Endangered

2

After what seemed like the longest forty-five minutes of his life, Joe arrived at the Twelve Sleep County Hospital and found Marybeth in the emergency entrance lobby. Sheriff Mike Reed was with her, as was Deputy Edgar Jess Boner, who had found the victim and transported her into town.

Marybeth was calm and in control, but her face was drained of color. She had the ability to shift into a cool and pragmatic demeanor when a situation was at its worst. She was blond with green eyes, and was wearing a skirt, blazer, and pumps: her library director’s outfit.

She turned to him as he walked in and said, “Sorry that took so long.”

He was unsettled from being nearly shaken to death on the ride down from the sagebrush foothills. His hands shook from gripping the steering wheel. He saw the subtle but scared look in her eyes and went to her and pulled her close.

“I saw her when they brought her in,” Marybeth said into his ear. “It’s April. She looks terrible, Joe. The emergency doctor called it blunt force trauma. Someone hit her in the head, and her face was bloody.”

“I was hoping it wasn’t her,” Joe said, realizing how callous that sounded. It shouldn’t be anyone.

“She’s alive,” Marybeth said. “That’s all they can say. She isn’t conscious, and as far as I know she hasn’t opened her eyes or tried to speak. I keep seeing doctors and nurses rushing back there, but I don’t know what they’re doing other than trying to stabilize her for the Life Flight.”

“This is so terrible,” he said.

“I kept telling her . . .” Marybeth started to say, but let her voice trail off. After a beat, she gently pushed away from Joe and said, “I’m going with her in the helicopter to Billings. We just have to hope that, with all she’s been through, she can hold on another hour.

“I called the high school and left a message with the principal that you would pick Lucy up,” Marybeth continued. “Maybe you can take her out to dinner tonight, but you’ll need to feed the horses when you get home.”

Joe started to argue, started to tell her not to worry about his dinner or anything else, but he knew this was how she processed a crisis—by making sure her family was taken care of. Only after it passed would she allow herself to break down. So he nodded instead.

“I’ll call Sheridan as soon as I know something,” she said. “I’ve already made arrangements to be gone a few days from work. They were very good about it.”

Sheridan was a junior at the University of Wyoming and had chosen not to be a resident assistant in the dormitory another semester. She was living with three other girls in a rental house and making noises about staying in Laramie for the summer to work. Joe and Marybeth didn’t like the idea, but Sheridan was stubborn. She was also not close to April, and the two of them had often clashed when they’d lived in the same house together.

Lucy was Joe and Marybeth’s sixteen-year-old daughter, a tenth grader at Saddlestring High School. She was blond like her mother and maturing into self-sufficiency. Lucy had been a careful observer of her two older sisters and had avoided their mistakes and errors in judgment. April had stayed in contact with Lucy more than anyone else, although Lucy had relayed what she’d been told to Marybeth.

Joe said to Marybeth, “You know who did this.”

“We can’t jump to that conclusion.”

“Already did,” Joe said.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Sheriff Mike Reed roll his chair toward them. If Reed hadn’t overheard Joe, he’d at least gotten the gist of what had been said, Joe thought.

“When you have a minute . . .” Reed said.

Joe turned to Reed and Boner, then shook Boner’s hand. “Thanks for bringing her here. We appreciate it. You made the right call not waiting for the ambulance to show up.”

Boner was new to the department and Joe didn’t know the man well.

“Just doing my job,” Boner said softly. “I’ve got a three-year-old girl at home. I can’t imagine . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, but looked away, his face flushed red.

Joe said to Reed, “It was Dallas Cates. That’s who she left with. We need to find him.”

“Whoa,” Reed said, showing Joe the palm of his hand. “I know you’ve got your suspicions, and I do, too, but right now we’ve got nothing to go on.”

“It was him.”

“Marybeth is right,” Reed said. “You’re emotional right now and you’re jumping to conclusions. I know it’s against your nature, but you need to let this thing work. I’ve got my guys working on the investigation and my evidence tech out there on Dunbar Road to see what we can find. It’s only been a couple of hours, Joe.”

Joe said, “If you don’t find him, I will.”

“Joe, damn you,” Reed said, shaking his head. “Slow down. Just slow down. You know as well as I do that we could screw the whole thing up if we put blinders on and make accusations that turn out to be false.”

Joe smoldered.

After a moment, he felt Marybeth’s hand on his shoulder and he looked back at her.

She was grave. She said, “Promise me you won’t do anything crazy while I’m gone. I need you here with Lucy, and this is too close to home. Promise me, Joe.”

“It’s obvious,” Joe said to both Marybeth and Reed. “A twenty-four-year-old local-hero cowboy takes a liking to my middle daughter and convinces her to take off with him on the rodeo circuit. She doesn’t know about his past, or what he’s capable of, so she goes. A few months later, she gets left in a ditch outside of town. Who else would we suspect?”

Marybeth didn’t respond, but Reed said, “Joe, we’re already on it. I sent two guys out to the Cates house fifteen minutes ago. Supposedly Dallas is at home recuperating from a rodeo injury right now.”

“He’s home?” Joe said. “When did he come home?”

“Don’t know,” Reed said. “We’ll find out.”

“April was probably dumped yesterday,” Joe said. “Do you feel the dots connecting, Mike?”

“We’re asking him to come in for questioning,” Reed said.

“I want to sit in.”

“Not a chance in hell, Joe. I was thinking about letting you watch the monitor down the hall, but if you keep up your attitude, I’ll ban you from the building.”

Joe looked to Marybeth for support, but she shook her head with sympathy instead.

Reed said, “All we need is for you to draw down on our suspect during the initial inquiry and for him to press charges against us and you. No, Joe, if we want to do this right, we do it by the book.”

“Promise me,” Marybeth said.

Joe looked down at his boots.

He said, “I promise.”

She squeezed his hand.

Then he looked hard at Mike Reed from under the brim of his hat. He said, “Mike, I know you’ll do your best and I’ll behave. But if something goes pear-shaped, things are going to get western around here.”

“I expected you to say that,” Reed said with a sigh.

—

BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA.

The very words were brutal in and of themselves, Joe thought as he and Marybeth trailed April’s gurney down the hallway. He could hear the helicopter approaching outside, hovering over the helipad on the roof of the hospital.

April was bundled up and he couldn’t see her face. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Joe was grateful Marybeth had positively identified her earlier.

He was unnerved by the number of suspended plastic packets that dripped fluids into tubes that snaked beneath the sheets. An orderly rolled a monitor on wheels alongside the gurney. Her body looked small and frail beneath the covers, and she didn’t respond when the orderlies secured her to the gurney with straps.

Joe reached down and squeezed her hand through the blankets. It was supple, but there was no pressure back.

“Let me know how it goes,” Joe said to Marybeth, raising his voice so as to be heard over the wash of the rotors.

“Of course,” she said, pulling him close one last time before she left. Her eyes glistened with tears.

Joe watched as the gurney was hoisted into the helicopter. A crew member reached down from the hatch and helped Marybeth step up inside. Seconds later, the door was secured and the helicopter lifted.

Joe clamped his hat tight on his head with his right hand and silently asked God to save April, because she’d suffered enough in her short life, and to give Marybeth the strength to carry on.

—

“HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW the Cates family?” Reed asked Joe as he drove them to the Twelve Sleep County Building. Joe was in the passenger seat of the specially equipped van. Deputy Boner had volunteered to follow them in Joe’s pickup and to keep an eye on Daisy until Joe could retrieve his vehicle and his dog.

“I’ve tangled with them before,” Joe said. “Mainly with Bull, the oldest son. I’ve met the old man, Eldon, and I’ve been to his elk camp a few times.”

He knew the Cateses lived on twelve acres in the breaklands. The property contained a smattering of old structures in the scrub pine, including the shambled main house, a barn, and several falling-down outbuildings. Their place was about twenty minutes from town.

“What do you know about them?” Reed asked.

Joe told Reed that the Cates family ran a hunting-guide business called Dull Knife Outfitters. Dull Knife was one of the oldest big-game outfitters in the Bighorns, and one of the most notorious. There were rumors that Eldon was involved in taking elk out of season as well as in the wrong hunt areas, on behalf of clients, and that he made deals with hunters to obtain prime licenses on their behalf without going through the lottery, if they paid his special fee. Joe had even heard that Eldon had a secret elk camp deep in the mountains that he operated completely above the law, where he guaranteed certain wealthy hunters a kill that would make the record books.

But they were rumors only. Joe had never caught Eldon committing a crime, and no accuser had ever come forward. He’d interviewed several Dull Knife clients over the years and none of them would implicate Eldon. Despite spending years on horseback in the most remote areas of the mountains, he’d not yet found Eldon’s secret camp—if it existed at all.

Eldon had a unique reputation among the other, more respectable outfitters in the district. Although sniping among competing hunting guides was normal, the one thing Eldon’s competitors could agree on was that they didn’t like Eldon. They thought he used his reputation as the oldest outfitter in the mountains as a slam against them, and they didn’t like how he challenged the ethics of the profession—which reflected poorly on them. Guides said that Eldon sometimes claimed kills made by their clients by tagging them on behalf of his clients, and that he refused to respect the boundaries of the Wyoming Outfitters Board’s designated hunting areas. He would also bad-mouth other outfitters to his clients, calling them “amateurs,” “greenhorns,” and worse. For a number of years, Eldon drove his four-wheel-drive pickup around town with a magnetic sign on the door that read DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS: SATISFYING OUR CUSTOMERS WHEN THE OTHER GUIDES WERE STILL IN DIAPERS.

Joe had been asked by several outfitters to talk to Eldon about it, but Joe told them there was nothing he could legally do. When the magnetic sign was stolen from the truck while Eldon was in a bar, Eldon had vowed to press charges for theft against the other outfitters in the county, but he never did.

Joe had always considered Eldon Cates to be an aggravating throwback who would someday foul up. When he did, Joe wanted to be there.

Bull was another story. Bull was bigger and dumber than his dad, and two years earlier, Joe had caught the son and his unpleasant wife, Cora Lee, red-handed with a trophy bull elk in the back of their pickup three days before the season opener.

Bull’s hunting rig could be identified instantly because it had been retrofitted as a kind of rolling meat wagon. He’d welded a steel pole and crossbeam into the bed and strung a steel cable and hook from a turnbuckle. With the device, Bull could back up to a big-game carcass, hook the cable through its back legs, and hoist it up in order to field dress and skin it on the spot.

Bull’s scheme had been to kill the bull prior to the arrival of two hunters from Pennsylvania. If either of the two hunters didn’t get their own trophy bull elk, Bull was going to tag the carcass with their license and let them take it home, thus guaranteeing a one hundred percent successful hunt. The Pennsylvania clients hadn’t been in on the scheme, from what Joe could determine.

Judge Hewitt was a hunter himself, and he came down hard on Bull Cates.

The violations had cost the outfitter several thousand dollars in fines, the forfeiture of his rifles and pickup, and the loss of his outfitter’s license from the state association. Bull was bitter and claimed Joe had “deprived him of his livelihood” and that he would someday even the score. Cora Lee acted out during the sentencing and hurled epithets at Joe and Judge Hewitt and was forcibly removed from the courtroom by deputies.

It wasn’t uncommon for a game violator to talk big in bars about getting even with the local game warden, and Bull wasn’t the first to ever make threats. For Joe, it was part of the job. He knew that in the past the threats had always dissipated with the onslaught of the next morning’s hangover.

Nevertheless, for months after, Joe had taken measures to avoid running into Bull and Cora Lee. There was no reason to pour fuel on the embers. Joe wasn’t as young as he used to be, and Bull had six inches and fifty pounds on him.

So when Joe would see Bull’s pickup—a 2007 Ford F-250 with a DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS decal crudely scraped off the driver’s-side door—in the parking lot of the grocery store, he would drive around the block until it was gone. When the vehicle was parked in front of the Stockman’s Bar, Joe would keep driving.

When there were no hunting seasons open, the Cateses operated C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service. C&C stood for “Cates & Cates.” It was a dirty job, pumping out rural septic tanks. The Cateses owned several circa-1980 pump trucks, and Joe often saw them on remote roads in the spring and fall. When he spotted one in front of him on the highway, he gave it a wide berth.

“So you know Bull, all right,” Reed said with a chuckle. “Did you ever run across Timber, the second son?”

“Timber?” Joe said. “What’s with these names?”

“If you think Bull is a problem, he’s a piece of cake compared to son number two. Timber was a hell of a high school athlete. He was quarterback in the late eighties, the last time the Saddlestring Wranglers won state, back before you came into this country. Timber walked on at UW, and he might have played eventually, but he got into some kind of bar fight at the Buckhorn in Laramie and they threw him off the team. Unfortunately, he moved back home. And he was crazy. He’d get so violent when he drank, it would take four of us deputies to get him down. When he discovered meth, he got even worse. Finally, he was arrested up in Park County for carjacking some old lady on her way to Yellowstone Park because he’d run out of gas and he wanted her Mustang. Lucky for all of us, Timber is doing three years in Rawlins. I hear he isn’t exactly a model prisoner, or he would have been out and back here by now.”

Reed took a deep breath. “However . . . I got word from a buddy of mine, a prison guard, that Timber could be released any day now. I’ve sent a memo to my guys to keep an eye out for him. My guess is he’ll go straight home to Mama. Then it’ll be a matter of time before he gets in trouble again.”

“Then there’s Dallas,” Joe said.

“Then there’s Dallas,” Reed echoed.

Joe had met him four months ago at his house. Dallas had been invited there by April, who at the time had worked at Welton’s Western Wear. Dallas was a local hero, winner of the National High School Finals Rodeo, then the College National Finals Rodeo, and at that time he was in second place in the standings in bull riding and bound for the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. His lean, hard face was so well-known among rodeo fans that his likeness was used to sell jeans in western stores, and he’d visit local retailers to promote the brand when he wasn’t riding bulls. That’s how Dallas and April met.

Dallas Cates was shorter than Joe, but had wider shoulders, and biceps that strained at the fabric of his snap-button western shirt. He had a compact frame that suggested he was spring-loaded and ready to explode at a moment’s notice. His neck was as wide as his jaw, and he projected raw physical power.

There was a two-inch scar on his left cheek that tugged at the edge of his mouth in an inadvertent sneer. Supposedly, Dallas got the scar when he jumped from a moving snowmobile onto the back of a bull elk, in an attempt to wrestle the animal to the ground like a rodeo cowboy did with a running steer. The sharp tip of one of the antlers had ripped Dallas’s cheek. Joe didn’t know if the story was true, but he’d heard it several times.

Dallas was also somewhere on the periphery of a terrible crime that had occurred when he was an all-state wrestler for Saddlestring High School, when a girl was abducted, raped, and dumped outside of town by at least four high school–aged suspects. Unfortunately, the victim, named Serda Tibbs, couldn’t identify her assailants because she’d been slipped a date-rape drug that rendered her unconscious. Were there four of them, or five? Four seniors were arrested, tried, and convicted. None of the four would finger Dallas Cates, even though several other students anonymously claimed Cates was the ringleader. That was the power Dallas held over the other student criminals.

“So have you met the matriarch, Brenda Cates?” Reed asked Joe, cocking his head as he pulled into his designated parking spot on the side of the county building.

The way he’d asked, Joe surmised, held significance.

“No. Marybeth’s met her at the library. Brenda wanted her support on creating signs to post at the entrances to town bragging about Dallas.”

Reed nodded. “She wants signage put up declaring Saddlestring the ‘hometown of PRCA bull-riding champion Dallas Cates.’”

Joe snorted.

“Let’s just say she’s very proud and protective of her family,” Reed said as he swung his seat around and lifted himself into his wheelchair in a single fluid motion.

Before Joe could ask what that meant, Reed’s cell phone burred and the sheriff held it up to his ear. He listened for a minute, then asked, “What about Dallas?” before listening more and punching off.

“What about Dallas?” Joe asked.

“That was my deputy. Dallas’s parents say he’s laid up and can’t make the trip into town right now. But Eldon and Brenda Cates themselves should be here any minute. They’re being very cooperative, I’m told.”

Joe said, “I’ll bet.”

Sheriff Reed said, “If Dallas Cates is that banged-up and has actually been home for a while, he might not have been the one, Joe.”

“I want to see him. I want a doctor to evaluate his condition.”

“We can do that,” Reed said, “and we will. But first I think we should hear out Eldon and Brenda, don’t you?”

Joe agreed.

“Brenda is the one you should be interested in,” Reed said, arching his eyebrows and sliding the van door open.