Phantom Purloiners, page 9
He didn’t have anything to say.
Actually, this was not true. He had been doing quite a bit of talking. To himself. In public, so to speak, in the psychiatric-holding facility. This was part of the plan. He only had to do four things publicly, in order, all of them legal:
1.Show up at the Frank M. Canton Hotel and claim to be someone he was not.
2.Allow himself to be taken to Casper for a psychiatric hold.
3.Talk to some cop from North Carolina.
4.Vanish.
He didn’t know when the cop from North Carolina was going to come. But his loyer would tell him. The conversation would be his final act. Then he’d be in the wind.
CHAPTER 25
Oddly, and for Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes,” who got the heebie-jeebies if he was too far from ocean salt water, he had always wanted to visit Casper, Wyoming. It wasn’t something on his bucket list in the sense that he wouldn’t have missed some great life adventure by not going. Rather, it was because he wanted to walk along the Platte River.
Why?
Because, like the coast of North Carolina, it had a ghostship. The environs of Sandersonville included the stretch of ocean where the Carrol A. Deering was discovered. The Carrol A. Deering had been a schooner with five masts which had run aground off Cape Hatteras in 1921, just up the coast from Sandersonville. Unlike other ships that had run aground, this one had no crew. All navigation equipment was gone as was the ship’s log—along with two lifeboats and all the crew’s personal property including clothing and seabags. And, most perplexing, food for a meal was being prepared when whatever happened. After an exhaustive investigation by the US Departments of the Treasury, Justice, the Navy, State, Revenue, and the US Coast Guard, no definitive answer was ever found. Half a century later the fate of the Carrol A. Deering was attributed to the mysterious forces of the Bermuda Triangle.
What fascinated Noonan was a similar tale of the Platte River. In this case, it was the Death Ship or Phantom Ship of the Platte.
The ship did not have a name.
It just appeared.
If that was all, then it would have been nothing more than grist in the ongoing maybe-strange-but-true tales of the Badlands—stories like the Big Nose George’s skin shoes, the jackalope, and the Pedro Mountain Mummy. Supposedly, the Death Ship of the Platte River first appeared in 1862 when a trapper by the name of Leon Webber alleged that he saw a phantom ship—its sails and mast coated with ice—preceding a massive fogbank, moving up the Platte River. History does not record if Webber had been drinking at the time, but it is hard to believe a man in the Badlands in those years would not have had a few at any time of day. There were also no witnesses to this sighting, it should be added. Supposedly, again, according to Webber, a frozen crew was on deck who, according to Wikipedia, were “huddled around a corpse on a canvas sheet.” This was a portending of a person’s doom, which, in the case of Webber—again according to Wikipedia—was Webber’s fiancé who “died later that same day.” It is unclear how Webber, clearheaded or not, from shore, could have seen a corpse of anyone lying on a sheet of canvas on the deck of a ship in motion—and a many-masted schooner at that—in the middle of a river. Where Webber’s fiancé was at the time is unclear.
Unclear also was the location of Gene Wilson’s wife on that tragic day in 1886 when Wilson reported seeing the same ship. Again, he was onshore, Wilson swore he had seen the “body of his wife laid out on the canvas.” Yet again, in 1903, one Victor Heibe was chopping down a tree on the banks of the Platte River when he saw the ship, and, again, on the canvas was “the body of a close friend who died the same day.”
It was never discovered why the ship was only seen in late fall. Then there was the question of why a multimasted schooner would be in a river named Plat by the French, which translated to Flat in English. Pioneers knew the river as the Plat, and more than one described it as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Further, the weather in Wyoming in the “late fall” was hardly conducive to an ice-laden multimasted schooner.
So, for Heinz Noonan to be headed up Highway 25 to Casper about the same time of the year as the appearance of the alleged Death Ship of the Platte River was a labor of historical love. After he had made his official rounds in Casper, he intended to drive the 111 miles to Guernsey and then go 6 miles southeast of town. Just in case, he kept telling himself, just in case, you know, the Death Ship of the Platte River made an appearance. He was not particularly interested in seeing anyone laid on a sheet of canvas, whether he knew them or not.
But then again there were some people . . .
Casper was the second-largest city in Wyoming, but even then it had barely sixty thousand people. That was miniscule by North Carolina standards. Nevertheless, the city reeked of the history of the West. In this case, West was a part of the country, not a direction. The city had been established on the site of Fort Casper, which had been built in the middle of the eighteen hundreds because it had been an ideal location for ferries to cross—of course, the Platte River. Not only did the military protect the river crossing but the telegraph and mail service too, which followed. The name Casper came from the son of Colonel Collins, the namesake of Fort Collins. True to the tradition of Wyoming oddly, Fort Collins, the city, was named after a fort that was never built there. Caspar Collins had been killed by Indians in the area. The garrison then known as the Platte Bridge Station was renamed Caspar in his honor. This fort had walls. Again, true to the tradition of Wyoming oddly, the cartographers misspelled Caspar as Casper, and the city’s name remains Casper to the present day.
Troops were only in Fort Casper for about three months. It was abandoned in 1867 when the troops moved south and established Fort Fetterman, which was the site of the largest Indian massacre to date. On December 21, 1866, ten years before the Little Big Horn, Colonel William J. Fetterman and eighty soldiers were suckered into battle against Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. It was estimated that the eighty soldiers and Fetterman faced a horde of two thousand Indians who unleashed a rain of forty thousand arrows.
Chloe Fetterman, the State of Wyoming forensic specialist, made it clear she was related to William J. “Direct descendant of William’s brother. You might say my roots are right here in Wyoming.”
“And in the right city,” commented Noonan. “It’s good to know someone appreciates local history.”
“No such thing as local history,” she retorted. “It’s all part of national history. What happens here affects everywhere, and what happens everywhere affects here. Chaos theory in action.”
“I like your attitude,” Noonan said as he sat down. “History is not the story of the past; it’s the study of the future.”
Fetterman—Chloe, not William J.—smiled. (Though it might have been possible for William J. to be smiling—in another dimension.) “With a name like Fetterman, in this state, at this time, you draw attention.”
“You talking about the Nimerigar?”
“Today, yes. In the past, their predecessors. You’re from North Carolina, so the population has become used to everyone living unhappily side by side. This is the West. The Sand Creek Massacre was last week. John Chivington was scum of the earth. It just so happened that he was white. There are plenty of cases of Indian Chivingtons. It’s just not PC to bring them up.”
“Ah, the stench of politics.”
“Ah, yes. And now to business, what do you want to know?”
“And you know who I am?”
“We’re a small state. No one ever comes to visit me. Yeah, you’re either Captain Heinz Noonan of the Sandersonville, North Carolina, Police Department—who likes to be called Heinz—or the tooth fairy. I’ve got almost all of my adult teeth, so I’m betting you’re Heinz.”
“I give up. Whacha got?”
“Zip.”
“You’re the forensic guru for Wyoming, and you’ve got zip!”
“Politics, Heinz, politics. We have a state crime lab in Cheyenne. It wants to handle the big cases. Murder is a big case. So . . . we little people gather the evidence and send it to them. They do the actual forensics.”
“Ah, the people of sweat and the people of show. The people of sweat do the work; the people of show take the credit.”
“Same the whole world over. So what I’ve got is zip.”
“Well, then tell what you can.”
“I collected a lot of red blood. It was human blood. We did a field test. I’d say the blood was ten to twelve hours old when I collected it.”
“How much was there?”
“Lots.”
“So whoever it was could not be alive?”
“That’s what I’d guess.”
“I was told there was blood splatter.”
“Careful with that term. It will take an expert to determine the details, and the expert we have . . .”
Noonan finished the sentence, “. . . is at the crime lab in Cheyenne and was not at the scene of the crime.”
“Correct. So—for the moment—was there splatter? Yes. What kind of splatter, I don’t know. I’m not an expert. But then again, there are enough forensic programs on television to clue anyone into making blood splatter. All you have to do is sling some bloody clothing around. There was blood splatter on the ceiling of the room, but that would be easy to fake.”
“Footprints?”
“Easy to fake. Everything in that room screamed fake.”
“Why so?”
“No body. No blood trail out of the room. No blood in the bathtub. No drag marks down the hallway. No personal effects in the room. No fingerprints. I’d say it was faked.”
“Why?”
“Uh, uh, uh.” She smiled and shook an index finger at him. “I’m the forensic person. You’re the detective. I should be asking you that question.”
“I don’t want to break your heart, but I do not have the slightest idea. I’m used to finding the money angle and tracing it to the perpetrators.”
“Well, I can’t help you there. Officially, the room had lots of a red substance looking like blood. It smelled like blood. It was sticky like blood. I took samples, which I sent to the state crime lab for analysis and DNA testing. Good luck on getting results anytime soon. There were footprints in the red substance. There were no fingerprints. That’s all I can say.”
“It’s enough. You have time for some wild questions?”
“I always have time for fantasies.” She smiled.
“OK. Where’s the money here?”
“I don’t see a dime anywhere. The room was empty when I got there. The guy they took to the psychiatric facility here in town had no money in his wallet. No big bucks there.”
“The Bodacious robberies in Washakie got the thieves all of about thirteen thousand dollars, which is p-r-e-t-t-y thin.” Noonan shook his head. “I’ll be visiting with the chiefs of police in Bridger and Colter. Anything I should know?”
“The cubed root of seventeen. No. This is Wyoming. Are those robberies related? Sure. Why not? Same MO and same suspects. Did the thieves get much? Nope. The only thing odd about the three is that the perps seemed to have disappeared after the crime. At least twice anyway. In Bridger and Washakie. Odd, you know. In towns that small to vanish. Bridger, well, that’s another story. Fourth of July weekend and the rodeo was in town. Lots of six-foot-tall men with short women all over town. Dump the masks, and the perps would fit right in. Colter and Washakie, not so much.”
“The Bridger robbery, then. Anything else odd?”
“Everything about Bridger is odd. It’s a unique Wyoming town. It’s historically odd because it has water—a lot of it. Even more important, it has a lake with easy access from the interstate. I don’t know what you know about Wyoming, but water is a very big deal here—at least during the summer. If you’ve got water, you’ve got gold. Quite literally. Bridger is on a huge lake—Buckle Bunny Lake. Because it has the lake, it has a tourist industry. You can rent boats in Bridger and fish.”
“Could the perps have taken a boat and sailed away?”
“Not in a sailboat. Powerboat, maybe, but I doubt it. State troopers have a chopper, and any boat on the water would be met with law enforcement. I haven’t heard that any boat actually made it across the lake that day. It’s a huge lake. All the boats rented that day came out of Bridger and came back that evening. The Bridger police are very good. They checked everyone out.”
“Another case of vanishing then.”
“Could be. But I doubt it. We just haven’t figured out how they did it yet. Sorry I could not help you with the blood work. You’ll have to wait a while for the DNA report. The state crime lab has it on low profile. No body, no crime. There are other murders with bodies that have to be considered first.”
“This is one time I agree with politics.”
“Anything else I can help you with?”
Noonan thought for a moment. “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Do you have any kind of a mechanical person here? You know, someone who does forensics on vehicles.”
“Not really. When the state crime lab doesn’t take our case, we have someone who goes over a vehicle looking for blood, fingerprints, fiber. The usual. But you mean someone who knows engines. The best person to talk to Nels Birkenbinder. He manages the bus station here in Casper. Worked his way up from mechanic. A bit quirky. Thinks he’s a reincarnated Viking. But he does know engines. When we have problems here, he does the repairs.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“If you spend time out of a city, remember the explorer’s code.”
“Explorer’s code?”
“Take nothing but photos. Leave nothing but footprints. Break nothing but silence. Kill nothing but time.”
“Got it.”
CHAPTER 26
Trust is a wonderful thing. It is also very fragile. Once broken, it is gone forever. He didn’t care. He’d spent a lifetime building trust across the state. And it had got him nothing. It was not as if he was respected for it. He wasn’t. He had just been another bureaucrat—usually said with a sneer. He had been the minion of the state. For a lifetime he had been the pebble in the shoe of corporations who were making more during his lunchbreak than he would make in a lifetime.
No more.
He was on a different wavelength now. He was in the right place at the right time. Even more important, he knew he was in the right place at the right time. Success, he was discovering, was more than sitting around and waiting for it to call. It was seizing the moment. Carpe diem.
Carpe diem was a fine quote to use in an English class, but it took more than that in real life. It meant taking a chance, marshaling your resources. Then you had to strike. You had to make your move. He would. He could. He had the keys to every county office in the state. Had had them for years. Now he was going to use them.
CHAPTER 27
When Chloe Fetterman had said that Nels Birkenbinder was a quirky Viking, Noonan had not been sure what she meant. But the moment he stepped into the Casper bus terminal, he knew exactly what she meant. Adorning the back wall of the terminal was a massive ceramic map of Norway with the mountain ranges supersized. Also supersized was a print of two men, clearly Norwegian, on skis whisking through a forest. Both men were only using one ski pole, and one of the men had what appeared to be a baby on his back.
As Noonan was taking a closer look at the print, Nels Birkenbinder came out of his office at the back of the terminal. If Hollywood studios were ever to be looking for the perfect Viking, Birkenbinder was their man. As tall as Noonan, he had a full head of long red hair and beard to match. If there was an ounce of fat on him, it was well hidden. Broad at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, his jumpsuit fit him perfectly. Had he been at the prow of a Viking vessel with horns on the steerer’s head, he would have been a perfect fit—except for the jumpsuit.
“Thorstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka,” he said proudly as he pointed at the print. “Do you know the story?”
“Actually, no. Is that a baby on the back of one of them?”
“Not just a baby, the future and greatest king of Norway. Haakon Haakonsson. For more than a century, there had been open civil war between the Birkenbeiners and Baglers.”
“Birkenbeiners. Like your name?”
“Absolutely. Birkenbeiners. Named because when they were poor, they wore trousers made of birchbark. In 1203, the Birkenbeiner king was poisoned and a new king elected. What no one knew at the time was that the king had a son, an infant at the time. That was the good news. The bad news was that the child, eighteen months old, was living the territory of the Birkenbeiners’ mortal foe, the Baglers. So a band of Birkenbeiners slipped into Bagler territory and took the child.”
“Let me guess,” said Noonan pointing to the print. “The Baglers found out about the child and sent their assassins.”
“Because of a traitor!” Bierkenbeiner said with venom in his voice. “To make sure child lived, a collection of Bierkenbeiners held up the Baglers while the two greatest skiers in the history of Norway”—he pointed to the print—“Thorstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka spirited the baby hundreds of miles to Nidaors. They all survived, and the child ushered in the Norwegian Golden Age.”
“I’m impressed,” said Noonan. “Just don’t ask me to repeat any of those names.”
Bierkenbeiner laughed. “It’s not easy being a Viking in Wyoming. But you’re not here to talk about Vikings. You want to know about buses.”
“How did you know that?”
“Wyoming is a very small town with a very long street. What can I do for you?”
“Tell me about smoke from a bus.”
“All buses smoke just like all cars smoke. You just don’t see the smoke. Anytime you have combustion, you have smoke. Buses smoke more than cars because they burn diesel, and most people see the bus smoke because they are directly behind the bus. You want to know about blue smoke.”
