Endangered (16 page)

Dirt sifted into the root cellar when the doors were thrown back. Liv covered her face and eyes with her hands until it settled.

“You can go,” the woman said to the man.

“Are you goin’ down there?” Bull asked his mother with alarm.

“No. I just need to have a private conversation with this young lady. Go over there and help your dad.”

Bull slunk away.

“I’m Brenda,” the woman said, standing over the opening with her hands on her ample hips.

Liv brushed grit from her face and opened her eyes.

“I heard you screamin’ down there. Luckily, nobody else did. Eldon can’t hear much these days and the game warden thought it was the compressor goin’ out.”

Liv didn’t know what to say. She’d screamed so hard she was still wet with sweat. She’d guessed her screams were drowned out by the motor. That was the reason, she was sure, they’d fired it up in the first place.

Brenda said, “If you ever do that again, I’ll send Eldon out here to fill up this hole.”

By the tone of her voice, Liv had no doubt she’d do it.

“I’m thinkin’ you might go without dinner tonight,” Brenda said.

Liv hugged herself but didn’t respond. Brenda stood there, looking down at her.

Finally, Liv asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“You know, I ain’t never had a daughter.”

“What?”

“I always wanted a little girl,” Brenda said wistfully, more to herself than to Liv. “I wanted a little girl so I could dress her up in dresses and brush her hair and sing songs with her, you know? Instead, I got boys. All they done was run wild, punch each other, and break things. Of course, my little girl would be a little paler than you.”

Liv stayed quiet.

Brenda said, “But at least them boys didn’t scream. I’ve gone my whole life without a screamin’ female in it. I don’t plan to start now.”

With that, Brenda turned and vanished from the opening. Liv heard her say, “Bull, go close that back up now.”

—

T
WO HOURS LATER
,
more footfalls.
Bull.
Liv was wondering if the game warden had been Nate’s friend Joe Pickett, and she planned to try to get the name out of Bull. She dutifully threw off her blanket and relocated her chair to accommodate the ladder.

When the doors were open, Bull said, “We got meat loaf and apple pie tonight.”

“Really?” Liv asked.

“I guess she changed her mind.”

Bull leaned over and tied a knot in the handle of the feed bucket and lowered it down to Liv.

“Is Joe Pickett coming back?” she asked in a conversational tone.

“He better not,” Bull said. “If he does, I’ll put him down and let the dogs clean up the remains.”

Liv nodded. “Aren’t you coming down?”

“Naw,” Bull said sullenly. “I ain’t supposed to anymore. Cora Lee, she . . .” He let his point trail off. But it had been made.

Liv reached up and grasped the bottom of the bucket with both hands. The plastic was warm to the touch.

“Besides,” Bull said, “what do you care if I come down there or not?”

Liv pretended she was thinking long and hard about what she was about to say. Then she said it.

“Because it gets kind of lonely down here.”

Bull was silent. She looked up. He seemed to be frozen there. She couldn’t see his face well because the sun was behind him, but she thought he might be blushing.

He closed the doors, locked them, turned, and went back toward the house.

Liv ate, but not because she was hungry. She ate because she needed fuel to survive.

As she did, those words came back.

I ain’t never had a daughter before.
It chilled Liv to the bone.

But the trap was set.

A
fter his encounter with the Cates family, Joe drove on the highway toward his home. He knew Marybeth was planning a big dinner with all the items Lucy liked best—pasta, garlic bread, green salad—as a way to atone for the time she’d been in Billings and for Joe’s food, and he wanted to be home for it. As he drove, a window opened in the storm clouds and he found himself suddenly bathed in warm yellow afternoon sun. The beam was small and concentrated, and the pool of light was no bigger than a half mile in every direction. It was as though he were the subject of some kind of cosmic spotlight. It felt good—
Summer was on the way
—although he was disappointed no revelation came along with it. It was just sun.

When his cell phone went off, he expected to see Marybeth’s name on the screen. That wasn’t the case.

“Governor,” Joe said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you on a Saturday evening.”

“Damn, I’m so jet-lagged I don’t even know what day it is,” Rulon said. Joe imagined the governor pacing back and forth in his home office as he’d seen him do—one hand holding his phone to his face and the other gesticulating and wildly punching the air as he talked.

“I just got back from a two-week trip to Asia,” Rulon said. “I was over there selling Wyoming coal—or trying to. We produce more coal than any other state, and the feds are shutting us down so they can stop global warming. The Asians want to grow so someday they can have First World problems like us. They want our coal, and as much of it as they can get. So we’ll shut down our coal-fired utilities over here and pay higher utility bills while they build them up over there and provide power and air-conditioning to their people so they can make things and get wealthy. You know, like Americans used to do.”

Joe smiled to himself. Rulon liked to rant. The governor said, “Somehow, we’re going to stop global warming by shutting down our clean power plants so the Chinese can burn our coal in their dirty power plants. Ah, the geniuses in Washington! They never fail to constantly lower the bar on common sense. Anyway . . .”

“Anyway,” Joe repeated.

“What’s this I hear that our precious sage grouse are being wiped out in your district?”

Joe sighed. “It’s true. I found an entire lek that had been—”

“I know all about it,” Rulon said, cutting him off. “I read the report from the Sage Grouse Task Force.”

Joe grunted.

“They’re required to keep me informed of their activities. And it’s attracting plenty of attention in the usual quarters, as you can imagine: ‘Wyoming Neanderthals Fail to Protect Endangered Species
.
’ That’s not the actual title, but it sure as hell is the tone.”

Rulon paused, then said, “Joe, I need you to clear up this sage grouse thing. I know you can’t bring those birds back to life, but if you find out who did it and throw the book at them, it’ll show the feds we aren’t complacent. Plus, it will set an example for other yahoos who might have the same idea.”

Before Joe could tell the governor what he’d learned, Rulon said, “The damned problem is the feds create reverse incentives and they don’t even realize they’re doing it. If you tell landowners that all their grazing land will be put off-limits for energy exploration or anything else if sage grouse are found up to two miles away, the incentive will be to
get rid of the damned birds
. Ranchers can’t make money ranching anymore, so they have to make deals for wind towers, or solar, or some damned thing Washington loves. So where does that leave a guy who wants to use his property?”

“I considered that,” Joe said. “The location where the grouse were shot is on BLM land.”

“Is it two miles away from anyone?”

“Well,” Joe said, “there’s one family.”

“Start with them.”

Joe knew Rulon fancied himself an amateur detective. He said, “I did that.”

“And?” Rulon prompted, ready to declare victory.

“They don’t have enough land for wind towers or fracking, so I doubt they’d have any lease opportunities. That’s not to say they might not be ornery enough to do something like this, but in this case I don’t think so. But they gave me a lead I’m going to track down,” Joe said. “If it goes where I think it could, we might have a bigger mess than we’ve got right now.”

Joe could hear Rulon take a breath, ready to continue with one of his rants. Then he paused. Joe understood why. Cell phone conversations could be monitored.

Rulon said, “Let’s meet tomorrow in my office. My afternoon’s free and I’ll try like hell to be lucid. Maybe I’ll send somebody out to get me one of those energy drinks, I don’t know. It’ll take me a couple of days to get back on track, I’m afraid.”

“I can drive down there tomorrow,” Joe said.

Saddlestring to Cheyenne was four hours. Denver was two hours beyond that. He could kill two birds.

“I’ll see you then,” Rulon said. “My antennas are up now.”

—

T
WO MINUTES
LATER
,
Joe’s phone lit up again. Rulon again.

“Joe, I heard about what happened to Romanowski and to your daughter. I meant to say how damned sorry I am, but I completely forgot when I called you the first time. Anyway: I’m damned sorry.”

“Thank you,” Joe said.

“Are they connected somehow?” Rulon asked, once again playing amateur detective.

Joe said, “No, sir. At least I don’t think so.”

“Two things like that happening in the same week in the same place,” Rulon said. “It just seems hinky. But you’re on the ground there, and I’m not. So how is your daughter doing?”

Joe told him.

“But they got the guy who did it?”

Joe hesitated before he said yes. Rulon had jarred him with his speculation.

“And the guy killed himself in his cell?”

“Yup.”

“That’s why I think we should issue nooses or electrical cords to every slimeball brought in on a nasty felony,” Rulon said. “Maybe with a little instruction book on how to do yourself in. It would save us a lot of money and time if we did that.”

Joe didn’t comment.

“What about Romanowski? I give him a conditional deal and he goes out and gets himself shot the very next day. That guy is something else.”

“As far as I know, he’s alive,” Joe said. “But the FBI has him under wraps. I can’t get anything out of him.”

Rulon cursed. He said, “I’ll talk to those bastards tomorrow. This is that Dudley guy, right?”

“Yup.”

“He’s a crap-weasel. I’ll go over his head. Maybe by the time you get here, we’ll know more.”

“I appreciate that,” Joe said.

“I’m fading fast,” Rulon said. “You’re a good man, Joe. Good night.”

“Good—”

Rulon had terminated the call before Joe said, “Bye.”

—

I
T WAS DUSK
when Joe cruised through the rows of cars in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. The lot was nearly full, which used to be unusual in March because it wasn’t yet tourist season. Things had changed, though, because the lot was filled with muddy oil service trucks on their way to—or from—the oil boom in North Dakota. Saddlestring was a logical halfway point between Denver and the Bakken formation, where the oil had been discovered.

It didn’t take long to find the white U.S. government pickup used by Annie Hatch and Revis Wentworth. For one thing, it was one of the few vehicles that had been recently run through a car wash. That in itself, Joe found interesting.

Since Wentworth was headquartered in Denver, he stayed at the hotel while he was in the area. Hatch lived in a rental in town, next door to her yoga studio.

Joe parked his pickup on the side of the hotel so it couldn’t be seen from any of the south-facing guest-room windows, and he carried his evidence kit through the parking lot.

When he found the white truck, he ducked down and opened his valise. Despite the fact that the outside of the pickup was clean, he ran his hand under the inside of the rear wheel wells and found a coating of dried mud. If analysis later proved that the soil was picked up in the vicinity of Lek 64, Joe knew, it proved nothing. Wentworth and Hatch had been in that area several times, including the night Joe discovered the crime. But if he could find mud that was embedded with feathers or sage grouse blood, well,
even that was a reach
.

Joe did it anyway.

When the evidence envelopes were filled with flakes of mud and labeled, he carefully photographed the tread on all four tires. If the tracks he’d photographed in the middle of Lek 64 matched up with the tread of the government pickup, he might have something. The allegation could be corroborated by Eldon Cates.

Wentworth and Hatch could claim that
of course
they’d left tracks when they got lost that night in the snow, but the time stamp on Joe’s shots would shoot that down.

It was circumstantial, but it was something, Joe thought.

And what about the shotgun shells? If he could find a half-empty box of 12-gauge shells in Wentworth’s room or Hatch’s home that were the same brand and shot quantity of the spent shells he’d found . . .

Then he smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand, nearly knocking his hat off. The realization hit him like a mule kick.

Hatch and Wentworth had been
very
concerned about the evidence Joe had gathered at Lek 64. Joe’d assumed they were concerned that he’d take too long, or that the state lab would somehow botch the analysis.

Given the circumstances, Joe had willingly handed over the box of evidence to them. He’d retained nothing but the photographs that were preserved on the memory card of his camera.

He thought:

What if they’d tampered with the evidence before sending it to Denver to their federal lab? Maybe changing out the photos he’d copied to a CD, or replacing or removing the spent shells?

What if they hadn’t even bothered to send it in?

If either thing had happened, Joe knew, he had nothing to tie the government vehicle to Lek 64 the night the sage grouse were wiped out.

—

J
OE SHOOK HIS HEAD
as he returned to his pickup. Before ducking around the side of the building, he looked up to see if he had any observers in the four-floor building.

At the second window on the third floor, Revis Wentworth stepped back. A moment later, the curtain was pulled shut.

Joe had been caught, he knew.

So how would he play it now?

—

H
E PULLE
D HIMSELF
inside his vehicle and started it up while punching the speed dial on his phone to his home number.

When Marybeth answered, he asked, “How long before dinner?”

“Why?” she asked, suspicious.

“I might have a break in the sage grouse case, and I have to act fast. I don’t want the suspects talking to each other before I get to them.”

Marybeth sighed. It was a familiar conversation to both of them. “We eat at seven,” she said. “You have an hour.”

“That should be enough,” he said, wheeling out of the parking lot.

—

W
HILE
J
OE
DROVE DOWN
the streets of the subdivision Annie Hatch lived in, he mulled things over.

If his suspicions were correct, it meant two federal employees charged with preserving sage grouse and overseeing their protection had wiped out an entire flock.

It made no sense.

He again recalled what Lucy had observed out the front window of his house when Hatch and Wentworth had come to talk to him.

Maybe . . .

—

A
NNIE
H
ATCH
lived in a small but well-appointed single-family home on Third Street. Next door was her Bighorn Valley Yoga Studio. A Prius in the driveway had bumper stickers that read
CERTIFIED YOGA INST
RUCTOR
and
MY OTHER CAR
IS A YOGA MAT
. So she was home.

As he approached her door, he heard a phone buzzing from inside. He suspected it was Wentworth calling her to tell her what he’d seen in the parking lot. Joe knocked sharply, hoping she’d choose to answer her door before picking up her phone.

The phone continued to buzz and he heard no footfalls from inside. He knocked again, then leaned over the side of the porch so he could see into her living room from the nearby window. The television was on and a cat was curled up on top of a couch, staring at him. But no Annie.

For a moment, he thought the worst. Would an unanswered phone constitute enough probable cause to enter her home? He knew it wouldn’t, but he twisted the screen door handle anyway. It wasn’t locked. That wasn’t unusual anywhere in Saddlestring.

He knocked again while he tried the doorknob. It was unlocked as well.

Joe glanced right and left down the street. It was deserted except for parked cars and trucks. No doubt the cool weather had kept the kids inside. He cracked the door open and leaned his head into the house.

“Annie? It’s Joe Pickett.”

No response. He looked around. There was a crumpled afghan on the couch in front of the television. It looked as though she’d thrown it aside moments before. He could smell popcorn from the direction of the kitchen.

“Annie?”

Her cell phone danced unanswered across a breakfast bar within view. Joe entered and snatched the phone up.

The display read:
REVIS
.

He quickly put it down and backed out toward the door. The cat watched him the whole time with dead button eyes and never flinched.

He was stepping out onto the porch when Annie Hatch said, “Joe, what are you doing in my house?” She was coming from the yoga studio, carrying a mop and bucket. And she was angry.

After being startled, he recovered and said, “I think you know why I’m here.”

—

B
UT SHE DIDN
’
T.
Joe could tell from her expression and the way she lowered the bucket and crossed her arms over her breasts without taking her eyes off him that she was harboring no guilt about anything. She was just miffed she’d caught him coming out of her house.

“Just tell me what you were doing in there,” she said.