by C. J. Box
It rang four times, then someone picked up.
“Nuss-bomb,” a deep voice answered.
“Hello?” Joe said, not understanding.
“Nuss-bomb.”
“What? Who is this?”
“NUSS-BOMB!”
“I can’t understand you,” Joe said, his voice betraying a hint of panic as well as the knowledge that he might have just done something really stupid.
“Nuss. Bomb,” the man said patiently.
“Where are you?”
The phone clicked off.
“Damn it!” Joe shouted. What had he done?
He weighed calling again, but decided against it. This might be a matter for the task force. He pulled back on to the road, mentally kicking himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Driving down Bighorn Road to his house, he reconsidered slightly. Why would the man who answered assume he was involved in any kind of investigation? As far as the man on the other end knew, it was a wrong number. Joe hadn’t identified himself, or given any indication why he called.
Joe was pleased to see that Maxine was up and excited to see him when he came in the house. She was still white, though.
Sheridan worked on homework on the kitchen table, while Lucy watched television.
“Where’s your mom?” he asked.
Sheridan gestured toward his office. The door was closed, which was unusual, and he opened it.
Marybeth sat behind his desk, the glow of the computer monitor making her features look harsh. But when she raised her face, Joe could see she was troubled.
“You’ve got some messages on the answering machine,” she said. “Why don’t you take care of those and then come back in here. We need to talk.”
27
THE FIRST TELEPHONE MESSAGE was from Sheriff Harvey in Park County.
“We tracked the cell phone number down, Joe. It is leased from Cingular Wireless to a guy named L. Robert Eckhardt, RN, whose last known address is Fort Bragg in North Carolina.”
Nate was right about that, Joe thought. He wrote the name down on a legal pad.
Harvey continued, “I’m assuming RN stands for registered nurse. We’ve got calls down there but we couldn’t get much cooperation. One guy we talked to was friendly at first, then he put us on hold and came back and wouldn’t say jack-shit. I got the impression he’d been told to stonewall us. We asked the FBI through Portenson to put some heat on them down there, and we should know more tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.”
The second message was from Robey Hersig: “The APB is out, Joe, but as of six this evening, there are no reports of Cleve Garrett and his traveling road show.”
The third was from Sheriff Barnum. His voice was tight with anger. “Pickett, I got a call from Sheriff Harvey in Park County. He says they may have an angle on somebody, but didn’t give much detail.” There was a long pause, and Joe pictured Barnum fuming at his desk, trying to keep calm, trying to find the right words to say. Finally, “You need to keep me in the goddamned loop here, Mr. Pickett.” The telephone was slammed down violently on the other end. Joe saved the messages for later, in case he needed them.
“Done?” Marybeth asked, trying to contain her impatience.
Joe nodded. “Can I grab something to eat first?”
“Sure. There’s some cold Wally’s Pizza in the refrigerator.”
“I haven’t eaten since . . .”
“Go, Joe.”
He returned with the box and a bottle of beer and sat down across from his desk. Except for some condiments, milk, and something old and green wrapped in plastic, the refrigerator was now officially empty. He tried not to let it get to him.
The look on her face shifted his line of thinking immediately. She looked agitated, yet sad. Maybe a little angry. He hoped it wasn’t aimed at him.
“You wanted me to find out what I could about Tanner Engineering, and how long ago Tuff Montegue worked for them,” Marybeth said, standing up and walking past Joe so she could close the door of his office. “There is a lot of information on them on the Internet. I started with a simple Google search.”
Joe listened, eating cold pizza.
“It was really easy to find,” she said, her eyes widening. She gestured at a stack of paper she had printed out and placed facedown on the edge of the desk. “Tanner Engineering is an environmental research firm that is contracted by the federal government and a lot of energy companies to assist with environmental impact statements. Their specialty is water-testing—and their most recent clients included all of the big firms drilling for coal-bed methane in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming—but mainly Wyoming. Especially in the Powder River Basin and here in Twelve Sleep County.
“Once the company does its testing and produces a certified report signed by the primary engineer, who was Mr. Tanner, then the energy company bundles it with all of their paperwork and submits it to all of the state and federal agencies that approve drilling. Without that seal of approval, there’s no drilling. If the company finds too many minerals—or salt—in the water, it’s a lot harder for the company to get approval to drill. So that certificate is pretty important.”
Joe twisted the cap off the bottle of beer, and drank a quarter of it. It was cold and good.
“I called the company down in Austin and talked to their personnel department,” she said, and her cheeks flushed. “I sort of told them I was related to Tuff Montegue, which I know I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t know if they would help me or not.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Joe said, saluting her with the beer bottle. “Good work.”
Marybeth beamed a quick smile. “And yes, Tuff was employed by them as a contractor in the spring. He was with a survey crew that resurveyed a property and put the stakes in the ground so that the water-testers could follow up. Tuff worked for them for six weeks.”
She was leading to something, Joe could see.
“And . . .” he said.
“When I asked what the property was, the lady in personnel got kind of suspicious. I guess I would, too, but I told her another lie. I told her that Tuff had passed away but that he’d said in the past that the place he was working in meant a lot to him, that he talked about how beautiful it was all the time, so we wanted to spread his ashes there. But we needed to know where exactly he worked.”
“That’s . . . inventive,” Joe said, equally impressed and alarmed by her deceit.
Marybeth shot him an uneasy grin. “The whole time I was talking to her, I was afraid Cam or someone would come into my office and ask what I was doing. Luckily, nobody did.
“Anyway, the woman decided to help me out. I guess she believed me, or else she didn’t see how helping me could hurt.”
“Yes . . .”
“Joe, it was the Timberline Ranch.”
Joe sat up.
“You’re probably wondering who hired Tanner Engineering to do the water survey.”
“Yes I am, darling,” he said, feeling his interior motor start to run.
She took a deep breath, and her eyes closed briefly. Then she opened them: “Logue Country Realty, on behalf of an unnamed client.”
Joe whistled, and sat back heavily in the chair. “So what does this mean?”
“I’m not sure, Joe, but it gives me a really bad feeling. And Joe, that’s not all.”
“What?”
She turned over the sheaf of papers on the desk, and thumbed through it. “On the Tanner Engineering Web site I went to the section on executives, and did a search. They had photos of their top management. There he is.”
She slipped a page to Joe. He looked at the photo of Stuart Tanner, CEO and founder. In the photo, Tanner looked to be in his mid-sixties, but was lean and fit. His face looked weathered behind rimless glasses. He looked like a serious man. Joe wondered if Marybeth thought Joe would recognize Tanner from somewhere.
“I saw him, Joe. I talked to him,” she said. “He was in the office that Monday when the first mutilated cows were discovered
. He had a big file with him that he said he needed to deliver to Cam.”
“You’re sure it was Stuart Tanner?”
Marybeth nodded her head, somewhat reluctantly. “Yes, it was him. Which means Cam knew him, and maybe Marie did, too. That’s fine, of course, but what troubles me is that neither of them ever mentioned it to me. Remember when we were talking about the murders at my mother’s dinner? The Logues said nothing about knowing Stuart Tanner. Nothing.”
“Of course, we weren’t talking about Tanner, we were talking about Tuff,” Joe said.
Marybeth leaned forward, now so still and tense that she looked like a snapshot. “Joe, you don’t think Cam and Marie . . .”
Joe was silent, thinking.
“We can’t rule anything out,” Joe said finally. “But I think it’s very, very unlikely they had anything to do with the crimes.”
Marybeth let out a long breath of relief, but her eyes still had him fixed in their sights.
“That doesn’t mean, though, that he didn’t see some opportunity in the situation,” Joe said. “That he didn’t use the circumstances to advance an agenda of his own.”
“I can’t see it, Joe. I can’t see Marie getting involved in something so awful.”
Joe drained his beer and wished he had another in front of him. “Didn’t you tell me she hasn’t been in the office? That she’s been sick? Maybe she can’t face you anymore, or can’t face the situation she’s got herself in.”
“I should go to her house,” she said. “I should talk with her.”
Joe held up his hand. “Maybe so. But I’d like to do some checking around before you do. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. This thing still doesn’t make much sense.”
As he looked at her, tears welled in her eyes, and when she blinked the tears coursed down her cheeks.
“Marybeth . . .”
“Damn it,” she said. “I liked and trusted them. How could I be so taken in? So blind?”
They both knew the answer to her question.
Joe stood up and went around the desk, and pulled her up and hugged her. She buried her face in his shirt, and he kissed her hair.
Although they were in bed and it was late, Joe could tell that Marybeth wasn’t sleeping, and neither was he. He lay with his hands clasped behind his head on the pillow, and he stared at the ceiling. The half-moon outside striped the bed in pale blue coming in through the blinds.
He tried to set all of the other tracks of the case aside and work through what Marybeth had learned.
He wondered if he had been assuming the wrong thing all along by concentrating on Tuff’s death instead of Stuart Tanner’s. Even though Tuff’s death seemed an aberration, maybe it was intended to look that way. To steer anyone looking into the crimes toward Tuff, away from Tanner. Maybe Tanner was the key to both murders, not Tuff. Maybe Tuff was killed to draw attention away from Tanner’s death.
But who could be so calculated?
In Joe’s experience, conspiracies like this simply didn’t work out. People talked too much, made too many mistakes, had too many individual motives to keep a secret for long. The coordination of two deaths fifty miles apart in the same night suggested a level of planning and professionalism that just didn’t seem likely, he thought. That was why no one even assumed it. The two murders, in the midst of the animal mutilations, were assumed by everyone—including him—to be part of the overall horror. But if someone used the cattle and wildlife mutilations as cover to murder Tanner in the same method, that suggested an icy, devious calculation. And if the killer was capable of that kind of subterfuge, maybe he took it to another level and went after Tuff for no reason other than to mask his true target.
Could it be Cam Logue?
He couldn’t see it, although there had always been something about Cam that hadn’t felt right to Joe. Cam seemed overeager, a bit too driven. Although both traits were the qualities of successful people, it seemed to Joe that just under the surface Cam seemed a little . . . desperate. Whatever drove him was powerful. But could it possibly drive him to murder? Joe didn’t think so.
If the report that Tanner had delivered to Cam indicated that the water was bad beneath the surface of the Timberline Ranch, who would be hurt? Cam would, but only to the degree that the ranch likely wouldn’t sell and he’d be out of a commission. But Cam had plenty of ranch listings, many larger than the Timberline Ranch.
Cam’s secret buyer might be hurt, Joe thought. If the buyer knew that he could never drill, the ranch would be all but worthless. But the buyer wouldn’t have had the mineral rights in the first place, since they had been sold off years ago. So why would he care?
Suddenly, Joe felt a spasm in his belly. Realtors didn’t work for buyers, Joe thought. Realtors worked for sellers. The person—people—who would be hurt by the discovery would be the Overstreet sisters. But could two old, cranky women who hated each other be capable of this? Again, it didn’t work, he thought. If the mineral rights didn’t go with the property, a bad-water report wouldn’t impact the sale to a buyer who wanted a ranch and not a CBM field.
So who was the secret buyer?
Then, as if a dam was breached, more questions poured forward.
Where were Cleve Garrett and Deena?
Who was L. Robert Eckhardt, the owner of the cell phone number, and what was he doing driving forest backroads in Wyoming at 4:30 in the morning?
What in the hell did “Nuss-Bomb” mean?
Joe moaned out loud.
“Are you okay, honey?” Marybeth asked sleepily.
“I’m sorry, I was thinking,” he said. “I’m giving myself a headache.”
“You’re giving me one, too,” she said.
It was an hour later, and although Joe hadn’t come up with any answers, he had thought through a list of places where he might find them. Carefully, he swung out of the bed, trying not to disturb Marybeth.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
He looked at the clock next to his pillow. It was 3:48 A.M.
She turned over and snapped on the lamp.
“Joe, if the information I got was so easy to find, why didn’t the task force do it earlier?”
“We weren’t looking into the backgrounds of the victims,” Joe said. “We were searching for aliens and birds, or not doing much at all. We were hoping the whole thing would go away, I think.”
“That’s . . .” she hesitated, then her eyes flashed, “that’s inexcusable.”
Joe nodded, “Yup.”
“Aren’t you cold standing there in your underwear?”
“I can’t sleep. I was going to get up and make a list of things to do in the morning.”
She looked at the clock. “It’s practically morning now. Why don’t you come to bed?”
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m too edgy. Every time I close my eyes, a million things charge at me and I can’t stop any of ’em.”
“What if I make it worth your while?” she said and smiled.
He hesitated, but not for long.
When they were through, Joe rolled over onto his back. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t concentrate.”
“You did fine,” she purred.
28
THE COUNTY CLERK’S OFFICE was located in the same building as the courtroom, jail, sheriff’s office, and attorney. A man named Stovepipe manned the reception desk and metal detector, and he nodded at Joe and waived him through at 7:45 A.M.
“You’re up early this morning,” Stovepipe said, lowering the morning edition of the Saddlestring Roundup. Joe noted the headline: HERSIG SAYS NO PROGRESS IN MUTILATION DEATHS.
“Still broken?” Joe asked about the metal detector.
Stovepipe nodded. “Don’t tell nobody, though.”
“I never do. Is Ike in yet?”
“They don’t open until eight, but I think I seen him come in earlier.”
Ike Easter’s glass-walled office was behind the counter where Twelve Sleep
County citizens lined up daily to do business with the three matronly clerks who sat on tall stools and called out “NEXT!” Most of the business transactions involved titles on automobiles and property. This was also the place to get marriage licenses, so the clerks who worked for Ike Easter were among the better informed gossips in the county, and much sought after when they got their hair done.
When Joe opened the door to the main office, all three of the matronly clerks wheeled on their stools and glared at him. It was easily one of the most unwelcome receptions he had ever received, he thought. One of the clerks quickly raised an open palm to him as he entered. “Sir, we’re not open for fifteen minutes,” she said. “Please take a seat in the hall and . . .”
“I’m here to see Ike,” Joe said flatly, ignoring her, and went through the batwing doors on the side of the counter.
“Sir . . .” The clerk was irritated.
“It’s okay, Millie,” Ike called out from his office when he saw Joe coming.
“I forgot about your elite Republican Guard,” Joe smiled, stopping outside Ike’s office and tipping his hat toward Millie. Millie huffed melodramatically. To Ike: “Do you have a few minutes? It’s important.”
Ike motioned Joe in, and Joe shut the door behind him.
“I’ll ignore the Republican Guard comment,” Ike said, not unpleasantly, “but they won’t. Next time you need a new title for your car, expect delays.”
Joe sat in a hardback chair across from Ike. “Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we get a new car.”
“All my clerks are county employees,” Ike said. “They work eight hours a day and not one minute longer. They take an hour for lunch and get two fifteen-minute breaks. If you woke one of them up in the middle of the night, she could tell you to the hour how long she has until retirement, how many days of sick leave she’s got left this fiscal year, and to the penny what her pension will be. Those women keep me in a constant state of absolute fear.”
Ike had a smooth, milk-chocolate face and wore large-framed glasses. He had a silver mustache and his receding hair was also going gray. Like his cousin, Not Ike, Ike was quick to smile and had dark, expressive eyes. He had been reading the newspaper as well, and it lay flat on his desk, opened to the page where the NO PROGRESS IN MUTILATION DEATHS front-page story was continued inside.