Winterkill

by C. J. Box

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.