by C. J. Box
The street where the bus parked beside Saddlestring Elementary was also marked as a secondary truck route through town. It shot straight through town, merged with Bighorn Road, and, eventually, curled into the mountains. So the heavy rumble of motors and vehicles on the street wasn’t, in itself, unusual enough for Sheridan to look up.
But when she did, tilting her head to avoid falling snow, she recognized that this was something strange: a slow but impressive column of rag-tag vehicles.
They passed her one by one. There were battered recreational vehicles, old vans, trucks pulling camping trailers, and school buses that didn’t look right because they were full of cardboard boxes. Four-wheel-drives pulled trailers piled high with crates, and the arms and legs of furniture poked out from water-beaded plastic tarps. It was as if a small neighborhood’s residents had gathered their possessions before a coming threat and fled. Sheridan thought of the word she had learned in social studies. Yes, the caravan reminded her of refugees. But in Wyoming?
The license plates were from all over: Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, Georgia, Michigan, and more. This in itself was odd, especially in the winter, when most people avoided traveling long distances because of the weather. Many of the drivers seemed rough and woolly; the men had big beards and they were bundled in heavy coats. Some of them looked at her, others looked away. One bearded man rolled down his window while he passed and shouted something about “government schools.” He didn’t say it in a nice way, and she instinctively stepped back toward the building and the chain-link fence. There were more men than women in the vehicles, and Sheridan saw only a few children, their hands and faces pressed against the windows as they passed. It was then that she noticed Lucy and April. They were standing on each side of her in their coats, hats, and mittens, watching the transient convoy rumble by. Under her coat, Lucy wore a dress and shiny shoes, fashionable as always. She was undeniably cute. April wore more practical corduroy bib overalls, the legs of which poked out from a hand-me-down parka that used to be Sheridan’s.
Sheridan noticed the regal, dignified profile of a big man at the wheel of a newer-model Suburban. The man turned his head as he passed, and he smiled. For a moment, their eyes locked. There was something kindly about him, and Sheridan picked him as the leader of the group simply by the way he sat up straight. He had confidence.
“Where’s our bus?” Lucy asked.
“Probably behind all of these cars and trucks,” Sheridan answered, looking for the end of the procession to see if the familiar yellow bus was there. She couldn’t see beyond the end of the block through the snow, and her wet glasses didn’t help.
“Who are all these people?” Lucy again.
“I don’t know,” Sheridan said, reaching back for Lucy’s and April’s hands. “One of them shouted at me.”
“If they yell again, let’s go in and tell the principal!” April said with some force, gripping Sheridan’s hand in its red cotton glove.
The three girls stood and waited while the parade slowly passed. They all had blond hair and green eyes. It would take a discerning observer to notice that April didn’t share Lucy’s and Sheridan’s rounded features and big eyes. April’s face was angular, and her demeanor stoic and inscrutable.
A battered blue Dodge pickup, the last of the caravan, swerved slightly and slowed as it approached. The back was piled high with bulky shapes covered by a soaked canvas tarp. Behind the pickup, Sheridan could see the red lights of the bus approaching, and Lucy pointed at it and yelled “Yay! Here it comes . . .”
But the Dodge stopped in the street directly in front of the three girls. Sheridan watched as a water-streaked window rolled down. A tiny, pinched-faced woman looked out at them. Her hair was mousy brown and had blond streaks in it, and her eyes were piercing and flinty. A cigarette hung from her lips, and it bobbed as she rolled the window down all the way.
Sheridan stared back, scared, squeezing tighter on her sisters’ hands. The woman’s look was meaningful, hard, and predatory. It took a moment for Sheridan to realize that the woman was not looking back at her, but lower and to the side. She was staring at April.
The truck started to roll again and the woman swung her head inside and barked something at the driver. Again, the pickup stopped. The school bus was now right behind it, crowding the blue Dodge, the bus driver gesturing at the stopped vehicle in front of him and the faces of children filling the windows to see what the problem was.
The woman continued to look at the three girls. Slowly, she reached up, pulled the cigarette from her mouth, and tapped the ashes into the snow. Her eyes were slits behind the curl of cigarette smoke.
The bus driver hit his horn, and the moment was over. The pickup lurched forward and the window rolled up. The woman had turned her head to yell at the driver. The blue Dodge raced off to join the rest of the caravan, and the big school bus turned into the bus stop.
As the accordion doors wheezed open, Sheridan could hear the raucous voices of children from inside the bus, and feel a blast of warm air.
“That was creepy,” Sheridan said, leading Lucy and April toward the door.
“I’m scared,” Lucy whined, burrowing her face into Sheridan’s coat. “That lady scared me.”
April stood still, and Sheridan tugged on her arm, then turned. She found April pale and shaking, her eyes wide. Sheridan pulled harder, and April seemed to awaken and follow.
On the bus, April sat next to Sheridan instead of Lucy, which had never happened before. She stared straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. She was still shivering. The bus driver had finally stopped complaining about the “gol-danged gypsy hoboes” who had blocked his route all the way into town.
“Where in the heck is that group headed?” the driver asked no one in particular. “No one in their right mind camps in our mountains in the middle of the gol-danged winter.”
“Are you cold?” Sheridan asked April. “You’re still shaking.”
April shook her head no. The bus pulled onto the road. Long windshield wipers, out of sync, painted rainbows across the front windows against the snow.
“Then what is it?” Sheridan asked, putting her arm around her foster sister. April didn’t shrug the arm away, which was unusual in itself. Only recently had April started to show, or willingly receive, real affection.
“I think that was my mom,” April whispered, looking up at Sheridan. “I mean, the mom who went away.”
Three
With the storm moving in, Joe found himself with no backup, no ability to communicate, and a dead district supervisor of the Twelve Sleep National Forest. Standing in the timber with Gardiner’s body pinned to the tree and fresh snow quickly covering their tracks back to his pickup, Joe needed to make some decisions and he needed to make them now.
He had just returned from the stand of trees where he assumed the arrows had been fired, assured that the killer was gone. Enough snow had fallen that the tracks left by the killer, or killers, were already filling in.
Joe looked skyward into the swirl of falling snow. He wasn’t sure what to do. Of course he should leave a crime scene undisturbed.
Suddenly, Gardiner’s body shivered and a fresh hot gout of blood coursed down his chest between the arrows. Joe leaped back involunarily, his eyes wide and his breath shallow. He pulled off a glove and felt Gardiner’s neck for a pulse. Amazingly, there was a tiny flutter beneath the cooling skin. Joe shook his head. He hadn’t even considered, given the wounds, that the man could still be alive.
Joe tried to pull one of the arrows out. He grunted with effort, but it was stuck fast. He tried to break off the back end of the arrow, but the graphite shaft was too strong. Finally, he lifted Gardiner from beneath the arms, Joe’s face pressing into Gardiner’s bloody parka, and pulled him free, sliding his body up and over the arrows’ fletching.
Fueled by adrenaline and desperation, Joe heaved the body over his shoulder, still dragging the steering wheel at t
he end of the handcuffs. He turned clumsily and started back toward the truck. Snow fell into his eyes as he walked, melting into rivulets that ran down his collar. He realized belatedly that moving Lamar this way might do more damage than good, but he didn’t see an alternative.
Despite his own heavy breathing, Joe tried to listen for signs of life from Gardiner. Instead, as Joe staggered through a stand of shadowed saplings, he heard the sound of death. A deep fluttery rattle came from Gardiner’s throat, and Joe felt—or thought he felt—a release of tension in the body. Now Joe had no doubt that Lamar Gardiner was dead.
Joe finally reached his truck on the road. A layer of snow had already covered the roof and hood. Leaning Gardiner’s body against the front wheel with as much dignity as he could, Joe opened the passenger door. He dragged the body around the open door, then tried to lift it into the passenger seat, but Lamar’s long legs had stiffened with cold and death and would not bend. The body maintained the posture it had assumed over Joe’s shoulder, with Gardiner’s outstretched arms parallel to his legs and his head turned slightly to the side, as if sniffing an armpit.
For a brief, horrifying second, Joe pictured himself as if from above, struggling to bend or break a body to make it fit into the cab of his truck while the heavy snow swirled around him.
Joe gave up, and dragged Gardiner’s body to the back of the truck and unlatched the tailgate. To make room, he hauled one of the still-warm elk carcasses out of the back, and it fell heavily to the ground. Then he lifted Gardiner’s body into the back of the truck next to the remaining carcass. Gardiner’s eyes were wide open, his mouth pursed.
Joe’s muscles quivered and burned with the effort. The steam of his sweat curled up from his collar, head, and cuffs. He closed the tailgate. He covered the body as well as he could with two blankets and a sleeping bag. He searched through the toolbox in the bed of his pickup. Finding a set of bolt cutters he wished he had thought of earlier, he severed the chain between the handcuffs. Then he reattached the steering wheel to the column. Finally, utterly exhausted, he sank back against the driver’s seat and started the engine.
By the time he got to the summit, it was dark. He drove down the mountain with the body of Gardiner and the remaining elk carcass in the back of the pickup, stopping several times to scout the road ahead. In the back, blood and ice from both Gardiner’s body and the elk had melted and mixed and had filled the channels of the truck bed. The reddish liquid spilled from under the tailgate to spatter the snow each time he stopped.
As he drove, he thought of Mrs. Gardiner—how she might feel if her husband’s body had been simply left where it was for the night. The forest was home to coyotes, wolves, ravens, raptors, and other predators who could have found the body and fed on it. This is best, he thought, despite the gruesome circumstances of carrying the body out.
The storm obscured the outside view as he labored to stay on the road. The swirling snow, lit up in his lights, was mesmerizing. Beyond the illuminated flakes, he could see nothing beyond. With no posts or road markers to guide him, Joe turned off his lights, extinguishing the pinwheel of snowy fireworks, and drove by feel. When he felt the dry crunch of sagebrush under his tires, he would search again for the road, saying a prayer each time his wheels again found the two-track.
Normally, in the distance, he could have seen the lights of Saddlestring in the river valley, looking like sequins flung across black felt. But he could see nothing. He could hear the fluid sloshing against the cab now that he was driving downhill.
The situation he was in was maddening, and frightening. For the first time, he realized that he still wore one blood-soaked glove and that his bare, thawing hand was red with dried gore.
“Damn you, Lamar,” he said aloud, “damn you.” Maxine looked to him with her condolences.
Now that he should be within radio range, Joe reached for the mike and tried to put together the words he would use to report what had happened.
O. R. “Bud” Barnum, Twelve Sleep County’s longtime sheriff and a man Joe had tangled with before, was livid when Joe brought Lamar’s body to the hospital.
As Joe backed into the lighted alcove of the hospital emergency entrance, Barnum stepped out of the well-lit lobby through the double doors and angrily tossed a half-smoked cigarette in the direction of the gutter. Two of his deputies, Mike Reed and Kyle McLanahan, followed Barnum. Joe and McLanahan went back four years, ever since McLanahan had carelessly wounded Joe with a poorly aimed shotgun blast.
“Tell me, Warden Pickett,” Barnum drawled, his voice hard, “why is it that every time someone gets murdered in my county, you’re right in the middle of it? And how are we supposed to investigate this murder when you’ve destroyed the crime scene by bringing Lamar down in the back of your truck?”
Barnum had obviously been rehearsing his opening remarks for the benefit of his deputies.
Joe climbed out and glared at Barnum, who was harshly lit by overhead alcove lights that made his aging face and deep-set eyes look even more severe than they really were. Barnum glared back, and Joe saw Barnum’s eyes narrow at the sight of Joe’s appearance.
“He was alive when I found him,” Joe said. “He died as I carried him back to my truck.”
Barnum harrumphed, not apologizing, and shined his Maglite flashlight into the back of the truck. “I see a big elk,” he said, and then the ring of the beam settled on the snow-covered blanket. Barnum reached in and peeled back the fabric.
“Jesus, somebody butchered him,” Barnum said.
Joe nodded. The gaping wound on Lamar’s neck looked savage and black in the harsh white light of Barnum’s flashlight.
Deputy Reed told Joe that the county coroner was on his way, fighting through the snowdrifts on the road to the hospital.
Joe and the sheriff’s team stepped aside as hospital orderlies pulled Gardiner’s body from the back of Joe’s pickup and strapped him onto a gurney. The four of them followed the gurney into the building, then waited in the admissions area. As the orderlies rolled the body down the hallway, McLanahan said it reminded him of the elk he had brought down from the mountains during hunting season.
“Seven-point royal,” McLanahan boasted. “Just shy of the Boone and Crockett record book. We had to quarter him just to get him to fit into the back of the truck.”
At this, Barnum turned, smirking, toward Joe. “Well, Warden Pickett,” he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t gut Lamar before you brought him in.”
Joe drove to the Gardiner house to break the news to Mrs. Carrie Gardiner. He had volunteered for the job, tough as it would be. He was grateful to get away from Barnum and McLanahan. Even in the cold, his cheeks burned. He stung from Barnum’s comments, and fought his welling anger at them. As he drove, however, thoughts of what had happened that afternoon, and what he was going to tell Carrie, crowded out Barnum’s words. He still couldn’t believe Gardiner had used the handcuffs—or that Gardiner had gone on his shooting rampage in the first place. Or that he had been randomly murdered in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm.
As Joe pulled up in front of the Gardiner’s house, the realization of what he was about to do hit him, and he sat in the truck for a moment, working up his courage before pushing himself out into the cold and up the front steps of the house. When Lamar Gardiner’s daughter opened the door in her nightgown, Joe felt even worse than he had before.
“Is your mom home?” Joe asked, his voice stronger than he expected.
“You’re Lucy’s daddy, right?” the girl asked. She had sung next to Lucy at the Christmas play. Joe couldn’t remember her name. He wished he were anywhere other than where he was at the moment, and felt ashamed of his wish.
Carrie Gardiner emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands in a towel. She was a heavy woman with an attractive, alert face and short dark hair.
“Let Mr. Pickett in and close the door, honey,” she said. Joe stepped in and removed his Stetson, which was soaked through and heavy.
The door closed, and both Carrie Gardiner and her daughter waited for him to speak. The fact that he didn’t, but simply looked at Mrs. Gardiner, said enough.
Her eyes moistened and flashed.
“Go watch TV, honey,” she told her daughter in a voice that would be obeyed.
Joe waited until the girl had left the room and took a deep breath. “There is no way to tell you this other than to tell it straight out,” he said. “Your husband Lamar was murdered in the mountains while he was elk hunting. I found his body and brought him down.”
Carrie Gardiner looked both stunned and angry, and she almost lost her balance. Joe stepped forward to steady her but she refused his hand. She let out a yelp, and threw the hand towel she was clutching at his boots.
“I’m so sorry,” Joe said.
She waved him away, excusing him as the bearer of bad news. Then she turned and walked back into the kitchen.
“Please call me or my wife if there is anything we can do at all,” Joe said after her.
She came back into the living room.
“How did he die?”
“Somebody shot two arrows into him.” He chose not to mention the cut throat.
“Do you know who did it?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Joe admitted.
“Will you find him?”
“I think so. The sheriff is in charge.”
“Is that Lamar’s blood on you?”
“Yes,” Joe said, flushing, suddenly aware that his coat was blackened with blood, and profoundly angry with himself for not realizing it earlier. He should have taken it off in the truck before he knocked on the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I . . .”