Back of Beyond (20 page)

“What?” her sister asked.

Gracie pointed toward the mud. “Look.”

There was half of a large fresh boot print on the edge of the mud, as if whomever had made it had tried to avoid stepping into the mud at the last second and almost succeeded.

Gracie wished she knew more about men’s boot sizes. But she could tell it was maybe a size ten or twelve since her dad wore size eight and these were bigger. The print had sharp lugs pressed into the dirt, a deep heel imprint, and a little diamond brand where the wearer’s arch was. The print was pointed up the trail.

“I don’t remember seeing that on the way, do you?” she said.

“No, but I didn’t look.”

Gracie nodded. “Memorize it. We may see who wears that boot later.”

*   *   *

When they broke through the
trees into the sunshine Danielle passed Gracie again and they ran toward their dad. He was still standing next to Rachel Mina. All the tents were up and Dakota was shoving the last of the tent stakes into the soft ground. Gracie noticed an amused look on her father’s face as they approached.

“That go all right?” he asked.

Danielle answered with a rush of words. “Somebody up there was
spying
on me. He scared the
shit
out of us.”

Rather than concern, her dad suppressed a grin. “Come on, girls,” he said. “Who would do something like that?”

Gracie ignored him and concentrated on doing inventory of the camp. Not a lot had changed, although she noticed there were four men missing: Wilson, Tony, Knox, and Jed.

Her dad said, “Don’t let your imaginations get the best of you. Do you know how many animals there are up here?” It was obvious he didn’t want to believe them, didn’t want the trip to take this kind of unpleasant detour on the first day. Her dad didn’t like detours, or surprises, or events wrought with emotion. No matter what the situation or the crisis, his first words were generally
I wish I would have known about this sooner,
as if it were possible to know everything in advance and avert every problem if he just had the foreknowledge. It was a trait that annoyed Gracie because it always put the burden on
her
. Danielle was never expected to know anything in advance.

Her dad looked at both of them. Neither budged.

Gracie said, “Animals don’t wear boots.”

He sighed, said, “Okay, let’s go take a look.”

Gracie nodded and turned to lead the way.

*   *   *

“Mind if I come along?”
Rachel Mina said to them as they started toward the trailhead up the mountain. “I overheard and I don’t like the idea of being spied on, either.”

Her dad said, “We’re not exactly sure what happened.” To Danielle, he asked, “Did the guy say anything at all?”

“No. He just coughed and laughed.”

“He
laughed
?”

Gracie and Danielle exchanged guilty looks.

“Gracie thought he did,” Danielle said.

“Did you feel threatened?” Rachel Mina asked them both.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Danielle said.

Said Gracie, “They should let us carry bear spray.”

“Or they should build a real fucking toilet,” Danielle mumbled.

“Language,” their dad said, and Gracie caught him shooting a quick glance to Rachel Mina to see her reaction to the profanity.

“Sorry.”

Her dad said, “Did you consider maybe he was as embarrassed to find you girls as you were? I mean, I’ve stumbled into a bathroom before and found somebody in it. It’s always a shock and I’ve been embarrassed. I remember opening the door on a stall once in a gas station and seeing this fat guy on the toilet looking at me. We were both kind of horrified.”

Rachel Mina laughed politely.

Her dad continued, “I remember I didn’t say anything—I was too red-faced. I just shut the door and went outside the station. When the guy finally came out neither one of us looked at each other. He went on his way, I went on mine. We both sort of pretended it didn’t happen, you know?”

Gracie hadn’t thought about it that way and she felt a needle of doubt creep in. Maybe they
had
overreacted with their shouting and Danielle calling him a pervert and all. Who would want to respond after being called a pervert? And much of the panic she’d felt earlier was more as a result of thinking she was lost in the forest than anything anyone did.

Still …

*   *   *

As they entered the trees
Gracie did a 360-degree pivot to see if anyone was watching them carefully. Dakota waved from near the firepit where she was breaking sticks into kindling. No one else met her eyes.

*   *   *

Within five minutes she found
the bog. The footprint was gone, obscured in the mud by a gnarled knot of pitchwood that had been dropped on top of it. Whoever had left the print had crushed it out of existence.

“It was here,” she said to her dad and Rachel.

“I’m sure it was,” he said, waggling his eyebrows in a way of saying maybe they’d been mistaken.

“It was,” Gracie said with less assurance.

“Who knows what we thought we saw?” Danielle said. “You know how you get. Remember when you used to say there was a werewolf under your bed?”

Her dad stifled a smile. Rachel looked away.

Gracie hated her sister at that moment.

*   *   *

When they returned to the camp,
Jed was setting up the aluminum cooking station—a series of interconnected boxes that became a counter, sink, and chuck box—and Dakota set a coffeepot over the fire. James Knox, Drey Russell, and K. W. Wilson sat on separate logs watching the fire burn. All of them looked up as the Sullivans and Rachel entered the camp from the trees.

“Everything all right?” Jed asked.

“Fine,” Gracie’s dad said quickly. He wanted to preempt either of his daughters. To say something now, Gracie thought, would seem silly. She collapsed on a log bench to watch the fire across from her dad and Danielle, who chose another log. Rachel sat next to Gracie, saying nothing but sitting close enough that Gracie felt the woman was sympathizing with her. That was nice.

“You folks might want to get your stuff all laid out in your tents,” Dakota said. “We’ll have dinner ready in about an hour and it’ll get dark fast. This way, you won’t have to try to unpack everything by flashlight.”

Her dad slapped his knees and stood up. “Makes sense.”

As Gracie rose she noticed Wilson had changed into moccasins. Maybe, she thought, so they wouldn’t see that his boots had been muddy.

15

Cody chain-smoked cigarettes in his room
at the Gallatin Gateway Inn, breaking the filters off each stick and lighting the new one from the cherry stub of the old one. It had only taken him two minutes to dismantle the smoke detector on the ceiling by unscrewing the faceplate and disconnecting the white and red wires. He hoped he’d remember to put it all right before he checked out in the morning.

He paced and surveyed his new gear piled on the bed. Before the stores closed, he’d found Ariat cowboy boots that didn’t hurt his feet at Powder Horn Sportsman’s Supply on Main as well as a straw cowboy hat, chaps, jeans, two sets of nylon saddlebags, and denim jacket. He’d felt foolish buying Western wear, but Bull Mitchell had insisted. Everything else he needed—sleeping bag, pad, water filter, daypack, .40 caliber Smith & Wesson cartridges, .223 rounds for his scoped departmental AR-15, a saddle sheath for the rifle, Steiner binoculars—he found at Bob Ward Sporting Goods on Max Avenue. Rounding out his purchases was a plastic grocery bag packed with two cartons of cigarettes, a long sleeve of Stride gum packets, plastic bottles of tonic water, and instant coffee. He’d spent five agonizing minutes staring at a pint of Wild Turkey behind the clerk’s head—
Just one pint, just one, what could it hurt?
Hell, he thought, he’d save it until he had Justin with him and the killer in cuffs or in the ground. It would be his
reward
.

While he argued with himself he tried to conjure up the image of Hank Winters saying, “Once you start you cannot stop. That is our curse.” Instead, the image of Hank was of a roasted and bloated arm reaching up from the black muck in the rain. And when the eager young clerk behind the counter asked, “May I help you?” Cody snapped, “Go to hell,” and stomped out of the place.

He felt guilty for that now.

*   *   *

He was pleased to find out
they had available rooms at the Gallatin Gateway Inn—a restored grand hotel from the early railroad days—because it was less than a half mile from the headquarters of Wilderness Adventures. The female receptionist wore a crisp white shirt and sniffed at him, saying, “Please keep in mind we have a strict no-smoking policy here.”

“I thought this was a railroad hotel,” Cody said. “Railroaders
smoked
.”

“At one time,” the clerk said. “Many many years ago. And there aren’t any railroaders around here anymore, if you noticed.”

“So this is a snooty place,” he said.

“Not at all,” she said crisply.

He winked at her and gave her his credit card. After she took the imprint, he hauled all his gear to his room to unwrap his purchases, clip off the price tags, and fill two new nylon saddlebags. To hell with Bull Mitchell’s twenty-pound limit, he thought.

*   *   *

It was dark by the time he
had everything packed. He’d made several trips to and from his Ford. There were things in the tool box and investigations lockers he wanted to take with him, including his rain gear. He was pleased he remembered to bring the Motorola Iridium 9505A handheld satellite phone. He’d stashed it in his SUV a few months ago after he stole it from the evidence room. Drug runners had used the phone so they wouldn’t be tracked via their cell phone calls by law enforcement, and the case was a slam dunk because the bad guys turned on each other so the phone was never introduced in court. The phone was small for a sat phone, less than a pound, and cost sixteen hundred dollars retail. It had three and a half hours of talk time without recharging and thirty-eight hours of stand-by time. He stuffed it in a saddlebag.

Then he sat at the small desk in the room, turned on the ancient banker’s lamp, and placed his cell phone within reach, waiting for Larry to call. It had been way too long not to have heard from him since he faxed the material, he thought. His partner must know something by now—he’d had the sheets all afternoon. Cody vowed to himself that if Larry didn’t call him by midnight he’d break his pledge and track Larry down like a dog.

He poured a glass of tonic over ice and lit yet another cigarette, and opened the file he’d taken from Margaret Cooper. He looked at his list of suspects:

  1. Anthony D’Amato

  2. Walt Franck

  3. Justin Hoyt

  4. James Knox

  5. Rachel Mina

  6. Tristan Glode

  7. Donna Glode

  8. André Russell

  9. Ted Sullivan

10. Gracie Sullivan

11. Danielle Sullivan

12. K. W. Wilson

On the bottom of the page he scrawled,

13. Jed McCarthy

14. Dakota Hill

He thought,
Everyone on the list could be the killer
. Except Justin, of course.

The applications had arrived in Jed McCarthy’s office throughout the past year. They were designed to elicit information Jed needed to know to plan the trip and to match up horses with riders. There was a short questionnaire about dietary restrictions, riding ability, allergies, medical issues, and emergency contact information. The last item on the application was “What do you hope to gain from this backcountry wilderness experience?” Cody wished there were more questions and information but he was grateful he had what he had. He hoped Larry was running the whole lot of them through every criminal background database he could access.

Anthony D’Amato, thirty-four, was from Brooklyn, New York, and worked for Goldman Sachs. He was married, no children. He weighed 185 pounds and listed his wife Lisa as his emergency contact. He’d ridden a horse once, at the Iowa State Fair when he was visiting relatives as a teenager. He answered the last question, “To not be eaten by a wild animal.”

Walt Franck, fifty-four, listed his home locations as Aspen and Fort Collins, Colorado, as well as Omaha. He was a commercial Realtor and developer of strip malls in the Mountain West and Midwest. He was soon to be married to Jenny, Cody’s ex, and listed her as his emergency contact. Cody snorted derisively when he saw His Richness listed his weight as 220 pounds, and he planned hereafter to refer to him as “His Fat Richness.” Walt was a novice rider, and he hoped the trip would “provide unique fly-fishing locations and bonding opportunities for me and my future stepson.” Cody snorted again.

Justin Hoyt, seventeen, Fort Collins, 165 pounds, stepson of His Fat Richness, was next. Cody recognized the handwriting on the application as Jenny’s, and it elicited a sudden desire for her again that had been rekindled the night before. He shook it off and continued reading. She said Justin wanted to experience “nature and outdoor skills.”

“Shit,” Cody said. “Send him to me in Montana. I could do
that.
” But he doubted Justin had even seen the application, much less discussed it with his mother.

James Knox, thirty-seven, Manhattan. Not married but had a partner named Martha, who was also his emergency contact. Worked as an executive with Millennium Capital Advisors and weighed 180 pounds. He had no experience with horses, and wrote that he and his two friends wanted to experience “the nature and diversity of Yellowstone while waiting for the market to come back.”

Cody smiled at that, and skipped ahead in the stack to find the third of the buddies.

André Russell, thirty-nine, of Manhattan. Married, two children, a boy and a girl, ages twelve and nine. Wife and emergency contact was named Danika. A VP with J. P. Morgan and had ridden horses at stables in Central Park to prepare for the trip. Cody was impressed by that. For his ambition for the trip he wrote, “To try and keep Tony D’Amato from being eaten by wild animals.”