Murder on Washington Square

by Victoria Thompson

“That’s horrible,” she said, wincing, wondering what she was getting into.

  “I’ve never been responsible for any injuries,” Stewie said quickly, looking hard at her. “The purpose isn’t to hurt anyone. The purpose is to save trees. After we’re done here, I’ll call the local ranger station and tell them what we’ve done. I won’t say exactly where we spiked the trees or how many trees we spiked. It should be enough to keep them out of here for decades, and that’s the point.”

  “Have you ever been caught?” she asked.

  “Once,” Stewie said, and his face clouded. “A forest ranger caught me by Jackson Hole. He marched me into downtown Jackson on foot during tourist season at gun-point. Half of the tourists in town cheered and the other half started chanting, ‘Hang him high! Hang him high!’ I was sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins for seven months.”

  “Now that you mention it, I think I read about that,” she mused.

  “You probably did. The wire services picked it up. I was interviewed on Nightline and 60 Minutes. Outside Magazine put me on the cover. My boyhood friend Hayden Powell wrote the cover story for them, and he coined the word ‘eco-terrorist.’ ” This memory made him feel bold. “There were reporters from all over the country at that trial.” Stewie said. “Even the New York Times. It was the first time most people had ever heard of One Globe, or knew I was the founder of it. Memberships started pouring in from all over the world.”

  One Globe. The ecological action group that used the logo of crossed monkey wrenches, in deference to late author Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. One Globe had once dropped a shroud over Mt. Rushmore for the President’s speech, she recalled. It had been on the nightly news.

  “Stewie,” she said happily, “You are the real thing.” He could feel her eyes on him as he drove in the spiral of spikes and moved to the next tree.

  “When you are done with that tree I want you,” she said, her voice husky. “Right here and right now, my sweet, sweaty . . . husband.”

  He turned and smiled. His face glistened and his muscles were swelled from swinging the sledgehammer. She slid her T-shirt over her head and stood waiting for him, her lips parted and her legs tense.

  Stewie slung his own pack now and, for the time being, had stopped spiking trees. Fat black thunderheads, pregnant with rain, nosed across the late-afternoon sky. They were hiking at a fast pace toward the peak, holding hands, with the hope of getting there and pitching camp before the rain started. Stewie said they would hike out of the forest tomorrow and he would call the ranger station. Then they would get in the SUV and head southeast, toward the Bridger-Teton Forest.

  When they walked into the herd of cattle, Stewie felt a dark cloud of anger envelop him.

  “Range maggots!” Stewie said, spitting. “If they’re not letting the logging companies in to cut all the trees at tax-payer’s expense, they’re letting the local ranchers run their cows in here so they can eat all the grass and shit in all the streams.”

  “Can’t we just go around them?” Annabel asked.

  “It’s not that, Annabel,” he said patiently. “Of course we can go around them. It’s just the principle of the thing. We have cattle fouling what is left of the natural ecosystem. Cows don’t belong in the trees in the Bighorn Mountains. You have so much to learn, darling.”

  “I know,” she said, determined.

  “These ranchers out here run their cows on public land—our land—at the expense of not only us but the wildlife. They pay something like four dollars an acre when they should be paying ten times that, even though it would be best if they were completely gone.”

  “But we need meat, don’t we?” she asked. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

  “Did you forget that cheeseburger I had for lunch in Cameron?” he said. “No, I’m not a vegetarian, although sometimes I wish I had the will to be one.”

  “I tried it once and it made me lethargic,” Annabel confessed.

  “All these western cows produce about five percent of the beef we eat in this whole country,” Stewie said. “All the rest comes from down South, in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana, where there’s plenty of grass and plenty of private land to graze them on.”

  Stewie picked up a pinecone, threw it accurately through the trees, and struck a black baldy heifer on the snout. The cow bolted, turned, and lumbered away. The small herd moved loudly, clumsily cracking branches and throwing up fist-sized pieces of black earth from their hooves.

  “I wish I could chase them right back to the ranch they belong on,” Stewie said, watching. “Right up the ass of the rancher who has lease rights for this part of the Bighorns.”

  One cow had not moved. It stood broadside and looked at them.

  “What’s wrong with that cow?” Stewie asked.

  “Shoo!” Annabel shouted. “Shoo!”

  Stewie stifled a smile at his new wife’s shooing and slid out of his pack. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the last ten minutes and rain was inevitable. The sky had darkened and black coils of clouds enveloped the peak. The sudden low pressure had made the forest quieter, the sounds muffled and the smell of cows stronger.

  Stewie Woods walked straight toward the heifer, with Annabel several steps behind.

  “Something’s wrong with that cow,” Stewie said, trying to figure out what about it seemed out of place.

  When Stewie was close enough he saw everything at once: the cow trying to run with the others but straining at the end of a tight nylon line; the heifer’s wild white eyes; the misshapen profile of something strapped on its back that was large and square and didn’t belong; the thin reed of antenna that quivered from the package on the heifer’s back.

  “Annabel!” Stewie yelled, turning to reach out to her—but she had walked around him and was now squarely between him and the cow.

  She absorbed the full, frontal blast when the heifer detonated, the explosion shattering the mountain stillness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer bludgeoning bone.

  Four miles away, a fire lookout heard the guttural boom and ran to the railing with binoculars. Over a red-rimmed plume of smoke and dirt, he could see a Douglas fir launch like a rocket into the air, where it turned, hung suspended for a moment, then crashed into the forest below.

  Shaking, he reached for his radio.

  2

  EIGHT MILES OUT OF SADDLESTRING, WYOMING, GAME Warden Joe Pickett was watching his wife Marybeth work their new Tobiano paint horse, Toby, in the round pen when the call came from the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s office.

  It was early evening, the time of night when the setting sun ballooned and softened and defined the deep velvet folds and piercing tree greens of Wolf Mountain. The normally dull pastel colors of the weathered barn and the red rock canyon behind the house suddenly looked as if they had been repainted in acrylics. Toby, a big dark bay gelding swirled with brilliant white that ran up over his haunches like thick spilled paint upside down, shone deep red in the evening light and looked especially striking. So did Marybeth, in Joe’s opinion, in her worn Wranglers, sleeveless cotton shirt, and her blonde hair in a ponytail. There was no wind, and the only sound was the rhythmic thumping of Toby’s hooves in the round pen as Marybeth waved the whip and encouraged the gelding to shift from a trot into a slow lope.

  The Saddlestring District was considered a “two-horse district” by the Game and Fish Department, meaning that the department would provide feed and tack for two mounts to be used for patrolling. Toby was their second horse.

  Joe stood with his boot on the bottom rail and his arms folded over the top, his chin nestled between his forearms. He was still wearing his red cotton Game and Fish uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on the sleeve and his sweat-stained gray Stetson. He could feel the pounding of the earth as Toby passed in front of him in a circle. He watched Marybeth stay in position in the center of the pen, shuffling her feet so she stayed on Toby’s back flank. She talked to her horse in a soothing vo
ice, urging him to gallop—something he clearly didn’t want to do.

  Persistent, Marybeth stepped closer to Toby and commanded him to run. Marybeth still had a slight limp from when she had been shot nearly two years before, but she was nimble and quick. Toby pinned his ears back and twitched his tail but finally broke into a full-fledged gallop, raising the dust in the pen, his mane and tail snapping behind him like a flag in a stiff wind. After several rotations, Marybeth called “Whoa!” and Toby hit the brakes, skidding to a quick stop where he stood breathing hard, his muscles swelled, his back shiny with sweat, smacking and licking his lips as if he was eating peanut butter. Marybeth approached him and patted him down, telling him what a good boy he was, and blowing gently into his nostrils to soothe him.

  “He’s a stubborn guy—and lazy,” she told Joe. “He did not want to lope fast. Did you notice how he pinned his ears back and threw his head around?”

  Joe said yup.

  “That’s how he was telling me he was mad about it. When he’s doing that he’s either going to break out of the circle and do whatever he wants to, or stop, or do what I’m asking him to do. In this case he did what I asked and went into the fast lope. He’s finally learning that things will go a lot easier on him when he does what I ask him.”

  “I know it works for me,” Joe said and smiled.

  Marybeth crinkled her nose at Joe, then turned back to Toby. “See how he licks his lips? That’s a sign of obedience. He’s conceding that I am the boss. That’s a good sign.”

  Joe fought the urge to theatrically lick his lips when she looked over at him.

  “Why did you blow in his nose like that?”

  “Horses in the herd do that to each other to show affection. It’s another way they bond with each other.” Marybeth paused. “I know it sounds hokey, but blowing in his nose is kind of like giving him a hug. A horse hug.”

  “You seem to know what you’re doing.”

  Joe had been around horses most of his life. He had now taken his buckskin mare Lizzie over most of the mountains in the Twelve Sleep Range of the Bighorns in his District. But what Marybeth was doing with her new horse Toby, what she was getting out of him, was a different kind of thing. Joe was duly impressed.

  A shout behind him shook Joe from his thoughts. He turned toward the sound, and saw ten-year-old Sheridan, five-year-old Lucy, and their eight-year-old foster daughter April stream through the backyard gate and across the field. Sheridan held the cordless phone out in front of her like an Olympic torch, and the other two girls followed.

  “Dad, it’s for you,” Sheridan called. “A man says it’s very important.”

  Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks and Joe took the telephone. It was County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum.

  There had been a big explosion in the Bighorn National Forest, Barnum told Joe. A fire lookout had called it in, and had reported that through his binoculars he could see fat dark forms littered throughout the trees. It looked like a “shitload” of animals were dead, which is why he was calling Joe. Dead game animals were Joe’s concern. They assumed at this point that they were game animals, Barnum said, but they might be cows. A couple of local ranchers had grazing leases up there. Barnum asked if Joe could meet him at the Winchester exit off of the interstate in twenty minutes. That way, they could get to the scene before it was completely dark.

  Joe handed the telephone back to Sheridan and looked over his shoulder at Marybeth.

  “When will you be back?” she asked.

  “Late,” Joe told her. “There was an explosion in the mountains.”

  “You mean like a plane crash?”

  “He didn’t say that. The explosion was a few miles off of the Hazelton Road in the mountains, in elk country. Barnum thinks there may be some game animals down.”

  She looked at Joe for further explanation. He shrugged to indicate that was all he knew.

  “I’ll save you some dinner.”

  Joe met the Sheriff and Deputy McLanahan at the exit to Winchester and followed them through the small town. The three-vehicle fleet—two County GMC Blazers and Joe’s dark green Game and Fish pickup—entered and exited the tiny town within minutes. Even though it was an hour and a half away from darkness, the only establishments open were the two bars with identical red neon Coors signs in their windows and a convenience store. Winchester’s lone public artwork, located on the front lawn of the branch bank, was an outsized and gruesome metal sculpture of a wounded grizzly bear straining at the end of a thick chain, its metal leg encased in a massive saw-toothed bear trap. Joe did not find the sculpture lovely but it captured the mood, style, and inbred frontier culture of the area as well as anything else could have.

  Deputy McLanahan led the way through the timber in the direction where the explosion had been reported and Joe walked behind him alongside Sheriff Barnum. Joe and McLanahan had acknowledged each other with curt nods and said nothing. Their relationship had been rocky ever since McLanahan had sprayed the outfitter’s camp with shotgun blasts two years before and Joe had received a wayward pellet under his eye. He still had a scar to show for it.

  Barnum’s hangdog face grimaced as he limped aside Joe through the underbrush. He complained about his hip. He complained about the distance from the road to the crime scene. He complained about McLanahan, and said to Joe sotto voce that he should have fired the deputy years before and would have if he weren’t his nephew. Joe suspected, however, that Barnum also kept McLanahan around because McLanahan’s quick-draw reputation had added—however untrue and unlikely—an air of toughness to the Sheriff’s Department that didn’t hurt at election time.

  The sun had dropped below the top of the mountains and instantly turned them into craggy black silhouettes. The light dimmed in the forest, fusing the treetops and branches that were discernible just a moment before into a shadowy muddle. Joe reached back on his belt to make sure he had his flashlight. He let his arm brush his .357 Smith & Wesson revolver to confirm it was there. He didn’t want Barnum to notice the movement since Barnum still chided him about the time he lost his gun to a poacher Joe was arresting.

  There was an unnatural silence in the woods, with the exception of Barnum’s grumbling. The absence of normal sounds—the chattering of squirrels sending a warning up the line, the panicked scrambling of deer, the airy winged drumbeat of flushed Spruce grouse—confirmed that something big had happened here. Something so big it had either cleared the wildlife out of the area or frightened them mute. Joe could feel that they were getting closer before he could see anything to confirm it. Whatever it was, it was just ahead.

  McLanahan quickly stopped and there was a sharp intake of breath.

  “Holy shit,” McLanahan whispered in awe. “Holy shit.”

  The still-smoking crater was fifteen yards across. It was three feet deep at its center. A half dozen trees had been blown out of the ground and their shallow rootpans were exposed like black outstretched hands. Eight or nine black baldy cattle were dead and still, strewn among the trunks of trees. The earth below the thick turf rim of the crater was dark and wet. Several large white roots, the size of leg bones, were pulled up from the ground by the explosion and now pointed at the sky. Cordite from the explosives, pine from broken branches, and upturned mulch had combined in the air to produce a sickeningly sweet and heavy smell.

  Darkness enveloped them as they slowly circled the crater. Pools of light from their flashlights lit up twisted roots and lacy pale yellow undergrowth.

  Joe checked the cattle, moving among them away from the crater. Most had visible injuries as a result of fist-sized rocks being blown into them from the explosion. One heifer was impaled on the fallen tip of a dead pine tree. The rest of the herd, apparently unhurt, stood as silent shadows just beyond his flashlight. He could see dark heavy shapes and hear the sound of chewing, and a pair of eyes reflected back blue as a cow raised its head to look at him. They all had the same brand—a “v” on top and a “u” on the bottom divided by a singl
e line. Joe recognized it as the Vee Bar U Ranch. These were Ed Finolla’s cows.

  McLanahan suddenly grunted in alarm and Joe raised his flashlight to see the Deputy in a wild, self-slapping panic, dancing away from the rim of the crater and ripping his jacket off of himself as quickly as he could. He threw it violently to the ground in a heap and stood staring at it.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” Barnum asked, annoyed.

  “Something landed on my shoulder. Something heavy and wet,” McLanahan said, his face contorted. “I thought it was somebody’s hand grabbing me. It scared me half to death.”

  McLanahan had dropped his flashlight, so from across the crater Joe lowered his light onto the jacket and focused his Mag Light into a tight beam. McLanahan bent down into the light and gingerly unfolded the jacket; poised to jump back if whatever had fallen on him was still in his clothing. He threw back a fold and cursed. Joe couldn’t see for sure what McLanahan was looking at other than that the object was dark and moist.

  “What is it?” Barnum demanded.

  “It looks like . . . well . . . it looks like a piece of meat.” McLanahan looked up at Joe vacantly.

  Slowly, Joe raised the beam of his flashlight, sweeping upward over McLanahan and following it up the trunk of a lodgepole pine and into the branches. What Joe saw, he would never forget . . .