Cold Wind (24 page)

Marybeth walked with Joe in silence. As Joe opened the door for her, she said, “I was hoping this would all be a matter of proving her innocence. Something clean.”

Joe said, “It’s rarely like that in a high-profile murder case or when money and ambition are involved on both sides. Or when the defendant . . .” He bit his lip.

“I’m going to check on Lucy and April to make sure they haven’t killed each other,” she said, digging her phone out of her purse. Joe reached across her lap and found his citation booklet in the box of documents and regulation books he kept on the floorboards. “Back in a second,” he said.

Missy met him at the front door. Over the years, both had made conscious efforts not to be anywhere alone with the other for fear of what would be said. Joe saw her standing in the shadow and he paused for a moment before continuing. She waited for him in silence. He realized she was sneaking a cigarette, and the cherry glowed red in the dark.

He said, “Here’s Marcus Hand’s ticket for poaching those grouse. See he gets it.”

She took it without a glance. “You never fail to disappoint,” she said, blowing smoke and keeping her voice down so her daughter couldn’t overhear her across the ranch yard.

“Thanks for the reminder,” Joe said.

“I know you’re doing what you’re doing more for your wife and daughters than for me. I understand that.”

Joe didn’t argue with her.

“You think I’m a heartless bitch,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’ve nothing but contempt for me. Look around you,” she said. “Then think about it later. You think this has been easy, don’t you?”

Before he could respond, she said, “I was the last of eleven children and my parents never failed to remind me I was their
mistake
, as they put it. We moved every year to a new farm in Missouri or Arkansas, wherever my father could get hired. I never had a home. We slept two or three to a bed. The clothes I wore had been handed down through six different girls, so by the time I got them they were rags. I once was forced to go to school wearing boots my brother made of
duct tape
.”

She paused, and Joe shuffled his feet and looked down.

“I didn’t own a new dress until I was two years out of high school,” she said. “And I bought it myself. By then my parents were so old and broken they could barely remember my name. My older brothers and sisters all scattered and I don’t know—or care—where a single one of them is or if they’re even alive. You think I’m kidding, but I’m
not
.”

“I gotta get going,” Joe said.

“You’ve only seen me as your wife’s gold-digger mother,” she said. “You’ve never seen or even thought about what made me this way, or how I clawed my way out of it. And you never give a thought to how tough that was to raise Marybeth right—with the right values—from the hole I crawled out of.”

“No,” Joe said, “I guess I haven’t given it much thought.”

She smiled triumphantly, but it morphed into a sneer. “If anyone thinks they’re going to take away all this, they don’t know me, either.”

“Did you do it, Missy?” Joe asked suddenly.

The sneer remained. There was no flinch. She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke at him and said, “What do
you
think?”

Then she turned on her heel and went back into her house. The citation Joe had given her fluttered to the ground.

 

 

“What was
that
about?”
Marybeth asked, when Joe climbed into the pickup.

“She told me about her childhood,” he said. “Some details I hadn’t heard before.”

Marybeth sat back in her seat and looked over at Joe, puzzled. “What about her childhood?”

“About growing up moving around, all her siblings, her parents, the poverty and all that. Like it sort of explains the way she is, I guess.”

Marybeth was stunned. “She said
that
?”

“Yup.”

“She didn’t tell you about shoes made out of duct tape, did she?”

“Yes. I hadn’t heard that one before.”

“Joe, you know my grandfather owned a dozen car dealerships in Southern California and my grandmother was an actress. Mom was an only child who grew up with everything she ever wanted. She was spoiled and
she makes things up
.”

Joe said, “I know all that. She lies without blinking an eye.”

“And the way she was flirting with Marcus Hand at dinner,” Marybeth said, “it was disgusting. Earl Alden is barely cold.”

“He’ll never be as cold as your mother,” Joe said.

On the way home,
they divided up duties. Even if Hand and his people developed the new theory, Marybeth thought it imperative that she know for sure what had happened, who had killed Earl even if Hand didn’t care as long as reasonable doubt could be established.

Joe agreed. He said, “I’m curious about what you’ll find out about Rope the Wind. How they came to be. Who they are—or were.”

“I’ll find out what I can about them,” she said.

“Also,” Joe said, “if Earl was such a big-time skimmer as Hand described him, why would he invest so much of his own money into actually building a wind farm? It seems out of character. Since Missy didn’t seem to know much about the initial financing—and I think she would—I wonder if maybe someone else was putting up the money? That seems more like Earl’s style. And if so, who?”

“I never thought of that,” Marybeth said. “I’ll find out what I can. The state has corporation filings, things like that. They’re all public documents.”

“I’m going to keep looking for Bud,” Joe said. “I have a feeling he’s not far. And despite what we talked about tonight, Hand knows Bud is still the key. If Bud takes the stand and comes across as credible, the rest is history. So I want to talk to Dulcie. She’s got to have more on Missy than we realize or she wouldn’t have pushed it as hard as she has. She can’t have based everything on Bud’s testimony.”

“Maybe she wants to beat Marcus Hand,” Marybeth said.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe she wants to put my mother away.”

“Could be.”

“We know what Sheriff McLanahan’s motivation is,” Marybeth said. “He wants to get reelected.”

“Yup.”

“Joe?” Marybeth asked as they drove under the archway. “Do you really think the Lees had something to do with it?”

Joe drove five minutes before answering. “No, I don’t.”

“Then why are we doing this? Is it just to help Marcus Hand create enough doubt?”

“Yup.”

She said, “If nothing else, I want to be assured Bob Lee had nothing to do with it so we can look elsewhere. Since Earl left a lifetime of deals behind him, he could have enemies we don’t know anything about. I can’t just sit here and let Hand get her off under a cloud. It makes me feel kind of dirty. Isn’t there another way?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Didn’t you ask me to do what I could to help her out? To help
us
out?”

Sighing, she said, “Yes, but I meant we should help prove her innocence. Not just muck up the water so badly the judge and jurors can’t decide. There’s a difference between innocence and being found not guilty.”

“Not to Marcus Hand,” Joe said. “Maybe not to your mother, either.”

“But we’re different,” Marybeth said.

Joe couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t get him in trouble.

“Joe,” she said, “now would be the time we need more help with this. The trial starts in ten days.”

He nodded.

“Joe?”

“I tried to call him today,” he confessed. “The call didn’t go through and there wasn’t any way to leave a message. He might have switched phones. So I might have to go where I know he was last and try to find him in person.”

She said, “Then go, Joe. Put the rest behind you.”

Joe spent the Labor Day weekend
in the field, patrolling his district from the banks of the Twelve Sleep River through the main streets of Saddlestring and Winchester to the high mountain roads in the Bighorns. As was his custom on the two busiest weekends of the summer, Memorial Day and Labor Day, he made himself as conspicuous as possible in his red shirt and green pickup truck. He noted the philosophical difference in the fishermen, hunters, hikers, and campers from the first three-day holiday of the season. On Memorial Day weekend, it was often still chilly, but the mood of the citizens he encountered was bursting with optimism and anticipation for the warm weather ahead. The Labor Day weekend, although nearly always blessed with pleasant weather and good conditions, was fused with a sense of loss and dread that the summer was over. More fights and violations occurred on Labor Day weekend, and citizens seemed to be walking around with shorter fuses.

He’d ticketed several fishermen for not having licenses as they got out of their drift boats at a river takeout, and he’d issued a warning to a raftful of floaters for forgetting their personal flotation devices. Although he was doing his duty and enforcing the law, he was immeasurably distracted because his head was swimming with thoughts of Missy, Earl, Bud, Marcus Hand . . . and what he’d discovered about Nate Romanowski.

 

 

He’d been alarmed
on Saturday to find Large Merle’s house abandoned on the two-track to Hole in the Wall Canyon. It was a hot and windy day, and dust devils swirled across the mesa that fronted the canyon. Sandy grit washed across the hood of his pickup like rain and filtered through the air vents on the dashboard. The closer he drove to the trailhead that led into the canyon, the worse his feeling of dread.

The feeling was confirmed even before he trekked down the trail to the caves. There was a palpable emptiness in the air, and when he saw the horrible gaping mouth of the cave marked by black tongues of soot that licked upward, it was as if he’d been hit hard in the chest.

Joe nudged his boot tip through the debris inside the cave, recognizing items he’d seen there before. Nate’s radios and monitors were shattered, table and chairs practically vaporized, his satellite phone disemboweled. Panic set in as Joe rooted through the wreckage. If Nate had been caught in the explosion—
What the hell had happened?
—there was no sign of a body. Which meant whoever had done this had taken the body. Or
somehow
his friend had survived. But when Joe surveyed the scorched walls of the cave and kicked through the shards that remained, he couldn’t imagine anyone living through it.

Joe had never anticipated this. Nate was security-conscious to the point of paranoia, and he had the ability to track anyone venturing into the canyon. Which meant that whoever had attacked had slipped by the wires, sensors, and cameras on the trail and gotten close enough to lob a grenade or explosive into the mouth of the cave. Either that, or it had been done from long distance. A missile?

And then he saw a blackened and cracked object within the pile. His first thought was:
burned flesh
. Swallowing hard to keep from retching, Joe used a broken stave to flick debris away from the object. To his horror, he saw it wasn’t skin or a body part, but the bottom half of Alisha Whiteplume’s black leather boot.

He said, “Oh, no.”

Knowing more than most how Nate thought, Joe exited the cave and hiked up above the shattered mews to a wooded alcove his friend had once showed him. The clearing was small but pastoral. Nate said he liked to sit naked on a lone rounded boulder in the clearing to read or think. Nate found it spiritual, and invited Joe to use it any time he needed it. Joe declined.

And here she was, or what was left of her body, anyway. Nate had placed her remains on hastily built scaffolding so it lay exposed to the sun and birds in the traditional Native way, before the Jesuits had banned the practice. Bits of her clothing and hair had been tied to the corner posts and they wafted in the slight breeze. Her skull was tilted to the side and Joe recognized her large white teeth grinning at him in a manic forced smile. Ravens that had been feeding on the body had nearly stripped it clean. They watched Joe from overhanging branches with tiny black soulless eyes, waiting for him to leave.