The Disappeared (Joe Pickett Book 18) Read online

  “Oh,” he heard Neal say from inside. Then: “Oh, shit.”

  Joe entered and his initial impression of what he saw at the other end of Neal’s flashlight beam was that it looked like a corpse.

  She was seated in a hard-backed chair with her back to the window and her long bare legs spread out straight. She wore spiked heels and lacy black lingerie. Her arms hung limp down at her side.

  The beam paused on her face: billowing blond shoulder-length hair, large blue eyes, a pert nose, and a wide-open O-shaped mouth.

  Neal said, “We came all this way to find McKnight’s damn sex doll.”

  Joe lowered his shotgun and briefly closed his eyes. The tension he felt morphed into humiliation.

  “They’re going to be talking about this one for years,” Neal said.

  They meant everyone, Joe knew. Locals, voters, the media, other law enforcement people. Not to mention Chief of Staff Hanlon, Governor Allen, and the British Consolate.

  “Well,” Nate said, “at least my conspiracy theory is back on the table.”

  “What theory is that?” Neal asked. His voice was suddenly weary.

  Nate ignored the question, but shot Joe a knowing look as he expelled the empty cartridge from his five-shot revolver and replaced it with a live round.

  *

  SHERIDAN HAD HEARD SHOTS several minutes before as they echoed through the mountains.

  Crack-crack-BOOM.

  She turned the fan down on the truck heater so she could listen better, but there were no follow-up gunshots. She glanced over at the other occupied vehicles in the lot.

  The snowmobile operator was sitting in the cab of his truck, but she could tell by the blue glow on the side of his face that he was talking on his phone. There was no indication he’d heard anything.

  Sophie and Billy Bloodworth were still in the middle of an argument and hadn’t heard it either. Their interior light was on. She could see Sophie pointing her finger at Bloodworth and jabbing the air. Bloodworth theatrically covered his ears with his hands for a moment and rolled his eyes toward the sky.

  Sheridan cracked the driver’s-side window an inch and felt the cold stab into the cab. The whine of an approaching snowmobile was faint at first, but it grew stronger.

  Just one snowmobile returning?

  Her dad’s pickup pointed toward the wall of snow where the sheriff and his team had departed. She assumed whoever was coming was using that same trail.

  After a minute, she saw a yellow glow flash through the treetops. Then a single headlight appeared over the embankment of snow and the snowmobile descended into the parking area. The driver paused at the sight of all the vehicles, then apparently made up his mind. The machine launched forward and was coming right at her.

  The snowmobile-rental operator opened his door as the machine and driver shot by him. The interior light from his truck gave Sheridan a glimpse of the driver. She recognized McKnight’s face through his plastic face mask. He looked angry and determined.

  She raised her hand so the bright light wouldn’t blind her as it got closer. McKnight seemed to sense that if he got through the parked vehicles he’d be home free.

  The roar grew, and Sheridan could see that the man was going to attempt to squeeze through the opening between her dad’s truck and Sheriff Neal’s SUV. It was a narrow chute.

  She unlatched the passenger door and waited until he was almost beside her before she kicked it wide open.

  With a bang that rocked the pickup, the door took out McKnight’s windshield and threw the man to the ground. His machine continued on for fifteen feet behind them before foundering in a drift.

  She scrambled outside. McKnight lay motionless on his back with his arms flung out as if making a snow angel. His face mask was spiderwebbed with cracks.

  A semiautomatic pistol lay on the packed snow a yard from McKnight’s outstretched hand. She lunged forward and picked it up. The steel was cold in her bare hands.

  *

  TWO OTHER SNOWMOBILES appeared on the trail. She was grateful they were being driven by deputies.

  McKnight was starting to recover from the impact and he groaned and writhed in the snow. She pointed his pistol at him and told him to be still.

  Billy Bloodworth’s camera flashed repeatedly somewhere behind her.

  One of the deputies shut off his motor, climbed from his machine, and said with admiration, “Damn, girl. That was a good trick.”

  21

  “THIS’LL BE FUN,” JOE SAID SOURLY AS HE PUNCHED IN HANLON’S cell phone number.

  It was an hour and a half after they’d all descended from McKnight’s cabin and Joe had finally been cleared by Sheriff Neal to depart from the parking lot at the end of the road. Joe and Sheridan had agreed to drive to the sheriff’s office in Rawlins the next day to give formal statements. Nate didn’t commit.

  An ambulance with flashing lights was ahead of them on the highway with McKnight inside. The preliminary diagnosis from the EMTs was that the trapper had a broken jaw, a cracked clavicle, and upper-body contusions.

  As he examined McKnight, one of the EMTs had said simply: “Lawsuit.”

  The call to Hanlon went straight to voicemail, for which Joe was grateful.

  He said, “The lead about the cabin turned out to be a dry hole. It wasn’t Kate. It wasn’t even a person in that photo. I can explain when we talk, but we’ll close down that channel of the investigation and start fresh in the morning.”

  Joe ended the call and dropped the phone to his lap.

  “I bet you regret that choice of words,” Nate said. “Dry hole.”

  Joe glanced up at the rearview mirror to see Sheridan looking away. She pretended she didn’t know what Nate meant.

  “I could have phrased it better,” Joe said.

  Despite the heater running full blast, it was cold inside the truck. The passenger door had been dented by the impact of McKnight’s crash and it wouldn’t close tightly. Joe had secured it to the doorframe as best he could with duct tape, but the icy wind whistled inside the cab.

  *

  THE SCENE IN THE PARKING LOT had been barely controlled chaos once Sheriff Neal and his colleagues returned from the mountain. They were drawn to where Sheridan stood over McKnight in the snow by the flashes of Billy Bloodworth’s camera.

  Joe wouldn’t soon forget the image of Sheriff Neal barking out orders to call for an ambulance with the blow-up doll pinned horizontally under his right arm. Bloodworth took several shots of that, too, and the sheriff ordered him to “get the hell out of my crime scene.”

  Bloodworth and Sophie sped away toward town, but not before the reporter got quotes from a couple of the deputies about what had happened at the cabin and what they’d found.

  Joe assumed Bloodworth was on his phone dictating the scoop to his editor in London. He’d likely upload the photos he’d taken as soon as he got back to Saratoga.

  . . .

  JOE PARKED NEXT to Sheridan’s company pickup at the Silver Creek Ranch so she could go back to her apartment. He said, “You were great up there.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I injured an innocent pervert.”

  “Don’t forget that he took a couple of shots at us,” Joe said. “Sheriff Neal will probably charge him with using deadly force against a law enforcement officer. McKnight’s not exactly home free.”

  “Will he sue all you guys?”

  “Probably.”

  “Will he win?”

  “Probably.”

  “What a night,” Sheridan said.

  As she climbed out, she patted Nate good-bye on his shoulder and said to Joe, “For what it’s worth, I still think Kate is alive.”

  “You do?”

  “Love you, Dad.”

  “Love you. Call your mother.”

  *

  “FOLLOW ME IN TO THE WOLF,” Nate said as he pushed through the tape holding his door closed so he could get to his vehicle. “We’ll dump your truck and you can get in with me. There’s
something I want to show you.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “Does this have something to do with your conspiracy theory?”

  Nate nodded.

  . . .

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, as the glow from Saratoga smudged the northern horizon and Nate’s taillights were ahead, Hanlon called back.

  Joe took a deep pull of icy air and answered.

  “A fucking doll?”

  Joe didn’t say, Literally. Instead, he said, “Word travels fast.”

  “A dispatcher at DOT listened to the whole thing on the radio and informed the governor of your latest screwup.” He didn’t sound enraged, Joe thought. He sounded cold and businesslike.

  “I tried to call you earlier,” Joe said.

  “I was on the phone with him at the time,” Hanlon said. “We’re trying to decide if we’re going to cancel the press conference and come out looking like we’re idiots or have it anyway and come out looking like we’re idiots. Plus, it sounds like we’ll get sued by the innocent trapper you attacked.”

  “We didn’t attack the trapper,” Joe said, while trying to keep his voice calm. “If you’ll recall, I advised against the press conference until we could confirm the photograph.”

  “I don’t,” Hanlon snapped. “Do you remember when I told you the governor wasn’t happy with you? Now he just wants you gone. You are officially a non-person as far as this administration is concerned.”

  Joe let those words sink in, but before he could reply, Hanlon continued. “This is going to make us all look as stupid as you are when it gets out. And it will, thanks to the reporter on the scene. It’ll go viral. Governor Allen and law enforcement in the state of Wyoming will be the subject of jokes, thanks to you.”

  Joe cut in. “When you say he wants me gone, he means I can go back to my district?”

  “He doesn’t give a shit where you go, as long as he never hears your name again. You’re fired, Pickett. We’ll send over the paperwork to Game and Fish first thing tomorrow.”

  Joe was stunned. Images of Marybeth, Sheridan, April, and Lucy flashed before his eyes.

  “Maybe we’ll change the focus of the press conference,” Hanlon said, apparently thinking out loud. “The governor can announce that he’s canning the incompetent investigator leading the search for Kate and redoubling his efforts to find out what happened to her. That way, he comes out looking like a determined man of action. Yeah, I like that.”

  Then to Joe: “Lose my number. If you call again, I won’t pick up. You’ve done enough damage already.”

  “We aren’t done,” Joe said, suddenly angry. “You need to answer a couple of questions first.”

  Hanlon scoffed. “You don’t get this chain-of-command thing, do you? Ten seconds. You’ve got ten seconds.”

  “Why did your office clean out Pollock’s house and take his keys after he left?”

  “Five seconds.”

  “What did you do to Pollock to make him leave?”

  “Two seconds.”

  “Why did the governor send me down here?”

  “We’re done. Have a nice life.”

  And the line went dead.

  22

  NINETEEN MILES NORTH OF SARATOGA, JOE SAW THE SEA OF BLINKING red lights as they emerged over the horizon. There were so many of them that the stars faded in the night sky and the untrammeled snowfields in the foreground glowed pink.

  Nate eased to the shoulder of the highway and then turned at a ninety-degree angle into the deep snow. When the front end of his Yukon began to bog down, he switched it to four-wheel drive and it lurched forward until the headlights illuminated the top three of a four-strand barbed-wire fence.

  Joe didn’t ask what they were doing. He was still too numb from the conversation he’d had with Hanlon to focus.

  “Look away as I break the law,” Nate said.

  His friend climbed down out of the vehicle with a well-used fencing tool he’d stashed in the driver’s-side door compartment. Joe watched without comprehension as Nate strode through the knee-high snow and pulled the staples from four posts until the wires sagged down. Then he reentered the Yukon, dropped the staples into the ashtray for later, and drove over the top of the fence.

  After he cleared the wires, Nate accelerated and the Yukon lurched forward. Joe braced himself as they broke through snowdrifts and ground over tall sagebrush that scraped along the undercarriage of the SUV. After a few minutes, they began to climb a steep hill that had been blown nearly clean of snow. The red lights had vanished from the horizon, but the illuminated sky was dead ahead.

  Finally, Joe asked, “Where are we going?”

  “To the top.”

  Joe nodded.

  “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Nate asked as they powered up toward the summit. “You haven’t said anything since you got in. You didn’t even give me a hard time about taking that fence down like you usually do.”

  Joe had trouble saying the words. He cleared his throat. “Hanlon found out about the botched raid and he fired me. He said the governor wants me gone.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Joe turned to him. Nate was concentrating on driving the Yukon up the hill and avoiding boulders. He didn’t even glance over.

  “You’re not?” Joe asked.

  “It was a matter of time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Nate said, “Sometimes you get so close to the case you’re working on, you can’t see what’s going on around you. I don’t say this to insult you, but it’s something I’ve observed over the years. It can be an asset that you’re so bull-headed, but sometimes it works to your disadvantage. One might think that after you being in the government for so many years, you’d be more cynical. But that’s why I like you, Joe: you aren’t cynical.”

  “What I am is confused.”

  “That, too.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Up. Until we can’t go up any farther without going down.”

  Joe paused for a second. “Have you ever considered talking like a normal human?”

  “Nyet,” Nate said.

  *

  BEFORE HE COULD ASK Nate to explain further, the Yukon broke over the top of the summit and the windshield filled with the blinking red lights. They were more intense than they’d been before because Nate had chosen a location where they could see... everything.

  The Buckbrush Wind Energy Project stretched across the vast valley as far as Joe could see. The blinking lights on the top of each two-hundred-and-fifty-foot turbine made him wince. Wind buffeted the Yukon and rocked it, and the interior of the vehicle filled with a kind of low subsonic hum from the turbine blades that spun in the dark.

  Below the blinking lights, spread across hundreds of acres, were the lone yellow lights from line shacks and maintenance buildings. They were tiny compared to the steel structures that rose before them.

  “You’re looking at the largest wind energy construction site in the world,” Nate said. “It cost five billion dollars’ worth of tax breaks and government subsidies to build it, and it exists to fulfill other government mandates about using a certain percentage of ‘green energy’ thousands of miles away. It’s being built so the beautiful people in California can keep their houses cool and their swimming pools heated. Plus, they won’t have to get all stressed out about creating their own electrical power and impacting the planet—that they can see, anyway. Out of sight, out of mind. As long as the lights stay on.”

  Joe smiled and shook his head. “Don’t beat around the bush, Nate. Tell me what you really think about it.”

  Nate actually growled in response.

  But Joe couldn’t believe the size and scope of the construction in front of them. The moon and the starlight lit up an immense grid of roads that linked up the bases of hundreds of turbines, and the roads glowed pink as well. A single vehicle miles below drove slowly down one of the roads.

  “See that truck down there?” Nate asked while he poin
ted.

  “I do.”

  “Watch what it does and where it goes.” He handed Joe a pair of binoculars and Joe focused in. He didn’t know why. The truck was too far to see clearly. It was light colored and it moved slowly.

  “What am I looking for?” Joe asked.

  “You’ll know it when you see it. Watch what it does when it goes from the base of one turbine to another.”

  Joe watched. The truck kept going straight and didn’t turn toward the base of the nearest turbine. It drove straight past the second turnoff as well.

  “Crap,” Nate said. “We picked the wrong night.”

  “The wrong night for what?”

  “The wrong night for my theory to fall into place right in front of your eyes. That’s not the truck I was looking for. It looks like they’re not out tonight.”

  Joe lowered the binoculars to his lap. “Your theory?”

  “I’ll get to that,” Nate said. “But first let’s talk about you and Governor Allen.”

  “Go on.”

  “I told you I’m acquainted with a few falconers around Big Piney, right? Guys who knew Colter Allen when he was a rancher and before he became a politician?”

  “Yup.”

  Nate said, “They knew the guy when he was filthy rich and arrogant. And they knew him when the bottom fell out of all of his investments, but he didn’t want anyone to know that fact. When it happened, he’d already decided he was going to run for governor, and all of a sudden he didn’t have the money to pull it off on his own. No one could know, though, or it would have destroyed the illusion of his candidacy. Who would vote for a financial failure, especially when the whole idea behind the guy was that he was a winner?”

  Joe nodded for Nate to go on.

  “So Allen needed backers with enough money to fund him and maintain the illusion. He needed backers who would stay in the background.”

  Nate paused, and said, “He found two of them. And you can bet he owes them now.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “When you find out who one of them is, you’ll know why you were sent down here to Saratoga to fail. It isn’t easy firing state employees. There has to be a good reason.”