The Disappeared (Joe Pickett Book 18) Page 2

  Now Bridger was her only company. It had been two years since Paul had died from injuries when his logging truck lost its brakes and missed a turn coming down Battle Mountain Road. The full load of green timber on the trailer had created such momentum that it had made it impossible for him to stop.

  After the EMTs had cut him out of the cab with the jaws of life, Paul had lingered with severe head injuries in the Memorial Hospital of Carbon County in Rawlins for three days and nights before passing away. He’d never regained consciousness and she’d spent most of her time trying to recall the last conversation they’d had. She narrowed it down to:

  Paul (putting on his coat before the sun was up): What did you pack me for lunch?

  Carol: Two bologna sandwiches, Pringles, and string cheese.

  Paul: Good. I like string cheese.

  ONCE, DEEP INTO the second night at the hospital, his eyelids had fluttered and his grip tightened on her tiny hand.

  He’d said one word.

  Bridger.

  Not Carol.

  She hadn’t held it against him. She figured he wasn’t in his right mind and that his last thought was about the most vulnerable among them.

  *

  SO SHE STOOD behind the frosted glass that glowed orange from the light of the wood burner across the way and waited for Bridger.

  She’d thrown Paul’s old Carhartt logging coat over her nightgown. It still smelled of him: diesel fuel and pine sawdust. She also wore a pair of high-top Sorel pac boots over her bare feet. Even with the storm door closed, the cold night seeped in. The single inch of exposed bare calf between the hem of the coat and the top of the boots stung with it.

  Despite that, she cracked the door and sniffed. She was used to the prevailing smell of wood smoke, didn’t mind it at all. The odor seemed warm in itself and it reminded her of Paul. If their long marriage had an official smell, she’d thought, it would have been wood smoke.

  But there was something else in the air and it reminded her of something unpleasant from her childhood. It had been so long ago and so repressed that she hadn’t thought about it for decades. It bothered her that the older she got, the more she recalled from her early youth and the less she remembered from the week before. Schmidt was afraid she had a front-row seat to the early stages of her own dementia. So she put that recollection aside.

  *

  THE BURNER WAS HOT and glowing.

  As she watched, the silhouette of a pickup passed in front of it, which was odd at that time of night. Because of her proximity, Carol Schmidt was a student of the mill across the road. She knew when the shifts changed, when the fresh-cut loads of lumber arrived from the mountains, when the sawdust and scrap were hauled down to the burner before dark.

  And she knew that the only employee on the site was the caretaker of the burner itself and he wouldn’t be driving around the yard in a late-model pickup with a camper shell on the back of it.

  After a few minutes, the pickup turned and came down the access road with its headlights off, which was also odd.

  Schmidt stepped back farther from the frosted glass of the storm door so she couldn’t be seen. She could make out the outline of the pickup clearly because it was backlit by the orange glow of the mill.

  The truck was silver or gray. She saw the heads of two men inside the cab.

  The pickup slowed as it approached the service road and its lights came on and bathed the Schmidt house. Carol stepped back farther.

  Of course, it was at that moment that Bridger finally lifted his leg and urinated and bounded back toward the house.

  But she kept her eyes on the pickup.

  It turned left and accelerated aggressively on the road behind her back fence and through the stop sign on the road toward the highway that led to Saratoga.

  There was a screech of tires, a rapid thump-thump, and the yelp of a dog.

  The truck had run over one of the neighbor’s pack.

  She watched as the vehicle stopped, the engine still running. Pausing like the driver didn’t know what had just happened.

  The dome light inside the cab came on as the passenger—a dark man in coveralls—opened his door and started to climb outside. She couldn’t see the passenger’s face because the light was behind him, but she could clearly see the driver. And she could hear him bark:

  “Forget it. Leave the goddamn dog. It shouldn’t be out running around anyway.”

  His voice was grating and it cut straight through the cold night air.

  “You sure?” the passenger asked.

  “Close the door before someone sees us,” the driver ordered.

  The passenger did as commanded and the truck lurched and drove away. One of the few streetlights in the town of Encampment was on her corner, and it cast a light blue glow in the night. She got a glimpse of the gray pickup and the logo and writing on its door, as well as the last three numbers of the license plate.

  Six-zero-zero.

  Bridger whined and did a clumsy dance on the other side of the door. He didn’t like it when snow packed between his claws on his single front paw.

  She stepped forward and opened the door and Bridger rushed in and sat down on the rug so she could remove the ice from his foot.

  As she did, she thought Six-zero-zero. Her hands trembled from what she’d witnessed.

  After Bridger padded off to go back to sleep, she called her neighbor. The phone rang eight times before a man with phlegm in his throat answered, “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I do. This is Carol Schmidt next door. I don’t know if you heard it, but I think one of your dogs got hit in the road.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Carol Schmidt. Your neighbor.”

  She could hear him muffle the receiver and turn to someone and say, “It’s that old lady next door.”

  A woman moaned and then he was back.

  “Forget it,” he said. “We’ve got too many dogs as it is.”

  “I could probably identify the truck and the driver.”

  “Carol, I’m asking you this politely even though you woke me up: mind your own business.”

  “I got part of the license number.”

  “Carol, my son went off to Alaska and he left us his three dogs. I never wanted any of ’em. I don’t mind being down one.”

  “That’s so sad,” she said.

  “Go to bed, Carol,” he said, and hung up the phone.

  *

  SCHMIDT WAS HALFWAY to her bedroom with Bridger padding along beside her when she said “Dang it!” and turned back around on her heel and picked the phone up and dialed 911.

  The twenty-four-hour dispatch center for the whole valley was located in Saratoga and she knew from experience that the woman dispatcher who pulled the late shift could be surly.

  “I need to report a hit-and-run on a dog,” Schmidt said. “I got a partial plate number.”

  She could hear the dispatcher take a long drag on a cigarette before asking, “Is this Mrs. Schmidt again?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I thought I recognized your voice. You called about barking dogs last week, right?”

  “Yes, I did,” Schmidt said.

  “And do you remember when you called that I told you this line is for emergencies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it your dog?”

  “No. I think it was my neighbors’ dog.”

  “Would you consider that an emergency, Mrs. Schmidt?”

  “Well, it is for the dog,” Schmidt sniffed.

  The dispatcher blew out a long stream of air. Probably smoke, Schmidt guessed. “We need to get off the line in case a real emergency call comes in,” the dispatcher said.

  “There is no need to take that tone.”

  Another sigh. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a report and send it on to the Encampment Police Department. Deputy Spanks should come by sometime tomorrow to follow up. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Deputy Spanks has been no help
at all with my previous calls,” Schmidt said.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Schmidt.”

  “There’s also an unpleasant smell in the air,” Schmidt said. “It’s coming from the mill.”

  “Is it wood smoke?”

  Schmidt stamped her foot. “Young lady, I know what wood smoke smells like. This is different.”

  “I’ll add that to the report,” the dispatcher said dismissively.

  “What about the dog out there?” Schmidt asked.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you with that,” the dispatcher said.

  Shaken and angry with the state of the Saratoga and Encampment police departments and wondering how to file a formal complaint against the dispatcher, she cracked the back storm door again. The mill was empty of vehicles, as it should be. The burner roared. She could hear the dog whimper out on the road as it lay bleeding.

  Tears froze on her cheeks as she crunched through the snow with the .38 she kept in her purse. No dog should suffer like that, she thought.

  Then she got another whiff of the smell from the burner that had bothered her so.

  And she tried to recall when, as a child, she’d first smelled the acrid odor of burning flesh.

  3

  THREE HUNDRED MILES NORTH OF ENCAMPMENT, WYOMING, GAME WARDEN Joe Pickett stood with his hands in the pockets of his down coat as he rocked back on his boot heels and watched the southern sky for the approach of Governor Colter Allen’s state jet. He was the only person in the lobby of the Saddlestring Municipal Airport.

  His green Ford F-150 pickup with the departmental pronghorn shield on the door was parked outside in the cold morning next to an ice-encased Prius rental with Utah plates that someone had apparently abandoned. Joe wondered what the backstory of the Prius might be, but he had no one to ask. The small carrier that had provided air service to Twelve Sleep County had pulled out due both to lack of customers and new federal regulations that had increased requirements for entry-level pilots hired by regional airlines. Ever since, the airport had become a lonely place that catered only to private aircraft. The six-person TSA squad was also gone and all that remained of their presence was fading posters and the half-full water bottles they’d left on top of the X-ray machine.

  The loss of service hadn’t changed the interior, though. Framed old photos of famous and semi-famous passengers deplaning still lined the cinder-block wall in back of him. Joe studied the shots of John Wayne from when he’d come to Wyoming to film Hellfighters in 1968. There were several photos of Queen Elizabeth carefully descending the stairs of her aircraft in 1984 on her way to visit a distant cousin who owned a polo ranch, as well as a photo of a different kind of royalty: the rock icon Prince in 1986 as part of an MTV promotion. After that, Joe noted, there had either been no celebrities flying in or the airport staff had lost interest in photographing them.

  A hunched-over man in his sixties wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a three-day growth of beard tapped on a keyboard behind the counter that had once served as the check-in area for departing flights. Joe could see the top of his head and his startling comb-over. His name was Monte Stokes and there had recently been a feature about him in the Saddlestring Roundup.

  Stokes had claimed that his employment contract with the airport board must be honored whether or not there was any commercial service, and he’d recently filed a wrongful termination suit against them. While the suit ground through the legal process, Stokes had maintained his job and spent forty hours a week sitting behind the counter and playing solitaire on his laptop.

  “Waiting for Air Allen?” Stokes asked Joe without looking up.

  “Air Allen?”

  “Used to be called Rulon One,” Stokes said. “Governor Allen changed the name of the state plane when he took over.”

  “Ah,” Joe said.

  “Surprised you didn’t know.”

  “There are lots of things I don’t know.”

  “I always heard you were pretty plugged-in when it came to the governor.”

  “Not this one,” Joe said. He had no desire to explain to Stokes that he’d had a long and complicated relationship with Spencer Rulon, the previous governor. Rulon had at times asked Joe to be his “range rider” and investigate cases on his behalf. The arrangement had fallen just over the line of state personnel policy, but Rulon had been canny enough to work the system to his benefit. The ex-governor had always been careful to distance himself from Joe’s investigations in case they went haywire.

  Although Rulon had been mercurial and given to flashes of anger and impatience, Joe missed him.

  Colter Allen was a different animal: a Republican, Yale-educated, Big Piney–area rancher who downplayed his Ivy League education as well as the fact that he not only owned a ranch but was also a wealthy lawyer and developer. Instead, Allen never failed to mention that he’d been a high school rodeo champion and U.S. Marine. Voters had gotten to know him when he’d campaigned across the state in a fifteen-year-old pickup that he drove himself. It wasn’t until the general election was over that word leaked out that the pickup was usually hauled on an Allen Ranches, Inc., flatbed to within a few miles of each town and that Allen would then leave his aides in his eighty-five-thousand-dollar Land Rover LR4 and climb out of the backseat to take the old truck the rest of the way into town.

  There were other rumors about Allen as well. Joe had heard from the Big Piney game warden that Allen’s fortune had taken a big hit in recent years because of some bad investments and land deals that had gone sour. While he’d once been considered a multimillionaire, there were grumblings from local Sublette County businesses that for the past year Allen hadn’t been paying his bills on time and that his excuses for payments due were slippery. The game warden also said that Allen had been propped up and financed by a couple of extremely wealthy benefactors whose identities were a mystery. The benefactors, according to the rumors, owned Governor Allen lock, stock, and barrel.

  But there were always rumors like that about politicians, and Joe couldn’t verify them, so he dismissed them as gossip.

  Since Colter Allen had been elected, he and Joe had had two conversations and neither had gone well.

  Stokes looked up and squinted at Joe through his glasses. “They’re eight minutes out.”

  “Thank you.”

  Stokes’s mouth formed a half smile. “Do you notice anything strange about the governor’s arrival?”

  Joe looked around. “Nope. What should I notice?”

  “There’s no ground transportation,” he said with an impatient sigh. “That means he’s just stopping over on his way to somewhere else. I’d guess Jackson or his ranch in Big Piney. Plus, the mayor isn’t here to greet him or anything. I don’t think they even know he’s coming. It’s just you.”

  Joe shrugged.

  “What makes you so important?” the man asked.

  “No idea,” Joe said.

  . . .

  THE CALL HAD COME the night before, when Joe and Marybeth were at a Saddlestring High School performance of Bye Bye Birdie in which their eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, the youngest of three and the only daughter still at home, played the lead.

  Although Joe had had his phone muted, he’d looked at the screen to see who had called, which annoyed Marybeth.

  “Ignore it,” she whispered.

  “It’s the governor’s office,” he whispered back.

  “Lucy is about to sing. Call them back at intermission.”

  Joe nodded and put the phone in his pocket just as Lucy came onstage playing Kim MacAfee. He was stunned at how beautiful she looked and it made his chest hurt. Marybeth dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex and clutched his arm as Lucy began to sing.

  They’d heard her practice the song in her room for months and it was so familiar Joe could have sung it himself, although badly. But he couldn’t have replicated Lucy’s presence and poise. And unlike Joe, she could actually sing. It wasn’t lost on him that he could recall falling deeply in love
with Ann-Margret in the same role when he’d seen the movie as a boy, even though it was already an old movie at the time. The thought confused and confounded him. Would males in the audience think of Lucy that way? The way he’d thought about Ann-Margret?

  If they did, he mused, things would get Western in that theater real fast.

  At intermission, Joe let his wife go into the lobby of the high school to accept the compliments from other parents. He wasn’t sure he could even talk to them through the lump in his throat.

  He stepped outside into the icy night and breathed in deeply to clear his head. Ice crystals suspended in the air formed halos around the blue overhead lights in the parking lot.

  The call went straight through.

  “Hanlon.”

  Joe recalled seeing on a memo from headquarters in Cheyenne that Allen’s chief of staff was a former D.C. operative named Connor Hanlon.

  “This is Joe Pickett returning your call from Saddlestring.”

  “I can read the screen.” Brusque. Joe could hear conversations in the background and the tinkling of plates and silverware. “Look,” Hanlon said, “I’m at dinner with my wife and some important donors. I only have a minute.”

  So do I, Joe thought.

  “Governor Allen would like to meet with you tomorrow. We’re scheduled to land in Saddlestring at 9:10 a.m., according to the schedule. Are you able to meet with him?”

  Although it was posed as a question, it sounded like a command. But Joe was more than available. January was the deadest time of the year for a game warden, and he’d been confined to his office and desk for the past ten days filling out bureaucratic paperwork—filing annual reports, making recommendations about local hunting seasons and quotas, and reviewing new regulations proposed by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

  “I’ll be there,” Joe said.

  “Of course you will.”

  “Can I ask what this is about?”

  “You’ll know tomorrow,” Hanlon said. “Gotta go.”

  And the connection went dead.

  . . .

  GOVERNOR ALLEN’S SMALL JET, a twin-engine eight-passenger Cessna Citation Encore, touched down smoothly on the runway. As it rolled toward the terminal, Joe noted the bucking-horse logo on the tail as well as Air Allen painted above the windows in a frontier font.