Blood trail

2

JOE PICKETT was stranded on the roof of his new home. It was the first Saturday in October, and he was up there to fix dozens of T-Lock shingles that had blown loose during a seventy-five-mile-per-hour windstorm that had also knocked down most of his back fence and sandblasted the paint off his shutters. The windstorm had come rocketing down the eastern slope of the mountains during the middle of the night and hit town like an airborne tsunami, snapping off the branches of hoary cottonwoods onto power lines and rolling cattle semitrucks off the highway and across the sagebrush flats like empty beer cans. For the past month since the night of the windstorm, the edges of loosened shingles flapped on the top of his house with a sound like a deck of playing cards being shuffled. Or that's how his wife, Marybeth, described it since Joe had rarely been home to hear it and hadn't had a day off to repair the damage since it happened. Until today.

He had awakened his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sheridan, a sophomore at Saddlestring High, and asked her to hold the rickety wooden ladder steady while he ascended to the roof. It had bent and shivered as he climbed, and he feared his trip down. Since it was just nine in the morning, Sheridan hadn't been fully awake and his last glimpse of her when he looked down was of her yawning with tangles of blond hair in her eyes. She stayed below while he went up and he couldn't see her. He assumed she'd gone back inside.

There had been a time when Sheridan was his constant companion, his assistant, his tool-pusher, when it came to chores and repairs. She was his little buddy, and she knew the difference between a socket and a crescent wrench. She kept up a constant patter of questions and observations while he worked, even though she sometimes distracted him. It was silent now. He'd foolishly thought she'd be eager to help him since he'd been gone so much, forgetting she was a teenager with her own interests and a priority list where "helping Dad" had dropped very low. That she'd come outside to hold the ladder was a conscious acknowledgment of those old days, and that she'd gone back into the house was a statement of how it was now. It made him feel sad, made him miss how it once had been.

It was a crisp, cool, windless fall day. A dusting of snow above the tree line on Bighorns in the distance made the mountains and the sky seem even bluer, and even as he tacked the galvanized nails through the battered shingles into the plywood sheeting he kept stealing glances at the horizon as if sneaking looks at a lifeguard in her bikini at the municipal pool. He couldn't help himself-he wished he were up there.

Joe Pickett had once been the game warden of the Saddlestring District and the mountains and foothills had been his responsibility. That was before he was fired by the director of the state agency, a Machiavellian bureaucrat named Randy Pope.

From where he stood on the roof, he could look out and see most of the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. It was quiet, he supposed, but not the kind of quiet he was used to. Through the leafless cottonwoods he could see the reflective wink of cars as they coursed down the streets, and he could hear shouts and commands from the coaches on the high-school football field as the Twelve Sleep High Wranglers held a scrimmage. Somewhere up on the hill a chain saw coughed and started and roared to cut firewood. Like a pocket of aspen in the fold of a mountain range, the town of Saddlestring seemed packed into this deep U-shaped bend of the Twelve Sleep River, and was laid out along the contours of the river until the buildings finally played out on the sagebrush flats but the river went on. He could see other roofs, and the anemic downtown where the tallest structure was the wrought-iron and neon bucking horse on the top of the Stockman's Bar.

In the back pocket of his worn Wranglers was a long list of to-do's that had accumulated over the past month. Marybeth had made most of the entries, but he had listed a few himself. The first five entries were: Fix roof Clean gutters Bring hoses in Fix back fence Winterize lawn The list went on from there for the entire page and half of the back. Joe knew if he worked the entire day and into the night he wouldn't complete the list, even if Sheridan was helping him, which she wasn't. Plus, experience told him there would be a snag of some kind that would derail him and frustrate his progress, something simple but unanticipated. The gutter would detach from the house while he was scraping the leaves out of it, or the lumber store wouldn't have the right fence slats and they'd need to order them. Something. Like when the tree branches started to shiver and shake as a gust of wind from the north rolled through them with just enough muscle to catch the ladder and send it clattering straight backward from the house to the lawn as if it had been shot. And there he was, stranded on the roof of a house he really didn't even want to live in, much less own.

The wind went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.

"Sheridan?"

No response. She was very likely back in bed.

"Sheridan? Lucy? Marybeth?" He paused. "Anybody?"

He thought of stomping on the roof with his boots or dangling a HELP! message over the eave so Marybeth might see it out the kitchen window. Jumping from the roof to the cottonwood tree in the front yard was a possibility, but the distance was daunting and he visualized missing the branch and thumping into the trunk and tumbling to the ground. Or, he thought sourly, he could just sit up there until the winter snows came and his body was eaten by ravens.

Instead, he went to work. He had a hammer and a pocketful of nails in the front of his hooded sweatshirt. And a spatula.

As he secured the loose shingles he could see his next-door neighbor, Ed Nedny, come out of his front door and stand on his porch looking pensive. Nedny was a retired town administrator who now spent his time working on his immaculate lawn, tending his large and productive garden, keeping up his perfectly well-appointed home, and washing, waxing, and servicing his three vehicles-a vintage Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee, and the black Lincoln Town Car that rarely ventured out of the garage. Joe had seen Nedny when he came home the night before applying Armor All to the whitewall tires of the Town Car under a trouble light. Although his neighbor didn't stare outright at Joe, he was there to observe. To comment. To offer neighborly advice. Nedny wore a watch cap and a heavy sweater, and drew serenely on his pipe, letting a fragrant cloud of smoke waft upward toward Joe on the roof as if he sent it there.

Joe tapped a nail into a shingle to set it, then drove it home with two hard blows.

"Hey, Joe," Ed called.

"Ed."

"Fixing your roof?"

Joe paused a beat, discarded a sarcastic answer, and said, "Yup."

Which gave Ed pause as well, and made him look down at his feet for a few long, contemplative moments. Ed, Joe had discerned, liked to be observed while contemplating. Joe didn't comply.

"You know," Ed said finally, "a fellow can't actually fix T-Lock shingles. It's like trying to fix a car radio without taking it out of the dash. It just can't be done properly."

Joe took in a deep breath and waited. He dug another nail out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

"Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't try or that you're wasting your time. I'm not saying that at all," Ed said, chuckling in the way a master chuckles at a hapless apprentice, Joe thought. The way his mentor-gone-bad Vern Dunnegan used to chuckle at him years ago.

"Then what are you saying?" Joe asked.

"It's just that you can't really fix shingles in a little patch and expect them to hold," Ed said. "The shingles overlap like this." He held his hands out and placed one on top of the other. "You can't fix a shingle properly without taking the top one off first. And because they overlap, you need to take the one off that. What I'm saying, Joe, is that with T-Lock shingles you've got to lay a whole new set of shingles on top or strip the whole roof and start over so they seat properly. You can't just fix a section. You've got to fix it all. If I was you, I'd call your insurance man and have him come out and look at it. That way, you can get a whole new roof."

"What if I don't want a whole new roof?" Joe asked.

Ed shrugged affably. "That's your call, of course. It's your roof. I'm not trying to make you do anything. But if you look at the other roofs on the block-at my roof-you'll see we have a certain standard. None of us have patches where you can see a bunch of nail heads. Plus, it might leak. Then you've got ceiling damage. You don't want that, do you?"

"No," Joe said defensively.

"Nobody wants that," Ed said, nodding, puffing. Then, looking up at Joe and squinting through a cloud of smoke, "Are you aware your ladder fell down?"

"Yup," Joe answered quickly.

"Do you want me to prop it back up so you can come down?"

"That's not necessary," Joe said, "I need to clean the gutters first."

"I was wondering when you were going to get to that," Ed said.

Joe grunted.

"Are you going to get started on your fence then too?"

"Ed…"

"Just trying to help," Ed said, waving his pipe, "just being neighborly."

Joe said nothing.

"It isn't like where you used to live," Ed continued, "up the Bighorn Road or out there on your mother-in-law's ranch. In town, we all look out for each other and help each other out."

"Got it," Joe said, feeling his neck flush hot, wishing Ed Nedny would turn his attention to someone else on the street or go wax his car or go to breakfast with his old retired buddies at the Burg-O-PARDNER downtown.

Joe kept his head down and started scraping several inches of dead leaves from his gutter with the spatula he'd borrowed from the kitchen drawer.

"I've got a tool for that," Ed offered.

"That's okay, Ed," Joe said through clenched teeth, "I'm doing just fine."

"Mind if I come over?" Nedny asked while crossing his lawn onto Joe's. It was easy to see the property line, Joe noted, since Ed's lawn was green and raked clean of leaves and Joe's was neither. Nedny grumbled about the shape of Joe's old ladder while raising it and propping it up against the eave. "Is this ladder going to collapse on me?" Ed asked while he climbed it.

"We'll see," Joe said, as Nedny's big fleshy face and pipe appeared just above the rim of the gutter. Ed rose another rung so he could fold his arms on the roof and watch Joe more comfortably. He was close enough that Joe could have reached out and patted the top of Nedny's watch cap with the spatula.

"Ah, the joys of being a homeowner, eh?" Ed said.

Joe nodded.

"Is it true this is the first house you've owned?"

"Yes."

"You've got a lovely family. Two daughters, right? Sheridan and Lucy?"

"Yes."

"I met your wife, Marybeth, a couple of weeks ago. She owns that business management company-MBP? I've heard good things about them."

"Good."

"She's quite a lovely woman as well. I've met her mother, Missy. The apple didn't fall far from that tree."

"Yes, it did," Joe said, wishing the ladder would collapse.

"I heard you used to live out on the ranch with her and Bud Longbrake. Why did you decide to move to town? That's a pretty nice place out there."

"Nosy neighbors," Joe said.

Nedny forged on. "What are you? Forty?"

"Yup."

"So you've always lived in state-owned houses, huh? Paid for by the state?"

Joe sighed and looked up. "I'm a game warden, Ed. The game and fish department provided housing."

"I remember you used to live out on the Bighorn Road," Nedny said. "Nice little place, if I remember. Phil Kiner lives there now. Since he's the new game warden for the county, what do you do?"

Joe wondered how long Nedny had been waiting to ask these questions since they'd bought the home and moved in. Probably from the first day. But until now, Nedny hadn't had the opportunity to corner Joe and ask.

"I still work for the department," Joe said. "I fill in wherever they need me."

"I heard," Nedny said, raising his eyebrows man-to-man, "that you work directly for the governor now. Like you're some kind of special agent or something."

"At times," Joe said.

"Interesting. Our governor is a fascinating man. What's he like in person? Is he really crazy like some people say?"

Joe was immensely grateful when he heard the front door of his house slam shut and saw Marybeth come out into the front yard and look up. She was wearing her weekend sweats and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She took in the scene: Ed Nedny up on the ladder next to Joe.

"Joe, you've got a call from dispatch," she said. "They said it's an emergency."

"Tell them it's your day off," Nedny counseled. "Tell 'em you've got gutters to clean out and a fence to fix."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Ed?"

"We all would," Nedny answered. "The whole block."

"You'll have to climb down so I can take that call," Joe said. "I don't think that ladder will hold both of us."

Nedny sighed with frustration and started down. Joe followed.

"My spatula, Joe?" she asked, shaking her head at him.

"I told him I had a tool for that," Ed called over his shoulder as he trudged toward his house. "I'M NOT used to people so close that they can watch and comment on everything we do," Joe said to Marybeth as he entered the house.

"Did you forget about my mother on the ranch?" she asked, smiling bitterly.

"Of course not," Joe said, taking the phone from her, "but what's that saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?"

The house was larger than the state-owned home they'd lived in for six years, and nicer but with less character than the log home they'd temporarily occupied on the Longbrake Ranch for a year. Big kitchen, nice backyard, three bedrooms, partially finished basement with a home office, a two-car garage filled with Joe's drift boat and snowmobile, and still-unpacked boxes stacked up to the rafters. It had been three months since they bought the house but they still weren't fully moved in.

Ten-year-old Lucy was sprawled in a blanket on the living room floor watching Saturday morning cartoons. She had quickly mastered the intricacies of the remote control and the satellite television setup and reveled in living, for the first time, as she put it, "in civilization." Sheridan was, Joe guessed, back in bed.

Marybeth looked on with concern as he said into the telephone, "Joe Pickett."

The dispatcher in Cheyenne said, "Please hold for the governor's office."

Joe felt a shiver race down his back at the words.

There was a click and a pop and he could hear Governor Spencer Rulon talking to someone in his office over the speakerphone, caught in midsentence: "… we've got to get ahead of this one and frame and define it before those bastards in the eastern press define it for us-"

"I've got Mr. Pickett on the line, sir," the dispatcher said.

"Joe!" the governor said. "How in the hell are you?"

"Fine, sir."

"And how is the lovely Mrs. Pickett?"

Joe looked up at his wife, who was pouring two cups of coffee.

"Still lovely," Joe said.

"Did you hear the news?"

"What news?"

"Another hunter got shot this morning," Rulon said.

"Oh, no."

"This one is in your neck of the woods. I just got the report ten minutes ago. The victim's hunting buddies found him and called it in. It sounds bad, Joe. It really sounds bad."

If the governor was correct, this was the third accidental shooting of a big-game hunter in Wyoming thus far this fall, Joe knew.

"I don't know all the details yet," Rulon said, "but I want you all over it for obvious reasons. You need to mount up and get up there and find out what happened. Call when you've got the full story."

"Who's in charge?" Joe asked, looking up as his day of homeowner chores went away in front of his eyes.

"Your sheriff there," Rulon said, "McLanahan."

"Oh," Joe said.

"I know, I know," the governor said, "he's a doofus. But he's your sheriff, not mine. Go with him and make sure he doesn't foul up the scene. I've ordered DCI and Randy Pope to get up there in the state plane by noon."

"Why Pope?" Joe asked.

"Isn't it obvious?" Rulon said. "If this is another accidental death we've got a full-blown news event on our hands. Not to mention another Klamath Moore press conference."

Klamath Moore was the leader and spokesman for a national anti-hunting organization who appeared regularly on cable news and was the first to be interviewed whenever a story about hunting and wildlife arose. He had recently turned his attention to the state of Wyoming, and particularly Governor Spencer Rulon, whom he called "Governor Bambi Killer." Rulon had responded by saying if Moore came to Wyoming he'd challenge him to a duel with pistols and knives. The statement was seized upon by commentators making "red state/blue state" arguments during the election year, even though Rulon was a Democrat. In Wyoming the controversy increased Rulon's popularity among certain sectors while fueling talk in others that the governor was becoming more unhinged.

"Why me?" Joe asked.

The governor snorted. Whoever was in the room with him-it sounded like a woman-laughed. Something about her laugh was familiar to Joe, and not in a good way. He shot a glance toward Marybeth, who looked back warily.

"Why you?" Rulon said. "What in the hell else do you have to do today?"

Joe reached back and patted the list in his pocket. "Chores," he said.

"I want fresh eyes on the crime scene," Rulon said. "You've got experience in this kind of thing. Maybe you can see something McLanahan or DCI can't see. These are your people, these hunter types. Right?"

Before Joe could answer, he heard the woman in the governor's office say, "Right."

Joe thought he recognized the voice, which sent a chill through him. "Stella?"

"Hi, Joe," she said.

At the name Stella, Marybeth locked on Joe's face in a death stare.

"I was going to introduce you to my new chief of staff," the governor said, "but I guess you two know each other."

"We do," Stella Ennis purred.

"Joe, are you there?" Rulon asked.

"Barely," Joe said. WHILE JOE changed into his red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope game and fish department patch on the shoulder and clipped on his J. PICKETT, GAME WARDEN badge above the breast pocket, Marybeth entered the bedroom and said, "Stella Ennis?"

The name brought back a flood of memories. He'd met her in Jackson Hole on temporary assignment three years before. She was the wife of a prominent and homicidal developer. She'd "befriended" the previous Jackson game warden and complicated his life. She tried to do the same with Joe, and he'd been attracted to her. It was a time in their marriage when they seemed on the verge of separation. They persevered. Now they owned their first home.

"The governor introduced her as his new chief of staff," Joe said.

"How is that possible?" she asked. "Wasn't her husband convicted of trying to kill her?"

Joe shook his head. "He was never charged because Stella turned up alive and well. Marcus Hand was his lawyer. The Teton County DA plea-bargained the rest of the charges and Don Ennis paid some fines and moved to Florida."

"How did she wind up in the governor's office?"

"I have no idea," Joe said. "She's resourceful."

"This state is too small sometimes," she said.

"Yes it is."

Marybeth approached Joe and pulled him to her with her hands behind his neck, so their faces were inches apart. "Stay away from her, Joe. You know what happened last time."

"Nothing," Joe said, flushing.

"Yes, but," she said.

"Honey…"

"She's a very good-looking woman. I've seen pictures of her. She's beautiful, and very dangerous. But so am I."

He smiled. "You have nothing to worry about."

"I believe you."

"Besides, it sounds like I'll be too busy dealing with Sheriff McLanahan and Randy Pope. I'm not looking forward to that."

"I don't trust her," Marybeth said. "But I do trust you."

"You should."

"Plus, Sheridan and Lucy would kill you if you ever did anything untoward."

"That I'm sure of," Joe said.

"So what's going on? Another hunter?"

"Apparently," Joe said. "I don't know much yet, but the governor's worried."

"Any idea how long you'll be gone this time?"

"I should be back tonight."

"No," she said. "I mean on this case."

He buckled on his holster with the.40 Glock, pepper spray, and handcuffs and reached for his Stetson that was crown down on the dresser.

"I don't know," he said. "We don't know if it's another accident or foul play. Everyone's jumpy because of those other hunters who got shot. No one wants to imagine that someone is hunting hunters, but everyone is thinking that."

She nodded. She didn't need to tell him there were parent-teacher conferences later in the week at Lucy's junior high and Sheridan's high school. Or about the party they'd been invited to with members of their church. Or about the fact that she wanted him home while she battled with her mother and needed his support.

"I'll be home as soon as I can," he said.

She walked him to the door. Lucy was still watching television and didn't look at him. She simply said, "Gone again?"

Joe stopped, hurt. Marybeth pushed him gently out the door into the front yard.

"We'll be here when you get home," she said. Then: "It looks like there's someone who would like to go with you."

He turned, hoping Sheridan was on the porch pulling on her jacket. But it was Maxine, his old Labrador who had turned white four years before and was now half-blind, half-deaf, and fully flatulent.

"Come on, girl," Joe said.

Maxine clattered stiff-legged down the sidewalk, her tail snapping side to side like her old self. Joe had to lift her back end into the cab.

"I am curious how she ended up on the governor's staff," Marybeth said. "I'll have to do a little snooping."

Joe kissed her. "You've made your point," he said. "There's nothing to worry about here. I need to go."

"I understand," she said, "but Ed Nedny is going to be real upset with you."