"I wonder who she is?" Joe asked aloud.
Robey shook his head, distracted. "We heard from the sheriff of Sheridan County this morning," he said to Joe, sitting back down with his coffee, "following up on Frank Urman. They're trying to determine if he had any known enemies, business problems, wife problems, threats, the usual."
Joe tore his eyes away from the woman and child and looked at Robey.
"They've found nothing to go on so far. Urman was fairly active in city and county government, belonged to a couple of groups-Elks and the American Legion-but kept a pretty low profile. He was well liked and respected, from what they say. He spent a lot of his time hunting and fishing, but that describes just about everybody in Wyoming."
Joe nodded, and tapped the files on his lap. "It describes John Garrett and Warren Tucker too," he said. "I was hoping when I read the files something would jump out at me. Or better yet, that there would be some kind of connection between the victims. Tucker and Garrett were around the same age, fifty-four and fifty-two, I think. That got me going for a few minutes until I saw that Urman was sixty-two."
Robey said, "What, you thought they might be members of the same group?"
"Just thinking."
"The only similarity I could find is that all three are white, middle-aged or older, hunters-and dead," Robey said.
Joe grunted, and looked back at his files. JOHN GARRETT was a CPA from Lander, Wyoming. Three weeks before, his body was found with a single gunshot wound to the head in the back of his pickup on a side road in the Wind River Mountains a few miles out of Ethete. He'd told his wife he was going deer hunting by himself after work, like he did every year since they'd been married, but this time he didn't come home. She reported his disappearance that night, saying she was worried because he was not answering his cell phone. The sheriff's deputy who found Garrett's vehicle said Garrett's body was laid out next to a four-point buck deer in the bed of his pickup. The buck had apparently been shot and dragged to the truck. Garrett's rifle was found on the open tailgate. Ballistics confirmed it had recently been fired. Judging by the way Garrett's body was found with his head near the cab of the truck, the deputy and others soon on the scene speculated that the accountant had somehow accidentally shot himself with his own rifle in the act of pulling the body of the deer into the back. Imagining a scenario where the accountant accidentally discharged his loaded rifle-which he may have leaned against the tailgate while he struggled to pull a two-hundred-pound carcass into his vehicle-was not that crazy. Although forensic technicians couldn't determine the exact sequence of events that led to the accident, enough disparate factors-his discharged rifle, the dead deer, the fact that his body was found in his own pickup-led to the conclusion that it was a bizarre hunting accident with no witnesses. Death had been instant. The slit across Garrett's throat was attributed to him falling on the point of the buck's antler after he'd been shot. WARREN TUCKER, the second victim, was a former Wyoming resident who owned a construction company in Windsor, Colorado, but still hunted every year in his former state with his son, Warren Junior, a high-school football coach in Laramie. Tucker Senior's body was found the week before in the Snowy Range Mountains near Centennial. According to Tucker Junior's affidavit, father and son were hunting elk from a camp they'd used for twenty years when the incident occurred. Senior took the top of a ridge while Junior positioned himself at the bottom, a thick forest between them. This was a strategy they'd used for years, and it had proved to be very successful. Elk in the area tended to stay in the black timber on the mountainside during the daytime but ventured out in the evening to graze and drink. Therefore, the herd would exit either over the top of the treeless bare ridge where Senior would get a shot at them or down through the bottom meadow where Junior was set up. Which was why he thought it was so strange, Junior testified, when he heard a single shot in the distance near the top of the ridge in the midafternoon because usually there was no action going on that time of day. He'd tried to contact his father by radio for several hours after he heard the shot, but there was no response. That in itself wasn't cause for alarm, Junior said, because if Senior was stalking a big bull he might have turned his radio off to maintain silence. Senior was also getting more forgetful as he aged, and sometimes didn't turn his radio on at all, which drove Junior crazy. But Senior had always shown up before, often with blood on his hands from harvesting his elk for the year. This time, though, when dusk came and went and he'd not heard anything from his father, Junior became alarmed. Junior was an experienced outdoorsman and knew not to set off into the timber in the dark to try to find his father. Instead, he wisely went the short distance back to camp and built a huge fire he hoped his father would see or smell, and kept trying to raise him on his radio. After a few hours, Junior started firing rifle shots in the air, three at a time, and waiting in vain for the sound of answering shots in the distance. None came. It was a very long night.
Junior contacted Albany County Search and Rescue. The county responded with a team at dawn, and with Junior they fanned out and scoured the black timber and the ridge. Unfortunately, it was Warren Tucker Jr. who found his father's battered, naked, upside-down, eviscerated body on the bottom of an old rockslide.
According to the report written by the head of the search-and-rescue team, it was assumed at first that Warren Tucker Sr. had lost his footing at the top of the ridge, perhaps firing his rifle as he lost his balance, and cartwheeled 350 feet down the length of the old slide to his death. The sharp and abrasive nature of the scree on the slide had not only stripped the victim's clothes away, but sliced through his soft belly. Somehow, a broken branch had been thrust into the victim's body in the fall as well, exposing his body cavity.
It was only when the Albany County coroner determined that Warren Tucker had a bullet hole from a high-powered rifle beneath his left nipple that the incident changed from a horrifying accident to a possible murder.
Joe had now read the files, including the burgeoning Frank Urman file, three times. He could see how both the Garrett incident and the Tucker death could initially be classified as accidents. Only when the two were considered together was there a linkage, and it was still not a definitive one.
Joe felt an uneasy rumble in his stomach and looked up at the ceiling of the airport.
"Are you okay?" Robey asked.
"Yup."
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing good," Joe said. He slid closer to Robey so they could talk without anyone hearing them. "So, let's assume it's the same killer."
"We don't know that yet," Robey said.
"No, we don't. But let's assume. With Garrett, the killer places the body next to a dead deer in the back of a pickup. He also slits Garrett's throat-just like the deer-to send a message that wasn't noticed. With Tucker, the killer ramps up his sociology lesson by gutting the victim the same way a hunter field-dresses a game animal. Again, the message doesn't get through because nobody is thinking of the deaths as murders, or linked in any way at this point."