Winterkill Page 6

  Joe turned to ask Brazille what “increase of violence” he was referring to, but the driver downshifted and the racket within the cab was too loud to continue the conversation.

  The Sno-Cat nosed over the rim, and the wooded bowl was spread out in front of them. The brilliance of the snow hurt Joe’s eyes. The snow had changed everything; the melded, muted greens, grays, and blues of the meadows and tree-covered folds of before were now portrayed in stark black and white, as if someone had adjusted the contrast of the picture to its most severe. The day had warmed up and the sunshine was lustrous. Pinpricks of reflected light flashed like sequins from the snow in the flats and meadows.

  The next thing Joe observed was that something was wrong in the meadow where the elk had been killed. The area should have been undisturbed, but it was criss-crossed with tracks. Tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention, Joe asked the driver to stop, and swung outside the Sno-Cat. Standing on the running board, he raised his binoculars. Behind him, he heard the other two vehicles approach and stop, their motors idling.

  It looked like a circus down there. He could see where the snow had been dug up and piled in places, and spots where the snow was discolored.

  Joe reentered the cab and closed the door. He turned to Brazille. “When you boys are through with me I need to take my snowmobile down there and look around.”

  “What’s the problem?” Brazille said.

  “It looks like somebody found those elk,” Joe said.

  “Who in their right mind would be up here?” Brazille asked. “Who would give a shit about dead elk in these conditions?”

  Joe shook his head. He was wondering the same thing. He turned back toward the front. “Me,” he said, more to himself than to Brazille.

  “If we find whoever it was, we’ve got to question them about Lamar Gardiner’s murder,” Brazille said. “Maybe they heard something, or saw something.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Hell,” Brazille said, raising his eyebrows, “Maybe they were the ones who did it.”

  Joe led all of them through the heavy timber toward the tree where he had found Gardiner. The snow was thigh-high, with the consistency of flour. The men grunted and cursed behind him, and Joe felt a thin film of sweat growing between his skin and his first layer of clothing.

  “How much farther?” Deputy McLanahan called out, between breaths.

  “It’s right up ahead,” Joe answered, gesturing vaguely. It was hard to get his bearings, and he hoped he wouldn’t walk beyond the tree.

  “You carried Lamar all this way?” Barnum asked, his voice wheezing. “Jesus!”

  “The snow wasn’t as deep,” Joe explained.

  “Can we rest for a minute? I need some air,” Melinda Strickland said, supporting herself against a tree trunk while she got her breath.

  “Plus I’ve got some important calls to make,” she said as she pulled a cell phone from her coat. She looked at the phone. “Shit, I don’t have a signal up here.”

  “Don’t you remember me saying that I couldn’t get a signal from up here?” Joe asked, annoyed that she hadn’t listened during the briefing that morning.

  “Let’s take a break before proceeding,” she said, as if Joe hadn’t spoken.

  “You’d think she was leading the investigation,” Barnum grumbled, although not loudly enough for Strickland to hear him. But the reporter, Elle Broxton-Howard, caught his remark and shot him a withering look.

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to her,” Broxton-Howard sniffed. “She is an amazing woman.”

  “Right,” Barnum coughed, rolling his eyes toward Joe.

  “When a man takes charge like that, he’s a leader,” Broxton-Howard said. “When a woman does it she’s a nasty bitch.”

  Joe waded away from them in the fresh snow. He felt a sharp tug in his stomach. First, an elk slaughter. Then a murder. Then a storm. Now this Melinda Strickland. What in hell is her official involvement?

  He found the tree, spotting it by the glint on the twin shafts of the arrows. He had been concerned that the killer might have returned and dug them out of the soft wood with a knife blade. Finding the arrows brought a sense of relief.

  Joe stopped and pointed. “I found him right there.”

  The party stopped and caught their breath. Billows of steam rose from them and dissipated above. The morning was eerily quiet, almost a vacuum. The storm had stilled the birds and the squirrels, who usually signaled the presence of strangers. The only natural sound was the occasional hushed whump of heavy snow falling from tree branches. One of the DCI men slid his day-pack from his shoulders and let it drop at his feet before unzipping it to dig out his evidence kit.

  Joe stepped aside while the sheriff’s officer and DCI men approached the tree.

  “These arrows are Bonebuster-brand broadheads,” one of the DCI agents said, leaning close to the thick, camouflage-colored shafts, but not touching them. “They have chisel-point tips that’ll cut right through the spine of a big animal. These arrows are vicious bastards, and judging by how far they’re sunk into the tree, whoever shot them had a compound bow with a hell of a pull on it. It’s going to be tough to get these suckers out.”

  Joe shot a glance toward Strickland, who had had been quiet up until then. She stood in the trail, again cradling her cocker spaniel, cooing into the dog’s ear. The Yorkie had been left to follow her, and did so by leaping through the deep snow in clumsy arcs. Strickland had not offered any advice, or suggested any procedure, since they had found the crime scene. Joe wondered if she really knew anything about conducting an investigation.

  As if reading Joe’s mind, Melinda Strickland spoke. “Elle needs to take some digital pictures of it,” Strickland said, nodded to her. “We can use them in our investigation,” she said.

  “I can?” Elle Broxton-Howard asked, honored.

  The local photographer had attached a filter to his lens to cut down the glare, and his camera made a distinctive sipping sound as he shot. Elle Broxton-Howard was obviously new to both her camera and this kind of photography, and she mimicked his actions with her digital camera. Getting the hint, the photographer offered to assist her. When she bent over to retrieve a dropped lens cap, McLanahan and Brazille eyed her form-fitting tights and exchanged boyish grins.

  “I don’t know what in the hell we can possibly find up here besides these arrows,” Barnum complained. “This is a whole different world than it was three days ago.”

  Brazille shrugged, and agreed. Then he ordered one of his team to fire up the chain saw they had brought. Brazille’s idea was to cover the arrows with a bag and cut down the tree, which was about a foot thick. They would then cut the trunk again, above the arrows, and transport the section back to town, where it would be shipped to the crime lab in Cheyenne. This way, he said, they wouldn’t damage the arrows or smudge prints by trying to remove them from the wood.

  “McLanahan, go through the trees over there to the other road and look for tracks or yellow snow,” Barnum barked at his deputy. “If you find anything, take a picture of it and then bag it.”

  McLanahan made a face. “You want me to bag yellow snow?”

  “It can be tested for DNA,” one of the DCI agents said.

  “Shit,” McLanahan snorted.

  “That, too,” Barnum said flatly, which brought a laugh from Brazille. McLanahan scowled.

  As one of the agents primed the chain saw, Joe turned.

  “Do you need me for anything else?” he asked Brazille and Barnum. “If not, I need to check out that meadow.”

  Brazille waved Joe away. Barnum just glared at Joe, clearly still annoyed that Joe was there at all, butting in on his investigation.

  Joe said nothing, accepting the fact that Barnum had a problem with him. The feeling was mutual.

  But if Joe had been given the choice to decide who would head up the investigation—Sheriff Barnum or Melinda Strickland—well, he was glad he didn’t have to choose.

  The chain
saw coughed and then started, the high whine of it invasive and loud, cutting a swath through the silence of the morning.

  Joe slowly cruised through the meadow on his snowmobile, half-standing with a knee on the seat, studying the tracks and re-creating what had happened. There had been at least three snow machines in the meadow, he judged. Two of them were similar, with fifteen-inch tracks and patterns. The third track was slightly wider, with a harder bite, and the machine that made it had been towing some sort of sleigh with runners. The visitors had been there the evening before, since a few fingers of fresh white snow had blown into the tracks during the night.

  Whoever had been there had ignored Gardiner’s pickup, which was encased in snow near the tree line. Two deputies were in the process of digging their way to it so they could photograph the inside of the cab.

  The piles of snow he had seen from above were where the elk had been found and butchered. The visitors had found all of them.

  The discoloration in the snow was from flecks of blood, hair, and tissue. The hindquarters and tenderloin strips had been removed from the elk and, Joe assumed, loaded onto the sleigh. He noted scald marks in the snow, and tissue blowback from where the cutting had been done. They’d used chain saws. Although Joe was grateful that the meat hadn’t gone to waste, the circumstances of its harvesting were bizarre. It wasn’t likely that three snowmobilers had been out for recreation the night before, as the storm finally let up. Their tracks showed that they had entered the meadow from the west, from the Battle Mountain area, and had left the way they’d come. They had driven directly to the meadow, then scouted it in wide circles until they began to find the lumps of the carcasses. He could see that their tracks dug deeper on the way out than when they entered, no doubt due to the thousand pounds of meat they had hauled.

  More than a thousand pounds of meat, Joe thought, and whistled. Who had the manpower, the equipment, and the acumen to butcher five elk during a mountain blizzard? How had the visitors known the elk were there? And, obviously, was there a connection between the snowmobiles in the meadow and the murder of Lamar Gardiner?

  Joe used his hand-held radio to contact Barnum and Brazille.

  “They took five elk somewhere on snowmobiles?” Barnum asked. He heard Brazille ask Barnum for the radio.

  “Can you see any tracks heading up this direction?” Brazille asked.

  “Nope,” Joe said.

  “Then it’s unlikely these meat-lovers knew about Gardiner being up here, or I think they would have checked on him,” Brazille concluded.

  “That’s possible,” Joe said. “But they could have done that earlier. It’s been two days. There’s been a lot of new snow since Gardiner was killed, so it’s impossible to see if they were up here before last night.”

  “Hold on just a second,” Brazille asked, and clicked off.

  A few minutes later, Brazille came back on and asked for Joe.

  “McLanahan found some yellow snow near the other road,” Brazille reported. “He bagged it. So we’ve got a little something to go on.”

  The thought of McLanahan grumbling and digging through the powder made Joe smile to himself.

  “I think I’ll find out where these tracks end up,” Joe said. “They go west toward Battle Mountain.”

  He heard Brazille consulting with Barnum for a moment, then Brazille came back on.

  “Don’t confront anyone if you find them,” Brazille said. “And keep your radio on at all times.”

  “Will do,” Joe said.

  “Sheriff Barnum asked me to tell you not to do anything that will piss him off.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” Joe said.

  Joe and Barnum had never been close, but their working relationship had been strained further since the previous summer. Joe had suspected Barnum of complicity and corruption in regard to the events that took place at Savage Run. But there was no proof, and the sheriff had fessed up to nothing. There was now an underlying hostility between them, and Joe knew that someday it would break out into something ugly.

  Before restarting his machine, Joe photographed the tracks, the remnants of the carcasses, and the blowback and jotted his observations in his spiral notebook. He patted his coat to make sure he had everything he might need: binoculars, handcuffs, pepper spray, batteries for the radio, his .40 Beretta.

  Then he fired the motor, goosed it, and sat back as he entered the timber, staying in the tracks of the visitors.

  Over the top of the west rim, six miles into the forest, the tracks stopped at a forest service road. Joe was out of the wind now, on the south side of the mountain, and the snow was not as deep. The vehicle that had pulled the snowmobile trailer up the mountain was long gone, but Joe could see footprints in the road where someone had loaded the machines, and where the truck had turned around. He took more photographs.

  The reception was scratchy, but he was able to reach Brazille on his radio and tell him what he had found.

  “Never mind that,” Brazille answered. “We just got a report that a rancher saw a vehicle coming down the mountain that night about the same time as you did. The rancher says he identified the vehicle and the driver and that he’s some bad-ass local yahoo who lives alone out in the sticks. So we’ve got to get back down in the valley and regroup. And get this,” Brazille continued. “He’s a bow hunter.”

  Then Joe heard Strickland’s voice from somewhere near Brazille: “Let’s get that bastard.”

  When Joe returned, the team was trudging back to the Sno-Cats carrying the section of tree with the arrows in it. Joe shuttled back and forth between them and the vehicles, giving rides on the back of his snowmobile. The Sno-Cats roared back to life and started clanking down the mountain, but then Joe saw the lead machine stop abruptly. The driver crawled out, and was peering under his vehicle. Joe got out of the cab and walked over to him. They were joined by Melinda Strickland.

  “Aw, I’m so goddamned sorry about this,” the driver said, clearly upset. “I saw that little dog dart right under my track and felt the bump before I could do anything about it.”

  Joe squatted, trying to see any sign of the dog under the heavy metal track. He could see a tuft of hair on the snow, and the still paw of the Yorkie sticking out from beneath the metal cleat.

  He braced himself for the explosion. It didn’t come.

  “The only place that dog could run was in the packed down snow from the Sno-Cats. It’s too deep everywhere else,” the driver said. Joe noticed that his eyes were moist and he looked like he was about to be ill.

  More of the team had gotten out and were standing around the lead Sno-Cat, looking down at what remained of the dead Yorkie.

  “How did the dog get out of the Sno-Cat?” Joe asked.

  “I didn’t let it in,” Strickland said.

  Joe felt a chill. It had nothing to do with the cold.

  “Ma’am, I’m so . . . ,” the driver started, but Strickland dismissed him with a wave of her hand. Joe watched her walk clumsily back through the snow toward her vehicle. If she was upset, he couldn’t tell.

  As she opened the door to climb back in her vehicle, she glared at the men still standing in the snow.

  “We need to stop wasting time here,” she snapped. “Lamar Gardiner’s killer isn’t going to wait for us.”

  Everyone stood there for a moment, then silently shuffled back to their Sno-Cats. The first machine lurched forward and resumed its pace. From the second, Joe saw a flat, tan, pie-shaped object in the road. He winced as he rolled over it, but there was no bump.

  The suspect’s name was Nate Romanowski, and he lived on a small tract of land south of Saddlestring near the river. Joe had heard the name before, somewhere, but he couldn’t place it. The procession of vehicles made their way along a county road toward Romanowski’s cabin.

  Sheriff Barnum had called ahead and ordered a county snowplow driver to start clearing the road toward the river. By the time the sheriff’s department, the DCI team, and Joe Pickett
had taken the Sno-Cats back down the mountain to the highway and gotten back into their trucks, the snowplow driver had reported that 75 percent of the road had been cleared. The snowplow operator was attacking the last 25 percent when the parade of four-wheel drive vehicles caught up with him and settled in behind.

  While the plow roared ahead of them, tossing wind-hardened plates of snow to the shoulder like winter flagstones, Joe thought that he must be taking part in the slowest-moving raid in law enforcement history.

  He had listened to the conversations on the radio while they drove. A local rancher, Bud Longbrake, had told the dispatcher that he’d been checking on his cattle in his winter pasture at the confluence of Bitter Creek and Crazy Woman Creek when the storm hit. He had gotten disoriented in the heavy snowfall, taken a wrong turn, was briefly lost, then found out where he was when he hit the road that led down from Wolf Mountain. As he turned onto the road in the blizzard, he was almost broadsided by an older-model Jeep that was screaming down the two-track. As the Jeep passed him, Longbrake said, he could see the driver clearly in his headlights. He recognized the profile, as well as the long blond ponytail. It was Nate Romanowski, all right. And Longbrake said Romanowski was a strange son-of-a-bitch—a recluse who hunted for all of his food with a bow and arrow and who raised birds of prey to hunt with as well.

  Now Joe remembered where he had heard the name before. Romanowski had sent in an application for a falconry permit. It was the only falconry-hunting application he had ever encountered on the job.

  Six

  Nate Romanowski lived in a stone house on the banks of the north fork of the Twelve Sleep River. Across the river, a steep red bluff rose sixty feet into the air, topped by a crew-cut juniper brush that this morning supported sixteen inches of frosting-like snow. The sun lit up the red face of the bluff. The deep river was slowed by its cargo of slush.

  Inside the stone house, Romanowski threw off his quilts after a midday nap. The inside walls of the house were cold, and the only light was a quarter-inch shaft from the edge of the shuttered window. He opened the shutters and squinted at the snow. After lighting a wood fire in his stove, he pulled on a pair of insulated coveralls and a tall pair of black rubber Wellington boots. He tied his blond hair into a ponytail with a leather thong, clamped on his cowboy hat, and started to cook a late lunch of pronghorn antelope steak, eggs, and toast.