The Disappeared (Joe Pickett Book 18) Page 15

  “You know that old lady who called the cops? The busybody?”

  Panos felt a cold pang of fear shoot through his chest. He nodded.

  “She’s not going to be a problem anymore,” Kessel said.

  Panos tried not to react. He didn’t want Kessel to know how scared he was of being implicated.

  “An accident,” Kessel said. “She slid off the highway on her way home last night.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Panos said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Kessel said with the slightest grin. “Because soon we need to make another run.”

  “Already?”

  “Something about the weather,” Kessel said.

  “I’ll dress warm.”

  “You do that,” Kessel said with a smirk.

  14

  AFTER BREAKFAST, JOE DROVE TO STEVE POLLOCK’S OLD HOUSE AT the top of the hill and bucked a deep snowdrift in the back driveway that nearly launched his pickup into the garage door. Luckily, he was able to stop the truck three feet away.

  He got out and looked around. The garage was attached to the back of the house. From where he was parked, he couldn’t be seen from the street or from the neighbors’ homes, which was the idea.

  Joe crunched through the snow to the garage door and tugged up on the handle with no luck. Then he tried the knob on the back door and confirmed it was locked as well.

  The house was state property, not Pollock’s. Joe could either wait for Casey Scales to come up with a spare set of keys and get them to him, or authorize a local locksmith to get inside, provided there was a locksmith in Saratoga. Both would take time Joe didn’t think he had and involve procedures that could get back to Connor Hanlon—who would rightly question why Joe wanted to poke around inside the house of an ex–state employee rather than investigate the disappearance of Kate Shelford-Longden.

  Which was a good question, he thought. Almost as good as why he’d been sent to Saratoga in the first place.

  But Pollock’s sudden absence was, to Joe, as puzzling as Kate’s.

  He had to try and figure it out, he thought. And he could partially justify it because there was the remote but possible chance that the two disappearances were somehow related. Had Pollock encountered Kate while on patrol? Had they possibly met at a bar when Kate was in town? Was it even credible that a sophisticated British executive would fall for... a game warden? The thought made Joe shake his head.

  Did Pollock have a dark side that might have led him to grab Kate as she left the ranch? Could his guilt about the incident have led him to flee his job?

  The door itself was made of cheap laminated wood with a four-pane window in the center of it. He thought about knocking out one of the glass panes so he could reach inside and unlock it. He decided instead to simply shoulder his way in.

  Joe glanced around again to make sure no one was watching, then threw himself toward the left side of the door. The doorjamb splintered free on the inside and he stepped quickly inside and shut it. There were tools on a workbench and a pile of scrap wood in the corner of the garage. He knew he could remount the lock plate and fix his damage before he left.

  *

  POLLOCK’S PICKUP TRUCK was open and the keys were in the center console. Joe climbed inside and looked around. The Ford F-150 was a newer model than the one he drove, and it was remarkably neat and clean inside. Even the floor mats were clean.

  This is the kind of vehicle you get, Joe thought, when you don’t have the dubious reputation of destroying more state vehicles than any other employee.

  He dug around and found Pollock’s citation book in a seat pocket and thumbed through it. Pollock had issued his last ticket two weeks before to a couple of ice fishermen on Saratoga Lake for fishing without licenses. There were no major incidents or arrests for the past three months that caught Joe’s attention. What he was looking for was the type of violations that might result in bad blood between a game warden and a violator. Something serious enough that Pollock had felt threatened by sticking around.

  But he found only standard stuff: hunting in the wrong area, taking a buck pronghorn antelope in a doe/fawn-only area, failing to adequately tag elk. The book contained citations going back eighteen months. Joe recognized none of the names of the perpetrators, but made a list of them in his own notebook. He replaced the citation book in the seat pocket where he’d found it.

  There were flex-cuffs in the glove box as well as a package of jerky, an unopened can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco, and a field first-aid kit.

  But as he went through the truck, Joe became more and more puzzled. Not by what he found, but by what he didn’t find.

  He climbed out and opened the utility box in the bed of the truck and looked inside. There were extra coats and vests, a sleeping bag, ropes, chains, come-alongs, a shovel, winter overalls and extra Sorel pac boots, a Handyman jack, road flares, as well as gloves, ice-creepers, and a satellite phone. But no briefcase that might have contained paperwork, maps, and other items.

  Game wardens lived in their vehicles. Their pickups were not only their means of transportation, but they also served as their offices in the field and holding cells when necessary. Every nook and cranny of Joe’s truck was used to store or cram something. There were topo maps wedged between the bench seats, evidence bags including tooth envelopes for determining the age of carcasses, ballistics pamphlets, seizure tags, a necropsy kit, and reams of printed departmental memos, edicts, and reports. Every warden pickup Joe had ever ridden in was in the same condition, and many were much worse when it came to clutter.

  Either Steve Pollock was the neatest and tidiest game warden in the state of Wyoming, Joe thought, or someone had already been through his truck and removed most of the contents.

  Whether that was Pollock himself or someone else was the question Joe couldn’t answer.

  *

  THE DOOR INTO THE HOUSE from the garage was unlocked, so Joe didn’t have to force it open. It also meant that Pollock probably entered his house primarily through that door. Pull into the garage, shut the garage door, and go inside.

  It was a good procedure for a game warden, Joe knew. Saratoga, like Saddlestring, was a hunting-and-fishing community. Locals kept close track of where the game warden patrolled—especially potential violators. If the Game and Fish vehicle was parked at home out front, it served as a green light to poach or commit other crimes. But if the vehicle couldn’t be seen from the street—if it were parked in the garage—it meant the game warden could be anywhere.

  The door opened onto a small vestibule that served as a mudroom. Boots lined the floor, hats and caps were lined cheek-by-jowl on a high shelf, and over a dozen coats and parkas hung in between.

  Joe spent a few minutes going through the pockets of the coats and found nothing of interest except a few spent cartridge casings, gum, and empty Copenhagen tins.

  It was cold inside. Joe walked through the kitchen and found the thermostat mounted on a hallway wall. He turned it up to sixty-eight and heard the sound of electric baseboards hum to life. He was grateful the department had continued to pay the electrical bill even though the occupant was gone.

  The kitchen had the look of one used by a single man. Pollock had been divorced for a while and apparently he’d had no partner at the time he vanished. There was one plate in the sink and one set of silverware. One glass had been turned upside down on a folded towel next to the sink.

  There were still items in the refrigerator. When Joe opened the door, he caught a whiff of spoiled milk. The freezer compartment was crammed full of locally packaged elk steak and burger.

  As he’d guessed the day before, it appeared that Pollock had simply walked out of the house. There were still clothes, including uniform shirts, in the bedroom closet. A suit hung still sheathed in clear plastic from a dry-cleaning shop in Rawlins. Two of the dresser drawers were empty. He’d taken his underwear.

  Joe pushed the clothes aside to check out the corners of the closet, then he did the s
ame in the two other bedrooms. He looked for Pollock’s agency-issued weapons: an M14 carbine chambered in .308, a .40 Glock like the one Joe had on his hip, a .22 revolver loaded with cracker shells to scare off game animals, a scoped .270 rifle, and a Remington 12-gauge shotgun that held seven rounds.

  He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed and found only dust bunnies. There were no weapons.

  Joe found it curious. If Pollock had taken the weapons, he’d committed the crime of stealing state property. Guns of every kind were easily available to anyone in Wyoming who wanted to buy them. It made no sense to Joe that Pollock would take that risk.

  *

  AS JOE GRUNTED to his feet, his phone vibrated. It was Marybeth.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not say right now.”

  She knew better than to ask by his tone, so she changed the subject.

  “You called this morning?”

  “Yup.”

  He told her about the missing file and Nate’s arrival after they’d talked the night before.

  “So how is Nate?” she asked.

  “He’s Nate,” Joe answered.

  “And we wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?” she said with a laugh.

  He asked her to find out what she could about Richard Cheetham and she agreed to do that.

  “Anything on Kate?” he asked.

  “I’m still looking,” she said. “She had a Facebook page and was on Twitter, but she was very cautious. She only seemed to post things that were related to her clients and her company. No personal stuff at all. And of course there’s been no activity since July.”

  *

  POLLOCK HAD USED a spare bedroom as his home office and Joe sat down behind the desk. When he jostled the mouse, the monitor of Pollock’s computer came to life. The screen saver was a photo of Pollock digging his pickup out of the mud and glancing toward the photographer with a frustrated look on his face.

  Joe smiled. One of the features of the annual Wyoming Game Warden Foundation dinner was photos taken over the previous year of game wardens digging their pickups out of mud, rivers, and snowdrifts. It was the kind of gallows humor they all seemed to identify with and hoot at. Joe himself had been in several of the photos over the years, once when he’d broken an axle on a rock.

  But he couldn’t get into Pollock’s hard drive because he didn’t know the password. He tried password, as well as GF-18, Pollock’s warden designation. Neither worked.

  Joe looked around on the desktop and in the drawers for a hidden sticky note that might reveal the password. He found nothing. He’d have to wait for a department investigator to officially enter the home and send the computer to the crime lab. That could take weeks or months. But he had no choice other than to leave it be.

  If he took the computer with him now, it would be an admission of breaking and entering the house.

  Frustrated, Joe opened Pollock’s file drawer on the side of the desk. Pollock was neat and organized, and the files were hung alphabetically inside. Behind the A tab were manila file folders with headers including ANTELOPE LICENSES, ANTELOPE NUMBERS, ANTELOPE HARVEST, and so on. Behind the C tab were Pollock’s old citation books that went beyond the one Joe had found in the truck. D was for DEER and E was for ENDANGERED SPECIES. The records were voluminous and Joe spent nearly an hour thumbing through the tabs for anything out of the ordinary.

  Which he didn’t find.

  *

  HE CHECKED HIS WATCH. On the way to Pollock’s, he’d called Mark Gordon, the general manager of the Silver Creek Ranch. Gordon had agreed to meet with him, but said he had to do it at one o’clock before he drove to Denver for a flight. He sounded like a very busy man.

  Joe pushed back in the office chair and stood up. The heat had been on since he adjusted it, but he could still see his breath. He wondered what he was missing and if he should consider coming back when he had more time.

  As he turned for the door, he stopped.

  Again, it wasn’t what he had found but what he hadn’t found.

  He walked back to the file drawer and double-checked. There was no file for the Silver Creek Ranch under S and not a single folder mentioned Kate Shelford-Longden. It seemed to Joe that a man as fastidious as Pollock would have kept records on the premier dude ranch in the area that included vast hunting and fishing opportunities, as well as a bizarre missing persons case that had occurred within his own district.

  But the files didn’t exist.

  Then he realized that the entire B section was missing as well.

  The only explanation Joe had was that whoever had cleaned out Pollock’s pickup had also gone through his files and removed some of them.

  Had Pollock taken them along with his weapons?

  But which ones, and why?

  *

  JOE WAS A LITTLE EMBARRASSED by the poor patch job he did on the inside of the back garage door, but he was pressed for time. He’d resorted to securing the lock plate back into the jamb using a couple of lengths of lathe and he’d screwed them in using Pollock’s electric screwdriver from his workbench.

  He stepped outside and closed the door. He put a little pressure on it to make sure it held and he was pleased with the result.

  As he climbed into his pickup and backed out through the drift, he glanced through his side window at the road, just in time to see a light-colored pickup with a camper shell pulling away from the curb and driving toward downtown.

  He didn’t recall seeing it when he’d arrived at Pollock’s.

  PART

  THREE

  We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

  —Mark Twain

  15

  “I’VE ALREADY TALKED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT SEVERAL TIMES ABOUT all of this,” Silver Creek Ranch general manager Mark Gordon said to Joe from behind his desk. He appeared to be trying not to show his impatience with Joe’s arrival. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to find out what happened to Kate as much as anyone on earth. Maybe more. This thing has been hanging over our heads for months and I’d really like to see it get resolved.”

  Gordon’s office was surprisingly small for such a massive operation, Joe thought. It was located adjacent to a receptionist desk in the administration structure—the latter was a renovated log cabin that from the outside looked like it had been constructed for a single man in the 1950s.

  The office cabin was on a hillside tucked away in a copse of fat bell-shaped spruce and could barely be seen from the ranch complex itself, which was both vast and understated at the same time. Within the sprawling complex below was a massive lodge, the Activity Center, barns and outbuildings, an indoor shooting range, a saloon, the largest indoor riding arena Joe had ever seen, and dozens of well-appointed cabins for guests. Although most of the buildings had been built in recent years, they’d been constructed to blend into the folds and contours of the exposed granite boulders of the terrain like natural outgrowths of the landscape itself.

  Even under eighteen inches of snow, the Silver Creek Ranch at first sight took his breath away.

  *

  GORDON WAS LARGE, fit, and anxious. His dark hair was pasted back and he had a fashionable three-day growth of salt-and-pepper whiskers framing a thick reddish mustache. He had intense hazel eyes and a habit of drumming the eraser end of a pencil on the top of his desk while he talked and thumping it hard on the wood to emphasize a point. He wore a fleece vest over a button-down shirt with SCR embroidered on the breast. His manner indicated that he had a lot to do and not enough time to do it, even though it was January and there were no guests at the facility.

  “This winter has been absolutely brutal,” Gordon said to Joe. “We’ve got a five-month season and seven months to update, maintain, and improve the ranch. Three of those months have been like this.” He indicated the heavy snow outside his window. “The clock is
ticking,” he said.

  A huge whiteboard covered the wall inside his office and a long list of projects to be completed was written on it in colored scrawls.

  Renovate Bridger, Owens, Saddlehorn units

  Complete ropes course

  Test all 32 wells

  Update 4-wheeler fleet

  Wind turbine project

  Order wine for cellar

  3,000 pheasants for upland game bird farm

  And on and on.

  “I realize you’ve gone over much of this ground before,” Joe said. “I really don’t want to waste your time. But it would be helpful to me if you gave me some background on the ranch as it pertains to Kate. The governor has asked me to look into this case while I’m here.”

  “Governor Allen?” Gordon asked, suspicious.

  “Yup.”

  “I’ve already talked to his chief of staff. Hanlon was his name, I think. He called to ask if there had been any developments.”

  Joe tried not to show his surprise. Hanlon hadn’t told Joe that he’d talked to Gordon directly. Once again, the governor’s office had come up in a circumstance that seemed odd.

  “When was that?” Joe asked.

  “Oh, I think it was a month ago. He also wanted me to invite our owners to the Governor’s Antelope Hunt next fall as his guests.”

  “Ah.”

  Joe knew that this year the invitation had been made only to Allen’s biggest political contributors. Allen’s predecessor Governor Rulon had invited ordinary Wyoming citizens. It said something about both of them, Joe thought.

  “So can you give me some background on the ranch, even though you’ve done it before?” Joe asked.

  Gordon glanced at his wristwatch, then said, “This ranch is like no other property I’ve ever managed, and that includes the thirty-five hotels and resorts I’ve opened up around the world. This place has special challenges and every day is a new adventure. Last week, the pipes froze and burst in the main lodge and we’re trying to find master plumbers to come in and fix them. There are so many existential factors working against us here. We’ve got the weather, the distance from a major airport, and the lack of a nearby population center to draw contractors and employees. Not to mention that creating a super-luxury resort in the least populated state in the country brings its own challenges.