C. Box - Force of Nature

“We’re getting closer,” Luke Brueggemann said, the GPS unit glowing in his lap. “That is, if those hunters who found the body gave the sheriff the right coordinates.”

Joe leaned forward and tried to see the sky through the top of the windshield. “I don’t like this snow right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get in, check out that line shack, and get out. I don’t want to get stuck back here on the dark side of the moon.”

“I think I’ve heard that story,” Brueggemann said, grinning.

“There’s not much funny about it.”

“It’s kind of a legend among the trainers,” Brueggemann said, referring to the time Joe had been handcuffed to his steering wheel by a violator, who escaped during a blizzard. “In fact, there’s probably more case studies of things you’ve gotten into than any other game warden.”

“Is that so?” Joe said, not knowing whether to be angry or impressed.

“Seems that way.”

“How far until we reach the line shack?”

Brueggemann held the GPS up and traced the contours on the screen. “A mile, maybe.”

“Good. I’ve got a lot of patience, but I’m just about ready to call Cheyenne and ask them to cut us loose from this investigation. I’ve never done that before, but we’re doing nothing out here except burning fuel and calories.”

“So you don’t think we’ll find her body?”

“Look around us,” Joe said. “We’re forty miles from the res. Do you really think a nice middle-aged lady like Alice Thunder would end up here?”

“I don’t know her.”

“I do,” Joe said. “This is a wild-goose chase.”

“But we’re gonna check out the shack first, right?” Brueggemann asked.

“Of course. But first thing tomorrow morning-provided we can get out of here tonight-I’m calling Cheyenne.”

“Does that mean we’re going to get to do real game-warden stuff?” the trainee asked. “Like checking out hunters and finally visiting all those elk camps?”

For the past day and a half, they’d been assigned to Sheriff McLanahan through an agreement reached between the governor’s office and the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. To both Joe Pickett’s and Sheriff McLanahan’s chagrin, County Attorney Dulcie Schalk had gone over the sheriff’s head and pulled together a multiagency effort that involved local, county, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. In addition to the state DCI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs investigators, Schalk had also commandeered state troopers and had borrowed deputies and investigators from adjoining counties, over the sheriff’s objections. But characteristically, McLanahan claimed credit for the effort to the Saddlestring Roundup and described it as “a show of force not seen since the Johnson County Range War.” Despite McLanahan’s frequent interviews with radio journalists and television stations from Billings to Casper and the impressive coordination effort spearheaded by Schalk, no progress had been made on either the three missing-persons cases or the triple homicide.

Because of Joe’s familiarity with the vast and empty corners of the county-and to keep him out of the way-McLanahan had assigned him the job of following up on far-flung anonymous tips and unsubstantiated sightings of Bad Bob Whiteplume, Alice Thunder, or Pam Kelly. All the leads had gone nowhere. Bad Bob was reportedly seen in Las Vegas and in the crowd of a Denver Nuggets basketball game. The Feds got those to follow up on. But when someone called in that they’d witnessed Bad Bob rappelling down the steep walls of Savage Run Canyon, it fell into Joe’s bailiwick. Joe and his trainee had driven as close to the rim of the canyon as they could and hiked the rest of the way, to find no evidence of Bad Bob or anybody else.

Pam Kelly had been reported lurking around the corrals of a neighboring ranch, but when Joe and Brueggemann got there, the mysterious person turned out to be a barmaid from the Stockman’s Bar. She explained haltingly that she was “moonlighting”-performing an erotic dance routine for three Mexican cowhands in the bunkhouse for money. They drove her back to her car.

The anonymous report from hunters said that they’d seen a body matching Alice Thunder’s description at a remote line shack on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains-for which they’d provided GPS coordinates-but it looked to be another dry hole.

For the past two nights, Joe hadn’t returned home until after ten. He’d barely seen Lucy or April. Each night, despite his exhaustion, he’d booted up his computer and checked the falconry website. There wasn’t a single entry on the kestrel thread. Nate seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. And for the first time he could recall, Marybeth hadn’t been able to provide any information from her legal and extralegal research into John Nemecek.

On the way up the mountain to check out the line shack, Luke Brueggemann tried to hide the fact that he was trading text messages with his girlfriend. He’d turn his shoulder to Joe to keep his phone out of view while pretending to be enthralled by something outside his passenger window while he tapped messages by feel.

“You’re not fooling me,” Joe had said as they neared the summit. Storm clouds from the north had marched across the sky and blacked out the stars and moon. “I can see the glow of your phone.”

“Sorry.”

“Luke, I’ve got teenage daughters. I know every texting trick in the book. I even know the one where you look right at me with a vacant expression on your face while you text under the table.”

Brueggemann looked away, obviously embarrassed. He said, “I told you, this is tough on her.”

“It’s going to get tougher,” Joe said, slowing the pickup, “because once we leave the highway you’ll lose your cell signal. We won’t even be able to use the radio for a while.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Consider it tough love,” Joe said. “For the both of you.”

Joe didn’t know the area well, because he rarely patrolled it. The mountainside had burned in a forest fire twenty-five years before, and the surface of the ground between the new six- to eight-foot pine trees was still littered with an almost impenetrable tangle of burned logs and upturned root pans. The slope was so crosshatched with debris even the elk steered clear of it, thus there were few elk hunters for Joe to check. And although the topo map he’d consulted showed several ancient logging trails through the mountainside, the first two trails they’d found were blocked by dozens of fallen trees.

The third, which of course was the most roundabout route to the abandoned line shack, was passable only because the hunters who’d reported the body had cleared it painstakingly with chainsaws.

“Less than a half mile,” Brueggemann said.

It was snowing hard enough that it stuck to the hood of the pickup and topped outstretched pine boughs like icing.

Joe said to Brueggemann, “The chance of there being a body way in here, and that body belonging to Alice, is slim to none. But that’s not the way we approach it. We approach this like a crime scene. We’re professionals, and we take our job seriously. Don’t touch or move anything. Be cautious, and keep your eyes open and your ears on.”

Brueggemann sat up straight and looked over at Joe, wide-eyed.

“When we get there, grab my gear bag from the back,” Joe said. “Find the camera. We may need to take some shots.”

After a beat Brueggemann said, “I gotta ask. What’s a line shack, anyway?”

Joe was surprised. “You really don’t know?”

“I guess not.”

Joe said, “Cowboys built them back when all of this was open range. It’s a shelter against sudden bad weather, or if the ranch hands got caught in the middle of nowhere toward dark. None of them are very fancy, and most of them are in bad shape these days. But they saved some lives back in the day, and we’ve found more than a few lost hunters in remote line shacks.”