Blood Trail - C. J. Box [75]
“Nope,” Reed said.
“I wonder where he is.”
Reed shrugged. “I hear the guy keeps on the move.”
Joe hoped Gordon was still around.
Reed sat back and put his coffee cup down. He looked like a man with a pain in his stomach. “I just wish Klamath Moore and his ilk would go away,” Reed said. “When they’re around it’s like I don’t know this place anymore. Everything seems off-kilter, if you know what I mean. We’ve always been sort of insulated from all of that activist crap here in our nice little town.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
“Maybe this is the beginning of the end,” Reed said. “Maybe all that stuff from the outside about animal rights and such has found us.”
JOE PARKED his pickup at the side of Nate’s house near the Twelve Sleep River and got out. It was high noon, still, cloudless, in the forties but dropping by the minute. He could hear the gossipy murmur of the river as he circled the house and the empty falcon mews. There was no point knocking on the door because there was obviously no one inside. And there were no birds in the sky.
What he noted, though, was a set of tire tracks coming in and going out. And the footprints—at least five sets—in the mud and dust near the front door. They’d been there, the whole carload of them, Joe thought. Nate, Alisha, Klamath Moore, Moore’s wife, Bill Gordon. The footprints led to the threshold and came back out again.
So Nate, Mr. Neighborly, had invited them inside, Joe thought. Perhaps they’d all taken chairs around Nate’s old dining table and sipped cocktails? Maybe Nate baked them a cake? Maybe they laughed and joked about how it had all come together as planned and Nate was now free to move about the country.
Just to make himself feel a little better, Joe kicked Nate’s door with the toe of his boot before leaving.
Hard pellets of snow strafed the ground and bounced off the hood of his truck. He was glad he’d thrown his thick Carhartt jacket into his vehicle that morning because, blink, it was winter.
THE SNAP winter storm roared through the Bighorns throughout Wednesday and into Thursday. Sheriff McLanahan’s search for the killer was postponed indefinitely Wednesday night when one of his volunteers—Joe and Marybeth’s plumber—was mortally wounded by another volunteer who mistook him for someone suspicious and shot him in the chest in close to zero visibility conditions.
That night, Joe reread Bill Gordon’s files and tried to watch television with Marybeth and Lucy but found himself wondering when, and if, Nate Romanowski would appear.
21
ON THURSDAY, Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Fallen leaves like tiny cupped hands skittered across the lawns to pile up against fences and brush. Wood smoke from the chimneys of small box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung close to the ground. Some houses had lawns, fences, trees, hedges. Some had pickup trucks mounted on blocks without engines or doors.
He had always been struck by the number of basketball back-boards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. Joe counted six fat mule deer hanging in one block and realized the moratorium the governor had placed on state lands wouldn’t apply to reservation lands, which were sovereign.
The reservation high school was a modern redbrick structure with well-kept lawns and nothing about to suggest the students were Northern Arapaho or Eastern Shoshone. The only student Joe saw outside was wearing a gray hoodie, smoking a cigarette, and listening to his iPod.
After checking the teachers’ lot for Alisha Whiteplume’s car (the SUV he’d seen through the binoculars), Joe parked and went in.
THE MAIN HALLWAY of the school was dark and empty. His boots echoed on the linoleum. Classes were in session, and he glanced