by C. J. Box
Leading Lizzie down to the stream so she could get a drink before he continued his ride up the summit, Joe marveled at the very bad run of luck the environmental community was having of late. First there was Stewie Woods, right here in his own district, blown up by a cow. Then their champion, Rep. Peter Sollito and his scandalous death. Then Hayden Powell is killed in a house fire in Washington State. Powell’s publisher claimed that Hayden had been two weeks away from delivering his book but no trace of the manuscript could be found.
Joe climbed back into the saddle and clucked at Lizzie to go. The string of bad luck had been capped this last week by the discovery of the body of wolf advocate Emily Betts. Her small private airplane had crashed in the Beartooth Mountains southwest of Red Lodge, Montana. Hikers found her body. They reported that upon approaching the wreckage they had seen two wolves emerge from the cockpit and flee. Emily Betts, likely dead on impact, had been partially devoured by her cargo.
Joe Pickett was not the only one to wonder if this series of deaths had a common thread. Speculation ran rampant in both the environmental community and over coffee in Saddlestring’s local diner. But each incident was vastly different from the others. If there was a pattern it was incomprehensible. There was nothing about any of the deaths that suggested murder, except perhaps for Rep. Sollito’s, and Joe had read that a prostitute had recently been arrested who was accused of the murder—although she was denying it and had hired a celebrity lawyer.
Now Emily Betts had joined the list; a wolf advocate who died while trying to illegally transplant wolves into Wyoming.
But even devoted conspiracy theorists could not connect the deaths in any way other than the fact that they were recent and all involved high-profile environmental activists. And that most of the deaths were, in some way, humiliating to talk about.
Joe had heard stories, though, of locals high-fiving each other in the bars. Apparently, there were allegations being made on a national level within the fringe environmental groups, accusations of conspiracies, calls for a congressional and FBI investigation into the string of deaths.
Reining Lizzie to a stop, Joe pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket, and flipped it open to a fresh page. He drew a crude outline of the United States. Then he drew stars and dates at four locations: Saddlestring, Wyoming, June 10; Bremerton, Washington, June 14; Washington, D.C., June 23; and Choteau, Montana, June 29. There were four days between the deaths in Saddlestring and Bremerton; nine days between Bremerton and Washington, D.C.; and six days between Washington, D.C. and Choteau.
If a killer or killers were responsible, Joe thought, then they had been criss-crossing the country by air or road for almost a month. And there could possibly be two, three, or even four of them, each with a separate assignment. That seemed unlikely, he thought, simply because it was too complicated, with too many factors and possibilities where something could go wrong. But if it were one killer or a team of killers, they were having a hell of a busy month. He thought about the time lapses between the incidents and concluded that it was possible, although unlikely, that one team could have done all of the killings. The longest span of time between incidents was between Bremerton and Washington, D.C., which was also the longest distance by car, which meant it was possible the killer or killers were traveling by car.
He stared at the drawing, thought about the dates.
He was getting nowhere.
Joe turned Lizzie back into the trees. He planned to work his way up to the summit and back down toward his pickup and horse trailer through a drainage on the other side of the mountain. He expected to find, and count, additional elk calves. He might find some fishermen as well near the road, or campers setting up early for the weekend. He would take the long way.
He remembered to lean forward in the saddle and stroke Lizzie’s neck and tell her what a good horse she was. He didn’t used to do that.
19
Sheridan Pickett answered the telephone Thursday during breakfast, listened for a moment, made an unpleasant face, and then handed the receiver to Marybeth.
“It’s that man again,” Sheridan said with distaste.
Joe and Marybeth exchanged worried glances and Joe mouthed, “Keep him on the line.” He pushed back from the table to go upstairs to get on the other extension.
“Can I talk to him?” Lucy asked through a mouthful of breakfast cereal. Lucy wanted to talk with anyone who called.
Joe bounded up the stairs and closed the door in the bedroom. He sat on the unmade bed and gently lifted the receiver to his ear. The conversation had already begun. The connection was poor and filled with static. The baritone voice of the man sounded drugged-out, slurred. The words came slowly as if through a mouthful of pebbles, the tone distorted.
“This is Stewie again, Mary,” the man said. “Please don’t hang up again.”
“Who is this really?” Marybeth demanded.
Through Marybeth’s phone in the background, Joe could hear Lucy asking again as if she could talk on the telephone and Sheridan telling her to be quiet.
“Stewie. Stewie. Come on, Mary, you know who it is.” He paused for a long beat. “I’m trying to think of how to prove it to you.”
Her name is Marybeth, Joe thought.
“That would be a good idea,” Marybeth said, “since Stewie Woods is dead.”
The man chuckled. “The old Stewie might be dead, but not the new one. Hey . . . I know. I wish I would have practiced for this quiz, but it looks like I have to do it off the cuff.” His words tumbled out and ran into each other. Joe guessed that the caller would be easier to understand if he could see him gesticulate. He imagined hands and arms flying through the air, the telephone pinned in place between jaw and shoulder, and determined pacing.
“Anyway, in high school you drove a yellow Toyota. Whenever it got cold, it wouldn’t start, and I figured out how to get it going by taking off the air cleaner and opening up the intake valve with a screwdriver. Who else could possibly know that?”
Joe felt his face go slack.
“Just about everybody in high school,” Marybeth answered, but her voice was tentative. “And it was a Datsun, not a Toyota.”
“Whatever,” the caller said, then bulled ahead with the confidence of a telephone solicitor trying to get as much across as possible before the phone went dead in his ear: “Okay, here’s another one. Our football team, the Winchester Badgers, once played in Casper and you and Hayden Powell drove down on a Friday to see the game. After we won—I think the score was 27 to 17 and I intercepted a pass and ran it in for a touchdown—the three of us drove up on top of that hill on the east side of Casper and pulled up all of the survey stakes for their new mall. Remember?”
Marybeth was silent. Joe could hear Sheridan and Lucy squabbling at the kitchen table, and Marybeth’s breathing.
“Who would possibly know that happened except you, me, and Hayden?”
“Maybe you told someone about it,” Marybeth said, her voice weak. “Or you wrote about it in your newsletter or something.”
Joe, Marybeth, and the caller all realized at once that Marybeth had said “you.” Joe was stunned.
“Did you just hear yourself?” the caller asked.
“I . . . I did,” Marybeth answered.
“Do I need to go on?”
“I’m just too shocked to answer right now,” Marybeth said. Joe wished he were with her. He hoped she wouldn’t hang up the telephone.
“Mary, I just want to see you again,” his voice was kind.
“I’m married,” Marybeth stammered. “I have three children eating breakfast at the table right in front of me.”
“Everyone’s married,” Stewie said slyly, “but the big question, the one I’ve learned to ask is: are you happily married?”
You bastard, Joe thought. I can’t wait to punch you right in the nose.
“Of course I’m happily married. To a wonderful man named Joe Pickett.”
Stewie sighed. His voice changed. “I
kind of figured that would be the case but I guess I hoped it wasn’t.”
Stewie was distancing himself. Now Joe hoped Stewie wouldn’t hang up. Joe quickly buried the receiver in blankets from the bed so Stewie wouldn’t hear the click of him hanging up, and scribbled a note in his spiral pad. He descended the stairs and handed it to Marybeth. Her face was pale and her eyes were vacant.
Joe had written: Keep him talking—Ask him where he is.
Marybeth read the note and frowned, and looked to Joe for confirmation. Joe nodded yes. Faintly, Joe could hear Stewie talking to Marybeth again.
“How can it possibly be that you’re still alive?” Marybeth asked.
Now Joe could only hear one side of the conversation.
“What do you mean when you say that?”
The school bus honked outside the house and all three girls scrambled as if an electric current had been simultaneously shot through their chairs.
They were suddenly grabbing backpacks, sack lunches, jackets, shoes. Joe signaled to Marybeth that he would take care of things. He opened the front door, waved at the driver, and shooed his girls toward the front gate. Sheridan gave him a look to indicate that she was getting a little old for shooing. The driver, a retired lumberjack named Stiles, leaned out of the door and asked Joe about the mule deer count in his hunting area.
“I’ll have to talk with you tomorrow,” Joe said, trying not to dismiss Stiles out of hand. “I’ve got a little bit of a situation inside I need to handle.”
Stiles waved him off and Joe literally ran back to the house. Marybeth, with wide, disbelieving eyes, was gently replacing the receiver on the cradle.
Joe and Marybeth simply stared at each other.
“Did that actually happen?” Joe asked.
Marybeth shook her head, stunned.
“He wants to meet me Saturday,” she said. “I wrote down the directions.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Joe said, as much to himself as anyone. “I saw where he died.”
Marybeth smiled cryptically. “Joe, Stewie said that he did blow up. But that he was reborn.”
“He actually said that?”
She nodded, and started across the room toward Joe.
That evening, in the library, Marybeth saw the handicapped-accessible Vee Bar U van cruise through the parking lot. The sight of the van froze her to her spot behind the counter, her fingers poised and still over the keyboard of the computer. She slowly swung her head toward the front doors, anticipating the arrival of Ginger Finotta and Buster. But Ginger didn’t enter and the van was no longer in sight.
Instead, in the side office behind the counter, Marybeth heard the metallic clunk of returned books being dropped into the drive-up return. The sound, familiar as it was, startled her.
She waited for the van to pull away from the building and didn’t move until the sound of the motor had vanished.
She quickly finished her entry, then went into the side office. On top of the pile of returns was the single, aged, dog-eared copy of The Life and Times of Tom Horn, Stock Detective.
20
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
July 5
It was dusk when the Old Man realized he had truly become evil.
The setting had nothing to do with it. The heavy evening sun had painted a wide bronze swath through the tall buffalo grass of the clearing below them and had fused through the lodgepole pines that circled the clearing like a spindly corral. Breezes so gentle they could barely be felt rippled across the top of the grass and looked like gentle ringlets on water. The air was sweet with pine and sage but there was an occasional whiff of sulfur from seeping, newly punctured pockets in a swampy hot spring flat where they had ridden the horses a few minutes before. And there was another smell, too. It was the smell of slightly rancid pork.
Earlier that day they had located Tod Marchand, attorney at law, near his tent on the bank of Nez Perce Creek. Marchand had been remarkably easy to find. He had checked in at the ranger station the day before at the South Entrance of the park and noted where he intended to camp. Tibbs had found the entry while the Old Man chatted with the female ranger and filled out the forms that permitted them to transport their newly acquired horse trailer and horses through the park.
They had ridden up on Tod Marchand just after noon, while Marchand was scrubbing his lunch plate clean with biodegradable soap. Marchand had looked back over his shoulder when he heard the horses approach, and stood up and turned around just in time for the butt of Charlie Tibbs’s rifle to crack down hard on the top of his head.
“Counsel, approach the bench,” Charlie Tibbs had said, without explanation, as Tod Marchand crumpled to the grass.
They had gagged and hog-tied Marchand and thrown him across the back of the Old Man’s saddle. They took the horses up into the trees far away from the trail and the creek—away from the places other hikers or trekkers might be.
Yellowstone was remarkably big and wild beyond the tourist traffic that coursed along the figure-eight road system in the park. As they rode up into the timber and over a rise, the sounds of the distant traffic receded, replaced by a light warm breeze wafting through the treetops. The chance of anyone seeing them, or of the two men stumbling upon another person, were remote.
Still, to the Old Man, Yellowstone Park was a disquieting place to do business. Despite unreasonable demands by environmentalists and mismanagement by the federal government, Yellowstone was a special place, in his opinion. It was somehow sacrosanct. It had just felt wrong to be riding through the lodgepole pine with a bound and gagged lawyer on his horse.
They had ridden down the slope to where the trees cleared and the creek wound through a draw with very high eroded banks. They let their horses droop their heads to drink. It was then that they heard a splash upstream, somewhere over the high bank and out of view. The instant they heard the sound, Charlie Tibbs slid his big .308 Remington Model 700 rifle out of his saddle scabbard. The Old Man fumbled for his pistol.
Within two minutes, the water on the stream was covered with floating feathers within a swirl of a dark oily substance. They watched the feathers float by in front of them. It was as if a duck had exploded on the water less than 100 yards away.
Both horses had begun to snort and act up. When the Old Man’s horse reared and turned back the way they had come, he muscled the horse around to face the water. The Old Man knew well enough that even experienced horses might be uncontrollable this close to bears.
They had quickly retreated back into the trees, tied off the horses, and tried to calm them. Marchand had been thrown to the ground when the Old Man’s horse spooked, but as Charlie said, he probably couldn’t feel it anyhow. Armed, they walked back down to the stream and cautiously climbed the bank. They heard muffled grunting and woofing even before they actually saw the bears—grizzlies, a sow and her two cubs. The sow was a shimmering light brown color with a pronounced hump on her back. Her snout was buried in the rotting bark of a downed tree, feeding on larvae. The cubs, already over a hundred pounds each, were further down on the tree trunk taking off shards of bark with lazy swipes of their paws. Apparently, the duck hadn’t been much of a meal.
Tod Marchand was propped against a tree trunk when he regained consciousness. The Old Man and Charlie had carried Marchand across the stream through a swampy meadow and into the timber on the other side of the slope. The bears had remained across the river. The first thing Marchand did when he awoke was pitch over sideways into the grass and throw up. When he was through, the Old Man helped him sit up again with his back against the tree. It took a while for Marchand to seem lucid.
The Old Man studied Marchand, while he waited for him to fully regain his senses. Marchand was, by all accounts, a good-looking man, the Old Man decided: tall, with thick blond hair cut into an expensive, sculpted, swept-back haircut. He was tanned and fit and he looked much younger than his fifty-three years.
The Old Man had, of course, seen his photogr
aph in the newspapers and had watched him several times on television news shows. Tod Marchand was the most successful environmental lawyer in America when it came to winning court decisions. Marchand had been the lead attorney in the five-year case that forced the National Park Service to dismantle several recreational vehicle campgrounds because the area the campgrounds were located in was thought to be prime grizzly bear habitat. The RV campgrounds had, in fact, been within ten miles of where Marchand was camped.
The Old Man distinctly remembered a shot of Marchand standing outside the federal courthouse in Denver talking to reporters after successfully arguing for a halt to a multimillion-dollar gold mine about to be started up in southern Wyoming.
“Gold is a matter of perception,” Marchand had told reporters. “Gold for many of us is wildlife running free in untrammeled wilderness.”
Marchand had paused for effect and looked straight into a major network’s camera (he was so experienced at this sort of thing that he knew by sight which were the network’s cameras and which belonged to local stations), Our gold won, Marchand had said, which had since become a rallying cry.
Tod Marchand looked much different now, the Old Man thought. The lump on his head from Tibbs’s rifle butt was hidden under tinted layers of hair, but a single dark red track of blood from his scalp had dried along the side of Marchand’s sharp nose.
Tod Marchand also looked different because he was now tied up with a thin horsehair cord. The horsehair cord bit into Marchand’s shoulders in several places, and continued down his waist and then was crisscrossed around his legs from his thighs to his ankles.
Horsehair was good, Charlie had said, because the bears would eat every inch of it and leave nothing. To make sure the bears would be attracted, Charlie had bound thick slabs of raw, uncured back-bacon under each of Marchand’s arms and between his legs. The pork was pungent.
