C. Box - Endangered

And she did so slowly, Joe thought as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Lucy was a girl without urgency, and she seemed to float through life at her own smiling but unhurried pace.

With her was Noah After Buffalo, her debate club partner. Lucy wore black leggings and knee-high boots with her golden hair cascading over the shoulders of her tight down coat.

Noah was a Northern Arapaho whose parents had recently moved off the reservation and into town. He was smart and polite and seemed to have grown a foot taller in the last few months. He was a year older than Lucy and had his own battered pickup. Sometimes he brought her home after school. Marybeth liked him, and Joe tolerated him as much as he tolerated any male in the vicinity of his daughters.

Lucy and Noah walked closer together than Joe would have liked, and he saw Lucy look over and scan the remaining cars for Marybeth’s van. When she saw Joe’s green pickup, she mouthed, “My dad is here” to Noah, who waved.

Joe waved back, and Lucy separated from Noah and made her way toward his pickup. But before she did, she reached back and squeezed Noah’s hand behind her back in an intimate gesture.

“I saw that,” Joe said as Lucy slid into the passenger side and Daisy greeted her by pressing her head under Lucy’s chin.

“Oh, Dad,” Lucy said, vigorously scratching Daisy until the dog moaned.

He thought: One daughter took up with a cowboy. Another is taking up with an Indian.

Joe wasn’t sure what to make of that.

—

AS THEY PULLED OUT, Lucy said, “Why isn’t Mom here? Not that I mind that you pick me up, but . . .”

She studied him and apparently sensed that bad news was coming. He could see it in her eyes. She was intuitive like that, and had the ability to read people in a way Joe never could. He attributed it to all the years that Lucy had hung back and observed family interactions from the standpoint of the youngest.

He said, “The sheriff’s office responded to a call today that a girl had been badly beaten and left by the side of a road. Lucy, it was—”

“April,” Lucy said, tears filling her eyes. “Is she okay?”

Joe took a deep breath and told Lucy all he knew, in workmanlike fashion. Lucy listened without comment, but the tears kept coming. She dried her cheeks with the back of her hand. He finished by telling her that Marybeth said the doctors were good.

“Maybe she’ll be okay,” Lucy said. “One thing about April—she’s tough. Sometimes that’s scary, like when she’s mad at me or thinks I stole her boots or something, but in this case it might get her through.”

Joe almost smiled. He recalled the incident a year before when April had launched across the dinner table at Lucy for borrowing her best cowboy boots. Later, they had been found under April’s bed. Lucy, to her credit, hadn’t backed down.

“So it’s you and me,” Joe said. “We can stop and get something to eat in town or I can fix you something at home for dinner.”

“What?” Lucy asked. “Red meat and bread?”

“What’s wrong with that?” He knew he had plenty of elk steaks in the freezer.

“Let’s get pizza.”

Joe nodded.

—

JOE ASKED LUCY, “When was the last time you heard from April? You’re the only one in the family she really communicated with.” They were making the eight-mile drive from Saddlestring to his rural state-owned home on Bighorn Road. The warm pizza was in a box on the seat between them. Strings of drool hung from Daisy’s mouth.

“A week ago, I guess,” Lucy said. “She posted a photo of herself in a bikini by a swimming pool. It was at some hotel in a big city.”

April had blocked both Marybeth and Sheridan from her Facebook and Twitter pages. Only Lucy was allowed to follow her.

“Can you be more specific?” Joe asked.

“It was in Texas somewhere.”

“Houston, maybe?”

“That sounds right. But she didn’t post much of anything beyond the photo. She never does—there are just lots of photos of her and Dallas doing cool things. I think she wanted to impress me. You know, goofing around in airports, partying with cowboys. Selfies, you know.”

Joe grunted. Then: “Did April tell you she and Dallas Cates had broken up?”

“What?”

He told her what Brenda Cates had said.

“A month ago?” Lucy said. “No way. If that had happened I’d know about it even if she didn’t tell me directly. She wouldn’t keep posting photos on her page of the two of them if it was over. April is strange, but she isn’t crazy. If they’d broken up—and especially if he’d broken up with her —the world would know it by now. She would have started up an ‘I Hate Dallas Cates’ site.”

“If they did break up, do you think April would come back here?” Joe asked.

Lucy shrugged and said, “I never know what April will do next.”

After a beat, she said again, “No way April and Dallas broke up.”

Joe said, “I believe you.”

—

THERE WAS a white late-model pickup parked at Joe’s house with two people sitting inside. They were obviously waiting for him to arrive. The vehicle had U.S. government plates.

Joe moaned.

“Who is that?” Lucy asked.

“I call them the sage grouse twins,” Joe said. “Go ahead and take Daisy and the pizza inside. I’ll be in shortly, after I talk to them.”

—

ANNIE HATCH of the Bureau of Land Management and Revis Wentworth of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waited for Lucy and Daisy to enter the house before they got out of their pickup. Joe remembered that Wentworth had a thing about dogs—one had bitten him once on a local ranch he was visiting and now he insisted that he wouldn’t get out of his vehicle until all canines were secured.

Hatch and Wentworth were members of the Interagency Sage Grouse Task Force (ISGTF), which had been created by the federal government two years earlier to oversee state efforts to manage the species. Governor Rulon had loudly objected to the creation of the task force and had threatened to lock up any federal government employees who entered his state, but he’d eventually acquiesced when Washington threatened to withhold highway repair and Medicare funds. An agreement had been reached that the task force would keep the governor’s office informed as to their activities and findings and that they’d restrict their jurisdiction to the public lands of the state. That meant literally half of Wyoming, though, and the governor’s feelings about that situation were well known.

Joe liked Annie Hatch just fine. She was in her mid-thirties, pleasant, and friendly in just a mildly bureaucratic way. She had long, curly brown hair and an athletic build, and she dressed in an “outdoor girl” style: jeans, hiking boots, fishing shirts, fleece jackets. Her personal car was a Prius and she taught yoga classes in the evenings. Unlike Wentworth, who resided in Denver and was renting a room at the Holiday Inn in Saddlestring, Annie lived in a small house in town and was a member of the community.

“Hey, Joe,” she said as she got out of the pickup.

“Annie,” Joe said. “What brings you here?”

“Sage grouse.”

“Imagine that,” Joe said wearily.

Revis Wentworth got out and cast a cautionary look toward the front door of the Pickett home.

“Daisy is inside and she’s harmless,” Joe said to him.

“Supposedly, so was the dog that bit me. I needed eleven stitches,” Wentworth said back.

Joe shrugged.

Wentworth said, “We got a report that there’s been a massacre on BLM land.”

Wentworth was slight, serious, and more than a little in love with his position, Joe thought. He was pale and wore black-framed hipster glasses. Joe had never seen him smile or make a joke. Wentworth always wore a sport jacket, but kept it unbuttoned so the people he met could see the semiauto hanging from a shoulder holster underneath. As one of 250 special agents for the USFW, he was authorized to carry a weapon.