C Box - Blood Trail

From what I can see, they’re experienced campers. Their food is hung high in mesh bags far from the campsite so as not to attract bears. There are pots and skillets on rocks around the fire pit but they look clean and are placed upside down. Nevertheless, it would be easy to accidentally kick one and make a racket. Another hazard are the thin tent lines attached to stakes in the ground. They’re easy to trip over or walk into because they blend so well with the night.

The layout of the campsite is now burned into my consciousness after studying it for so long. When I close my eyes I can see it, and I prefer this picture to the real one, which is confused by shafts of starlight. Eyes closed, I walk through the camp like a shadow, every sense tingling, reaching out, reporting back. I sense a tent line and veer left to avoid it. When my boot tip touches the head of an ax left in deep grass, my foot slides smoothly around it like a fish in a stream confronted with a river rock.

In seconds I’m through the camp. I go a little farther down the trail until I’m once again back in the shadows of the trees before I open my eyes and look back. The camp is still, the hunters sleeping. I think how what I’ve just done could be dramatized and told around a campfire:

With a human head in a pack, the hunter of hunters walked right through the sleeping elk camp without making a sound…

THE MORNING FLIGHT from Denver with master tracker Buck Lothar on board was late arriving at Saddlestring Regional Airport, and Joe spent the time reviewing the files Robey had copied the night before, noting the ever-growing crowd assembling in the lobby, and wondering when exactly it had happened that white-clad federal TSA employees had come to outnumber passengers and airline personnel in the little airport. Or at least it seemed that way.

The airport was humble, with two counters for regional commuter airlines, a single luggage carousel, a fast-food restaurant that was always closed, and several rows of orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor facing the tarmac through plate-glass windows. The painted cinder-block wall across from the airline counters was covered with crooked and yellowing black-and-white photos of passengers in the fifties and sixties boarding subsidized jets that used to serve the area. In the photos, the men were in suits and the women in hats. Local economic development types had created a display case to showcase local products, which consisted of… a package of jerky. Outside, a resident herd of six pronghorn antelope grazed between runways, the morning sun on their backs. When Joe was district game warden, he received calls from the county airport authorities every few weeks to come and try to scare the antelope away because the herd tended to spook and scatter when airplanes landed, and at least one private aircraft had hit one. Despite the use of cracker shells and rubber bullets fired into their haunches that dispersed the animals for a few days, they always returned.

Robey sat a few seats down from Joe, reading his copies of the same files. He was dressed in full-regalia Cabela’s and Eddie Bauer outdoor clothing for his first day on the crime team, and Joe had stifled a smile when he picked him up that morning. Robey’s boots were so new they squeaked when he got up to get another cup of coffee so weak the only taste was of aluminum from the pot itself. Randy Pope paced through the airport, working his cell phone. From snippets Joe could hear whenever Pope neared, his boss was dealing with personnel and legislative issues back in Cheyenne. Pope was a bureaucratic marvel, firing orders, interrupting calls he was on to take more important ones, keeping several people on hold at once, and jockeying between them as he paced.

As the arrival time came and went and an announcement was made by a spike-haired blonde with a tongue stud that the United Express flight from Denver would be at least twenty minutes late, Joe tried to discern the makeup of the people in and around the airport waiting for the aircraft to arrive. It was difficult to count them because they didn’t gather in one place so much as flow through the airport and back to their cars-many of which were campers and vans-in the parking lot. He didn’t recognize any of them, which was unusual in itself. They didn’t fit the profile of those usually found in the Saddlestring Regional Aiport: ranchers waiting for a new employee, usually one who spoke Spanish; a coal bed methane company executive greeting a contractor; or various local families picking up loved ones who had ventured out. Instead, the people waiting had an earthy, outdoor look. There was a wide-eyed, anxious, purposeful attitude about them Joe-at first-couldn’t quite put his finger on. A very attractive olive-skinned, black-haired woman struck him in particular. She seemed to be removed from the throng but with them at the same time, caring for her baby in a stroller and thanking those who approached her and complimented her on the child. Joe noted her dark eyes, high cheekbones, and pegged her for Shoshone. She had a dazzling smile and seemed to exist in a kind of bubble of serenity that he found mesmerizing.

“I wonder who she is?” Joe asked aloud.

Robey shook his head, distracted. “We heard from the sheriff of Sheridan County this morning,” he said to Joe, sitting back down with his coffee, “following up on Frank Urman. They’re trying to determine if he had any known enemies, business problems, wife problems, threats, the usual.”

Joe tore his eyes away from the woman and child and looked at Robey.

“They’ve found nothing to go on so far. Urman was fairly active in city and county government, belonged to a couple of groups-Elks and the American Legion-but kept a pretty low profile. He was well liked and respected, from what they say. He spent a lot of his time hunting and fishing, but that describes just about everybody in Wyoming.”

Joe nodded, and tapped the files on his lap. “It describes John Garrett and Warren Tucker too,” he said. “I was hoping when I read the files something would jump out at me. Or better yet, that there would be some kind of connection between the victims. Tucker and Garrett were around the same age, fifty-four and fifty-two, I think. That got me going for a few minutes until I saw that Urman was sixty-two.”

Robey said, “What, you thought they might be members of the same group?”

“Just thinking.”

“The only similarity I could find is that all three are white, middle-aged or older, hunters-and dead,” Robey said.

Joe grunted, and looked back at his files.

JOHN GARRETT was a CPA from Lander, Wyoming. Three weeks before, his body was found with a single gunshot wound to the head in the back of his pickup on a side road in the Wind River Mountains a few miles out of Ethete. He’d told his wife he was going deer hunting by himself after work, like he did every year since they’d been married, but this time he didn’t come home. She reported his disappearance that night, saying she was worried because he was not answering his cell phone. The sheriff’s deputy who found Garrett’s vehicle said Garrett’s body was laid out next to a four-point buck deer in the bed of his pickup. The buck had apparently been shot and dragged to the truck. Garrett’s rifle was found on the open tailgate. Ballistics confirmed it had recently been fired. Judging by the way Garrett’s body was found with his head near the cab of the truck, the deputy and others soon on the scene speculated that the accountant had somehow accidentally shot himself with his own rifle in the act of pulling the body of the deer into the back. Imagining a scenario where the accountant accidentally discharged his loaded rifle-which he may have leaned against the tailgate while he struggled to pull a two-hundred-pound carcass into his vehicle-was not that crazy. Although forensic technicians couldn’t determine the exact sequence of events that led to the accident, enough disparate factors-his discharged rifle, the dead deer, the fact that his body was found in his own pickup-led to the conclusion that it was a bizarre hunting accident with no witnesses. Death had been instant. The slit across Garrett’s throat was attributed to him falling on the point of the buck’s antler after he’d been shot.