What he could see: her face was angular, smooth, pale, and there was a slightly Oriental cast to her eye, which was widened in alarm.
He couldn’t be sure.
Joe said to Sheridan, “Is that her?”
“I can’t tell,” Sheridan said quickly.
“Want to look again?” Coon asked. “It’s the best shot we’ve got of her face on here.”
Joe asked why. Coon said, “Watch.”
Two things happened at once on the tape. A white-sleeved arm reached out from the bottom of the frame and grasped the girl by the arm and pulled her closer. Unfortunately, it was too close to the camera for the lens to focus. All that could be seen was the top of her hood, which was dark and blurred. She appeared to be struggling. At the same time in the background, Robert threw open the door and strode toward the camera. His face was a snarling mask. He bent into the girl and out of view and emerged a second later with a gun in his fist. He pointed it below the eye of the camera and it bucked three times.
Sheridan gasped, “Did he shoot her?”
“No,” Coon said, “he shot the pharmacist. Killed him. And if you want to wait for a minute here, I’ll advance the tape to where you can see Robert and the girl leaving the store with the shopping basket and some rather large pill bottles. But their backs are turned to the camera, so we can’t see their faces.”
Joe realized that Sheridan was squeezing his hand so hard his fingers ached. He asked Coon to rerun the glimpse of her face again. They watched it over and over. He wanted to recognize April, but he was overwhelmed with the dark feeling that he couldn’t remember her face except in abstract: a ghost at a trailer house window. He wished Marybeth were there to give her opinion.
Was it her? She’d certainly look different six years older. But was it her?
“I just don’t know,” Sheridan finally said. “It could be. But it might not be.”
Coon sighed heavily, shook his head. “We can get that one shot blown up and printed. Maybe then?”
Sheridan shrugged.
“Man, I was hoping for better,” he said.
Joe agreed. It bothered him immensely that April had been an eyewitness to Robert shooting the pharmacist to death. No matter what her role was, there was no reason for her to have to see that. She was fourteen. He despised Robert for what he’d done. Then: “What about April’s cell phone? Cyndi said she left it in Skelton’s truck. Let’s see if it’s the right phone.”
Coon didn’t move.
“What?” Joe asked.
The FBI agent shook his head. “It got a direct hit. Maybe two. The pieces are there, but I don’t know if we can put them together to get anything out of it.”
Joe said, “I’m sure there’s a computer chip or something with the call log on it. Can’t you guys find that and analyze it? Isn’t that what you do?”
Coon nodded. “It may take a while.”
“I’d suggest you speed it up.”
Coon looked over at the SUV and his shoulders slumped. “If I’m not suspended.”
THE FBI INCIDENT TEAM arrived in two helicopters an hour after dawn. Eight men in suits and ties and sunglasses, so crisply and icily efficient that they’d cordoned off the SUV and separated the witnesses within minutes of landing. After Joe gave his statement, he declared himself free to go and was surprised there was no argument from the sandy-haired special agent who’d interviewed him. He was in his pickup with Sheridan and pointed back toward Savageton before someone else decided they needed him again.
In his rearview mirror, he watched as Cyndi gesticulated for three stone-faced men, giving her version of events.
Sheridan was already sleeping hard, her head tilted back on the headrest. Joe reached over and gently lowered her to the bench seat and pulled his jacket over her.
As he drove out of the basin, he scanned the landscape. Oil wells, gas lines, survey stakes, metal signs adorned with the company logos of international energy conglomerates. He was exhausted and there was too much swirling in his head to make sense out of anything. But as he beheld the magnitude of the basin, the multimillion-dollar efforts being undertaken to extract fossil fuel from beneath the earth’s crust in this particular place, he thought about energy, about power, about Cyndi’s statement in regard to being looked down upon by people with their lights on.
He thought about the size of the carbon footprints in the basin from all that activity. Then something hit him.
What had April written when Sheridan asked her why she was in Aspen? “Wedding & footprints.”
Joe thumped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand.
HOURS LATER, Sheridan moaned and woke up. “Where are we?” she asked. “I don’t recognize this.”
Joe said, “Ever hear of a place called Hole in the Wall? This is it.”
“Why are we here?”
“We’re gonna need some help, I think.”
She nodded, and realization crossed her face. “Nate. Where you brought the eagle.”
“Yup.”
“This is where he is?”
“Not far from here. We’ll need to do some hiking. Are you up for that?”
“Sure. What time is it?”
“Almost ten.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Where’s April?”
20
Bear Lodge Mountains, Wyoming
SHE OPENED HER EYES AND TRIED TO REMEMBER WHERE she was. It was late dawn. They were parked off the road, hidden in a thick knot of pine trees on the side of a hill. It was cool and still in the dark rolling hills, but above in the big azure sky there was a lot going on, she thought, the way those clouds scudded across from horizon to horizon like traffic on a highway, like they were being called in for emergency duty somewhere else. Up there, things were happening.
On the ground they were, too. Or soon would be. She just wasn’t sure about the details. Something about a ranch, a man named Leo, and the Talich Brothers. And about all that money.