“I know,” Cody said, “I’m sorry. You’re thinking clearly and I’m not. Thank you, Larry.”
“I’m tired of doing you favors,” Larry said.
“I know. I don’t blame you.”
“You are an unthinking prick sometimes,” Larry said.
“Okay,” Cody hissed, “I’ve got the point.”
“Good,” Larry said with finality.
Cody heard the rolling-thunder sound of the garage door being opened up. He turned to see the mechanic backing out his SUV. There was a headlight there, all right. It didn’t fit into the damaged fender but was wired and taped around the dented hole. It looked like a detached eyeball.
“I’m ready to roll,” Cody said. “Keep me posted on what you find out from ViCAP and RMIN.”
Larry sighed.
“You call me, I won’t call you,” Cody said, “but keep that burner phone handy and hidden, okay? In case I find something out from the office in Bozeman.”
“Gotcha,” Larry said.
“Thanks, buddy.”
Cody waved and took a deep breath as he drove by the highway patrol car pulled over on the side of the highway a mile out of Townsend. The trooper whooped on his siren and gestured for him to pull over.
Cody sat seething while the trooper slowly got out of his car and slowly walked up along the driver’s side. He powered the window down.
“Now what?” Cody said.
“I see you got a headlight. It doesn’t look so good, though,” the trooper said. “I hope you’ll get that front end fixed and get a new light as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
“I’ve got a question for you,” the trooper said, tipping his hat back and watching Cody’s face carefully for tics or tells. Cody knew the drill. He was about to be asked a question he wouldn’t want to answer, and the trooper hoped to catch him in a lie. “I ran your plates. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, this vehicle doesn’t exist. Your number doesn’t correspond with a name, in other words.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Cody said quickly. “I bought it at a county auction up in Helena. They used to use it for undercover surveillance, the auctioneer told me. He said the sheriff’s department uses some dummy plates so the bad guys don’t know who they are. I guess they just kept the plates on.”
The trooper rubbed his chin, thinking that over.
“I’ll get some new plates as soon as I get home to Bozeman,” Cody said. “I promise you. I’ll send you the receipt to prove it.”
At that moment, the trooper’s handheld squawked. Cody heard the dispatcher reporting a one-car rollover five miles north of Townsend.
“Guess you better go,” Cody said.
The trooper hesitated for a moment, then said, “Send me that receipt. But something about that story of yours is fishy.”
“Check it out,” Cody said. “You’ll see.”
The trooper waved at him dismissively and started back to his car. Cody silently thanked whomever had lost control of their car north of town, and eased back out onto the road.
The headquarters for Wilderness Adventures was located south of Bozeman on U.S. 191 near the Gallatin Gateway Inn on the road to West Yellowstone and Yellowstone Park. Cody arrived at 1:30 P.M., cursing himself yet again for the debacle in Townsend that put him twelve hours behind where he wanted to be.
The office was a converted old home shaded by ancient cottonwoods and surrounded by rolling pasture and outbuildings and corrals in decent repair. Six or seven horses grazed and twitched their tails against the flies and didn’t look up to greet him. It wasn’t the kind of office guests were likely to visit, he thought, but no doubt it made for a good staging area for large-scale horse operations. The pasture fed the horses when they weren’t on a pack trip. The sign for Wilderness Adventures was homemade; a modern swooping logo painted on a frame made of old barnwood. There was an older blue sedan parked on the side of the building.
He killed the engine, vaulted up the wooden steps to the porch, and banged on the frame of the screen door.
“Yes?” A woman’s voice. She sounded startled.
“My name’s Cody Hoyt,” he said. “I need to talk to someone who knows something about the pack trip in Yellowstone.”
“Oh my,” said a plump older woman who suddenly came into view through the screen. “You weren’t booked on the trip, were you? Because it left this morning.”
Her name was Margaret Cooper and she was the sole office employee of Wilderness Adventures and had been for twenty-five years, she said. She wore thick glasses and her hair was tightly curled and looked like steel wool. She wore jeans, a white shirt that bulged in the middle, and a Western pattern vest embroidered with cowgirls and lariats. The lobby of the office was filled with large cardboard boxes reading DELL.
“We’re in the process of computerizing,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Jed is making me learn how to run one of those things. He says it will make us more efficient, but I think it’s, you know, a fad. This old dog doesn’t need new tricks. I’ve been running the business part of the company all these years and I don’t need a machine. I’ve got everything I need in there,” she said, and gestured toward a bank of old metal filing cabinets. “I’m supposed to put all that information back there into the machine, and Jed says he wants me to update the Web site so he doesn’t have to do it from home. Can you imagine that? The World Wide Web? I want no part of it.”
Cody nodded curtly. He noticed the telephone on her desk was blinking with messages.
“Don’t you answer your phone?” he asked. “My colleague was calling you all morning.”
“Of course I answer the phone,” she said, her eyes flashing behind those thick lenses. “But it’s a little hard to do when you’re sitting in a computer class the entire morning learning how to work a program called Excella.”
“Excel,” Cody said. “So you haven’t been in until now?”
“I just got here a half hour ago,” she said, still miffed at him. “I was working. I just wasn’t here. Jed insisted I take that class once a week and today is the day.”
Cody said, “Do you have the list of clients on the current trip? I need to look at it.”
“Of course I have it,” she said. “But can you tell me why you want to see who is on it? Isn’t this kind of an invasion of privacy?”
Cody caught himself before he rolled his eyes. “I don’t see how it could be,” he said. “Look, I need to know if my son is on this trip. It’s important. There’s an emergency in the family.”
“You won’t be able to contact him,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s no way to communicate with a pack trip once they’ve left into the park. There are no cell things.”
“Towers,” he said. “Look, I know that. But if he’s on it I need to know. I’ll figure the rest out.”
She squinted at him and pursed her lips. “Your manner is very brusque.”
“Sorry,” he said, stepping toward her. “But show me the list.”
She made a show of sighing dramatically, then turned around and approached the filing cabinets. “I know where everything is,” she said. “I have my own filing system. Apparently, it aggravates Jed that he can’t find anything, even though I’ve tried to explain to him how it works. Let’s see, today is July first, so 07/01. Seven corresponds with G in the alphabet, the seventh letter. One corresponds with A…” She reached for a middle drawer and pulled it out and started fingering through tabs marked by handwritten letters.