counter.
“Wow,” the man said, “I didn’t see you pull in.”
Joe smiled. “It gets lonely here, huh?”
The ranger, whose name tag said B. Stevens, nodded. “You’re the first people here today. It gets real slow this late in the season.”
B. Stevens hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and hadn’t combed his hair that morning. He was the polar opposite of the spit-shined James Langston Joe had met that morning.
Demming took over, telling Stevens they were following up on the murders, that Joe was with the State of Wyoming and she was providing assistance. While they talked, Joe flipped through the guest register, going back to July 21.
“Stevens was working that morning,” Demming told Joe. “He was here when Clay McCann checked in.”
“I was here when he came back too,” Stevens said with unmistakablepride. “He put his guns right here on this counter and told me what he’d done. That’s when I called for backup.”
Joe nodded, asked Stevens to recall the morning. Stevens told the story without embellishment, replicating the chain of events Joe had studied in the incident reports.
“When he checked in before going on his hike,” Joe asked, “did you see any weapons on him?”
Stevens said he didn’t, McCann must have left them in his car. What struck him, though, was how McCann was dressed, “like he’d just taken all of his clothes out of the packages. Most of the people we see down here are hard-core hikers or fishermen.They don’t look so. . neat.”
“He didn’t seem nervous or jumpy?”
“No. He just seemed. . uncomfortable. Like he was out of his element, which he was, I guess.”
“Can you remember how much time he spent signing in? Did he do it quickly, or did it take a few minutes?”
Stevens scratched his head. “I just can’t recall. No one’s asked me that before. He didn’t make that much of an impressionon me. The first time he was in here, I mean. When he came back with those guns, that’s what I remember.”
“Can I get a copy of this page he signed in on?”
Stevens shot a look at Demming, said, “We don’t have a copy machine here. We’ve been requesting one for years, but headquarters won’t give us one.”
“Bureaucracy,” Demming mumbled.
Joe asked if he could borrow the register and send it back, and the ranger agreed.
“We can’t even get a phone line,” Stevens said. “In order to call out we use radios or cell phones that get a signal about an hour a day, if that.”
Joe said, “Does this entrance have a camera set up at the borderlike the others?”
Stevens laughed. “We have a camera,” he said, “but it hasn’t worked for a few years. We’ve requested a repairman, but. .”
“We were thinking of hiking to the crime scene,” Joe said. “Is it straight down that trail out there?”
“We were?” Demming asked, slightly alarmed.
Stevens nodded. “There’s a fork in the trail right off, but it’s well marked.” The ranger hesitated. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yup.”
Stevens looked at Demming, then back at Joe. “Be damned careful. This area has become pretty well known with all of the publicity. They call it the Zone of Death once you cross the line into Idaho. Lots more people show up here than they used to. Some of them get as far as the border but chicken out and come back giggling. But others are just plain scary-looking. The Zone draws them, I guess. They want to be in a place with no law. It’s not my idea of a good time, but we can’t stop them from walkinginto it if they’ve paid their fee and signed in. Personally, I think we ought to close the trail until the situation is resolved, or everybody just forgets about what happened.”
Demming asked, “Are there people in there now?”
Stevens shrugged. “It’s hard to say. More folks have signed in than have come out. Of course, the stragglers could have gone on from here, or come back after we’re closed. But you never know. Our rangers are a little reluctant to patrol in there now, if you know what I mean. They’re afraid of getting am-bushedby somebody who thinks they can’t ever be prosecuted for it.”
“You’re right,” Demming said. “We should close the trail.”
“We’ll be okay in a few weeks,” Stevens said, “when the snow comes. We’ve had twelve feet by Halloween in the past. That’ll give us the winter to make our case.”
Joe thanked Stevens and left with Demming. “Why did you take the register?” Demming asked.
Joe showed her the page with Clay McCann’s name on it. Above his name were signatures from the day before for R. Hoening, J. McCaleb, C. Williams, and C. Wade. They listed their destination as “Nirvana.”
Joe said, “If he wanted to make sure they were here, all he had to do was read the register.”
As they stood near the Yukon they both looked at the trailhead,as if it were calling to them.
“I don’t know, Joe. .” Demming said cautiously.
“I want to see the crime scene,” Joe said. “It’ll help me get my bearings. You can wait for me here if you want.”
She thought about it for a few seconds, looking from Joe to the trailhead and back before saying, “I’m going with you.”
The sign at the fork in the trail indicated it was thirty miles to Old Faithful to the right, two miles to Robinson Lake on the left. The trail on the right fork was more heavily traveled. They went left.
The forest closed in around them. Because there was no plan or program to clear brush in the park, the floor of the timber on both sides of the trail was thick and tangled with rotting deadfall.Joe was struck by how “un- Yellowstone-like” this part of the park was. There were no geysers or thermal areas, and they’d seen no wildlife. Only thick, lush vegetation and old-growthtrees. He studied the surface of the trail as he hiked, looking for fresh tracks either in or out, and stopped at a mud hole to study a wide Vibram-soled footprint.
“Someone’s been in here recently,” he said.
“Great,” Demming whispered.
There was no delineation sign or post to indicate where they crossed the Idaho border. Joe assumed they had because the line, according to his map, was less than two hundred yards from the ranger station and they’d gone much farther than that. The trail meandered at a slight decline, but it was easy walking.
He heard it before he saw it.
“Boundary Creek,” Joe whispered. They were now in the Zone of Death.
Joe felt his senses heighten as they crossed the creek, which was wider and more impressive than he’d guessed from looking at the map. He hopped from rock to rock, spooking brook trout that sunned in calm pools, their forms shooting across the sandy bottom like dark sparks. On the other side, as they pushed fartherinto the trees, he tried to will his ears to hear better and his eyes to sharpen. His body tingled, and he felt, for the first time in months, back in his element.
Robinson lake was rimmed with swamp except for the far side where trees formed a northern stand. The trail skirted the lake on the right and curled around it to the trees where, Joe guessed, the campers had set up their tents and been murdered. As they walked, he tried to put himself into Clay McCann’s head. How far away did he see their tents? Where did he encounterHoening? Did he smell their campfire, hear them talkingbefore he got there?
As they approached the stand of trees and an elevated, grassy flat that had to be where the camp was located, Joe heard Demming unsnap her holster behind him. She was as jumpy as he was.
The camp had been cleared months before but the fire ring revealed the center of it. Logs had been dragged from the timberto sit on around the fire. Tiny pieces of plasticized foil in the grass indicated where a camper-or Clay McCann-had opened a package of snacks.
In the campsite, Joe turned and surveyed the trail they had taken. From the camper’s perspective, they must have seen McCanncoming. There was no way he snuck up on them unless they were distracted or oblivious, which was possible. Since Williams had been found near the fire ring and McCaleb and Wade had been killed coming out of their tent, he assumed McCannwas literally in the camp before he started shooting. So was Hoening, whose body was found on the trail, the first or last to die? Again it struck him that the sequence of events really didn’t matter.
