Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  “Shit!”

  His boot eased off the brake and he began to roll forward again, making sure he could still go forward. The Ford went a few feet before it stopped again. He needed to assess the damage. And he couldn’t leave her suffering like that.

  Chanting “Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…” he got out and walked back along the wet asphalt in the rain and drew his Sig Sauer and shot her in the head. Her thrashing went manic until it stopped altogether. He couldn’t shed the afterimage of her eyes boring into him before he hit her, even when she closed them now. It took five minutes to pull her off the roadway. She was heavy, wet, and smelled of musk and hot blood.

  He took a quick look at his bumper. His right headlight was out and thatches of elk hair were caught in the grille. There was a six-inch gap between the frame and the hood. He could smell the sharp odor of burning hair and meat on the hot surfaces of the motor. He had a couple of thousand dollars in damage and years of jokes from the county maintenance shop guys and fellow cops ahead of him. But the Ford still ran.

  “Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…”

  For his next trick, he climbed into the cab of the Ford to locate a dead body in a burned-out cabin.

  “Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…”

  A body that, in all probability, belonged to someone he knew and trusted and admired and who had kept him tethered to normalcy the past few months by a single fraying thread. And he could feel the thread unraveling.

  2

  The rain had turned to slush by the time Cody Hoyt drove through Vigilante Campground and continued up the sloppy road along Trout Creek. The patrol officer ahead of him was easy to follow because of the deep fresh troughs in the chocolate one-track. His single headlight seemed to light up and suspend the cold viscous rain in midair.

  He could never enter the campground—which the U.S. Forest Service contracted with the L&C Sheriff’s Department to patrol—without remembering the keggers he used to attend there when he was growing up in junior and senior high. That’s when it started, he knew. When he learned that when he drank he could feel like a superman. His muscles and attitude swelled and his reticence and common sense stepped aside. He recalled a fight with baseball bats, remembered the hollow sickening sound his twenty-eight-inch maple bat made when it connected with Trevor McCamber’s forehead. Remembered the creamy white belly and thighs of Jenny Thompson under the blue-green glow of his dashboard lights … before that belly swelled with his son and he married Jenny in a drunken and hasty ceremony at a ranch outside of town. His best men had been Jack McGuane and Brian Winters, fellow seniors and best friends at Helena High. Brian thought the wedding was hilarious. Jack tried to pretend it wasn’t. Jack’s parents spent the ceremony shaking their heads and looking toward the road to see if Cody’s father and uncle Jeter would show. They didn’t.

  After graduation from high school, Cody and Jenny moved from place to place until finally he was back in Montana without her or his boy.

  * * *

  Cody Hoyt drove under the towering knotty pine archway and over an ancient wooden bridge barely nosing above the foam and fury of Trout Creek filled with runoff. Around a wooded corner was the cabin, and suddenly there were lights in the pure darkness: the headlights of a patrol cruiser trained on the charred remains of the structure, and a single round Cyclopean eye of a departmental Maglite swinging his way and blinding him.

  This was the crime scene, all right.

  Cody pulled up next to the patrol SUV. Inside the next vehicle, illuminated by the interior lighting, were two citizens. A man in his forties and a woman who looked to be in her early twenties huddled in the backseat. They looked cold and tired, he thought. The man needed a shave. The woman needed a hot shower. He nodded at them through two sets of windows and they nodded back.

  The patrol officer, Ryan Dougherty, appeared at his driver’s window, and tapped on the glass with the flashlight. In the process of doing it, he blinded Cody again.

  Cody powered down the window, and said, “Would you quit shining that fucking thing into my eyes?”

  “Oh, sorry.” The patrol officer, newer to the department than Cody, was blond and baby-faced with a trimmed bristly mustache that said, Here comes a cop! and eyes that had not seen enough. In fact, Cody thought, Dougherty looked flushed, despite the weather.

  “What happened to your front end?” Dougherty asked.

  “Hit an elk,” Cody said.

  “On the way up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bull or cow?”

  Cody hesitated. “Cow.”

  Cody knew what Dougherty would say next. “Got a cow permit?” he said, grinning.

  “Ha ha,” Cody said, deadpan.

  “I bet you’ll be hearing that one a lot.”

  “I bet I will,” Cody said, nodding toward the patrol vehicle. “Those two the hikers who found the cabin?”

  “Yeah. I met them at the York Bar and they showed me the way up here. Here, I got their names.…” Dougherty dug inside his raincoat for the notebook in his breast pocket. He was in uniform: brown shirt, tan pockets, and epaulets. The reason the dopers called them “L&C County Fascists.”

  “I don’t need their names,” Cody said. “Unless you think they did it.”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “Did they tromp all over the crime scene?”

  “Just a little,” Dougherty said. “It’s hard to tell what they touched.”

  Cody said, “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good. Put one of them in this vehicle and interview them separately. Walk them through their movements when they first saw the cabin. Find out which direction they came down, and what they did inside. Find out what they touched and if they took anything. It’s amazing how many times citizens take souvenirs from a crime scene. If something sounds wrong or their stories don’t match, come get me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dougherty said. The flush was gone from his cheeks. Cody could tell he was beating himself up for taking their story at face value.

  “I’m gonna go take a look,” Cody said.

  “It’s wetter than hell,” Dougherty said. “The ash from the fire makes it all … soupy.”

  Cody glared at him. “Have you been in the crime scene?”

  Dougherty looked away for a second, and when he turned his head back he said, “A little.”

  Cody’s voice was ice. “How fucking little?”

  “Enough to confirm there’s a body. A big fat one.”

  Cody took a deep breath of wet air.

  “You aren’t gonna write me up, are you?” Dougherty asked. “I was thinking, Jesus, what if the person is still alive?”

  “Don’t lie.” He repeated a sheriff’s department bromide: “You lie, you die, Dougherty. You wanted to see a burned-up dead body. Everybody wants to see a dead body until they see one. Have you had your fill?”

  “Christ, yes,” Dougherty said, shaking his head. “I’ll be seeing that thing in my dreams.”

  “Step aside so I can get my rain gear,” Cody said.

  It began to rain harder.

  * * *

  His foul weather gear was in a heavy plastic box in the back of his SUV and there was no way to reach it from the inside, so he grabbed his Colorado Rockies baseball cap, jammed it on, and opened the door. The cold rain stung when it hit his bare face and hands. He could remember only one other time when he got his rain gear out, the previous spring when he was called to a ranch because the foreman thought he saw Middle Eastern terrorists photographing a missile silo. Turned out the photographers were farmers from India on an agricultural mission sponsored by the State of Montana and their interest was wheat, not missile silos. But it rained so rarely in Montana, Cody thought, that packing rain gear was almost silly. He didn’t know a single person who owned an umbrella, for instance.

  He leaned into the back of the Expedition while he wrestled with the box. It was jammed against the backseat and he had to pull it over
the top of the rest of his gear—his long-gun case, large evidence box, canvas duffel packed with two armored vests, a survival crate the sheriff insisted they carry with them filled with a sleeping bag, candles, food, and water. While he threw the boxes around and got the one with his crime-scene clothing, he could feel the rain soaking through the back of his shirt and jeans. His boots were already wet from the puddle in the parking lot.

  Even though it was getting more pointless by the second, he pulled on rain pants and slipped Tyvek booties over his wet boots. Instead of a raincoat he pulled on a full-length Australian oilcloth duster. Rain immediately beaded on the fabric.

  His cell phone burred and he dug it out and saw the call was from his son Justin. Justin was an anomaly to Cody—miraculously, the only genuinely good person he knew. Justin was kind, selfless, and admirable. Plus he was tall and nice-looking and had a sweet temperament. Cody had no idea how he could have spawned such a child, given his own foibles and his long lineage of white-trash relatives. Every time Cody saw his son he looked for signs of his own obsessions and bad traits and had yet to see them. Justin was a fucking miracle at seventeen years old, Cody thought.

  “Hey,” Cody said. “This is bad timing and my signal’s weak.”

  “Hi, Dad. Sorry, but I wanted to ask you something.”

  “I’m on a crime scene,” Cody said. “Can I call you back later?”

  “Yeah, but do it quick. I’m gonna be gone for a while.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Didn’t Mom tell you?”

  “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, Justin, this is a really bad time.”

  “You said that,” his son said, not masking his disappointment well. “I wanted to ask you if I could borrow—”

  “You can borrow anything you want of mine,” Cody said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got to go. Later.”

  He snapped the phone shut and crammed it in his pocket, feeling guilty and angry at himself for cutting off Justin.

  * * *

  Cody grabbed his digital camera and light setup and his favorite flashlight, a Maglite with an extension that held six batteries and could be swung like a heavy lead pipe—with the same results. It was better than that twenty-eight-inch maple bat. The long flashlights had been banned from most police departments, which Cody saw as a further sign of official wimpification. He turned toward the burned-up cabin.

  As Dougherty escorted the female hiker into Cody’s SUV, he said, “Look at you. You look like a gunfighter in that coat. I need to get me one of those. Cool.”

  Cody sighed.

  * * *

  As he approached the cabin he tried to clear his mind of everything in it, including Justin’s call, to make it a fresh whiteboard. He wanted to view the scene with absolute open-minded clarity. He knew this was his only chance to investigate the scene without anyone around. If there was a body, the place would be swarming with people within the hour. Skeeter would be there with his deputy coroner and perhaps a reporter from the Helena Independent Record. Skeeter would feign innocence as to why the reporter was there, but everybody would know he called her before he rolled. There might even be a team from one of two local television stations, although he knew they operated lean going into the weekends. And Sheriff Tub Tubman, also up for reelection, would no doubt arrive in his Suburban with Undersheriff Cliff Bodean just a few steps behind him. Mike Sanders, the other detective on call, might surprise him with his presence because the sheriff was there, no doubt bitching about the fact no one had called him. The forensics unit shared by the Helena PD would be present, as would the county evidence tech. So until the scene became chaotic, this was his opportunity to see it fresh. He couldn’t do anything about the fact that the hikers had reported seeing a hand, but he tried to ignore that, also. He wanted to see the hand for himself as if he’d stumbled upon it. If there was a hand.

  If there was a body.

  Because if there was a body and it belonged to whom he thought and if the evidence pointed to a homicide, he’d personally go after who did it like a rabid dog until he took that person down. And he wasn’t thinking Deer Lodge, Montana, where the state penitentiary was located. He was thinking Dirt Nap, Montana. Which was just about anywhere he wanted it to be.

  * * *

  Cody opened the beam on his Maglite as he approached on a flagstone footpath. He moved slowly, taking in not only the cabin itself but anything of note on the path, which was the only walkway to the place from a gravel parking area. Looking for anything out of place; a wrapper, a cigarette butt, a spent cartridge. He saw nothing unusual.

  The cabin was originally built in the 1920s on the edge of a meadow that sloped down to Trout Creek. The twenty acres of wooded land that went with it was surrounded on three sides by the Helena National Forest. An agreement had been granted years before to the Forest Service for a public easement for access to the trails in the Big Belts. That’s how the hikers stumbled on the scene.

  The cabin was built of logs and had a deck overlooking the meadow in back and a covered porch in front. Tall spruce trees bordered it on three sides. Although it had fallen into disrepair in the 1970s, the structure had been expensively renovated and restored. At least before half of it burned down, that is.

  The cabin was, quite simply, half the size it should have been. The left side was burned to the ground except for a black woodstove and chimney that leaned dangerously toward the creek. The right side was perfectly intact. He looked at the right side first, where the bedrooms and kitchen were. Rainwater coursed down bronze-colored logs, and there were lace curtains in the windows. A plaque near the front door read LEAVE YOUR TROUBLES OUTSIDE BEFORE ENTERING. He smiled bitterly at that.

  He slowly circled the outside of the cabin, flashlight down, walking a perimeter he would later flag with yellow plastic CRIME SCENE tape to keep the press and public out. The ground was soaked and muddy. There was standing water in every depression. The grass was long and hadn’t been mowed for a while. Long blades of it bent down as if depressed, heavy droplets on every point. He looked for footprints wherever the grass gave way to dirt. He saw none except for two sets of fresh hiking boot impressions. He shot photos of the footprints and checked to see if they were good shots on the display screen on the back of his camera. He knew where they came from, and glanced back toward the parking area. Dougherty had moved from interviewing the male in his Ford to the department vehicle where the female hiker had been asked to stay.

  Then he carefully approached the burned-out part of the cabin, and twisted the lens of his Maglite to narrow and brighten his field of view.

  The floor of the burned rooms consisted of black wet tarlike sludge; ash mixed with rainwater. It looked like wet black cement. Fallen timbers and collapsed framing stuck out from the soup. As did the woodstove, a charred black metal desk with a squared-off black box on top of it, and the metal frames of an easy chair, fold-out couch, and gun safe.

  It all smelled of charcoal, smoke, rain, and damp. And something else: barbecued pork.

  A tangle of wooden beams and wall joints had fallen on the metal skeleton of the couch. But protruding from the tangle was a swelled and waxy-looking arm. On the end of the arm was an outstretched human hand, the fingers splayed out as if to say Stop!, the hand so bloated he could barely see the glint of a gold wedding band on the third finger. The skin of the forearm looked crispy and black, like the burn on the side of a roasted marshmallow. Cody further narrowed the beam on the flashlight to a five-inch spot to peer further inside the load of burned wood. A naked thigh, the skin burned and split to reveal neon orange fat like a pig or a goose.

  Cody closed his eyes and reached up and took his cap off and let the rain hit him in the face.

  * * *

  Larry Olson arrived a half hour later. By then, Cody had thoroughly photographed the scene. He’d placed plastic numbered tents near the body, the stove, the desk, and the couch. He’d set up his remote flashe
s on mounts that lit it up like daylight. The photos he saw on his display were sharp, focused, and thorough. He tried not to think about what he was shooting or who the body had belonged to. He shut off his mind from speculation, and made sure every possible angle and object was preserved digitally. He never once walked into the burned-out rooms, but did all of his shooting from outside. As he did, he found other objects of interest: a metal briefcase swimming in the black soup, the frame of a Winchester rifle with the stock and forestock burned off, a blackened bottle shape he recognized with such intimacy and disappointment that it was as if someone had punched him in the throat.

  He looked up as Larry’s flashlight bobbed along the flagstone path and eventually raised to take him in.

  Larry said, “Nice raincoat. You headed to the OK Corral later tonight? You and the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got issues with Ike Clanton, that bastard.”

  Larry actually laughed. “Suicide? Tell me it’s a suicide.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything,” Cody said. “I’m going to go back to my truck and burn one. I’ll stay out of your way. Then I’m going to come back and listen to your initial theory. I’ve looked over the scene and I’ve got more than enough shots of it. And I’ve got a theory of my own, but I don’t want to steer you one way or the other.”

  Because it was dark, Cody couldn’t tell what Larry was thinking.

  “Have you been in the unburned section?” Larry asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. Let’s do that together.”

  “All right.”