Free Fire (35 page)

The image that would stay with Joe as he glanced into the bar after paying for dinner was Mr. and Mrs. Hanson’s bloodless,horrified expressions as Doomsayer wagged his finger in their faces.

As they walked back to their cabin, Nate dropped back from Joe and Marybeth and asked Sheridan and Lucy if they’d like to go hot-potting.

“With swimsuits,” Nate added, for Marybeth’s benefit.

Joe watched his older daughter carefully. Nate and Sheridan had once been master falconer and apprentice, but the relationshiphad severed. There had been a time, two years before, when Sheridan announced quite clearly that she didn’t care if she ever saw Nate Romanowski ever again. Nate tried to apologize to her for his transgressions but she’d hear none of it. Nate let it ride, biding his time. Now he was asking her and her sister to join him.

“What’s hot-potting?” Lucy asked.

Nate said, “It’s like sitting in a hot tub outside, only this hot tub is natural.”

“Isn’t it illegal?” Marybeth asked.

“Yes,” Nate said.

Joe nudged his wife, and she got it. Nate was not only mendingfences with Sheridan, he was working it so Joe and Marybethcould have some time alone together.

“I’ve got a new pink suit,” Lucy said. “I was hoping I could use it. Sheridan, you brought yours, right?”

Sheridan hesitated. “Yes.”

“Can we go?” Lucy asked.

“As long as you don’t get thrown in the Yellowstone jail,” Joe said.

“So let me get this straight,” Sheridan said. “It’s legal to shoot and kill people in Yellowstone Park, but it’s against the rules to pick up a rock or go hot-potting?”

“You’ve got it,” Nate said. “Thus begins your enlightenment and understanding of our federal government.”

Marybeth laughed nervously, started to object, but again Joe nudged her.

“Don’t be gone long,” Marybeth said.

But long enough
, Joe thought.

“Okay,” Sheridan said, sighing, “I’ll go.”

As they left the cabin, Sheridan paused at the door, rolled her eyes at her parents, and sighed again before leaving.

“She knows,” Marybeth said.

“No, she doesn’t,” Joe assured her.

“Yes,” Marybeth said, “she does.”

Their lovemaking was furious and seemed dangerously illicit, as they kept expecting a knock on the locked cabin door when the hot-potters returned. Both feared either Sheridan or Lucy asking, “What are you two
doing
in there?”

As usual, Joe overestimated his staying power and was up, dressed, and scanning the entrance gate videotapes when Nate and his daughters returned.

27

While sheridan and lucy got ready for bed in the cabin, Joe and Nate sat outside under the porch light sipping bourbon and smoking Cuban cigars Nate dispensed from a box beneath the seat of his Jeep labeled “Fuses and Toilet Paper.”

“I’ve never smoked a Cuban cigar before,” Joe said, marveling at its fruit-tinged smoothness. “I think I could get used to ’em.”

“Don’t,” Nate said. “They’re illegal.”

“Quintero Brevas,” Joe said, reading the label of his cigar, “Habana.”

“Yup.”

“I’m not going to ask how you got them,” Joe said. “Just like I’m not going to ask you what you do to make a living.”

“Wiser that way,” Nate said, nodding in agreement, the red cherry of the cigar bobbing in the dark. “That way you’ve got plausible deniability. You need that. You’re a man of the law. At least you used to be. I’m not exactly sure what you are now.”

“I’m beginning to wonder that myself.”

"Governor Rulon’s private detective,” Nate said. “Range Rider Number One.”

While nate read over the thick printouts Marybeth had brought from her Internet search, Joe fast-forwarded through the entrance gate videotapes on his laptop from the East, Northeast,and South gates, looking for black SUVs.

“Thanks for taking the girls hot-potting,” Joe said.

“My pleasure.”

“You mending fences with Sheridan?”

Nate smiled. “She’s tough. But we’re getting there.”

“Did you two talk about falconry?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Nate said. “As I was handing her a towel when we were done, she asked about the peregrine.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“You’re right. Once those birds get in your bloodstream, they never get out.”

Joe struggled to concentrate on his screen and the images.He felt as if he were running on fumes. He was beyond tired from the full day of sightseeing and the night before spent in the hospital, but he was determined to see this through. If he stopped for even a minute, he thought, he would collapse with exhaustion. That wouldn’t do, because he felt he needed to keep the investigation moving forward. He’d learned over the years that often the thing that solved a case, especially one like this, with so many aspects and floating facts, was simple and unrelentingforward motion. By pushing ahead, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going, he sometimes forced a reactionfrom the conspirators that might reveal them.

The moon was a perfect thin slice of ice-white in a thick soup of stars that hardened as the temperature dropped near freezing. Although Nate was still warmed to the core from hot-pottingand wore a fleece vest over his denim shirt, Joe was bundled in the hooded Carhartt coat he had worn on the LongbrakeRanch in the winter. He could feel exploratory fingers of cold pushing up his pant legs and down his collar. The cold helped him stay awake.

By his estimate, he had looked at more than three hundred vehicles thus far on his screen. Although that was a lot of cars, he knew he was lucky that the three days he was viewing were so late in the season and the number of visitors was at its lowest. Yellowstone received 3.5 million visitors in the summer, and he could only imagine the traffic count in mid-July. Of the three hundred-plus he had looked at, there were thirteen dark SUVs. Of the thirteen, six were black. Five of the six had Wyoming plates. He bookmarked each of them before proceeding, since he had no idea how many target vehicles he’d end up with after looking at the whole tape.

The camera angles from each gate were different, he noticed. The focus from the Northeast and East gates was more on the licenseplates, so the vehicle and registration could be identified later if the driver failed to pay the entrance fee or had commercialcargo and didn’t declare it. The South Gate camera had a wider field of vision and included not only the plate but also the grille and front window. If the glass wasn’t tinted in the vehicle, he could see the driver and passenger, and sometimes faces peeringover the front seat from the back. Joe had no idea what the vantage points at the North and West gates—from Demming’s missing computer—were. He was under the assumption that whoever had bushwhacked her had entered the park from one of those two entrances, which is why they took her computer.

Which meant that he was probably wasting his time.

Nevertheless, he continued until he was through. Then he went back to study the shots he’d marked. All were from the South gate, via Grand Teton Park and Jackson. He remembered a ranger in the Gardiner clinic lobby saying Demming’s call specified that the SUV she pulled over had Wyoming plates and a rental sticker. Maybe, he thought, he had something.

The first of the five black Wyoming SUVs had a single driver and no passengers and the plate WYO 22-8BXX. County 22 was Teton County, or Jackson. The driver was male, mid-fifties, silver hair, serious. That in itself was interesting, since most of the shots Joe saw were of harried tourists with a carload of family members.But a single driver didn’t match the profile. He forwarded.

The second and third matches were families. A pudgy man in an Australian drover hat manned the first, his anxious wife at his side, kids and dogs peering over the front seat. Joe discountedthem, as well as the second shot of an enormously fat contingent of five, two of whom were gnawing on what looked like turkey legs.

The fourth black SUV was WYO 22-8BXX again, which got Joe’s attention and he sat forward in his chair. This time, there were two profiles in the vehicle, which he could now identify as a GMC Yukon. Unfortunately, the sun hit the windshieldand obscured any identification of the driver and passenger. Joe checked the date. Two days before. The day Cutler was killed. He searched for the time stamp and found it: 5:15 A.M.

“Nate,” Joe said, “I may have something.”

Joe did a quick calculation based on spending a week in Yellowstonedriving the figure-eight road system. If WYO 22-8BXX entered the park at the South entrance at 5:15 A.M., it could have been at Sunburst Hot Springs by 6:30, a half-hour before they were to meet Cutler.
It worked
.

“Oh man,” Joe said.

“What?” Nate asked.

“I may have them,” Joe said, puffing furiously on his cigar. “They may have taken the wrong computer. I may have them right here, coming up from the South entrance.”

“Jackson,” Nate said, snorting. “That figures.”

Joe fast-forwarded to the fifth and last bookmark.

There it was, WYO 22-8BXX again. From the day before, the day Judy Demming was shot. They had come back. There were two of them again, and despite the sun on the windshield and the smoked-glass windshield, this time he could see their profiles. The driver matched with the first shot: lean, silver-haired.Whoever it was was back again, three times in three days. The passenger was harder to see because of glare on the glass, but there was something about his silhouette, the tilt of his head, the jut of his jaw, that seemed strangely familiar to Joe. Inside his head, alarm bells went off. He realized he was shaking not only with the cold but also with excitement.

“I know this guy,” Joe said.

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure. But there’s something about him. I’ve seen him before. I just can’t make him out on the screen.” Joe wonderedif he could send the image to the Wyoming DCI in the morning for enhancing. He didn’t know if they worked on Sundays.He doubted it.

The cabin door opened and Marybeth came out.

“It’s cold out here, guys,” she said. “You can come in now. The girls are in bed.”

“Joe thinks he’s figured something out,” Nate said.

“Maybe,” Joe said.

“Aren’t you going to offer me a cigar?” Marybeth asked, looking from Joe to Nate. Joe couldn’t believe it.

Nate opened his “Fuses and Toilet Paper” box, and she took one. Joe watched in amazement as she clipped off the tip, lit it, and blew out the smoke.

“Good,” she said.

“You’re smoking a cigar,” Joe said, dumbfounded. Marybeth raised her eyebrows at him as if to say,
Why not?

“This is real interesting,” Nate said, holding up a sheaf of paper. “I might have found something too.”

“Sounds like we’ll be up for a while,” she said.

“I almost missed it,” Nate said once they were inside and had spread the documents out on a table. Sheridan and Lucy were in bed sleeping, lumps amid strewn covers. “I was concentratingon this Swiss company called Genetech. They’re the ones who have the bio-prospecting permit in Yellowstone Cutlertold us about. Judy couldn’t remember the name. Remember the ‘million-dollar slime’ they found at Sunburst that’s used for genetic typing? They’ve made millions off of it, according to these documents and what Cutler said.”

Joe took the cover sheet from the Genetech file and read it over. Based in Geneva, the company was partially owned by the Swiss government but had majority private financing. Genetech’s bioengineers were also researching hot springs microbesin New Zealand and Iceland to try to mine more useful microbe thermophiles, but as yet could not find a match for the particular specimen they’d found in Yellowstone.

“Would the microbe be worth killing over?” Joe asked rhetorically.

“Absolutely,” Nate said. “The company’s made a fortune so far exploiting it.”

“So we have a suspect?” Marybeth asked. “A Swiss bioengineeringfirm?”

“That’s what I was thinking at first,” Nate said, “but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think this has anything at all to do with Genetech, other than they were the company that originally found the microbe and obtained the permit to harvest it from Yellowstone.”

Joe explained to Marybeth what Cutler had told him about the permitting process—how sloppy and controversial it seemed to be, how environmental purists like Rick Hoening and others were opposed to it.

“I tend to agree with them,” she said. “If it’s illegal to dig a mine, hunt, or do any logging in a national park, how can you justify taking microbes for commercial purposes? I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion either way, but it’s not consistentwith their policy, is it?”

“Nope,” Nate said.

“Then why would the Park Service grant permits to companiesto do this kind of prospecting?”

“Bucks,” Nate said. “Parks always need more money.”

Joe was beginning to get what Nate was driving at.

“So we’ve got Genetech, who has a permit extending anotherfive years to exclusively harvest this particular microbe,” Nate said, digging out a copy of the agreement. He showed them where it was signed by the superintendent of the park as well as the chief ranger. “But it seems there’s another company in this pile of papers Marybeth brought with her that desperatelywants a permit as well.”

Nate turned to Marybeth. “Where did you get this particular list of companies?”

She nodded to Joe.

“I saw the names on binders in Clay McCann’s office,” Joe said.

“Okay,” Nate said, his voice rising, “that’s the connection— Clay McCann. Now we come to a company called EnerDyne.”

This was the file Nate had waved in the air earlier. He summarizedit: "EnerDyne was incorporated just last year in the State of Colorado. The incorporation papers are filed with the secretary of state there, and Marybeth was smart to print out the documents when she did her search. EnerDyne has several floors of offices in downtown Denver, a pretty large payroll, but no income as yet according to the records.”