C Box - Trophy hunt

"I'm here to see Mr. Logue, but don't worry, I didn't have an appointment."

Marie overheard the conversation and entered the room.

"I'll let him know you're here," Marie said. She was bursting with cheerfulness, Marybeth thought, and for good reason.

Lucy Pickett and Jessica Logue were waiting at the pickup spot with

Sheridan when Marybeth arrived. The playground was empty except for a few students on the swings. Marybeth felt guilty for being late.

Marybeth swung her minivan to the curb and the three girls piled in. Lucy and Jessica tossed their backpacks on the floor and immediately started telling Marybeth about their day in overlapping bursts, while Sheridan settled into the backseat alone and rolled her eyes. Lucy and Jessica were inseparable in a way that Sheridan never had been with another girl. Lucy and Jessica loved to dress up, do each other's hair, talk on the telephone, and play together. They even looked alike, as much like sisters as Lucy and Sheridan did.

"Jessica, your mom suggested you and Lucy play at your house this afternoon instead of ours," Marybeth said, pulling out into the road. "She'll bring Lucy home later."

"I hope dropping them off won't take too long," Sheridan interjected from the back. "I've got a falconry lesson in a little while."

Marybeth nodded, again feeling guilty that she was late. Sheridan had been learning falconry from Nate Romanowski, a loner and Joe's friend. He lived in a cabin on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River.

"It'll just take a minute," Marybeth said. "I'm sorry I'm running late."

"You seem to be running late a lot these days," Sheridan said under her breath but loud enough that Marybeth heard her. Both Lucy and Jessica immediately stopped talking and waited for what they hoped would be an argument.

"Please don't use that tone with me, Sheridan," Marybeth said evenly, locking eyes with Sheridan in the rearview mirror. "We can discuss this later."

Sheridan broke the gaze and shrugged. Marybeth noticed that Lucy and Jessica had huddled together and shrunk out of view, no doubt trying not to giggle.

The Logue home was one of Saddlestring's fading treasures; a classic Victorian, one of the original homes built at the edge of town near the river by an 1890s cattle baron. The faded house was hard to see behind the mature cottonwoods that towered around it. In addition to the old, magnificent house there was wooded acreage and a few outbuildings, including a carriage house. The house had sat vacant for fifteen years, in disrepair, until the Logues bought it last winter. Marie had walked Marybeth through the place recently, apologizing endlessly for its condition. Only two rooms had been modernized so far, the kitchen and a bathroom. The rest looked as it had in the mid-1980s, when the longtime county clerk of Twelve Sleep County died there in his seventy-eighth year. The rumor was that the county clerk used to store records in the house and the buildings and charge the county for rent.

Maybe now, Marybeth thought as she watched Lucy and Jessica skip away, Cam and Marie would have the means to accelerate the remodeling on the great old house.

"Mom?" Sheridan said from the backseat. "She's getting bigger. You don't have to wait until she gets in the house before we leave."

"I'm just not used to this yet Sheridan," Marybeth said. "You two have so many things going on these days. I struggle with letting you go."

"Mom, my falconry lesson?"

As Marybeth pulled away and turned left on Centennial Street toward Bighorn Road, her phone chirped. It was Joe, telling her about the call he had overheard concerning mutilated cows. He told her he would likely be late for dinner.

Dinner, Marybeth thought, the guilt rushing back. She had forgotten to plan dinner.

The Hawkins Ranch was a checkerboard of private land and state and federal leases spread across the lee side of the foothills, and Joe had to cross through seven barbed-wire fence gates to get to it. Most of the ranch was blanketed with tall sagebrush and scrub oak, buffalo grass and biscuit root, except for several large fingers of heavy timber that reached down from the mountains through saddle-slope draws.

Joe pulled into the ranch yard, a packed-gravel courtyard surrounded by structures. The Hawkins place was an old-line working outfit, unlike many of the hobby ranches that were taking over the state. The largest buildings in the yard were vast metal Quonset huts that served as vehicle sheds, barns, and equipment storage. A maze of wooden-slat corrals bordered the small, white-framed ranch house. There were no adornments of any kind anywhere; nothing to suggest anything other than what the place was-the business center for a large-scale beef-and-hay operation.

Joe turned toward the small house and saw Mrs. Hawkins step out on an unpainted porch and gesture sternly to the mountains. There was no need to stop and visit, Joe thought, and he drove through the middle of the ranch yard until his wheels fell into the long-established ruts of a dirt road that pointed straight toward the timber five miles away. Ahead of him in the ruts were the fresh tread tracks of several vehicles.

Approaching the scene, Joe noted that two identical GMC Blazers belonging to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff's Department, and a light- blue Ford pickup, were parked nose-to-tail on the two-track where the scrub thinned and the pine trees began. To the right of the vehicles were three figures in the middle of what appeared to be a glacial-boulder field.

As Joe closed in, the front of his pickup bucked suddenly and a cascade of maps fell from a clip on the sunshade. Maxine lost her footing on the dashboard and scrambled back to her place on the seat, looking at him for an explanation.

"Rock," he said. "Didn't see it."

The figures turned out to be Deputy Kyle McLanahan, Sheriff Barnum, and a visibly upset Don Hawkins. What Joe had thought were boulders strewn across the ground were actually carcasses of cattle, at least a dozen of them. The sour-sweet smell of death filtered into the cab of the pickup through the vents, and Maxine sat up ramrod straight, her brow wrinkled with concern.

Even from this distance, Joe could see that Barnum was glaring at him. The old man's eyes bored across the brush and through the windshield of the pickup. McLanahan stood to the side of Barnum with a 35-mm camera hanging from his hand, looking from Barnum to Joe's pickup and back to Barnum. Don Hawkins wore a bandanna over his face and paced among the dead cows.

"Stay, girl," Joe told Maxine as he parked to the side of the Sheriff's Department vehicles and swung out of his pickup. He fitted his gray Stetson on his head and skirted the Blazers. The smell of the cows was not as ripe as the smell of the moose had been, and he was grateful for that.

"Who called you out here?" Barnum asked. His deep-set eyes were cold, bordered by blue folds of loose skin. He lowered a cigarette from his lips and jetted twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.

"Heard it on the mutual-aid band."

"This look like a Game and Fish matter to you?"

"I'm not sure what it looks like yet, Sheriff," Joe said, walking among the carcasses, "but I found something similar done to a bull moose on Crazy Woman Creek."

It had been months since Joe had seen Barnum, and that had been fine with Joe. He despised Barnum, knowing the sheriff was as corrupt as he was legendary. There were rumors that Sheriff Barnum was in his last term of office, that he would retire within the next year. The electorate that had supported him for twenty-eight years seemed to be turning on him for the first time. The local weekly newspaper, the Saddlestring Roundup had run a series of editorials in the spring saying outright that it was time for Barnum to go.