Force of Nature (25 page)

“I’m surprised,” he said, but his tone wasn’t. He said, “There must be some kind of mistake.”

She turned back to him and shrugged.

“Maybe you can try again,” he said. “Maybe you entered the wrong name.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Try it again,” he said. “Just for grins.”

She didn’t want to but had no good reason to refuse other than reluctance to turn her back on him again. But if it would move things along and get him out of there …

While she tapped the keys he said, “So where is your husband these days? Still out
investigating
?” The last word simmered with sarcasm and she mistyped “W-h-i-t-e” and had to delete and rekey. It wasn’t unusual for patrons to ask about Joe. The location of the game warden was valuable information in a hunting and fishing community. But the question was tinged with malice, and was too familiar from someone she’d never met.

“No, he’s on his way here now,” she lied.

“He is, is he?” he chuckled. He obviously didn’t believe her, and she felt her neck flush.

Then: “What about your kids? Are they home?”

A chill rolled through her. She couldn’t type. She swiveled in her chair and stared at him.

“Why are you asking about my family?” she whispered.

“I guess I’m just neighborly. I’m a neighborly guy.”

“You need to leave,” she said, dropping her right hand below the counter and gripping the pepper spray. “You have no idea who you’re talking to. You do
not
talk about my family,” she said, her eyes flashing.

“Who are you?” she asked, terrified that she already knew.

“Bob White. Like the bird. I already told you that.”

“I could call nine-one-one right now,” she said.

He nodded. “Yes, you could, Marybeth. And we could both wait here in embarrassed silence until they arrived.”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. When he used her name, she felt as if she’d been slapped.

“Your name tag,” he said, gesturing toward her breast.

She felt her face flush.

“What I’m really interested in,” he said, leaning forward on the counter so his face was two feet away, “is falconry. They call it the sport of kings, you know. It’s an ancient art with almost religious overtones.” He tapped the book as he talked. “I understand you’re acquainted with a master falconer. I’d love to talk with him and, you know,
pick his brain
.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

He shook his head slightly, as if disappointed.

“Please,” she said, her mouth trembling. “Just leave.”

A low hum suddenly came from the breast pocket of his leather jacket, and she saw a split-second look of irritation in his eyes. He rose off the counter and pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.

He stepped back away from the counter until he was in an aisle of shelving. Close enough to keep an eye on her but far enough not to be overheard. Or so he thought. Due to the strange acoustics in the building, she could clearly hear him when he raised the phone to his mouth and said, “Yes?”

Beneath the counter, out of his view, Marybeth reached down and opened her own phone. She kept her chin and eyes up, though, so he couldn’t sense what she was doing. Opening her phone, she opened up her “favorites” screen. Joe’s number was at the top, and she pressed send. Quickly, and without looking down, she keyed the speaker button and turned down the volume of his voice message. It was good to
hear his recorded voice, even briefly, before she dialed it down. When the prompt came to leave a message—she had the cadence memorized and knew without hearing it—she increased the volume all the way. She was now recording on his phone, wherever it was. And he’d hear what happened in the library if anything did.

The man who called himself Bob White listened to his phone without responding. But even at that distance and in the poor light, she could see him stiffen.

“But not our target?” His voice was clipped and angry.

Then: “I don’t care. We can talk about it when you get here.”

After a minute more of holding the phone up to his ear, the man closed it without another word and dropped it into his pocket. He hesitated for a moment, then strode back toward her out of the shadows. His head was tilted slightly forward, and his eyes pierced into her from under his brow. She felt her heart beat faster.

He turned sharply toward the door to the parking lot, as if changing his mind from his original intention. Over his shoulder, he said, “You can keep the books. I’ve already read them.”

He walked toward the doors swiftly, retrieving his phone and raising it to his face. Before he pushed his way out, he covered the speaker and looked back over his shoulder.

“It was a real pleasure to meet you, Marybeth Pickett,” he said through clenched teeth. “I look forward to the next time.”

And he was gone.

SHE WAITED
until he was clear of the vestibule before running to the doors herself and throwing the locks. Even though she was sure she’d attended to all of them, she double-checked each. Through the glass, she could see him backing out of his space and turning toward the exit onto Main Street.

She was shaking so badly she had to concentrate to punch the three numbers on the handset back at her desk. When Wendy, the dispatcher, answered, Marybeth said, “This is Marybeth at the library. A man was just here….”

And after she hung up, she picked up her cell phone and said, “Joe, I hope you heard that. It was
him
.
Get home now.
I’m calling the girls to tell them to lock everything up and stay inside. Joe, he knows too much about us.”

JOE PICKETT
didn’t receive the message, because at 9:30 he was miles away from the highway, on the side of a mountain, grinding his departmental pickup down a brutal and narrow two-track in the falling snow. He was looking for an abandoned line shack deep in the timber that might or might not contain the remains of Alice Thunder. By the time he neared the shack, he was quietly fuming.

Heavy wet snowflakes shot through the beams of his headlights like meteors. Luckily, the road was knuckled with protruding rocks so the traction on his tires was sound, but they made for painfully slow progress and a ride similar to being caught inside a tumbling clothes dryer.

“We’re getting closer,” Luke Brueggemann said, the GPS unit glowing in his lap. “That is, if those hunters who found the body gave the sheriff the right coordinates.”

Joe leaned forward and tried to see the sky through the top of the windshield. “I don’t like this snow right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get in, check out that line shack, and get out. I don’t want to get stuck back here on the dark side of the moon.”

“I think I’ve heard that story,” Brueggemann said, grinning.

“There’s not much funny about it.”

“It’s kind of a legend among the trainers,” Brueggemann said, referring to the time Joe had been handcuffed to his steering wheel by a violator, who escaped during a blizzard. “In fact, there’s probably more case studies of things you’ve gotten into than any other game warden.”

“Is that so?” Joe said, not knowing whether to be angry or impressed.

“Seems that way.”

“How far until we reach the line shack?”

Brueggemann held the GPS up and traced the contours on the screen. “A mile, maybe.”

“Good. I’ve got a lot of patience, but I’m just about ready to call Cheyenne and ask them to cut us loose from this investigation. I’ve never done that before, but we’re doing nothing out here except burning fuel and calories.”

“So you don’t think we’ll find her body?”

“Look around us,” Joe said. “We’re forty miles from the res. Do you really think a nice middle-aged lady like Alice Thunder would end up here?”

“I don’t know her.”

“I do,” Joe said. “This is a wild-goose chase.”

“But we’re gonna check out the shack first, right?” Brueggemann asked.

“Of course. But first thing tomorrow morning—provided we can get out of here tonight—I’m calling Cheyenne.”

“Does that mean we’re going to get to do real game-warden stuff?” the trainee asked. “Like checking out hunters and finally visiting all those elk camps?”

_______

FOR THE PAST
day and a half, they’d been assigned to Sheriff McLanahan through an agreement reached between the governor’s office and the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. To both Joe Pickett’s and Sheriff McLanahan’s chagrin, County Attorney Dulcie Schalk had gone over the sheriff’s head and pulled together a multiagency effort that involved local, county, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. In addition to the state DCI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs investigators, Schalk had also commandeered state troopers and had borrowed deputies and investigators from adjoining counties, over the sheriff’s objections. But characteristically, McLanahan claimed credit for the effort to the Saddlestring
Roundup
and described it as “a show of force not seen since the Johnson County Range War.” Despite McLanahan’s frequent interviews with radio journalists and television stations from Billings to Casper and the impressive coordination effort spearheaded by Schalk, no progress had been made on either the three missing-persons cases or the triple homicide.

Because of Joe’s familiarity with the vast and empty corners of the county—and to keep him out of the way—McLanahan had assigned him the job of following up on far-flung anonymous tips and unsubstantiated sightings of Bad Bob Whiteplume, Alice Thunder, or Pam Kelly. All the leads had gone nowhere. Bad Bob was reportedly seen in Las Vegas and in the crowd of a Denver Nuggets basketball game. The Feds got those to follow up on. But when someone called in that they’d witnessed Bad Bob rappelling down the steep walls of Savage Run Canyon, it fell into Joe’s bailiwick. Joe and his trainee had driven as close to the rim of the canyon as they could and hiked the rest of the way, to find no evidence of Bad Bob or anybody else.

Pam Kelly had been reported lurking around the corrals of a
neighboring ranch, but when Joe and Brueggemann got there, the mysterious person turned out to be a barmaid from the Stockman’s Bar. She explained haltingly that she was “moonlighting”—performing an erotic dance routine for three Mexican cowhands in the bunkhouse for money. They drove her back to her car.

The anonymous report from hunters said that they’d seen a body matching Alice Thunder’s description at a remote line shack on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains—for which they’d provided GPS coordinates—but it looked to be another dry hole.

For the past two nights, Joe hadn’t returned home until after ten. He’d barely seen Lucy or April. Each night, despite his exhaustion, he’d booted up his computer and checked the falconry website. There wasn’t a single entry on the kestrel thread. Nate seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. And for the first time he could recall, Marybeth hadn’t been able to provide any information from her legal and extralegal research into John Nemecek.

On the way up the mountain to check out the line shack, Luke Brueggemann tried to hide the fact that he was trading text messages with his girlfriend. He’d turn his shoulder to Joe to keep his phone out of view while pretending to be enthralled by something outside his passenger window while he tapped messages by feel.

“You’re not fooling me,” Joe had said as they neared the summit. Storm clouds from the north had marched across the sky and blacked out the stars and moon. “I can see the glow of your phone.”

“Sorry.”

“Luke, I’ve got teenage daughters. I know every texting trick in the book. I even know the one where you look right at me with a vacant expression on your face while you text under the table.”

Brueggemann looked away, obviously embarrassed. He said, “I told you, this is tough on her.”

“It’s going to get tougher,” Joe said, slowing the pickup, “because
once we leave the highway you’ll lose your cell signal. We won’t even be able to use the radio for a while.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Consider it tough love,” Joe said. “For the both of you.”

JOE DIDN’T KNOW
the area well, because he rarely patrolled it. The mountainside had burned in a forest fire twenty-five years before, and the surface of the ground between the new six- to eight-foot pine trees was still littered with an almost impenetrable tangle of burned logs and upturned root pans. The slope was so crosshatched with debris even the elk steered clear of it, thus there were few elk hunters for Joe to check. And although the topo map he’d consulted showed several ancient logging trails through the mountainside, the first two trails they’d found were blocked by dozens of fallen trees.

The third, which of course was the most roundabout route to the abandoned line shack, was passable only because the hunters who’d reported the body had cleared it painstakingly with chainsaws.

“Less than a half mile,” Brueggemann said.

It was snowing hard enough that it stuck to the hood of the pickup and topped outstretched pine boughs like icing.

Joe said to Brueggemann, “The chance of there being a body way in here, and that body belonging to Alice, is slim to none. But that’s not the way we approach it. We approach this like a crime scene. We’re professionals, and we take our job seriously. Don’t touch or move anything. Be cautious, and keep your eyes open and your ears on.”

Brueggemann sat up straight and looked over at Joe, wide-eyed.

“When we get there, grab my gear bag from the back,” Joe said. “Find the camera. We may need to take some shots.”

After a beat Brueggemann said, “I gotta ask. What’s a line shack, anyway?”

Joe was surprised. “You really don’t know?”

“I guess not.”

Joe said, “Cowboys built them back when all of this was open range. It’s a shelter against sudden bad weather, or if the ranch hands got caught in the middle of nowhere toward dark. None of them are very fancy, and most of them are in bad shape these days. But they saved some lives back in the day, and we’ve found more than a few lost hunters in remote line shacks.”