Winterkill - C. J. Box [17]
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,