Trophy Hunt

by C. J. Box

  “I know. But you talked to them. Do they seem like normal human beings? Not like Clancy and Helen? Or Marie?”

  “They seem normal.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I didn’t give them a psychological test, or anything. Come on, Joe . . .”

  “I’m serious.” Joe said, raising his voice. “It’s important. We’ve seen too many people screwed up by bad parents. I can’t let Jessica go there unless I’m sure she’ll be okay. If it’s not, we’ve got to find a normal uncle and aunt. There’s got to be somebody.”

  Portenson sighed, “Okay, okay. I’ll make your case. We’ll send some people over there, and do some checking. But please understand that this isn’t what the FBI does . . .”

  Joe thanked him before he could recant.

  On the plane back, Joe sat in his seat and furiously rubbed his face with his hands. He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t suspected. And even though one part of the investigation was concluded, there was still more. The whole sordid case left a bad taste in his mouth. It always came down to the family, he thought.

  Marybeth listened as Joe recounted the interview, watching him. She shook her head sadly.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “She fooled everyone.”

  Marybeth came over and sat on Joe’s lap. Her eyes were moist. “We talked about everything, Joe. She told me about her dreams. I told her about mine. Now I find out that her dreams were things she made up for my sake. I feel horribly duped, and angry.”

  He held her. “Sometimes, darling, we see what we want to see. Remember Wacey Hedeman?”

  Wacey had been Joe’s closest friend until he betrayed Joe. Four years before, Wacey had shot Marybeth and threatened Sheridan. It still hurt when Joe thought about it. Wacey had twenty more years to go at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins.

  “Thank you for trying to find the best family for Jessica,” Marybeth said softly. “I wish we could keep her, I really do. But after what happened to April, I just can’t make the commitment.”

  Joe nodded. “I knew that. It’s okay.”

  They sat like that for a half an hour, each with their own rumination, holding each other.

  Eric Logue is still out there, he thought, and so is whatever mutilated the cattle.

  She thought, We’re back to where we started.

  39

  WINTER STORM CLOUDS were nosing over the top of the Bighorn Mountains and the air was cold and lifeless when Nate Romanowski pulled on his jacket to check his falcons in the mews. Joe Pickett was bringing Sheridan out later that morning, for her first falconry apprenticeship lesson in a while. Nate’s special project had concluded, more or less successfully, and it was time to fly his birds again. It had been too long, nearly two months.

  On mornings like this, in the quiet of an impending storm, sounds carried farther. It would be a good morning to submerge himself in the river and listen, Nate thought. But the water was getting too cold for that. He needed a winter wet suit.

  From inside the mews, he heard his peregrine squeal and flap his wings wildly, and Nate stopped before opening the door. He had put a leather hood on the bird the night before, specifically to keep the falcon calm. Something had alarmed the bird. There was something wrong. . . .

  The blow to his head came from above, from the roof of the mews. He hadn’t thought to look up.

  Nate knew what was happening, he knew why it was happening, but there was nothing he could do about it. His limbs wouldn’t respond and he couldn’t even open his eyes. The heavy blow had temporarily paralyzed him, disconnected his brain from his body. He lay on his back in the dirt near the door of the mews.

  Even worse, someone was on top of him, pinning him down.

  He felt the deep slice of a blade behind his ear, felt it draw down across his jaw, the sound like a liquid swish, then a jarring scrape of metal on bone that sent a shock throughout his nervous system. It reminded him of how amplified things sounded when he was underwater. He felt the air on exposed tissue as the flesh on his face was pulled aside, and it felt cold.

  Eric Logue.

  Sheridan had been searching the sky for falcons and lazily eating a banana for breakfast as they drove to Nate Romanowski’s stone cabin on the bank of the river, when she lowered her gaze and saw the two forms on the ground near the mews.

  “Dad, what’s that?”

  Joe took it in quickly, saw it for what it was, yelled, “Hold on tight!” and jammed the accelerator into the floor.

  Through the windshield, Joe saw Eric look up at the sound of the approaching pickup. Eric was wild looking and filthy, with shredded clothing, a scraggly beard, and stiff, tumbleweed hair. He was on top of Nate’s prone body with his knees on either side of Nate’s head. Joe saw blood and Nate’s lifeless, pale hand flung out to the side of him.

  As Joe bore down on the mews, Eric stood up, looked quickly at his unfinished business on the ground, then turned and started running toward the river, loping toward it like some kind of heavy-limbed animal.

  Sheridan braced herself on the dashboard of the truck, her eyes wide, as Joe drove by Nate and pursued Eric. The distance between Joe, Eric, and the river closed at once, and Joe saw Eric shoot a panicked glance back over his shoulder seconds before Joe hit him.

  The collision dented the grille and buckled the hood of the pickup, and sent Eric flying toward the river where he hit the water with an ungainly, flailing splash. Joe slammed on his brakes, and the pickup fishtailed and stopped at the water’s edge.

  Joe and Sheridan scrambled out, with Maxine bounding behind them.

  “Jeez, Dad . . .” Sheridan said, her face white. “I mean . . . wow.”

  Joe concentrated on the surface of the river. The water was dark and deep, the surface blemished only by ringlets that spread from the center of the violent splash. Eric had sunk like a rock, but Joe wasn’t sure he had hit Eric hard enough to kill him outright. He wished Sheridan hadn’t been there to see it.

  Nate was breathing and his eyes were open when Joe and Sheridan got to him. The cut on the side of his face was deep, and bleeding profusely, and a flap of his skin was folded back and raw. Joe knelt and put it back, seeing that Eric had been interrupted before he could sever any arteries or do fatal damage.

  “Ouch,” Nate said weakly.

  “Stay down,” Joe said, still shaky. “Don’t sit up. I’m calling the EMTs right now.”

  Sheridan stripped off her hooded sweatshirt and dropped to her knees to compress the cloth against his wound.

  Joe ran back to his truck and keyed the mike.

  He completed the call and was told to expect the ambulance within twenty minutes.

  “That’s a hell of a long time,” Joe said angrily.

  “They’re on their way,” Wendy the dispatcher snapped back. “You are quite a ways out of town, you know.”

  He looked back toward the mews. He could see Nate and Sheridan talking to each other. Nate was going to be okay, Joe thought, although he would have quite a scar on his face.

  For the first time since they’d arrived, Joe took a deep breath. He realized that his hands were shaking and his mouth was dry.

  He looked at the river, at its deceptive, muscular stillness. On the other side of the river, a high red rock face was dotted with tenacious clumps of sage. Then down river, where the channel began a slow bend away from him, he saw Eric Logue dragging himself out of the water on the other bank.

  Eric pulled himself into a clump of willows, got to his hands and knees, and crawled out of sight into a small red rock fissure.

  Stay with him until the EMTs get here,” Joe told Sheridan, checking his loads and racking the pump on his shotgun. He had given her his first aid kit so she could use a sterile compress, as her sweatshirt was now heavy with Nate’s blood. “You’re doing a good job, honey.”

  Sheridan looked up, concerned. “Where are you going?”

  “Down river.”

  Nate was watching him warily. He started to s
it up.

  “Nate, stay down,” Joe said.

  “Joe, you should know something. We’ve been waiting for Eric Logue to show up. We knew he would.”

  Joe hesitated.

  “They’re both vessels,” Nate said. “Eric Logue and the bear. It’s not even their fight, but you have to let it play out. It has to end here.”

  Joe looked at him, then at Sheridan.

  “The next time you have a dream about bad things coming,” Joe said to his daughter, “I’ll listen.”

  She nodded, her eyes wide.

  “It’s about time,” Nate said.

  A quarter of a mile beyond where Joe had seen Eric emerge from the river, there was an old footbridge that had been built by a Hungarian hard rock miner named Scottie Balyo in the 1930s. Scottie had used the bridge to work a secret seam of gold somewhere in the foothills. The bridge was no longer safe, due to rotten and missing slats, but Joe labored his way across it by straddling the planks themselves and keeping his boots on the outside rails. The frame sagged and moaned as he went across, but it held. On the other side, he stepped down into soft, wet sand.

  He kept to the sand as he crept downriver, walking as quietly as he could. As he neared the willows he had seen Eric crawl into, he turned and scrambled up the loose wall of the bank so he could see the fissure from above.

  Never again, Joe thought, would he discount a dream Sheridan had. Like Nate, she was connected to this thing in a way that was real, if incomprehensible. Perhaps it was intuitiveness born of her age, that preteen angst that allowed her to tap into events that were occurring on another level, as Nate had described. Sheridan had seen the evil coming, and tracked it.

  With Nate, it was his preternatural animal sense; his interaction with the natural world around him, that drew him to the bear. Joe couldn’t explain either circumstance, and didn’t want to. But it was there, had been there, and if nothing else he would now open his mind, if only a little, to accept it.

  The fissure was narrow where Eric had entered it, but it widened into a brush-choked draw. The floor of the draw was dry now, in the winter, but in the spring it served as a funnel for snowmelt from the mountains into the river. The soft sand was churned up down there—Eric’s track. Joe couldn’t yet see him, but he couldn’t imagine that Eric had gotten very far.

  Joe heard him before he saw him; a low, sad moan from farther up the draw.

  “Cleve?” Joe called. “Dr. Eric Logue?”

  The moaning stopped.

  “Joe Pickett,” Joe called. “I’m going to arrest you.”

  “You’re going to kill me!”

  Joe dropped into the draw. “Maybe so,” Joe said.

  When he found him, Joe was surprised to see that Eric had managed to stand up, using the help of an emerged root on the side of the draw as a handhold. He was bent forward, obviously in great pain. His head was slightly lowered, but his eyes locked on Joe as he approached. A thread of bloody saliva strung from his lips to the sand.

  Joe kept his shotgun pointed at Eric’s chest. Joe was a notoriously bad shot, but he figured even he couldn’t miss with a shotgun at this distance.

  Eric still held the scalpel in his right fist, which rested on his thigh, but he didn’t threaten Joe with it. It was almost as if he had forgotten it was there.

  “I’m really busted up inside, man,” Eric groaned, never taking his eyes off of Joe. “I’m not gonna make it.”

  “Probably not,” Joe said.

  Eric coughed, and the cough must have seared through him, because his legs almost buckled. “It hurts so bad,” he groaned. He coughed again, then spit a piece of what looked like bright red sponge into the sand between his feet. Lung, Joe knew, having seen the spoor of lung-shot big-game animals many times before. Eric’s ribs had probably broken and then speared his lungs when the pickup hit him.

  “Think you can walk across that bridge?” Joe asked.

  Eric just stared at him. Then: “Why don’t you just shoot me? It’s okay.”

  Joe squinted, trying to determine if Eric was playing games with him.

  “Pull the trigger, you coward,” Eric said.

  “Why?”

  Eric coughed again, then righted himself. “I’m really sick, man. And they’re through with me.”

  Joe felt his scalp twitch. “Who is through with you?”

  Eric tried to gesture skyward, but his arm wouldn’t work. “They are. I thought there would be some kind of payoff, but they just used me. No one told me the other side would send something after me.”

  Behind Eric was a dark wall of Rocky Mountain junipers. Joe thought he saw movement in the lower branches, but decided it must have been the cold wind. The wind did strange things in draws like this.

  “Tell me,” Joe said. “We know about Stuart Tanner and Tuff Montegue. But why did you kill your brother?”

  Eric’s face twisted painfully. “It was Bob. Bob did that. I guess Cam tried to get away, and Bob whacked him on the head. Then Bob figured he’d mutilate him to make it look like the others. I wasn’t in the room when it happened.”

  “You were carving on Deena in the other room at the time, I guess,” Joe said.

  “Who cares about any of this?” Eric said. “You got me. So shoot, you bastard. Give me some peace. Or I’ll come over there and start cutting on you.”

  “What made Tuff Montegue’s horse throw him?”

  Eric twitched. “Bob said it was just dumb luck. Bob said he must have spooked the horse as he moved from tree to tree.”

  “Why the animals?” Joe asked, gripping the shotgun tighter. “Why did you mutilate the animals?”

  Eric shook his head. “I didn’t hurt any animals. Except for that stupid horse on that ranch, and I messed that up.”

  “What?” Joe asked, perplexed.

  “I know who did it, though,” Eric said, coughing. His eyes shined. He took a clumsy step toward Joe now, and raised the scalpel. “They did it.”

  Again, Joe saw a shiver in the junipers. This time, he knew it wasn’t the wind. It was something huge, something big-bodied.

  “They’re gone now,” Eric said, wincing but still lurching forward. “But they’ll be back. And if you think I’m scary . . .”

  The grizzly bear, the one Joe had once been chasing, the one Nate had made his obsession, blasted out of the junipers and hit Eric Logue in the back with such primal force and fury that it left Joe gasping for breath. The bear had waited, and Eric Logue had finally come.

  Joe watched as the grizzly dragged Eric’s wildly thrashing body into the shadows.

  Sheridan still dreamed vividly, and one dream in particular stayed with her, subtly growing in meaning until she would later look back on it as the end of something. In that dream, one of many that took place the night after Eric Logue attacked Nate Romanowski, the roiling black clouds were back. This time, though, the tendrils of smoke or mist leached from the ground and low brush and rose upward, as if being withdrawn. The black horse-head snouts of the thunderheads rolled back, eventually clearing the top of the Bighorn Mountain, leaving big, blue sky.

  She believed there had been a battle. The battle took place in plain sight, in front of everyone, but few could see or sense it. She wanted to believe that the battle was between good forces, with the bear as the agent, and evil, embodied by some other kind of beings who had recruited Eric Logue and Nurse Bob. Perhaps the good forces had engaged her dad and Nate as temporary foot soldiers as well. But she would never know that.

  It was remarkable to Sheridan how little the incidents—the cattle, wildlife, and human mutilations—were talked about. It was as if everyone in the Twelve Sleep Valley collectively wished that nothing had happened. But they had. Men had died. Maxine would forever be changed from seeing something that had scared her white. A family, the Logues, was destroyed.

  Even when the e-mail came to her father from someone named Deena, who had written to him from somewhere in South America where more mutilations had subsequently occ
urred, her father didn’t want to discuss it. Sheridan wouldn’t have even known about the e-mail if she hadn’t heard Nate try and broach the subject with her dad.

  “Too many holes in the earth,” Nate had said. “Maybe something was released into the atmosphere that drew in a force like putrid meat draws in flies.”

  Her dad had said, “Or maybe not,” in that dismissive way he had, and changed the subject. When Nate tried to steer him back, her dad told Nate, “I don’t want to talk about something we’ll never have the knowledge to understand.” Then: “Nate, I hate woo-woo crap.”

  Nate said, “I know you do,” and smiled, the edges of his new scar twisting his mouth slightly.

  She was with her dad later that fall when he slowed his pickup on the bridge to call out to Not Ike Easter, who was fishing in the river. Not Ike hollered back, laughing. Sheridan asked her dad what Not Ike had said.

  “He said he’s caught three fish.” Then he smiled as if he were content, as if things had finally returned to normal.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincere thanks to those who provided information, background, inspiration, and expertise in the creation of this novel.

  Thanks to Katie Oyan of the Great Falls Tribune, for providing her stories, background photos, and information on a new series of cattle mutilations near Conrad, Montana, in December of 2000 and January of 2001.

  Special thanks to those who read early drafts of the manuscript and offered expertise and advice: Bill Scribner; Wyoming Game Warden Mark Nelson and Mari; Laurie, Molly, and Becky; RoseMarie London and Lois Chickering; and Ann Rittenberg, who went way beyond the call of duty.

  Thanks to Michael Burton for writing “Night Rider’s Lament,” and Don Hajicek for designing and maintaining the cjbox.net site.

  And my gratitude to Joan Montgomery of Murder by the Book in Denver, who two years ago asked, “Have you ever thought of checking out those cattle mutilations?”

  As always, special recognition and acknowledgment must go to Martha Bushko, my editor at Putnam, as well as the entire team of professionals at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Berkley.