later, he heard a boy say, “Hey, Dad, look over here. It’s that damned game warden everyone’s looking for.”
He is mad past recovery, but yet he has luci intervals.
ON THE THIRD DAY OF HIS STAY IN THE BILLINGS HOSPITAL, after he’d been moved out of the intensive care unit, Joe awoke to find a tall, thin man in ill-fitting clothes—white dress shirt, open collar, loose tie, overlarge sports jacket—hovering near the foot of his bed. The man had world-weary brown eyes and a thin neck rising like a cornstalk out of the gaping collar of his shirt. His hair was light brown, peppered with silver. A pair of smudged reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck. Joe got the immediate impression the man was or had been in law enforcement. His aura of legal bureaucracy was palpable. He said, “Joe Pickett? I’m Bobby McCue, DCI.”
Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation.
McCue reached into his jacket with long spidery fingers and came out with a shiny black wallet, which he flipped open to reveal a badge. Just as quickly, and before Joe could focus on the shield or credential card, he snapped it shut and slid it back inside his coat.
“I read the statement you gave the sheriff down in Carbon County,” McCue said. “I was hoping I could ask you a few more questions just to clarify some things. We’re trying to fill in some of the gaps.”
“What gaps?” Joe raised his eyebrows, which elicited a sharp pain where they’d removed the shotgun pellet behind his ear and stitched it closed. The skin on his face seemed pulled tight from scalp to chin and ear to ear, and it hurt to do much more than blink his eyes.
“Nothing major,” McCue said. “You know how this works.”
“I should by now, yes.”
Joe had already given statements to Carbon County Sheriff Ron Baird, Baggs Police Department Chief Brian Lally, his departmental supervisor, and the Game and Fish Department investigator assigned to the case. Although Joe had absolutely no reason to lie about anything, he was concerned there could be contradictions or problems if all the statements were compared. Each investigator had asked basically the same questions but in different ways, and Joe had no control or approval over what they wrote down when he answered. Even though what had happened in the mountains was clear in his mind, it was possible that his statements, when laid side-by-side, might not completely jibe. It was the nature of the game, and one played—sometimes unfairly—by investigators, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. Joe had played it himself. So he knew to be alert and careful each time he was questioned. He couldn’t afford to be sloppy or offhand. He wished he could recall more of the interrogation by Baird immediately after he’d been rescued, when his head was still cloudy with exhaustion and his wounds were fresh. He hoped he hadn’t said something he’d come to regret.
“Mind if I borrow this?” McCue said, gesturing toward Joe’s tray table.
“Fine.”
McCue nodded man-to-man to Joe, slid the tray table toward himself, and opened a manila folder on top of it. He fitted the glasses to his eyes, then slid them as far down his nose as they would go before they fell off. Joe was distracted by how cloudy the lenses were.
“Just a couple of questions,” McCue said, peeling back single pages within the file. Joe recognized them as copies of the original sheriff’s department statement given to Ron Baird.
“About the Brothers Grim . . .”
“They prefer ‘the Grim Brothers,’ ” Joe said.
McCue looked over his lenses at Joe appraisingly. “They do, do they?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, then. Caleb, the first one you encountered at that lake. It says here he gave you permission to look through his possessions.”
Said Joe, “Yes, and when I think back on it, I don’t know why he did. He must have known he didn’t have a fishing license, which is all I wanted to check on. But, yes, he let me look through his bag.”
McCue placed a bony finger on a dense paragraph of text. “It says here he had a variety of items in the pack.”
“Yes.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I thought I had.”
McCue nodded and read from the statement, “‘The subject’s daypack contained several items, including a water container, a knife, a diary, half of a Bible, and an iPod and holder.” He looked up e xpectantly.
“I think that was pretty much it,” Joe said, trying to recall all the contents. “There were some matches and some string I think, also. Oh, and there wasn’t the iPod itself, just the holder. I’m pretty sure I made that clear to the sheriff, but he must have misunderstood me.”
