Claws (16 page)

Thirty

Vehicles lined the county road near Brown’s Creek. Fewer than half were police cars. Skip Tibbits was the first officer Jackson saw when he arrived. He was clearing a spot for an ambulance, while Deborah Dawson and Armando Diaz wrangled eight skittish pintos out of the way. Skip’s team, the group using Deborah’s horses to search the area for little Eric Stutz, had found the body. Jackson left his Jeep at the end of the line and walked back to where people were gathered below the two-lane asphalt.

On the hillside three men wrestled a mangled Harley-Davidson half-buried in dirt and weeds. Some thirty feet away, other people surrounded a body. In addition to Skip and Tucker and search volunteers, Jackson spotted two state troopers and the state police detective Jessup had sent to town a day earlier. Judy Gatwick was mid-thirties and built like a fireplug. Jackson had met her briefly and arranged for her to talk to Tucker. Gatwick and everyone else wore surgical masks or some other facial covering to lessen the
smell. Despite the strong odor, there wasn’t enough body left to fill a baby’s casket. Jackson wouldn’t have known he was looking at the body of Ronnie Greathouse if Gatwick hadn’t shown him the driver’s license and State Trooper identification that had been found nearby.

“Judging from the skid marks,” Gatwick told Jackson and Sheriff Midden, who arrived a moment after Jackson, “he lost control of his bike, and the crash either killed him or he laid out here until some animals did the job.”

Gatwick took photos and measurements, and after the coroner officially pronounced the obvious, the body was removed. Tucker Thule watched the removal and wept. Earlier, Jackson had seen him off in the bushes vomiting. He spoke with Tucker now and sent him back to town. Then he saw the country sheriff beckoning him and joined him.

Paul Midden was leaning against his white Chevy SUV. It had a big county sheriff’s star on both front doors. Midden informed Jackson that he had brought in a team of search dogs and their handler from Atomic City, but the dogs didn’t pick up any scent of Eric Stutz except in the campground. He asked, “Now, what’s that suggest to you?”

Jackson thought about it for a moment. “That Eric left there in a vehicle that was parked close by.”

Midden bobbed his head. “We’ve broadened the Amber Alert.
Checking motels and convenience stores in a fifty-mile radius. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do.”

“Not much else to do,” Jackson said, “except start looking for a fresh grave.”

“There’s a lot of woods to cover ’round here.”

“Eric’s parents, they were hunting the day he went missing. Might be a good to start wherever they were.”

Midden groaned and spat tobacco juice. “Aw, hell.”

After Midden left, Jackson called the police station. He told Sadie Pope what he wanted. He waited while the dispatcher/secretary dug around in his desk for an address book and found Gary Peterson’s phone number. Jackson’s former neighbor in Fort Collins, and the man responsible for Jackson becoming a policeman, was now a homicide detective with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. He also had become a born again Christian and anytime they talked, he eventually tried to convert Jackson. Still, Gary Peterson was the best contact Jackson had in Colorado.

Peterson was at home when Jackson reached him. Once they caught up on families and careers, Jackson outlined the details of the Eric Stutz case and asked Peterson for his help. “I was thinking I might get in one last fishing trip before snow,” Peterson said. “Now you’ve
given me an excuse to go fly fishing in the mountains. There’s that butcher shop I like up in Kremmling too.”

Iris flagged down Jackson as he circled the downtown square. He pulled over and lowered the window on the driver’s side. Iris was too short and the Jeep too high for her to lean in the window, but she did her best.

“I heard that lions killed Ronnie Greathouse.”

Jackson nodded. “State boys are handling it.”

“This injunction puts all of us in more danger.”

Jackson thought, it was really you and Dell who made it more dangerous when you sent the troopers home. But all he said was, “Maybe you can stop it. You’re a lawyer.”

“And you’re Chief of Police, so you could make life inconvenient for these ARK people.”

“What exactly should I do, shoot them?” he asked.

“That’ll work for me.”

“Unless they break the law, I can’t bother them.”

“Trespassing. Speeding. Unlawful assembly. You can think of something. If you don’t, other people will.”

“Vigilante justice?” said Jackson. “So we’re back to the wild, wild west?”

“We never left it,” Iris said and walked off.

Jackson still wore his blue funeral suit when he entered the police station. He planned to change before paying a visit to Stan and his ARK crew, but the moment he saw Major Jessup and Detective Gatwick, his plans changed. Jackson offered them something to drink, since he badly needed a cup of coffee, and then they went into his office.

“Any thoughts about what happened?” Jessup said.

In his mind Jackson ticked off the body count: Ted, Dolly, Ed, Wade, and now Ronnie. “I think if the killing keeps up,” he said, “I’m going to wear out my dark suit.”

For a while they talked about Ronnie Greathouse. Then they talked about the lion hunt and what the court ruling would mean. Jessup ended a rant against the Colorado judge by saying, “I can send a few troopers to help. Best I can do without going upstairs.”

“Thanks. We could use some help.” Jackson paused. “But you didn’t come here just to offer me troopers.”

“Not exactly.” Jessup sipped the tea he had made from Sadie’s personal stash. “We think we’ve deciphered some of Greathouse’s notebook.”

Jackson nodded and waited. A moment later Jessup handed him a slip of paper. A line of initials ran down the left side of the paper. “No names?” Jackson said.

“Thought you might be able to figure out who some of these people are by their initials.”

“You’re sure the letters refer to people?”

“Nope,” Jessup said. “But it seems likely.”

Gatwick piped up. “I might know one of them.” She said the name of a man she identified as a truck driver in Rexburg. “His name came up in a case I handled.”

Jackson stared at the list: F. B. could be Fred Bulcher or Fern Bruce or Frank Brotherton … and T. T. could be Tim Thunder or Terri Tomms or … Tucker Thule. Fred, Ronnie, and Tucker. Christ! “I’ll check into it,” Jackson said. “Let you know if I come up with anything.”

The state cops left, and the afternoon faded into sundown by the time Jackson was free of duties and phoned Katy. His call went to voice mail. He left her a message. Then he went into the break room and turned on the TV. He ran through the channels looking for news about the lion hunt or the search for Eric. He knew Sheriff Midden would be talking to the press as soon as he had something.

He didn’t find Midden on television, but he did find Eric’s parents. Rene wore a nice dress and heavy makeup, and Rodney sported a fresh haircut. They made a tearful plea to the public and offered a $10,000 reward for any information that led to finding their son. They thanked an anonymous donor for the money and provided their contact information for anyone who wanted to send donations so that they
could increase the reward. “Sis-boom-bah!” muttered Jackson. He was reminded of a couple of hustlers in the 1990s that used a pulpit to fleece people. It took him a minute to recall the names: Jim and Tammy Baker. He shut off the TV.

That’s when the call about the fire came in.

Eagle Cassel’s doublewide sat above a dirt road a mile off State Highway 34. Jackson parked behind a lone fire truck and Tucker’s cruiser. Half a dozen vehicles were scattered along the road. The ARK trucks were in a field across from Cassel’s house trailer on an acre of timberland that Cassel also owned. The smaller of the two trucks, the one that had once had been a U-Haul, looked like a piece of burnt toast. The fire was out but the engine block still gasped with smoke and steam. The larger truck and the ARK van had been moved a safe distance away.

“What’ve we got here?” Jackson asked the fire chief.

“Arson.” Hank Dow was a veteran fireman from Boise.

“Somebody torched it?”

“Yep.” The fire chief spat. “Eagle’s family was gone and these bunny-lovers, they were in town having a party.” Dow grinned. “Careless of them to leave like that.”

“Let me guess,” Jackson said. “You can tell where the fire started and how it was done, but you can’t find a single clue to the identity of the arsonist?”

Dow spat again. “Professional job. Nobody local.”

“Thanks, Hank,” Jackson said and walked over to Stan Ely and his small band of merrymakers. Stan was livid and demanded police protection. Jackson listened to him patiently and then gave him the name of a private security firm in Idaho Falls. “I can’t spare any officers to watch your operation,” he told Ely.

Jackson also talked to a small woman that he at first mistook for a boy and large man that he might have mistaken for Jerry Garcia had he not known that the rock idol was dead. The rest of ARK’s crew was at the motel.

“I told’em they should’ve expected trouble,” Tucker told Jackson a few minutes later.

Jackson led Tucker away from the others. “How’d you get here so fast?” he asked.

“I don’t live but five miles away.”

Tucker was off duty. He was dressed in civilian clothes. Jackson thought he smelled gas on Tucker, but he also smelled smoke and other scents he couldn’t identify.

“Well, since you’re here, get the preliminary report from Hank,” Jackson said. “Then I want the truck towed to town and impounded. I’ll have somebody else examine it.”

“Impounded? But we don’t have an impound lot.”

“We do now,” Jackson said.

Thirty-One

When Stan Ely showed up at her front door, Iris barked, “What the hell do you want?”

“Same thing you want,” Stan replied.

“You got a lot of nerve coming here,” Iris said, but she stepped aside and let Stan enter. “Anyway, I’m in a hurry. There’s a gym full of pissed-off hunters waiting to shoot me if I’m late.” While she spoke, Iris walked through the living room and into the dining room where a bottle of tequila and a shot glass were on the table.

“I wouldn’t mind a drink,” Stan said. He sat down. “Tequila will do fine.” Thirty minutes later, Stan left in his dark green Ford van. He followed Iris’s sporty Cadillac to the Buckhorn High School gymnasium.

The gym wasn’t as packed as on Monday, but even so, a few hundred people had come. None of them looked happy to be there. The moment they saw Stan Ely, the gym filled with boos and shouts. Iris quickly hustled Stan to the stage where Dell and most of the town council were seated.

Iris asked for quiet and repeated her words in the microphone until the crowd settled. Once they did, she said, “Now, I know everyone here is as angry as I am.” This time she talked through the groans and jeers. “You all think you’ve been cheated out of a chance to win the prize money. And I know you want your thousand dollars back.” This brought another uproar. “You’ll get it too.”

The crowd jeered and yelled out “when?”, and Iris waited for them to be quiet again before she continued.

“Or you could trade your lion hunting license for a chance to win a new and bigger prize.”

Some of the audience cheered. Others shouted out, “How?” Most people remained quiet and looked confused.

Iris nodded to Stan Ely, then stepped aside, and he replaced her at the podium. The floor shook from boos and catcalls and stomps. Stan waited until the noise died down before he said, “The big, new prize mayor Inslay referred to is an offer from Animal Rescue Kingdom.” The mention of ARK brought another round of boos and jeers.

“I know all of you have heard about this big female liger. But what you didn’t hear is that she’s pregnant or has already gave birth to a litter of liger cubs. What you don’t know is that these liger cubs are rare. They’re so special, in fact, that Animal Rescue Kingdom will pay you
good people twenty-five thousand dollars for each and every liger cub that you can capture.” This news brought a rippling of applause. Stan talked over it. “And we’ll also offer twenty-five thousand dollars to anyone who locates the female liger and guides me to her.”

The applause was louder now, but it also was easier for Stan to quiet the crowd. “Now I said capture, not kill. The liger cubs must be alive.” Stan glanced back at Iris. She smiled. “One more thing. This offer isn’t bound by the court ruling. It’s not open to just anybody. To be eligible, you need to trade your hunting license for a prize ticket. Mayor Inslay will explain the details. Just remember, you could go home with twenty-five or fifty thousand or more. Anybody here like a hundred grand?”

The crowd answered with cheers and applause. Iris breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t her fault if Stan believed she had engineered the fire and that Jackson and the Buckhorn police were responsible. Her smile never left her face, not even as her mind churned out a way to screw over Stan Ely. She watched him hold up his hands, like Moses parting the sea, and yell, “Twenty-five if alive!”

When Jackson arrived, Stan Ely was basking in adulation. Jackson had sent Angie, Brian, and two reserve officers to the assembly to keep order and deal
with traffic while he finally changed clothes and ate dinner. Now that he was at the assembly, he at first could not fathom what had happened. Upon hearing about the miraculous turn of events Jackson was happy that the town had escaped disaster. His second thought was that Katy had not been as lucky. Katy only had herself to look for Kali. Stan Ely now had a whole town.

While Stan was turning the hunters in the gym from mob to disciples, Katy was at Green State Park following the trail of the three-legged tiger. She had been following the trail of the cat since leaving the Placett farm, changing clothes, and gearing up. Just as she thought she was closing in, the tracks had ended at an asphalt road. For the past hour she had been trying to find them in the dark using a flashlight.

She shut off the light now and stood in the road and listened. She shivered as the wind rustled the leaves around her. Then she turned and headed back to the camp.

To her surprise Jackson was at the campground talking to two oil workers from Galveston that had been part of his search team the first day. When he saw her, he peeled off from them. “Any luck?” he asked Katy.

She told him what she had been doing. “But I can’t find any tracks on the other side of the pavement.”

“So the tiger’s following the road now.”

“Seems like it.”

“And that road leads into town,” Jackson said. So far there had been no confirmed sightings of big cats in town despite six calls from people in the last day claiming to have seen a lion. “So what now?” he asked Katy.

“I don’t know. Talk to Stan, I guess. He left a strange message on my cell phone.”

“Oh hell! You don’t know what happened, do you?”

“Know what?”

He told Katy about the public assembly and Stan Ely’s surprise offer. When he finished, Katy said that she needed to see Stan, jumped in the Ford, and drove off.

On the drive home Jackson tried to think about something other than Katy, so he thought about the coded names Jessup had given him. If any of his officers were part of a militia group, he would put his money on Tucker. But he had no proof. Not yet anyway. Before leaving for the night, Jackson had shared the information and his own suspicions with Angie. She had offered to investigate Tucker. She seemed delighted by the opportunity.

The farmhouse was lit up when Jackson arrived. Only then did he remember that Jesse was spending the night.
The door was unlocked. He entered, called her name, and heard his daughter reply.

“Upstairs,” she said. “We’ll be right down.”

We? That was the other part of the message Jesse had left. Missy Yow was spending the night too. Missy had stayed over many times before, but Jackson hadn’t known about the condoms before. He was not happy that Jesse’s sleepover friend was a sexually active fifteen-year-old.

After uncapping a beer Jackson plopped down in the recliner in the living room. Jesse and Missy clomped down the steps a few minutes later. Both girls wore floppy lounging pants and oversized t-shirts. His daughter brushed his cheek with a kiss. “You look tired,” she said.

“Cause I am.” He said hello to Missy. “So how’d you two get here?” he asked Jesse. “Your mom?”

“Mom’s busy with Dell,” Jesse said sarcastically. “And with celebrating. Shane gave us a ride.” Jackson wanted to say something about the need for her to get along better with Iris, but while he was searching for the right words, Jesse said, “Daddy, you find the little boy yet?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But I’m hopeful.”

Jackson told the girls about the Bengal tiger Katy had followed. Both Jesse and Missy thought the
story was deliciously scary. Even so, their conversation soon drifted away from big cats and little Eric to more of the normal stuff that interests teenagers.

Jackson listened to their chatter until he felt his eyes close. He got up, kissed Jesse, and told Missy goodnight. Missy leaned forward offering her cheek for a kiss too. As Jackson hesitated, a necklace popped out of her t-shirt. It was a silver cross on a chain.

“That necklace you’re wearing,” he said to Missy, “where’d you get it?”

“This old thing?” Missy said, touching the cross and chain. “My mom gave it to me. She has one just like it.” Missy wrinkled her brow. “But I think she lost it.”

The call came at five-fifteen Saturday morning. By five-twenty Angie was dressed, and five minutes after that, she unlocked her Subaru. She had no police radio with her, since she was off-duty, and when she tried to phone Tucker at the police station, her call was routed to the communication center in the county seat. “Asshole,” she said, and quickly added, “No, not you,” as soon as she realized the dispatcher in St. Anthony she had talked to earlier was on the line again. “My duty officer’s MIA.”

Last night, she had instructed the communication center to call her instead of Jackson in case of an emergency. A
tiger prowling Martino’s Market, a block from downtown, was certainly an emergency. Martino’s was a deli and grocery store known for good meats. A frantic Mexican janitor had reported the tiger and then ran off.

Angie hadn’t followed Tucker Friday night since he was at work. But she had tailed him the two previous nights, before Jackson made her surveillance official. She didn’t know if Tucker belonged to a militia group or not, but she knew that he was the one harassing Sharon and her. On the second night, he had cruised Sharon’s bungalow three times. Today, she planned to confront his homophobic ass.

Angie stopped at the police station and swapped her Subaru for the Dodge cruiser. She didn’t use the siren, but flashed the lights as she drove to Martino’s Market. A few minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot and parked next to another Buckhorn police cruiser. The car was empty.

She popped the trunk on the Dodge and removed her M4 tactical rife and loaded it. Then she jogged to the front of the market and peered through twin glass doors. The lights were dim, but Angie could see shelving was knocked over and food scattered in the aisles. She heard noises inside. A second later Tucker crashed into a shelf. Angie only saw him for a second, long enough the see the blood.

Angie rattled the doors, but they were locked. She ran around the building to a side door near a tumble of
milk crates and strewn garbage. The door was open. Angie was about to radio for backup when she heard Tucker scream.

She entered as Tucker scuttled across a meat case, a three-legged Bengal tiger right behind him. Angie was so dumbstruck, she couldn’t move. In fact, she didn’t move again until after Tucker stumbled, until the tiger pounced on him and knocked him off the case. They thudded against the black and white tile floor behind the meat case. She slid along the wall until she could see them again. The tiger had Tucker’s right arm in his mouth.

“Oh god! Oh god! Oh god!” Tucker shrieked. His bowels and bladder had released. Angie could smell him now. When Tucker saw her, he stopped screaming for a second. She would never forget the surprised and fearful look on his face. She really didn’t mean to grin.

Angie shot the tiger in the neck, breaking his spine. As the big cat fell, the bones and muscles that attached Tucker’s arm to his body snapped and tore, and his right arm was severed. Blood spurted from the stump. Angie grabbed up a pile of towels and called for help.