To Joe, it was a tour de force of smoke and misdirection. Reed was right. Brenda had coached Eldon on what to say, but Eldon had fouled it up so she had to step in and take over. Brenda was running the show and she no doubt ran the family. Now he knew what he was dealing with.
“Even in his condition, he wanted to come into town with us and see April,” Brenda said, tears forming in her eyes. “He wanted to make sure she was okay, but I told him to stay.”
“Why?” Dulcie asked her.
“Because I know how you people could stack the deck against him,” Brenda said, narrowing her eyes again. “He’s on pain meds and you could get him to say something and twist it back around on him later.”
“We’d never do that,” Reed said defensively.
“
He
would,” Brenda said, pointing at Joe. “I saw how he railroaded Bull right out of our outfitting business.”
Joe said, “I caught him and Cora Lee with a dead six-by-six elk in the back of his pickup three days before the season opener. How is that railroading?”
Brenda Cates ignored the question, and this time Reed didn’t glare at Joe for talking.
She said, “Do you want to know what I think happened to April? I know you probably don’t want to hear it because you all have your sights set on my Dallas, but I thought you might be interested anyway.”
“What’s that, Brenda?” Reed asked. Joe could tell by the set of the sheriff’s jaw that he was trying hard to remain civil.
Brenda looked around, as if inviting everyone else in the room into her conspiracy theory. She lowered her voice and said, “I think April took up with another man—maybe another cowboy. She has the looks, she could pick anyone she wants and they’d go with her. I think she did it to rub Dallas’s nose in it, hoping he’d want to get back together with her. But she picked the wrong man to make Dallas jealous. Maybe that cowboy figured out what she was up to and lost his temper.
“Either that,” Brenda continued, raising her hand and showing two fingers, “or she was hitchhiking her way back home and she got picked up by the wrong people. It could have been just as simple as that. Didn’t I hear that she didn’t have her purse or ID on her?”
Reed nodded.
“Maybe that’s because the people who beat her, robbed her as well. And they probably left her for dead out there.”
Reed and Dulcie looked skeptical.
Brenda pressed on. “I hope you don’t go at this thing with blinders on. You’ve got to consider other possibilities.”
“We’ll consider them all,” Reed said. “But it just seems more likely she was with someone she knew.”
“It wasn’t Dallas.”
“We get that,” Reed said.
“It could have been anyone,” Brenda said fervently. “It could be someone you’d never suspect. It could’a been those other buckle bunnies she was with. Or it could’a been someone local who picked her up on the highway and offered her a ride to town. I’ve seen some strange people driving around on the highways. Who knows what they’re looking for. Maybe a young, pretty girl wearing cowboy boots?”
Convinced she’d made her point, Brenda said, “There’s another reason why I didn’t want Dallas to come here with us.”
Reed arched his eyebrows and said, “Yes?”
“There’s nothing more vengeful than a woman scorned,” Brenda said. “If she regained consciousness, I wouldn’t put it past her to say Dallas was responsible. That way she could get back at him once and for all.”
At that moment, the room seemed to turn red to Joe. He bit his lower lip with his teeth and looked away so that he wouldn’t go after both Brenda and Eldon.
“You have interesting theories,” Reed said. “And don’t think we don’t appreciate you coming in on your own to talk with us.” His words sounded hollow.
Dulcie said, “I hope you don’t mind if I come out and talk with you again and ask some follow-up questions. Plus, I’d like to meet Dallas. I’ve heard a lot about him.”
Joe said, “Like this isn’t the first girl he’s been around who ended up beaten and dumped.”
Eldon’s face went white while Brenda rotated her bulk in the chair and stabbed a finger toward Joe.
“My Dallas had nothing to do with that Tibbs girl. Nothing!”
She turned back to Reed. “He has no right to say that to us.”
“You’re right,” Reed said, looking witheringly at Joe.
“This is what I mean,” Brenda said, gathering herself onto her feet. “We try to do the right thing and this is what happens.”
Eldon stood in a single motion, but never took his cold, dead eyes off Joe. Joe stared right back.
Dulcie moved quickly and stood between them.
“We’re sorry,” she said to Brenda. “I hope you can understand that Joe is upset right now. If something like that had happened to your daughter . . .”
Brenda nodded. She said, “If you need to talk to us, just make sure to call first. Out at our place, we’re always on the watch for poachers and trespassers. Eldon and Bull are known to shoot first and ask questions later.”
Eldon gestured toward Joe and said, “If you bring him with you, there’ll be trouble.”
“I won’t. And I’ll call first,” Dulcie said, looking down at her notebook. Joe could tell she was angry.
—
A
FTER THE
C
ATESES HAD LEF
T
, Sheriff Reed said to Joe, “That was real smooth.”
Joe shrugged and waited for more. Instead, Reed wheeled over to his window and parted the blinds. His office overlooked the parking lot.
Eldon and Brenda were in the cab of their huge SUV, Eldon behind the wheel. The vehicle was old enough that it still had the name
SUBURBAN
on it, and not the revamped
YUKON XL
that Chevrolet had taken when they rechristened the exact same vehicle with a less controversial brand. The man stared blankly ahead while Brenda reamed him out, jabbing him in the arm with the same finger she’d pointed at Joe.
“I’d give my right arm to hear what they’re saying,” Dulcie said.
After five minutes, the truck backed out of the lot and pulled away.
“They’re gone,” Reed said.
“There are so many holes in their story, I don’t know where to start,” Dulcie said. “Is it possible for a man with cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder to drive fifteen hundred miles across the country?”
“It was obvious Brenda wanted Eldon to tell the story,” Reed said. “She coached him and set him loose. But he’s too damned dumb to keep his days or his story straight. I don’t know whether to believe that rattlesnake story or not.”
“They’re lying,” Joe said.
Reed said to Joe, “I know how it looks. But we’ve got to build a box around Dallas. It shouldn’t take too long to establish if and when he was injured and when he got back. There’s obviously a video of his ride, and we should be able to find credit card receipts for fifteen hundred miles’ worth of gas. We’ll see if he’ll consent to a doctor going out there. Plus, we don’t have any of April’s lab results yet or the tech report on the samples taken from where we found her. We might even find Dallas’s DNA on her, which destroys their story.”
Dulcie snapped her notebook closed. She said, “What is it with their attitude toward us? The county is filled with rural people. We don’t look down on anyone.”
“That’s the way they are,” Reed said. “Brenda, especially. She’s got a chip on her shoulder and always has. Something about a land deal her father got screwed out of. I don’t know the details.”
“I don’t care about the details,” Joe said. “Dallas Cates is guilty as hell.”
“But you are
not
to get any further involved in the investigation,” Dulcie said, pointing her finger at him. “You already made them mad. If this looks like an angry father going after an innocent kid, it blows up the prosecution.”
Joe looked over at Reed. He didn’t need to say it again.
“We’ll nail the bastard,” Reed said. “And maybe we’ll charge Eldon and Brenda with obstruction and being accessories to the crime. And if April dies . . .”
Joe cringed.
Reed said, “Sorry. You know where I was going with that. This is why you need to step aside.”
—
A
S
J
OE AND
D
ULCIE
left Reed’s office, she put her hand on his shoulder.
“How is Marybeth holding up?”
“Better than can be expected,” Joe said. “I’m waiting for her to call from Billings.”
“Give her my best.”
“I will.”
“We’ll get him, Joe.”
He looked at her and said, “You better.”
“I wasn’t kidding about you staying out of this,” she said. “If I need to go all the way to the governor, I will.”
He nodded, but he didn’t commit.
“And you shouldn’t get Nate Romanowski involved, either. In fact, I’d suggest you not tell him until we’ve got Dallas behind bars. The last thing we need around here is Nate’s brand of justice.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Joe said. “He’s gone straight.”
“Riiiight,”
she said, drawing out the word.
—
W
HILE
J
OE WAS CLAMPING
on his hat to go outside to his pickup and Daisy, Dulcie put her hands on her hips.
“Do you think there’s anything to Brenda’s denials?” she asked.
“No.”
“She’s right about one thing, though. We need to look beyond Dallas. We need to consider this other mystery cowboy or even the hitchhiking theory. And we need to be open to any other kind of idea, whether we heard it from Brenda Cates or not.”
Joe didn’t respond.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” she said. “We need to verify Brenda’s story and track down where April has been for the past month—who she was with, what rodeos she attended, all of that. We need to verify when Dallas was injured—if he was—in Houston. And I need to talk with Dallas himself, without his mother in the room.”
Joe nodded.
“Of course, if April recovers, she can tell us who did it, even though Brenda tried pretty hard to discount that even before it happens,” she said.
“Which is why her son is guilty as hell,” Joe said.
J
oe sat sullenly in his pickup with his phone in his hand on the outer circle of Saddlestring High School, waiting for Lucy to come out. He was midway in a long line of parents in pickups and SUVs who were waiting for their teenagers to emerge. Even though, officially, he was prohibited from using his state pickup to transport family members, it seemed like the least of his worries at the moment.
He re-litigated the scene from Sheriff Reed’s office the hour before, trying to open himself up to the possibility that Dallas had nothing to do with April’s injuries. He mulled over Brenda’s theories. A mystery cowboy? A stranger picking up hitchhikers? He couldn’t square the circle.
He recalled how relentlessly Brenda and Eldon had defended their son. It bothered him on a couple of levels. Although it could be expected that parents would protect their own, it seemed not to have even occurred to them that Dallas could be responsible for the crime. They simply refused to believe it, which made them less than credible. To have such an unshakable belief that Dallas was innocent reminded Joe of other parents he’d encountered over the years: couples who attacked teachers because of their child’s failing grades, or coaches because their child was a poor athlete, or
him
because he’d given a citation to their boy for fishing without a valid license.
For some parents, their offspring were perfect beings. It was a cancer on society, he thought, and it was getting out of control. The Cateses were the worst example of it he’d encountered.
He grinned cruelly to himself when he imagined their reaction when Dallas was convicted and sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins.
Oh,
he thought,
the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth . . .
—
M
ARYBETH HAD SENT
a series of cryptic texts while Joe waited.
Landing at the trauma center now.
Doctors evaluating her in the ICU.
Still hasn’t regained consciousness.
Good doctors, thank God.
Did you remember to pick up L?
He’d responded:
Yup.
—
S
TUDENTS BEGAN TO POUR
out of the front doors of the school moments after the bell rang. Groups of upperclassmen came out and turned for the parking lot and their cars. Tenth graders and those who didn’t have vehicles searched the line of cars for their rides.
Joe waited, and waited some more. No Lucy.
Only after he had raised his phone to call her did she come out. She wasn’t alone.
Joe had been cursed with three attractive daughters. They stood out in a crowd. Especially Lucy. She was blond, lithe, lively, and stylish. He cringed when he was in a public place with her and saw the looks males gave her, but he understood. She was not as studious as Sheridan or as brooding as April, and she’d come into her own as a genuinely warm personality who looked at the bright side of every situation. Marybeth had once said that Lucy seemed to move across the earth in her own personal sunbeam.
And she did so slowly, Joe thought as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Lucy was a girl without urgency, and she seemed to float through life at her own smiling but unhurried pace.
With her was Noah After Buffalo, her debate club partner. Lucy wore black leggings and knee-high boots with her golden hair cascading over the shoulders of her tight down coat.
Noah was a Northern Arapaho whose parents had recently moved off the reservation and into town. He was smart and polite and seemed to have grown a foot taller in the last few months. He was a year older than Lucy and had his own battered pickup. Sometimes he brought her home after school. Marybeth liked him, and Joe tolerated him as much as he tolerated any male in the vicinity of his daughters.
Lucy and Noah walked closer together than Joe would have liked, and he saw Lucy look over and scan the remaining cars for Marybeth’s van. When she saw Joe’s green pickup, she mouthed,
“My dad is here”
to Noah, who waved.
Joe waved back, and Lucy separated from Noah and made her way toward his pickup. But before she did, she reached back and squeezed Noah’s hand behind her back in an intimate gesture.
“I saw that,” Joe said as Lucy slid into the passenger side and Daisy greeted her by pressing her head under Lucy’s chin.
“Oh, Dad,” Lucy said, vigorously scratching Daisy until the dog moaned.
He thought:
One daughter took up with a cowboy. Another is taking up with an Indian.
Joe wasn’t sure what to make of that.
—
A
S THEY PULLED OUT
,
Lucy said, “Why isn’t Mom here? Not that I mind that you pick me up, but . . .”
She studied him and apparently sensed that bad news was coming. He could see it in her eyes. She was intuitive like that, and had the ability to read people in a way Joe never could. He attributed it to all the years that Lucy had hung back and observed family interactions from the standpoint of the youngest.
He said, “The sheriff’s office responded to a call today that a girl had been badly beaten and left by the side of a road. Lucy, it was—”
“April,” Lucy said, tears filling her eyes. “Is she okay?”
Joe took a deep breath and told Lucy all he knew, in workmanlike fashion. Lucy listened without comment, but the tears kept coming. She dried her cheeks with the back of her hand. He finished by telling her that Marybeth said the doctors were good.
“Maybe she’ll be okay,” Lucy said. “One thing about April—she’s tough. Sometimes that’s scary, like when she’s mad at me or thinks I stole her boots or something, but in this case it might get her through.”
Joe almost smiled. He recalled the incident a year before when April had launched across the dinner table at Lucy for borrowing her best cowboy boots. Later, they had been found under April’s bed. Lucy, to her credit, hadn’t backed down.
“So it’s you and me,” Joe said. “We can stop and get something to eat in town or I can fix you something at home for dinner.”
“What?” Lucy asked. “Red meat and bread?”
“What’s wrong with that?” He knew he had plenty of elk steaks in the freezer.
“Let’s get pizza.”
Joe nodded.
—
J
OE ASKED
L
UCY
,
“When was the last time you heard from April? You’re the only one in the family she really communicated with.” They were making the eight-mile drive from Saddlestring to his rural state-owned home on Bighorn Road. The warm pizza was in a box on the seat between them. Strings of drool hung from Daisy’s mouth.
“A week ago, I guess,” Lucy said. “She posted a photo of herself in a bikini by a swimming pool. It was at some hotel in a big city.”
April had blocked both Marybeth and Sheridan from her Facebook and Twitter pages. Only Lucy was allowed to follow her.
“Can you be more specific?” Joe asked.
“It was in Texas somewhere.”
“Houston, maybe?”
“That sounds right. But she didn’t post much of anything beyond the photo. She never does—there are just lots of photos of her and Dallas doing cool things. I think she wanted to impress me. You know, goofing around in airports, partying with cowboys. Selfies, you know.”
Joe grunted. Then: “Did April tell you she and Dallas Cates had broken up?”
“What?”
He told her what Brenda Cates had said.
“A month ago?” Lucy said. “No way. If that had happened I’d know about it even if she didn’t tell me directly. She wouldn’t keep posting photos on her page of the two of them if it was over. April is strange, but she isn’t crazy. If they’d broken up—and especially if he’d broken up with
her
—the world would know it by now. She would have started up an ‘I Hate Dallas Cates’ site.”
“If they did break up, do you think April would come back here?” Joe asked.
Lucy shrugged and said, “I never know what April will do next.”
After a beat, she said again, “No way April and Dallas broke up.”
Joe said, “I believe you.”
—
T
HERE WAS
a white late-model pickup parked at Joe’s house with two people sitting inside. They were obviously waiting for him to arrive. The vehicle had U.S. government plates.
Joe moaned.
“Who is that?” Lucy asked.
“I call them the sage grouse twins,” Joe said. “Go ahead and take Daisy and the pizza inside. I’ll be in shortly, after I talk to them.”
—
A
NNIE
H
ATCH
of the Bureau of Land Management and Revis Wentworth of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waited for Lucy and Daisy to enter the house before they got out of their pickup. Joe remembered that Wentworth had a thing about dogs—one had bitten him once on a local ranch he was visiting and now he insisted that he wouldn’t get out of his vehicle until all canines were secured.
Hatch and Wentworth were members of the Interagency Sage Grouse Task Force (ISGTF), which had been created by the federal government two years earlier to oversee state efforts to manage the species. Governor Rulon had loudly objected to the creation of the task force and had threatened to lock up any federal government employees who entered his state, but he’d eventually acquiesced when Washington threatened to withhold highway repair and Medicare funds. An agreement had been reached that the task force would keep the governor’s office informed as to their activities and findings and that they’d restrict their jurisdiction to the public lands of the state. That meant literally half of Wyoming, though, and the governor’s feelings about
that
situation were well known.
Joe liked Annie Hatch just fine. She was in her mid-thirties, pleasant, and friendly in just a mildly bureaucratic way. She had long, curly brown hair and an athletic build, and she dressed in an “outdoor girl” style: jeans, hiking boots, fishing shirts, fleece jackets. Her personal car was a Prius and she taught yoga classes in the evenings. Unlike Wentworth, who resided in Denver and was renting a room at the Holiday Inn in Saddlestring, Annie lived in a small house in town and was a member of the community.
“Hey, Joe,” she said as she got out of the pickup.
“Annie,” Joe said. “What brings you here?”
“Sage grouse.”
“Imagine that,” Joe said wearily.
Revis Wentworth got out and cast a cautionary look toward the front door of the Pickett home.
“Daisy is inside and she’s harmless,” Joe said to him.
“Supposedly, so was the dog that bit me. I needed eleven stitches,” Wentworth said back.
Joe shrugged.
Wentworth said, “We got a report that there’s been a massacre on BLM land.”
Wentworth was slight, serious, and more than a little in love with his position, Joe thought. He was pale and wore black-framed hipster glasses. Joe had never seen him smile or make a joke. Wentworth always wore a sport jacket, but kept it unbuttoned so the people he met could see the semiauto hanging from a shoulder holster underneath. As one of 250 special agents for the USFW, he was authorized to carry a weapon.
“Yup,” Joe said, gesturing toward the foothills to the west. “Lek Sixty-four. I counted twenty-one dead birds.”
“My God, an entire lek,” Hatch said, covering her open mouth with her hand as she gasped. “That’s horrible.”
“Were you going to inform ISGTF about it at any point?” Wentworth asked. He pronounced the acronym “Izg-Tiff.”
“Probably.”
“Is there some reason you didn’t call right away?”
“By the time I had thought about it, I checked my watch and it was already after five,” Joe said. It was a dig, but it was also true.
“You have my cell phone number,” Wentworth said.
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Please,” Hatch said, stepping between them. “Let’s settle this later. We’re talking about an entire lek of sage grouse.”
“This is nothing more than a provocation,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. Joe eyed him carefully to determine that he was talking about the slaughter and not about him.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it yet,” Joe said, sidling past the special agents so that he was positioned to open his gate and go inside. He hoped they would let him. He said, “I gathered evidence and took a bunch of photos. I’ve got spent shotgun shells, tire tracks, and maybe even a DNA sample. It looked to me like a couple of yahoos stumbled onto those birds and went postal. We’ll get ’em.”
“Locals, no doubt,” Wentworth said with disdain.
“Probably.”
“You’ll need to turn over all the items you found so we can send them to our forensics lab,” Wentworth said.
“I’m sending them to our own lab in Laramie on Monday,” Joe said, annoyed with Wentworth’s attitude. “They’re the best when it comes to wildlife crimes.”
“Do you want me to go over your head?” Wentworth asked, arching his eyebrows.
“Go ahead,” Joe said with a flash of anger. Then he took a breath and said, “Revis, why can’t we talk to each other like a couple of adults? Why do you need to act like the federal alpha dog? I know how to do my job, and we’re just talking about sage grouse here.”
It was another shot.
“Just sage grouse,”
Wentworth repeated, as if he couldn’t believe Joe’s insolence. “I suppose if you spend every day with hunters and dead animals, a few dead birds don’t seem like much. Did you forget the entire population is on the brink?”
Hatch put her hand on Wentworth’s shoulder and said to Joe, “There’s no reason we can’t work together on this, is there?”
“No, of course not. By the way, how did you find out about the incident?”
“Someone called our tip line,” Wentworth said.
“Who?”
“It was anonymous.”
“Male? Female? Age? That area up there where I found the birds isn’t a place where someone would just happen by.”
“I can’t give you any of that without authorization,” Wentworth said, looking over the top of his hipster glasses. “But we need you to take us up there to Lek Sixty-four.”
“Really?”
“We don’t want to get lost. You can guide us there.”
“There you go again,” Joe said. “Giving me another order I’m going to ignore.”