C. Box - Force of Nature

“Well?” Brueggemann asked, stopping short of reaching Joe.

“Have you ever seen a dead body?” Joe asked.

“Sure,” Brueggemann said, hitching up his pants.

“You have?”

The trainee looked above and to the right of Joe. “My grandma. At her funeral.”

Joe smiled, despite the situation. “It’s up to you, Luke. I won’t force you, but I won’t keep you away.”

With that, Joe turned and headed for the garage. No footsteps sounded behind him.

“Ron Connelly,” Joe said, as he fought to keep his stomach from churning, “He’s known as the Mad Archer. I arrested him twice. The other two are Stumpy and Paul Kelly. They have a shady outfitting business outside of Winchester. I’ve been trying to catch them poaching for years.”

The sheriff had arranged to have all of the county vehicles moved out of the big garage to make space. The three victims were laid out next to one another on thick plastic sheeting on the concrete floor. When Joe first saw them, he was reminded of Old West photos of dead outlaws on display. All three were stiffened into the unnatural positions in which they’d been found.

Joe asked, “Why didn’t you just pull their wallets to see who they were?”

Before McLanahan could answer, Dulcie Schalk said, “I told the sheriff not to touch the bodies again until the forensics people could get here.”

McLanahan made a face, obviously displeased that Schalk had taken over.

Joe looked around.

The boat they’d arrived in was on the concrete next to the bodies. It smelled of blood. Joe imagined there were gallons of it congealing inside, but he didn’t look to confirm it. He did note that the Mad Archer’s compound bow and a Savage twelve-gauge pump shotgun with a synthetic stock had been tagged and placed on a tarp.

“See?” Sheriff McLanahan said to Dulcie Schalk, who stood off to the side, holding her hand over her mouth in horror. “I told you he’d know ’em. They’re of his ilk.”

Joe ignored the comment and spoke directly to Schalk. “Ron Connelly killed dozens of game animals with his bow and arrows over the years. Down in southern Wyoming where I was stationed for a while, he took potshots at cows and horses, too. I know he wounded an eagle once, and that time I caught him and threw him in the clink. But the penalties for poaching and injuring animals are so weak he didn’t spend much time in jail.

“Our department has-I should say had — alerts out on him,” Joe said. “All the game wardens in the state kept a good eye out for this guy. He used to be a tweaker, but I’d heard he cleaned up his act. Apparently not well enough,” he said, nodding toward the body.

“The Kellys are real backwoods types,” Joe said. “Paul Kelly and his wife, Pam, run a few cows and lease out their stud horse, but other than that they survive off welfare payments and some kind of disability pension Paul got from an accident he’d had when he worked for the county road crew. The disability didn’t stop him from running illegal guided hunts, though. Both Paul and Stumpy got the boot from the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association a few years ago because of client complaints and their general lack of ethics. One client claimed they dropped him off up in the Savage Run country and forgot to come back and pick him up so he had to walk out for two days. I’ve had my eye on them for years, but they’re pretty slippery.”

He nodded toward the bodies. “Or they were, anyway. What doesn’t work for me is how the three of them got hooked up. The Mad Archer was too nuts to keep any friends, and the Kellys stayed completely to themselves.”

Two of McLanahan’s deputies bookended him. Both were young, muscle-bound, and menacing, and both wore large campaign buttons that read reelect our sheriff. Deputy Sollis smirked at Joe through heavy-lidded eyes. Sollis wore a uniform shirt that was a size too small, to show off his biceps and pectorals, and a black mock turtleneck underneath that didn’t fully hide the acne rash on his neck from steroid use. Behind the sheriff and his men was Deputy Mike Reed, McLanahan’s opponent in the election, who was older, rounder, and balding. Joe liked Reed, and tipped his hat brim to say hello. Reed nodded back.

The sheriff hadn’t gotten rid of Reed, which had surprised Joe before he learned the strategy behind it. Keeping him in the department showcased the sheriff’s good-guy credentials, but the idea had actually come after McLanahan watched The Godfather II and heard Michael Corleone say, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Although Reed was the senior investigator, McLanahan steadily undermined him in the eyes of voters and observers by assigning him to the most menial tasks, such as supervising random DUI roadblocks, overseeing county road cleanup crews, and in one case sending his deputy on a meth-house raid to the wrong address.

Joe asked the sheriff, “They were all in the same boat?”

“Literally,” McLanahan guffawed.

Joe shook his head. “Did they get into a tussle and start blasting at each other?”

Deputy Reed said, “We can’t say for sure, but we doubt it.”

The sheriff acted as if Reed hadn’t spoken.

Dulcie Schalk parted her fingers to talk. She was clearly nauseated by the scene in front of her, and likely the enormity of the crime itself. When she spoke, she bit off her words in a tight-mouthed way, as if trying to avoid breathing the fetid air. “Coroner Will Speer is on his way here to take them for autopsies, Joe, but from what we can tell they were all shot to death at the same time. It appears each was killed by a single fatal gunshot. From what the sheriff told me, the firearm used was… huge.”

She attempted to continue but had to look away. Joe had an odd impulse to go over and hug her, but he knew she’d be embarrassed by the gesture in front of the sheriff and his men.

Sollis said, “Huge as in fucking massive. There’s entry wounds as big as most exit wounds. And the exit wounds, well, look at that Connelly guy. Half his head is just gone.” He said it with what sounded like twisted admiration, Joe thought. He refused to look closely at Ron Connelly’s wound, despite Sollis’s prompting. Joe didn’t think he could take it.

“Which means,” McLanahan said, “we may not recover the slugs because they passed right through. Even Stumpy there with a full body shot. It looks like the slug went in under one arm and out under the other.”

Schalk said through her fingers, “That’s why I asked Sheriff McLanahan to call DCI and bring the FBI in. He may not think we need their expertise, but we do need their resources.”

Joe looked over to the sheriff. McLanahan’s gunfighter mustache was trimmed, but it still obscured his mouth. He wore a battered cowboy hat and suspenders over his uniform shirt. He’d traded his departmental Glock for a low-slung Colt. 45. McLanahan was from West Virginia but chose to look, dress, and talk like a frontier rube. Some were fooled. Joe wasn’t. The sheriff’s response to Dulcie Schalk’s suggestion was to roll his eyes.

Joe knew the sheriff well enough to know he hadn’t been called there simply to identify the bodies.

McLanahan rocked back on his boot heels and stabbed his thumbs through his belt loops. To Joe, he said, “Who do we know that is rumored to live upriver from time to time and carry a great big gun?”

Joe was thinking the same thing, but he didn’t reply.

“Tell me,” McLanahan said, “when is the last time you saw your buddy Nate Romanowski? The fugitive?”

Nate was still being sought by the Feds because Joe had arranged a temporary release the year before and Nate had never turned himself back in. Instead, his friend had gone to ground and had managed to elude them. Which is why Joe saw very little of his friend these days and rarely communicated with him. It was protection for the both of them.