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For a moment, he wondered if the horses and Daisy could wait to eat until late that night. Then he groaned and continued into the driveway.

Annie Hatch opened the passenger-side door and walked over to greet him with her hands stuffed in the back pockets of her jeans. Her body language said: I am remorseful. Revis Wentworth stayed behind the wheel of the pickup. Apparently, he wasn’t as remorseful, Joe thought.

Joe parked and got out. “Now isn’t a good time, Annie,” he said.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said, looking up from her boot tops to Joe. “Why didn’t you tell us about what had happened to your daughter? I—we—feel terrible about pressuring you during this time in your life.”

“You’re doing your job,” Joe said. “I didn’t want to bring my own personal stuff into it.”

“But if you would have told us . . .”

Joe chinned toward Wentworth, who seemed to be studying something fascinating on the dashboard. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Joe said.

“It would have to me,” she said.

“Thank you, Annie.”

“How is your daughter?”

“She’s stable. It’s complicated.”

“Good, good,” Hatch said. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

Joe nodded. It was apparent there was more on her mind, but he didn’t want to hear what it was. He said, “Well, it was nice of you to come by, but I’m on my way to the hospital right now.”

Because she didn’t turn around and walk back to her truck, Joe knew that she definitely had more to say.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, I almost hate to ask,” she said, “but we were wondering if you’d sent that box of evidence from Lek Sixty-four to your people at the lab.”

Joe took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. The anger he’d felt in the courtroom had dissipated, but it was still within reach.

“No, I haven’t,” he said. The evidence box had been taped up and labeled, but was still on his desk in his cluttered office. He hadn’t even thought about it the past few days.

“In that case, Revis was wondering if you wouldn’t mind handing it over to us. We’d like to FedEx it to our experts in Denver. The word is getting out that an entire lek was massacred, and, well, you know how it is. We’ve got people breathing down our necks, wondering what we’re doing about it. Revis even got a call from D.C.”

Joe put his hands on his hips.

From the open window of the pickup, Wentworth spoke up. “Like you said, we still have a job to do.”

Joe knew he’d screwed up, and he wanted the sage grouse twins to go away.

He said to Hatch, “I’ll go get it. Just let me know what you hear back, okay?”

“Thank you, Joe.”

“One more thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

He pointed at Wentworth. “Keep him away from me.”

USING A BROKEN GREEN PINE BOUGH he’d found on the side of the road, Joe propped up the yellow crime scene tape that was stretched across the open gate of the HF Bar Ranch and then drove his pickup underneath it.

Gary Norwood was leaning against his SUV and eating an apple when Joe pulled into the ranch yard. Norwood had been on the job less than two years and had taken it straight out of college. He looked it. He wore a loose oversized cowboy shirt over a black concert T-shirt, baggy jeans, and a backwards baseball cap. He had a shaved head and a soul patch beneath his lower lip. He’d not taken off his latex gloves to eat the apple.

“The sheriff said you might stop by,” Norwood said. “I don’t mind the company, since it’s just me: the entire Twelve Sleep County Evidence Tech Department.”

“I can’t stay long,” Joe said, getting out of his pickup. “What have you found?”

“Follow me,” Norwood said, opening the back door of his SUV and tossing the apple core onto the floorboard, into a month’s worth of fast-food wrappers and other trash. “Just make sure to walk clear of the evidence markers. I’ve got everything prepped for when the feds show up later.”

He led Joe through the ranch yard on foot toward an ancient log horse barn.

“This is quite a place,” Norwood said over his shoulder. “It would be cool to see it in full operation. I might come up this summer when it’s in full swing. I bet there are some good-looking rich women who come out here to play cowgirl.”

“That’s usually the case,” Joe said. He knew how the local single cowboys and wranglers made sure they got the night off during the summer—usually Wednesdays—when the guest ranches brought their clients into town. Many liaisons between rawboned local boys and well-heeled women executives from the east had occurred over the years at the Stockman’s Bar.

“Did I hear it right that you know the guy they found here last night?” Norwood asked.

“Yup.”

“He going to make it?”

“It doesn’t sound good.”

“I can see why,” Norwood said, matter-of-fact. “Because somebody lost a hell of a lot of blood.”

NORWOOD WALKED JOE through his best reconstruction of what had happened.

“He was found here,” Norwood said, pointing toward a clearing on the near end of the ranch yard marked with a yellow plastic evidence marker. “I don’t know whether he was trying to crawl farther and just played out, or what.”

“Can you tell where it happened?” Joe asked.

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Norwood said. “I just wish it hadn’t rained yesterday. Any footprints or tire tracks I might have been able to find in the dirt were washed away. But I can show you where he was shot.”

Joe followed, and Norwood shined his flashlight on a massive spoor of blood on the floor of the barn. Evidence markers were spaced around the pool.

“He bled quite a bit here, so I think this is where he first went down. There’s an intermittent blood trail going out the open door and through those trees toward the ranch yard. That’s where the FBI guys found him.”

Joe said, “So as far as you know, the FBI guys never came into the barn?”

“As far as I know. I think they landed the helicopter and scooped him up and took him to Saddlestring Airport. They were met there by the Billings Life Flight chopper that took him to the hospital.”

“Why didn’t the FBI take him there?” Joe asked.

“Their chopper was too big to land on the roof, from what I understand, so they had to move him onto a smaller aircraft. You know how the feds are—only the biggest and best equipment for them.”

“Anyway,” Joe said, prompting Norwood. “Could you determine where the shots were fired from? Or how many shooters there were?”

Norwood dug out an ultraviolet flashlight from his gear bag and shined it on the back of the sliding barn door. A pattern of tiny flecks appeared under the light and glowed like a frozen starburst.

“It appears from the blood spatter that he was shot from shoulder height from one of those empty stalls over there. There’s also some blood spatter near the baseboard—see it?”

“Yup.”

“That indicates a second shooter from up there in the loft, because the spatter is nearly on the ground. So two shooters at least—one at ground level and one from above—but it’s just a guess.”

Joe rubbed his chin. “Did you find any spent casings?”

“No,” Norwood said. “The shooters must have had the presence of mind to pick them up before they left. But I think I know what kind of weapons they used.”

Joe arched his eyebrows.

“Shotguns. Both of ’em.”

Norwood walked to the doorframe of the sliding barn door while opening a pocketknife. He jabbed the point into the old wood and started digging. In a moment, Joe heard the knife click on something metallic. Norwood dug it out and handed it to Joe.

“A shotgun pellet. Pretty big, too. I’m guessing double-ought, but I’ll have to gather up a few more and measure them in my lab. It could be a zero buck, but I think it’s too big to be an ‘F’ or a ‘T.’”