by C. J. Box
Sheridan looked up and their eyes met for a moment before she turned away. She clamped her lips together to keep them from quivering.
Kate acknowledged him with a curt nod.
He said to Kate, “You’ve created a lot of problems around here for a lot of people, but I’m glad you’re safe and alive.”
“I was always safe and alive, why can’t people understand that?”
Sheridan shot a bitter look at Kate, and Gordon sighed audibly. Joe could feel the tension in the room. It was Silver Creek Ranch versus Kate Shelford-Longden. For her part, Kate seemed preternaturally disconnected from the situation, as if she were there by mistake. That rubbed Joe the wrong way.
He held up his phone and said, “Smile for the camera.”
He got two clear shots before Kate looked away, annoyed.
He attached both photos to a message and sent them to Governor Allen and Connor Hanlon with the tagline We found her and she’s in good shape.
“Lance is in surgery,” Gordon said to Joe. “We talked to the surgeon and his prognosis is good. They’re worried about infection, but they said the cold temperatures probably worked in his favor.”
Gordon reached over and put his hand on Sheridan’s shoulder. “Your daughter probably saved his life.”
“Yeah—so that’s on me,” Sheridan said.
“You did the right thing,” Joe told her.
“Then why do I feel so crappy?”
“I did my best before she got there,” Kate said defensively. “I don’t have any formal training in treating injuries.”
Joe ignored her as he approached Sheridan. His daughter stood up and he hugged her. She felt small again in his arms.
“Mark, I did my best,” Kate said to the general manager. “I was trying to figure out how to get some help for Lance when she showed up. I would have gotten something sorted.”
Gordon turned to Kate and there was a long pause. He said, “I suppose I shouldn’t expect gratitude from you after all this time, but a lot of people risked their lives and their careers trying to find you. My property will forever be linked to a visitor’s disappearance in the minds of potential guests. So you could at least shut up for a while.”
“Oh, please—” Kate started to speak and then obviously thought better of it and closed her mouth.
Joe took Sheridan aside and told her that he was meeting Nate at the Encampment lumber mill and he’d be happy to give her a ride back.
“I’ll stay,” she said. “I guess I want to make sure he makes it through surgery.”
Joe nodded.
“So I can kill him,” she added.
Joe hugged her again.
Before he left the room, he said to Kate, “You need to stay right here. I’m calling Sheriff Neal. He’ll probably have his own ideas about what to do with you. You wasted a lot of state and federal resources, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to slap you with a whopping bill. And legal charges.”
She put on a defiant look, but she looked a little shaken.
“She doesn’t care about anything or anyone but herself,” Sheridan said to Joe. “She doesn’t care how many people she’s hurt on her ‘voyage of self-discovery.’”
Joe wasn’t entirely sure what his daughter meant, but he trusted her judgment.
“There’s another reason I’m staying,” Sheridan said to Joe softly as she turned her back to Kate and showed him the screen of her phone. She’d surreptitiously taken several photos of Kate at the cabin, in the cab of her pickup, and at the hospital.
“These are going up on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram,” Sheridan whispered. “They’ll go viral within hours. Kate told me one of the things she dreaded most was the social media reaction. Well, now Kate’s chickens will come home to roost.”
Joe gulped.
“I want to be here to see it happen,” Sheridan said with narrowed eyes.
. . .
SHERIDAN WAS TOUGH, he thought as his boots echoed in the long hallway away from the surgical suite. But she was hurt and there was very little he or Marybeth could do about it other than to be there for her.
When the girls were young, he knew better how to deal with their problems and minor tragedies. He could distract them, or make pancakes for them, or offer to drive them into town for ice cream. He had little experience dealing with the problems of adult children. He wished Marybeth were there, but perhaps Sheridan didn’t.
He raised his chin when a woman shouted from one of the hospital rooms ahead of him. She sounded angry.
“Nurse!” the woman called out. “I need to make a statement. Nurse.”
A nurse brushed by Joe and walked quickly up the hallway toward the room with the disturbance. She said to Joe, “She just gained consciousness. I’ve told her to use her call button, but she’d rather yell.”
Joe followed and glanced over at the open doorway where the nurse had entered. The whiteboard next to the doorframe read Carol Schmidt.
He paused.
Schmidt was sitting up in bed. She peered around the nurse who was hovering over her and she saw Joe in the hallway.
“Are you a game warden?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. You’ll do.”
You’ll do?
Then: “I need to talk to somebody in law enforcement. I need to make a statement.”
“You really need to calm down and get some rest,” the nurse told Schmidt as she gently pushed her back toward her pillow. “It isn’t good for you to get so worked up. I’ll talk to the doctor about prescribing a sedative.”
Joe recognized the name as the same woman he’d heard about the other day at breakfast. He removed his hat and entered the room.
“A statement?” he said.
The nurse gave up trying to get her to lie flat and she stood helplessly to the side of Schmidt’s bed.
“Gaylan Kessel ran me off the road,” Carol Schmidt said. “I’ll testify in court it was him. At first I couldn’t remember his name when I saw him, but it came to me just this afternoon.”
“Gaylan Kessel,” Joe repeated.
“He’s that windmill guy.”
“I’m aware of him. Why would he do that?”
“I made some legitimate complaints about that burner at the mill in Encampment and I identified his truck being there. I even got the license plate number and he knew it.”
To the nurse, Joe said, “Keep her healthy. We’ll need her on the stand.”
*
SHERIFF NEAL DIDN’T pick up when Joe called him directly on his cell phone. Joe didn’t want to call the sheriff’s office itself with the news of either Kate’s appearance or Schmidt’s allegation, since Michael Williams thought Kessel had a mole or two within the agency.
When it went to voicemail, Joe said, “Everything has broken open. Call me back.”
Then he sent the photos of Kate as well, thinking they would prompt Neal to drop everything he was doing and return the call.
*
JOE ROARED DOWN I-80 toward Walcott Junction and the road to Saratoga. It was dark enough now that the sea of red blinking lights from the Buckbrush Project pierced through the southern sky and cast the horizon in an unnatural neon hue.
A thousand wind turbines, he thought. A five-billion-dollar facility.
Whether operating on his own or under orders, somebody was out to protect that investment at all costs until it could go completely operational.
That somebody, Joe believed, was Gaylan Kessel.
And Nate was sure Kessel himself was making a delivery to the burner in Encampment that very night.
*
WHEN JOE’S PHONE lit up while he was making the exit off the interstate, he expected Neal to be on the other end. But it wasn’t the sheriff.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Hanlon shouted. Joe had to move the phone away from his ear.
“We found Kate,” Joe said.
“I saw the fucking photos,” Hanlon sc
reeched. “Are you sure it’s even her this time?”
“Yup.”
“Why are you even there? Why are you still working the case?”
Joe said, “I thought you’d be happy to know she’s okay.”
“I’m happy! I’m happy!” Hanlon screeched. “But that has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve gone rogue over there. Don’t you even know what ‘you’re fired’ means?”
“I guess not.” Joe smiled.
“It doesn’t change a thing,” Hanlon said. “If you thought this would buy your job back, you’re even dumber than I thought you were.”
“Maybe I am,” Joe said.
“I’m going to send the Highway Patrol after you. I’m going to order them to pull you over and arrest you for impersonating a law enforcement officer.”
“Tell them to hurry,” Joe said.
Hanlon went silent for a moment. “Why?”
Joe disconnected the call.
Then he said to himself out loud: “Because after tonight the governor’s two biggest contributors are going to be real mad at him.”
Hanlon called back immediately and Joe let it ring.
32
NATE WAS WITH JEB PRYOR AND A SULLEN OVERWEIGHT MAN WHO slumped in a hard-backed chair in Pryor’s mill office. Joe had walked through the darkened and silent mill to get there. He stomped snow and sawdust from his boots as he entered the room.
“Don’t worry about making a mess,” Pryor said. “Where did you park?”
“Out front,” Joe said. “I didn’t see your vehicles.”
“We hid them behind the building,” Pryor said. “Except for Wylie’s pickup. That’s the truck you saw down by the burner on your way in.”
Joe nodded and assessed Wylie, who was apparently the sullen man. Wylie hugged himself in a way that suggested his ribs hurt.
He had both ears, though. Joe shot Nate a look.
“He’s a no-account worm,” Nate said. “His only purpose on earth right now is to receive a call from Gaylan Kessel.”
“That name again,” Joe said.
The room smelled of sawdust and pizza. The pizza box was on Pryor’s desktop, along with a half-full bottle of Yukon Jack whiskey. They’d already eaten the pizza and all that was left was grease-stained cardboard and a few discarded crusts.
“We found her,” Joe said. “We found Kate.”
“Alive?” Nate asked.
“Very much so. She was hiding out at Lance Ramsey’s cabin and she’d been there the whole time. Actually, Sheridan found her and brought her in.”
“Sheridan?”
“Yup.”
“I’m not all that surprised about the Brit,” Nate said. “Too many people around here seemed to think she just stayed. I think if you really look into it, you’ll find that the Teubners sold her a little meth and the Youngbergs probably spied on her.”
Joe nodded. “I really don’t care about that woman anymore. She’s someone else’s problem. I’m more worried about my daughter.”
“You’ve got something else to be worried about,” Nate said as he held out his balled fist toward Joe. “We found this in the burner.”
Joe opened his palm up and Nate dropped a light metal object into it. It was an elongated ring nearly half an inch wide.
“Recognize that?” Nate asked.
Joe held it up to the light and turned it in his fingers. The soot had been largely rubbed off of it and he could make out some kind of insignia and a series of numbers.
“It’s a leg band,” Joe said. “The kind the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service use for research.”
“Research on golden and bald eagles in particular,” Nate said.
They exchanged looks.
Nate said, “Maybe next time you’ll listen when falconers start complaining.”
“They’re always complaining,” Joe said. “They’re like farmers or outfitters.”
“But this time we had a point,” Nate said. “There was a reason why the feds wouldn’t let us get eagles to hunt with. Too many of them were ending up in that burner down there.”
“What?” Pryor boomed.
Even Wylie Frye looked up. He was confused.
“We’ve only got a couple of hours,” Nate said. “We need to make our plan.”
“Damn,” Pryor mused. “All along I thought that Kate woman ran off with the game warden.”
“That was your theory?” Joe asked.
“It was until now.”
“Some conspiracy theories are better than others,” Nate said with a smirk.
*
TED PANOS SLOWLY unthawed in the passenger seat of Gaylan Kessel’s pickup as they drove south toward Encampment. He was glad he’d popped Percocet before they went out that night to help numb him against the cold. But it was wearing off and Kessel kept looking over at him with suspicion.
“Open your window,” Kessel said.
“What? Why? It’s fifteen below zero out there,” Panos complained.
“You’ve got fucking feathers stuck to your sleeve, moron.”
Panos held his arms out in front of him and placed his fingertips on the dashboard. Kessel was right. There were a number of small pinfeathers stuck to the fabric of his coveralls, as well as smears of blood.
“Oh.”
“Clean yourself off,” Kessel said. “Get those feathers off your arms and out of my cab.”
As he said it, Kessel worked the master control on his side of the truck and Panos’s window rolled down. Panos winced against the cold while he frantically brushed at his sleeves to remove the feathers, which floated away behind them on the two-lane highway.
When he was done, Panos shoved his frozen hands between his thighs and waited for Kessel to roll up the window.
When he finally did, Kessel said, “You smothered the wrong old lady last night.”
Panos looked over, unsure of what he’d just heard.
“You killed some old broad named Alvarez who was in there with pneumonia. Do you not know the difference between a sixty-nine-year-old white lady and an eighty-five-year-old Mexican?”
“That’s im-possible,” Panos stammered, although she had looked older and smaller than he’d guessed. “I saw her name outside the room. Carol Schmidt.”
“Carol Schmidt is alive and kicking,” Kessel said. “My sources in the hospital confirmed it. But this Alvarez woman died last night. It’s not considered a suspicious death because of her age, which is the only good thing to come out of this.”
“I can’t believe it,” Panos said.
“When we get done tonight, we’re going back,” Kessel said. “This time, you’re going to get it right.”
Panos started to object when Kessel backhanded him hard across his mouth. Then his boss leaned over toward him with bulging eyes.
“You’re fucking this up for me,” Kessel hissed. “You’re threatening my livelihood and my freedom. No one does that and lives.”
Panos shot a glance out the front windshield. The truck was wandering over the center line because Kessel was glaring at him.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Kessel shouted.
“Yes, boss.”
Kessel swung at him again and Panos was ready for it and partially deflected the blow.
“No more fuckups,” Kessel said. “And stop taking whatever drugs you’re on. From now on, you operate clean. I saw you out there picking up those carcasses in my headlights. You were stumbling around.”
You could have helped me, Panos thought but didn’t say.
“No more fuckups,” Panos echoed. “Please watch the road.”
Kessel jerked on the wheel just in time to avoid clipping off his driver’s-side mirror on a delineator post on the wrong side of the highway.
After he’d recovered and was once again in the correct lane, Kessel raised his phone to his mouth.
When Wylie Frye answered, Kessel said: “Are we clear?”
Then a moment later: “Hit the bricks.”
&nb
sp; *
ENCAMPMENT OFFICER JALEN SPANKS was parked on a side road a hundred yards inside the town limits when he saw a set of oncoming headlights veer wildly on the highway. He’d been watching pornography on his phone and had nearly missed the display of careless driving.
He quickly zipped up and returned to his home screen. He looked at the time on his dashboard clock.
Two-fifteen in the morning. No doubt the oncoming truck was being driven by a drunk who’d closed down the bars in Saratoga and was returning home.
*
JOE WAS SLOWLY freezing in the cab of his pickup because of the damaged passenger door. He’d jammed a few dozen balled-up citation forms into the gaps, but he could still feel the cold coming in.
He was parked hard against a wedge of plowed snow on a residential street that gave him a good view of the glowing burner and the mill yard. His Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge shotgun was propped muzzle-down on the floorboard. His phone was on his lap so he could instantly see a text from Nate.
Joe noticed that Hanlon had called him seven times that night, and he smiled to himself.
A text appeared from Nate.
It read: Get ready.
At that moment, a call came in from Sheriff Neal. His voice sounded groggy. “Jesus, I just saw what you sent me,” he croaked. “I was out with the missus and had a few cocktails and I forgot to look at my phone. Is Kate still at the hospital?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said quickly. “But forget about her for now and get to the Encampment lumber mill. Bring guys you know you can trust.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” Joe said. He could see a wash of headlights on the road out in front of him from an approaching vehicle. “Believe me and get here fast.”
He disconnected as the light-colored pickup with the camper shell he’d seen parked outside Pollock’s house passed under a streetlight and turned toward the mill yard. Joe now recognized the Buckbrush logo on the driver’s-side door.
He also noted the license plate and saw that the last three digits were six-zero-zero, just as Carol Schmidt had reported.
What Joe didn’t expect was the sudden blinding red and blue light bar of the Encampment Police Department SUV in hot pursuit of Gaylan Kessel’s truck.
