Free Fire - C. J. Box [16]
Claudia Wade, twenty-four, managed the laundry facility near Lake Lodge. Wade’s body was in the same tent as Mc-Caleb’s. There were two shotgun blasts to her back, and she’d been shot once in the head with a handgun.
Caitlyn Williams, twenty-six, was a horse wrangler at Rooseveltfor Zephyr. Williams’s body was sprawled over the campfire pit with a shotgun blast to her back and a single large-caliberwound to her head.
Rick Hoening, twenty-five, was a desk clerk at the Old FaithfulInn. His body was located twenty yards from the others in the campsite, near the trail. Investigators speculated that he’d been the first to encounter the gunman and the first one killed. He’d been shot three times with a handgun, twice with a shotgun, and, like the others, had an additional single shot to the head.
Wade, Williams, and Hoening were also Zephyr Corp. employees.All four victims listed their original home addresses in St. Paul, Minnesota—the Gopher State—although they lived in Gardiner, Montana, or within the park at the time of their murders.The forensic pathologist in Idaho Falls noted that while each had sustained enough wounds to be fatal, the single shots to the head were likely administered after the initial confrontation.
They were the coup de grâce, fired close enough to leave powder burns and guarantee that no one survived the initial assault.
Joe thought, The Gopher State Five. But there were only four of them. He read on.
The scene was littered with .45 brass and fired twelve-gauge shotgun shells. The newspaper articles called the incident “overkill,” a “senseless slaughter” with “the fury of a crime of passion.” One of the rangers who found the bodies was quoted as saying, “He killed them and then he killed them again for good measure. He was a mad dog. There is nothing at the scene to suggest that the guy [McCann] didn’t just lose it out there.”
There was no question then, and no question now, who had killed them.
Clay McCann willingly handed over two SIG-Sauer P220 .45 ACP semiautomatic handguns and a Browning BT-99 Micro twelve-gauge shotgun to the park rangers. Then he shocked the rangers by asking for them back. They refused.
When asked why he did it, McCann made the statement that became infamous, the words that became the subhead of every story written about the slaughter at the time:
“I did it because they made fun of me, and because I could.”
At the time, no one imagined the possibility that Clay McCannwould be released from jail three months later to return to his home and law practice.
That he’d committed the perfect crime.
4
“Explain this to me again,” nate romanowski said to Joe over coffee in the small dining room of Alisha Whiteplume’s home on the Wind River Indian reservation.
“It’s about jurisdiction and venue, and what they call ‘vicinage,’” Joe said. “It’s a hidden loophole in the federal law. Or at least it was hidden until recently.”
A large-scale map of Yellowstone was spread out on the table between them with cups of coffee and the pot holding down the edges.
“Yellowstone was established as the first national park in the world in 1872 by an act of Congress. The boundaries were drawn before Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana were granted statehood,” Joe said, pointing at the strips of national park land that extended beyond the square border of Wyoming—which contained more than ninety-two percent of the park—north into Montana and west into Idaho. “About two hundred and sixty square miles of Yellowstone is in Montana, and about fifty in Idaho. The law in Yellowstone is federal law, not state law. If a crime is committed there, the perp is bound over under federal statutes and tried eitherinside the park at a courthouse in Mammoth Hot Springs, or sent to federal district court in Cheyenne. The states have no jurisdictionat all.”
Nate nodded while he traced the boundary of the park with his finger on the map. He was tall with wide shoulders and a blond ponytail bound