Endangered (24 page)

“I am.”

“Oh,” Brenda said, bending forward again and whispering a few inches from Liv’s ear, “if only that were true.”

Liv closed her eyes. She thought about wheeling in her chair and plunging her thumbs into Brenda’s throat. If Bull wasn’t up there, she would have done it.

“I want to know,” Liv said.

“I’m waiting on Eldon,” Brenda said. “He’s got to go get his tank filled up. Then instead of dumping it at the treatment plant, he’s going to bring it back here.”

It took a moment for Liv to realize what she’d just heard.

“He’s going to dump sewage in the cellar?”

“Pretty much,” Brenda said in a conversational tone. “Then he can fire up the Bobcat and fill the rest of the hole with dirt. If anybody ever gets a notion to dig it up, they’ll realize this hole is full of sewage. There’s no way they’d keep digging and eventually find a body. We’ll just tell ’em our septic tank must have leaked.”

Liv closed her eyes.

“So you were asking me about pork chops. Is that because it’s my last meal?”

Brenda snorted, stopped brushing, and backed away.

She said, “Bull, cover me. I’m coming up.”

Dirt sifted into the cellar from the edge as Bull bent over and peered in. Liv saw that he was holding her handgun.

She turned her head to see Brenda clumsily mount the ladder and start to climb. She grunted on each rung.

Liv stood and approached the clay wall and grasped the stone and pulled. It didn’t budge.

As Brenda awkwardly climbed the ladder out of striking distance, she said, “Oh, I don’t know about it being your last meal. I might bring you some breakfast, so put all those containers and the silverware back in the bucket tonight so I can pull it up.”

When Brenda was out of the cellar, she said, “Thanks for letting me brush your hair. Maybe if it was different circumstances, we could have actually been friends, you know?”

Then to Bull: “Close it.”

Liv waited until the footfalls faded away, then turned back to the stone.

It shredded her to know that she might have missed the only chance she’d ever have.

I
t made a warped kind of sense, Joe thought. If Eldon Cates needed to hide a vehicle fast, where better than an elk camp that was unknown to everyone, including the game warden?

Revis Wentworth had given Joe an all-important clue to the location of the elk camp simply by describing which direction the two vehicles were going on the two-track road across the sagebrush bench. Joe had been on the road before, of course, when he’d found Lek 64. He’d taken a more established county road to the two-track, and when he intersected it, he’d turned east.

Several years ago, Joe had taken the road west through the foothills of the Bighorns and on into the timber. At the time, he was looking for a promontory, or high-altitude point, where he might “perch” and glass the terrain with his spotting scope. The road was little used, and Joe had given up looking for an opening in the timber as he ascended the mountain. It was difficult even finding a place to perform a three-point turn because the lodgepole pines were so thick.

His district was 1,800 square miles of mountains, plains, and broken country. There were hundreds of ancient two-tracks running through it, most leading nowhere in particular. If they didn’t lead to an obvious destination or were rarely used by hunters or fishermen, he simply forgot about them, like he had with this nameless path.

The western direction of the two-track from the sagebrush bench into the mountains would be convenient for an elk outfitter like Eldon Cates, he thought. Eldon could access it from his compound down below in the valley and never cross a highway or county road, therefore not likely to be seen by hunters or anyone else. The land the two-track crossed was a confusing mix of BLM, U.S. Forest Service, and private land. It was a baffling checkerboard on the map and likely to deter visitors. So it was perfect for Eldon.

If Joe was guessing right, anyhow.

Something else made sense, now that he thought about it. He’d wondered how it was that April’s possessions had been found at Tilden Cudmore’s place and in his vehicle if Cudmore wasn’t responsible for her attack. Or how Nate’s assailants had accessed the HF Bar Ranch through a locked gate and not been seen.

Although he had to first confirm the existence of the secret elk camp and that the Yarak, Inc.
van was hidden there, dots were suddenly connecting.

—

H
E HIT THE SPEED DIAL
on his phone as his tires sizzled on the wet highway.

“County Sheriff’s Department,” the receptionist said.

“I need to talk to Sheriff Reed.”

“Joe?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in a meeting.”

“Get him out, please.”

The snow was sticking to the green shoots of grass on the side of the highway, and the storm was moving over the tops of the mountains and coming down the western side like rolls of smoke. Joe had his windshield wipers on low and the defroster on. He thought he could find the camp and get out before dark and before the storm enveloped the Twelve Sleep Valley.

“Reed here. What is it, Joe? I’m in a budget meeting with the county commissioners.”

“I got a lead,” Joe said. “Revis Wentworth was at Lek Sixty-four last Tuesday and he said he saw two vehicles crossing the sagebrush into the mountains. One fits the description of Eldon Cates’s old Suburban. The other fits the description of the white van Nate was driving the day he got ambushed.”

Reed paused. “What are you saying exactly?”

“That the Cateses were involved in the shooting. Either they did it on their own or somebody hired them to remove Nate’s van from the scene. They’re implicated one way or another. Moving that van made everyone wonder where Olivia Brannan had gone after the shooting and made people think she must have been in on it. But it doesn’t sound like she was there when Wentworth saw the two vehicles. The descriptions he gave me of the drivers sound like Eldon and Bull.”

Reed said, “Why would they go after Romanowski? What’s the connection there?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.”

“This is coming out of left field,” Reed said. “How are we going to prove anything? Do you need a couple of my guys?”

“Not yet,” Joe said. “But you might want to let them know what’s going on so they’ll be ready. I’m on my way up the mountain to see if I can find that van in Eldon Cates’s elk camp. If I find it, we can go after Eldon.”

“In this storm?”

“It’s just snow, Mike,” Joe said. “It doesn’t look to be as bad as they were predicting. If we only worked in good weather, we wouldn’t get much done around here, would we?”

Reed snorted.

“There’s another thing,” Joe said. “I’ve been thinking about Tilden Cudmore.”

“What about him?”

“We all wondered how he could possibly be innocent in regard to April’s attack after her stuff was found on his place and in his car, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I want you to think about something,” Joe said as he turned off the highway onto the county road that would lead him to the Lek 64 two-track. No one had driven on the road since the snow started, and it was untracked. “Think about patrolling this county every day. You—and me—always keep an eye out for anything unusual. We notice cars we’ve never seen before, or out-of-county plates. We notice out-of-state plates, or pickups with two or three men inside—that kind of thing. But what we don’t notice is normal activities. We just kind of shunt them aside.”

“I’m not quite getting what you’re saying,” Reed said.

Joe continued. “We don’t even see the propane truck making its rounds. We don’t notice the mail carrier on her route or the garbage service. We see them so often, they turn invisible, because we’re only tuned to people and activities that aren’t part of the day-to-day. They hide in plain sight.”

Reed said, “Like a sewage-service pump truck.”

“Exactly,” Joe said. “Like C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service
.
I probably see that truck, or trucks like it, five times a day and never even think about it. You probably do, too. They’re all over, but we just don’t see them.”

Reed said, “Hold on.” Joe could hear the sheriff speaking to someone while he held the phone away from his mouth. “Tell the commissioners it’s going to be a minute.”

Then back to Joe: “I see where you’re going with this. You’re saying Eldon could have planted evidence at Cudmore’s place and in his vehicle and no one would have given a second glance. He could roll his pump truck onto Cudmore’s property and no one would even look up.”

“Right,” Joe said. “And I bet if you take a look at that big key ring Eldon has on his belt, you’d find a key to the front gate of the HF Bar. They probably have a contract with him and they wouldn’t even notice him when the ranch is in full swing. He comes and goes, and his pump truck is big, but it’s also invisible.”

“I hear you,” Reed said. “But if what you’re saying is true, you’re back to thinking it was Dallas who beat April and dumped her. That the Cates family was covering for him by planting evidence at the Cudmore place.”

Joe said, “Yup.”

“It also means an innocent man hung himself in my jail because of the pressure we put on him.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Tilden Cudmore ended up like Tilden Cudmore always thought he would: persecuted by the government.”

“You said it, not me.”

“That’s a lot of speculation, Joe.”

“It is.”

“But it sort of makes sense.”

“It does.”

“We need real evidence before we can move on anything, but I’ll run this by Dulcie and see if she can shoot any holes in it.”

“Good.”

“Still, though,” Reed said, “it doesn’t account for a couple of things. One, why did they ambush Nate Romanowski? Two, what happened to Olivia Brannan?”

Joe almost overran the two-track that intersected the county road, but he recognized it and turned right.

He said, “I just found the road into the mountains and I’m taking it. We may lose our connection real soon.”

“Call me on my cell phone either way,” Reed said. “I’ll reschedule this damned meeting I’m in and call Dulcie. We’ll be ready to move if you find something.”

—

B
ECAUSE THE SNOW
was coming from the west as the storm barreled down the mountain, it now swirled like a white kaleidoscope in front of the windshield. The volume of it had increased since he turned off the highway.

Joe couldn’t focus his vision in the distance so he concentrated on keeping his front wheels in the two-track. Daisy seemed to sense his anxiety and she put her big head on his lap. She was warm so he didn’t push her away.

The snowstorm was both good and bad, he thought. It was unlikely the Cateses would be out and about and see him on the road from their compound. But if the intensity of the snow kept building and turned into a patented Rocky Mountain spring whiteout, he ran the risk of getting lost or stuck.

Joe keyed the button on his dash-mounted GPS to record his current location. If nothing else, he’d be able to find his way back to where he started.

—

T
HE ONCOMING SNOW
stopped swirling once he entered the trees at the base of the Bighorns. Instead, it sifted down through the pine branches like fine flour.

The lodgepoles closed in as the pickup serpentined up the mountain in a long series of switchbacks. A mile up the grade, the road got rougher and the canopy of branches closed in over the top of the cab. He remembered turning around at about this spot the first time he’d ventured up.

But it felt right, he thought. If Eldon’s camp was up ahead, the last thing Eldon would do would be to improve the access road. The grade and condition of the road itself would turn back most visitors.

Then:
Whump.

Joe nearly lost control of the steering wheel when something hit the passenger side of his truck. Daisy’s head jerked up with alarm.

He looked over to see the mirror had struck a thick branch and had folded back against the passenger window. Joe looked at his reflection and observed,
He looks worried.

And he was.

The tires ground over large slick rocks now, pitching the pickup right to left as it climbed. Snow-covered boughs smacked the windshield and dumped more wet snow over the hood.

Joe upped the speed of his wipers to compensate and to keep the glass clear.

“We’re going to find it and get out,” he assured Daisy. She looked up at him as if she understood.

—

H
IS SITUATION CRYSTALLIZED
as he shifted into four-wheel drive low to continue the ascent. Whether or not he found Eldon’s camp, he could be in trouble. He could easily imagine getting high-centered and stuck on the boulder-strewn path during an epic spring storm. He was out of cell tower range and his radio crackled with static. Even the satellite phone he kept in his gear box in the bed of the pickup would likely not get a signal through the thick canopy of snow-covered branches overhead.

There were no openings in which to turn his truck around, and there was no way he could back it out down the switchbacks he’d taken. He had no choice but to keep going up.

—

S
OUR THOUGHTS
came to him as he climbed.

He’d assumed the Yarak, Inc.
van had followed the Suburban up the trail. But how could a two-wheel-drive van have gotten up there, considering the fact that his pickup was barely making it?

He realized he might be completely wrong about the scenario he’d laid out for Reed.

Revis Wentworth could have lied about the two vehicles, or been so drunk he got the direction and the road they were on incorrect.

Joe imagined a fruitless grind up the eastern face of the Bighorn Mountains that resulted in him getting his pickup hopelessly stuck and him traipsing back down in knee-high snow at the same time his daughter was being brought out of her coma in a Billings hospital.

Then the road leveled, and even through the thick snowfall, he could see a slot in the rock wall ahead that appeared wide enough to drive his truck through.

—

T
HE STRIATION THA
T FORMED
the granite wall stretched out as far as he could see in either direction. Behind and above the twelve-foot wall, the timbered mountain continued to climb. But on the other side of the slot, there appeared to be an opening in the timber, a clearing.

He jumped out of his truck to move a log that blocked the entrance. As he moved it, he noticed how simply it came up and swung to the side. None of its branches were embedded in the ground and the base of the log was cut cleanly, meaning
it had been moved before
. Perhaps many times.

Joe got back in his pickup and slowly drove into the middle of Eldon Cates’s elk camp.

—

W
EATHERE
D GRAY CROSS POLES
had been chained to the lodgepole trunks to hang game carcasses. Each had a rusty block-and-tackle assembly at the midpoint of the game pole.

Several square-shaped tent sites were aligned around a blackened fire pit. Broken glass winked within the pit, as did beer bottle caps. Metal boxes were stacked against the inside granite wall. They were locked and bear-proof.

It was a terrific location for an elk camp, he thought. No wonder Eldon kept it a secret.

The white Yarak, Inc. panel van was located against the thick wall of trees on the south edge of the camp. It didn’t look to be parked there as much as pushed there.

Joe approached it on foot with his shotgun barrel resting in the crook of his left arm. He noticed that both the front and back bumpers were practically wrenched from the van’s frame, probably from tow chains they’d used to pull the vehicle up the rocky road.

He photographed the van from several angles as he got close to it. Other than the bumpers, it didn’t appear to be damaged.

Joe took a breath before peering inside. He braced himself, hoping he wouldn’t find Liv Brannan’s body on the floor of the van. He exhaled his relief.

After pulling on a pair of leather gloves so he wouldn’t leave additional fingerprints on the surfaces, he opened the vehicle and shot the interior with his camera. He recognized the hoods and jesses hanging from the inside walls as Nate’s. Joe wondered what the Cateses had done with the falcons. He hoped they were still alive.