Chapter 8
Arriving at the motel, I was tempted to listen to the car radio or turn on the TV in my room to catch a news story about a missing Hispanic man. But that seemed fruitless. He hadn’t even been missing a day yet. And this was Willow Run, Montana. There weren’t any news reporters hanging around hoping to catch a hot story.
I sat in a plastic lawn chair on the concrete pad outside my room. I faced west to watch the sun dip behind the forested hills. Out there is where I found the dead man, and out there was the answer to why he died. I had been a cop, not a detective, so I had no true investigative experience. But it was time to find out if I had the right stuff to be a detective.
First of all, the guy was dead. Of that I had no doubt. And his body was taken. He did not get up and walk away like the local cops preferred to believe.
Next, he died from a fall off the cliff. There was no trail of footprints up to the body, so he didn’t just walk there and drop dead. And the only evidence of a wound I saw was a pool of blood on the ground under the head. It was reasonable to assume he died from impact of the left side of his head with the ground. I rejected consideration of his death being suicide or being dumped out of an aircraft. Those seemed too far-fetched.
He was running when he went off the cliff. The widely spaced imprints at the top of the cliff indicated that. And his body was far from the face of the cliff. For sure he was running. And there were no other imprints up there either, so the guy had been alone.
He was running and went off the cliff. An accident. My estimated time of death was sometime very early in the morning. If he had been running in daylight, he would have seen the rim of the cliff and turned left to go up or right to go down the slope, just as I did. Last night there was only a sliver of moon. It would have been really dark out there, too dark to see the drop-off.
But why was he running in the dark? Because he was late getting back from a hike? Even if it were really late, I would be walking in the dark. I might be walking briskly, but still walking, not running. He would be walking too.
So he was probably running away from something, like a bear or mountain lion. But when they retrieve your body, it’s as a meal. They don’t then put you in a car and drive away. So he was running from someone. Whoever chased him was frightening, terrifying enough that the guy ran in the dark through the forest to escape.
The disappearance of the body was the most puzzling part of all this. The body snatcher was not a friend and not a Good Samaritan. Either of them would have asked me to help carry the guy to the vehicle and be grateful for the assistance. Whoever chased him had to be the one who took the body. The man on the ridge with the rifle. All of this had to be linked to him.
I took out a pad of paper to prepare a list of what I did after finding the body. I made the 9-1-1 call, took some pictures, inspected the body, and then climbed the cliff. Near the top of my climb I saw the guy with the rifle, climbed up to that spot, searched around up there, and came back down. How long did all that take? I could estimate the amount of time as at least thirty minutes, which would be plenty of time to snatch the body. But I needed to get some real numbers. Tomorrow.
The man with a rifle saw me for sure. I walked right up into his field of view. He aimed the gun right at me. Then he was gone. And so was the body. He must have been looking for it and took it.
The body must have already been gone by the time I got back to the bottom of the cliff. Once I got back down the cliff, if the body was being taken away, I would have seen or heard something. After all, I wasn’t that far away.
Why would someone take a rotting body?
But maybe the body snatcher didn’t know he was looking for a corpse. You don’t need to carry a gun to retrieve a corpse. You bring a gun when you are hunting. He was hunting for a guy who was running away. The man with the gun was probably tracking him and saw me.
When did he see me? Certainly when I climbed up the cliff. Or did he see me before that? He probably saw me when I was near the body. Once I left the body and started climbing up the slope, that gave him the opportunity to go snatch the corpse. Maybe he didn’t intend for me to see him. The sun was to his back and in my eyes. It was a good position for him to avoid detection. And I only got a glimpse of him. Or maybe he wasn’t that concerned about being seen. Once he took the body, I was going to realize he had been there anyway. So as long as I did not get a good look at him, could not later identify him, he was just a ghost figure on the hill.
But the body of a guy who falls off a cliff is not a prize to be stolen. It’s buzzard food.
Then again, maybe it is a prize, if the guy has some value. There might be a bounty on the man. I had no experience with bounty hunters. I knew they were out there, everywhere, trying to capture suspects and collect the rewards. But I had never encountered one in my time as a cop in Cincinnati. Yet that would explain why he was out there with a rifle. He was in armed pursuit of a fugitive, who just happened to end up dead from a fall. A bounty hunter wouldn’t identify himself to me and wouldn’t ask for my assistance since that might mean he would have to share the reward. Just quietly grab the body and disappear.
The bounty hunter might have been aiming his rifle at me since he did not know what my intentions were. He also would not know if I was armed. He might have looked at me as a threat. So he just watched me from a distance, waiting for an opportunity to take the body.
But it still did not explain the coincidence of me finding the body, many hours after it became a body, and then the bounty hunter showing up to retrieve it within minutes. Too narrow a time frame. Too much coincidence.
The guy had already been dead for several hours, so it was not as if the bounty hunter was close on his heels. The dead man had been running in the dark. The hunter may have been tracking him in the dark, a very slow process.
It had to be my phone call that led him to the body. I called 9-1-1 and indicated precisely where to find the corpse. I was on National Forest land, so the call likely would have been transferred to the ranger station since it is in their jurisdiction. But I ended up talking to Deputy Powell in Willow Run. Did a ranger defer to the Willow Run cops? I found it surprising that a federal agency would give up jurisdiction on anything to anyone, especially a small-town police department. Once US government agencies were on a case, they seemed unlikely to give it up to the locals. Something about pride, boundaries, territory, jurisdiction, turf.
But maybe there was an agreement between the National Forest and the local law regarding such matters, since the park might not be equipped to handle a report of something like a body. The rangers may not be trained in how to deal with a corpse. And budgets were tight. Washington, DC funding had been cut deeply across the country on so many fronts, including monies for National Forests and Parks. Lewis and Clark National Forest would be no exception, with likely deep cuts leading to downsizing of maintenance, vehicles, equipment, people, and services. They might be so under-funded and short-handed that they simply could not muster a response to a 9-1-1 call. Then they would give up jurisdiction because of manpower issues.
So, if someone in this string of people told the guy with the rifle they were looking for a body instead of a running Hispanic man and where to find it, who was the leak? The 9-1-1 Operator? That seemed too far-fetched to even consider. Calls into 9-1-1 are randomly picked up by the next available Operator.
Or maybe the leak was a National Forest Ranger? It was difficult to assign any involvement there since I hadn’t even talked to or met any of them yet. I needed to rectify that situation.
The Sheriff? I couldn’t see it. He was too lazy to do any digging beyond the superficial. It was convenient to just accept that it didn’t happen. Sit back, be the nice doddering old fool, and wait for retirement.
Then there was Deputy Powell. He was the one I talked to on the phone. Maybe he knew beforehand that a bounty hunter
was on the hunt in the area. He had sounded surprised when I told him there was a body in the National Forest, the body of a Hispanic man. No wonder he was so excited. It would be exciting, especially if he could turn it into a profit. If he knew there was a bounty hunter in the area seeking a Hispanic, he would call and make a deal. Cash for the location. The deal was struck, the body was snatched, and then Deputy Powell showed up to close the loop. He might have expected to find nobody at the scene. The bounty hunter might have already disposed of me, if I had gotten in the way. But he did find me. So he took me out of there in handcuffs, helping his friend disappear without a pursuit.
Enid Powell put on quite a show on Monarch Trail. He feigned a spectrum of emotions when finding me. He went from excitement to suspicion to pity and finally to anger. He played his part well, like a performer on a stage. And I played right into his hands, turning away from him in the direction the body snatcher went, giving him precisely the opportunity he needed to slam me to the ground and slap on the cuffs. That ended any pursuit. I had underestimated him. What he may lack in intelligence, he made up for in guile and acting skills.
Deputy Powell might be collecting his share of the bounty money at this very moment, as I sit here figuring out what happened today. It bothered me professionally that the Deputy might be greedy enough to do this. Otherwise it didn’t particularly perturb me to the point that I would make a stink about it, even if I could prove it. But it might be the tip of the iceberg of some larger-scale corruption. It might run deeper and involve bigger stakes. Even in a small town, it is often surprising how big the payout can be. The possibility of something bigger right here in Willow Run kept my juices flowing. It gave me something even more compelling to investigate, unofficially, of course.
My thoughts then returned to the bounty hunter. He saw me next to the body and waited for me to climb the slope. Then he went down and carried the body away. He carried the dead weight of that body on his back for about 100 yards in the late morning heat to his vehicle and drove away. For sure, he was strong to do that. And he was also very motivated to do that. Very tough, determined, and motivated.
It was convenient for him that I went up on the cliff top, out of view of the body so he could snatch it. As soon as he saw me, he must have hustled down to retrieve the body while I was up on the top of the cliff.
“Damn,” I blurted out loud. He didn’t carry the body away. I didn’t have the numbers, but there just was not enough time, considering the amount of rough ground he had to cover, even if he pushed himself hard. He had an accomplice. Someone else did the carrying. So there had to be two guys. One was watching me while the other snatched the body. They were in communication somehow.
So now there are at least two bounty hunters, partners, who wanted that corpse. It certainly was convenient that I had climbed up the slope to investigate. That gave them the chance to grab the body.
But there was a more chilling consideration. Maybe it was convenient, perhaps even lucky, for me that I had been nosey. The guy was armed. He had a rifle. His partner probably was also armed. They wanted that body. I had chastised myself for not sitting there next to the body, waiting for the Deputy to arrive. If they really wanted that corpse, I would not have been any obstacle to them. Armed or not, I would have been an easy target, sitting in the middle of an open field, with at least one of them holding the high ground. I might have become a corpse myself, dragged away and dumped somewhere. The only trace left of me might be my 9-1-1 call and my car parked at the trailhead lot. There would have been a search, for a day or two. Then it would be called off. Lost and never found.
And Deputy Powell would just report that he had received a 9-1-1 call, got to the location, and found nothing. I would be labeled as another crazy tourist in over his head in Big Sky Country.
Quite possibly, I was alive now only because I had been nosey and climbed that slope. That was a very sobering consideration.
But I was alive and well. Since I had postulated the bounty hunter angle, I had to go prove it. If writing a book is where this was going to lead me, I needed more facts. Run away and write the Great American Novel. That is what my ex-partner Ed Garvey advised. Well, I was right in the middle of a plot now. I had to see where it led.