Joe Pickett didn’t receive the message, because at 9:30 he was miles away from the highway, on the side of a mountain, grinding his departmental pickup down a brutal and narrow two-track in the falling snow. He was looking for an abandoned line shack deep in the timber that might or might not contain the remains of Alice Thunder. By the time he neared the shack, he was quietly fuming.
Heavy wet snowflakes shot through the beams of his headlights like meteors. Luckily, the road was knuckled with protruding rocks so the traction on his tires was sound, but they made for painfully slow progress and a ride similar to being caught inside a tumbling clothes dryer.
“We’re getting closer,” Luke Brueggemann said, the GPS unit glowing in his lap. “That is, if those hunters who found the body gave the sheriff the right coordinates.”
Joe leaned forward and tried to see the sky through the top of the windshield. “I don’t like this snow right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get in, check out that line shack, and get out. I don’t want to get stuck back here on the dark side of the moon.”
“I think I’ve heard that story,” Brueggemann said, grinning.
“There’s not much funny about it.”
“It’s kind of a legend among the trainers,” Brueggemann said, referring to the time Joe had been handcuffed to his steering wheel by a violator, who escaped during a blizzard. “In fact, there’s probably more case studies of things you’ve gotten into than any other game warden.”
“Is that so?” Joe said, not knowing whether to be angry or impressed.
“Seems that way.”
“How far until we reach the line shack?”
Brueggemann held the GPS up and traced the contours on the screen. “A mile, maybe.”
“Good. I’ve got a lot of patience, but I’m just about ready to call Cheyenne and ask them to cut us loose from this investigation. I’ve never done that before, but we’re doing nothing out here except burning fuel and calories.”
“So you don’t think we’ll find her body?”
“Look around us,” Joe said. “We’re forty miles from the res. Do you really think a nice middle-aged lady like Alice Thunder would end up here?”
“I don’t know her.”
“I do,” Joe said. “This is a wild-goose chase.”
“But we’re gonna check out the shack first, right?” Brueggemann asked.
“Of course. But first thing tomorrow morning-provided we can get out of here tonight-I’m calling Cheyenne.”
“Does that mean we’re going to get to do real game-warden stuff?” the trainee asked. “Like checking out hunters and finally visiting all those elk camps?”
For the past day and a half, they’d been assigned to Sheriff McLanahan through an agreement reached between the governor’s office and the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. To both Joe Pickett’s and Sheriff McLanahan’s chagrin, County Attorney Dulcie Schalk had gone over the sheriff’s head and pulled together a multiagency effort that involved local, county, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. In addition to the state DCI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs investigators, Schalk had also commandeered state troopers and had borrowed deputies and investigators from adjoining counties, over the sheriff’s objections. But characteristically, McLanahan claimed credit for the effort to the Saddlestring Roundup and described it as “a show of force not seen since the Johnson County Range War.” Despite McLanahan’s frequent interviews with radio journalists and television stations from Billings to Casper and the impressive coordination effort spearheaded by Schalk, no progress had been made on either the three missing-persons cases or the triple homicide.
Because of Joe’s familiarity with the vast and empty corners of the county-and to keep him out of the way-McLanahan had assigned him the job of following up on far-flung anonymous tips and unsubstantiated sightings of Bad Bob Whiteplume, Alice Thunder, or Pam Kelly. All the leads had gone nowhere. Bad Bob was reportedly seen in Las Vegas and in the crowd of a Denver Nuggets basketball game. The Feds got those to follow up on. But when someone called in that they’d witnessed Bad Bob rappelling down the steep walls of Savage Run Canyon, it fell into Joe’s bailiwick. Joe and his trainee had driven as close to the rim of the canyon as they could and hiked the rest of the way, to find no evidence of Bad Bob or anybody else.
Pam Kelly had been reported lurking around the corrals of a neighboring ranch, but when Joe and Brueggemann got there, the mysterious person turned out to be a barmaid from the Stockman’s Bar. She explained haltingly that she was “moonlighting”-performing an erotic dance routine for three Mexican cowhands in the bunkhouse for money. They drove her back to her car.
The anonymous report from hunters said that they’d seen a body matching Alice Thunder’s description at a remote line shack on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains-for which they’d provided GPS coordinates-but it looked to be another dry hole.
For the past two nights, Joe hadn’t returned home until after ten. He’d barely seen Lucy or April. Each night, despite his exhaustion, he’d booted up his computer and checked the falconry website. There wasn’t a single entry on the kestrel thread. Nate seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. And for the first time he could recall, Marybeth hadn’t been able to provide any information from her legal and extralegal research into John Nemecek.
On the way up the mountain to check out the line shack, Luke Brueggemann tried to hide the fact that he was trading text messages with his girlfriend. He’d turn his shoulder to Joe to keep his phone out of view while pretending to be enthralled by something outside his passenger window while he tapped messages by feel.
“You’re not fooling me,” Joe had said as they neared the summit. Storm clouds from the north had marched across the sky and blacked out the stars and moon. “I can see the glow of your phone.”
“Sorry.”
“Luke, I’ve got teenage daughters. I know every texting trick in the book. I even know the one where you look right at me with a vacant expression on your face while you text under the table.”
Brueggemann looked away, obviously embarrassed. He said, “I told you, this is tough on her.”
“It’s going to get tougher,” Joe said, slowing the pickup, “because once we leave the highway you’ll lose your cell signal. We won’t even be able to use the radio for a while.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Consider it tough love,” Joe said. “For the both of you.”
Joe didn’t know the area well, because he rarely patrolled it. The mountainside had burned in a forest fire twenty-five years before, and the surface of the ground between the new six- to eight-foot pine trees was still littered with an almost impenetrable tangle of burned logs and upturned root pans. The slope was so crosshatched with debris even the elk steered clear of it, thus there were few elk hunters for Joe to check. And although the topo map he’d consulted showed several ancient logging trails through the mountainside, the first two trails they’d found were blocked by dozens of fallen trees.
The third, which of course was the most roundabout route to the abandoned line shack, was passable only because the hunters who’d reported the body had cleared it painstakingly with chainsaws.
“Less than a half mile,” Brueggemann said.
It was snowing hard enough that it stuck to the hood of the pickup and topped outstretched pine boughs like icing.
Joe said to Brueggemann, “The chance of there being a body way in here, and that body belonging to Alice, is slim to none. But that’s not the way we approach it. We approach this like a crime scene. We’re professionals, and we take our job seriously. Don’t touch or move anything. Be cautious, and keep your eyes open and your ears on.”
Brueggemann sat up straight and looked over at Joe, wide-eyed.
“When we get there, grab my gear bag from the back,” Joe said. “Find the camera. We may need to take some shots.”
After a beat Brueggemann said, “I gotta ask. What’s a line shack, anyway?”
Joe was surprised. “You really don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
Joe said, “Cowboys built them back when all of this was open range. It’s a shelter against sudden bad weather, or if the ranch hands got caught in the middle of nowhere toward dark. None of them are very fancy, and most of them are in bad shape these days. But they saved some lives back in the day, and we’ve found more than a few lost hunters in remote line shacks.”
“Ever find any bodies?” Brueggemann asked.
“Nope.”
They almost missed it. Joe was taking a slow rocky turn to the left through the trees when his headlights swept quickly across a dark box twenty yards into the timber.
“Any time now,” Brueggemann said, his eyes glued to the GPS.
“You’re a little late,” Joe said, reversing until the beams lit up the old structure.
The heavily falling snow didn’t obscure the fact that the line shack was a wreck. It was tiny-barely ten by ten feet-and made of ancient logs stained black with melting snow. The roof sagged, and there was no glass in the two rough-cut windows on either side of the gaping door. A dented black metal stovepipe jutted out of the roof at a haphazard angle.
“What a dump,” Brueggemann said.
“Yup,” Joe said, swinging out of the cab. He dug his green Game and Fish parka out from behind the bench seat. It had been back there, unused, for the last five months, and he shook the dust off. His twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun was behind the seat as well, but he decided to leave it. He reached inside the cab for the long black Maglite flashlight, which was jammed between the seats. He clicked it on and shined it toward the line shack. He choked the beam down so it peered into the open windows, but all he could see were interior log walls.
“I’ve got the camera,” Brueggemann said, tossing the evidence bag into the cab of the truck.
Joe took a step toward the line shack, then stopped. He turned and got his shotgun.
“You think you’re going to need that?” Brueggemann asked.
“Probably not.”
The snow crunched under their boots as they approached the line shack. Joe held the flashlight with his left hand and carried the shotgun in his right.
“Why a shotgun?” Brueggemann asked. “What’s wrong with your service pistol?”
“Nothing,” Joe said, “except I can’t hit a damned thing with it.”
Brueggemann chuckled. He said, “I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“You’re starting to get on my nerves,” Joe said. “Now, get behind me.”
The heavy snow hushed the rumbling of the running motor of Joe’s pickup as he neared the front of the line shack. He swept the beam left to right and back again, covering the front of the structure as well as the roof and several feet to each side. Because of the snowfall, any boot prints that might have been there were hidden.
“Anybody home?” Joe asked, feeling more than a little silly.
He heard Brueggemann’s breath behind him, and was grateful he didn’t giggle.
As he got close to the line shack, still sweeping the light across the windows, he saw something that surprised him: a glimpse of brightly colored cloth on the cluttered dirt floor inside.
“There might be something,” he said over his shoulder.
“Really?” Brueggemann asked, surprised.
Rather than enter the sagging open door, Joe moved to the left to the broken-out window.
Joe took a deep breath of cold air and inhaled several large snowflakes that melted in the back of his sinus cavities. Then he stepped forward and thrust the Maglite through the window frame toward the floor, slowly moving it up and down the length of the body wrapped in a blanket. The beam swept across the partially exposed skull, the matted hair, the gaping eye sockets where the flesh had been eaten away by rodents and insects.
“Want to look?” Joe asked Brueggemann.
“Is it her?”
“Not exactly,” Joe said, stepping aside and handing his trainee the flashlight.
On the way out of the forest toward the highway, Luke Brueggemann said, “Jesus, who would do something like that? Wrap a dead deer in a blanket and leave it in a line shack? What in the hell could they have been thinking?”
Joe shrugged.
“That’s just sick, man,” the trainee said.
“It happens,” Joe said. “My guess is some hunter shot an extra deer than he had permits for, and decided to dump it. Why he’d wrap it in a fake Navajo blanket-I don’t know. I hate it when hunters waste a life and all that meat. It makes me furious. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often.”
“I wish we could have found the bullet,” Brueggemann said. He’d watched Joe perform the necropsy with equal measures of curiosity and disgust. But because of the deteriorated condition of the carcass, the fatal wound couldn’t be determined. “I’d like to figure out who did that and ticket their ass.”
“We’ll never know unless someone fesses up,” Joe said. “Sometimes it takes years to solve a crime like that. But we’ve got the photos, and we’ll write up an incident report for the file. One of these days we may solve it. Someone talking in a bar, or telling the right person about it-that’s when we can cite them. And you’d be surprised how many of these miscreants show up and confess. Crimes against nature eat on some of these guys the way nothing else does.”
“It’s a puzzle,” Brueggemann said, withdrawing his cell phone and glancing at the screen.
“What’s even more of a puzzle,” Joe said, “is how those hunters saw a deer carcass in a blanket and thought it was Alice Thunder. There seems to be something strange in the air right now. The missing people and that triple homicide have everyone looking over their shoulders and seeing things that aren’t there, I think.”
When his trainee didn’t respond because he was concentrating on his phone, Joe said, “We’re still a few miles away from getting a signal.”
“I can wait.”
“You’ll have to.”
The snow had accumulated so quickly they couldn’t see their entry tracks in the rough two-track on the way out. The big rocks in the road made them pitch back and forth inside the cab like rag dolls.
“I’ll be glad to get back on asphalt,” Brueggemann said.
“Uh-oh,” Joe said, as his headlights lit up a dead tree that had fallen across the road in front of them, blocking their progress. Luckily, the tree didn’t look too large to push aside.
“When did that happen?” Brueggemann asked.
Joe said, “Heavy snow brings down those old dead trees. Try and push it out of the way. If that won’t work, I’ll get the saw out of the back.”
The trainee hesitated for a moment, as if preparing to argue, but apparently thought better of it. “It’ll just take a minute,” he said, pulling on leather gloves.
While Brueggemann walked toward the fallen tree, his back bathed in white headlights, Joe withdrew his own cell phone to check messages. No bars. He glanced to the bench seat and realized Brueggemann had absently left his there. Joe wondered if Brueggemann’s smart phone picked up a signal yet, and picked it up to check.
There was no signal yet, but the darkened screen hinted at the text thread underneath. Joe glanced up to make sure Brueggemann’s back was still to him-it was, as his trainee lifted the tree and walked it stiffly to the side-before tapping a key to light up the screen. Although Joe had no business looking at the extended text thread, he was curious. But the phone was locked and a password was required for access. He lowered the phone back to the seat, ashamed of his attempted spying.
Out on the road, Brueggemann stepped aside and brushed snow from his sleeves and signaled for Joe to drive forward. When he drew up alongside, Joe stopped for his trainee to crawl in. He noted that the first thing Brueggemann did when he swung inside was to immediately retrieve his cell phone from the seat and drop it in his breast pocket.
“Thank you,” Joe said.
“The pleasure is mine,” Brueggemann said sarcastically. “It’s snowing like a motherfu-” He caught himself before the curse came out. “Like crazy,” he said instead.
“It is,” Joe said. “But we’re not that far from the highway now, and we should be fine.”
“Late, though,” his trainee said, looking at his wristwatch. He seemed to be in a hurry to get back to his motel. Probably to talk to his girl. Joe wondered what her name was.
After being tumbled about the cab on the two-track, it felt like heaven to drive onto the snow-covered highway again, Joe thought. He turned right and began to climb toward the summit.
After shifting out of four-wheel-drive low, he snatched the mic from its cradle. They were now back in radio range. Since they were participating in the task force, the under-dash radio unit was still tuned to the mutual aid channel that included all the law enforcement agencies.
“This is GF-48,” Joe said. “We investigated the lead and it’s negative. We’re heading back to the barn now.”
“Roger that, GF-48,” the dispatcher said. The signal-and her voice-crackled with static. “I’ll inform the county sheriff’s department.”
“It was a dead mule deer wrapped in a blanket,” Joe said, and glanced to Brueggemann, who smiled.
“Roger that. A dead deer.”
“GF-48 out,” Joe said. As he leaned forward to cradle the mic, the dispatcher came back. “Joe, have you been in touch with your wife yet?”
Concerned, Joe said, “Negative. We just regained radio contact.”
“Better call her,” the dispatcher said.
“Right away.”
To Brueggemann, Joe asked, “Do we have cell service yet?”
The trainee looked at his phone and shook his head and said, “Must be the snow.”
There was an untracked foot of it on the summit of the mountain, and Joe used the reflections of the delineator posts to make sure he kept the pickup on the road. As they finally began to descend, he felt the vibration of an incoming message on his cell phone in his pocket. At the same time, Brueggemann’s cell phone chirped with received text messages.
As both men reached for their phones, the radio chatter increased in volume and was filled with distant voices.
Brueggemann reached forward to turn down the volume when Joe recognized the fast-clipped exchange of officers somewhere involved in a tense situation.
“Hold it,” Joe said to Brueggemann. “Something’s going on, and I want to hear what it is.”
They listened as Joe drove. One of the speakers identified himself as a Teton County sheriff’s deputy. The other was a Wyoming highway trooper. The third was the local dispatcher in Jackson Hole. Snatches of the conversation popped and crackled through the speakers of Joe’s pickup radio.
… One dead at the scene of the rollover…
… transporting a second victim now to Saint John’s…
… the vehicle is a Chevy Tahoe, Colorado plates, VIN number…
“Where’s Saint John’s?” Brueggemann asked Joe.
“Jackson,” Joe answered quickly, imploring his trainee to be quiet.
… need to alert the emergency room doctors that the victim is in bad shape… claims he was tortured and it sure as hell looks like it…
“Tortured!” Brueggemann yelped.
“Please,” Joe said, “I can’t hear.”
… The dead one at the scene appears to be male, late twenties to early thirties, no identification… massive head wound…
… The staff at Saint John’s has been informed…
… snowing like hell here… not sure if there are other victims around… can see tire tracks but no other vehicles…
… cannot send additional units because our personnel is currently across the border in Idaho…
… Idaho! We need them here…
… Teton Pass is closed because of the storm…
… We need an evidence tech on the scene ASAP. The snow is covering the tracks and we’re gonna lose the chance of figuring out what happened…
… Requesting once again any possible backup or assistance on the scene…
“Jesus,” Brueggemann said. “What do you think happened?”
Joe shook his head as if he didn’t have any idea, and raised his phone to listen to Marybeth’s message that had been left two hours before.
When he heard it, he felt his insides go ice cold. Despite the road conditions, he punched the accelerator.
“Jesus!” Brueggemann said. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to get home,” Joe said through clenched teeth.