Cold Wind

by C. J. Box

  Joe slid down the driver’s-side window and fitted his Redfield spotting scope to the frame of the door. As the dawn melded into morning, the vista below him came into view. Hundreds of brown-and-white pronghorn antelope grazed amidst knee-high sagebrush. Mule deer descended from windswept grassy flats back into shadowed draws. Eagles and hawks soared above it all in morning thermals, making long-distance loops at his eye level.

  He focused on a single blue pickup that was crawling along a two-track, a thin plume of dust giving chase. There was a flash of orange through the windows of the vehicle, as he identified the occupants—a driver and passenger—as hunters. As far as he could tell, they didn’t know he was up on the bench watching them.

  The blue pickup was too far away to hear, but he slowly swiveled his spotting scope as it passed beneath him traveling left to right. They were headed south, and because of the contours of the land, they had no idea that the huge herd was to their east on the other side of a ridge. Joe wondered if they’d catch a glimpse of the antelope as they drove along, but the vehicle continued on slowly, apparently looking for all the game out their front windshield.

  “Road hunters,” Joe whispered to himself. If the hunters fired at game from the vehicle, they’d be in violation and Joe would cite them. He hoped they were ethical and law-abiding, and would leave the truck on foot to stalk the antelope—if they even saw them.

  He followed the progress of the pickup. He caught a glimpse of a license plate—Wyoming—but was too far away to read the numbers, so he focused in and narrowed his field of vision until the vehicle filled his scope. It was a shaky view at that distance, but he could see the passenger lower his window and extend his arm out of it, pointing toward something ahead of them.

  Joe leaned back from the scope and surveyed the basin with his naked eye. He followed the road the hunters were on until it became a thin tan thread in the distance. And where the two-track crested a hill and vanished, he saw the dark form of a big animal. It was too large to be an antelope, and too dark to be a deer. Puzzled, he swung the spotting scope far to the right.

  It was a riderless horse. The animal was big and sleek, well groomed, with a saddle hanging upside down under its belly. Joe knew from experience that when the saddle was inverted, it meant the horse had run hard and usually at great distance. The exertion loosened the cinch and the top-heavy configuration of the saddle caused it to slide. The horse was grazing on a strip of grass between the tracks of the road, but it had obviously noted the oncoming pickup by the way it periodically raised its head and noted the approach.

  Joe looked back at the truck, expecting it to be closer to the horse by now. But the pickup had stopped in the road, and the occupants—two older men bundled in Carhartt jackets and fluorescent orange headgear—were out of their vehicle and gesturing to each other. The passenger was again pointing ahead, but it wasn’t at the horse, but higher. Much higher.

  “What?” Joe asked, as he opened up the field of vision on his spotting scope and swung it back to the right.

  He scoped the horizon behind the horse and saw nothing worth noting, nothing unusual enough to prompt two lazy road hunters to jump from their vehicle. Then he looked beyond the crest at the long straight line of wind turbines in the distance. They were now bathed in full morning light and framed against the deep clear blue of the cloudless sky.

  The blades all spun in the lazy rotation that Joe had come to learn in reality wasn’t lazy at all at the blade-tip. At least nine of the ten were spinning swiftly. He concentrated on the one that wasn’t. He’d observed enough wind turbines before to know there could sometimes be a marked disparity of wind speed from unit to unit. And he knew that sometimes turbines were damaged or disabled and the blades turned roughly in comparison with the other machines. But there was no doubt there was something strange about this one, because it turned at less than half the speed of the others in the row.

  Joe climbed the tower with his scope until he could see the nacelle, a structure on top where the hub held the turning blades. And he could see what was wrong and he whispered, “Jesus.”

  A form was suspended from a chain or cable that was looped around the shaft of one of the three spinning blades. The form was close to the hub. It hadn’t slid down the length of the blade because the tether held fast where the blade widened. Even with the weight, the rotor turned fast enough that the object flew through the air between the blades, circling up and around the hub like a spider held by a web on a rotating fan.

  Although the distance was great and Joe’s trembling fingers shook the view within the scope as he adjusted it, he caught glimpses of the form as it flashed through his field of vision. Portly, solid, arms cocked out to both sides, legs spread in a V—it certainly looked like a body.

  Was it a real body? Joe could imagine workers hanging a dummy or mannequin in some kind of prank. How was it possible for someone even to get up there, much less get caught up in a chain attached to the shaft of a blade? How long had it been up there?

  Then he linked the area, the horse without a rider, the location of the wind turbines, and Missy’s frantic phone calls the day and night before.

  “Oh, no,” he said aloud, while he plucked the mike from his dashboard and called dispatch in Cheyenne. He’d hold off calling Marybeth, he decided, until he could confirm the flying body belonged to the former Earl of Lexington.

  4

  En route to the wind turbine with the form spinning on the blade, Joe passed the antelope hunters and exchanged waves with them—they were locals he recognized from town, and ethical hunters who took good care of their game meat—and he bounced along past them on the two-track to the Lee Ranch fence line. As he drove, the towers rose above him into the sky. Tube awoke and strained forward in the cab and peered out the front windshield as well, determining the direction of Joe’s interest if not the object of it, and scanned the sky for birds. That was the Lab in him. So was the penchant for sudden salivation, which strung from his tongue and pooled around the air vents on top of the dashboard.

  Joe had called in the situation to Cheyenne dispatch, and they’d relayed the message via SALECS (State Assisted Law Enforcement Communication System) to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department and all relevant law enforcement agencies. As he drove, he heard the exchanges, and he could only imagine what Sheriff Kyle McLanahan was thinking. And he wondered how quickly and how far the word would spread beyond the local law network. Plenty of citizens in Saddlestring monitored the police band, and rumors shot through Twelve Sleep County like rockets. He hoped Marybeth—or Missy, for that matter—wouldn’t get hit with speculative phone calls until he knew for sure what the situation was.

  He braked at the gate between the Lee and Alden ranches, perplexed at what he found. The Earl had replaced the old chain and lock system with a ten-foot electronic gate. This was one of the issues locals had raised over the last few years, how The Earl had shut off access to and across his holdings to people who had used the roads for generations. Joe knew Alden had every right to secure his property, but questioned the need to do so. It was like rubbing his wealth and power in the nose of those who had short supplies of both. And the gate in front of Joe was a monument to the controversy.

  Instead of calling Alden Ranch headquarters for the keypad sequence, since that would alert Missy, Joe simply parked his pickup to the right of the gate where it joined with the four-string barbed wire fence and got out, leaving the motor idling. He climbed into the bed of his pickup and rooted through his metal gearbox until he found his bolt cutters. As he walked toward the fence, he could hear a cacophony of voices from the radio. Dispatchers talked to dispatchers, and sheriff’s department deputies, highway patrolmen, and local police officers all weighed in. He ignored them as he clipped through each strand of barbed wire on the fence top to bottom. He wanted to be the first to the scene.

  Like the gate itself, the fence was perfect and new, stretched tight. His bolt cutters bit cleanly through the
shiny metal wire. Each strand snapped back into a curl until he had clearance for his vehicle. He was surprised what pleasure it gave him to break through the fence.

  Joe was familiar with the layout of the wind farm, although he had never approached it from this direction. The rough two-track gave way to a smooth, graded, and banked gravel road that was part of the development, and he was able to switch from four-wheel drive to two and increase his speed. He roared toward the slowest turbine.

  The rapid development of the installations across Wyoming and the West had created new wildlife and environmental concerns. Wind turbines required a significant footprint on the land, at least fifty acres per structure, or three rotor distances apart from one to the other. Alden’s huge project of one hundred units stretched across five thousand acres of his land, not counting the well-engineered roads connecting them all. As yet, no transmission lines coursed over the horizon to export the electricity to downstream substation transformers.

  Because wind companies obviously chose open areas with plenty of wind, they were often located in untrammeled terrain where there had been no previous impact and no person in his or her right mind would want to build a home. Unfortunately for the wind developers, many of these locations brought out concerns regarding impacts on the winter range of big game animals and their migration routes. The impact on the sage grouse population—strutting, flinty native game birds about the size of chickens—was of immediate concern. Since half of all the sage grouse in existence in North America were located in Wyoming and the population of the game birds had been declining for years, the introduction of wind turbines on their habitat was an issue with environmentalists, hunters, and the Game and Fish Department, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

  One of Joe’s new directives was to assist in monitoring the sage grouse activity in areas where wind development was occurring and send memos of his findings to Cheyenne. Although he couldn’t honestly link one to the other on his forays into the wind farms, he had noted a number of dead birds (not sage grouse) and even more bats crumpled up dead at the base of the towers. Bats, apparently, had their natural radar fouled by the air pressure of the spinning blades and they’d become disoriented (so the theory went) and fly headlong to their death into the steel of the towers.

  As he approached the first row of turbines, Joe noted another vehicle coming fast in his direction. He thought it might be the first of the sheriff’s deputies to the scene until it got closer and he recognized it as one of several of The Earl’s company pickups by the Rope the Wind logo on the door. Rope the Wind was Alden’s newest enterprise. He’d shown Joe and Marybeth a mock-up of the logo, expecting their enthusiastic approval at a dinner they’d attended with their girls at the ranch. He said he’d bought the company and the name recently, anticipating the wind energy boom. The logo was a drawing of a large cowboy straddling the nacelle of a three-megawatt turbine. The cowboy’s hat was bent back by the oncoming wind, and he was tossing a lariat into it.

  “It combines the historical figure of the frontier cowboy with the new frontier of renewable energy in the twenty-first century,” The Earl had said with typical bombast. “I love the hell out of it and it cost me big money to some of the hippest graphic designers in Portland. It’s perfect. So, what do you think? ”

  Joe had said he liked it just fine, but apparently not with enough enthusiasm. The Earl had huffed and rolled up the design and stomped away. He was a man who valued those who agreed wholeheartedly with him, and discounted those who didn’t. Joe had been discounted.

  The company pickup arrived at the base of the tower at the same time Joe did. The driver swung out and faced Joe with his hands on his hips. He was in his mid-twenties and beefy, with a full red beard and a crisp new jacket with the Rope the Wind logo on his breast. “You seeing what I’m seeing?” he asked Joe.

  “Tell me it’s a joke,” Joe said, shutting his door gently on slobbering Tube.

  “I wish to hell it was,” the worker said, leaning back and craning his neck up. “I can’t figure what the hell it is or how it got up there.”

  “It looks like a body.”

  “Yeah,” the worker said, rattling the door latch on the tower to confirm it was locked. “But that’s just crazy. You need a key to get inside one of these to access the ladder. There’s no way to go up the outside and the only other explanation is it flew through the air and landed on the blade. That ain’t likely.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” the worker said, digging into his jacket for his keys. “Let’s go see.”

  While the worker unloaded hard hats and other equipment from his vehicle, Joe grabbed the handheld radio from the cab of his truck. He turned it on and it was instantly alive with voices, and one of them was addressing him directly.

  “Joe Pickett, this is Sheriff McLanahan. Do you read me?”

  Joe considered ignoring him, but thought better of it. Although the two had clashed repeatedly over the years, it was the sheriff’s jurisdiction.

  “I read you,” Joe said.

  “Are you on the scene?”

  “Affirmative. I called it in.”

  “Okay, well, hold tight. We’re on the way. Under no circumstances are you to climb that tower and compromise the crime scene.”

  Joe bristled at the command. “How do you know it’s a crime scene?”

  Silence. Then, from miles away, someone—probably a highway trooper monitoring the exchange—said, “Good point.”

  “Did you hear my initial command?” McLanahan asked, with the put-on Western drawl he’d adopted since moving west from Virginia ten years before. “Under no circumstances . . .”

  Joe clicked the radio off and slipped it into the holder on his belt. McLanahan seemed to know something Joe didn’t, and he didn’t want to share what it was, which was typical of the sheriff. Joe looked up and said to the worker, “I’m ready if you are.”

  “Then let’s go. Here, let me show you how this works.”

  “Have you done this a lot?” Joe asked, gesturing toward the tower.

  “I’ve been a turbine monkey half my adult life,” the man said.

  The worker handed Joe a nylon harness. Joe fed his arms through it and pulled twin buckles up from between his legs and snapped them tight to receivers secured on his chest. The worker clipped a carabiner through a metal loop on Joe’s harness that supported a metal fall-arrest mechanism that hung by a steel cable. The man showed Joe how to fit the mechanism around the taut cable inside the tower that ran parallel to the ladder from the top of the tower all the way to the floor. The mechanism was supposed to seize tight and prevent him from falling if he lost his balance or slipped off the rungs.

  “It’s two hundred fifty feet to the top,” the man said. “That’s a lot of climbing. Plus, the handholds are kind of slippery in there. You’ll see.”

  Joe nodded and followed the worker through the open hatch door at the base of the tower. It was instantly dark inside except for a bank of glowing green and amber lights from a control panel mounted on the wall. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He looked up and could see the narrow ladder and safety cable disappear up into the darkness.

  “I’m guessing you have an idea what we’re gonna find up there,” the man said. He’d softened his voice because the sound carried with resonance inside.

  “I have a theory,” Joe said. “But I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

  “I didn’t see any parked trucks out there anywhere besides ours,” the man said. “I don’t know how this joker even got through the gates. When I checked in this morning, all our guys were accounted for, so it isn’t one of us.”

  “I saw a horse a while back,” Joe said.

  Even in the dark, Joe could tell the man was staring. “A horse?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m Bob Newman,” the worker said.

  “Joe Pickett.”

  “I’ve heard of you,” Newman said, and left it at that. “I didn’t ask�
�are you okay with heights?”

  Joe said, “Kind of.” Since he’d stepped inside the tower, he could feel basic terror rise inside him, because he wasn’t okay with heights at all. Some of the worst moments of his life had taken place as he clenched his eyes shut and gripped the hand rests of his seat in a small plane.

  “Don’t look down and don’t look up,” Newman said. “Keep staring straight ahead and climb one rung at a time. Even if you aren’t scared of heights, you won’t like what you see if you look down, believe me.”

  Joe nodded.

  “If you clutch up and freeze halfway up, well, there isn’t any pretty way to get you down.”

  “Right.”

  “I wonder how it got up there,” Newman mumbled as he snapped his fall-arrest mechanism to the safety cable, locked it around the cable, mounted the ladder, and started climbing.

  “Give me a few minutes and some distance before you follow,” he said over his shoulder. “The ladder vibrates worse if two men are close together on it.” He called down further instructions as he rose, telling Joe how to slide the mechanism up the cable, pointing out the metal grate step-outs every fifty feet up the ladder if he needed to catch his breath. Newman’s voice receded as he climbed until Joe could barely hear him. Joe had his hand around the first rung, and he could feel Newman’s progress due to the vibration. Joe took a deep breath and clipped onto the cable and stepped up on the first rung. Then another. The fall arrest mechanism squeaked as it was pulled up the lifeline. Joe reached out and gave it a rough yank to make sure it would hold tight if he slipped. It worked. He considered keeping his eyes shut as he climbed, wondering if that would help. It didn’t.