Winterkill - C. J. Box [85]
“I’m sorry about last night and this morning,” she said. “You didn’t deserve it.”
“Yes, I did. You were right,” he said, his mood suddenly lifting. “It’s okay. The tension level was pretty high around here.”
She smiled, but stayed silent.
“What?” he asked, finally.
“Joe, sometimes you amaze me. Two antelope fawns?”
He laughed.
Twenty-three
In the morning, Joe confirmed Rope Latham’s story with Carrie Gardiner. He found her standing in front of her house in a heavy coat, hugging herself with both arms. A big moving truck had backed up to her front door across the yard, and a crew was carrying furniture and boxes up a ramp from her house into the back of the trailer.
“I heard,” Joe said, tipping the brim of his hat toward the moving truck. “Where are you going?”
“My parents live in Nebraska.” She sighed. “Still on the farm. They’ve got room for all of us.”
“I’m sorry to see you leave.”
Her eyes flared briefly. “I’m not,” she said.
“You heard about Rope?”
“Yes. The sheriff called this morning. Thank you for arresting him.”
“Yup.”
“Please tell me what happened,” Carrie said.
She listened, staring at her winter boots, while Joe told her everything Rope had said.
When he was done, she nodded.
“I believe it,” she said.
“You do?”
She nodded sadly. “I wish it didn’t make sense, but it does. The roofers even called our house a couple of times to complain. I spoke with Spud Cargill once, and he told me about it, so I asked Lamar about it when he got home that night.
“Lamar was going through a real tough time last summer. I guess he realized he wasn’t going any further in the Forest Service and it was really bothering him. He’d been applying for other districts for the past three years, and jobs at regional headquarters, but he wasn’t getting any encouragement. I think he realized that he would always be a midlevel manager, and he didn’t take it well at times. It was hard on me, and on the kids.”
Joe listened, shifting his gaze occasionally to watch the team of movers emerge from the house with something and disappear into the back of the truck.
“I’m not excusing what Lamar did up there in the mountains,” she said. “Shooting all those elk makes me sick to my stomach. But I know that his frustration level was really high. For the first time since we’d been married, he was snapping at me and the kids. He was drinking too much. I was thinking about leaving him just before, well, you know . . .”
“Carrie, what about the roofers?”
“Oh, yes.” She flushed. “From what Lamar told me, he did a standard request for bids in the spring to get all the buildings shingled. Bighorn Roofing—Spud and Rope—had the best bid. Lamar said he gave them a verbal okay to start working, then submitted the paperwork to the regional office in Denver. He said that in the past, submitting the paperwork was just a formality.
“But this time, after a couple of months, the regional office sent him everything back and said he hadn’t filled out a couple of the forms properly. Lamar was really angry when they did that, so he resubmitted everything and didn’t tell the roofers about it.”
“When was this?” Joe asked.
“I think it was about August,” she said. “The work was just about done already, and the roofers were getting mad about having to front the Forest Service all of the materials and labor without getting paid. Then the regional office denied the request altogether, because they said Lamar had entered into a contract without their approval.”
Joe shook his head.
“Lamar was fit to be tied over that one.”
“I can believe that he would be,” Joe said.
“They hung him out to dry,” she said. “They didn’t give one bit of consideration to what it would be like for him out here in the field. They didn’t really care that he had to look people in the eye and tell them they wouldn’t get paid for the work they did.”
It was so . . . believable, Joe thought. And so frustrating. It didn’t have to happen this way.
He thanked her and told her once again that he was sorry she was leaving.
As he approached his pickup, she called after him.
“Oh,