“Mr. Stoddard, you don’t rightly believe a hunter could mistake a man for a buck deer at close range, do you?”
“Is that how it happened, then, Sheriff?”
“That’s what it looked like to me. He was shot from a range of four hundred yards or better and it was an uphill trajectory. Fighting gravity and all, those slugs weren’t going too fast when they hit him.”
“Both bullets hit him in the chest?”
“Not more than three inches apart. One of them penetrated his heart.”
“That’s extraordinary shooting, wouldn’t you say?”
“Or lucky shooting.”
“Two shots within three inches of each other at four hundred yards, uphill?”
Wilkerson’s shoulders stirred as if to dismiss it. “Let me lay it out for you, Mr. Stoddard. I just got back here an hour ago myself — spent the day up on that mountain with Sam Mallory. I expect you’ll want to talk to him?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Surely. Anyhow, we went over the ground up there again. It’s pret’ near up to timberline, that area. Scrub trees, a lot of rocks, talus slopes, bare ground in patches here and there. You can pick up a track if you know what to look for but it ain’t easy.”
“And you found the killer’s tracks?”
“Yes, sir.” He refilled my cup and set the electric coffee pot back on the window sill. With his gangly frame and sharp Adam’s apple he looked boyish, but he had to be at least 40. He went on, “The way Sam and I pieced it together, there was some fellow lower down over on the opposite slope, facing the mountain that your friend climbed over. This fellow, whoever he was — well, you’ve got to figure if he’s up there with an ’ought-six rifle, then he’s doing the same thing there that Mr. Cord’s doing. Hunting. So this hunter looks across and sees Mr. Cord moving through the scrub oaks up there and he thinks it’s got to be a deer or maybe an elk or an antelope or a bighorn sheep. Whatever he figures, he takes aim and he lets go two shots.”
“What was Charlie wearing?”
“Buff-colored hunting coat. Bright red cap. We’ve got to assume the hunter didn’t see the cap.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“After he fires the two shots, the fellow goes down one mountain and up the other to find out what he shot and whether it’s dead.”
“You managed to follow his tracks, then?”
“Yes, sir, we saw where he’d come across the canyon there. We saw where he came up to look at Mr. Cord’s body. He sat himself down a while there. Probably shocked to realize he’d killed a man.”
“And then the hunter just walked away?”
“Right back the way he came. We tracked him back to the point where he’d done the shooting from. Used a forked tree for a rifle rest. We found that.”
“Where did the tracks go from there?”
“Into a shale slope. Nothing but loose rocks. Acres of them. No way to track the man through there.” Wilkerson poured his own coffee, lifted it to blow on it, and watched me over the rim of the cup. “The way I size it up, Mr. Stoddard, this hunter discovered he’d killed a human being by mistake and he sat there all gloomy-like, trying to think. And after a while I expect he must have said to himself, ‘Now this here poor man is dead and that’s my own stupid fault for sure, but there ain’t a thing I can do for him now. If I was to take this body down and admit I was the one that shot him, why the sheriff just naturally he’d put me in jail and I’d go on trial for manslaughter or some damn thing and I could spend the next five years of my life in prison on account of this stupid accident.’”
Wilkerson put his cup down. “You see how it could have been.”
“Yes.”
“But this Mr. Cord was a valuable man to the big company you work for. I guess they want more evidence than my guesswork. So they’ve sent you up here to look around.”
“I don’t want to step on your toes,” I said. “I’ve got no official authority. But Charlie’s widow and his father-in-law and the company I work for — yes, they’d like as many answers as we can find.”
“I’m happy to help out however I can. But I doubt we’ll find much. It ain’t the first time we’ve had this kind of accident with hunters in these mountains and I expect it won’t be the last.”
“Does it happen often?”
“Sometimes five, six men get injured or killed up there in a single hunting season. We get crowded with hunters up there, you know. Some of them are city people that don’t know half as much as they think they know. Just last year we had three Milwaukee men in a party up in those canyons back of Goat Peak, all three of them were found dead at the end of the season. Two of them had been shot with each other’s rifles and the third one got shot by some ’ought-six. Wasn’t much my office here could do about it except file the reports and notify the next of kin. As long as the law allows men to go banging around mountains without so much as a hunting license test to find out if they can recognize the difference between a human being and a cow, you’re going to have accidents.”
When I left Wilkerson’s office I drove the rent-a-car around to the buildings that housed Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd. They were weathered barns and sheds; there was a corral with a few horses and a mule. A terse old man in the tackroom told me Sam Mallory had left for the day. The place smelled of leather and manure. The old man gestured with a spade-bit bridle when he directed me to Mallory’s house.
I felt as though I were going uselessly through the motions. But I owed it, I supposed, to that sad angry lost woman who’d come to my office and I owed it to Schiefflin Aerospace. The company had lived up to the moral stereotypes that are honored more often by empty lip service: Schiefflin had recovered me from a psychic gutter, reformed a tattered soul, brought me back to a life that seemed worth something after all.
It was a pleasant old frame house on a shady street behind a row of saloons and shops that had been restored for the tourist trade. Sam Mallory surprised me: I must have expected to find a rustic old-timer. He had a broad freckled young face and soft kindly gray eyes and blond hair tied back with an Apache-style headband. He was probably in his late twenties, no more. He had a leggy young wife with a quick intelligent smile; she excused herself to go back through the house toward the wail of a baby.
Mallory knew who I was; obviously Sheriff Wilkerson had briefed him. He offered me a drink and we sat in the front room surrounded by magazines and bookshelves and a few paintings. The only outdoorsman touch was a tall rifle rack in one corner. It held five rifles; they were locked in place with a chain.
He told me a number of things I already knew but I wanted his version. He’d been with Wilkerson when they’d tracked the killer across the canyon. “We didn’t find his empties. But then a lot of hunters pick up their brass. Anyhow the sheriff tells me the slugs were fired by an old Springfield. First World War type.”
“When I was in the army,” I said, “they still issued those to rifle competition teams. It was a hell of an accurate weapon.”
“I never saw one in the service myself. We all had M-14’s.”
“You were in Vietnam?”
He nodded.
“What outfit?”
“Why? Were you over there?”
“In the C.I.D., yes.” I smiled as if to apologize.
“Not a very popular outfit,” Sam Mallory observed. “I was just a grunt myself.” Then he grinned and put on a hillbilly twang: “Never had much truck with you hifalutin criminal-investigation types.” He sounded uncannily like Wilkerson when he did that.
“I didn’t like the work much,” I confessed.
“Then why are you still doing it?”
I said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”
He gave me an up-from-under look as if to catch me off guard. “You seem awfully low-key. Do you do it well?”
“Usually.”