Joe stood there as the snow swirled around him, then felt a wracking sob burst in his chest taking his remaining strength away. His knees buckled and his hands dropped to his sides and he sank down into the snow, hung his head, and cried.
PART FOUR
Snow Ghosts Thirty-four Two months had passed, and except for an occasional morning dusting, it hadn't snowed. Even in March, normally the snowiest month of the year in Wyoming, it didn't snow. A combination of high-altitude sunshine and warm Chinook winds that swept down and roared across the face of the Rockies had melted the snow on the valley floor, although there were still six to ten feet of snow in the mountains.
At the Sovereign Citizen compound, the disabled Sno-Cats still sat as silent hulks. The empty trailers, campers, and vehicles of the Sovereigns hadn't been removed either, and probably wouldn't be until late spring, when the mountain roads were open and tractors and flat-bed trucks could get up there.
Except for investigators and a very few journalists, there had been almost no visitors to the compound since it had erupted. For all practical purposes, it looked the same as it had on that day in January. An internal Forest Service investigation had been launched immediately to determine whether or not policies had been breached and regulations followed. The FBI announced a similar investigation into the actions of Special Agent Dick Munker.
Robey Hersig had tentatively put out feelers to the attorney general in Cheyenne about an investigation on a statewide level. He was rebuffed on the basis that it was a federal matter.
Wade Brockius was among those found in the burned trailer. His body lay on top of Jeannie Keeley's as if he had been trying to shield her, and April's body was found beside her mother. Eunice Cobb's body was also found and identified. She had been the victim who had run burning from the trailer. The Reverend B. J. Cobb announced that he intended to file a wrongful-death suit against the U.S. Forest Service and the FBI, and that he would start a legal expense fund based at his church. Cobb had been told to expect that the suit would take as long as five years to culminate in a trial, if it ever went that far.
Cobb had noisily objected to the "internal" nature of the investigations carried out by the federal agencies. He called for an independent investigation instead and proposed that the U.S. Justice Department should form a task force. His proposal gained no traction.
In the meantime, Melinda Strickland had remained in Saddlestring. She had been named interim district supervisor, and had taken over Lamar Gardiner's office and desk. Two female employees had already filed a grievance, claiming that Strickland had hurled books at them in a rage. Joe and Marybeth Pickett paid for the funerals of April and Jeannie Keeley with money they didn't have. Although they still had legal bills from the lawyer they had hired to get April back, they went further into debt to pay for the plots and coffins in the Twelve Sleep County cemetery. The plots were located next to the grave of Ote Keeley, the murdered outfitter who had been buried in his pickup four years before. The fact that they paid for the funerals raised some eyebrows in Saddlestring, and it became a topic of conversation at the Burg-O-Pardner restaurant. The "Shoot-out at Battle Mountain," as it had been dubbed, faded quickly as a mainstream national news story, and didn't linger much longer than that within the state and region, except within pockets of the suspicious and dispossessed. Robey Hersig explained to Joe that the reasons for this had been the inaccessibility of the compound, the lack of media buildup, more pressing war news, and the absence of television coverage. Without visuals, Hersig said, there was no news. He gave the late Dick Munker credit for that.
Therefore, what happened at Battle Mountain didn't rank in the national conscience with Waco, Ruby Ridge, or the Montana Freeman standoff. Although the incident raged through Internet forums and simmered beneath the surface throughout the Mountain West, the lack of good information relegated the story to the back pages of newspapers. Robey told Joe that a few of the Sovereigns who had fled that day had contacted journalists in different parts of the country to offer their stories, but were generally deemed less than credible.
Melinda Strickland was hailed as a hero in a long-form feature in Rumour magazine written by Elle Broxton-Howard. Another feature in Us magazine-"Lady Ranger Bucks the System and Saves a Forest"-showed a photo of a shoeless Melinda Strickland on the couch in her home, with streaky blond hair, hugging her dog. A cable-television news crew came to Saddlestring and did a feel-good feature on Broxton-Howard and Melinda Strickland for a newsmagazine show.
As a result, Broxton-Howard's U.S.-based publicist parlayed the segment, which showcased his client's good looks, her on-screen presence, and an accent that seemed to have grown more refined and pronounced since she left Saddlestring, into a series of talk-show and twenty-four-hour cable-news bookings. Elle Broxton-Howard could now be seen on television several nights a week as a paid analyst specializing in gender and environmental issues.
Since January, Broxton-Howard had left three messages for Joe on his office answering machine. She still wanted to do his story, she said. She "smelled" a six-figure movie option. They could work out the details later, when they met, she said. Joe had yet to return her calls.
One night, while Marybeth was idly channel-surfing, Broxton-Howard's face appeared on their television screen. Marybeth scowled at Joe and quickly changed the channel. Bud Longbrake's wife, the woman who had been Nate Romanowski's secret lover and who had gone on a world cruise, sent divorce papers from somewhere in Nevada to her husband. He signed them. A week after that, Missy Vankueren moved to the Longbrake ranch. Nate Romanowski had vanished. Joe was surprised to find out that Nate had not been identified by the assault team as the man who had fired on them. His bulky snowmobile suit and helmet had disguised him. They mistakenly assumed that the shooter had been a Sovereign who had somehow flanked them. Ballistics reports couldn't positively identify the huge slugs that had disabled the Sno-Cats because the bullets were damaged beyond recognition. Joe realized that only two people could have positively identified Nate Romanowski as the shooter-Dick Munker and himself. Joe told state and federal investigators everything he knew about the incident that day and the buildup to it, with the exceptions of Nate Romanowski's identity and the conversation Joe had had with Romanowski as Dick Munker lay dying. He knew that his account was at odds with those of other witnesses, namely Melinda Strickland, Sheriff Barnum, Elle Broxton-Howard, and a half-dozen deputies. Joe was the only witness to claim that Munker's "warning shot" damaged the propane pipe, or that Munker had manufactured the hostage situation on the fly when told that Spud Cargill was in custody. According to the others, the warning shot had been exactly that, as far as they knew. No one else claimed to have seen a severed copper gas line or heard escaping propane gas. Joe didn't think the members of the assault team were lying-after all, they had been bundled up and wearing helmets that blocked sound, and none of them had been as close as Joe was on the road to the trailer and the severed pipe. The heat of the fire had damaged the pipe that Joe claimed was severed, literally melting it into the snow so Joe had no way to prove his allegations. Despite this, he hoped that his account would not be dismissed.