As Juan gathered up his things, Joe said to her, “You might want to dust that disc for prints just to see if mine are on it.”

She looked at him with a withering glance that said, I know how to do this job.

Joe responded by putting his palms in the air in an apology.

But she dusted the disc. There were no prints.

“He wore gloves,” Joe said. “I’m not that clever.”

—

THE PHOTOS on the CD of the tire tracks didn’t match the ones from the memory stick on Joe’s camera. Unlike the shots he had taken in the killing field, the ones on the CD were of tire tracks squished through a grassy bog.

“Now look at this,” Joe said, urging her to advance through the photos on his memory stick. She clucked her tongue while she toggled back and forth between the tracks on the sagebrush flat and the tread pattern of the tire on Wentworth’s government pickup.

“These appear to match up,” she said. “Further analysis is needed to confirm it, though.”

“And the photos on the disc are obviously not taken in the same location,” Joe said.

He pointed out the differences to Kelsea Raymer and she remarked on the disparity of the vegetation.

“He probably took those right off the edge of the parking lot of the Holiday Inn,” Joe said. “And the shells probably came from the back of some oil-field worker’s truck parked at the same hotel in Saddlestring. Believe me, I could wander through that lot myself and gather spent brass casings, shotgun shells, and beer cans out of twenty different trucks.”

“Oh my,” she said.

—

“THE TIRES IN MY PHOTO belong to a government truck,” Joe said.

She winced as if he’d poked her with a pin, then said, “I still don’t have enough evidence here to make any conclusions.”

“I agree,” Joe said. “But I can. I know what I packed in that box and I know that what was sent to you was tampered with.”

She rolled her chair back. “It’s not my job to investigate agency personnel,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to investigate,” Joe said. “In fact, you need to handle this the way you’re supposed to handle it. All I ask is that you lock this box away along with the memory stick for my camera. If a guy named Revis Wentworth wants it back, I hope you’ll throw up some bureaucratic roadblocks. You know, play dumb or tell him you’re researching his request.”

“That’s his name? The agent who did this?”

Joe nodded.

“I’ve heard of him,” she said. “He’s supposed to be a sage grouse expert.”

“Oh, he is,” Joe said.

“But why would he do something like this?” she asked. “His job is to protect the species, not endanger it.”

Joe told her Lucy’s observation. While he did, Raymer shook her head in disbelief.

“If he did this, I hope he gets arrested,” she said. “I don’t like the thought of people like that in our agency.”

“Good for you,” Joe said. “Now I have another request.”

She looked at him skeptically.

“I have his shotgun in my pickup and two spent shells I picked up out in the field that I didn’t put into the original evidence box. I had completely forgotten about them until this morning, when I saw them rolling around in the back of my truck. You might be able to pull a couple of prints, or at least partials, off of the brass of the two shells. I think you’ll find that the shotgun and the primer stamp on the spent shells match up. That will prove that he did the shooting.”

She shook her head. “It might prove it to you, but it doesn’t prove anything to me. All of this—all of it—is based on your assumptions.”

Joe said, “That’s right.”

Raymer’s phone chimed from a pocket in her lab coat and she instinctively drew it out and looked at the screen.

“How interesting,” she said. “I just got an email from Revis Wentworth.”

Joe smiled.

“He’s asking me to confirm that we received a box of evidence in an important case,” she said. “And he cautions me that, because of the magnitude of the crime, I may be contacted by local law enforcement attempting to influence our findings. I assume that would be you,” she said, looking up.

“Yup.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Nope. He’s trying to run interference. He’s desperate.”

She dropped the phone back in her pocket and looked at Joe squarely.

“So you’re going to turn over every piece of evidence you have to me? The shells and the shotgun and the memory stick? How can you build your case if all of the evidence for it is here locked away in Denver?”

He said, “Because I trust you to keep it until we need it.”

She cocked her head. “Why?”

“Because you’re from Montana and your dad was a game warden,” Joe said.

—

JOE HATED DENVER TRAFFIC and he kept both of his hands on the wheel and his pickup in the far right lane as cars zipped around him. It was as if every driver on the five-lane freeway had just downed three shots of vodka and had been handed the keys to Daddy’s sports car. When his cell phone rang, he ignored it until he was nearly ten miles north of the city and the traffic finally eased up.

Marybeth.

She said, “The hospital called and the swelling on April’s brain has gone down.”

Joe blew out a breath of relief.

“They want to try and bring her out of it tonight or tomorrow. I need to be there, Joe.”

“Of course you do,” he said.

“I’m taking Sheridan and Lucy with me,” she said. “They want to see their sister. They want to be there when she comes out of it.”

Joe paused for a few seconds, trying to figure out how to frame his words, when Marybeth did it for him: “We talked it all out this morning. They know she may never be April again. They know that this may turn out to be one of the most difficult experiences of their lives, and so do I. But we have to be there, Joe.”

He said, “I’m on my way, but you should all go now. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

“I’ll keep you posted after I talk to the doctors,” she said.

Near Fort Collins, he called the governor’s office. He used the private number Rulon had given him and the call went straight to voicemail.

Joe said, “We’ve got the goods on Wentworth. He slaughtered Lek Sixty-four and tried to cover it up.

“On another matter, I might be out of touch for a few days. There’s news on my daughter’s condition. The news could be good or bad.”

23

Timber Cates refused to look back over his shoulder at the brick-and-glass front entrance of the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. He vowed he would never look back at it, because he intended to never see it again for the rest of his life, and there was nothing good to remember about it anyway.

Not even when the corrections officer called out after him, “We’ll keep the light on for you, Timber, my boy!”

What an asshole.

—

WHILE HE WAS BEING processed out, the CO had kept up a one-sided monologue that seemed intended to agitate Timber, as if baiting him one last time so he’d explode and get himself turned around and sent back inside.

“This seems like a whole lot of trouble when you’ll probably be back here in a few months anyway,” the CO said. He was short and stout, a fireplug, with a piglike face and a wispy goatee that looked unfinished. He had half-Asian features. Timber didn’t like it when an Asian talked to him that way. Or when Asians tried to grow beards like real men. They weren’t designed for it. He wished they would just give up and shave, for Christ’s sake.