This time, he let Daisy out. If there were any remaining grouse, she would find them. He let her work the brush, and he monitored her the way he did when they were bird-hunting. She flowed through the brush with her nose down and her tail straight up and wagging. For a minute, it appeared she had found something when her tail, like a supercharged metronome, suddenly picked up speed. Joe followed her, wondering how he’d catch a crippled grouse with his bare hands, where he’d store it for the ride down, and where he’d keep it.
Those thoughts vanished when a cottontail rabbit shot from the brush with Daisy in pursuit.
—
BEFORE JOE had put on his uniform and left for the breaklands, Marybeth had a long talk with the doctors in Billings. There was no bad news, but there was no good news, either. It was a miserable state of limbo.
The swelling on April’s brain had gone down slightly, but it was a difficult thing to test. It didn’t make Marybeth optimistic, but it confirmed that the hospital was doing all it could, she said.
Whether their insurance would pay for it all was also undetermined, despite daily calls Marybeth made to their provider.
Nate’s condition was a mystery. All they knew was that he probably hadn’t died. His wing of the ICU was locked down tight, per the orders of Special Agent Stan Dudley of the FBI. Dudley wouldn’t take Marybeth’s calls, and didn’t return them. Joe had tried with the same result, and a call to Coon in Cheyenne had resulted in no information because, Coon said, Dudley communicated only with Washington and he didn’t feel any obligation to let the locals in on Nate’s prognosis. Even Nurse Reckling confided that Nate’s condition was unknown to her and others she knew on staff. There had been more surgeries, but that’s all she knew.
—
MORE NAILS had been hammered into Tilden Cudmore’s coffin when it was learned by the sheriff’s department that he’d been charged ten years earlier in Illinois for aggravated sexual assault. The victim was found walking down a rural road, and she’d accused Cudmore of giving her a ride and then pulling over and assaulting her. Unfortunately, she died several days later in a car wreck, before she could provide testimony against him in court. Cudmore was in custody at the time of the accident. The case was dropped.
Dulcie told Joe it showed a pattern that had eluded them until they learned of the Illinois charges. Long before he moved to Saddlestring, Cudmore had haunted the rural highways and picked up hitchhikers and women needing a ride. Once they were in his vehicle, he assaulted them and dumped them to fend for themselves. Dulcie said she’d asked Sheriff Reed to initiate an investigation to find out whether there were other victims of similar crimes throughout the state and region. Perhaps, she’d told Joe, Cudmore had been operating under their radar for years. His political causes and eccentricities, she thought, had masked his obsession.
—
BRENDA’S STORY about Dallas’s journey home could not be disproved. He’d been thrown from the bull in Houston on Saturday, March 8. Brenda said he’d stayed in Houston most of Sunday as his pain got worse, then hit the road and drove twenty-two straight hours to arrive late Monday night. He was recovering at home and had been there for two days, she claimed, when April was attacked by Tilden Cudmore.
Unfortunately, Dulcie said, the Cateses could produce no credit card receipts for gasoline or food on Dallas’s long ride home. Dallas, like most rodeo cowboys, paid his entry fees in cash and was paid in cash when he won. He rarely used a credit card except for the rare plane ticket or rental car.
No one had come forward to dispute any aspect of Brenda’s explanation, Dulcie said. Until there was evidence otherwise, that line of inquiry was dead.
But Joe still had his doubts about Cudmore, and about Dallas.
—
AS HE TRAILED DAISY through the brush, he stopped and fixed his gaze on the southern horizon. He knew the Cates place was several miles in that direction. The bench he was parked on was flat, but a mile to the south it sloped down into a shallow valley. The BLM land abutted the twelve-acre Cates compound.
He turned slowly and studied the contours of the high bench. There were places, he thought, where the road he’d arrived on might be seen from below due to the high folds of the terrain. The angle might just be such that a vehicle on the road could be glimpsed from below in the valley in visual snapshots.
He called Daisy back and started his pickup and did a three-point turn, then slowly retraced his route.
At three different places along the two-track there were drainages to the south where he could see the valley below. At two of those drainages, he could see the distant cluster of buildings that belonged to the Cateses.
Joe stopped at the second swale, rolled his driver’s-side window down three-quarters of the way, and mounted his Redfield spotting scope to the top of the glass. Because the Cates place was two miles away, he turned off the motor to stop the vibration through his cab so he could focus.
There was no activity on the place. After all, he thought, it was Saturday. He scoped the main house, a double-wide trailer, a barn, and several outbuildings. In the opening of a metal building he could see the chrome snouts of two pump trucks Eldon used to pump out septic systems.
As he watched, he saw the front door of the main house open and Cora Lee, Bull’s wife, come out. She walked across the yard through a couple of old shacks. Her body language was surly, Joe thought, but then it always was. When Joe had arrested Bull for game violations, Cora Lee had called Joe every name in the book. She had a mouth on her.
Cora Lee stopped at what looked like a well, opened some doors, and tossed something down in it. A few minutes later, she pulled up a bucket and dumped it out near the opening. Then she threw the bucket back in, closed the doors, and returned to the house.
Could someone at the Cates place possibly have seen the vehicle of the person or persons who’d wiped out Lek 64? After all, if he could see the compound from where he was, they could see him.
Joe doubted it. Too much distance, and too quick of a look at a vehicle on the road.
But it gave him a pretense to pay them a visit. Director LGD would even approve of it.
Dulcie might be another story.
—
EVEN THOUGH the Cates compound was in plain view in the valley, it took twenty-five minutes for Joe to get there on ancient two-tracks that were barely roads at all. As the place got larger in his windshield and he bounced his tires over ruts and knee-high sagebrush, he thought that the family employed the same kind of defense sage grouse did: they hid in plain sight. The tough part wasn’t finding them. The tough part was getting there.
And it would be impossible to sneak up on them.
He circumnavigated the fence line that defined the Cates property from BLM land and passed under a hand-lettered sign that read:
DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS
C&C SEWER AND SEPTIC TANK SERVICE
BIRTHPLACE OF PRCA WORLD CHAMPION COWBOY DALLAS CATES
Bull had emerged from inside the house and stood waiting for Joe with his hands on his hips outside the front door.
—
AS JOE SHUT OFF the engine and reached for the door handle, a pack of six big dogs thundered out, howling, from underneath the wooden porch Bull was standing on, and surrounded the pickup. They were mixed-breed short-haired mottled-color brutes with dark muzzles and flashing teeth. Joe guessed they were a mix of Rottweiler and Rhodesian ridgeback, a scary combination. One of them lunged at the passenger window and bounced off with a thump, leaving a smear of goo on the glass. Daisy cowered and backed up into Joe.