Breaking Point

5

Because his house on Bighorn road was midway between Big Stream Ranch and the highway he’d need to take to get to Dull Knife Reservoir, Joe stopped long enough to let Toby out into the corral and dump the horse trailer. Poke, Dulcie’s gelding, greeted Toby by playfully biting him on the butt. Toby kicked back at Poke and missed. Rojo, Marybeth’s other horse, watched the two of them imperiously from the corner of the corral.

Joe’s district was considered a “two-horse” district by the department, meaning he received reimbursement for horses, tack, food, and vet bills. It was a two-horse district because of the vast size of it-more than 1,800 square miles. He was also in charge of a department snowmobile, a boat with an outboard motor as well as a drift boat, and a four-wheel ATV. And, of course, his assigned pickup, which was stuck on top of a mountain and he might never retrieve.

As he put the three horses out to pasture, he heard Marybeth’s van drive up the road and swing into the driveway in the front. He checked his watch-4:38 in the afternoon-and wondered why she was home so early.

As he unhooked the trailer hitch from the ball on his pickup, he heard Marybeth park in front. She was apparently on a break from work. Then the back door opened and slammed shut, and she emerged from the house. He thought she looked lovely: blond, slim, compact, with green eyes and nice cheekbones.

“Hey,” he said, cranking the trailer hitch up and over the ball of his truck.

“You saw Butch Roberson?” she asked.

He stood and wiped away a drip of sweat that coursed down the side of his face from his hatband. “How’d you know that already?”

“Dulcie told me. She said you called it in.”

“Yup.”

“Joe, did you hear what happened?”

“Some of it,” he said, repeating the reports he’d heard over the radio.

“Do they think Butch had something to do with it?”

“That’s my impression,” Joe said. “It’s still too early to say. I’m not sure anyone knows anything yet.”

“How did he seem to you?” she asked, concerned.

Joe shrugged. “Strange. Different. Spooked, I guess.”

“But he didn’t tell you anything? He didn’t confess?”

“Nope. And he didn’t shoot me, either.”

“I don’t think that’s funny, Joe.”

He grinned.

“Hannah is inside,” Marybeth said, gesturing toward the house. “I haven’t talked with her yet. She doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know what’s going on at their house, but apparently law enforcement is there questioning Pam.”

“Man,” Joe said, shaking his head. It was strange to be so close to people who were apparently under suspicion.

“I feel so bad for Hannah,” Marybeth said, as if reading his mind. “I don’t think she really knows what’s going on.”

“Maybe I’ll know more in a while,” Joe said, telling her his intention to go back up into the mountains to Aspen Highlands. “I guess I didn’t realize they’d bought a lot up there.”

“Pam mentioned it to me,” Marybeth said. “She said they’d scraped together enough to buy some land to build their retirement home. I don’t think they’ve started building anything yet, though. I don’t think they can afford to. The construction business hasn’t exactly been booming around here, as you know.”

“Could be worse,” Joe said. “They could be trying to restore a historic hotel.”

Marybeth’s glare caught him off guard, and he realized he’d hit a nerve.

“I was just joking,” he said, feeling his ears flush hot.

“I’m not amused,” she said.

“I’ll call when I know something,” he said, giving her a good-bye kiss that she returned without much enthusiasm.

“Hannah’s staying for dinner and maybe for the night,” Marybeth said. “When my shift is over, I’ll come back and feed everyone.”

“Sheridan and April are home?”

“They will be soon. Sheridan gets off at six, and April’s off at six-thirty. Sheridan’s supposed to pick April up.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” he said. “And go ahead and start dinner without me.”

“Ah,” she said. “I hoped you’d be home.”

“That’s the way it goes,” he said, climbing into the cab of his pickup. Daisy was already there.

Joe took Hazelton road up into the Bighorns to Dull Knife Reservoir. Dust hung in the air on the gravel road-there had been plenty of traffic before he got there-and the waning sun fused through it to give the scene a burnished orange cast. Trees closed in and opened into mountain meadows and closed back in again, and he regretted his ill-timed joke with Marybeth about the hotel. It wasn’t necessary, and he didn’t harbor any resentment toward her or the prospect of the project. In fact, he trusted her business acumen and admired her tenacity, and sometimes wished he didn’t love his job and these mountains so much, so he could focus his ambition on enterprises that would better benefit his family.

“Remind me to apologize,” he asked Daisy. Daisy looked back as if she understood.

He turned off the gravel road to a graded two-track at a sign in the trees announcing the Aspen Highlands development. The road plunged down into a wooded swale, then leveled out at the bottom as it got closer to the reservoir. Dull Knife had been created years before by damming the Middle Fork of the Powder River and flooding the creek basin. A smattering of cabins had been built on the east and west sides, but Aspen Highlands was obviously more preplanned. The roads through it were wide and straight and graded, and there were already a dozen or so homes built on two-acre lots in the trees.

The Roberson property was easy to find because of the collection of law enforcement vehicles he could see parked in the grass just off one of the spur roads. There were three sheriff’s department SUVs, a pale green U.S. Forest Service pickup, and a highway patrol cruiser. Joe swung in off to the side of the vehicles, told Daisy to stay, and cracked the windows for her.

It was a beautiful afternoon: warm, still, almost sultry. The air was fused with pine, pollen, and wildflowers. Joe could also get a whiff of the tawny surface of the reservoir itself.

He approached the scene as if he were the first to arrive, keeping his eyes and ears open.

The lot itself was rectangular, and the borders were obvious. There were homes on both the east and west sides of the lot; an Austrian-looking chalet style on one side and an A-frame on the other. Behind the Roberson lot was a two-story log cabin built within the last couple of years, judging by the sheen on the logs and shine of the green metal roof. The cabin had a clear view of the scenic reservoir below.

Joe paused for a moment to study the other homes. By their drawn shades and the lack of any vehicles around them, he guessed no one was staying in them at the time. There were no observing neighbors standing around the perimeter of the location, or anyone talking with the deputies and other law enforcement inside.

Although he’d driven past the sign before, he’d never ventured into the development. He’d expected to find something more rural and remote, and was surprised how close the homes were to one another.

The north side of the Roberson lot appeared to be the edge of the Aspen Highlands development, and it flowed seamlessly into the National Forest. Someone-Butch? — had set up a half-sheet of plywood in front of a bermed backstop of dirt. The plywood was peppered with small holes, and had obviously been used for target practice. The paper targets had been removed. Next to the plywood was a stack of hay bales, likely used for archery practice. He looked around in the grass for the wink of spent brass and didn’t see a single ejected cartridge. Whoever had been shooting had been meticulous about cleanup. The setup looked safe and well thought out to Joe, and certainly not an unusual sight in Twelve Sleep County.

Joe ducked under yellow crime scene tape that had been tacked to tree trunks and entered the lot. There was nothing on the lot except grass, an orange Kubota tractor with a loader on the front and a backhoe bucket on the back, and a mound of freshly dug soil. A knot of officers stood together off to the side of the mound, and their faces swung toward him. One of the uniformed deputy sheriffs-Joe knew him-nodded his way and detached from the others.

Deputy Justin Woods was young, tall, and angular. He was a fairly new hire since Sheriff Reed had cleaned house of McLanahan’s team of thugs. He’d recently returned from training at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy in Douglas, and his uniform was crisp and new. As he greeted Joe, he tipped his hat back on his head.

“Joe.”

“Justin.”

He gestured toward the mound of dirt. “Sheriff Reed is on the way up here with our evidence tech. We’re waiting for the go-ahead to start digging.”

Joe stepped to the side so he could see the mound better. It was about seven feet long and five feet wide, and the soil was so fresh some of the larger rocks poking out from it hadn’t dried completely. Severed cables of tree roots were mixed with the soil.

“Sure looks like a grave, don’t it?” Woods said.

“Yup.” Joe nodded.

The surface around the mound was scored with V-shaped tractor tire tracks.

Woods said, “We’ve got to check the backhoe for prints once the tech gets here. But it sure looks like somebody used it to dig this hole last night.”

Joe agreed, and winced.

“I found the car,” Woods said, gesturing over his shoulder in a vague southern direction. Joe frequently used the gravel ridge road Woods indicated. It was cut into the side of a steep mountain with a sloping grade on one side and a chasm on the other. There were turnouts for faint-of-heart drivers to return to civilization. Woods said, “It looked like somebody took it up the road and deliberately drove it off the ridge road into the canyon. They probably thought it would roll to the bottom and we wouldn’t find it for months, but there were enough trees to stop it from crashing all the way to the creek.”

“But no one inside?” Joe asked.

“No. But I could see those U.S. Government plates easy enough from the road.”

“And you’re thinking this happened last night?” Joe asked.

Woods shrugged. “No way to know for sure yet, but that would be my guess.”

Joe looked over at the mound again.

“Yeah,” Woods said. “If somebody was buried alive. .” He let his voice trail off.

Woods nodded toward his colleagues, who leaned on their shovels in a pool of late-afternoon sunlight. “I’d kind of like to get these guys started before it gets dark.”

Joe felt a pang of frustration. He glanced at the deputies with their spades and the Forest Service ranger talking to the highway trooper. He could tell by the way the ranger was gesticulating that he was showing the size of a fish he claimed he’d caught recently in Meadowlark Lake on the other side of the mountains. He thought, So much of law enforcement work is just standing around.

He heard the pop of gravel under tires and looked up to see Sheriff Mike Reed’s van strobing through the trees. It was a ten-year-old handicap-equipped panel Ford that had been specially purchased in Billings at an auction for the sheriff’s use. Joe could see Reed was at the wheel, using the hand controls, with the evidence tech, another new employee named Gary Norwood, in the passenger seat. The election the year before had taken place while Reed was in surgery from his gunshot wounds. He’d emerged from the hospital as the paraplegic new sheriff of Twelve Sleep County. The county commissioners had agreed to buy the van, but they were balking at purchasing the motorized wheelchair he’d requested, so Reed rolled down the side ramp and was immediately stopped fast in the soft dirt. Norwood bounded over to help, but the sheriff waved him off. Instead, Sheriff Reed leaned forward and grasped the thin wheels with his big hands and shoved, powering his way to firmer ground, where Joe met him.

“I hate this,” Reed said to Joe under his breath. “I’m fine in the office. I can get around. But out here it’s another story. But I’m the sheriff. I need to get out into the county.”

“Yup,” Joe said, stepping aside.

“And I don’t want anyone helping me, including you.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this,” Reed said. Joe wasn’t sure he would, either. Before he’d been cut down by a desperate suspect, Reed had been tall and strapping, with a graceful, loping stride. It had been less than a year since the shooting, but Joe could see the loss of muscle mass in Reed’s legs. His uniform trousers hung from bony thighs.

Reed spun in his chair toward Woods and asked for an update.

Joe listened in as Woods briefed the sheriff. Norwood tiptoed around the scene, snapping digital photos and placing evidence markers. Finally, Reed nodded, then called out to his men, “Okay, do this gently. Don’t get your weight behind the shovel. Sift the dirt off and put it on a plastic tarp. You don’t want to slice into anything with those shovels, gentlemen.”

The deputies nodded and got to work. Reed glanced at his wristwatch and instructed Woods to call back to the sheriff’s department and request a walled outfitters’ tent, a generator, and portable lights.

“This may take a while,” he said.

When Woods walked back to his SUV to get on the radio, Reed said to Joe, “I think I know what we’re going to find.”

“What?”

“At least two federal employees of the Environmental Protection Agency from Denver.” His tone was solemn.

Joe looked over. The deputies were proceeding with caution, as instructed. When streams of soil were dropped on the blue plastic tarp, it made a sizzling sound.

“You saw him, then,” Reed said to Joe, as they watched the fresh dirt get removed from the mound an inch at a time.

“Butch Roberson?” Joe said. “Yeah, I ran into him just above Big Stream Ranch this afternoon. He told me he was scouting elk.”

Joe described Butch’s clothing, gear, and rifle.

“On foot?” Reed asked.

“Yup.”

“And you believed his story?” Reed asked, flat.

“No reason not to,” Joe said, a little defensive.

“If you’d brought him in, we might be a long way to solving this thing,” Reed said, not meeting Joe’s eyes.

Joe didn’t respond.

“Sorry,” Reed said, shaking his head. “There was no reason for me to say that, and no reason to bring him in. You didn’t know anything at the time. But you know him, right?”

“Through my daughter,” Joe said. “We aren’t fishing buddies or anything.”

Reed sighed and shifted his weight in his wheelchair from his left to his right side. Joe noticed the grimace on his face as he did it, and realized Reed was in pain. He hadn’t considered that Reed still hurt from the gunshot wounds.

Joe asked Reed when the sheriff’s office had first gotten the tip to check out the Roberson lot.

“This morning,” Reed said. “Somebody called it in. Said he knew of two federal agents who were headed up here last night who never checked into the Holiday Inn.”

“Who called?”

“He didn’t give his name at first, but we tracked him down.” Reed dug a notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers guy out of Cheyenne named Kim Love,” he read. “He said he was supposed to come up here with the two EPA guys, but he got cold feet, or he felt kind of sick and needed to lie down. He said both things, so his story is a little hinky. I asked the guy to stay another night at the hotel before he headed back to Cheyenne so we could talk to him a little more. He said he’d check with his supervisor. That pissed me off, so I told him if he tried to leave my county tonight I’d have him arrested,” Reed said with irritation.

Joe asked, “He didn’t say why he and the EPA guys were here in the first place?”

Reed said, “Something about serving a compliance order. I didn’t quite understand at first. Not until I talked with Pam Roberson.”

Joe was confused. “I haven’t heard a thing about any conflict between the Robersons and the EPA. I’m pretty sure Marybeth doesn’t know anything from Pam or she would have told me. Why is the EPA poking their noses around here, anyway?”

Reed snorted and said, “You won’t believe it when I tell you. You’ll want to be sitting down, if what Pam told me is true.”

Joe waited, but Reed changed the subject.

“This might turn out to be my first murder investigation as sheriff,” Reed said. “I used to be damned hard on McLanahan for the way he ran things. But now all I can think of is what we’re missing or forgetting to do so some defense lawyer doesn’t rip us up in court. This isn’t easy, Joe. And I don’t even have to tell you what a shit storm we’re going to have if there are two dead Feds in my county.”

Joe looked up. He said, “No, you don’t.”

“We heard they’re on their way now. A couple of Fed big shots from the regional headquarters in Denver and some folks from Washington, D.C. They want to get up here and make sure we know what we’re doing, I guess. They want to make sure I don’t botch the investigation.”

“You won’t,” Joe said, feeling bad for his friend.

“I should just tell them to turn around and go back. That we can handle it.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because they didn’t exactly ask my permission,” Reed said, narrowing his eyes in anger. “You know how they can be.”

One of the deputies digging into the mound gave a shout, and Gary Norwood jogged over to him. Joe and Reed saw the pops of a camera flash, then watched the evidence tech drop something into a paper evidence bag before he walked it over to show the sheriff.

Joe looked inside as the tech opened the top.

“One of our guys said it’s a.40 Sig,” Norwood said. “I sniffed it, and it doesn’t appear to have been fired. We’ll know for sure once we take it down to the lab and run it through tests.”

Reed sat back in his chair and whistled.

Joe said, “Hold it. These guys were armed? Armed EPA people?”

“We haven’t found any bodies yet,” Norwood cautioned Joe.

“Still,” Joe said, incredulous.

Ten minutes later one of the deputies with a shovel called out, “Got a body.”

Sheriff Reed pursed his lips and rotated back on his wheels, then set the chair down. It was an involuntary reaction, Joe thought, as if Reed were shuffling his feet after hearing bad news. Reed whispered, “Damn it.”

Another deputy said, “I’m pretty sure we’ve got two.”

Norwood hovered around the pit taking photographs, the flash popping.

Joe left Reed and walked to the mound, which was now a shallow pit. He saw a young, waxen, square-jawed face that appeared to be looking up and out of the ground, eyes open. There was a single black hole in the brow. Next to the face was the profile of another man, older, turned on his side, his eyes closed as if sleeping. The arm of the older man was flung over the chest of the first, as if trying to cuddle. Their skin was dirty, pale, and dry, as though it were made of plastic. Norwood’s camera exposed their dead white skin in bursts of flash.

Joe thought, So indecent. So obscene. So without dignity in death. Norwood retrieved two body bags from the back of Reed’s van and unfurled them on the grass.

“Keep digging,” Reed said from the perimeter. “Let’s hope there’s no more in there.”

Joe felt his stomach constrict. He turned and stumbled out of the lot, ducking under the yellow tape. He tried to hold in his nausea, and succeeded until he heard retching from one of the new deputies. Then he bent forward, his hands on his knees, until there was nothing left in his stomach.

He heard the heavy bass beat of helicopter blades before he saw the lights in the still dusk sky. From the cab in his SUV, Woods said to Reed, “It’s the Feds. They sent up a bird from Denver, and they want to know where they can land.”

“Tell ’em the airport,” Reed said sourly.

“Sir,” Woods said, holding the mic away from him and covering it with his palm as though he wanted nothing more to do with it, “I think they want to land here.”

“What, do they expect us to clear a landing zone like we’re in Vietnam?” Reed asked. “Tell them if they have to, they can land up on the road.”

“Will do,” Woods said, ducking back into his vehicle because the sound of the helicopter was filling the forest.

Joe looked up as the chopper appeared, hovering a hundred feet above the treetops. The wash of wind swayed the trees and caused clouds of pine needles to drop to the forest floor. A spotlight clicked on and bathed the lot and everyone within the tape in blinding white light.

“This is Special Agent Chuck Coon of the FBI. Clear the crime scene immediately,” came the amplified voice from the helicopter, “and I mean immediately. Put those shovels down and step behind the tape until we give you the word.”

The deputies all looked toward Sheriff Reed, and Joe saw the man curse. Reed rarely cursed, so it surprised Joe. But the sound was so deafening he had to lip-read the words: “Fucking Feds.”

Reluctantly, Reed motioned to his men to step back away, and they did so, grumbling.

“Coon,” Joe said to Reed. “Remember him? He usually doesn’t come on so strong.” Thinking: Coon must have somebody senior to him up there in the chopper, barking commands.

Coon was Joe’s age, and he’d supervised the Cheyenne office of the FBI for several years. He was tightly wound and boyish-looking, with several children and a nice wife. Joe and Chuck Coon had been flung together on several cases, and despite the inherent bureaucratic tension, they’d gotten along well and Joe respected him.

The helicopter above them was still for a moment, then banked and flew above toward the road. As it did, Joe felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, and he turned his back to the beating sound and opened his phone. He could barely hear what the dispatcher said, so he had to keep asking her to repeat the message.

“The governor’s on his way,” she said, practically shouting into the other end. “And he’s bringing your new director with him.”

“New director?” Joe asked.

“Oh,” the dispatcher said, “you haven’t heard?”