“That’s what’s eating at me,” Joe said. “We might as well have been trailing a banner that said, ‘The guy you’ve been hunting for is right here.’”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said. “There’s no way you could have known someone was after him, right? And there’s no way you can even be sure it was Dave Farkus.”
“True. But it was somebody, and I just sat there and watched it happen. It kind of makes me feel . . . dirty. Like I saw something I shouldn’t have seen: the last seconds of a man’s life.”
She shivered and took another sip of wine. Marybeth had once referred to Farkus as the Zelig of the Bighorns for his uncanny knack of turning up in the middle of dangerous situations time and again. Just like her husband.
“And we know who did it, don’t we?” she asked.
“We don’t know that at all,” Joe said.
She leaned forward and lowered her tone, because Lucy was in her bedroom not far down the hall and she didn’t want to be overheard.
“It was Dallas Cates.”
“He’s the number one suspect.”
“Has he been arrested?”
“No. And I can’t guarantee he will be.”
“Take off your law enforcement hat and put on your thinking cap,” she said. “We know Dallas Cates was released from the penitentiary less than a year ago. We’ve been waiting for him to resurface. Dreading is a better word.
“Then, two nights ago you get a message from Dave Farkus saying he saw Dallas here in town. Maybe Dallas saw him and figured out he might contact you. So he went after him with two of his friends to shut him up.”
Joe nodded.
“We know Dallas is capable of anything and we know he’s likely to come after us,” she said. “You need to talk to Mike Reed about finding Dallas and his thugs and arresting them tomorrow.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Joe said.
“I know it isn’t. You need evidence and probable cause. I haven’t lived with a law enforcement officer all these years and not learned that. But we know in our hearts who did this and why, right? And we need to nip it in the bud before things get worse for all of us.”
“Nip what in the bud?” Lucy asked from the hallway. “Is this about Dallas Cates being back in town?”
Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks.
—
NEARLY TWO YEARS BEFORE, April had been beaten and dumped along a county road outside of Saddlestring. The immediate suspect had been local rodeo champion Dallas Cates, with whom April had run off to travel the rodeo circuit. Eldon and Brenda Cates, Dallas’s parents, had fought for their son’s innocence with the same zeal they had mustered trying to convince the community to pay special honor to Dallas’s rodeo championships and standings.
Brenda, in particular, had felt that the community had always looked down on the Cates family as white trash, and she resented that Saddlestring wouldn’t erect highway signs that said, SADDLESTRING: HOME TO PRCA WORLD CHAMPION COWBOY DALLAS CATES at the entrances to town.
It had been more than a year since Joe had testified at her trial, and a few months longer since he’d seen her splayed out on her back on the floor of the root cellar where she’d fallen. Her husband, Eldon, was pinned beneath her and was already dead.
Brenda’s arms were at her sides and her legs were motionless but askew from breaking her back in the fall. Her sack-like floral-print dress was hiked up over her enormous white thighs and she was physically unable to reach down and smooth it out. She had no feeling from her neck down.
Her wild and hateful eyes had pierced through the darkness and raked over Joe, and her mouth had twisted into a snarl. He’d never forget the chill that had gone through him, or the guilt he felt witnessing her complete and utter humiliation. At that moment, he thought, she probably wished that she’d died along with her husband and her oldest son, Bull. She’d probably assumed that Dallas was dead as well.
The worst scenario possible for Brenda had occurred and she was fully conscious to experience it, and Joe had not only been responsible for it—in her view—but he was also the only eyewitness to her ignominy.
It hadn’t mattered to Brenda that the men in her family—and Brenda herself—had spent decades alienating their neighbors in the rest of the county. Eldon was notorious for cheating and overcharging customers for rural water and sewer work, and the only thing that had kept him in business was lack of competition. Eldon and Bull had antagonized other big-game outfitters in the area by vandalizing their hunting camps, claiming for their own clients or for themselves trophy elk that had been killed by others, and flouting territorial understandings between guides as to who hunted where.
Bull and Timber, the middle son, had grown up intimidating schoolmates and getting in trouble with the police. Timber, in fact, had preceded Dallas in the state penitentiary, for carjacking.
Dallas himself had been implicated in but not arrested for the sexual assault of a new female student at his high school. She’d been found beaten and dumped on the side of a county road—much like what had happened to April.
For more than twenty years, when bad things had happened in Twelve Sleep County, the first thought of every law enforcement officer was: I bet a Cates boy is involved.
Joe had been convinced Dallas was responsible for April’s injuries, even though some of her belongings had been found on the property of a local miscreant and survivalist named Tilden Cudmore—who had a history of cruising the highways for prey. April hadn’t been able to shed any light on the matter because she was in a drug-induced coma in the hospital.
But all the actual evidence had pointed away from Dallas—who’d claimed to be recuperating from rodeo injuries at the Cates family compound at the time—and toward Cudmore. Cudmore was arrested and all but confessed to the crime in open court, but he hanged himself in his cell before he could be convicted.
Despite the evidence pointing to Cudmore, Joe had circled back around to the Cates compound. His investigation had triggered a chain reaction that resulted in the deaths of Dallas’s two brothers, Bull and Timber, as well as their father, Eldon. Joe had killed Bull in self-defense, and Timber had fallen—or been thrown—from a hospital balcony in Billings. Brenda, now a quadriplegic, was serving a life sentence at the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk for kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder.
Dallas Cates had been severely injured by Joe and was later convicted of the only charges County Attorney Dulcie Schalk could pin on him: five counts of wanton destruction of big-game animals, specifically five elk that Cates had bulldogged to death in the snow near the family compound at the base of the Bighorn Mountains.
A wanton destruction charge, article 23-3-107 in the Wyoming Game and Fish Department provisions, was a violation that constituted a first-degree misdemeanor and often resulted in a heavy fine, forfeiture of vehicles and weapons used in the crime, and a loss of hunting privileges. But in an obvious effort to get Dallas off the streets after he’d vowed retribution on Joe, she’d argued for sending him to the state penitentiary in Rawlins. Judge Hewitt had agreed with her and sentenced Cates to two to four years.
He’d served twelve and a half months.
For the past year, Joe, Marybeth, all three girls, and the law enforcement community in Twelve Sleep County had kept their eyes out for the return of Dallas Cates.
Joe had approached every fisherman and hunting camp with extra caution in case Dallas was there. He’d purchased a Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 revolver for Marybeth to keep in her purse, and canisters of pepper spray for all three girls. Marybeth and Dulcie Schalk often rode horses together, and for the past year the two of them had also gone to the shooting range together, because Dulcie had also bought a weapon.
T. Cletus Glatt, the editor of the Saddlestring Roundup and a bitter man who’d lost a series of high-profile jobs at much bigger newspapers throughout the
country due to downsizing and his repellent personality, had seized on the potential of Cates’s return. He’d questioned the “overcharging” by the prosecutor and had even written an editorial titled “Will Dallas Cates Come Back for Revenge?”
And now perhaps he had.
Joe had set off the vicious circle with the Cates family and it had yet to close. He thought about it often and questioned some of the actions he’d taken because he’d been convinced of Dallas’s guilt. Brenda herself had believed her son guilty, because he’d gotten away with past crimes, and she’d defended him with the single-minded ferocity of a sow grizzly protecting her cub.
That Joe could have never predicted how catastrophic the outcome would turn out to be for the surviving Cateses was something he wrestled with. It had kept him up nights for the two years since it happened.
He put himself in the cowboy boots of Dallas himself. What would he himself do, Joe thought, if someone was responsible for the slaughter of his father and brothers and the crippling of his mother, not to mention inflicting the injuries that ended his championship rodeo career?
Joe could understand why Dallas wanted to exact revenge.
That was the problem.
—
“WHERE DID YOU HEAR that Dallas Cates was back in town?” Marybeth asked Lucy.
“I saw it on Facebook. Somebody thought they saw him driving down a county road.”
Lucy had become a beautiful young woman, no doubt about it. Joe noted with alarm the second looks and outright stares from males as she passed by, even though she seemed to ignore them. Lithe and blond, she was underestimated by most of those around her, he thought. They didn’t know her depth or her empathy for others. She’d grown up in the wake of her willful older sisters and had learned to keep quiet, listen, and operate on the margins. She knew more about what was going on with every member of their family than anyone else, including Marybeth. She’d learned to survive by not standing out, he thought. That she was embarrassed having just been voted homecoming queen at her high school said a lot about her.
“We were just talking about Dallas,” Marybeth said. “There isn’t proof he’s back, but I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Marybeth turned to Joe. “That’s why he needs to be arrested.”
“First things first,” Joe said. “You know what happened last time when we all thought he was guilty and we went after him with blinders on. We overlooked the obvious bad guy.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Lucy asked. “I know you can’t just go out and pick him up because of what he might do.”
“You’re right,” Joe said, “but he may have already committed a crime tonight.”
He briefly told her what he’d seen from the airplane.
He said, “I’m going to meet the sheriff and his guys first thing tomorrow and we’re going to go into the mountains in search of the body of a man named Dave Farkus. At least we assume it will turn out to be him. Then we’ll proceed from there.”
“And it will lead to Dallas Cates,” Marybeth said. “Then they’ll arrest him and send him away for the rest of his life.”
Lucy nodded, but she wasn’t convinced.
“I’ll text Sheridan and April,” she said. “They need to know he might be around.”
“Good idea,” Marybeth said.
“Keep your pepper spray near you at all times,” Joe said. He’d told all of his daughters that so many times, they could finish the sentence for him.
—
AS THEY GOT READY for bed and she was washing her face at the bathroom sink, Marybeth said to Joe, “I sometimes get the impression you almost feel sorry for him.”
“Who? Dallas?”
“Who else have we been talking about?”
He was laying out his clothing for the next morning because he’d be getting up at four-thirty to meet Sheriff Reed at the command center by six. It would be cold in the mountains.
“I wish things had gone a different way, I guess.”
“We can’t change that now,” she said. “Dallas could have made the decision just to cut his losses and drop it. He could have thought about how Brenda created the mess in the first place and put the blame on her instead of you, or he could have found Jesus in the penitentiary and learned to forgive and forget. It’s not your fault that he didn’t—it’s his.”
Joe sat down on the bed. She was right, as usual.
He said, “I can kind of see why he’s the way he is. I’d probably be like that if I grew up with a mother like Brenda Cates. But if he tries to harm anyone in our family, things are going to get real Western real fast, and Dallas Cates is a dead man.”
“And no one in this valley would have a problem with that,” she said.
He looked away. He knew she was correct. He also knew he’d have to be careful.
Most of all, he needed to make sure he was in the right.
4
The snow started midmorning. It floated heavily through the boughs and dispersed into drops on contact, much like a late-spring snow, but it wasn’t yet sticking to the pine-needle floor of the forest.
Joe reined his horse, Toby, to a stop in a small meadow and climbed off. He wanted to pull on his raincoat before his clothes were soaked. While Joe could trust Toby not to spook when he unfurled his jacket, he didn’t know enough about the other horses he was riding with to assume they wouldn’t panic. He knew through years of experience dealing with injured or stranded hunters that all it took was the unfurling of a coat or the snapping of a horse blanket to make an already jittery horse bolt and run off. A sudden movement—or in some instances simply a lone plastic grocery bag caught in a tree—could kick in the I am prey—Run! instinct of some mounts.
One by one, the other riders stopped their horses and did the same. There were six of them in the search team and seven horses. The riderless horse was being trailed by one of the deputies.
The team was made up of Undersheriff Lester Spivak and deputies Justin Woods and Ryan Steck. Steck was a new hire fresh from college and the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy. Gary Norwood, the county evidence tech who had likely never been on horseback before, was also along. And Cotton Anderson had made the case that he should be involved as well, because he was the last person to see his hunting buddy Dave Farkus alive.
Spivak had taken the job from a similar position in eastern Pennsylvania, where he’d been chief investigator for a larger sheriff’s department. He was compact and intense and his East Coast accent was tinny and distinct. Although he’d never lived in the Mountain West until recently, Joe was impressed how quickly he’d taken to it. Eastern Pennsylvania was also rural hunting country, Spivak said, so the transition wasn’t as difficult as he thought it would be. He’d moved with his wife and daughter to a house outside of town, and he’d already bought two old horses. The tin in his voice was gradually smoothing out and words didn’t come out of his mouth in torrents unless he was excited.
Spivak had been named by Sheriff Reed the official team leader for the search-and-rescue team, although he deferred to Joe on which route they should take into the forest and how they should proceed, since he didn’t know the mountains well. Their primary goal was to ride to the location pinpointed by GPS coordinates made by the Civil Air Patrol the night before, and possibly establish a crime scene and retrieve a body.
Their secondary goal was to get out of the mountains before the first big winter storm hit.
They’d already failed at that.
—
SHERIFF REED HAD REMAINED at the command center in the campground. Reed had been crippled by a bullet several years before while he was running for sheriff, and he’d lost the use of his legs. Although he was more than capable of performing all of his duties and responsibilities, to the point that it was easy to forget that he did them from a wheelchair and a specially equipped van, his riding a horse thro
ugh the timber was impractical and would have severely slowed them down.
Instead, Reed stayed in radio contact with Spivak and Woods and tracked their progress through the forest on a topo map spread over a picnic table. He’d also ordered the team to turn around if the storm hit early, because he didn’t want them to risk their safety or their lives.
“I don’t know how you people do this,” Norwood moaned to Joe. “My butt hurts and it feels like the insides of my thighs are rubbed raw.”
The evidence tech had climbed off his horse and was bent over next to it with his head down and his hands on his knees. He’d let the reins slip to the wet grass when he dismounted.
Joe reached over and gathered them up. “First time on a horse?”
“First and last, if I have anything to say about it.”
“We still need to ride back out.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Norwood grumbled.
—
BACK ON THE GAME TRAIL, Joe goosed Toby a little so he could ride abreast with Cotton Anderson. Anderson was in his early sixties and sported a thick white mustache that sparkled with moisture from the falling snow. He wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a Gus McCrae crease and a red silk bandanna that poked out of his Carhartt jacket. Joe knew him slightly from when he’d cited him years before for fishing without a conservation stamp.
“So how did you two lose each other?” Joe asked after a short discussion about how miserable it was riding a horse in a snowstorm.
“Me’n Dave?”
“Yes. I would have thought you’d hunt together.”
Cotton sighed and said, “Normally we would. Usually, we pick a big timber stand and one of us walks through it after the other one is set up on point, in case the elk run out. Or we just settle in up in the rocks, where we can glass the meadows for when the critters come out to feed.”
“But not this time,” Joe said. “What was different?”
Cotton looked over warily and didn’t answer. Joe knew the look. It was the look a suspected violator got when Joe drove up to the house, knocked on the door, and said, “I guess you know why I’m here.”