by C. J. Box
What explained the feeling in the air Joe experienced when he first found the dead moose?
What scared Maxine so badly that he was now the proud owner of the world’s only all-white Labrador?
The last part of the scenario was just as troublesome. What had driven Eric and Nurse Bob to confront Cam in his home, and to kidnap him? Why did they pick up Not Ike? And why had Eric and Nurse Bob killed and mutilated Cam?
And the biggest question of all: Where was Eric Logue?
Joe was still distracted when he and Marybeth cleared the dinner dishes from the table. He had scarcely heard the dinner conversation, with Lucy, Jessica, and Sheridan talking about their day in school.
As he filled the sink with water, Marybeth said, “You’re thinking about Eric Logue again, aren’t you?”
He looked at her.
“We may just never know, Joe. We’ve discussed it to death.”
“I didn’t think it was possible to discuss anything to death,” he said, taking a jibe at her.
“Very funny.”
He washed, she dried.
Lucy and Jessica laughed in the next room at something on television. Joe looked over his shoulder at them. They had changed out of their school clothes. They liked to dress alike, much to Sheridan’s consternation. Tonight, they both wore oversized green surgeon’s scrubs.
“Why are they wearing those?” Marybeth asked, suddenly alarmed, knowing whom the shirts once came from.
She raised her voice. “Both of you girls go change clothes right now. I thought I told you to get rid of those.”
Both girls looked back at Marybeth, obvious guilt on their faces. They had forgotten.
“Sorry, Mom,” Lucy said as she skulked to her room.
“Sorry, Mrs. Pickett,” Jessica said.
Then it was as if Marybeth’s legs went numb, Joe saw, the way she suddenly reached for the door jamb to keep herself steady.
“What?” Joe asked, puzzled.
Marybeth looked at Joe. Her expression was horrifying.
“What?”
“Oh, no,” she said, looking pale.
“Marybeth . . .”
She turned to him and whispered, “Joe, Marie didn’t throw out those scrubs. She let Jessica keep them and wear them.”
“So?”
“Think about it, Joe. A woman wouldn’t keep something like those scrubs around her house unless she had a reason. Marie had to know they were there. She washed them for Jessica, and folded them up for her, probably dozens of times.”
Joe said, “Go on.”
“Why would Marie keep those in her house? Clothes that would remind her husband of the brother he hated? Why would she keep a picture of Eric on her mantel? And now that I think about it, you were more surprised that Eric had come to their house after Cam that day than Marie was.”
Joe felt a hammer blow square in the middle of his chest. “Marybeth, do you know what you’re saying?”
Instead of answering, Marybeth stepped forward to intercept Jessica as she walked toward the bedroom to change. Marybeth dropped to her knees so she could look at Jessica eye-to-eye. She placed her hands gently on the little girl’s shoulders.
“Jessica, how long have you had those shirts?”
Jessica stopped and thought. “A while.”
“How long?”
Jessica was surprised at Marybeth’s tone. “A couple of years, I guess. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Who gave them to you?”
“Uncle Eric.”
Joe watched Jessica carefully. There was fear growing in her eyes.
Marybeth asked, “Jessica, was your uncle Eric at your house a couple of years ago? Before you moved here?”
Her eyes were huge and she was on the verge of tears. But she nodded.
“Your dad and your uncle Eric didn’t get along very well, did they?”
“No.”
“Your dad even asked you to get rid of those hospital scrubs when he saw you wearing them, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“But your mom said you could keep them, as long as you never wore them around your dad, right?”
Jessica nodded. “I think they’re cool to wear.”
“I understand.”
Jessica looked over Marybeth’s shoulder at Joe. Joe knew that Jessica couldn’t determine if she was in trouble or not.
“No one’s angry with you, Jessica,” he told her. “Just answer Marybeth’s questions.”
Jessica nodded. “My mom said I could keep them as long as I didn’t wear them around my dad, and I never did.”
Marybeth asked, “Your mom and uncle Eric were good friends, weren’t they? They talked a lot on the telephone when your dad wasn’t there, right?”
Joe took a deep breath, feeling a shroud of dark horror engulf him.
When Jessica nodded, Joe didn’t even want to see Marybeth’s reaction. But Marybeth remained calm, at least outwardly.
“Okay, honey,” Marybeth said, standing. “You can go change now.”
Jessica didn’t move.
Joe and Marybeth stared at each other, neither wanting to say anything in front of Jessica. Jessica watched them both, and her eyes filled with tears.
She looked at Marybeth. “My mom’s not coming back, is she?”
38
THREE DAYS LATER, Marie Logue was at the New Orleans International Airport, checking in for a flight to Milan, when she was surrounded by a dozen special agents from the local office of the FBI. The name she was using was Barbara Grossman, and she had a Louisiana driver’s license and a four-year-old passport to prove it. Unfortunately for Marie Logue, the FBI had, on videotape, the footage of the transaction taking place between Marie and the same man who had sold Eric Logue his Cleve Garrett identity papers.
Portenson was exuberant and cocky when he called Joe and told him what had happened. He said he had thought it through once Joe tipped him off about the relationship between Marie and Eric Logue, and he figured out that Eric had probably told Marie about the location of the identity thief in New Orleans. Portenson figured that Marie would eventually go there herself, for her new documents. Portenson said his colleagues in New Orleans had arrested the identity thief earlier in the week and had made a deal for leniency with him if he would help them set her up, including the placement of video cameras in his office over a bar on Bourbon Street.
“We want to interview her tomorrow, and we’d like you to be here, since you know her,” Portenson said.
“I thought I knew her,” Joe corrected.
“Whatever. We want you there.”
“New Orleans?”
“I’ll fax you the address for our field office, and we’ll make you a reservation at a hotel nearby. If you take the commuter flight that leaves your little podunk airport in two hours, you can connect in Denver. You can be here tonight.”
“I don’t think I have the budget to . . .”
“We’re covering your expenses, Joe. I already got approval for it.”
Joe Pickett landed in New Orleans at midnight, in a rainstorm of biblical dimensions. His Stetson got soaked through in just the time it took him to climb into a taxi at the airport.
Despite the rain, there were throngs of people moving on the sidewalks downtown. Some carried umbrellas, but most just got wet. He checked in at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter.
As he stood at the front desk, dripping, the flinty blond clerk found his reservation and said, “Are you really from Wyoming?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever actually met anyone from there before.”
“Now you have,” he said.
There was a message on the voice mail in his room from Portenson saying to be at the FBI field office on Leon C. Simon Boulevard by 9 A.M.
“We’ll brief you on what we’ve got so far, and then we’ll go in and see her,” he said. “So don’t party too hard on the Quarter tonight.”
Joe called Maryb
eth to tell her that he had arrived safely, then tried to sleep. He couldn’t. The unfamiliarity of it all—Marie Logue, mutilations, New Orleans—kept him awake.
At two in the morning he put on his wet hat and went outside into the rain. The streets were still crowded with people. He walked down Dauphine Street and then Bourbon, and a reveler from a balcony above him called him “Tex” and threw him a beaded necklace.
It was still raining in the morning when he arrived at the FBI field office. The security guard found his name on the computer, gave him a guest badge, and sent him into the back offices.
Portenson was waiting with a bookish woman he introduced as Special Agent Nan Scoon. Scoon had been the leader of the team that arrested Marie at the airport.
Portenson said, “When we brought her in, she had $8,000 in cash on her and records that indicate that she transferred $1.3 million—the rest of the insurance money—to accounts in the Caymans. That’s what she had spent her time doing after she left your place.
“The calls she made to your wife supposedly to check on her daughter were from all over the country. Not one actually came from Denver, where her parents do live. We interviewed them and she never even showed up there.”
Joe whistled. “You did some good work.”
“I know,” Portenson said, “I’m a fuckin’ genius. But the great thing is that we built the case on her while we waited for her to show up here, and last night we dropped it on her like a ton of bricks. First-degree accessory to three murders, child abandonment, conspiracy, racketeering, and fifteen other counts. She was playing it straight at first—she kept insisting she was Barbara Grossman—but we dropped those charges on her like the Mother of All Bombs. And after a little crying jag, she cracked. She gave us a little at first, fishing around for a deal. When she saw she wasn’t going to get one, she started yapping. My guys down there said that by the time she was through, it was like she was bragging about it, all full of herself.”
“So she’s willing to talk?” Joe asked.
“That’s why we brought you down here, cowboy.”
Joe didn’t recognize her at first when they entered the spartan interview room. Marie was now blond, and she wore fashionable, black-framed glasses. She had added a beauty mark to her upper lip. When she saw Joe, her eyes widened behind the lenses.
“Hello, Marie,” Joe said, sitting across the table from her. Portenson and Scoon took the other chairs.
Agent Scoon signaled for the tape to roll, and briefed Marie on her rights. As she had done the day before, Marie waived the right to have an attorney present.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said curtly, looking at Joe.
“So who actually found the file in the basement?” Joe asked.
“Moi,” she said, and her eyes sparkled. “Cam might have seen it before, but it didn’t connect with him the way it connected with me. He was a little slow in that regard. Cam was a fairly weak guy, basically. He looked to me for guidance.”
Joe grunted. In retrospect, it didn’t surprise him all that much. As he had thought earlier, Cam was driving without a road map. But Marie was the one providing directions.
“Then those mutilations came,” she said, “and that’s all everyone was talking about. We liked the idea that the land values were sinking, but we worried about whether we could afford the Timberline Ranch anyway. That’s when I started pushing Cam so hard to get out there and get more listings. I rode him hard, thinking that if even one of the ranches sold we would have the down payment on the Timberline.”
While she talked, she drew invisible patterns on the tabletop with her index finger.
“That’s when poor old Stuart Tanner showed up with his file. We didn’t figure that Tanner would research the deed and find the same thing I did. So when Cam told me that we needed to forget about buying the place and move on, I played my hole card.”
“You called Eric,” Joe said.
“Right. We’d kept in touch for years.” She batted her eyes coquettishly. “He’s been smitten with me, like forever. We’d had a relationship years before that Cam never knew about. I moved on but Eric kept a torch. Even when he started getting sick he never lost his feelings for me. He said he’d do anything for me. Then he’d talk like a nut about his obsession with aliens. I let him go on and on about that. So when I called him and asked him for a favor, he came. Eric and his buddy Bob did Tanner and Montegue. Eric did it to please me, which was kind of sweet when you think about it.”
Joe felt his stomach curdle, but tried to stay calm and ask his questions.
“Why did they choose Tuff Montegue?”
She shrugged. “He was just there, I suppose. But Eric was clever in a devilish kind of way. He told me that they intentionally messed up the job on Montegue. They did it to draw attention away from Tanner, and as you know, it worked. Your task force would have been working the wrong angle on that one until hell froze over, if it weren’t for you, Joe.”
Joe said nothing. He was thinking. Most of the pieces had finally fallen into place. But there were still problems.
“So Cam didn’t know about his brother being there?” Joe asked.
“I think he assumed he was somewhere close. He told me he thought it was just a matter of time before the family was back together, now that his parents were there. He dreaded the prospect.”
“Did he know Nurse Bob was living in a shack on your property?”
“I didn’t even know that. I thought he was living somewhere out in the woods.”
“What about Cam’s parents? Did Cam know they were coming? Did you?”
Marie laughed sourly. “That was as big of a surprise for me as it was for Cam when they showed up. I knew about Bob coming, of course, but I had no idea they were bringing him. Old Clancy and Helen really threw a kink into things.”
“Did you tell Eric to kill his brother?”
Marie reacted with shock. “Of course not. Of course not. I was genuinely shocked when you told me what happened. I just wanted Eric to put a little spine into Cam, because Cam was wavering on me.”
“Why was he wavering?”
“You spooked him,” Marie said, smiling at Joe. “That meeting you had with him shook him up. When he found out you were checking out the deeds at the county clerk’s, he told me we needed to forget the whole damned thing. But I had no intention of giving up.”
Joe was chilled by her. She was so matter-of-fact, and actually a little charming. Poor Cam, Joe thought. He’d married a manipulator.
“I never saw it,” Joe confessed. “I never even considered you.”
“You weren’t the only one,” she said.
“I kept wondering why they went after Not Ike,” Joe said, “but now I know. It’s because I told Cam that Not Ike said he had seen somebody in the alley behind the real estate office. When Cam told you the story, you panicked and called Eric.”
She leaned forward and fixed Joe with her eyes. “I don’t panic,” she said.
“Do you know where Eric is?”
“Absolutely not,” she said adamantly. “I swear it. I haven’t been in contact with him since that morning. I hope you find him, and I hope he hangs or whatever they do to killers in Wyoming. Joe,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “He killed my husband, remember? As far as I know, he’s still out there.”
“You mean in Wyoming?”
“As far as I know,” she repeated. Then she looked to Agent Scoon, as if she was exasperated with Joe.
“Don’t you think I’d give him up in a heartbeat if I knew where he was? Eric’s location is the only thing I’d have to make a deal with. You people have me on so many charges, at least if I knew something I’d be able to, you know, negotiate a little.”
It did make sense, Joe conceded to himself. Damn it.
“So it was all about money,” Joe said sadly. “All about getting the CBM leases.”
She turned on him. “Of course, Joe. Why would there be any more to it? You’ve got these rub
es all over the state becoming instant millionaires, just because they own mineral rights. It’s not like they earned their money by being virtuous, or working hard. Why not Cam and me?
“What did you expect? That we were going to just bump along all of our lives living paycheck to paycheck like you and Marybeth?”
That stung, and he blinked.
“Cam was okay with that kind of existence, but I never was,” she said. “When it’s raining money, you can either put on your raincoat or get the buckets out. You better think about it too, Joe. You’ve got your family to think about. Marybeth wants more, Joe. She deserves more. Don’t think we haven’t talked about it, either.”
Joe sat in silence, staring at her.
“Stop staring,” she snapped.
“Never once have you asked about your daughter,” he said. “Not once have you even mentioned her.”
Marie smiled. “That’s because I know she’s in good hands.”
They left Marie in the interview room. Joe and Portenson stood in the hall, shaking their heads at each other.
“Couple of things,” Joe said. “If Marie called Eric to come and get Stuart Tanner, then Eric could not have done the cattle mutilations.”
Portenson moaned. “Why don’t we forget about the dead cows for now.”
“Because I can’t.” Joe didn’t bring up the moose.
“Jesus Christ.”
“It means that somebody or something else mutilated the animals,” Joe said. “It had nothing to do with Eric, or Marie. She used the mutilations for cover to do in Tanner. But she didn’t have anything to do with them in the first place.”
Portenson sounded almost physically pained. “Joe . . .”
“Don’t tell me it was birds, Portenson.”
After a long silence, Portenson said, “Okay, I won’t. But I don’t see where it matters anymore. The mutilations have gone away. We’ll never find out who did it, and frankly, since we’ve got Marie, I really don’t care anymore. We’ll find Eric. It’s just a matter of time.”
“One more thing,” Joe said. “Jessica Logue.”
“Oh, man . . .”
“Are her grandparents okay? The ones in Denver? Can they take her?”
“This isn’t my department.”
