“Damned right,” Joe said.
Deputy Cook returned in a few minutes holding a printout. He closed the door behind him and sat down heavily in his chair.
“I don’t know if this is helpful or not,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me anyway.”
“You’ve got a number?” Harvey asked impatiently.
“Yup. But it’s not a local number like I thought it would be. The area code is 910.” He looked to Joe and Harvey to see if they recognized it. Both men shook their heads.
“Nine-one-oh,” Cook repeated. “I looked it up. The cell phone is from Fayetteville, North Carolina.”
“What?” Harvey said, his voice high-pitched. “We’ve got a guy from North Carolina driving around in the mountains at 4:30 a.m.?”
Joe tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t. He wrote the number down in his notebook.
“Maybe he’s one of those CBM guys,” Cook said. “They’re from all over. Is there natural gas in North Carolina? Or a company headquarters there?”
Harvey shrugged. “Arden, you need to follow up on this.”
“I’ll get on it right now,” Cook said. He asked Harvey if he could use two of the other deputies so they could work faster. Harvey agreed.
After Cook left, Harvey turned to Joe and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we’ve actually got something here.”
“It’s a start anyway. Will you call me when you’ve got a name?” Joe said, handing Harvey his card. “I’ll fill Robey in on what we’ve got so far.” “Which really, when you think of it, isn’t very damned much,” Harvey said. “But at least I’ve got my guys running around all excited, instead of sitting there reading the Pro Rodeo News.”
Joe stood, shook hands, and opened the door. Before he left, he remembered one of the questions he meant to ask when he arrived.
“You said Stuart Tanner owned an outfit called Tanner Engineering?” Harvey nodded. “Right, based out of Texas, but his family’s had a cabin up here for years, and he liked to stay there when his company was working in the area.”
“Do you know what Tanner Engineering was working on? Specifically?” While Harvey shuffled through the file, Joe recalled something from the day before. Tuff Montegue’s brother had said Tuff worked for “Turner Engineering.” Could it have been Tanner Engineering? Joe felt a twinge.
Harvey looked up after going through the file. “We don’t have anything on what he was doing here,” he said. “You know, I feel kind of stupid that we haven’t really pursued this angle. To be honest, we’ve been sort of waiting for something to break in Twelve Sleep County.”
That sounds about right, Joe thought.
“I’ve got to think about this,” Harvey said, as much to himself as to Joe. “If some bad guy killed and mutilated Stuart Tanner, did he also do all of the livestock? And the moose? And the cowboy? It doesn’t seem possible to me.”
Joe didn’t know what to say. But his mind was spinning.
Back in his pickup heading for Saddlestring, Joe called Marybeth at Logue Country Realty.
“Are things okay today?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, sounding more cheerful than he would have antici-pated. “Except Marie is sick again. I haven’t seen her in three days. I’m starting to get a little worried about her, Joe. I asked Cam how she was doing, and he said he thought she’d be back in later this week.”
“So you talked with Cam, huh?” he asked, feeling a surge of anger. “Of course I talked with him,” Marybeth said, admonishing Joe. “He’s my boss. Nothing was said about our conversation yesterday, and I think he’s a little ashamed of the whole thing. I’m not worried, Joe.”
“You’ll call me if something happens again, right?”
“Of course. But I can handle myself. I’m a big girl, and I’m smarter than hell.”
“That you are,” Joe said although he still felt like smashing his fist into Cam’s face.
“But that’s not the only reason why you’re calling, is it?” she teased. Man, she knew him well, he thought. “I was wondering if you would have any time to do some research. It can probably be done on the Internet and with a couple of calls.”
“Is something happening, Joe?” She sounded intrigued. “Maybe. But I’m not sure yet.”
“I can grab some time over lunch,” she said. “What do you need?”
“Do you have a pencil?”
It was late afternoon when the town of Saddlestring came into view. From the distance on the highway, it looked insignificant beneath the slumping shoulders of the Bighorn Mountains. Joe could see a few buildings poking out of young trees, the Twelve Sleep River as it serpentined through the valley and through the middle of town, and four shining rib-bons of highway that intersected within the tree-choked community.
He had tried to let his mind work during the drive back, to process what he had learned in Cody. He tried to think of what they might be overlooking that was sitting there right in front of them.
This was giving him a headache. But maybe this new information would sort itself out, start to fit into proper places.
Then something occurred to him. It was obvious, if risky. It could move the new track of the investigation forward, or screw it all up forever.
