“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.
“Yup,” Joe said, gesturing toward the foothills to the west. “Lek Sixty-four. I counted twenty-one dead birds.”
“My God, an entire lek,” Hatch said, covering her open mouth with her hand as she gasped. “That’s horrible.”
“Were you going to inform ISGTF about it at any point?” Wentworth asked. He pronounced the acronym “Izg-Tiff.”
“Probably.”
“Is there some reason you didn’t call right away?”
“By the time I had thought about it, I checked my watch and it was already after five,” Joe said. It was a dig, but it was also true.
“You have my cell phone number,” Wentworth said.
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Please,” Hatch said, stepping between them. “Let’s settle this later. We’re talking about an entire lek of sage grouse.”
“This is nothing more than a provocation,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. Joe eyed him carefully to determine that he was talking about the slaughter and not about him.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it yet,” Joe said, sidling past the special agents so that he was positioned to open his gate and go inside. He hoped they would let him. He said, “I gathered evidence and took a bunch of photos. I’ve got spent shotgun shells, tire tracks, and maybe even a DNA sample. It looked to me like a couple of yahoos stumbled onto those birds and went postal. We’ll get ’em.”
“Locals, no doubt,” Wentworth said with disdain.
“Probably.”
“You’ll need to turn over all the items you found so we can send them to our forensics lab,” Wentworth said.
“I’m sending them to our own lab in Laramie on Monday,” Joe said, annoyed with Wentworth’s attitude. “They’re the best when it comes to wildlife crimes.”
“Do you want me to go over your head?” Wentworth asked, arching his eyebrows.
“Go ahead,” Joe said with a flash of anger. Then he took a breath and said, “Revis, why can’t we talk to each other like a couple of adults? Why do you need to act like the federal alpha dog? I know how to do my job, and we’re just talking about sage grouse here.”
It was another shot.
“Just sage grouse,” Wentworth repeated, as if he couldn’t believe Joe’s insolence. “I suppose if you spend every day with hunters and dead animals, a few dead birds don’t seem like much. Did you forget the entire population is on the brink?”
Hatch put her hand on Wentworth’s shoulder and said to Joe, “There’s no reason we can’t work together on this, is there?”
“No, of course not. By the way, how did you find out about the incident?”
“Someone called our tip line,” Wentworth said.
“Who?”
“It was anonymous.”
“Male? Female? Age? That area up there where I found the birds isn’t a place where someone would just happen by.”
“I can’t give you any of that without authorization,” Wentworth said, looking over the top of his hipster glasses. “But we need you to take us up there to Lek Sixty-four.”
“Really?”
“We don’t want to get lost. You can guide us there.”
“There you go again,” Joe said. “Giving me another order I’m going to ignore.”
“Please, Joe?” Hatch pleaded.
Joe paused by his gate and looked over his shoulder at her. He said, “Not tonight. I’ve got a personal situation going on and I need to be home with my daughter.
“I’ll give you precise directions if you want, but I’m surprised you don’t know where it is. Believe me when I tell you there isn’t much more to find up there, and by the time you locate the site, it’ll be dark and snowing.”
“Let us decide that,” Wentworth said.
Joe turned and went to his truck and found his topo map of the benchland foothills. He spread it out on the hood of his truck and circled the location, then handed the map to Hatch.
“I’ll need that back when you’re through,” he said.
“I’ll return it,” she said with a smile.
Joe looked toward the Bighorns. They were obscured by storm clouds.
“You might want to wait until tomorrow,” he said.
“We heard you the first time,” Wentworth said. Then: “C’mon, Annie. Let’s go do the game warden’s job for him.”
“You do that,” Joe said, and turned to the house.
“Joe, is everything okay?” Hatch asked.
“Nope, it isn’t,” he said, and went inside.
—
LUCY SAID, “They’re in love,” when Joe entered the mudroom and kicked off his cowboy boots. She was sitting on the couch with their Lab/corgi mix, Tube, in her lap. Since Sheridan and April had left the house, Tube had become Lucy’s dog.
“What?”
“They’re in love, those two. Or at least he’s in love with her. I was watching them through the window. What are their names?”
Joe told her, then said, “Lucy, they just work together.”
“Are they single?”
Joe said, “I don’t know. Annie Hatch is. I’m not sure about Wentworth. I saw a wedding ring on his finger when I first met him, but I don’t think he has it on now.”
Lucy nodded smugly. She had a gleam in her eye. She said, “He’s definitely not wearing it now.”
“How do you know he’s in love with her?” Joe asked, a bit flummoxed by his youngest daughter.
“Didn’t you notice their body language? She’s nice and friendly, but he’s very protective of her. He acts like he wants everyone to know he’s in charge. And when she put her hand on his shoulder, it calmed him down immediately. That wouldn’t happen if they just worked together.”
“I never would have noticed,” Joe said.
“No kidding,” Lucy said.
If Lucy was correct, Joe thought, it helped explain the almost religious fervor the sage grouse twins brought to their jobs. They’d been brought together by a single mission: to save a species. They spent hours and days together and they came from a certain bureaucratic mind-set. It made sense, and he wondered why he’d never noticed it before.
“Why didn’t you tell them about April?” Lucy asked. “I’m sure they’d understand.”
“It just didn’t seem right,” Joe muttered.
“They’ll know soon enough,” she said. “The word will get out.”
He nodded. Of course she was right. And the information would have wiped the smirk off Wentworth’s face.
Still, though . . .
—
“HEY,” Lucy said to Joe as she ate a slice of pizza at the dining room table, “I want to show you something.”
She’d been browsing on her iPad while Joe skimmed the weekly Saddlestring Roundup. She turned the iPad in his direction.
“What are we watching?” Joe asked. He could see she’d already queued up a YouTube video.
“It took me about ten seconds to find Dallas Cates’s ride.”