Sheridan, and Lucy, and you.”
“Marybeth, I . . .”
“It’s just another setback. No one said this would be easy.” Joe felt awful. “I wish I were as tough as you are,” he said.
She smiled again, and pinched his cheek. “You’re better than tough, Joe. You’re good. I’ll stick with good.”
30
His mind and emotions on edge , Joe spent the rest of the morning patrolling the breaklands and foothills close to town, checking hunters for licenses. He did his job mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere. The few hunters in the field were clean, and in every camp someone asked him about the mutilations. He found himself getting irritated with the entire subject.
Throughout the morning, he checked messages on his cell phone and home telephone, hoping to hear from Hersig, Ike, or Sheriff Harvey.
He decided to push things along, if for no other reason than to see if anyone pushed back, or panicked. He’d start at the county clerk’s.
ke Easter, Millie, and the two other clerks were assembled around a conference table covered with dozens of old file boxes and stacks of files that smelled of age and dampness when Joe entered the county clerk’s office.
If his reception that morning was cold, this time it was something out of the Ice Age. The three clerks and Ike had hard scowls and dirt-smudged clothing.
“There he is,” Millie said as Joe let the door wheeze shut behind him. “Here I am,” Joe said, looking at Ike. “Find it?”
Ike looked harried. Joe suspected that Ike had been abused for most of the day by his clerks as they searched the archives.
“Good timing,” Ike said to Joe, raising a file into the air. “I’ve got something for you, but it’s kind of a puzzlement.”
Joe followed Ike into his office.
“Thanks for your hard work,” Joe told the clerks as he passed them. “We really appreciate this.”
Millie held his gaze for a moment, then rolled her eyes heavenward. Ike fell into his chair and pushed the file across the desk to Joe. Joe noted that the tab on the file said “Overstreet” and was followed by the physical coordinates of the tract.
“Take a look,” Ike said.
Joe opened the file. Inside was a clean copy of a deed and title originally made out to Mr. Walter Overstreet in 1921. An amendment was added in 1970, when additional acreage—the Logue property—was added to the document. Joe thumbed through the paperwork, then looked up at Ike for some kind of interpretation.
“Everything’s there and in perfect order,” Ike said. “Except for two things. One, there’s no record of the OG&M. It should have been attached to the document. Second, it’s a duplicate of the original deed.”
Joe shook his head. “What’s that mean?”
Ike shrugged. “As far as the OG&M lease goes, that could just be an error. We find plenty of those in these old files. It’s not that big of a problem, because I can request a copy from the state easy enough . . .”
“How soon?”
Ike looked at his watch, mumbled “they’ll kill me,” before calling Millie on the intercom and asking her to contact Cheyenne ASAP and have them fax a copy of the lease to the office. Joe didn’t even turn around to see what kind of furor Ike’s request had set in motion.
“What else?” Joe asked.
“Look at the deed in your hands, Joe.”
Joe did. He saw nothing unusual about it. It had been typed, probably with a manual typewriter, on a deed form decades before. He looked at the dates and description and could see no alterations.
“It’s a clean copy of the original,” Ike said. “It’s all pretty and nice. It’s not a carbon copy, which is what they used in those days. It’s a modern machine copy.”
Joe felt a twitch in his scalp. “So somebody made the copy recently.” “That’s what it looks like to me. The copy was made while it was still in the archives, for some reason, and the file was put back in the old box. We probably wouldn’t have ever even noticed it if we weren’t looking for this particular file on this particular day.”
Joe looked up. “How many people had access to the archives, then?” Ike raised his eyebrows. “All of us. The sheriff ’s deputies who transferred them. The old county clerk, of course. And the new owners of the old county clerk’s home, where the files were kept.”
“Cam Logue,” Joe said. “And the sheriff.”
“Maybe,” Ike said, “but there’s no crime here. There’s nothing wrong with making a copy of a deed.”
“What about taking the mineral rights lease terms?” Joe asked.
“Also not a crime,” Ike said. “Why do you ask?”
As Joe got up to leave, he asked Ike to call him on his cell phone as soon as the fax from Cheyenne showed up. Ike followed him to the door.
Joe thanked the clerks again, and one of them actually smiled back. “Joe, can I ask you a favor?” Ike said.
“Of course.”
“It’s going to take me a while to get the office cleaned up after all of this.” He gestured to the table and the
