C Box - Trophy hunt

"Cows are one thing," Harvey said. "But you don't fuck with a man's dog."

"Damned right," Joe said.

Deputy Cook returned in a few minutes holding a printout. He closed the door behind him and sat down heavily in his chair.

"I don't know if this is helpful or not," he said. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me anyway."

"You've got a number?" Harvey asked impatiently.

"Yup. But it's not a local number like I thought it would be. The area code is 910." He looked to Joe and Harvey to see if they recognized it. Both men shook their heads.

"Nine-one-oh," Cook repeated. "I looked it up. The cell phone is from Fayetteville, North Carolina."

"What?" Harvey said, his voice high-pitched. "We've got a guy from North Carolina driving around in the mountains at 4:30 A.M.?"

Joe tried to make sense of it, but couldn't. He wrote the number down in his notebook.

"Maybe he's one of those CBM guys," Cook said. "They're from all over. Is there natural gas in North Carolina? Or a company headquarters there?"

Harvey shrugged. "Arden, you need to follow up on this."

"I'll get on it right now," Cook said. He asked Harvey if he could use two of the other deputies so they could work faster. Harvey agreed. After Cook left, Harvey turned to Joe and raised his eyebrows. "Maybe we've actually got something here." "It's a start anyway. Will you call me when you've got a name?" Joe said, handing Harvey his card. "I'll fill Robey in on what we've got so far." "Which really, when you think of it, isn't very damned much," Harvey said. "But at least I've got my guys running around all excited, instead of sitting there reading the Pro Rodeo News." Joe stood, shook hands, and opened the door. Before he left, he remembered one of the questions he meant to ask when he arrived. "You said Stuart Tanner owned an outfit called Tanner Engineering?" Harvey nodded. "Right, based out of Texas, but his family's had a cabin up here for years, and he liked to stay there when his company was working in the area." "Do you know what Tanner Engineering was working on? Specifically?" While Harvey shuffled through the file, Joe recalled something from the day before. Tuff Montegue's brother had said Tuff worked for "Turner Engineering." Could it have been Tanner Engineering? Joe felt a twinge. Harvey looked up after going through the file. "We don't have anything on what he was doing here," he said. "You know, I feel kind of stupid that we haven't really pursued this angle. To be honest, we've been sort of waiting for something to break in Twelve Sleep County." That sounds about right, Joe thought. "I've got to think about this," Harvey said, as much to himself as to Joe. "If some bad guy killed and mutilated Stuart Tanner, did he also do all of the livestock? And the moose? And the cowboy? It doesn't seem possible to me." Joe didn't know what to say. But his mind was spinning.

Back in his pickup heading for Saddlestring, Joe called Marybeth at Logue Country Realty. "Are things okay today?" he asked. "Fine," she said, sounding more cheerful than he would have anticipated. "Except Marie is sick again. I haven't seen her in three days. I'm starting to get a little worried about her, Joe. I asked Cam how she was doing, and he said he thought she'd be back in later this week."

"So you talked with Cam, huh?" he asked, feeling a surge of anger.

"Of course I talked with him," Marybeth said, admonishing Joe. "He's my boss. Nothing was said about our conversation yesterday, and I think he's a little ashamed of the whole thing. I'm not worried, Joe."

"You'll call me if something happens again, right?"

"Of course. But I can handle myself. I'm a big girl, and I'm smarter than hell."

"That you are," Joe said although he still felt like smashing his fist into Cam's face.

"But that's not the only reason why you're calling, is it?" she teased.

Man, she knew him well, he thought. "I was wondering if you would have any time to do some research. It can probably be done on the Internet and with a couple of calls."

"Is something happening, Joe?" She sounded intrigued.

"Maybe. But I'm not sure yet."

"I can grab some time over lunch," she said. "What do you need?"

"Do you have a pencil?"

It was late afternoon when the town of Saddlestring came into view.

From the distance on the highway, it looked insignificant beneath the slumping shoulders of the Bighorn Mountains. Joe could see a few buildings poking out of young trees, the Twelve Sleep River as it serpentined through the valley and through the middle of town, and four shining ribbons of highway that intersected within the tree-choked community.

He had tried to let his mind work during the drive back, to process what he had learned in Cody. He tried to think of what they might be overlooking that was sitting there right in front of them.

This was giving him a headache. But maybe this new information would sort itself out, start to fit into proper places.

Then something occurred to him. It was obvious, if risky. It could move the new track of the investigation forward, or screw it all up forever.

He could simply call the number with the 910 area code, and see who answered. Fayetteville, he said to himself. What is in Fayetteville?

Joe pulled his cell phone from its mount on the dash and was reaching for his notebook to look up the number, when the phone trilled.

"Joe, it's Trey Crump."

Joe hadn't talked to his district supervisor since before the task force was formed, although he had kept him up to date on the progress, or lack of it, via e-mailed reports.

"What's up?"

"You're not going to believe this, but I just got a call from the bear guys up in Yellowstone. Apparently, they just picked up a signal on our missing grizzly."

Joe had a feeling what was coming.

"They tracked him to a location that's literally in your backyard, so to speak. Just east of the mountains, in the breaklands. He appears to have stopped, because they said the signal is strong and not moving."

Joe grabbed his notebook from the seat, and flipped to a fresh page.

"Do you have the GPS coordinates?" Joe asked.

"Got 'em. You ready?"

"Sure," Joe said, scribbling.

As he shot through Saddlestring and out the other side toward the break- lands, Joe called Nate Romanowski. As usual, he got Nate's unreliable answering machine.

"We located the bear," Joe said. "If you get this, you'll want to get right out to the BLM tract off Dreadnought Road. The bear is supposedly right in the middle of it, about six miles off-road to the north. Look for my truck."

The Breaklands Country beyond Dreadnought Road served as a kind of geological shelf before gradually rising into the foothills and then swelling into a sharp climb into the mountains. At first glance it looked flat and wide open, but in actuality it was deceptive terrain coursed through with deep draws of crumbly, yellow-white earth that created massive islands of grass-covered flats that were attractive to pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and ranchers. Before lamb and wool prices collapsed in the 1980s, the breaklands had been filled with sheep. Joe had seen photos from the forties and fifties on the wall at the Stockman's Bar of sheep herds clipping the grass in the Dreadnought breaklands as far as the photographer could see. There were still a few bands of sheep in the area, tended by Mexican or Basque herders, but nowhere near the amount there had been.

Joe slowed his pickup on Dreadnought Road while watching the GPS unit on his console, and scanned the surrounding area for Nate Ro- manowski. He was wary of striking off-road as it approached dusk because of the network of arroyos and draws that could cut him off, isolate him, or get him stuck.

Joe didn't find a road, and realized he had gone beyond where he should have turned right. He stopped and studied a well-worn topo map of the area, trying to find if there was another approach-one with roads-to where the bear had been located. There was an old road of some kind that entered the area from the exact opposite direction but he estimated it would take close to an hour to get to it. His only choice, he concluded, was to go off-road.