by C. J. Box
Wentworth didn’t move. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or showered since Joe had seen him last. He reeked of alcohol and sweat. His hair looked greasy and was pasted to his skull.
“Wake up, Revis,” Joe said loudly, nudging Wentworth’s foot with his boot tip.
Wentworth groaned but his eyes didn’t open.
Joe thought about dousing the man with a bowl of ice water, but he didn’t want to get his couch wet. Instead, he let Daisy out of the bedroom where Wentworth had obviously shut her inside.
After quivering and rubbing herself against Joe’s legs to say hello, she romped into the living room and started licking Wentworth’s face, just as planned. As she did, Joe got a digital micro-recorder out of his breast pocket and turned it on to record, then put it back while Daisy lapped away. At first, Wentworth responded by smiling and mewing. Joe could only guess what was going on in the man’s mind and assumed it involved a vision of Annie Hatch. Then Wentworth cracked one eye, saw Daisy’s mouth a few inches away, and screamed.
He shot up to a sitting position and raised his hands as if surrendering.
“Get that animal away from me.”
“Daisy,” Joe said, and his Labrador padded over to him.
“Stay.”
Daisy sat on her haunches and looked from Joe to Wentworth, who was obviously terrified. Wentworth used his sleeves to dry his face and neck.
“Start by explaining why you’re in my house or I’ll . . .” Joe paused for effect. “Let her lick you again.”
Wentworth lowered his hands and looked around. He shook his head. “I can’t even remember getting here.”
“But you did. What if my wife or girls had found you here? What if they’d called the sheriff on you?”
He obviously hadn’t thought of that, and he winced as he reached out for Joe’s bottle.
“Right, help yourself to more of my whiskey,” Joe said. “Don’t even bother to ask.”
“I need it,” Wentworth said, drinking straight from the bottle.
Then he looked at Joe with glassy eyes and said, “What can I do to get myself out of this? Is there something I can say or do? This could kill my whole career.”
Joe remained standing. “So you’re willing to admit it, then? You won’t get fired. Nobody in a federal agency ever gets fired.”
Wentworth’s first reaction was to argue, but he fought against it. He said, “I could get reassigned to Bumfuck, North Dakota. Right now, no one down at the lab will return my calls. Annie won’t even talk to me. The walls are closing in on me, and you know it.”
“Yup,” Joe said.
“So what can I do? I know I have a problem,” he said, raising the bottle again and flirting with it. “I know I drink too much and get out of control and do things I later regret. Like coming here. Or that night out at Lek Sixty-four.”
“So you admit you killed all those birds,” Joe said.
Wentworth nodded. That wouldn’t be an admission on the tape.
“Start by admitting it and we can go on from there,” Joe said.
“I just did.”
“Thank you,” Joe said. “Then you tampered with the evidence I gathered and sent false evidence to your lab in Denver. I know because we opened the box this morning and looked at it.”
Wentworth moaned. He said, “You were down there?”
“I met Kelsea Raymer,” Joe said. “We opened the box together. Where did you get those spent shotgun shells?”
Wentworth tipped his head back and moaned again. Joe was getting tired of the moaning.
“I found ’em in the back of a guy’s truck. It isn’t hard to find shotgun shells around here.”
“That’s what I figured,” Joe said. “And the tire tracks?”
Wentworth hesitated, then mumbled, “In an alley in back of the Stockman’s Bar.”
“Now, doesn’t it feel good to come clean?”
“Not really,” he said, sullen.
“Isn’t that why you came here?”
“Kind of,” he said. “I was kind of hoping you and I could work something out, you know?”
“Like a bribe?”
“Maybe. I’ve got some money in savings, and by looking around here you could use it.”
Joe shook his head. “Have you been drinking since I saw you last?”
“Pretty much. I can’t remember it all. I do remember going back up to Lek Sixty-four to see if you’d found all the shotgun shells. It was the second time I’d been up there since the incident.”
“Did you find any?” Joe asked.
“A couple.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “I didn’t send all of the originals in the evidence box. I held a couple out that came from your shotgun. Kelsea Raymer has them now. She’ll no doubt find your fingerprints on them and determine they were fired from your shotgun.”
Another moan.
“When is the last time you ate something?” Joe asked.
Wentworth shrugged.
“I’m going to scramble some eggs,” Joe said. “Maybe you ought to put a cap on that bottle.”
“It’s a disease,” Wentworth said. “I have a disease.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As he cracked eggs into the skillet, Joe said, “In the state of Wyoming, only one party to a recorded conversation needs to be aware of it to serve as evidence in court.”
He let that sink in for a minute.
When Wentworth staggered to his feet and leaned against the kitchen doorframe, Joe patted the recorder in his front pocket.
“So I’m fucked,” Wentworth said.
“Yup.”
“I just wanted to spend every second I could with Annie,” he said.
“Judge Hewitt has a soft spot for crimes of passion.”
“He does?”
“No,” Joe said. “He doesn’t.”
—
THEY SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. Joe watched Wentworth pick at his food at first, then cover it with ketchup and shovel it in like a wolf.
Joe said, “Do you feel bad about killing all those sage grouse? I mean, you’re considered an expert on them. I would have thought you were serious about their survival.”
Wentworth didn’t respond, but just kept eating.
“Maybe if you explained it to me, I could understand,” Joe said.
“Nothing to explain,” Wentworth said. “Those birds are just a means to an end for me. Not all that much is known about them, so it wasn’t all that hard to become an expert. Their population has boomed and crashed over the years. It’s crashing now. If we can hold up a few oil rigs and slow the crash—well, good for us.”
“What if they’re crashing on their own? Without our help?” Joe asked. “I see it all the time. Some years, there are rabbits everywhere you look, and the next year there are coyotes and foxes in huge numbers eating rabbits. Then the rabbit population crashes and I don’t see many coyotes or foxes for a few years. Could that be the case with sage grouse?”
“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “It’s above my pay grade to answer that question. It’s just a job, okay? I don’t have a personal investment in them.”
“But the people out here have a personal investment in what you decide about those birds,” Joe said. “It might mean either they have jobs or they don’t.”
“They can always change jobs,” Wentworth said. “Or move. That’s not my problem.”
Joe frowned. Wentworth spooned more eggs onto his plate.
“What’s happening outside?” Wentworth asked as he chewed.
“It’s snowing.”
“Crap. Can I make it back to the hotel?”
“You sure aren’t staying here,” Joe said.
—
WHILE DOING THE DISHES, Joe turned to Wentworth, who was still a
t the table sipping coffee.
“Didn’t you just tell me you’d gone up to Lek Sixty-four before?” Joe asked. “I don’t mean the night you shot up all the birds. I thought you said you’d gone up there looking for shotgun shells previously.”
“Are you recording this?”
“Sure am.”
“Can you shut it off?”
“No point now, Revis.”
Wentworth sighed. He said, “Yeah, I went up there last week after you’d been up there. That’s after I came up with the plan to send bad shells to Denver. I wanted to see if I could find any more of mine and get rid of them.”
“When did you go?”
Wentworth surveyed the ceiling for a few minutes, then said, “Last Tuesday.”
Joe thought back. Tuesday was when Nate was ambushed.
“Did you see anything unusual up there?” Joe asked.
“No. This whole state’s unusual.”
“Come on, Revis. Think.”
Wentworth drummed his fingers on the table, and Joe watched his expression change. He’d recalled something.
“I’d been drinking,” he said. “But I remember I was out there in the sagebrush and I heard a vehicle coming down that two-track. I thought it was you, so I got on the ground.”
“Where was your pickup?”
“I hid it half a mile away, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.”
Joe nodded. “So who was it?”
“I don’t know their names,” he said with distaste. “But it was just a couple of locals. Two vehicles went by and I laid there thinking: ‘Here I am, drunk and facedown in the mud. It has come to this.’”
Joe felt something tingle in his chest. He sat down at the table across from Wentworth.
“Two vehicles?”
“Yeah. One following the other.”
“What did they look like?”
Wentworth said, “The first one was an old beat-up SUV. There was an old man driving it. The second was one of those white panel vans, you know? Like plumbers drive? A younger man—a big bruiser type—was driving that.”
The tingle spread. Joe recalled Eldon and Brenda’s battered Suburban in front of the courthouse. He’d seen it again at their place. The first driver sounded like Eldon. The second: Bull.
“The white van,” Joe said, “was it new?”
“Newer than the beat-up piece of shit,” Wentworth said.
“Was there any writing on the side of it?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t see all that well down there, but it was something like ‘Yahoo Falconry Services.’ There was a picture of a bird on the side, like an eagle.”
Joe leaned forward and his glare must have been intense because Wentworth sat back in his chair.
“Could it have been Yarak Falconry Services?”
“Yeah, maybe. I guess it could have been,” Wentworth said. “That’s a word I’m not familiar with. Why does it matter, anyway?”
Joe ignored him. “The SUV and the van were going which direction?”
“Toward the mountains.”
“Did you see either one of them come back down later that night?”
“Naw—I was gone by then.”
Joe guessed only one of the vehicles had returned, and he thought he knew which one.
Why would the Cateses have Nate’s van? Where was Olivia Brannan?
The world tilted.
Joe asked, “Did you go up there again?”
Wentworth seemed surprised at the question. “How did you know?”
“Someone saw your truck up there Thursday night. I didn’t suspect you until I heard about it.”
“Who was it?”
“That isn’t important now,” Joe said. “So did you go back up there Thursday?”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
Joe said to Wentworth: “It’s time for you to go.”
Wentworth looked hurt. He said, “What should I do?”
“Go back to your room and bunker in. There’s a storm coming. Just sit tight.”
“But what about me?”
“What about you?” Joe said.
“I’m supposed to just sit at the Holiday Inn and wait to be arrested?”
“That’s what I’d recommend,” Joe said. “Dry out and get some sleep. Stay sober. Do the right thing. Now, git.”
—
FROM THE FRONT WINDOW, Joe watched Wentworth’s taillights vanish in the light snow.
He surveyed the sky. The snow wasn’t falling as heavily as he’d thought it would. He might have a few hours before it really came down. It was still three hours until it got dark.
He turned and said, “Come on, Daisy. We’re going to go find Eldon’s secret elk camp.”
25
At the same time, Liv heard footfalls approaching and she quickly stopped digging around the rock. Most of the rock was exposed now, but it was still stuck fast. Liv’s fear that the stone was simply a spur of a much larger boulder had grown throughout the day but had recently been put to rest. The contours of the smooth ancient river rock were starting to round out at the back. It was, in fact, approximately the size and shape of a football. She’d cleaned enough of the packed clay from around it that she could now reach in and grab the top and bottom of the stone with both hands, although she couldn’t get enough leverage yet to work it free. It would take more time and effort.
The doors opened and large flakes of snow floated down into the root cellar. The sky was cream-colored, the sun muted behind heavy clouds.
Brenda said, “I wanted to see if you liked pork chops.”
“You’re asking me what I want for dinner?” Liv asked, surprised.
“Not if it’s something exotic the men won’t eat. But what about pork chops?”
“I like pork chops.”
“Then it’s settled,” Brenda said.
But instead of leaving, Brenda sat down on the lip of the doorframe. She was wearing an oversized barn coat over her housedress and her feet dangled down. Liv could see the woman’s thick ankles and her heavy, old-fashioned shoes. She wore support hose and there was a bulge of white fat above the top of the hose.
“There’s supposed to be a big winter storm coming,” Brenda said. “By midnight tonight, we’re supposed to really get hit. Is that heater working okay?”
“Yes.”
“You got enough sleeping bags and all?”
“I think so. They don’t smell so good, though.”
“They smell like the guys,” Brenda said. “Beggars can’t be choosers, you know.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Liv said, wondering if Brenda was going to go away.
After a long beat, Brenda said, “I brought this,” and held something out in her hand. It was a hairbrush.
“I appreciate that,” Liv said. “Are you going to drop it down to me?”
“I was actually thinking I’d come down there and brush your hair. It’s something I’ve been thinking about. Would you be okay with that?”
Liv felt an equal mix of panic and revulsion. Brenda behind her, brushing her hair? The idea of it almost made her physically sick. But if she could actually get her down here . . .
Liv glanced at the stone in the wall. Maybe with enough adrenaline rushing through her she’d be able to jerk it out and brain Brenda.
“I’d love it,” Liv said.
Brenda said over her shoulder, “Bull, lower that ladder.”
Liv’s heart sank. She hadn’t realized Bull was right there with her, but out of view.
“Keep close and have that pistol handy,” Brenda said to Bull. “Pop her if she tries anything.”
“Okay, Ma.”
Brenda said to Liv, “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”
Liv closed her eyes, fighting away
tears. “No.”
“You want your hair brushed?”
“Yes.”
—
LIV SAT with her back to the stone in the dirt wall so that when Brenda brushed her hair she wouldn’t glance up and notice it. Liv wished she’d had more warning they were coming so she could have packed more loose dirt around the rock than she had.
The teeth of the brush actually felt good coursing down through her hair, although Brenda was a little rough at first, pulling it hard through tangles.
“Your hair is nice,” Brenda said. “Is it always like this or do you treat it somehow?”
“I get it straightened.”
“What would it be like otherwise?”
“It would be natural.”
“You mean like an Afro?”
“Yes.”
Brenda clucked her tongue. She said, “I can’t even imagine.”
Up at the compound, an engine started up with a high whine. Then it revved up fast.
Brenda called to Bull, “Did Dallas get that snowmobile started?”
“Sounds like he did.”
Brenda chuckled. “That boy—he’s a go-getter. There’s nothing he loves more than getting up into the mountains on his snowmobile. When I told him about this storm moving in, he just lit up.”
“Didn’t he get injured at a rodeo?” Liv asked, making small talk.
“Yeah, sort of.”
The answer perplexed Liv for what it didn’t say.
Brenda said, “I’ve never seen a human recover so quick. He’ll be back in the game in a few days at this rate. I wish I could come back after getting hurt like he does. But he’s always been fast in whatever it is he chooses to do. He’s an exceptional person, and I ain’t just sayin’ that because he’s my boy. I just wish the folks around this county would give him his due.”
“They should,” Liv agreed, trying anything to establish common ground. “How did Dallas get injured? Was it a bull?”
“Yeah, in Houston. But he didn’t get hurt that bad. Dallas got thrown in front of a big crowd of people and that probably hurt him more than anything else,” Brenda said. “It wasn’t until he got back here that he got those busted ribs and got his shoulder pulled out of the socket.”
Liv was confused. Brenda must have sensed it.
“I had to have Eldon and Bull do it. Dallas agreed, but it isn’t any fun to watch your husband and your oldest son beat the crap out of your youngest. Pulled his arm out of the socket and busted in his ribs. I had to turn my head when they done it.”
