The Chimera Secret

10

The chartered Beech Twin Bonanza thumped down onto the grass runway and rumbled along beside the tiny town of New Meadows. Ethan peered out of rain-streaked windows at the soaring mountains nearby, their peaks lost in dense wreaths of gray cloud and the fields below sodden and damp.

A light drizzle had enveloped the airplane all the way up from Friedman Memorial Airport, the thick clouds obscuring Ethan’s view of the mountainous and forested terrain as the pilot guided them over tumultuous bumps in the air. The mountains caused violent updrafts and downdrafts that tossed the little aircraft about as though it were a leaf in a gale.

Ethan knew that Idaho was not a densely populated state, but even so the vast tracts of wilderness that had stretched into the gloomy distance beneath them had seemed so immense that he could not imagine how one might begin systematically searching it for any creature unknown to science, much less one that had made these lonely forests its home for untold millennia.

‘We’re digging ourselves a hole with this one,’ Lopez said, peering out of her window as the aircraft taxied off the runway and bumped along a track. ‘A big, damp, cold hole.’

‘Sheriff’s picking us up from here,’ Ethan replied as he unbuckled from his seat. ‘Maybe there have been more developments since we left Chicago.’

The pilot shut down the aircraft’s engines, and as Ethan clambered out of the airplane he saw a portly sheriff ambling his way across the rutted, rain-sodden soil toward them.

‘Earl Carpenter,’ he introduced himself, ‘Riggins Sheriff’s Department. Welcome to Idaho.’

He said it with a cheery smile and a twinkling eye, and Ethan wondered whether the drizzle and cold was something folk just got used to up here. The sheriff proved himself a helpful soul, carrying their bags to his patrol car before they climbed in and set off north on the U-95.

‘Riggins is about thirty-five miles out,’ Earl informed them as he drove away from the airport. ‘Say, where did you guys come from? All I got told was that you were working for the government or something?’

‘Private contractors,’ Ethan replied by way of an explanation, ‘the FBI don’t have the manpower to dedicate a team to this investigation, so we help fill in for them.’

Earl Carpenter frowned as he glanced in his mirror at Lopez.

‘You qualified for this kind of work, ma’am?’

‘Worked homicide as a detective in DC for six years,’ Lopez replied without bridling. ‘Ethan here is ex-marines, recon.’

Earl raised an eyebrow and smiled apologetically at them. ‘I guess that’s good enough for me.’

‘What’s the story so far?’ Ethan asked. ‘You’ve got two dead bodies, another supposed dead but still missing and a kid who swears that his brother was killed by an animal, right?’

‘To cut it short,’ Earl agreed, ‘but there’s a whole lot about this that doesn’t fit right.’

‘Tell us,’ Lopez said.

Earl puffed his cheeks and blew the air out as he drove.

‘Hard to know where to start. I get me a call about a local lady whose son’s been found hanging in the garage.’

‘Randy MacCarthy,’ Ethan said.

‘So I goes down there,’ Earl went on, ‘and I check out the scene before the county coroner gets called in. Sure enough, Randy’s swinging in the wind. There’s a stool underneath him and he’d been dead for a few hours.’

‘How did you know?’ Lopez asked.

‘Body was cold,’ Earl replied. ‘His neck weren’t broken, so he died on the rope.’

‘Any history of prior convictions?’ Ethan asked. ‘Anything that might motivate this kid to take his own life?’

‘He’d been busted a couple of times for possession but nothing serious, got held by the local police department for forty-eight hours but no charges were filed as he wasn’t dealing,’ Earl replied. ‘Made a lot of claims about conspiracies and said that he had evidence of government agents working in and around Riggins. Watched too many TV shows, you ask me. But there’s no evidence of foul play. I took some photographs before forensics moved in, and Randy’s post-mortem confirmed death by asphyxiation.’

‘You got copies of the photographs on you?’ Lopez asked from the rear seat.

Earl reached down into the side pocket of his door and pulled out a manila envelope before passing it to the back seat. Ethan watched as Lopez pulled out a wad of six-by-eight images and began sifting through them. If there was anything unusual about the crime scene, she would notice it soon enough.

‘What about the other brothers?’ Ethan asked. ‘And the ranger who was killed?’

Earl Carpenter rested one arm on the sill of his door as he drove. Ethan noticed that the hills around them were getting steeper as they traveled, thickly forested with pines or coarse grass, and the roadside flanked by occasional shacks and game crossings.

‘Well, that there’s a mystery. Cletus and Jesse go off huntin’ out in Nez Perce Forest, and it turns out that the ranger, a local man called Gavin Coltz, spotted them tracking a game elk. Season’s out right now so he decided to follow them and catch them in the act. He was a tenacious soul, Gavin, and he stuck with them for almost four hours before they tried to take their shot out near Fox Creek.’

‘Then they get attacked?’ Lopez guessed.

‘By a bear,’ Earl confirmed. ‘Gavin is killed, so is Cletus, and Jesse runs for his life. Turns up next morning in Riggins lookin’ for all the world like he was dead already.’

‘You don’t believe his story about a monster killing his brother?’ Ethan asked.

Earl Carpenter looked Ethan in the eye.

‘I’ve been working out here since I was a boy,’ he said, ‘and I’ve seen a lot of people come close to dying after attacks by bears and cougars. This kid, he din’ have no reason to claim what he did, that some kind of other creature had at them. In all my years I’ve never seen fear like that in the face of a man, but then if he’d just killed two members of his family then I’d guess he’d be all shook up. Truth is, I don’t know what to believe.’

Ethan glanced up at the foggy mountains looming either side of the car as it drove between the steep hillsides. ‘It’s a mystery all right.’

‘It’s not the only mystery,’ Lopez said from the rear seat.

‘What you got?’ Ethan asked.

‘You say you found Randy MacCarthy hanging just like this?’ Lopez asked Earl Carpenter. ‘And you hadn’t touched him at all?’

‘Exactly like that,’ Earl confirmed. ‘I only touched him once to search for a pulse. Needless to say I din’ find one, and his body was cold.’

Lopez nodded.

‘Then this isn’t a suicide, Sheriff, it’s a homicide.’

Earl’s old eyes flicked up to meet hers in the rear-view mirror. ‘You shittin’ me, lady? The boy’s a suicide for sure. There’s nothing that suggests foul play in my book.’

Lopez handed the photographs to Ethan. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with the picture,’ she said.

Ethan looked at the six-by-eights one after the other. Randy dangling from the noose, his tongue swollen and poking from his mouth, his eyes half-closed and lifeless. The toppled stool three feet below him. Ethan shook his head.

‘I’m not seeing it,’ he admitted.

‘The body was cold,’ Lopez said. ‘Been there a few hours. What’s missing?’

It took only a moment for Ethan to realize what she meant. Images from his service with the marines in Iraq and Afghanistan flashed through his mind, of the shameful sight of the dead lying in the streets or in bitter, lonely caves in the mountains.

‘The body hasn’t voided,’ he said finally. ‘Randy didn’t die where he was found.’

‘That’s my boy,’ Lopez smiled.

‘Crap,’ Earl Carpenter uttered, and slapped a hand across the steering wheel, angry with himself. ‘Should’ve realized that.’

‘When a person dies their sphincter muscles give way and they void their bowels,’ Lopez said. ‘This kid had been hanging for some time but there was no residue beneath him from the moment of death.’

‘So he died elsewhere and was moved,’ Ethan said. ‘Any further clues here?’

‘None,’ Earl shook his head. ‘Whoever hanged him there was careful enough to sweep the floor, which covered their tracks but I guess also proves they were there.’

‘Exactly,’ Lopez said. ‘That was my next point: they cleaned up after themselves, which means premeditated homicide.’

‘I’d better call ahead to Grangeville,’ Earl said, and reached for the patrol car’s radio. ‘Inform them of what you guys have figured out.’

‘Can you think of any likely suspects?’ Ethan asked Earl.

‘Only Randy’s ma, Sally, who found him,’ Earl said. ‘But I don’t think she’s on the cards for this. She had three sons and loved them all. Besides, there’s no clear motive. Randy had no life insurance and no savings. The mother’s penniless and all three of her sons contributed to the upkeep of their household from their own pay checks, all of which were from menial jobs in town.’

Ethan mentally scratched a financial motive to the killing from his list.

‘So it’s a homicide disguised as a suicide, and done badly,’ Lopez said. ‘That suggests somebody inexperienced, maybe a local person who doesn’t know much about crime.’

Earl Carpenter chuckled bitterly.

‘Sure does, which means most all folk in Riggins. Our population work in local business or make the run over to McCall and Grangeville for work. Anybody wantin’ bigger cahoots in life gets out of the county altogether.’

‘Anything from forensics or the coroner’s office?’ Ethan asked.

‘Nothing much,’ Earl replied. ‘Randy died of asphyxiation by the same rope that was found around his neck, that much is for sure. So whoever did this, they had a vehicle to transport him and there was probably more than one of them. Hard to carry and hoist a body on your own.’

Ethan struggled to get his head around it.

‘So they’re dumb enough to botch the apparent suicide, yet smart enough to leave no trace of their presence at the scene or on the body? Were there any tire marks or tracks?’

‘None but my own vehicle when I arrived,’ Earl replied. ‘Which means they cleared their own trail out of there.’

‘We were told that the ranger’s body had been recovered,’ Lopez informed him. ‘Anything you guys have learned there?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Earl replied. ‘We’ll head up past Riggins to Grangeville first. I’ll let the doctors fill you in about that, because I don’t even like talking about it.’