Endangered

1

When Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett received the call every parent dreads, he was standing knee-high in thick sagebrush, counting the carcasses of sage grouse. He was up to twenty-one.

Feathers carpeted the dry soil and clung to the waxy blue-green leaves of the sagebrush within a fifty-foot radius. The air smelled of dust, sage, and blood.

It was late morning in mid-March on a vast brush-covered flat managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management. There wasn’t a single tree for eighteen miles to the west on the BLM land until the rolling hills rocked back on their heels and began their sharp ascent into the snow-covered Bighorn Mountains, which were managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The summits of the mountains were obscured by a sudden late-season snowstorm, and the sky was leaden and close. Joe’s green Game and Fish Ford pickup straddled the ancient two-track road that had brought him up there, the engine idling and the front driver’s door still open from when he’d leapt out. His yellow Labrador, Daisy, was trembling in the bed of the truck, her front paws poised on the top of the bed wall as she stared out at the expanse of land. Twin strings of drool hung from her mouth. She smelled the carnage out on the flat, and she wanted to be a part of it.

“Stay,” Joe commanded.

Daisy moaned, reset her paws, and trembled some more.

Joe wore his red uniform shirt with the pronghorn patch on the sleeve, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, and a Filson vest against the chill. His worn gray Stetson was clamped on tight. A rarely drawn .40 Glock semiauto was on his hip.

Twenty-one dead sage grouse.

In his youth, everyone called them “prairie chickens,” and he knew the young ones were good to eat when roasted because they’d been a staple in his poverty-filled college days. They were odd birds: chicken-sized, pear-shaped, ungainly when flying. They were the largest of the grouse species, and their habitat once included most of the western United States and Canada. Wyoming contained one hundred thousand of them, forty percent of the North American population.

Of this flock, he’d noted only three survivors: all three with injuries. He’d seen their teardrop-shaped forms ghosting from brush to brush on the periphery of the location. They didn’t fly away, he knew, because they couldn’t yet.

It was obvious what had happened.

Fat tire tracks churned through the sagebrush, crushing some plants and snapping others at their woody stalks. Spent 12-gauge shotgun shells littered the ground: Federal four-shot. He speared one through its open end with his pen and sniffed. It still smelled of gunpowder. He retrieved eighteen spent shells and bagged them. Later, after he’d sealed the evidence bag, he found two more shells. Since eighteen shells were more than a representative sample, he tossed the two errant casings into the back of his pickup.

There was a single empty Coors Light can on the northeast corner of the site. He bagged it and tagged it, and hoped the forensics lab in Laramie could pull prints from the outside or DNA from the lip. Problem was, the can looked much older than the spent shotgun shells and he couldn’t determine if it hadn’t simply been discarded along the road a few weeks prior to the slaughter.

Joe guessed that the incident had occurred either the night or day before, because the exploded carcasses hadn’t yet been picked over by predators. Small spoors of blood in the dirt had not yet dried black. Whoever had done it had shot them “on the lek,” a lek being an annual gathering of the birds where the males strutted and clucked to attract females for breeding. The lek was a concentric circle of birds with the strutting male grouse in the center of it. Some leks were so large and predictable that locals would drive out to the location to watch the avian meat market in action.

The birds bred in mid-March, nested, and produced chicks in June. If someone was to choose the most opportune time to slaughter an entire flock, this was it, Joe knew.

So “Lek 64,” as it had been designated by a multiagency team of biologists charged with counting the number of healthy groupings within the state, was no more.

—

JOE TOOK A DEEP BREATH and put his hands on his hips. He was angry, and he worked his jaw. It would take hours to photograph the carcasses and measure and photograph the tire tracks. He knew he’d have to do it himself because the county forensics tech was an hour away—provided the tech was on call and would even respond to a game violation. Joe knew he was responsible for the gathering of all evidence to send to the state lab in Laramie, and it would have to get done before the snow that was falling on top of the mountains worked its way east and obscured the evidence. Since it was Friday and the lab technicians didn’t work over the weekend, at best he’d hear something by the end of next week.

He’d find whoever did this, he thought. It might take time, but he’d find the shooter or shooters. Fingerprints on the brass of the shells, tire analysis, the beer can, gossipy neighbors, or a drunken boast would lead him to the bad guys. Sometimes it was ridiculously easy to solve these kinds of crimes because the kind of person who would leave such a naked scene often wasn’t very smart. Joe had apprehended poachers in the past by finding photos of them posing with dead game on Facebook posts or by looking at the taxidermy mounts in their homes. Or by simply going to their front door, knocking, and saying, “I guess you know why I’m here.”

It had been amazing what kinds of answers that inquiry sometimes brought.

But he wasn’t angry because of the work ahead of him. There was also that special directive recently put out by Governor Rulon and his agency director about sage grouse. Preserving them, that is. Game and Fish biologists and wardens had been ordered to pay special attention to where the grouse were located and how many there were. The status of the sage grouse population, according to Rulon, was “pivotal” to the future economic well-being of the state.

Sage grouse in Wyoming had shifted from the status of a game bird regulated by the state into politics and economics on a national level. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was threatening to list the bird as an endangered species because the overall population had declined, and if they did, it would remove hundreds of thousands of acres from any kind of use, including energy development—whether gas and oil, wind, hydrothermal, or solar. The federal government proposed mandating an off-limits zone consisting of one to four miles for every lek found. That would impact ranchers, developers, and everyone else.

That was the reason Joe had been on the old two-track in the first place and stumbled onto the killing ground. During the winter, he’d seen the flock more than once from the window of his pickup, and sage grouse didn’t range far. Sage grouse did not exhibit the brightest of bird behavior. He recalled an incident from the year before, when a big male—called a “bomber” by hunters—flew into the passenger door of his pickup and bounced off, killing itself in the process. Joe’s truck hadn’t been moving at the time.

Years before, prior to the national decline in the sage grouse population, Joe had accompanied outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski to this very sagebrush bench. At the time, Nate flew a prairie falcon and a red-tailed hawk. Joe and Nate served as bird dogs, walking through the brush to dislodge the grouse while the raptors hunted from the air. Grouse defended themselves against the falcons by flopping over onto their backs and windmilling their sharp claws, but the raptors got them anyway, in an explosion of feathers.

Joe wondered if he’d ever hunt with Nate again, and not just because of the sage grouse problem. With a half-dozen serious allegations hanging over his head by the feds, Nate had agreed to turn state’s witness against his former employer, a high-society killer for hire. Nate had not touched base with Joe, or Marybeth, or their daughter Sheridan in months. Joe had no idea if Nate’s long-ago pledge to protect the Pickett family still held. And Joe was still angry with him for getting mixed up in a murder-for-hire operation, even if the targets richly deserved killing.

—

JOE SHOOK HIS HEAD to clear it, and looked at the carnage. Half a year after being named “Special Liaison to the Executive Branch” by Rulon himself, in the middle of Joe’s own five-thousand-square-mile district, he’d discovered the site of the wanton destruction of twenty-one rare game birds whose deaths could bring down the state of Wyoming.

That’s when the call came. And suddenly he was no longer thinking about birds.

—

THE DISPLAY SAID MIKE REED.

Reed was sheriff of Twelve Sleep County, and had been for two years. He was a personal friend of Joe’s and had cleaned up the department, ridding it of the old cronies and flunkies who had been collected by the previous chief, Kyle McLanahan. Reed was a paraplegic due to gunshot wounds he’d received in the line of duty and he traveled in a specially outfitted van. His injuries had never prevented him from getting around or performing his job.

Reed’s voice was tense. Joe could hear the sound of a motor in the background. He was speeding somewhere in his van.

Reed said, “Joe, we’ve got a situation. Are you in a place where you can sit down?”

“No, but go ahead.”

“I’m running out to meet my deputy on Dunbar Road. He responded to a call from a couple of hunters this morning. They claimed they found a victim in a ditch.”

Joe knew Dunbar Road. It was south of Saddlestring, an obscure county road that ended up at a couple of old reservoirs in the breaklands. It was a road to nowhere, really, used only by hunters, anglers, and people who were lost.

“The victim is a young woman, Joe,” Reed said. “She was found by Deputy Boner.”

Joe felt himself squeezing his cell phone as if to kill it.

“My deputy thinks she looks a lot like April. He says he knew April from when she worked at Welton’s Western Wear, and it might be her.”

Joe’s knees weakened, and he took a step back. April was their eighteen-year-old adopted daughter. She’d disappeared the previous November with a professional rodeo cowboy and they’d only heard from her two or three times. Each time she called, she said not to worry about her. She was, she said, “having the time of her life.”

Because she’d turned eighteen, there was little Joe or Marybeth could do, except encourage her to come home.

“She’s alive?” Joe asked, his mouth dry.

“Maybe. Barely. We’re not sure. It might not be her, Joe. There’s no ID on her.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the backseat of my deputy’s cruiser,” Reed said. “He didn’t want to wait for the EMTs to get out there. He said it looks touch and go whether she’ll even make it as far as the hospital.”

Joe took a quivering breath. The storm cloud was moving down the face of the mountains, the snow blotting out the blue-black forest of pine trees.

“Whether it’s April or not,” Reed said, “it’s a terrible thing.”

“Mike, was she in an accident?”

“Doesn’t sound like it,” Reed said. “There was no vehicle around. It looks like she was dumped there.”

“Dumped?” Joe asked. “Why didn’t she walk toward town?”

“She’s been beaten,” Reed said. “Man, I hate to be the one telling you this. But my guy says it looks like she was beaten to a pulp and dumped. Whoever did it might have thought she was already dead. Obviously, I don’t know the extent of her injuries, how long she’s been there, or if there was, you know, a sexual assault.”

Joe leaned against the front fender of his pickup. He couldn’t recall walking back to his truck, but there he was. The phone was pressed so tightly against his face, it hurt.

March and April were usually the snowiest months in high-country Wyoming, when huge dumps of spring snow arrived between short bursts of false spring. The last week had been unseasonably warm, so he was grateful she hadn’t died of exposure.

Joe said, “So you’re going to meet your deputy and escort him to the hospital?”

“Roger that,” Reed said. “How quick can you get there? I’m about to scramble Life Flight and get them down here so they can transport her to the trauma center in Billings. These injuries are beyond what our clinic can handle. Can you get there and . . . identify her?”

“I’m twenty miles out on bad roads, but yes, I’ll be there,” Joe said, motioning for Daisy to leap down from the bed of the truck and take her usual spot on the passenger seat. He followed her in and slammed the door. “Does Marybeth know?”

Marybeth was now the director of the Twelve Sleep County Library. She’d be at the building until five-thirty p.m., but she was known to monitor the police band.

“I haven’t told her,” Reed said, “and I asked my guys to keep a lid on this until I reached you. I thought maybe you’d want to tell her.”

Joe engaged the transmission and roared down the old two-track.

“I’ll call her,” Joe said, raising his voice because the road was rough and the cab was rattling with vibration. Citation books, maps, and assorted paperwork fluttered down through the cab from where they had been parked beneath the sun visors. “We’ll meet you there.”

“I’m sorry, Joe,” Reed said with pain in his voice. “But keep in mind we don’t know for sure it’s her.”

Joe said, “It’s her,” and punched off.

—

HE CALLED MARYBETH’S CELL PHONE. When she answered, he slowed down enough so that he could hear her.

“Mike Reed just told me they’re transporting a female victim to the hospital,” he said. “She was found dumped south of town. Mike says there’s a possibility the girl could be—”

“April,” Marybeth said, finishing the sentence for him. “How bad is she?”

“Bad,” Joe said, and he told her about the Life Flight helicopter en route to the hospital from Billings.

“I’ll meet you there,” she said.

Before he could agree, she said, “I’ve had nightmares about this for months. Ever since she left with that cowboy.” Joe thought, She can’t even say his name.

Joe disconnected the call, dropped his phone into his breast pocket, and jammed down on the accelerator. Twin plumes of dust from his back tires filled the rearview mirror.

“Hang on,” he said to Daisy.

Then: “I’m going to kill Dallas Cates.”

Daisy looked back as if to say We’ll kill him together.