“What happened to the van?”

“Eldon’s good for something,” Brenda said. “He knows every inch of this country out here because he guides hunters in the fall. He knows where to hide a vehicle where no one can find it.”

“Why are you telling me all this now?”

Brenda went back to brushing Liv’s hair. “Might as well.”

Those words weren’t chosen at random, Liv thought.

“You said you had a plan for me. Can you tell me what it is?”

“I’m not sure you want to know.”

Liv said, “You could let me out of here. I could help you around the house. I could be the daughter you never had. Or I could leave and never say a word to anyone.”

“You know neither one of those is a good choice,” Brenda said. “If you stayed, somebody would see you and wonder why a black girl was living with us. They’d wonder where you came from and somebody would figure it out. And there’s no way you can convince me you’d keep this all to yourself. Women aren’t made that way.”

“I am.”

“Oh,” Brenda said, bending forward again and whispering a few inches from Liv’s ear, “if only that were true.”

Liv closed her eyes. She thought about wheeling in her chair and plunging her thumbs into Brenda’s throat. If Bull wasn’t up there, she would have done it.

“I want to know,” Liv said.

“I’m waiting on Eldon,” Brenda said. “He’s got to go get his tank filled up. Then instead of dumping it at the treatment plant, he’s going to bring it back here.”

It took a moment for Liv to realize what she’d just heard.

“He’s going to dump sewage in the cellar?”

“Pretty much,” Brenda said in a conversational tone. “Then he can fire up the Bobcat and fill the rest of the hole with dirt. If anybody ever gets a notion to dig it up, they’ll realize this hole is full of sewage. There’s no way they’d keep digging and eventually find a body. We’ll just tell ’em our septic tank must have leaked.”

Liv closed her eyes.

“So you were asking me about pork chops. Is that because it’s my last meal?”

Brenda snorted, stopped brushing, and backed away.

She said, “Bull, cover me. I’m coming up.”

Dirt sifted into the cellar from the edge as Bull bent over and peered in. Liv saw that he was holding her handgun.

She turned her head to see Brenda clumsily mount the ladder and start to climb. She grunted on each rung.

Liv stood and approached the clay wall and grasped the stone and pulled. It didn’t budge.

As Brenda awkwardly climbed the ladder out of striking distance, she said, “Oh, I don’t know about it being your last meal. I might bring you some breakfast, so put all those containers and the silverware back in the bucket tonight so I can pull it up.”

When Brenda was out of the cellar, she said, “Thanks for letting me brush your hair. Maybe if it was different circumstances, we could have actually been friends, you know?”

Then to Bull: “Close it.”

Liv waited until the footfalls faded away, then turned back to the stone.

It shredded her to know that she might have missed the only chance she’d ever have.

26

It made a warped kind of sense, Joe thought. If Eldon Cates needed to hide a vehicle fast, where better than an elk camp that was unknown to everyone, including the game warden?

Revis Wentworth had given Joe an all-important clue to the location of the elk camp simply by describing which direction the two vehicles were going on the two-track road across the sagebrush bench. Joe had been on the road before, of course, when he’d found Lek 64. He’d taken a more established county road to the two-track, and when he intersected it, he’d turned east.

Several years ago, Joe had taken the road west through the foothills of the Bighorns and on into the timber. At the time, he was looking for a promontory, or high-altitude point, where he might “perch” and glass the terrain with his spotting scope. The road was little used, and Joe had given up looking for an opening in the timber as he ascended the mountain. It was difficult even finding a place to perform a three-point turn because the lodgepole pines were so thick.

His district was 1,800 square miles of mountains, plains, and broken country. There were hundreds of ancient two-tracks running through it, most leading nowhere in particular. If they didn’t lead to an obvious destination or were rarely used by hunters or fishermen, he simply forgot about them, like he had with this nameless path.

The western direction of the two-track from the sagebrush bench into the mountains would be convenient for an elk outfitter like Eldon Cates, he thought. Eldon could access it from his compound down below in the valley and never cross a highway or county road, therefore not likely to be seen by hunters or anyone else. The land the two-track crossed was a confusing mix of BLM, U.S. Forest Service, and private land. It was a baffling checkerboard on the map and likely to deter visitors. So it was perfect for Eldon.

If Joe was guessing right, anyhow.

Something else made sense, now that he thought about it. He’d wondered how it was that April’s possessions had been found at Tilden Cudmore’s place and in his vehicle if Cudmore wasn’t responsible for her attack. Or how Nate’s assailants had accessed the HF Bar Ranch through a locked gate and not been seen.

Although he had to first confirm the existence of the secret elk camp and that the Yarak, Inc. van was hidden there, dots were suddenly connecting.

—

HE HIT THE SPEED DIAL on his phone as his tires sizzled on the wet highway.

“County Sheriff’s Department,” the receptionist said.

“I need to talk to Sheriff Reed.”

“Joe?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in a meeting.”

“Get him out, please.”

The snow was sticking to the green shoots of grass on the side of the highway, and the storm was moving over the tops of the mountains and coming down the western side like rolls of smoke. Joe had his windshield wipers on low and the defroster on. He thought he could find the camp and get out before dark and before the storm enveloped the Twelve Sleep Valley.

“Reed here. What is it, Joe? I’m in a budget meeting with the county commissioners.”

“I got a lead,” Joe said. “Revis Wentworth was at Lek Sixty-four last Tuesday and he said he saw two vehicles crossing the sagebrush into the mountains. One fits the description of Eldon Cates’s old Suburban. The other fits the description of the white van Nate was driving the day he got ambushed.”

Reed paused. “What are you saying exactly?”

“That the Cateses were involved in the shooting. Either they did it on their own or somebody hired them to remove Nate’s van from the scene. They’re implicated one way or another. Moving that van made everyone wonder where Olivia Brannan had gone after the shooting and made people think she must have been in on it. But it doesn’t sound like she was there when Wentworth saw the two vehicles. The descriptions he gave me of the drivers sound like Eldon and Bull.”

Reed said, “Why would they go after Romanowski? What’s the connection there?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.”

“This is coming out of left field,” Reed said. “How are we going to prove anything? Do you need a couple of my guys?”

“Not yet,” Joe said. “But you might want to let them know what’s going on so they’ll be ready. I’m on my way up the mountain to see if I can find that van in Eldon Cates’s elk camp. If I find it, we can go after Eldon.”