C. Box - Endangered

Wentworth’s first reaction was to argue, but he fought against it. He said, “I could get reassigned to Bumfuck, North Dakota. Right now, no one down at the lab will return my calls. Annie won’t even talk to me. The walls are closing in on me, and you know it.”

“Yup,” Joe said.

“So what can I do? I know I have a problem,” he said, raising the bottle again and flirting with it. “I know I drink too much and get out of control and do things I later regret. Like coming here. Or that night out at Lek Sixty-four.”

“So you admit you killed all those birds,” Joe said.

Wentworth nodded. That wouldn’t be an admission on the tape.

“Start by admitting it and we can go on from there,” Joe said.

“I just did.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. “Then you tampered with the evidence I gathered and sent false evidence to your lab in Denver. I know because we opened the box this morning and looked at it.”

Wentworth moaned. He said, “You were down there?”

“I met Kelsea Raymer,” Joe said. “We opened the box together. Where did you get those spent shotgun shells?”

Wentworth tipped his head back and moaned again. Joe was getting tired of the moaning.

“I found ’em in the back of a guy’s truck. It isn’t hard to find shotgun shells around here.”

“That’s what I figured,” Joe said. “And the tire tracks?”

Wentworth hesitated, then mumbled, “In an alley in back of the Stockman’s Bar.”

“Now, doesn’t it feel good to come clean?”

“Not really,” he said, sullen.

“Isn’t that why you came here?”

“Kind of,” he said. “I was kind of hoping you and I could work something out, you know?”

“Like a bribe?”

“Maybe. I’ve got some money in savings, and by looking around here you could use it.”

Joe shook his head. “Have you been drinking since I saw you last?”

“Pretty much. I can’t remember it all. I do remember going back up to Lek Sixty-four to see if you’d found all the shotgun shells. It was the second time I’d been up there since the incident.”

“Did you find any?” Joe asked.

“A couple.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “I didn’t send all of the originals in the evidence box. I held a couple out that came from your shotgun. Kelsea Raymer has them now. She’ll no doubt find your fingerprints on them and determine they were fired from your shotgun.”

Another moan.

“When is the last time you ate something?” Joe asked.

Wentworth shrugged.

“I’m going to scramble some eggs,” Joe said. “Maybe you ought to put a cap on that bottle.”

“It’s a disease,” Wentworth said. “I have a disease.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

As he cracked eggs into the skillet, Joe said, “In the state of Wyoming, only one party to a recorded conversation needs to be aware of it to serve as evidence in court.”

He let that sink in for a minute.

When Wentworth staggered to his feet and leaned against the kitchen doorframe, Joe patted the recorder in his front pocket.

“So I’m fucked,” Wentworth said.

“Yup.”

“I just wanted to spend every second I could with Annie,” he said.

“Judge Hewitt has a soft spot for crimes of passion.”

“He does?”

“No,” Joe said. “He doesn’t.”

—

THEY SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. Joe watched Wentworth pick at his food at first, then cover it with ketchup and shovel it in like a wolf.

Joe said, “Do you feel bad about killing all those sage grouse? I mean, you’re considered an expert on them. I would have thought you were serious about their survival.”

Wentworth didn’t respond, but just kept eating.

“Maybe if you explained it to me, I could understand,” Joe said.

“Nothing to explain,” Wentworth said. “Those birds are just a means to an end for me. Not all that much is known about them, so it wasn’t all that hard to become an expert. Their population has boomed and crashed over the years. It’s crashing now. If we can hold up a few oil rigs and slow the crash—well, good for us.”

“What if they’re crashing on their own? Without our help?” Joe asked. “I see it all the time. Some years, there are rabbits everywhere you look, and the next year there are coyotes and foxes in huge numbers eating rabbits. Then the rabbit population crashes and I don’t see many coyotes or foxes for a few years. Could that be the case with sage grouse?”

“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “It’s above my pay grade to answer that question. It’s just a job, okay? I don’t have a personal investment in them.”

“But the people out here have a personal investment in what you decide about those birds,” Joe said. “It might mean either they have jobs or they don’t.”

“They can always change jobs,” Wentworth said. “Or move. That’s not my problem.”

Joe frowned. Wentworth spooned more eggs onto his plate.

“What’s happening outside?” Wentworth asked as he chewed.

“It’s snowing.”

“Crap. Can I make it back to the hotel?”

“You sure aren’t staying here ,” Joe said.

—

WHILE DOING THE DISHES, Joe turned to Wentworth, who was still at the table sipping coffee.

“Didn’t you just tell me you’d gone up to Lek Sixty-four before?” Joe asked. “I don’t mean the night you shot up all the birds. I thought you said you’d gone up there looking for shotgun shells previously.”

“Are you recording this?”

“Sure am.”

“Can you shut it off?”

“No point now, Revis.”

Wentworth sighed. He said, “Yeah, I went up there last week after you’d been up there. That’s after I came up with the plan to send bad shells to Denver. I wanted to see if I could find any more of mine and get rid of them.”

“When did you go?”

Wentworth surveyed the ceiling for a few minutes, then said, “Last Tuesday.”

Joe thought back. Tuesday was when Nate was ambushed.

“Did you see anything unusual up there?” Joe asked.

“No. This whole state’s unusual.”

“Come on, Revis. Think .”

Wentworth drummed his fingers on the table, and Joe watched his expression change. He’d recalled something.

“I’d been drinking,” he said. “But I remember I was out there in the sagebrush and I heard a vehicle coming down that two-track. I thought it was you, so I got on the ground.”

“Where was your pickup?”

“I hid it half a mile away, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.”

Joe nodded. “So who was it?”

“I don’t know their names ,” he said with distaste. “But it was just a couple of locals. Two vehicles went by and I laid there thinking: ‘Here I am, drunk and facedown in the mud. It has come to this.’”

Joe felt something tingle in his chest. He sat down at the table across from Wentworth.

“Two vehicles?”

“Yeah. One following the other.”

“What did they look like?”

Wentworth said, “The first one was an old beat-up SUV. There was an old man driving it. The second was one of those white panel vans, you know? Like plumbers drive? A younger man—a big bruiser type—was driving that.”

The tingle spread. Joe recalled Eldon and Brenda’s battered Suburban in front of the courthouse. He’d seen it again at their place. The first driver sounded like Eldon. The second: Bull.

“The white van,” Joe said, “was it new?”

“Newer than the beat-up piece of shit,” Wentworth said.

“Was there any writing on the side of it?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t see all that well down there, but it was something like ‘Yahoo Falconry Services.’ There was a picture of a bird on the side, like an eagle.”