The doorknob.

It was Gearbox, horrified. He wretched at the sight of Coats’s face.

“Air!” Coats groaned, as he tasted blood at the back of his throat.

The cold came through the door like a hammer.

“The doc,” Coats mumbled. Right before he passed out.

36

MARTY, WALT’S FOUR-YEAR-OLD GOLDEN, BANGED AGAINST the fire screen and sent one of Emily’s mittens flying. The mitten landed on a fresh ember and soon the wet wool began to smolder, producing a god-awful stink.

The foul smell brought Walt from the kitchen. To the twins, who knew they weren’t supposed to play fetch indoors, their father’s expression came as a complete surprise. Not one of anger but curiosity. Laughing, they ran for cover behind the couch. But the admonishment never came.

Instead, a moment later, they overheard him speaking on the phone with Lisa and they mistakenly believed his leaving was the punishment for their crime.

“Could you possibly come over and get them to bed?” he asked. “Something’s come up at work.”

“THE SMELL?” Brandon asked, nursing his arm in the sling from the passenger seat of the Cherokee.

“A wool mitten. Yes. At first, I was pissed at the girls. Same old same old. But then I recognized that smell; I remembered that smell. Lon Bernie’s ranch. Remember that stink?”

“Impossible to forget.”

“Burning wool,” Walt said. “That’s what the smell was: burning wool.”

WALT KILLED the headlights way out on the plowed two-lane state road and continued on by the dim glow of a fingernail moon. They parked the vehicle a half mile from the driveway leading onto Lon Bernie’s ranch and went on foot, both sporting day packs, six-cell flashlights that doubled as nightsticks, and their 9mm Berettas.

They made quite the pair, throwing night shadows in the soft moonlight. Walt, cursed with DNA that got him to five foot ten only with boots on, had compensated by working the weight room until he was as wide in the chest as he was tall. Brandon, meanwhile, shopped the Big and Tall Guys stores. Now the deputy was one-winged and walking awkwardly because of it.

They held to the left of the road, putting the fence as a screen between them and Lon Bernie’s farmhouse.

“Does it bother you that we have no authority in this county?” Brandon said, his words puffing out from his mouth as gray fog.

“I wouldn’t say no authority, but it does make things a little tricky.”

“Tricky? If he’s up to something he’ll shoot us like dogs and ask questions later. Welcome to Lemhi County.”

“I’m aware of that,” Walt said.

“Oh, and this just in: he wasn’t real thrilled to see us last time, in daylight.”

“Point taken.”

“Are you trying to get me killed in the line of duty?”

Walt didn’t dignify that.

“It’s midnight, Sheriff. Couldn’t we have-”

Walt cut him off. “If we’d come by day, all we’d have accomplished was to tip him off to our interest in his burn pit. He’d have snuffed it, buried it, and it would have froze solid, leaving us waiting ’til April or May to dig for evidence.” Walt tugged on Brandon ’s sheriff’s coat, pulling him lower as they drew closer to the gate. “It has to be now, when we can get a good look at whatever’s in there. We owe that to Mark.”

When the wind shifted, the putrid smell hit them both at the same moment.

“Damn,” Brandon said.

They turned onto the property, staying low. The burn pit was on the far side of the ranch, requiring them to pass the farmhouse and the outbuildings to reach it. Walt assumed there would be dogs-there were always dogs on ranches-but that wild game was more likely to wake dogs than humans, and so the trick was to move quickly and keep to shadows.

It was bitterly cold, somewhere in the teens. Each light breeze penetrated and burned their faces. Ducking, they hurried through the dry, crunching snow. As barking erupted from inside the farmhouse, to their right, they ran across the plowed driveway and ducked into the deep snow behind a hay swather. If Lon Bernie was awakened by the barking, he might think he had a shot at poaching an elk or deer from his bedroom window.

They waited. Brandon began to shiver, though didn’t say a thing.

Finally, the dogs stopped their noise. Walt held Brandon there another few minutes-long minutes-knowing that Bernie could be moving window to window in hopes of spotting some trespassing game. Then they stood, returned to the plowed driveway, and moved together toward the far side of a toolshed. From there, around a granary, and, from the granary, around the far side of the main barn. Here, Walt picked up tractor tracks-dualies-two tracks of double tires, each pair four feet wide, running parallel to the barn and disappearing like train tracks into the dark. He and Brandon followed these away from the glow of the mercury lamp, out into an artificial dusk, and finally into the coal black night, clouds having moved in to mask the moon, the hideous smell growing stronger with every step. They never dared use their flashlights for fear of being spotted. At times, they stopped, awaiting a cloud to pass by the moon, the surrounding dark so intense, the silence so complete, that, had it not been for his heartbeat in his ears and the stinging cold in his toes, Walt might have thought he’d died.

It took forever to reach the burn pit. Nearly an hour had passed since they’d left the Cherokee by the side of the road. Finally, the tractor tire tracks gave way to a wide disturbance in the velvet field of snow just as the stink from the pit achieved epic proportions. The pit appeared before them as a square black shadow amid the white glaze of snowfall. Slash had been pushed into a pile on the left side, a tangle of dead limbs and detritus stacked well over ten feet high. The pit itself had been dug crudely into the brown earth some years before, a catchall of burnable waste, which to a rancher meant anything from plastic pesticide containers and fertilizer bags to household paper trash and spent gearbox oil. Walt kneeled and, cupping his flashlight to mute its light, aimed a diffused beam down into the pit.

Brandon projectile-vomited down into the pit, staggered, and stepped away. Normally he was a man of a strong constitution, but his reaction reflected the horror there: an assortment of limbs, bodies, and heads of dozens of sheep, all blackened, the burned skin peeling back in leaflike flakes, the scabbed, unmoving eyes bulging or missing, having exploded from the heat. Fuel had been poured over everything and lit, further discoloring the skin and patches of wool, and leaving a mass of twisting limbs and burgeoning flesh, ripped open by the gases of decomposition to expose frozen pink tears in the carbon wasteland of dead animal.

The smell was of everything bad in the world: excrement, burned hair, lost life.

Walt dug around in his day pack, withdrew the Gamma-Scout and a Dell laptop that was part of his office’s mobile command center.

“Jesus,” Brandon said, pulling himself together. “Sorry about the hurl, Sheriff.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Walt said.

“And then some.”

“Get rope ready.”

Brandon slipped his day pack off. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Stop thinking so much.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Walt had the Gamma-Scout plugged into the laptop; the laptop powering up. “The cord isn’t near long enough.”

“Sheriff…”

“I’ve got to go down there. Look for a decent hold. Try that fence post.”

“Sheriff…”

“You don’t burn your hoof stock. You sell its meat. The only reason you wouldn’t sell the meat is if the meat is contaminated. Wholesale slaughter like this? Come on! It’s the only explanation. But we’ve got to prove something’s going on. And you’ve got one good arm, Tommy. You can’t go down in there and you can’t pull me out. So get that rope tied off. And do it quickly,” he said calmly. He lifted his chin, indicating the distant ranch. “We may have company.”