Blood Trail jp-8

by C. J. Box

  Pope snorted. “Back to that again, eh? Why can’t you just do your job without constantly questioning me? If you spent half the time trying to find this killer that you do questioning my motives, we might actually have some progress. Have you thought of that?”

  Nice dodge, Joe thought.

  “I put my reputation on the line supporting your insistence on springing that Nate Romanowski,” Pope said. “I hope you’re in control of him. Is he there with you now?”

  “No.”

  “No? Where is he?”

  I don’t have a clue, Joe thought, but said, “He’s following some leads on his own.” He hoped it didn’t sound like the lie it possibly was.

  Pope took an audible breath before shouting, “On his own! He’s got federal charges against him and he was released to your custody! On his own? What are you thinking?”

  Joe didn’t respond.

  “Are you out of your mind? If either the governor or the FBI finds out he’s on his own you’ll be toast. I’ll be toast. And so will the governor! Jesus, what are you thinking?”

  Joe swallowed. “Nate operates on different channels than we do. He works best with a loose rein.”

  “All I can say is you had better rein him in! Like right now.” Pope moaned, and Joe could visualize the man pacing his office with his free hand flying around his head like a panicked bird. “I don’t know why the governor even trusts you,” Pope said.

  Me either, Joe thought.

  “I’m calling you tomorrow,” Pope said, “and when I do, you had better be able to hand the phone over to your friend Nate Romanowski so I can talk to him. And if he isn’t there. . . there will be hell to pay.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows.

  “If he isn’t there, I’m coming up there again to take over this investigation. Do you hear me?”

  Joe punched off the phone.

  HE DIDN’T like what Pope had told him about the sheriff, though. Not that the sheriff was disparaging the governor so much as McLanahan leading parties of armed men into the field was a recipe for disaster.

  ATTACHED TO the summary of Bill Gordon’s calls were several sheets of names Gordon had gathered from rallies around the country. Joe guessed it was the closest thing there was to a membership roster of Klamath Moore’s movement. A caveat at the top of the first page, written by the agent who compiled the list, said the spelling of the names couldn’t be verified.

  Joe skimmed the list. A couple of names jumped out at him because they were Hollywood actors.

  On the third page he saw it: Alisha Whiteplume.

  He moaned and raked his fingers through his hair.

  Joe recalled what Marybeth had said about Nate: “What it all boils down to is you either trust him or you don’t.”

  20

  FOR THE REST OF Saturday and Sunday, Joe tried to reach Nate Romanowski while at the same time avoiding calls from Randy Pope. Joe tried Nate’s home on the river and his cell (both long disconnected) as well as Alisha Whiteplume’s home (no answer, but Joe left repeated messages) and her employer (Wind River Indian High School), who said she’d called in sick both Monday and Tuesday. As each hour went by with no contact from Nate, Joe knew he was digging himself deeper and deeper into a professional hole he may never be able to climb out of. He considered calling Bud Longbrake, Marybeth’s stepfather, to see if the rancher could use a ranch foreman again, but decided to wait.

  There were no more murders.

  Joe’s only progress, and it was minimal, was to learn via Deputy Mike Reed that Klamath Moore’s followers were staying at the Blue Moon Motel, an ancient but clean twenty-room throwback to the 1950s at the edge of town. The motel was a favorite of budget-minded fishermen because it catered to weekly rentals and had kitchenettes. During hunting season, the owners allowed hunters to hang antelope and deer from a huge cottonwood in the courtyard. Joe wondered how Klamath’s people would react to that—until he remembered that the state was all but shut down for hunting while the shooter remained free, so there would be no hunters.

  He assumed that Bill Gordon would be at the Blue Moon Motel, and planned to contact the informant that evening after he’d checked in with the FBI and was notified of Joe’s assignment.

  Joe and Reed had agreed to meet for breakfast Wednesday morning at the Chuckwagon Diner to compare notes and catch each other up on new information or lack thereof. Maybe, Joe thought, Reed or someone in the sheriff’s department had seen Nate.

  JOE WAS downtown early to exchange the Yukon for his repaired pickup and to meet Reed for breakfast. As he drove to the Chuckwagon he happened on a spectacle taking place in front of the county building, something out of an old western movie, as the sheriff organized a posse to search for the shooter in the mountains. Each team consisted of at least four men, all heavily armed and recently deputized. Joe recognized many of the volunteers from out in the field or at high-school sporting events or simply around town. These were not the small-town elite, the city council types or the lawyers or cronies of the politicians or business leaders who met each morning at the Burg-O-Pardner to drink coffee and plot how to run the town. These men were the blue-collar guys, the ones who fixed cars and dug septic systems and stacked hay and kept Saddlestring operating. The men who worked hard so they could go hunting for two weeks out of the year, the men who asked, “Get your elk yet?” to one another by way of greeting. Joe knew them, liked them for the most part, respected them for both their work and their outdoor ethic, and wondered if the sheriff had any idea what he was doing.

  The sheriff had assigned each team a sector and given them radios to check in with his dispatcher on the hour. McLanahan milled among them, slapping backs, shaking hands, asking if they wanted any of the coffee or doughnuts that had been donated to the cause by a bakery.

  Joe pulled over to watch the assemblage and recognized Chris Urman lining up to be one of the volunteers. Leaving his truck running, he approached Urman and tried to keep out of McLanahan’s view.

  “How are you doing?” Joe asked. “Is your family okay?”

  Urman shrugged. “My aunt is a mess, of course, but we’re hanging in there.”

  “Be careful up there,” Joe said. “It could be chaos.”

  Urman nodded toward the sheriff. “I get that impression. We’re not exactly being organized here with military precision. But I’ve got to do somethimg to redeem myself.”

  “You are blameless for what happened.”

  “I wish I felt that way,” Urman said. “I mean, I killed a man. It’s the worst feeling in the world. I hope you never have to experience it.”

  Joe looked down at his boots. “I have and you’re right.”

  “It changes you.”

  “Yup.”

  A SMALL GROUP of Klamath’s followers stood to the side of the volunteers, jeering them. One of the protesters saw the same similarity to a western Joe had noted and started humming the theme to the old western television program Bonanza, and the rest eventually joined in . . .

  Bum-duh-duh-Bum-duh-duh-Bum-du-duh-Bum BONANZA! Bum-duh-duh-Bum-duh-duh-Bum-du-duh-Bum BONANZA!

  ... until the theme got stuck in Joe’s head like musical peanut butter and he couldn’t get rid of it the rest of the morning.

  AT BREAKFAST, Reed shook his head and looked down at his uneaten eggs. “I felt real sad when those boys roared out of here all full of piss and vinegar. They’d love to find the shooter and bring him back so the moratorium will be lifted and they’ll be a bunch of heroes. But I don’t see it happening.”

  Joe said to Reed, “I don’t think our shooter is just roaming around up there waiting to be caught. I doubt he’s still up there at all.”

  Reed looked over the top of his coffee cup at Joe.

  Joe said, “I would speculate that the shooter was there on the street this morning singing the theme to Bonanza.”

  Reed snorted.

  “I didn’t see Klamath Moore or his wife in that assembly this morning,” Joe said. “Did you?” O
r Bill Gordon or Alisha Whiteplume or Nate Romanowski, Joe thought.

  “Nope,” Reed said.

  “I wonder where he is.”

  Reed shrugged. “I hear the guy keeps on the move.”

  Joe hoped Gordon was still around.

  Reed sat back and put his coffee cup down. He looked like a man with a pain in his stomach. “I just wish Klamath Moore and his ilk would go away,” Reed said. “When they’re around it’s like I don’t know this place anymore. Everything seems off-kilter, if you know what I mean. We’ve always been sort of insulated from all of that activist crap here in our nice little town.”

  Joe said, “Yup.”

  “Maybe this is the beginning of the end,” Reed said. “Maybe all that stuff from the outside about animal rights and such has found us.”

  JOE PARKED his pickup at the side of Nate’s house near the Twelve Sleep River and got out. It was high noon, still, cloudless, in the forties but dropping by the minute. He could hear the gossipy murmur of the river as he circled the house and the empty falcon mews. There was no point knocking on the door because there was obviously no one inside. And there were no birds in the sky.

  What he noted, though, was a set of tire tracks coming in and going out. And the footprints—at least five sets—in the mud and dust near the front door. They’d been there, the whole carload of them, Joe thought. Nate, Alisha, Klamath Moore, Moore’s wife, Bill Gordon. The footprints led to the threshold and came back out again.

  So Nate, Mr. Neighborly, had invited them inside, Joe thought. Perhaps they’d all taken chairs around Nate’s old dining table and sipped cocktails? Maybe Nate baked them a cake? Maybe they laughed and joked about how it had all come together as planned and Nate was now free to move about the country.

  Just to make himself feel a little better, Joe kicked Nate’s door with the toe of his boot before leaving.

  Hard pellets of snow strafed the ground and bounced off the hood of his truck. He was glad he’d thrown his thick Carhartt jacket into his vehicle that morning because, blink, it was winter.

  THE SNAP winter storm roared through the Bighorns throughout Wednesday and into Thursday. Sheriff McLanahan’s search for the killer was postponed indefinitely Wednesday night when one of his volunteers—Joe and Marybeth’s plumber—was mortally wounded by another volunteer who mistook him for someone suspicious and shot him in the chest in close to zero visibility conditions.

  That night, Joe reread Bill Gordon’s files and tried to watch television with Marybeth and Lucy but found himself wondering when, and if, Nate Romanowski would appear.

  21

  ON THURSDAY, Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Fallen leaves like tiny cupped hands skittered across the lawns to pile up against fences and brush. Wood smoke from the chimneys of small box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung close to the ground. Some houses had lawns, fences, trees, hedges. Some had pickup trucks mounted on blocks without engines or doors.

  He had always been struck by the number of basketball back-boards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. Joe counted six fat mule deer hanging in one block and realized the moratorium the governor had placed on state lands wouldn’t apply to reservation lands, which were sovereign.

  The reservation high school was a modern redbrick structure with well-kept lawns and nothing about to suggest the students were Northern Arapaho or Eastern Shoshone. The only student Joe saw outside was wearing a gray hoodie, smoking a cigarette, and listening to his iPod.

  After checking the teachers’ lot for Alisha Whiteplume’s car (the SUV he’d seen through the binoculars), Joe parked and went in.

  THE MAIN HALLWAY of the school was dark and empty. His boots echoed on the linoleum. Classes were in session, and he glanced through windows in the closed doors to see teachers teaching, students sprawled at their desks, a few catching his eye as he passed. The teachers’ names were printed on construction paper outside each door, and he paused at the one reading MISS WHITEPLUME. Inside was obviously a substitute teacher—a man in his midtwenties with shoulder-length hair and round wire-rimmed glasses. He was explaining something to the students but their glassy-eyed response unveiled his ineffectiveness.

  Student artwork decorated the walls, pen-and-ink the medium. Joe was struck by how similar the work was to what he saw in the hallways of Saddlestring High School in town; how little distinctively Indian was included in subject and theme. In fact, he thought, he’d seen more warriors and mystical American Indian scenes in town than he saw on the reservation. Plenty of typical teenage dark-minded fantasy stuff, though, as well as NBA, hip-hop, and NASCAR-THEMED scenarios. Farther down the hall, closer to the office, were framed photos of graduating classes dating back more than forty-five years, many of which had once been displayed in the old high school before this new one was built. The graduate displays slowed him, and his eyes looted through the cameo photos.

  The faces that looked back at him from year to year reflected the styles and attitudes of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, to the present. The number of graduates grew and receded from year to year, and he couldn’t tell if there were many more students at present than there had been forty years ago. There were sullen faces, hopeful faces, fierce faces, doomed faces. Because of the high mortality rate on the reservation, he recognized some of the recent names as accident victims, overdose victims, shooting victims. Too many from the recent classes were already gone, he thought.

  THE RECEPTIONIST looked up from behind the counter when he entered the school office. She was oval-faced and kindly-looking, a Native whose eyes showed she’d seen a lot over the years in that school. The name plaque on her desk read MRS. THUNDER. He liked that name and wished his name was “Joe Thunder.”

  Because he was wearing his uniform, Mrs. Thunder said, “Okay, who did what?”

  “Nobody I’m aware of,” he said.

  “None of my boys shot a deer out of season or without a license?”

  “Not this time,” he said, placing her because of the way she said “my boys” as the heart and soul of the school, the Woman Who Knew Everybody And Everything. He always felt blessed when he met up with such women because they were generally the key to unlocking the secret doors to an institution.

  “Ah,” she said, “that’s good to hear.”

  “I was going to ask to see the principal if he’s in, but you can probably help me.”

  Mrs. Thunder shook her head, an impish grin on her lips. “I could, but it’s not protocol. You should see the principal and he’s a she. And she’s in. I’ll see if she has a minute. May I ask what you need from her?”

  Joe said, “I want to ask about a teacher here, Alisha Whiteplume.”

  Mrs. Thunder’s eyes flashed and Joe couldn’t interpret the reaction.

  “I’ll be back,” Mrs. Thunder said.

  Joe wondered what he’d just done.

  In a few moments, Mrs. Thunder reappeared and said, “Principal Shoyo is waiting for you in there,” gesturing to an open door at the back.

  Mrs. Shoyo was surprisingly young, Joe thought. She was dressed in a white blouse and business suit and wore a gold medicine-wheel pendant. She stood as Joe entered and they shook hands. Mrs. Shoyo had black hair that was swept back and piercing brown eyes. She was Native. He noted the pin on her lapel, a horizontal piece with a red wild rose on one side and a flag with parallel red and black bars on a field of white on the other side. The pin represented the two nations on the reservation: the rose the symbol of the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho flag.

  “Joe Pickett,” he said. “Thanks for taking a few minutes.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, sitting back down.

  He glanced at the wall behind her where she displayed photos of he
r family: three beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girls, a shot of her husband, he assumed, on a knee next to a dead bull elk he was very proud of; her diploma from the University of Wyoming; a certificate naming her one of the “Top 100 American Indian Women Leaders of 2001.”

  “Mrs. Thunder said you were asking about one of my teachers, Alisha Whiteplume.”

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “What about her?” Shoyo asked, her eyebrows arching, “Did she commit some kind of game violation?”

  Joe laughed. “Not at all. I wish I weren’t wearing this uniform shirt right now. No, I’m here because she was last seen in the presence of a friend of mine I’m trying to track down. I was hoping she could help me find him.”

  Mrs. Shoyo narrowed her eyes as if to read him better.

  “I hope that’s all this is about because Alisha is one of my best, if not the best teacher I’ve got here. She left the reservation after graduating from here and went off and made a success of herself. Then she chose to come back, to help her people. She’s such a role model because she’s bright and attractive and her students always do the best on the aptitude tests. She’s also one of my closest friends.”

  Joe now knew why Mrs. Thunder had flinched.

  “Then you know of Nate Romanowski,” Joe said.

  Mrs. Shoyo smiled gently, but Joe could see that she had placed an invisible shield between them. “Everybody knows Mr. Romanowski,” she said, which somewhat surprised Joe. “But my understanding is he’s in Cheyenne in jail waiting for his trial.”

  “He’s out,” Joe said. “He’s supposed to be in my custody.”

  “But he isn’t,” she said.

  “But he isn’t,” he sighed.

  “Are you saying you think Alisha is with him, wherever he is?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And by finding her you might find him.”