McCall had lived her whole life here in the shadow of the Little Rockies and the darker shadow of the Winchester family.
As she started to step around the grave washed out by last night’s rainstorm, the sun caught on something stuck in the mud.
She knelt down to get a better look and saw the corner of a piece of orange plastic sticking out of the earth where the bones had been buried.
McCall started to reach for it, but stopped herself long enough to swing up the camera and take two photographs, one a close-up, one of the grave with the corner of the plastic visible.
Using a small stick, she dug the plastic packet from the mud and, with a start, saw that it was a cover given out by stores to protect hunting and fishing licenses.
McCall glanced at Rocky’s retreating back, then carefully worked the hunting license out enough to see a name.
Trace Winchester.
Her breath caught in her throat but still she must have made a sound.
“You say somethin’?” Rocky called back.
McCall shook her head, pocketing the license with her father’s name on it. “No, just finishing up here.”
Chapter Two
Inside her patrol pickup, McCall radioed the sheriff’s department. “Looks like Rocky was right about the bones being human,” she told the sheriff when he came on the line.
“Bring them in and we’ll send them over to Missoula to the crime lab. Since you’re supposed to be off shift, it can wait till tomorrow if you want. Don’t worry about it.”
Sheriff Grant Sheridan sounded distracted, but then he had been that way for some time now.
McCall wondered idly what was going on with him. Grant, who was a contemporary of her mother’s, had taken over the job as sheriff in Whitehorse County after the former sheriff, Carter Jackson, resigned to ranch with his wife Eve Bailey Jackson.
McCall felt the muddy plastic in her jacket pocket. “Sheriff, I—” But she realized he’d already disconnected. She cursed herself for not just telling him up front about the hunting license.
What was she doing?
Withholding evidence.
She waited until Rocky left before she got the small shovel and her other supplies from behind her seat and walked back over to the grave. The wind howled around her like a live animal as she dug in the mud that had once been what she now believed was her father’s grave, taking photographs of each discovery and bagging the evidence.
She found a scrap of denim fabric attached to metal buttons, a few snaps like those from a Western shirt and a piece of leather that had once been a belt.
Her heart leaped as she overturned something in the mud that caught in the sunlight. Reaching down, she picked it up and cleaned off the mud. A belt buckle.
Not just any belt buckle she saw as she rubbed her fingers over the cold surface to expose the letters, W I N C H E S T E R.
The commemorative belt buckle was like a million others. It proved nothing.
Except that when McCall closed her eyes, she saw her father in the only photograph she had of him. He stood next to his 1983 brand-new black Chevy pickup, his Stetson shoved back to expose his handsome face, one thumb hooked in a pocket of his jeans, the other holding his rifle, the one her mother said had belonged to his grandfather. In the photo, the sun glinted off his commemorative Winchester rifle belt buckle.
She opened her eyes and, picking up the shovel, began to dig again, but found nothing more. No wallet. No keys. No boots.
The larger missing item was his pickup, the one in the photograph. The one he allegedly left town in. Had he been up here hunting? She could only assume so, since according to her mother, the last time she saw Trace was the morning of opening day of antelope season—and his twentieth birthday.
Along with the hunting license, she’d found an unused antelope tag.
But if he’d been hunting, then where was his rifle, the one her mother said he had taken the last time she saw him?
McCall knew none of this proved absolutely that the bones were her father’s. No, that would require DNA results from the state crime lab, which would take weeks if not months.
She stared at the grave. If she was right, her father hadn’t left town. He’d been buried on the edge of this ridge for the past twenty-seven years.
The question was who had buried him here?
Someone who’d covered up Trace Winchester’s death and let them all believe he’d left town.
Her hands were shaking as she boxed up the bones and other evidence—all except the license still in her coat pocket—and hiked back to her rig. Once behind the wheel, she pulled out the plastic case and eased out the license and antelope tag.
The words were surprisingly clear after almost thirty years of being buried in the mud since the plastic had protected the practically indestructible paper.
Name: Trace Winchester. Age: 19. Eyes: dark brown. Hair: Black. Height: 6 ft 3 inches. Weight: 185.
He’d listed his address as the Winchester Ranch, which meant when he’d bought this license he hadn’t eloped with her mother yet or moved into the trailer on the edge of Whitehorse.
There was little information on the license, but McCall had even less. Not surprising, her mother, Ruby Bates Winchester, never liked talking about the husband who’d deserted her.
Most of what McCall had learned about her father had come from the rumors that circulated around the small Western town of Whitehorse. Those had portrayed Trace Winchester as handsome, arrogant and spoiled rotten. A man who’d abandoned his young wife, leaving her broke and pregnant, never to be seen again.
According to rumors, there were two possible reasons for his desertion. Trace had been caught poaching—not his first time—and was facing
