He stared at the assembly and thought about it. The clay was obviously plastic explosive, likely C-4 or Semtex. The wires fed into a thin silver tube—a blasting cap—inserted into the lump. The idea, he guessed, was to leave the bomb under his truck until they decided to trigger it with a remote call to the cell phone, which would activate the explosives in back and blow his truck in half using its own fuel. They wouldn’t even have to tail him—just be sure he was driving the roads of Medicine Wheel County, preferably on a series of steep switchbacks with cell reception—and hit the speed dial.
Then: Boom.
Conceivably, Joe would be injured or killed instantly or lose control of the vehicle and plunge off the mountain. The gasoline fire would consume the truck and melt away the components and render the cell phone unrecognizable.
Still, he thought, it was a sloppy and desperate act. There were holes in the plot. State and federal forensics units could determine the origin of the explosion, the specific brand of plastic, and maybe find the wires and cell phone detonator. The prepaid phone could possibly be traced to where it was purchased, and by whom.
Joe knew he’d gotten their attention. His first inclination was to go right back after them. Bill Critchfield and Gene Smith weren’t hard to find. But what would he do—arrest them and take them to the county jail, which was run by coconspirator R. C. Mead? Or in front of Judge Bartholomew, who also was likely in on the act?
And he didn’t dare try to call any backup. Latta was involved, and likely the town cops and sheriff’s deputies. A request made by dispatch through channels would be instantly heard by all the players.
In the past, he knew who he’d call for help: Nate Romanowski. But Nate had apparently crossed over as well.
Then he recalled his promise to Marybeth, and vowed to leave Medicine Wheel County the next day. The Feds and state boys could follow up.
The question, though, was whether he could keep himself safe until the big guns moved in to take over.
A thought hit him. What if the explosive had been planted not to kill him while he drove, but to be activated remotely to warn him off? And what if they decided to call the number on the cell phone at that moment, once the four men were far enough away not to be tied to the scene?
Joe felt his gut contract, and he stared at the cell phone, willing it not to light up with a call. He quickly scrambled back to the gas tank and reached up—his movements seemed incredibly slow in his mind—and pulled the blasting cap out of the lump. Then he switched ends and cut the cell phone loose from the tape and powered it off. If they tried to call now, he thought with relief, nothing would happen.
• • •
“SORRY, GIRL,” Joe said to Daisy on the bench seat of his truck as he drove out of the parking lot. “You’ve been cooped up all night. But you’re a lousy watchdog.”
She responded to the tone of his voice and not his words with a rhythmic thumping of her tail on the inside of the passenger door.
The bomb components were in a large plastic evidence bag on the floor of the cab. The cell phone was off and the wires and blasting cap weren’t attached to anything, but Joe was nervous about the lump of explosives. He drove extra-slowly to the apple orchard, avoiding potholes and rocks. He blew out a breath of relief when he reached his destination and killed the engine. But he made it a point not to slam his door shut, and eased it closed.
The move would puzzle his enemies, he figured. Anna would no doubt call them at dawn to report Joe missing, his pickup gone. A quick check of his room would reveal that he’d packed up and left during the night.
He wondered what they’d do. Would they try and locate him before calling the number on the cell phone under the pickup? Or would they panic and hold off until they knew it would be a clean kill? Either way, he figured, they’d be confused . . . and alarmed.
• • •
JOE CONVINCED DAISY to hop up on the rear platform of the ATV. The key to his room at the hunting lodge was in his front pocket, and he couldn’t think of a better place to bunker in and get some sleep. He started the four-wheeler and began to pull away from his truck when a thought came to him that made him grin.
Then he cranked on the handlebars and returned to the pickup. If the C-4 was stable enough not to explode on the ride to the orchard, it was stable enough to survive a trail ride as well, he thought. But all the way to the Black Forest Inn he drove slowly and cautiously, avoiding rocks and bumps, in a cold sweat, despite the freezing air.
Overhead, a thick wall of storm clouds extinguished the stars as it advanced from the northwest.
• • •
THERE WAS NO ONE at the front counter when Joe led Daisy into the lobby of the old hunting lodge, just as there had been no one about outside. He removed his hat and whapped it on his thigh to clear the half-inch of snow that had gathered on the brim. The door to the saloon was shut and locked, and the interior lights were muted. If the decades-old bull moose head on the wall could have seen through its dusty glass eyes, it would have beheld a dirty and disheveled man with a pair of ATV saddlebags over his shoulder, a shotgun in his hand, and a tired yellow Labrador on his boot heels.
Joe circled behind the lectern and checked the guest registry book. No Nate Romanowski. He saw where Alice had written Maint next to room 318, which corresponded to the key she’d given him. He guessed Maint meant “maintenance,” the reason she listed for not renting it out. All the other rooms in the lodge were full.
He nodded at his luck. For the hundred dollars cash that was now in Alice’s pocket, he had inadvertently gone off the grid.
• • •
ROOM 318 WAS SMALL, dark, and smelled of carpet fungus and historic flatulence. The walls were fake wood-grain sheets of paneling that were blistered from a leaking roof or broken ceiling pipe. The double bed sagged in the middle and was lit by a naked low-wattage bulb that hung from a cord. The curtains were pulled across a tiny window, and they looked like they were made of lace. Obviously, Joe thought, Templeton’s men hadn’t renovated it yet.
Joe parted the curtains to find a view of the parking lot. The window opened roughly, but it was too small to climb through if it came to that.
The bolt on the lock didn’t fit snugly into the doorframe, despite Joe’s putting his shoulder to it. So in addition to attaching the chain lock—which was lamely held by two small screws to a three-quarter-inch strip of plywood—Joe wedged the top of the only hard-backed chair in the room under the knob. He dropped the saddlebags on the seat of the chair to give it some weight.
He plugged in his cell phone to recharge, then jacked a shell into the receiver of his shotgun and propped it in the corner near the headboard. The .40 Glock went on the floor on the right side of his bed so he could reach down in the dark and raise it quickly if necessary.
The bedsprings moaned as he flopped back on the bed fully dressed. It was two-thirty in the morning and the inn was quiet except for snoring sounds through the thin wall behind him.
• • •
IF HE WAS GOING to try to get some sleep, he thought, he had a three-hour window before hunters started getting up and pounding on one another’s doors and wrestling guns and gear down the hallways.
Joe shut off the light and closed his eyes but couldn’t will himself to sleep. Nate was in the hills, there’d been a bomb under his pickup, and in the morning Templeton’s minions would be looking for him.
He settled in for a short and miserable night.
Black Forest Inn
“What do you mean, not until tomorrow?” Joe said angrily to Chuck Coon.
“Realistically, it may be a couple of days.”
“Are you sure? In a couple of days, I may be dead.”
“Have you looked outside?”
He grunted as he swung to his feet and limped to the window. His lower back ached from sleeping on the sagging mattress.
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Fifteen inches of snow covered the ground outside, and it was still coming down. The pine forest had been transformed into two tones: white and gray. Trees looked ghostly through the falling snow, and the hills looked quiet and muted—as if everything was on hold for a while.
“It’s worse in Cheyenne because the wind has kicked up as usual,” Coon said. “Everything’s closed—the airport, the interstates, the schools. Half my guys didn’t even make it in this morning. What a freak damn storm. They didn’t even predict it. It’s just like you wake up and it’s a whiteout.”
Joe groaned.
He’d spent the previous thirty minutes on the phone with Coon—pausing only to take a quick call from Marybeth to say he’d call her back—recapping all that had gone on the night before and what he suspected. Coon admonished him for dismantling the bomb instead of leaving it intact for forensics, but he was as intrigued as Joe was about locating Nate Romanowski. In fact, the agent-in-charge seemed almost jaunty—which rubbed Joe the wrong way. Joe’s story had energized Coon to a surprising degree, Joe thought. The man was on the hunt now, armed with real evidence. Joe understood the feeling but couldn’t share it because of his circumstances. The dreary hotel room, lack of sleep, and growing fear that he’d be found by Critchfield and the others didn’t allow him to share Coon’s enthusiasm.
Coon spoke as if he were thinking out loud: “We finally have actionable evidence on the operation up there, thanks to our midnight bombers. You can personally identify the four of them, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you get any photos?”
“No.”
“I wish you had.”
“Chuck, I didn’t even think of it at the time, and I’m not sure I could have risked it.” Joe paused and said, “But they don’t know that.”
Coon chuckled. “We might be able to suggest you did, is what you’re saying. Something like, ‘What would you say if you found out that Joe Pickett took a camera-phone shot of the four of you together in the sheriff’s SUV?’ And see what they do.”
“Yup.”
“If we can get somebody to talk—and we now have four suspects—one or more of them might give us something we can build on. I’m particularly interested in sweating this Bill Critchfield. He might be our link between the bomb under your truck and Wolfgang Templeton.”
“That’s why I made that stupid call to your voice message yesterday. I was trying to flush them out.”
“And just maybe it worked. I still can’t condone all your methods, though.”
“Oh well,” Joe said.
They talked about sending state DCI and federal evidence techs to search the ranch with sonar for buried bodies.
Coon said, “That makes it even more important we do this right. From what you’re telling me, we need to storm that county with every man we’ve got and grab them all at once before they know what’s happening, so we can isolate the four bombers from each other. We can’t pick them up one by one or they might warn the rest in the food chain. So that means we need at least four arrest teams and maybe even extra manpower from South Dakota or Montana. I need my full forensics team to go over that motel cabin to pull out the spy gear you say is there, and the bomb experts to go over that device you found. We need to get approval from D.C. for an operation on that scale.”
“How long will that take?” Joe asked.
“Like I said, a couple of days. You know how the bureaucracy works—or doesn’t.”
“I want to get out of here as soon as I can,” Joe said, parting the moth-eaten curtains with the back of his hand to look outside again. Most of the hunting vehicles were long gone. Nothing excited hunters more than fresh snow to track game. “Everybody knows everybody around here. It may not take them long to figure out where I am.”
“I’ll make some calls,” Coon said. “I’ll call you back after I’ve talked to D.C. Guys are slowly making their way in here now, so I’ll have a better idea of what kind of manpower we’ve got by this afternoon. I’ll also give the heads-up to Rulon that his range rider might have broken this thing wide open. He’ll need to give us his blessing to proceed, because he’s said in the past—many times—that he’d arrest any federal official who takes action in the state without his approval.”
Joe noted the disdain in Coon’s tone, and it made him smile.
Coon continued, “I don’t think there’ll be any problem this time, since he was the one who sent you up there. But keep in mind even if everything goes perfectly, it’s still five hours from here to there on the roads. There’s no way we can fly up there in this weather. So you’ll need to just lie low and stay off their radar until we can get there.”
“I thought I was supposed to make my report and go home,” Joe said. “That was the deal.”
“That deal is no longer operable,” Coon laughed. “Now we need you to stay. It’ll make a big difference that you’re with us when we brace those four bombers—especially that other game warden. They need to see your face and know that you can place them at the motel last night. That’ll turn the heat up on them. Make sense?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, discouraged.
Coon mused, “I’m thinking that even without the definitive photo of them together from you, we can still pull trace and DNA evidence from inside the sheriff’s vehicle that will put them at the scene. Not to mention fingerprints and trace from the bomb itself. Where did you say it was now?”
“In a safe place,” Joe said.
Coon paused. “What does that mean?”
“I hid it someplace they won’t think to look for it. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“But what if—”
Joe finished Coon’s thought for him. “What if they get to me and by the time you get up here, I’m not around to show you where it is or place them at the scene? Well, maybe that’ll give you another reason to get things moving on your end.”
Coon chuckled. Joe didn’t appreciate it.
“Whatever you do, Joe, don’t engage them. Just stay where you are and don’t let yourself be seen. We can’t risk them finding you and blowing the case before we can move on it.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” Joe said.
“Yeah—it didn’t exactly come out the way I wanted it to sound,” Coon said, his voice contrite.
“But it’s what you meant.”
Joe took Coon’s silence as agreement.
“I’m trapped here for the moment,” Joe said, explaining that his pickup was miles away through the forest and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to retrieve it.
“There’s something else,” Joe added. “I need money.”
“We all need money.”
“No—I need cash. I’m tapped out, is what I’m saying.”
Coon said, “The governor didn’t give you a budget?”
“No.”
“Well—this is uncomfortable,” Coon sighed.
They worked out a way that Coon could transfer seven hundred dollars from a bureau emergency fund directly into Joe and Marybeth’s bank account. Joe could draw it out from the saloon ATM when it cleared, which he hoped would be soon.
“You’ll have to pay that back,” Coon said.
“Talk to the governor about that.”
Coon groaned but agreed.
“I’ll call you back as soon as I know when we can move,” Coon said.
• • •
BEFORE JOE COULD speed-dial Marybeth, his phone lit up again. Coon calling back.
“That was quick,” Joe said.
“Ha-ha. No, I just remembered I had something to tell you. I forgot about it until now. Didn’t you say this fancy southern guy you ran into was named Whip?”
“Yes.”
“We might have something on him. The photo we’ve got matches your description, and I’ll send it to your ph
one in a second so you can ID it.”
“So who is he?” Joe asked.
“He might be named Robert Whipple, originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. My guys did a search of FBI databases and got more than a few hits on him. If it’s this Robert Whipple, you need to not run into him again.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Joe said. He could hear Coon shuffling through paperwork so he could summarize it over the phone.
“Robert Whipple, aka Whip, was a CIA Black Operator during Operation Desert Storm. He was with an off-the-books rendition and interrogations unit, but his cover got blown by a whistle-blower in the same unit who claimed Whipple murdered a couple of Iraqi Republican Guards who wouldn’t cooperate. The whistle-blower said Whip shot one of the Republican Guards in the back of the head with a .22 pistol in front of the other. The scared Iraqi told Whip everything he wanted to know, but it turned out the information was bad. Whip supposedly came back the next week and put a .22 round into that man’s head as well.
“Let’s see,” Coon said, reading further: “By the time the whistleblower made his allegations, Whip had vanished into thin air. He’s never been arrested, and his whereabouts were unknown—until possibly now. But his name was associated with several high-profile disappearances, kind of the same deal as Templeton himself. Dirty people seem to know his name—Whip—but they didn’t give enough information to tie Whipple directly to any murders.”
Joe felt his chest constrict. Again, he parted the curtains on the window. There were no new vehicles in the lot.
His phone chimed and he opened the photo message sent from Coon.
“Yup,” Joe said. The dark features, hooded eyes, and feminine mouth. “That’s him.”
“Man,” Coon laughed, “there is a nest of dangerous outlaws up there. I may end up getting a promotion out of this.”