“I’m just going over things again,” Joe said. “Maybe I’m spinning my wheels. I’m not accusing you guys of withholding anything.”
“That’s good,” the sheriff said, sipping his coffee and exchanging a glance with Cook. “Because we’re not. Besides, practically everything happened in Twelve Sleep County. Our guy is dead just because the aliens or whatever couldn’t see the county line.”
Cook laughed at the sheriff ’s joke, and Joe smiled. “So who called it in?” Joe asked.
Cook opened his file with a copy of the 911 log. “The call came in at 4:32 a.m. from an unknown male. The caller didn’t identify himself, but he reported a body within sight of county road 212. Dispatch took down the information and called me at home because I’d just gotten off of my shift. Katherine, the night dispatcher, said it was hard to understand the caller, and she had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times. Bad connection, I guess.”
Joe was silent for a moment, considering the situation, turning the details over in his head. “Deputy Cook, you said the body was found within sight of the road, but was it parallel to the road, or somewhere on a turn?” Cook sat back, not sure where this was headed. “It was parallel to the road, in the trees. We found the body in a clearing.” “You found it pretty easily, then?”
“Yup. The directions from the call-in were good. He told us it was 6.8 miles on the country road from the highway. It was exactly 6.8 miles, all right.”
“So you drove 6.8 miles and then what? Shone your spotlight out to the side?” Joe asked.
Cook bobbed his head. “I picked up the body right where it was supposed to be.”
“So,” Joe asked, rubbing his jaw, “if you hadn’t known the exact location of the body, could you have seen it from the road?”
Cook snorted, “In the daylight, hell yes. It was plainly visible from the road.”
“But it wasn’t daylight,” Joe said, perking up. “It was night. Would your headlights have picked up the body if you were driving down that road?” Cook hesitated, then: “No. There’s no way I could have seen it off to the side like that in the dark.”
Sheriff Harvey slowly sat up, and leaned forward on his desk. “Shit,” he said. “So how did the guy who called it in see the body? How did he know it was there?”
Joe said, “Yup.”
“I never thought of that,” Cook confessed. “Damn it all. The coroner said Tanner was killed between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. which means the guy either saw it happen, or he fucking did it.”
“Do you keep a tape of the calls?” Joe asked. His question betrayed his growing excitement.
Harvey’s cheeks flushed. “We do, but the machine wasn’t working that day. I’m sorry about that.”
“The call came in at 4:30 a.m., right? Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that someone was driving around out there at that time of night?” Joe asked.
Harvey shook his head. “Not really. We know that there’s been some drug activity on that road, some meth buys. It’s also a road pretty popular with the high school crowd. They go out there to drink and jump each other’s bones. My guess is that somebody like that called it in.”
“So it was from a cell phone?” “We assume so.”
“Does your dispatcher have Caller ID?”
Harvey’s eyebrows shot up. “You know, we honestly didn’t think of that. We’ve got it but we never really pursued it because we didn’t put much emphasis on the caller himself. Didn’t seem important. The dispatcher said the guy was really hard to understand, and she kept having to ask him to repeat himself. It was like he was drunk or drugged, she said.”
“I’ll check the record,” Cook said, standing up. “Be right back.” “Seems like a good guy,” Joe said after Cook had left.
“He is,” Harvey said, sipping his coffee. “I think he’s a little miffed that he didn’t have an answer for you.”
“I’ll tell him not to worry.”
While they waited, Joe told Harvey about his encounter with Cleve Garrett and Deena, as well as the crop circles that weren’t crop circles. Joe explained that he was currently operating under the theory that the mur-ders and mutilations in Twelve Sleep and Park County were connected, with the exception of Tuff Montegue’s death, which didn’t fit the pattern. Harvey maintained a steady smile, and nodded from time to time. He was noncommittal overall and Joe suspected that Harvey would rather have the murder that was part of the pattern instead of the exception to it. That way, there would be no special expectations placed on him or his department. When Joe told Harvey about Maxine turning white, Harvey seemed genuinely shocked.
“Cows are one thing,” Harvey said. “But you don’t fuck with a man’s dog.”
“Damned right,” Joe said.
Deputy Cook returned in a few minutes holding a printout. He closed the door behind him and sat down heavily in his chair.
“I don’t know if this is helpful or not,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me anyway.”
“You’ve got a number?” Harvey asked impatiently.
“Yup. But it’s not a local number like I thought it would be. The area code is 910.” He looked to Joe and Harvey to see if they recognized it. Both men shook their heads.
“Nine-one-oh,” Cook repeated. “I looked it up. The cell phone is from Fayetteville, North Carolina.”
“What?” Harvey said, his voice high-pitched. “We’ve got a guy from North Carolina driving around in the mountains at 4:30 a.m.?”
Joe tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t. He wrote the number down in his notebook.
“Maybe he’s one of those CBM guys,” Cook said. “They’re from all over. Is there natural gas in North Carolina? Or a company headquarters there?”
Harvey shrugged. “Arden, you need to follow up on this.”
“I’ll get on it right now,” Cook said. He asked Harvey if he could use two of the other deputies so they could work faster. Harvey agreed.
After Cook left, Harvey turned to Joe and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe we’ve actually got something here.”
“It’s a start anyway. Will you call me when you’ve got a name?” Joe said, handing Harvey his card. “I’ll fill Robey in on what we’ve got so far.” “Which really, when you think of it, isn’t very damned much,” Harvey said. “But at least I’ve got my guys running around all excited, instead of sitting there reading the Pro Rodeo News.”
Joe stood, shook hands, and opened the door. Before he left, he remembered one of the questions he meant to ask when he arrived.
“You said Stuart Tanner owned an outfit called Tanner Engineering?” Harvey nodded. “Right, based out of Texas, but his family’s had a cabin up here for years, and he liked to stay there when his company was working in the area.”
“Do you know what Tanner Engineering was working on? Specifically?” While Harvey shuffled through the file, Joe recalled something from the day before. Tuff Montegue’s brother had said Tuff worked for “Turner Engineering.” Could it have been Tanner Engineering? Joe felt a twinge.
Harvey looked up after going through the file. “We don’t have anything on what he was doing here,” he said. “You know, I feel kind of stupid that we haven’t really pursued this angle. To be honest, we’ve been sort of waiting for something to break in Twelve Sleep County.”
That sounds about right, Joe thought.
“I’ve got to think about this,” Harvey said, as much to himself as to Joe. “If some bad guy killed and mutilated Stuart Tanner, did he also do all of the livestock? And the moose? And the cowboy? It doesn’t seem possible to me.”
Joe didn’t know what to say. But his mind was spinning.
Back in his pickup heading for Saddlestring, Joe called Marybeth at Logue Country Realty.
“Are things okay today?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, sounding more cheerful than he would have antici-pated. “Except Marie is sick again. I haven’t seen her in three days. I’m starting to get a little worried about her, Joe. I asked Cam how she was doing, and he said he thought she’d be back in later this week.”