The Royal Wulff Murders

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Authors: Keith McCafferty
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the fishing?”
    “Great. Catching’s a little slow.” There was that smile again.
    Martha checked the fly hooked to the stripping guide of his fly rod and looked up.
    “My name’s Martha Ettinger. I’m the sheriff of Hyalite County. Did you know that a man was found drowned in this river a few days ago?”
    “I saw the paper,” he said. “But I thought that was down around the West Fork.”
    “A little lower actually, below Lyons Bridge. But fishermen get around. We’re trying to talk to as many as we can to see if anybody saw someone fall in or noticed anything out of the ordinary. Were you fishing this Tuesday?”
    He scratched at a stubble of beard.
    “I fished in the evening. But that was down below Ennis, in the Bear Trap Canyon.”
    “It was a long shot,” Martha admitted.
    The man nodded. “Well, that’s what fishing is, too,” he said. “Every cast’s a long shot and then sooner or later a trout comes up and your fly disappears.” He gave a short laugh. “Later, mostly.”
    Martha brought her notebook out of her shirt pocket, added his name—Sean Stranahan—and his phone number to her list of question marks, which so far consisted only of the man who had maybe seen the bear. She thanked him for his time.
    “Good luck to you, Ma’am,” he said.
    Martha hadn’t heard a man call her Ma’am in ten years.
    “Good luck yourself,” she said. She climbed up the high bank and started walking back down toward the dead-end private road where Walt had agreed to meet her.
Martha
, she said to herself,
you’re a lonely heart. You feed chickens in the morning and at night you brushyour cats and go to bed alone. The only way you’ll ever catch a man as good looking as that one is to arrest him.
    It wasn’t such a bad idea. Arrest him, she thought, then jump his bones and pump the truth out of him. Ask him, for example, why, out of all the fishermen she and Walt had talked to, he was the only one with a Royal Wulff knotted to the end of his leader.

CHAPTER NINE
A Light in the Window
    A fter the sheriff left, Stranahan clipped the Royal Wulff from his leader. With its snowy wing and red floss body, it looked about as conspicuous on the surface as a hummingbird in a teacup, and that’s precisely why he’d tried it. Any trout that managed to survive in this torrent didn’t ask questions; if a fly looked like food, it ate it. He’d given the Wulff fifteen minutes to prove that point. It hadn’t.
    He examined the flies in his box and selected a nymph pattern with a tungsten bead at the head. To the leader he added a blob of biodegradable orange indicator that would float on the surface as the fly ticked the gravel. This was about as far from fly fishing as a boy drowning a garden worm under a wine cork, he thought wryly. But it was just about as effective, too, and today he was fishing for his living, rather than the other way around.
    Or was he? What was he really doing here? When Vareda Lafayette had reluctantly sat back down in his office yesterday afternoon, he had asked directly if her brother was missing. She had insisted he wasn’t. Her brother, who would be a senior at Ole Miss this fall, had a summer job working in a fish hatchery near Great Falls on the Missouri River. The hatchery was two hundred miles north of Bridger, but he had agreed to help find the trout their father had fin-clipped on his days off. It was his second summer at the hatchery, and, having fished his way around the state, he knew the Madison River. But he didn’t have a cell phone and she hadn’t been able to reach him. Shethought he might have driven down and could be on the Madison now—that was all. But he was a kid and she wanted to hire Stranahan because he was a professional.
    “How do you know I’m a good fisherman?” he had asked her.
    She’d asked at one of the fly fishing stores for a reference and his name came up, she’d told him.
    That must have been the Kingfisher, Stranahan thought. He’d fished

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