He rose quietly and went to the window. An icy breeze flowed under the sill-he would need to pack it with insulation tomorrow, he thought.
It was still dark, still snowing, and the wind was still blowing.
He turned and looked at Marybeth, who had finally fallen asleep under the quilts. Then he tiptoed downstairs and looked in on Sheridan-Maxine was asleep at the foot of her bed-and on Lucy and April, who shared a bunk bed. He could not see their faces, only tangles of blond hair. After gazing at them for a moment, he returned to his bedroom.
He stared out at the storm, mesmerized. The wind had increased. There was now a bare spot on the front lawn where the brown grass showed through. It was never just the snow in Wyoming that caused problems. It was always the snow plus the wind that sculpted it into something hard, shiny, and impassible. A foot-high stream of blowing snow, like cold smoke, coursed across the ground.
It struck Joe as he stood there, the floor cold beneath his bare feet, that Lamar's murder had an oddly personal feel to it. Saddlestring was not a violent place, and murders were almost unheard of, yet someone had hated Lamar Gardiner so much that he not only shot him with arrows but slashed his throat open, bleeding him like a wounded deer.
Joe wondered if the killer was still out there, caught in the storm. Or if the killer, like himself, had made it off of the mountain. And he wondered if the killer was also standing at a window somewhere, his gut churning, his mind replaying what had happened that day, as the storm pummeled Twelve Sleep Valley. Four Joe was being gently shaken awake by Marybeth, who held a telephone out to him.
"It's Sheriff Barnum," she said, cupping her hand over the phone. He sat up quickly in bed, rubbed his face hard, and looked around. Marybeth was fully dressed. The curtains were drawn, but on the ceiling and walls were blooms of muted light. The digital clock radio showed that it was 8:20 A.M. That's impossible, Joe thought.
His immediate fear was that Barnum had assembled his deputies, the state Division of Criminal Investigation unit, and the county emergency team, and that they were in town-all waiting for him.
Marybeth read the panic in his eyes, and shook her head. "Don't worry," she said, her hand still covering the telephone. It was his cell phone, instead of the handset to the telephone near the bed. "You won't believe the snow outside."
"Why didn't you wake me up earlier?" Joe asked, groggy. "I can't believe I slept this late."
"You needed the rest. And I don't think anybody is going anywhere this morning."
Joe took the phone while he swung out of bed. "Sheriff?"
Barnum's voice was gravelly. "Have you looked outside?"
"I'm doing that now," Joe said, opening the curtains. The blast of pure white light temporarily blinded him. For a moment, he got a sense of vertigo. There was no sky, no grass, no trees or mountains. Only opaque white.
"I can't even see the road," Joe marveled.
"Neither can the snowplow drivers," Barnum grumbled. "We've got thirty-six inches of snow and the wind's supposed to hit fifty miles per hour this afternoon. Everything's closed-the highways, the airport, even our office officially. The phone lines are down again, and half the county doesn't have power. The DCI boys started up here in a state plane and made it as far as Casper before they turned back. The storm was right on their ass, so they had to outrun it and ended up somewhere in Colorado."
Joe squinted. He could make out ghostly shapes of his pickup, and a snow-covered pine in his yard below.
"So what's the plan?" Joe asked.
"Shit, I don't know," Barnum sighed. "I'm trying to get ahold of a Forest Service Sno-Cat to take up there. But I can't reach anybody who can find the keys."
Joe thought briefly about using snowmobiles but it was too far.
"Keep your cell phone on," Barnum barked. "As soon as we can move around here we'll try to assemble and get up there. You'll have to get to town when that happens so you can show us where Gardiner got rubbed out."
"I'll chain up all four tires," Joe said, ignoring the "rubbed out" comment. "I'll be ready when you are."
"You've got power, then?" Barnum asked.
"For now."
"Keep that cell phone charged," Barnum said again. "Who knows when they'll get the lines fixed."
"Sheriff?" Joe asked, before Barnum hung up.
"What?"
"Good thing I brought him down, wouldn't you say?" Joe turned to Marybeth, who had a satisfied look on her face.
Barnum hung up.
"Are you up for making pancakes?" Marybeth asked. "The girls want to know."
Joe looked again out of the window. What little he could see looked like a freeze-frame of a storm at sea, with bucking waves of snow and ground blizzards instead of spray.
"You bet," Joe said, smiling. "I'm not going anywhere for a while."
"The girls will like that."
Then he remembered: "Your mother."
"What about her?"
"Oh," Joe moaned, "nothing." Joe stood at the window after he dressed, blinking at the whiteout, a combination of feeling the frustration and dread churning within him. His thoughts from the night before still haunted him. He fought a wave of nausea as he recalled the brutality of Lamar's murder. The fact that the murderer had sliced Gardiner's throat-and while Gardiner was still alive and pinned to the tree-was particularly hideous. Whoever had done it was unimaginably brutal, and Joe couldn't help but think that there wasn't any randomness about it. He assumed that the killer had known Gardiner, or at least known who and what he represented. The longer it took to begin the investigation, the more time the murderer would have to get rid of evidence, wipe out his tracks, and build his alibi. The crime scene itself was inaccessible, with potential evidence-hair, fibers, blood-being pummeled and scattered by ice and wind.
Joe felt that, unlike hunters, who often policed themselves, whoever had killed Lamar Gardiner was not wracked with guilt. The killer was likely local, possibly someone Joe knew, possibly someone who would not stop with killing Lamar Gardiner if he felt threatened. Someone without a conscience.
And the murderer was out there, shielded by the fury of the storm. Before breakfast, Joe retreated to his office to type up the report on Lamar's murder for his supervisor, Terry Crump. He wouldn't be able to e-mail it to him until the phones were back up, but he wanted to get the details down while they were still fresh in his mind. As a game warden, one of only fifty-five in the entire state of Wyoming, Joe Pickett had unique duties and obligations. Within his district, he worked virtually alone. His office was in a small anteroom off the living room in his house, and he had no administrative or secretarial staff. Marybeth, and sometimes Sheridan, took messages and served as unpaid assistants. The job of a Wyoming game warden was supposed to consist of one-third public contact, one-third harvest collection, and one-third law enforcement-with no area to exceed 35 percent. Supposedly, the percentages would balance out over the year. The hours ranged from 173 to 259 per month. Joe was paid $32,000 per year in salary by the state of Wyoming and provided with housing and a vehicle. He was supervised, sort of, by District Supervisor Terry Crump, a game warden as well, who was 250 miles away in Cody. Crump's supervision consisted of an occasional telephone call or radio dispatch, usually after Joe had sent in his monthly report via e-mail attachment. Generally, Terry simply wanted to bullshit or trade departmental gossip. He had never called Joe to task, even when Joe's activities had enraged the bureaucrats in Cheyenne, where the headquarters were. Although Joe sometimes worked in tandem with the county sheriff's office or the Saddlestring police department, and even with federal agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the BATF, and the FBI, he was almost always on his own. He liked the autonomy, but there were problems inherent in it that came up when he encountered situations like he had the day before.