Endangered

24

Light rain was changing to snow when Joe reached his home on Bighorn Road.

Spring storms in the Rockies always had the most impact. Unlike the powder snow that came down in the winter, spring snow was heavy with moisture. It piled up quickly and broke tree branches and downed power lines. Although it usually melted down within a day or so, the heavy wet blanket seemed like a cruel ending to a harsh winter, especially when the trees were starting to bud and baby animals had just been born.

His plan was to feed the horses and Daisy, grab a change of clothes, and head to Billings to meet up with the rest of his family before the storm hit.

A text from Marybeth and an unexpected visit from Revis Wentworth changed all that.

The text read:

We made it safe and sound to Billings and the hospital in front of the storm. The doctors have postponed bringing April out of the coma until tomorrow or the next day. We’re getting two rooms at a motel, but no need to try to get here tonight. Word is the highways may close anyway. I’ll call when we get settled.

xoxoxoxoxo,

MB

—

WENTWORTH’S WHITE PICKUP was parked at an odd angle in front of Joe’s house, but Wentworth didn’t appear to be inside. Joe parked in front of his garage and approached the pickup cautiously with his hand on the grip of his Glock. The cab was unoccupied except for an empty Wild Turkey bottle on the passenger seat.

Puzzled, Joe pushed through his front gate and walked across the lawn. The snow was starting to stick to the grass, big thick flakes of it, and he could feel it melting through his uniform shirt.

Several scenarios went through his mind when it came to Wentworth. He could imagine the man sitting in his lounge chair with a shotgun across his lap, waiting for Joe to come in the door. Or he was there with Annie Hatch and a new story to try and get Joe off his trail.

Or . . .

He was drunk and passed out on their couch. Which he was.

Joe sighed and mounted the porch steps and entered his house. As he walked through the mudroom, he heard Daisy whimper from behind his closed bedroom door.

He stood over Wentworth, who had obviously found Joe’s bottle of bourbon and had drunk a quarter of it, judging by the level of liquor in the bottle, and Joe said, “Hey, wake up.”

Wentworth didn’t move. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or showered since Joe had seen him last. He reeked of alcohol and sweat. His hair looked greasy and was pasted to his skull.

“Wake up, Revis,” Joe said loudly, nudging Wentworth’s foot with his boot tip.

Wentworth groaned but his eyes didn’t open.

Joe thought about dousing the man with a bowl of ice water, but he didn’t want to get his couch wet. Instead, he let Daisy out of the bedroom where Wentworth had obviously shut her inside.

After quivering and rubbing herself against Joe’s legs to say hello, she romped into the living room and started licking Wentworth’s face, just as planned. As she did, Joe got a digital micro-recorder out of his breast pocket and turned it on to record, then put it back while Daisy lapped away. At first, Wentworth responded by smiling and mewing. Joe could only guess what was going on in the man’s mind and assumed it involved a vision of Annie Hatch. Then Wentworth cracked one eye, saw Daisy’s mouth a few inches away, and screamed.

He shot up to a sitting position and raised his hands as if surrendering.

“Get that animal away from me.”

“Daisy,” Joe said, and his Labrador padded over to him.

“Stay.”

Daisy sat on her haunches and looked from Joe to Wentworth, who was obviously terrified. Wentworth used his sleeves to dry his face and neck.

“Start by explaining why you’re in my house or I’ll . . .” Joe paused for effect. “Let her lick you again.”

Wentworth lowered his hands and looked around. He shook his head. “I can’t even remember getting here.”

“But you did. What if my wife or girls had found you here? What if they’d called the sheriff on you?”

He obviously hadn’t thought of that, and he winced as he reached out for Joe’s bottle.

“Right, help yourself to more of my whiskey,” Joe said. “Don’t even bother to ask.”

“I need it,” Wentworth said, drinking straight from the bottle.

Then he looked at Joe with glassy eyes and said, “What can I do to get myself out of this? Is there something I can say or do? This could kill my whole career.”

Joe remained standing. “So you’re willing to admit it, then? You won’t get fired. Nobody in a federal agency ever gets fired.”

Wentworth’s first reaction was to argue, but he fought against it. He said, “I could get reassigned to Bumfuck, North Dakota. Right now, no one down at the lab will return my calls. Annie won’t even talk to me. The walls are closing in on me, and you know it.”

“Yup,” Joe said.

“So what can I do? I know I have a problem,” he said, raising the bottle again and flirting with it. “I know I drink too much and get out of control and do things I later regret. Like coming here. Or that night out at Lek Sixty-four.”

“So you admit you killed all those birds,” Joe said.

Wentworth nodded. That wouldn’t be an admission on the tape.

“Start by admitting it and we can go on from there,” Joe said.

“I just did.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. “Then you tampered with the evidence I gathered and sent false evidence to your lab in Denver. I know because we opened the box this morning and looked at it.”

Wentworth moaned. He said, “You were down there?”

“I met Kelsea Raymer,” Joe said. “We opened the box together. Where did you get those spent shotgun shells?”

Wentworth tipped his head back and moaned again. Joe was getting tired of the moaning.

“I found ’em in the back of a guy’s truck. It isn’t hard to find shotgun shells around here.”

“That’s what I figured,” Joe said. “And the tire tracks?”

Wentworth hesitated, then mumbled, “In an alley in back of the Stockman’s Bar.”

“Now, doesn’t it feel good to come clean?”

“Not really,” he said, sullen.

“Isn’t that why you came here?”

“Kind of,” he said. “I was kind of hoping you and I could work something out, you know?”

“Like a bribe?”

“Maybe. I’ve got some money in savings, and by looking around here you could use it.”

Joe shook his head. “Have you been drinking since I saw you last?”

“Pretty much. I can’t remember it all. I do remember going back up to Lek Sixty-four to see if you’d found all the shotgun shells. It was the second time I’d been up there since the incident.”

“Did you find any?” Joe asked.

“A couple.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “I didn’t send all of the originals in the evidence box. I held a couple out that came from your shotgun. Kelsea Raymer has them now. She’ll no doubt find your fingerprints on them and determine they were fired from your shotgun.”

Another moan.

“When is the last time you ate something?” Joe asked.

Wentworth shrugged.

“I’m going to scramble some eggs,” Joe said. “Maybe you ought to put a cap on that bottle.”

“It’s a disease,” Wentworth said. “I have a disease.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

As he cracked eggs into the skillet, Joe said, “In the state of Wyoming, only one party to a recorded conversation needs to be aware of it to serve as evidence in court.”

He let that sink in for a minute.

When Wentworth staggered to his feet and leaned against the kitchen doorframe, Joe patted the recorder in his front pocket.

“So I’m fucked,” Wentworth said.

“Yup.”

“I just wanted to spend every second I could with Annie,” he said.

“Judge Hewitt has a soft spot for crimes of passion.”

“He does?”

“No,” Joe said. “He doesn’t.”

—

THEY SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. Joe watched Wentworth pick at his food at first, then cover it with ketchup and shovel it in like a wolf.

Joe said, “Do you feel bad about killing all those sage grouse? I mean, you’re considered an expert on them. I would have thought you were serious about their survival.”

Wentworth didn’t respond, but just kept eating.

“Maybe if you explained it to me, I could understand,” Joe said.

“Nothing to explain,” Wentworth said. “Those birds are just a means to an end for me. Not all that much is known about them, so it wasn’t all that hard to become an expert. Their population has boomed and crashed over the years. It’s crashing now. If we can hold up a few oil rigs and slow the crash—well, good for us.”

“What if they’re crashing on their own? Without our help?” Joe asked. “I see it all the time. Some years, there are rabbits everywhere you look, and the next year there are coyotes and foxes in huge numbers eating rabbits. Then the rabbit population crashes and I don’t see many coyotes or foxes for a few years. Could that be the case with sage grouse?”

“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “It’s above my pay grade to answer that question. It’s just a job, okay? I don’t have a personal investment in them.”

“But the people out here have a personal investment in what you decide about those birds,” Joe said. “It might mean either they have jobs or they don’t.”

“They can always change jobs,” Wentworth said. “Or move. That’s not my problem.”

Joe frowned. Wentworth spooned more eggs onto his plate.

“What’s happening outside?” Wentworth asked as he chewed.

“It’s snowing.”

“Crap. Can I make it back to the hotel?”

“You sure aren’t staying here,” Joe said.

—

WHILE DOING THE DISHES, Joe turned to Wentworth, who was still at the table sipping coffee.

“Didn’t you just tell me you’d gone up to Lek Sixty-four before?” Joe asked. “I don’t mean the night you shot up all the birds. I thought you said you’d gone up there looking for shotgun shells previously.”

“Are you recording this?”

“Sure am.”

“Can you shut it off?”

“No point now, Revis.”

Wentworth sighed. He said, “Yeah, I went up there last week after you’d been up there. That’s after I came up with the plan to send bad shells to Denver. I wanted to see if I could find any more of mine and get rid of them.”

“When did you go?”

Wentworth surveyed the ceiling for a few minutes, then said, “Last Tuesday.”

Joe thought back. Tuesday was when Nate was ambushed.

“Did you see anything unusual up there?” Joe asked.

“No. This whole state’s unusual.”

“Come on, Revis. Think.”

Wentworth drummed his fingers on the table, and Joe watched his expression change. He’d recalled something.

“I’d been drinking,” he said. “But I remember I was out there in the sagebrush and I heard a vehicle coming down that two-track. I thought it was you, so I got on the ground.”

“Where was your pickup?”

“I hid it half a mile away, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.”

Joe nodded. “So who was it?”

“I don’t know their names,” he said with distaste. “But it was just a couple of locals. Two vehicles went by and I laid there thinking: ‘Here I am, drunk and facedown in the mud. It has come to this.’”

Joe felt something tingle in his chest. He sat down at the table across from Wentworth.

“Two vehicles?”

“Yeah. One following the other.”

“What did they look like?”

Wentworth said, “The first one was an old beat-up SUV. There was an old man driving it. The second was one of those white panel vans, you know? Like plumbers drive? A younger man—a big bruiser type—was driving that.”

The tingle spread. Joe recalled Eldon and Brenda’s battered Suburban in front of the courthouse. He’d seen it again at their place. The first driver sounded like Eldon. The second: Bull.

“The white van,” Joe said, “was it new?”

“Newer than the beat-up piece of shit,” Wentworth said.

“Was there any writing on the side of it?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t see all that well down there, but it was something like ‘Yahoo Falconry Services.’ There was a picture of a bird on the side, like an eagle.”

Joe leaned forward and his glare must have been intense because Wentworth sat back in his chair.

“Could it have been Yarak Falconry Services?”

“Yeah, maybe. I guess it could have been,” Wentworth said. “That’s a word I’m not familiar with. Why does it matter, anyway?”

Joe ignored him. “The SUV and the van were going which direction?”

“Toward the mountains.”

“Did you see either one of them come back down later that night?”

“Naw—I was gone by then.”

Joe guessed only one of the vehicles had returned, and he thought he knew which one.

Why would the Cateses have Nate’s van? Where was Olivia Brannan?

The world tilted.

Joe asked, “Did you go up there again?”

Wentworth seemed surprised at the question. “How did you know?”

“Someone saw your truck up there Thursday night. I didn’t suspect you until I heard about it.”

“Who was it?”

“That isn’t important now,” Joe said. “So did you go back up there Thursday?”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

Joe said to Wentworth: “It’s time for you to go.”

Wentworth looked hurt. He said, “What should I do?”

“Go back to your room and bunker in. There’s a storm coming. Just sit tight.”

“But what about me?”

“What about you?” Joe said.

“I’m supposed to just sit at the Holiday Inn and wait to be arrested?”

“That’s what I’d recommend,” Joe said. “Dry out and get some sleep. Stay sober. Do the right thing. Now, git.”

—

FROM THE FRONT WINDOW, Joe watched Wentworth’s taillights vanish in the light snow.

He surveyed the sky. The snow wasn’t falling as heavily as he’d thought it would. He might have a few hours before it really came down. It was still three hours until it got dark.

He turned and said, “Come on, Daisy. We’re going to go find Eldon’s secret elk camp.”