Savage Run

18

It was a month after elk-calving season in the Bighorns and Joe Pickett was doing a preliminary trend count. The purpose of the trend count was to assess how the elk had wintered, and how many babies had been born to replenish the herd. The season for calves was generally May 20 through June 30, so all of the new ones should have dropped. He rode near the tree line on his buckskin, Lizzie, looking down the slope into the meadows and brush for the elk. It was one of those rare, perfect, vibrant July mornings that pulsed with color and scent. Wildflowers were bursting open in the meadows like strings of mute fireworks, and saplings were stretching sunward after recently breaking out of the solitary confinement of the snowpack. Swollen narrow streambeds were flexing their muscles with runoff. Summer was here, and it was in a hurry.

The cow elk used the tall sagebrush just below the tree line for calving, and Joe had found seven elk cows and six month-old newborns so far. It was a good year for elk given the fairly mild winter and the moist spring. He could smell their particular musty presence even before he saw the first mother and calf. The mothers eyed him warily as he quietly rode by in the shadows of the trees. One tried to lure him away from her calf by fully exposing herself in the meadow and trotting through the open field toward the opposite rise. She stopped in clear view to look over her shoulder, and snorted when Joe rode on and didn’t pursue. Her calf looked at him through a fork in the tall brush. The calf was all eyes and ears, and Joe was close enough to see a bead of condensation on the calf’s black snout.

Joe rode deeper into the trees and further up the mountainside until the mother elk turned back to her calf. He goosed Lizzie through the timber, toward a patch of sunlight that became a small grassy park and dismounted. He tied up his horse and sat on a downed log, where he stretched out and let the sun warm his legs. Pouring a cup of coffee from his battered Thermos, he tipped up the brim of his hat and sighed. The coffee was still hot.

Joe had put off doing any serious thinking until he was in the mountains, hoping the quiet solace of the outdoors would help him find the answers he was looking for. Now, he reviewed the particularly odd chain of events that had started with Jim Finotta getting to Sandvick and Judge Pennock’s refusal to advance Joe’s charges against Finotta.

Judge Cohn in Johnson County had reluctantly agreed to review the charges against Finotta but had yet to take any action. It was very likely that the charges, and the case, would go nowhere. The previous day, Joe had received a call from Robey Hersig saying that Judge Pennock was furious with him-and Joe, for taking the case out of the county. Hersig reported that Finotta was burning up the telephone lines between his law office in Saddlestring and the governor’s office in Cheyenne. Joe was being accused of engaging in a vendetta against Finotta. Words like “harassment,” “land owner abuse,” and “bureaucratic arrogance” had been used. It wouldn’t be long, Joe knew, before he heard something from Game and Fish headquarters in Cheyenne. He could imagine the furtive meetings and hand-wringing that was almost definitely going on at headquarters over what he had done. If the governor got involved, which was likely, the issue would be elevated immediately, probably to the office of director. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten in trouble, and probably wouldn’t be the last time. He hoped if the boys at headquarters in Cheyenne decided to admonish him that they’d do it in a straightforward manner, but sometimes that was too much to expect from them.

If it weren’t for mornings like this in a place like this, Joe thought, they could have this job.

He was not very good about letting things drop, Joe decided. It wasn’t as if elk were an endangered species. There were tens of thousands of elk in the state, and probably more than there should be. Elk were killed every day by cars, disease, and predators. Hunters harvested thousands every fall. Other elk would replace dead elk.

But a huge bull elk had been killed out of season by a man who simply wanted the head of the animal on his wall. The elk’s headless, massive body was left where it fell, and seven hundred pounds of meat left to rot. And nobody, it seemed, was as outraged about the crime as Joe Pickett was. For reasons he had trouble defining, he had taken this particular offense personally.

It wasn’t that Jim Finotta was a millionaire lawyer, or a rancher, or a developer. Joe didn’t harbor any ill will toward successful men. What outraged Joe was the casualness of the crime and Finotta’s reaction when accused.

Most poachers Joe caught lied about their crime when confronted. But Finotta lied with contempt and a haughty arrogance that suggested that it was somehow beneath him to have to waste his good, valuable lies on the likes of Joe. Jim Finotta didn’t need a trophy head on his wall for any other reason than to impress his guests and boost his own sense of worth. He certainly didn’t need the meat, like a lot of poachers and hunters, but instead of giving it away or donating it to a shelter in town, he left it. If it was just a trophy Finotta had wanted, he could have hired a guide and hunted the elk in season like a sportsman. Instead, Finotta chose to shoot the bull elk off season, when no one else could hunt it, order his lackeys to behead it, cover up the crime when accused, and use his influence and connections to discredit his accuser. As Robey Hersig had put it, the assholes usually won.

But Joe had more than just Jim Finotta on his mind.

Two days before, “Stewie” had called again. This time Sheridan had answered the telephone. When she asked who was calling, the caller had, at first, refused to tell her. But when Sheridan said she would have to hang up, the man identified himself as Stewie Woods and said he would be calling back when her mother was home. Sheridan wouldn’t tell him when that would be.

Marybeth confided that evening when they were in bed that she had a strange feeling about this. If it were some kind of joke, there was nothing remotely funny about it. She said it didn’t make sense that even the most dogged reporter would call twice using the same ruse. It had to be someone else, she said, calling for some other reason. She hoped it wasn’t some morbid follower of One Globe.

But it couldn’t actually be Stewie Woods. That was one thing both Joe and Marybeth left unsaid. There wasn’t any reason to speculate further.

Whoever it was, Joe was irritated by the calls. They had requested Caller ID in the hope of tracing the number, but it not yet been installed. He hoped he would be there the next time a call came so that he could snatch the telephone away and try to determine what was going on. It offended him that a stranger would call his wife, and it offended him even further that the reason they were calling was because of her past relationship with another man. As innocent as Marybeth made it out to be, it made him grit his teeth when he thought about it. It was hard to imagine her in her high school and early college days laughing and trading jokes with two guys like Stewie Woods and Hayden Powell. Both of those men would later become well known, at least in the environmental community. They were semifamous and charismatic. And both of them had loved his wife. However, Marybeth had chosen Joe and opted out of her potential life of excitement and notoriety. He hoped like hell she didn’t regret the path that she had chosen. Instead of hanging out with two big-shot environmentalist celebrities, Marybeth got to move around the state of Wyoming with Joe Pickett from one falling-down state-owned house to another. Choosing Joe had resulted in discontinuing her legal career and adopting severe month-by-month budgeting to make ends meet, not to mention getting shot in her own house and being left for dead.

Joe sighed, smiled grimly to himself, and tried to calm down. But he vowed that when he found out who was calling Marybeth he would punch him right in the nose.

Leading Lizzie down to the stream so she could get a drink before he continued his ride up the summit, Joe marveled at the very bad run of luck the environmental community was having of late. First there was Stewie Woods, right here in his own district, blown up by a cow. Then their champion, Rep. Peter Sollito and his scandalous death. Then Hayden Powell is killed in a house fire in Washington State. Powell’s publisher claimed that Hayden had been two weeks away from delivering his book but no trace of the manuscript could be found.

Joe climbed back into the saddle and clucked at Lizzie to go. The string of bad luck had been capped this last week by the discovery of the body of wolf advocate Emily Betts. Her small private airplane had crashed in the Beartooth Mountains southwest of Red Lodge, Montana. Hikers found her body. They reported that upon approaching the wreckage they had seen two wolves emerge from the cockpit and flee. Emily Betts, likely dead on impact, had been partially devoured by her cargo.

Joe Pickett was not the only one to wonder if this series of deaths had a common thread. Speculation ran rampant in both the environmental community and over coffee in Saddlestring’s local diner. But each incident was vastly different from the others. If there was a pattern it was incomprehensible. There was nothing about any of the deaths that suggested murder, except perhaps for Rep. Sollito’s, and Joe had read that a prostitute had recently been arrested who was accused of the murder-although she was denying it and had hired a celebrity lawyer.

Now Emily Betts had joined the list; a wolf advocate who died while trying to illegally transplant wolves into Wyoming.

But even devoted conspiracy theorists could not connect the deaths in any way other than the fact that they were recent and all involved high-profile environmental activists. And that most of the deaths were, in some way, humiliating to talk about.

Joe had heard stories, though, of locals high-fiving each other in the bars. Apparently, there were allegations being made on a national level within the fringe environmental groups, accusations of conspiracies, calls for a congressional and FBI investigation into the string of deaths.

Reining Lizzie to a stop, Joe pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket, and flipped it open to a fresh page. He drew a crude outline of the United States. Then he drew stars and dates at four locations: Saddlestring, Wyoming, June 10; Bremerton, Washington, June 14; Washington, D.C., June 23; and Choteau, Montana, June 29. There were four days between the deaths in Saddlestring and Bremerton; nine days between Bremerton and Washington, D.C.; and six days between Washington, D.C. and Choteau.

If a killer or killers were responsible, Joe thought, then they had been criss-crossing the country by air or road for almost a month. And there could possibly be two, three, or even four of them, each with a separate assignment. That seemed unlikely, he thought, simply because it was too complicated, with too many factors and possibilities where something could go wrong. But if it were one killer or a team of killers, they were having a hell of a busy month. He thought about the time lapses between the incidents and concluded that it was possible, although unlikely, that one team could have done all of the killings. The longest span of time between incidents was between Bremerton and Washington, D.C., which was also the longest distance by car, which meant it was possible the killer or killers were traveling by car.

He stared at the drawing, thought about the dates.

He was getting nowhere.

Joe turned Lizzie back into the trees. He planned to work his way up to the summit and back down toward his pickup and horse trailer through a drainage on the other side of the mountain. He expected to find, and count, additional elk calves. He might find some fishermen as well near the road, or campers setting up early for the weekend. He would take the long way.

He remembered to lean forward in the saddle and stroke Lizzie’s neck and tell her what a good horse she was. He didn’t used to do that.