking lot and silently surveyed its two pickups and Chance’s Rover. “Yours, mine, and Kev’s,” Tyler said. Then he added, “Somebody could have dropped them off.”
“Maybe.” If that was the case, somebody in Butte was harboring material witnesses in a murder case, no petty crime. “If they did drive here, then how would they get back here to get their vehicle after the crash.”
“What difference does it make anyway?” Tyler said, in a mildly irritated voice. “All you’re doing is putting together a story for the paper. You don’t have to know every detail, do you?” He turned away from the window and walked into the office.
The dismissive note in Tyler’s voice hit home. What difference did it make? The truth was, the crash had unnerved Chance, especially the fact that the pilot had disappeared. The pilots he knew were serious, safety-conscious people. They certainly wouldn’t abandon a plane they’d wrecked, let alone someone who was critically injured, even an ex-con.
“Maybe somebody picked up their car for them,” Tyler added as an afterthought.
“Or maybe they had someone drive them out here, and maybe somebody saw them pick up the car,” Chance said in a probing tone.
“Well, it wasn’t me.” Tyler plopped down at the desk back behind the counter shuffling through an in-basket of file folders. Then he stopped and looked at Chance. “Which is why you asked about who else came in,” Tyler said and sighed. He reached for a black binder that showed a record of fuel sales. “A guy from California came in on Monday in one of those new Beechcrafts. He wanted to go down to Melrose to look at some property. We set him up with a rental car.”
“Is that it? Nobody else was with him?”
“I think I heard Kev say some young guy hopped a ride with him. I’m not sure.”
“A rabbinical student,” a voice from behind them said.
Chance turned around to see Morris Untermann standing in the lobby by the door to the tarmac. He and three other dentists in town owned a Cessna they kept tied down at Fitz’s.
“Hey, Mo. Long time no see,” Chance said.
“That’s because you missed your appointment to have your teeth cleaned,” Mo said and shook his hands in the air in mock distress. “I can’t be held responsible.”
Chance smiled. Dr. Untermann had a light touch with the drill, but he was still a dentist. Chance always dragged his feet when it came to visits, even routine ones. “You talked to this rabbinical student?”
“Sure I talk to him. I see him at synagogue.”
“Where’s he live? I’d like to ask him a few questions.”
“He lives in L.A,” Mo said with a smile. The dentist and his wife had moved to Butte from Brooklyn twenty-five years before. His accent had softened, but his appreciation for an occasional sarcasm had not.
Chance’s heart sank.
“But he comes to Butte once a month for services. That’s why he was on the airplane. This time the lucky schmuck hopped a ride with some rich guy from Santa Monica.”
“Did he go back with him?” Chance asked, ready to be disappointed.
“Nah, he doesn’t fly back ’til Sunday.”
* * *
When Jake Brinig was in town, the rabbinical student who provided religious guidance to the B’nai Israel Congregation stayed in a home in Butte’s “Mediterranean Block.” On the west side of Broadway and Granite between Washington and Idaho Streets, the area’s houses, many nearly a hundred years old, had almost all been renovated. One of Chance’s favorite neighborhoods, it demonstrated so well what a facelift could do to the rest of the city.
Jake’s host owned the gray stucco Victorian home with a red and white decorative façade, which reminded Chance of a wedding cake. Its renovation had just begun when he had returned to Butte after his divorce. He had watched with admiration the progress of the restoration of the down-on-its-luck home to its former glory.
“I wouldn’t have even noticed the car,” Jake said while he and Chance sat on a metal glider on the porch under the house’s arched entrance, “except that we followed it right out of the airport and onto Harrison Avenue for a few miles.”
Brinig’s stylish horn-rimmed glasses clashed with his short-sleeved, white dress shirt and brown suit pants. He hardly seemed old enough to be leading a congregation. Chance knew no Jews in Butte besides Mo Untermann, who he could not imagine seeking Jake Brinig’s advice on much of anything. But Brinig had an eye for detail, and that was what Chance needed. “When exactly was this?”
“Monday, around noon. I came in early this month. I’m officiating at a funeral tomorrow. One of my Yeshiva teachers has a brother who’s a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, and owns his own jet. He gave me a lift,” Jake said with a smile. “They all think I’m crazy for coming out here.”
Chance knew little about B’Nai Israel, Butte’s congregation, except that its synagogue had been renovated recently for its one-hundredth anniversary. The congregation had sunk a lot of money into the project and done it right. The gold domed building was in tiptop shape. “So why do you?”
“My great grandfather owned a clothing store here in the twenties. Can you believe that? On Main Street. They moved back east after World War II.”
Chance smiled. He always thought the Jewish community had to have been a lot bigger to support a building like the synagogue. Like the Finn, Croatian and Serbian communities that had shrunk once the mines started to close in the early 1950s, others moved away too. Not that many Jews worked in the mines. Like Jake’s great-grandpa, they were the retailers and professional people whose services were needed in any bustling metropolis. “Butte family ties go far and wide.”
No doubt people in L.A. couldn’t imagine what the Mo Untermanns of the world saw in a place like Butte now. But then they didn’t know that Mo worked four days a week and went fly-fishing without fail on the fifth. “What do you think of Butte?”
“I enjoy the history of the place, but I couldn’t live here,” said Jake. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the congregation, but the town’s too small and too slow,” he said with a sheepish grin.
“I understand,” Chance said. “It takes a certain kind of person to survive here. Whether you’re born here or transplanted, you get this feeling about the town, and you just can’t leave. It defies explanation.”
“That what happened to you?”
“Well, my mother was born here, and I visited a lot when I was a kid. In the end, I couldn’t find another place I’d rather be. I guess it gets in your blood.”
Jake smiled in a way that made Chance think he was envious. Feeling unexpectedly self-conscious, Chance broached the real reason he had come to talk to Jake. “When you left the airport on Monday morning, did you happen to notice the cars parked in the lot? Usually there are two pickups in the lot, one white, one red. Did you see any others?”
“Just the one we followed out of the lot when we left,” Jake said nonchalantly.
Chance perked up. It was a long shot but it was possible the car that had transported the men in the plane had also ridden in that car. “Did you recognize the model of the car? Anything distinguishing about it?”
“Maroon Ford Bronco. A guy in our building has one, not that you’d need an SUV in L.A., of course. It had one of those special Montana license plates.”
Chance smiled and pulled out his notebook.
“I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Mr. Samuels, who gave me a ride, didn’t know his way around that well so he drove pretty slowly at first. Plus, it being a holiday, traffic was nonexistent. The place felt like a ghost town.” He paused for a moment as if trying to visualize the car. “Oh, it had one of those ribbon magnets. You know, support the troops.”
Chance couldn’t write fast enough. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s go back to the license plate.” There were easily twenty or thirty different specialty license plates in Montana—those that said Support the Griz, or the Bobcats or one of the other colleges. Rocky Mountain Elk foundation plates, all different ones. “Do you remember which particular plate it was?”
“It’s that one with the sunset and the trees. Support the parks, something like that.”
Chance made a note to check the state’s web site. But he was pretty sure Jake was describing the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Foundation’s license plate. Hoyt Rawlins? Chance thought for a moment. No, that couldn’t be. Rawlins and other Montana game wardens drove those lime-green, heavy-duty, club cab trucks with government vehicle license plates. They even drove them to and from home so they could take off in the middle of the night if somebody called with a tip about a poacher.
“You say you followed this car for some time. I don’t suppose you remember which way it was headed? Did it turn somewhere?”
Jake’s quick smile made Chance’s day as if he was proud that he could find his way around town. “We came up Harrison Avenue from what you call the Flat and turned onto Dewey, followed it all the way up to Montana Street. The Bronco turned left just before the Town Pump at the light. I forget the name of that street.”
“Platinum Street,” Chance said. The car was headed in the direction of the west side and the college. “How about a description of the driver.”
Jake stopped with a quizzical look on his face. Apparently, he had been more interested in the car than the person driving it. He stopped and put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to halt the lighting quick details of his mind and go back to the picture he needed.
“Man or a woman, young or old?” Chance asked, trying to narrow the possibilities.
Jake shook his head. “I didn’t notice.”
Chance was surprised. The kid had paid more attention to the car than the person in it. Though in truth, that’s probably what Chance would have done.
“Why the interest in this car?” Jake asked. “What kind of story are you working on?”
Chance explained about the Cessna’s crash landing, which seemed to amuse Jake.
“That sounds like a stunt for Evel Days,” he said with a smile. “Did you ask the guys at the airfield?”
The kid was right about Evel Days. Every dare devil outfit in the West showed up at the end of July to honor the memory of Evel Knievel, arguably Butte’s most famous, or infamous, favorite son. As yet, they had not attracted any aerial acts, unless you could count the stunt guy who had jumped off the Finlen Hotel roof. Chance wasn’t about to make any suggestions.
“They were the ones who told me about you. Or at least Mo Untermann did.”
Chance’s cell phone rang, and he stood up to answer it. The call was from Nick Philippoussis.
“Right,” Jake said and ran his hands through his thick, dark hair. “Mr. Untermann.” His words trailed off, as if he were wondering what Mr. Untermann might think of the conversation that had just taken place. Then he added quickly, “What’s your phone number? If I see the car again, I could call you.”
But Chance did not hear Jake. What he heard was Nick saying, “The call just came in from Missoula. Your barnstormer definitely did not die of natural causes.”