On the way to the statehouse in Tassell’s Cherokee, the sheriff kept shaking his head. “We lose a couple of people every year on the river,” he said. “Unlike homicides, it isn’t that unusual.” He had told Joe, Pope, and Trey that while going through the rapids, Stella apparently lost her grip on the rope and was thrown from the boat. Don Ennis said she must have been tugged underneath his raft because they didn’t see her again. Teams were searching for the body, but they hadn’t found it yet.
“We’ve had situations where the body isn’t found for weeks,” Tassell said, “sometimes even longer. If it gets pinned under the water against rocks, we just have to wait. One guy wasn’t found for over a year. His body washed all the way down to Palisades Reservoir and an ice fisherman found him when he was drilling a hole in the ice.”
“Who else was in the boat?” Joe asked again.
“Don, of course,” Tassell said, “Pete Illoway, and some guy named Shane Suhn, who works for Ennis. They all corroborated the story.”
“How do we know she was in the boat?”
“Some other rafters saw her when they launched,” Tassell said.
“Where did it happen?” Joe asked. “Where on the river?”
“At the start of the worst stretch of whitewater,” Tassell said. “That’s where most of the drownings take place. People get used to nice easy rapids, and then they hit the hard stuff and they aren’t prepared for it.”
Tassell leaned across the table to look at Joe. “You’ve seen all those Snake River rafting pictures around town?
That’s where they’re taken, because the rollers are so big.”
Joe thought about the photos he had seen in the window of Wildwater Photography.
“She wasn’t inexperienced,” Joe said. “She’d been on that stretch of the river many times.”
“But why would Don kill his wife?” Tassell asked.
“She discovered something about him,” Joe said. “And he was planning to dump her.”
Trey turned in his seat, hanging an arm over the back of it, narrowing his eyes at Joe. “How well did you know her, anyway?”
“Well enough,” Joe said.
“I thought you were going to say ‘not well enough.’ ”
Pope grinned.
Joe glared at him, and Pope looked away.
At the statehouse, Joe showed them how the piece of siding on the back of the house could be removed. They watched as he took it off and peeled back a layer of pink insulation, revealing a line of copper tubing and a metal screwtop fitting that had been soldered onto the tube.
“This line connects directly from the well in the basement to the drinking water outlet on the refrigerator inside,” Joe said. “It was the surest way they could drug Will.
They couldn’t put it in his food, because he ate out a lot and rarely cooked, except for that last night. But if they could connect it to his drinking water”—Joe fingered the valve where a bottle of liquefied narcotic could be connected by a fitting with a dispensing valve on it—“they knew it would get him.” He showed them how the valve could be adjusted to dispense a quantity of the drug into the line. It was still set at onequarter open, enough to affect Joe but not disable him.
“Christ,” Tassell said, looking over the mechanism.
“The first night I was in the house I heard somebody out here,” Joe said. “I heard a clunking sound, probably after they hooked up the bottle and fumbled with putting the siding back up. But I didn’t figure this out until yesterday. Once I knew it was drugs, things started to make sense.”
“So they didn’t actually murder him,” Trey said. “They created a scenario where he would either get fired, get arrested, or do himself in.”
“Right,” Joe said. “He was under a lot of strain after his wife left, and that’s when they installed it. And they also knew that after she left he’d be in worse shape, and more vulnerable. Ennis knew Will was going to veto Beargrass Village, and the only way the project could go forward was if Will was gone and discredited. Will couldn’t figure out what was happening to him—you can read it in his journals. The drugs just made things worse to the point that he couldn’t see another way out of it.” Joe had made the decision not to tell them what he knew about Stella’s part in it.
He didn’t see the point, now that she was gone and Will’s death had been ruled a suicide.
“But we don’t know who rigged this up,” Pope said. “You’re speculating here.”
“I am,” Joe said. “But who besides Don Ennis had the means to do something like this? Who gained from Will going off the deep end?”
“You’ve got a point,” Trey said.
“Another thing,” Joe said. “Susan Jensen told me that Will’s cremation was paid for by some anonymous person.
She thought it was someone who liked Will, or the family.
I’ll bet if we check the crematorium we’ll find out the check came from Ennis, or Beargrass Village, or one of his other companies.”
“Why would he do that?” Pope asked.
“In case someone wanted to dig up the body and do an autopsy later,” Joe said. “To prevent the discovery of drugs in Will’s system.”
Tassell rubbed his face with his hands and moaned.
“Let me show you something else,” Joe said, leading them around the house to the driveway.
Joe explained that he had located the transmitter in Will’s pickup the previous afternoon, before he went to the party at the Ennises’. After searching the wheel wells, bumpers, and motor, he found it mounted under the dashboard within a spider’s web of wiring. Will’s line about They know where I’m going and they track my movements made him think of the truck.
“They knew were he went, what he said, what he told people over his radio,” Joe said. “Since game wardens spend more time in their vehicles than they do anywhere else, it was like tapping his office.”
Trey nodded, leaning into the cab to look under the dashboard. “If we check the frequency on that transmitter and match it to a receiver, we’ve found who was listening in.”
“I’d guess the receiver is in a room at Beargrass,” Joe said. “That’s how they knew what decision he was going to make on Beargrass Village. They listened to him talk to biologists and others about the migration problems a fence would cause.”
“So that’s why they torched your truck,” Tassell said, still with a pained expression on his face. It was as if Joe’s discoveries were causing him escalating physical pain. “It was easier to do that than run the risk of getting caught putting another transmitter in your vehicle. They knew you’d just take Will’s truck instead, and you did.”
Joe stood back and let the men hash out theories and make connections. Trey bought what Joe had shown them;
Pope was intrigued but wary because if Joe was right he would look foolish for his agreement with Ennis, and Tassell was pained by the prospect of confronting one of the most powerful and willful men in Teton County. While Joe listened, he saw the neighbor in the tam come out of his house with his dog. He had kept Stella out of it so far, figuring it was the least he could do. Even though he knew she was dead, the fact hadn’t really sunk in yet.
“Let’s go back to the station,” Joe said, interrupting.
“I’ve got an idea how we might be able to get Ennis to admit he murdered his wife.”
Pope and Tassell looked at Joe with incredulity.
They were in the Cherokee before the neighbor made it down the block, for which Joe was grateful. That man, he had learned the day before, was a talker.
Thirty Six
Pi Stevenson was in the process of flipping the open sign to closed in the window of Wildwater Photography when Joe rapped on the door. She started to point to the sign, then recognized him and unlocked the bolt.
“What happened to you?” she asked, recoiling from the bruises and lumps on his face.
“Is Birdy here?” Joe asked, not wanting to take the time to explain.