Cold Wind (20 page)

“So they don’t know where Bud is, either?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I can only imagine the scene when McLanahan tells Dulcie Schalk he’s misplaced the star witness.”

“What do they have if they don’t have Bud?”

Joe shrugged. “They may not have the airtight case they thought they had. I could see Hand blowing it wide open.”

“They still have his statements, though?”

“I assume so. We don’t know what he said, but we can assume it’s pretty bad for Missy. But without Bud . . .”

“Dulcie wouldn’t hide him, would she?” Marybeth asked. “From what you described, it sounds like he packed up for a few days. It’s not like someone kidnapped him and took him away?”

“There were no signs of a struggle,” Joe said. “I doubt kidnappers would tell him to grab his toothbrush before they took him somewhere.”

“I’ll bet Dulcie will be in full panic mode,” she said. “Same with the sheriff.”

Joe agreed.

“What if we find him first?” she asked.

Joe said nothing. He wasn’t sure he liked where she seemed to be headed. “What if we did?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. But maybe he ran because he’s been making this up all along and his conscience got the best of him? Maybe he’d like a chance to recant his part in the frame-up?”

“Marybeth,” Joe said, reaching out and touching her hand. “There’s still the rifle. And if Earl really was in the process of divorcing her . . . well, it still doesn’t look very good.”

“How do they know he was going to leave her?” she asked. “Was that from Bud, too?”

Joe shrugged. He hadn’t thought of that.

“Where would Bud go to hide out?” she asked. “We know him pretty well. You know him. Where would he go?”

The next day,
after checking the licenses and stamps for a group of antelope hunters from Texas, Joe drove across the break lands to the home of Bob and Dode Lee of the Lee Ranch, which bordered Missy and Earl’s property. Cumulus clouds scudded across the expanse of sky as a cold front approached, as if fleeing the state for warmer climates. As he approached the ranch headquarters, Joe was cognizant of the tops of the wind turbines peeking over the southern horizon, their tri-blades turning. There was the snap of fall in the air, and he’d had to scrape frost from his windshield that morning before leaving his sleeping house.

After the arraignment and posting of bail, Marcus Hand had driven Missy home. According to Marybeth, Hand had sent for a large team of paralegals and additional lawyers from his Jackson Hole office. Team Missy, as Hand had taken to calling it, would occupy most of the bedrooms of the ranch house to prepare for the next stage of the trial. Cable news satellite trucks rumbled into Saddlestring, and a half-dozen legal reporters from newspapers as far away as New York and Los Angeles booked rooms at the Holiday Inn.

There had been no news in regard to either Bud Longbrake or Alisha Whiteplume. Joe had placed a call to the sheriff’s office to check on Alisha and gotten Sollis, who said they were giving it another day or two before opening an inquiry. When Joe asked why, Sollis said he didn’t appreciate the implication and hung up on him.

Unlike the spectacular
stone headquarters on the adjoining Thunderhead Ranch once occupied by Missy and Earl Alden and now serving as command central for Team Missy, the Lees’ place was clapboard, tired, and utilitarian. The once white house needed a coat of paint and the old gray shingles on the roof were warped and cracked from sun and weather. It sat in a wind-whipped grove of Austrian pines—the only standing trees for miles—on the high prairie at the end of a rough two-track. The trees all leaned to the south. The windward sides were flattened and the southern sides were bushy and gnarly as if they’d all been shot in the back and were reaching out with branch-hands to break their fall. Joe thought the word “hardscrabble” would have had to be invented to describe the Lee Ranch if it didn’t already exist.

The ranch compound consisted of the house, three battered metal Quonsets that served as garages, an oversized peeling wooden barn, and an intricate set of corrals and chutes built with crooked poles sunk into the hard ground and linked with haphazard railings. Hereford cattle and bony horses fed on piles of hay scattered across the ground within the corrals and looked up at the approaching green pickup.

He didn’t know the Lees well. They weren’t the kind of ranchers who participated in the community or in public meetings, politics, or even the state livestock organizations. They kept to themselves, making no demands when it came to problem game animals or hunters, for that matter. Joe had heard the rumor that Bob Lee once took care of elk feeding on his hay by mowing them down with a .30-06 rifle and burying the carcasses with his front-end loader, but there’d never been a call or report on him.

Hollow-eyed mixed-breed ranch dogs came boiling out from beneath the front porch as Joe got out. He quickly jumped back in his pickup next to Tube, who was alarmed but not exactly motivated to protect him from the snarling pack. The dogs circled his pickup as if they’d treed it, snapping their teeth in the air and yapping. It was obvious there were people around; the lights were on inside and five vehicles—two battered ranch pickups, a later model Jeep Cherokee, and two low-slung restored muscle cars from the 1970s—were parked around him. Joe waited for someone inside the house to come out and call the dogs back.

Finally, a woman pushed through the front screen door and held it open, as if unsure if she wanted to come all the way out or go back in. She was old and heavy, wore a faded tent-like dress and bright yellow Crocs on her feet and her iron-colored hair was in curlers. She squinted at Joe’s pickup with her mouth clamped tight, and Joe slid his window down and said, “Mrs. Lee, can you call off your dogs so I can talk with you and Bob?”

He saw Dode Lee turn to someone inside and mouth “game warden” as if answering a question. To Joe, she said, “They won’t hurt you, those dogs. They haven’t bit anyone in years.”

“I believe you,” Joe said cheerfully, not sure if he believed her but reminding himself that one-third of his job description fell under the heading
Landowner Relations
, “but I’d appreciate it if you’d call them back.”

Again, Dode Lee turned to address someone inside. “He’s scared of the dogs,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then back to Joe, “What is it you need?”

“Just to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

“He says he wants to talk to us,” Dode reported. Then back to Joe: “What about?”

A large man with shoulder-length black hair and a basketball-sized beer belly shouldered past Dode and yelled angrily at the dogs. He was wearing greasy denim jeans and a black Aerosmith T-shirt. He also wore Crocs, which Joe thought odd. The dogs cringed at his voice, one yelped as if struck, and they crawled back to the house. Joe knew how dogs behaved around someone who had severely beaten them, and this pack was a case study. He swung out and shut his door on Tube, who, now that he was safe and the dogs were gone, started barking at them. That was the corgi part in him, Joe thought with regret.

“Thanks,” he said to the man. “They’re obviously scared of you.”

“Good reason for that,” the man said.

The big man was much younger than Dode, although Joe could see some resemblance in his rough wide face and unfriendly manner. He thought he must be her son.

“Are you Wes Lee?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Joe Pickett.”

“I know. I heard of you.” He said it in a way that suggested Wes wasn’t impressed at all.

“Mind if I talk to your folks for a couple minutes?”

Wes glanced at his mother, who looked back without expression. “Make it quick,” he said. “We’re kind of busy today.”

Joe nodded. He didn’t question what it was they were busy doing. “Mind if I come in?”

“If it’s about Earl Alden,” Dode said, “we don’t have much good to say.”

“It’s about him,” Joe replied, trying to see past Wes, who hadn’t moved his bulk from the top of the porch steps to let Joe by. “Your neighbor.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” Dode Lee said.

“Mom,” Wes said to Dode, while eyeing Joe suspiciously, “the less you talk to law enforcement, the better. They can twist your words around and use it against you.”

“So you’ve had some experience in that regard,” Joe said breezily, stepping around Wes, trying not to show he was wary of the son’s bulk, size, and attitude.

“That was years ago,” Wes said, fully aware of his effect on Joe and only reluctantly letting him by.

Joe nodded and made a mental note to himself to look up Wes Lee’s rap sheet after the interview. Joe had spent years trying to read people the first time he encountered them in the field, and he had the strong impression Wes owned a mean streak a mile wide.

 

 

The home was dark
and cluttered and smelled of cigarette smoke, motor oil, and dogs. The reason for the oil smell was obvious. An engine block sat on a stained tarp in the middle of the living room. Tools were scattered around it. Joe wondered why the work wasn’t being done in one of the three outbuildings, but he didn’t ask about it. People’s homes were people’s homes.

Bob Lee sat in a worn lounge chair at the back of the room next to a tall green oxygen bottle. Despite the yellowed tube that ran from the tank to a respirator that clipped under his nose, Bob held a lit cigarette between two stained fingers. Joe glanced at the decal on the side of the tank that read:

The television was on:
The Price Is Right
. Lee had a large frame but looked sunken in on himself, as if his flesh had collapsed over his skeleton. He had large rheumy eyes, thin lips, and folds of loose skin that lapped over his shirt collar.

“What’s the game warden want with us?” Bob asked, his voice both scratchy and challenging.

Joe removed his hat and held it in his hands. Wes came back in and sat on his engine block with his big hands on his knees and looked up at Joe expectantly. Dode hung back, not far from the door, as if she needed to be close to it in case she had to escape.

Joe said, “I was just wondering if all of you were around last week. Sunday and Monday, to be specific. I was wondering if you saw anything unusual on the day Earl Alden was killed, since his place is next to yours.”

Bob commenced coughing. It took a moment for Joe to realize the old man had started to laugh, but the phlegm in his throat made him cough instead. Wes looked over at his father, not alarmed by the reaction. Dode tut-tutted from her place near the door. Joe found it interesting that both wife and son deferred completely to the old man and waited for him to speak. Especially Wes.

“Unusual like what?” Bob asked.

“You know,” Joe said, “vehicles you didn’t recognize on the county roads. Strangers about, or even people you know who were out and about on a Sunday.”

“Maybe like equipment trucks and construction vehicles?” Bob asked, sarcasm tainting his tone. “Like hundreds of goddamned wind farm people driving through our ranch raising dust and scattering our cattle? Like engineers and politicians driving through our place like they owned it? Like that?”

Joe said nothing.

“That’s just a normal day around here,” Bob said. “It’s been like that for a year. And now we have
the noise
.”

Joe said, “The noise?”

“Open that kitchen window, Dode,” Bob commanded.

Mrs. Lee left her place near the door and entered the kitchen. The big window over the sink faced south, and she unlatched it and slid it open.