Joe drove five minutes before answering. “No, I don’t.”
“Then why are we doing this? Is it just to help Marcus Hand create enough doubt?”
“Yup.”
She said, “If nothing else, I want to be assured Bob Lee had nothing to do with it so we can look elsewhere. Since Earl left a lifetime of deals behind him, he could have enemies we don’t know anything about. I can’t just sit here and let Hand get her off under a cloud. It makes me feel kind of dirty. Isn’t there another way?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Didn’t you ask me to do what I could to help her out? To help us out?”
Sighing, she said, “Yes, but I meant we should help prove her innocence. Not just muck up the water so badly the judge and jurors can’t decide. There’s a difference between innocence and being found not guilty.”
“Not to Marcus Hand,” Joe said. “Maybe not to your mother, either.”
“But we’re different,” Marybeth said.
Joe couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t get him in trouble.
“Joe,” she said, “now would be the time we need more help with this. The trial starts in ten days.”
He nodded.
“Joe?”
“I tried to call him today,” he confessed. “The call didn’t go through and there wasn’t any way to leave a message. He might have switched phones. So I might have to go where I know he was last and try to find him in person.”
She said, “Then go, Joe. Put the rest behind you.”
SEPTEMBER 5
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—GALILEO
23
Joe spent the Labor Day weekend in the field, patrolling his district from the banks of the Twelve Sleep River through the main streets of Saddlestring and Winchester to the high mountain roads in the Bighorns. As was his custom on the two busiest weekends of the summer, Memorial Day and Labor Day, he made himself as conspicuous as possible in his red shirt and green pickup truck. He noted the philosophical difference in the fishermen, hunters, hikers, and campers from the first three-day holiday of the season. On Memorial Day weekend, it was often still chilly, but the mood of the citizens he encountered was bursting with optimism and anticipation for the warm weather ahead. The Labor Day weekend, although nearly always blessed with pleasant weather and good conditions, was fused with a sense of loss and dread that the summer was over. More fights and violations occurred on Labor Day weekend, and citizens seemed to be walking around with shorter fuses.
He’d ticketed several fishermen for not having licenses as they got out of their drift boats at a river takeout, and he’d issued a warning to a raftful of floaters for forgetting their personal flotation devices. Although he was doing his duty and enforcing the law, he was immeasurably distracted because his head was swimming with thoughts of Missy, Earl, Bud, Marcus Hand . . . and what he’d discovered about Nate Romanowski.
He’d been alarmed on Saturday to find Large Merle’s house abandoned on the two-track to Hole in the Wall Canyon. It was a hot and windy day, and dust devils swirled across the mesa that fronted the canyon. Sandy grit washed across the hood of his pickup like rain and filtered through the air vents on the dashboard. The closer he drove to the trailhead that led into the canyon, the worse his feeling of dread.
The feeling was confirmed even before he trekked down the trail to the caves. There was a palpable emptiness in the air, and when he saw the horrible gaping mouth of the cave marked by black tongues of soot that licked upward, it was as if he’d been hit hard in the chest.
Joe nudged his boot tip through the debris inside the cave, recognizing items he’d seen there before. Nate’s radios and monitors were shattered, table and chairs practically vaporized, his satellite phone disemboweled. Panic set in as Joe rooted through the wreckage. If Nate had been caught in the explosion—What the hell had happened?—there was no sign of a body. Which meant whoever had done this had taken the body. Or somehow his friend had survived. But when Joe surveyed the scorched walls of the cave and kicked through the shards that remained, he couldn’t imagine anyone living through it.
Joe had never anticipated this. Nate was security-conscious to the point of paranoia, and he had the ability to track anyone venturing into the canyon. Which meant that whoever had attacked had slipped by the wires, sensors, and cameras on the trail and gotten close enough to lob a grenade or explosive into the mouth of the cave. Either that, or it had been done from long distance. A missile?
And then he saw a blackened and cracked object within the pile. His first thought was: burned flesh. Swallowing hard to keep from retching, Joe used a broken stave to flick debris away from the object. To his horror, he saw it wasn’t skin or a body part, but the bottom half of Alisha Whiteplume’s black leather boot.
He said, “Oh, no.”
Knowing more than most how Nate thought, Joe exited the cave and hiked up above the shattered mews to a wooded alcove his friend had once showed him. The clearing was small but pastoral. Nate said he liked to sit naked on a lone rounded boulder in the clearing to read or think. Nate found it spiritual, and invited Joe to use it any time he needed it. Joe declined.
And here she was, or what was left of her body, anyway. Nate had placed her remains on hastily built scaffolding so it lay exposed to the sun and birds in the traditional Native way, before the Jesuits had banned the practice. Bits of her clothing and hair had been tied to the corner posts and they wafted in the slight breeze. Her skull was tilted to the side and Joe recognized her large white teeth grinning at him in a manic forced smile. Ravens that had been feeding on the body had nearly stripped it clean. They watched Joe from overhanging branches with tiny black soulless eyes, waiting for him to leave.
Nate hated ravens, Joe knew.
So in homage to his friend, he blew one out of a tree with his shotgun. Black feathers filtered down through the branches to settle on the pine needle floor. The surviving ravens scattered with rude caws and heavy wing-beats.
He knew they’d come back after he left to finish the job. But he knew he’d never come back, and he doubted Nate would.
If his friend was somehow still alive.
And if Nate had somehow survived an attack that killed his lover and wiped out his sanctuary . . . there would be hell to pay.
When Marybeth heard the story on Saturday night, she sat back on the couch and closed her eyes. She said, “Poor, poor Alisha. She always knew if she stayed with Nate, something could happen. But she didn’t deserve this. Her poor family. Her students and everyone who knew her . . .” Marybeth’s voice trailed off.
After a minute, she opened her eyes and looked up at Joe. “We’ll never know for sure what happened, will we?”
“Maybe not,” Joe said. “Unless Nate comes back and tells us. Or whoever did it brags.”
“This is the price for living outside of society,” she said. “When horrible things happen, no one knows. This is the price for living the way Nate lives.”
“Either that,” Joe said, “or marking time in prison. Nate made his choice.”
“And you helped him,” Marybeth said, not without sympathy.
“I did,” Joe said.
“Do you have any idea where he is?”
“Nope.”
“But you think he’s alive?”
Joe nodded. “Someone built that scaffold. I’m sure it wasn’t the guy who attacked him. There’s Large Merle, but he seems to be missing also.”