She shrugged her shoulders in conjecture. “Any number of things in flight—heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage, diabetic coma, maybe a drug interaction. God knows they kill more people than doctors would like to admit.”
“Hmm. What about if it was a homicide, like if somebody killed the guy and then left him in the plane to make it look like he died in the crash? How would you do it so that it didn’t look like he had been murdered?”
“Chance, you’re such a gentle soul,” Adrienne said. “Why such sinister questions?”
Chance did not like to admit to his morbid curiosity, though it did seem plausible that an ex-con who died in a likely stolen plane hadn’t died of natural causes. “It’s background for a story for the paper. That’s all.”
“I thought you didn’t like that tiresome stereotype that Montana is full of anti-government types who like to take the law into their own hands?” Her voice was earnest but laced with a dash of sarcasm. “I can think of a lot more likely possibilities than murder. Maybe this man went into cardiac arrest or had a stroke. Maybe the pilot was his son, and he lost control of the plane when he tried to help his father.”
Chance considered this for a moment. Of course, Lowell Austin had not even been married according to the stories Chance had read online in the Idaho Statesman at the Messenger office. He shook his head. “Good, but if that’s the case, why did the son do a disappearing act?”
She wagged a finger at him and smiled, “Not a medical question.”
“Plus, in this case, I think we can rule out the family angle. The victim was an ex-con who is sure to have had serious enemies.”
She tapped her lips with her first two fingers and considered these implications. The gesture took him back to the first time he had kissed her a month ago.
It was early August, the last night of the Irish festival. He had just finished the final touches on her loft apartment. Sanding the joint paste on the drywall, he had spent much of the evening wondering how he might manage to see her again. He had almost convinced himself that she probably wouldn’t care if she ever laid eyes on him again, when she reappeared.
She carried a four-pack of Guinness she had won from a street vendor. Blushing, she told him how people in the crowd had teased that she should find a man to share her winnings. “At this point in my life, you’re the only man I seem to share anything with. So I came back to see if you’d like a Guinness.”
He had never seen her drink anything stronger than herbal tea. They drank to his job well done. Then, as if she were reading his thoughts, she said she would miss him.
The Guinness must have gone to his head, because finally, he told her, “You know, I’ve wanted to kiss you every day for the last month. Since I don’t officially work for you anymore, would it seem too forward of me to kiss you now?” Pondering his question, she had tapped her fingertips to her lips then too.
“Strangulation,” Adrienne said, thinking out loud. “But you’d see bruises around the neck probably. Spinal shock of some kind, maybe?” she mumbled, and then looked up at him. “Aren’t they doing an autopsy?”
It was Chance’s turn to shrug. “They’re working on the preliminary report. But they still need the tox screens. They’ll have to wait for the logjam at the state lab to break,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Who knows if they’ll ever figure it out.”
“Speaking of mysteries, guess who I met today?”
Before Chance could answer, Adrienne announced proudly, “Mesa.”
“She showed up here, did she?” Chance wondered offhand what had prompted her visit. “How did it go?”
“Fine,” Adrienne said. “She seemed a little shy. Why? How would you expect it to go? She likes your painting.”
Chance said a silent prayer of thanks. The last thing he wanted was for Adrienne and Mesa to get off on a bad footing. “There seemed to be some confusion about the Mountain Gallery’s account with the Messenger.” He gestured toward a stack of bills on a large oak desk behind her. On it, he could see a stack of unopened mail. “Planning to get to those anytime soon?”
She turned quickly to follow his gaze and then sighed. “Check’s in the mail, honest.”
“I’m teasing. It came today,” he said, his mind no longer on Mesa. “Too bad, too. I was thinking about taking what you owed in trade. Just as well. I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to Anna Takkinen.”
“Maybe I should hire her to be my business manager,” Adrienne said. “You really think that’s why Mesa came to the gallery?” She feigned a grimace when he didn’t answer. “Guess I blew my chance for a good first impression.”
Chapter 10
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?”