Blood Trail

by C. J. Box

  Joe recalled the man in Alisha Whiteplume’s classroom: it fit.

  Joe asked, “Did she say where she was calling from?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder answered from just outside the doorway, where she’d been listening.

  “You can come in, Alice,” Mrs. Shoyo said, doing a quick eye roll for Joe’s benefit. “Nothing goes on in this school that Alice isn’t aware of.”

  “I understand,” Joe said, looking over his shoulder at Mrs. Thunder, who came into the room.

  “I don’t think she was calling from her house, though,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I could hear the wind in the background, like she was outside somewhere. I assumed she was calling from her cell phone. I didn’t question her. It’s her right to call in sick and she hardly ever has until this year. She’s had trouble shaking cold after cold this year, and she’s missed quite a few days the past few months.”

  “Outside,” Joe said. “Could you hear anything else? Background talk? Highway noises?”

  “No.”

  “And she didn’t call again this morning?”

  Mrs. Thunder shook her head.

  Joe dug in his pocket for two business cards and handed one to Mrs. Shoyo and one to Mrs. Thunder. “If she shows up or calls in again, can you let me know? And if she calls, can you please try to find out where she is and when she’ll be back? I’m not asking you to rat on her—she’s not in trouble at all. I just want to make sure she’s safe and knows what she’s doing.”

  Both women took the cards and looked at them in the long, contemplative, and deliberate way Joe had noted before in many American Indians.

  “Alisha is a smart woman,” Mrs. Thunder said, finally. “I’m sure she wouldn’t do something stupid.”

  “But she’s with Nate Romanowski,” Joe said, immediately regretting he’d put it that way.

  “How can she be,” Mrs. Shoyo said slyly, “if he’s in your custody?”

  “Not you too,” Joe moaned, and both women laughed.

  AS JOE walked back down the long hallway toward the parking lot, the bell rang. The hall was suddenly filled with students pouring out of doors, gathering books, chattering, bound for their next class. Rather than swim against the tide, he stepped to the side and flattened himself against the wall. Due to his uniform and sidearm he got his share of inquiring looks. A pack of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys passed close by him talking loudly to one another in a staged exchange:

  “Benny, are we still on to go poach some antelope after school today?”

  “Absolutely, man. I got two guns and a bunch of bullets in my car! We can shoot a whole herd of ’em just like we did last night!”

  “It’s a good thing there ain’t no smart game wardens around here, huh, Benny?”

  “Yeah, that’s a good thing. Otherwise, he’d know we were killin’ and poachin’ fools!”

  “Ha-ha,” said Joe, and the boys broke up into self-congratulatory laughter.

  AS THE halls thinned and cleared he found himself looking at the framed photos of the Class of 1991, which had graduated seventeen years before. There she was, Alisha Whiteplume. Her beauty was striking, and intelligence shone in her eyes. But there was another female student two rows up from Alisha who was familiar as well. This girl exuded brash self-confidence. Her eyes seemed to challenge the photographer to take the picture, and she had an inscrutable smile of self-satisfaction. Joe knew her now as Shannon Moore, Klamath’s wife.

  “THAT DIDN’T take long,” Mrs. Thunder said when Joe returned to the office.

  “I was hoping you could give me some background on another student I saw in one of the photos in the hallway,” Joe said.

  “I’ll try,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’ve been around this place for thirty years. If it’s before that I might not be able to help you.”

  “Class of ’ninety-one,” Joe said.

  “That”—Mrs.Thunder beamed—“was a very good year. That’s when Alisha graduated.”

  Joe nodded. “And the other student I think I recognize. Her name is Shannon Moore now, but I don’t know her name at the time she graduated.”

  Mrs. Thunder sat back, puzzled. “Shannon?”

  Joe’s heart sank for a moment. Had he screwed up and mistaken one face for another? Then: “Maybe I can point her out to you.”

  “Show me,” Mrs. Thunder said, plucking the 1991 high-school yearbook off a shelf behind her and opening it on the counter.

  Joe used his index finger to guide him through the photos of graduating seniors. It settled on the one he’d seen in the hallway. As he read her name, Mrs. Thunder said, “So she goes by Shannon now, huh?”

  “It says here her name was Shenandoah Yellowcalf,” Joe said. “Do you know her?”

  Mrs. Thunder snorted. “Do I know her? She was only the best girls’ basketball player we’ve ever had here. I’m surprised you don’t know her.”

  Joe explained he’d only been in the valley for eight years.

  “Here,” Mrs. Thunder said, flipping through the yearbook pages, “let me show you.”

  Joe looked at countless photos of Shenandoah Yellowcalf in the activities section of the yearbook. There were action photos of her on the court, at the foul line, and in the lane, another of her cutting down the net at the state championship.

  “You’ve never seen a girl play like Shenandoah played,” Mrs. Thunder said softly, caressing the photos with a stubby fingertip as if drawing memories from them. “She had a blinding crossover dribble as good as any great NBA point guard as she brought the ball down the court, and she left her opponents flailing at air in her wake. She made us gasp the way she played. There has never been a player here with so much determination. She was so fierce. Shenandoah led our team, the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, which was made up of only seven girls, to win the state championship game.”

  Joe read from the yearbook. “She scored fifty-two points in the championship game?” he said. “Good Lord!”

  “Oh, she was good,” Mrs. Thunder said, shaking her head. “Alisha was on that team too,” and pointed her out in the team photo.

  “Was Shannon—um, Shenandoah—recruited by colleges?” Joe asked.

  Mrs. Thunder nodded enthusiastically. “She was offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, all the national powers. We were so proud of her.”

  “Where did she go to school?” Joe asked.

  “She didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder said sadly.

  Joe shook his head, confused.

  “Shenandoah’s grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared—there was so much pressure on her—and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her.”

  She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. “I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed.”

  Joe nodded, prodding her on.

  Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn’t want Joe to see her eyes, didn’t want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn’t entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports—or at least that’s what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she’d grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.

  “Kind of like me,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’m guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, ‘I knew her when.’”

  “Where did she go?” Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but no
t how she got there.

  “Nowhere, for way too long, I’m afraid,” she said. “The time away from sports didn’t do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they’re used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that’s me speaking . . . I don’t even know if she tried.”

  Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she’d hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.

  Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also “cooks”—mainly younger women—who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf ’s bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho “camp cook” they’d hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he’d heard years before when he was a trainee working under the former game warden Vern Dunnegan . . .

  But he’d sort that out later.

  He asked, “Do you know if Shenandoah and Alisha were friends?”

  Mrs. Thunder smiled. “They were best friends. I think Alisha did everything she could to help Shenandoah.”

  “Did they keep in touch?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assume they did.”

  Joe said, “Hmmmm.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I can tell you that Shenandoah is back and doing very well. I saw her recently. She looks good and she has a little baby. She’s married to a guy named Klamath Moore.”

  It was obvious from Mrs. Thunder’s expression that she was grateful to hear the news but didn’t know who Klamath Moore was.

  “I’m so happy to hear that,” she said, growing misty again. “That’s so good to hear. Please, if you see her again, tell her to come by the school. Tell her I’d love to see her again.”

  Joe smiled. “If I get the chance, I’ll pass along the invite.”

  “Tell her that old Alice Thunder wants to give her a hug.”

  JOE WAS buoyed as he walked out into the parking lot. The best entree to Klamath Moore would no doubt be through his wife, Shannon . . . and Alisha. Maybe that was the angle Nate was working.

  If his friend was working on anything at all.

  HE SAT in the pickup without starting the motor. His mind raced. What was it Vern Dunnegan had once told him about the Indian camp cook?

  Vern told a lot of stories. He talked nonstop. Joe had learned to tune him out because the chatter was incessant and many of Dunnegan’s stories were mean-spirited. Joe had tried to forget everything Vern had told him once Vern showed himself to be a liar and a criminal eight years before; he’d done all he could to expunge Vern Dunnegan from his mind. But he tried to remember this particular story about the camp cook. He hoped he’d written it down in his notebook at the time, and he planned to locate his old notes to try to refresh his memory.

  THERE WERE two messages on his cell phone and he punched in the access number to hear them.

  The first was from Stella, saying Randy Pope was doing everything he could to meet with the governor to get his blessing to leave Cheyenne and take over supervision of the case. She was running interference, but she said she couldn’t hold him off forever. What, Stella asked, was going on?

  The second was from Portenson of the FBI, saying Bill Gordon was prepared to meet Joe that night in the little town of Winchester. He said Gordon wanted to talk and he had something to say. Portenson said Joe was to be at the park promptly at eight. No earlier, no later. If Joe wasn’t there on time and alone, Gordon, Portenson promised, would flee. And if something bad happened—if Joe was late or Gordon smelled a trap—there would be no more meetings, because the informant couldn’t risk them and, frankly, he had no idea if Joe could be trusted in the first place.

  “You’ve got one shot at our man,” Portenson said. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  Joe was grateful Portenson didn’t mention Nate, which meant he didn’t yet know. But Joe assumed the FBI would know soon, one way or another—possibly even Pope would tell them in an effort to take over—and he wondered if he’d hear the explosion from 350 miles away.

  IT WASN’T the new knowledge of Shenandoah Yellowcalf, or the calls from Stella or Portenson that suddenly unnerved Joe, caused the hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck to stand on end, his flesh to crawl. It wasn’t something that had happened or what he’d learned as much as what he was feeling: there was something malevolent in the air.

  He was being watched.

  Over the years, he’d come to trust his instincts in this regard. When he had felt he was being watched he habitually discarded the notion, convinced himself he was imagining things, tried to move on, only later to learn that he had been correct in the first place.

  He raised his eyes, surveyed the cars in the parking lot. No one. He scanned the school grounds, anticipating the sight of a student skulking in the shadows and alcoves, maybe sneaking a smoke, keeping his eyes on Joe. He scanned the windows of the school for a face. Maybe Mrs. Thunder and Mrs. Shoyo looking out at him, seeing him off. Maybe those boys who had been pretending to be “poaching fools” were having another laugh at his expense.

  He scanned the sagebrush-covered hillsides that flowed like frozen swells toward the foothills and the mountains beyond. There were pockets of pine and aspen, plenty of vantage points to hide in.

  Joe saw no one.

  22

  I WATCH the game warden through my binoculars as he leaves the school building. He is wearing his red uniform shirt. He clamps his Stetson on his head and climbs into his green pickup truck. He’s doing something in front of him or on his lap, eyes down. Probably checking a PDA or his cell phone.

  Following him wasn’t a problem and I’m sure he never suspected I was there.

  The stand of aspen is behind me, the dried leaves rattling in the wind. I’ve parked my vehicle on the side of the old road in back of the trees, so it’s hidden from view. My rifle is beside me, pulled from its case. I estimate 250 yards at most across the flat. It is a clear, sunny day. The wind is so slight it wouldn’t be a factor in aiming.

  Two things, though: I don’t like long shots, and killing the game warden now would hurt me more than help me.

  Shots at this distance can be problematic. There is no guarantee. I like them much closer; close enough there is no doubt. Beyond the game warden’s pickup is the school, and the windows of the classrooms are at the same height as the windshield of his truck. I’ve heard of occasions when bullets were deflected by glass. If I missed—not likely, but always possible—I could kill a teacher or a student. An innocent.

  More important is that I have nothing against the game warden, although I fear in his clumsy way he’s getting closer. I don’t fear the sheriff, or the sheriff’s men in the mountains right now. They’re hunting a ghost. But this game warden has worried me since the first time I saw him. There is something earnest and relentless about him that scares me in a way I can’t articulate. He reminds me of me.

  But why would he be at the school, if not to ask about Alisha Whitep
lume? Or question the staff about the person once known as Shenandoah? If he makes the connection, it is a big step toward finding out about me. I can only hope in this case I am mistaken. I’m not ready to be found out.

  Not yet.

  The game warden has frozen up in a way that I think he must know I’m here. I can see a certain stiffness to his movements, an attempt not to give away the fact that he’s looking for me, trying to find the eyes that he feels on him. I wriggle backward on the hill, in case he uses his binoculars or spotting scope.

  I wait until I hear him start his pickup and drive down the road. I hear the crunch of his tires on the gravel road.

  I don’t need to follow him. I know where he’s going.

  23

  PORTENSON HAD said Bill Gordon would be waiting for Joe in the public park at 8 P.M. in the little town of Winchester, population 729, which was eighteen miles northwest of Saddlestring via the interstate north to Montana. Joe was familiar with the park because years before he’d taken Sheridan, Lucy, and Maxine to a local dog show there. Maxine didn’t place in any of the events but was awarded a “Most Unusual Color” consolation certificate that his girls were very proud of and that still hung on the refrigerator with magnets. None of the judges had ever seen a Labrador that had once been scared completely white. Nobody had.

  The park consisted of a few picnic tables, a shelter, some benches, and a jungle gym and slide erected and maintained by the Winchester Lions Club, according to a sign. The park was a perfectly square town block. It was sealed off on four sides by neat rows of ancient cottonwood trees, which made it a good place to meet because of its seclusion on a cold fall night and because of its location off the main street.

  As instructed by Portenson, Joe wore street clothes—Wranglers, boots, snap-button cowboy shirt, his worn Carhartt ranch coat—and drove the family van instead of his game and fish pickup. Any suggestion that he was official would blow the meeting, expose Gordon if someone saw them together. The interstate was clear of snow but black and wet in his headlights. His twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun rested against the passenger seat, muzzle down, and his .40 Glock was clipped to his belt and out of view under the coat. He was edgy, unsure, which is why he’d brought his weapons. But he wanted to talk to Gordon. Joe had the feeling—and it wasn’t more than that at this point—that he was getting somewhere, that momentum was finally with him. Not that he was solving the murders or understanding what was going on, but that finally he was in motion toward an end.