Out of Range

by C. J. Box

  Joe watched Tassell carefully. What exactly was he getting at?

  "This place is special," Tassell said. "We've got the highest per capita income than any county in the U.S., because of all the millionaires and billionaires. There are people here who don't think they need to play by the rules.

  And you know what," the sheriff said, arching his eyebrows, "they don't. They don't like a sloppy suicide happening in their town. Neither do I"

  "I'm confused," Joe said.

  Tassell looked away. "What's done is done. I don't want it dredged up again."

  "You think I'm going to do that?"

  "Maybe. That's what Barnum said you'd do."

  Joe paused before responding. Tassell was obviously warning him off, but was it because there was something to hide or simply because a further inquiry would look bad and attract unwanted attention? Joe guessed the latter.

  "Don't worry," Joe said. "It doesn't seem like you've got anything to fear from me."

  "Let's hope not," Tassell said with finality. "Let's hope not."

  Then he excused himself, saying, "I want another hit of that cheese."

  "About those keys," Joe said.

  "Come by the office around five," Tassell said. "We should be done with our workshop by then."

  JOE WATCHED AS Randy Pope gave Susan Jensen a long hug. Joe thought Pope held the clench three beats too long, moving it into the category of inappropriate behavior. Susan didn't appear to be hugging back.

  Finally, Pope said something sincere to her and took his leave. As he passed Joe, Pope looked up.

  "On behalf of the department, right?" Joe said.

  "Don't you have work to do?" Pope snapped, his face flushing pink.

  SUSAN JENSEN WORKED her way through a group of well-wishers and walked purposefully up to Joe and said, "May I have a few minutes, please?"

  "Of course," he said, following her through the room and into the hallway.

  "I need a drink," she told him, as if apologizing.

  Joe didn't need one, but didn't say so. The lounge was at the end of the hall, and Susan looked inside before going in.

  "All clear," she said. She took a seat on a stool at the empty bar and ordered a glass of white wine. Joe liked her, and had from their first meeting. She was ebullient, smart, and a little caustic. Like Marybeth, Susan Jensen was a go-getter.

  "Just tonic for me," Joe said to the bartender, who was young, fit, and sunburned—the Jackson look.

  "You're not drinking, that's good," Susan said.

  "Not today, anyway."

  She waited for the explanation.

  "I had a couple of extras last night," he said.

  "Will used to be reasonable like that," she said. "He'd have a few drinks and then he'd go for weeks without one. It wouldn't even occur to him. But then he changed."

  "Susan, I'm sorry," Joe said.

  "Everybody is," she said, sipping, an edge creeping into her voice. "Everybody in that room is very sorry. We never had so many friends in Jackson who thought so well of us."

  Joe didn't know how to respond.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have said that. It's catty. A few people have shown the boys and me real kindness. Some anonymous person even paid for the costs of cremation, which helped us out a lot. Will's life insurance policy won't pay because of what happened. I have a new job, but still, I've got to think about the boys, how I'm going to pay for them to go to college."

  Joe hadn't thought of the fact that suicide was exempted in most life insurance policies. He felt a stab of anger, wondered how Will could have been so selfish.

  "Joe, when you leave a man you want him to regret it. You want him to sit and stew and feel lousy for driving you away. Then maybe, you want him to get his act together and come crawling back on his knees. You don't want him to kill himself and leave you with that."

  "I understand."

  "I hope you do," she said. "If Marybeth ever leaves you, go crawling back to her like a whipped puppy. Don't internalize it, and brood about it, and think there's no way out."

  He nodded. He wasn't sure why she was giving him this advice. She drained her glass, ordered another.

  "I need fortification to go back into that room," she said.

  He had so many questions for her. "Where will you go?"

  "The kids and I live in Casper," she said. "We moved there four months ago. I've got a job at the newspaper, and we live with my parents. I started selling ads, and recently moved up to marketing director. It's a hard job, but I'm very good at it. We're making more income now than we ever did."

  Joe thought of the parallels with his own family, Marybeth's new business, the obvious conclusion that it would likely prosper if either Joe took a different job or the family moved out of Saddlestring. He asked, "How are the boys handling the move, and now this?"

  "Terribly," she said, matter-of-factly. "Will was a god to them. You can guess what it's like. You have girls, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Imagine if you had boys. If every day they watched you strap on your gun after breakfast and put on your hat and go out into the mountains to catch bad guys and protect the herds." She said "protect the herds" in a well-practiced way, and Joe guessed it had been some kind of joke between Susan and Will. "They worshipped him," she said. "They still do. They didn't see him like I did those last terrible months, when I'd come visit from Casper and we'd try to reconcile. Something definitely changed with him. A couple of times he would roar around the house, stumbling and cursing me. He never used to do that. His mood swings got absolutely crazy and unpredictable. He'd be manic one day and sullen the next. I didn't know him anymore, and he scared me. If the boys saw or heard him like that, I don't know what they'd think of him now."

  Joe winced as she talked. He had thought about saying that it might not be all that different with his girls, but he refrained. He didn't want to have that kind of discussion.

  "Susan, what happened to him?"

  She shrugged. "That's the big question, isn't it?" Her eyebrows arched. "He said a few times that the pressure was building, that he was being squeezed alive. But that wasn't unusual. Things have always been like that here, you'll see. Will had a gift for dealing with it, though. At least he did at one time. He just went into his cave."

  "His cave?"

  She took a long drink. "That's what we used to call it. It was a mental cave he could sit in and depressurize after a bad day. He'd sit and stare at the television, or out the window. Sometimes he took the dog for a walk, or messed with his horses. It didn't matter what he did, because even though he was there, he really wasn't there, you know?"

  "I do," he said. "When I feel like that, Marybeth and the girls say I've gone into Joe-Zone."

  She smiled sympathetically. "He used to come back from backcountry patrols feeling pretty good, though," she said. "He said they cleared his mind and gave him his good perspective back."

  Joe understood that.

  "I took the job in Casper to give Will the option of getting out of this pressure cooker. I thought he'd follow me to be with the boys. I even found a couple of opportunities for him there, but he never took them. He stayed here and things got worse."

  Joe shook his head, trying to think what he would do in the same situation, if Marybeth said she'd had it with his absences and threatened to move away. He'd follow her, wouldn't he? When he realized he was missing some of what she said, he apologized and asked her to repeat it.

  Susan said, "I said he didn't give a lot of thought to the fact that while he was away for nights on end sleeping under the stars or whatever he did, he was completely out of contact with the outside world. He liked that, I guess. But he had a family here in town who never heard from him. I worried so much about him out there, Joe, that I would cry myself to sleep. Then I'd hate him. But I always got over it when he came back. When I saw you at the funeral, that was what I thought of."

  "But things changed with Will?"

  "Did they ever,
" she said, tapping the rim of her glass to signal the bartender for a refill. "Especially after we left. It was like his cave door closed shut and locked him out. He couldn't find any relief, so the pressure just kept building. Of course, he never said anything to me or asked for help. Not Will." Susan didn't even try to keep the anger out of her voice.

  "What caused the biggest problems?"

  "Are you asking me because you want to know about Will, or because you want to know what you're going to be dealing with here? Joe, I know you're here to replace him. I'm still in the loop."

  He flushed, sorry he hadn't said it earlier. "Both, I guess."

  She thought that over for a moment. "Will thought—and he was right—that it seemed like things were coming at him from all sides. The animal liberation people were after him. I was surprised to see that Pi woman here, considering that she literally put a contract out on him on her website. Then there was Smoke Van Horn and his bunch, the old-timers. They rode Will hard, tried to get him fired a few times. Smoke always showed up at the public hearings and ripped Will as well as the state and the Feds. Smoke was hard on Will, and I hate him for that. Oh," Susan said, smiling bitterly, "then there's the developers. They come from other places and they want to do here what they did wherever they made their millions. It drove them crazy that somebody like Will, who made less money than what their cars probably cost, could stall their projects by writing an opinion that would affect their plans."

  Joe interrupted. "Are you talking about Don Ennis?" he asked, thinking about the business card in his pocket.

  Susan's face tightened. "Don Ennis. Do you know him?"

  "I sort of met him last night. He sent over a drink."

  "Don and Stella Ennis," Susan said, more to herself than to Joe, as if recalling something unpleasant.

  Joe recalled Tassell's comments about breaking up an argument at the ski resort. He would need to follow up with Tassell to see if the other party was Don Ennis.

  Susan's eyes burned into Joe, and her voice dropped as if someone might overhear her. "Joe, all I can tell you is to watch out for that man. He gets what he wants, and he doesn't care who gets hurt."

  Joe blinked at her sudden intensity.

  "As for Stella," she said, "she's playing a game that only she understands. She might be the most dangerous of them all."

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  Susan sat back, drained her glass. "I'm not sure what I mean. I just got this vibration from her. A dark kind of feeling. I think she's a predator. And Will," she said, drinking again although her glass was empty, "Will thought I was wrong about her. He thought I was jealous. And you know what? I probably was."

  Joe felt that he needed to defend Stella. Did Susan see her crying during the funeral? Were those tears of a predator? But he didn't want to go there with Susan, not now. He changed the subject.

  He asked, "What was he working on most recently?"

  "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that," she said. "The boys and I had been gone for months. Even when we were together, he didn't talk about the specifics of his projects much. He tried to leave all of that at his office, or in his truck, or wherever. The only way I knew about the big things—like ALN, Smoke, or Ennis's Beargrass Village— was because sometimes he'd mention them in passing or I'd hear about it from someone or read about it in the newspaper."

  "Susan, where did he keep his files? His notebooks?" He realized he sounded like he was grilling her. "Sorry for my tone."

  "It's okay," she said, patting his hand. "I'm not sure about the files. I think at the office. He brought his notebook into the house some nights—he was always scribbling in those notebooks—but he never left papers or files around the house."

  "Do you mind if I look through the boxes of what he left?"

  "Feel free, Joe. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them anyway. They probably belong to the state."

  Suddenly, Susan turned her wrist and looked at her watch. If her glass hadn't been empty, Joe noticed, she would have spilled wine on her lap. "I need to get back to the boys and the, um, mourners."

  "Thank you for your time, Susan. I really appreciate it."

  Again, she patted his hand.

  She slid down from the stool, a little shakily. Joe steadied her by holding her forearm until she was standing. She put the glass down and smoothed her skirt. She started to say good-bye and then stopped. "Joe, with all of your questions I nearly forgot why I needed to talk to you in the first place."

  She said, "A year ago, just as Will was starting to lose his bearings and six months before I left him, he took me out to dinner. It was a fairly nice evening, even though we couldn't afford it. Everything here just costs so much. Anyway, out of the blue, he said that when he died he wanted his remains scattered in a specific place. When I look back on that now, I think he knew something was going to happen."

  She had her legs back and was walking out of the lounge, Joe following.

  "Two Ocean Pass, that's the place," she said. "It's somewhere up in the wilderness area, where he patrolled. He described it pretty thoroughly, for Will."

  She stopped in the hallway and turned to face Joe. He could hear the fog of conversation coming from the reception room, where no doubt mourners were waiting for the widow.

  "He said a creek comes down from the mountains. I think he called it Two Ocean Creek. Anyway, the stream flows south through a big meadow and splits at a lone spruce tree. It's exactly on the Continental Divide. One part of the stream flows to the Atlantic and the other to the Pacific. He said it was the most beautiful meadow he had ever seen. He wants his ashes scattered there, by the tree."

  Joe now grasped what she was asking.

  "I'll never get up there," she said. "I don't even want to try. But it's in your new district, and you can probably find it."

  "I'll do it," Joe said. "I'm honored." He knew vaguely of the location from the map on the office wall. "Do you want me to do anything else?"

  She shook her head. "That's more than enough, Joe. I'll give you my number in Casper, if you don't mind calling me when it's done."

  THE URN LOOKED like an extra large beer stein. Joe carried it to his pickup, thinking how light it was, wondering guiltily what the ashes looked like (brown, gray, or white?). On the street, a jacked-up Grand Am filled with teenagers slowed, and a window rolled down and an unformed simian face jutted out, asking, "Dude, where's the party?"

  THIRTEEN

  At 4:45 P.M., Joe entered the office of the Teton County Sheriff's Department and told the receptionist he was there to meet with Sheriff Tassell. The receptionist said the sheriff was in a meeting and couldn't be disturbed. Behind her he could see a hallway with several closed doors, and he could hear the hum of voices from behind one of them.

  Joe was annoyed. "When will he be free?"

  "He didn't say."

  "Did he leave me a message? Or a set of keys?"

  "And you are ... ?" she asked archly.

  He told her.

  "No, there's nothing for you here."

  Joe considered waiting, and looked around the small reception area. There were two chairs, and one of them was filled with a sinewy man wearing khakis, a polo shirt, a jacket, and light hiking boots. Not local, Joe thought, but buttoned-up and urban, attempting to appear casual and outdoorsy. The man looked straight back at Joe, as if daring him to take the seat next to him.

  "Are you waiting for the sheriff too?" Joe asked.

  "Could be," the man said. There was something coiled up about him, Joe thought. Then he noticed the earpiece, and the thin wire that curled from it into the man's collar.

  "Are you Secret Service?" Joe asked, remembering Tassell's other meeting about the vice president's visit.

  "Could be," the man said again. "I think the sheriff will be in there awhile."

  Joe was being dismissed. He glanced at the receptionist, who was suddenly busy reading a magazine and wouldn't look back.

  "When you see the sheriff," Joe told
the receptionist, "please ask him to call me." He wrote down his cell phone number on a business card and handed it to her. "Tell him if he doesn't call me, I'll need to bother him at home later."

  She took Joe's card without comment.

  The Secret Service agent watched him coolly, but turned away as if to say, "You're dismissed."

  HE DROVE OUT of town to the north and parked in a pull-out overlooking the river. The urn with Will Jensen's ashes sat on the passenger seat where Maxine should have been, the seat belt securing it. The urn gave him a feeling of macabre unease.

  The Tetons, backlit from the setting sun, were black sawteeth against the purpling sky. On the Snake River, through the gold aspen, Joe could see a blue rubber raft floating down the river filled with tourists bundled up in life vests. The guide who manned the oars pointed upriver for his guests, and Joe followed his gesture. A large bald eagle's nest, the size of a small car, it seemed, occupied an old-growth cottonwood treetop. With his binoculars, Joe could see two fledgling eagles in the nest. The mother duckwalked around the rim of the nest, looking down at her young ones. He could see their hooked beaks opening and closing, pink inside their mouths.

  Which made Joe think of Nate's falcons. Which made him think of Saddlestring. Which made him think that he better call home. He plucked his phone from the cradle and hit the speed dial.

  After five rings, Lucy answered.

  "May I speak with your mom?" he asked, after Lucy had told him a long story about the substitute teacher she had that day, a man who said he really wanted to be friends with the kids in her class and asked them to call him "Mr. Kenny."