Trophy Hunt

Joe handed the license back. “Well, at least go get a valid temporary one when you can, okay?”

Not Ike nodded. He concentrated on refolding the permit and sliding it into his vest pocket. His big face furrowed as he did it. Not Ike had poor motor-skill coordination, and although his casting was graceful, it took him ten minutes to button up his fly-fishing vest, and longer than that to tie on a new fly. He had all the patience in the world, Joe thought, all the patience that didn’t manifest itself in greedy, impatient fishermen like Jeff O’Bannon.

“Yeah, okay,” Not Ike said. “You gonna give me a ticket?” Joe shook his head. “Just get the new permit, okay?”

Not Ike looked up, his face dark with sudden concern. “You found the Ripper yet?” “No.”

Not Ike stepped close to Joe. “I think I seen them in the alley downtown the night before those two men got killed.”

“Really.”

“I was fishin’ a ways upstream, around the corner. I told the sheriff and that deputy. Even the FBI guy.”

Joe wasn’t sure what to ask. “What did they look like?”

“Wiry. Hairy and wiry. Creepylike. They were up in the alley, in the shadows,” Not Ike said and gestured toward downtown Saddlestring, toward the alley behind the buildings on Main Street.

“And there’s something else.” “What’s that?”

Not Ike leaned in even closer, until his lips were nearly touching Joe’s ear, and his voice dropped dramatically. “I caught three fish that night.”

Tuff ’s death was likely caused by massive head injury,” the county coroner told Joe when he finally returned Joe’s cell phone call. “It was obvious even before we sent the body to the FBI that there was severe head trauma. The wound looked like what a hammer or baseball bat would make, but most likely it was caused by a rock he hit when he was thrown from the horse. We found blood and tissue on a rock up there.”

“What about the autopsy?” Joe asked, as he drove. “Anything unusual?”

“Nope. His blood alcohol level was .15, so he was legally drunk. But I don’t think there are any laws against that if you’re riding a horse.” “But nothing else you found that was odd? Toxicology?”

Joe could hear tinny country music playing in the background in the coroner’s office.

“Nothing other than the obvious mutilations and the teeth marks of your grizzly bear.”

Joe rolled his eyes. His bear again.

“Have you spoken to the coroner in Park County about the other guy?” Joe asked. “Or should I call him?”

“I talked to Frank yesterday,” the coroner said. “He’s a friend of mine. Basically, he determined the same thing on Mr. Tanner: blunt trauma head injury likely caused the death, although Frank thought it was possible that the blow to the head didn’t kill the victim outright. Frank said it was possible the man had a severe concussion, and that they started skinning him before he actually expired.”

“Yikes,” Joe said, feeling a chill. “I agree.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, Frank’s guy didn’t have any of the other wounds we saw with Tuff Montegue. The body seemed to be found in the same place it fell, and there was no predation of any kind on it. Your bear didn’t make it over to Park County, I guess.”

“Right,” Joe said absently, but it made him think of something. “Thanks, Jim.”

“You bet,” the coroner said. “I’ve been over all of this with Sheriff Barnum and Agent Portenson.”

“I know,” Joe said, his mind elsewhere.

On the other side of town, outside the town limits, Joe pulled off of the highway into the rutted, unpaved parking lot of an after-hours club called the Bear Trap. The Bear Trap was a one-level cinder-block building with bars on the few small windows and a fading members only sign on the front door. The place looked like a bunker. There were five vehicles, battered pickups parked at odd angles near the front of the club. The Bear Trap skirted liquor laws by proclaiming itself a private club, and it catered to drinkers who were still thirsty after the bars in Saddlestring closed at 2 a.m. It made the Stockman’s Bar in town seem like an upscale establishment. Joe had been to the Bear Trap once before, following up on an anonymous poaching hotline tip that a “member” had been seen taking a pronghorn antelope out of season and that the poacher had retired to the club after field-dressing the animal.

The poacher had been easy to find and arrest, because the still-warm carcass of the antelope was in the back of his pickup under a tarp, blood running in thick strings from beneath the tailgate into the mud, and the man himself was at the bar wearing a shirt matted with blood and clumps of bristly pronghorn hair. The poacher surrendered without a fight, and seemed to look forward to a calm night in jail. The Bear Trap was the kind of a place where a blood-stained shirt didn’t really stand out, the bartender had told him later. The bartender’s name was Terry Montegue, Tuff ’s brother.

Joe checked his gun and the pepper spray on his belt before entering. Once he was inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The barred windows were shuttered closed, and the only light came from Coors, Bud, and Fat Tire beer signs, a fluorescent backlight over the bar, and an ancient jukebox playing Johnny Horton songs. Joe liked Johnny Horton, but wasn’t sure he could ever justify the fact if somebody challenged him to say why.

Four drinkers were crowded together on stools in the middle of the bar, and Terry Montegue hovered over them behind the bar. Joe heard the sound of dice being scooped into a cup, and saw a clumsy flurry as the drinkers stuffed the cash they had been gambling into their coat pockets.

“Nothing to worry about,” Terry told the drinkers, looking over them at Joe. “It’s just the game warden.”

Joe smiled to himself, gave the drinkers a wide berth, and sat on a stool at the end of the bar.

Montegue was tall and bald with a beer belly that hid the buckle on his belt. He had a fleshy, cruel drinker’s face, made worse by the scar that cut a white, wormlike path up his cheek, through his eyelid, and into his brow. He wore a too-small short-sleeved shirt that showed off his arm muscles, as well as the rattlesnake-head tattoos on both forearms.

“Can I get you something?” Montegue asked.

Joe looked up at the drinkers, who were trying to look at him without being obvious. They looked like out-of-work ranch hands or CBM roughnecks between crew shifts. Joe guessed the latter, since their pockets were stuffed with cash. He wondered what he would turn up if he called their plates in.

“I thought you had to be a member to drink here?”

Montegue’s upper lip arced, and Joe assumed it was a smile. Montegue reached under the bar and tossed a thick pad of perforated cards on the counter. They were blank membership cards, Joe saw.

“Membership costs fifteen bucks a year, or ten with your first drink. You wanna join?”

“Nope,” Joe said. “What, then?”

“Your brother, Tuff. I’m a member of the task force . . .”

One of the drinkers snorted down the bar, and turned away. The others stared ahead, not looking at each other or, Joe surmised, they would be forced to laugh.

Joe started again. “I’m investigating the death of your brother, Tuff. I want to ask you a few questions.”

Montegue sighed, leaned forward, and placed both of his palms on the bar. He rotated his arms to give Joe the full effect of his triceps. “The sheriff ’s been here, and some FBI dork. Are you guys just following each other around?”

“Sort of,” Joe admitted.

“I bet whoever sucked the blood out of Tuff was bombed for a week,” Montegue said. “Look for a drunk alien, is my suggestion.”

This produced a big laugh from the drinkers.

“I’m interested in what Tuff had been doing for the last couple of years,” Joe said. “I know he was working for Bud Longbrake at the time of his death, but what else was he into?”

Montegue went down the list: ranch hand, school bus driver, roofer, customer service rep, surveyor, and professional mountain man at a Wild West show, until he hurt his back.

“When was he a surveyor?”

“Well, he wasn’t actually a surveyor. He was more like a surveyor’s peon.” “He was a rodman,” one of the eavesdropping drinkers said. “You know, the guy who walks out and holds the rod so the surveyor can shoot it.”

“Who did he work for?”

Montegue leaned back and rubbed his chin. “I know he worked a little for the county on the roads, but he also worked for some big outfit based out of Texas that was doing work up here.” He turned to the drinkers. “Anybody remember the name of that company Tuff worked for a while? I remember him bragging about it, but I can’t remember the name.”

“Something Engineering,” one of the drinkers said. “Turner Engineering?”

Montegue frowned. “No, that ain’t it. Something like that, though. Why does it matter?” he asked Joe.

Joe shrugged. “I’m not sure it does. I was just curious. I’ll check around.”

“Check away,” Montegue said.

“Did Tuff have enemies? Someone who might want to kill him?” Montegue snorted, “Me, at times. He owed me 850 bucks. He still does, I guess, and I aim to sell a couple of his rifles so we’re even.” Joe nodded.

“He had his share of fights, I guess. But he’s like all of these assholes. They fight, then they buy each other a drink, then they’re butt-buddies for life. I can’t think of any serious enemies Tuff had. Anything else you want to ask me?”

“Nothing I can think of,” Joe said. “But I might come back.”

“Feel free,” Montegue said, then thought of something that brought a smile to his face. “In fact, bring your wife. I’ll waive the first year of membership if you bring her.”

“I’ll pay for your membership if you bring her,” one of the drinkers said, and the others laughed.

“Leave my wife out of it,” Joe said with enough steel in his voice that Montegue raised his hands in an “I’m just kidding” gesture.

s he climbed into the Bighorn Mountains and neared Bud Longbrake’s Ranch, Joe mulled over a theory that had been floating in the back of his mind. Something about Tuff ’s death was just a little bit wrong. It almost but not quite fit the pattern.

The wounds on the cattle and wildlife had been reported in gruesome detail in the Saddlestring Roundup, Joe thought. What hadn’t been reported was the exact kind of cut made in the hides of the cows. A person following the story would have known just enough to make Tuff ’s murder appear to be like the others, he thought. But the wrong knife or cutting instrument was used. And how could a killer possibly prevent predators from finding the body? While there was something extraordinary in the bodies of the cattle, moose, and Stuart Tanner that apparently prevented predation, Tuff ’s killer obviously hadn’t been able to duplicate whatever it was.

Maybe, Joe thought, Tuff ’s murder was a copycat and entirely unrelated to the others. Maybe Tuff was killed for reasons wholly different from the other deaths, by someone who saw his opportunity to take advantage of the bizarre happenings to solve a personal problem with Tuff Montegue?

Again, Joe felt that if he could figure out what had happened to Tuff, and who murdered the man, the answers to the other and bigger parts of the puzzle might become more apparent.

“Or maybe not,” Joe said aloud to Maxine, his voice rising with frustration. “Maybe all of this crap has been the work of two wiry, hairy, creepylike guys who hang out in an alley in Saddlestring, like Not Ike said.”

21

Mary b eth drove lu c y, Jessica, Hailey Bond, and Sheridan to the Logues’ home after school, but something felt wrong about it. The three younger girls shared the middle seat in the van, and she could see through the rearview mirror that they were conspiring; they were animated, sneaky, whispering directly into each other’s ears, barely containing excitement. Something was going on, Marybeth thought. She could tell by their body language and sparkling eyes, and the way they shot glances at her while they whispered.

She said, “Jessica, are you sure it’s okay with your parents that they drive Lucy home?”

Marybeth tried to read Jessica in the mirror. The little girl was good, Marybeth thought. She could lie well.

“Yes, Mrs. Pickett, it’s okay,” Jessica said, while Lucy and Hailey stopped talking and looked innocently—too innocently—at Marybeth.

“And Sheridan’s coming too,” Lucy said.

“What?”

Sheridan chimed in, bored, from the backseat, “It’s okay, Mom. Really. I’ll make sure we’re home for dinner.”

Now Marybeth knew that something was up. Why would Sheridan want to join Lucy at the Logues? A conspiracy was afoot, no doubt. Sheridan was in on it, which was unusual in itself. Marybeth tried to read Sheridan’s face in the mirror while she drove. Sheridan, anticipating the scrutiny, looked casually out the side windows of the van, feigning a sudden interest in the homes along the street.

Marybeth felt a pang; her girls were growing up. They no longer wanted to share all of their secrets with her. It hurt to think that. Maybe if she didn’t work so much, Marybeth thought, it would be different. Maybe if she was home when school was out, like she used to be, her girls would confide in her again. Sheridan, especially. Sheridan used to tell Marybeth everything, lay bare her feelings and concerns, bounce things off of her while Marybeth prepared dinner. She didn’t do that anymore, because of Marybeth’s schedule, her work, her burgeoning new enterprise. Dinner was rushed, something she thawed in the microwave and gave Joe to grill, or takeout. While Marybeth still insisted on a family dinner together, it wasn’t the same anymore. Everything was rushed. Dinner was for eating, not catching up and visiting, talking about everyone’s day. Dinner now was a fuel stop that preceded homework, showers, and bed. God, she felt guilty.

But when Cam Logue had come into her office earlier in the day, looking surprisingly interesting—she chose that word, rather than others—in a black turtleneck and blazer and blue jeans and cowboy boots, and perched on the corner of her desk with his hair askew in his eyes and an open, hangdog expression on his face, and asked her if she would consider becoming a full partner in the real estate firm, she had had a brief, giddy vision of what it would be like if she succeeded as she knew she was capable of succeeding. She pictured them moving to a home in Saddlestring with bedrooms for everyone and a stove where all four burners actually worked.

“I’ve been thinking about this,” Cam had said, “and I believe it could be profitable for all of us.” He looked at her in a way he had never looked at her before, she thought, as if he were sizing her up for the first time.

“I think it could work, too,” she had said. “I could make you a lot of money.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second,” he said, leaning toward her, inches away so she could smell his subtle scent—Joe never used aftershave lotion or cologne—“I think you would be a great asset to the company,” he said. “I know one thing,” she told him, as he leaned closer. “I would bust my butt for you.”

He had smiled, almost painfully. “Don’t bust it, because it’s perfect as it is.”

Then she knew.

A line had been crossed. Cam was hitting on her, and she felt momentarily flattered. Then it passed. She wanted to be taken seriously as a professional, but now she wondered. Was this whole “get-your-realestate-license” thing a ruse by Cam to get her into bed?

“Cam,” she said, “you are way too close to me, physically, right now. Lean back. And if the reason why you want me to get my license is so something will happen with us, you’re so wrong about that it makes my head hurt. Marie is my friend, and don’t get me wrong—I think you’re an admirable businessman—but if the reason you want me to become involved is what you’re hinting at right now, well . . .”

Cam had shrunk back while she was talking, and was literally about to fall off of the desk.

“. . . Joe is my guy. That’s it. That’s all there is. He may screw up on occasion, and he doesn’t make much money, but he’s my guy.”

She was angry at herself at that moment, because she felt tears well in her eyes, which was the last thing she wanted to have happen. But she continued, narrowing her eyes, “And if you ever, and I mean EVER, even suggest again that there is anything more than a business relationship at all, I’ll tell Joe. And then I’ll tell Nate Romanowski . . .”

When she said the name “Nate Romanowski,” Cam visibly flinched. “. . . And that will be that,” Marybeth concluded.

All of this was coursing through Marybeth’s thoughts as she wheeled into the Logue home, stopped fast, once again, by the pickup with South Dakota plates in the driveway. It had been moved to the opposite side of the driveway, but the rear of it still jutted out into the path.

“So Jessica, your grandparents are still here?” Marybeth asked, looking into the mirror.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is your mom feeling better? She hasn’t been in the office in a couple of days.”

“I think so,” Jessica said. But it was obvious she was bristling to get out of the car. So was Lucy. And Sheridan was glaring at her.

“Well,” Marybeth said, “tell your mom hello from me and tell her I wish her to get well.” “Okay, Mrs. Pickett.”

Marybeth turned in her seat, stern. “You girls be home in time for dinner. Stay away from those buildings in the back. And if Marie isn’t feeling well enough to bring you home, you call me and I’ll come get you, okay?”

Lucy nodded. Sheridan mumbled something, averting her eyes. “What was that, Sherry?”

“Nothing.”

But Marybeth had heard what Sheridan said. Like you’re going to cook dinner, was what she mumbled.

Stung and hurt, Marybeth watched her girls skip toward the old house. They were leaning into each other, conspiring again. For the second time that day, she felt tears well in her eyes.

22

So how much farther is it?” Hailey Bond asked boldly, but there was a tremor of false courage in her voice.

“Right up here,” Jessica said. “And don’t talk so loud. Maybe we’ll catch him in the shack.”

Sheridan reluctantly followed the three younger girls. She couldn’t believe she had let Lucy talk her into this. But Lucy had begged her older sister to accompany them, and Sheridan felt an obligation, and also responsibility for Lucy’s well-being. If there was something to this crazy story, Sheridan thought, she wanted to be there for Lucy. It made her uncomfortable to be with the younger girls, with their chattering, and she wondered if she had ever been like that. Probably not.

“It’s right up here,” Jessica said, stopping and turning, holding her finger to her lips to shush everyone. “From now on, just whisper.”

“You’re trying to scare me,” Hailey said aloud. “Whisper!” Jessica admonished.

Hailey shrugged, trying to act brave.

This is silly, Sheridan thought. Lucy would get it for this later.

But Sheridan noticed Lucy looking at her with a false, frightened smile. Even if it was silly, Lucy was taking it seriously. Sheridan nodded to her, go on.

The shack seemed to morph out of the thick timber, as if it were a part of it. The shape of it seemed partly blurred, because it fit in so well with the trees. It was older, smaller, and more decrepit than Sheridan had imagined.

Jessica took a step ahead of the girls and turned, wide-eyed. She gestured toward the open window near the front door of the shack. This was as far as she and Lucy had been before. There was something in the air, maybe just the silence, but it got to Hailey Bond. Hailey shook her head, no.

“I’m not going closer,” Hailey said in an urgent whisper. “You guys are just trying to scare me.”

Sheridan noticed the smirk of satisfaction on Jessica’s face. Sheridan hoped that the whole thing wasn’t a setup, and that she had been asked along to legitimize it. If that turned out to be the case, Lucy would really get it later. But it didn’t seem like something she would do. In fact, she had stepped back and was standing next to Sheridan, clutching at her hand.

“Let me look,” Sheridan said, shaking off Lucy’s hand. The three younger girls stared at her, their eyes wide. “Step aside,” Sheridan whispered.

The girls parted, and Sheridan strode past them. She tried to walk with confidence, with courage. But she felt her knees weaken as she approached the window. She remembered Lucy saying that she and Jessica had trouble seeing in. For Sheridan, that should be no problem. Her chin was about the same height as the bottom of the windowsill.

She slowed as she neared the window. It was dark inside. She never even considered opening the door and walking in.

She approached the windowsill, stopping a few inches from it. She leaned forward, holding her breath.

There was a sleeping bag on the floor, all right. With nobody in it. There were magazines, papers, empty cans. A small gas stove. Books— hardbacks, thick ones. And, on a square of dark material, what looked like silverware. A lot of silverware.

She didn’t exactly lose her nerve, but when she turned around toward the younger girls she saw them running. Hailey was gone, Jessica was disappearing into the timber. Lucy held back, fear on her face, waiting for her older sister.

Sheridan was about to tell her sister there was nothing to worry about when she noticed that Lucy’s eyes had shifted from her to the side of the shack. Sheridan followed Lucy’s eyes, and felt her own heart whump against her chest.

He was a tall man, thick and dirty. Sheridan saw him in profile as he came from around the shack. He was looking at Lucy. He had long, greasy hair and a wispy beard. His nose was hooked, his mouth pursed, his eyes black and narrow. He wore a heavy, dirty coat. His trousers were baggy.

“Get the HELL out of here!” he snarled at Lucy. “Go away!”

Lucy turned on her heels and ran a few feet, then stopped again. Sheridan knew why. Lucy wouldn’t run without her sister.

The man hadn’t yet seen Sheridan, who was now hugging the side of the building.

Sheridan hoped he wouldn’t turn his head and see her. But he did.

For a second, she looked into his eyes, which were dark and enraged. Maybe a little frightened, she thought later.

“G-g-get OUT OF HERE, YOU l-l-little b-b-bitch!” he screamed. Her eyes slid down the front of him, at his coat. The name “Bob” was stenciled above a breast pocket.

He took a step toward her, and Sheridan ran. She had never run faster, and she overtook Lucy in seconds. She reached back, found the hand of her younger sister, and didn’t let go as they weaved in and out of trees, around untrimmed brush, until they collapsed within sight of the Logue home.

23

An ho u r an d a ha lf away, after calling Marybeth to tell her that he’d be getting home later than usual, Joe drove up the two-track on the Longbrake Ranch toward the treeline where Tuff Montegue was killed. He wanted to retrace the route of Tuff Montegue, to be there in the same place and at the same time of night that the coroner suggested Tuff was killed.

There was a crisp fall chill in the air. The beginning of dusk had dropped the temperature a quick twenty degrees. The chill, along with the last of the fall colors in the aspen pockets that veined through the dark timber, seemed to heighten his senses. Sounds seemed sharper; his vision extended; even the dry, sharp smell of the sage seemed to have more of a bite. Maybe it was because just prior to darkness the wind usually stopped, and it was the stillness that brought everything out.

He was placing himself right square in the middle of it, using himself as bait. Marybeth wouldn’t approve.

The grass around the murder scene was still flattened by all of the vehicles that had been up there, so it was easy to find. He stopped and killed the engine. Maxine eyed him desperately, her excitement barely contained. “Yup, we’re going to get out,” he told her, “but you’re sticking close to me.”

With that, she began to tremble. Dogs were so easy to please, Joe thought. Pulling on his jacket, he swung out of his pickup and drew his twelvegauge Wingmaster pump shotgun from its scabbard behind the seat, loaded it with double-ought buckshot, and filled a jacket pocket with more shells. He pulled on a pair of thin buckskin gloves, clamped his Stetson on tight, and walked the perimeter of the crime scene. It had been cleaned up, he was glad to note. No cigarette butts or Coke cans in the grass. Maxine worked the area as well, nose to the ground, drinking in the literal cornucopia of smells—wildlife scat, blood, maybe the bear, a dozen Sheriff’s Department people, the ME, the coroner, anything else that clung to the grass.

He turned and faced east, studying the shadowed tree-line above him, wondering what it was that Tuff and his horse had seen that caused the problem. Walking very slowly and stopping often, as if he were hunting elk, he moved up the slope. He had learned that moving too quickly dulled too many senses in the wilderness. If his breathing became labored, all he could hear was himself. By walking a hundred yards and then stopping, he could see more, hear more. As the light filtered out, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sky was brilliant and close with swirls of stars. A quarter moon turned the grass and sagebrush dark blue. Maxine stayed on his heels.

For an hour, he moved slowly up the mountain until the first few of the trees were behind him and the forest loomed in front.

It wasn’t so much that Joe could see something in the trees as sense it. It was a hint, a barely perceptible hint, of the pressure he had felt at much greater volume when he found the moose.

Maxine moved up in front of him and set up on point. The hair on her back was raised, and she was sniffing the air.

He reached down and ran his fingers down her neck to calm her, but she was rigid. Her eyes were wild, her ears up and alert. “Stay,” he whispered to her. “Stay, girl.” She was staring into the dark trees the way she would if they were bird hunting and she had found pheasants in the cover. But he could see nothing.

Suddenly, the dog exploded with purpose. She launched herself into the trees ahead—Joe missed when he grabbed for her collar—and she barked with a manic, deep-throated, hound like howl that sounded so loud in the stillness that it even scared him. He had never seen his mild-mannered Labrador act so crazy.

“Maxine!” he yelled. No point in proceeding quietly now. “MAXINE! Get back here! MAXINE!”

He glimpsed her in the shadows, her tail and hind legs illuminated by a dull shaft of moonlight. And then she was gone.

He chased her through the trees listening for her barking. It sounded like she had veered left, then right. She sounded so mean, he thought. And he thought he heard something else. Footfalls? Somebody running? He couldn’t be sure.

He whistled for her, and kept shouting as her barking grew more and more distant. He unholstered his Mag-Lite and bathed the area in front of him with its beam, then sharpened it into focus and shot it up into the trees in the general direction of where she had run. He couldn’t pick up her track.

“Oh, no,” he moaned aloud. In the seven years he had had his dog, she had never run away from him.

He wondered whether she was stupid enough to have taken off after the grizzly bear.

Her barking was now so faint, he could barely hear it. It came from farther to the right in the forest, much deeper into the timber.

While she was still in earshot, he hoped, he fired two blasts from the shotgun into the sky. The flame from the muzzle strobed orange on the tree trunks near him.

Then he waited. Yelled. Whistled. Fired two more blasts and reloaded the shotgun with shells from his pocket. Nothing. It was now completely silent again.

“Shit, Maxine.”

There was no way he could track her in the dark and find her. He couldn’t even be sure she was to the right, the way sounds bounced around in the mountains. Very reluctantly, he began to work his way back the way he had come, stopping periodically hoping to hear her bark. Joe knew that if she managed to emerge from whatever forces had turned her into the hellhound she had become, she would know to return to the pickup. In normal circumstances, he would have given her a day or so before getting worried. But these weren’t normal circumstances. He pictured her mutilated body and it made him shudder.

Joe sat in his pickup with his windows rolled down and his headlights on. Every few minutes, he honked the horn. Maxine would know the sound, recognize it as him. He scanned the slope and timber, hoping des-perately to see her.

It pained him to think that Maxine had possibly charged at something in an effort to save him. Why else would she have become so ferocious, so single-minded? It wasn’t for her own sake, he thought. She wasn’t the kind of dog to embrace a confrontation or want to fight.

“Damn it all,” he said and fought the urge to pound the steering wheel. He kept looking over at the passenger seat, thinking that’s where she should be. He thought that he’d probably spent more hours with Maxine than with Marybeth or the girls. Maxine was a part of him.

He tried not to get maudlin. Leaning on the horn, he let the sound of it express what he felt.

He sat up with a start when something light colored and low to the ground moved just beyond his headlights. Grabbing for the spotlight, he thumbed the switch, the beam bathing the acreage in front of him with white light, seeing something doglike . . . only to discover that it was a damned coyote. The coyote stopped for a moment, eyes reflecting red, then moved down the mountain.

Again, Joe cursed. And the curse released something that started in the back of his throat like a hard, hot lump and burst forward, and he sat there in the dark and he cried.

he cell phone on the dashboard burred at 10 p.m., and Joe could see from the display that it was Marybeth. He had avoided calling her.

“So, are you coming home tonight?” she asked, an edge of irritation in her voice.

“Yes, I’m just about to leave. I’ll be home in forty-five minutes.”

She obviously picked up on the tone of his voice, the solemnity: “Joe, are you all right? Is something wrong?”

“Maxine ran away,” he said, telling her in as few words as possible what happened.

For several moments, neither spoke.

“I don’t want to tell the girls,” Marybeth said. “We’ll have to.”

“Okay, but in the morning. Otherwise, they’ll cry all night long.” Joe nodded, knowing she couldn’t see the gesture.

“Oh, Joe,” she said, in a way that made him feel guilty for once again bringing pain into their family.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said.

As Joe drove down the mountain, he kept honking. He wondered if Bud Longbrake could hear him down at the ranch, and figured that he probably could. He called Bud from his cell phone, told him why he was making so much noise, asked Bud to keep an eye out for his dog.

“Your dog?” Bud said, genuine sympathy in his voice. “Damn, I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“When my first wife left me I didn’t feel nearly as bad as when my dog died.”

Joe didn’t dare respond to that one.

quarter of a mile from where he would turn onto the highway, Joe looked into his rearview mirror and saw something in his taillights. “YES!” he shouted, and slammed on his brakes.

Maxine was exhausted, her head hung low, her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth like a fat, red necktie. She literally collapsed in the road.

Joe walked back and picked her up, seventy-five pounds of dog, and buried his face in her coat as he took her to his truck. He saw no obvious wounds on her, although she was shaking. He lay her on her seat, and she looked at him with her deep, brown eyes. Filling a bowl with water from his water bottle he tried to get her to drink, but she was too tired.

As he wheeled on to the highway with giddy relief, he called Marybeth, and she burst into tears at the news. He called Bud, and said not to worry about the dog. After punching off, Joe told Maxine, “Don’t ever, ever do that again, or I’ll shoot you like the dog you are.” He meant the first part but not the second. She didn’t hear him because she was sleeping, her head where it always was when he drove, on his lap.

As he pulled into his driveway, he glanced up to see Marybeth at the window pulling the shade aside. The porch light lit up the cab of the truck, and he looked down to see if Maxine was awake. He didn’t really want to have to carry her again.

That was when he noticed something wrong. Her coat seemed lighter than it should.

He snapped on the dome light and simply stared. Whatever she had seen or experienced had scared her so badly that her coat was turning white. “Okay,” Joe said aloud. “Enough is enough. Now I’m starting to get mad.”

Sheridan and Lucy were still up, even though it was past their bedtime, because Marybeth wanted them to tell Joe what had happened earlier on the Logue property. As Joe entered the house and hung his jacket on the rack in the mudroom, he saw two guilty-looking girls in their pajamas standing near the stair landing. Marybeth was behind them in the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Tell him, girls,” Marybeth said to them.

Sheridan sighed and took the lead. “Dad, we screwed up this afternoon and we’re sorry for it. We went out to that shack on the Logue place . . .” He leaned against the doorframe of his office and listened to Sheridan tell him how they had deceived their mother and how they snuck up to the old shack. She described the contents inside the shack; the bedroll, books, stove, the long line of gleaming silverware on a dark cloth, then the appearance of “Bob” who called her a bitch. Lucy twisted the bottom of her pajama top in her fingers while her sister spoke, betraying her guilt.

“He called Sherry a bitch!” she repeated unnecessarily. “But he didn’t follow you,” Joe said, wary.

Both girls shook their heads. “You’re sure?”

Sheridan nodded. “We checked behind us when we were running. I saw him go back into the shack.”

Joe asked Marybeth, “Did you call the sheriff ?”

“No, I wasn’t sure if you would want him involved. We still can, though.” “Cam Logue needs to call Barnum,” Joe said. “I don’t know why he didn’t the first time the girls saw this guy.”

“I think he was just some homeless guy,” Sheridan said. “I feel bad about bothering him, now. I feel sorry for a grown man who has to live like that.”

Marybeth shot Joe a look. She was admonishing him to hold the line, to reinforce the talking to she had given the girls earlier in the evening. She knew Joe well enough that she feared he would soften. She was right, he thought. He tried to keep his expression stern and fixed.

“Girls, it’s past your bedtime now,” Marybeth said. “Kiss your dad goodnight and get into bed. We’ll discuss your punishment later.”

Relieved to be done with it, both girls approached Joe. It was then that Sheridan froze, looking around Joe toward the figure in the mudroom. “What’s wrong with Maxine?”

“She’s exhausted, girls,” Joe said. “I thought for a while tonight I lost her.” Sheridan stepped around Joe and turned on the light switch in the mudroom.

“She’s white!” she howled.

“What happened to her? Did she fall into some paint?” Lucy asked.

Joe said, “No. I think she got really scared. I’ve heard of it happening sometimes to animals. They get so scared that their hair turns white.”

“Is she okay?” Sheridan asked, bending over the dog and patting her white fur.

“I think so,” Joe said. “She’s probably just tired from running to catch me.” He watched as both girls nuzzled the sleeping dog, telling Maxine that everything would be okay. Marybeth gave it a few moments before scoot-ing the girls along.

When the girls were in bed, Marybeth turned to Joe. “I can’t believe how white she is.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Joe said, slumping into his office chair. “I’ve never seen a lot of things before, that have happened around here.”

“What are you doing now?” she asked.

He sighed. “I need to check my messages, see if anything is happening. Then I’ll be up.”

“Don’t be long.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

He called to her before she went upstairs. “Try not to go to sleep right away, I’ve got some things I want to talk with you about.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, smiling at him. Her smile took him off guard, and he welcomed it. With her schedule, it had been a while since they had gone to bed together with both of them not too tired.

“Really,” he said, grinning back. “It was quite a day. I investigated a crop circle that wasn’t a crop circle, met with Nate, then lost our dog.”

“Hmmmm,” she purred, obviously thinking of what to say next. “I had an interesting day as well. Don’t be long.”

Nothing from Robey, nothing from Trey Crump, nothing from anyone. Except another email from deenadoomed666@aol.com.

“Oh, no,” he whispered aloud.

There were no photos this time, only text.

Dear Joe:

I hope you got my last e-mail—didn’t hear from you so I wasn’t sure :) I hope you liked the pictures O¨¢ . things are getting a little crazy here now so this has to be short. i’ve got some very important things to tell you that you will want to know. don’t know how much longer i’ll be able to tell you these things. please come by as soon as you can or at least reply to me. i know a lot more now. i’ve got to go. He’ll be back any minute. Just when you think that things can’t get any weirder they get weirder.

Love O¨¢ , Deena Joe replied:

Deena:

I’ll be by in the morning. I hope you’re okay. If you need to talk to me away from him let me know and we can go somewhere. It’s important that you stay safe. If you need help now, call 911 or my direct line.

Joe Pickett As he prepared to go to bed, his head swimming once again with the unwanted images she had previously sent him, he saw a glow of light from beneath the closed bathroom door. He stopped and knocked.

“Come in.” It was Lucy.

He opened the door wide enough to stick his head in. Lucy was standing at the sink, looking carefully at herself in the bathroom mirror.

“What are you doing, darling?”

Lucy’s cheeks flushed red. “I was really scared today, Dad, when that man came out. Sherry said I looked funny. So I was just checking myself.” Joe smiled. “You were checking to see if your hair was turning white?”

“I guess so. That’s what Sherry said.” “Don’t worry, sweetie. It’s still blond.”

To Sheridan, as he passed their dark bedroom: “Quit scaring your sister, Sheridan.”

“Sorry, Dad,” Sheridan said from beneath her covers, where she had no doubt been hiding to muffle her giggles. “She deserved it, is all.”

“Good night.”

Marybeth was in bed and she looked as beautiful as he could ever remember. Her blond hair was loose and brushed to the side, fanning across a pillow. Her knees tented the covers, but the quilt was turned down enough that he could see she was wearing the dark-blue silk chemise that drove him crazy. One of the thin straps had fallen over a shoulder.

“Get in here now,” she said. “We can talk later.”

24

Joe was in a foul mood at breakfast when he heard the sound of an engine and the crunching of gravel outside. He’d been stewing about what Marybeth had just told him about Cam Logue. Although she had handled it well—Marybeth always handled these things well, he thought—the very idea of it infuriated him. She had made Joe promise that he wouldn’t do anything; wouldn’t go to the office and confront Cam, or urge her to find another job. Chances of finding another job with this kind of promise in Saddlestring, as they both knew, were remote.

“I knew I never really liked him,” he told her, buttering his toast. “Joe,” she cautioned him, imploring him with her eyes to let it go. As she did, Sheridan came to the table. She was always first, before Lucy. Lucy took much more time to color-coordinate her outfit and determine what her hair would look like for the day.

“I had that dream again,” Sheridan announced. “I’m starting to think I know where it’s headed. It’s a showdown of some kind.”

Joe dropped his knife on the tabletop, looking at her. “A showdown between whom?”

“Good and evil,” she said, matter-of-fact. “Who wins?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The dream hasn’t gotten that far along yet.” “Well, let me know,” he said cautiously.

“I will,” she said, reaching for the jam. “Oh, somebody’s outside. They parked next to your truck.”

“Did you see who it was?” Joe asked.

“A four-wheel drive with a light-bar on top,” she said, filling a bowl with cereal. “Probably Sheriff Barnum.”

“Great,” he said, pushing away.

“Joe,” Marybeth cautioned again.

Joe strode outside feeling as if he were about to enter a boxing ring. He clamped his hat on his head while he walked, and pushed through the front gate harder than he had intended to, making it slam open.

It was Barnum, all right, as well as Agent Portenson. They both sat in a cloud of smoke inside the vehicle. They squinted at him as he approached. Simultaneously, the driver and passenger doors opened, and both men swung out. What a good morning for them to show up, Joe thought sardonically. If only they had Cam Logue with them, he could deal with two problems at once.

“Sorry to disturb your breakfast,” Barnum said, his voice more gravelly than usual and his face more gray.

“No, you aren’t,” Joe said, taking a position on the other side of his truck and leaning his forearms on the hood. He did not trust Barnum, and the early-morning surprise meeting had a confrontational feel about it. If something was going to happen, he wanted his truck between him and Barnum and Portenson. At least until he bridged the gap.

“What do you want?” Joe asked. “Why don’t you get right to it? I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”

“You could at least invite us in for a cup of coffee,” Barnum said, pretending he was offended.

Portenson snorted, and lit another cigarette.

Joe said to Barnum, “You are not welcome in my house, Sheriff. This is where my family lives. If you need to talk with me all you have to do is call, and I’ll meet you anywhere.”

“It’s also your office, right?” Barnum said, squinting. “Working among all of those girls, it must be tough to get anything done.”

“Right,” Joe said, looking squarely at Barnum. “Unlike the Sheriff ’s Department, where things get done but they’re usually wrong.”

Barnum stood still, but Joe saw the sheriff ’s jaw muscles twitch. Barnum’s flat, blue eyes didn’t look away.

“Boys,” Portenson said, waving his cigarette in the air. “We are getting nowhere.”

“What do you want?” Joe asked again. Barnum finally broke the staredown. “I mean, that can’t be discussed at a task-force meeting?”

“Sheriff,” Portenson said, “you want to start?”

“Keep the fuck away from our investigation,” Barnum growled. “Just stay the fuck away. You’re wasting everyone’s time.”

Joe smiled bitterly. “I suspected that was what this was about.”

“Just worry about your furry animals, and the alien hunter you were assigned by Robey,” Barnum said. “Don’t second-guess us and don’t reinterview all of our leads. There’s nothing you can find that we haven’t already.”

Joe looked to Portenson. The FBI agent seemed to be concentrating on his cigarette, and watching the morning sun hit Battle Mountain. He looked so out of place here, Joe thought. Portenson’s coat was too heavy for the fall, and too outdoor-gear trendy. His slacks and black slip-on shoes belonged beneath a desk in a temperature-controlled office.

“I talked with Robey,” Joe said to both of them. “I told him what I wanted to do. I’m not second-guessing anyone, but I thought that maybe I could find an angle on this whole mess that had been overlooked. You’re welcome to go talk to Cleve Garrett, if you want to. Go ahead and check up on me. I don’t care. Maybe you’ll turn up something I missed. We’ve got nothing so far. Not a damned thing. If I can look at the murders with a fresh eye . . .”

“You’re a goddamned game warden!” Barnum thundered, stepping around the nose of Joe’s truck toward him. “You’re no investigator. You’re only on the task force because the governor needed somebody from your agency.” Joe watched as Barnum’s face reddened. He had stopped just before he fully came around the truck.

“You should be out finding that bear, or counting fish, or whatever the hell it is you do. Leave the professional work to the professionals!”

“And who would that be?” Joe asked calmly.

“You son of a bitch!” Barnum spat, and Joe squared himself, ready. This had been brewing for years. He noted that Barnum wore his gun.

Joe was unarmed. Fine, Joe thought. He couldn’t imagine Barnum actually shooting him, not in front of an FBI agent, anyway. And it would be against Barnum’s nature to hurt him directly. Barnum was more of a corrupt, behind-the-scenes man.

Nevertheless . . .

Because of the rush in Joe’s ears, he didn’t hear the school bus on Bighorn Road until the brakes squealed to a stop and the accordion doors wheezed opened.

“Hello, Sheriff !” the bus driver called out cheerfully. “Hey, Joe!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Joe saw Portenson roll his eyes heavenward. The front door of the house opened and Sheridan and Lucy came out. Both girls were pulling on jackets and fumbling with their backpacks and lunch boxes. Marybeth stood in the doorway, watching them skip up the walk. But she was really watching Joe, Barnum, and Agent Portenson, Joe knew.

Sheridan made a point of walking between Joe and Barnum, and stopped long enough in front of Joe to tilt her chin up for a good-bye kiss. Lucy was right behind her.

The men watched as the girls boarded the bus and the doors closed. Both girls took seats near the window and waved as the bus pulled away.

Joe waved back. A thin roll of dust bloomed from the tires of the school bus as it labored away.

It was uncomfortably silent. Barnum still stood near Joe’s fender, but his hand had dropped away from the butt of his weapon. Marybeth still stood in the open doorway, watching the bus. Portenson leaned back against the sheriff ’s Blazer, and laughed silently.

“This is over,” Portenson said.

“No, it isn’t,” Barnum said, his voice low. “It’s just postponed.” “Anytime, Sheriff,” Joe said.

Barnum turned his back on Joe, nodded his head to Marybeth, and walked back to his GMC. He threw himself into the driver’s seat with more dexterity than Joe would have guessed, given Barnum’s age and health, and slammed his door shut.

“Agent Portenson,” Joe said. “How come you’re mixed up with him?” Portenson stared at Joe, smiling coldly. “I’ve got to go.”

“It isn’t birds, Portenson.”

Portenson waved his hand in front of his face, as if shooing away a fly. “Then what is it?”

“It’s two things, I think,” Joe said, keeping his voice low enough that Barnum wouldn’t hear. “I think we’ve got one set of killers responsible for most of the animals and Stuart Tanner. I think we’ve got another entirely separate killer who did Tuff Montegue.”

Portenson looked pained.

“Whether they’re connected or not I don’t know,” Joe said. “But if nothing else, we’ve got to figure out one or the other. We can’t look at the mutilations as one thing any longer, or we’ll never get anywhere.”

“We aren’t anywhere now,” Portenson said.

“No, we aren’t. But if we change the focus of the investigation, we might find something out.”

Portenson shook his head as if dispelling a bad thought.

“Look, Portenson, I know you’re not a bad guy,” Joe said. “I know what you did last winter, how you tried to stop the massacre. You blame me for putting you in that position, but you did the right thing. You can do it again.”

“Oh, just shut up,” Portenson said.

Joe grinned. “I can count on you, can’t I?” “Why do you even care?”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t want this kind of thing happening in my mountains, or my district. Not around my family. They’ve gone through enough in the last few years without worrying about something like this.”

Portenson looked genuinely sympathetic. Then something changed in his face.

“I still think you and that Nate Romanowski maniac are guilty of something. I’ll find that out one of these days, and I’ll bust you both. Then I’ll get out of this hellhole I’m in.”

Joe nodded. “That’s fine. But right now, we’ve got killers out here who are just about as scary as anything I can think of. You know that.”

Portenson lit another cigarette, then tossed it away angrily after one drag. “I’m hoping the whole thing just goes the fuck away,” he said. “There haven’t been any incidents in a few days, not since that stupid horse got his face ripped off. I just hope the whole thing goes away.”

“Maybe it will,” Joe said, thinking again of Cleve Garrett’s theory. “Or maybe just part of it will. If that happens, we’ve still got the other part to figure out.”

Barnum leaned on the horn, even though Portenson was just feet away from his vehicle.

“What an asshole,” Portenson said. “That’s just the half of it,” Joe said back.

25

Lot c17 at the riverside resort and RV Park was empty. “Damn it,” Joe said, thumping the steering wheel of his pickup with the heel of his hand. He looked over to Maxine, remembered that he had left her home to sleep today, then looked back at the vacated lot.

He wondered when they’d left. How long had the Airstream been gone?

A sick feeling welled up in Joe’s stomach. He hoped that Deena was all right. He felt responsible for her, since she had reached out to him even in her pathetic way. If he had acted sooner, had come over to see Deena the morning after the first message, could he have averted something? Had Cleve Garrett discovered their correspondence and hurt her? Or had he simply moved his operation to some other place?

He found Jimbo behind his trailer, raking leaves in his postage-stamp backyard.

“Jimbo, when did Cleve Garrett pull out?” Joe asked the resort manager. Jimbo froze, then slowly looked up. “What do you mean?”

Joe was confused for a moment. “Don’t you know that he’s gone? I just came from there. The lot is empty.”

Jimbo let the rake fall into the pile of leaves he had made. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “He musta’ left during the night. He was all paid up, so he doesn’t owe me anything. But he at least could have said goodbye so I’d have known I have another space to rent.”

“Didn’t you hear him go?” Joe asked, incredulous.

Jimbo pointed at his own head. “I don’t hear nothing without my hearing aids anymore. I take ’em out to sleep, so I guess he left after I went to bed.”

“When was that?”

Jimbo pondered the question. “Let’s see, I watched the news, read a little. You ever read Harry Potter?”

Joe had, but he didn’t want to discuss it.

“I’m hooked,” Jimbo said. “I’m on the third one now. I never thought I’d care a good goddamn about a little Brit orphan, but . . .” “Jimbo, what time?”

Jimbo’s face lost enthusiasm, and he thought for a moment. “Must have been after 11:30 or so. I think that’s when I packed it in.”

Deena’s last e-mail to Joe had been sent at 11:15, Joe remembered. In it, she hadn’t said they were leaving. Maybe she hadn’t known yet, he thought, the sick feeling coming back. Maybe Cleve read Joe’s response over Deena’s shoulder, and decided then that they needed to go immediately.

But what difference did it make what time they left? Joe thought. What was significant was the fact that they were gone, and that they felt a need to leave in the middle of the night.

Why?

As he crossed the Twelve Sleep County line into Park County, Joe called Hersig and told him that Cleve Garrett was gone and mentioned Deena’s e-mail.

“I think we should put out an APB,” Joe said. “Locating their truck and that big Airstream shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Hersig hesitated. “What?” Joe asked.

“We don’t have any grounds to stop him,” Hersig said. “A man has a right to move his trailer from place to place, Joe.”

“What about Deena?”

“What about her? Can you honestly make a case that you think she’s in danger? Or threatened? From what you told me she hasn’t ever indicated that she’s in trouble. It doesn’t sound like we have anything to go on at all here, Joe.”

Joe held the phone away from his ear and looked at it, scowling at Hersig. Then he pulled it back. “They left right after she sent me an e-mail, like I said. She was going to tell me something this morning that she thought was important. I’m telling you, Cleve Garrett is dirty in some way. Why else would he hightail it out of town so quickly when just the other day he was begging me to get him on the task force? I think he’s going to hurt her, if he hasn’t already.”

“Aw, Joe.. .”

“Damn it, Robey, if we find her body somewhere I hope you remember this conversation.”

Hersig sighed, “Okay, I’ll call the highway patrol. But if he’s located, we need more than what you’ve given me to search the trailer or arrest the guy. If she’s with him and looks okay we’ll have to cut him loose with our apologies.”

Joe hoped that if Garrett was stopped the man would give something away that would invite inquiry. At least Joe would know if Deena was with him, and if she was unharmed.

Maybe Barnum had a point, Joe thought, as he slowed his pickup to enter Cody. Maybe Joe didn’t know what he was doing.

Park County sheriff Dan Harvey had agreed to meet with Joe in his office to go over the case file of Stuart Tanner’s death. Harvey seemed younger and more at ease than he had been during the task-force meet-ing, Joe thought. Maybe he was just more comfortable on his own turf.

The sheriff offered coffee, and Joe accepted. They sat in the sheriff ’s office, which was larger and much neater than Barnum’s rathole, Joe observed. There were even books on the bookshelves.

“I asked Deputy Cook to sit in with us, Joe. He received the callout and was the first officer on the scene.”

Joe nodded to Cook, who nodded back. Joe thought the deputy seemed capable and serious.

“Anything happening in Twelve Sleep County?” Harvey asked, as a receptionist delivered three Styrofoam cups of see-through coffee.

“Need anything in it?” she asked Joe.

Maybe some coffee beans, Joe thought, but declined her offer. “Has Robey been in contact with you?” Joe asked.

“Every afternoon.”

“Then you know that we haven’t made any progress. That paranormal guy Cleve Garrett has disappeared, though. We’re looking for him. But nothing of significance has happened yet.”

Harvey shrugged. “This is a bad case. I just wish it would go away somehow. There’s just no real evidence anywhere.”

Cook nodded in agreement. “The only good thing about it is that there haven’t been any more murders or mutilations in Park County.”

“We found a horse,” Joe said, grimacing a little. “I heard. You were there, right?”

Joe nodded.

“You heard that the FBI said there was no toxicology on Mr. Tanner, right?” Harvey said. “Nothing unusual, I mean. He died from a blow to the head, and he would have died from severe exposure anyway. His mutilation occurred postmortem.”

Cook said, “Basically, there’s nothing we’ve found that we haven’t already given to Robey Hersig,” an edge of jurisdictional integrity creeping into his voice. “So frankly, I’m not sure why you’re here.”

“I’m just going over things again,” Joe said. “Maybe I’m spinning my wheels. I’m not accusing you guys of withholding anything.”

“That’s good,” the sheriff said, sipping his coffee and exchanging a glance with Cook. “Because we’re not. Besides, practically everything happened in Twelve Sleep County. Our guy is dead just because the aliens or whatever couldn’t see the county line.”

Cook laughed at the sheriff ’s joke, and Joe smiled. “So who called it in?” Joe asked.

Cook opened his file with a copy of the 911 log. “The call came in at 4:32 a.m. from an unknown male. The caller didn’t identify himself, but he reported a body within sight of county road 212. Dispatch took down the information and called me at home because I’d just gotten off of my shift. Katherine, the night dispatcher, said it was hard to understand the caller, and she had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times. Bad connection, I guess.”

Joe was silent for a moment, considering the situation, turning the details over in his head. “Deputy Cook, you said the body was found within sight of the road, but was it parallel to the road, or somewhere on a turn?” Cook sat back, not sure where this was headed. “It was parallel to the road, in the trees. We found the body in a clearing.” “You found it pretty easily, then?”

“Yup. The directions from the call-in were good. He told us it was 6.8 miles on the country road from the highway. It was exactly 6.8 miles, all right.”

“So you drove 6.8 miles and then what? Shone your spotlight out to the side?” Joe asked.

Cook bobbed his head. “I picked up the body right where it was supposed to be.”

“So,” Joe asked, rubbing his jaw, “if you hadn’t known the exact location of the body, could you have seen it from the road?”

Cook snorted, “In the daylight, hell yes. It was plainly visible from the road.”

“But it wasn’t daylight,” Joe said, perking up. “It was night. Would your headlights have picked up the body if you were driving down that road?” Cook hesitated, then: “No. There’s no way I could have seen it off to the side like that in the dark.”

Sheriff Harvey slowly sat up, and leaned forward on his desk. “Shit,” he said. “So how did the guy who called it in see the body? How did he know it was there?”

Joe said, “Yup.”

“I never thought of that,” Cook confessed. “Damn it all. The coroner said Tanner was killed between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. which means the guy either saw it happen, or he fucking did it.”

“Do you keep a tape of the calls?” Joe asked. His question betrayed his growing excitement.

Harvey’s cheeks flushed. “We do, but the machine wasn’t working that day. I’m sorry about that.”

“The call came in at 4:30 a.m., right? Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that someone was driving around out there at that time of night?” Joe asked.

Harvey shook his head. “Not really. We know that there’s been some drug activity on that road, some meth buys. It’s also a road pretty popular with the high school crowd. They go out there to drink and jump each other’s bones. My guess is that somebody like that called it in.”

“So it was from a cell phone?” “We assume so.”

“Does your dispatcher have Caller ID?”

Harvey’s eyebrows shot up. “You know, we honestly didn’t think of that. We’ve got it but we never really pursued it because we didn’t put much emphasis on the caller himself. Didn’t seem important. The dispatcher said the guy was really hard to understand, and she kept having to ask him to repeat himself. It was like he was drunk or drugged, she said.”

“I’ll check the record,” Cook said, standing up. “Be right back.” “Seems like a good guy,” Joe said after Cook had left.

“He is,” Harvey said, sipping his coffee. “I think he’s a little miffed that he didn’t have an answer for you.”

“I’ll tell him not to worry.”

While they waited, Joe told Harvey about his encounter with Cleve Garrett and Deena, as well as the crop circles that weren’t crop circles. Joe explained that he was currently operating under the theory that the mur-ders and mutilations in Twelve Sleep and Park County were connected, with the exception of Tuff Montegue’s death, which didn’t fit the pattern. Harvey maintained a steady smile, and nodded from time to time. He was noncommittal overall and Joe suspected that Harvey would rather have the murder that was part of the pattern instead of the exception to it. That way, there would be no special expectations placed on him or his department. When Joe told Harvey about Maxine turning white, Harvey seemed genuinely shocked.

“Cows are one thing,” Harvey said. “But you don’t fuck with a man’s dog.”

“Damned right,” Joe said.

Deputy Cook returned in a few minutes holding a printout. He closed the door behind him and sat down heavily in his chair.

“I don’t know if this is helpful or not,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me anyway.”

“You’ve got a number?” Harvey asked impatiently.

“Yup. But it’s not a local number like I thought it would be. The area code is 910.” He looked to Joe and Harvey to see if they recognized it. Both men shook their heads.

“Nine-one-oh,” Cook repeated. “I looked it up. The cell phone is from Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

“What?” Harvey said, his voice high-pitched. “We’ve got a guy from North Carolina driving around in the mountains at 4:30 a.m.?”

Joe tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t. He wrote the number down in his notebook.

“Maybe he’s one of those CBM guys,” Cook said. “They’re from all over. Is there natural gas in North Carolina? Or a company headquarters there?”

Harvey shrugged. “Arden, you need to follow up on this.”

“I’ll get on it right now,” Cook said. He asked Harvey if he could use two of the other deputies so they could work faster. Harvey agreed.

After Cook left, Harvey turned to Joe and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we’ve actually got something here.”

“It’s a start anyway. Will you call me when you’ve got a name?” Joe said, handing Harvey his card. “I’ll fill Robey in on what we’ve got so far.” “Which really, when you think of it, isn’t very damned much,” Harvey said. “But at least I’ve got my guys running around all excited, instead of sitting there reading the Pro Rodeo News.”

Joe stood, shook hands, and opened the door. Before he left, he remembered one of the questions he meant to ask when he arrived.

“You said Stuart Tanner owned an outfit called Tanner Engineering?” Harvey nodded. “Right, based out of Texas, but his family’s had a cabin up here for years, and he liked to stay there when his company was working in the area.”

“Do you know what Tanner Engineering was working on? Specifically?” While Harvey shuffled through the file, Joe recalled something from the day before. Tuff Montegue’s brother had said Tuff worked for “Turner Engineering.” Could it have been Tanner Engineering? Joe felt a twinge.

Harvey looked up after going through the file. “We don’t have anything on what he was doing here,” he said. “You know, I feel kind of stupid that we haven’t really pursued this angle. To be honest, we’ve been sort of waiting for something to break in Twelve Sleep County.”

That sounds about right, Joe thought.

“I’ve got to think about this,” Harvey said, as much to himself as to Joe. “If some bad guy killed and mutilated Stuart Tanner, did he also do all of the livestock? And the moose? And the cowboy? It doesn’t seem possible to me.”

Joe didn’t know what to say. But his mind was spinning.

Back in his pickup heading for Saddlestring, Joe called Marybeth at Logue Country Realty.

“Are things okay today?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, sounding more cheerful than he would have antici-pated. “Except Marie is sick again. I haven’t seen her in three days. I’m starting to get a little worried about her, Joe. I asked Cam how she was doing, and he said he thought she’d be back in later this week.”

“So you talked with Cam, huh?” he asked, feeling a surge of anger. “Of course I talked with him,” Marybeth said, admonishing Joe. “He’s my boss. Nothing was said about our conversation yesterday, and I think he’s a little ashamed of the whole thing. I’m not worried, Joe.”

“You’ll call me if something happens again, right?”

“Of course. But I can handle myself. I’m a big girl, and I’m smarter than hell.”

“That you are,” Joe said although he still felt like smashing his fist into Cam’s face.

“But that’s not the only reason why you’re calling, is it?” she teased. Man, she knew him well, he thought. “I was wondering if you would have any time to do some research. It can probably be done on the Internet and with a couple of calls.”

“Is something happening, Joe?” She sounded intrigued. “Maybe. But I’m not sure yet.”

“I can grab some time over lunch,” she said. “What do you need?”

“Do you have a pencil?”

It was late afternoon when the town of Saddlestring came into view. From the distance on the highway, it looked insignificant beneath the slumping shoulders of the Bighorn Mountains. Joe could see a few buildings poking out of young trees, the Twelve Sleep River as it serpentined through the valley and through the middle of town, and four shining rib-bons of highway that intersected within the tree-choked community.

He had tried to let his mind work during the drive back, to process what he had learned in Cody. He tried to think of what they might be overlooking that was sitting there right in front of them.

This was giving him a headache. But maybe this new information would sort itself out, start to fit into proper places.

Then something occurred to him. It was obvious, if risky. It could move the new track of the investigation forward, or screw it all up forever.

He could simply call the number with the 910 area code, and see who answered. Fayetteville, he said to himself. What is in Fayetteville?

Joe pulled his cell phone from its mount on the dash and was reaching for his notebook to look up the number, when the phone trilled.

“Joe, it’s Trey Crump.”

Joe hadn’t talked to his district supervisor since before the task force was formed, although he had kept him up to date on the progress, or lack of it, via e-mailed reports.

“What’s up?”

“You’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from the bear guys up in Yellowstone. Apparently, they just picked up a signal on our missing grizzly.”

Joe had a feeling what was coming.

“They tracked him to a location that’s literally in your backyard, so to speak. Just east of the mountains, in the breaklands. He appears to have stopped, because they said the signal is strong and not moving.”

Joe grabbed his notebook from the seat, and flipped to a fresh page. “Do you have the GPS coordinates?” Joe asked.

“Got ’em. You ready?”

“Sure,” Joe said, scribbling.

As he shot through Saddlestring and out the other side toward the breaklands, Joe called Nate Romanowski. As usual, he got Nate’s unreliable answering machine.

“We located the bear,” Joe said. “If you get this, you’ll want to get right out to the BLM tract off Dreadnought Road. The bear is supposedly right in the middle of it, about six miles off-road to the north. Look for my truck.”

26

The break lands country beyond Dreadnought Road served as a kind of geological shelf before gradually rising into the foothills and then swelling into a sharp climb into the mountains. At first glance it looked flat and wide open, but in actuality it was deceptive terrain coursed through with deep draws of crumbly, yellow-white earth that created massive islands of grass-covered flats that were attractive to pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and ranchers. Before lamb and wool prices collapsed in the 1980s, the breaklands had been filled with sheep. Joe had seen photos from the forties and fifties on the wall at the Stockman’s Bar of sheep herds clipping the grass in the Dreadnought breaklands as far as the photographer could see. There were still a few bands of sheep in the area, tended by Mexican or Basque herders, but nowhere near the amount there had been.

Joe slowed his pickup on Dreadnought Road while watching the GPS unit on his console, and scanned the surrounding area for Nate Romanowski. He was wary of striking off-road as it approached dusk because of the network of arroyos and draws that could cut him off, isolate him, or get him stuck.

Joe didn’t find a road, and realized he had gone beyond where he should have turned right. He stopped and studied a well-worn topo map of the area, trying to find if there was another approach—one with roads—to where the bear had been located. There was an old road of some kind that entered the area from the exact opposite direction but he estimated it would take close to an hour to get to it. His only choice, he concluded, was to go off-road.

On the floor of the pickup was a tranquilizer gun in its plastic case. The gun had a pistol grip and shot a single fat dart loaded with a debilitating sedative. The warnings on the box of darts said that the sedative was extremely concentrated, and designed for animals weighing over 400 pounds. The dosage was lethal to humans. Reversing down the empty county road for nearly quarter of a mile, he slowed, cranked the wheel so that the nose of the pickup pointed straight out into the breaklands, punched the fourwheel-drive high switch, and started crawling across the sagebrush in the dusk. His tires crushed sagebrush, and the sharp, juniper-like smell perfumed the chilling air. As usual, he kept both windows open so he could see and hear better. As the front tires bucked down and up through a hidden, foot-deep channel, he instinctively reached over with his arm to prevent Maxine from toppling from the seat to the floorboards before re-membering Maxine wasn’t there.

wenty minutes after he had left the road, Joe glanced up and saw a pair of bobbing headlights in his rearview mirror. The vehicle was at least ten minutes behind him, and seemed to be using the same set of tracks that he had cut across the grass and brush.

Who could possibly be following him, or even know where he was? Maybe Nate got his message after all.

While he was watching the mirror instead of where he was going, his left front tire dropped into a huge badger hole and jerked the truck to a stop. The steering wheel spun sharply left as the tire fell and twisted in the hole, and maps, memos, and other paperwork rained on him from where they had been wedged under rubber bands on his visor for safekeeping. The motor died. He picked up all the paper that had fallen on him and shoved it out of the way between the seats. He looked up and saw lazy dust swirling in his headlights, lit up with the last brilliant half hour of the ballooning sun.

Feeling his chest constrict, he checked his mirror. Because he had stalled out in a small dip in the terrain, he couldn’t see the headlights behind him. He turned in his seat, looked through the glass, but couldn’t see the vehicle.

Was it Nate? If Joe could see the headlights again, he could be sure. Nate’s Jeep had a recognizable grille and set of lights. It looked like an owl’s face.

He had a wild thought: what if it wasn’t Nate? What if someone had used the same frequency as the bear collar to alert the biologists and lure Joe out here? The frequency itself, though assigned to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was available on the handheld radios favored by most hunters and fishers, even though use of it was discouraged.

Uh-oh, Joe thought. Did he have time to unsheath his shotgun before the vehicle behind him caught up?

Then headlights cleared the wash and Joe instantly recognized the grille of Nate’s Jeep. Nate thrust his head out the window.

“Hey, Joe,” Nate Romanowski, the driver, said in greeting. “I got your message about the bear and came straight out.”

Joe sighed, relaxing. “Have you ever considered calling ahead, Nate? Have you ever thought about calling me on my cell phone or through my dispatcher and telling me that you’re planning to find me?” Joe said, his voice rising. “Have you ever thought about that, Nate? Instead of scaring the hell out of me by chasing me across the prairie?”

Nate didn’t respond right away, which was his way. Joe noticed that Nate was wearing his side-draw shoulder holster.

“So,” Nate said, a smile tugging on his mouth, “where’s your bear?”

hey left Nate’s Jeep in the ditch and, after working Joe’s pickup out of the badger hole, Nate and Joe sat side by side on the bench seat in Joe’s truck and churned forward through the prairie in the half-light of the last ten minutes of dusk.

“The bear might be out here,” Joe said, “but I don’t think the bear is the key to the mutilations.”

Nate shrugged. “This is one of those instances where reasonable people can disagree.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “Explain.”

Nate chuckled again, which sounded somewhat false.

“Things are happening with the investigation,” Nate said. “I can tell by your mood. You’re . . . jaunty, all of a sudden. A little excitable also, I’d say. If you give me the background I’ll be able to let you know if I’m still in the ballpark or not. But I’ve had a few thoughts lately and a few more dreams. I’ve talked to some Indian friends.”

Joe shot Nate a look. He knew Nate had contacts on the reservation. The mutual interest was falconry, which the Shoshone and Arapaho admired.

“So you need to tell me what’s going on,” Nate said.

Joe checked the GPS unit. They were close. So far, he was pleasantly surprised that they’d paralleled the worst draws in the breaklands, and hadn’t been confronted with any ditches that stopped their progress.

“Things are getting interesting,” Joe said, and told Nate about his confrontation with Barnum and Portenson, his interview with Montegue, and the meeting with Sheriff Dan Harvey.

“Okay,” Nate said, after listening carefully. “There is something here.” “So what is it?” Joe asked.

Nate shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. But something ought to fit with something else. Tanner Engineering may be the place to start. But, Joe . . .”

“What?”

“Don’t dismiss what I said earlier. About the energy booms and the fact that the murders and mutilations seem to come when the ground is being tapped. Or that the bear may be more than a bear. That bear is here for a reason.”

Joe waved Nate away, as if swatting at a fly. “Nate, let’s not even go down that road. It’s crazy.”

Nate clammed up, stung by Joe’s attitude. Silence hung heavily in the cab.

“Okay, Nate, I haven’t dismissed it completely,” Joe said, sorry he’d snapped. “But I still can’t see where it connects.”

They hit another badger hole, which pitched the pickup like a sailboat in a choppy swell.

Nate said, “It probably doesn’t. That’s my point. I feel like there are things happening on different levels of reality but all at the same time. We happen to be in the right place at the right time where different levels of conflicts are overlapping.”

“What?”

“You should open your mind a little.” “Perhaps.”

Both Nate and Joe watched the GPS unit. They knew they were moments away from contact.

“What did you say that area code and telephone number was?” Nate asked, changing the subject. The pickup nose was pointed toward the sky, into a swirl of early-evening stars. When they broke over the rise Joe expected to see the bear. They were that close.

“Nine-one-oh something,” Joe said. “Fayetteville, North Carolina. Wherever that is.”

Nate laughed. “Here’s a guy in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, asking where North Carolina is.”

“We’re just about over the top,” Joe said. “Get ready for I don’t know what.”

“Nine-one-oh,” Nate said suddenly. “That’s the area code for Fort Bragg. The army base. I spent some time there. Forget Fayetteville, Joe. Think Fort Bragg.”

With that, Joe felt another door open. As it did, they topped the hill and looked down on an immense flat basin that was lit up in the moonlight. He saw no bear. But in the center of the basin was a sheep wagon. There was no pickup next to the wagon, only a few white sheep, their backs absorbing the light blue moonlight. The sheep wagon was prototypical of the models that used to be found all over the Rockies: a compact living space mounted on wheels that could be pulled by a long tongue hitch and stationed amid the herds. It was the nineteenth-century precursor to the RV. There was a single door at the rear of the wagon, and a single window over the bunk-shelf near the front. A wood-stove chimney pipe poked out of the rounded top.

Joe stopped and checked the coordinates. “This doesn’t make any sense,” Joe said. “What?” Nate asked.

“We’re here. This is where the bear boys said they caught the grizzly’s signal. Right here. But I don’t see anything besides the wagon and the sheep.” Nate leaned forward, looking back and forth from the GPS display into the basin. “Unless I’m wrong,” he said, “our bear is inside that sheep wagon.” Joe turned his head toward Nate. “This is really strange.”

Nate nodded.

“Do you have a lot of bullets for that gun?” Joe asked.

Nate arched his eyebrows. “I do. I just hope I don’t have to use them.” Joe stopped the truck twenty yards from the sheep wagon. His headlights bathed the door, which appeared to be slightly ajar. There was no light from inside, and no curl of smoke from the chimney.

Nate spoke softly as Joe armed the tranquilizer gun under the glow of the dome light, twisting off the plastic cap from the needle, checking that the dart was filled with 4 cc’s of Telazol, inserting the dart into the chamber, and snapping the barrel down on the assembly.

Nate said, “I’ve read where the methods of working with bears is similar in concept to working with raptors. On a much bigger scale, of course, but it’s basically the same program of give-and-take, and mutual respect.” Joe checked over the tranquilizer pistol and found the button which engaged the CO2 cartridge. He pushed the button and heard a short, an-gry hiss.

“Nate, are you saying you want to train the grizzly?” This was incomprehensible to Joe, not to mention illegal.

“Not at all,” Nate said emphatically, “I want to get inside his head, see what makes him tick. Find out what he’s thinking and why he came here. And who sent him.”

Joe looked at Nate, hoping to see a hint of a smile but Nate was dead serious.

Joe’s heart raced as he approached the sheep wagon. Their plan was for Joe to go to the left side of the wagon, the side the door would open up to, and for Nate to take the right. Joe had the tranquilizer gun in one fist and his Mag-Lite flashlight in the other. Once in position, Nate was to slip a cord over the handle of the door and ease it open. Joe would shine his light inside. If the bear was in there, he would shoot it pointblank, aiming for a haunch or shoulder. Don’t hit him in the head, he told himself. If he missed, the dart could bounce right off.

So here he was, he thought, with his little dart gun and no place to run if things went bad. The sheep in the plain hadn’t even looked up to note their presence.

Nate was his insurance policy in this situation. Despite his earlier statements, Nate had agreed that if the bear turned on either one of them Nate would fire. From the other side of the sheep wagon, Joe heard the faint click-click of Nate’s revolver being cocked.

Joe heard no sound from inside the wagon as he stood next to it. No breathing, no rustling. He could smell a dank, musky odor—a bear.

He peered cautiously around the edge of the wagon and saw Nate slip the cord over the door handle. Slowly, the cord tightened and the door began to open. When a rusty hinge creaked, Joe nearly jumped out of his boots.

Then the door was fully open, and Joe pivoted around the side of the wagon and aimed his flashlight inside. The tranquilizer gun was held parallel to the flashlight.

The sheep wagon was empty.

“All clear,” Joe croaked, his voice giving away his fear.

Nate wheeled around the door and looked down the sight of his handgun into the wagon.

“The place has been trashed,” Nate said, easing the hammer down and holstering the gun.

Inside, in the naked white light of the flashlight, Joe could see that the table was splintered and the old mattress on the bunk was shredded, with rolls of foam blooming from the tears. The insides of the walls were battered.

Joe stepped up on the trailer hitch and shined his flashlight on the old cooking stove. It showed deep scratches from huge claws, as did the cupboards and shelves.

“He’s been here, all right,” Joe said. “But where is he now?”

Nate shouldered Joe aside and reached down into the gloom. Joe shined his light down to see what he was after. A battered, sun-faded nylon collar hung from the bent-back steel handle of an ancient icebox. Nate pried it loose and held it up.

Joe said, “He must have snagged his collar on that handle, and ripped it off when he pulled out. But what was he even doing here, going inside a sheep wagon? There are plenty of sheep out there to dine on.”

He looked closely at the radio collar, surprised how old it looked. The collars Joe had seen had much smaller radio transmitters. This collar looked like an old model. Perhaps the underfunded bear researchers had had to dig into their storage containers to keep up with demand. No wonder it hadn’t worked properly, he thought.

oe dropped Nate off at the Jeep.

“Thanks for the adventure,” Nate said.

“Are you going to follow me out?” Joe asked, before driving away. Nate slowly shook his head. “I’m going in the other direction, back to the wagon.” “What?”

Nate shrugged. “That bear is close.”

“He doesn’t even have his collar anymore, Nate,” Joe said. “How are you going to find him?”

Nate was silent for a moment. He seemed utterly calm. “I’m going to stay here and let him come to me. I think he’ll come when he realizes I mean no harm.”

Joe thought about it for a moment. There was no point in arguing, because it wouldn’t do any good. Nate hunted for deer and antelope by staking out a spot and “letting the animals come to him.” Joe had scoffed when he heard it the first time. He didn’t scoff anymore.

“Don’t disturb the crime scene, okay? And don’t get hurt.”

Nate was quiet for a few seconds. “Remember when you asked why the bear trashed the sheep wagon?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he was looking for somebody,” Nate said and smiled wickedly.

As Joe made it back onto the highway, he listened to his radio after he called Trey Crump to let him know about the bear collar. His report had caused a firestorm of recrimination and controversy among the elite bear team. They openly doubted his claim that the collar was an old model. Trey promised to send it to them after he received it from Joe. One of the researchers accused another of using old equipment, and the man accused denied it. An argument started. Joe turned down the volume of the radio to a low roar.

He thought about the sheep wagon, the collar, what Nate had said. He thought about Nate out there in the dark, letting the grizzly come to him. And what had Nate meant about different levels of reality? Joe shook the thought off.

Then he remembered the telephone number.

Why not, he thought. He pulled over to the side of the road and found the number in his notebook. Grabbing his cell phone from the dashboard, he keyed the number, then held it to his ear.

It rang four times, then someone picked up. “Nuss-bomb,” a deep voice answered.

“Hello?” Joe said, not understanding.

“Nuss-bomb.”

“What? Who is this?”

“NUSS-BOMB!”

“I can’t understand you,” Joe said, his voice betraying a hint of panic as well as the knowledge that he might have just done something really stupid.

“Nuss. Bomb,” the man said patiently. “Where are you?”

The phone clicked off.

“Damn it!” Joe shouted. What had he done?

He weighed calling again, but decided against it. This might be a matter for the task force. He pulled back on to the road, mentally kicking himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Driving down Bighorn Road to his house, he reconsidered slightly. Why would the man who answered assume he was involved in any kind of investigation? As far as the man on the other end knew, it was a wrong number. Joe hadn’t identified himself, or given any indication why he called.

Joe was pleased to see that Maxine was up and excited to see him when he came in the house. She was still white, though.

Sheridan worked on homework on the kitchen table, while Lucy watched television.

“Where’s your mom?” he asked.

Sheridan gestured toward his office. The door was closed, which was unusual, and he opened it.

Marybeth sat behind his desk, the glow of the computer monitor making her features look harsh. But when she raised her face, Joe could see she was troubled.

“You’ve got some messages on the answering machine,” she said. “Why don’t you take care of those and then come back in here. We need to talk.”

27

The first telephone message was from Sheriff Harvey in Park County.

“We tracked the cell phone number down, Joe. It is leased from Cingular Wireless to a guy named L. Robert Eckhardt, RN, whose last known address is Fort Bragg in North Carolina.”

Nate was right about that, Joe thought. He wrote the name down on a legal pad.

Harvey continued, “I’m assuming RN stands for registered nurse. We’ve got calls down there but we couldn’t get much cooperation. One guy we talked to was friendly at first, then he put us on hold and came back and wouldn’t say jack-shit. I got the impression he’d been told to stonewall us. We asked the FBI through Portenson to put some heat on them down there, and we should know more tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.”

The second message was from Robey Hersig: “The APB is out, Joe, but as of six this evening, there are no reports of Cleve Garrett and his traveling road show.”

The third was from Sheriff Barnum. His voice was tight with anger. “Pickett, I got a call from Sheriff Harvey in Park County. He says they may have an angle on somebody, but didn’t give much detail.” There was a long pause, and Joe pictured Barnum fuming at his desk, trying to keep calm, trying to find the right words to say. Finally, “You need to keep me in the goddamned loop here, Mr. Pickett.” The telephone was slammed down violently on the other end. Joe saved the messages for later, in case he needed them.

“Done?” Marybeth asked, trying to contain her impatience. Joe nodded. “Can I grab something to eat first?”

“Sure. There’s some cold Wally’s Pizza in the refrigerator.” “I haven’t eaten since . . .”

“Go, Joe.”

He returned with the box and a bottle of beer and sat down across from his desk. Except for some condiments, milk, and something old and green wrapped in plastic, the refrigerator was now officially empty. He tried not to let it get to him.

The look on her face shifted his line of thinking immediately. She looked agitated, yet sad. Maybe a little angry. He hoped it wasn’t aimed at him.

“You wanted me to find out what I could about Tanner Engineering, and how long ago Tuff Montegue worked for them,” Marybeth said, standing up and walking past Joe so she could close the door of his office. “There is a lot of information on them on the Internet. I started with a simple Google search.”

Joe listened, eating cold pizza.

“It was really easy to find,” she said, her eyes widening. She gestured at a stack of paper she had printed out and placed facedown on the edge of the desk. “Tanner Engineering is an environmental research firm that is contracted by the federal government and a lot of energy companies to assist with environmental impact statements. Their specialty is water-testing—and their most recent clients included all of the big firms drilling for coal-bed methane in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming—but mainly Wyoming. Especially in the Powder River Basin and here in Twelve Sleep County.

“Once the company does its testing and produces a certified report signed by the primary engineer, who was Mr. Tanner, then the energy company bundles it with all of their paperwork and submits it to all of the state and federal agencies that approve drilling. Without that seal of approval, there’s no drilling. If the company finds too many minerals—or salt—in the water, it’s a lot harder for the company to get approval to drill. So that certificate is pretty important.”

Joe twisted the cap off the bottle of beer, and drank a quarter of it. It was cold and good.

“I called the company down in Austin and talked to their personnel department,” she said, and her cheeks flushed. “I sort of told them I was related to Tuff Montegue, which I know I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t know if they would help me or not.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Joe said, saluting her with the beer bottle. “Good work.”

Marybeth beamed a quick smile. “And yes, Tuff was employed by them as a contractor in the spring. He was with a survey crew that resurveyed a property and put the stakes in the ground so that the water-testers could follow up. Tuff worked for them for six weeks.”

She was leading to something, Joe could see. “And . . .” he said.

“When I asked what the property was, the lady in personnel got kind of suspicious. I guess I would, too, but I told her another lie. I told her that Tuff had passed away but that he’d said in the past that the place he was working in meant a lot to him, that he talked about how beautiful it was all the time, so we wanted to spread his ashes there. But we needed to know where exactly he worked.”

“That’s... inventive,” Joe said, equally impressed and alarmed by her deceit.

Marybeth shot him an uneasy grin. “The whole time I was talking to her, I was afraid Cam or someone would come into my office and ask what I was doing. Luckily, nobody did.

“Anyway, the woman decided to help me out. I guess she believed me, or else she didn’t see how helping me could hurt.”

“Yes .. .”

“Joe, it was the Timberline Ranch.” Joe sat up.

“You’re probably wondering who hired Tanner Engineering to do the water survey.”

“Yes I am, darling,” he said, feeling his interior motor start to run.

She took a deep breath, and her eyes closed briefly. Then she opened them: “Logue Country Realty, on behalf of an unnamed client.”

Joe whistled, and sat back heavily in the chair. “So what does this mean?” “I’m not sure, Joe, but it gives me a really bad feeling. And Joe, that’s not all.” “What?”

She turned over the sheaf of papers on the desk, and thumbed through it. “On the Tanner Engineering Web site I went to the section on executives, and did a search. They had photos of their top management. There he is.”

She slipped a page to Joe. He looked at the photo of Stuart Tanner, CEO and founder. In the photo, Tanner looked to be in his mid-sixties, but was lean and fit. His face looked weathered behind rimless glasses. He looked like a serious man. Joe wondered if Marybeth thought Joe would recognize Tanner from somewhere.

“I saw him, Joe. I talked to him,” she said. “He was in the office that Monday when the first mutilated cows were discovered. He had a big file with him that he said he needed to deliver to Cam.”

“You’re sure it was Stuart Tanner?”

Marybeth nodded her head, somewhat reluctantly. “Yes, it was him. Which means Cam knew him, and maybe Marie did, too. That’s fine, of course, but what troubles me is that neither of them ever mentioned it to me. Remember when we were talking about the murders at my mother’s dinner? The Logues said nothing about knowing Stuart Tanner. Nothing.” “Of course, we weren’t talking about Tanner, we were talking about Tuff,” Joe said.

Marybeth leaned forward, now so still and tense that she looked like a snapshot. “Joe, you don’t think Cam and Marie . . .”

Joe was silent, thinking.

“We can’t rule anything out,” Joe said finally. “But I think it’s very, very unlikely they had anything to do with the crimes.”

Marybeth let out a long breath of relief, but her eyes still had him fixed in their sights.

“That doesn’t mean, though, that he didn’t see some opportunity in the situation,” Joe said. “That he didn’t use the circumstances to advance an agenda of his own.”

“I can’t see it, Joe. I can’t see Marie getting involved in something so awful.”

Joe drained his beer and wished he had another in front of him. “Didn’t you tell me she hasn’t been in the office? That she’s been sick? Maybe she can’t face you anymore, or can’t face the situation she’s got herself in.”

“I should go to her house,” she said. “I should talk with her.”

Joe held up his hand. “Maybe so. But I’d like to do some checking around before you do. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. This thing still doesn’t make much sense.”

As he looked at her, tears welled in her eyes, and when she blinked the tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Marybeth . . .”

“Damn it,” she said. “I liked and trusted them. How could I be so taken in? So blind?”

They both knew the answer to her question.

Joe stood up and went around the desk, and pulled her up and hugged her. She buried her face in his shirt, and he kissed her hair.

lthough they were in bed and it was late, Joe could tell that Marybeth wasn’t sleeping, and neither was he. He lay with his hands clasped behind his head on the pillow, and he stared at the ceiling. The half-moon outside striped the bed in pale blue coming in through the blinds.

He tried to set all of the other tracks of the case aside and work through what Marybeth had learned.

He wondered if he had been assuming the wrong thing all along by concentrating on Tuff ’s death instead of Stuart Tanner’s. Even though Tuff ’s death seemed an aberration, maybe it was intended to look that way. To steer anyone looking into the crimes toward Tuff, away from Tanner. Maybe Tanner was the key to both murders, not Tuff. Maybe Tuff was killed to draw attention away from Tanner’s death.

But who could be so calculated?

In Joe’s experience, conspiracies like this simply didn’t work out. People talked too much, made too many mistakes, had too many individual motives to keep a secret for long. The coordination of two deaths fifty miles apart in the same night suggested a level of planning and professionalism that just didn’t seem likely, he thought. That was why no one even assumed it. The two murders, in the midst of the animal mutilations, were assumed by everyone—including him—to be part of the overall horror. But if someone used the cattle and wildlife mutilations as cover to murder Tanner in the same method, that suggested an icy, devious calculation. And if the killer was capable of that kind of subterfuge, maybe he took it to another level and went after Tuff for no reason other than to mask his true target.

Could it be Cam Logue?

He couldn’t see it, although there had always been something about Cam that hadn’t felt right to Joe. Cam seemed overeager, a bit too driven. Although both traits were the qualities of successful people, it seemed to Joe that just under the surface Cam seemed a little . . . desperate. Whatever drove him was powerful. But could it possibly drive him to murder? Joe didn’t think so.

If the report that Tanner had delivered to Cam indicated that the water was bad beneath the surface of the Timberline Ranch, who would be hurt? Cam would, but only to the degree that the ranch likely wouldn’t sell and he’d be out of a commission. But Cam had plenty of ranch listings, many larger than the Timberline Ranch.

Cam’s secret buyer might be hurt, Joe thought. If the buyer knew that he could never drill, the ranch would be all but worthless. But the buyer wouldn’t have had the mineral rights in the first place, since they had been sold off years ago. So why would he care?

Suddenly, Joe felt a spasm in his belly. Realtors didn’t work for buyers, Joe thought. Realtors worked for sellers. The person—people—who would be hurt by the discovery would be the Overstreet sisters. But could two old, cranky women who hated each other be capable of this? Again, it didn’t work, he thought. If the mineral rights didn’t go with the property, a bad-water report wouldn’t impact the sale to a buyer who wanted a ranch and not a CBM field.

So who was the secret buyer?

Then, as if a dam was breached, more questions poured forward. Where were Cleve Garrett and Deena?

Who was L. Robert Eckhardt, the owner of the cell phone number, and what was he doing driving forest backroads in Wyoming at 4:30 in the morning?

What in the hell did “Nuss-Bomb” mean? Joe moaned out loud.

“Are you okay, honey?” Marybeth asked sleepily.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking,” he said. “I’m giving myself a headache.” “You’re giving me one, too,” she said.

t was an hour later, and although Joe hadn’t come up with any answers, he had thought through a list of places where he might find them. Care-fully, he swung out of the bed, trying not to disturb Marybeth. “I’m not sleeping,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

He looked at the clock next to his pillow. It was 3:48 a.m.

She turned over and snapped on the lamp.

“Joe, if the information I got was so easy to find, why didn’t the task force do it earlier?”

“We weren’t looking into the backgrounds of the victims,” Joe said. “We were searching for aliens and birds, or not doing much at all. We were hoping the whole thing would go away, I think.”

“That’s.. .” she hesitated, then her eyes flashed, “that’s inexcusable.” Joe nodded, “Yup.”

“Aren’t you cold standing there in your underwear?”

“I can’t sleep. I was going to get up and make a list of things to do in the morning.”

She looked at the clock. “It’s practically morning now. Why don’t you come to bed?”

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m too edgy. Every time I close my eyes, a million things charge at me and I can’t stop any of ’em.”

“What if I make it worth your while?” she said and smiled.

He hesitated, but not for long.

hen they were through, Joe rolled over onto his back. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t concentrate.”

“You did fine,” she purred.

28

The county clerk’s office was located in the same building as the courtroom, jail, sheriff ’s office, and attorney. A man named Stovepipe manned the reception desk and metal detector, and he nodded at Joe and waived him through at 7:45 a.m.

“You’re up early this morning,” Stovepipe said, lowering the morning edition of the Saddlestring Roundup. Joe noted the headline: HERSIG SAYS NO PROGRESS IN MUTILATION DEATHS.

“Still broken?” Joe asked about the metal detector. Stovepipe nodded. “Don’t tell nobody, though.”

“I never do. Is Ike in yet?”

“They don’t open until eight, but I think I seen him come in earlier.”

Ike Easter’s glass-walled office was behind the counter where Twelve Sleep County citizens lined up daily to do business with the three matronly clerks who sat on tall stools and called out “NEXT!” Most of the business transactions involved titles on automobiles and property. This was also the place to get marriage licenses, so the clerks who worked for Ike Easter were among the better informed gossips in the county, and much sought after when they got their hair done.

When Joe opened the door to the main office, all three of the matronly clerks wheeled on their stools and glared at him. It was easily one of the most unwelcome receptions he had ever received, he thought. One of the clerks quickly raised an open palm to him as he entered. “Sir, we’re not open for fifteen minutes,” she said. “Please take a seat in the hall and . . .”

“I’m here to see Ike,” Joe said flatly, ignoring her, and went through the batwing doors on the side of the counter.

“Sir . . .” The clerk was irritated.

“It’s okay, Millie,” Ike called out from his office when he saw Joe coming. “I forgot about your elite Republican Guard,” Joe smiled, stopping outside Ike’s office and tipping his hat toward Millie. Millie huffed melo-dramatically. To Ike: “Do you have a few minutes? It’s important.” Ike motioned Joe in, and Joe shut the door behind him.

“I’ll ignore the Republican Guard comment,” Ike said, not unpleasantly, “but they won’t. Next time you need a new title for your car, expect delays.”

Joe sat in a hardback chair across from Ike. “Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we get a new car.”

“All my clerks are county employees,” Ike said. “They work eight hours a day and not one minute longer. They take an hour for lunch and get two fifteen-minute breaks. If you woke one of them up in the middle of the night, she could tell you to the hour how long she has until retirement, how many days of sick leave she’s got left this fiscal year, and to the penny what her pension will be. Those women keep me in a constant state of absolute fear.”

Ike had a smooth, milk-chocolate face and wore large-framed glasses. He had a silver mustache and his receding hair was also going gray. Like his cousin, Not Ike, Ike was quick to smile and had dark, expressive eyes. He had been reading the newspaper as well, and it lay flat on his desk, opened to the page where the NO PROGRESS IN MUTILATION DEATHS front-page story was continued inside.

“Before you ask me whatever it is you’re going to ask me, can I say one thing?” Ike said.

“Sure.”

“Thank you for being so kind to my cousin, George. I know he gives you fits with all of those temporary licenses and all.”

Joe grunted, and looked down.

“I’ve tried and tried to get him to get a yearly license,” Ike said, “but I just can’t break through to him. It’s very generous of you to ease up on him a bit, Joe. I know you don’t have to do that. His life is fly-fishing, and I figure as long as he’s fishing he’s not getting himself into any other kind of trouble.”

“Okay, Ike, gotcha.”

“But I do appreciate it, Joe. Both Dorothy and I are grateful.” “Okay, Ike. Enough,” Joe said.

“So, what do you want from me so early in the morning?” Joe looked up. “How do mineral rights work?”

Ike’s eyes narrowed, and he paused. “Let me get another cup of coffee.

This will take a few minutes.”

Ike Easter used a legal pad to explain. He started out by writing “OG&M”

on the top of the pad.

“When I say ‘OG&M,’ I’m referring to oil, gas, and mineral rights. They’re usually sold for a term on a specific piece of land, or they can be retained by the landowner. If the OG&M are sold, it usually means that the developer pays the landowner a fee for the rights or, in some cases, a percentage of the gross that is derived if the OG&M is exploited.”

Joe asked, “Are they like water rights?”

Ike shook his head. “No. Water rights go with the land. That means if you sell your land to somebody, the buyer gets your water rights. You don’t keep them and lease them back, and you can’t sell them separately to somebody else downstream or upstream.

“OG&M rights, however, can be bought and sold among companies or developers, or eventually returned to the landowner if the terms of the sale run out.”

Ike explained how the market for mineral rights in Wyoming peaked in the mid-twentieth century, during the boom years for oil, trona, coal, and uranium. Some landowners made much more from their mineral rights than they ever made from their cattle or sheep.

“Up until recently, we had almost forgotten about all of the intrigue and wheeling and dealing that gets done for mineral rights,” Ike said. “I had a clerk here who didn’t know what in the hell to do when some land man with a Texas accent walked into the office and wanted to file. But we all got back into the rhythm of it soon enough.”

“Because of CBM?” Joe asked.

“Yes, because of CBM. See, no one realized after the last oil bust that natural gas was down there in the kind of quantity it is. Suddenly, all of those fields that everyone thought were played out or useless were valuable again. Quite a few of the ranches had changed hands since their first leases or sales, and some of the new landowners didn’t even know that other people owned their OG&M rights. A lot of the squawking we all heard from ranchers bitching about the CBM companies on their land was because those ranchers discovered that the mineral rights had been sold years before.”

Joe tried to work it through. “So even if a ranch sells, the mineral rights stay with whoever had them?”

“Right.”

“The Timberline Ranch, for example, has six hundred wells planned for it. Those rights are owned by a mineral company, I assume, even though when they bought the rights they had never heard of coal-bed methane?”

“Right.”

Joe rubbed his face. He was missing something. The incentive to sell, or buy, or manipulate the land value, wasn’t there.

“Why would a company buy mineral rights to a ranch when they didn’t know what was in the ground?” Joe asked.

Ike shrugged, “It happened—and happens—all the time, Joe. Companies speculate. They lock up land, betting that somewhere down the road their investment will pay off.”

“Can I see the OG&M deed for the Timberline Ranch in the county record books?” Joe asked. “It would be interesting to know who has the mineral rights to the place. My understanding is that old man Overstreet sold the rights a long time ago.”

“Of course you can,” Ike said. “It’s a public record. But it might be a bitch to find right away.”

“Isn’t it all on computer?”

Ike laughed. “Not hardly, Joe. The most recent stuff is, of course. But anything older than ten years was indexed in deed books. Anything beyond twenty-five years is in the archives, but completely disorganized. There was a flood in the vault back then, and the deed books all got soaked. Because all of those old deeds and patents were typed on parchment paper, somebody emptied the books and put them into files after they dried out. They never were put back into new books in sequential order.”

“I’d still like to see it,” Joe said.

“May I ask why?” Ike said, lowering his voice.

Joe sighed. “It may be relevant to a sale of the place. Or a murder.” “Really?”

“This is purely speculation on my part, Ike,” Joe said. “Please keep this confidential.”

Ike got up and opened his door. “Millie, can you please find and pull the OG&M file for the Timberline Ranch? Owned by the Overstreet sisters?” Millie reluctantly got down from her stool, and gave Joe a look as she walked by.

“Why’d you ask her?” Joe said in a whisper.

Ike smiled sympathetically. “She’s been assigned to the archives, Joe. She’s the only one who can find any of that old stuff. We’re in the process of going through all of the old county files—which were kept off-site in file boxes for over fifty years—and bringing them in-house to recreate the old deed index books.”

“I heard something about that,” Joe said. “How the old county clerk charged the county rent for storage in his own house.”

“Um-hmmm,” Ike said, raising his eyebrows. The scandal was one of the reasons Ike Easter was elected county clerk.

“We think we’ve recovered all of the old records,” he said, “but every few months we find another box or two. The old county clerk had them in his basement, in bedrooms, and even in a couple of old locked garages in town.”

While they waited, Ike asked Joe questions about the Murder and Mutilations Task Force, and the story in the newspaper. Joe confirmed that there was very little progress, but said that some things appeared to be emerging, although he couldn’t get into them.

“Hold it,” Joe said suddenly, looking at Ike. “What?”

“The old county clerk’s residence, where the old records were kept—

that’s where Cam and Marie Logue live now, isn’t it?” “Yes.”

“Would Cam and Marie have had access to the boxes?”

Ike thought about it for a moment. “I suppose they would have. The boxes were sealed up with tape, but they weren’t locked up or anything. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just interesting,” Joe said.

Finally, Millie returned to Ike’s office, wiping her hands with a wet towel.

“Those old boxes are filthy,” she said, glaring at Joe.

“Did you find the file?” Ike asked, even though she wasn’t carrying anything.

She shook her head. “It must be in one of those boxes we’ve still got in storage. It hasn’t been brought up to the filing room yet.”

Ike groaned, thanked her, and waited for the door to close.

He told Joe, “We’ve got twenty or more boxes downstairs in the boiler room that still need to be brought up and gone through.”

“How quickly can you do it?” Ike said, “Are you serious?” “Yup.”

“Joe, I want to help you out and all, but can you at least give me a better reason so I can justify the overtime hours and feel good about it when the elite Republican Guard turns on me?”

Joe leaned forward on Ike’s desk. “As I mentioned, I think that the murders have something to do with either the potential sale of the Timberline Ranch or the mineral rights. I think if we know who holds the rights, we might know who ordered—or did—the killings.”

Ike swallowed. “Even the cows?” he asked.

“Maybe not the cows, but Tuff Montegue and Stuart Tanner.” “And you feel pretty confident about this?”

Joe sat back and rubbed his face. “Kind of,” he confessed.

oe found Robey Hersig in his office reading the Roundup and looking very sour.

“Tell me something good, Joe.”

Joe sat down and recapped what he knew and suspected. Hersig grew increasingly interested, and began to take notes. When Joe was through, Hersig steepled his fingers and pressed them against the bridge of his nose. “We don’t have enough to arrest anyone yet, or even bring them in for questioning,” Hersig said. “I know.”

“So what’s your next step?”

“I’m going to go see Cam Logue.” Hersig winced. “It might be too soon.”

“Maybe so. But it might break something loose. Or,” Joe said, “Cam may blow my whole theory out of the water.”

Robey sat for several moments, thinking things through. “What can I do to help?”

“A few things,” Joe said. “Intensify the search for Cleve Garrett. We’ve got to find him and make sure the girl’s okay. I can’t see him just blowing out of town like he did, after wanting to get so involved with the task force. Then follow up with Sheriff Harvey and Deputy Cook. They’ve already involved Portenson, so maybe we can find out more about this Eckhardt guy. I don’t know how or if Fort Bragg figures in, but Cook said he thought the army was stonewalling him when he called. Maybe if they heard from you, or the governor, we’d get some answers. Oh, and check up with Ike to see if they’ve located that Timberline Ranch file.”

“I can do all of that,” Hersig said, writing it down on the pad. “But you’re forgetting somebody. What about Barnum?”

“Keep him the hell out of it,” Joe said. “Joe .. .”

“It’s not just about this thing between Barnum and me,” Joe said. “Barnum seems more hostile than usual. He called me at my house and all but warned me off of this thing. I think he’s involved in some way, Robey.”

Hersig slapped his desktop angrily. “Joe, do you realize what you’re saying?”

Joe nodded. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Barnum had anything to do with the mutilations or the murders. I think he’s playing another angle, but I don’t know what it is yet. Somehow, I think he’s taking advantage of the situation.”

Hersig stared at Joe, still upset. “I can’t lie to him, Joe. He’s the sheriff.” “But you can just sort of withhold information, can’t you? Not return his calls? Just for the rest of the day and maybe tomorrow?” Hersig shook his head. “Do you think we’re that close?”

“I think we’re close to something,” Joe said, standing and clamping on his hat. “I just don’t know what it is yet.”

Hersig gave a low moan.

As Joe opened the door, Hersig called out to him.

“Give Cam my regards,” Hersig said. “And call me the minute you know something.”

29

It felt odd , Joe thought, entering the front office of Logue Country Realty. In a few hours, Marybeth would be there.

Marie wasn’t at the front desk, as she usually was. In her place was a thin, blond woman who pursed her lips, whom Joe caught reading a supermarket tabloid. She was the only person in Saddlestring, he thought with some relief, who wasn’t aware that there was NO PROGRESS IN MUTILATION DEATHS.

“Is Marie still sick?” Joe asked.

“I guess so,” the woman said. “All I know is that the temp agency called and asked me to come in again.”

“Is Cam here?”

“May I ask your name?” “Joe Pickett.”

The temp hesitated and looked puzzled for a moment, as if she had heard the name but couldn’t place it.

“My wife, Marybeth, works here,” Joe said.

“Ah,” the temp said. “She seems nice.”

“She is nice,” Joe said, impatience creeping in. “But I’m here to see Cam.”

The temp looked at her wristwatch. “He usually comes in around nine, I think.”

Joe glanced at his own watch. Ten to nine. “I’ll wait in his office.”

The temp wasn’t sure if this was appropriate, but Joe strode by her as if he waited for Cam every day, and she said nothing.

Joe sat in a chair across from Cam’s desk, and put his hat on the chair next to him. This would be interesting, he thought. He planned to watch Cam carefully as he asked him questions, and listen even more carefully. Joe dug his microrecorder out of his front shirt pocket, checked the cassette, and pushed the record button, then buttoned his pocket. By Wyoming law, the tape would be admissible in court, even if Cam wasn’t aware he was being recorded.

Joe surveyed the office. Neat stacks of paper lined the credenza in columns. A large-scale map of Twelve Sleep County covered an entire wall in the room. Cam’s realtor and insurance licenses were framed behind his desk, as were large portraits of Marie and Jessica, and several family photos of them all. There was a Twelve Sleep County Chamber of Commerce “Businessperson of the Year” plaque, as well as a photo of a boys’ soccer team Cam obviously coached, signed by all of the players. On Cam’s desk was a coffee cup that read “World’s Greatest Dad.” There was a “Volunteer of the Year” award from the United Way. Jeez, Joe thought. What am I doing here?

Cam entered his office a few moments later, without a hint of trepidation. He asked how Joe was with concerned sincerity, and if he wanted a cup of coffee.

Joe passed on the coffee, but stood and shook Cam’s extended hand and returned a half-smile. Joe thought he detected a flash of discomfort in Cam’s eyes as he shook Joe’s hand, but wouldn’t swear to it. Then Joe thought, If I made a pass at a man’s wife and the husband showed up in my office unannounced, I might be more than a little jittery too.

Cam asked, “What can I do you for, Joe?” in a forced, too-cheerful way, and sat in his big, leather chair across the desk from Joe. “I do have a meeting in twenty minutes, so I hope . . .”

“Shouldn’t take that long,” Joe said. “How’s Marie?”

Again, the flash of discomfort, or maybe fear. Then it was gone. “Marie?” Cam said almost absently. Then: “I’m sorry, I guess Marybeth must have told you. Marie’s had some kind of a bug for over a week that just won’t go away. She has not been a happy camper.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Joe asked.

Cam seemed to be thinking about it, then he shook his head. “That’s a really nice offer, Joe. But she seems to be just about back to normal, now. I wouldn’t be surprised if she came back to work this afternoon. Tomorrow for sure, I’ll bet.”

“Well, good,” Joe said. “But don’t hesitate to ask. Marybeth thinks the world of Marie.”

“Yes, Marie and Marybeth have a great relationship, which is wonderful. Really wonderful,” Cam said, agreeing enthusiastically. Too enthusiastically, Joe thought. But was Cam’s nervousness because of what he had said to Marybeth, or something else?

“Cam, you know about the task force I’m on,” Joe said, watching Cam’s face carefully. “The investigation isn’t going quite as badly as what you might have read in the paper this morning. We’re pursuing some new leads.”

Cam’s eyebrows arced. He was interested. “One of them involves you.”

Cam seemed to freeze in place. Even his breathing stopped. His tanned face drained of color.

“Say again?” Cam asked, his voice a whisper.

“We’re pursuing everything, even if it turns out to be a dead end,” Joe said. “I’m here to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.”

Cam was clearly shaken. Joe tried to interpret it, but couldn’t decide if Cam was displaying guilt, or shock.

“I guess I don’t mind,” Cam said. “Jesus. I can’t believe you’re even here.

I can’t believe you could even think . . .”

“Why did you think I was here?” Joe asked innocently, but the implication was clear. Now you’ve done it, Joe said to himself. Whatever the Logues and the Picketts had together is now over. Marybeth and Marie. Lucy and Jessica. Maybe even Marybeth’s future career.You’ve done it now, Joe, and there’s no going back.

“Gee, I guess I thought maybe it was because Marybeth and I had a misunderstanding a while back,” Cam said, looking at his hands and not at Joe. “But I think she thought I meant something I didn’t. That was bad enough. But to have you here saying I’m being investigated . . .” he trailed off.

Joe sat in silence, letting Cam talk.

“Should I call a lawyer?” Cam asked. “Is it that bad?” “Only you can answer that,” Joe said. Man, he felt cruel.

Cam still didn’t meet Joe’s eye, but reached for his telephone. Joe noticed that the man’s hand was shaking.

“Please cancel my 9:30,” Cam told the temp, then listened for a moment. “No, I don’t want to reschedule it right now.” When he replaced the receiver, it rattled in the cradle.

“What do you want to ask me, Joe?”

Joe thought that Cam looked just about as pathetic—or guilty—as anyone he had ever seen. He was either about to nail a killer, or make a horrible, unforgivable mistake.

“Cam, we have a theory that the murders of Tuff Montegue and Stuart Tanner were connected. We think there is a possibility that they were killed because of something they—or one of them—knew about the sale of the Timberline Ranch.”

“You’re kidding me,” Cam said. The flash in his eyes this time was of anger.

Joe plowed on: “I think Stuart Tanner was going to nix the drilling of all of the CBM wells because there was too much salinity in the water. Or maybe he found something else, like silica or something. His report would cost some people a hell of a lot of money. The company that holds the mineral rights would be out millions, and the realtor who didn’t get his commission would be out thousands. I think somebody wanted him dead, and saw the opportunity to kill him in the same method as the cattle and the moose.”

Joe tried to make his face and eyes go dead. “So who is the secret buyer, Cam?”

Slowly, the color returned to Cam Logue’s face, and kept going. Now his face was turning red.

“Joe, I can’t believe you just said that to me. You’re so goddamned off base.” Cam said it with enough passion that Joe nearly flinched.

“You knew Stuart Tanner,” Joe said. “You hired him. He delivered the water report to you personally, right in this office. But when the news came out that he died, you said nothing. You didn’t report it to the sheriff, or even mention it to me.”

“You’re right about that,” Cam said, his voice back to normal. “You’re absolutely right. I got the report, and I knew the guy. I paid Tanner Engineering for his work. And damn it, I didn’t say anything because given the current market, the less said about any of this shit the better. Hell, Joe, I can’t even sell a ranch with a willing buyer and a willing seller. Everybody’s waiting for your stupid task force to make a conclusion, or arrest somebody. But I can see why you’re getting nowhere, if this is the best you can do. If all you can come up with is to target a guy who’s made a huge commitment to this community.”

Cam looked up and shook his head. He was upset, and visibly tried to calm himself. “Joe, there’s a couple of things really wrong with your theory, and it pisses me off that you would be going in this direction.”

“What’s that?” Joe asked.

“First, Tanner Engineering cleared the way for the CBM drilling. The water is fine.”

Cam turned quickly in his chair and dug through one of the neat stacks of paper on his credenza. He produced an inch-thick report bound in plastic, and tossed it across the desk. Joe picked it up and thumbed through it until he found the summary page.

“Tanner concluded that there was no excess salinity, or anything else in that water,” Cam said. “The water’s good, Joe. It’s perfect. It’s the best damned water in the Twelve Sleep Valley.”

Joe read enough to see that Cam was right.

“Second,” Cam said, his voice rising, “the secret client is me. And Sheriff Barnum.”

Joe was stunned. “What?” So this is where Barnum figured in, he thought.

Cam stood quickly, sending his chair to roll back until it thumped against the credenza. He glared down at Joe.

“Barnum’s a year away from retirement, and he’s got one hell of a pension after twenty-five-plus years as sheriff,” Cam said. “He planned to borrow against it for a down payment on 360 acres of the ranch we’d buy together. He wants to retire on it. But with all of this bullshit going on, the bank’s been holding back. It’s only temporary, but they’re dragging it out. I’ve always wanted the family ranch back. I grew up there, Joe. It’s my dream, Marie’s and my dream. We couldn’t say anything, even to Marybeth.”

“You want it even with all of those CBM wells all over it?” Joe asked. Cam shrugged. “They won’t be there forever. And they’re bound by law to clean up when they’re gone.” “But that could be thirty years.”

Cam smiled, but not warmly. “I’m willing to wait. Land is always a good investment. Especially the land I grew up on and still love.”

Joe felt as though he had had the rug, the floor, and the joists pulled out from under him.

“How in the hell are you going to buy it?” Joe asked.

Cam’s eyes lit up. “Okay, since you’re asking, since you’ve spent a good deal of the morning trying to fuck up my life, I’ll tell you.”

Joe winced at that.

“Real estate sales is sizzle, Joe. It’s flash and sizzle. If the market is hot, the realtor is hot. Everybody wants to work with a winner, and that’s me. Once I listed the Timberline Ranch, the landowners around here figured that if I could get a couple of old crones like the Overstreet sisters to sign, then I must be hot shit indeed. As you know, we now have exclusive listings on just about every available ranch in this part of Northern Wyoming. I did it by hard work, Joe, and by creating the sizzle of a winner.”

Joe still felt pole-axed. “You figured a couple of the other ranches would sell first. That you could use the commission money from those other ranches for the down payment on the Timberline Ranch.”

Cam opened his eyes in an exaggerated way, as if he were addressing a simpleton. “Right, Joe. There’s not a single thing wrong with that. Not a single thing.”

“But no property is selling, because of the mutilations,” Joe said. “Right again, Joe. Exactly what I’ve been telling you for a month.

Nothing’s selling because buyers think this county is spooked.” “Man,” Joe said.

But Cam was on a roll. “Do you know who I’m not going to invite to the ranch when I finally own it?”

Joe didn’t guess.

“My parents, Joe. Mom and Dad. The people who sold my birthright out from under me so they could devote more time and attention to sending my big brother, Eric, to medical school. You thought I was going to say you and Marybeth, didn’t you?”

Joe looked up.

“Well, I probably won’t invite you out, either. Not now.” Cam’s eyes had a fiendish intensity.

Despite feeling bad, feeling stupid, Joe caught a whiff of something in the air from Cam. It was the desperation he had recalled earlier, the overthe-top intensity that seemed a notch or two higher than it needed to be. “Some day, all of you people are going to regret the way you treated Cam Logue,” Cam said, his voice dropping but his face screwed up with rage. “You sit around and come up with some lunatic idea that it must be the new guy in town, it must be the guy who just moved here who’s upsetting the sleepy little village by working his ass off and being aggressive.”