Vicious Circle

by C. J. Box

  “Yes, but you should probably confirm that with her. I’m talking out of school here.”

  “I think I did confirm it with her, although I didn’t realize it at the time,” Joe said as much to himself as to Gilbertson. “Now things are starting to make more sense to me.”

  “Then are we okay here?” Gilbertson asked. He didn’t even need to look over his shoulder at the out-of-season elk mount to emphasize what he was getting at.

  “Yup,” Joe said, closing his notebook and standing up. “But I might come back one of these days and give that trophy head a closer look. And I might want to see some of the mounts you’ve got up there in that hunting cabin of yours.”

  Gilbertson got the scared look in his eyes again.

  Joe continued. “Now, is there anything about this particular situation you might not be telling me? Now is the chance to clear the air. Anything that might be relevant that you’re aware of?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Except that I have lunch with Ashlyn about once a week. We’re friends, kind of. You have to be friends with the banker in a town this small.”

  “Yes?” Joe said to prompt him.

  “Since she was named trustee to that account, she always has a second cell phone with her. It’s one of those cheap ones—the prepaid kind. I’ve never seen her make a call on it, but she always has it with her. I guess that’s so she’ll be available at a moment’s notice.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Don’t think too badly of Ashlyn, though,” Gilbertson said. “Seven-point-five million is a lot of capital for a small-town bank these days. Especially when the feds are trying to drive them all out of business.”

  —

  JOE DESCENDED the wooden stairs and closed the door behind him, his head swirling with new revelations and scenarios.

  He didn’t recall receiving the two phone calls until he was on the highway back to Saddlestring. He removed his phone and checked his screen.

  The call was from a 777 prefix that meant state government, followed by a low-digit series that indicated the governor’s office.

  The message was from Marybeth and it read:

  Call me. I found out where Cora Lee’s been hiding.

  Joe made a decision based on priority . . . and called his wife first.

  23

  The midmorning mist was burning off the hayfields and the hundreds of symmetrical round bales from the last cutting of the year as Joe sizzled by on the highway toward Saddlestring. As the mist lifted, the dark mountains to the west asserted themselves and took their place on the horizon.

  For Joe, everything was becoming very clear.

  —

  MARYBETH ANSWERED on the first ring.

  “Twelve Sleep County Library, this is Marybeth.”

  “Of course it is,” Joe said. “I called your cell.”

  “I’m out of practice,” she said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the mountain of work I’ve got in front of me after being gone so long.”

  “I believe it,” Joe said. “That place can’t function without you.”

  “Sometimes I wish it could.”

  “So what did you find?”

  “Cora Lee was easy to find,” she said. “Just a simple Google search and some follow-up with our databases.”

  For years, Marybeth had been Joe’s unpaid researcher while he was in the field. Through friends in law enforcement, she’d obtained the passwords and procedures to official crime database programs including NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System), NCIC (National Crime Information Center), ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and RMIN—the Rocky Mountain Information Network, which included Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

  “I’m listening,” Joe said.

  He could hear her tapping on keys. She said, “Cora Lee Cates was arrested and convicted of possession and intent to sell methamphetamine and soliciting in Rock Springs a year ago. She was sentenced to fifteen months in prison, but she only served nine. She was released September twentieth of this year, so she’s been out a little more than a month.”

  “Good work, but I guess I’m not surprised,” Joe said. “Cora Lee went bad fast after she left Bull.”

  “And it looks like she went right back on the pipe as soon as she got out,” Marybeth said. “But why go after our daughters?”

  “I may have an answer to that,” Joe said. He recounted what he’d learned that morning in Winchester.

  “Seven-point-five million?” Marybeth said incredulously. “That’s a pile of money.”

  “It’s a war chest,” he said. “Remember when we talked about motivation? Dallas doesn’t need it—he’s out for revenge. But this might explain how he’s able to hang around and terrorize us with no visible means of support. And it might explain how he keeps his thugs loyal and working for him—or why Cora Lee was so relentless. This kind of scheme doesn’t work in a vacuum—it has to be financed.”

  Marybeth was silent for half a minute. She said, “I heard something this morning, but I don’t want it to be true. I heard some of my patrons talking about it after their book club.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They were saying how surprised they were that Lester Spivak drove his twelve-year-old to some kind of elite gymnastics camp in Colorado Springs yesterday. They were saying how odd it was that a man under investigation and suspended without pay could afford something like that.”

  Joe gripped the wheel so tightly his fingers turned white.

  “Tell me I’m wrong to be suspicious all of a sudden,” Marybeth asked with sincerity.

  “I don’t think you’re wrong,” Joe said. “But it means this thing goes a lot deeper than I thought possible. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out there had been a disbursement from the Bank of Winchester to Spivak in the last day or two. I’d like to know the names of all the people getting paid off from that account.”

  She said, “I’ll talk to Dulcie about getting a warrant for that information. After all, she should be easy to find because we’re all in the same house together.” She laughed a sad laugh that wrenched at Joe’s heart and made him even angrier about the situation they were in.

  Then it hit him. He asked, “Cora Lee—was she sent to the Sweetwater County Jail or the Wyoming Women’s Center?”

  “Let’s see . . .” Marybeth said as she clicked on her keyboard. “Okay—it was the WWC.”

  The state had only one women’s prison and it was located in Lusk in the eastern part of the state.

  “We know who else is there, don’t we?” he asked.

  “Brenda Cates. But . . .”

  “I know,” Joe said. “She’s a quadriplegic and supposedly held in isolation. But if there’s anybody mean enough and smart enough to orchestrate all that’s happened to us, it’s Brenda. Plus, she has access to a war chest to make it happen.”

  “My God,” Marybeth said.

  “I’m dropping Daisy off at Dulcie’s,” Joe said. “Then I’m taking a trip to Lusk. I should get there by three this afternoon.”

  “What if she won’t talk to you?” Marybeth asked. “Don’t you have to be on a list of some kind?”

  “She’ll talk to me,” Joe said. “She won’t have a choice. Inmates are compelled to talk to law enforcement whether they want to or not.”

  —

  AFTER COAXING HIS RELUCTANT LABRADOR to leave his truck and go into Dulcie’s backyard for the rest of the day, Joe took I-25 south toward Casper. The journey to Lusk would give him time to work through what he now knew and to think about his next steps. He looked forward to both, although he was exhausted from lack of sleep. There would be a mandatory stop at Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitters in Casper to buy a set of new clothes. Every stitch Joe owned had burned up in his closet and he’d been wearing the same unif
orm shirt and Wranglers for more than thirty hours.

  The Bighorns continued to fill his passenger-side window as he neared Buffalo. Strings of aspen in their fall colors looked like yellow veins through the dark pine forests.

  Joe made a mental list of the people he needed to talk to as he drove. He started with the governor’s office.

  Colter Allen had served as the new governor of Wyoming since January, replacing Spencer Rulon, who had completed his second term. Allen, unlike Rulon, was a Republican. He’d run on a traditional platform of gun rights, revitalizing the energy sectors, suing the federal government on every imaginable front—his campaign slogan was “Stick It to the Feds”—and vowing to take over federal lands, which comprised more than fifty percent of the landmass of the state. He won with seventy-six percent of the vote over a bespectacled University of Wyoming political science professor who ran on renewable green energy and workforce training to turn out-of-work coal miners into baristas and software programmers.

  Prior to becoming governor, Allen had been a Big Piney–area lawyer, rancher, and land speculator. In addition to being a high school rodeo champion and U.S. Marine, he’d attended Yale Law School—although he said very little about that during the campaign.

  Joe had met Colter Allen once when the man campaigned in Saddlestring and he didn’t know yet what he thought about him. The Big Piney game warden had told him Allen was arrogant and hard to deal with, but Joe kept an open mind. Thus far, the shake-ups in state government Allen had promised hadn’t taken place, and the state hadn’t reclaimed an inch of federal land.

  Joe missed Rulon, who’d been mercurial and charismatic at the same time, and he’d always be grateful to the ex-governor for making some of his financial problems go away and for facilitating the release of Nate Romanowski from a slew of federal charges. As far as Joe knew, Rulon had established a law practice in Cheyenne. He’d been very quiet since Allen replaced him.

  Colter Allen was a tall man with wide shoulders, longish silver hair, a movie star jawline, and bushy eyebrows. In what Joe saw as a further attempt to make people forget about that Yale Law School stain on his record, he wore jeans and scuffed boots, a string tie, and a Western-style yoked sports jacket. His dog was a blue heeler he referred to as “the first dog,” and it went everywhere with him. First Lady Tatie was a skeleton-thin outdoor-clothing heiress, and she’d had enough face-tightening medical procedures to appear perpetually astonished.

  —

  “GOVERNOR ALLEN’S OFFICE,” the receptionist said in a stern tone.

  “This is game warden Joe Pickett returning the governor’s call.”

  “Please hold.”

  Joe slowed as he passed through the town of Buffalo. The highway patrolman who was based there was known to be zealous about giving out speeding tickets.

  A twangy deep voice said, “Joe Pickett. You’re a hard man to get a hold of. One would think it would be easier for a governor to speak to one of his employees.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Joe said. “I did call back, but I missed you.”

  Allen ignored the apology and said, “I was just talking to Linda this morning,” meaning Linda Greene-Dempsey, the director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “She seems quite concerned about you.”

  “Sir?”

  Allen chuckled. “She says you are tops on the list for destruction of state property—and this was before your house burned down.”

  Joe sighed and said, “Yup.”

  “That’s quite a record. I also heard you once arrested Governor Budd for fishing without a license. You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

  “Actually, I would,” Joe said.

  Allen didn’t laugh. He said, “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. The reason I’m calling is that my chief of staff was cleaning out some of Rulon’s records and he came upon a couple of files with your name on them.”

  Joe felt a twinge in his stomach. He could guess where this was going.

  “He referred to you as his ‘range rider,’” Allen said. “My understanding is that he gave you a couple of off-the-books assignments over the years and you did well on them.”

  “Well enough, I guess,” Joe said.

  The truth was more complicated. No investigation Joe completed had been without serious flaws. If anything, he’d managed to be on-site at the right time and he’d angered the right people, which caused them to overreact in incriminating fashion.

  Allen continued. “Rulon played his cards close to the vest most of the time. He didn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the personnel in his administration, and even though he could bluster with the best of them—as we know—he rarely told even his friends what he was really thinking. So I find it really interesting that he seemed to trust you.”

  Joe recalled that Rulon had once said to him, “You possess special skills. Your talent for bumbling around until the situation explodes into a bloodbath or a debacle is uncanny. I don’t know how you manage to do it.”

  “Well,” Allen said, “now that I’ve been here nearly ten months I can see how it might be helpful from time to time to have a range rider myself. Someone who is duty-bound, loyal to me, and capable of keeping his mouth shut.”

  Joe didn’t know how to respond.

  “Did you hear what I just said?” Allen asked, obviously peeved.

  “I did, sir.”

  “Is there a reason why you wouldn’t want to work with Governor Allen like you did for Governor Rulon?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “Good,” Allen said. “That’s good. That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  He seemed like the kind of man, Joe thought, who liked to refer to himself in the third person and who demanded acquiescence.

  “I can see what Rulon was doing,” Allen said. “He’d send you out there into situations where it wasn’t unusual for a game warden to be around. No one would think much of it because you guys are usually out there on the fringe of things anyway, right? So you’d insinuate yourself into a situation like the one up in the Black Hills or last year in the Red Desert. But rather than looking for outlaws who didn’t have a fishing license or a conservation stamp, you were actually working as the eyes and ears of the governor of Wyoming.”

  “That’s about right, sir.”

  “I know it is,” Allen said. Joe heard the familiar click of the speakerphone being disconnected. When Allen came back, his voice was more clear and lower in volume, as if the governor didn’t want anyone passing in the hallway to overhear him.

  He said, “I’ve gotten a couple of calls from some donors up in Campbell County. They say there’s a movement starting among the out-of-work coal miners. These guys are mad at government in general for shutting down their jobs. There’s talk about groups of men meeting at night to curse every politician in the country—including me.”

  Allen sounded defensive when he said it. “Don’t these rubes know it was the greenies that created the war on coal? Greenies in Washington, to be precise. Not state government. Not me. Don’t they know the difference?”

  Joe didn’t answer, because it was a rhetorical question.

  “No, they don’t,” Allen said, answering it. “According to the people I talked to, these guys expect me to reverse the war on coal, as if I could just sign an executive order and make natural gas more expensive. They seem to think I can repeal all the renewable energy mandates from communist cities like Boulder and San Francisco!” He was outraged.

  Joe didn’t remind Governor Allen that he’d promised to do just that if elected. After all, Joe thought, what politicians ran on and what they did once they got into office were often two completely different things.

  Allen continued. “The word is, these guys plan to protest and stir everyone up. They want to disrupt public meetings, and they plan to show up at a ribbon-cutting event I’ve got on
my calendar in Moorcroft. You know the type: blue-collar rednecks with jacked-up four-wheel-drives, plenty of guns, and beards like those Duck Dynasty hillbillies.

  “So I want you to go up into coal country in the next few days and poke around. Go hang around Gillette and Wright. Find out who these guys are and who the ringleaders appear to be. Dig up some dirt on them we can use if we have to. I’ll bet there are outstanding warrants on some of them, failure to pay child support—that kind of thing. Maybe we can round them up and nip this in the bud.”

  Joe paused a long time before he said, “That’s not what I do. I don’t do political.”

  “What do you mean?” Allen said with heat. “Everything is political.”

  “Not in my world.”

  “Then what good are you?” Allen asked. “What good are you to me?”

  “Maybe not a good fit,” Joe said. He couldn’t believe he’d said it to the new governor, although he meant every word of it.

  To Rulon’s credit, Joe thought, he had never asked him to serve as a political hack to go after real or perceived enemies. The cases Rulon had asked him to investigate were those that fell outside the lines of local law enforcement or the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation.

  “I’m a busy man,” Allen said in a fit of pique. “I don’t have time for personal ethics. I was hoping you’d show me the same loyalty you showed Rulon.”

  “I will, sir,” Joe said, not knowing if he really meant it. He was astonished how childish Allen came across. Joe was used to the smoother—if deliberately obtuse—stylings of the former governor.

  “Maybe down the road I’ll come up with an assignment that meets your high standards,” Allen said. “If so, I may give you a call. That is, unless I find another range rider who is easier to work with.”

  “Whatever you think, sir,” Joe said.

  “I was thinking about you in regard to this British problem they’ve been trying to meet with me about. Did you know there was a British consulate in Denver with real diplomats?”

  The abrupt change of direction did remind Joe of Rulon.