Endangered

11

Has she had a chance to say anything yet?”

Of all the things that had been said that morning in that courtroom, it was Brenda’s parting question that lingered in Joe’s mind as the most bitter and profound. It hung in the air in the cab of his pickup like a foul smell, and it lingered as he exited the town limits and merged onto Bighorn Road. He needed to feed the horses and Daisy before embarking on his two-and-a-half-hour trip north to Billings.

It wasn’t: “How is she doing?”

Or: “When is she expected to recover?”

Or: “When can we see her?”

But: “Has she had a chance to say anything yet?”

Joe answered aloud: “What are you afraid she might say, Brenda?”

—

DESPITE TILDEN CUDMORE’S crazy guilt dance of a performance in the courtroom that morning, which seemed designed to show Judge Hewitt he was mentally incompetent to stand trial, and what he had said about April—who he’d not admitted to even knowing when he was arrested—Joe wondered why Brenda had asked that particular question.

And he wondered why the Cateses had shown up for the arraignment.

—

HE MADE THE LAST straight ascent to his home. In the distance, Wolf Mountain was budding green through his passenger-side window. And when he approached his house, he saw the white pickup with U.S. government plates parked in front.

For a moment, he wondered if the horses and Daisy could wait to eat until late that night. Then he groaned and continued into the driveway.

Annie Hatch opened the passenger-side door and walked over to greet him with her hands stuffed in the back pockets of her jeans. Her body language said: I am remorseful. Revis Wentworth stayed behind the wheel of the pickup. Apparently, he wasn’t as remorseful, Joe thought.

Joe parked and got out. “Now isn’t a good time, Annie,” he said.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said, looking up from her boot tops to Joe. “Why didn’t you tell us about what had happened to your daughter? I—we—feel terrible about pressuring you during this time in your life.”

“You’re doing your job,” Joe said. “I didn’t want to bring my own personal stuff into it.”

“But if you would have told us . . .”

Joe chinned toward Wentworth, who seemed to be studying something fascinating on the dashboard. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Joe said.

“It would have to me,” she said.

“Thank you, Annie.”

“How is your daughter?”

“She’s stable. It’s complicated.”

“Good, good,” Hatch said. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

Joe nodded. It was apparent there was more on her mind, but he didn’t want to hear what it was. He said, “Well, it was nice of you to come by, but I’m on my way to the hospital right now.”

Because she didn’t turn around and walk back to her truck, Joe knew that she definitely had more to say.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, I almost hate to ask,” she said, “but we were wondering if you’d sent that box of evidence from Lek Sixty-four to your people at the lab.”

Joe took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. The anger he’d felt in the courtroom had dissipated, but it was still within reach.

“No, I haven’t,” he said. The evidence box had been taped up and labeled, but was still on his desk in his cluttered office. He hadn’t even thought about it the past few days.

“In that case, Revis was wondering if you wouldn’t mind handing it over to us. We’d like to FedEx it to our experts in Denver. The word is getting out that an entire lek was massacred, and, well, you know how it is. We’ve got people breathing down our necks, wondering what we’re doing about it. Revis even got a call from D.C.”

Joe put his hands on his hips.

From the open window of the pickup, Wentworth spoke up. “Like you said, we still have a job to do.”

Joe knew he’d screwed up, and he wanted the sage grouse twins to go away.

He said to Hatch, “I’ll go get it. Just let me know what you hear back, okay?”

“Thank you, Joe.”

“One more thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

He pointed at Wentworth. “Keep him away from me.”

—

USING A BROKEN GREEN PINE BOUGH he’d found on the side of the road, Joe propped up the yellow crime scene tape that was stretched across the open gate of the HF Bar Ranch and then drove his pickup underneath it.

Gary Norwood was leaning against his SUV and eating an apple when Joe pulled into the ranch yard. Norwood had been on the job less than two years and had taken it straight out of college. He looked it. He wore a loose oversized cowboy shirt over a black concert T-shirt, baggy jeans, and a backwards baseball cap. He had a shaved head and a soul patch beneath his lower lip. He’d not taken off his latex gloves to eat the apple.

“The sheriff said you might stop by,” Norwood said. “I don’t mind the company, since it’s just me: the entire Twelve Sleep County Evidence Tech Department.”

“I can’t stay long,” Joe said, getting out of his pickup. “What have you found?”

“Follow me,” Norwood said, opening the back door of his SUV and tossing the apple core onto the floorboard, into a month’s worth of fast-food wrappers and other trash. “Just make sure to walk clear of the evidence markers. I’ve got everything prepped for when the feds show up later.”

He led Joe through the ranch yard on foot toward an ancient log horse barn.

“This is quite a place,” Norwood said over his shoulder. “It would be cool to see it in full operation. I might come up this summer when it’s in full swing. I bet there are some good-looking rich women who come out here to play cowgirl.”

“That’s usually the case,” Joe said. He knew how the local single cowboys and wranglers made sure they got the night off during the summer—usually Wednesdays—when the guest ranches brought their clients into town. Many liaisons between rawboned local boys and well-heeled women executives from the east had occurred over the years at the Stockman’s Bar.

“Did I hear it right that you know the guy they found here last night?” Norwood asked.

“Yup.”

“He going to make it?”

“It doesn’t sound good.”

“I can see why,” Norwood said, matter-of-fact. “Because somebody lost a hell of a lot of blood.”

—

NORWOOD WALKED JOE through his best reconstruction of what had happened.

“He was found here,” Norwood said, pointing toward a clearing on the near end of the ranch yard marked with a yellow plastic evidence marker. “I don’t know whether he was trying to crawl farther and just played out, or what.”

“Can you tell where it happened?” Joe asked.

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Norwood said. “I just wish it hadn’t rained yesterday. Any footprints or tire tracks I might have been able to find in the dirt were washed away. But I can show you where he was shot.”

Joe followed, and Norwood shined his flashlight on a massive spoor of blood on the floor of the barn. Evidence markers were spaced around the pool.

“He bled quite a bit here, so I think this is where he first went down. There’s an intermittent blood trail going out the open door and through those trees toward the ranch yard. That’s where the FBI guys found him.”

Joe said, “So as far as you know, the FBI guys never came into the barn?”

“As far as I know. I think they landed the helicopter and scooped him up and took him to Saddlestring Airport. They were met there by the Billings Life Flight chopper that took him to the hospital.”

“Why didn’t the FBI take him there?” Joe asked.

“Their chopper was too big to land on the roof, from what I understand, so they had to move him onto a smaller aircraft. You know how the feds are—only the biggest and best equipment for them.”

“Anyway,” Joe said, prompting Norwood. “Could you determine where the shots were fired from? Or how many shooters there were?”

Norwood dug out an ultraviolet flashlight from his gear bag and shined it on the back of the sliding barn door. A pattern of tiny flecks appeared under the light and glowed like a frozen starburst.

“It appears from the blood spatter that he was shot from shoulder height from one of those empty stalls over there. There’s also some blood spatter near the baseboard—see it?”

“Yup.”

“That indicates a second shooter from up there in the loft, because the spatter is nearly on the ground. So two shooters at least—one at ground level and one from above—but it’s just a guess.”

Joe rubbed his chin. “Did you find any spent casings?”

“No,” Norwood said. “The shooters must have had the presence of mind to pick them up before they left. But I think I know what kind of weapons they used.”

Joe arched his eyebrows.

“Shotguns. Both of ’em.”

Norwood walked to the doorframe of the sliding barn door while opening a pocketknife. He jabbed the point into the old wood and started digging. In a moment, Joe heard the knife click on something metallic. Norwood dug it out and handed it to Joe.

“A shotgun pellet. Pretty big, too. I’m guessing double-ought, but I’ll have to gather up a few more and measure them in my lab. It could be a zero buck, but I think it’s too big to be an ‘F’ or a ‘T.’”

“Yup,” Joe said, rolling it around in his palm.

Hunters in Wyoming didn’t use buckshot for deer. That was a southern thing, using shotguns in heavy brush at close range. Wyoming deer hunters used rifles because there was rarely much cover and most shots were at a distance. The only real use for buckshot was to kill men or bears at close range.

Norwood said, “And as you know, this makes identifying the weapons much tougher. Spent bullets have unique marks on them from the rifling of the barrel. We can identify the caliber and match up a test round fired from the same gun. But shotgun pellets? No markings. Even if we find someone with a half-empty box of double-ought shells it’s difficult to make a match that’ll stand up in court.”

“So this was a trap from the get-go,” Joe said. “Somehow, they lured him up here with the express purpose of shooting him down.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Norwood said.

—

JOE CONNECTED on the phone with FBI Special Agent Chuck Coon when he was in sight of the WELCOME TO MONTANA sign on I-90. The snowcapped Bighorns were in his rearview mirror and the vast rolling terrain was a carpet of brilliant green grass.

Coon was in charge of the Wyoming office of the FBI in Cheyenne. He was intense and honest, a by-the-book G-man as distressed by some of the goings-on in Washington as the locals. Which meant, Coon had told Joe, that he’d be stationed in far-off Wyoming for the rest of his career.

Joe said, “Nate Romanowski walked into an ambush and, from what I can tell, he wasn’t armed. How did you people let that happen?”

Coon sighed and said, “Hold on.” That was code for closing his office door so he couldn’t be overheard.

“Look,” Coon said, “the deal with your pal Romanowski was negotiated directly with the DOJ, with your governor playing a supporting role. They didn’t include us local guys in the deal and they didn’t let us see the final agreement. I didn’t even know he was gone until after the whole thing came down.”

“But they took away his weapon,” Joe said. “They sent him to his death.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” Coon said, “but then, I wouldn’t have agreed to let Romanowski out of the basement for the rest of my natural life. Everywhere he goes, somebody winds up dead or with their ears twisted off. But this isn’t any secret to you.”

“No, it isn’t,” Joe said. “So who is the agent in charge?”

“His name is Stan Dudley.”

“Can you patch me through to him?”

“No can do,” Coon said. “The only way I can talk to him is if I go through the DOJ channels in D.C. That’s the way they have it set up. Besides, I don’t think he’s in the building. I think he’s hovering around Romanowski on his deathbed, hoping he’ll find out who shot him with your pal’s last words.”

“Dudley’s in Billings?”

“I think so,” Coon said. “That’s the last I heard. But don’t hold me to it. Like I said, Dudley’s operating on a separate track. Frankly, I don’t really like the man, but that’s neither here nor there. He probably doesn’t like me, either.”

Joe paused, then asked, “But do you know what’s going on? Why would they want Nate out? Not that I’m against it, but it doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Me, either,” Coon said. “I’ve heard some things, though. Governor Rulon wanted him out because, well, he likes him. He made Romanowski promise not to commit another felony in Wyoming. But for the feds—my understanding is they wanted to put him out there to serve as bait to Wolfgang Templeton. They wanted to snare Templeton when he came after Romanowski.”

“And Nate agreed to that?”

“Apparently,” Coon said. “He agreed to stay out of trouble, but it sounds like that didn’t last very long.”

“Nope,” Joe said. “Why is the DOJ even involved? Don’t they have enough on their plate these days?”

Coon snorted. “What I’m going to tell you is complete speculation on my part. And if you repeat where you heard it, you and I are going to have a problem.”

“Shoot,” Joe said.

“Some of Templeton’s victims were crony capitalists or friends of big fund-raisers for the current administration. It’s personal. Officials who shall remain nameless want revenge on Templeton and they want to shut him up. Simple as that. Romanowski is just a means to an end.”

Joe felt his ire rising once again. “So Templeton, or Templeton’s men, found Romanowski and they took him out? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m purely speculating. Who else would want him dead? I’m surprised they even knew that quickly he was out. Unless, of course, someone on the inside let them know.”

That possibility gave Joe an instant headache. “You mean like someone in your building?”

“Like I said, I’m speculating,” Coon said.

“Who else could it be?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Coon said. “Maybe someone at DOJ tipped Templeton off. Maybe Templeton acted a lot more quickly than the bureaucracy thought possible and they weren’t prepared yet. Have you thought of that? We’re a big agency and we move slow. Someone may have started something that quickly went over their head.”

“They wouldn’t want anyone to know that,” Joe said. “There would be some big-time CYA action going on right now.”

Joe drove on. He could hear Coon breathing on the other end.

“Are you done?” Coon asked.

“I guess so. I’ve got a lot to think about.”

“You do.” Then, with his voice softening, Coon asked, “How’s your girl, Joe? I hear she’s in the same hospital.”

Joe brought Coon up to speed, and told him briefly about the calamity in the courtroom that morning.

Coon said, “It’s a good thing you’ve got Marybeth. If I had all that going on . . . I don’t know what the hell I’d do.”

Joe agreed.

“Chuck,” Joe said before punching off, “please let me know if you hear anything about Nate or Templeton.”

“Not officially,” Coon said. “But I may give you a call from time to time on your cell phone.”

“Thank you.”

“Hang in there, man,” Coon said.