C Box - Trophy hunt

Suddenly, Cam stopped.

"Talking too much," Cam said, more to himself than to Joe.

He lumped back into his chair, staring at something over Joe's head, looking drained.

"I'm truly sorry, Cam."

No response.

"I screwed up," Joe said. "I came up with a conclusion and tried to find facts that would fit it, instead of the other way around." Putting his hat on his head, Joe stood up.

Cam still sat there, eerily drained, his concentration elsewhere.

"Cam?"

Joe thought that Cam was somewhere deep inside of himself now. What had he done? "CAM!"

Thankfully, Cam Logue seemed to snap back to the present. He blinked rapidly, then his eyes settled on Joe.

"I'll be going," Joe said.

Cam nodded. "Okay."

Joe started to turn, then stopped himself. "Do you have any ideas on what's happening, Cam? With the mutilations and the murders? We obviously don't even have a clue."

Cam shook his head wearily.

"We've got bears, aliens, all sorts of bad ideas," Joe said. "Hell, somebody even claims he saw a couple of figures out in the alley behind your office a while back."

Joe was surprised that Cam's face blanched again, as it had when he first saw Joe.

"Who said that?" Cam asked.

Joe shrugged. "That's not important. My point was about all of the crazy theories."

"Tell me who said it."

"Cam, I'm sorry, I've got to go now. I'm sorry I took up so much of your time."

Cam stared at Joe and set his mouth.

"I really am sorry about all of this, Cam."

In his pickup, Joe thumped the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. He had been so wrong, he thought.

He called Hersig, who answered anxiously.

"You should take me off the task force," Joe said morosely. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

"Dry hole?" Hersig asked.

"Wrong county, even. Not even close."

Hersig sighed. "We're going to have to mend some fences with the business community after this."

"Worse than that, Robey, I've got to tell Marybeth."

Joe found her in her tiny back office at Barrett's Pharmacy. She looked up expectantly as he came in.

"I was wrong about Cam."

"Tell me."

He did, her face hardening as he spoke.

"Why did you come down on him so tough, Joe?"

He shrugged. "I thought it was the best way. I thought I could shock him into saying something."

"Well, I guess you did that all right."

He shook his head and stared at the tops of his boots. "I feel terrible."

"Don't."

He looked up, puzzled.

"It sounds like a hell of a performance," she said.

"I know, I just thought if I laid it right out…"

"No," she said, shushing him. "Not by you. By Cam. There's something there, Joe. I just know it. There's no good reason why Cam and Marie wouldn't have told me about getting back the ranch. They know I'd keep it confidential, and what difference would it make anyway? Marie and I shared everything, Joe. We talked about both you and Cam, and we talked about our children and our aspirations. Believe me, if Marie knew about Cam's plan to buy back that ranch, she would have told me about it. When Cam told us together about the 'secret buyer,' he was misleading Marie as well. Why would he go out of his way to do that?

"So, he's lying to you. Besides, there's nothing wrong with a realtor wanting to buy property. Realtors do it all the time."

Joe felt a wave of relief for a moment.

"But I sabotaged your career."

She smiled. "If I wanted a career, Joe, I'd have it. And I'd be damned good at it. Even now, without the Logues, my small business is chugging along. I just need to keep it small, I know now. More flexible. I've got to think about Sheridan, and Lucy, and you."

"Marybeth, I…"

"It's just another setback. No one said this would be easy."

Joe felt awful. "I wish I were as tough as you are," he said.

She smiled again, and pinched his cheek. "You're better than tough, Joe. You're good. I'll stick with good."

His mind and emotions on edge, Joe spent the rest of the morning patrolling the breaklands and foothills close to town, checking hunters for licenses. He did his job mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere. The few hunters in the field were clean, and in every camp someone asked him about the mutilations. He found himself getting irritated with the entire subject. Throughout the morning, he checked messages on his cell phone and home telephone, hoping to hear from Hersig, Ike, or Sheriff Harvey. He decided to push things along, if for no other reason than to see if anyone pushed back, or panicked. He'd start at the county clerk's.

Ike Easter, Millie, and the two other clerks were assembled around a conference table covered with dozens of old file boxes and stacks of files that smelled of age and dampness when Joe entered the county clerk's office. If his reception that morning was cold, this time it was something out of the Ice Age. The three clerks and Ike had hard scowls and dirt-smudged clothing. "There he is," Millie said as Joe let the door wheeze shut behind him. "Here I am," Joe said, looking at Ike. "Find it?" Ike looked harried. Joe suspected that Ike had been abused for most of the day by his clerks as they searched the archives. "Good timing," Ike said to Joe, raising a file into the air. "I've got something for you, but it's kind of a puzzlement." Joe followed Ike into his office. "Thanks for your hard work," Joe told the clerks as he passed them. "We really appreciate this." Millie held his gaze for a moment, then rolled her eyes heavenward. Ike fell into his chair and pushed the file across the desk to Joe. Joe noted that the tab on the file said "Overstreet" and was followed by the physical coordinates of the tract. "Take a look," Ike said. Joe opened the file. Inside was a clean copy of a deed and title originally made out to Mr. Walter Overstreet in 1921. An amendment was added in 1970, when additional acreage-the Logue property-was added to the document. Joe thumbed through the paperwork, then looked up at Ike for some kind of interpretation. "Everything's there and in perfect order," Ike said. "Except for two things. One, there's no record of the OG amp;M. It should have been attached to the document. Second, it's a duplicate of the original deed." Joe shook his head. "What's that mean?" Ike shrugged. "As far as the OG amp;M lease goes, that could just be an error. We find plenty of those in these old files. It's not that big of a problem, because I can request a copy from the state easy enough…" "How soon?" Ike looked at his watch, mumbled "they'll kill me," before calling Millie on the intercom and asking her to contact Cheyenne ASAP and have them fax a copy of the lease to the office. Joe didn't even turn around to see what kind of furor Ike's request had set in motion. "What else?" Joe asked. "Look at the deed in your hands, Joe." Joe did. He saw nothing unusual about it. It had been typed, probably with a manual typewriter, on a deed form decades before. He looked at the dates and description and could see no alterations.

"It's a clean copy of the original," Ike said. "It's all pretty and nice. It's not a carbon copy, which is what they used in those days. It's a modern machine copy."

Joe felt a twitch in his scalp. "So somebody made the copy recently."

"That's what it looks like to me. The copy was made while it was still in the archives, for some reason, and the file was put back in the old box. We probably wouldn't have ever even noticed it if we weren't looking for this particular file on this particular day."

Joe looked up. "How many people had access to the archives, then?"

Ike raised his eyebrows. "All of us. The sheriff's deputies who transferred them. The old county clerk, of course. And the new owners of the old county clerk's home, where the files were kept."