Chapter 7

By eleven the next morning, Vic and I had showered, breakfasted, and canvased a few other locations in Bozeman that Ryan Running Feet had suggested. Unfortunately, aside from a cashier at the Super Shop who remembered seeing Ryan, Brian, Donny and Shane when they stopped in on their way into town for 'a piss and a Coke', as Ryan had so eloquently phrased it, we didn't turn up much in the way of new information. The actual festival venue was a complete bust, mostly because it was less of a venue and more of an empty cattle field outside of town. We stopped in anyway, and did a broad sweep of the location, but the stage had been long since dismantled and carted away, as had the food and beverage stalls, chemical toilets and most of the trash. The field itself was a wreck of mashed grass, bare earth and a lot of mud, but, overall, the cleanup was pretty thorough.

"I'd be impressed if I weren't so pissed off that there's nothing helpful here," Vic said, putting my thoughts into words as she propped her aviator sunglasses up on her hair and surveyed the scene. "Woodstock, this was not."

"I imagine the county is thankful for that small mercy," I said.

Vic raised an eyebrow at me.

"Woodstock was only expected to draw around 50,000 people, but more than 400,000 showed up," I said. "They tore up cattle fences and stripped produce from some of the nearby farms because there wasn't enough food to go around. The press described it as 'a massive traffic jam in a giant mud puddle'."

"Well, they got the mud puddle part right, anyway," Vic said. "I'm guessing bands like Death Trap Relay and Black Fungus don't have quite the same draw as Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead."

"I'd imagine not," I agreed.

The campground was less than a mile down the highway, conveniently positioned halfway between a gravel truck escape ramp and the derelict shell of a decommissioned Exxon station. Vic pulled her duty vehicle in between the stone pylons that bordered the entrance and parked neatly in the 'no parking' zone in front of the split trailhead. One side led to the camp sites, which appeared to be purely rustic in nature – no fancy camper hookups or showers to tempt the high-maintenance tourists. The other was wide enough to permit vehicle access to the boat ramp, though it was gated off at the moment, no doubt to spare park services from having to monitor the lake in the off season.

Janelle had described the place in surprising detail, so we had no problem identifying the rusty, peeling picnic table where she had waited for Brian, or the path that she had taken when she finally got fed up and decided to go see what was taking him so long.

We retraced her footsteps now, our boots crunching down the gravel path that led to the lake. It wasn't large as recreational bodies of water go, and it was clearly man-made for the express use of the campground, but it was big enough for smaller boats to make use of. It was stocked, too, if the occasional small splashes that disturbed the surface of the water were anything to go by. There was no real beach to speak of; in most places, trees and undergrowth were tangled up all the way to the water's edge – perfect for snakes and turtles, less accommodating for people – but there were two boat launches, one on either side of the lake, and a utility shed at the far end, which was most likely used to house the campground's maintenance equipment and tools.

Still following Janelle's directions, we headed down the dirt path that led toward the shed. This was the last place she had reported seeing Brian before his mysterious friend came on the scene, and I was starting to get a bad feeling. It could have been nothing more than the fact that an empty lake at an off-season campground was going to feel like something out of an extremely B-rated slasher flick no matter what the situation entailed, but after twenty-five years, I had learned not to disregard those bad feelings out of hand.

The shed was a small, nondescript wooden structure about the size of a small barn, with its own short pier and boat ramp. A rickety looking rowboat had been pulled up out of the water and left to molder at a drunken angle on the edge of the concrete ramp. An abandoned bird's nest in the prow suggested it had been there for some time. The jagged crack in the fiberglass hull suggested it would be there for quite a while longer.

"I'm going to take a quick walk around," Vic said, and headed around the back of the structure while I stayed put, surveying the area and wondering if I would even know what I was looking for if I saw it… right up until I did.

She was back in a moment. "No surveillance. Only one door to the place and it's padlocked. There's also an access road back there. So, no real mystery as to how our guy came and went without Janelle seeing him. So, the question now is – did Brian leave with him voluntarily or was he compelled?"

"Or did he not leave at all?" My tone immediately got Vic's attention. She turned and followed my gaze to the tangle of undergrowth that clogged the edge of the lake next to the pier and what could quite possibly be the crumpled orange and black fabric of a Durant High School sweatshirt.

"Shit," she said, her voice ringing out over the stillness of the lake.

My thoughts exactly.

*****

It took nearly two hours for county law enforcement and their forensic unit to make it out to the crime scene.

"Motherfucker," Vic said with feeling when the body of Brian Many Bridges had finally been extracted from the water and laid out on the stretcher. He'd clearly been submerged for some time – most probably since shortly after he'd last been seen by Janelle. His body was bloated, facial features distorted and damaged from the predations of the fish that had been added to the lake for the enjoyment of the summer tourists. I found myself hoping that the campground maintained a strict catch and release policy.

This wasn't our jurisdiction, or our case, so we just stayed the hell out of the way while the crime scene techs did their best with what they had to work with. Two forensic pathologists from the medical examiner's office were with the body, conferring in low murmurs. Montana law enforcement had descended en masse and were scattered throughout the campground, canvasing as much of the area as they could as the light began to fade. I didn't imagine they would find much, but they were certainly going to earn their county paycheck while they looked.

Jim Daniels, the Sheriff of Gallatin County, was on-site, and cussing a blue streak that might have made Vic proud under other circumstances. Under the current circumstances, she had taken an immediate dislike to him the moment he referred to her as "little darlin'".

"I mean, goddamn, son." Daniels was on his cell phone, pacing and gesturing wildly at the chaos going on around us. "School just started back up at State a couple weeks ago, and now I got a dead kid not twenty minutes away from campus. How's that gonna look, Ronnie? How's that gonna fuckin' look?" He paused, apparently listening to the other end of the conversation and then shook his head and went back to pacing. "I know they said he's not from here." He glanced up at us with his brows knit in accusation, "but nothing's settled yet, and until it is, I gotta assume this is one of ours. Hell, even if it isn't, there's still a dead kid in our backyard with a hole in his gut that he didn't put there himself. Get in touch with our liaison at the University and figure out how we're going to handle this." He stabbed at his phone with one angry finger, and then stuck it in his breast pocket and turned back to us.

"You wanna try and explain to me one more time what brought you all the way over here from Durant?"

"Nothing's changed since the first time you asked," Vic said, her hands parked on her hips in belligerent splendor. She really did not like him.

I put a hand on her shoulder, pressing just hard enough to get her attention. The last thing we needed was bad blood between departments. I wanted to be kept in the loop on this investigation, and that was never going to happen if the love of my life pissed off the county sheriff before it ever got off the ground.

"I came to Bozeman with Deputy Moretti," I said in as conciliatory a tone as I could manage, "looking for a missing person. This was the last place anyone remembered seeing him, so we came by to check things out."

"And you just happened to find him?" Daniels asked.

"He just happened to be here," Vic said.

The Sheriff cut a sharp look at her, but went on as though she hadn't spoken. "I'm sure you'll be happy to turn over any information you have on this boy – if he is who you think he is? I'd like to know who you've spoken to, any contact information you have."

"Guess we'll just do your job for you, then?" Vic said, with one dark eyebrow arched into her hairline.

"Of course," I said smoothly. I tightened my grip on Vic's shoulder. I could feel the tension in her muscles, but she subsided, opting instead to smile as insincerely as she could at the sheriff until got annoyed and stomped away, muttering about jurisdiction.

"He's a dick," Vic said without preamble once Daniels was, I hoped, out of earshot.

"No argument," I said. "But you know as well as I do how difficult this part of the job is. I don't envy him. There's a university with 16,000 students right up the road, and they're going to want answers a lot sooner than he's going to be able to provide them."

We turned and headed back up the trail towards where Vic's truck had been impeding traffic all afternoon. "Some days it pays to work in the least populated county in the least populated state in the union, huh?"

I laughed. "Some days it pays to be retired."

We stopped in at the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office to drop off copies of all of my notes – or rather, I did, while Vic waited impatiently in the truck. I also assured Sheriff Daniels that I would be doing the family notification whether he liked it or not. Fortunately, he had no desire to give up one of his deputies to make the nine-hour round-trip drive to Durant, and so I was pseudo-deputized to make the official notification. It wasn't that I relished the prospect of notifying Brian's parents of his death, but I had taken on this case, and I was going to see it through to the conclusion whatever else happened.

*****

It was nearly a five hour drive back to Durant. Vic let me drive, opting instead to lean her seat back with her feet propped on the dash, and my hat pulled low over her eyes. We drove in silence for so long, I assumed she had fallen asleep until she spoke up.

"Does it ever get any easier?"

I glanced over, but her face was still hidden beneath the brim of my hat. "Which part? Finding dead bodies, or having to notify the family?"

She took the hat off and sat it in her lap with the brim up, like a good Wyoming girl, and brushed her hair back away from her face. "Either. Both." She looked out the window, watching as the darkening mountains passed in the distance.

"No."

She nodded. I was only confirming what she already suspected. Hell, what she already knew. She didn't have my years of experience, but with the start she'd gotten in Philadelphia homicide before she came into my orbit, she probably had more experience with violent death than I did. But it's not the kind of thing that ever gets easier, or that you ever get used to – or, if you do, then you're in the wrong line of work and need to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

"It's just…" She hesitated and then went on. "Brian's parents are sitting at home right now with no idea where their kid is, or what's happened to him. They still have hope that maybe he's going to come home any minute. And we're going to roll up in a few hours and pull the rug straight out from under them. How do you ever recover from that, Walt? How do you lose a child that you have raised and loved for their entire life, and then just move on? Are either of them ever going to feel normal again? Ever?"

I looked out at the road as it unfolded in front of us, uncertain how to respond. "I don't know," I said. "I've had to tell a lot of people a lot of bad news over the years, and, well, some of them seem to recover better than others."

My answer clearly didn't satisfy her, but she didn't belabor the subject. Instead, she put my hat back on, and this time she did fall asleep…or at least, she didn't say anything else until after we had already crossed the line back into Absaroka County.

The notifications went pretty much the way I expected them to.

Eddie Many Bridges opened his screen door and saw us standing on his porch, and the life simply went out of his face. "Okay," he said and sat abruptly on the worn linoleum, his big body folding like an accordion. His breathing was heavy and even, and when he looked up, there were wet tracks running down his weathered cheeks. "How?" he said. "How did it happen?"

"I'm so sorry," Vic said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "We don't know all the details yet. It appears as though Brian was involved in an altercation of some kind. We'll be able to tell you more once the M.E.'s office in Bozeman releases their findings."

He nodded, but looked up at me. "Walt."

"He was stabbed, Eddie. That's all we know."

He nodded again, and then pushed himself ponderously to his feet. Physically, the man was taller than me, but the news of his son's death had diminished him somehow, and I had to resist the urge to reach out and support him. "Thank you for coming to tell me yourself. I appreciate it."

"Is there anyone we can contact for you?" Vic asked. Her features were tight, but I could see the emotional undercurrent playing out behind her passive expression. No. It never did get any easier.

Eddie shook his head. "No. Thank you. My parents live next door. I will go to them myself. Does Bonnie know?"

"Not yet. We're going to go see her when we leave here."

Eddie wiped a work-roughened hand across his face and took a deep breath. "If it's okay with you, I am going to call her husband. He should be with her."

"That's a fine idea, Eddie," I said. "We'll stay with her until he arrives."

"That's kind of you, Walt." He hung heavily on the door, his big, strong frame looking suddenly frail. "Go on and tell his mother. And tell her…tell her I am sorry I didn't take her concerns more seriously. Maybe if I had – "

Vic interjected. "There is nothing you could have done. You can't blame yourself."

"She's right, Eddie," I said. "You couldn't have known."

He shook his head again. "Then I should have done things differently many years ago – not let him continue on the path that led him to this terrible end." He grimaced as fresh tears brimmed on his dark lashes. "Perhaps I couldn't have known…but I should have done better."

Bonnie Calloway answered her hotel room door in a matching pink pajama set with her hair pulled back into a messy bun at the base of her neck, and a glass of amber liquid in her hand - bourbon, if the row of tiny, airplane-sized liquor bottles on her table were anything to go by. It was late, but her television was on and the ice in her glass was fresh.

"Oh, hello," she said, blinking up at me. "I wasn't expecting to see you so soon." I was struck suddenly by what a lovely shade of blue her eyes were, and by the knowledge of how devastated they were going to look in the next few seconds.

"I'm sorry to trouble you so late in the evening, Mrs. Calloway," I began. "But I thought it best to come and see you as soon as we had any information."

"Did you find Brian?" she asked, stepping away from the door so that we could enter. "Please come in. I'm sorry I'm not quite dressed; I was getting ready for bed."

"That's quite alright, ma'am," I said. I took off my hat and held it in both hands, feeling the painfully familiar weight of the news I was about to disclose pressing down on my shoulders. "I'm afraid we have some bad news."

"You couldn't find him?" There was a hopeful note in her voice, but realization had already begun to seep into her expression. Her eyes were pleading, her knuckles turning white where she was gripping the glass hard between her fingers.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," I said as gently as I could. "Brian was killed in an altercation a few days ago at a campground outside of Bozeman."

There was a single moment like an indrawn breath when nothing happened. And then the glass tumbled from her fingers and shattered against the floor. She brought her shaking hands up to cover her mouth and gasped like she was drowning. She probably felt like she was. "Oh no," she said softly. "My baby."

Bonnie stood forlorn in her matching pajamas set, with broken glass scattered on the floor around her bare feet, weeping silently. I took a step towards her, the glass crunching under my boots as I reached down and lifted her with one arm behind her knees and the other around her shoulders, and then I carried her over to the sofa. I would have put her down, but she fisted her hands into the front of my shirt, so I simply turned and sat us both down, holding her against my chest while she wept.

It was close to midnight before Vic and I headed home. As promised, we stayed with Bonnie until her husband, Bob, arrived. I had comforted her as best I could while Vic cleaned up the broken glass, and, once the initial shock had passed, answered her questions to the best of my ability while Vic made coffee. I described the clothes Brian had been wearing, and showed her the copies of his driver's license and credit cards, all of which had been removed from the wallet we had found in the victim's back pocket, along with his cell phone. Her hands smoothed over his driver's license photo again and again. I thought about Vic's question from earlier. Would she ever feel normal again? Maybe. But not for a long, long time.

We drove back to the cabin without much in the way of conversation. It had been a difficult, exhausting day, and I was weary to my bones. Vic went on ahead to the bedroom, and by the time I had turned off the lights and secured the doors, she was already in bed, laying on her side with her eyes closed. I brushed my teeth, and then turned out the lights before I slid beneath the sheets next to her, and then lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, praying for a sleep which, despite my exhaustion, felt like a distant promise.

After a long silence, Vic spoke softly into the darkness. "Walt? Are you awake?"

"Mmhmm."

She turned over so that she was facing me, her face inches away from mine. "Walt…I'm sorry," she said. And it was only then that I realized that she was crying.

"Vic? What's wrong?" Startled, I reached for her and drew her into my arms.

She butted her head up against my chest, her breath hitching. "I'm so sorry. It's all my fault. You didn't want to take this case, and I made you."

"Vic." I tried to pull away so that I could see her face, but she clung to me, so, for the second time today, I simply let the woman in my arms cry until she couldn't anymore.

I smoothed a hand across her hair, petting her like a skittish horse until her breathing evened out. "I'm not angry, you know."

"Of course not," she replied, her voice still thick with tears. "You never get angry."

I laughed. "Well, now we both know that's not true."

"At me," she amended. "You never get angry at me."

"That's also not true," I said. "However rarely. But I'm not angry with you now."

"I should never have pushed you to take on this case. Like you said – it's not your job anymore." She pushed up on her elbow so that she could look me in the face, her own cast in shadow by the moonlight coming in through the window. "Walt, I really was just trying to help. I didn't mean to drag you into the middle of this mess. I just thought if you had something to do…"

"Vic," I said again. "Do you think I wish I hadn't helped Bonnie Calloway?"

"Well…don't you?"

I shook my head and reached out to wipe the last remnants of her tears from her cheeks with the pad of my thumb. "Absolutely not. Of course, I wish it had turned out differently, but, if I hadn't stepped in, how long do you think it would have been before someone else went looking for Brian? People go missing from the Rez all the time, and, most of the time, nobody looks for them. Most of the time, they slip through the cracks and their families never get closure. At least, this way, Eddie and Bonnie won't have to spend the rest of their lives wondering."

She settled back down next to me, and then reached up to touch my cheek. "You're not just saying that to make me feel better?"

"No," I said and bent to kiss her forehead. "I'm not. In fact, I think you were probably right about me all along. I'm not sure I was really meant for retirement. I need something to keep me busy. And if I can help out a little bit along the way, so much the better."

I could hear the smile in her voice this time. "So, you're saying I was right?"

"This time," I said with mock seriousness. "But don't let it go to your head."

"I would never," she said, and tucked herself underneath my chin. "Well, maybe I would a little."

I chuckled and then tightened my arms around her. Sleep was still a long time coming, but I found peace there in the dark, with the woman I loved wrapped in my arms.

A/N: A sad end for the Many Bridges family, but perhaps Walt has finally found his calling?

Enormous thanks for the reviews/messages! You have no idea how motivating they can be! For instance, I finished this chapter in less than a year!