Winterkill - C. J. Box [0]
PART ONE Severe Winter Storm Warning
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART TWO Snow Blind
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
PART THREE Whiteout
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
PART FOUR Snow Ghosts
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Winterkill
A Berkley Prim Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2003 by C. J. Box
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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ISBN: 978-1-1012-0459-7
A BERKLEY PRIME CRIME BOOK®
Berkley Prime Crime Books first published by The Berkley Prim Crime Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the “BERKLEY PRIME CRIME DESIGN” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: July, 2004
Other titles by C. J. Box
SAVAGE RUN
OPEN SEASON
WINTERKILL
For Morris and Joanna Meese and for Laurie, always
winterkill ['win•ter•kil] vt
to kill (as a plant or animal) by, or to die as a result of,
exposure to winter weather conditions
PART ONE
Severe
Winter Storm
Warning
One
Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming
Astorm was coming to the Bighorn Mountains.
It was late December, four days before Christmas, the last week of the elk hunting season. Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was in his green four-wheel drive pickup, parked just below the tree line in the southern Wolf range. The terrain he was patrolling was an enormous wooded bowl, and Joe was just below the eastern rim. The sea of dark pines in the bowl was interspersed with ancient clear-cuts and mountain meadows, and set off by knuckle-like granite ridges that defined each small drainage. Beyond the rim to the west was Battle Mountain, separated from the Wolf range by Crazy Woman Creek, which flowed, eventually, into the Twelve Sleep River.
It was two hours away from nightfall, but the sky was leaden, dark, and threatening snow. The temperature had dropped during the afternoon as a bank of clouds moved over the sky and shut out the sun. It was now twenty-nine degrees with a slightly moist, icy breeze. The first severe winter storm warning of the season had been issued for northern Wyoming and southern Montana for that night and the following day, with another big Canadian front forming behind it. Beneath the high ceiling, clouds approached in tight formation, looking heavy and ominous.
Joe felt like a soldier at a remote outpost, listening to the distant rumble and clank of enemy artillery pieces being moved into place before an opening barrage.
For most of the afternoon, he had been watching a herd of twenty elk move cautiously from black timber into a windswept meadow to graze. He had watched the elk, then watched the sky, then turned back to the elk again.
On the seat next to Joe was a sheaf of papers his wife Marybeth had gathered for him that had been brought home from school by his daughters. Now that all three girls were in school—eleven-year-old Sheridan in fifth grade, six-year-old Lucy in kindergarten, and their nine-year-old foster daughter April in third grade—their small state-owned house seemed awash