"He was alive when I found him," Joe said. "He died as I carried him back to my truck."
Barnum harrumphed, not apologizing, and shined his Maglite flashlight into the back of the truck. "I see a big elk," he said, and then the ring of the beam settled on the snow-covered blanket. Barnum reached in and peeled back the fabric.
"Jesus, somebody butchered him," Barnum said.
Joe nodded. The gaping wound on Lamar's neck looked savage and black in the harsh white light of Barnum's flashlight.
Deputy Reed told Joe that the county coroner was on his way, fighting through the snowdrifts on the road to the hospital.
Joe and the sheriff's team stepped aside as hospital orderlies pulled Gardiner's body from the back of Joe's pickup and strapped him onto a gurney. The four of them followed the gurney into the building, then waited in the admissions area. As the orderlies rolled the body down the hallway, McLanahan said it reminded him of the elk he had brought down from the mountains during hunting season.
"Seven-point royal," McLanahan boasted. "Just shy of the Boone and Crockett record book. We had to quarter him just to get him to fit into the back of the truck."
At this, Barnum turned, smirking, toward Joe. "Well, Warden Pickett," he said, "I'm surprised you didn't gut Lamar before you brought him in." Joe drove to the Gardiner house to break the news to Mrs. Carrie Gardiner. He had volunteered for the job, tough as it would be. He was grateful to get away from Barnum and McLanahan. Even in the cold, his cheeks burned. He stung from Barnum's comments, and fought his welling anger at them. As he drove, however, thoughts of what had happened that afternoon, and what he was going to tell Carrie, crowded out Barnum's words. He still couldn't believe Gardiner had used the handcuffs-or that Gardiner had gone on his shooting rampage in the first place. Or that he had been randomly murdered in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm.
As Joe pulled up in front of the Gardiner's house, the realization of what he was about to do hit him, and he sat in the truck for a moment, working up his courage before pushing himself out into the cold and up the front steps of the house. When Lamar Gardiner's daughter opened the door in her nightgown, Joe felt even worse than he had before.
"Is your mom home?" Joe asked, his voice stronger than he expected.
"You're Lucy's daddy, right?" the girl asked. She had sung next to Lucy at the Christmas play. Joe couldn't remember her name. He wished he were anywhere other than where he was at the moment, and felt ashamed of his wish.
Carrie Gardiner emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands in a towel. She was a heavy woman with an attractive, alert face and short dark hair.
"Let Mr. Pickett in and close the door, honey," she said. Joe stepped in and removed his Stetson, which was soaked through and heavy.
The door closed, and both Carrie Gardiner and her daughter waited for him to speak. The fact that he didn't, but simply looked at Mrs. Gardiner, said enough.
Her eyes moistened and flashed.
"Go watch TV, honey," she told her daughter in a voice that would be obeyed.
Joe waited until the girl had left the room and took a deep breath. "There is no way to tell you this other than to tell it straight out," he said. "Your husband Lamar was murdered in the mountains while he was elk hunting. I found his body and brought him down."
Carrie Gardiner looked both stunned and angry, and she almost lost her balance. Joe stepped forward to steady her but she refused his hand. She let out a yelp, and threw the hand towel she was clutching at his boots.
"I'm so sorry," Joe said.
She waved him away, excusing him as the bearer of bad news. Then she turned and walked back into the kitchen.
"Please call me or my wife if there is anything we can do at all," Joe said after her.
She came back into the living room.
"How did he die?"
"Somebody shot two arrows into him." He chose not to mention the cut throat.
"Do you know who did it?" she asked.
"Not yet," Joe admitted.
"Will you find him?"
"I think so. The sheriff is in charge."
"Is that Lamar's blood on you?"
"Yes," Joe said, flushing, suddenly aware that his coat was blackened with blood, and profoundly angry with himself for not realizing it earlier. He should have taken it off in the truck before he knocked on the door. "I'm sorry," he said. "I…"
She shook him off, bent and picked up the towel, and touched her face with it.
"I was afraid something like this would happen," she said, and again walked away. She didn't elaborate, and Joe didn't follow up.
Joe let himself out and stood on the porch for a moment. Inside, a wail began and grew louder and louder. It was awful. At the sheriff's office, Barnum was already giving assignments for the coming day. Joe stood uncomfortably in the back of the briefing room. He had been asked to give a statement earlier, but had insisted on going to the Gardiner house first, promising to return later. Barnum told his deputies to forget whatever they were doing and to focus entirely on Lamar Gardiner's murder. He explained that he'd already called the state Division of Criminal Investigation, and notified the Forest Service. As soon as they could, he said, they would follow Joe Pickett to the crime scene to retrieve the arrows and any other kind of evidence they could find. Gardiner's staff would be questioned, as would his wife and friends, "… if he had any." This brought a muffled guffaw from someone. Gardiner's office would be searched, with the goal of gathering credible evidence of threats or conflicts. The records and sign-in sheets of the public meetings Gardiner had recently held about road closures, lease extensions, and other access issues would be gathered. Barnum wanted the names of everyone in Twelve Sleep Valley who had confronted Gardiner or expressed disagreement over public-policy decisions that had been made by the forest service. Joe had attended the meetings, and he knew that Barnum was likely to end up with a lot more names than he wanted.
"I want this investigation to proceed quickly and I want somebody rotting in my jail by Christmas," Barnum barked. "Pickett, we need your statement."
The deputies in the room, many wearing the sloppy civilian clothes they'd had on when they were abruptly called into the department, turned and looked at Joe, seeing him back there for the first time.
"You're a damn mess," one of them said, and somebody else laughed. It was two-thirty in the morning before Joe got home, and he drove by his house twice before seeing the yellow smudge of the porch light that looked like an erasure in the storm. The wind had come up, turning a heavy but gentle snowfall into a maelstrom.
After bucking a three-foot snowdrift that blocked the driveway and sent him fishtailing toward the garage, he turned off the motor and woke Maxine. The Labrador bounded beside him through the front lawn, leaping over drifts. Joe didn't have the energy to hop, so he plowed through, feeling snow pack into the cuffs of his Wranglers and into his boot-tops for the second time that day. Snow swirled around the porch light like smoke. Christmas decorations, made by the girls in school, were taped inside the front window, and Joe smiled at the Santa drawing that Sheridan had done the previous year. Unnoticed by most, Sheridan had added a familiar patch, with a pronghorn antelope profile and the words WYOMING GAME AND FISH DEPARTMENT, to Santa's red coat-sleeve.
The small house had two storeys, with two small bedrooms, a detached garage, and a loafing shed barn in the back. Forty years old, the house had been the home and office of the two previous game wardens and their families. Across Bighorn Road was Wolf Mountain, which dominated the view. In back, beyond rugged sandstone foothills, was the northwest slope of the Bighorn range. He could see none of it in the dark and through the snow.
The people he met in the field were mostly hunters, fishermen, ranchers, poachers, environmentalists, and others Joe lumped into a category he called "outdoorsmen"-but his home was filled with four blond, green-eyed females. Females who were verbal. Females who were emotional. He often smiled and thought of this place as a "House of Feelings." If the expression of feelings produced a physical by-product, Joe could imagine his house filled with hundreds of gallons of an emotional goo that sometimes spilled out of the windows and doors and seeped from the vents. But his family was everything to him; this place was his refuge, and he wouldn't have had it any other way.