Back of Beyond (26 page)

Tristan looked around, and said, “I’ll have to decide tomorrow if we’ll even stay with this expedition.”

His words fell heavily, until Donna said, “Speak for yourself, kemosabe.”

Humiliated again, Tristan Glode stormed past Jed, headed for the tents. Over his shoulder, he said, “Democracy is no way to run a business, Jed. You’ll need to learn that.”

After a beat, Knox said, “I don’t think he likes losing arguments.”

“You think?” D’Amato said. “Man, what a buzz kill.”

“Welcome to my life,” Donna said, sliding across the ground toward D’Amato and taking the bottle of tequila from his hands.

Rachel Mina was curt: “Good night, everyone.” She strode away from the fire, followed by Sullivan.

“Okay then,” Jed said, taking the rest of his bottle from Walt, who’d gotten stuck with it. “We’ve got a decision. That means it’s going to be a real interesting day tomorrow, and we’ll be getting up early.”

“Interesting,” D’Amato said, repeating the word and getting up. “As if today was boring.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Jed said, smiling.

Jed turned to the sound of Rachel and Sullivan arguing in the dark near the tents. He saw Dakota standing there, glaring at him. He wondered how much she’d heard.

That question was answered when she slowly shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe what was happening.

21

Framed by the pulsing wig-wag
lights that painted the stone walls and arched windows of the front of the Gallatin Gateway Inn in vivid reds and blues, Cody Hoyt tossed the duffel he’d saved into the back of his Ford. He had trouble breathing due to the smoke inhalation and he coughed violently and spattered the back windows with globules of black sputum.

Behind him, guests gathered in knots in the front yard. The staff who’d helped evacuate them formed a perimeter with several firemen and now a few deputies who’d just arrived. Cody had slipped away while they all watched a bucket truck back across the lawn toward the hotel. He paused to take it all in before entering the Ford. His room on the second floor was easy to spot because of the bright orange glow of flames from inside. Several firefighters had climbed into the bucket and were now being raised toward the second level. When they were even with the orange window, the bucket paused and swayed a bit while a horizontal column of water blasted through the window. When the glass broke a ball of flame shot out of the frame accompanied by gasps from the guests on the lawn.

He noted the fire seemed to have stayed within his room and not spread to any others, no doubt due to the sprinkler system. Cody guessed it would be short work now to put it out and gain control of the building. It wouldn’t be long before the investigators figured out who had been staying in the room and would want to question him.

He swung inside the Ford and it was immediately filled with the acrid smell of the smoke from his clothes and hair. His bare skin stung from exposure to the fire, and when he brushed his forearm with his other hand the singed hair on it broke and fell off.

Thumping the steering wheel with the heel of his hand hard enough to crack the plastic, he cursed and spat and started the engine and rolled away.

*   *   *

The lights and sirens faded
as he turned from the inn grounds onto U.S. 191 South. It didn’t take long before he was engulfed in darkness and safely away from the scene. He wheeled the Ford into a pullout and killed the engine.

Someone had found him and tried to burn him alive.

He found a half-full pack of cigarettes in the console and lit one. He inhaled deeply—smoke on smoke—then coughed. Jesus, he thought, it was like he was trying to burn
himself
up from the inside out. He tossed the cigarette out onto the gravel.

There was a bright side to the fire, he thought. Now he knew he was on the right track, because someone was trying to kill him.

*   *   *

The more he thought about
what had happened and what had almost happened, the more his skewed world tilted even farther off plumb.

He was glad he hadn’t gone cop on the fireman or spoken to anyone on his way out, even though possibly they could have found whoever did it through the process of elimination. But his story would sound preposterous at first, he realized. The firefighters would quickly discover he’d dismantled his smoke detector and they’d find the small mountain of cigarette butts in his room. The conclusion they’d reach immediately was he was smoking in bed and started the fire and had come up with a story about lighter fluid to cover himself. Or they’d accuse him of accidentally—or intentionally—spilling the accelerant on the floor and it went up. Hell, he thought, given the facts on the ground he’d come to the same conclusion. Within minutes they’d have his ID and call it in, discover who he was and where he was supposed to be, and he’d likely spend the rest of the night in the Bozeman jail waiting for a Helena deputy to come get him and take him back. No doubt the damage to the hotel caused by the fire and water would cost millions to repair. He thanked God all the guests had been accounted for, or there would be a murder charge as well.

He couldn’t risk
that
.

Since the attempted method of getting rid of him had been fire, he wondered if the murderer he was tracking wasn’t on the pack trip after all, but had stayed around Bozeman. But how would the killer know he was in town, or what he was up to? And how could he possibly know he was spending the night at the Gallatin Gateway Inn, or which room? It made no sense.

Did this mean he was next on the killer’s list? Cody dismissed it, since the other victims had been clean and sober for years and he hadn’t. Unless, of course, the killer knew Cody was getting close and had decided to try a preemptive strike.

In many ways, Cody thought, the crime could have been almost perfect. The flames had moved so fast that if he hadn’t been awake at the time the match was struck, he might have been incinerated in the bed. A little digging would bring forth stories of the recent incident with the coroner in Helena, his suspension from the Denver Police Department a year ago, and his infamous alcohol-related binges.

Which meant that whoever had done it knew him well enough to know they might get away with it.

He thought about the few people he’d been in contact with who knew where he was or what he was doing. Larry, obviously, but he’d withheld crucial info from him, like his location.

Cody retraced his steps that day. Other than Cooper and the Mitchells, he’d encountered a half-dozen sales people and the hotel staff. There had also been the state trooper and the mechanic in Townsend. While each may have known a very small piece of what he was up to, no one could have realistically put it all together, he thought.

This was the kind of puzzle he liked to bounce off his partner, because the two of them could usually brainstorm their way to a plausible answer.

His cell phone had a good signal and he scrolled through his contacts until he found Larry’s home phone, but something stopped him before he speed-dialed. He sat in silence, staring at the lit screen, then closed the phone and turned it off. He opened the driver’s door and let the phone drop to the gravel, then smashed it into pieces with the heel of his boot.

Whether they’d followed him from Helena or called ahead he wasn’t sure. If they were keeping tabs on him through the GPS embedded in his cell, that would be the end of that.

Then it hit him with a force that took his breath away.

The stop in Townsend, the overnight there that slowed him down. The long delay that held him in place until tonight. Had the trooper been tipped to keep an eye out for him?

He climbed back into the Ford and covered his face with his hands. Only two people could possibly know the entire story, every part of it. Only two people knew where he was going, why he was going there, and what he planned to do.

One of them was the killer. The other …

He said aloud, “Larry, you treacherous son of a bitch. Why?”

22

By the light of a headlamp,
Jed McCarthy stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear in his tent and jammed his outside clothing into a stuff sack he’d use for a pillow, then checked his watch. Getting late. Dakota should be back any second.

He’d left some clients at the fire. Two of the three Wall Streeters were still there, Knox and D’Amato. So was Donna Glode. And K. W. Wilson. Ted Sullivan had left a half hour after he had words with Rachel Mina, saying, “Better go try to patch things up.” Walt Franck had also gone to his tent.

His tooled leather business backpack was stored where it always was, near the head of the tent. He retrieved it and unzipped the front flap, then reached down through his files, canisters of bear spray, the new portable GPS unit, and his loaded .44 Magnum secured in an Uncle Mike’s Cordura holster by an interior zipper that was hidden by design. The light from his headlamp bobbed around while he did it. He kept his ears open for Dakota’s boots swishing through the tall grass toward the tent.

He withdrew a thin brown envelope made stiff by the eight-and-a-half-by-twelve-inch piece of cardboard inside and dumped the contents on the top of his sleeping bag. Newspaper clippings, GPS coordinates, and most important, the Google Earth maps he’d printed off on high-grade photographic paper while Margaret Cooper was choking back tears out in the reception area as she read (out loud) the instructions on how to operate Windows Vista. She’d had no idea what he was doing.

The photographic images were precise. He found the location of Camp One, where they were now, and traced the trail south along the shoreline of the lake with the tip of his finger. He reviewed the place he’d marked with an X at the natural junction where they’d cut west toward Two Ocean Plateau as he described it to his clients around the campfire. Although the terrain and the creeks were burned into his memory from endless hours with the maps, he wanted to reassure himself for the hundredth time that it looked passable, that he could lead the group up and away from the Thorofare on terrain they could handle, that the horses and mules could navigate.

He hoped the new route from the Thorofare to Two Ocean was as clear and unencumbered as the photographs showed. He wished he knew how old the images Google had posted were. If they were a couple of years old, he prayed there’d been no severe timber blowdowns or microbursts in the meanwhile. In the back of his mind was his memory of seeing an entire mountainside in Yellowstone leveled by a nighttime weather phenomenon that scattered hundreds of acres of lodgepole pines like so many pick-up sticks. No one had seen it happen, and the Park Service, being the Park Service, refused to acknowledge that it did. But Yellowstone was a world of its own, as Jed knew better than anyone, and the physical landscape could change literally overnight as geysers shot through the thin crust or earthquakes rattled the ground or unspeakably violent storms blew through. Fires would be okay because they’d help open up the undergrowth, and he knew there had been a dozen lightning-caused blazes in the area the previous fall.

But he knew that no matter how carefully he’d planned things they’d never go exactly right in Yellowstone. The place seemed designed to foil human plans and aspirations. Conditions within the Yellowstone ecosystem were ramped up and exaggerated compared to the world around it. Every natural phenomenon—storms, fires, temperatures, thermal activity, wildlife, geography, weather in general—always seemed pushed to extremes. The more time he spent in the park the smaller he felt, and the less in control of the world around him. All he could do at times was point himself in the general direction of where he wanted to go—both figuratively and literally—and hope he’d get there. He remembered Bull Mitchell telling him something like that when he bought his company, but Jed discounted the statement and credited Bull’s advancing age. Now he knew it to be true.

He jumped when Dakota suddenly entered the tent. He hadn’t heard her coming, and she hadn’t signaled him in any way like she sometimes did with a whistle or a finger-drum on the taut tent wall. It was simple camp etiquette to do so and he’d taught her that. She’d disregarded it, though, and he scrambled to stuff the maps back into the envelope before she saw what he was doing.

She winced when he looked up at her and shined his headlamp directly into her eyes, pretending it was inadvertent.

“Jeez, Jed,” she said, waving her hand at him, “you’re blinding me.”

“Sorry.”

“I bet.”

Once the papers were back in the envelope and the envelope slipped under his sleeping bag, he turned his head and the beam of light.
That was too close,
he thought.

She didn’t unzip her jacket or remove her boots, but sat Indian style on the foot of her sleeping bag.

He pulled the headlamp off and hung it from a loop so the light hit the inside tent wall and was diffused. “Horses okay?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Food hung up?”

She nodded.

“Kitchen wiped down and locked up?”

“Like always,” she said.

“Anyone left at the camp?”

Dakota said, “Donna Glode is still there with Tony D’Amato and James Knox. Knox is trying to protect his friend from her, I guess.”

“Donna will be easy to track if she gets lost,” Jed said. “We’ll just have to follow the cougar tracks.”

Dakota didn’t even smile as she fixed her eyes on him. “Jed, what the
fuck
is going on?”

“Keep your voice down,” Jed said. Even though their tent was two hundred yards from the other tents and closer to the horses than the camp itself, he always worried about being overheard by any guests, since the topic of conversation was generally them.

Her eyes blazed in the semidarkness. “You’re breaking every damn rule you’ve ever told me about,” she said. “You’ve got something going on here or else you’ve just lost your damn mind.”

He started to speak but she cut him off.

“
Never
leave the guests to tend the fire at night,” she said. She lowered her voice and added a low drawl to mimic his cadence as much as possible. “Gently encourage the guests to take their socializing to the tents and wait them out if necessary so you can secure the camp and make sure there’s no food or anything around to draw animals in, then put the fire out with water. Then do a walk-around to double-check the night checklist. Last, make sure the animals are fine.”