She sat in the passenger seat wearing a sweater over her shoulders with her briefcase on her lap and her phone in her hand as Joe drove through Saddlestring. She looked to Joe like she was trying to be a good sport by coming along with him. He was embarrassed by the unkempt appearance of the gear and paperwork stuffed into every nook and cranny inside the cab, and he was grateful he hadn’t brought Tube or Daisy along as well that morning.
“It’s kind of my office,” he said.
“I understand. So what is it we’re doing?”
“Checking on a couple of low-life poachers,” Joe said. “I’ve seen them around. They bounce from entry-level job to entry-level job and usually quit in a huff. Neither one of them graduated high school, although Bryce may have gotten his GED. I’ve seen Ryan McDermott’s name in the police blotter a few times for DWI, and I think Pendergast might have been picked up once for breaking into cars. I haven’t seen them out in the field, though, so I always considered them city troublemakers, not poachers.”
She shook her head as he talked, and said, “It’s troubling what happens to youth that are without opportunities.”
Joe shook his head and said, “Bryce’s parents are high school teachers, and Ryan McDermott’s dad is an Episcopalian bishop. They’ve had plenty of opportunities—they just didn’t want ’em.”
“Oh,” she said quickly, and looked away.
Joe said, “Sometimes people just turn out mean. You’ll go crazy trying to figure out ways to prevent it from happening altogether. The only thing we can do is arrest the bad guys and put them away if we can.”
She nodded and said, “This we can agree on.”
“Some common ground,” Joe said, smiling. He said, “People who violate our game and fish regulations often go on to do real harm to innocent citizens. It’s like a gateway drug to them to worse crimes down the road. You’ve heard of the ‘broken windows’ theory of law enforcement?”
She nodded. “If we rigorously prosecute even the smallest crimes, it will set a tone and prevent bigger crimes, right?”
“Right. Well, this is the frontier version. Someone who would kill an animal out of season for the thrill of it indicates a general lack of respect for rules and laws, and sets the stage for something worse to come. That’s why I throw the book at ’em if I catch ’em.”
She considered what he said, and seemed to agree, he thought.
—
HE DROVE into an unincorporated area that hugged the west side of the town limit. The asphalt road gave way to rutted dirt, and the neat rows of suburban homes gave way to wildly incongruous houses, trailers, and lot-sized collections of junked cars and weeds.
He briefed her on the crime itself and the entries Sheridan had found on Facebook. LGD listened with interest and said, “Do you really think they’re stupid enough to put the pictures up on the Internet?”
“Oh, yeah,” Joe said.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yup. And nothing makes me madder than slaughtering an animal and leaving it to rot.”
“But to post things on Facebook . . . How dumb can they be?”
“Dumb,” Joe said. “Most criminals aren’t very smart—that’s why they’re criminals. I’ve caught guys because they mounted the heads of illegal trophies in their living rooms. This is a new wrinkle, though, putting up a kind of cyber-trophy.”
—
“THESE PEOPLE,” she said, looking out her window at the ramshackle homes and trailers with tires thrown on the roof to keep the tops from blowing off in the wind. Then, catching herself, she said, “You know what I mean.”
“They’re not all bad,” Joe said defensively. “The kind of crime we’re investigating is actually pretty rare. Most folks around here hate poachers as much as I do, and they turn them in. They look at wildlife as a resource. They don’t want it violated any more than we do.”
“There are degrees of violation,” Joe said, knowing he was pushing the line. “If I find somebody who killed a deer to feed his family, I usually don’t come down on him as hard as someone who killed a deer for the antlers only. And this type of thing—leaving the carcass—deserves no mercy at all.”
She didn’t look at him when she said, “So you’re telling me you make your own rules?”
“I’d consider it discretion,” he said.
Then: “Do all my game wardens make their own rules?”
“Can’t say,” Joe said, realizing he’d provided fuel to one of her burning fires.
“I worry that getting too close to the locals might make some of my people go . . . native,” she said, looking closely at him for his reaction. “You know, it might not be as easy to arrest somebody whom you saw at PTA board the night before, for example. Or you might be a little more sympathetic than necessary to a local rancher making a damage claim if that same rancher is on your softball team.”
Joe shrugged. “Seems to me we do a better job if we know the people we’re working for—if we’re among them.”
“Unless you forget who you’re working for,” she said, and shifted in her seat in a way that said the conversation was over.
—
HE TURNED on Fourth Street and slowed down under an overgrown canopy of ancient cottonwood trees. The duplex he was looking for, Bryce Pendergast’s last known address, was one half of the house. There was a marked difference between the condition of the duplex on the left side and the one on the right. The right side was freshly painted, and there were flowers planted on the side of the porch and floral curtains in the window. The right side of the lawn was green and well maintained. An ancient Buick was parked under a carport.
On the left side of the duplex was a jacked-up Ford F-150 parked in front on the curb so it blocked the sidewalk, and the small yard between the unpainted picket fence and the front door was dried out and marked by burned yellow ovals on both sides of the broken walk between the gate and the door.
“Guess which one Bryce lives in,” Joe said, pulling over and killing the engine.
He called in his position to dispatch and said he planned to question a potential suspect in a wildlife violation and gave the name and address.
“GF-forty-eight clear,” he said, and racked the mic. Then he remembered and said to Greene-Dempsey: “I should have said GF-twenty-one, I guess.”
She nodded nervously, her eyes dancing between Joe and the dark duplex.
Joe dug a digital audio micro-recorder out of the satchel on the floor and checked the power, then turned it on and dropped it in his front breast pocket.
She said, “Is that legal? To record somebody like that?”
“Yes. As long as one party knows the conversation is recorded, it’s legal,” he said patiently.
“So you’re just going to walk up there and knock on the door?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to call for help? For backup?”
“Don’t have any,” Joe said, trying to maintain his calm. “Plus, I think the sheriff’s department has enough on its plate right now, don’t you think?”
“Still . . .”
“Relax,” he said. “This isn’t unusual. I’ll go up there and see if Bryce is in, and if he is, I’ll check him out.”
“How? You don’t have a warrant . . .”
Joe said, “Here’s what I do, and I’ve done this many times. It’s my standard operating procedure. If Bryce or Ryan McDermott come to the door, I’ll be friendly and professional and say, ‘Hi, guys. I guess you know why I’m here.’ And then I’ll see what happens, whether they act like they don’t know, or they start lying and overtalking, or what. I’ve had people confess right on the spot quite a few times. Sometimes, they blurt out confessions to crimes I didn’t even know about, and sometimes they implicate their buddies.”
Greene-Dempsey looked at him with obvious doubt.
She said, “Maybe you should wait a few days for this. You know—after the sheriff’s department can provide some help.”
He thought about it, then shook his head. He said, “It’s been a week since that antelope was shot. They probably think they got away with it. But something about killing wildlife bugs many of them worse than if they’d shot a person. It’s like that little tiny bit of conscience they’ve got tells them it’s really wrong. So when you just ask them, sometimes they’ll start spilling.”