Trophy Hunt

by C. J. Box

  Joe tried to make his face and eyes go dead. “So who is the secret buyer, Cam?”

  Slowly, the color returned to Cam Logue’s face, and kept going. Now his face was turning red.

  “Joe, I can’t believe you just said that to me. You’re so goddamned off base.” Cam said it with enough passion that Joe nearly flinched.

  “You knew Stuart Tanner,” Joe said. “You hired him. He delivered the water report to you personally, right in this office. But when the news came out that he died, you said nothing. You didn’t report it to the sheriff, or even mention it to me.”

  “You’re right about that,” Cam said, his voice back to normal. “You’re absolutely right. I got the report, and I knew the guy. I paid Tanner Engineering for his work. And damn it, I didn’t say anything because given the current market, the less said about any of this shit the better. Hell, Joe, I can’t even sell a ranch with a willing buyer and a willing seller. Everybody’s waiting for your stupid task force to make a conclusion, or arrest somebody. But I can see why you’re getting nowhere, if this is the best you can do. If all you can come up with is to target a guy who’s made a huge commitment to this community.”

  Cam looked up and shook his head. He was upset, and visibly tried to calm himself. “Joe, there’s a couple of things really wrong with your theory, and it pisses me off that you would be going in this direction.”

  “What’s that?” Joe asked.

  “First, Tanner Engineering cleared the way for the CBM drilling. The water is fine.”

  Cam turned quickly in his chair and dug through one of the neat stacks of paper on his credenza. He produced an inch-thick report bound in plastic, and tossed it across the desk. Joe picked it up and thumbed through it until he found the summary page.

  “Tanner concluded that there was no excess salinity, or anything else in that water,” Cam said. “The water’s good, Joe. It’s perfect. It’s the best damned water in the Twelve Sleep Valley.”

  Joe read enough to see that Cam was right.

  “Second,” Cam said, his voice rising, “the secret client is me. And Sheriff Barnum.”

  Joe was stunned. “What?” So this is where Barnum figured in, he thought.

  Cam stood quickly, sending his chair to roll back until it thumped against the credenza. He glared down at Joe.

  “Barnum’s a year away from retirement, and he’s got one hell of a pension after twenty-five-plus years as sheriff,” Cam said. “He planned to borrow against it for a down payment on 360 acres of the ranch we’d buy together. He wants to retire on it. But with all of this bullshit going on, the bank’s been holding back. It’s only temporary, but they’re dragging it out. I’ve always wanted the family ranch back. I grew up there, Joe. It’s my dream, Marie’s and my dream. We couldn’t say anything, even to Marybeth.”

  “You want it even with all of those CBM wells all over it?” Joe asked.

  Cam shrugged. “They won’t be there forever. And they’re bound by law to clean up when they’re gone.”

  “But that could be thirty years.”

  Cam smiled, but not warmly. “I’m willing to wait. Land is always a good investment. Especially the land I grew up on and still love.”

  Joe felt as though he had had the rug, the floor, and the joists pulled out from under him.

  “How in the hell are you going to buy it?” Joe asked.

  Cam’s eyes lit up. “Okay, since you’re asking, since you’ve spent a good deal of the morning trying to fuck up my life, I’ll tell you.”

  Joe winced at that.

  “Real estate sales is sizzle, Joe. It’s flash and sizzle. If the market is hot, the realtor is hot. Everybody wants to work with a winner, and that’s me. Once I listed the Timberline Ranch, the landowners around here figured that if I could get a couple of old crones like the Overstreet sisters to sign, then I must be hot shit indeed. As you know, we now have exclusive listings on just about every available ranch in this part of Northern Wyoming. I did it by hard work, Joe, and by creating the sizzle of a winner.”

  Joe still felt pole-axed. “You figured a couple of the other ranches would sell first. That you could use the commission money from those other ranches for the down payment on the Timberline Ranch.”

  Cam opened his eyes in an exaggerated way, as if he were addressing a simpleton. “Right, Joe. There’s not a single thing wrong with that. Not a single thing.”

  “But no property is selling, because of the mutilations,” Joe said.

  “Right again, Joe. Exactly what I’ve been telling you for a month. Nothing’s selling because buyers think this county is spooked.”

  “Man,” Joe said.

  But Cam was on a roll. “Do you know who I’m not going to invite to the ranch when I finally own it?”

  Joe didn’t guess.

  “My parents, Joe. Mom and Dad. The people who sold my birthright out from under me so they could devote more time and attention to sending my big brother, Eric, to medical school. You thought I was going to say you and Marybeth, didn’t you?”

  Joe looked up.

  “Well, I probably won’t invite you out, either. Not now.” Cam’s eyes had a fiendish intensity.

  Despite feeling bad, feeling stupid, Joe caught a whiff of something in the air from Cam. It was the desperation he had recalled earlier, the over-the-top intensity that seemed a notch or two higher than it needed to be.

  “Some day, all of you people are going to regret the way you treated Cam Logue,” Cam said, his voice dropping but his face screwed up with rage. “You sit around and come up with some lunatic idea that it must be the new guy in town, it must be the guy who just moved here who’s upsetting the sleepy little village by working his ass off and being aggressive.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Joe said lamely.

  Cam leaned across his desk, thrusting his face forward. “I know what it’s like, Joe. I remember what you people are like, and I don’t forget. I remember you all looking down at the ground when we left this place. You wouldn’t even say good-bye when I stood there with my stupid parents as they drove around this town and canceled their utilities, and their post office box, and got the transcripts from my school.”

  We didn’t even live here then, Joe said to himself but not to Cam. Joe simply watched and listened.

  “You people never even thought about me at all, trying to go to a school in South Dakota that was half-Indian and half-white and all fucked up. If anything, you wondered about my brother, the genius, the future doctor who would make my parents so proud. You wanted to be able to tell people you remembered when he was a student here, going to sixth grade when he should have been in third grade, winning all of those science contests. If only you knew . . .”

  Suddenly, Cam stopped.

  “Talking too much,” Cam said, more to himself than to Joe.

  He lumped back into his chair, staring at something over Joe’s head, looking drained.

  “I’m truly sorry, Cam.”

  No response.

  “I screwed up,” Joe said. “I came up with a conclusion and tried to find facts that would fit it, instead of the other way around.” Putting his hat on his head, Joe stood up.

  Cam still sat there, eerily drained, his concentration elsewhere.

  “Cam?”

  Joe thought that Cam was somewhere deep inside of himself now. What had he done?

  “CAM!”

  Thankfully, Cam Logue seemed to snap back to the present. He blinked rapidly, then his eyes settled on Joe.

  “I’ll be going,” Joe said.

  Cam nodded. “Okay.”

  Joe started to turn, then stopped himself. “Do you have any ideas on what’s happening, Cam? With the mutilations and the murders? We obviously don’t even have a clue.”

  Cam shook his head wearily.

  “We’ve got bears, aliens, all sorts of bad ideas,” Joe said. “Hell, somebody even claims he saw a couple of figures out in the alley behind your office a while back.”<
br />
  Joe was surprised that Cam’s face blanched again, as it had when he first saw Joe.

  “Who said that?” Cam asked.

  Joe shrugged. “That’s not important. My point was about all of the crazy theories.”

  “Tell me who said it.”

  “Cam, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”

  Cam stared at Joe and set his mouth.

  “I really am sorry about all of this, Cam.”

  In his pickup, Joe thumped the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. He had been so wrong, he thought.

  He called Hersig, who answered anxiously.

  “You should take me off the task force,” Joe said morosely. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

  “Dry hole?” Hersig asked.

  “Wrong county, even. Not even close.”

  Hersig sighed. “We’re going to have to mend some fences with the business community after this.”

  “Worse than that, Robey, I’ve got to tell Marybeth.”

  Joe found her in her tiny back office at Barrett’s Pharmacy. She looked up expectantly as he came in. “I was wrong about Cam.” “Tell me.” He did, her face hardening as he spoke.

  “Why did you come down on him so tough, Joe?”

  He shrugged. “I thought it was the best way. I thought I could shock him into saying something.”

  “Well, I guess you did that all right.”

  He shook his head and stared at the tops of his boots. “I feel terrible.”

  “Don’t.”

  He looked up, puzzled.

  “It sounds like a hell of a performance,” she said.

  “I know, I just thought if I laid it right out . . .”

  “No,” she said, shushing him. “Not by you. By Cam. There’s something there, Joe. I just know it. There’s no good reason why Cam and Marie wouldn’t have told me about getting back the ranch. They know I’d keep it confidential, and what difference would it make anyway? Marie and I shared everything, Joe. We talked about both you and Cam, and we talked about our children and our aspirations. Believe me, if Marie knew about Cam’s plan to buy back that ranch, she would have told me about it. When Cam told us together about the ‘secret buyer,’ he was misleading Marie as well. Why would he go out of his way to do that?

  “So, he’s lying to you. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a realtor wanting to buy property. Realtors do it all the time.”

  Joe felt a wave of relief for a moment.

  “But I sabotaged your career.”

  She smiled. “If I wanted a career, Joe, I’d have it. And I’d be damned good at it. Even now, without the Logues, my small business is chugging along. I just need to keep it small, I know now. More flexible. I’ve got to think about Sheridan, and Lucy, and you.”

  “Marybeth, I . . .”

  “It’s just another setback. No one said this would be easy.”

  Joe felt awful. “I wish I were as tough as you are,” he said.

  She smiled again, and pinched his cheek. “You’re better than tough, Joe. You’re good. I’ll stick with good.”

  30

  HIS MIND AND EMOTIONS ON EDGE, Joe spent the rest of the morning patrolling the breaklands and foothills close to town, checking hunters for licenses. He did his job mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere. The few hunters in the field were clean, and in every camp someone asked him about the mutilations. He found himself getting irritated with the entire subject.

  Throughout the morning, he checked messages on his cell phone and home telephone, hoping to hear from Hersig, Ike, or Sheriff Harvey.

  He decided to push things along, if for no other reason than to see if anyone pushed back, or panicked. He’d start at the county clerk’s.

  Ike Easter, Millie, and the two other clerks were assembled around a conference table covered with dozens of old file boxes and stacks of files that smelled of age and dampness when Joe entered the county clerk’s office.

  If his reception that morning was cold, this time it was something out of the Ice Age. The three clerks and Ike had hard scowls and dirt-smudged clothing.

  “There he is,” Millie said as Joe let the door wheeze shut behind him.

  “Here I am,” Joe said, looking at Ike. “Find it?”

  Ike looked harried. Joe suspected that Ike had been abused for most of the day by his clerks as they searched the archives.

  “Good timing,” Ike said to Joe, raising a file into the air. “I’ve got something for you, but it’s kind of a puzzlement.”

  Joe followed Ike into his office.

  “Thanks for your hard work,” Joe told the clerks as he passed them. “We really appreciate this.”

  Millie held his gaze for a moment, then rolled her eyes heavenward.

  Ike fell into his chair and pushed the file across the desk to Joe. Joe noted that the tab on the file said “Overstreet” and was followed by the physical coordinates of the tract.

  “Take a look,” Ike said.

  Joe opened the file. Inside was a clean copy of a deed and title originally made out to Mr. Walter Overstreet in 1921. An amendment was added in 1970, when additional acreage—the Logue property—was added to the document. Joe thumbed through the paperwork, then looked up at Ike for some kind of interpretation.

  “Everything’s there and in perfect order,” Ike said. “Except for two things. One, there’s no record of the OG&M. It should have been attached to the document. Second, it’s a duplicate of the original deed.”

  Joe shook his head. “What’s that mean?”

  Ike shrugged. “As far as the OG&M lease goes, that could just be an error. We find plenty of those in these old files. It’s not that big of a problem, because I can request a copy from the state easy enough . . .”

  “How soon?”

  Ike looked at his watch, mumbled “they’ll kill me,” before calling Millie on the intercom and asking her to contact Cheyenne ASAP and have them fax a copy of the lease to the office. Joe didn’t even turn around to see what kind of furor Ike’s request had set in motion.

  “What else?” Joe asked.

  “Look at the deed in your hands, Joe.”

  Joe did. He saw nothing unusual about it. It had been typed, probably with a manual typewriter, on a deed form decades before. He looked at the dates and description and could see no alterations.

  “It’s a clean copy of the original,” Ike said. “It’s all pretty and nice. It’s not a carbon copy, which is what they used in those days. It’s a modern machine copy.”

  Joe felt a twitch in his scalp. “So somebody made the copy recently.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me. The copy was made while it was still in the archives, for some reason, and the file was put back in the old box. We probably wouldn’t have ever even noticed it if we weren’t looking for this particular file on this particular day.”

  Joe looked up. “How many people had access to the archives, then?”

  Ike raised his eyebrows. “All of us. The sheriff’s deputies who transferred them. The old county clerk, of course. And the new owners of the old county clerk’s home, where the files were kept.”

  “Cam Logue,” Joe said. “And the sheriff.”

  “Maybe,” Ike said, “but there’s no crime here. There’s nothing wrong with making a copy of a deed.”

  “What about taking the mineral rights lease terms?” Joe asked.

  “Also not a crime,” Ike said. “Why do you ask?”

  As Joe got up to leave, he asked Ike to call him on his cell phone as soon as the fax from Cheyenne showed up. Ike followed him to the door.

  Joe thanked the clerks again, and one of them actually smiled back.

  “Joe, can I ask you a favor?” Ike said.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s going to take me a while to get the office cleaned up after all of this.” He gestured to the table and the boxes. “I was going to give George a ride home from where he’s fishing on the
river. Would you mind taking him to the house?”

  “Not a problem, Ike. I’m headed that way now.”

  Ike smiled, and looked over at his shoulder at the clerks, as if assessing the threat before returning to battle.

  31

  MARYBETH DIDN’T GO TO WORK at Logue Realty that afternoon, assuming she was no longer employed, and she felt guilty about it. She hated to leave a job unfinished, even if it were for someone like Cam.

  When she was through for the day at Barrett’s Pharmacy, she used the telephone on the desk to call Logue Country Realty, and she asked for Cam. The temporary receptionist said Cam was out for the rest of the day.

  “Is he on his cell phone?” Marybeth asked.

  “He didn’t say anything about that,” the temp said. “He seemed a little mad about something, so I didn’t even bring it up.”

  “Can you please put me through to his voice mail, then?”

  After fumbling with the telephone system, the temp figured it out.

  Marybeth listened to Cam’s recorded greeting, then spoke softly. “Cam, I talked with Joe about what happened and I’m sure we’ll both agree that it’s best if you find another bookkeeper. I just hope this won’t affect the friendship between Lucy and Jessica. I hope we can both be better parents than that.”

  Marybeth paused. “And I hope Marie and I can still be friends. But you don’t need to give this message to her. I’ll go see her myself.”

  She hung up. After all, Marybeth thought, she now had the afternoon off.

  Marybeth bought a quart of chicken noodle soup from the Burg-O-Pardner and chocolates from Barrett’s Pharmacy and drove through downtown to the Logues’. This time, she anticipated the pickup and camper with the South Dakota plates, and swerved around it and parked near the front door. The house, she thought, looked lifeless, even though she knew there were people inside.