Lone Creek

8

Driving into Helena from the north was usually something I enjoyed. The old part of the city was a pretty sight, built in a pocket at the base of steep forested slopes that rose like waves into the mountains beyond. Downtown was studded with grand old stone buildings. There were quite a few real mansions, and even the modest houses lining the streets conveyed a comfortable old-time feel. The huge dome of the state capitol and the twin spires of St. Helena Cathedral gave a sense of grandeur.

But on this particular trip, two khaki-uniformed sheriff's deputies in a cruiser were right behind me, escorting me to the Lewis and Clark County jail.

By now I'd had long enough to start grasping how slick Balcomb was, how far ahead of me he'd been at every step. All the time I'd worked there, I'd considered Kirk's commando act to be a silly show of "security." Now I realized that he'd really been gathering information, and that had provided Balcomb a ready-made excuse for bracing me. I'd been stupid enough to make it easy, but I was willing to bet that Balcomb had some pretext for getting rid of just about anybody on the place. He'd also had the foresight to impress on the other men that I wasn't to be trusted or believed, before I'd had a glimmer of what was happening.

I stood amazed at the kind of mind that could think like that. I suspected that he'd had a lot of practice.

The jail was in the original county courthouse, in the hills toward the south end of town. Probably its most famous resident had been the Unabomber, when they'd first nailed him a few years ago. I'd spent a night there once myself, the result of a youthful indiscretion involving too much tequila and a barroom brawl that ended with a friend of mine running a bouncer's head through a wall. The bouncer came out of it OK and the only damage was a minor drywall repair, but everybody agreed how lucky it was that he hadn't hit a stud.

When we got there, the deputies put handcuffs on me. The older one was burly and grizzled, with the seen-it-all look of a veteran. He was decent enough to be apologetic about the cuffs, and told me it was a formality for booking prisoners. The other wasn't much more than a teenager, and had a withered arm. Helena was a big enough place so you didn't know everybody, and I didn't know these men, which was just as well-it kept things impersonal. Cops tended to give me a two-edged feeling. On the one hand, they were usually just doing a thankless job. On the other, it was easy to imagine that they liked pushing people around, and the kid with the bad arm sure seemed to.

Inside, they turned me over to the jailers. The place didn't look any more modern than on my last visit, but the drill was different. Back then, they'd just made sure my friend and I didn't have any weapons and thrown us in a tank. Now they took away my clothes and issued me a bright orange jumpsuit, so small that the seam cut into my crotch. They made me take the laces out of my boots, then shuffle in them down a hallway with a few individual holding cells not much bigger than closets. The door to mine, a solid metal slab with a mesh-fortified window about a foot square, locked behind me with a no-bullshit clang.

Late on a Saturday afternoon, it was going to take a while to reach a judge and set my bail. I figured I'd be released on my own recognizance-I was a local, and an upstanding citizen. At least, I had been until an hour ago.

The jail would probably be busy later tonight, but now the other cells were empty, with nothing stirring in the hallway, no windows to the outside world, no diversions except graffiti, scrawled by well-equipped guys eager to meet others like themselves. The bunk was a thinly padded bench too short for me to stretch out on. I sat back with my knees up and my hands behind my head, and tried to make use of my first chance to concentrate.

Maybe Balcomb didn't know anything about those dead horses-would have been appalled to find out, investigated the matter, seen to it that anybody who had it coming got punished. Maybe there'd just been some kind of bizarre accident. Maybe I was overblowing the situation and blaming him out of shock and anger.

But I was more certain now of what I'd suspected right off-that Doug Wills's stopping me didn't really have anything to do with the lumber, and neither did any of what had followed.

I might have saved myself this trip to jail if I'd come clean with the ranch hands or told the deputies when they arrived-cast a cloud on Balcomb and his motives for bracing me. But my credibility was zilch. Nobody wanted to cross a rich landowner, especially the men who worked for him. And given his smoothness, he probably had a way figured out to deflect any blame even if the horses had been uncovered.

But-more important-I was spooked worse than ever. The intensity of his reaction and his warning that I was out of my league had underscored my feeling that something really ugly was at work, and whatever I gained in the short term by exposing it might leave me facing serious trouble.

There were plenty more questions, starting with who had done the killing and why. I had to think it was Balcomb himself. There were other employees at the ranch besides Doug who I didn't much care for, but I couldn't imagine any of them treating an animal that way. Kirk had that twitchy violent edge, and I could easily see him going ballistic and shooting somebody-like me-but I couldn't believe he was capable of that kind of brutality. Balcomb must have figured that the carcasses would stay safely hidden until they decomposed. He'd have been right except for some hungry coyotes and a construction worker dumping trash on a Saturday afternoon. I could only guess that Kirk had spotted me, known that Balcomb didn't want anybody around there, and alerted him. Balcomb had immediately given orders to get me stopped, used the smokescreen of the lumber theft to question me, then fired me to justify it.

I could think of several reasons why he might get rid of a couple of horses-not pretty reasons, but at least they made some sense. The horses might have been old, costing more to care for than they were worth, or carrying a contagious disease, which he'd certainly want to cover up. There were insurance scams, too. A couple of his thoroughbreds, reported stolen, would be worth a sizable chunk of cash. The worst possibility that came to mind was a drunken rage or sheer insane cruelty. There'd been a few of those kinds of incidents around here in the past years. A group of hunters had slaughtered a sitting-duck elk herd, leaving most of them to rot; another time, some out-of-state executive types had chased a penned-up antelope herd in a jeep and run them nearly to death.

But I couldn't imagine anything to explain why the horses had been sliced open. My scalp still bristled every time those images came back to me.

I turned my mind to how I was going to handle this from here. I had an old friend named Tom Dierdorff, a respected lawyer in town and a thoroughly decent guy, who came from a big ranch family that had been here for generations, like the Pettyjohns. Balcomb needed to be accepted by people like that; and with any luck, Tom's influence would get him to drop the criminal charges. I'd get the lumber back to the ranch somehow and be done with this-no worse off except for a couple of hours in jail and the kind of memories that woke you up at three o'clock in the morning.

I hated to be a coward, hated to let something so vile slide. But I couldn't get past that queasy fear, and this wasn't my fight, anyway.