Winterkill

PART TWO

Snow Blind Nine Christmas was pleasantly claustrophobic, and Joe and Marybeth realized that with their growing children-and the addition of just a single extra person-how small their home had become.

Joe roasted wild pheasant and grouse, while Marybeth and her mother made wild-rice casserole, mashed potatoes, fresh bread, vegetables, and pecan pie. The girls had been up early, of course, and their gifts were opened, played with, tried on, and strewn about the living room. Because of their limited finances, Marybeth budgeted throughout the year to provide a substantial Christmas for the children, and she and Joe economized on their own gift-giving. Marybeth gave Joe a new fly-fishing vest, and Joe reciprocated with two pairs of Canadian-made Watson riding gloves. Marybeth loved the gloves, which were suede, and lined with a thin layer of fleece. She said they were supple enough for reining her horses while riding, but tough enough to withstand stall-mucking and other stablework.

Missy spent most of the afternoon on the telephone in Joe's office with the door closed, talking with her husband, and came out wiping away tears. She might be staying awhile, she announced. Mr. Vankueren was being indicted, his assets had been frozen, and she was quite angry with him. Marybeth offered support, and the couch bed. Joe greeted the news with the false courage he hoped he would display one day when the doctor told him he had one month to live. On Christmas evening, after the melancholy period when the girls became quiet because the day was nearly over, Joe sat with Marybeth on the couch with his arm around her. They sipped red wine in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, enjoying a rare moment of quiet. The girls were down the hall getting ready for bed and Missy was napping.

"Joe, are you still fretting about Lamar Gardiner and Nate Romanowski?" Marybeth asked.

He started to protest, but realized she was right. "I guess," he said. "It's a hard one to just put away."

She nodded, and burrowed closer to him.

"And to make things even more complicated," Joe said, "we've got Jeannie Keeley back in town. And…"

He stopped himself.

"What?" she asked, then frowned. "Oh-my mother."

"Not that she's as bad as…"

"Hush, Joe."

He took a drink of wine, and wished he hadn't started down that road. Luckily, she seemed willing to let it go.

"I wish we could just stay snowed in," Marybeth whispered. "With our family all together under our roof. Where no one, and nothing, can get us." Her voiced trailed off.

They sat without speaking, surrounded by the soft sounds of Missy's breathing and the internal popping of the woodstove. Joe drank the last of his wine as he thought about what Marybeth had said.

"We can't control what's happening," he said softly. "All we can do is stay focused and be prepared. That means first things first: We need to find out what Jeannie Keeley's intentions are."

Marybeth looked up. "How?"

"I'll ask her," Joe said. "It may be that we're worried over nothing."

"God, I hope that's the case. Did you see how happy April was today? She had a glow I've never seen before."

Joe nodded. "I'll just flat-out ask her," he said, almost to himself. Which meant he needed to approach the ragtag group of men and women who had been at the First Alpine Church of Saddlestring on Christmas Eve.

"Are you guys okay?" It was Sheridan, standing in the doorway in her new flannel pajamas. Joe and Sheridan shared a special look. She had been through a lot, and seemed specially tuned to gauging the moods and concerns of her parents. She's getting older, more mature, Joe thought. She was becoming formidable, like her mother.

"We're fine," Joe answered. "Go to bed, honey."

"Merry Christmas," she said, padding over to them for a hug and kiss.

"Merry Christmas, darling." The next day, Joe pulled on his wool vest and parka over his red uniform shirt and drove toward the mountains. He intended to see if he could find out if Jeannie Keeley was at the camp on Battle Mountain.

Snow had been cut sharply on each side of the road, and he had the feeling of driving through a tunnel. The top reflectors of delineator posts nosed out just above the surface of the snow at the level of his pickup windows. Another storm like the last would bury the tops of the posts for the rest of the winter, and the snowplow driver would be without landmarks in finding the road to plow, and would give up on it until spring.

While his tire chains bit into the snowpacked road, and the sun beamed off of the icy glazed surface, he thought about the stories he had read in the Roundup over breakfast. It was the first day that the newspaper had been delivered since the storm of a week ago. The arrest of Nate Romanowski commanded the front page. A photo of Romanowski in handcuffs, his eyes fixed boldly and contemptuously on the photographer, appeared under a headline that stated LOCAL MAN ARRESTED IN USFS SUPERVISOR MURDER. An old photo of Lamar Gardiner, looking particularly chinless, was inserted within the text. There was also a photo of Melinda Strickland, and she was quoted extensively throughout the article. Joe learned new information that Barnum had not passed along to him.

In addition to the compound bow found at Romanowski's home near the river, the DCI investigators had found two Bonebuster-brand broadhead arrows in a quiver, as well as a credit-card receipt for the purchase of four. Also found in the stone house were copies of letters Romanowski had sent to Lamar Gardiner protesting the closure of specific Forest Service roads that Romanowski claimed he used for accessing falcon traps and for hunting. With the account by the rancher placing Romanowski near the scene, the apparent murder weapon, the specific arrows, and the letters providing a motive, Melinda Strickland had "strongly speculated" that justice had been served.

The additional evidence was incriminating, Joe thought, and furthered the case against Romanowski. In a way, it surprised him. The doubts that he'd had when he saw Romanowski up close still nagged at him. But Joe had thought more about it over the past few days, and a few explanations had arisen. One, Joe recognized a tendency in himself to assume morality and rationality in others because he aspired to those qualities himself. Joe knew that if he was guilty of a murder, he certainly wouldn't be able to hide it. Hell, he'd confess to Marybeth so fast he'd leave skid marks. So Joe assumed others, even bad guys, would possess at least some of the same rationality and guilt, and that the guilt would be obvious in some way. But a person capable of the kind of cruelty that surrounded Lamar Gardiner's murder might not be rational at all, or even feel guilt in a conventional sense. Murderers and molesters of children were beyond Joe's comprehension, for example. And to assume that morality or guilt played a role in the mind of a molester was simply naive. Maybe he was just as naive about Nate Romanowski.

Two, Joe had followed his instincts before on occasions when it was later discovered that there was more to a crime than the obvious. This couldn't be the case every time, he conceded. Years ago, Barnum had told Joe that sometimes things are exactly what they seem. In the case in question then, Barnum had turned out to be wrong. But there was truth in that statement and Joe knew he needed to recognize it.

Nate Romanowski was not an average citizen, after all. He was a loner with a mysterious past and present. He lived alone, trained hawks, and carried a huge pistol. He was feared and talked about, but no one could really say why, except for his manner. He was just someone who seemed suspect from the start.

"This is only the beginning," Melinda Strickland was quoted near the end of the article. "The antigovernment movement that resulted in Lamar Gardiner's tragic murder still exists. Mr. Romanowski was merely a soldier. Our investigation, and my task force, will continue."

Joe had been troubled by that, just as he had been troubled when she first brought up the prospect to him. Unless he had been stubbornly oblivious-a possibility, he conceded-he could not see the "antigovernment" threat she seemed so sure of. Certainly, there were hunters, loggers, cattlemen, and now, apparently, outlaw falconers, who objected to some forest-service policies. But the opposition wasn't violent, or even organized, as far as Joe Pickett could tell. He wondered if Melinda Strickland headed up a federal task force in search of a task. And he wondered how long she would remain in Twelve Sleep County. Ten The first thing Joe saw as he approached the Battle Mountain campground were the strands of barbed wire strung through the timber and stapled into the trunks of trees. There were several signs, two of them nailed over the top of the ubiquitous dark-brown Forest Service signs identifying the campground. Hand-painted in crude block letters. They read:

THE NATION OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN SOVEREIGN CITIZENS. ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED.

The Sovereign Citizens, or "Sovereigns" as they called themselves, had literally taken over the old Forest Service campground. Their trailers, RVs, and pop-up campers occupied all of the camping spaces. Trails tramped down in the snow wound from unit to unit and clothing and equipment hung from ropes strung between trees. Crossbeams had been roped up to hang garbage, and possibly wild game, Joe surmised. In the center of the compound, tipi poles had been lashed together, but no canvas or hide had been attached yet. To Joe, the Sovereign Citizen Compound looked like a twenty-first-century version of a Plains Indian winter camp. The road into the compound was blocked by a barbed-wire gate with orange ribbons tied to it for visibility.

Joe stopped in front of the gate, and stayed in his pickup while it idled. He decided not to enter unless invited in.

Two men wearing insulated coveralls who had been working on the tipi poles stopped what they were doing and stared at Joe. One of them raised a single-bladed axe and let it rest on his shoulder. The other walked to the nearest and biggest travel trailer and loudly knocked on the side of it with his knuckles.

There were only two Sovereigns visible, but Joe had no doubt that there were others watching him. Although the camp was cleared except for a few large trees, the forest walls on both sides were thick and dark, with trails from the compound leading into it.

Joe considered backing up and driving away, now that he had seen the camp. Judging by the lack of tire tracks in the snow, he was their first visitor since the plow had come through. His heart whumped in his chest. As usual, he had no backup, and Marybeth was the only person who knew where he was. But with the two men still staring, and his goal incomplete, he took a deep breath, steeled himself, and slowly opened his door. His boots squeaked as they hit the snow-packed road. Although the compound seemed deserted, Joe noted the hiss of propane tanks feeding the trailers and curls of steam and smoke rising from chimney pipes. And there was a cooking smell-of meat, but-something sweeter than roasting beef or chicken. Wild game was being prepared-pronghorn antelope, or elk.

Joe was about to ask the two men where the leader of the camp was, but the distinctive metal-on-metal sound of a slide being racked on a shotgun stopped him.

"You need some help, mister?"

Joe turned toward the sound and the voice. Someone stood behind a bulwark of downed green timber and piled snow. He saw the dull glint of metal between two evergreen branches, and guessed he was looking into the opening of a barrel. He could not see the man who spoke.

"Game Warden Joe Pickett," he said. "Please put the weapon away." His voice sounded steadier than he thought it would.

The barrel withdrew from the timber, but the man behind it said nothing.

Joe turned back toward the compound and watched as a door opened on the trailer the tipi worker had knocked on. The large man who emerged was the same one Joe had seen in the church-the man Sheridan had guessed was the leader.

Slowly, the man walked down the slope toward the gate, his outline bearlike, with wide, slumped shoulders, a massive head, and a fleshy mouth framed by pouchy jowls. Joe guessed his height at six-foot-five, his weight at least 290. Joe noted in his peripheral vision that a few curtains had been inched back and blinds raised in some of the campers. He tried not to think about how many weapons might be pointed at him. He knew that if the situation suddenly deteriorated and he was forced to fumble through his coat for his handgun-the shotgunner in the trees, and perhaps dozens of others, would have the time to fire.

Clamping on a floppy brown felt hat, the man approached the barbed-wire gate. He didn't open it, or invite Joe in, but extended a gloved hand through the strands.

"Wade Brockius," the man said. Brockius read Joe's name badge. "How can I be of service, Mr. Pickett?" Joe shook Brockius's hand, and tried to mask his own trepidation, although he guessed that he failed at that.

Wade Brockius had a profoundly deep gravel voice with a hint of a southern accent, and soft, soulful eyes.

"I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions," Joe said. He could hear the tick-tick-tick of the radiator cooling from the grille of his pickup directly behind him.

Brockius smiled slightly. "Is it about the elk we found in the field?"

"That's one of the questions."

"We harvested them," Brockius declared. "They provided enough food for our entire group for months to come. I don't think we broke any laws doing it."

"No, you didn't." Joe shook his head. "Actually, I'm glad the meat didn't go to waste out in the meadow."

Brockius nodded, studying Joe and waiting for what would come next.

"How did you know about them?" Joe asked, watching Brockius carefully.

"Our advance team heard the shots," Brockius answered easily, without hesitation. "Five of our party were up here holding the campground until we got there. They heard a bunch of shooting way up there on the mountain and after the rest of us had arrived, they took some snowmobiles out to see what had happened. That's when they found the dead elk."

Joe nodded. He saw no holes in that.

"Did your people see or hear anyone else up there in that meadow?"

Brockius shook his head. "It was the next morning when they went up there," he said. "There's no way they could have gone up that night in that storm."

That was the first day I was snowed in, Joe thought. The time line made sense. He changed the subject.

"You know, of course, that you're in a national forest."

"Yes, we're aware of that."

"So you know there's a limit to the number of nights you can camp?"

Brockius's eyes narrowed, and the softness Joe had noted earlier hardened. "Are you an agent of the Forest Service as well?"

"Nope," Joe said quickly. "Not at all."

"Good," Brockius responded. "Because I really don't want to have an argument about this with you. As far as we can tell, this is a public campground in a national forest. By definition, that means that the forest is owned by the citizens of the United States. We own this, as do all American citizens. So I'm pleased to hear that you're not asking us to leave our forest."

Joe tensed. "There are others… Forest Service officials… who may want to make an issue of it, though. Stringing that barbed wire is an invitation for trouble."

Wade Brockius started to speak, then sighed deeply.

"The Forest Service are servants of the people, are they not?" Brockius didn't so much ask as state it. "They work for us. They are our employees, I believe. I didn't elect them, did you? So who are they to tell me where I can set up a camp in a place owned and operated by the people?"

"I'm not going to argue with you," Joe said. In fact, he wasn't sure he could make an argument with much effectiveness. "I just wanted to pass that along."

"Noted," Brockius said, his features softening once again.

"Do you know anything about the murder of Lamar Gardiner, the Forest Service supervisor here?" Joe asked suddenly, hoping to startle Brockius into revealing something.

"No, I do not," Brockius answered with gravity. "I heard about it on Christmas Eve. It's unfortunate. And I assume he was the man who shot all the elk in the meadow."

"Yes he was. Do you know a man named Nate Romanowski?"

"Never heard of him," Brockius said.

There was a beat of silence, and Joe heard the shotgunner shift his position behind the timber.

"Do you plan to stay here long?"

Brockius looked heavenward, then his deep eyes settled on Joe. "I honestly don't know. We might, we might not. In many ways, this seems like a good place to settle in for a while. It feels like the end of the road, the end of our journey. You see, we've been traveling, and I'm very, very tired."

Joe's face obviously betrayed his confusion.

"There are about thirty of us," Brockius said. "From all over the country. We've found each other, and are bound together through mutual tragedies and experiences. Nearly all of us are the last of our kind, the survivors of places and situations that are just incredibly sad."

Brockius turned and pointed to a pop-up camper at the south of the compound. Joe noted the Idaho FAMOUS POTATOES license plate. "Ruby Ridge," Brockius said. "They were there when the FBI snipers shot the dog, the boy, and the woman as she stood at her door holding her baby. If you'll recall, no one on the federal side was ever prosecuted for that. Only the survivors." He pointed toward a camper on a pickup with Montana plates. "Jordan," he said. "The last of the Montana Freemen, only recently released from prison. They lost their liberty, their land, their prospects, everything. No one on the federal side was prosecuted for that, either."

Joe felt an icy shiver crawl up his spine as Brockius spoke. How can this be happening, right here, right now? he thought. Brockius could be putting him on. Joe hoped like hell he was.

"Waco," Brockius intoned, motioning toward a fifth-wheel trailer with a Texas plate parked next to his. "They lost their two young sons in the fire. No arrests were made of the officers or politicians who were there."

Brockius turned to Joe. His voice was still soft, but it suggested steel wrapped in velvet: "We see this place as our refuge, at least for a while. We pose no threat to anyone. We're beaten down and unbelievably tired. We've been wronged, but we just want to be left alone, and we intend to leave others alone. We need this place to rest."

Joe found himself staring back at Brockius. Oddly, he believed the man.

"It was nice meeting you, Mr. Pickett." Brockius thrust his hand through the fence again. "I think I've talked too much. It's a bad habit of mine."

Joe reached out, but felt weak.

"One more question."

Brockius sighed again. His expression was pained.

"Is a woman named Jeannie Keeley with you? And is she intending to contact the little girl she left in Saddlestring?"

"I understand it's her daughter," Brockius said.

"And mine," Joe said, his voice hard and low. "My wife and I are her foster parents. Jeannie Keeley abandoned April when Jeannie cleared out of Saddlestring five years ago. My wife and I are attempting to adopt her."

"Oh," Brockius said. "This is personal, then. And complicated."

"Not really."

"Yes, it is." Brockius looked apologetic. "I hope you understand that I have no control over the Sovereigns. They're here on their own free will, and can come and go as they please. They have their own business and personal interests. And if one of them is involved in legal action for custody of her daughter, that is no concern of mine or any of the others."

"Custody?" Joe repeated. His heart sank.

"She's not in camp right now," Brockius said, shaking his woolly head. "I'm not sure when she'll be back. But I'll tell her you were here."

Joe thanked Wade Brockius and watched as the big man trudged back toward his trailer.

Joe heard his own heartbeat in his ears. He had been hit with two hard blows within a few minutes. The explanation of who these people were. And the news that Jeannie had come back for April. Heading back down Bighorn Road, Joe was grateful for the walls of snow on either side of the road, because without them he'd be likely to drive right off it.

Was it really possible that the survivors, criminals, accessories, sympathizers, and victims of several of America's worst events had grouped together and decided to set up a compound in his mountains? Or that one of them, Jeannie Keeley, was there to take April back?

It was too much, too fast. Then his cell phone rang.

"This is Nate Romanowski," the voice said. Romanowski spoke with a kind of drawled sarcastic lilt. "I've got one phone call and I'm calling you, buddy. Can you meet with me?"

"Why aren't you calling a lawyer?" Joe asked, stunned.

"Because I'm calling you," Romanowski said, sounding annoyed. "Because I thought about it for two days and I'm calling you, mister."

"This is ridiculous."

"It sure is," Romanowski agreed. Joe assumed Romanowski was referring to the case against him. "I'll be waiting for you. I'll clear my schedule."

"Clear your…"

But Romanowski had hung up. A few minutes later, his phone rang again.

Joe snatched it up.

"Please hold for Melinda Strickland," an unfamiliar female voice commanded.

"How did you get my number?" Joe asked. He knew he'd never given it to Strickland.

"Please hold for Melinda Strickland."

Joe held, anger welling up inside of him. He heard a click as the call was put through.

"Uh, Joe, why is Nate Romanowski calling you?" Strickland's voice was strained, as if barely under control.

"I'm not exactly sure," Joe answered. "But how did you know that, and how did you get my cell phone number?"

"I don't like being kept in the dark about things like this," she said icily, ignoring his questions.

Joe was confused.

"He just called. Just minutes ago. And why should I report that to you, anyway?"

"Because, Joe Pickett, I am in charge of this investigation. A man was murdered, you know." Her voice was dripping with sarcasm. "I need to be kept in the loop. I can't have this kind of thing happening behind my back."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Joe said, raising his voice. He felt his scalp twitch. "And there's nothing going on behind your back."

"He called you!" she shouted. "The man who murdered a federal employee on federal land called you, of all people!"

Joe stared at his cell phone as if it were a hyena. Then he raised it to his ear. She was still shouting.

"I'm losing my signal," he lied, then turned the phone off and tossed it angrily aside onto his truck seat. Eleven Bucking a rooster tail of plowed snow in the county building's lot, Joe parked in the designated visitors section and got out. Three floors of institutional blond brick housed the sheriff's office, the jail, the attorney, the court, the assessor, the treasurer, and other county administration offices. The sandstone inscription over the front doors read:

TWELVE S LEEP C OUNTY -

WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS

AND THE WEST B EGINS

The slogan was an endless source of amusement, especially among a group of retired men who drank coffee every morning at the Burg-O-Pardner. They'd petitioned the Saddlestring Roundup for years with slogans that they preferred:

TWELVE S LEEP COUNTY -

TRAILHEAD FOR THE INFORMATION COWPATH

TWELVE SLEEP COUNTY -

MILLENNIUM? WHAT MILLENNIUM?

TWELVE SLEEP C OUNTY -

TEN YEARS BEHIND WYOMING,

WHICH IS TEN YEARS BEHIND EVERYWHERE ELSE

Joe was still shaken from the events of the morning. The word "custody" hung in the air and wouldn't go away. Joe hoped like hell that Brockius was wrong. And where was Jeannie Keeley, if she wasn't in the camp?

Melinda Strickland's rantings had angered and confused him further. She had sounded unhinged, hysterical. When would she go away?

And now this. Nate Romanowski.

After hanging up on Strickland, Joe had decided to visit Nate at the county jail. He was curious as to why the man had called him. He hoped as well that talking to Nate would dispel the lingering doubts he had about his guilt. And Joe also hoped it would really piss off Melinda Strickland. A newly installed metal detector and security desk were manned by a semi-retired deputy wearing a name tag that identified him as "Stovepipe." He'd received the nickname years before in an elk camp when he fell over a woodstove in a tent and brought the chimney down all over himself. Joe had met Stovepipe during the previous summer when Joe had driven up on him to check out his fishing license. Stovepipe had fallen asleep on the bank of the river, where he had been bait fishing, and was angered to discover when he awoke that a trout had not only taken his bait, but had dragged his rod into the river.

This time, Stovepipe was awake, although barely.

"You ever find your fishing rod?" Joe asked, while he unbuckled his gunbelt and slid it across the counter.

Stovepipe shook his head sadly. "That was a hundred-dollar Ugly Stik with a Mitchell 300 reel. I bet you that fish must have been seven pounds."

"Maybe," Joe said, patting his pockets for metal items.

"Don't worry about it," Stovepipe said conspiratorially, leaning forward over the counter to see if anyone else was around. "The machine's broke anyway. It hasn't worked since July." The sheriff's office and county jail were on the second floor. Joe mounted the steps and pushed through frosted glass doors. Barnum's door was shut and his office was dark, but Deputies Reed and McLanahan sat at desks, staring into computer monitors.

"Which one of you told Melinda Strickland that Nate Romanowski called me?" Joe asked.

Reed was obviously puzzled by the question. That left Deputy McLanahan. When McLanahan looked up, Joe noticed two things. The first was a barely disguised hatred-a snake-eyed, thin-lipped countenance similar to a horse about to bite. The second thing he noticed were the stitches that appeared to fasten McLanahan's nose to his face.

"What can I help you with, Mr. Pickett?" McLanahan asked, the question posed as a bored statement.

"What happened to you?" Joe asked, taking his coat off and hanging it on a hook. He kept his cowboy hat on.

"Nate Romanowski happened to him," Reed volunteered from across the room. McLanahan glared at Reed.

"When did he do that?"

"Two days ago," Reed answered again, ignoring McLanahan.

"What are you, my goddamned mouthpiece?" McLanahan asked, rising from his desk. He turned to Joe.

"I looked in Romanowski's cell and he was on his bed trying to choke himself. He had his hand in his mouth, and I told him to knock it off," McLanahan explained, his voice nasal due to his injury. "He wouldn't quit, so I went in there to make him stop."

"And Romanowski decked him," Reed said, pointing toward McLanahan. "Romanowski cleaned McLanahan's clock, then kicked him outside his cell, and shut his own door. He doesn't like Deputy McLanahan very much."

"SHUT UP!" McLanahan seethed. Reed looked away, obviously hiding a smile.

Joe looked from Reed to McLanahan. McLanahan's face was red, and his anger had caused tiny beads of bright red blood to leak through his stitches.

"He didn't try to escape?" Joe asked. "Seeing that you were on the floor and he could have stepped over you and walked away?"

McLanahan shook his head. "Maybe he knows what I would have done to him if he'd tried."

"I'm sure that's it," Joe said, deadpan. Reed continued to look away, but Joe could tell he was smiling by the way Reed's cheeks bulged out in profile.

McLanahan tried to gauge Joe's comment. He looked ready to fight-and if not Joe, then Reed. Anybody. But, Joe thought, McLanahan is at his best in a fight when he's surrounded by armed agents and his opponent is defenseless. Like Nate Romanowski was.

"Has he admitted to the murder?" Joe asked.

"He denies everything," McLanahan said. "He hasn't even requested a lawyer. Instead, he called you."

"Maybe you should have hit him again with your rifle butt," Joe said.

Reed turned back, expectant. McLanahan tried to grimace, but it clearly hurt his face to do so.

"Why exactly did he call you?" McLanahan asked.

"I don't know."

"Why the game warden and not a lawyer?" Reed wondered.

Joe shrugged.

"You going to meet with him?" McLanahan asked, looking at Joe with a suspicious eye.

"That's why I'm here."

McLanahan and Reed exchanged a glance, each waiting for the other to make a decision of some kind.

"It's his funeral," Reed said dismissively, "If Romanowski wants to talk to the game warden, he has every right to do so."

McLanahan crossed his arms over his chest. "Something about this doesn't sound right to me."

"Me either," Joe said truthfully. "I don't know the man."

"You're sure?"

Joe rolled his eyes. "Of course I'm sure."

Reed stood up, jangled his ring of cell keys, and threw Joe a "follow me" nod.

"You left your gun and everything with Stovepipe, right?"

"Yup."

"Watch that son-of-a-bitch," McLanahan called after them. "If he jumps you, I may not hear it."

As they entered the hallway, Reed looked over his shoulder at Joe. "I'll hear it," he said. Nate Romanowski lolled on his cot with his hand in his mouth, just as McLanahan had described. His other arm was flung over his eyes. One of his feet was on the concrete floor of the cell and the other hung over the foot of the bed. He wore a sky-blue one-piece county jumpsuit and standard-issue slip-on boat shoes-no belt or shoelaces that he could harm himself with.

The cell was ten feet by ten feet square, with a cot, an open toilet, a desk and chair bolted to the wall and floor, and a stainless-steel sink with a faucet that leaked a thin stream of water into the basin. The single window was thick opaque glass reinforced with wire.

Joe Pickett had never been in the county jail itself. He had been in the anteroom, where, on two occasions, he had brought in game violators because they were either drunk or drugged and he didn't want to run the risk of leaving them out in the field. Unlike Lamar Gardiner, they had sat quietly in Joe's pickup while being transported to town.

Although it was uncomfortably warm, the bare walls and metal furnishings made the cell seem cold. Not for the first time that day, Joe asked himself what he was doing here, and questioned whether he should have come. He wondered if he was thinking clearly enough after his encounter with Wade Brockius and the Sovereigns. Maybe, he thought, he should have run this by Terry Crump, his supervisor.

But the door closed behind him, and Nate Romanowski was sitting up, both his feet on the floor now, fixing sharp, cold, lime-green eyes on Joe. Romanowski's head was bowed forward slightly, and he was looking out at Joe from under a thick shelf of brow bone that made him seem even more menacing. Romanowski was lanky and all angles, his sharp elbows and long arms jutting out from broad shoulders, his nose beaklike above a V-shaped jaw. His blond hair was thinning on top.

"Thanks for coming," he said. His hand remained in his mouth slurring his voice.

"I'm not sure why I'm here," Joe said honestly.

Romanowski smiled with his eyes, then ever so slowly withdrew his fingers from his mouth. Joe noticed that Romanowski was working his mouth gently with his tongue, probing his teeth. Then he realized what Romanowski had been doing: holding the teeth that had been knocked free by the rifle butt in the sockets they had come from, so they would reattach.

"Think that's going to work?" Joe asked, impressed.

"It seems to." Romanowski shrugged. "They're loose-but my two front teeth are back in. They should stay there and firm up as long as I don't use 'em."

"You mean, like eating?"

Romanowski nodded. "Soup's okay. Broth is better."

"There are dentists in Saddlestring," Joe offered. "One could be sent up here."

Romanowski shrugged again. "It gives me something to do. Besides, I don't know if Barnum would be that helpful."

Romanowski's voice was low and soft. The cadence of his speaking rhythm was sarcastic, making him sound a little like Jack Nicholson. Joe strained to hear him.

Romanowski seemed oddly comfortable with his surroundings. He was the kind of man, Joe thought, who was probably comfortable in his own skin wherever he was. He was cool, confident-and intriguing. And charged with murder, Joe reminded himself.

"Why'd you clean Deputy McLanahan's clock?" Joe asked.

Romanowski snorted and pulled down the collar of his jail overalls. Joe could see two small burn marks, like snakebites, on Romanowski's neck. Joe recognized the marks as the aftereffects of the Taser stun-gun that McLanahan carried on his belt. McLanahan, Joe guessed, hadn't been checking up on Romanowski as he'd claimed. He had been harassing him, probably trying to elicit a confession.

"I'll get right to it," Romanowski said. "I want to ask you two favors. If you can do either one of them I'll be in your debt. If you can do 'em both, I'll owe you a life. Mine, I mean."

Joe shook his head. What was this?

"First, you should try to get me out of here."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because," Romanowski said, displaying either a smirk or a smile-Joe was unsure which-"I didn't kill Lamar Gardiner. Not that I might not have if I was given the chance and considering the circumstances. I heard about those dead elk. Any asshole that shoots seven elk deserves a couple of arrows in his heart. But I'm innocent on this one."

"Why aren't you telling your lawyer this?"

Romanowski fixed his gaze on Joe. "My public defender is a twenty-six-year-old named Jason. He still has notes from college classes in the same legal pad he brought with him to see me. I'm his second client ever. When he was making conversation, he asked me if I listened to hip-hop."

Joe listened blankly.

"My lawyer is a twenty-six-year-old named Jason," Romanowski repeated, his voice rising for the first time.

It was if Romanowski had said all he was going to say about this subject, and Joe should readily agree. But Joe didn't.

"Maybe you ought to be calling a real private-practice criminal lawyer instead of me."

Romanowski shifted slightly, and closed one eye as if to see Joe Pickett from a different angle.

"But I didn't. I called you."

Joe shifted in his chair, uncomfortable.

"How can I prove you didn't murder Lamar Gardiner?" Joe asked. "They've got your bow and the arrows, you were seen coming down from the mountain that afternoon, and you've got a motive. You've got to give me something to go on."

Romanowski snorted. "I was coming down that road. I was coming from the Longbrake ranch, where I had returned a certain item of clothing to Mrs. Longbrake."

"A certain item of clothing?" Joe asked.

"Her black thong underwear. I found it under a juniper bush at my house. I guess it had been there since the summer." Romanowski paused. "Mary Longbrake and I had a certain thing together. She would come out to my place when Bud was out of town. I'd wait for her naked in my tree. When she got out of her truck, I'd come down and get her. We would do it outside. Sometimes on my picnic table, sometimes on the bank of the river, sometimes in the river. She was a lonely woman, and I helped. Hell, I made her whoop!"

Joe didn't know whether to laugh or call for Reed to let him out.

"So did you tell the sheriff?"

"I did," Romanowski sneered. "He said he called Mary and she swore she's never heard of me. When she talked to Barnum she was packing for an around-the-world cruise and planned to be gone for a few months. She's lying about me, I understand that. Not about the cruise, though. Besides, Bud would pound her into jelly if she came clean."

"Okay," Joe said. "What about the bow and the Bonebuster arrows?"

Romanowski nodded. "I've hunted with a bow, and I own that brand of arrows. But it's not my weapon of choice. Even for a lowlife like Gardiner, I would use my weapon of choice."

"Which is?"

"My.454 Casull," Romanowski said, smiling. "A five-shot revolver made by Freedom Arms in Freedom, Wyoming. It's the most powerful handgun in the world. It's four times more powerful than a.44 Magnum."

Joe remembered hearing about it, and seeing the butt of the revolver in a holster at Romanowski's home.

"And the motive?" Joe asked, as if playing the game through.

"I already told you, I would have likely popped Gardiner given the circumstances, but I wasn't there. He was a bureaucratic little turd, floating in a bowl. He shut off the roads to where I trap falcons, and imposed policies and restrictions on the citizens of this county that were heavy-handed and dictatorial. I sincerely disliked the son-of-a-bitch, but somebody got to him first. And good for them."

Joe thought: That ought to convince a jury. The cadence of Nate's words was odd as well-a series of short, edgy pulses. Joe couldn't decide if he was credible or not.

"When we came to your place," Joe said, "You seemed to be expecting us."

Romanowski nodded.

"But when Barnum and Melinda Strickland started accusing you of Lamar Gardiner's murder, you looked confused. Did I read that right?"

"Absolutely," Romanowski said, nodding. "Absolutely."

"So explain."

Romanowski sighed, and looked away. "Let's just say I got into a little trouble a year and a half ago in Montana. I know there's a warrant, but I wasn't sure when they'd find me. So when the vehicles pulled up out there, I figured my time had come to go back to the Treasure State."

"What did you do up there?" Joe asked.

Romanowski winced. "I don't know how it can help me to tell you."

"You're probably right about that," Joe said. "But you're asking me to trust you. How can I trust you if you won't tell me the truth?"

A slow smile tugged at Romanowski's mouth. Joe waited.

Romanowski turned back. "I was in the Special Forces in a unit that doesn't officially even exist. If you try to check up on me, you won't find anything about it. I was involved in some things in other countries. Some of the countries are friendly, but most of them aren't. It was covert, and it was nasty.

"But I had a conflict with a supervisor," Romanowski said, weighing and measuring each word in an attempt, Joe thought, to tell his story without getting too specific. "I guess I don't deal with authority all that well, especially when there's a philosophical difference with regard to policy. Like when I get sent out to do things to people simply to further the career of a supervisor, and not to serve my country. In my opinion, at least."

Joe nodded for him to go on.

"So I quit, which isn't an easy thing to do in the first place. But I sent some letters about my supervisor before I left, and I named names and literally told them where some bodies were buried. That didn't make me very popular with my superiors, and they tracked me down. I knew they would, eventually."

Romanowski gazed at the ceiling, pausing. Then he lowered his sharp eyes until they locked with Joe's.

"The people they sent after me met with some trouble in Montana. Up by Great Falls. A car crash or something. Somebody told the local authorities that I might have been involved, might have seen something. But they couldn't find me, because I had left the state."

Joe sat silently as Romanowski finished, trying to judge what he had just heard. Romanowski was a convincing speaker, although his admission that he "didn't deal with authority all that well" didn't help his case. Lamar Gardiner had certainly been "an authority."

Romanowski seemed to be reading his thoughts, because he lowered his voice, leaned forward so that Joe was less than two feet from him, and said: "Forget Lamar Gardiner. He was an insect, and not worth swatting. Melinda Strickland is who you need to watch out for."

Joe was genuinely surprised at this, and he cocked his head.

"Why?"

"She's a psycho. She's real trouble."

"Do you know her?" Joe asked.

Nate shook his head. "I could feel it when she approached. It emanated from her. She reminded me a lot of my former supervisor, in fact."

Joe sighed. For a moment there, he'd been taken in.

Romanowski held up his hand. "No, I don't mean she is my former supervisor. She just reminds me of her. You just have to look into her eyes to realize she's trouble.

"I know these things," Romanowski said, looking hard at Joe. There was no hint of a smirk now. "That's why I ended up here in Wyoming. As far away from government bullshit as I thought I could get. How was I to know I'd find another one like her?"

"What are you talking about?" Joe asked, leaning back away from Romanowski.

Romanowski's eyes got hard. "Make no mistake, Joe-Melinda Strickland is a cruel woman, who doesn't give a shit about anyone but herself. I knew I was in the presence of someone evil. Even though that idiot deputy knocked my teeth in, I recognized him for the dumb, redneck cracker he is. There's a hint of evil with that sheriff, but nothing like what I felt from Melinda Strickland. It's like my gut seized up when she looked at me."

"Do you know who killed Lamar Gardiner?" Joe asked abruptly, breaking into Romanowski's monologue. Joe suddenly realized that he had crossed over; that he believed Nate Romanowski was telling the truth. He wasn't sure he really wanted to believe that, but he did.

"I don't have a clue. But from the details I've heard, I think it was a local thing, maybe a business or a family thing, even," Romanowski said.

Joe tried not to react: to say that Romanowski had just echoed his own thoughts from before.

"The bastard who did it is still out there," Romanowski said. "You might even know him."

Joe felt his own stomach knot. This was exactly what he had been thinking.

"Can Melinda Strickland really be as bad as you say?" Joe asked.

Nate held Joe's gaze for a long count. "Maybe worse. She'll climb over the dead body of her mother to get what she wants."

Joe sat and thought in silence, staring at Nate Romanowski, not sure what to think of this dangerous, fascinating man.

"I believe in right and wrong, and I believe in justice," Romanowski said. "I believe in my country. It's the bureaucrats, the lawyers, and the legal process I have a problem with."

"Okay, then," Joe said, slapping his knees and standing up. "I think we're through here." He admitted to himself that he was thoroughly conflicted, and confused. He had not entered this cell expecting to be convinced of Romanowski's innocence.

Joe stood, looking at Romanowski as he would a suspect, trying to assume that the man was guilty. He looked for a facial tic, for the averted eyes, bitten lip, or furtive glance of a liar. But Romanowski exuded calm, even a hint of righteousness. Or arrogance. Or self-delusion.

"So what was the other favor?" Joe asked.

"My birds," Romanowski said. "I've got a peregrine falcon and a red-tailed hawk out at my place. I left them pretty abruptly, as you know. They're probably circling, hanging around. I fed them just before I left, and there are wild rabbits and ducks around the river, but I'm worried about them. I was hoping you could go out there and feed them."

"I think I could do that," Joe said. "But understand that I'm doing it because I don't want the birds to starve, not because I believe you."

"The peregrine is a suspicious little bitch," Romanowski said. "But she was coming around. She just doesn't know who to trust."

"Sounds familiar," Joe said, thinking of his own predicament.

Romanowski smiled in an understanding, slightly defeated way.

"Do you know a man named Wade Brockius? Or the people who call themselves the Rocky Mountain Sovereign Citizens?" Joe asked, watching Romanowski carefully.

"I've heard of them," he said, his tone conversational. "I don't know any of them, but I overheard the deputies out there talking about some camp in the mountains."

Joe nodded and turned to call for Reed, then remembered that one question was still unanswered. "Why did you call me?" he asked.

Romanowski nodded. "I know about you. I've been watching you for some time. I followed the situation with the Millers' weasels, and what happened at Savage Run."

Joe said nothing. It unnerved him to know that someone had been observing him.

"You like to fly under the radar," Romanowski said, locking eyes again with Joe. "When you see something that's wrong, you don't give up. You value being underestimated. In fact, you encourage it. Then, if you have to, you turn fucking cowboy and surprise everyone."

"REED!" Joe yelled, turning, ready to get out.

"I trust you to do the right thing," Romanowski said evenly to Joe's back.

Joe looked over his shoulder. "Don't put that on me."

"Sorry," Romanowski said, smiling as if he had just touched Joe Pickett during a game of Ultimate Tag. "You're the only guy between me and a needle." That night, Joe worked in his garage. Under a bare hanging lightbulb, he replaced the spark plugs and belt from his state-issued snow machine so it would be ready when he needed it again. The clear, sunny day had birthed a crisp and bitterly cold night. When he'd last checked, it was fifteen below zero outside and even with the propane heater hissing in the corner of the garage, he could see his breath. The thick gloves he wore made it tougher to unscrew the plugs with his ratchet, but when he took them off, the steel tool burned his skin with cold.

Earlier, after dinner, while he and Marybeth had done the dishes, Joe poured out everything from the day: seeing the Sovereigns, hearing of Jeannie Keeley's intentions, the call from Melinda Strickland, the meeting with Romanowski, and the possibility that the real murderer was still out there. Marybeth listened in silence, her expression becoming more tense and alarmed as he talked. He noticed that she was washing the same plate twice.

"I don't know what to think, Marybeth," he confessed. "And I'm not sure I know what to do about any of it either."

"I wish Jeannie Keeley would have been up there, so you could see how serious she really was." Marybeth was focusing on the part most important to her. Earlier in the evening she had told Joe she'd spoken with a lawyer and that the lawyer hadn't been very optimistic about their chances if Jeannie Keeley sincerely wanted April back.

"Why is she back now? It's been five years, Joe-why the hell is she back now?"

Joe looked at his wife, her face pale with anger and fear and wished he had an anwer for her. The side door opened and Marybeth stepped in wearing her parka. Her arms were crossed, her hands clamped under her armpits.

"It's not much warmer in here than outside," she said, closing the door and huddling back against it. "Are you coming in soon?"

"Is everyone in bed?"

"You mean my mother?" Marybeth sighed. "Yes."

"I'll be in in a minute," Joe said, ratcheting a plug in. It had been a year since he'd replaced the spark plugs.

"I've thought about what you told me tonight. Brockius, Romanowski, Strickland, all of it. I wish I had been with you."

Joe looked up. "Me, too. Maybe you'd have a better read on these people than I do."

"Do you put any stock into what Nate Romanowski said about Strickland?" Marybeth asked. "Could she really be that bad? Or does she just remind him of somebody he hated?"

Joe's socket wrench slipped on a spark plug and he struck his knuckles hard against the engine block and cursed. He looked up. "I don't know, Marybeth. But that woman gives me the willies. There's something… off… about her."

"Then you believe him? Do you think he's innocent, like he claims?"

Joe pulled the wrench out of the engine, slipped off his glove, and examined his skinned knuckles. His bare fingers immediately stiffened in the cold.

"He's either innocent, or he's an excellent liar," Joe said.

"I do know one thing he might not be lying about," Marybeth said, arching her eyebrows. "Mary Longbrake was seeing a much younger man. It could have been Nate."

"How in the…" Joe caught himself, and rephrased, "How could you possibly know that?"

"From the library," Marybeth said, smiling. "A couple of the women who work there used to play bridge with Mary every week. I guess they talk about all sorts of things in that club. Apparently, Mary made it very clear that her life had changed for the better since she had met this man." Twelve The closed-casket funeral for Lamar Gardiner was held on the morning of New Year's Eve, while another dark winter storm front was forming and boiling in the northwest. The wind was icy and withering. The service took place at Kenneth Siman's Memorial Chapel on Main Street in Saddlestring and was attended by about fifty mourners, most of whom were family, employees of the Forest Service office, or local law enforcement.

Joe sat with Marybeth in the next-to-last row of chairs. He wore a jacket and tie, and had left his hat on the coatrack. Carrie Gardiner, wearing black, sat in the front row with her two children. Behind them was Melinda Strickland, surrounded by Forest Service employees. Strickland's hair, Joe noted, was a different color than when he had last seen her. Now it was tawny, almost blond. She wore her Forest Service uniform. Sheriff Barnum and his two deputies occupied a single row of chairs, but they all kept empty chairs between them. Elle Broxton-Howard, with her notebook in her lap, sat alone behind them all.

The ferocity of the wind outside made something flap and bang on the roof while the pastor spoke. Kenneth Siman, the earnestly sober funeral director and county coroner, appeared from a door near the front of the room, looked up to check that nothing within the building had been damaged, and silently disappeared.

When the pastor was done, Melinda Strickland approached the dais and withdrew a folded piece of yellow paper from her uniform pocket. Her demeanor was oddly melodramatic, and she consciously tried to meet the eyes of all of the mourners before she spoke.

"You've heard from Pastor Robbins about the life of Lamar, and I'm here to let you know that he didn't die in vain. No Sirree Bob."

No Sirree Bob? Joe felt Marybeth squirm next to him. And he felt it again when Melinda Strickland paused and forced a blazing, inappropriate smile.

Joe felt a cold shiver run through him. Was it just Strickland, he wondered, or was it Romanowski's manipulation?

"Cassie," Strickland said to Carrie Gardiner, getting her name wrong, "your dutiful husband was the casualty of a war that we must, and will, stop. When citizens turn against their federal government it will not stand, ya know?"

Joe tried to attribute Melinda Strickland's words, gestures, and behavior to nervousness. She was certainly making Joe nervous. And Marybeth seemed to be trying to shrink into her chair.

"Ya know, this little war some citizens have with federal employees has gone too far, don't you think?" She seemed to be looking straight at Joe, and she nodded conspiratorially.

"Ya know, a group of extremists have set up a compound on federal land. That's kind of 'in your face,' don't you think?"

Melinda Strickland went on for another five minutes. Her thoughts seemed random and disconnected, sound bites in search of a paragraph. Joe barely heard her, but he did hear Marybeth groan.

When she was through, Strickland approached Carrie Gardiner and her children, and grasped both of Carrie's hands in hers.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Cassie," Strickland said.

Joe noticed that Elle Broxton-Howard was scribbling furiously in her notepad. As Strickland rejoined her employees, she turned and handed her speech to Broxton-Howard, who accepted it with a grateful smile. The reception/wake was held at the Forest Service building. Joe noted right away that the Gardiners hadn't come. He felt sorry for Carrie, and especially for her children. The other mourners stood in the reception area, drinking punch in paper cups and eating cookies from plates on the office desks. USFS employees stood uncomfortably behind the desks, urging mourners to have another cookie with a lack of enthusiasm that led Joe to believe that they had been instructed to be good hosts by their immediate supervisor, Melinda Strickland.

Elle Broxton-Howard approached Joe and Marybeth and introduced herself. She wore a high-collared Bavarian wool jacket over black stretch pants. She handed Joe a card.

"Rumour Magazine," Joe read aloud. He gave her his card, and she slid it absently into a pocket without looking at it.

"It's very popular in the U.K," Broxton-Howard explained. "It's kind of a cross between your Maxim and People, with a little of The New Yorker thrown in for highbrow literary content. I also freelance."

"I think my mother reads it," Marybeth said, making conversation.

Broxton-Howard nodded at Marybeth, but turned again to Joe. Joe knew how well this would go over with his wife.

"I'm doing a long-form story on the battle between the rural militia types and the U.S. government," Broxton-Howard said, "And I plan to feature Melinda Strickland as my protagonist. I see her as a strong-willed, independent woman in a man's world. A Barbara Stanwyck of our time."

She was interrupted, however, as Melinda Strickland joined them wearing her wide, inappropriate grin. Her cocker spaniel trailed behind her.

"I'm Marybeth Pickett, Joe's wife," Marybeth said, extending her hand, and smiling with a hint of malice, Joe thought.

"Joe's been working very closely with our effort, and we appreciate that immensely," Strickland said, looking at him. "He's been such a help."

"I didn't get that impression when you called me on my cell phone," Joe said.

Strickland reacted as if Joe had slapped her. "I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to," she said. Then her expression softened once again into her hostess face.

Wow, Joe thought.

"So tell me, Joe," Strickland asked, "have the extremist tendencies in this area affected the job you're trying to do?"

Joe thought for a moment. "To be honest, I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'extremist tendencies.' There are a few bad apples, but the community is generally supportive."

Strickland cocked her head skeptically at Joe. "Really?" she said, in a way that indicated that she didn't believe him, but didn't want to cause a scene.

Joe shrugged. "Some folks might get a little eccentric and hardheaded when it comes to land policies and rules and regulations. But I've found you can deal with them, if you're reasonable and fair across the board."

" 'Eccentric' is an odd term for the murder of a Forest Service supervisor, I would think," Strickland said, looking to Marybeth and Broxton-Howard for confirmation.

Joe waded in, taking advantage of the moment, wanting to make a point while Melinda Strickland was in front of him.

"I want to let you know," Joe interjected, "that I met a man named Wade Brockius a couple of days ago. He's the spokesman of sorts for the-" But before Joe could get any further, Melinda Strickland suddenly noticed that the cookies were gone from the nearest desk and excused herself to admonish the employee. Broxton-Howard faded into the crowd.

Joe and Marybeth looked at each other.

"Well, she's interesting," Marybeth added. "In a bad kind of way."

"Remember what Nate Romanowski said," Joe added.

"You're quoting a murder suspect, Joe," Marybeth smiled.

"I'll stop doing that," Joe said sourly.

"But did you notice how Melinda was acting with you?"

Joe shook his head.

"She wasn't talking with you or even listening to you. She was assessing you," Marybeth said.

"Why?"

"To see if you'll be any value to her personally; if you'll buy into her agenda, her career path, or hurt it. Remember when you told me she almost turned back on the mountain? It sounds to me like when it got tough physically, she looked up and saw that probably nobody in that party really mattered to what was important to her. She saw a bunch of local yokels and the state DCI. A bunch of losers. The only person in that group who mattered was the journalist, and she was already in her camp. The rest of you meant nothing. She's a user, and she's dangerous."

"You got all that from a two-minute exchange?"

"Yes."

Marybeth nodded toward Broxton-Howard, who now commanded the attention of McLanahan and Reed.

"She's nice-looking," Marybeth said in a flat tone. "It takes hours to make your hair look that casually wind-tousled."

Joe wisely said nothing. While Marybeth searched for the bathroom, Joe sought out County Attorney Robey Hersig.

"What are your plans tonight, Joe?"

Joe rolled his eyes. Their New Year's Eve plans were the same as they had been since Sheridan was born eleven years ago: They would go to bed early. Missy had asked about parties and celebrations in town, and hinted that she might want to go. Joe had offered her the use of their minivan, and she had wrinkled her nose, but accepted.

"Got a minute?" Joe asked. Hersig nodded and motioned Joe into an office behind them. He entered and sat on a desk and loosened his tie. Joe eased the door closed behind them. The office had been Lamar Gardiner's, but was now, obviously, occupied by Melinda Strickland. A framed photo of her cocker spaniel stood on the desk. Joe hadn't realized that she'd already moved in.

Hersig was from one of Twelve Sleep County's oldest ranching families, and after a bout of college rodeo he had gone into law at the University of Wyoming. His first term as county attorney would end in the coming year, and there was speculation as to whether he would run again. Although almost brutally cautious when it came to prosecuting a case, Hersig had an impressive track record of convictions. The summer before, Hersig and Joe had discovered that they were both fly fishermen, and had floated the Twelve Sleep river together in Hersig's flat-bottomed McKenzie boat. They got along, and made plans to do it again. To both, fishing together successfully created a special bond.

Joe had called Hersig earlier in the week to talk about April, but their conversation had been brief; Hersig's phone was full of static, thanks to damage from the storm.

"We're not sure what we can do about Jeannie Keeley," Joe said. "Can we ask for a restraining order or something?"

Hersig shook his head. "Joe, she has to do something first. Just her presence isn't enough. And legally, since April hasn't been adopted, Jeannie has a damned good chance of getting her back."

Joe winced. "How could a judge possibly give her back to that woman after what she did?"

"Judges do things like that, Joe. Birth mothers carry a lot of clout, even when it's clear that you and Marybeth care for April. In Wyoming, if the mother's maintained contact in some way-even with the judge-the child isn't considered abandoned."

"We love her," Joe said firmly. "She's one of ours."

"Too bad the adoption got delayed so long," Hersig commiserated. "That's where the problem lies."

Joe cursed, and looked away for a moment.

"I wish this punch had a kick," Hersig said idly, looking into his cup as if willing a shot of bourbon into it. "It's New Year's Eve, after all."

"How's the case against Nate Romanowski?" Joe asked. "You know, he called me the other day-I met with him and he told me he was innocent."

"I heard about that," Hersig said, shaking his head. "Imagine a man in jail claiming that." Hersig threw down the last of the punch.

"I wish our case against him was stronger," Hersig confided. "It's compelling, but largely circumstantial. I'd be nervous taking it to a jury without more direct evidence. Did he tell you anything of interest?"

Joe relayed the story about Mrs. Longbrake and what Marybeth had told him about the women at the library, but nothing about what Romanowski had said about Melinda Strickland, or the supposed incident in Montana. Joe wondered why he felt guarded about what Romanowski had said. Joe's allegiance, after all, was supposed to be to Hersig and the law.

"I've got to admit that I found myself questioning his guilt," Joe said.

Hersig turned his head to look at Joe.

"Questioning his guilt, or being taken in?" Hersig asked.

Joe shrugged and admitted, "I'm not sure."

"Mrs. Longbrake is out of the country," Hersig said. "The sheriff checked. So we can't confirm that part of his story yet although now maybe we'll interview the women she played bridge with."

Joe nodded. "What do you know about Nate Romanowski? What's his background?"

"It's pretty mysterious." Hersig raised his eyebrows. "He's a Montana boy, from Bozeman originally. He was appointed to the Air Force Academy and played football for them. Middle linebacker for the Falcons…"

"Falcons?" Joe repeated, thinking about Romanowski's birds. He hadn't fed them yet; there had been no time. He had to get out there soon.

"Then he vanished off the face of the earth from 1984 through 1998. Nobody can vanish like that unless they've got special help from the Feds."

"Special Forces?" Joe asked. "He said something about that when I saw him at the jail." Two of Romanowski's claims-about Mrs. Longbrake's dalliances and his Special Forces background-were now much more likely true than false, Joe thought.

"Really? That's interesting," Hersig said. "I didn't know that. And Romanowski's not cooperating. Even with his P. D."

"I know. He says he's depending on me to help him out," Joe said sourly.

Hersig frowned. "Romanowski's only arrest was in 1999-he was held in Idaho for allegedly beating a rancher. He claimed the guy shot his falcon out of the sky. Spent ninety days in the Blaine County Jail for that."

"Do you see a connection between Romanowski, the Sovereigns, and Lamar Gardiner?" Joe asked. "They all sort of happened at once."

Hersig peered at the ceiling for several beats. "It almost seems like there's got to be one, doesn't it?"

"Maybe so," Joe said.

The door opened and one of the Forest Service employees looked in. "Oops, sorry," he said.

Hersig waved to indicate it was okay. "Leave the door open. We're through, aren't we?"

"Yup."

Hersig heaved himself off of the desk, and they stood in the doorway looking out. Elle Broxton-Howard stood in the middle of a gaggle of midlevel Forest Service managers as well as Reed and McLanahan. Hersig tilted his chin toward her.

"She likes 'em rugged and real, or so she says," Hersig confided to Joe. "Ranchers, cowboys, loggers. Real manly men."

Joe stared at Hersig. "How do you know that?"

Hersig smiled, but his face was flushed. "She told me that. And believe me, she's got a few notches on her lipstick case in this county already."

As if she'd heard Hersig, or read Joe's thoughts, Broxton-Howard suddenly turned, extricated herself from the knot of admirers, and walked boldly up to Joe Pickett.

"You were there when Mr. Gardiner was killed," she stated flatly. Joe was surprised she hadn't known that already.

"Yes."

"You've met with Wade Brockius and the Sovereigns as well."

"Sort of." Joe felt his neck getting warm.

"Then we must have an interview," she said, her eyes boring into his, her jaw set with sincerity. Without breaking her gaze, she fished Joe's card out of her pocket and raised it until it came into her view.

"Joe Pickett. Game warden," she said, in a breathy British accent. Then she turned on her heel and walked back to her admirers.

Marybeth entered the room from a dark hallway, looking for Joe. Joe felt both guilty and slightly exhilarated. As Marybeth made her way over, Hersig leaned toward Joe and mocked, "We must have an interview!" "What did Robey say about April?" Marybeth asked, as they drove out of Saddlestring on Bighorn Road. The storm clouds had blocked out the moon and stars, and the wind was relentless. Tiny flakes of snow, like sparks, flashed past the headlights.

"He wasn't encouraging," Joe said. "But he didn't indicate that Jeannie's tried to get April back, either."

"That was a very strange experience back there," Marybeth said, sighing. "The funeral was disturbing, and the reception was even worse. The person I feel for the most is Carrie Gardiner. Or Cassie, as Melinda Strickland calls her. I almost look forward to seeing my mother."

Joe laughed. "Me, too," he said. But he was thinking of Melinda Strickland. And Nate Romanowski. And Elle Broxton-Howard.

"What did she say to you?" Marybeth asked abruptly.

"Who?" Joe asked. He sounded guilty, even to himself.

"You know who," Marybeth snapped. "The chick you and Robey were melting in front of when I came from the bathroom. Ms. Broxton-Howard."

Again, Joe felt his neck get hot.

"She wants to interview me," Joe said.

"I'll bet that's what she wants," Marybeth snorted.

Joe didn't say a word. He had learned that, in these kinds of situations, the less he said, the better.

He felt Marybeth looking at him and he turned to her.

"Honey, I…"

"JOE!" Marybeth shouted. And Joe looked, saw the ragged form of a man bathed in the white of his headlights, his wide-eyed face black with streaming blood, outstretched frozen hands up as if to shield himself; then he heard the sickening thump despite his violent effort to wrench the car away into the ditch, saw what looked like a scarecrow turned bright red by the taillights bounce and crumple on the glass-slick surface of the snow-packed highway in his rearview mirror, heard Marybeth scream. Thirteen His name was Birch Wardell, he was an employee of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Joe hadn't killed him after all. The collision did break Wardell's pelvis, however, which was just one of many injuries he sustained that day after wrecking his truck in a sharp ravine in the breaklands that led up to the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.

The emergency-room doctor had recognized Joe from when he'd brought Lamar Gardiner's frozen body in.

"I'm seeing more of you than I want to," the doctor said. "And every time you show up, you bring trouble."

Joe agreed with him. But at least this time, he thought, the man's alive. Joe sat in the hallway on a molded plastic chair, still in his jacket and tie, outside Wardell's room at the clinic. It was well into New Year's Day. He had called Marybeth to tell her that Wardell was alive and expected to recover. Marybeth thanked God.

"I can't believe that poor man was walking down the middle of the road," she said. "On a night like this."

"I'll try to find out why," Joe said. "Now go to bed and get some sleep."

"How are you going to get home?" she asked.

Joe hadn't thought of that yet. Marybeth had taken the car home after they had brought Wardell to the hospital.

"I'll figure it out," he said. The hospital was silent and subdued, the lights dimmed for the night. Mrs. Wardell had been in to see her husband after he came out of surgery, and she thanked Joe for bringing him into town.

"But I was the one who hit him," Joe said.

She patted Joe's arm. "I know," she said. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. "But if you hadn't found him, the doctor said there was no doubt he would have died of exposure out there. It's eighteen below."

"I wish I could have missed him, though."

"It's okay, Mr. Pickett," she said soothingly. "He's alive, and conscious. The doctor says he'll be okay."

"You think it would be okay if I talked with him?"

Mrs. Wardell looked over Joe's shoulder for a doctor or nurse but the hall was empty.

"They gave him medication to help him sleep," she said. "I'm not sure he'll make much sense." Birch Wardell lay in his hospital bed with his eyes at half-mast. A thin tube of fluorescent light extending from the headboard lit up half his face and threw peaked shadows across his blankets. In addition to his broken pelvis, Wardell also had a broken collarbone and nose. Stitches climbed from his neck into his scalp like railroad tracks. Joe had overheard the nurses say that the tips of three of his fingers and four of his toes were severely frostbitten.

The man in the bed was stout and in his mid-forties, with a thick mustache and brown eyes. Joe had seen him before while patrolling.

Wardell's eyes found Joe in the doorway, and he raised his good hand slightly in greeting.

"You doing okay?" Joe asked softly.

Wardell seemed to be trying to find his voice. "Much better since they filled me full of drugs. In fact, I'm kind of… happy."

Joe approached Wardell. The room smelled of bandages and antiseptic.

"Happy New Year," Joe said, smiling.

Wardell grunted, and then winced because the grunt clearly hurt his ribs.

"Thanks for saving my life. The doctor said I couldn't have stayed out there much longer."

"I'm just sorry I hit you," Joe said. "So what happened? You walked all the way out of the breaklands after you wrecked your truck?"

"I was on my way back to town," he said. "Must have been about four-thirty or so. I had about another half hour, forty-five minutes of light yet. I wanted to get home because Mrs. Wardell and me had tickets for the steak and shrimp feed at the Elks Lodge for New Year's."

Joe nodded, urging him on.

"I seen a white pickup truck on BLM land up on a ridge, past the signs that say the damn road is closed in the winter. You know, in that cooperative Forest Service/BLM unit?"

Joe had patrolled the area. It was a rough, treeless expanse of sharp zigzag-cut draws and sagebrush that stretched from the highway to the wooded foothills of the Bighorns. The "unit" had been recently designated a research area, jointly managed by the two federal agencies to study the spread of native buffalo grass in the absence of cattle or sheep. The designation had raised the ire of several local ranchers who had grazed their stock in the breaklands for years, and of some local hunters and fishermen who used the roads to get to spring creeks in the foothills. Wardell was the project manager.

"Well, this white truck was in the process of pulling my 'Road Closed' signs out of the ground with a chain. When I seen that, I thought: 'What the hell?'" Wardell pronounced it "hay-uhl."

"I heard something about signs being vandalized," Joe said.

Wardell nodded his head slightly. It took him a moment to start up again-the sedatives were working. Joe hoped Wardell could finish the story before he went to sleep. "It's been going on for a few months now. Sometimes the signs are gone, and other times they're just run over.

"So I says to myself, 'What the hell?'" Wardell said again. "And I turned up that closed road and give chase."

"Got it. Can you identify the vehicle?"

"White. Or maybe tan. Light-colored, for sure. Not brand-new. The damn sunlight was starting to go bad on me about then."

"Ford? GMC? Chevy?" Joe asked.

Wardell thought. "Maybe a Ford. The truck was pretty dirty, I noticed that. There was mud or smudges on the doors, I think."

Joe smiled grimly. Finding a Ford pickup in Wyoming was about as hard as finding a Hispanic male in Houston.

"Anyway…" Wardell swallowed, and his eyes fluttered. He was tiring. Joe felt a little bit guilty pushing him so hard. Joe looked at his watch: 3:30 A.M.

"Anyway, that truck saw me coming and the driver took off over the hill, still on the closed road. You know how it is out there with all them draws and hills. It's damn easy to get lost or turned around. But whatever… I took off after him up that hill anyway."

"Did you try to call anyone?"

"Damn right I tried. But the BLM office closed early, on account it's New Year's Eve. Our dispatcher left early."

"Go on."

"I got to the top of that hill and the whole unit was out there to be seen. The road turned to the left and I started to go that way but then I seen that white Ford halfway down the hill. He had gone off-road and was barreling down the hill toward the bottom. I said 'What the hell?' and followed him. All I wanted to do by then was get a license plate."

"I think this patient needs some rest," a night shift nurse said tersely from the doorway.

Joe turned. "We're about done."

"You better be," the nurse said.

"Sassy little number," Wardell commented, watching her walk away, her big hips making the hem of her skirt jump.

Joe turned back. "So, you saw the truck at the bottom of the draw. Doesn't it start to get brushy down there?" Joe was becoming convinced that he knew the specific road and hill Wardell was describing.

Wardell nodded, then winced. "Yeah, it gets all tangly down there. And it was getting pretty dark, but I could see those taillights go right into the bush and disappear. Hell, I had no idea there was a way to get across that draw down there in a vehicle."

Joe stroked his jaw. He didn't know of any way to cross there either.

"Then I saw the truck come out of the brush on the other side and start climbing the hill straight across from me. I said…"

" 'What the hell?' " Joe joined in with Wardell.

"I tried to get a read on the plate through the binoculars, but I couldn't get an angle on it. So I thought, shit, if he could cross down there, I can cross down there."

"What about the snow?" Joe asked suddenly. "Wasn't it deep?"

Wardell shook his head. "That hill is on a southern exposure. The wind and sun cleared it down to the grass. The big drifts are all toward the foothills."

"Okay."

"So I followed the tracks straight down that mountain, stayed right in 'em. Right into the big bushes… and then WHAM! I was suddenly ass over teakettle, and in the air. I literally was airborne for a second until I hit the bottom of the draw. I hit harder than hell. Good thing I was wearin' my seat belt."

Joe agreed. "You didn't see how the truck crossed down there?"

Wardell said no, he didn't see how anyone could have done it. It was steep on the sides, and there was a frozen little stream on the bottom.

"So how did he get across?" Joe asked.

"I have no earthly idea," Wardell said, his eyes widening with amazement. "No clue at all. But when I was hanging there, suspended by the seat belt with blood pouring out of my head, I could hear laughing."

"Laughing?"

"That son-of-a-bitch in the truck was laughing out loud. I heard his truck start up again, and he just laughed his stupid head off. He must have been sitting up there on that hill watching me. I'm sure he thought he left me there to die."

Joe stood up straight and crossed his arms. The scenario just didn't sound quite right.

"I finally got out of the cab of the truck and started walking. To be real honest, there must have been an angel with me, because I wasn't even sure I was going the right direction toward town."

You weren't, Joe thought. Luckily, though, he had stumbled into Bighorn Road-and then Joe had hit him with his car.

Joe stared at the ceiling tiles, trying to figure it all out.

"I think it was those goddamned Sovereigns," Wardell mumbled.

"What makes you say that?" Joe asked, but although Wardell's eyelids flickered he didn't respond. Wardell was asleep.

The nurse was back at the door. "Good night, Mr. Pickett. Drive safely. It's cold and icy out there."

Joe let himself be ushered out.

In the lobby, the emergency-room doctor was pulling his coat on to leave after his shift.

"Quiet night, except for you," the doctor said, winking, and offered Joe a ride home. Joe accepted gratefully.

Outside, it was still dark and the wind was bitter, and it sliced right through his clothing. The doctor drove a Jeep Cherokee, a vehicle prized locally because of how fast the heater started working.

Joe sank back in the leather seat, realizing how exhausted he was. He liked the doctor because the man felt no compulsion to start up a conversation.

Joe thought about what Wardell had said. He thought about how cruel it was of the driver of the light-colored truck to leave Wardell behind like that. Surely the driver would have seen or heard Wardell crash, and realize that if Wardell wasn't killed on impact, he would likely freeze to death out there. Either way, it was a bad way to die. It had suddenly occurred to Joe when he was talking to Wardell that the viciousness was similar to how Lamar Gardiner had been treated.

If the same person who was responsible for Gardiner's murder was involved in leaving Birch Wardell to freeze to death, then the killer was not Nate Romanowski. The likelihood that the perpetrator was a Sovereign, as Wardell had suggested, didn't make sense to Joe, since Birch had seen the truck well before the Sovereigns had set up camp. It was unlikely, Joe knew, that any of the Sovereigns-including Jeannie Keeley-had the kind of intimate familiarity with the BLM land and the complicated terrain within it to know the secret route that Wardell said the light-colored pickup had taken. Joe shuddered. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that neither the Sovereigns nor Nate Romanowski were to blame. And that the real killer was still out there. They drove slowly down Main Street while the defroster cleared ever-larger sweating holes in the ice on the windshield. Saddlestring was still. Streetlights illuminated the clouds of heat and steam that escaped from the vents of dark buildings, giving the illusion that they were silently breathing. Joe noticed a few more cars than normal still parked downtown, and guessed they belonged to revelers who would come and get them in the morning.

The only place with lights and cars out front was the Elks Club. As they passed, Joe rolled his head over on the headrest. A couple stood in profile in the front door, backlit by a bare porch light, their outlines in silhouette. The woman wrapped her arms around the man, and his cowboy hat tipped back as he lowered his head to kiss her.

Joe moaned, and turned to stare straight out the front window.

"Are you alright?" the doctor asked.

"Yup," Joe answered. "I just thought I saw my mother-in-law back there." Joe thanked the doctor and gingerly approached his front door, careful of the ice on the walk. Inside, he confirmed that the couch bed had not been slept in.

Dragging himself upstairs, he wondered how long it would take for word to get out that another federal employee in Twelve Sleep County had been assaulted.

The news would no doubt supercharge Melinda Strickland's crusade. Fourteen On Sunday, New Year's Day, Joe mixed pancake batter in a bowl with a whisk and watched the snow fall outside the kitchen window. It was a light snow, powdery as flour, and it skittered along over the top of the week-old glaze, settling into cracks and crevices. In the living room, the girls watched the Rose Bowl parade-a sun-drenched pageant of flowers, floats, and Pasadena Parade Committee members in matching blazers-while wrapped in robes and blankets on the floor. Marybeth had made room for them by folding up the couch bed when Missy had finally awakened. Missy was now upstairs preparing herself for the day. Joe had learned that this took about two hours and ten minutes.

Joe let his mind wander as he prepared the batter, unwrapped the bacon, and put the "special" bottle of real maple syrup in a pan to warm. He was tired, and already forecasting an afternoon nap. The night at the hospital, and several sleepless hours afterward thinking about Birch Wardell, Nate Romanowski, the Sovereigns, Lamar Gardiner, Missy Vankueren, and Melinda Strickland had wiped him out. He woke up feeling worried and unfocused. Joe was thankful he had the day off, and the fresh snow was not unwelcome.

He had heard that the Inuit people had scores of words to describe snow, and that had always impressed him until he thought of how many he knew. Most described the condition of snow. There was powder, packed powder, slush, wind-groomed, wind-loaded, fluff, glazed, crud, rain crust, cold smoke, and corduroy. Also carvy, sugary, tracked out, white smoke, dust on crust, ice cube, gropple, granular, and wind butter. He knew lots of snow words.

Marybeth came into the kitchen and nodded her approval at the breakfast he was preparing. Then she checked over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening.

"Mom came in at five-thirty this morning." Her eyes were disbelieving. "I can't imagine ever coming home that late when I was growing up."

"I told you I saw her last night," Joe said. "She sure doesn't waste any time."

"Joe!" Marybeth scolded, but didn't really argue. "Don't let the girls hear you."

"I won't."

Marybeth leaned forward conspiratorially. "Could you tell who she was kissing?"

"I wasn't sure at the time," he said, pouring palm-sized rounds of batter onto the griddle. "But it might have been Bud Longbrake."

Marybeth moaned. She knew that Longbrake's wife-Nate Romanowski's supposed alibi-was out of the country.

"It fits the profile," Joe said. "One, he's a state senator. Two," Joe held up his hand and raised a finger as he made each point, "He's wealthy. Three, he's sort of single at the moment. Four, she's sort of single at the moment. Five, she apparently needs a man in the on-deck circle in case the one at bat strikes out." He grinned ruefully. "Like if he goes to federal prison or something."

Marybeth shook her head at him, mildly disapproving.

"What's gotten into you?" she asked.

"I've got a question for you," Joe said. "How in the hell did you ever turn out to be so wonderful?"

She smiled at him. Then, apparently jarred by the earlier mention of Mrs. Longbrake, she told Joe to follow her into his office. "While I was waiting up for you last night, I did an Internet search," Marybeth said over her shoulder while she settled into Joe's office chair. "I wanted to see if I could find anything on a car crash in Montana a year and a half ago."

Joe arched his eyebrows and waited for more. She handed him several sheaves of paper that she had hidden under a stack of files.

Joe took them and read. They were stories from the Great Falls Tribune from three consecutive days in June eighteen months ago. The first was headlined TWO DEAD IN U.S. 87 ROLLOVER. The story said that a damaged vehicle with out-of-state plates had been called in to the Montana highway patrol twenty-one miles north of town near Fort Benton. The identities of the occupants were unknown at the time, but authorities were investigating.

On the next page, a smaller story identified the victims of a multiple-rollover accident as two men, aged 32 and 37, from Arlington, Virginia and Washington, D.C., respectively. Both were killed on impact. The highway patrol suggested that, judging by the skid marks, it was possible that the engine of the late-model SUV had died on a sharp grade with several turns, and that the driver, unable to negotiate the sharpest of the turns, had blown through a guardrail. The SUV had rolled at least seven times before it reached the bottom of the canyon. The passenger was thrown from the vehicle, and the driver was crushed behind the wheel.

"The engine lost power. No power steering, no power brakes. Yikes," Joe said absently, and read on.

WITNESS SOUGHT IN ROLLOVER INVESTIGATION, the third and smallest headline read. In the story, the highway patrol reported that they were seeking a potential witness to the rollover on U.S. 87 that had killed two men from out of state. Specifically, they were looking for the driver of an older-model Jeep with Montana plates that was seen passing a speed checkpoint near Great Falls. The authorities estimated that the Jeep may have been in the vicinity of the rollover and that the driver could have seen the accident happen.

Joe looked up at Marybeth and put down the papers.

"Doesn't Nate Romanowski drive a Jeep?" Marybeth asked.

Joe nodded. "Yes, he does."

"Interesting, huh?"

"Two guys sent from our nation's capital sent to clear up an internal problem crash on a desolate road in Montana," Joe said. "So what did he do, force the SUV off the road?"

"If the motor of the SUV wasn't working, he wouldn't have to, would he?" Marybeth asked. She had obviously been thinking about this.

"So how could he make a motor die in another car?" Joe asked, but halfway through his question, he guessed the answer. They listened to the shower run upstairs while they ate breakfast. The girls ate pancake after pancake, soaking up every drop of the syrup. Because real maple syrup was expensive, it was saved for holidays and special occasions.

"Grandmother Missy takes long showers," Lucy observed.

"She uses up all our hot water," Sheridan grumbled.

"I like the sweet taste of the syrup and the salty taste of the bacon," Sheridan said, savoring it.

"I just like the syrup," Lucy declared. "I wish I could suck that syrup up through a straw." Lucy smiled, pantomiming exactly how she would do it.

"Remember when Mom caught you licking your plate clean of all of the leftover syrup like a dog?" Sheridan asked Lucy, baiting her. Lucy made a face, and Sheridan laughed. "Like Maxine, licking out her dog-food bowl!"

"Stop it!" Lucy howled.

Marybeth shut things down with a look of disapproval.

"What do you like, April?" she asked.

April had been silent through the Rose Bowl parade and breakfast. Joe looked at her from his place at the stove. Sometimes, April withdrew from the rest of them, seeming almost to shrink out of view even though she was in the middle of things-the invisible girl. Other times, like now, she looked lonely and haunted. Joe sometimes thought of her as a living, sweet ghost.

April mumbled something, and stared into her lap.

"What was that, honey?" Marybeth asked.

April looked up. Her face was hard, and pinched. "I said I had a dream my other mom was looking at me last night."

April's words froze everyone at the table.

Marybeth leaned closer to April. Sheridan and Lucy looked from their mother, to April, and back.

"Are you doing okay now?" Marybeth asked softly.

"She was outside my window, looking in at me through the curtains," April said, her eyes still downcast. "She sort of rubbed the window with her hand and smeared the glass. She kept saying 'I love you, April, I miss you, April.' "

April said it in a Southern accent that sounded just like Jeannie Keeley, and it disturbed Joe because he had never heard April talk like that before.

For the first time that morning, Joe was focused. The dull red ball of anxiety, dormant in the pit of his stomach for a few hours, awoke.

Then he realized that Marybeth was trying to catch his eye. When he looked back, Marybeth was using her chin to point toward the back door without April realizing what she was doing. Joe got it: She wanted him to go outside and check the yard. Marybeth obviously believed April, or at least wanted to dispel any lingering possibilities. As Marybeth cleared the dishes away-leaving a clean one for Missy when she made her morning entrance-and the girls returned to their parade, Joe pulled on his insulated coveralls in the mud room. As he laced his boots, he looked up. Sheridan was the only one who looked back. She had caught the exchange between Marybeth and Joe, and knew where he was headed. Her eyes slid off of him and back to the television. She was complicit in the plan.

He went out the front door, shoving it hard to break through a small drift that had piled against it. It was bitterly cold outside, with enough of a wind to bite into his exposed skin. Pinpricks of snow stung his eyes. Pulling a stocking cap over his ears, he trudged around the house and into the backyard. His boots broke through the crust of snow, making it hard to walk without moving like Frankenstein's monster.

The girls' room was at ground level. April's and Lucy's bunk bed was near the wall and window, and Sheridan's single bed was near the door. The snow in the yard looked undisturbed except for a recent set of dog tracks and a yellow stain left by Maxine. He approached the back porch and squinted into the wind at the snow beneath the window.

The world was white-on-white-white ground, white sky, snow in his eyes-making it hard to see.

But they were there-two slight indentations beneath the window. They were only a little larger than a child's boot-prints. At least he thought he could see something. With the fresh snow filling them and the wind topping them off with powder it was hard to know for sure. Ground blizzards, like water flowing over a dam, rolled over the fence and snaked across the yard, obscuring the depressions under the window.

Joe stopped and closed his eyes. He hoped when he opened them he could see more clearly.

When he opened his eyes they were still there. Kind of. For Jeannie Keeley to have stood beneath April's window, she would have had to park on the road the night before, open the front gate, and walk around the dark house to the back. It had been extremely cold, as he knew. And if she had done it, it had to have been after Marybeth had arrived home from the funeral and Missy had taken the van back into town, or before she returned home that morning. Joe wondered when April thought she'd seen her mother, but knew it was unlikely that she'd noticed the time. He didn't want to upset April more by asking her.

His camera was in his evidence kit in his pickup, and he retraced his steps to the front to dig it out. If he had hard evidence of his daughter being stalked, it could be used in a custody hearing. Returning, he wondered if the camera's shutter release would be too cold to work properly. Photographing in snow was always difficult.

But it didn't matter. By the time he returned, the boot tracks under the window-if they had ever really been there at all-were gone beneath the shifting rivulets of windborne snow. As he stamped the snow off his boots, Marybeth came into the mud room.

"Well?" she asked.

Joe sniffed and shrugged. "Maybe. It was too hard to tell."

Marybeth shivered, but Joe doubted it was from the cold. That afternoon, Joe smashed his pickup through snowdrifts on the dirt road to Nate Romanowski's house by the river. In the bed of the pickup were flattened, road-killed jackrabbits that Joe had collected on the highway, and two pheasants from his freezer. Blowing snow flowed like floodwater over the brush, obscuring Romanowski's house and the mews.

On the bank of the river, Joe stopped and opened his door, which snapped away from his grasp as the wind took it and threw it wide open. He leaned against the wind and snow, clamping his hat on his head, and carried the burlap sack of rabbits and pheasants to the river's edge. He tucked the carcasses between large round river stones so they wouldn't blow away. While he did this, he searched vainly in the howling sky for a glimpse of Nate Romanowski's hawks. If they were there, or watching him from the gorge, he couldn't see them.

As he drove home, his fingers thawing, he hoped the birds were still around and would find the food he had left them.

He was fulfilling one of Romanowski's requests. It was time to get working on the other one, he thought, now that he knew more. Now that he knew that Nate Romanowski had been telling the truth. Fifteen The next morning, Joe got a call from a local rancher who complained that elk had knocked down his fence and were in the process of eating the hay he had stacked to feed his cattle during the winter. When Joe arrived at the ranch, the elk had eaten so much hay out of the rancher's haystack that it leaned precariously to one side, ready to topple. The small herd of elk, lazy and satiated, had moved from the stack to the protection of a dark windbreak of trees. Because the animals of Wyoming were the responsibility of the state, ranchers called game wardens when elk, moose, deer, or antelope ate their hay or damaged their property. The warden's job was to chase the animals away and assess the harm done. If the damage was significant, the rancher was due compensation, and Joe would have to submit the paperwork.

Using a.22 pistol loaded with cracker shells, Joe drove toward the sleeping elk while firing out the window. The cracker shells arced over the animals and popped in the air. It worked: The herd rumbled out of the meadow and back toward the mountains, through the place in the barbed-wire fence that they had flattened to get in. It's going to be a busy winter of chasing elk out of haystacks, Joe thought. The heavy snow in the mountains would drive them down for feed, and the worst snows of the year, usually in March and April, were still to come.

At least elk are usually pretty easy to clean up after, Joe thought. Moose were far worse. Moose were known to walk through a multi-strand barbed-wire fence as if it were dental floss and drag the fence along with them, popping the strands free from the staples in the posts like buttons from a ripped shirt.

After chasing the elk away, Joe stopped by the rancher's small white house. The rancher, named Herman Klein, was a third-generation landowner who Joe knew to be a good man. Klein had told Joe before, after a similar incident, that he wouldn't mind feeding the elk if the damned things didn't get so greedy.

As Joe pulled into the ranch yard, Klein walked out of the barn, where he had been working on his tractor. He wiped grease from his hands on his Carhartt coveralls and invited Joe in for coffee. After they had performed the winter ranch ritual of leaving their boots and heavy coats in the mud room before walking in stocking feet to the kitchen table, Klein poured Joe a cup of thick black coffee. While Mrs. Klein arranged sugar cookies on a plate, Joe filled out a report to submit to the Game and Fish Commission confirming the loss of hay and the damage to the fence. Joe didn't mind doing this at all. He considered Herman Klein a good steward of the land, a thoughtful manager who improved the range and riparian areas on both his private and leased land.

"Joe, can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot," Joe said, as he finished up the damage claim.

Klein tapped the morning Saddlestring Roundup on the table. "What in the hell is going on in Saddlestring these days?"

The headline read SECOND FEDERAL EMPLOYEE ASSAULTED. There was a photo of Melinda Strickland holding a press conference on the steps of the Forest Service office the day before, deploring the "outrageous attack" on Birch Wardell of the BLM by "local thugs."

"Is there really a movement afoot to go after the Forest Service and the BLM?"

Joe looked up. "That's what she seems to think, Herman." The press conference itself was a unique event in Twelve Sleep County.

"Is she serious?"

"I think she is."

"That's complete bullshit," Klein snorted, shaking his head.

"Herman!" Mrs. Klein scolded, placing the cookies on the table. "Watch your language."

"I've heard much worse," Joe smiled.

"Not from Herman, you haven't." His cell phone was burring in his pickup when Joe climbed in. He plucked it from its holder on the dashboard.

"Game Warden Joe Pickett."

"Joe Pickett?" asked a female voice he didn't recognize.

"That's what I said."

"Please hold for Melinda Strickland."

Joe moaned inwardly. Strickland was the last person he wanted to talk to. He was placed on hold. Background music played. He identified the song as "Last Train to Clarksville" by the Monkees. Only the U.S. Forest Service would have a waiting tape that old, he thought.

He held. Maxine watched him hold, and minutes passed. He assumed that when the President of the United States wanted to talk with the President of Russia, this was how it worked.

"Joe?" It was Melinda Strickland. She sounded chirpy.

"Yes."

"Joe, my friend, how are things going? Are you hanging in there?"

Her tone was that of a lifelong chum who was concerned with his health and welfare, which puzzled him.

"I'm fine," he said haltingly. "Why do you ask?"

"I'm getting hammered by the press asking questions about how you found Birch Wardell out on that road. They want to know how he got hit by your car, and all of that, you know?"

Joe took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. Hammered by the press?

"I hit Birch Wardell with my car because he was standing in the middle of the road," Joe said flatly. "It was an accident. Then I took him to the hospital and stayed with him until I was sure he was okay."

"Joe, you don't need to use that tone," she said soothingly. "I'm on your side here, you know? They just keep asking me about you being there when Lamar Gardiner was killed, then you being there again when Birch Wardell was hurt."

Joe felt a flush of anger. "Are you suggesting I had something to do with those incidents?"

"Oh, God no," she said. "I'm on your side."

"What other side is there?" Joe asked. "And who exactly is 'hammering' you with questions?" In Saddlestring, there was the Roundup, an FM radio station, and one local AM station that played preprogrammed music, stock reports, and CNN radio newsbreaks.

There was a long pause, and then she filled the silence with a rush of words. "That's not why I called, Joe. Lamar Gardiner scheduled a public meeting for Friday night on the USFS strategic plan for this district… you know, the road closures. He announced the meeting quite a few weeks ago and I'm going to go ahead and chair it. I was hoping you would come and offer support. I know Lamar's policies were controversial, and I could use your help on this."

The quick change of direction caught Joe by surprise.

"I can be there," Joe said, although he immediately wished he hadn't.

"Great, great. Thank you, Joe." Her chirpiness resumed. "You be careful out there, my friend. Things may be a little dicey until we get all this stuff figured out with the Sovereigns-and who knows if they'll go after state government representatives as well as federal land managers."

"Are the Sovereigns being targeted for Birch Wardell's ambush?" Joe asked. He had heard nothing of this.

"I'm not at liberty to say,"

Then she wished him a good day and hung up. Joe listened to the silence on the phone for a moment, still not sure what had just transpired.

The conversation left him flummoxed. He wished he had recorded it so he could replay it later, and try to make sense of it. Melinda Strickland seemed to be implying things-that Joe was the subject of controversy and suspicion, that forces were out to get her, that maybe Joe was aligned with those forces-while at the same time assuring him that everything was fine and that she and Joe were working well together. Her backtracking, when he asked her for specifics, he thought wryly, left a smell of burning rubber as she floored it into reverse.

He turned off his cell phone so she couldn't call again. Instead of returning home and to his office, Joe turned toward the BLM joint range-management study area. He wanted a clearer picture of the crash site and the terrain that Birch Wardell described. It took nearly an hour and a half on drifted-in gravel roads to get to the place where Wardell had seen the light-colored pickup that had fled from him and led to the accident.

Joe stopped in the road and looked up the gently rising hill where Wardell said he had first seen the other vehicle. Gunmetal-gray sagebrush dotted the hillside, each bush supporting a shark-fin wedge of drifted snow. The rest of the ground was blown clean of snow, revealing gray dirt and yellow grass. It was the first grass he had seen for a couple of weeks.

From where he sat in the idling truck, Joe could make out tire tracks in the crushed grass that led from the road he was now on to the top of the hill. The tracks, he assumed, were Wardell's. On the top of the hill, against the sky, he could see a broken signpost. It was all just as Wardell had described it.

Joe reached down and shoved the pickup into four-wheel drive, and ascended the hill, staying in Wardell's tracks. At the top, near the broken signpost, he stopped. Beyond him, the breaklands stretched for miles until they melted into the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. The terrain was deceptive. At first glance, it looked flat and barren, like gentle corduroy folds. But the folds obscured rugged draws and arroyos, and small sharp canyons. Pockets of thick, tall Rocky Mountain juniper punctuated the expanse.

With his binoculars, Joe swept the bottom of the hill, where Wardell said he'd wrecked his pickup. Sure enough, through the thick brush, Joe saw the back bumper of a BLM pickup pointing toward the clouds. The truck had crashed headfirst into a steep draw. It had been there for two days, and the BLM had not yet sent a tow truck to pull it out. For once, Joe was pleased with bureaucratic inertia.

Joe found another set of tracks on the opposite hill that led up and over the top. Those tracks no doubt belonged to the vehicle Birch Wardell had been chasing. Slowly, Joe studied the bottom of the hill and the sharp draw that stretched out from both sides of the wrecked truck like a stiletto slash. He could see no obvious place to cross. There was no place to cross. But, damn it, that other driver had done it somehow.

Joe sighed and lowered his glasses. How in the hell did he do it? He thought about the possibility of a ramp or bridge that the vandal had carried with him. Maybe he carried it in the back of his truck, and laid it across the draw. But that was too far-fetched, Joe decided. The distance across the arroyo was too great, and the logistics of carrying, deploying, and retrieving a ramp while being pursued were impractical.

He sat back and thought about it. Maxine crawled across the seat and put her large, warm head in his lap. He studied the opposite hill, the dual sets of tracks up from the bottom of the draw, and the bumper of the wrecked truck, sticking up obscenely from the heavy brush.

While he thought, a pronghorn antelope doe and her yearling twins crossed in front of him. Their coloring was perfect camouflage for this terrain-finely drawn patches of dark tan, white, and black that blended in with the grassy, windswept slopes with their dark brush and dirty snowdrifts. At a distance, they fused so well with the landscape that entire herds were virtually invisible.

Joe smacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. "Damn, Maxine," he said aloud, "I just figured it out."

Now it would be a matter of finding the light pickup, and letting himself be drawn in. Sixteen That afternoon, Marybeth went to work at her part-time job at the stables. Her mother, who had not left the house since her New Year's Eve sojourn, stayed at home with Lucy and April, and Sheridan was at basketball tryouts at school. Joe had left early that morning to respond to Herman Klein's call.

All eight of the horses had stalls in the barn and twenty-four-foot fenced runs outside. They were in the runs when she drove up. She loved being around the horses, who had nickered a greeting when she arrived. There were four sorrels, three paints, and a buckskin. All belonged to boarders who paid monthly for shelter, hay, stall-mucking, and in some cases, grooming and exercise. All of the horses had grown hairy for the winter, and she liked the look of them: frosted muzzles billowing clouds of condensation, and thick, shaggy coats.

She wore her thick canvas barn coat, Watson gloves, and a fleece headband over her ears and under her blond hair.

The owner of the stables, Marsha Dibble, had left her an envelope pinned to the bulletin board inside the barn. In it was her paycheck for the hours worked in December, a "Happy New Year" card, and a Post-it note reminding Marybeth to add a nutritional supplement to the grain of one of the older mares. Because Marybeth's arrival meant they would soon get their evening feed, all of the horses had come into their barn stalls to watch her. Using a long hay-hook, she tugged two sixty-pound bales of grass hay from the stack and cut the binding wires. She divided the hay into "flakes"-about one-fifth of a bale per horse-while the horses showed their impatience by stomping their hooves and switching their tails.

It was while Marybeth mixed the granular supplement in a bucket with the grain that she noticed that several of the horses had turned their heads to look at something outside. Their ears were pricked up and alert. Then she heard the low rumble of a motor and the crunching of tires on snow. The engine was killed, and a moment later, a car door slammed shut.

Assuming it was Marsha, Marybeth slid back the barn door to say hello. Her greeting caught in her throat.

Jeannie Keeley stood ten feet away, looking hard at Marybeth through a rising halo of cigarette smoke and condensed breath. Behind Keeley was an old blue Dodge pickup. A man sat behind the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield toward the mountains.

"Do you know who I am?" Jeannie Keeley asked. Her Mississippi accent was grating and hard. Dew you know who Ah yam?

Keeley wore an oversized green quilted coat. Her small hands were thrust into her front jean pockets. She looked smaller and more frail than Marybeth remembered her from their brief introduction four years before at the obstetrician's office. At that time, both were pregnant. Keeley had six-year-old April with her in the office at the time.

"I know who you are," Marybeth said, trying to keep her voice from catching in her throat. Behind her in the stalls, one of the buckskins kicked at the front of her stall to get her attention. Marybeth ignored the horse, her attention on the small woman in front of her.

"I know who you are, too," Keeley said. Her cigarette tip danced up and down as she spoke. "I want my April back."

The words struck Marybeth like a blow. Until this moment she hadn't realized just how much she had hoped Jeannie Keeley's arrival back in town was benign, that perhaps she was just passing through and making some noise.

"We consider April our daughter now, Jeannie. We love her like our own." Marybeth swallowed. "Joe and I are in the process of adopting her."

Keeley snorted and rolled her eyes.

"That process don't mean shit 'til it's done. And it ain't done if the biological mother don't consent."

"She's happy now," Marybeth said, trying to talk to Jeannie mother-to-mother. "If you could see her…" Then she remembered the tracks in the snow and flushed with anger. "Or maybe you did see her. Jeannie, were you outside our house two nights ago? Were you looking into our windows?"

A hint of a smile tugged at Keeley's mouth, and she tipped her head back slightly.

"Your house? That musta' been somebody else." Ay-else.

Marybeth tried to keep her voice calm and measured, while what she wanted to do was scream and yell at Jeannie at the top of her lungs. In the back of her mind, Marybeth had been preparing for this fight ever since she heard that Jeannie Keeley was back. But she fought the urge to attack, choosing instead, and with difficulty, to try to appeal to Jeannie's emotions.

"Jeannie, you dropped April off at the bank with your house keys when you left town. I understand how painful losing your husband and your home must have been. But you made the choice to abandon your daughter. We didn't take her from you."

Keeley eyed Marybeth with naked contempt. "You don't understand nothin' at all. I fuckin' hate people who say they understand things about me they don't." Her eyes narrowed into slits. "There's nothing for you to understand, Miss Marybeth Pickett, except that I want my baby back. She needs to be with her real mama, the one who changed her diapers. She was a hard birth, lady. She got me to bleedin'. I like to bled to death to bring her into this world." Keeley's voice lowered: "I want my daughter… back… now."

Marybeth glared back. She felt her rage, and her frustration, building. This woman hated her. This stupid, trashy woman hated her.

"We love April," Marybeth said evenly. The words just hung there.

"That's mighty white of you," Keeley smirked. Tha's mahty waht uv you. "But it don't matter. She's not your child. She's my child." Chile.

Marybeth realized that Jeannie was trying to bait her, trying to get her to lose her cool and say or do something that would look bad if they ever ended up in court. Jeannie had even brought a witness with her.

Again, Marybeth forced back her rage, and spoke softly.

"Jeannie, I do understand what it's like to lose someone. I lost my baby four years ago. Did you know that? Remember when we met at the doctor's office when we were both pregnant? I lost that baby when a man shot me. He was the same man who killed your husband." Marybeth's eyes probed for a sense of connection or compassion, but neither was forthcoming. "After I got out of the hospital, we found out about April. We took her in as our own. She's part of our family now. She's got wonderful sisters who care for her. Joe and I care for her. Can't you see that…"

Marybeth needed to be careful here, and she tried to be. "Can't you see that April is happy, and has adjusted? That the greatest gift a mother can give is to make sure her child is loved and cared for?"

Jeannie Keeley took her eyes off Marybeth, and seemed to be searching the snow for something. Absently, she dug in her coat pocket for another cigarette and placed it in her mouth, unlit.

Marybeth noticed that the man driving the pickup had finally turned his head to look at her. He was severe-looking, older than Jeannie, with an unkempt growth of beard. He wore a dirty John Deere cap. His eyes were sunken and dark, his pupils hard dots.

A match flared, and Marybeth looked back to Keeley as she lit her cigarette. Was it possible she was reconsidering, that Marybeth had touched her?

Keeley let two streams of smoke curl out of her nose. "Fuck you, princess," she hissed. "I want my April back."

Marybeth clenched her teeth, and her eyes fluttered. She thought that in four steps she could be on this horrible woman, pummeling her head with the hay hook that hung within easy reach on an upside-down horseshoe inside the door.

It was as if the man behind the wheel could read her mind, and he quickly opened his door and walked around the front of the truck. He stopped and casually pulled open his coat so that Marybeth could see the faux-pearl grip of a heavy stainless-steel pistol stuck into his greasy jeans.

"We best go, honey," the man said to Jeannie Keeley.

Keeley snorted, her eyes locked in hatred on Marybeth. The man reached up and put his hand on Keeley's shoulder but she shook it off.

"We best go."

"Look at that bitch," Keeley said, her voice barely a whisper. "Look at her standin' there like some kind of goddamned princess. She loses her baby so she thinks she can just steal mine to make up for it."

That tore at Marybeth, but she stood still and firm. Four steps, she thought.

The man moved behind Keeley, and put his arms around her, squeezing her into him, his head close to her ear, "I said let's go. We'll get April back. The judge said we would."

Jeannie started to resist, but was obviously overpowered. She relaxed, and he released his grip. She never broke off her glare at Marybeth.

"What was that about a judge?" Marybeth asked, not able to stop a tremble in her voice.

Keeley smiled, shaking her head instead of speaking. "Never mind that," she said, and backed up past the man, never taking her eyes off of Marybeth until she bumped up against the door of the truck. "You just better be packing her stuff up so's she'll be ready when we come get her and take her home."

Jeannie Keeley turned and opened the door, climbed in, and slammed the door with a bang.

The man looked vacantly at Marybeth, his face revealing nothing. Then he patted the butt of the pistol without looking at it, turned on his heel, and climbed back behind the wheel. Neither looked over at her as they drove away. Marybeth stumbled into the barn and slid the door closed. Her legs were so weak that she collapsed on a bale of hay and sat there, staring at the door handle, replaying the scene in her mind, disbelieving what had just happened.

A judge, she said. Joe's experience with Judge Pennock had shown how nonsensical the courts could be in these cases, especially when it came to decisions involving a biological mother.

She could call the sheriff and report the incident, but she knew it would be her word against theirs, and it would go nowhere. Marybeth had not actually been threatened in any way she could prove. Maybe Joe will have an idea, she thought, and she tried to call him on his cell phone. She cursed out loud when he didn't pick up. He must have turned it off for some reason. He was due to pick up Sheridan at practice within the hour, and Marybeth would keep trying.

The mare nickered aggressively and she looked up at her.

"You'll get fed," Marybeth said aloud, her voice weak. "Just give me a minute to think and settle down." After feeding the horses, she slid open the barn door again. She looked at the tracks that the pickup had made, saw the cigarette butt and spent matches that Jeannie Keeley had dropped in the snow. It was almost as if she could see Keeley standing there again, squinting against the smoke, putrid with hate, spewing filthy words. The dirty man stood next to her, his handgun stuck in his pants.

These two reprobates, these scum, wanted her April with them. The injustice of it filled her with violent passion. Children were not pets, not furniture, not items put on earth to bring pleasure to people who owned them, she raged to herself.

She clenched her hands into fists and shook them. She threw the now-empty bucket across the barn, where it clattered loudly against the wall and sent the horses scattering back to the outside runs. Her eyes welled hotly with tears that soon ran down her freezing cheeks. Seventeen Sheridan Pickett stood in the brick alcove of the school and waited for her dad. Her hair was still damp, so she pulled her hood over her head. The basketball tryouts had been held the day before school resumed, and tomorrow she and the other hopefuls would be greeted with a posted list revealing who had made the team.

It was always strange being at the school when it wasn't in session, she thought. The sounds they made in the gym echoed louder, and the hallways seemed twice as wide when empty. She had peeked into her locked classroom to see that her teacher had replaced all of the Christmas decorations with self-esteem motivational posters.

Most of the girls had walked home from school, but that wasn't an option for Sheridan. So she waited, hoping her hair wouldn't freeze.

Sheridan shook her head when she thought about how the tryouts had gone. She doubted that she'd made the team. Although she had hustled-her dad had told her that even if she couldn't shoot, every team needed players who hustled and played defense-the fact remained that she was a lousy shooter. In the scrimmage, she had gone 0-for-3, and one of her errant shots had bounced straight up off the top of the backboard. Worse, in one scramble after a loose ball, her glasses had been knocked off and gone skittering across the floor. The coach had whistled a time-out to protect them. The time-out called attention to her, and a couple of the girls giggled when Sheridan obviously had trouble locating her glasses, and the coach, because of her poor vision. When play resumed, and she had her glasses back on, she was called for two fouls in a row. She had hacked one of the girls who had giggled before when the girl went up for a layup, and she'd set a moving pick on another.

The doors wheezed open behind her and the coach, Mr. Tynsdale, who also taught art, came out of the building and locked it up behind him.

"Do you have a ride?" he asked. She tried to judge from the way he looked at her if he was asking out of sympathy or if he wanted to provide transportation to one of his new players. She couldn't tell.

"My dad is supposed to pick me up."

Mr. Tynsdale nodded. "He's the game warden, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay, then." Mr. Tynsdale smiled and walked toward the teacher's parking lot.

"Thanks for offering!" Sheridan called after him, wishing she would have thanked him earlier.

Mr. Tynsdale waved it off. As he started to climb into his car, he gestured toward the main road as if to say, "I think your ride is here."

Sheridan started toward the street, then saw that the big late-model SUV that had pulled to the curb was not her dad's. She stopped as the passenger window descended.

"Do you know where the Forest Service office is?" a man asked. He was thin, almost skeletal, with a close-cropped pad of curly gray hair. He had a long thin nose and wore silver-framed glasses. His eyes were blue and rheumy.

The driver was dark, but didn't look as old as the man who had asked the question. The driver had close-set eyes and a scar that hitched up his upper lip so that it looked like he was snarling.

"You scared her, Dick," she heard the driver tell the passenger, not intending for her to hear.

A slight smile pulled at Dick's thin lips, but he didn't acknowledge his partner's comment.

"Is this a school for the deaf?" Dick asked.

The driver chuckled at the other man's remark. Dick, Sheridan noted, didn't mind trying to intimidate young girls. Sheridan wasn't to be intimidated.

"No, it isn't," she answered a bit testily. "This is Saddlestring Elementary. The U.S. Forest Service office is three blocks down and a block to the right." She pointed down Main Street.

"You stand there much longer you're gonna catch a flu," Dick said dryly. The driver laughed.

"And if you keep talking to me, I'm going to call the police," Sheridan snapped, a little surprised that she'd said it.

"Woo-hoo!" the driver laughed.

Dick turned to him, then back to Sheridan. The power window began to whir closed.

"Thanks for your help, you little-" The window sealed tight, and the insult wasn't heard. But through the glass, Sheridan saw the man say the word "bitch."

The vehicle eased away from the curb and continued down the street. Sheridan watched it go. She noticed that the license plates weren't local. They read: U.S. GOVERNMENT.

Sheridan stood there for a moment, still shocked that an adult would call her that. It made her feel numb inside.

Before she could retreat to the alcove, her dad's green pickup appeared. She was relieved and grateful that he was there, and she ran out to greet him.

"Who was that?" her dad asked, nodding toward the SUV that was now two blocks away.

"A couple of men wanted to know where the Forest Service office was," she said, settling in and pulling the seat belt across her. Maxine's tail thumped the back of the seat in greeting. "They were jerks."

She sat in silence as they drove through town. Both Sheridan and her dad glanced down the street where the Forest Service building was and saw the two men getting out of their SUV. Her dad slowed his truck to a crawl as they drove by. The men wore heavy, high-tech winter clothing that looked brand-new. The man named Dick had a large black duffel bag. The driver was sliding a long metal case out of the hatchback of the SUV.

"That's a gun case," her dad said.

She looked over to see if he was concerned or not, but couldn't read his expression.

"Why are we going this way?" she asked, since their home was in the opposite direction.

"I wanted to see these guys," her dad responded. "And I was wondering if you would want to help me check on some birds at a place out by the river."

"Some birds?"

"Falcons," her dad said. "I'm doing a guy a favor."

Sheridan had never seen a hawk up close, and she'd always wanted to.

"You bet, Dad," she said.

Sheridan noticed, however, that her dad wasn't looking at her. His eyes were fixed on his rearview mirror, watching the two men enter the Forest Service office.

"Oh," her dad said, as they cleared Saddlestring on the highway. "I'm sorry. How did tryouts go?"

"Bad, I think," she said.

"Did you hustle?"

She smiled. "That's the one thing I did right."

He winked at her. "That's the most important thing, Sheridan. Even if you're just hustling inside, and anybody who looks at you just sees calm. Always be aware of what's going on around you." The wind picked up as they drove west. The fresh snow from the day before mixed with the gritty snow from the first storm and whorled in kaleidoscopic ground blizzards. Snow in Wyoming never stays in one place, Sheridan thought. It just keeps moving and rearranging itself, as if it's constantly looking for a better place to live. They turned off of the highway and drove several miles down a snow-packed gravel road. Drifts were high and sharp on both sides of the pickup.

"There it is," her dad said, pointing through the windshield.

"Is this the house of the man who's in jail?" Sheridan asked.

"Yes, it is. He's a falconer, and he asked me if I would feed his birds."

"Is he a bad man?"

"He's accused of murder."

Sheridan screwed up her face. "Then why are we helping him?"

"We're not," Joe said. "We're keeping the birds alive. There's no reason they should be punished. At least, I hope we're helping them. I didn't see them the last time I was out here to feed them."

There was a broken-down fence, and beyond that a small stone house and a little building of some kind that had collapsed. It wasn't much, she thought, although the steep red bluff on the other side of the river was beautiful and vibrant in the last half-hour of sunshine. Her dad drove into the ranch yard close to the house and turned off the truck. Before getting out, he pulled on a pair of leather gloves.

"It's cold but it's not too bad," he said, opening his door and jumping out. "Nate Romanowski picked a good place here. It's the only spot in the valley where the wind isn't blowing."

Sheridan patted Maxine and closed the door on her. Sheridan didn't need to be told that Maxine should stay in the cab of the truck if they were going to try to feed the birds.

Her dad stood near the front of the truck, looking at the stone house and shaking his head. The house's front door was flung open, and clothes and furniture had been tossed out. Books lay open and facedown in the snow, their pages swelled with moisture so that they were twice their normal size.

"It's been ransacked," her dad said. "They tore the place apart to find evidence."

Sheridan nodded. She thought that maybe her dad was a little ashamed that law enforcement had done this. After all, he was law enforcement, too.

He picked up a few of the books out of the snow. "The Art of War, Mutiny on the Bounty, Wealth of Nations, Huckleberry Finn," he said, looking at the spines. Sheridan picked up two from the ground and followed him toward the cabin. Both of the books she had were about falconry.

Inside, they stacked the books on a counter before looking around. It was a mess. Cupboard doors hung open, drawers sagged. Their contents littered the floor. The mattress in the bedroom had been sliced open, its innards of cotton and spring exposed. Even sections of the interior walls had been smashed open.

Sheridan watched as her dad went back outside and brought the furniture back in. Most of the pieces-clearly not all that great to begin with-were damaged. "The least we can do is get this stuff out of the weather," he said. It took her dad eight trips to get everything back inside. She helped as much as she could. One thing she could not stop staring at was a framed photo with cracked glass. The photo was faded, but it was of four men standing shoulder to shoulder in the desert. The men wore white robes, and behind them was a camel. Three of the men looked like Arabs, with dark features and beards. The fourth man was fair, with piercing eyes and a slight smile.

Her dad saw her looking at the picture and picked it up.

"That's Nate Romanowski, by God," he said, pointing at the fourth man. Her dad sounded surprised. He nodded at the picture, and pursed his lips as if reaffirming something.

"What is it?" She asked.

"Nothing," her dad answered, but in a way that she knew meant he didn't want to talk about it.

They went outside, and her dad closed the door behind them. Then he scanned the sky.

"There's one of them," he said, pointing toward the river. She followed his sight line, and there it was, all right.

"That's a red-tailed hawk," he said. "He's immature, not older than a year. You can tell because he's still got a brown tail and a speckled dirty breast."

She looked to her dad, and he smiled. "Go ahead and walk up to him, but give him plenty of space. He needs sort of a cushion between you and him, or he'll get nervous. I'll go get some of their food and be with you in a minute."

The hawk stood on a piece of driftwood near the river. He stood so still that she thought it would be possible to miss him if they hadn't been looking for him. His eyes were on her as she approached.

Her first impression of the bird was that it was smaller than she would have guessed it would be. Still and compact, not revealing his wingspan, the hawk looked to be about the size of a large raven. But unlike a raven, the hawk had a sense of majesty about it, she thought. The bird's head was cocked back slightly, as if looking down on her. Its coloring was finely textured, a beige breast and mottled, bay-colored wings. His large, wrinkled talons gripped the driftwood, and she could see shiny black and curled nails.

From behind, she heard her dad approach. The hawk was now watching him instead of her. She found out why when he approached the bird and lowered a dead sage grouse on the ground in front of it.

The hawk looked at the grouse, looked at Sheridan, looked at her dad. Its movements were precise, almost mechanical.

Then, with a slight shuffle of his wings, he hopped down from the driftwood to the grouse and began to eat.

"This is kind of… gross, honey," her dad cautioned.

But she was fascinated. She watched the hawk methodically take apart and consume the entire sage grouse. As he ate, a lump above his breast got bigger and bigger.

"That's called his crop," her dad explained. "It fills as he eats. The food is stored there for later. That's one of the reasons these birds can go so long between meals."

She noticed now that blood flecked the hawk's sharp beak, and that bits of down from the grouse floated through the evening air. She watched the hawk carefully. Although its eyes were hard and impassive, she sensed a kind of comfort in him now. He was full, and relaxed.

"This bird is somebody's pet?" she asked.

"It's not like that," her dad said. "Good falconers don't break the birds, or domesticate them. They work with them, like partners. The birds can fly away any time they choose to leave."

All that was left of the sage grouse was a pair of clawed feet. Sheridan watched as the hawk dipped down and took one of the feet in his mouth and started eating it. The crunching sound reminded her of when she opened peanuts to eat them.

"Here comes the peregrine," her dad whispered.

She looked up and saw it, an airborne "V" cruising upriver like a missile, a few feet from the surface of the water and ice. She could hear it cutting through the air with a hiss as it went by.

"Stay still," her dad said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "I think he'll come back."

"Do you have another sage grouse?" she asked, concerned.

"Yup."

It took a few moments before the peregrine reappeared. This time, it was flying downriver, and a little closer to the bank.

"What a beautiful bird," Sheridan said.

"Peregrines are the ultimate hunters," her dad said. "They're not the biggest falcons, but they're the fastest and the most versatile. They used to be endangered, but now there are lots of them."

She was entranced.

And when the peregrine came back, flared, and lit with a graceful settling of his wings just a few feet away from them, she felt as if something wild, and magical, had happened.

Her dad lowered the other grouse to the ground in front of the peregrine. The little bird, darker and somehow more cocky and warlike than the red-tailed hawk, gracefully tore into it.

"I think I'd rather learn about these falcons than play basketball," she heard herself say. In the pickup, as they drove from Nate Romanowski's place in the pre-dark of winter, Sheridan realized just how cold she was. Her teeth chattered as she waited for the heater to warm up. Seeing the falcons had made her forget about the cold, forget about how late it was getting.

She noticed that her dad's cell phone, clipped to the dashboard, was turned off, and she mentioned it.

"I forgot about that, damn it," he said, turning it on. Her dad rarely cursed.

Almost immediately, it rang and he grabbed it quickly. She watched him. His expression seemed to sag, then harden, as he listened.

"I can't believe she said that."

"Is it Mom?" Sheridan asked. But she knew it was.

"I'll be home in half an hour, darling. I'm so sorry this happened. And I'm sorry you couldn't reach me."

Sheridan was concerned. His voice was low, and calm, and very serious. But she knew that inside, he was hustling. Eighteen The next morning dawned gray and cold, and there was a bulletin on the radio that said a stockman's advisory had been issued for Northern Wyoming. For their first day back to school, the girls were dressed in clothes they had received for Christmas. Because the girls had become used to sleeping later in the morning over the break, Joe and Marybeth had trouble moving them along so they would be finished with breakfast and ready to go when the bus arrived.

"Christmas is over, ladies," Joe told them. "Back to work we go."

Marybeth was quiet, her eyes tired. She had spent most of the previous night awake and crying about her encounter with Jeannie Keeley. Joe had held her, and shared her rage and frustration. Both Joe and Marybeth were painfully aware of the fact that this might be the last "normal" breakfast with the three girls for a while. And both were determined to see it go smoothly. Neither Marybeth nor Joe had said anything to April, or Sheridan and Lucy about Marybeth's encounter with Jeannie Keeley the afternoon before. But April seemed prophetic, and was acutely alert. Throughout breakfast, her eyes darted furtively from Marybeth to Joe, as if trying to pick up a signal or read a glance. Just as Maxine always seemed to know when Joe was going to go out of town, April seemed to sense instinctively that something was afoot. Sheridan and Lucy, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were oblivious to the morning drama.

After they'd gathered their coats and backpacks, Joe ushered all three girls outside to meet the bus. As the bus doors opened, April turned and threw her arms around Joe's neck and kissed him goodbye. Joe couldn't remember such an open display of affection from April before. When he returned to the house, it was obvious that Marybeth had seen them from the front window, and she was wiping away tears again.

Before they could talk about it, the telephone rang. Marybeth picked the receiver up, and as she listened, Joe watched her face turn into an ivory mask.

"Who is it?" Joe mouthed.

"Robey Hersig," Marybeth answered in a sharp voice. Joe could not hear the county attorney speaking, but he could tell what Hersig was saying by Marybeth's reaction.

"Robey, I appreciate you letting us know," Marybeth said, and hung up the phone. She looked up at Joe and her eyes were flat and distant. "Robey said that Jeannie Keeley got a judge down in Kemmerer to issue an order for April's return. The judge issued the order last week, and Robey just got a copy of it. He's going to fax it to us."

Kemmerer was a small town in southwestern Wyoming. Joe was puzzled. Why Kemmerer?

"Robey says the judge is a loose cannon, some kind of a nut," Marybeth continued, still eerily matter-of-fact. "He said the order could probably be overturned in court, but until that happens we're obligated to hand over April if Jeannie wants her."

Joe stood still, his eyes locked with Marybeth's.

"Joe, Robey says that if Jeannie comes for her and we don't turn her over, that we could be charged."

Joe shook his head, as if trying to shake away the news.

Her mask cracked and she broke down, and he welcomed her into his arms. "Joe," she asked him, "What are we going to do?" After Marybeth regained control and seemed to hammer her emotions into the armor of icy resolve, she left for work at the library. Joe, frustrated, spent the day in the field. There was plenty to keep him busy, as always, and he threw himself into it in a barely controlled frenzy. Better to work himself hard physically, he thought, than to sit and contemplate what was happening at home.

He loaded his snow machine and mounting ramps in the back of his pickup, drove up the Crazy Woman drainage as far as the road was plowed, then chained up and continued until he reached a trailhead. He backed the snowmobile down the ramps with a roar, then raced across untracked snow up and over the mountain. In the drainage below was a designated winter elk refuge, and he cruised down through it. Because of the deep snow, most of the elk that normally would have been there had moved to lower ground, even though a contractor had dropped hay for them. Instead of using the refuge, though, the elk were eating Herman Klein's lowland hay, as well as the hay of other ranchers in the valley. Joe didn't particularly blame the elk, but wished they would have stayed around. The few elk that were present on the range were emaciated. He could tell they weren't likely to last through the winter. The storms and the coyotes would get them. They stood dark and mangy, looking pathetic, he thought.

He fought a totally uncharacteristic urge to challenge them with his snowmobile, to charge at them and watch them run. Instead, he turned back and raced up the mountain he had come down, flying though the trees with a recklessness that both frightened and exhilarated him.

He stopped short of his pickup and tried to collect his thoughts. He noted the elk population of the winter range-seventeen sick and starving animals-in his notebook. He would check the other ranges throughout the week, and compile a report for Terry Crump. Joe expected to find the same depressing results in the other refuges as well. A lot of elk were going to die this winter, he concluded. He couldn't protect them. Too damned many would die of winterkill. One thing had crystallized in Joe's mind during his breakneck rush up the mountain: He needed to talk with Jeannie Keeley. He drove toward Battle Mountain and the Sovereign Citizen compound but was stopped by a sheriff's-department truck that was blocking the road. The Blazer was sidewise on the plowed one-track, its front and back bumpers almost touching the walls of snow.

Joe slowed to a stop as Deputy McLanahan emerged from the Blazer and walked toward his truck. McLanahan raised a hood over his head as he approached. A short-barreled shotgun was clamped under his arm.

Joe rolled his window down.

McLanahan's damaged nose was a grotesque blue-black color and there were half-moons of dark green under his eyes. He looked worse than Joe remembered.

"Where are you heading, game warden?"

The way McLanahan said it, "game warden" sounded to Joe like "son-of-a-bitch."

"Patrolling," Joe said, which was not quite accurate. He had intended to go to the compound to see if Jeannie Keeley had returned. And to advise Wade Brockius that April should not be the pawn in the bitter game Jeannie was playing.

"I thought the hunting seasons were over," McLanahan stated. Joe could tell the deputy was in his hard-ass mode, and he guessed that being assigned to roadblock duty by the sheriff might have precipitated it.

"They are," Joe agreed. "But I've got winter range all over these mountains to check. What's going on here, anyway?"

McLanahan's face looked raccoon-like inside the hood.

"Roadblock. I'm supposed to check anyone coming in or going out."

"Because of the Sovereigns?"

"Yep. They've overstayed their welcome as of today. The eight-day camping limit has done run out."

Joe didn't understand. "What?"

"Folks can camp for eight days in this national forest campground. That's it. Then they have to move on. These yay-hoo extremists have not only overstayed their welcome, they've tapped into the electricity and the phone lines up there. I'm freezing my ass off down on this road and those assholes are up there surfing the Internet and using county power to heat their RVs." McLanahan spat, but the cold spittle didn't clear his lips. "Sheriff Barnum and Melinda Strickland want them to get the fuck out of our county. So they posted eviction posters up there last night, and I'm here to see if they leave."

So Barnum and Strickland are working together. How odd, Joe thought.

"And if they don't leave?" Joe asked.

A grim smile broke across McLanahan's face. "If they don't leave there's a plan in place to take care of business. We won't stand for any more incidents like what happened with Lamar or that BLM guy."

Joe rubbed his eyes. He knew it was a nervous habit, something he had the strong desire to do as stress built up inside him. "What's the connection between the Sovereigns and those two?" Joe asked. "Do they really think they're connected in some way?"

McLanahan's eyes were flat pools of bad pond water. "The day the Sovereigns showed up was the day Lamar got killed," he said, deadpan. "The BLM guy was a week later. Both are Feds. These Sovereign nutcases hate the government. We've got one of 'em in jail, but the rest are up in that camp. Is it really that hard to figure out, game warden?"

McLanahan said "game warden" in that way again. Joe controlled his anger, and asked calmly, "What are they going to do?"

"You mean, what are we going to do," McLanahan said, the grin still stretched tight. "Melinda Strickland called in a couple of experts in the field. They're in charge of the situation, and they're a couple of bad-ass cowboys."

Joe thought of the two men who had questioned Sheridan, then driven to the Forest Service building. But he said nothing.

"So what are you going to do if they don't leave?" Joe asked again.

McLanahan's bruised and mottled face contorted even further into a kind of leer. Joe realized that McLanahan didn't have a clue what Barnum, Strickland, and the two "bad-ass cowboys" were planning. But he didn't want Joe to know that.

"Let's just say that we're not going to stand around and scratch our nuts like they did in Montana with those Freemen," McLanahan finally said.

"What's that mean?"

"That's priveleged information," McLanahan blustered. He stepped away. "I'm freezing to death standing out here," he said. "I'm going to get in my truck and fire up the heater. You want to go up there you're going to have to clear it with Barnum first."

"Have you seen an older-model blue Dodge pickup come up this road?" Joe asked. "With a man and a woman in it? Tennessee plates?"

"Nope."

Joe watched McLanahan walk away. Joe's mind was swirling with new implications. He rubbed his eyes. In the afternoon, Joe patrolled the breaklands. He drove the BLM roads boldly, and took the ones that would crest hills or traverse sagebrush clearings, choosing to fully expose himself. He was looking for the light-colored Ford. He hoped the driver of the Ford, the man (or men) who had lured Birch Wardell into the canyon, would try to do the same to him. He needed some kind of action that would make him feel he was doing something, and occupy his mind to delay the inevitable.

The inevitable would be later in the evening, when he and Marybeth sat down with April to tell her that her mother wanted her back. Nineteen Jeannie Keeley sat in the dirty pickup wearing her best green dress and smoking a cigarette. The defroster didn't work worth a damn, and every few minutes she leaned forward and wiped a clean oval on the foggy windshield. When it was clear, she could see the redbrick facade of Saddlestring Elementary. It was Wednesday morning, the second day the children were back at school.

A bell rang, and despite the cold, children filed out of a set of double doors on the side of the building and across a playground that was mottled with snow and frozen brown gravel. Jeannie noted that there was a playground supervisor-a teacher, she supposed-walking stiffly on the perimeter of the children.

Her eyes squinted and fixed on a blond girl wearing a red down coat with a hood rimmed with fake white fur. The girl was in the middle of a group of three other girls huddling near the building. The girls, presumably classmates, were talking and gesturing with animation.

"There she is," Jeannie whispered, pressing her finger against the glass. "There's my April."

Clem, her man, cleaned a little oval for himself.

"Which one?"

"By the building. In that red coat."

Clem hesitated. He obviously couldn't pick her out. "Red coat?" he asked. "There's about twenty red coats."

Jeannie waved him off impatiently. "I goddamned know which one is my daughter, Clem."

"Didn't say you didn't," he answered, clearly looking to avoid a confrontation. She knew he would choose to do that. Usually, she wished he wouldn't talk at all. Rarely did he say anything worthwhile. She wished he would just shut up and drive. Jeannie had met Clem in eastern Tennessee at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. She had been waitressing, just about to quit and move on, and he was seated in her section. He was alone. He had driven her crazy with the length and precision of his order-how, exactly, he wanted his eggs cooked (just shy of over-easy with a dollop of butter on the yolk), his gravy ladled (on the side, in a soup bowl and not a cup, with plenty of pieces of pork sausage in it), his fried apples prepared (a double order with extra cinnamon) and his toast toasted (hard on one side, soft on the other). She had stared at the man with his prison pallor and thin dark hair when he'd asked her politely to repeat his order back to him. She did, and then asked him where in the hell he was from that he could order a breakfast like that and expect to get it. Eastern Montana, he said. Jordan. And it wasn't that he could get a breakfast exactly like that in Jordan. It was that he had been dreaming of this particular breakfast for three years in Deer Lodge, Montana, at the penitentiary. He told her his name was Clem. She told him her name was Suzy. She always lied about her name; it was habit. He ate his breakfast and read a newspaper, and didn't move until lunch, when she came to take his order again.

"How come your name tag says 'Jeannie' if your name is Suzy?" he had asked her.

"If you want lunch, you'll shut your goddamned pie-hole," she answered, and was overheard by the manager, an overeager junior achievement type who didn't even have the guts to fire her in person but sent the accountant to do it.

Jeannie had gathered her few belongings in a bundle and left the Cracker Barrel. Along with her possessions, she took some silverware and a few frozen steaks from the walk-in to her car. But the battery was dead, or something, and the car wouldn't start. She was furious at this turn of events, but Clem had been waiting for her in the parking lot and he had offered her a ride.

That was nine months ago now. Neither one of them had a place to stay, a place to go, or family to move in with. When Clem heard that a man named Wade Brockius planned to provide some refuge for people like him, he told Jeannie about it and they bought a twenty-year-old travel trailer with what little money they had and drove northwest. She had no idea at the time that she would end up in a place she knew, a place she hated, where her husband had been murdered and her daughter lost to her.

"You look purty in that dress," Clem said. She shot a look at him.

Here was a man, she thought, a Montana Freeman, who had held out in a dirty farmhouse outside Jordan, Montana, for months in defiance of local, state, and federal law enforcement. A man who had patrolled the flat scrub earth of eastern Montana wearing a ski mask and carrying a Ruger Mini-14 with a banana clip. (His image had been broadcast around the world during the siege.) A man who had spent three years at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge rather than tell the authorities what he knew about the Freeman leadership. But a man who was so damned scared of her that he flinched when she turned on him and started crying like a eunuch when she threatened to leave him. Clem the Freeman, she thought. Clem the Freeman.

The bell rang again. Recess was over. Jeannie watched April and the other girls go back inside the building.

"That woman, Marybeth Pickett, thinks she's a better mother to April than I am," Jeannie said bitterly.

Clem grunted in disapproval of Marybeth.

"She took advantage of me, and my April," Jeannie spat. "She took that child when I was at my worst, when I couldn't care for her. Now that woman wants to keep her because she lost one of her own."

Clem grunted again.

"People been taking things from me all of my damned life. Just because I'm smaller, or had less school than them, they figure they can just take what they want from me." Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she lit another cigarette. "My first husband, Ote, took my childhood and my future from me when he moved me out to this damned place so he could be a mountain man. Then that judge in Mississippi took my boy away after that. That damned judge said I abandoned my boy, which was a damned lie. Everybody has a right to go on a vacation, and that's all I done. How could I be blamed for the fact that my baby-sitter, that little bitch, went on vacation, too? But that judge took my boy away anyway."

Jeannie's youngest, her three-year-old daughter, was with Ote's parents in Jackson, Mississippi. They claimed they were going to keep her, but Jeannie had other plans.

She looked at Clem, her eyes blazing. He was shaking his head slowly.

"It's a crying shame," Clem said.

"You goddamned right it is," she said, turning back to the windshield, which was fogging again. "Once we get April, we'll go back for my baby."

Jeannie pulled two envelopes from her purse. One was old and brown, and the other was crisp and white. She shook out a thin sheaf of photos from the brown envelope. Clem watched as she shuffled through the snapshots.

"I'm gonna show these to April to remind her where she comes from," Jeannie said. "This one's her and her brother when they was babies. April used to suck her two fingers all the time, instead of her thumb. Ote said that was unnatural."

She went through all of the pictures again, smiling at some, riffling past others. Then she dropped them back into the brown envelope.

The white envelope contained a court order assigning immediate custody of April to Jeannie. The order was signed by Judge Potter Oliver of Kemmerer, Wyoming. Clem had been the one who knew of Judge Oliver, and they had driven across the state to meet the judge, after hours waiting in his office. Clem had told her Judge Oliver was "eccentric," but had his heart in the right place. What he meant, she found out, was that Judge Oliver was sympathetic to the Freemen and had okayed several of their most outrageous financial schemes to fund their militia group. Despite petitions and threatened judicial and legislative action to have him removed from the court, Oliver had somehow stayed on. He was now being forced to retire within the year, he told them. Because of his age.

Judge Oliver was massively fat, with a wispy beard and heavy-lidded eyes. A single green-shaded banker's lamp threw garish shadows across the judge and across the room. When he met with them, Oliver wore an ancient three-piece suit that was shiny from wear and stained with grease spots. Because of an attack of gout, Oliver explained, he was forced to wear slippers on his feet instead of shoes. She saw the slippers under his desk. They were big, like elephant slippers.

Jeannie had pleaded her case for April while Clem sat next to her, holding her hand. Judge Oliver listened impassively, his fingers intertwined across his stomach.

When she was through, the judge asked Jeannie to leave the room while he talked with Clem.

She had waited outside the door for less than ten minutes when Clem came outside to retrieve her. He nodded and told her things were going to be okay.

"I have remanded custody of your daughter to you upon your request," Judge Oliver told Jeannie in a wheezy voice. "My clerk is preparing the order as we speak, and we will fax it to Twelve Sleep County."

Jeannie actually cried with joy, and reached across the desk to shake his huge, crablike hand. She was so happy, and so grateful, thanks to Judge Oliver.

Oliver smiled back, but his eyes were on Clem.

Clem ushered Jeannie to the back of the room while the judge sat at his desk. She could tell when she looked at him that Clem had done something awful.

"The judge asked about compensation," Clem had whispered nervously. "I told him we couldn't pay him very much."

"Clem, you asshole," Jeannie had whispered back, furious. "We can't pay him anything!"

Clem had hesitated, then gulped, then pulled at his collar.

"What, damn you?" she asked. Her whisper was loud enough, she thought, to be heard by the judge.

Clem continued to look at his own boots. Then she understood. The judge wanted compensation.

She turned toward Judge Oliver and smiled sweetly.

"I'll wait for you out in the truck," Clem mumbled, still looking down.

"You bet your bony ass you will," Jeannie said over her shoulder, through smiling teeth. "I guess I don't get it why you want to go into that school and get her," Clem said. "With that order and all, you could march right up to their house and take her."

Jeannie sighed and rolled her eyes. "Clem, sometimes you're even stupider than usual."

He looked away, stung.

"It's been three long years," she said. "Do you want to drag a crying, screaming kid out of somebody's house?"

Clem frowned. "But you're her mother. She'll want to go with you."

She glared at him. "Who knows what kind of crap and filth about me they've put into her head? Who knows what they'll tell her tonight, now that they know we've got this here order?"

Clem shook his head, confused. But it was obvious he didn't want to argue.

"What this order means," Jeannie said, "is that they can't get her back."

Clem dropped his eyes to the floorboards of the truck. "I'm just sorry what you had to do to get it."

Jeannie snorted. "I've done worse." For once, Jeannie Keeley was lucky. She remembered the layout of the school well enough to walk straight to the office without asking anyone where it was.

Her heels clicked on the tile floor and her green dress swished with purpose as she walked down the hallway. Most of the classroom doors were open, and the sounds of children and teachers came and went like radio stations set on "scan" as she walked.

The school office was empty except for a secretary who sat at a computer behind the front counter. Jeannie had been thinking about this for a long time. This was a small town. Everybody knew damned near everybody else. She had not been inside the school for four years, since April was in kindergarten. She doubted she had made enough of an impression to be remembered. When she finally decided how to play it, it was simple. She operated on one premise: What would Marybeth Pickett do? When the secretary looked up, Jeannie smiled at her.

"Hi again. I'm April Keeley's mother," Jeannie said with such familiarity and assurance that the secretary should be ashamed for not recognizing her. "Third grade. I'm here to take her to the dentist."

The secretary looked befuddled, and plunged into a spiral notebook on her desk. "I'm filling in today for the secretary because she came back from Christmas vacation with the flu," the woman explained. "I'm trying to figure out how this works."

Jeannie tried not to whoop with jubilation. She hoped she hadn't looked too elated.

What would Marybeth Pickett do?

"No hurry at all," Jeannie said. "I sent the note with April this morning, so it could be that it didn't even get to you. I don't mean to cause any problems."

The secretary flipped page after page in the notebook, then looked up. Her face was red with embarrassment. "There's nothing here, but that doesn't mean she didn't bring in the note."

Jeannie made a "What can you do?" gesture. Twenty Sheridan and Lucy stood waiting at the curb when their father pulled up to the school to pick them up. Sheridan held Lucy's hand. It was darker than it had been all day, and mist tendrils reached down from the sky like cold fingers. It wasn't really snowing, but ice crystals hung suspended in the air.

"Where's April?" her dad asked, as Lucy climbed over the bench seat to the narrow crew-cab backseat and Sheridan jumped up beside him.

"Mom came and got her this afternoon," Sheridan said, pulling the seatbelt across her.

Her dad nodded, and began to pull away from the curb. Then something seemed to hit him and he slammed on the brakes. Lucy yelled "Dad!" to admonish him, but Sheridan turned in her seat to face her father.

"Sheridan," he said slowly, enunciating clearly, each word dropping like a stone. "How do you know your mother came and got her?"

"I heard the announcement from the other room," she said. "The secretary came on and asked for April to report to the principal's office. That's what they do."

Lucy came to her older sister's defense. "They made an announcement like that for me when Mom came and got me to take me to the dentist. Whenever they do that it means your mom or dad is waiting in the office for you."

"Did you see her?" her dad asked. "Did you see your mom?"

Both girls shook their heads. Sheridan had seen a woman in a green dress pass by her classroom door. But it wasn't her mother. She had no idea why their father seemed so upset. Then she realized what must have happened-Jeannie Keeley must have come for April and taken her away. Sheridan clapped her hand to her mouth. She had been afraid something like this would happen. Her parents had never spelled out what was happening with April, but Sheridan knew whatever it was, it wasn't good.

"Your mom was at work all day at the library and the stables," he said.

And their sister April was gone.

Sheridan began to sob, and Lucy joined her. Sheridan felt awful. April was her responsibility because she was the oldest. Her dad closed his eyes tightly, then opened them and drove. He did not say It's okay, it's not your fault.

"I need to call your mother," her dad said, his voice resigned. Joe lay awake in bed and waited for Marybeth to join him. It was late, and he was exhausted. He watched Marybeth brush her teeth and clean her face in the vanity mirror. He could hear the murmur of late-night television from downstairs, a nightly habit of Missy Vankueren's.

Marybeth had amazed him once again that night. By the time Joe got home, Marybeth had again channeled her rage and frustration into usefulness. Her ability to push her emotion aside and develop a strategy was stunning, Joe thought.

She had calmed Sheridan and Lucy as well as she could, and made dinner for them all. While she cooked, she methodically called both the principal and the sheriff to notify them of what had happened. She left after-hours messages with the county attorney and three local attorneys, asking them to call her in the morning.

While the girls bathed and watched television with Missy, Marybeth filled a suitcase and several boxes with April's clothing and toys. At the first opportunity, she announced to Joe, they must make sure Jeannie received April's belongings. She said it with a kind of chilly determination that had unnerved him.

"Jeannie got April before we could prepare our little girl, or kiss her goodbye," Marybeth said. "I will never forgive her for that."

Missy always thought-and often said-that Marybeth would have made an excellent corporate lawyer if she hadn't married Joe Pickett and started having children. Now Joe could see what an efficient and cold-blooded lawyer she could have become.

Marybeth turned the vanity light off and came to bed. Joe held her.

"We're going to get April back," Marybeth said through gritted teeth. "We're going to get her back, Joe."

Three times during the night, Marybeth left the bedroom. Joe slept so fitfully that he woke up and noted her comings and goings each time. He knew what she was doing. She was checking to make sure that her other two girls were still there. Twenty-one On Friday night, the public meeting on road closures in the national forests was held in the cafeteria of Saddlestring High School, home of the Wranglers. Joe Pickett arrived late. He parked in the last row of cars in the lot and shuffled through vehicles toward the building. It was bitterly cold, with a clear sky. The stars looked blue-white and hard, and he could hear the rattling hum of an overworked power transformer mounted on a light pole. A set of fluorescent pole lamps cast chilling pools of light on the snow and ice in the gravel lot. The storm predicted by the National Weather Service had skirted the Bighorns and slammed full-force into the Tetons, the Absarokas and the Wind River mountains to the west. Twelve Sleep Valley had received only a skiff of light snow and single-degree temperatures.

Before he had left his home office, Joe had sent a report to his supervisor outlining the doubts he had about Nate Romanowski's guilt, and saying that he thought there was a connection between Lamar Gardiner's murder and Birch Wardell's crash in the foothills. Joe wrote that he didn't have enough information to take his suspicions to the sheriff or Melinda Strickland, but that he hoped to draw out the driver of the light-colored vehicle. He ended his report to Terry Crump by saying that due to personal circumstances relating to his foster daughter, he might need to request time off in the near future. Then he had sent the e-mail, gathered his parka, walked out through the cold to his pickup, and left to attend the meeting. Judging by the number of vehicles in the parking lot, Joe expected a full house inside for the meeting. A blast of warm air greeted him as he opened the cafeteria door, and he could see that the room was filled with locals sitting in metal folding chairs. This was definitely an outdoor crowd-hunters, fishermen, outfitters, ranchers. Most of the men wore heavy coats, boots, and facial hair. Melinda Strickland was speaking from behind a podium. Maps were taped to the wall behind her. Joe worked his way toward the back of the room. A few men Joe knew in the audience nodded greetings to him.

Behind him, Melinda Strickland paused in her briefing about the meeting's protocol.

"Glad you could make it, Joe!" Melinda Strickland said with surprising enthusiasm.

Joe waved and felt his face flush as nearly a hundred men turned in his direction before they settled back around toward the podium. For a moment, Joe wondered why she had greeted him so warmly and publicly. When a number of the faces lingered on him with narrowed eyes, he realized why. It was Melinda Strickland's way of announcing to the crowd that he was on her side. The realization left him cold.

Several men were already standing behind the crowd, their backs to the wall, surveying the participants. Two of them, one with curly gray hair and another with hawkish eyes, stood with their arms folded, barely contained smirks on their faces. Joe recognized them as the men who had asked Sheridan for directions. Elle Broxton-Howard, looking smashing in a black outfit with a fleece vest, was there as well. She scribbled earnestly in her pad. Robey Hersig, the county attorney, still wore his jacket and tie from the office and stood off to the side of the crowd, against the wall. He slid over to make room for Joe.

"Any progress with April?" Hersig asked in a whisper out of the side of his mouth.

Joe shook his head. "Nope."

"It's a matter of time," Hersig said. "That's what I told Marybeth. If we can charge Jeannie with abuse or neglect, we can move in and get April back."

Joe turned his head and stared at Hersig. His neck was hot. "That's great, Robey. Let's hope April gets abused or neglected. We'll pray that happens."

"Joe, you know what I meant."

Joe didn't respond.

"Come on, Joe." Hersig leaned over and gently prodded Joe in the ribs. "You know what I meant."

Joe nodded, but didn't look over. Joe knew he was being unfair to Hersig but he didn't care. He was haunted from lack of sleep and frustration.

Hersig was an officer of the court, and Joe's opinion of the legal process right now was poor and getting worse. He was ashamed of the whole system, and angry with the people who made it up. Joe knew Robey wanted to be helpful, but there was little he could do. The situation with April seemed practically hopeless. Judge Potter Oliver's order was valid, if outrageous. An attorney Marybeth had hired (and who they didn't know how they would afford) was filing paperwork to contest the order. If they were successful in a preliminary hearing, a full hearing would be scheduled. But even without inevitable postponements or delays, the hearing wouldn't likely be for weeks or possibly months. The slow grind of the legal system was diabolical in circumstances like this, Joe had concluded. Who even knew if Jeannie Keeley would be around by the time a hearing was scheduled? And what would happen to April in the meanwhile? Marybeth had called the school to see if April was there, but Jeannie had kept her out of school and out of sight both Thursday and Friday, telling the school that April was sick with some kind of virus.

With each day, April seemed farther away. The emptiness in their house seemed to shout at them. But the shouting would eventually fade. The most frightening thing of all, Joe thought, would be the day when he didn't wake up thinking of April-because too much time had passed. The thought depressed him and he shook his head in an attempt to dispel it. He tried to focus on the public meeting at hand.

Melinda Strickland was still talking, holding forth on the policy of road closures. Her voice seemed distant, disconnected, and singsong. Her hair color had been changed again, and was now off-orange.

"What's she saying?" Joe asked.

Hersig quietly scoffed. "What we are witnessing is an amazing display of the most sanctimonious, dysfunctional, cover-your-ass, bureaucratic horseshit I have ever heard. And if you quote me on that I'll deny it."

Taken aback, Joe turned to listen to Melinda Strickland. A retired electrical contractor had been called on, and he asked why a certain road in the Bighorns had been closed to vehicle traffic. He said that he had used the road all his life when he hunted, and that his father had used the road for fifty years before that.

"I wish I had a choice in the matter," Strickland was explaining to the crowd, "But it's not as simple as that. I understand what you're saying, but the policy is in place and there is very little we can do to change it at this juncture. We don't have the manpower or resources to reevaluate grazing leases or timber allotments in this fiscal year…"

Hersig was right, Joe concluded. Strickland was talking in circuitous paths leading nowhere, with confusing little asides thrown in to divert attention from her meaning just as it threatened to become clear. Joe knew that, like Lamar Gardiner, Melinda Strickland had much more discretion in decision-making than she let on. And like Lamar Gardiner, Strickland blamed all of her own unpopular decisions on unnamed, faceless higher-ups, nebulous policy documents, or public meetings that had never been public and that might never have actually occurred.

"… strike a balance between resource management, recreation, the health and welfare of the ecosystem itself…"

As she droned on, several hands were raised in the audience. She looked over the tops of the hands as she spoke, as if she couldn't see them. Joe could sense the rising tension in the room. Men fidgeted and cleared their throats. Many sat back with their arms crossed, staring at the ceiling.

"…A thorough, top-to-bottom assessment needs to be completed in order to determine the biodiversity needs of the resource in regard to input from a wide range of scientific and recreator-derived opinions…"

Finally, one of the men who had raised his hand stood up. As he did so, his flimsy folding chair fell over backward. The sound caught Strickland's attention, and her face betrayed a flash of terror.

It was Herman Klein, the rancher Joe had shared coffee with the previous week. He introduced himself to Strickland and the room.

"Public comments need to be submitted in advance so we can address them, and I don't believe your name is on the list," she said to Klein. "Additional comments can be registered after the presentation. So please, sir, take your seat." Two Forest Service employees who flanked Strickland at the podium stood up to reinforce her statement. But they did so reluctantly, Joe noticed.

Klein put his hands in the front of his jeans in an aw-shucks manner, but he didn't sit down. "Ms. Strickland, I've been to enough of these things to know that by the time the 'public comment' period rolls around we'll be either out of time or your decision will have already been made."

His words sent a ripple of laughter through the room. Joe watched Melinda Strickland carefully. Her face betrayed fear and contempt. She hated this. She hated the fact that someone would interrupt her.

"Please excuse me for my stupidity," Klein continued, "but I want to make sure I understand what you're saying up there. Those of us not used to speaking in government rhetoric have a hard time following you." More laughter rumbled through the room.

Joe looked around quickly. All of the faces were turned to Herman Klein. Joe recognized more of the attendees than he had thought he would. Several of Klein's fellow ranchers were scattered throughout. Outfitters who used the forest for hunting and packing trips were there in full force. Local hunters made up the rest of the crowd. In a hunting community like Saddlestring, that meant doctors, lawyers, retailers, and teachers. Spud Cargill and Rope Latham, the roofers, wore their company jackets with the logo of a winged T-Lock shingle on the backs. Joe remembered them from the First Alpine Church. But as far as he could tell, there were no Sovereigns in the room. He had wondered if any of them would attend.

Melinda Strickland was falling into a trap that was being baited by Herman Klein. It was the "I'm just a poor dumb country boy" ruse that locals loved to spring on outsiders and especially government officials. Joe recognized the trap from experience.

"My understanding is that just about half of all the land in the state of Wyoming is owned and managed by the federal government," Klein said, "Whether it's the Forest Service, or the BLM, or the Park Service, or whatever. In any case, half of our state is run by federal bureaucrats. Not that I have anything against federal bureaucrats, of course."

The crowd tittered and even Joe smiled. Melinda Strickland stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes cold. One of her employees started to sit down beside her and she shot him a withering look. He stood back up.

"The problem I got with this," Klein continued, "is that there is no accountability. If all this land was run by the state, or even local politicians, we could vote them out if we wanted to. If it was run by a corporation we could buy stock and go to board meetings and raise hell. But because it's run by bureaucrats who nobody elected-all we can do is come to meetings like this to hear what you're going to do to our forests and our countryside." There were murmurs of assent.

"Excuse me," Melinda Strickland interrupted. "Excuse me. Our agency manages the resources on behalf of the public. We're not dictators here, ya know." She looked to the back of the room for approval. The two men standing next to Robey Hersig nodded to her.

"That may be," Herman Klein agreed, smiling. "But by saying you're managing things on behalf of the public you're basically saying that those of us here in this room who live here aren't the public, because you sure as hell never asked us anything."

"That's the purpose of this meeting!" Melinda Strickland countered, exasperated.

"If that's the case," Klein asked, "why did you try to shut me up just a minute ago when I stood up?"

"Because there needs to be order," Strickland said, her face flushed. "We can't do things based on mob rule."

Herman Klein feigned surprise. He slowly looked around the room. "This doesn't look like a mob to me," he said. "This looks like a group of concerned local citizens who came out on a cold-ass night to participate in a public meeting."

"Nailed her," Hersig whispered. "He nailed her."

Joe nodded.

"This," Melinda Strickland said, her voice rising and her finger pointed at Herman Klein, "This is an example of the problem. I've had a district supervisor murdered and a hardworking BLM employee assaulted because of this kind of hateful attitude."

"Me?" Klein asked, genuinely hurt. "What in the hell did I do?"

"You didn't do anything, as far as I know," she said. "But this kind of antigovernment attitude allows things like that to happen! It practically guarantees that things like that will happen!"

Hersig turned his head and he and Joe exchanged glances. The air had been sucked out of the room. Melinda Strickland had, within a minute, successfully shamed the crowd.

"What are you going to do about those Sovereigns?" someone asked.

Melinda Strickland jumped at the chance to change the subject, and compound her momentum.

"A plan is in place to evict the violators," she said. "I'm not at liberty to explain the steps that are being taken, other than to say that a well-thought-out, strategic plan is in place that will end in the desired results."

Several people in the crowd clapped with approval. While they did, Herman Klein quietly sat back down.

"Amazing," Hersig whistled, as he gathered his coat to leave. As the crowd filed out, Melinda Strickland strode toward Joe in the back of the room. She approached him as if she couldn't wait to shake his hand. The two men in the back joined them. She introduced them to Joe as Dick Munker and Tony Portenson of the FBI.

"This is Joe Pickett," she said to the two men. "He's the game warden I was telling you about."

The gray-haired, skeletal man with the deep voice was Dick Munker. Munker offered Joe a business card.

"Manager, Federal Bureau of Investigation Interagency Special Assignment Unit," Joe read. "What does that mean?"

"We defuse volatile situations." Munker smiled with his mouth, his eyes fixed on Joe. "We're here by special request."

"You two insulted my daughter, I believe," Joe said. "She was the one who gave you directions to the Forest Service office."

Munker looked quickly away, but Portenson stared back at Joe with what looked like anxiety. He seemed to Joe to be wishing that there was not a confrontation with Munker.

Melinda Strickland acted as if the exchange had not occurred. "They're very familiar with quite a few of the Sovereigns," she said. "That's why I wanted them here. We want to prevent another Ruby Ridge, or Waco."

Joe nodded.

"In Idaho they called it 'Weaver Fever,' " Munker added, taking Strickland's cue, his voice dropping an octave so he couldn't possibly be overheard by the departing crowd. "It's when the community and the press get whipped up into a fury by a standoff situation and things get ugly. We're here to make sure that doesn't happen."

"I thought it was the FBI who got ugly at Ruby Ridge." Joe said.

Munker set his jaw and his eyes bored holes into Joe. "You thought wrong," he said. He shot a look at Melinda Strickland. "Which side is he on, anyway?"

"Geez, I wished I could get away with wearing a hat like that," Tony Portenson interjected, clearly attempting to change the direction of the conversation. He nodded toward Joe's well-worn Stetson. "But I'm from Jersey, and everybody would know I was faking it."

"I know who you are," Munker said, stifling a smile. Portenson's joke hadn't diverted him. "You're the one who had Lamar Gardiner in custody when he escaped. The game warden, right?"

Joe felt a pang of anger and embarrassment.

"Joe," Strickland said, placing her hand on Joe's shoulder, "Mr. Munker and Mr. Portenson are experts in the kind of situation we have here in Twelve Sleep County. They're in demand all over the west. They're here to advise us on how we should proceed with the Sovereigns. They'll be working here, but also in Idaho and Nevada."

"Other hotbeds of insurrection," Munker added. "Where federal officials have been hurt or threatened."

Strickland opened her purse so Joe would look inside. "They advised me to get this to protect myself." He could see the checkered grip of a stainless-steel nine-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol. "I still can't believe I'm actually carrying a gun around with me." Her half-giggling voice belied her words of concern, though, Joe thought.

Joe took his hat off and rubbed his eyes. Melinda Strickland with a gun.

He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"I think saying this is a hotbed of insurrection is pretty strong," Joe cautioned. "I live here and I just don't see it. I'm not saying there aren't some real independent characters around, or some hotheads. But I just don't see that it could be organized like you seem to be suggesting."

Tony Portenson and Dick Munker exchanged glances.

"How familiar are you with the extremists up there in that compound?" Munker asked. "Do you know what kind of people they are? What they believe? We know them, and their type. Some of those individuals have been involved in some of the worst situations that have taken place in this country in the past dozen years. You've got ex-cons, and conspirators, and scumbags who just haven't been caught at anything yet. These scumbags have gotten this far because they've been tolerated and coddled. They need to know that not everybody will take their crap."

Joe stared at Munker in disbelief. He felt another hard twist in his stomach as he listened.

"Ms. Strickland has given us carte blanche to deal with the situation," Portenson said, grinning. "For once, we can deal with these assholes the right way."

Melinda Strickland returned his grin. She clearly liked being admired by colleagues. It made Joe slightly sick. "Sheriff Barnum is completely on board with this," she told Joe. "He's volunteered his complete cooperation."

"I met Wade Brockius," Joe confessed. "He told me they just want to be left alone. That they mean no harm."

"And you believed him?" Munker asked, cocking his eyebrow.

"I don't have any reason not to," Joe said.

"How about a dead Forest Service supervisor? How about a BLM employee left for dead?"

Joe felt a slow rise of anger. "Unless there's something you boys can tell me, I can't see the connection between those crimes and the Sovereigns. Nate Romanowski is already in jail for the Gardiner murder. Are you saying Romanowski is connected to the Sovereigns?"

"Maybe Romanowski scouted the mountains for them," Portenson said, raising an eyebrow. "Maybe Romanowski found that campground for them and called his buddies to come join him here in Lost Bumfuck, Wyoming."

Joe turned on Portenson with a withering stare. "Do you have a single shred of proof that what you say is valid?" Joe asked. "You sound like you're making this up as you go along."

"What about your little girl?" Munker asked. "Didn't one of them take her?"

Joe didn't reply. He couldn't believe April had been brought up. The wound was still too fresh.

"Maybe if you help us out, it will help you get her back sooner."

"How?"

Munker started to speak, then caught himself. A wry smile formed. "At least then we'll know whose side you're on."

Joe fought the urge to smash Munker's face with his fist. Instead, Joe fitted his hat back on and walked away. Joe was sitting in his truck waiting for it to warm up when Elle Broxton-Howard appeared in his headlights and approached the passenger-side window. She knocked on the glass, and Joe gestured for her to come in. She climbed into the truck and shut the door.

"The heater isn't hot yet," he apologized. "It'll take a minute to get going."

"It's so cold here," she said, shivering. She was huddled in her dark wool coat. "I don't know how you people can stand it out here."

"Sometimes I wonder that myself," Joe said, making conversation.

"Melinda was magnificent in there, wasn't she?" Broxton-Howard said, sounding awestruck.

Joe grunted-not a yes, not a no. He was still seething from his encounter with Munker.

As the cab warmed, Joe could smell her scent. The far-off light from the fluorescent pole lamp profiled her against the window. She was lovely.

Suddenly, Elle leaned across the seat toward him. "I'm starting to think you're the key to my story."

"What?" Joe asked, confused. "I thought you were writing about Melinda Strickland."

"Well… it's about her. But you seem to be a pivotal character in all of this." She stared deeply into his eyes as she spoke. Her eyes glistened. Her lips were parted ever-so-slightly. Her scent seemed even stronger now, somehow. It both troubled and excited him.

"I heard that you've shot three men? That you wounded two men three years ago and that you killed a man last year at a canyon called Savage Run?"

Joe broke off their gaze and stared out the windshield.

"Who told you that?"

"Oh… people around town."

He felt his throat constrict, and tried to recover.

"We need to talk… soon," she said. "How about dinner?"

She smiled. Her teeth were white and perfect.

"Sure," Joe said, pausing. "At my house. With my wife Marybeth and the kids."

The light went out of her eyes, and although the smile remained it decreased in wattage. She assessed him coolly.

"I guess that would work," she said, businesslike. "Although I was kind of thinking of something more…" The sentence trailed off into nowhere. He didn't prompt her to continue.

"I'll give you a call," she said, withdrawing and opening her door. "Your number's in the wonderful little half-inch-thick Saddlestring telephone book, I presume?"

"Yup."

"Do you have a fax machine?" she asked suddenly, half-in and half-out.

He told her the number.

"I'll fax over the list of things I can't eat," she said, and was gone. Driving home, he tried to put the evening into some kind of perspective. He failed. All he could foresee, as he thought about it, was inevitable tragedy. Dick Munker troubled him. The man exuded a smug, chip-on-the-shoulder fanaticism, and he had Melinda Strickland's ear. Munker didn't seem like the kind of person who could defuse a situation, as he claimed, but the kind who would ignite one. The kind of guy who would spray a campfire with gasoline. Munker, and Portenson, seemed disdainful of the Sovereigns, the community, and Joe himself. They seemed to revel in being insiders with guns, specialists finally given a green light to do what they saw fit. Munker, Joe thought, was the kind of guy who would kill somebody and later claim it was for the victim's own good.

He opened his window and let a knife-edge of icy air cut into his face. Maybe, he hoped, it would sweep the scent of Elle Broxton-Howard's perfume from the cab of the pickup.

Joe felt like his head was caught in a vise. And every day, someone applied another half-turn. Missy was awake in the dark, watching television on the couch when Joe got home. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw things more clearly. There was an empty wine bottle on its side near the foot of the couch, and a half-full bottle gripped in her other hand. Her face was shiny with tears.

"Are you okay?" Joe asked tentatively.

She raised her head, and her unfocused eyes settled somewhere to the left of his nose. She was very drunk.

"Okay?" she asked. "I'm just fucking wonderful."

He regretted that he had asked.

"It's my BIRTHday," she slurred. "I'm sixty-three. Sixty-three goddamned years old without a house, without a husband, without even a boyfriend for the first time in my life."

Yes, you're old, Joe thought, old enough not to act like this. He began to mount the stairs.

"It's been a long night," he said, hoping she would stop.

"Stuck here in the middle of nowhere-land, getting older by the minute, and missing my granddaughter April." She sipped from her glass and a bead of red wine ran down her chin. "Even though she's not really my granddaughter."

Joe stopped and turned. "That's right," he snapped. "Even though she's not 'really' your granddaughter. How generous of you. I can tell you're pretty busted up about it. You're so upset, you even opened a bottle of wine."

Missy's face fell. "I can't believe you said that to me," she said, tears glistening in her eyes.

"Sorry," Joe said, his voice unsympathetic. "Happy Birthday." He turned and resumed climbing the stairs.

"Ah, you don't really care," Missy said behind him. "You know, Joe Pickett, if you weren't my son-in-law, I'd say you were a very self-absorbed man."

Joe hesitated again on the stairs, thought better of it, and proceeded. He heard the clink of the wineglass against her perfect, six-thousand-dollar teeth. Although the bedroom was dark, Marybeth was awake.

"Joe, were you arguing with my mother?"

Joe stood still, trying to tamp down his anger from a moment before. Instead, something he had been bottling up gushed out.

"Is she going to live with us?" he asked. "Is she going to stay here?"

Marybeth turned on her bedside lamp. "Joe, she's going through a tough time. I can't believe you're acting this way."

Joe couldn't quit. "She's going through a tough time? Look at us, Marybeth. All she has to do is snag another husband and she's home free. We've got the situation with April, and lunatics are running everything… I've got a guy who somehow expects me to save his life, and I'm pretty sure there's a murderer out there running loose…"

"Joe, lower your voice," Marybeth said sternly.

"… and I've got a mother-in-law downstairs feeling sorry for herself."

"Joe."

He stopped and caught himself.

"I don't need you to remind me what's going on." Marybeth's eyes flashed. "What do you want me to do, throw her out into the snow? All day long I've been trying to blot out this… 'situation'… with April and do something constructive. And you lose your temper and bring it all back."

Joe looked at her, noticed the tears forming in her eyes. But he was still too angry to apologize.

In a silence that was deafening, Joe got ready for bed and climbed in. She switched off the lamp, turned her back to him and he thought she was pretending to sleep. He touched her shoulder but she didn't respond.

You're right, he wanted to tell her now, I'm sorry.

Joe rolled back over and stared at the ceiling and listened to the icy wind outside rattle the window. Joe woke a few hours later, the remnants of another nightmare skittering in his head. He quietly slid out of bed and went to the window. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and wondered how everything had gotten so bad so quickly.

Things are building up, Joe thought. His family was coming unhinged, and he was not blameless. Somehow, he thought, I need to do more. To try and fix things. Take some kind of action before everything explodes. Twenty-two The next morning, Joe was eating breakfast early and alone when Marybeth came down the stairs. He could tell by the way she walked that she was still angry with him, and he watched as she went silently into his office, and came out with something in her hand and a glare in her eyes.

"You got a fax." Her voice was not kind. "I heard it come in late last night."

Joe winced, and reached for the single sheet.

"It's from Elle Broxton-Howard," Joe said, reading it.

"I know."

"She wants to interview me. I invited her to dinner with us."

"I figured that out."

"This is a list of things she can't eat. I guess she has a stack of these all made up and ready to send to people when she gets a dinner invitation."

"Apparently."

"Says here she doesn't eat beef, poultry, pork, olive or canola oil, sugar, processed foods of any kind, or genetically enhanced products."

"Mm-hmm."

"She has a suggested menu here. Baked trout, steamed broccoli, and brown rice. Hell, we don't have any of that stuff," Joe said.

"No, we don't-although I'd be happy to get it for you and your friend for your little dinner."

"That's not necessary, Marybeth."

Marybeth turned on her heel and went up the stairs to get dressed.

Joe cursed, and crumpled the paper into a ball and flipped it toward the garbage can in the kitchen. In a foul mood, Joe left the house and drove into the mountains on the Bighorn Road toward Battle Mountain and the Sovereign Citizen Compound. Again, McLanahan's Blazer blocked his path. Joe eased up to it and stopped, while the sheriff's deputy slowly climbed out into the cold to greet him.

"Still on roadblock duty, huh?" Joe asked, opening his window.

"Yes, goddammit," McLanahan said, his teeth chattering. Twin plumes of condensation blew from his nostrils.

"Is there any traffic up here?" Joe asked. "Do the Sovereigns come and go much?"

McLanahan shook his head. "Every once in a while there's a truck or two. But they also use Timberline Road on the other side of the mountain, so I don't see 'em all."

"Any activity this morning?"

"Just you," McLanahan said. "Things pick up at night. Those two FBI guys have been through here a lot. They had quite a bit of sound equipment with them, and I guess tonight they're planning a new phase."

"A new phase?"

McLanahan shrugged. "Don't ask me. They don't tell me anything, and I'm not here at night. All I know is that that Munker guy is a real prick."

Joe cocked his thumb toward the back of his truck. "I've got some clothes and toys to deliver to the compound for our daughter April."

Marybeth had packed the boxes early that morning, before it was light out. It must have been very hard on her, but she didn't say anything about it. Marybeth was not talking with him, and neither was Missy, which Joe counted as a blessing.

McLanahan shrugged. "I'm supposed to inspect all deliveries."

"Feel free," Joe volunteered.

McLanahan developed a pained look, and Joe could see him weighing the time it would take to search through the boxes in the bitter cold versus climbing back into his warm Blazer. He stepped aside and waved Joe through. At the gate to the compound, Joe stopped as he had before, and got out. A bearded man in a heavy army-surplus parka emerged from the nearest trailer and approached on the other side of the fence. He didn't carry a rifle, but Joe guessed that he was armed. Joe stacked the boxes and suitcase near the barbed wire.

"What you got there?" the man asked.

Joe explained that it was for April Keeley. "Is she here?" Joe asked. "Is Wade Brockius around?"

"I don't give out that kind of information," the man mumbled. "Is it important?" He reached through the strands and opened the top of the highest box to confirm that it was clothing.

"It's important."

The man lifted the top box over the barbed wire and carried it back to the large trailer that Brockius had come out of the last time Joe was there. "We've gotta go through all this stuff," the man said over his shoulder. "Then I'll be back for the rest. I'll ask about Wade and Jeannie."

"I'll wait."

Joe turned to get back in his pickup, his eyes sweeping through the timber around him. Something seemed out of place, and he tried to figure out what it was.

When he saw it, he was surprised he hadn't noticed it earlier. Four silver speakers poked into the sky above the tops of the trees. Their fluted metal openings were aimed at the Sovereign Citizen Compound. The speakers were mounted on poles that were apparently secured to tree trunks within the forest. The speakers were silent, for now.

Munker and Portenson had been busy. Wade Brockius emerged from the trailer and walked slowly down to the fence. His gait suggested arthritis, or a leg injury. Joe went out to meet him.

"This cold weather stiffens me up," Brockius mumbled. "The clothes are thoughtful. Thank you."

"There's two more boxes," Joe said. "Some of April's toys, too."

Brockius nodded, and Joe thought he looked uncomfortable. "Thoughtful," he said again.

Joe looked into the compound at the trailers and RVs. He hoped to catch a glimpse of April, or even Jeannie Keeley, through a window.

"Can I see her to make sure she's okay?"

"She's with her mother right now, Mr. Pickett."

"Does she know I'm here?"

Brockius sized up Joe from beneath his heavy brow. "No, she doesn't."

"Can you tell her?"

Brockius shook his massive head. "I'm sorry. I really don't want to interfere."

Joe swallowed. "I want to let April know that we miss her, and that we love her very much."

Brockius appeared to think it over. Then he shook his head again. "No, I don't think it would be a good idea," he said with finality.

"Just tell me she's here and that she's okay," Joe asked. "It would mean a lot to my wife to know that."

"She's here," Brockius said, in a tone so low that Joe could barely make it out. Then Joe realized that Brockius didn't want to be overheard by anyone in the RVs or hidden away in the brush. "And she seems fine."

"Thank you," Joe said.

"You best move on now, Mr. Pickett." Brockius's voice was raised back to normal now. "We'll make sure the clothes and toys go to good use."

Obviously, the conversation was over as far as Wade Brockius was concerned. He handed the remaining boxes to Brockius, who took them. He and Brockius exchanged a long, silent look. Brockius appeared troubled by the situation with April. This is not the kind of thing, he seemed to be communicating, that I want to be involved in.

"What comes out of those speakers back there?" Joe asked, as he prepared to leave.

Brockius paused and looked up and over Joe's pickup at the speakers.

"I don't know yet," he said in a bass rumble. "But I suspect we'll be finding out soon."

"Did your people have anything to do with that dirty trick down on the BLM land?" Joe asked, out of the blue.

Joe wanted to see Brockius's reaction to the question.

Brockius's face hardened, as it had before. He was not puzzled by the question, which to Joe meant that the Sovereigns were in communication with someone on the outside-or that they were involved with the ambush. Brockius turned to walk back to his trailer.

"I'd suggest you look a little closer to home, Mr. Pickett," Brockius said over his shoulder. The opportunity to look closer to home came almost immediately, as Joe descended from the snowy mountains. He was still in deep snow, with twenty miles of rugged BLM breaklands laid out in a vista below him. The town of Saddlestring, beyond the breaklands, glittered in the morning sun.

His radio crackled to life.

"I think I've got a situation out here." The signal was strong, and the voice belonged to a woman. "This is Jamie Runyan calling BLM headquarters. Does anybody read me?"

Joe heard a rush of static and assumed it was somebody trying to reply to Jamie Runyan from town.

"I didn't get that at all," she said. "Try again."

There was another squawk.

"Damn it," she said. "I don't know whether anyone there can hear me or not, but I'm out in the joint management unit and I see a light-colored pickup up on top of a hill. I think it might be the vehicle Birch Wardell described. I don't know whether to pursue it or not."

Contact, Joe thought. He reached for the microphone, and waited for Jamie Runyan to repeat her message to the dispatcher once again.

"This is game warden Joe Pickett," he said when she was through. "I read you loud and clear. Please stay put. I'm about fifteen minutes away from you."

He increased his speed, and roared down the mountain as fast as he could without sliding off the road. Jamie Runyan's tan pickup with the BLM logo was pulled to the side of the gravel road with its exhaust burbling. Joe stopped behind her and swung outside. While driving down the mountain, he had unfastened his Remington WingMaster shotgun from his saddle scabbard behind his seat, and he carried it to her vehicle.

She was thick-bodied and plain, with a wide, simple face. She rolled her window down as he approached.

"Where did you see the truck?" Joe asked, scanning the horizon. Because she had parked in a depression, her truck would be hard to see from a distance.

She gestured up the road, over the hill. "I was going up that hill when I saw it. It was a light-colored, older-model pickup on the top of the next ridge. It looked to me like the guy was pulling our fence down with a chain."

"Did he see you?"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure. I backed down the road out of sight when I saw him."

"Has anyone from your office replied to you?"

She shook her head. "I think I'm out of range in these damn hills. The only person I heard was you."

Joe nodded. "Do you mind if I borrow your truck? You can stay here in my truck and keep warm."

She searched his face while she decided. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I've got a theory about what happened," he said. "If you let me borrow your truck I'll look like I'm BLM and I can test it out."

She hesitated. "I don't know. Only authorized government personnel are allowed to drive these vehicles."

"I'm authorized," Joe lied. "The Game and Fish has an inter-agency agreement with the BLM." He thought he sounded convincing, and it worked.

She got out of the cab, remembering to take her sack lunch.

Joe racked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun, then flipped the safety on and slid it muzzle-down onto the floorboards. He narrowed his eyes and gunned the truck up the gravel road.

As he cleared the hill he could see the light pickup Runyan had described. And she was right-it was in the process of pulling a post-and-wire fence down with a chain attached to its bumper. The fence had been erected by the BLM and Forest Service to keep the public off of the management study area.

The truck was about a half-mile from Joe. On his present course, he would soon be on the road beneath it. In his mind, he replayed the scenario Wardell had described to him that night in the hospital: how the truck took off out of sight over a hill while Wardell pursued. Joe wasn't sure of the terrain over the hill, but he assumed it would be similar.

Despite the cold, Joe rolled down his window so he could hear the other vehicle better as he drove. As his BLM truck bucked and pitched on the frozen gravel road, the light-colored truck dropped in and out of view. Soon, Joe could hear the motor of the light-colored truck grinding in the still morning air. In a minute, Joe would be close enough to look up and see the driver, he thought, or perhaps a license plate.

But the next time the truck came into view, it was speeding away. Joe saw its outline against the deep blue sky as it crested the hill and went over it.

Following Wardell's script, Joe jerked the wheel and left the gravel road, pointing the squat nose of his BLM truck up the hill where he had last seen the other truck. He crashed through two crusty drifts, and nearly lost traction as he approached the top of the hill. His back wheels threw plumes of frozen gray dirt as the pickup fishtailed on dirt and ice, but then they caught solid rock and propelled him up and over the top.

Joe's heart pounded in his chest as he crested the ridge and plunged over it. The tire tracks from the other truck went down the hill and vanished into a wide, tall swath of evergreen brush at the bottom.

Joe reached for the shotgun, which had slid toward the passenger door during the rough ride up the hill, and pulled it close to him as he descended.

On cue, a light-colored truck emerged from the brush below and started climbing the opposite slope, directly across from him. The truck labored up the hill as well, sliding a little in loose shale and kicking out puffs of dislodged rock. At the rate Joe was flying down the hill and the other pickup was laboring up the opposite slope, he would be on it in seconds.

Joe tapped the brakes to slow his reckless plunge and gripped the wheel tighter. The tracks he drove in would soon be swallowed in the tangle of ancient juniper.

Suddenly, the brush closed over the top of his BLM truck and branches scratched the sides of his doors like fingernails on a chalkboard. A sap-heavy bough slapped the windshield, leaving needles and gray-blue berries smashed against the glass. He caught a flash of an opening through the branches ahead But then Joe did something Birch Wardell hadn't done. He slammed on his brakes. Then, throwing the pickup into reverse, he floored the accelerator at the same time that he cranked the steering wheel to the right. The engine whined and the tires bit, and the vehicle flew back and to the side through the brush in a cacophony of snapping branches.

BOOM!

Joe hit something metal and solid so hard that his head jerked back and bounced off the rear-window glass. He slumped forward over the wheel as bright orange spangles washed across his eyes. Then smoke, or steam, enveloped the cab of the truck in darkness. Trying to shake his head clear, he looked up and smelled the steam. It was bitter and smelled like radiator fluid.

The spangles had shrunk to the size of shooting sparks when he fell out of the door of the pickup and landed on his hands and knees in the dirt and snow. His hat was smashed down hard on his head, and he pushed it up so he could see.

The twisted grille of the light-colored pickup furiously spewed green steam. A pool of radiator fluid smoked on the ground, and was beginning to cut its way through the snow toward him. Standing, Joe retrieved his shotgun from the seat. He walked around the back of the BLM pickup toward the vehicle he had smashed into.

The windshield of the light-colored truck was marred by a single spidery star where a man's head would have hit it. Joe skirted the steam and looked into the cab to see a man slumped over the steering wheel, a cap askew over his face and dark rivulets of blood coursing down from under the cap into the collar of his coat. Joe recognized the coat, and the logo that was painted on the truck's door even though a thick smear of mud had been applied to obscure it.

It was a flying T-Lok shingle with wings.

Joe opened the door, and Rope Latham, the roofer, moaned and rolled his head toward him.

"How bad are you hurt, Rope?" Joe asked.

"Bad, I think," Rope said. "I think I'm blind."

Joe reached into the cab and lifted the baseball cap that had fallen over Rope's eyes. A three-inch cut ran along Latham's eyebrows. The cut looked like it would require stitches, Joe thought, but it didn't look much worse than that.

"I can see!" Rope cried.

"Climb on out of there," Joe ordered, prodding Rope Latham in the ribs with his shotgun. "Turn around and put your hands on the truck and kick your feet out."

Moaning, Latham obeyed.

Joe pulled each of Latham's arms back in turn and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Then he turned Latham and pushed him back into the truck. Joe saw a Motorola Talkabout hand-held radio on the seat that Rope had obviously used to communicate with the other truck.

"Two trucks," Joe said. "Two identical Bighorn Roofing trucks. One goes down the hill and pulls over at the last second into the brush. Another truck that looks just the same starts up the other side of the hill where it's been parked out of sight. Looks like one truck that crosses the draw and goes on up the other side. Makes the poor BLM guy think he can cross the draw just like that other truck just did. Pretty good trick, even though he didn't die out here like you two intended."

Latham grimaced. Blood was pooling in his eyes as it ran down his face.

"There's a six-foot drop down there once you clear the brush, isn't there?" Joe asked.

"Spud thought of it," Latham said. "But we waited a couple days for that BLM guy to bite. It worked pretty good before."

Joe didn't say that seeing twin antelope fawns had led him to think of how they'd pulled it off.

Keeping Rope Latham in his peripheral vision, Joe stepped back and looked up the opposite slope. Spud Cargill, the other half of Bighorn Roofing, had stopped at the top of the hill and was looking back with binoculars. Joe grabbed the hand-held radio from Spud's pickup and held it up to his mouth.

"We've got you now, you son-of-a-bitch," he said, then tossed the radio back inside. Joe raised his arm and pointed his index finger at Cargill, who was still looking back through binoculars, and pretended to shoot him.

Spud's truck started to move again, and vanished over the top of the hill. While Joe waited for Jamie Runyan to arrive in his pickup, Rope Latham began to tremble. He hoped Latham's injuries weren't worse than they appeared.

Joe read Rope his Miranda rights, then turned on the micro-recorder that he hid in his shirt pocket.

"Why were you targeting the BLM boys?" Joe asked. He leaned against a tree with his shotgun pointed vaguely at Rope Latham. The back of his own head had started to throb from the collision.

"They owed us money," Latham said dejectedly. "So did the goddamned Forest Service."

"They owed you money?" Joe was confused. "What?"

"Those bastards owed us from last summer. Twelve thousand dollars' worth of work we did for them on their buildings. We replaced all the roofs, and paid for the material in advance. But it's been six months and we still haven't been paid." Latham spat bloody saliva into the brush. "Some goddamned problem with the check request the BLM sent to Cheyenne has held it all up, and me and Spud want our money. When it comes to paying their bills, our government is just fucked. 'Maybe next month,' they tell us. Shit, how would those BLM shitheads feel if their paychecks were even a week late, much less six months?"

Joe pushed himself off the tree. The back of his neck was tingling, and it wasn't from hitting the window.

"These people throw money around like it isn't even real, you know? Just look at this stupid 'joint management' area that cost three million dollars between them just to string some fence and put up some signs."

"What did you say before about the Forest Service?"

Latham's voice suddenly caught in his throat. "Nothing."

"No, you said the Forest Service owed you money as well."

"Fuckers." Latham coughed. "They're the worst of all. They owe us fifteen thousand from work we did last summer!"

"This would be Lamar Gardiner," Joe said flatly.

"It was Lamar Gardiner," Latham said, smiling wickedly. His teeth were pink from a cut in his mouth. "He wouldn't even return our calls about it, and he told Spud that if he didn't stop harassing him, we'd be off the government bid list for good and he'd press charges!"

"Move aside," Joe ordered, and Latham slid along the truck away from the cab.

Reaching inside, Joe pulled the bench seat forward. A well-used compound bow was wedged between the seat and the cab wall. A narrow quiver of arrows lay next to it.

Joe slid one of the arrows out and held it up.

"Bonebuster," Joe said.

Latham's eyes bulged, and his face drained of color. At the same time, the cut on his forehead started to gush again.

Joe was stunned. "This was about some unpaid bills? You killed a man and tried to kill another because their agencies owed you money?"

Latham nodded, fear in his face because of Joe's tone.

"I ought to shoot you right here and leave you for the coyotes," Joe said icily. "Do you realize what you two idiots almost set in motion?" Sheriff O. R. "Bud" Barnum sat shell-shocked as Joe Pickett dropped the bow and arrows with a clatter on his desk after he had turned Rope Latham over to Deputy Reed.

"I got one of 'em," Joe said. "Spud Cargill is the other one and he got away. Rope shot the arrows and Spud cut Lamar's throat."

Barnum glared.

"Rope confessed everything on the way into town," Joe said. "I've got it on tape."

"Did you read him his rights?"

"That's on the tape."

"So where's Spud?"

"I don't know," Joe said. "Why don't you find him? You're the sheriff."

Barnum stared at Joe, his eyes darkening.

"I know you're busy with the Sovereigns and Melinda Strickland and 'Phase One' and all, but Spud's driving a tan pickup with a Bighorn Roofing logo on the door and Wyoming plates. It shouldn't be all that hard to find," Joe said. He put his hands on Barnum's desk and leaned toward him.

"This had nothing to do with any antigovernment movement in the county. It had to do with roofers who didn't get paid when they should have been paid." Joe glared at Barnum. "And it had a lot to do with sloppy police work by the sheriff's department."

Veins in Barnum's temples began to throb. But he said nothing.

"When you release Nate Romanowski, please tell him I'm looking forward to talking with him," Joe said. "That is, if your deputy is through hitting him with a hot shot."

Joe turned and walked out. That night, in bed, Marybeth shook Joe awake. When he opened his eyes, he found her staring at him.

"I'm sorry about last night and this morning," she said. "You didn't deserve it."

"Yes, I did. You were right," he said, his mood suddenly lifting. "It's okay. The tension level was pretty high around here."

She smiled, but stayed silent.

"What?" he asked, finally.

"Joe, sometimes you amaze me. Two antelope fawns?"

He laughed. Twenty-three In the morning, Joe confirmed Rope Latham's story with Carrie Gardiner. He found her standing in front of her house in a heavy coat, hugging herself with both arms. A big moving truck had backed up to her front door across the yard, and a crew was carrying furniture and boxes up a ramp from her house into the back of the trailer.

"I heard," Joe said, tipping the brim of his hat toward the moving truck. "Where are you going?"

"My parents live in Nebraska." She sighed. "Still on the farm. They've got room for all of us."

"I'm sorry to see you leave."

Her eyes flared briefly. "I'm not," she said.

"You heard about Rope?"

"Yes. The sheriff called this morning. Thank you for arresting him."

"Yup."

"Please tell me what happened," Carrie said.

She listened, staring at her winter boots, while Joe told her everything Rope had said.

When he was done, she nodded.

"I believe it," she said.

"You do?"

She nodded sadly. "I wish it didn't make sense, but it does. The roofers even called our house a couple of times to complain. I spoke with Spud Cargill once, and he told me about it, so I asked Lamar about it when he got home that night.

"Lamar was going through a real tough time last summer. I guess he realized he wasn't going any further in the Forest Service and it was really bothering him. He'd been applying for other districts for the past three years, and jobs at regional headquarters, but he wasn't getting any encouragement. I think he realized that he would always be a midlevel manager, and he didn't take it well at times. It was hard on me, and on the kids."

Joe listened, shifting his gaze occasionally to watch the team of movers emerge from the house with something and disappear into the back of the truck.

"I'm not excusing what Lamar did up there in the mountains," she said. "Shooting all those elk makes me sick to my stomach. But I know that his frustration level was really high. For the first time since we'd been married, he was snapping at me and the kids. He was drinking too much. I was thinking about leaving him just before, well, you know…"

"Carrie, what about the roofers?"

"Oh, yes." She flushed. "From what Lamar told me, he did a standard request for bids in the spring to get all the buildings shingled. Bighorn Roofing-Spud and Rope-had the best bid. Lamar said he gave them a verbal okay to start working, then submitted the paperwork to the regional office in Denver. He said that in the past, submitting the paperwork was just a formality.

"But this time, after a couple of months, the regional office sent him everything back and said he hadn't filled out a couple of the forms properly. Lamar was really angry when they did that, so he resubmitted everything and didn't tell the roofers about it."

"When was this?" Joe asked.

"I think it was about August," she said. "The work was just about done already, and the roofers were getting mad about having to front the Forest Service all of the materials and labor without getting paid. Then the regional office denied the request altogether, because they said Lamar had entered into a contract without their approval."

Joe shook his head.

"Lamar was fit to be tied over that one."

"I can believe that he would be," Joe said.

"They hung him out to dry," she said. "They didn't give one bit of consideration to what it would be like for him out here in the field. They didn't really care that he had to look people in the eye and tell them they wouldn't get paid for the work they did."

It was so… believable, Joe thought. And so frustrating. It didn't have to happen this way.

He thanked her and told her once again that he was sorry she was leaving.

As he approached his pickup, she called after him.

"Oh, Mr. Pickett-I didn't tell you who at regional headquarters kept sending back Lamar's request."

Joe turned.

"It was Melinda Strickland," she said bitterly. "The woman who thinks my name is Cassie." The combined law-enforcement agencies in and around Twelve Sleep County scrambled to find Spud Cargill, who was still at large. From the radio in his small office, Joe monitored their progress while writing an overdue report to his supervisor. A rookie deputy sheriff reported that Spud Cargill's empty pickup had been found near the Saddlestring landfill with the driver's-side door open and tracks in the snow indicating that Spud had run toward the two-lane highway. "The suspect's tracks end at the pavement," the deputy said. "He either had another car to climb into, or he stole one, or somebody picked him up on the highway. I don't know where in the hell he is." A citizen in town reported seeing someone who looked like Spud running across the Saddlestring High School football field, and the police were sent to check it out. It turned out to be the boys' basketball team running outdoor windsprints for punishment. An all-points bulletin was issued by Sheriff Barnum, and the Wyoming highway patrol set up roadblocks on all four highways out of Saddlestring to check drivers, passengers, and anything that looked suspicious. Barnum dispatched his deputies to Bighorn Roofing, Spud's residence (where he lived alone except for a caged badger in the garage), and the Stockman's Bar, where Spud liked to drink beer after work.

Spud Cargill could not be found. It had turned out to be a nice day for a manhunt, Joe observed through his window. After he had come home from seeing Carrie Gardiner, the wind had stopped, the sky had cleared, and the sun swelled bright and warm in the western sky. Water from the melting snow dropped like strings of glass beads from the eaves of the house and melted holes in the snow on the ground. The sound of running water through the outside drainpipes sounded like music to Joe. He loved water like a true Westerner. There was never enough of it. It pained him when the wind kicked up and blew the snow away. It seemed unfair.

He finished the report and e-mailed it to Terry Crump. He ended it by writing that since Rope Latham was in jail and Spud Cargill would no doubt soon be caught, the pressure that had been building in Twelve Sleep County should ease up.

At least he hoped so. For the first time in days, he didn't have a dull pain in his stomach.

He wished he could have been there when Melinda Strickland, Dick Munker, and Tony Portenson heard that the likely motive for the killing of Lamar Gardiner and the ambush of Birch Wardell was not crazed, organized, antigovernment hate, but anger at unpaid bills from federal agencies. Joe couldn't help but shake his head at that. He wondered if Munker and Portenson would simply sneak out of town now, and if Melinda Strickland would follow.

Then he could concentrate on something that mattered: April. "Joe, there's someone out front," Missy said from his office doorway. There was concern in her voice.

Joe had dozed off in his chair with his feet on his desk and his hat pulled down over his eyes. The week had worn him out.

He stood up and rubbed his face awake with his hands and looked at his mother-in-law through his fingers. Her face and hair were… perfect, the result of at least two hours under construction, he guessed. She wore an oversized camel-colored cashmere sweater, pearls, shiny black tight pants, and shoes with straps and stiletto heels. She was obviously not dressed for dinner at their house.

Then he remembered why he was suddenly awake. She stepped aside for him and he parted the curtains in the living room.

"Who is that man?" she asked. "He didn't knock on the door or anything. He's just sitting out there."

A battered and ancient snub-nosed Willys Jeep was outside, its grille and mesh-covered headlights leering over the top of the picket fence like a voyeur. Canvas from the shredded top hung in shreds inside the vehicle from a bent-up frame. Sitting on the hood of the Jeep, with his heavy boots resting on the front bumper, was Nate Romanowski. The setting sun, now dropping into a notch between two mountain peaks, backlit the visitor in a warm and otherworldly glow. The red-tailed hawk sat hooded on Romanowski's shoulder, making him look like a pirate with a parrot. The peregrine gripped Romanowski's fist, flaring his wings for balance.

"I don't know how long he's been out there," Missy said, fretting. "Marybeth and Sheridan will have to pass right by him to get to the house."

That's right, Joe remembered. Marybeth's picking Sheridan up from basketball practice.

"His name is Nate Romanowski," Joe said.

Missy gasped and raised her hand to her mouth. "He's the one who…"

"He didn't do it," Joe said bluntly.

Joe let go of the curtain and went to find his coat. Although the sun had warmed up the afternoon nicely, it would be much different when the sun dropped behind the mountains.

As he pulled his coat on, he noticed that Lucy had emerged from her bedroom and was standing next to Missy. It was a jarring sight, and he realized he'd done a double-take. Lucy was a miniature version of Missy Vankueren. The sweater, pants, pearls, and shoes she wore were identical to her grandmother's, except that the sweater was cotton and the pearls were fake. Even her swept-up hairstyle was the same.

Joe looked up for an explanation, and found Missy beaming.

"Isn't she adorable?" Missy gushed. "The outfit is a late Christmas present from me. We're going out to dinner tonight, my little granddaughter and me."

"Going out? Like that?" Joe asked, incredulous.

"Show him," Missy commanded.

Lucy swung her little hips and did a slow turn with her arms raised above her head. She looked and moved so much like Missy that Joe cringed.

"What did you do that for?" he asked, refraining from saying what in the hell because of Lucy.

Missy looked back, hurt.

"Come on, honey," she said, turning on her heel. "Your daddy doesn't appreciate style." Lucy turned as well, following Missy stride for stride toward the bathroom. Unlike Missy, though, Lucy looked over her shoulder as she entered the bathroom and winked at Joe. Lucy knew it was a joke, even if Missy didn't. Joe didn't know whether to laugh or run from the house. "I owe you," Nate said, as Joe approached.

"No, you don't."

Nate fixed his sharp eyes on Joe. "I asked you for two things and you did both of them. I knew I could trust you."

Joe stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked uncomfortably at the snow. "Forget it. I'm just real glad we found the guys."

"Is Spud Cargill still out there?" Nate asked.

"As far as I know."

Nate nodded and seemed to be thinking about that.

"Why? Do you know something?" Joe asked.

There was a hint of a smile. "I know just enough to be dangerous. I overheard a lot of things in that jail-snippets between Barnum and his deputies and between Melinda Strickland and Barnum. And I could tell what they were thinking by what they questioned me about. Things are in motion to get those Sovereigns out of here. The sheriff and Strickland were convinced I was one of them, you know. Dick Munker even tried to get me to admit I was a soldier for the militia types. That whole sick crowd is real disappointed to find out that all the Sovereigns are guilty of at this point is hating the federal government-which isn't a crime-and staying too many nights in a campground. They're trying like hell to pin something on those people up there."

"Maybe now things will ease off," Joe said, hopeful.

"Don't count on it."

"No," Joe said sternly. "It needs to happen."

A set of headlights appeared on Bighorn Road from the direction of town. Absently, Joe watched the car approach and the headlights pool wider on the freezing road. It was Marybeth, and Sheridan.

"My wife's home," Joe said. "Would you like to come in? It's getting cold out here."

Instead of answering, Nate studied Joe, his eyes narrowing.

"What?" he asked, annoyed.

"You really are a good guy, aren't you?"

Joe's shoulders slumped. "Knock it off."

"I'm not kidding around," Nate said softly. "I've spent most of my life around hypocrites and assholes. McLanahan and Barnum types. Most of them haven't had a thimbleful of character. So it's just kind of heartwarming to see that there are still some good guys left."

Joe was grateful for the darkness because he knew his face was flushing.

"Are you drunk, Nate?"

Nate laughed. "I had a few. After I saw what they did to my cabin."

"They trashed it, all right. Sheridan and I put a bunch of your stuff back in your house." The minute Joe said it he cringed, because he knew what was coming.

"See!" Nate exclaimed, raising his arm and turning it as if showing Joe off to his peregrine. "See what I mean? You are a good man. With a good wife and good children!"

After what seemed like forever to Joe, Marybeth had pulled off the road and parked her car next to the Jeep. She got out with an armful of groceries. Sheridan walked around the car, her eyes fixed on Romanowski and the hawks. Joe could tell she was entranced.

Joe introduced Marybeth and Sheridan to Nate Romanowski.

"I was just telling your husband what a nice family you have," Nate said. "I'm happy to find people like you."

Marybeth and Joe exchanged glances.

"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Romanowski…"

"Call me Nate," he interrupted.

"… Nate," Marybeth amended, "But I've got to get these things in and get dinner started."

Nate shook his head ruefully. "And get dinner started," he repeated. "That's lovely."

"Would you like to join us?" Marybeth asked.

"Please?" Sheridan pleaded. "I'd like to ask you some questions about falcons and falconry."

Everyone looked to Joe.

"I already invited him in," Joe grumbled. While Marybeth prepared dinner in the kitchen, Joe listened as Nate Romanowski discussed his birds with Sheridan in the living room. Nate spread newspaper on the floor and borrowed two chairs from the table for the birds to perch on. He lowered the birds to the tops of the chairs, where they perched facing backward with their tail feathers down the chairbacks. Missy had taken Lucy to town in the van for dinner. If Nate thought the sight of two identically dressed females with a fifty-something age difference was odd, he didn't say anything.

Nate and the falcons seemed to fill the living room, Joe thought. Although the birds were no more than twelve inches tall on the chairbacks, they projected a much larger aura. Like Nate himself, they seemed to be creatures of a different, wilder, and more violent world.

While Sheridan sat enraptured, Nate explained the accessories on the birds themselves, from the tooled leather hoods that covered their eyes but not their hooked beaks, to the long, thin leather jesses that hung from their ankles. The jesses, Nate said, were how the falconer kept a bird secured on his hand. Gently, he lifted the peregrine on his gloved fist and showed Sheridan how he twined the jesses through his fingers. The grip of the jess in his hand, he said, provided balance and stability for the bird and also prevented it from taking flight or walking up his arm. At the end of the jess was a swivel and a leash.

"What if it tries to fly?" Sheridan asked.

"Then the bird just kind of flops around like a chicken," Nate answered. "You'd be surprised how much lift they've got and how much power. A scared falcon flapping his wings can almost pull you off your feet."

He held the peregrine close to Sheridan, letting her examine it.

"I feel sorry for it, having to wear that hood," Sheridan said, gently stroking the bird's breast with the backs of her fingers.

"Then let's get rid of it," Nate said, pulling two small strings and slipping the hood off.

The falcon cocked its head toward Sheridan, studying her with rapid, almost mechanical snaps of its head. The bird's eyes were preternaturally alert and piercing. Nate told Sheridan how those eyes worked, how they had more cell surface area inside than human eyes so they could see in the dark and catch movement, like a mouse, from more than a mile away.

"I've heard it said that if you look into a falcon's eyes you can see forever," Nate said softly, in his strange blunt cadence. "I've also heard it's bad luck, because looking into a falcon's eyes is like looking into your own black, murderous heart."

Sheridan's own eyes widened at that, and she looked to Joe.

Joe shrugged. "I've never heard either one of those."

Nate smiled mysteriously.

"One thing I do know is that you can tell the difference between a falcon that's wild and a falcon that's broken by the look in their eyes. I've seen it at aviaries and zoos. The falcons there look at you, but something is missing behind the stare."

After a moment, Sheridan said, "Why don't we put his hood back on?" And Nate did.

"How do you get these birds?" she asked.

"Some I trap them when they're young," he said, describing how he mountaineered on cliffs to find the aeries, or nests, to set the mesh webs. He would stay at the site, ready to pounce if a bird hit the trap. "Others I've rescued when they've been hit by a car, or shocked by high wires."

"Falconry is considered the sport of kings in some Middle Eastern countries," Joe added, nodding.

"How long can you keep them?" she asked.

"It's not how long you keep them. It's how long they decide to stay with you. They can fly away any time they want and never come back. So every time they come back, it's a precious gift."

"What do they hunt?"

Nate explained that while all falcons are hawks, not all hawks are falcons. He said that each bird had its particular specialty, and that falconers often chose the birds based on that. Red-tailed hawks, like the one on the chair, were best on rabbits and squirrels. Falcons were best on sage grouse, ducks, and pheasants-upland game birds. The mere silhouette of a falcon in the sky, he said, would make ducks on the water freeze or seek cover, because a duck in flight would be instantly intercepted and destroyed. Ducks knew the imprint of a falcon from birth, and knew to fear it.

"The peregrine, though, is unique: It will hunt just about anything. That's why peregrines are so prized, and why they were protected for so many years when it looked like they were going extinct. For a peregrine, its specialty is prey in general, and they can hunt ground game, upland game birds, or waterfowl.

"You can't just keep a raptor like a pet and be a true falconer," Nate said. "Falconry requires hours of patience, training, and communicating with your bird. The birds must be exercised daily and kept in top condition-to hunt well, and in case they leave. You have to think like a falcon, like a predator, but at the same time you can't dominate the bird. If you do that, you break it. If it's broken, it's ruined forever. It'll fly off for sure, and its defenses will never again be as sharp. You're imposing a death sentence on a falcon if you break it. So if you respect the bird, you'll work to keep that wild, sharp edge the bird naturally has."

Then he nodded toward a thick glove in his falconry bag.

"You want me to put that on?" Sheridan asked.

"Don't you want to hold the bird?"

"Dad, is it okay?"

Joe wasn't sure what to say. Sheridan's eyes were glowing, and Romanowski continued to smile inscrutably.

"Sure," Joe finally said.

Nate took off the hood and leveled his fist near Sheridan's gloved hand, and slightly swiveled his wrist, urging the falcon to step forward. It did, gracefully, and Sheridan's arm dipped a little from the weight of the falcon on her fist. Nate helped her wrap the jesses through her fingers and pulled them tight near the heel of her hand. It was an oddly intimate moment that made Joe squirm a little. Nate was a big man, with a soothing veneer that was somehow calming as well as magnetic. Sheridan was only eleven years old. As Joe studied the falconer, he sensed the same kind of natural, violent wildness under the surface that Nate described in his birds. Nate is a raptor, Joe thought. He's a hunter and a killer, and he lives closer to the earth than anyone I've ever known. In a way, Nate was terrifying. He could also be, Joe thought, a hell of an ally. To Joe's chagrin, Marybeth served meat loaf. It wasn't her fault that she had played to type this way and further entertained Nate's ideal fantasy of the Picketts-happily married, picket fence, loving family, Labrador, and now meat loaf for dinner-but that's how it looked.

Nate smiled happily and took a double portion. He moaned almost obscenely as he ate it, which caused Joe and Marybeth to stifle smiles of their own. No one had ever loved Marybeth's meat loaf quite so much, or so obviously. Sheridan picked at her food, spending most of her time either watching Nate or looking over her shoulder at the two birds on chairs in the living room.

The telephone rang and Marybeth left the table to answer it. After a beat, she handed it to Joe.

"Please hold for Melinda Strickland," Marybeth said, mocking what the secretary had told her.

Joe winced, and excused himself. He felt Nate's eyes on his back as he took the telephone into the living room.

After a moment, Strickland came on. "Joe!" She cried, "You got one of the bastards! Good work, Joe!"

"Thank you," he mumbled. He knew that both Marybeth and Nate were quietly listening at the table.

"Too bad he didn't have an accident on the way into town, though."

"Excuse me?"

"You know, too bad the guy didn't try to escape or something."

He knew what she meant, but he wanted her to actually say it. But she was too good a bureaucrat to admit anything outright.

"Is there any news on Spud Cargill?" he asked.

What she told him froze him to his spot. He found himself still standing, still holding the telephone to his ear, long after she had said goodbye and hung up. The dull pain in his stomach that had been with him for days reappeared, and once again he felt the tightening jaws of the vise. "What's wrong?" Marybeth asked as he sat back down on the table.

"Joe?"

He looked up. "They still haven't found Spud. Melinda Strickland said that someone thinks they saw him in a stolen truck on the way to Battle Mountain, and McLanahan said that a truck fitting that description ran his roadblock just a couple of hours ago."

"Didn't someone also say they saw him on the football field?" Marybeth asked skeptically.

"Yes."

"So why are you acting this way?"

Joe noted that Sheridan was watching him carefully.

Nate leaned back in his chair and he spoke in almost a whisper. "What this means is that Strickland and her FBI hit team can now go after the Sovereign compound. She can say that they're harboring a fugitive suspected of murdering a federal employee."

"I was thinking this thing was going to calm down," Joe said. "But Melinda Strickland is determined to prove there's a war on. And now she's got a much better reason to start it."

Marybeth instantly understood. "She wouldn't do that, would she?" Her eyes flashed. "April…" Joe walked Nate Romanowski to his Jeep in the dark. The sky was clear and gauzy with stars. The melting snow had frozen into a slick cold skin on the sidewalk and road.

Nate perched his falcons on the top of the backseat and secured the jesses to metal swivels he had installed on the framework for the purpose. Joe watched, his breath condensing into snaky wisps, his mind twenty miles away in the deep snow of Battle Mountain.

When he had secured the birds, Nate reached under his Jeep seat and pulled out a bundle that turned out to be a shoulder holster and his massive revolver. He looped a strap over his head and buckled it below his sternum. Another strap fit around his midsection. The curved black grip of the stainless-steel.454 Casull now offered itself to Joe.

"Why do you carry a gun like that?" Joe asked.

Nate smiled slightly. "Because I know how to use it and it's all I need. It gives me the mobility of a handgun but with more firepower and velocity. It's a Freedom Arms Model 83 with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. A hand cannon. I did my research and went to the factory in Freedom, Wyoming and paid twenty-five hundred for it. It shoots a 300-grain bullet and it can literally shoot through a car."

Joe whistled.

"Or I could fire into the trunk and hit the driver. If three bad guys were lined up, I could put a single slug through all of them. And I could do it from three hundred yards away."

Joe had been waiting for this moment. "I suppose you could even knock out the engine of an SUV driving down U.S. Highway 87 near Great Falls, Montana."

Nate turned and leaned against his Jeep, folding his arms across his chest. His uncommonly sharp eyes bored into Joe.

"Theoretically, yes," Nate said evenly. "That could happen. Now I really owe you."

"No, you don't, I told you that."

"Do you want me to get your little girl back?"

Joe paused, and thought. He was torn. The question wasn't unanticipated. Nate was well aware of the empty chair at the table, as they all were.

"We've got a lawyer working on it," Joe said. "That's our only recourse right now."

Nate didn't scoff, but his silence said enough.

"I worry about her, Nate. She's been abandoned once already, then taken away from her school. If you go in and grab her, she might be even more messed up. We love her too much to put her through that right now. Plus the fact that we would be facing kidnapping charges. The law isn't on our side in this."

Nate nodded. "You've thought about it."

"For days."

"Something bad is going to happen up there in that compound. I think we both know that."

Joe rubbed his eyes and sighed, and said nothing.

"Maybe something could happen to Melinda Strickland," Nate said.

Joe looked up, shocked. Nate was deadly serious. He had also crossed a line by threatening Strickland in front of Joe, who had a duty and obligation to take some kind of action. Nate knew all of this.

"Don't ever say anything like that to me again, Nate," Joe said, his voice low and hard.

Nate didn't react.

"Joe, thank you for dinner and the very nice evening. Your wife and daughter are wonderful. Sheridan is something special. I think she would make a good falconer."

Joe nodded, half-hearing Nate. His head was swimming with situations and consequences.

"I'll be available if you need me," Nate said. "Do you hear me, Joe?"

It seemed to have gotten much colder in the past two minutes, Joe thought.

"Joe?"

"I hear you." Twenty-four At the same time on Battle Mountain, a convoy of vehicles had driven up the road outside the Sovereign compound. As they approached the fence, their engines rumbling, Jeannie, Clem, and April had pulled back the curtain and watched through the trailer window. Clem doused all the lights so they could see out but not be seen.

There were either six or seven vehicles out there. As they came up the road, they turned toward the fence as if they were going to drive through it. But then four of the trucks stopped abreast of each other, their headlights flooding the snow between the road and the compound. The trailing vehicles parked behind the first row. Framed by the rising, glowing clouds of exhaust, the front row of trucks looked like they had risen from a cauldron. Their drivers were silhouetted: Jeannie could see Sheriff Barnum behind the wheel of his Blazer. A woman sat next to him holding a little dog in her arms. A bullhorn squawked, and someone asked for Wade Brockius.

Brockius had been outside his trailer, and he ambled toward the headlights.

"Stop where you are."

Spotlights from two of the vehicles came to life and bathed him in light.

Brockius stopped.

"This is Dick Munker of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have reason to believe that you're harboring a dangerous fugitive by the name of Spud Cargill, who is a murder suspect in an ongoing investigation. We would like your permission to conduct a thorough search of the premises."

Brockius raised his arm to block the spotlights from his eyes. His deep voice rumbled through the icy night. He didn't need a bullhorn.

"Permission denied. I don't know what you're talking about."

"We can show up with a court order tomorrow."

"That won't do you any good, Mr. Munker. There's nothing to be found. Mr. Cargill is not here. There are people here who would consider your forced intrusion to be an armed attack."

Wade Brockius paused, and lowered his arm, attempting to see the man with the bullhorn. "We know what happened at Waco, Mr. Munker. I know you were there. I remember your name. You were one of the snipers, as I recall. You were also on Ruby Ridge. You should be in federal prison, Mr. Munker."

Jeannie tried to look into the darkness around her, but her eyes were scalded by the headlights and spotlights. She knew there were armed Sovereigns behind trailers, in the brush, and in the trees. There were probably a half-dozen sets of crosshairs focused on the man with the bullhorn, and open sights trained on Sheriff Barnum.

Munker spoke through the bullhorn, although it wasn't really necessary. "All of the entrances and exits to this compound have been sealed off by deputies of the Twelve Sleep County sheriff's office and the FBI. You're trapped here, and Cargill has nowhere to run. We had planned to keep the power and telephone lines available as long as you were communicating and cooperating with us. But that doesn't appear to be what's happening."

Although Munker lowered his bullhorn to speak to someone else, his muffled voice could be heard saying "Turn off their lights, boys."

At that moment, the electricity was cut to the compound. Lights blinked out. Heaters whirred to a stop. Refrigerators ticked to silence. Almost immediately, the cold began to seep into the trailers.

Jeannie knew that all of the trailers and campers had full propane tanks in addition to a large community tank in the middle of the compound. There were gas powered generators as well as wireless telephones and transmitters hidden under tarps in the woods. So the power outage was simply symbolic, a way of showing who held the cards.

"We've got some musical entertainment lined up for you later, Mr. Brockius. I made it myself and it's one-of-a-kind. It's also on a continuous loop."

They had all seen the speakers above the trees, Jeannie knew, and they had expected something like this to happen eventually. Wade had prepared them.

"We have children here," Brockius said.

"Then you might want to reconsider your position," Munker had said. The contempt in his voice was palpable. "If you do reconsider, call me personally. That's why we kept your telephone line up. Just dial nine-one-one and the dispatcher will track me down day or night. Otherwise, I'll be back in the morning with the court order for Spud Cargill."

"I told you he's not here."

One by one, the vehicles backed up from the line and began to leave. The last remaining car was a dark SUV containing Dick Munker and a driver.

Jeannie knew what was happening. The good people of Saddlestring, along with the Feds, were trying to kick them out. Just like they had kicked her out before. To do so, they were going to make things as miserable as possible.

Her mouth curled into a snarl. Fuck them, she hissed. After Munker and the trucks left, it took hours for April to calm down. She asked why they hadn't given the men in the trucks what they wanted.

Clem told April to shut up, and Jeannie backhanded him across the mouth. Clem glared at Jeannie, then went outside for a while. When he came back, he was half-drunk and docile, and April was finally sleeping. Late that night, from inside a heavy black box under the base of a tree near Battle Mountain, there was a dull click. The click was so faint that it could not have been heard beyond a few feet away. Through the snow, two amber lights now glowed, and a digital tape began to spin. Heavy, double-insulated electrical wires crawled up from the box through the snow and were stapled fast on the trunk of the tree. A hundred feet away and twenty-four feet in the air, the two speakers crackled to life. The mountain silence yielded to a swinging back beat, tinny horns, and a young Wayne Newton singing: Danke schoen, darling, Danke schoen, Thank you for walks down Lover's Lane… Inside one of the ice-encrusted trailers within the compound, Jeannie Keeley sat bolt upright in her bed. She listened, and realized that the song was not part of her dream. She looked through the gloom toward the rear of the trailer where April slept. April's bed was of a thin fold-down design made of plywood veneer. When the girl tossed or turned, the bed creaked. It was creaking now.

The song finally ended. Within a few seconds, it started up again. The same song, "Danke Schoen," by Wayne Newton. This time the song was slightly louder than before. Clem, sleeping next to Jeannie on the double bed that they built each night by fitting the tabletop between the trailer's two bench seats, had not stirred. As the music increased in volume, April began to cry.

Jeannie was enraged. This was the first night that April had gone to sleep without crying. Since April had been back with her, Jeannie thought, there were lots of signs that she'd turned back into a baby. She had obviously been coddled. The girl cried about everything. April seemed to think that life was supposed to be easy, not tough. Jeannie knew better. April would learn. She would toughen up. She would have to, or else.

Jeannie had just about had it with the girl. There'd been times in the last few days when she wanted to drive April back to the Picketts' house and toss her out the door. It annoyed Jeannie to no end that April referred to the Pickett girls, Sheridan and Lucy, as her "sisters." Jeannie had even rehearsed a "Here, you can have her back" speech in her mind.

But when April slept, she was lovely. When April slept, Jeannie felt some of her motherly feelings come back. When April slept, the girl's face relaxed and gentled and looked like a photo Jeannie had seen of herself when she was nine. Which reminded Jeannie that April was hers. Now, though, there was this horrible music, music that was almost pleasant at first but that now was otherworldly, awful, and gruesomely out of place.

"Why do they keep playing that song over and over again?" April asked from her bed. Her voice was tiny and rough from crying.

" 'Cause they're trying to get rid of us, honey," Jeannie answered. Danke schoen, auf wiedersehen, Danke schoen… The song started up again, as soon as it was over. Jeannie had heard it six times now. Again, it was louder. The bass beat reverberated through the metal frame of the trailer, sounding to Jeannie like the devil's own heartbeat.

"Why do they keep playing it again and again? Can you make them stop?" April said.

Another sound emerged, layered beneath the snappy tune of "Danke Schoen." The first hints of it were distant: A knife being honed on a sharpening steel. There was a slight pop and the sound of tearing, like fabric being ripped, accompanied by a high-pitched, otherworldly squeal that set Jeannie's teeth on edge. April cried harder, her body shaking. The squealing was now ear-piercing. It began to overwhelm the Wayne Newton song.

"You know what that is?" Clem said, now awake. "That's a rabbit being skinned alive."

Jeannie didn't ask him how he knew that.

Finally, it stopped. The rabbit panted shallowly, then died with a death rattle.

April was now shaking, her hands covering her ears, her eyes closed tight.

Then the brassy music started up again, louder. Then the background sound of the knife being sharpened. Danke schoen, darling Danke schoen, Thank you for walks down Lover's Lane…