The manila folder she’d glimpsed the night before in their tent was on top of his other materials and she could see the corners of the printouts peeking beyond the stiff file cover.
She took a deep breath and centered the file folder and reached for the smudged tab to open it.
The white flash in front of her eyes was not another grasshopper, but the blade of a knife wielded by someone who pressed into her back, pinning her to the side of the bay. It sliced so deeply through the flesh of her throat she felt the steel scrape on bone.
34
The sounds in the trees became more pronounced; twigs cracking, the click of hooves against rock, the squeak of leather on leather, the nickering of horses. He felt more than saw the presence of heavy-bodied beings approaching en masse. Cody thought, How many of them are there?
He glanced down at his rifle. Likely not enough bullets. And if they were armed? He might need to pull his Sig Sauer when the rifle was empty.
Then a deep-throated shout: “Cody?” The voice carried through the trees.
Cody closed his eyes and took a deep breath and stood up. “Bull?”
“Where the hell are you?” Mitchell grumbled.
“Here. Ahead of you, I think. In a clearing.”
“Gotcha,” Mitchell said, “so don’t shoot me. I’m coming toward your voice.”
“I won’t,” Cody said. “Who is with you? How many of you are there?”
“Just one,” Mitchell said.
Cody didn’t know if that meant just Mitchell or another. Nevertheless, he could feel heavy weights release from the tops of his shoulders. “I’ve got to say I’m glad you came back.”
“It’s taking me a while,” Mitchell grumbled, “seeing I’ve been gathering up loose horses for miles.”
Cody lowered his rifle and waited. He could hear Mitchell and the horses coming, picking their way through the timber and brush, but he couldn’t see them yet.
Finally, a horse head with a white star blaze on its forehead pushed through the brush. Mitchell’s horse.
“There you are,” Mitchell said, and Cody could see him. He was a big man but he sat the horse as if they were conjoined, and Cody had trouble discerning where the horse stopped and Bull Mitchell began.
“Damn, I’m glad to see you,” Cody said. “Why’d you come back?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “As Hank the Cowdog says, there’s a thin line between heroism and stupidity.”
Cody found himself grinning at the answer. “Then you’ll probably want your gun back.”
“Yup.”
Mitchell was leading Gipper and the packhorse that had run away. Behind them, tied with a series of lead ropes, were four more horses. The first three had empty saddles.
The last one, a gray, had a rider. Cody was surprised and instinctively raised the rifle again. A dark man, hatless, glowered back at him. So there was another. The man rode oddly, shifting around subtly as if he were trying to maintain his balance, as if he were simply cargo. That’s when Cody noticed the man’s hands were cuffed behind him and he’d been lashed by the waist and legs to the saddle with rope he’d last seen looped on Mitchell’s saddle.
“Says his name is Wilson,” Mitchell said. “I don’t care if you shoot him because he’s been nothing but trouble. But I was thinking you might want to talk with him, first.”
“K. W. Wilson,” Cody said, “fifty-eight, Salt Lake City. Or, as I like to call you, Suspect Number One.”
Wilson didn’t react. Cody noticed the contusion under Wilson’s left eye and his bloody and fattened lower lip.
“Doesn’t like cheese,” Cody said, remembering Wilson’s trip registration.
“I had to thump him a couple times,” Mitchell said, patting the butt of his rifle. “He didn’t want to work with me very much.”
Cody thought Wilson didn’t give off any indication of fear-or innocence. Like so many criminals he’d encountered in lockup over the years, Wilson’s bearing was a dismissive mix of arrogance and regret. Not regret at what he’d been picked up for, but regret he’d been caught.
Cody nodded. He wondered if he was meeting the killer of Hank Winters and the others.
“I found a couple of things on him you might find interesting,” Mitchell said, leaning back and digging into his saddlebag. He produced a six-inch Buck knife in a sheath and a stubby handgun. He handed them both butt-first to Cody.
Cody inspected the revolver, a snub-nosed.38 Special. It was a double-action Taurus six-shot revolver made of stainless steel with rubber grips. It had a two-inch barrel. He sniffed the muzzle and cracked open the cylinder.
“Two rounds have been fired recently,” Cody said to Mitchell, who nodded.
Cody snapped the cylinder home, spun it, and pointed the gun at Wilson. Wilson didn’t flinch. Cody said, “This is an odd choice of weapon to bring up here. It’s not big enough for bears and hard to hit anything at a distance because of the short barrel and fixed sights. I used to carry one of these as a backup in an ankle holster in Denver, but I knew this kind of piece is strictly for self-defense and it’s only good for close-in work. Meaning,” he said to Mitchell without taking his eyes off Wilson, “he was right on top of D’Amato and Russell when he shot them. Probably a couple of feet away, max. They knew him well enough to get close. I doubt it was an ambush. He probably looked right into their eyes before he pulled the trigger.”
He slid the gun into his belt and drew the knife out of the sheath. The blade had been wiped clean but there was dark gummy residue where the fixed blade met the brass guard. Cody dug some out with his fingernail and tasted it. “Blood,” Cody said, then spat it out. To Wilson, “This is what you used on Tristan Glode, then. More close-in work.”
He circled around Wilson and came up from behind him. He could sense the man start to stiffen, possibly anticipating the stab of the knife. Cody reached up and pressed the point of the blade to Wilson’s spinal column just to make him jump. But what he was interested in was an intimate view of Wilson’s bound hands.
“You’ve got blood under the fingernails of your right hand,” Cody said. “Looks just like the blood on this knife. There’s blood spatter on your cuff, too, it looks like.”
“Oh,” Mitchell said, digging something silver and square out of the front snap pocket of his shirt and flipping it through the air to Cody. “Something else. Check this out.”
Cody fumbled the catch and reached down in the grass for the object. “I was hoping it was a pack of cigarettes,” Cody said.
“Nope,” Mitchell said, “Wilson’s camera. You might want to take a look at some of the shots in there to see if there’s anyone you recognize. While you do that I’m gonna tie these horses up and get Wilson down.”
“I’ll help you,” Cody said, doing the math. He assumed the three riderless horses had belonged to Tristan Glode, D’Amato, and Russell.
Mitchell swung off and put his hand up to Cody. “Stay there, if you don’t mind, pard. The only thing you seem to know about horses is how to lose them.”
Cody shrugged. “True enough.” He pushed buttons and flicked toggles on the digital camera until the display came alive. The first dozen shots were obviously from the departure area. People milled around eyeing horses, their faces mixes of excitement and anticipation as they got ready to get under way. There were vehicles in the background and glimpses of a long horse trailer with JED MCCARTHY’S WILDERNESS ADVENTURES painted along the side.
As he advanced through the photos he tried to match up faces with the names and descriptions he’d memorized from the file he’d borrowed.
The cowboy with the mustache was obviously Jed himself, shadowed by a younger woman in a floppy sweat-stained hat. He recalled her name: Dakota Hill.