Winterkill Read online

  Hersig was from one of Twelve Sleep County’s oldest ranching families, and after a bout of college rodeo he had gone into law at the University of Wyoming. His first term as county attorney would end in the coming year, and there was speculation as to whether he would run again. Although almost brutally cautious when it came to prosecuting a case, Hersig had an impressive track record of convictions. The summer before, Hersig and Joe had discovered that they were both fly fishermen, and had floated the Twelve Sleep river together in Hersig’s flat-bottomed McKenzie boat. They got along, and made plans to do it again. To both, fishing together successfully created a special bond.

  Joe had called Hersig earlier in the week to talk about April, but their conversation had been brief; Hersig’s phone was full of static, thanks to damage from the storm.

  “We’re not sure what we can do about Jeannie Keeley,” Joe said. “Can we ask for a restraining order or something?”

  Hersig shook his head. “Joe, she has to do something first. Just her presence isn’t enough. And legally, since April hasn’t been adopted, Jeannie has a damned good chance of getting her back.”

  Joe winced. “How could a judge possibly give her back to that woman after what she did?”

  “Judges do things like that, Joe. Birth mothers carry a lot of clout, even when it’s clear that you and Marybeth care for April. In Wyoming, if the mother’s maintained contact in some way—even with the judge—the child isn’t considered abandoned.”

  “We love her,” Joe said firmly. “She’s one of ours.”

  “Too bad the adoption got delayed so long,” Hersig commiserated. “That’s where the problem lies.”

  Joe cursed, and looked away for a moment.

  “I wish this punch had a kick,” Hersig said idly, looking into his cup as if willing a shot of bourbon into it. “It’s New Year’s Eve, after all.”

  “How’s the case against Nate Romanowski?” Joe asked. “You know, he called me the other day—I met with him and he told me he was innocent.”

  “I heard about that,” Hersig said, shaking his head. “Imagine a man in jail claiming that.” Hersig threw down the last of the punch.

  “I wish our case against him was stronger,” Hersig confided. “It’s compelling, but largely circumstantial. I’d be nervous taking it to a jury without more direct evidence. Did he tell you anything of interest?”

  Joe relayed the story about Mrs. Longbrake and what Marybeth had told him about the women at the library, but nothing about what Romanowski had said about Melinda Strickland, or the supposed incident in Montana. Joe wondered why he felt guarded about what Romanowski had said. Joe’s allegiance, after all, was supposed to be to Hersig and the law.

  “I’ve got to admit that I found myself questioning his guilt,” Joe said.

  Hersig turned his head to look at Joe.

  “Questioning his guilt, or being taken in?” Hersig asked.

  Joe shrugged and admitted, “I’m not sure.”

  “Mrs. Longbrake is out of the country,” Hersig said. “The sheriff checked. So we can’t confirm that part of his story yet although now maybe we’ll interview the women she played bridge with.”

  Joe nodded. “What do you know about Nate Romanowski? What’s his background?”

  “It’s pretty mysterious.” Hersig raised his eyebrows. “He’s a Montana boy, from Bozeman originally. He was appointed to the Air Force Academy and played football for them. Middle linebacker for the Falcons . . .”

  “Falcons?” Joe repeated, thinking about Romanowski’s birds. He hadn’t fed them yet; there had been no time. He had to get out there soon.

  “Then he vanished off the face of the earth from 1984 through 1998. Nobody can vanish like that unless they’ve got special help from the Feds.”

  “Special Forces?” Joe asked. “He said something about that when I saw him at the jail.” Two of Romanowski’s claims—about Mrs. Longbrake’s dalliances and his Special Forces background—were now much more likely true than false, Joe thought.

  “Really? That’s interesting,” Hersig said. “I didn’t know that. And Romanowski’s not cooperating. Even with his P. D.”

  “I know. He says he’s depending on me to help him out,” Joe said sourly.

  Hersig frowned. “Romanowski’s only arrest was in 1999—he was held in Idaho for allegedly beating a rancher. He claimed the guy shot his falcon out of the sky. Spent ninety days in the Blaine County Jail for that.”

  “Do you see a connection between Romanowski, the Sovereigns, and Lamar Gardiner?” Joe asked. “They all sort of happened at once.”

  Hersig peered at the ceiling for several beats. “It almost seems like there’s got to be one, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe so,” Joe said.

  The door opened and one of the Forest Service employees looked in. “Oops, sorry,” he said.

  Hersig waved to indicate it was okay. “Leave the door open. We’re through, aren’t we?”

  “Yup.”

  Hersig heaved himself off of the desk, and they stood in the doorway looking out. Elle Broxton-Howard stood in the middle of a gaggle of midlevel Forest Service managers as well as Reed and McLanahan. Hersig tilted his chin toward her.

  “She likes ’em rugged and real, or so she says,” Hersig confided to Joe. “Ranchers, cowboys, loggers. Real manly men.”

  Joe stared at Hersig. “How do you know that?”

  Hersig smiled, but his face was flushed. “She told me that. And believe me, she’s got a few notches on her lipstick case in this county already.”

  As if she’d heard Hersig, or read Joe’s thoughts, Broxton-Howard suddenly turned, extricated herself from the knot of admirers, and walked boldly up to Joe Pickett.

  “You were there when Mr. Gardiner was killed,” she stated flatly. Joe was surprised she hadn’t known that already.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve met with Wade Brockius and the Sovereigns as well.”

  “Sort of.” Joe felt his neck getting warm.

  “Then we must have an interview,” she said, her eyes boring into his, her jaw set with sincerity. Without breaking her gaze, she fished Joe’s card out of her pocket and raised it until it came into her view.

  “Joe Pickett. Game warden,” she said, in a breathy British accent. Then she turned on her heel and walked back to her admirers.

  Marybeth entered the room from a dark hallway, looking for Joe. Joe felt both guilty and slightly exhilarated. As Marybeth made her way over, Hersig leaned toward Joe and mocked, “We must have an interview!”

  “What did Robey say about April?” Marybeth asked, as they drove out of Saddlestring on Bighorn Road. The storm clouds had blocked out the moon and stars, and the wind was relentless. Tiny flakes of snow, like sparks, flashed past the headlights.

  “He wasn’t encouraging,” Joe said. “But he didn’t indicate that Jeannie’s tried to get April back, either.”

  “That was a very strange experience back there,” Marybeth said, sighing. “The funeral was disturbing, and the reception was even worse. The person I feel for the most is Carrie Gardiner. Or Cassie, as Melinda Strickland calls her. I almost look forward to seeing my mother.”

  Joe laughed. “Me, too,” he said. But he was thinking of Melinda Strickland. And Nate Romanowski. And Elle Broxton-Howard.

  “What did she say to you?” Marybeth asked abruptly.

  “Who?” Joe asked. He sounded guilty, even to himself.

  “You know who,” Marybeth snapped. “The chick you and Robey were melting in front of when I came from the bathroom. Ms. Broxton-Howard.”

  Again, Joe felt his neck get hot.

  “She wants to interview me,” Joe said.

  “I’ll bet that’s what she wants,” Marybeth snorted.

  Joe didn’t say a word. He had learned that, in these kinds of situations, the less he said, the better.

  He felt Marybeth looking at him and he turned to her.

  “Honey, I . . .”

 
; “JOE!” Marybeth shouted. And Joe looked, saw the ragged form of a man bathed in the white of his headlights, his wide-eyed face black with streaming blood, outstretched frozen hands up as if to shield himself; then he heard the sickening thump despite his violent effort to wrench the car away into the ditch, saw what looked like a scarecrow turned bright red by the taillights bounce and crumple on the glass-slick surface of the snow-packed highway in his rearview mirror, heard Marybeth scream.

  Thirteen

  His name was Birch Wardell, he was an employee of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Joe hadn’t killed him after all. The collision did break Wardell’s pelvis, however, which was just one of many injuries he sustained that day after wrecking his truck in a sharp ravine in the breaklands that led up to the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.

  The emergency-room doctor had recognized Joe from when he’d brought Lamar Gardiner’s frozen body in.

  “I’m seeing more of you than I want to,” the doctor said. “And every time you show up, you bring trouble.”

  Joe agreed with him. But at least this time, he thought, the man’s alive.

  Joe sat in the hallway on a molded plastic chair, still in his jacket and tie, outside Wardell’s room at the clinic. It was well into New Year’s Day. He had called Marybeth to tell her that Wardell was alive and expected to recover. Marybeth thanked God.

  “I can’t believe that poor man was walking down the middle of the road,” she said. “On a night like this.”

  “I’ll try to find out why,” Joe said. “Now go to bed and get some sleep.”

  “How are you going to get home?” she asked.

  Joe hadn’t thought of that yet. Marybeth had taken the car home after they had brought Wardell to the hospital.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he said.

  The hospital was silent and subdued, the lights dimmed for the night. Mrs. Wardell had been in to see her husband after he came out of surgery, and she thanked Joe for bringing him into town.

  “But I was the one who hit him,” Joe said.

  She patted Joe’s arm. “I know,” she said. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. “But if you hadn’t found him, the doctor said there was no doubt he would have died of exposure out there. It’s eighteen below.”

  “I wish I could have missed him, though.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Pickett,” she said soothingly. “He’s alive, and conscious. The doctor says he’ll be okay.”

  “You think it would be okay if I talked with him?”

  Mrs. Wardell looked over Joe’s shoulder for a doctor or nurse but the hall was empty.

  “They gave him medication to help him sleep,” she said. “I’m not sure he’ll make much sense.”

  Birch Wardell lay in his hospital bed with his eyes at half-mast. A thin tube of fluorescent light extending from the headboard lit up half his face and threw peaked shadows across his blankets. In addition to his broken pelvis, Wardell also had a broken collarbone and nose. Stitches climbed from his neck into his scalp like railroad tracks. Joe had overheard the nurses say that the tips of three of his fingers and four of his toes were severely frostbitten.

  The man in the bed was stout and in his mid-forties, with a thick mustache and brown eyes. Joe had seen him before while patrolling.

  Wardell’s eyes found Joe in the doorway, and he raised his good hand slightly in greeting.

  “You doing okay?” Joe asked softly.

  Wardell seemed to be trying to find his voice. “Much better since they filled me full of drugs. In fact, I’m kind of . . . happy.”

  Joe approached Wardell. The room smelled of bandages and antiseptic.

  “Happy New Year,” Joe said, smiling.

  Wardell grunted, and then winced because the grunt clearly hurt his ribs.

  “Thanks for saving my life. The doctor said I couldn’t have stayed out there much longer.”

  “I’m just sorry I hit you,” Joe said. “So what happened? You walked all the way out of the breaklands after you wrecked your truck?”

  “I was on my way back to town,” he said. “Must have been about four-thirty or so. I had about another half hour, forty-five minutes of light yet. I wanted to get home because Mrs. Wardell and me had tickets for the steak and shrimp feed at the Elks Lodge for New Year’s.”

  Joe nodded, urging him on.

  “I seen a white pickup truck on BLM land up on a ridge, past the signs that say the damn road is closed in the winter. You know, in that cooperative Forest Service/BLM unit?”

  Joe had patrolled the area. It was a rough, treeless expanse of sharp zigzag-cut draws and sagebrush that stretched from the highway to the wooded foothills of the Bighorns. The “unit” had been recently designated a research area, jointly managed by the two federal agencies to study the spread of native buffalo grass in the absence of cattle or sheep. The designation had raised the ire of several local ranchers who had grazed their stock in the breaklands for years, and of some local hunters and fishermen who used the roads to get to spring creeks in the foothills. Wardell was the project manager.

  “Well, this white truck was in the process of pulling my ‘Road Closed’ signs out of the ground with a chain. When I seen that, I thought: ‘What the hell?’” Wardell pronounced it “hay-uhl.”

  “I heard something about signs being vandalized,” Joe said.

  Wardell nodded his head slightly. It took him a moment to start up again—the sedatives were working. Joe hoped Wardell could finish the story before he went to sleep. “It’s been going on for a few months now. Sometimes the signs are gone, and other times they’re just run over.

  “So I says to myself, ‘What the hell?’” Wardell said again. “And I turned up that closed road and give chase.”

  “Got it. Can you identify the vehicle?”

  “White. Or maybe tan. Light-colored, for sure. Not brand-new. The damn sunlight was starting to go bad on me about then.”

  “Ford? GMC? Chevy?” Joe asked.

  Wardell thought. “Maybe a Ford. The truck was pretty dirty, I noticed that. There was mud or smudges on the doors, I think.”

  Joe smiled grimly. Finding a Ford pickup in Wyoming was about as hard as finding a Hispanic male in Houston.

  “Anyway . . .” Wardell swallowed, and his eyes fluttered. He was tiring. Joe felt a little bit guilty pushing him so hard. Joe looked at his watch: 3:30 A.M.

  “Anyway, that truck saw me coming and the driver took off over the hill, still on the closed road. You know how it is out there with all them draws and hills. It’s damn easy to get lost or turned around. But whatever . . . I took off after him up that hill anyway.”

  “Did you try to call anyone?”

  “Damn right I tried. But the BLM office closed early, on account it’s New Year’s Eve. Our dispatcher left early.”

  “Go on.”

  “I got to the top of that hill and the whole unit was out there to be seen. The road turned to the left and I started to go that way but then I seen that white Ford halfway down the hill. He had gone off-road and was barreling down the hill toward the bottom. I said ‘What the hell?’ and followed him. All I wanted to do by then was get a license plate.”

  “I think this patient needs some rest,” a night shift nurse said tersely from the doorway.

  Joe turned. “We’re about done.”

  “You better be,” the nurse said.

  “Sassy little number,” Wardell commented, watching her walk away, her big hips making the hem of her skirt jump.

  Joe turned back. “So, you saw the truck at the bottom of the draw. Doesn’t it start to get brushy down there?” Joe was becoming convinced that he knew the specific road and hill Wardell was describing.

  Wardell nodded, then winced. “Yeah, it gets all tangly down there. And it was getting pretty dark, but I could see those taillights go right into the bush and disappear. Hell, I had no idea there was a way to get across that draw down there in a vehicle.”

  Joe stroked his jaw. H
e didn’t know of any way to cross there either.

  “Then I saw the truck come out of the brush on the other side and start climbing the hill straight across from me. I said . . .”

  “ ‘What the hell?’ ” Joe joined in with Wardell.

  “I tried to get a read on the plate through the binoculars, but I couldn’t get an angle on it. So I thought, shit, if he could cross down there, I can cross down there.”

  “What about the snow?” Joe asked suddenly. “Wasn’t it deep?”

  Wardell shook his head. “That hill is on a southern exposure. The wind and sun cleared it down to the grass. The big drifts are all toward the foothills.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I followed the tracks straight down that mountain, stayed right in ’em. Right into the big bushes . . . and then WHAM! I was suddenly ass over teakettle, and in the air. I literally was airborne for a second until I hit the bottom of the draw. I hit harder than hell. Good thing I was wearin’ my seat belt.”

  Joe agreed. “You didn’t see how the truck crossed down there?”

  Wardell said no, he didn’t see how anyone could have done it. It was steep on the sides, and there was a frozen little stream on the bottom.

  “So how did he get across?” Joe asked.

  “I have no earthly idea,” Wardell said, his eyes widening with amazement. “No clue at all. But when I was hanging there, suspended by the seat belt with blood pouring out of my head, I could hear laughing.”

  “Laughing?”

  “That son-of-a-bitch in the truck was laughing out loud. I heard his truck start up again, and he just laughed his stupid head off. He must have been sitting up there on that hill watching me. I’m sure he thought he left me there to die.”

  Joe stood up straight and crossed his arms. The scenario just didn’t sound quite right.

  “I finally got out of the cab of the truck and started walking. To be real honest, there must have been an angel with me, because I wasn’t even sure I was going the right direction toward town.”

  You weren’t, Joe thought. Luckily, though, he had stumbled into Bighorn Road—and then Joe had hit him with his car.