Back of Beyond

“I don’t know whether I’m relieved or pissed,” Cody said. “Because our best angle just got shut down.”

“Yeah, it sucks. My cop radar never went off once talking with any of them. They all were helpful and they sounded sincere.”

“Maybe it was Edna,” Cody said, his voice dropping into his conspiratorial rhythm. “Maybe she was banging Hank and something went wrong.”

“Or maybe it was you,” Larry said. “Can you account for your whereabouts that night?”

This is what they did, Cody thought. Cop-talk. But maybe there was a hint of curiosity in Larry’s question. In fact, he thought, he had no alibi. He’d been out driving, driving, driving. There was no one to confirm where he’d been.

“Tying flies,” Cody said, thinking of what his son was doing.

“You’re lying. You need steady hands for that.”

“Come and get me, flatfoot,” Cody said. Actually, he did tie flies. He’d tied two hundred-caddis, hoppers, Adams, stimulators, tricos, nymphs-in the last two months when he wasn’t driving aimlessly around the county. “Did you hear anything from your IT folks?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. They were able to access part of the hard drive but not all of it. The bad news is no e-mails were found. None. So we’re screwed on that front. But remember you asked me about the history in his browser? Which Web sites he’d been on?”

Cody said yes. He was starting to feel a tingle just by the way Larry was setting it up.

“They’re faxing me printouts and I don’t have them yet, but they said most of the sites he visited were from a week before, apparently before he went on his trip to Salt Lake. News, weather, Drudge, ESPN, no porno or weird shit. But the most recent site he visited was at nine on the night he died.”

Cody waited. Finally: “Was your guy an outdoorsman?”

“Not really,” Cody said. “I remember him talking about hunting, but my impression was it was way back. He didn’t fish because I offered to tie him some flies and he didn’t want any. Why are you asking?”

“Because the last site he visited was for an outfitter.”

Cody heard Larry shuffling papers. “Okay, got it. It was for something called Jed McCarthy’s Wilderness Adventures. I don’t know what the hell they do, but I’d guess hunting trips. I’m in the cruiser right now going back to the office after dinner so I haven’t been able to look it up.”

Cody scribbled down the name. “Thanks, man. I’ll check ’em out, too.”

“Hey, did you hear Skeeter held a press conference from his bed in the hospital?”

“No.”

“Called you a ‘rogue cop.’” Larry laughed. “The spin has already begun.”

“Great.”

“In his version, a shadowy creep jumped around the side of the crime scene brandishing a weapon and he fired instinctively to protect himself and the reporter. He said he wants you fired.”

Cody said, “You’re right. I should have gone for a head shot.”

“Next time,” Larry said.

* * *

The Google search took two seconds and Cody brought the site up: Jed McCarthy’s Wilderness Adventures. “Wilderness Adventures” was in a bold frontier font and the name of the owner/outfitter was in script across the top at an angle, indicating to Cody the name of the company was a well-established brand if Jed himself was not.

The site was clean and well organized, unlike many of the local productions he’d seen where a fishing guide, dude ranch, or lodge owner hired his granddaughter to throw something up on the Web. The Wilderness Adventures site had a menu including Day Rides, Pack Trips, Multi-Day Adventures, Photos, Fly-Fishing, Rates, Booking, Maps, Virtual Tour, on and on. Even an online booking form. He clicked on “Pack Trips” and read through pages of text accompanied by stunning photos of Yellowstone Park. It turned out Jed McCarthy was one of the few outfitters licensed by the National Park Service to provide long excursions into Yellowstone, and McCarthy took every available opportunity to point it out.

He accessed the calendar page. There were a dozen or so different trips, leaving on different dates. He wished Larry would have told him if the IT guys had isolated Hank’s browsing history to a specific trip, or whether Hank was simply looking at the home page.

But it just didn’t seem right.

Cody recalled the hours he had spent talking with Hank. They had discussed their failures and their dreams together. He couldn’t recall Hank ever saying he wanted to ride a horse into the backcountry, or go on a long wilderness trip, or anything similar. Although Hank obviously liked the mountains-that’s why he bought his cabin there-he recalled Hank once saying he’d already spent more than enough time roughing it when he was a marine.

Which led to a new possibility in the murder scenario Cody had put together earlier.

Maybe it wasn’t Hank who was going on the trip, he thought. Maybe it was his guest. Maybe the guest was showing Hank where he was headed next after leaving Helena. And as Hank read the screen, the visitor slipped behind him and hit him in the head with something…

“Shit,” Cody said, his mind swimming. Thinking, which trip? There were so many of them…

He flashed through them. Snake River. Geysers and Explorers. Slough Creek. Hoodoo Basin Progressive Pack Trip. Lower Falls Adventure. Lamar River. Electric Peak and Beyond.

Then he brought up the calendar again.

“Ah,” he said, and it all became clear. Cody had assumed Jed McCarthy had an army of guides and employees and trips going everywhere at once. But the calendar showed only June, July, August, and September. Within those months, three-, four-, five-, and seven-day blocks were marked out and color-coded by which trip was scheduled then. The trips didn’t overlap. So what appeared to be the deal was McCarthy and his people took a group out for three or four days and returned to the base camp. A few days later, he led another trip. One after the other from the last week of May through mid-September, the trips bookended by melting snow on one end and flying snow on the other.

He clicked on the link that said “Meet Our Guides.” There were two of them. Jed McCarthy wore a big cowboy hat and a silk scarf and in the photo he was striking a manly pose. There was also a nice-looking woman named Dakota Hill, who was pictured with a horse. She looked young enough to be Jed McCarthy’s daughter.

* * *

His phone rang and he snatched it up. Larry.

“I’m looking at that Web site…”

“So am I,” Cody said. “I’ve got a question-did the IT folks fax you the specific page he was looking at? I mean, was it a specific trip?”

“It was the home page,” Larry said. “But Hank had been looking at a bunch of the pages previous to that in the last ten minutes before. ‘What to Bring,’ ‘Menus,’ ‘Interactive Maps.’ He was really scoping out this Web site. Which makes me think Hank was either doing some research or planning to go on a trip.”

“That doesn’t sound right to me,” Cody said. “It could be a side of Hank I never saw, but it doesn’t ring true. If this was the kind of thing he was into we should have found camping gear, saddles, a sleeping bag, that sort of thing. I don’t remember any outdoor gear at all, do you?”

“It could have burned up in the fire,” Larry said, but not with much conviction. “And besides, how do we know he wasn’t just checking out the site? Maybe thinking about it for some other year? There’s nothing we’ve got that suggests he was planning a trip this summer.”

Cody shook his head. “I’m not buying. Think about it. He buys dinner to cook, rushes home to greet his guest. He’s been gone for days. But instead of unpacking completely or getting dinner ready, he sits in his den and bounces around on the Internet? Does that make sense to you?”

“No.”

“But what if it was his guest?” Cody said. “What if the killer was showing Hank where he was going next?”