Cold Wind - C. J. Box [60]
After the arraignment and posting of bail, Marcus Hand had driven Missy home. According to Marybeth, Hand had sent for a large team of paralegals and additional lawyers from his Jackson Hole office. Team Missy, as Hand had taken to calling it, would occupy most of the bedrooms of the ranch house to prepare for the next stage of the trial. Cable news satellite trucks rumbled into Saddlestring, and a half-dozen legal reporters from newspapers as far away as New York and Los Angeles booked rooms at the Holiday Inn.
There had been no news in regard to either Bud Longbrake or Alisha Whiteplume. Joe had placed a call to the sheriff’s office to check on Alisha and gotten Sollis, who said they were giving it another day or two before opening an inquiry. When Joe asked why, Sollis said he didn’t appreciate the implication and hung up on him.
Unlike the spectacular stone headquarters on the adjoining Thunderhead Ranch once occupied by Missy and Earl Alden and now serving as command central for Team Missy, the Lees’ place was clapboard, tired, and utilitarian. The once white house needed a coat of paint and the old gray shingles on the roof were warped and cracked from sun and weather. It sat in a wind-whipped grove of Austrian pines—the only standing trees for miles—on the high prairie at the end of a rough two-track. The trees all leaned to the south. The windward sides were flattened and the southern sides were bushy and gnarly as if they’d all been shot in the back and were reaching out with branch-hands to break their fall. Joe thought the word “hardscrabble” would have had to be invented to describe the Lee Ranch if it didn’t already exist.
The ranch compound consisted of the house, three battered metal Quonsets that served as garages, an oversized peeling wooden barn, and an intricate set of corrals and chutes built with crooked poles sunk into the hard ground and linked with haphazard railings. Hereford cattle and bony horses fed on piles of hay scattered across the ground within the corrals and looked up at the approaching green pickup.
He didn’t know the Lees well. They weren’t the kind of ranchers who participated in the community or in public meetings, politics, or even the state livestock organizations. They kept to themselves, making no demands when it came to problem game animals or hunters, for that matter. Joe had heard the rumor that Bob Lee once took care of elk feeding on his hay by mowing them down with a .30-06 rifle and burying the carcasses with his front-end loader, but there’d never been a call or report on him.
Hollow-eyed mixed-breed ranch dogs came boiling out from beneath the front porch as Joe got out. He quickly jumped back in his pickup next to Tube, who was alarmed but not exactly motivated to protect him from the snarling pack. The dogs circled his pickup as if they’d treed it, snapping their teeth in the air and yapping. It was obvious there were people around; the lights were on inside and five vehicles—two battered ranch pickups, a later model Jeep Cherokee, and two low-slung restored muscle cars from the 1970s—were parked around him. Joe waited for someone inside the house to come out and call the dogs back.
Finally, a woman pushed through the front screen door and held it open, as if unsure if she wanted to come all the way out or go back in. She was old and heavy, wore a faded tent-like dress and bright yellow Crocs on her feet and her iron-colored hair was in curlers. She squinted at Joe’s pickup with