With that, Hanlon headed for the door and Air Allen. As he opened the vestibule door, Joe heard him mutter, “Or really bad if you fuck it up.”
4
STILL SEETHING FROM THE ENCOUNTER WITH GOVERNOR ALLEN AND his chief of staff, Joe drove his pickup from the airport into the town of Saddlestring with his Labrador, Daisy, on the passenger side and the file marked KATE SHELFORD-LONGDEN jammed down between the bench seats. Behind him, the roar of Air Allen thrummed through the air as the aircraft took off for Jackson Hole.
It was the worst of January: a rare overcast day with a steady twenty-miles-per-hour wind out of the north. Cattle in the meadows near town crowded together into black Angus gangs. A sheen of ice covered the streets, and the wind sculpted what was left of the last blizzard into razor-sharp drifts that clung to lawns and open spaces. A loose dog that looked like a cross between a hound and a hyena ran across the highway in front of Joe with a single severed mule deer leg in its mouth.
He turned on First into the parking lot of the Twelve Sleep County Library and parked next to Marybeth’s van. The sign near the grille of her vehicle read RESERVED FOR DIRECTOR.
“Take a breath,” he said aloud to himself, although Daisy looked over from where she was curled up as if he’d spoken something interesting and wise.
*
“I DON’T HAVE a good feeling about this,” Joe said to Marybeth as he sat across her desk in her office after explaining what had happened. “And I don’t have a good feeling about our new governor.”
“Well, that’s a problem,” she said, shaking her head.
Marybeth wore a dark wool suit with narrow lapels and a white blouse. A stray blond hair on her shoulder caught the light. Budget sheets covered her desk.
“The timing could be better,” she said.
The last few months had been difficult for them. The state-owned home outside of town where they’d lived for years and raised their three girls had been burned to the ground in an arson fire. They’d lost one of Marybeth’s horses in the blaze as well as their beloved Corgi/Lab mix, Tube—or so they’d thought.
The only good thing to come out of the disaster was when Tube had waddled down from the juniper scrub above the blackened debris a week later. His coat was singed and his pride wounded, but he’d apparently survived by catching and eating gophers. Marybeth and Lucy had been thrilled and they referred to the incident as “The Resurrection of the Tube.”
Homeowners’ insurance had helped them replace lost clothing, utensils, and other items, but the painful fact was that so much of their history had burned up. Boxes of artwork from Sheridan’s grade school years, April’s scrapbooks about rodeo and travel, Lucy’s dancing costumes—things that could never be replicated.
Construction on a new game warden home was going as slowly as expected, given the red tape involved. Joe often drove the eight miles up Bighorn Road to see what progress had been made, and so far, the debris had been cleared away, but no new construction had begun. Seeing the property like that always filled him with a sense of melancholy.
So they were living in a rented condominium in a complex near the Twelve Sleep River with the department grudgingly paying the rent. That had its challenges as well.
The landlord allowed Daisy and Tube in the town house, but Marybeth had had to board her two remaining horses. They were at a stable owned by the county prosecutor, Dulcie Schalk, Marybeth’s friend and riding companion, but still, Marybeth missed them acutely.
The move had been difficult for Joe, too. It wasn’t lost on him that the fire had caused his family to move backward through time. Before the girls had been born, Joe and Marybeth had lived in a double-wide trailer outside Lovell, and they were in an apartment in town when he’d been given his first district to manage. They’d moved up to an actual home during his second stint outside of Meeteetse. Now, years later, he was descending the ladder again.
It rankled Joe, too, that his downward trajectory had long been predicted by Marybeth’s mother, Missy Vankueren.
Missy despised Joe as much as she pined for Marybeth, whom she was convinced had married beneath her. Missy and Joe clashed often, and Missy’s machinations to convince Marybeth to leave her husband had grown increasingly more desperate. Unfortunately, she had the means to support her efforts.
Missy had been married six times, each time to a man wealthier than the one she had left behind. Joe had thought she’d finally get her comeuppance when she was charged in the murder of husband number five, but no, she’d been found innocent, and then protected herself against further charges by marrying her defense attorney, Marcus Hand.
Luckily for Joe, Marybeth wasn’t like her mother in any respect.
Even though, he thought with a grimace whenever he drove up to the rented town house, Missy had a point.
*
AND NOT EVERYONE liked the idea of a game warden living in the building. A divorced woman in her sixties who stayed home all day and occupied a condominium on the top floor of the building objected to looking outside and seeing Joe’s truck parked in the lot with animal carcasses in the bed of it. She’d called the police, as well as the sheriff’s department, to complain about it and had sent a letter to Game and Fish headquarters in Cheyenne. Joe had explained to her that retrieving and investigating dead game was a part of his duties, but that hadn’t blunted her outrage and revulsion. Finally, he’d agreed to cover the carcasses with canvas and blankets in the future, and that seemed to have quieted her down.
Lucy’s star turn in the high school production had been a wonderful break from all this, but now things were even worse than before.
*
“IT WASN’T AN OFFER,” Joe said. “It was an ultimatum.”
“How long would you be gone?” Marybeth asked.
He shrugged.
Joe had been assigned to other areas of the state multiple times and his absences had varied from a week to several months. Once, he’d been assigned to Jackson Hole too long and it had frayed their marriage. They’d promised each other it would never happen again, and when Joe was away now, he tried to call home every night.
“What can you tell me about the secret assignment?” she asked, genuinely intrigued.
“It’s in Saratoga.”
“Really? You’ll get to see Sheridan, then.”
“There’s that. She might even have some insight into the matter.”
“Maybe you can get an inkling of what she’s planning next,” Marybeth said with a sigh. “She really won’t say. I can’t decide if it’s because she’s keeping it close to the vest or she just doesn’t know.”
Sheridan was the oldest and had paved the way for her younger sisters, showing them how to be independent and to think for themselves. Of the three, Joe had probably spent the most time with her when she was growing up, because she was interested in his job and loved to ride along when he was in the field. She was comfortable outdoors and had become an apprentice falconer in her teens. Joe had always assumed she was destined for an outdoor job of some kind. Either that, or law enforcement. Instead, though, she’d declined graduate school and taken a job at Silver Creek Ranch while she sorted out her next steps.
“I think there’s a boy,” Marybeth said.
Joe winced.
“It’s not that she’s said it outright,” she continued. “It’s what she hasn’t said. She’s never said she’s lonely, even though it has to get kind of lonely on a guest ranch in the winter when there are no guests. Her sisters probably know more because they text all the time, but they haven’t spilled the beans.”
Joe and Marybeth knew Sheridan had dated in college, but as far as they knew, she’d had no serious men in her life. Sheridan wasn’t one to share her feelings until she was absolutely sure about them.
“If there’s a boy, she probably doesn’t want to see me around,” Joe said.
“But you’ll find out and report back, right?” Marybeth said with a smile.
“Of course.”
“So what does the governor want you to do down there?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to keep it confidential,” Joe said.
“With the public, sure. But I’m your wife.”
“You sure are,” he said.
“Damn tootin’.”
“Have you heard of Kate Shelford-Longden?”
Marybeth’s eyes got wide. “You mean Cowgirl Kate?”
“So you know.”
“Of course I know about her. Cowgirl Kate—how interesting.”
“Why?” Joe asked.
Marybeth said, “The British tabloids are obsessed with three things: reality TV stars, footballers—I’m talking about soccer players—and royalty. Kate ticked two of those boxes: TV and footballers. Both are clients of hers.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. In general, Marybeth was better informed about the world than he was. When they were watching television together and a vaguely familiar face came on the screen and Joe wondered who it was, she not only knew the actor’s name, but who he or she was married to, as well as who they’d been previously married to, plus their earlier roles. It was the same with questions about medical procedures, food, songs, politics, history, and even the royal family.
“So the governor wants you to try and find her?”
“Yup. Or what happened to her.”
His wife cocked her head. “Does he suspect something bad?”
Joe shrugged.
“Do you want me to see what I can find out about her?”
Joe nodded. Marybeth had been invaluable to him on cases in the past. She had access not only to her vast library resources, but also to law enforcement databases. In fact, he thought, he should have told the governor that the main reason he’d solved the majority of his investigations was the research and background material supplied to him by his wife.
“I suppose Lucy and I can cope for a few weeks without you,” she said.
He was puzzled by her reaction until she said, “Joe, every January you wander around the house grumping about all the paperwork you have to do. You’re at your best when you’re outside every day, and we both know that. Plus, this could be really interesting. It’s an actual whodunit with an English twist. A real Masterpiece Theatre mystery right here in Wyoming. If we could solve it...”
“What?” he asked sourly. He noted the we.
“You might see your name in the British tabloids.”
“That hasn’t actually ever been a goal of mine,” he said.
5
AFTER A QUICK CHEESEBURGER LUNCH AT THE BURG-O-PARDNER, JOE drove out to his temporary office in an unused room of the Department of Transportation building outside of town. It would have been more convenient to have an office space in town, closer to the condo, until the house was rebuilt, but a supervisor at Game and Fish headquarters had rejected the idea of paying rent at a commercial office building and worked out an interagency agreement with the Saddlestring DOT supervisor.
State agencies were tribes, and the DOT tribe didn’t usually interact with the Game and Fish tribe. Joe credited highway patrol officers for the tension and he’d had several run-ins with individual troopers who’d muttered about how game wardens “drove around with their dogs all day in the woods looking for fishing spots and collecting a state paycheck.” Not all the troopers were like that, by any means, he knew, but there were enough of them to keep the feud alive.
No more than a large closet, his office was at the end of a hallway with a view of fuel pumps outside in the icy yard. Headquarters had provided him with an old computer and printer, but he’d had to bother highway department staff to borrow a desk, a chair, empty filing cabinets, and a garbage can. He got stares from exhausted snowplow drivers for his occasional use of the break room. Using “shared” resources such as office supplies was such a complicated interagency procedure that he’d simply bought his own at the Walmart in Saddlestring.
While Daisy curled up on an old blanket in the corner, Joe sat down at the desk and opened the file marked KATE SHELFORD-LONGDEN.
The material inside consisted of a seven-page incident report written by a DCI agent, as well as photos, interviews, and statements obtained by other agents. The rest of the file included letters from the British Embassy to Governor Allen, printed-out email inquiries from reporters, friends, and relatives of Shelford-Longden, and over sixty items (most from online sources) from UK newspapers including the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Mirror, the Daily Dispatch, the Telegraph, and a couple of pieces from the Times.
It was a lot to review.
Rather than let himself be influenced by the incident report and summaries from the DCI, Joe placed that report facedown on the desk for later. Instead, he decided, he would read all the background material on the case first. It would be interesting to see afterward if the DCI agents had come up with theories on the situation that Joe agreed with.
He shuffled through all the material and divided it into four categories, making a pile for each: letters and correspondence, statements and interviews, photos, and newspaper clippings. Then he set about collating the documents by date. On a fresh legal pad, he wrote Kate Timeline.
The oldest document in the stack was a Silver Creek Ranch manifest of visitors for the week of July 23 to 30, Sunday to Sunday. The printout was extremely detailed and went on for thirty-six pages. He noted the dates of her stay at the top left of the legal pad.
Joe found the manifest fascinating because it was a glimpse into the world of an extremely exclusive resort as well as into the kind of people who could afford to stay there. The more Joe studied the document, the more he realized that the listing was not simply a guest list, but also a dossier that could be consulted by every employee at Silver Creek Ranch to cater to and better serve each customer.
Eighty guests had been at the ranch during the time period Kate—he was already thinking of her by her first name—had been there.
In the far left column of each page was the guest’s name as well as a phonetic pronunciation of the name.
He flipped through the pages until he found her. Joe read on:
GUEST: Katherine Shelford-Longden
PREFERRED Name: Kate
DATES OF VISIT: 23–30 July
TRANSPORTATION: Will hire car at Denver Airport and self-drive
ADDRESS: 1-5-107 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, London SW7 5LR, United Kingdom
EMAIL:
[email protected] TELEPHONE: (W) 44 20 7496 5577 (Mobile) 44 7911 212545
OCCUPATION: Managing Director, Athena Public Relations
GROUP OR FIT: FIT
COMPANIONS: Traveling alone
AGE RANGE: 40–50
FITNESS RANGE: Good for a Brit (drink & smoke)
FOOD RESTRICTIONS: Would say bloody red meat, but I’m coming to Wyoming!
ALLERGIES: Ex-husband and Donald Trump
HOUSEKEEPING NEEDS: No telephone, television, or newspapers, please!
CELEBRATIONS DURING STAY (BIRTHDAYS, ANNIVERSARIES, ETC.): New Lease on Life
SPECIAL REQUESTS: Meet a real cowboy—ha!
FIRST RANCH EXPERIENCE?: Yes
OTHER FOUR-STAR RESORT EXPERIENCES: Laucala Island Resort, Fiji; Nayara Springs, Arenal, Costa Rica; Singita Sabi Sand, South Africa; Anantara Peace Haven Tangalle Resort, Galle, Sri Lanka; Borgo Egnazia, Savelletri di Fasano, Italy; and others.
ACTIVITIES:
☒ Horseback Riding
☐ Fly-Fishing
☒ Target Shooting
☒ Upland Bird Hunting
☐ Yoga
☐ Hiking
☐ Whitewater Rafting
☐ Glamping
☐ Archery
☐ Spa
☐ Climbing Wall
☐ ATV Adventure
☐ Tennis
☐ Golf
☐ Culinary Classes
☒ Western/Cultural Experience
☐ Other
HOW CAN WE MAKE THIS THE
GREATEST VACATION/HOLIDAY OF YOUR LIFE?: See “special requests” and “celebrations” answers above—ha!
Another column listed “Six Months,” “Three Months,” “30 Days,” and “One Week.” Each had been checked. Joe didn’t know what the list meant.
It appeared from the dossier and her sometimes flippant and humorous answers that she had either filled out all the questions herself or someone had transcribed them from an interview or correspondence. He guessed the latter. He had no idea what an “FIT” was, and all the resorts she’d listed were completely unfamiliar to him, but they indicated she was quite a world traveler. He made a note to ask someone what “glamping” was.
He noted that she’d indicated she’d “hire” a car instead of rent one and that she referred to herself as “Managing Director” instead of CEO—both British terms. He keyed in on a couple of her responses, particularly “New Lease on Life” and “Meet a real cowboy—ha!”
The last item on the personal dossier was “Staff Liaison.” The staff personally assigned to Kate were identified as “LR” and “SP2.”
Joe didn’t know what those designations meant either, but he wondered if “SP2” referred to Sheridan Pickett, his oldest daughter.
He turned next to the newspaper clippings, which was the largest stack of the four. He arranged the items in the order they had been published.
Joe noted the differences between the style of the articles he was reading versus the more familiar—but more stilted—style of the American press. The British stories had stimulating headlines and were written in a more vibrant and conversational tone.
The first item about Kate, from the August 4 edition of the Daily Mail, was titled PR HEAD REPORTED MISSING WHILST ON HOLIDAY.
Joe smiled at the word whilst.
It read:
Katherine Shelford-Longden, 43, managing director of the leading public relations and advertising firm Athena, has been reported missing after not returning from a U.S. ranch holiday, according to a company spokesman.
According to the spokesman, Kate Shelford-Longden was scheduled to return to the UK on the morning of July 31 but she never checked in or boarded BA flight 218 in Denver, Colorado, on July 30. The company grew concerned after calls, texts, and emails to her went unanswered.