by C. J. Box
“It’s okay,” the cowboy said to Joe with a nod of his brim. “I’ve got this.”
“Brady can break you in half,” Ben said to the cowboy. The cowboy turned away from Joe and nodded his head as if he agreed with the statement.
“Maybe so,” he said. “But I ain’t moving.”
Joe took a deep breath and walked over and stood shoulder to shoulder with the cowboy.
He heard Sheridan whisper, “Dad, don’t get in a fight with them.”
At the word Dad, the cowboy glanced over to Joe for a brief second before turning his attention back to the Youngberg brothers. His eyes settled on Joe’s uniform shoulder patch and suddenly widened in reaction.
He was nervous; the expression on his face was a mix of alarm and fear.
Ben said to Brady, “You all right?”
“Getting there,” Brady hissed.
“Brady’s getting his breath back,” Ben announced. “When he does, we’re going to take you two apart.”
They looked very capable of it, Joe thought. Both had removed their coats and their forearms looked like hams from the horse work they did every day.
A low growl came from the direction of the kitchen.
“Is everything under control in here?”
Joe looked up to see a human bulldog of a man in his early seventies filling the doorway. He recognized the owner of the Hotel Wolf from the photos he’d seen in the lobby of the building. The owner wore a bloody white apron and he gripped a meat cleaver in each hand. Apparently, he’d been cutting steaks in the kitchen.
“I think we’re all right now,” the cowboy said.
“Ben?” the owner asked as he waved a cleaver in the direction of the brothers. “Brady? I’ve warned you before that I’d eighty-six your sorry butts if you caused any more trouble in here.”
“We’re fine,” Ben said, suddenly conciliatory. “We’re completely cool.”
“Brady?”
“Yeah, it’s over,” he grunted.
The owner nodded toward them, turned on his heel, and strode back into the kitchen to cut more beef.
*
“THIS IS LANCE RAMSEY,” Sheridan said to Joe after the Youngbergs had left the building and gone down the street to the Rustic Bar. “He gave me a ride into town tonight.”
Joe recognized the name from Williams’s files. Ramsey had been interviewed because he’d been the prime liaison with Kate on the ranch. He was also the head wrangler and Sheridan’s immediate supervisor.
Joe nodded and shook Ramsey’s hand. “Thanks for standing up to them.”
“My pleasure,” Ramsey said with a shy grin. “I think they would’ve cleaned my clock without your help.”
“They would have cleaned both of our clocks.”
Ramsey blushed. He looked like a quiet, gentle, ramrod-straight caricature of what a shy but capable cowboy was supposed to look like. He could be Gary Cooper in his Helena, Montana, youth, Joe thought.
Joe looked to his daughter and she looked away.
“Nice to meet you, Lance,” Joe said.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Pickett,” Ramsey said. “Sheridan talks a lot about you.”
Which explained the look of alarm and fear he’d shown earlier, Joe thought.
Lance Ramsey was obviously more to Sheridan than her boss.
Marybeth, he thought, was right again.
10
“AS MUCH AS IT PAINS ME, I HAVE TO SAY I GOT A PRETTY GOOD FIRST impression of him,” Joe told Marybeth on his cell phone, after saying good night to Sheridan and Lance Ramsey and going upstairs to his room to call her. “I wish you were here, because you’re better at reading people than I am.”
“I knew it,” she said with triumph. “I knew she was seeing someone.”
“And you were right. At least he’s not a slacker or one of those hipster types.”
“He’s not a metrosexual?” she asked in a mocking tone.
“He’s a cowboy,” Joe said. “He looks like he walked in out of a movie. He really reacted when he met me—in a good way, I think.”
“I can’t believe you’re sticking up for him already.”
“Me either,” Joe said. “He doesn’t say much, but he was there for Sheridan.”
He was always prepared to dislike any male who pursued any of his daughters. He’d been correct—in spades—when it came to April’s choice of rodeo cowboy Dallas Cates. Joe wanted to dislike Lance Ramsey. He really did.
“You were there to protect her as well,” she said. “I’m glad you didn’t get into a bar fight on day one in a new place.”
“Me too.”
As they talked, Joe approached the window that overlooked Bridge Street and pushed the lace curtain aside. Sheridan and Lance Ramsey were on the sidewalk on the way to a white Silver Creek Ranch three-quarter-ton four-by-four pickup that was parked at an angle. Sheridan walked to the passenger door, but before she could get in, Ramsey jumped ahead of her and opened it for her. She slid in on the passenger seat. Then she turned and cupped Ramsey’s neck with her hand for a moment and said something to him. Then she gave him a quick kiss on the mouth.
Ramsey blushed red in the glow of the dome light and stared at his boots for a moment afterward before gently closing the door and shuffling around the truck on the ice for the driver’s side. Joe felt heat rush to his face as well.
Marybeth had been talking, but Joe hadn’t heard a word. He wished he hadn’t seen what he’d seen.
“Joe?” Marybeth said.
“Yup.”
“Are you there? I asked you a question.”
“I’m here. I just saw Sheridan give him a kiss in the street outside.”
“Are you spying on them?” she asked, incredulous.
“Yup, and I wish I wasn’t.”
“She was probably thanking him for defending her in the bar. That’s kind of a rare virtue these days.”
“That’s what fathers are for,” Joe said as he watched the ranch pickup back out and turn onto the street. Before the dome light went out inside the cab, he saw a glimpse of his daughter’s blond hair through the back window of the cab. She had her head turned and she was talking happily to Ramsey at the wheel.
When the light went off, the afterimage in Joe’s mind was seven-year-old Sheridan sitting in the passenger seat of his Game and Fish truck during a ride-along sixteen years before. She of the ponytails and missing teeth.
“She’s twenty-three,” Marybeth said, reading his mind.
“So what was it you were asking me before?” he said.
“I asked how it was going so far.”
“Complicated,” he said.
*
TEN SECONDS AFTER HE SIGNED OFF with Marybeth, the phone lit up and burred. The screen read CASEY SCALES. Joe punched him up.
“Hey, I’ve got weird news for you,” Scales said. “I went to my office to get the spare keys to the house over there—and I found out they’re gone. I asked the receptionist about them and she said she sent the keys to Cheyenne about a week ago.”
“To Cheyenne? You mean headquarters?”
“No. And that’s where it gets even weirder. She said someone from the governor’s office called, but she couldn’t remember who it was.”
“Why?” Joe asked.
“No idea.”
“Someone from the governor’s office wanted the keys to a game warden house in Saratoga?”
“I know,” Scales said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either. Where are you staying while you’re there?”
“Got a room at the Wolf.”
“Ah, good place. If I was you, I’d stay there and send the bill to LGD.”
“Oh, I will. She can add it to my running tab. Still, I’d like to get in the house and see if I can figure anything out while I’m here,” Joe said.
“I’ll see what I can find out about those keys tomorrow and I’ll get back to you,” Scales said. Then: “Are you in your new house up in Saddlestring?”
“Not
even close,” Joe said.
*
FOR THE NEXT HOUR, Joe lay on the bed with the reading lamp on and reviewed the Kate file again, hoping he would find something he’d previously overlooked. His eyes lingered on the names Ben and Brady Youngberg, and he circled them.
The brothers had been aggressive toward Sheridan in a public place. What, he wondered, would they be like if they encountered a lone blond British driver on the highway and thought they could grab her and get away with it?
*
HE STARTED TO GET READY for bed, when he realized he hadn’t signed off on his bar-and-food bill earlier. At the time, he’d been so flummoxed by the encounter with the Youngbergs and meeting Lance Ramsey he’d forgotten and walked out on his open ticket.
He closed the door to his room behind him and locked it, then took the staircase down to the first level and pushed though the bat-wing doors.
Kim Miller saw him and said, “Here for a nightcap?”
“Here to sign my tab.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll keep it running until you check out. Besides, I know where to find you. Sure you don’t need anything?”
“Maybe an ice water.”
“Daredevil,” she said, and winked.
While she filled a pint beer glass with ice, he noticed that the earlier crowd had largely dispersed and had been replaced with new faces. Four men wearing coveralls and with Buckbrush Wind Energy Project embroidered on the breasts of their coats sat side by side at the bar nursing draft beer.
Joe’s gaze settled on a man and a woman at a table in the meeting area adjacent to the bar. While the room had been almost full during the confrontation with the Youngberg Brothers, the couple was alone in the empty room with their heads together, engaged in what looked like an intense conversation.
They were dressed almost entirely in black and they looked out of place in a town where denim jeans, sand-colored Carhartt canvas overalls, and puffy down jackets were the norm.
Miller handed Joe his ice water and noted where he was looking.
“Ma’am,” she mocked in a whispered British accent so the pronunciation sounded like mom, “do you mind terribly if we smoke? And can I trouble you for a bar menu?”
“Ah,” Joe said, as much to himself as to Miller.
*
THE MAN AT THE TABLE looked to be in his early thirties and his skin was so pale it was nearly translucent. He had short spiked silver-flecked hair and a long pointed nose. He wore heavily scuffed black combat boots, tight black trousers, and a black peacoat over a black turtleneck. His long fingers were stained yellow from nicotine and he was scratching furiously on a steno pad while the woman spoke quickly in low tones. An expensive camera with a long lens was on the table, as well as a small digital recorder much like the device Joe carried in his own uniform breast pocket.
The woman had red hair the color of new rust and a round face with a full mouth and green eyes. A light peach-colored scarf was knotted loosely around her neck to break up the blackness. Her left elbow was on the table, but her right arm was held straight down at her side presumably to hide the cigarette in her hand from Miller behind the bar.
Both looked up and stopped talking as Joe approached. Neither looked enthusiastic at the prospect of an interruption, he noted.
Joe held out his hand and said, “Billy Bloodworth of the Daily Dispatch and Sophie Shelford-Longden. My name is Joe Pickett. I’m a game warden. Welcome to Wyoming.”
Bloodworth and Shelford-Longden exchanged a long, confused look and Bloodworth said in a thick throaty accent that was nearly incomprehensible to Joe’s ear, “Sorry, how do you know us?”
“I’ve read some of your... work,” Joe said.
“You’re shitting me,” Bloodworth said, unable to keep the pride out of his voice.
“Nope.”
“So you know about Kate,” Sophie said. “We were starting to wonder if anyone around here knew about the story.” She paused for a moment, then, “Or cared.”
“They know and they care,” Joe said. “It’s not the sensation that it is in your country, but people around here would like to find out what happened to her.”
She looked at Joe as if not sure to believe him.
“What does a gamekeeper do?” she asked.
“Game warden. Unlike England, our wildlife belong to the people of the state, not property owners. The state hires guys like me to enforce the laws and regulations and make sure there are plenty of healthy critters around. Most people in this state—and just about everyone in a town like Saratoga—have a freezer full of game meat for the winter.”
“Barbaric,” Bloodworth whispered to her.
She nodded to Joe and ignored Bloodworth. “Our hunting isn’t like that.”
“That’s what I understand,” he said.
“Our hunters are upper-class twits,” she said with a curl of her lip. “They shoot birds raised on farms or they chase poor little foxes across the fields. They don’t hunt to eat—they hunt for the sport of it. They’re relics of the past, those so-called hunters.”
Joe let it go. “Can I buy you two another drink?”
She nodded and Bloodworth said, “Finally, a man after my own heart.”
Joe turned to see Miller was already on it.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked. “It turns out we’re here for the same reason: to try and find out what happened to your sister, Kate.”
Bloodworth took a long breath and screwed up his face as if he were about to object, but Sophie nodded toward an empty chair. “We welcome any help we can get. It’s bloody cold out there to be chasing around the countryside by ourselves.”
Joe nodded and agreed.
“I thought I brought the right gear, but I could have used more heavy jumpers.”
“Jumpers?”
“You call them sweaters,” she corrected. Then: “What a horrible term.”
He sat down as Kim Miller delivered a glass of white wine for Sophie, a pint of beer for Bloodworth, and another ice water for Joe.
When she was gone, Joe said, “Officials in Wyoming assigned me to this case along with my other duties. Right now, trying to fiqure out what happened to your sister, Kate, is my highest priority. From what I understand, you’ve been here in Saratoga for a while.”
“Eight days,” Sophie said. “Eight very long and jet-laggy days.”
“Who are these officials?” Bloodworth asked with barely contained derision. “Are they the same people who didn’t give Sophie and her family the time of day for months? Is one of them your Governor Allen, who acted like he didn’t know anything about Kate when asked by the British ambassador?”
Joe ignored him just as Sophie had. Bloodworth, despite being a reporter, was not taking any notes. Joe turned his attention to Sophie. “It seems to me there’s no good reason for us to work at cross- purposes since we both want to find out the same thing.”
“I find this area primitive but deceptively beautiful,” she said as she took a sip. “We’ve seen elk, bald eagles, deer, antelopes, and mooses. And a lot of beef cattle. Today we took the wrong road to Silver Creek Ranch and we got stuck in the deep snow. Lucky for us, a local rancher happened by and pulled our car out with a chain he had with him. Otherwise we could have frozen to death out there.”
“Fucking humiliating,” Bloodworth grumbled into his beer.
Joe liked the way she said antelopes, mooses, and RAHN-chers in her British accent.
Sophie leaned forward and placed her hand on Joe’s wrist. “The rancher looked at Billy and said, ‘Who’s the fop?’”
Bloodworth angrily looked away and Joe stifled a smile.
“‘Who’s the fop?’” she said again in a faux American accent.
“You’re lucky I know how to drive,” Bloodworth said to her. To Joe: “She doesn’t have a driver’s license.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t get us stuck in the snow, Billy.”
He shook his head. “It’s not
like I’ve tooled around the countryside in a four-wheel-drive beast the size of my house before, Sophie.”
“So,” Joe said to them both, “I just got here this afternoon. Since you’ve been here a few days, have you come up with any ideas about what happened to your sister?”
She said, “We think we know who took her.”
Joe sat back.
“Sophie,” Bloodworth hissed. “We agreed to keep that on the QT until I broke the story. You agreed to that condition.”
Sophie shrugged. “Billy wants a scoop because his tabloid sent him over here. I want to know what happened to my sister.”
“We’re a team, remember?” Bloodworth said. “We’re fucking aliens in this world. We need to stick together like we talked about.”
“We’ve actually got a snap of him,” Sophie said as she rapidly scrolled though photographs on her phone. When she found the one she was looking for, she turned the screen toward Joe just as Bloodworth reached over and pulled her hand away.
“Sophie,” he hissed.
But Joe had very briefly seen the blurry image of a man inside a home of some kind, the photo shot through a window from what looked like a great distance. The man stood in shadow in the background and seemed to be gesturing with his hands. In the foreground of the shot, near the bottom of the window itself, was someone’s head. Long blond hair. She appeared to be seated with her back to the window as she watched the man inside. The shot was so out of focus that Joe couldn’t see the man’s face, only his lanky form.
“Let me see that again,” Joe said.
“Absolutely not,” Bloodworth said. He’d taken Sophie’s phone from her and she looked away, half-embarrassed but completely resigned.
“Is that Kate?”
“We’re sorting it,” Bloodworth said.
“If you have evidence, you need to share it with law enforcement,” Joe said.
Bloodworth looked suspiciously at Joe, then said to Sophie, “Something happened here to Kate. Right here, in this beautiful little valley. She didn’t vanish on her own. Someone knows what happened to her and we think we know who it was. We’re not ready to reveal our findings yet. We don’t know who we can trust.”
Joe said, “But if you’ve got proof that she’s alive, wouldn’t you want her rescued immediately?”
