by Box, C. J.
She sighed again, but softly, so there would be no way he could possibly hear it.
Because after a single-malt scotch or two, Tom often became amorous. She thought of it as a stress reliever for him, like the drinks. She doubted he thought of it the same way.
Sometimes, he’d inadvertently bang his knee into the bed frame as he got close. Or when he threw the sheets back, he’d bend back the comforter only and climb in between it and the top sheet where he couldn’t touch her. Which meant he’d have to climb out clumsily, sort out the covers, and come back to bed.
Then he’d start nuzzling her, pressing his erection against her thigh. He’d tell her she was sexy and warm and that he needed her.
If he insisted, she’d comply. It wasn’t romantic, but it was necessary. Like most of the men she’d been with, Tom had simple needs. In fact, despite his advanced education, his responsibilities, and his position within the community, it was very simple to keep him happy.
Which, for Candy, was a very small price to pay to live in a five-bedroom country house on fifteen acres with horses to ride and no incentive or need to work outside the home herself. They’d gone on fifteen- and twenty-one-day boutique river cruises in Europe and she’d seen Broadway shows in New York City. When they hosted a party, they hired a caterer. And the cleaning crew showed up twice a week to make sure the home was a showplace.
He’d told her more than once that he enjoyed spending money on her and there was plenty more where that came from. She didn’t object, of course.
Of course.
*
SHE HEARD THE SOUND of ice again just as she started to doze back to sleep. Then his footfalls in the hallway to the bathroom. Then a flush of the toilet and the sound of him washing his hands.
He was naked when he snuggled up to her. Her back was to him and he threw a leg over hers and burrowed into her. His left hand cupped her left breast, and she moved her arm so he’d have better access. She feigned a happy, sleepy moan and turned over to him. Although he’d brushed his teeth, she could taste single-malt scotch on his tongue.
Tom was more energetic and aggressive than usual, if clumsier. It took him longer than she was used to and she chalked it up to the alcohol, which had likely dulled his nerve endings. More than once she got the impression that he was exorcising something from his system, as if transferring it to her, where it would dissipate. Which wasn’t a very nice thing to think about, actually.
Finally, he shivered and rolled to his back. Within minutes, he was snoring.
She lay still, wide-awake. She waited for his breath to become rhythmic.
Then, with the grace of a cat, she slid out of bed. There was no going back to sleep for Candy; she knew she wasn’t wired for it. Once she was up, she was up. And she could always take a long nap in the late afternoon after he’d dressed and gone back to work. Two glasses of wine followed by a long, leisurely nap.
It was such a small price to pay.
*
CANDY CROSWELL PADDED across the bedroom and closed the door to her walk-in closet behind her. She turned on the light and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. Her nightgown was gone, balled up somewhere near the foot of the bed.
She was redheaded, lithe, long-legged, and in good shape for her age. There was a constellation of freckles on her shoulders and back, but Tom said he liked them. Everybody told her she looked hot, but the one whose opinion mattered the most was Tom.
He was the reason she didn’t eat carbohydrates, though she loved bread and pasta. He liked to run his hands over her body as if checking for fat pockets or other anomalies. She purred as he did it and acted as though she didn’t realize what he was doing.
Candy wriggled into a pair of yoga pants and a tight spandex top. She turned slowly in front of the mirror and looked at herself from every angle. She wished her thighs were slimmer, but that had always been a problem. Fortunately, he’d never pointed that out.
This, by far, was the best situation she’d ever had, and she was determined not to lose it. During the evening, after her nap and when Tom was gone, she’d walk through all of the rooms with a glass of wine and pinch herself.
Like Tom, she’d been married before, but in her case it was twice. The first time she’d lived in a double-wide trailer outside of Williston, North Dakota, which was quite unlike the failing dairy farm she’d grown up on in southern Nebraska. She’d never been as cold or as lonely as she had been in North Dakota. Although Brent made good wages in the Bakken oil fields, the money never went as far as it should have, given the inflated prices of everything during the energy boom and Brent’s penchant for wasting it. Brent never saw the incongruity of driving his new yellow Corvette home and parking it in a snowdrift by the side of the trailer at night. She did, though.
Her second husband, Nicolas, worked as a financial planner in Bismarck when she met him and he wore a tie and drove an SUV and he urged her to order another glass of wine when they had lunch together to discuss a plan that would result in Candy and Brent’s fiscal stability. Brent hadn’t thought the meeting was necessary, but Candy knew it was. He feared she’d try to put him on a budget.
But the actual result of the lunch, once Candy realized how handsome and charming Nicolas came across, was: Goodbye, Brent.
*
UNFORTUNATELY, THOUGH, NICOLAS turned out to be a very unhappy man. What he really wanted—and he confessed to her six months after her divorce to Brent was final and they had married—was to go off the grid and “get back to nature.” Nicolas revealed to Candy that he’d been born a hundred and fifty years too late and he craved a simpler and more basic existence that actually meant something tangible. He wanted to kill and catch their food and make love to her under the warm hides of big-game animals he’d shot and tanned himself. He wanted to be one with the earth, and he was sure it would fill up his heart.
They’d moved from North Dakota to Alaska, which was even colder. The log cabin he built for them was on the bank of the Chatanika River thirty-five miles north of Fairbanks. The first fall, Nicolas grew out his beard and killed a moose and a caribou, and caught salmon and Arctic graylings in the river. He talked for hours about writing a book about his journey back to the simple life, but he never started it. Candy drove the snowmobile an hour each way to the post office to retrieve the parcels of fashionable clothing that Stitch Fix sent every month. They were too impractical to wear—but she kept them all.
While Nicolas was on a two-week bear hunt with some neighbors, Candy strapped all of her Stitch Fix boxes onto the back of a sled and towed it behind the snowmobile to Fairbanks, where she used a stash of cash and Nicolas’s credit card to buy a used minivan. Then she motored south for forty-one hours and over two thousand miles until she collapsed from exhaustion at a resort near Whitefish, Montana, where she slept for two days straight.
Candy had no idea she was one of the few non-attendees of a national conference at the resort when she dressed in her best Stitch Fix cocktail dress and went to the bar that night. But that’s when she met Tom, who was recently divorced and lonely and attending the professional event from northern Wyoming.
She thought a lot about that double-wide trailer and that drafty log cabin when she walked through Tom’s home with her glass of wine.
*
CANDY GRABBED A plastic bottle of Vitamin Water from the refrigerator and selected a jacket from the back closet because it was getting colder every night as fall came. Her state-of-the-art yoga studio was located a hundred yards from the house in the loft of the sprawling horse barn. It had been completed the previous summer, but she’d yet to teach any classes in it.
There were two reasons for that. The first was she didn’t know many locals and she had no network to get the word out. Her target clientele were women like her, of a certain age, who had free time during the day to drive out to the property. She didn’t want super-athletic young things who would show her up and create a judgmental environment for her clients.
Candy knew there was a way to find those kind of women—she didn’t want any men, either—and she’d recently learned about the members of the Eagle Mountain Club and considered it a target-rich environment. Unfortunately, by the time she’d settled on a word-of-mouth marketing campaign among the older female spouses of the club, it was fall, and they’d left the place.
The other reason was she enjoyed having the studio all to herself. Tom had never pressured her about opening it up to strangers, and until that happened, she felt no reason to do so.
*
TO AVOID THE HASSLE of keying the password into the alarm system for the front door, Candy left the house through the four-car garage. There was an illuminated pathway outside from the side garage door to the barn and her studio.
Tom’s new gunmetal-gray Ford Raptor pickup was parked next to her Mercedes. Tom loved his pickup, and he’d explained to her that it cost $53,000—as much as a luxury car—but that because it was a pickup it didn’t raise as many eyebrows among the locals as a Mercedes or BMW would have. Candy herself didn’t mind being seen in the Mercedes that Tom had passed along to her. In fact, she reveled in it.
As she walked between her car and Tom’s truck, she noticed the pickup was covered with a thin layer of road dust and the tires were discolored by dried mud. This was out of character for Tom, who kept his vehicle immaculately clean.
She paused and peered over the bed well into the back. In the bed of his pickup were several sandbags and two gearboxes, plus a canvas duffel bag. She didn’t open any of them.
Candy was puzzled. She cast a glance at the door from the mudroom on the off-chance that Tom would open it and see her snooping, but he wasn’t there. Then she opened the truck’s rear door.
On the floor mats was a pair of lace-up hunting boots next to crumpled coveralls. Under the backseat on the floorboards was a stout oblong aluminum case that spanned the width of the cab. She recognized it as an expensive rifle case. Nicolas had had one for his prized big-game hunting rifle.
However, she couldn’t recall seeing this case before, although she knew Tom, like so many others in the area, enjoyed target shooting. He was also a big-game hunter and had several fine elk heads in the great room to show for it.
So when, she wondered, had he taken a break from his shift and gone to the range to blow off steam? Even if he hadn’t, she thought, he’d obviously taken the Raptor off-road recently. That he hadn’t mentioned either bugged her, and she made a mental note to ask him about it later. She’d do it in a gentle way that was not accusatory, because the last thing she wanted was for Tom to think of her as controlling or hectoring. He’d mentioned that those qualities had annoyed him greatly in his first wife.
Instead, she’d say that she’d learned to shoot in Alaska and she enjoyed it almost as much as she enjoyed four-wheeling. Perhaps Tom would like a couple’s date at the range?
It was so easy.
Then she fitted in her earbuds, launched her carefully curated playlist called Yoga Sounds, and went outside toward her studio sanctuary.
NINE
JOE ASKED NATE, “IF YOU WERE A MILITARY SNIPER WITH a designated target, where would you set up to take that shot?”
“Are you sure it was from this side of the river?” Nate asked back.
“No, not at all. But these foothills can be seen very clearly from the picture window of the Hewitt home, and the angle seems right, even though the sheriff dismissed the idea.”
Nate nodded that he understood.
They were rumbling along a rough two-track on the other side of the river in the WYDOT pickup. The path led to nowhere, but it paralleled the river and it was used primarily by fly fishermen. Across the river was a vast, flat, irrigated hayfield and beyond it was the green smudge of the Eagle Mountain Club.
It was a sunny and cool fall morning with no clouds. A slight breeze in the treetops along the river dislodged errant yellow leaves, which floated down and carpeted the old road or became small rafts in the current. Fall in the Rockies brought the widest swings in temperature at high elevations, with thirty-degree mornings climbing to the upper sixties or low seventies by midafternoon. Everyone dressed in layers and they were constantly stripping off clothing or adding it back on. Joe had started the morning with his uniform shirt, wool vest, and windproof outer shell. The shell was now discarded and crumpled on the seat between them. Nate wore a heavy hooded sweatshirt with yarak, inc. printed over one breast.
Joe had noted there was still plenty of law enforcement activity on the faraway golf course. Tiny commandeered golf carts moved in and out of the trees driven by cops completing their assigned grid searches. He wondered if Sheriff Kapelow had kept them at it the entire night, and he hoped not. And he doubted they’d found anything of significance, because there had been very little chatter on the mutual aid band from his handheld radio.
Nate didn’t answer the question Joe posed for a while. He’d rolled down the passenger-side window and stuck his head out of it so his blond hair blew back behind him. He studied the terrain on their right and measured it against the club on their left, looking for angles and locations.
“Daisy does the same thing,” Joe said. “She likes to stick her head out the window like that.”
Nate scowled, but didn’t respond.
Then, pointing up a steep hill on the side of the road, he said, “Here.”
The sagebrush-covered hills undulated from the riverbank all the way to the base of the mountains. The one Nate indicated rose the highest and, Joe assumed, afforded the greatest view of the river valley and the golf course in the distance.
“I don’t see a road to the top,” Nate said.
“If there was, I doubt this truck would make it,” Joe grumbled as he stopped and killed the engine. “We’ll need to hike.”
He climbed out and stretched and he could hear and feel his spine pop like muffled fireworks. His knees ached. He felt all of his fifty years.
Joe threw a daypack filled with a spare evidence kit over his back and cinched it tight for the climb.
*
HE’D BEGUN THE DAY five hours before at Duane Patterson’s Toyota 4Runner on the side of Four Mile Road. The county prosecutor had still been huddled on the floorboards when Joe arrived and shined his flashlight inside. Bits of glass in Patterson’s hair sparkled like diamonds. Duane was relieved to see him and he smiled grimly. There were trickles of blood on his face from cuts in his scalp, but he seemed okay.
Within minutes, Deputies Woods and Steck arrived in their SUVs, grateful for being released from their posts at the golf course. There were no other vehicles on the road or in the area, although Patterson said he thought he heard one start up and drive off right after his windshield exploded and he was on the floor. He hadn’t looked up to get a description of the car.
Patterson said that he often worked very late at the courthouse and that he took Four Mile Road to clear his head before returning to his small apartment downtown. He said he had no idea how the shooter knew when he’d arrive, but he guessed the rifleman had tracked his movements and set up to wait. At the moment the bullet had shattered the glass, he’d been fiddling with the radio dial, trying to find the all-night sports talk station he sometimes picked up on this stretch of road. If he hadn’t been bent over awkwardly to the right, the bullet would have likely hit him square in the face.
Steck helped Patterson into his vehicle and transported him to the Twelve Sleep County Memorial Hospital for observation. Joe and Woods remained on the scene until dawn, keeping a watchful eye out for the shooter if he decided to double back, which he didn’t do.
It was obvious to both of them how the incident had taken place. The stretch of Four Mile Road that Patterson had been driving on was a three-mile straightaway that led to the T-junction that was Highway 78. On the other side of the highway was a thick stand of cottonwoods approximately two hundred yards away, which were the only trees in sight. The shooter had obviously parked in the trees to set up
, and had waited for Patterson to drive down the road toward him.
It was a miracle that the shooter had missed and Patterson was still alive. The bullet had punched through the windshield directly above the steering wheel. The shooter had assumed he’d hit his target when Patterson careened off the road into the ditch. Why the gunman hadn’t followed up to make sure Patterson was dead was a mystery, Joe thought. Perhaps he’d been afraid of being seen by a passerby, or he had been so confident in his shot that he’d deemed it unnecessary.
Woods reported that Sheriff Kapelow and forensics tech Norwood were on their way and that the sheriff had warned Joe and Woods not to enter the trees and risk fouling the crime scene. No doubt, Joe thought, Kapelow’s hope was to find footprints, used food wrappers, or a spent casing.
Joe used that unnecessary warning as his excuse to drive away and leave Woods to deal with his boss.
*
HALFWAY UP THE HILLSIDE, Joe paused to get his breath back and to turn and look at the Eagle Mountain Club. In the distance, the line of homes including the Hewitt home was no more than a pale band set against the green of the grounds. He couldn’t make out individual structures, and the band undulated slightly in the heat waves as the temperature rose. Joe shook his backpack off and stuffed his vest into it for the rest of the way.
Nate had a sophisticated range finder around his neck and his weapon in a shoulder holster. Joe had found a spare set of binoculars in his office and brought them along as well.
“From here,” Nate said as he peered through his range finder, “we’re just short of a mile. Sixteen hundred yards, to be exact.”
“That’s a long way,” Joe said.
“It is. But it’s doable,” Nate said.
“Seriously?”
Nate nodded. “It’s right at the edge of the envelope for a special operator with the right weapon, but it’s a shot he would take.”