Force of Nature (16 page)

The Tahoe made an unholy racket as it rolled down the mountainside,
snapping trees and breaking up in showers of glass and plastic and pine boughs until it settled upside down eight hundred feet below in a small rocky ravine.

In Nate’s mind, the faces of the two men—one of his brethren raising his weapon to try and take him out before the impact—hung suspended in the air. But something about them didn’t jibe. Unlike Nate’s fellow operators in The Five, these guys looked less like cool and efficient warriors than well-conditioned thugs. Either The Five were recruiting a different class of special operators, or he was so far away from his days in the unit that he remembered his brothers with murky nostalgia. He shook his head sharply, trying to make their faces and his thoughts go away.

HE PARKED
in the trees so his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the highway or from his father’s home. He kept in the timber as he skirted the clearing, getting just close enough to confirm there were fresh tracks in the drive from when the Tahoe had come and gone earlier. He suspected there was a third operator of The Five inside, possibly two, and prayed that Dalisay and the girls had been returned unharmed. The operators were no doubt waiting for the two men in the Tahoe to come back and pick them up after dispatching Nate.

He approached the house from the side, running from tree to tree, keeping low. He had to close a distance of eighty yards from the timber to the siding of the structure. The three windows on the side of the house went to the back bedrooms and the bathroom. All had curtains drawn, but as he made his last desperate sprint to the house over open lawn, he looked up and saw the curtains part on the bathroom window. Nate dropped to a squat and raised his weapon and cocked the hammer in a single move.

The crosshairs through his scope settled on the bridge of his
father’s nose as the old man looked out. He was using the toilet and happened to part the curtains while he stood. Nate saw his Dad’s eyes widen in shock and surprise when he saw him.

Nate lowered the gun and raised a single finger to his lips to indicate “Sssshhh.”

His father nodded slightly before looking over his shoulder. Then, apparently satisfied no one was watching, he turned back.

Nate mouthed,
“How many?”

His father mouthed,
“One.”

“Front or back?”

“Front.”

“I’m going to ring the doorbell,”
Nate mouthed, and illustrated by jabbing his pointer finger. He turned his finger on his Dad.
“You answer the door.”

Gordo looked back at him blankly for a moment, then nodded that he understood.

NATE KEPT
below the windows as he turned the corner from the side of the house. He approached the porch, then reached through the railing to press the doorbell. When the chime rang inside, he heard a series of sudden footfalls. Light and heavy steps. Meaning there were more inside than his father and the bad guy. Dalisay and the girls? He hoped so.

“Who the hell is that?” an unfamiliar man asked.

“I’ll get it,” he heard Gordon say.

“Stay where you are,” the other man said.

“Who’s here, Mom?” A small girl’s voice. Nate smiled to himself.

Nate heard and felt the sucking sound of the front door opening out. He pressed himself against the siding of the house with his weapon cocked and pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle.

A man’s head poked outside, squinting toward the circular drive. The operator was older than the two men in the Tahoe, but his features were just as hard and rough. Heavy brow, close-cropped hair, zipperlike scar on his cheek, and serious set to his mouth. Another thug. At Nate’s eye level, he recognized the blunt round snout of a flash suppressor mounted on the barrel of a semiautomatic long gun.

The operator sensed something wrong and his head rotated toward the big revolver.

Nate blew it off.

As he holstered his weapon and the shot rang in his ears along with shrieks from inside, he thought:
Yarak.

THE NEXT MORNING
, Wednesday, outside Saddlestring, Wyoming, Joe Pickett backed his pickup toward the tongue of his stock trailer in the muted dawn light. The glow of his taillights painted the front of the trailer light pink as he tried to inch into position so he could lower the trailer hitch onto the ball jutting out from beneath his rear bumper.

It was a cool fall day, with enough of a wind that the last clinging leaves on the cottonwoods were releasing their grip in yellow/gold waves. It had dropped below freezing during the night and he’d had to break through an inch of ice on the horse trough. Southbound high-altitude
V
’s of Canada geese punctuated the rosy day sky, making a racket.

He’d left a message on Luke Brueggemann’s cell phone that it was time to ride the circuit in the mountains and check on those elk camps they hadn’t gotten to earlier. While he bridled Toby to lead him over to the open trailer, he heard a vehicle rumbling up Bighorn Road from town. Hunters, he guessed, headed up into the mountains.

Gravel crunched in front of his house and a door slammed, and he
leaned around the corner of the trailer to see who it was. It wouldn’t be unusual for a hunter to stop by to verify hunting area boundaries or make a complaint. But it wasn’t a hunter, it was a sheriff’s department vehicle. Joe caught his groan before it came out.

He stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and walked around the house to the front. Deputy Mike Reed was on his porch, fist raised, about to knock.

“Hey, Mike,” Joe said.

“Joe.”

“You’re out and about early.”

Reed sighed and crammed his hands into the pockets of his too-tight department jacket. “It seems late to me. I’ve been up most of the night.”

Joe frowned. “What’s up?”

“Hell is breaking loose. I was hoping you might offer me a cup of coffee.”

“Sure,” Joe said. “Just let me go inside and check around first. I’ve got one bathroom and three females in there getting ready for work and school in various stages of undress.”

Reed nodded. “I’ve got daughters. I remember what that’s like. I used the lilac bushes on the side of my house for eight years, I think. Maybe you could bring the coffee out here.”

“That would be a better idea,” Joe said, shouldering past the deputy.

THEY LEANED
their arms over the top rail of the corral at the opposite sides of the corner post. Each held a steaming cup of coffee and put a single boot up on the bottom rail. When they breathed or talked, small clouds of condensation puffed out and haloed their heads before dissipating.

“Like I said, long night,” Reed said.

“Seems like you want to tell me something.”

“That’s right, Joe.” There was gravity in Reed’s words.

“Then you’d best get to it,” Joe said. “I’ve got horses to load and a trainee to pick up, and if the sheriff or one of his spies sees us out here talking, he’ll think we’re plotting against him.”

Reed barked a laugh. “At this point, he’s probably already convinced of that. At least as far as I’m concerned.”

Joe sipped his coffee and waited.

“Since I’ve worked at the department,” Reed said, “I can’t remember more of a clusterfuck than we’ve got going right now. And the timing! Just a few weeks until the election. I should be kind of happy, I guess, but I almost feel sorry for that idiot of a sheriff right now.”

“Meaning what?” Joe asked.

“Well, the triple homicide, of course,” Reed said. “We’re not getting anywhere on that. We’ve notified the FBI, but we haven’t made a request for assistance. State DCI boys are bumping into each other in the office, but until something breaks, we’ve got nowhere to run with it. Ballistics is inconclusive, other than they were all shot with a big projectile that passed through their bodies and can’t be found. No one’s come forward to link them up, and nobody seems to know anything about why they were in that boat in the first place.”

Joe looked into the top of his coffee cup, because he couldn’t meet Reed’s eyes.

Reed said, “On top of all this, we get a call from Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein. She’s a psychologist from Winchester. You know her?”

Joe shook his head no.

“She’s … interesting. Anyway, this psychologist was in a house with a man named Bad Bob Whiteplume out on the res.”

“I know Bob,” Joe said, looking up.

“Anyway, according to this Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein, she was staying
over with Bad Bob at his place Monday night and someone started honking their horn outside about three-thirty in the morning and wouldn’t stop. Bad Bob went outside to see what the problem was in his bathrobe and never came back. She thinks something might have happened to him and she’s raising hell with the sheriff to start a search.”

“Did she hear an argument or a fight?”

“No. She was in the back room.”

“She didn’t see anything?”

“No.”

“Why’d she wait two days to call?” Joe asked.

“Actually, she didn’t,” Reed said. “She called Tuesday. But with everything we’ve got going on, nobody got back to her. That really hacked her off.”

“I see,” Joe said.

“So when Bob didn’t show up later and nobody from the sheriff’s department came out, this doctor went on the warpath, so to speak.”

“So to speak,” Joe echoed.

“She started calling everybody. The newspaper, the radio station, all the television folks in Billings and Casper. Even the governor. She accused the department of racism because we didn’t respond quickly.”

Joe looked up. “Well …”

“I know,” Reed said, shaking his head. “But that sort of thing happens all the time on the res. We all know it. People just kind of come and go. We don’t get too worked up about it until we know someone’s really missing and the Feds give us the go-ahead since they’ve got primary jurisdiction.”

“Was this your decision not to call her back?” Joe asked.

Reed shook his head. “No, it was McLanahan’s. But it doesn’t reflect very well on any of us.”

“Probably shouldn’t,” Joe said.

“Anyway,” Reed said, “what happened happened. The result was the mayor and the city council called McLanahan in yesterday to demand some answers. Nobody likes it that we’ve got unsolved murders like this, but it’s even worse when the whole department is accused of racism. Nobody likes us making this kind of news, especially the sheriff. I almost feel sorry for him, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

Joe clucked his tongue. He thought he knew where this was going but didn’t want to encourage it.

“That’s not all,” Reed said. “About eleven last night, we got a call from the FBI in Cheyenne. They wanted to see if we could confirm the fact that our person of interest in the triple homicides, Nate Romanowski, was the son of one Gordon Romanowski of Colorado Springs, Colorado.”

Joe felt his throat go dry.

“Seems a body was found in the senior Romanowski’s place. No ID, but a massive head wound that sounds suspiciously like our three rubes from the boat.”

“No ID?” Joe asked.

“That’s what they said. We don’t have a lot more information on it yet, but they’re investigating. You know the Feds—they don’t share information. They just collect it and make their case and keep us in the dark pretty much.”

“Do they think the body was Gordon Romanowski?”

“No,” Reed said. “That they’re sure about. But they said it looks like Gordon and his family—a second wife and two little girls—have split the scene. No one can locate them.”

Joe’s head spun. He’d checked the falconry website that morning and there had been no new entries.

“I got the impression there were some other unexplained things going on down there in Colorado Springs,” Reed said. “They wouldn’t
tell us what was going on, but maybe there were other bodies found. I don’t know.”

“Man oh man,” Joe said, and whistled.

“So because of this mess we’ve got,” Reed said, leaning forward on the rail so he could get closer to Joe, “McLanahan is personally leading the Whiteplume investigation, so he assigned me as lead investigator on the triple homicides. He called the mayor and the editor of the newspaper last night to let them know. He hung me out to dry and set me up to fail. It was a good move on his part, I’ll give that to him. This way, when the election comes around, the voters will have a choice of the racist incumbent who has been there for a while and the incompetent deputy who can’t solve a triple homicide. It evens the playing field, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yup.”

“I need to ask you something,” Reed said, his voice dropping. “I know we’re friends, but I’ve got a job to do.”

Here it comes
, Joe thought.

“I know you’re close with Romanowski,” Reed said. “So I’ve got to ask you if you’ve been in contact with him the last couple of days. In any way.”

Joe looked up. “I talked to him a couple of nights ago.”

Reed’s face hardened.

“He told me he didn’t commit murder,” Joe said. “I believe him.”

“You knew we wanted to talk with him,” Reed said.

Joe nodded. “And there wasn’t—and isn’t—an arrest warrant. I could have asked him to voluntarily show up at your office for questioning, but he wouldn’t have done it.”

Reed said softly, “I appreciate you being straight with me.”

Joe looked away again.

“Now I’ve got to ask you if you’ve been in contact with him in any form the last couple of days.”

Joe said, “I haven’t.”

“But you’ll let me know, right? Now that our department and the Feds are wanting to talk to him?”

“The Feds have been wanting to talk to him for years,” Joe said. “That’s nothing new.”

“But a dead body in his father’s house is.”

Joe nodded.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you know how we can reach him?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

Reed reacted as if slapped. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t want to lie to you,” Joe said. “So don’t ask me questions like that. Nate’s my friend. It’s possible he may reach out to me. I won’t betray him unless you can look me in the eye and say you know he’s done something bad.”