Blood Trail Page 17

  Steadily, he moved the binoculars back. The dome light was still on because the passenger door was open. The man behind the wheel was Bill Gordon. In the backseat were Klamath Moore and his wife.

  Joe’s mouth went dry and his heart thumped in his chest. His hands went cold and slick and the binoculars slipped out of them into the dirt.

  19

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, Joe Pickett stood at the stove in an apron and made pancakes for his daughters whom, he hoped, would eventually wake up and want to eat them. When the pancakes were cooked he moved them to a large serving plate that he warmed in the oven so they’d be hot and ready. Bacon sizzled in his favorite cast-iron skillet and maple syrup warmed in a pan of water. The morning smells of breakfast cooking and brewed coffee were good smells, and he tried not to think of the roof that needed repair or the fence that needed fixing. It was nice to be home and doing something routine, although he didn’t yet consider this house on this street to be home. He could see his neighbor Ed outside already in his perfectly appointed backyard, prowling the lawn while smoking his pipe, apparently targeting thin places in the turf where weeds might get a stonghold and grow when spring came. While Joe watched, Ed raised his head to look over the fence at the Pickett house, and Ed shook his head sadly, as if the mere sight of it made him want to weep.

  For years, whether at the state-owned house on Bighorn Road or the old homestead house they’d lived in on the Longbrake Ranch, there had been no neighbors except wildlife. When the bathroom was occupied, which was nearly full-time with a houseful of females, Joe was used to going outside to relieve himself, which felt normal and good because there was no one around. Sometimes, he would go outside and sit on a stump and smoke a cheap cigar and watch antelope or deer moving cautiously toward water. On the ranch it was cows. Sometimes he would just sit and think and dream, trying to figure out why things were, how they worked, what his role was in the scheme of life. He ended up short on answers. His only conclusion was that his purpose, his reason for being, was to be a good husband and father and not to shame either his wife or his daughters. Why he’d been chosen by the governor to be his point man in the field still baffled Joe. Rulon once said, “When I think of crime committed out of doors, I think of Joe Pickett. Simple as that.” But it wasn’t as simple as that, Joe thought.

  In this house in town Joe felt contained, bottled up, tamped down. He longed to look out the window and see an antelope or a cow and not Ed. But he didn’t have a choice at the moment other than to make more pancakes and try not to speculate that Nate Romanowski had betrayed him.

  MARYBETH RETURNED from her morning walk with Maxine on a leash. She’d scarcely unclipped the leash before the Labrador collapsed in a heap and went immediately to sleep. “Poor old girl,” she said, patting their old dog. “She still wants to go, but she sure doesn’t have the energy she used to have.”

  Joe nodded. He didn’t like contemplating Maxine’s inevitable demise and tried not to think about it. Marybeth was much more practical about life-and-death matters and had said she would continue to take Maxine out until Maxine could no longer go. Then they’d have a decision to make.

  “Breakfast smells good,” she said. “I’ll wake up the girls in a minute.”

  Joe handed her a mug of coffee.

  “How are you doing?” she asked, taking it and sipping. “You tossed and turned all night long. Did you get any sleep?”

  “Some.”

  They’d talked briefly the night before when he got home after one. He was still reeling from what he’d seen through the binoculars.

  “Have you heard from him?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She nodded. “On my walk I was thinking a lot about what you saw last night. I can’t come up with a good explanation. What it all boils down to is you either trust him or you don’t.”

  “He’s never given me a reason not to trust him,” Joe said.

  “That’s all you’ve got,” she said, taking her coffee with her to wake up Sheridan and Lucy.

  AFTER THE breakfast dishes were cleared away, Marybeth took Lucy to school and Joe read over the file he’d been given from the FBI. Bill Gordon was indeed deep inside Klamath Moore’s organization, and one of the few of his followers to travel with Moore from rally to rally. The reports in the file were records of the calls Gordon had made to the FBI when he checked in on Mondays and Thursdays. They went back two years.

  Six months before, an enterprising agent had summarized the reports up to that date.

  The Klamath Moore Animal Rights Movement

  KM is the self-appointed leader and spokesman of the movement.

  The number of “members” is unknown and as far as BG knows there is no formal membership list. Based on the attendance at rallies, BG estimates the membership to be more than 200 and less than 500 hard-core followers. KM enjoys telling the media his sympathizers are “ten thousand strong,” but there is no evidence to confirm this.

  The movement has no formal name or charter. There are no officers or leadership structure. This is by design. BG describes the movement as “nonlinear,” like al-Qaeda.

  BG says KM has studied al-Qaeda and used the terrorist organization as a model for structure and purpose. KM says he can never mass enough followers to mount a legitimate, large-scale fight against hunting in the United States. But like AQ, he can—with a very small organization of loyal followers—strike surgically and create chaos far beyond their actual strength.

  Communication with sympathizers is done exclusively via the Web. Access to the nonpublic URLs is password-protected and changed at random. It’s unknown how many followers visit the nonpublic websites.

  The financing of KM and his effort is murky. BG says KM always seems to have enough money to travel, self-publish pamphlets, and pay organization costs for staging rallies. The hat is passed around at rallies but BG says he’s seen the results and the cash collected isn’t substantial enough—amounting to a few hundred dollars, usually— to sustain such an effort. BG speculates that KM has a trust-fund inheritance and that he draws from it when he needs money. BG says only rich people never talk of money so he figures KM is rich. We have asked BG to investigate the funding angle further.

  KM has close relationships with sympathetic reporters at two major television networks and one cable news network (names deleted). These reporters are rewarded for their sympathetic treatment of his cause by being tipped off ahead of time to the staging of events so they will have exclusives. KM will only talk to sympathetic reporters so portrayals of him in the media are generally positive.

  KM claims to “own” two congressmen and one senator (names deleted).

  KM’s last known address is Boulder, CO, but he keeps constantly on the move. He lives like a fugitive, staying with sympathizers across the nation and around the world.

  KM keeps in contact with like-minded organizations including PETA, the Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!, Animal Defense Alliance, and similar organizations around the world dedicated to animal rights and the anti-hunting movement (list attached).

  JOE FLIPPED to the list and was shocked by the sheer number of animal rights organizations. He counted 248 groups in the United States and Canada alone, and thirty-six more in other countries. Most of the organizations stated that they were against “hunting, the fur trade, circuses, rodeos, and animal experimentation.” The names were all unfamiliar to him, but varied from the Animal Crusaders in Tucson to Action for Animals in Oakland to SKUNKS, an acronym for the Palmdale, California, Society of Kind Understanding and Not Killing Skunks.

  He shook his head and read on:

  KM travels with a laptop computer from which he manages his public website and the nonpublic websites. BG says KM claims not to need more than three hours of sleep a night, and spends countless hours communicating with followers.

  KM told BG a week prior to the trespass and arson at a Texas hunting ranch near Waco that “something big is about to happen,” but KM could not be
physically placed in Texas during the crime. BG didn’t know KM’s whereabouts during that week, but assumed he was involved.

  KM was in nearby Wyoming when David Linsicomb, the most prominent of Idaho’s domestic trophy elk breeders, was run off the road near Driggs and killed when his vehicle rolled over. On the night of the accident, BG could not verify KM’s whereabouts.

  KM’s wife, Shannon, and his infant daughter frequently travel with him. BG gets along well with Shannon, who is Native American.

  At rallies, KM traces his hatred of hunting and hunters to his boyhood in Oregon’s Klamath Valley (hence the name he is known by, his actual name is Harold). KM’s uncle used to take him deer hunting. KM says his uncle shot and wounded two deer but didn’t pursue them because it was too much trouble. When he finally killed a large trophy near the road, his uncle stood by and watched the buck bleed out instead of putting it out of its misery. The instance so scarred KM that his life’s mission was revealed to him at that moment, he claims. BG says KM hinted that his uncle eventually “got what was coming to him” but didn’t elaborate. Bureau follow-up reveals that KM’s uncle, one Everett Dysall of Klamath Falls, OR, died in 1997 from food poisoning. No foul play was suspected at the time. A bureau review of the autopsy and interview with the attending coroner corroborates the cause of death but provided no solid link to KM.

  BG says KM seems excited about something about to happen, something BG thinks will be bigger than anything else thus far. Says KM hints that “something is in the works that will blow everybody away.”

  “GEE,” JOE said aloud, “I wonder what he’s referring to?”

  He sat back and rubbed his chin. He was looking forward to talking with Bill Gordon. The hunting story concerning Moore’s uncle made him angry. Nothing made him angrier than cruel acts by thoughtless hunters.

  “If the story is true,” Joe mumbled, “he deserved it.”

  “Who deserved what?” Sheridan asked as she entered the kitchen. She’d just showered and she wore a towel wrapped around her head.

  “Hey, nice hat,” Joe said.

  She made a face at him because he’d made it a practice over the years to greet her that way when she was turbaned. Joe was surprised to see Sheridan.

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “In-service training day for high school teachers. We’ve got the day off.”

  “Who deserved it?” she asked, sitting across from him at the table. “What are you reading?”

  “Files on Klamath Moore,” Joe said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t like him. He’s a bully.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  Joe was astounded by both the coincidence and the fact that a teacher had arranged for an in-school program by a man on the FBI’s domestic terror watch list.

  She told him the story from her class the day before.

  “This was your teacher’s idea?” Joe said, astounded.

  “Mrs. Whaling’s kind of, well, passionate about some things. I don’t think she knew what kind of jerk he is. But I didn’t call him a jerk. I called him an asshole.”

  Joe flinched.

  “I liked his wife, though,” she said. “She was kind to me.”

  “Shannon?”

  “I didn’t get her name. He didn’t introduce her, which was just not cool. So,” she said, tapping the file, “what does it say about him?”

  “I really can’t get into the specifics,” Joe said. “Sorry.”

  “Do you think he has something to do with the murders?”

  “I’m not sure,” Joe said, “but he may know something about them. But please, keep this between us. I can’t believe I’m even discussing this with you.”

  “I’m interested in this kind of stuff,” Sheridan said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve been around it all my life, you know.”

  “I wish you hadn’t,” Joe said, stung.

  She shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “My, you’re philosophical these days.”

  He could tell she had something on her mind, so he waited her out.

  “What about what Klamath Moore says?” she asked. “I mean, he’s a jerk and all, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Do people really need to hunt? I mean, there’re easier ways to get food. Like go to the store.”

  “Do you really think that?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. On the one hand I do. But on the other...” She reached for a banana from a bowl of fruit on the table and began to peel it. “In order to eat this I need to literally pull the skin off. That’s pretty gross if you think of it that way. And in order to get milk, some guy has to yank on the private parts of a poor old cow. I mean, yuck.”

  Joe smiled.

  She took a bite of the banana. “It’s too bad we can’t figure out a way to live without making other creatures give up their lives, is what I’m saying. Or something like it.”

  “It’s a dilemma,” Joe said. “But let me ask you something. As people build more and more homes in places where wildlife lives, there are more and more encounters. Add to that the fact that the population of many species—deer, bears, mountain lions, elk—are increasing beyond carrying capacities. Is it better for that excess wildlife to starve to death, to be slaughtered by sharpshooters or hit by cars, or is it better for the animals to be harvested by hunters, who thank them for their meat and their lives? And you can’t not choose one of them. People can’t just say how much they love animals and turn their heads away and not have some kind of responsibility. My job as a game warden is to make that last choice—hunting—as efficient, biologically responsible, and sporting as possible.”

  Sheridan nodded slowly.

  “I talked too much,” Joe said, looking down.

  “No, I appreciate what you said,” Sheridan mused. “And there’s another thing I think about. If I were given a choice to live in a world where some people still know how to hunt and survive in the wilderness or a world where it’s all been forgotten, I want to live in that first world. I remember watching television after nine/eleven when all the news people started praising those police and firemen like they didn’t even know those men were still around, like they’d sort of looked down on them for years and years. But all of a sudden, when people needed rescuing and somebody had to be physically brave, they were really glad those men were still around after all. It’s sort of like that.”

  She said, “If something big happens and the electricity and Internet go out and we run out of gasoline and groceries, I’m not going to ask Ed Nedny next door or some computer game geek or Emo at school for help. I’m coming straight to you, Dad, because I know you know how to keep us alive.”

  Joe grinned, embarrassed but proud.

  “One thing I do know, though,” she said, chewing, “is that when somebody is as hateful as Klamath Moore is—even if it is sort of for a good cause—I don’t like them. It’s too much.”

  Joe nodded. “You are philosophical. And maybe even wise.”

  She grinned at the compliment. “When people want to control other people . . . it’s like those fascists, you know?”

  Joe wasn’t sure what to say. His daughter amazed him. Where had little Sheridan gone?

  “Hey, nice hat,” he said.

  WHEN THE telephone rang Sheridan sprang out of her chair to answer it, assuming it was for her. She said, “Just a minute, I’ll get him,” and handed the handset to Joe.

  “Your boss,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Gotta go.”

  Joe sighed. “Yes?”

  Randy Pope said, “Any progress?”

  “None.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “What’s your plan of attack?”

  “I don’t have one,” Joe said. “I’m reviewing the FBI files. I just got home at one in the morning.”

  Pope cursed. “So you’re just sitting around? Do you not quite understand the significance of this case? Are you aware that your
sheriff is assembling teams to go into the mountains and hunt the shooter down? That he is on the Associated Press saying, and I quote, ‘Since the governor has thrown up his hands and gone to ground, we’ve got to take on this thing ourselves.’”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Joe said. “But wouldn’t it be good if the shooter was arrested? Isn’t that what we want?”

  Pope paused uncomfortably long. “Of course that’s what we want.”

  Joe wondered, Why the hesitation?

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Randy?”

  Pope snorted. “Back to that again, eh? Why can’t you just do your job without constantly questioning me? If you spent half the time trying to find this killer that you do questioning my motives, we might actually have some progress. Have you thought of that?”

  Nice dodge, Joe thought.

  “I put my reputation on the line supporting your insistence on springing that Nate Romanowski,” Pope said. “I hope you’re in control of him. Is he there with you now?”

  “No.”

  “No? Where is he?”

  I don’t have a clue, Joe thought, but said, “He’s following some leads on his own.” He hoped it didn’t sound like the lie it possibly was.

  Pope took an audible breath before shouting, “On his own! He’s got federal charges against him and he was released to your custody! On his own? What are you thinking?”

  Joe didn’t respond.

  “Are you out of your mind? If either the governor or the FBI finds out he’s on his own you’ll be toast. I’ll be toast. And so will the governor! Jesus, what are you thinking?”