Mrs. Hanson excused herself, telling Lucy, “It was great to see you, Lucy, but sometimes the teacher needs even more education,if you can believe that.”
When the Hansons were gone, Marybeth looked suspiciouslyfrom Joe to Nate and asked, “What are you two smiling about?”
The image that would stay with Joe as he glanced into the bar after paying for dinner was Mr. and Mrs. Hanson’s bloodless,horrified expressions as Doomsayer wagged his finger in their faces.
As they walked back to their cabin, Nate dropped back from Joe and Marybeth and asked Sheridan and Lucy if they’d like to go hot-potting.
“With swimsuits,” Nate added, for Marybeth’s benefit.
Joe watched his older daughter carefully. Nate and Sheridan had once been master falconer and apprentice, but the relationshiphad severed. There had been a time, two years before, when Sheridan announced quite clearly that she didn’t care if she ever saw Nate Romanowski ever again. Nate tried to apologize to her for his transgressions but she’d hear none of it. Nate let it ride, biding his time. Now he was asking her and her sister to join him.
“What’s hot-potting?” Lucy asked.
Nate said, “It’s like sitting in a hot tub outside, only this hot tub is natural.”
“Isn’t it illegal?” Marybeth asked.
“Yes,” Nate said.
Joe nudged his wife, and she got it. Nate was not only mendingfences with Sheridan, he was working it so Joe and Marybethcould have some time alone together.
“I’ve got a new pink suit,” Lucy said. “I was hoping I could use it. Sheridan, you brought yours, right?”
Sheridan hesitated. “Yes.”
“Can we go?” Lucy asked.
“As long as you don’t get thrown in the Yellowstone jail,” Joe said.
“So let me get this straight,” Sheridan said. “It’s legal to shoot and kill people in Yellowstone Park, but it’s against the rules to pick up a rock or go hot-potting?”
“You’ve got it,” Nate said. “Thus begins your enlightenment and understanding of our federal government.”
Marybeth laughed nervously, started to object, but again Joe nudged her.
“Don’t be gone long,” Marybeth said.
“Okay,” Sheridan said, sighing, “I’ll go.”
As they left the cabin, Sheridan paused at the door, rolled her eyes at her parents, and sighed again before leaving.
“She knows,” Marybeth said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Joe assured her.
“Yes,” Marybeth said, “she does.”
Their lovemaking was furious and seemed dangerously illicit, as they kept expecting a knock on the locked cabin door when the hot-potters returned. Both feared either Sheridan or Lucy asking, “What are you two
As usual, Joe overestimated his staying power and was up, dressed, and scanning the entrance gate videotapes when Nate and his daughters returned.
27
While sheridan and lucy got ready for bed in the cabin, Joe and Nate sat outside under the porch light sipping bourbon and smoking Cuban cigars Nate dispensed from a box beneath the seat of his Jeep labeled “Fuses and Toilet Paper.”
“I’ve never smoked a Cuban cigar before,” Joe said, marveling at its fruit-tinged smoothness. “I think I could get used to ’em.”
“Don’t,” Nate said. “They’re illegal.”
“Quintero Brevas,” Joe said, reading the label of his cigar, “Habana.”
“Yup.”
“I’m not going to ask how you got them,” Joe said. “Just like I’m not going to ask you what you do to make a living.”
“Wiser that way,” Nate said, nodding in agreement, the red cherry of the cigar bobbing in the dark. “That way you’ve got plausible deniability. You need that. You’re a man of the law. At least you used to be. I’m not exactly sure what you are now.”
“I’m beginning to wonder that myself.”
'Governor Rulon’s private detective,” Nate said. “Range Rider Number One.”
While nate read over the thick printouts Marybeth had brought from her Internet search, Joe fast-forwarded through the entrance gate videotapes on his laptop from the East, Northeast,and South gates, looking for black SUVs.
“Thanks for taking the girls hot-potting,” Joe said.
“My pleasure.”
“You mending fences with Sheridan?”
Nate smiled. “She’s tough. But we’re getting there.”
“Did you two talk about falconry?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Nate said. “As I was handing her a towel when we were done, she asked about the peregrine.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“You’re right. Once those birds get in your bloodstream, they never get out.”
Joe struggled to concentrate on his screen and the images.He felt as if he were running on fumes. He was beyond tired from the full day of sightseeing and the night before spent in the hospital, but he was determined to see this through. If he stopped for even a minute, he thought, he would collapse with exhaustion. That wouldn’t do, because he felt he needed to keep the investigation moving forward. He’d learned over the years that often the thing that solved a case, especially one like this, with so many aspects and floating facts, was simple and unrelentingforward motion. By pushing ahead, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going, he sometimes forced a reactionfrom the conspirators that might reveal them.
The moon was a perfect thin slice of ice-white in a thick soup of stars that hardened as the temperature dropped near freezing. Although Nate was still warmed to the core from hot-pottingand wore a fleece vest over his denim shirt, Joe was bundled in the hooded Carhartt coat he had worn on the LongbrakeRanch in the winter. He could feel exploratory fingers of cold pushing up his pant legs and down his collar. The cold helped him stay awake.
By his estimate, he had looked at more than three hundred vehicles thus far on his screen. Although that was a lot of cars, he knew he was lucky that the three days he was viewing were so late in the season and the number of visitors was at its lowest. Yellowstone received 3.5 million visitors in the summer, and he could only imagine the traffic count in mid-July. Of the three hundred-plus he had looked at, there were thirteen dark SUVs. Of the thirteen, six were black. Five of the six had Wyoming plates. He bookmarked each of them before proceeding, since he had no idea how many target vehicles he’d end up with after looking at the whole tape.
The camera angles from each gate were different, he noticed. The focus from the Northeast and East gates was more on the licenseplates, so the vehicle and registration could be identified later if the driver failed to pay the entrance fee or had commercialcargo and didn’t declare it. The South Gate camera had a wider field of vision and included not only the plate but also the grille and front window. If the glass wasn’t tinted in the vehicle, he could see the driver and passenger, and sometimes faces peeringover the front seat from the back. Joe had no idea what the vantage points at the North and West gates-from Demming’s missing computer-were. He was under the assumption that whoever had bushwhacked her had entered the park from one of those two entrances, which is
