road, Game Warden.”
“Deputy Reed filled me in on what was going on this morning,” Joe said. “I know you’re shorthanded until the state boys and the Feds show up.”
“He did, huh?” Sollis asked, as if Joe and Mike Reed’s conversation was proof of some kind of collusion.
Joe said, “Yup. You guys have a lot on your plate right now, and there’s two of us available.”
The sheriff snorted a response.
Joe ignored him and looked around. There was very little that stood out about the scene, Joe thought. The convenience store was still, the we’re closed sign propped in the window. Bad Bob’s blue Dodge pickup was parked on the side of the building where it always was, meaning he hadn’t driven it away. Two battered Dumpsters had been turned over behind the building and the contents inside scattered across the dirt. The concrete pad housing the gas pumps was dusty but not stained with blood.
Joe said, “I was wondering if you’d talked to the folks at the school. They seem to know everything that’s happening on the res.” He was thinking in particular of Alice Thunder, who had her finger on the pulse of the community and was supposed to be gone, according to Nate.
“We really don’t need your help with real police work,” Sollis said. “Aren’t there some fishermen you can go out and harass?”
“Not many,” Joe said. “Most folks are hunting by now.”
Joe was struck by McLanahan’s demeanor. He was usually blustery and sarcastic, roiling the calm with quaint and colorful cowboy sayings. But he looked gaunt, and the dark circles under his eyes were pronounced. This whole thing-the murders, the disappearance of Bad Bob, the upcoming election-was getting to him, Joe thought. There were many times in the past when Joe would have paid to see the sheriff in such pain. But for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this wasn’t one of them.
Joe said, “Bob is kind of a renegade. He might show up.”
“You think we don’t know that?” McLanahan said. “Do you think we want to…” But he caught himself before he finished the sentence.
“Get a move on, the both of you,” Sollis said. “We’re busy here, and you’re interfering with a crime scene.”
“A crime scene, is it?” Joe said.
“You heard him,” McLanahan growled. Joe noted that when the sheriff was truly angry, the West Virginia accent he once had and now suppressed poked through.
“Hey,” Luke Brueggemann said to the sheriff, gesturing toward Joe. “He’s just trying to help. He spends a hell of a lot more time out here than you people do, and he’s a lot more effective. Maybe you ought to listen to what he has to say.”
Joe raised his eyebrows in surprise. Sollis glared and squared his feet as if bracing for a fight. McLanahan turned his attention from Joe to the trainee.
“Who in the hell are you?”
“Name’s Luke Brueggemann.”
McLanahan let the name sit there. After a moment, he shook his head and said to Joe, “Get him out of here. He ain’t no older than my grandson, and even stupider, if possible.”
Joe hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and rocked on his boot heels. He nodded and said, “I guess you’re right. We’ve got fishermen to harass.”
He turned and put his hand on Brueggemann’s shoulder as he walked past. Brueggemann gave Sollis a belligerent nod and the sheriff an eye roll before turning and walking with Joe toward their truck.
“What was that about?” Joe whispered.
“They piss me off,” Brueggemann said. “They’ve got no good reason to act like that.”
“The county sheriff has jurisdiction in his county,” Joe said. “We can assist if asked, but he can say no.”
“That guy needs a lot of help, if you ask me. And I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.”
“Welcome to game warden school,” Joe said, a smile tugging on the corners of his mouth.
As he opened the door to his truck, McLanahan called after him, “And you can tell your friend Nate we’re going to find his ass and put him away.”
Joe and Luke Brueggemann stood in front of the counter in the principal’s office of Wyoming Indian High School, waiting for the principal, Ann Shoyo, to conclude a phone conversation. She held a slim finger in the air to indicate it would be only a few more seconds.
She was native, well dressed, and attractive, with a long mane of jet-black hair that curled over her shoulders. He noted the pin on her lapel, a horizontal piece that had a red wild rose on one side and a flag with parallel red and black bars on a field of white on the other side. The pin represented the two nations on the reservation: the rose was the symbol of the Eastern Shoshone, and the flag was the Northern Arapaho.
Ann Shoyo sat back and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I’d like to talk to Alice myself,” she said. “But she hasn’t come in for two days. I would really like to talk to Alice.”
Joe quickly fished a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Please call me if she shows up or if you hear anything,” he said.
“Not good news,” Joe said to Brueggemann as they approached the pickup.
His cell phone burred and he retrieved it from his pocket. Deputy Mike Reed calling.
“Joe,” Reed said, “I’ve hit a brick wall. Pam Kelly isn’t here, and her stock is going crazy, kicking the fences all to hell and screaming at me.”
Joe could hear braying and anguished bleats in the background.
Reed said, “They act like they haven’t been fed for a couple of days.”
“Did you look inside the house?” Joe asked.
“I looked in through the windows, is all. I’ve got no probable cause for going in, although I might just make something up. I wonder if she did herself in, considering she lost her husband and her son?”
Joe paused for a moment, then said, “That doesn’t sound like her. She’s too mean.”
“I’ll keep looking,” Reed said. “I’ll let you know if I find her. But this place gives me the creeps, and I’ve got a real bad feeling about it.”
Joe understood. He felt the same way as they turned into the rough driveway off Black Coal Road that led to the back of Alice Thunder’s home. Her GMC wasn’t parked on the side, which gave him an ounce of hope.
“Give me a minute,” Joe said to Brueggemann as the trainee reached for his door handle. “I’ll be right back.”
Brueggemann shrugged a whatever shrug.
Joe realized as he walked up Alice’s broken concrete path that something was amiss. It was when he rapped on her back door that he realized what it was: no dogs. Every time he’d ever been there, her little dogs put up a cacophony and she’d have to push them aside to get to the door.
She wasn’t home, and the dogs were silent.
He thought: Bad Bob, Pam Kelly, and now Alice Thunder. His chest tightened, and he took several deep breaths as he stepped back and pulled out his phone. He was surprised to see he had a message from Marybeth. Apparently, she’d called while he spoke to Mike Reed and he’d missed it.
He punched the button to retrieve it.
Her voice was tense. “I’m frustrated. I’ve looked everywhere-every database I have access to. John Nemecek doesn’t exist,” she said.
He thought: Yes, he does.
17
The next morning, in the long cold shadow of the sawtoothed Teton Range in the mountains outside of Victor, Idaho, Nate Romanowski smeared a tarry mixture of motor oil and road dirt below his eyes, across his forehead, and over his cheeks. The morning sun had not yet broken over the top of the mountains. Light frost
