Double Cross

home.
    On Sunday, four thirty, Flight 322 from Denver.
    DCAK might just be back to meet the flight himself.

Chapter 108

    BREE AND I FLEW to Denver on Friday afternoon, then up to Kalispell, Montana, the next morning. Our return flight was early on Sunday, so we had only a day or so to get everything done and find out as much as possible about Tyler Bell, about whatever had been going on up here in the North Woods, and about what he might be planning next.
    The drive from Kalispell to Babb took us straight through Glacier National Park. I’d always wanted to see Glacier, and it didn’t disappoint. The switchbacks on the Going-to-the-Sun Road had us alternately hugging a mountain wall, then looking straight down one. It was kind of humbling, actually, as well as beautiful, and would have been romantic—if Bree and I had any time for that on this trip. At one point, she did look over at me and say, “Where there’s a will!”
    We got to Babb just after noon on Saturday. Deputy Steve Mills kindly agreed to drive up from the sheriff’s office in Cut Bank, saving us about seventy-five miles on twisting country roads, more than an hour’s trip.
    Mills was loose and amiable, and answered our very first question without being asked.
    “Met my wife while I was on holiday here from Manchester. Fishing trip, of all things. Twelve years ago, and never looked back,” he said in his proper English. “Once this place grabs hold of you, it doesn’t let go. You’ll see, I’m quite sure. I used to call myself
Stephen
, not Steve.”
    We followed Mills south on 89, past the Blackfeet Reservation, to the tip of Lower St. Mary Lake.
    From there, he took an unmarked dirt road for another mile and a half, until we came to a mostly overgrown track on the right.
    The side road was partitioned with two police sawhorses, one of them thrown over on its side. I wondered how effective these had been against the likes of CNN and God only knew who else had wanted to visit.
    High wheatgrass brushed against the sides of the car as we drove back several hundred yards, then onto a cleared acre or more of land.
    Tyler Bell’s cabin certainly wasn’t deluxe, but it was no Unabomber shack either. He had sided it with natural red cedar that blended nicely into the landscape. It was small and nestled in the crook of a west-flowing river, with a gorgeous view of the mountains in the distance.
    I could certainly see why someone would choose this place to settle—so long as they had no need for human contact, and maybe murdered people for a living.

Chapter 109

    THE FRONT DOOR to the cabin had no lock. Deputy Mills waited for us outside, and once we entered, we smelled why. Some combination of food and garbage had been rotting in here, possibly for months. It was beyond putrid.
    “So much for this being a little slice of heaven on earth,” Bree said, putting a handkerchief over her nose as if this were a homicide scene.
Maybe it was
.
    The main room was a kitchen/dining/living area—a picture window at the back looked onto the river. All along the sidewall, Bell had a workbench littered with tools and several dozen fishing flies in various stages of completion. A small collection of rods hung on the wall.
    Other than two leather easy chairs, the furniture seemed to have been made by Tyler Bell himself, including a pair of pine bookcases.
    “You can tell a lot about a man by his books,” Mills said, finally deciding to join us. He stood in front of them, scanning the lot. “Biography, biography. Cosmology. All nonfiction. That say anything to you?”
    “Whose biographies? That would be my first question,” I said, and came over to look for myself.
    There were several volumes on American presidents—Truman, Lincoln, Clinton, Reagan, and Bushes forty-one and forty-three. Other world leaders too: Emperor Hirohito, Margaret Thatcher, bin Laden, Ho Chi Minh, Churchill.
    “Delusions of grandeur, maybe?” I said. “Fits the bill for DCAK. At least, what we think we know about him.”
    “You don’t sound too confident about your intel,” huffed Mills, who was a huffy sort.
    “I’m not. He’s been messing with us from the start. He’s a game player.”
    Bell’s bedroom was smaller and darker—dank, actually. He had a toilet and sink right in the room, partitioned off with another bookcase. I didn’t see a tub or shower, unless you counted the river. In fact it reminded me of a prison cell—and that made me think of Kyle Craig