“Is Bud up there now?”
“Yes, he took the sheriff up there to the scene.” Joe nodded.
“What does this all mean?” Missy asked.
Joe was thinking the same thing. First moose, then cattle, now possibly a man.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “If what Bud says is true then we really have a problem on our hands.”
“No, not that,” Missy shook her head. “I meant in terms of Bud. We’re working on plans for the wedding, and I don’t want him to be distracted.” Joe looked at her and fought an urge to ask, Are you really Marybeth’s mother?
Instead, he stepped back from her as if she were radioactive. “How far is the body?” he asked.
With one exception, the scene was eerily similiar to the scene on the Hawkins Ranch. Just below an aspen grove and before the slope darkened with heavy pine, the two Sheriff ’s Department vehicles were there again, as well as a ranch pickup, no doubt driven by Bud Longbrake. The addition to the group was the lone four-wheel-drive ambulance from the Twelve Sleep County Hospital.
As he approached in his pickup, he could see a small crowd of men bending over something in knee-high sagebrush. Bud Longbrake, in a gray, wide-brimmed Stetson, looked up and waved to Joe. Barnum straightened up and glowered. Deputy McLanahan and two EMTs made up the rest of the group. One of the EMTs, a squat bruiser with a whisp of tawny facial hair, looked pale and distressed. While Joe pulled up next to the Longbrake truck and swung out, he saw the EMT turn quickly and retch into the brush behind him. The other EMT walked over to his colleague and led him away by the arm, apparently for some air.
“Joe,” Longbrake said.
“Bud.”
“Missy call you?” “Yup.”
“She all right?”
Joe paused for a beat. “Fine,” he said.
Barnum snorted and exchanged glances with McLanahan.
“What do we have?” Joe asked, stepping through the sagebrush. The ground was spongy and soft, except for the football-sized fists of granite that punched through it on the slope.
When he saw what the men were standing over, Joe stopped abruptly. Although he had seen hundreds of harvested game animals as well as the moose and cattle, he was not prepared for what was left of Tuff Montegue. The body lay on its back, legs askew. One arm was thrown out away from the body, as if caught making a sweeping gesture. For a moment, Joe thought that the other arm was missing, but then he realized it was actually broken and pinned beneath the trunk. Tuff was disemboweled; his blue-gray entrails blooming out of a foot-long hole in his abdomen like some kind of sea plant in the corral. His Wranglers had been pulled down to mid-thigh—Tuff had bone-white skin—and his genitals had been cut out, leaving a maroon-and-black oval. Huge chunks of clothing and flesh had been ripped from Tuff ’s thighs.
Tuff ’s face was gone. It had been removed from his jawbone to his high forehead. All that was left were obscenely grinning teeth, wide-open eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls, a shiny, white wishbone protrusion where his nose had been, and a mass of drying blood and muscle. There was also the smell; a light but potent stew of sweet-smelling sage, spilled blood, exposed entrails, and the half-digested breakfast of the squat EMT. Joe gagged and tried to swallow.
He turned away, closing his eyes tightly and trying to breathe steadily. He heard Barnum snort behind him.
“Something the matter, Joe?” Barnum asked.
Then, damn it, Joe could no longer fight the wave of nausea and he threw up his morning coffee onto the soft ground.
Joe was there for most of the morning, keeping his distance as the hillside was photographed, measured, and tied off with yellow crimescene tape wrapped around hastily driven T-posts. Additional deputies had arrived from Saddlestring, as well as a Wyoming highway patrolman who had heard the chatter on his radio.
Sheriff Barnum seemed more distressed than Joe had ever seen him, barking orders at his underlings and marching up and down the hillside with no apparent intent. Several times, he climbed into his Blazer and slammed the door to work the radio channels.
Bud Longbrake stood near Joe, leaning against the grille of his pickup. Longbrake was a large man, with wide shoulders, silver hair, and thick ears that stuck out almost at right angles from his temples. His face was weathered, his eyes sharp blue, his expression inscrutable. He wore a starched, white cowboy shirt and a silver belt buckle the size of a softball that celebrated an ancient rodeo win. Longbrake watched the procedures carefully but dispassionately, as if trying to guess the conclusions of the investigators before they announced them.
“I ain’t never seen a body in that shape before,” Longbrake told Joe after nearly an hour of silence.
“Nope.”
“I’ve seen calves hamstrung and gutted by coyotes while they were still alive, and I’ve seen a damn wolf eat the private parts out of a calf elk while the elk bawled for his mama, but I never seen a man like that.”
Joe nodded, agreeing. The EMTs were trying to slide Tuff ’s body into a body bag without any of his parts detaching. Joe looked away.
“I never knew a bear could do that to a man,” Longbrake said. It took Joe a moment, then he turned toward the rancher. “What did you just say?”
Longbrake shrugged. “I said I never heard of no grizzly making cuts like that.”
“Grizzly?”
“Didn’t Barnum tell you?”
