C. Box - Endangered

Joe heard Marybeth gasp in front of him and saw her raise her hand to her mouth.

“I know that’s your theory,” Joe said. “But it doesn’t wash.”

“So where is she?” Dudley asked with a forced grin. “She picks him up, takes him to that ranch, and vanishes off the face of the earth. It isn’t a stretch to guess she colluded with the shooters.”

Joe shook his head.

“Do you know where she is?” Dudley asked. “Does anybody? She wasn’t at the scene, and her and her van are AWOL.”

Marybeth said, “She’s head over heels for Nate, and he feels the same way about her.”

“She devoted years of her life to working for Wolfgang Templeton,” Dudley countered. “She’s known Romanowski for what—six months?”

“I’m not buying it,” Joe said. But his mind was spinning because it made sense.

“Maybe we can ask her,” Dudley said. “If she can ever be found .”

—

LATER, AS JOE’S PICKUP rose above the rimrocks that defined Billings and the dark prairie was stretched out in front of them, Marybeth said, “If both April and Nate are taken away from us . . .”

Joe said, “Don’t you dare lose hope.”

—

AS THEY CROSSED the border back into Wyoming, Joe’s cell phone lit up. Dulcie Schalk.

“Hello, Dulcie,” he said.

He could tell by her long pause that bad news was coming.

She said, “Tilden Cudmore hanged himself in his cell. They found his body an hour ago.”

Joe tapped his brakes so he could pull over to the shoulder of the highway. Marybeth studied his face. Joe repeated what he had just heard, and Marybeth closed her eyes.

“How did it happen?” Joe asked, holding the phone away from his face and punching the speaker button so Marybeth could hear the conversation as well.

“He used a bedsheet for a rope and he tied it to the light fixture,” Dulcie said.

“Where were the deputies?”

“We just interviewed them. They checked on him at eight-fifty p.m. and he appeared to be sleeping in his bunk. When they went back in at five past nine, he was dead. They did CPR on him when they cut him down, and the clinic tried to revive him, but he was DOA.”

Joe said, “He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would do himself in.”

“I agree,” Dulcie said. “Otherwise, we would have put him on a suicide watch. You just never know what’s going on in a man’s head. Especially that man’s head.”

“Is it possible someone got to him?” Joe asked.

She sighed. “No. It’s all on videotape. He waited until the deputy left the cell and he jumped up and went to work. No one was watching the monitor at the time he did it. So, no. He killed himself.”

“His guilt got to him,” Marybeth said. “Or he was a coward who couldn’t face jail.”

“I’m guessing the latter,” Dulcie said. Then: “Marybeth, I’m sorry I had to call you with this news.”

Marybeth said, “Don’t be. I would have gladly handed a rope to the man who assaulted April.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Dulcie said. “I’d rather have sent him to Rawlins, but in a sense, we’ve got justice—just not the kind I prefer.”

After a pause, she asked, “So how is April?”

Joe turned off the speaker and handed the phone to Marybeth.

While Dulcie and Marybeth talked, he eased the pickup back out onto the highway.

He could not have predicted this turn of events. It was not at all satisfying to him. He couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t sure justice had been served at all.

Cudmore was a creep and a paranoid conspiracy theorist. The evidence was stacked against him. The things he had said and done at the arraignment hearing had almost convinced Joe he was capable of beating and dumping April. Dulcie obviously believed Cudmore had done it. Marybeth seemed to think the same thing.

Joe wasn’t so sure. And he couldn’t reach out to Nate for help because Nate was dying.

13

Two days later, Liv Brannan looked up when she heard the heavy oncoming footfalls approach the root cellar from outside. She’d come to recognize the day-to-day routine.

It was dinnertime on Friday night, March 21. It was her thirty-third birthday, but she didn’t plan on telling anyone about it because she knew they wouldn’t care. When a single tear leaked out of her left eye, she violently wiped it away.

She sat on a rickety hard-backed chair near the air mattress and a mass of rumpled sleeping bags. It was the only chair available.

By the looks of it, the cellar had been dug into the earth many years ago, probably before the motley collection of houses, double-wide trailers, and metal buildings had been assembled above ground. She’d seen glimpses of the compound through a tiny gap at the bottom of her blindfold when they brought her here after the shooting. There were old trucks and cars rusting in a field, a pack of dogs that had rushed out to greet the Suburban, and stray chickens in the yard. Elk, moose, and deer antlers whitened by age and sun covered the entire side of an old clapboard barn. She thought: White trash.

By the glow of a utility light that hung from a slit in the double doors, she’d studied every inch of the root cellar. She didn’t have anything else to do except reread the dozen magazines— American Hunter , National Enquirer , Taste of Home —they’d left for her. Someone had torn off the address labels on the front of each one so she wouldn’t know who the subscriptions were for—or the address they’d been sent to. All she knew was that the compound was about an hour from the HF Bar Ranch. She had no idea which direction they’d come from, and she hadn’t seen which roads they had taken, because she hadn’t been allowed to get off the floor of the second row of seats in the SUV until they arrived. She knew they’d been on gravel roads, asphalt, and finally a rutted dirt road that was a bruiser.

The walls of the cellar were hard dry clay. It had been dug by hand tools and she could make out the pick marks. Webs of dried roots reached out of the walls like gnarled hands. Several rows of empty shelving covered each wall, no doubt where someone used to store canned vegetables or jam. She’d heard that people out here used to can trout and wild game in Mason jars as well. The shelves were held up by rusted metal L-shaped braces. She’d tried to pull one out, but it was stuck fast. She’d continue to try to get one free because it was the only thing she had that could possibly serve as a weapon.

Plotting her escape was better than crying to herself. Liv was cried out.

The other items in the cellar—the blankets, the ancient thick sleeping bags lined with deer and elk montages that were no doubt used in a hunting camp, the humming electric space heater, the five-gallon white bucket that served as her toilet, the case of bottled water—were harmless.

—

THE HASP WAS THROWN on the double doors twelve feet above her. The left door was opened, then the right. The particular smell of the place—the mixture of spilled diesel fuel, manure, and sage—wafted down from outside. She could see a square of pure blue sky.

“Stand back,” the man said. “I’m puttin’ the ladder down.”

Liv stood and moved the chair, then retreated to the wall in back of her as the aluminum extension ladder was lowered until the feet were solidly on the floor. She looked up as the opening filled with the shoulders and head of a man. He wore a cowboy hat with sharp upturned side brims like he always did, and he appeared to be grinning.