Cold Wind jp-11

by C. J. Box

  “I’m getting lost,” she said.

  “Here’s how Smith explained it to me,” Joe said, looking at his scribbles. “It’s like Earl figured out a way to have someone dig a gold mine for him using their money and mining equipment, but he gets to sell all the gold he produces to others at an inflated cost that’s guaranteed by the government. Then he uses grants and new federal programs to guarantee that the mine will always make money or at least never lose it. Then he signs deals with people to buy his gold at a preset price, because they’re do-gooders and market prices don’t matter to them. He used all the grants, subsidies, incentives, and tax credits to bail out the losses of all of his other interests.”

  “Joe. ” she said, objecting, he thought, to the enormity and complexity of what he was telling her.

  “I know,” he said. “But in order to understand this, you’ve got to throw out everything you know about how real capitalism works. That’s how The Earl thought. It was all a big poker game where the chips were free to him because he was one of the favored players. And with all those chips, he was able to create a multi-layered corporate entity that was completely cushioned against any kind of risk or loss. He could now protect all of his other assets like big ranches or homes all over the world, because the contracts, tax credits, and guarantees tied to Rope the Wind to offset all his losses and limited his liability.”

  Joe paused to review his notes and let her take it all in, and to see if he had left anything out.

  She asked, “But why would Orin Smith dump on his partner like that if he stood to make a killing? Why tell you all this?”

  Joe said, “I wondered the same thing, but the fact is all these transactions and technicalities benefitted Earl personally, but the wind farm won’t show any real profit for years on its own. It’s designed to suck up subsidies and provide tax credits, not to create power in the real world for real people. It’ll take years to get transmission lines to that ridge to actually move the power to the electrical grid. And remember-there are no true profits until all the overhead is paid for, and that will take decades. Building those things is expensive, even with used turbines they got on the cheap.”

  “So Smith is cut out,” she said.

  “That’s what he claims,” Joe said. “He says he’ll never live long enough to see a penny. And I have to believe him, because the guy got so desperate for cash that he created the Ponzi scheme that landed him in federal custody.”

  “Do you think he had something to do with Alden’s death?” she asked. “Is that what you’re driving at?”

  “No,” Joe said. “I don’t think he was involved, even though I’m sure he wouldn’t have stopped it if he’d known about it. But what you should consider, now that we know all this, is how many people would benefit from Earl Alden’s death. I mean, besides Missy.”

  “Who do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

  “Think about it,” Joe said. “If this scheme was made public-which it might now be-the whole house of cards would fall and dozens of people would be implicated in the fraud. You want me to name them all?”

  “No need,” she said sullenly. “You’ve got the owners of the Texas company, who likely knew what Alden was up to because no one had ever bought their entire inventory before. You’ve got the officers, shareholders, and regulators of Great Lakes, who all benefitted from the financing of a crackpot company. You’ve got the mob in Chicago, who’s suddenly lost their own personal bank that doesn’t ask questions. You’ve got the cities and states that signed contracts without investigating whether or not Rope the Wind could actually produce the power they claimed it could produce. You’ve got other wind farm companies-legitimate ones-who didn’t get all that stimulus money because Earl was there first. You’ve got the Lees, who were cheated out of their land. And you’ve got the politicians in Washington, who designed the mechanism to allow for and encourage fraud at this level.”

  Joe said, “That’s a start.”

  “But you don’t have a specific villain, do you?” she said. “You don’t know who in that cast of characters was desperate enough to shut him up that they took action?”

  “No,” Joe said. “It’s like a big locked-room mystery. There are maybe forty, fifty, sixty people out there who were taken advantage of, but who wouldn’t want the scheme exposed because it would hurt them. So the only way to prevent the thing from blowing up would be to kill the king.”

  She paused for a long time. He could only imagine what she was thinking.

  He said, “I really don’t know who could have done it. And it will take time and a lot of investigation to find out. I’m not thinking it’s the city, state, or government people involved. They wouldn’t solve it this way. I’m thinking either the mob, or an angry shareholder out there. Maybe even someone local who realized how The Earl had taken advantage of them, or someone crazy with rage because they’d been cut out. We should definitely get the Feds involved, and Chuck Coon heard this stuff and may be starting to make some calls as we speak. But given the stakes and the suspects, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility to think that someone figured out a way to off Earl and frame Missy.”

  She said, “This is so far-fetched.”

  He sighed. “I know it sounds that way. But what about the method of death? Why would anyone go to all that trouble of shooting him and hanging the body from a wind turbine blade except to send a message of some kind? If it was Missy on her own, why didn’t she just cut the gas line on his car or poison him or something? Why didn’t she smother him in his sleep?”

  She said, “Unless she wanted to steer us away from her.”

  Joe thought about it. “She is pretty crafty, all right. But I don’t know if she’s capable of that kind of premeditation.” As he said it, he thought about how Missy, over the years, had lined up the next rich husband well before the soon-to-be-discarded one had a hint of dissatisfaction. And how she’d mastered the fine art of hidden but definitive language in her prenuptial agreement with Bud Sr., which had gained her his third-generation ranch.

  Joe sat back in his seat. The rose-colored clouds had lost their light and now looked like heavy clumps of dark steel wool set against a graying sky.

  “Well,” Schalk said, “this is all very interesting.”

  “This stuff I just told you,” Joe said, “it’s new information, right?”

  “Most of it,” she said.

  “So it may be worth looking into?”

  “Except for one thing,” she said.

  “Bud Longbrake,” Joe said.

  “And as far as that aspect of the case goes, it’s still solid,” she said. “You can throw all these conspiracies at me and watch the implications of what Alden did fly all over the country, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a man who claims your mother-in-law tried to hire him to kill her husband and he’s willing to testify to that fact. We’ve got phone records to prove that they were talking, even though Missy claims she hadn’t seen Bud or heard from him since she filed a restraining order against him. And, Joe, we have the motive. I’ve got people who will testify to the fact that Earl Alden was seeking a divorce.”

  Joe winced. “But still. ”

  “Facts are stubborn things, Joe,” she said. “And I can promise you a jury will be able to understand Missy wanting to kill her husband much easier than a wild-eyed conspiracy involving wind energy, tax credits, the mob, and so on.”

  He said, “You’re probably right about that. But is it worth it? Would you do your best to convict a woman who may be innocent because it’s easier than expanding the investigation?”

  Her voice had a sharp edge to it when she said, “Don’t you ever question my integrity again. If I didn’t believe she did it, we wouldn’t have brought the charges against her.”

  “I apologize,” Joe said, flushing. “I went over the line.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  No words were spoken for a full minute. Then Joe said, “But you’ve got to be thin
king of what Marcus Hand will do with this.”

  “I’m thinking about that, Joe,” she said. “No doubt he will use it to muddy up the case and confuse the jury.”

  “He’ll find a juror or two-maybe more-to buy his theory,” Joe said. “We both know that. So given what he’ll do with this information, you might want to consider delaying the trial until you can make sure you can counter it.”

  She said, “So, when did you get your law degree? When was it you were elected by the voters in Twelve Sleep County to enforce the law?”

  Joe said, “I’ve seen Marcus Hand in action. I’ve seen him win with less than this.”

  “Besides,” she said, her voice lightening in tone, “who says he needs to know all this ahead of time?”

  Joe looked suspiciously at his cell phone before raising it back up. “Dulcie, you didn’t just say that.”

  She was silent.

  “Dulcie, now I’m questioning your integrity.”

  “I was just speculating,” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice.

  “He knows,” Joe said. “Marybeth is talking to him.”

  “Joe, you’re a son-of-a-bitch.”

  He was speechless.

  “And the same goes for your wife,” she said.

  Joe took a deep breath. He said, “Dulcie, this isn’t you. This is somebody who wants to beat Marcus Hand so badly they’ve lost their judgment. Dulcie, I need to talk to Bud.”

  Silence.

  “You still don’t know where he is, do you?”

  She said, “See you in court, Joe.”

  “Dulcie, please-”

  She hung up on him.

  “You may not know where he is,” he said to the dead phone, “but I think I do.”

  As he pulled back on the highway, he tried to call Marybeth, but his call went straight to voice mail. No doubt, she was speaking to Marcus Hand or her mother, or both. Telling them what he’d told the county prosecutor.

  He said, “I’m headed back, but I’ll keep my phone on. I’ve got a stop to make on the way.”

  Then: “I’m really disappointed in Dulcie. But she’s probably going to put your mother away. The women’s prison is in Lusk, by the way, if you ever want to visit her.”

  Glendo Reservoir shimmered in the moonlight to the north and east of the highway. There were a couple of boats out there in the dark, walleye fisherman Joe guessed, and a few lights across the lake from a campground.

  After his conversation with Schalk, he got angrier with each mile traveled. He was angry with Dulcie Schalk, Sheriff McLanahan, Bud Sr., Bud Jr., Orin Smith-the whole lot of them. But he traced most of his anger to his own frustration with himself. He couldn’t crack this thing, he might never be able to crack it, and he wasn’t sure, deep down, he wanted to.

  What Smith had told him about The Earl and the way business was done in the country these days had instilled a deep and hopeless strain of melancholy. There was no right and no wrong anymore.

  34

  After filling his Jeep with gasoline in Jackson, Nate drove north and east toward the dark Gros Ventre Mountains via Togwotee Pass.

  He pulled over on the two-lane highway before he reached the Togwotee Mountain Lodge. He got out and kept the engine running. There were walls of lodgepole pines on each side of the road and a channel of sky above his head like a river carrying fallen stars. The high mountain air, piney and cool with oncoming fall, helped place him back where he needed to be. Behind him, through the narrow clearing in the trees due to the road, he could see the tops of the Teton Range silhouetted on the horizon like the teeth of a frozen buzz saw. He reached down beneath the seat and checked to make sure his.500 hadn’t been stolen. It was there.

  He shed his Jackson Hole clothes and threw them into a pile in the back and pulled on jeans and a heavy shirt. He laced his boots on tight.

  Nate swung himself back into the cab of the Jeep and eased off the shoulder onto the blacktop. He hoped he could make it over the summit to Dubois before all the restaurants closed. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast in Chicago.

  He planned to drive all night until he found and killed the person who’d given him up.

  Nate leaned into the switchback turns coming down off the mountain. He drove fast and kept his lights dim so he could see beyond the orb of headlights for the eye reflections of elk or cows or mule deer on the road.

  He thought about Alisha, how he hadn’t yet allowed himself to really mourn her. Even when he’d built the scaffolding for her body, he’d concentrated on the construction of it, the materials, the timbers, the sinews holding the joints together. How he’d hoist the body up without letting it fall apart on him. And he’d left her without looking back.

  Still, though, he hadn’t wrapped his mind around the fact that she was really, truly gone.

  He just knew he couldn’t do it, mourn her, until he’d avenged her first. In a strange way that made him feel increasingly guilty, he knew the journey to Eden and Chicago and back had been done with such a murderous single-mindedness that he’d used it to justify pushing his feelings away.

  After it was done, he would slip onto the res and talk to Alisha’s relatives and the little girl she was taking care of and allow his focus and rage to turn into something else.

  He wasn’t sure how to do it when the time came, what to say, or what words to use.

  For the first time since it had happened, he gave it some consideration. Joe could help, he knew. Joe and Marybeth, especially. They were in the mainstream of sorts and Nate’s only real connection to the world of loving couples, growing children, mortgages, pet dogs, lawns, and social mores. It was a world he wished he understood and hoped he could enter some day, but it was still as foreign to him as daily life in Outer Mongolia. But because Joe and Marybeth were his only true connection to that world, he wanted to nurture them and protect them and keep them away from what he knew to be out there. Not that Joe wasn’t capable of protecting his family-he was, and in surprising ways-but Joe still seemed to believe in his oath and duty and in innocence and the law’s brand of justice. Nate didn’t want to be there if and when Joe learned otherwise, because it wouldn’t be pretty.

  Marybeth could help him with the words, Nate thought, and Joe could stand by with nothing but his own kind of humility and decency that would be like an anchor or a wall for Nate to attach himself to.

  There was nothing open in Dubois except a convenience store with shelves filled with processed food in plastic packaging. Nate bought a large paper cup of weak coffee (because there was no strong coffee), beef sticks that weren’t much more than stringy black muscle tissue laced with sodium and preservatives, and a package of string cheese.

  It had been years since he’d eaten such things. He couldn’t wait to get this all over and harvest an elk and an antelope and grill the back straps.

  What Laurie Talich had told him shouldn’t have been such a surprise, he thought. It all made sense when he thought about it and connected the dots. He was grateful his location hadn’t been determined by The Five, but through local channels.

  He once again pushed the particulars of mourning out ahead of him and concentrated on the task at hand.

  There was a compound to enter, and it was guarded. There might be motion detectors and no doubt there’d be cameras. Not that they’d stopped him before.

  SEPTEMBER 8

  Letting the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back in.

  — WILL ROGERS

  35

  Joe rolled into Saddlestring at 12:30 a.m. and drove straight to the Stockman’s Bar. There were several cars and trucks parked diagonally outside, and he was grateful it was still open. The Coors, Fat Tire, and 90 Shilling neon beer signs lit the small windows on the side. He knew Timberman often shut the place down before 2:00 a.m. if he had no customers or if the drinkers who were still there had stopped drinking.

  Joe pulled into a space out front and killed the engine. He recognized a few of the vehicl
es and was pleased to locate the one he was looking for: a 1992 Ford pickup with a cracked windshield that had primer painted on the top of both rear fenders.

  He got out and strode toward the bar and instinctively patted himself down to make sure he was geared up. Cuffs, pepper spray, bear spray, digital camera, digital recorder, notebook, pen, citation book, radio, cell phone, 40 Glock with two extra magazines in a holster. Not that he planned to pull his service weapon or, God forbid, try to hit something with it.

  He paused outside the door of the bar, took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself down against anticipation, and pushed his way inside.

  Timberman looked up, his eyebrows arched slightly, which meant surprise. Joe hadn’t been in the place so late at night for eight years or so, and it was obvious the barman wasn’t expecting him.

  Joe nodded to Timberman and took in the customers. He recognized all of them. The one he was looking for avoided his eyes.

  He walked down the length of the bar and took the stool once occupied nightly by Bud Longbrake Sr. Keith Bailey, Bud’s friend and drinking partner and the gatekeeper for the Eagle Mountain Club, leaned slightly away from him, putting space between them. Bailey slowly rolled a can of Budweiser between his big hands and there was an empty shot glass sitting on the bar next to Bailey’s glasses and a copy of the Saddlestring Roundup. Bailey turned his head a quarter toward Joe, just enough to see him warily with both eyes. His expression was stoic. Cop eyes, Joe thought.

  When Timberman approached, Joe said, “A bourbon and water for me. Maker’s Mark. And whatever Keith is having.”