by C. J. Box
“Maybe she wants to beat Marcus Hand,” Marybeth said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe she wants to put my mother away.”
“Could be.”
“We know what Sheriff McLanahan’s motivation is,” Marybeth said. “He wants to get reelected.”
“Yup.”
“Joe?” Marybeth asked as they drove under the archway. “Do you really think the Lees had something to do with it?”
Joe drove five minutes before answering. “No, I don’t.”
“Then why are we doing this? Is it just to help Marcus Hand create enough doubt?”
“Yup.”
She said, “If nothing else, I want to be assured Bob Lee had nothing to do with it so we can look elsewhere. Since Earl left a lifetime of deals behind him, he could have enemies we don’t know anything about. I can’t just sit here and let Hand get her off under a cloud. It makes me feel kind of dirty. Isn’t there another way?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Didn’t you ask me to do what I could to help her out? To help us out?”
Sighing, she said, “Yes, but I meant we should help prove her innocence. Not just muck up the water so badly the judge and jurors can’t decide. There’s a difference between innocence and being found not guilty.”
“Not to Marcus Hand,” Joe said. “Maybe not to your mother, either.”
“But we’re different,” Marybeth said.
Joe couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t get him in trouble.
“Joe,” she said, “now would be the time we need more help with this. The trial starts in ten days.”
He nodded.
“Joe?”
“I tried to call him today,” he confessed. “The call didn’t go through and there wasn’t any way to leave a message. He might have switched phones. So I might have to go where I know he was last and try to find him in person.”
She said, “Then go, Joe. Put the rest behind you.”
SEPTEMBER 5
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—GALILEO
23
Joe spent the Labor Day weekend in the field, patrolling his district from the banks of the Twelve Sleep River through the main streets of Saddlestring and Winchester to the high mountain roads in the Bighorns. As was his custom on the two busiest weekends of the summer, Memorial Day and Labor Day, he made himself as conspicuous as possible in his red shirt and green pickup truck. He noted the philosophical difference in the fishermen, hunters, hikers, and campers from the first three-day holiday of the season. On Memorial Day weekend, it was often still chilly, but the mood of the citizens he encountered was bursting with optimism and anticipation for the warm weather ahead. The Labor Day weekend, although nearly always blessed with pleasant weather and good conditions, was fused with a sense of loss and dread that the summer was over. More fights and violations occurred on Labor Day weekend, and citizens seemed to be walking around with shorter fuses.
He’d ticketed several fishermen for not having licenses as they got out of their drift boats at a river takeout, and he’d issued a warning to a raftful of floaters for forgetting their personal flotation devices. Although he was doing his duty and enforcing the law, he was immeasurably distracted because his head was swimming with thoughts of Missy, Earl, Bud, Marcus Hand . . . and what he’d discovered about Nate Romanowski.
He’d been alarmed on Saturday to find Large Merle’s house abandoned on the two-track to Hole in the Wall Canyon. It was a hot and windy day, and dust devils swirled across the mesa that fronted the canyon. Sandy grit washed across the hood of his pickup like rain and filtered through the air vents on the dashboard. The closer he drove to the trailhead that led into the canyon, the worse his feeling of dread.
The feeling was confirmed even before he trekked down the trail to the caves. There was a palpable emptiness in the air, and when he saw the horrible gaping mouth of the cave marked by black tongues of soot that licked upward, it was as if he’d been hit hard in the chest.
Joe nudged his boot tip through the debris inside the cave, recognizing items he’d seen there before. Nate’s radios and monitors were shattered, table and chairs practically vaporized, his satellite phone disemboweled. Panic set in as Joe rooted through the wreckage. If Nate had been caught in the explosion—What the hell had happened?—there was no sign of a body. Which meant whoever had done this had taken the body. Or somehow his friend had survived. But when Joe surveyed the scorched walls of the cave and kicked through the shards that remained, he couldn’t imagine anyone living through it.
Joe had never anticipated this. Nate was security-conscious to the point of paranoia, and he had the ability to track anyone venturing into the canyon. Which meant that whoever had attacked had slipped by the wires, sensors, and cameras on the trail and gotten close enough to lob a grenade or explosive into the mouth of the cave. Either that, or it had been done from long distance. A missile?
And then he saw a blackened and cracked object within the pile. His first thought was: burned flesh. Swallowing hard to keep from retching, Joe used a broken stave to flick debris away from the object. To his horror, he saw it wasn’t skin or a body part, but the bottom half of Alisha Whiteplume’s black leather boot.
He said, “Oh, no.”
Knowing more than most how Nate thought, Joe exited the cave and hiked up above the shattered mews to a wooded alcove his friend had once showed him. The clearing was small but pastoral. Nate said he liked to sit naked on a lone rounded boulder in the clearing to read or think. Nate found it spiritual, and invited Joe to use it any time he needed it. Joe declined.
And here she was, or what was left of her body, anyway. Nate had placed her remains on hastily built scaffolding so it lay exposed to the sun and birds in the traditional Native way, before the Jesuits had banned the practice. Bits of her clothing and hair had been tied to the corner posts and they wafted in the slight breeze. Her skull was tilted to the side and Joe recognized her large white teeth grinning at him in a manic forced smile. Ravens that had been feeding on the body had nearly stripped it clean. They watched Joe from overhanging branches with tiny black soulless eyes, waiting for him to leave.
Nate hated ravens, Joe knew.
So in homage to his friend, he blew one out of a tree with his shotgun. Black feathers filtered down through the branches to settle on the pine needle floor. The surviving ravens scattered with rude caws and heavy wing-beats.
He knew they’d come back after he left to finish the job. But he knew he’d never come back, and he doubted Nate would.
If his friend was somehow still alive.
And if Nate had somehow survived an attack that killed his lover and wiped out his sanctuary . . . there would be hell to pay.
When Marybeth heard the story on Saturday night, she sat back on the couch and closed her eyes. She said, “Poor, poor Alisha. She always knew if she stayed with Nate, something could happen. But she didn’t deserve this. Her poor family. Her students and everyone who knew her . . .” Marybeth’s voice trailed off.
After a minute, she opened her eyes and looked up at Joe. “We’ll never know for sure what happened, will we?”
“Maybe not,” Joe said. “Unless Nate comes back and tells us. Or whoever did it brags.”
“This is the price for living outside of society,” she said. “When horrible things happen, no one knows. This is the price for living the way Nate lives.”
“Either that,” Joe said, “or marking time in prison. Nate made his choice.”
“And you helped him,” Marybeth said, not without sympathy.
“I did,” Joe said.
“Do you have any idea where he is?”
“Nope.”
“But you think he’s alive?”
Joe nodded. “Someone built that scaffold. I’m sure it wasn’t the guy who attacked him. There’s Large Merle, but he seems to be missing also.”
She hugged he
rself, thinking that over. She said, “Poor Nate. He fell hard for Alisha. What do you think he’ll do?”
Joe didn’t hesitate. He said, “My guess is things are going to get real Western.”
He was surprised when she didn’t ask him to try to stop it.
Early the next morning, Joe drove out of town into the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation. His green Ford game warden truck always got plenty of looks from those outside, and he could guess most of them were speculating who had done something wrong on the outside this time, since Joe had no jurisdiction within the sovereign borders of the reservation. He tipped his hat to a pair of large short women padding along the roadside, and at a group of boys playing pickup basketball at the school playground. He noted the pronghorn antelope carcasses hanging from tree branches and especially from basketball hoops hung over most garages. Three men in the process of skinning a pronghorn squinted at him as he drove by, wondering if he was going to stop.
Alice Thunder’s home was a neat ranch-style pre-fab plopped down in the center of a postage-stamp lot. Her car was parked outside on the driveway to the garage. Joe wondered why American Indians never used their garages for parking their cars, but let it remain a mystery.
On the res, Joe had learned, bloodlines ran deep and far and everyone was connected in some way. Alice Thunder was the receptionist at Wyoming Indian High School. She and Alisha had been close friends and possible relations of some kind. Alice was oval-faced and kindly-looking, a Native whose eyes showed she’d seen a lot over the years in that school. She was an anchor within the community whom everyone confessed to and relied upon, the Woman Who Knew All and Was Not a Gossip.
Joe parked pulled behind Alice Thunder’s car and took a deep breath before opening his door. He told Tube to stay inside. He removed his hat as he walked across the dew-sparkled lawn to her front door.
She opened it as he raised his hand to knock.
“Mrs. Thunder,” he said.
She didn’t smile or grin with greeting or recognition. Her face was still, stoic. He followed her gaze from his pickup to his hat in his hands to his expression, and she said, “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
Joe said, “I’m sorry.”
There was the slightest flicker of her eyes, but her mouth didn’t pucker and there were no tears.
“I knew the second I saw you drive up,” she said. “I’ve had a feeling about Alisha for several days that she was gone.”
He looked at his boots.
She asked, “How?”
He said, “I’m not exactly sure how it happened. She was with Nate when someone went after him. I don’t know who it was or how they got to them. I’m sure she wasn’t targeted.”
Alice Thunder nodded slightly, as if she wasn’t surprised. “Is Nate alive?”
Joe said, “I hope so, but I don’t know that, either. I haven’t heard from him. By the way,” he said, looking up, “law enforcement in Johnson County doesn’t know about this. I didn’t report it. You and my wife are the only people who know. I can give you the location of her body if you want to bring her back or pay your respects.”
Alice said, “I’ll have to think about that. Was her body treated with respect?”
Joe nodded.
“Then it isn’t necessary right now.”
“Thank you for coming and telling me,” she said. “I appreciate that, Joe.”
“Yup.”
“You’ll find out who did it and punish them?”
Joe said, “I think Nate’s on the hunt right now. If I can catch up with him, I’ll do what I can.”
She nodded approvingly. “I hope you don’t mind if I close this door on you right now. I need some time for myself.” And she closed the door.
Joe stood on the porch for a moment, then turned and walked back to his pickup.
For a woman like Alice Thunder, who had seen so much tragedy over the years due to the crime rate on the reservation and so many young people taken away, Joe thought, death was a part of life.
For the next two days while Joe patrolled, the scene in the cave—and especially Alisha’s body on the scaffold—stayed burned into his mind and was there when he closed his eyes at night. His theory, based on the layout of the canyon and Nate’s security system, leaned toward an explosive fired from a distance. Maybe so far away Nate never knew someone had found him.
Which led Joe to wonder who, besides Large Merle and Joe himself, knew where his friend could be found. Sheridan knew because she’d once been there. Marybeth was vaguely aware of Nate’s hideout, but had never been there and couldn’t find it on a map. Joe, of course, had no idea who Nate was in contact with who might have be aware of his location. There was so much about Nate that Joe didn’t know and didn’t want to know that he now wished he did.
While Joe was out on patrol, Marybeth used the long holiday weekend at the library to do research. As she learned specifics about the wind energy industry, she called Joe on his cell. The more she learned, the more agitated she became.
She said, “I always thought all these windmills were going up because the energy they produced was clean and cost-effective. But that’s not the case at all. The reason they’re going up is political, and the demand for the power they generate is because of mandates by states and cities that a certain percentage of their electricity come from renewables like wind or solar.”
“Down, girl,” Joe said. “One thing this state has is wind.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m all worked up. Too much coffee and too much information I never knew before. And, yes, there are places where the wind blows hard enough where some of those turbines actually do make enough electricity to be profitable. Nearly all of the older turbines were put in places where they could actually do some good. But there isn’t anywhere in the state or the country where the wind blows all the time. According to what I found, a good wind project produces at forty-five percent of capacity. That’s all. And there’s nowhere to store the energy if the power grid doesn’t need it when the wind is blowing. There aren’t big batteries anywhere, I mean. A lot of that energy is just wasted.”
“Okay,” Joe said, “but what does this have to do with Earl Alden’s project?”
“I’m not exactly sure yet,” she said, “but this whole thing might fall right into what Marcus Hand said about him, that he’s a skimmer and not a ‘maker-of-things.’ ”
“That’s what I don’t get,” Joe said. “How much does a wind turbine cost to put up?”
She said she’d found the figures, and read them off. The installed cost of a turbine was roughly three million to six million dollars per including the equipment, roadwork, and overhead. The disparity in cost depended on whether the turbine was a 1.5-megawatt machine or one of the newer, bigger 3-megawatt generators.
“Wow,” Joe said. “So a hundred turbines at Earl’s farm . . .”
“I figured it out,” she said, reading, “and came up with an investment of four hundred million dollars.”
Joe whistled.
“For a farm the size of Earl’s,” she said, “Bob Lee would have received at minimum one point five million dollars per year. With all the considerations, he could have generated forty-five million dollars over the first thirty-year lease.”
“Oh, man,” Joe said.
“Lots of people would kill for that,” she said. “Or kill if they were swindled out of it.”
“He doesn’t seem like the killing type,” Joe said. “So tell me about Rope the Wind,” Joe said.
“I’m still researching,” she said. “What I’ve found is pretty interesting. Give me a little more time to dig.”
As if he’d somehow been pulled there, Joe wound up on the two-track public easement that led to the windy ridge and the wind farm on the Thunderhead Ranch. He retraced his route from two weeks before when he’d seen the antelope hunters and later found The Earl’s body. The blades of the turbines cut through the cloudless sky like scythes, whistling, and he drove to the edge of
the Lee Ranch and pulled off the road onto a promontory.
He was surprised to find another vehicle on top, a red Subaru wagon. County Attorney Dulcie Schalk’s car.
She apparently didn’t hear him coming, because she didn’t turn around as he drove up behind her. She was out of her car, leaning back against the hood, looking out at the wind farm with her arms crossed below her breasts. She wore a red tank top, snug white shorts, and a ponytail cascaded from the back opening of a King Ropes ball cap.
Joe had never seen her on her day off before. Her long tan legs were crossed one over the other. She looked young, athletic, and undeniably attractive.
So that he wouldn’t scare her by suddenly appearing by her side, he tapped his horn as he pulled his truck in behind her car. The sound startled her and she wheeled around, fear and anger in her eyes until she recognized him. She acted as if she’d been caught doing something she was ashamed of, and he wondered what it was.
Joe told Tube to stay inside and climbed out.
“I didn’t expect to find you out here,” he said, fitting his Stetson on his head and ambling up to her. “I’m sorry I surprised you.”
“I was focused on the windmills,” she said, “and that high-pitched sound they make. It’s like you can’t hear anything else except that sound.”
“You should hear ’em when the wind is really blowing,” Joe said. “You’ll think there’s a truck coming at you.”
“There’s always a downside, I guess,” she said, turning around and assuming the pose she’d had when he arrived.
Joe leaned back against the grille of the Subaru next to her and looked out, trying to see what she was focused on. “Downside to what?”
“Every kind of energy development, I guess,” she said.
He thought about what he’d learned from Marybeth, but decided it wasn’t the time to go there.
“I’m just getting it all straight in my mind,” she said by way of explanation, “since things were pretty crazy that day you found the body. I want to make sure it’s clear in my mind where Earl Alden was shot, how far the body was transported, and which turbine he was hoisted up.”