The Royal Wulff Murders by Keith McCafferty Page A

traffic. He could duck away if he saw headlights coming.”
    Walt said, “Be worth putting out the word in the radio and the newspaper, see if anybody spotted a man on foot.”
    “We’ll do that. But right now what we do is ribbon off this campsite. Then I need you to put a plastic sheet on the driver’s seat and drive the car back to Bridger. We’ll need to run the VIN number.”
    Walt nodded. “Okay. But ’fore we go, all your supposin’ is based on supposin’ that the killer put the body in the trunk of this car, drove around with him awhile, then put him to sleep with the fishes. Switched license plates, for the love of Pete. That’s a lot of exposure. What I’m saying is, well… two things. One, why bother movin’ the body at all? Why not leave it to be discovered by the lake, or wherever it was he was drowned? ’Cause it would be found earlier? It was found the next day anyway. Two, why drive the car here? Why not just remove the ID, wipe your fingerprints, and leave it by the river? Doesn’t add up.”
    Martha tapped her foot on the ground.
    “Unless there was something about the place where he was drowned that could tie the two of them together. But you’re right,” she said. “We’re missing something and I don’t know what it is. Hmpff. Come on, let’s go see that Lurch fellow who runs the camp. See if our visit jogged his memory.”
    She walked back to the car.
    “You coming, Walt?”
    “I’m comin’.” Walt swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
    Without turning around, he said, “You feel it? You feel the difference in the air? Like a chill. Normal police work, it just makes you jaded. But killin’ does something else. It gets in your bones. You’re around death, it gets in your bones. You can’t be a normal person anymore. You try to talk to a lady, carry on a conversation, there’s this gulf. You’re not living in her world. It’s like an eternal twilight, like you’re doomed to live in fog where it’s cold all the time. A boogeyman’s life. You can’t wash it off. It’s no way to be. I moved out here to get away from it.”
    Martha felt a muscle flutter above her collarbone. She felt it all right. For the second time in twenty minutes the hairs of her arms lifted against the sleeves of her shirt. She could smell it, smell it in the earth and the pines. Or maybe just knowing sharpened the senses. She looked away from the sepulchral lake and its ice-pick tree trunks and took a couple breaths.
    “It’s a bastard all right,” she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rocky Mountain South
    “I  knew you couldn’t stay away,” Doris said. “Didn’t even have time to change your clothes, just shucked your waders and had to see her, didn’t you?”
    “Our relationship is strictly professional.”
    “And what relationship might that be?” Doris cocked a hand on her hip.
    “One of mutual admiration, I suppose.” Stranahan took a swig of beer, holding the sweating bottle with two fingers on the neck. Except for a cupped handful of water from a seepage spring on the riverbank, it was the first drink he’d had since dawn, when he’d brewed cowboy coffee at his campfire on the West Fork.
    “Crowd’s bigger tonight,” he offered.
    “They’re not coming for the listening. It’s the watching. It’s like she’s left a scent trail around town and all the men have followed their noses. Tell me honestly, Stranny: What do men see in her? She’s superficial. No, she’s worse than that. She’s artificial. Every word she says, it’s like honey pouring out of the comb.”
    “It’s Southern, Doris. It’s her heritage.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Stranahan had to smile. “There’s the fact that she’s a babe,” he said. “That might have something to do with it.”
    “I’ve got a niece who’s pretty as she is. She’s one of the dairy Sizemores, three sections up on the Musselshell River. Deeded land rightup against the national forest. Let me set you up with