Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  Robert said, “You’re drifting.”

  “No, I’m not,” Stenko said. “I know where Leo is with all my money. He’s on my ranch, the son-of-a-bitch.” To her, he said, “Sorry for the language.”

  She shrugged, totally confused.

  Robert shook his head, muttering, “A ranch. You own a ranch. What else do you own?”

  Stenko said, “A lot.”

  SHE’D BEEN SLEEPING SOUNDLY in the roomy back seat when she was awakened by Robert shouting, “Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?”

  AND SHE COULD HEAR Robert now, through the wall. Something about Stenko’s morphine. “Then take more!” Robert yelled. “Take as much as you need to!”

  She’d gotten a glimpse at Stenko as he staggered into the bathroom. He’d looked back at her. His face was white, his eyes rimmed red. His mouth was twisted in pain, but he still managed to smile at her and gesture with his hand that he’d be right back. The way he bent forward as he walked made her think it was his stomach that was hurting him.

  The bathroom she was in was filthy, with grime on the floor, an overflowing trash can, and the strong ammonia smell of urine from the stall. She imagined the men’s was just as dirty, and she felt sorry for Stenko, who sounded like he was probably clutching the toilet, knees on the floor.

  She heard Robert say harshly, “For Christ’s sake, Dad. Hang in there already. We’ve got too much to do here.”

  And she thought: What if he dies right there? What would Robert do with her? She thought about the look on his face that morning in the car, his wild eyes, the way he beat that drum solo on the dashboard. It was either that or long hours of pouting and sarcasm. Plus the way he sometimes leered at her, his eyes pausing on her breasts. She didn’t want to be alone with Robert.

  She fished the TracFone out of her jeans. She hadn’t turned it on since the night before, when she’d made contact. It seemed like forever before the phone grabbed a signal, showed strong bars.

  She typed:

  Sherry, r u there?

  13

  Cheyenne

  JOE HIT THE NORTHERN OUTSKIRTS OF CHEYENNE MID-AFTERNOON. He was traveling south on I-25 when he saw the first of many concentric circles of massive new homes. He also saw more grazing horses than had likely ever been there when the capital city was the hub of the Union Pacific and home to dozens of wealthy ranchers in the 1880s and 1890s, when the west was new.

  He was running late. Too much time in the Hole in the Wall.

  Special Agent Chuck Coon was getting up to leave and was obviously ticked off when Joe walked into The Albany downtown. The place was old and dark, with private booths. The building was in the shadow of the restored Union Pacific depot. Between the lunch and dinner crowds, The Albany was devoted to serious drinkers and none of them even turned around and looked at Joe as he said, “Sorry I’m late, Chuck, please sit back down.”

  Coon had stripped off his tie and loosened his collar, but Joe thought there was no one with a shred of intelligence in the bar who wouldn’t look at him and say, “FBI.” Coon had close-cropped brown hair, small features, and a boyish, alert face that didn’t wear his impatience well.

  Joe slid into the booth across from Coon.

  “I can’t spend much time,” Coon said, looking nervously around the bar before sitting back down. “I told the secretary I had a podiatrist appointment. I don’t know why I said that. There’s nothing wrong with my feet.”

  “I won’t waste your time then,” Joe said. “Here’s the number.” He slipped a page from his notebook across the table with the number of April’s cell phone.

  Coon didn’t pick it up. “I told you, Joe. I can’t seek a tap unless we get approval to open up an investigation. I’m sorry you had to drive so far to hear that in person.”

  Joe nodded but forged on. “I’ve got other business this afternoon, but since I’m here at least you can answer some questions though, right? So I know more about this?” He tapped the notebook page.

  Coon sighed, shot out his wrist, and looked at his watch.

  “I’ll be quick,” Joe said. “First, tell me if it’s possible to pinpoint the location of a cell phone user. I mean, assuming you’ve got the court order and everything’s aboveboard.”

  “The short answer is yes,” Coon said. “The long answer is what screws us up all the time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “When a cell phone is turned on, it has to reach out and grab a signal before you can make a call. When it connects with a cell tower, it’s referred to as a ping. The telephone providers can key on a specific number and they can pinpoint the location of the phone based on which cell tower got the ping.”

  “Great,” Joe said, smiling.

  “There is also a GPS feature in a lot of the newer phones. Most people don’t even know their phone is also a GPS device. We’re waiting for someone to come up with software that blocks the signal, but so far no one’s come up with an easy system. So we’ve got two ways to track down where a call comes from, the ping and the GPS if the phone has one.”

  “Even better,” Joe said.

  Coon looked around the bar again to see if anyone was listening to him. Satisfied, he leaned toward Joe. “The technology we’ve got is really good, but there are some real drawbacks out here in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes the cell towers are ten miles or more apart from each other. The mountains play havoc on the tower sight lines, for instance. It isn’t like a city, where there are towers everywhere. So even though we might pick up the ping we’ve been waiting for, we often can’t narrow the actual location of the phone down much more than a ten- or fifteen-mile radius of the tower. That’s twenty or thirty square miles—a big area, Joe.”

  “What if the suspect is in a car?” Joe asked. “Can you track his movements by which cell towers get pinged along a highway?”

  “Yes.” Coon demonstrated by running his index finger along the table as if the Formica were a map. He flicked his finger every couple of inches, going, “Ping, ping, ping, ping, all the way to Denver.”

  “Let me ask you another question,” Joe said. “If you were given a printout of a text thread and all the specifics of the exchange, could you go to the phone company and trace where each phone was at the time?”

  Coon frowned. “It’s possible, but it doesn’t always work. Like I told you, the companies only keep text messages on their servers a short time. Once the texts are trashed, they’re trashed.”

  The way Coon said it made Joe suspicious. Joe said, “Okay, that’s the official FBI spin. But you can’t tell me that if you really wanted to, if someone involved in counterterrorism, say, wanted to track down both parties even weeks after the conversation that they couldn’t do it?”

  Coon looked away. “I have no comment on that.”

  “Which tells me what I need to know,” Joe said.

  “I’ve got to get going, Joe. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

  Joe said, “So the key is for the target to keep their cell phone on, even if they’re not making calls all the time. If the phone is on, it’s making these pings out there.”

  Coon sighed, “Right.”

  “What if the phone is only turned on to call or text, and then is turned off again?”

  “That makes things real hard,” Coon said. “It means we’ve got to be on top of it when that cell phone is turned on to track it immediately, as it’s being used. Once it gets turned off, we lose any ability to know where it’s going.”

  “What about the GPS feature?”

  “Same thing. If the phone is off, the GPS is off.”

  “Hmmm,” Joe said, rubbing his chin. He had a feeling April didn’t keep her phone on because of how she’d warned Sheridan not to call. If April didn’t want anyone to know she was in contact, she wouldn’t risk an errant ring or even a wrong number that would tip them off. So it made sense she’d power it up only when she wanted to communicate.

  “Who are you trying to find?” Coon asked.

  Joe ev
aded the question. “How long does it take to get a subpoena if you’ve got probable cause?”

  “Minutes, in some cases. As I mentioned, Judge Johnson is right down the hall.”

  “Wow—it’s never that quick out in the real world.”

  “Who are you trying to find?” Coon asked again.

  Before Joe could think of another way to avoid the question, his cell phone burred. He fumbled, found it in his breast pocket. Sheridan.

  “Excuse me,” Joe said to Coon, “It’s my daughter.”

  “I’m out of here,” Coon said, reaching for his jacket.

  Joe held up his hand for Coon to wait, but Coon shook him off.

  Sheridan said, “April texted me again.”

  Joe grabbed Coon’s wrist. “Please, just a minute.”

  Coon conceded with a sigh.

  To Sheridan, Joe said: “How long did you text back and forth?”

  “Not long. Not more than a minute. She was in a big hurry. I think she’s scared, Dad.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Not much. She asked how I was.”

  “Did you get a chance to ask her any of the questions I left you?”

  “Only one.”

  “Did she answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Okay. When I asked her ‘Who is Robert?’ she said, ‘Stenko’s son.’ ”

  Joe grabbed the notebook sheet with April’s number on it and uncapped his pen. “How is that spelled?”

  “S-T-E-N-K-O.”

  Joe wrote it down. “Nothing else? No first name or anything?”

  “That’s all. Then she texted, ‘Gotta go, later,’ and that was all. I sent her a couple more messages but she didn’t reply. I think she turned her phone off.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Good job. Keep your phone on and call me if she gets back in contact.”

  “I will, Dad. Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  Joe snapped his phone shut. Coon hadn’t left. In fact, Coon stood transfixed, staring at Joe.

  “You’re shitting me, right?” Coon said.

  “What?”

  “Stenko. You wrote down Stenko. Is that a joke?”

  “No joke,” Joe said.

  “Stenko called your daughter?”

  Joe could see in Coon’s eyes that the name made bells ring. He didn’t know which ones, of course, but it gave him the excuse to do an end-around, to keep April’s name out of it.

  “He didn’t call,” Joe said. “He sent a text.”

  “Is this Stenko from Chicago?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Do you have any idea who he is?”

  “Nope.”

  “We do,” Coon said, sitting back down.

  JOE’S HEAD WAS STILL SPINNING when he went to see the governor. He bounded up the capitol steps and opened the heavy door just as the guard on the other side prepared to lock it.

  “We close at five,” the guard said.

  “I’m here to see the governor,” Joe said.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “He told me to drop by any time I was in Cheyenne.”

  The guard laughed. “He tells everyone that.”

  “Really,” Joe said. “It’s urgent. If you don’t believe me, go into his office and tell his receptionist Joe Pickett is here to see the governor. If he turns me away, I promise to go quietly.”

  The guard looked Joe over, noted the Game and Fish shirt, the J. PICKETT badge.

  “You’re really him, aren’t you?” the guard said. “Wait here, Mr. Pickett.”

  For the first time in his life, Joe felt mildly famous. It was similar to a headache.

  GOVERNOR SPENCER RULON was on the telephone. He cringed a greeting and waved Joe into a deep red leather chair. Joe removed his hat, put it crown-down in his lap, and waited.

  Rulon was a big man in every way, with a round face like a hubcap, an untamed shock of silver-flecked brown hair, and eyes like brown laser pointers when he fixed them on a person or an object. He had the liquid grace big men had, and his movements were impatient, swift, and energetic. If the recent scandal allegations had affected him physically, Joe couldn’t see it.

  The last time Joe had been in the governor’s office, Stella Ennis, Rulon’s chief of staff, had been there along with the head of the state DCI. Tony Portenson of the FBI had also been present, and Rulon had successfully browbeaten him into releasing Nate Romanowski on Joe’s request. That had not gone well.

  Rulon was in the last year of his first term and he was running again. What should have been a walkover had turned into a race, primarily due to the Stella Ennis and Nate Romanowski scandals. His natural enemies were flush with newfound excitement and confidence, like journeymen boxers who had been beaten round after round but somehow landed a lucky punch that sent the champ reeling.

  His opponent was Forrest Niffin, a Central Wyoming rancher with a handlebar mustache, who was mounted on a white horse in all of his campaign posters. Despite his rustic image, the challenger was a multimillionaire who had recently moved to Wyoming from upstate New York, where he’d founded a fashion empire. Oddly, Rulon had a framed photo of the challenger on his bookshelf behind his head.

  Despite Rulon’s eccentric and mercurial ways, like challenging the senate majority leader to a shooting contest to decide a bill or sending Joe on assignments “without portfolio” to maintain deniability, Joe knew that the governor had saved him and pulled him out of the bureaucratic netherworld. He owed him his job and his family’s welfare.

  “I understand,” the governor said into the phone, “but if you permit one more well before your lawyers and my lawyers have a sit-down, I’m gonna sue your ass. That’s right. And I’m going to call a press conference out in some scenic spot in the mountains to announce the suit so every photo has that pristine view behind me.”

  Joe could hear the caller say, “You’re out of your mind.”

  Rulon nodded and waggled his eyebrows at Joe while he said into the phone, “That’s pretty much the conclusion around here.”

  Smiling wolfishly, Rulon hit the speaker button on his phone and leaned back in his chair.

  “You can’t threaten me,” the caller said. Joe thought the voice was vaguely familiar.

  “I just did.”

  “Look, can’t we discuss this more reasonably?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” Rulon said, grasping the phone set with both hands, pleading into it. “That’s what I proposed.”

  Joe could hear the man sighing on the other end. “Okay. I’ll have our legal guys call your people tomorrow.”

  “Lovely. Good-bye, Mr. Secretary.”

  Rulon punched off. Joe felt his scalp twitch.

  “The secretary of the interior?” Joe asked.

  Rulon nodded. In the west, the secretary of the interior was more important than whoever the president might be. And Rulon had just threatened to “sue his ass.”

  “Empty suit,” Rulon declared.

  Joe was confused. Did the governor mean the threatened legal action or the secretary himself?

  “Both,” Rulon said, reading Joe’s face. “Now what is the occasion of your extremely rare visit to the very heart of the beast?”

  Joe knew Rulon didn’t like formalities or rhetoric, and Joe wasn’t adept at either one anyway: “I want a leave of absence to pursue a case on my own. I might be in Wyoming, but I might also need to cross state lines. And this is the thing: I might need to call on you or the DCI for help at some point.”

  Rulon leveled his gaze. “You know how much trouble you got me in letting Romanowski go?”

  “Yes,” Joe said. “I want to thank you for sticking your neck out for me last year. I know you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorry about the heat you’ve taken.”

  Rulon said, “Goes with the territory. I’ll survive. What can they do? Take my birthday away from me?” He gestured behind him at the photograph. “The people of Wyoming ar
e smart. They’ll flirt with that knucklehead Niffin at first, but they’ll come to their senses.”

  “I hope so,” Joe said.

  “Besides, the Romanowski thing was peanuts compared to what Niffin’s operatives are saying about me and Stella Ennis.” Rulon probed Joe’s face, making him uncomfortable. Joe had known Stella two years before she showed up as the governor’s chief of staff. He knew what kind of power she had over men. He doubted Mrs. Rulon would be so understanding.

  Rulon said, “Nothing happened. And the stuff they’re saying—that’s not how we do politics in Wyoming.”

  Joe nodded.

  “It could have. Hell, it should have. But it didn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “She left on her own accord.”

  “Okay,” Joe said, squirming. He wasn’t sure why Rulon felt the need to confess to him.

  “Back to your request,” Rulon said. “What’s it concerning?”

  Joe swallowed. “It’s a family thing. I’d rather not say.”

  Rulon smiled slightly and shook his head, his eyes never leaving Joe. “You ask me things no one else would ask me,” he said.

  Joe nodded.

  “Good thing I trust you,” the governor said, standing up quickly. He was around the desk before Joe could react.

  Rulon placed his hand on Joe’s shoulder like a proud father. “Go, son. Do what you need to do.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Joe said, taken aback.

  “Do the right thing.”

  Joe said, “That’s what you told me last time, and I let Nate escape.”

  Rulon chuckled. “I’ll advise your new director that you’ll be out of pocket for a while but that you’re still on the payroll.”

  “Thank you.”