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fingerprints.
    Only a few cities in Montana had the electronic system. Otherwise, prints were taken the old-fashioned way and sent to the crime lab. He had no doubt that the victim’s prints would be in the system, since he was betting the man had done prison time somewhere, possibly even Deer Lodge at some point. Which could explain how he had the photograph in his possession, if he’d crossed paths with Cullen Ackermann before his death.
    “It looks like a map,” Lynette had said of the faded marks on the back of the photo.
    Maybe at one time it had been a map, but the drawings were indistinguishable now. Still, before he died Cullen could have given the photo and map to one of the boys. If any of the boys had survived. And if these marks on the photo were a map, was it to the fabled hidden gold?
    Frank had learned to live with the slow pace investigations often took.
    That was, until this one.
    He couldn’t help feeling anxious. He had to know what he was dealing with, starting with the dead man he had cooling his heels in the fridge down at the local mortuary.
    It’s that damned photograph. His gut instinct told him that the man on that slab at the morgue was connected to the Ackermanns. Maybe he’d made Cullen’s acquaintance in prison. But why then was the rope, according to Jack, not one that was hitched at Montana State Prison, where Ackermann had been confined for the past thirty years?
    Frank knew his fear ran much deeper than that. Hadn’t he been afraid for years that Cullen Ackermann would release his vengeance on Beartooth, just as he’d promised all those years ago?
    Cullen’s dead. All the Ackermanns are dead.
    Were they? He told himself that if any of the children had survived all those years ago, they would have turned up long before this. All four boys, and the little girl had been presumed dead more than three decades ago. But the remains of only one of the boys had ever been found back up in the Crazies. Who was to say that one or more of them hadn’t survived? And had just now turned up.
    But if so, why now?
    “Because their father died,” he said to his empty office. “Cullen’s death triggered whatever is going on.”
    He knew he was jumping to conclusions, which also wasn’t like him. But Assistant Coroner Charlie Brooks had estimated the dead man’s age at somewhere around forty-five. The boys in the snapshot ranged in age from about twelve to seventeen. This photo had to have been taken about thirty years ago, which meant that the dead man could conceivably be one of the boys.
    Frank felt as if a clock had started ticking the moment Cullen Ackermann died. He had to know who the dead man was. Or wasn’t, he thought as he studied the photo again.
    When he couldn’t take it any longer, he picked up the phone and called a local artist he knew. “Have you ever done a sketch of a dead man?”
    “You mean like a police artist’s sketch?” his friend asked.
    “Exactly.”
    * * *
    N EWS OF THE BODY found by the river shot through the county like a high-powered rifle report. But since the dead man was found near the Yellowstone River twenty miles away and no one was missing from Beartooth, the news died down quickly.
    That was until the sketch of the dead man came out Saturday in the weekly Big Timber newspaper asking if anyone could identify the man.
    “Probably just some bum off the interstate,” Jack heard people saying. He hadn’t seen the paper. He’d been too busy on the W Bar G. Nor was he interested. All his attention Saturday morning at the café was on Kate LaFond.
    “Some homeless guy. Or a hobo,” he heard people saying.
    He smiled to himself. Were there still hoboes who rode the rails?
    The Branding Iron Café was packed this morning. Not because of the news about the dead man being found by the river a few days ago, but because the Sweetgrass County Spring Fair was this weekend in Big Timber.
    Everyone looked forward to the fair. It was a sign that spring had