Endangered

4

Joe sat sullenly in his pickup with his phone in his hand on the outer circle of Saddlestring High School, waiting for Lucy to come out. He was midway in a long line of parents in pickups and SUVs who were waiting for their teenagers to emerge. Even though, officially, he was prohibited from using his state pickup to transport family members, it seemed like the least of his worries at the moment.

He re-litigated the scene from Sheriff Reed’s office the hour before, trying to open himself up to the possibility that Dallas had nothing to do with April’s injuries. He mulled over Brenda’s theories. A mystery cowboy? A stranger picking up hitchhikers? He couldn’t square the circle.

He recalled how relentlessly Brenda and Eldon had defended their son. It bothered him on a couple of levels. Although it could be expected that parents would protect their own, it seemed not to have even occurred to them that Dallas could be responsible for the crime. They simply refused to believe it, which made them less than credible. To have such an unshakable belief that Dallas was innocent reminded Joe of other parents he’d encountered over the years: couples who attacked teachers because of their child’s failing grades, or coaches because their child was a poor athlete, or him because he’d given a citation to their boy for fishing without a valid license.

For some parents, their offspring were perfect beings. It was a cancer on society, he thought, and it was getting out of control. The Cateses were the worst example of it he’d encountered.

He grinned cruelly to himself when he imagined their reaction when Dallas was convicted and sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. Oh, he thought, the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth . . .

—

MARYBETH HAD SENT a series of cryptic texts while Joe waited.

Landing at the trauma center now.

Doctors evaluating her in the ICU.

Still hasn’t regained consciousness.

Good doctors, thank God.

Did you remember to pick up L?

He’d responded: Yup.

—

STUDENTS BEGAN TO POUR out of the front doors of the school moments after the bell rang. Groups of upperclassmen came out and turned for the parking lot and their cars. Tenth graders and those who didn’t have vehicles searched the line of cars for their rides.

Joe waited, and waited some more. No Lucy.

Only after he had raised his phone to call her did she come out. She wasn’t alone.

Joe had been cursed with three attractive daughters. They stood out in a crowd. Especially Lucy. She was blond, lithe, lively, and stylish. He cringed when he was in a public place with her and saw the looks males gave her, but he understood. She was not as studious as Sheridan or as brooding as April, and she’d come into her own as a genuinely warm personality who looked at the bright side of every situation. Marybeth had once said that Lucy seemed to move across the earth in her own personal sunbeam.

And she did so slowly, Joe thought as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Lucy was a girl without urgency, and she seemed to float through life at her own smiling but unhurried pace.

With her was Noah After Buffalo, her debate club partner. Lucy wore black leggings and knee-high boots with her golden hair cascading over the shoulders of her tight down coat.

Noah was a Northern Arapaho whose parents had recently moved off the reservation and into town. He was smart and polite and seemed to have grown a foot taller in the last few months. He was a year older than Lucy and had his own battered pickup. Sometimes he brought her home after school. Marybeth liked him, and Joe tolerated him as much as he tolerated any male in the vicinity of his daughters.

Lucy and Noah walked closer together than Joe would have liked, and he saw Lucy look over and scan the remaining cars for Marybeth’s van. When she saw Joe’s green pickup, she mouthed, “My dad is here” to Noah, who waved.

Joe waved back, and Lucy separated from Noah and made her way toward his pickup. But before she did, she reached back and squeezed Noah’s hand behind her back in an intimate gesture.

“I saw that,” Joe said as Lucy slid into the passenger side and Daisy greeted her by pressing her head under Lucy’s chin.

“Oh, Dad,” Lucy said, vigorously scratching Daisy until the dog moaned.

He thought: One daughter took up with a cowboy. Another is taking up with an Indian.

Joe wasn’t sure what to make of that.

—

AS THEY PULLED OUT, Lucy said, “Why isn’t Mom here? Not that I mind that you pick me up, but . . .”

She studied him and apparently sensed that bad news was coming. He could see it in her eyes. She was intuitive like that, and had the ability to read people in a way Joe never could. He attributed it to all the years that Lucy had hung back and observed family interactions from the standpoint of the youngest.

He said, “The sheriff’s office responded to a call today that a girl had been badly beaten and left by the side of a road. Lucy, it was—”

“April,” Lucy said, tears filling her eyes. “Is she okay?”

Joe took a deep breath and told Lucy all he knew, in workmanlike fashion. Lucy listened without comment, but the tears kept coming. She dried her cheeks with the back of her hand. He finished by telling her that Marybeth said the doctors were good.

“Maybe she’ll be okay,” Lucy said. “One thing about April—she’s tough. Sometimes that’s scary, like when she’s mad at me or thinks I stole her boots or something, but in this case it might get her through.”

Joe almost smiled. He recalled the incident a year before when April had launched across the dinner table at Lucy for borrowing her best cowboy boots. Later, they had been found under April’s bed. Lucy, to her credit, hadn’t backed down.

“So it’s you and me,” Joe said. “We can stop and get something to eat in town or I can fix you something at home for dinner.”

“What?” Lucy asked. “Red meat and bread?”

“What’s wrong with that?” He knew he had plenty of elk steaks in the freezer.

“Let’s get pizza.”

Joe nodded.

—

JOE ASKED LUCY, “When was the last time you heard from April? You’re the only one in the family she really communicated with.” They were making the eight-mile drive from Saddlestring to his rural state-owned home on Bighorn Road. The warm pizza was in a box on the seat between them. Strings of drool hung from Daisy’s mouth.

“A week ago, I guess,” Lucy said. “She posted a photo of herself in a bikini by a swimming pool. It was at some hotel in a big city.”

April had blocked both Marybeth and Sheridan from her Facebook and Twitter pages. Only Lucy was allowed to follow her.

“Can you be more specific?” Joe asked.

“It was in Texas somewhere.”

“Houston, maybe?”

“That sounds right. But she didn’t post much of anything beyond the photo. She never does—there are just lots of photos of her and Dallas doing cool things. I think she wanted to impress me. You know, goofing around in airports, partying with cowboys. Selfies, you know.”

Joe grunted. Then: “Did April tell you she and Dallas Cates had broken up?”

“What?”

He told her what Brenda Cates had said.

“A month ago?” Lucy said. “No way. If that had happened I’d know about it even if she didn’t tell me directly. She wouldn’t keep posting photos on her page of the two of them if it was over. April is strange, but she isn’t crazy. If they’d broken up—and especially if he’d broken up with her—the world would know it by now. She would have started up an ‘I Hate Dallas Cates’ site.”

“If they did break up, do you think April would come back here?” Joe asked.

Lucy shrugged and said, “I never know what April will do next.”

After a beat, she said again, “No way April and Dallas broke up.”

Joe said, “I believe you.”

—

THERE WAS a white late-model pickup parked at Joe’s house with two people sitting inside. They were obviously waiting for him to arrive. The vehicle had U.S. government plates.

Joe moaned.

“Who is that?” Lucy asked.

“I call them the sage grouse twins,” Joe said. “Go ahead and take Daisy and the pizza inside. I’ll be in shortly, after I talk to them.”

—

ANNIE HATCH of the Bureau of Land Management and Revis Wentworth of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waited for Lucy and Daisy to enter the house before they got out of their pickup. Joe remembered that Wentworth had a thing about dogs—one had bitten him once on a local ranch he was visiting and now he insisted that he wouldn’t get out of his vehicle until all canines were secured.

Hatch and Wentworth were members of the Interagency Sage Grouse Task Force (ISGTF), which had been created by the federal government two years earlier to oversee state efforts to manage the species. Governor Rulon had loudly objected to the creation of the task force and had threatened to lock up any federal government employees who entered his state, but he’d eventually acquiesced when Washington threatened to withhold highway repair and Medicare funds. An agreement had been reached that the task force would keep the governor’s office informed as to their activities and findings and that they’d restrict their jurisdiction to the public lands of the state. That meant literally half of Wyoming, though, and the governor’s feelings about that situation were well known.

Joe liked Annie Hatch just fine. She was in her mid-thirties, pleasant, and friendly in just a mildly bureaucratic way. She had long, curly brown hair and an athletic build, and she dressed in an “outdoor girl” style: jeans, hiking boots, fishing shirts, fleece jackets. Her personal car was a Prius and she taught yoga classes in the evenings. Unlike Wentworth, who resided in Denver and was renting a room at the Holiday Inn in Saddlestring, Annie lived in a small house in town and was a member of the community.

“Hey, Joe,” she said as she got out of the pickup.

“Annie,” Joe said. “What brings you here?”

“Sage grouse.”

“Imagine that,” Joe said wearily.

Revis Wentworth got out and cast a cautionary look toward the front door of the Pickett home.

“Daisy is inside and she’s harmless,” Joe said to him.

“Supposedly, so was the dog that bit me. I needed eleven stitches,” Wentworth said back.

Joe shrugged.

Wentworth said, “We got a report that there’s been a massacre on BLM land.”

Wentworth was slight, serious, and more than a little in love with his position, Joe thought. He was pale and wore black-framed hipster glasses. Joe had never seen him smile or make a joke. Wentworth always wore a sport jacket, but kept it unbuttoned so the people he met could see the semiauto hanging from a shoulder holster underneath. As one of 250 special agents for the USFW, he was authorized to carry a weapon.

“Yup,” Joe said, gesturing toward the foothills to the west. “Lek Sixty-four. I counted twenty-one dead birds.”

“My God, an entire lek,” Hatch said, covering her open mouth with her hand as she gasped. “That’s horrible.”

“Were you going to inform ISGTF about it at any point?” Wentworth asked. He pronounced the acronym “Izg-Tiff.”

“Probably.”

“Is there some reason you didn’t call right away?”

“By the time I had thought about it, I checked my watch and it was already after five,” Joe said. It was a dig, but it was also true.

“You have my cell phone number,” Wentworth said.

“Actually, I don’t.”

“Please,” Hatch said, stepping between them. “Let’s settle this later. We’re talking about an entire lek of sage grouse.”

“This is nothing more than a provocation,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. Joe eyed him carefully to determine that he was talking about the slaughter and not about him.

“I wouldn’t read too much into it yet,” Joe said, sidling past the special agents so that he was positioned to open his gate and go inside. He hoped they would let him. He said, “I gathered evidence and took a bunch of photos. I’ve got spent shotgun shells, tire tracks, and maybe even a DNA sample. It looked to me like a couple of yahoos stumbled onto those birds and went postal. We’ll get ’em.”

“Locals, no doubt,” Wentworth said with disdain.

“Probably.”

“You’ll need to turn over all the items you found so we can send them to our forensics lab,” Wentworth said.

“I’m sending them to our own lab in Laramie on Monday,” Joe said, annoyed with Wentworth’s attitude. “They’re the best when it comes to wildlife crimes.”

“Do you want me to go over your head?” Wentworth asked, arching his eyebrows.

“Go ahead,” Joe said with a flash of anger. Then he took a breath and said, “Revis, why can’t we talk to each other like a couple of adults? Why do you need to act like the federal alpha dog? I know how to do my job, and we’re just talking about sage grouse here.”

It was another shot.

“Just sage grouse,” Wentworth repeated, as if he couldn’t believe Joe’s insolence. “I suppose if you spend every day with hunters and dead animals, a few dead birds don’t seem like much. Did you forget the entire population is on the brink?”

Hatch put her hand on Wentworth’s shoulder and said to Joe, “There’s no reason we can’t work together on this, is there?”

“No, of course not. By the way, how did you find out about the incident?”

“Someone called our tip line,” Wentworth said.

“Who?”

“It was anonymous.”

“Male? Female? Age? That area up there where I found the birds isn’t a place where someone would just happen by.”

“I can’t give you any of that without authorization,” Wentworth said, looking over the top of his hipster glasses. “But we need you to take us up there to Lek Sixty-four.”

“Really?”

“We don’t want to get lost. You can guide us there.”

“There you go again,” Joe said. “Giving me another order I’m going to ignore.”

“Please, Joe?” Hatch pleaded.

Joe paused by his gate and looked over his shoulder at her. He said, “Not tonight. I’ve got a personal situation going on and I need to be home with my daughter.

“I’ll give you precise directions if you want, but I’m surprised you don’t know where it is. Believe me when I tell you there isn’t much more to find up there, and by the time you locate the site, it’ll be dark and snowing.”

“Let us decide that,” Wentworth said.

Joe turned and went to his truck and found his topo map of the benchland foothills. He spread it out on the hood of his truck and circled the location, then handed the map to Hatch.

“I’ll need that back when you’re through,” he said.

“I’ll return it,” she said with a smile.

Joe looked toward the Bighorns. They were obscured by storm clouds.

“You might want to wait until tomorrow,” he said.

“We heard you the first time,” Wentworth said. Then: “C’mon, Annie. Let’s go do the game warden’s job for him.”

“You do that,” Joe said, and turned to the house.

“Joe, is everything okay?” Hatch asked.

“Nope, it isn’t,” he said, and went inside.

—

LUCY SAID, “They’re in love,” when Joe entered the mudroom and kicked off his cowboy boots. She was sitting on the couch with their Lab/corgi mix, Tube, in her lap. Since Sheridan and April had left the house, Tube had become Lucy’s dog.

“What?”

“They’re in love, those two. Or at least he’s in love with her. I was watching them through the window. What are their names?”

Joe told her, then said, “Lucy, they just work together.”

“Are they single?”

Joe said, “I don’t know. Annie Hatch is. I’m not sure about Wentworth. I saw a wedding ring on his finger when I first met him, but I don’t think he has it on now.”

Lucy nodded smugly. She had a gleam in her eye. She said, “He’s definitely not wearing it now.”

“How do you know he’s in love with her?” Joe asked, a bit flummoxed by his youngest daughter.

“Didn’t you notice their body language? She’s nice and friendly, but he’s very protective of her. He acts like he wants everyone to know he’s in charge. And when she put her hand on his shoulder, it calmed him down immediately. That wouldn’t happen if they just worked together.”

“I never would have noticed,” Joe said.

“No kidding,” Lucy said.

If Lucy was correct, Joe thought, it helped explain the almost religious fervor the sage grouse twins brought to their jobs. They’d been brought together by a single mission: to save a species. They spent hours and days together and they came from a certain bureaucratic mind-set. It made sense, and he wondered why he’d never noticed it before.

“Why didn’t you tell them about April?” Lucy asked. “I’m sure they’d understand.”

“It just didn’t seem right,” Joe muttered.

“They’ll know soon enough,” she said. “The word will get out.”

He nodded. Of course she was right. And the information would have wiped the smirk off Wentworth’s face.

Still, though . . .

—

“HEY,” Lucy said to Joe as she ate a slice of pizza at the dining room table, “I want to show you something.”

She’d been browsing on her iPad while Joe skimmed the weekly Saddlestring Roundup. She turned the iPad in his direction.

“What are we watching?” Joe asked. He could see she’d already queued up a YouTube video.

“It took me about ten seconds to find Dallas Cates’s ride.”

Joe was suddenly interested. Lucy started the video. It was titled “Dallas Cates Riding Bushwhacker at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.” The date the video had been posted was three days before, but he knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was when it was taken.

It was an amateur video, shot by someone standing behind the chutes with a shaky handheld camera phone. There was no narration.

It began with a shot of Dallas buckling on the mandatory flak vest, then pulling his cowboy hat on tight. His face was grim and determined and practically set in stone. Then he turned and mounted the chute where Bushwhacker stood waiting.

The crowd sounds were loud in the background and there were snippets of conversation nearby. It was shoulder-to-shoulder behind the chutes: contestants, stock contractors, cowboys who were there to help their friends and offer advice. The visual swooped around at times as the videographer was jostled, and there were brief shots of the astrodome roof, the crowd, and dirt on the floor. Then the videographer managed to secure a good location right next to the chute itself.

The announcer said, “Now, folks, you can turn your attention to chute number two, where the world champion bull rider from two years ago, Dallas Cates of Saddlestring, Wyoming, and Stephenville, Texas, prepares to go mano a mano with Bushwhacker, the 2014 Bull of the Year.”

Joe and Lucy exchanged glances.

“Watch this close,” she said.

Dallas Cates lowered himself down on the back of the bull. He jammed his gloved right hand through the rope and used his left hand to pull his fingers through farther. The camera jostled again, and for a moment the screen was filled with overhead lights. Then it settled back on Dallas. He was hunched forward on the back of the bull, his left hand already poised in the air.

Someone shouted, “Ride ’im, Cates!”

The announcer said, “Dallas Cates enters this go-round at number two in the world and number three in the standings. A good ride on this bull will vault him to first place! Folks, Dallas Cates is eight seconds away from shocking the world.”

Behind the chute where Cates was mounted, a rodeo official pulled back hard on the flanking strap. The official would release it the moment the gate was thrown open.

Cates broke his concentration for a moment and glanced over at the stands. The camera followed, and there, for no more than a second, was April. She flashed a smile at Dallas and offered him two thumbs up.

Then Dallas turned back to the task at hand and nodded to the men outside the gate waiting for the signal to open it. Dallas had a certain something, Joe noted as he watched. He had a presence about him, real charisma. As much as Joe hated him, he couldn’t take his eyes off the man. No wonder the jeans company chose him as a spokesman, he thought.

Almost imperceptibly, Cates nodded to the men in the arena that he was ready.

Bushwhacker and Dallas exploded into the arena in a whirling combination of twists and bucks. The crowd went wild. Although the videographer missed part of it, Dallas Cates was thrown forward on the front shoulders of the bull, then rocked back. The cowboy flew through the air and landed flat on his back in the dirt behind the bull.

While the announcer said, “Dallas Cates gets Bushwhacked in two-point-eight-seven seconds!” the bull wheeled and lowered its head and charged Dallas, who scrambled backward like a crab.

Bullfighters dressed as clowns swooped in a second too late to distract the animal, and the bull either hooked or head-butted Cates with enough power to send him airborne again. There was an audible gasp from the fans, but despite the unreliable camerawork, Joe could see Cates roll to his feet and scramble up the chute boards to safety.

Then it was over.

“Let’s see it again,” Joe said.

They watched it three more times. It was April, all right, and it didn’t look like the two of them were at odds. After all, Dallas had looked over to her for last-second encouragement. She’d been beaming. Joe had rarely seen her look so happy or so excited.

“I told you,” Lucy said. She was focused on the relationship.

Joe was focused on the wreck of the ride.

The last glimpse of Dallas was of him climbing the chute boards and vaulting over the top into the ready area.

“That bull got Dallas,” Joe said, “but he looks pretty darned healthy when he runs away. I know adrenaline can make a man do all kinds of things, but I also know how much it hurts to get your ribs broken. There’s nothing worse. Dallas doesn’t look like he’s got broken ribs the way he’s flying over that chute gate. Plus, he was wearing one of those flak vests they all have to wear these days.”

Lucy looked over and said, “Does that mean those Cates people are lying?”

“I think it does,” Joe said.

—

HE WAS FEEDING THE HORSES in the barn after dinner when Marybeth called. She sounded shaken.

“The doctors say April has severe brain damage. She was hit multiple times in the head. There’s swelling around her brain.”

“Oh no,” he said, once again feeling his knees wobble.

“They say they want to put her into a medically induced coma.”

“A what?”

“A medically induced coma.”

“How bad is it, Marybeth?”

She said, “They really don’t know. They say she’s on the low end of the Glasgow Coma Scale, whatever that means. There’s no eye, verbal, or motor response. They need our permission to put her under, so I wanted to talk with you first.”

Joe shook his head. As if Marybeth could see him do it, she said, “The idea is to keep her unconscious and healing until the swelling in her brain goes down. They want to give her a drug called propofol to put her into the coma. The doctors say shutting down her functions will lower her blood pressure and reduce the swelling in her brain in case they have to do surgery later. It’ll give the brain time to heal. It’s what they did for Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. representative who got shot in the head in Arizona, and what they do with other victims of blunt force trauma.”

Joe recalled the Giffords incident. He asked, “What do you think?”

“If they leave her the way she is, her body may shut off blood flow to the damaged parts of her brain. She’d be brain-dead.”

“Oh, man.”

When Marybeth didn’t speak for a moment, he realized she had lowered the phone to cry. He waited.

“It’s not a sure thing, so we have to brace ourselves,” she said after a moment, once she’d gathered herself together. He could imagine her wiping away tears on her cheeks as she talked. “It’s possible she’ll never come out of it. It’s also possible that they could bring her out of it, but there’s been so much damage, she’d never really be the same. But they’re good doctors and I trust them. They have a neurosurgeon on call in case they need to do surgery. All we can do is trust them and pray for her.”

Joe tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

“How long?” he asked.

“Days, weeks, maybe months. They use propofol because it’s easily controlled and it has a short length. That’s so they can reduce the dosage when the swelling goes down and bring her out of the coma periodically. When they do, they can measure her Glasgow scale to see if she’s responding. They also measure brain activity through catheters in her brain.”

“Then we have to say yes,” Joe said.

“I agree. I’ll go sign whatever it is I have to sign and I’ll call you later tonight.”

—

JOE WENT INSIDE and told Lucy what Marybeth had said. Lucy nodded, wide-eyed, then got up and started toward her room to call her big sister, Sheridan.

In the threshold of the doorway, she asked, “Did April say for sure who did this to her?”

Joe shook his head.

“Will she ever be able to tell us?”

“We don’t know, Lucy.”

Lucy closed her eyes briefly, then shut the door behind her.

—

WHEN JOE’S CELL PHONE lit up an hour later, he lunged for it. He was halfway through his first bourbon and water. The television was on, but he had no idea what network it was tuned to.

He looked at the phone screen and scowled, then punched it live.

Annie Hatch said, “It’s a blizzard up here, Joe. We can’t see well enough to find the road to get back to town. Revis and I were hoping you could drive up here and kind of lead us back.”

“Did you find the site?”

“We think so, but we’re not sure. There’s so much snow in the sagebrush—”

“I told you not to go up there tonight,” he said.

“I know, I know,” she said wearily. “Do you think we wanted to call you?”

“Sit tight,” Joe said with irritation. “Don’t keep driving around. Just sit tight with your headlights on. How far did you go off the county road?”

“Not far, I don’t think.”

“Tell him to hurry,” Wentworth said in the background.

She didn’t, but Joe said, “Wentworth better keep his mouth shut or you’ll both be there all night.”

He heard her shush her partner.

As Joe laced on his boots in the mudroom, his phone lit up again. Reed.

“Mike,” Joe said.

“Are you sitting down?”

Joe braced for it, whatever it was.

“After you left this afternoon, the dispatcher got a 911 call. The reporting party said she heard about April through someone she knows at the hospital, and she recalled seeing a man she identified as Tilden Cudmore force a girl matching April’s description into his vehicle on the highway yesterday morning. She said she didn’t call it in at the time because she thought maybe Cudmore was her father and the girl was a runaway or something.”

Joe tried to process what Reed had just told him.

“Who made that call?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “She wouldn’t identify herself to the dispatcher.”

“But you think it was legitimate?”

“Yeah,” Reed said. “We’ve had run-ins with Cudmore a few times. He’s a survivalist type who lives by himself in a trailer out in the county. He’s a real piece of work. There have been rumors about him cruising the highways, driving well below the speed limit, like he’s looking for somebody, but we couldn’t hardly pick him up for that.

“Anyway, I sent a deputy out to his place, but he wasn’t home and his Humvee was gone. The deputy happened to look in the man’s dumpster and he found a purse inside with April’s ID. There’s also a backpack and some clothing we hope you can identify.”

Joe said, “Tilden Cudmore. You’ve thrown me for a loop.”

“Join the club,” Reed said. Then: “Here’s the address. I’m on my way out there now.”

—

JOE KNOCKED AND OPENED Lucy’s bedroom door. She was still on the phone with Sheridan.

He said, “Get dressed and bundled up. I need your help. They may have found some of April’s things and you’ll be better at recognizing them than I am.”

“Did Dallas Cates have them?” Lucy asked.

“Some guy named Tilden Cudmore.”

“Who’s he?”

“I have no idea,” Joe said. “But we’re going to find out.”