by C. J. Box
Layborn smirked. “Drugs and environmental terrorism,” he said. “I’ll bet the house they’ll have something to do with this. We’ll just never fucking know, I’m afraid.”
Layborn’s conspiracy had silenced the room.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said, leaning across the table toward Joe. Ashby saw what was happening and was too late to intervene. Layborn growled, “Getting rid of those four assholes was not the worst thing to ever happen to Yellowstone National Park.”
“Eric!” Ashby said. Then quickly, to Joe: “That is not our policy.”
“But I bet you wish it could be.” Portenson grinned.
“No, we don’t,” Ashby said heatedly.
Demming had shrunk back into her chair as if trying to becomeone with the fabric.
Joe didn’t know what to say. He looked back down at the list he had made several days before and continued as if nothing had happened.
“There are several references to the Gopher State Five,” he said. “Four are dead. Who survived?”
“His name is Bob Olig,” Demming said quietly. “We haven’t been able to find him.”
“There’s a nationwide BOLO for him,” Portenson said, meaning Be On The Lookout. “No solid hits yet.”
“He worked here also?” Joe asked.
Layborn said, “Another Zephyr scumbag.”
“He was employed at the Old Faithful Inn,” Ashby said wearily, having lost all control of Layborn and given up trying. “He vanished the day after the murders were reported.”
“Where was he the day of the murders?” Joe asked.
“Giving tours of the Old Faithful Inn,” Ashby said. “That’s been verified by the site director, Mark Cutler. Olig was a tour guide, and a pretty good one.”
Joe sat back, thinking. “So three of the five-Rick Hoening, Jim McCaleb, and Bob Olig-all worked together at Old Faithful?”
Ashby nodded. “In the area, anyway. But it’s a big complex with hundreds of employees, nearly a thousand in the summer. It wasn’t like they did the same job.”
“But I assume they lived in employee housing together?”
“Correct.”
“And it’s been searched?”
“Torn apart,” Layborn said. “We found some meth, some dope, like I said. A bunch of books about environmental sabotage,monkey-wrenching, that sort of crap. And e-mails from their fellow loons around the world. But nothing about Clay McCann, or anything we could use.”
“Can I look at them?” Joe wondered how many of the e-mails were to and from Yellowdick, and what they were about.
When he asked the question, he saw Layborn, Portenson, and Ashby all smile paternalistically. Portenson leaned forward on the table. “You can quit the charade, Joe.”
Joe didn’t respond but he knew his face was flushing because it was suddenly hot. The thunderhead of doubt rolled across the sky, blacking it out.
“We know about the e-mail to your governor,” Portenson said. “It was sent by Hoening. He was Yellowdick. He sent messages to the governors of Montana and Idaho too.” He paused, letting that sink in before continuing. “And the president,and the secretary of the interior, and the head of the EPA. None of them make any sense. All of the e-mails have referencesto resources and cash flow. The best we can determine is the guy objected to some aspects of management up here and liked to be a scaremonger. The Park Service is an easy target, you know. Everyone’s a critic. Hoening liked to stir things up, is all.”
Joe was embarrassed. They had known all along why the governor sent him and had been waiting for him to come clean. His duplicity shamed him.
“We know all about his e-mail traffic; we know everything there is to know about the victims,” Portenson said. “We didn’t just fall off the fucking turnip truck. But what we can’t figure out is if there is anything more to this case than what is staring us right in the face: that Clay McCann walked into Yellowstone Park and shot four people in cold blood and got off. That’s bad enough, but I’m afraid that’s all there is.”
Joe swallowed.
Portenson said, “This is the strangest case any of us have ever been involved in because everything’s transparent.” The FBI agent raised his fist and ticked off his points by raising his fingers one by one: “We know what happened. We know who did it-the son of a bitch admits it. We think we know the motivation.And we know there isn’t a goddamned thing any of us can do about it.”
Joe said, “Unless we can prove McCann went there specificallyto kill those four people as some kind of bigger scheme, then we can get him on conspiracy to commit murder.”
Portenson sighed. “You think we haven’t tried?”
“You’re welcome to follow up with me and my staff with any questions you might have,” Ashby said, taking back control of the meeting as Joe gave it up. “But we resent the idea that your governor thinks we’re a bunch of incompetents up here and he needs to send a game warden to figure things out. We resentthe hell out of it.”
Joe’s ears burned, and he needed a drink of water because his mouth was suddenly dry.
Ashby said, “Everything that could be investigated has been investigated. We’re sick to death of reporters, and questions, and second-guesses. We didn’t write the law that created this loophole and there’s nothing we can do about it now. The chief ranger wants this whole episode to go away.”
“Meaning,” Layborn said, “do what you have to do and then get the hell out. We don’t need your help and we don’t need your governor to check up on us.”
Ashby looked at his wristwatch again. For all intents and purposes, the meeting was now over.
“Thank you,” Joe said, and his voice sounded hollow even to him.
Layborn was up and out of the room before Joe could gather his papers and put them back into his file. Demming gave Joe a sympathetic nod and was gone.
“My daughter has a volleyball game in Gardiner,” Ashby said. “It started at five.” He held out his hand and Joe shook it.
“I’ve got daughters too,” Joe said. “I know how that goes.”
Ashby stood aside so Joe and Portenson could leave, then locked the room after them.
Joe and Portenson went down the stairs. The receptionist, who had to stay five minutes beyond quitting time because of the meeting, glared at Joe as he passed her desk.
The evening was cool and still. Joe didn’t realize Portenson was following him until he reached the Yukon.
“You ought to just go home, Joe,” Portenson said. “Save yourself the aggravation. This case has beaten me to death.”
Joe turned around and leaned against his vehicle. “You reallythink we know all there is to know?”
Portenson shook his head. “Sometimes, it’s all there right in front of you. We all want to find something else, figure it out, be heroes. But in this case, there’s nothing to figure. It is what it is.”
Joe wasn’t sure he agreed. “So where’s Bob Olig?”
“Who the fuck knows? Or cares? He probably just felt guilty because his friends died and he didn’t so he went to Belize or someplace like that.”
“Shouldn’t the FBI be able to find him?”
Portenson snorted. “Man, haven’t you been reading the paper?”
Joe didn’t want to go there. “The other thing I can’t wrap my mind around is this Clay McCann. The story just doesn’t ring true. He just happened to go on a hike armed like that? Come on.”
“The story’s so bizarre that it might just be true. And even if the guy knew about the Zone of Death, so what? He committed the perfect crime.”
Joe mulled that over.
“Those guys up there,” Portenson said, nodding toward the law enforcement building, “they don’t know you very well, do they?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The FBI agent grinned wolfishly. “They don’t know you’ve got a knack for getting yourself in the middle of trouble. I wouldn’t really call it a talent, exactly; it’s more like
a curse, like I’m cursed to never get out of this fucking state.” He laughed. “It might be just their bad luck that you’ll bumble onto something we missed. Poor fucking them.”
Joe shook his head and thought Portenson had more confidencein him than he had in himself, especially after having his head handed to him in the conference room.
“Are you going to be needing any help up here?”
Joe misunderstood. “Are you offering?”
“Fuck no. I’m through with this case. What I was wondering about was whether you might ask your old buddy Nate Romanowskito show up with his big gun and his bad attitude.”
Joe looked away, hoping his face didn’t reveal anything.
Portenson read him. “So he might show, eh?”
Joe said nothing.
“I still want to talk to him, you know.”
“I know.”
“I may never get out of this state,” Portenson said, “but it’ll make my sentence more pleasant if I know Romanowski is in a federal pen.”
“Don’t you have real terrorists to chase?” Joe asked.
Portenson snorted and opened his arms to embrace all of Mammoth Hot Springs, all of Yellowstone, all of Wyoming, and shouted, “I fucking wish!”
With that, Portenson turned on his heel and stomped across the small parking lot to his Crown Vic with U.S. Government plates. The FBI agent roared away with a spray of gravel.
Joe sighed, looked around. Cumulus clouds became incendiaryas the setting sun lit them. The quiet was extraordinary, the only sound the burble of a truck leaving Mammoth Village and descending the switchbacks toward Gardiner.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t made arrangements for where he would stay that night. His choice was to drive down the switchback roads from Mammoth out the North Gate and find a motel in Gardiner, Montana, or cross the street, the lawns where the elk grazed, to the rambling old Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel.
8
Joe’s boots echoed on the hardwood floor of the lobby of the Mammoth Hotel. The lobby had high ceilings, a cavernous sitting area overlooked by a massive mural, dozens of empty overstuffed chairs. Two check-in clerks huddled around a computer monitor behind the front desk and looked up at him as he approached.
“Can I get a room?”
The clerk said, “Sorry, sold out,” then smiled to show he was kidding.
“Very funny, Simon,” the other clerk said in a British accent, then to Joe: “Don’t worry, we’re at the end of our season. There are plenty of rooms available. We get a little punchy when the end is near.”
“When the end is near,” Simon mimicked with an intonation of false doom while he tapped on a keyboard.
“You know what I mean,” the other clerk said.
Joe drew his wallet out and fished for a credit card. Although the state had sent him his credentials, a state credit card wasn’t in the package. He’d need to ask about that, and soon. The familycredit card had a low maximum, and Joe didn’t know the limit.
The two clerks worked together with a jokey, easy rapport that came from familiarity. Joe noted that both wore Zephyr Corp. name badges with their first names and residences. While both were undoubtedly British, their name tags said “Simon” and “James” from Montana.
“You aren’t really from Montana,” Joe said, while Simon noted the name on his credit card.
“How did you guess that?” James asked slyly.
“Actually, when you work for Zephyr long enough and get hired on in the winter, you can claim Montana or Wyoming for your residence,” Simon said. “Better than Brighton, I suppose.”
“Definitely better than Brighton,” James said.
“Or Blackpool, James.” To Joe: “You’ve got a reservation,” Simon said, looking up from the screen.
“I do?”
Simon nodded. “And it’s covered. By a Mr. Chuck Ward from the State of Wyoming.”
Joe liked that and appreciated Ward for taking care of details.Simon handed over the keys to room 231.
“Are you familiar with the hotel?” Simon asked.
Joe was, although it had been a long time. Despite the years, the layout of the building was burned into his memory.
Room 231, along with the rest of the rooms and the hallway,had been renovated since Joe was there last. The lighting wasn’t as glaring and the walls not as stark as he remembered, he thought, musing how years distorted memory and perception.It was still a long hallway, though, and he struggled down it with too many bags. A sprinkler system now ran the length of the ceiling, and the muted yellow paint of the ceiling and hallwaywalls was restful. Still, it gave him a feeling of melancholy that was almost overwhelming. While they could change the carpeting and the fixtures, they couldn’t change what had happenedthere more than twenty-five years ago, or stop the memoriesfrom flooding back to him.
His room was small, clean, redone. A soft bed with a brass headboard and a lush quilt, a pine desk and chair, tiled floor in the bathroom, little bear-shaped soap on the sink. There was no television. A phone on the desk was the only nod toward the present. Otherwise, the room could have been something out of the 1920s, when the hotel was built. He looked out the window and was pleased it overlooked the huge stretch of lawn known as the parade ground.
He sat on the bed, his head awash with overlapping thoughts. He tried to convince himself the meeting had not gone badly, that he hadn’t embarrassed himself, that he’d learned a few things to help him carry out his assignment. That was true, but he couldn’t get over the moment when Portenson said, “Cut the charade, Joe,” and he realized they had all been waiting for him to fess up.
Joe stood and surveyed his room. There was a two-foot space between the bed and the curtained window. He stared at the space, thinking it must have been larger once, since that was where he’d spent his time when he was here last. His parents had put down blankets and he slept there on the floor. But it had seemed so much bigger at the time, just like the room had seemed bigger, the hallways longer, the ceilings higher, the lightbulbs brighter. He could recall the musty smell of the carpetand the detergent odor of the bedspread. He remembered pretending to sleep while his father drank and raged and his mother sobbed. It was the first time in his life he’d been without his brother, and his brother was the reason they were in Yellowstonethen. But most of all, he could remember the feeling of loss in the room, and what he thought at the time was the dawningof his own doom, as if his life as he knew it was over after only eighteen years. And not so great years either.
Long after his family had stayed at the Mammoth Hotel, Joe saw the movie The Shining. In one scene the camera lingers on an impossibly long, impossibly still hallway when a wave of blood crashes down from a stairwell and floods the length of it. At the time he had thought of the hallway of the Mammoth Hotel.He thought of it now. He needed a drink.
Joe dug through one of his duffel bags for a plastic bottle-a “traveler”-of Jim Beam and poured some into a thin plastic cup. He remembered the hum of an ice machine in the hall and grabbed the bucket.
He opened the door cautiously, half expecting the wave of blood he’d imagined to slosh across the floor. It didn’t, and he felt foolish for letting his mind wander. As he stepped out there was a bustle of clothing and a sharp cry from the end of the hallway where the stairs were. He turned in time to see two men scrambling out of sight from the landing down the stairs. He glimpsed them for only a second; they were older, bundled in heavy clothes, not graceful in their sudden retreat. He hadn’t seen their faces, only their backs.
Puzzled, he considered following them but decided against it. Their heavy footsteps on the stairs pounded into silence and they were no doubt crossing the lobby. Had he frightened them? He wondered. What had they been doing that they felt it necessaryto flee like that when he emerged into the hallway?
Joe filled his bucket and went back to his room. Although he generally liked solitude, it was the quiet of being outside, where he could see, hear, and feel the landscape arou
nd him, that drew him. It was different in a huge, virtually unoccupied hotel, where he longed for the hum of conversation behind doors he passed, and the assurance that he wasn’t totally alone on his floor. He paused at his door and shot a suspicious glance back where he’d seen the men. There was no one there now, although the empty hotel seemed clogged with ghosts.
The mammoth dining room was the only restaurant still open in the village and it was a short walk from the hotel. AlthoughJoe disliked eating alone, he had no choice so he grabbed his jacket and the Zone of Death file to read over, yet again, while he ate. Simon and James were still at the desk when he descended the stairs.
Joe asked Simon, “About a half hour ago, did two old men come running across the lobby from the stairs?”
Simon and James exchanged glances. Simon said, “I rememberthat, yes. But they weren’t running when I saw them. They were walking briskly toward the front doors.”
“Do you know them?”
Simon shook his head.
“Were they Zephyr employees?”
James laughed. “Who knows? It’s the time of year when the nutters really come out, you know? We don’t pay any attention to them unless they bother the guests. Were they bothering you?”
“Not really,” Joe said.
As joe crossed the street to the restaurant he noticed a park ranger cruiser at the curb. The door opened and Judy Demming got out.
“Del Ashby asked me to give you something,” she said, poppingopen the trunk with a remote on her key chain.
Demming was out of uniform, in jeans, a turtleneck, and a sweater. She looked smaller and more scholarly in street clothes, Joe thought, her eyes softer behind her glasses.
“Were you waiting for me?” Joe asked.
“I just pulled in.”
He followed her around her car as she lifted a cardboard box out of the trunk.
“All of those e-mails printed out,” she said, holding the box out to him. “The ones you said you wanted to look at.”