Two DAYS BEFORE, "Stewie" had called again. This time Sheridan had answered the telephone. When she asked who was calling, the caller had, at first, refused to tell her. But when Sheridan said she would have to hang up, the man identified himself as Stewie Woods and said he would be calling back when her mother was home. Sheridan wouldn't tell him when that would be.
Marybeth confided that evening when they were in bed that she had a strange feeling about this. If it were some kind of joke, there was nothing remotely funny about it. She said it didn't make sense that even the most dogged reporter would call twice using the same ruse. It had to be someone else, she said, calling for some other reason. She hoped it wasn't some morbid follower of One Globe.
But it couldn't actually be Stewie Woods. That was one thing both Joe and Marybeth left unsaid. There wasn't any reason to speculate further.
Whoever it was, Joe was irritated by the calls. They had requested Caller ID in the hope of tracing the number, but it not yet been installed. He hoped he would be there the next time a call came so that he could snatch the telephone away and try to determine what was going on. It offended him that a stranger would call his wife, and it offended him even further that the reason they were calling was because of her past relationship with another man. As innocent as Marybeth made it out to be, it made him grit his teeth when he thought about it. It was hard to imagine her in her high school and early college days laughing and trading jokes with two guys like Stewie Woods and Hayden Powell. Both of those men would later become well known, at least in the environmental community They were semi famous and charismatic. And both of them had loved his wife.
However, Marybeth had chosen Joe and opted out of her potential life of excitement and notoriety He hoped like hell she didn't regret the path that she had chosen. Instead of hanging out with two big-shot environmentalist celebrities, Marybeth got to move around the state of Wyoming with Joe Pickett from one falling-down state owned house to another. Choosing Joe had resulted in discontinuing her legal career and adopting severe month-by-month budgeting to make ends meet, not to mention getting shot in her own house and being left for dead.
Joe sighed, smiled grimly to himself, and tried to calm down. But he vowed that when he found out who was calling Marybeth he would punch him right in the nose.
Leading lizzie down to the stream so she could get a drink before he continued his ride up the summit, Joe marveled at the very bad run of luck the environmental community was having of late. First there was Stewie Woods, right here in his own district, blown up by a cow Then their champion, Rep. Peter Sollito and his scandalous death. Then Hayden Powell is killed in a house fire in Washington State. Powell's publisher claimed that Hayden had been two weeks away from delivering his book but no trace of the manuscript could be found.
Joe climbed back into the saddle and clucked at Lizzie to go. The string of bad luck had been capped this last week by the discovery of the body of wolf advocate Emily Betts. Her small private airplane had crashed in the Beartooth Mountains southwest of Red Lodge, Montana. Hikers found her body They reported that upon approaching the wreckage they had seen two wolves emerge from the cockpit and flee. Emily Betts, likely dead on impact, had been partially devoured by her cargo.
Joe Pickett was not the only one to wonder if this series of deaths had a common thread. Speculation ran rampant in both the environmental community and over coffee in Saddlestring's local diner. But each incident was vastly different from the others. If there was a pattern it was incomprehensible. There was nothing about any of the deaths that suggested murder, except perhaps for Rep. Sollito's, and Joe had read that a prostitute had recently been arrested who was accused of the murder--although she was denying it and had hired a celebrity lawyer.
Now Emily Betts had joined the list; a wolf advocate who died while trying to illegally transplant wolves into Wyoming.
But even devoted conspiracy theorists could not connect the deaths in any way other than the fact that they were recent and all involved high-profile environmental activists. And that most of the deaths were, in some way; humiliating to talk about.
Joe had heard stories, though, of locals high-fiving each other in thebars. Apparently there were allegations being made on a national level within the fringe environmental groups, accusations of conspiracies, calls for a congressional and FBI investigation into the string of deaths.
Reining Lizzie to a stop, Joe pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket, and flipped it open to a fresh page. He drew a crude outline of the United States. Then he drew stars and dates at four locations: Saddlestring, Wyoming, June 10; Bremerton, Washington, June 14; Washington, D.C." June 23; and Choteau, Montana, June 29. There were four days between the deaths in Saddlestring and Bremerton; nine days between Bremerton and Washington, D.C; and six days between Washington, D.C. and Choteau.
If a killer or killers were responsible, Joe thought, then they had been crisscrossing the country by air or road for almost a month. And there could possibly be two, three, or even four of them, each with a separate assignment. That seemed unlikely he thought, simply because it was too complicated, with too many factors and possibilities where something could go wrong. But if it were one killer or a team of killers, they were having a hell of a busy month. He thought about the time lapses between the incidents and concluded that it was possible, although unlikely that one team could have done all of the killings. The longest span of time between incidents was between Bremerton and Washington, D.C. which was also the longest distance by car, which meant it was possible the killer or killers were traveling by car.
He stared at the drawing, thought about the dates. He was getting nowhere.
Joe turned Lizzie back into the trees. He planned to work his way up to the summit and back down toward his pickup and horse trailer through a drainage on the other side of the mountain. He expected to find, and count, additional elk calves. He might find some fishermen as well near the road, or campers setting up early for the weekend. He would take the long way
He remembered to lean forward in the saddle and stroke Lizzie's neck and tell her what a good horse she was. He didn't used to do that.
***
Sheridan pickett answered the telephone Thursday during breakfast, listened for a moment, made an unpleasant face, and then handed the receiver to Marybeth.
"It's that man again," Sheridan said with distaste.
Joe and Marybeth exchanged worried glances and Joe mouthed, "Keep him on the line." He pushed back from the table to go upstairs to get on the other extension.
"Can I talk to him?" Lucy asked through a mouthful of breakfast cereal. Lucy wanted to talk with anyone who called.
Joe bounded up the stairs and closed the door in the bedroom. He sat on the unmade bed and gently lifted the receiver to his ear. The conversation had already begun. The connection was poor and filled with static. The baritone voice of the man sounded drugged-out, slurred. The words came slowly as if through a mouthful of pebbles, the tone distorted.
"This is Stewie again, Mary," the man said. "Please don't hang up again."
"Who is this really?" Marybeth demanded.
Through Marybeth's phone in the background, Joe could hear Lucy asking again as if she could talk on the telephone and Sheridan telling her to be quiet.
"Stewie. Stewie. Come on, Mary you know who it is." He paused for a long beat. "I'm trying to think of how to prove it to you."
Her name is Marybeth, Joe thought.