“Let’s get pizza.”
Joe nodded.
—
JOE ASKED LUCY, “When was the last time you heard from April? You’re the only one in the family she really communicated with.” They were making the eight-mile drive from Saddlestring to his rural state-owned home on Bighorn Road. The warm pizza was in a box on the seat between them. Strings of drool hung from Daisy’s mouth.
“A week ago, I guess,” Lucy said. “She posted a photo of herself in a bikini by a swimming pool. It was at some hotel in a big city.”
April had blocked both Marybeth and Sheridan from her Facebook and Twitter pages. Only Lucy was allowed to follow her.
“Can you be more specific?” Joe asked.
“It was in Texas somewhere.”
“Houston, maybe?”
“That sounds right. But she didn’t post much of anything beyond the photo. She never does—there are just lots of photos of her and Dallas doing cool things. I think she wanted to impress me. You know, goofing around in airports, partying with cowboys. Selfies, you know.”
Joe grunted. Then: “Did April tell you she and Dallas Cates had broken up?”
“What?”
He told her what Brenda Cates had said.
“A month ago?” Lucy said. “No way. If that had happened I’d know about it even if she didn’t tell me directly. She wouldn’t keep posting photos on her page of the two of them if it was over. April is strange, but she isn’t crazy. If they’d broken up—and especially if he’d broken up with her—the world would know it by now. She would have started up an ‘I Hate Dallas Cates’ site.”
“If they did break up, do you think April would come back here?” Joe asked.
Lucy shrugged and said, “I never know what April will do next.”
After a beat, she said again, “No way April and Dallas broke up.”
Joe said, “I believe you.”
—
THERE WAS a white late-model pickup parked at Joe’s house with two people sitting inside. They were obviously waiting for him to arrive. The vehicle had U.S. government plates.
Joe moaned.
“Who is that?” Lucy asked.
“I call them the sage grouse twins,” Joe said. “Go ahead and take Daisy and the pizza inside. I’ll be in shortly, after I talk to them.”
—
ANNIE HATCH of the Bureau of Land Management and Revis Wentworth of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waited for Lucy and Daisy to enter the house before they got out of their pickup. Joe remembered that Wentworth had a thing about dogs—one had bitten him once on a local ranch he was visiting and now he insisted that he wouldn’t get out of his vehicle until all canines were secured.
Hatch and Wentworth were members of the Interagency Sage Grouse Task Force (ISGTF), which had been created by the federal government two years earlier to oversee state efforts to manage the species. Governor Rulon had loudly objected to the creation of the task force and had threatened to lock up any federal government employees who entered his state, but he’d eventually acquiesced when Washington threatened to withhold highway repair and Medicare funds. An agreement had been reached that the task force would keep the governor’s office informed as to their activities and findings and that they’d restrict their jurisdiction to the public lands of the state. That meant literally half of Wyoming, though, and the governor’s feelings about that situation were well known.
Joe liked Annie Hatch just fine. She was in her mid-thirties, pleasant, and friendly in just a mildly bureaucratic way. She had long, curly brown hair and an athletic build, and she dressed in an “outdoor girl” style: jeans, hiking boots, fishing shirts, fleece jackets. Her personal car was a Prius and she taught yoga classes in the evenings. Unlike Wentworth, who resided in Denver and was renting a room at the Holiday Inn in Saddlestring, Annie lived in a small house in town and was a member of the community.
“Hey, Joe,” she said as she got out of the pickup.
“Annie,” Joe said. “What brings you here?”
“Sage grouse.”
“Imagine that,” Joe said wearily.
Revis Wentworth got out and cast a cautionary look toward the front door of the Pickett home.
“Daisy is inside and she’s harmless,” Joe said to him.
“Supposedly, so was the dog that bit me. I needed eleven stitches,” Wentworth said back.
Joe shrugged.
Wentworth said, “We got a report that there’s been a massacre on BLM land.”
Wentworth was slight, serious, and more than a little in love with his position, Joe thought. He was pale and wore black-framed hipster glasses. Joe had never seen him smile or make a joke. Wentworth always wore a sport jacket, but kept it unbuttoned so the people he met could see the semiauto hanging from a shoulder holster underneath. As one of 250 special agents for the USFW, he was authorized to carry a weapon.
“Yup,” Joe said, gesturing toward the foothills to the west. “Lek Sixty-four. I counted twenty-one dead birds.”
“My God, an entire lek,” Hatch said, covering her open mouth with her hand as she gasped. “That’s horrible.”
“Were you going to inform ISGTF about it at any point?” Wentworth asked. He pronounced the acronym “Izg-Tiff.”
“Probably.”
“Is there some reason you didn’t call right away?”
“By the time I had thought about it, I checked my watch and it was already after five,” Joe said. It was a dig, but it was also true.
“You have my cell phone number,” Wentworth said.
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Please,” Hatch said, stepping between them. “Let’s settle this later. We’re talking about an entire lek of sage grouse.”
“This is nothing more than a provocation,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. Joe eyed him carefully to determine that he was talking about the slaughter and not about him.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it yet,” Joe said, sidling past the special agents so that he was positioned to open his gate and go inside. He hoped they would let him. He said, “I gathered evidence and took a bunch of photos. I’ve got spent shotgun shells, tire tracks, and maybe even a DNA sample. It looked to me like a couple of yahoos stumbled onto those birds and went postal. We’ll get ’em.”
“Locals, no doubt,” Wentworth said with disdain.
“Probably.”
“You’ll need to turn over all the items you found so we can send them to our forensics lab,” Wentworth said.
“I’m sending them to our own lab in Laramie on Monday,” Joe said, annoyed with Wentworth’s attitude. “They’re the best when it comes to wildlife crimes.”
“Do you want me to go over your head?” Wentworth asked, arching his eyebrows.
“Go ahead,” Joe said with a flash of anger. Then he took a breath and said, “Revis, why can’t we talk to each other like a couple of adults? Why do you need to act like the federal alpha dog? I know how to do my job, and we’re just talking about sage grouse here.”
It was another shot.
“Just sage grouse,” Wentworth repeated, as if he couldn’t believe Joe’s insolence. “I suppose if you spend every day with hunters and dead animals, a few dead birds don’t seem like much. Did you forget the entire population is on the brink?”
Hatch put her hand on Wentworth’s shoulder and said to Joe, “There’s no reason we can’t work together on this, is there?”
“No, of course not. By the way, how did you find out about the incident?”
“Someone called our tip line,” Wentworth said.
“Who?”
“It was anonymous.”
“Male? Female? Age? That area up there where I found the birds isn’t a place where someone would just happen by.”
“I can’t give you any of that without authorization,” Wentworth said, looking over the top of his hipster glasses. “But we need you to take us up there to Lek Sixty-four.”
“Really?”
“We don’t want to get lost. You can guide us there.”
“There you go again,” Joe said. “Giving me another order I’m going to ignore.”
“Please, Joe?” Hatch pleaded.