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Chapter One

Seven Months Before

Nate Romanowski was thigh-high in the icy water of North Piney Creek under the craggy profile of the snow-covered Wyoming Range. He was there to kill a man named Axel Soledad, whom he’d pursued in a state of unhinged fury for months.

Soledad had left a trail of death and destruction behind him in his hunger for revenge against Nate and Joe Pickett. The cost had been catastrophic.

Liv. The blood, the body.

Nate blamed himself for his wife’s death.

He blamed Axel Soledad more.

It was mid-April and the ice was finally breaking up. Large three-inch-thick platters of it bobbed along the surface, carried by the current. As he crossed the creek, he kept one eye upriver so he could spot the largest chunks floating his way and dodge them, lest they knock him off-balance. Even though he wore a pair of waders that he’d purchased at a fly-fishing shop in Pinedale, a small town with a welcome sign that announced that it was All the Civilization You Need , the water was so cold that his legs had gone numb and he could barely feel his feet. The water in the freestone river was so clear he could see the rounded maroon and beige river rocks between his boots.

Nate was tall, blond, and rangy. His eyes were icy blue and piercing and they peered out from a high-altitude windburned face with high cheekbones and a hatchet-like nose. He wore his long hair tied back in a ponytail with a leather falcon’s jess.

Under his parka was the weight of a Freedom Arms .454 Casull handgun loaded with five rounds. Half a box of spare cartridges was in his parka pocket. He doubted he’d need them. Five rounds meant five dead bodies, and from what he’d learned, there were only four people at his destination.

—

At over seven thousand feet in the mountains, it was still winter. Crusty snow clogged the pine tree–lined banks, and the first green shoots emerging from the snowpack were at least a month away. It was twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit and every breath he exhaled was in the form of a condensation cloud.

The night before, Nate had learned through a barroom conversation in Big Piney that a man matching Soledad’s description had been holed up in a bizarre rental property on the west bank of Piney Creek. The property belonged to a marina owner from the Ozarks who was a Wild West aficionado. The Missourian had purchased a onetime line shack on a small private holding and transformed it into a mini frontier village with a two-story lodge, false-front outbuildings, and a serve-yourself saloon.

People would go crazy for it, the owner had announced. The locals in Big Piney and Pinedale had been less impressed. The property was so isolated that very few tourists ever booked it, and those who did were lucky to find it. It sounded like the perfect place for Soledad.

Soledad had shown up in the town of Big Piney a week ago with three others, Nate had learned—two men in their midthirties and a woman who appeared to be Soledad’s girlfriend. They’d arrived in an older-model Honda Civic with Colorado plates.

While one of the men had retrieved the keys to the place from a local realtor who served as the owner’s agent, the man behind the wheel had gotten out of the Honda and walked stiffly around on a pair of crutches. That was undoubtedly Soledad. Nate had no idea who the other three were, but one of Soledad’s traits was collecting hangers-on. This certainly fit the pattern.

The drinks he had bought for the talkative realtor last night had been well worth it, Nate thought.

—

He’d found out during midnight reconnaissance that the remote lodge could be accessed off a county road and then a two-track that ended at the house. The only way to approach would be to drive his Jeep right up to the front door, which was not a good plan.

Rather, Nate stayed on a rough path that hugged the curves of North Piney Creek. He’d found a place to hide his vehicle off-road. Then he’d left it at three in the morning and worked his way downstream along the tangled bank of the creek. It had been hard going—there was no game trail or natural path—and he’d had to bushwhack through frozen brush and outstretched tree roots. For about half a mile, the creek had been frozen solid and he could slide his way along the top of it. But when he saw black openings in the ice ahead of him in the moonlight, and the surface began to crack under his weight, he realized that the only way he was going to be able to proceed was to get into the water.

When he did, the cold shocked him even through the waders, but Nate didn’t mind. Like most prey, including big game, Soledad would never expect a threat to come from the water.

—

As the sun lit up the tops of the pine trees in a warm orange, the lodge came into view around a bend in the creek. The buildings were dark and squarish, and no artificial light shone from any of the windows.

Nate hugged the right bank, keeping the thick brush between him and the structures as he approached the enclave. It was as it had been described to him: a two-level wooden clapboard building and a small jumble of faux-Western businesses. A thin line of woodsmoke clung to the top of a chimney pipe and looked like a vaporous flag.

An older-model Honda sedan was parked on the side of the lodge.

Nate found himself shaking, and he stepped out of the creek onto the icy rocks to calm himself. He looked hard at the lodge, trying to guess which room Soledad would be in.

So, he thought. It has come down to this.

“Get ready, Axel,” he whispered.

—

Nate entered the close-packed pines upstream from the enclave and slowly advanced toward the lodge. He tried to step on patches of snow that had seen the most shade during the day, so the surface would be hard and he wouldn’t break through. As he moved toward the compound, he sized it up through gaps in the tree trunks.

In addition to the lodge, there was a line of small outbuildings extending to the side. Each was signed in frontier lettering: Saloon , Livery Stable , Marshall’s Office , Jail . They all looked empty and forlorn.

A great horned owl watched his progress from its perch on top of a hitching-post rail. Its eyes were unblinking. Nate stared back, and for a second a connection was made. A beat after, the owl shuffled its talons on the rail, extended its wings, and flapped away. Nate nodded his approval. His message had been received: Trouble was on the way.

—

Nate went still when the front door of the lodge swung open and a man stepped outside.

Concealing himself behind a tree, Nate leaned to the right and peered around it. The figure was bearded and hugging himself against the cold. Tight black jeans, sneakers, a light leather jacket. It was not serious clothing for the location and the conditions. Where had Soledad picked him up?

The man walked across the hard-packed snow to what appeared to be an outhouse. Before going inside, he propped a semiautomatic rifle with an extended magazine next to the door.

The fact that the man had a weapon with him even for a trip to the outhouse made Nate smile. He was in the right place.

—

Nate was on the move the second the outhouse door closed. He jogged to a space between the parked car and the side of the lodge, keeping his eyes open for movement behind any of the windows. There was none, and when he reached his destination he leaned his back against the siding of the house and removed his waders. Then he unzipped his parka. The grip of his revolver was warm from his body heat.

He bent over and looked inside the Honda through the side windows. There were fast-food wrappers on the floors and someone had left a coat on the back seat. He tried the driver’s-side door and found it unlocked.

Nate leaned into the vehicle and opened the glove compartment and the console. The console revealed two cheap burner phones and a half-empty box of .410 shotgun shells. Then he backed out of the Honda and reached under the driver’s seat. As he suspected, he found a gun and pulled it out.

It was a bruiser of a weapon: a Taurus Judge Public Defender, with a two-inch barrel and five .410 shotgun shells in the cylinder. They could be replaced with .45 rounds, but Nate was pleased with them. Unlike the rounds from his own .454 that could exit a body and punch through walls like they weren’t even there, the Judge would be perfect for close-in work. Shotgun pellets couldn’t be matched to a particular weapon like slugs could, they were devastating at close range, and the weapon wasn’t tied to him in any way.

—

With the . 454 in his right hand and the Judge in his left, Nate shouldered the front door of the lodge open and swung inside.

The lobby was dark and jammed with overstuffed chairs and couches. Buckaroo prints hung on the pine-paneled walls, and an unlit wagon-wheel chandelier was suspended from the ceiling.

Past the lobby in the dimly lit kitchen, a doughy ginger-haired man with a growth of stubble looked up from a breakfast table in the kitchen. His eyes were red and unfocused, and he had a quizzical expression on his face that quickly morphed into anger.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked in a phlegmy voice that suggested either illness or the effects of a hangover. He glanced down at a semiautomatic handgun on the tabletop next to his coffee mug. So did Nate.

“Where’s Axel?” Nate said in a tense whisper. Then: “Don’t do it.”

But he did it and lunged for the gun.

Nate shot the man in the heart with the Judge. The impact of the blast flung him tumbling backward in his chair, and the sound of the shot was deafening.

But surprisingly, he wasn’t dead. The ginger man scrambled on all fours on the floor out of Nate’s line of vision, and his crablike hand reached up and appeared on the table, searching for the gun.

“Really?” Nate said as he blew a hole in the table with his new weapon, and the ginger man sprawled out and went still.

Nate strode across the room into an adjoining bedroom where the door was open. He peered inside at an unmade bed. There was meth paraphernalia on the bedside stand next to a half-full bottle of Fireball whiskey.

The window above the bed gave a clear view of the outhouse in the yard, where the occupant inside suddenly kicked the door open while buckling up his black jeans at the same time. When he reached around the opening for his rifle, Nate raised his .454 and aimed it through the glass. His revolver bucked hard and the window shattered and the man was hit center mass. He dropped like a stone. Illuminated by morning sunlight, Nate could see a round hole in the back of the outhouse wall where the bullet had passed through.

He backed out of the room and glanced through the open door of a second bedroom off the lobby. Like the first, the bed was unmade. Clothes were strewn across the floor.

Between the two bedrooms was a small bathroom. It was empty. Nate twisted the faucet and no water came out. That explained why the man had gone to the outhouse: The water pipes were frozen in the lodge.

There were no more rooms on the first level, and Nate eyed the staircase.

Two down , Nate said to himself as he ran up the stairs. Go, go, go.

—

Since the lodge had been built for guests, Nate expected to find several bedrooms on the top floor. In fact, there were four. Two closed doors on either side of the hallway were marked by hand-lettered signage inspired by historical Wyoming figures: The Jim Bridger Room , The Buffalo Bill Room , The Chief Washakie Room , The John Colter Suite .

Nate paused for a second at the top of the landing with both weapons outstretched before him. It was quiet down the hallway with no sign of activity from any of the rooms. He had no doubt that Axel had heard the gunshots and was ready for the intruder. Since the last door on the left was a suite, Nate made a calculated guess that Axel had chosen the grandest for himself. He bypassed the first three rooms and launched himself at the door of the John Colter Suite, hitting it low with his shoulder, just below the doorknob latch.

The doorframe splintered as Nate bulled his way inside. He rolled on the floor and came up on his knees at the foot of a four-poster bed, both weapons aimed at a naked woman sitting bolt upright in a maelstrom of covers. She had tousled brown hair, and her face was smeared with eyeliner that had run across her cheeks, making her look like a raccoon.

She was in her late twenties, thin and bony, and she screamed as she scrambled away from him, clutching the tops of the sheets and pulling them under her chin as if they would protect her.

Axel wasn’t with her. There was no place in the bedroom for him to hide and the window wasn’t open. A pile of black clothing lay on the floor beside the bed and a black bra was draped over a lamp on the bedside desk. Black combat boots poked out from under the bed. There was no other clothing in the room.

“Where is he?” Nate asked her.

“Where is who?” she asked back unconvincingly.

“Axel. Where is he?”

She seemed to be deciding whether to lie to Nate or tell the truth as she pulled the top of the sheets tighter to her chin.

Nate stood up, but kept both guns on her.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He left yesterday.”

“Then why is his car outside?”

“Constantine took him to Jackson Hole. He was going to get a new car there. Constantine brought Axel’s Honda back here so we wouldn’t be completely stranded.”

Nate thought that was possible. “Constantine was the city guy in the leather jacket?”

She vigorously nodded her head.

“Who was the other guy? The ginger?”

“J.R.,” she said. Then she echoed the word “was,” and it seemed to dawn on her what had happened downstairs. She looked up at Nate with horror.

“You killed them?” she asked. “Both of them?”

Nate asked, “When is Axel coming back?”

“I don’t know. We’re supposed to stay here until he contacts us.”

“You don’t have any idea? Are we talking hours? Days?”

“I don’t know,” she said again. Tears filled her eyes. “I got the impression he’d be back in a week or so. He left us a few hundred dollars to buy food and gas.”

Then she shrugged and said, “Axel doesn’t always explain things very well. He keeps a lot to himself.”

“Who are you?”

Again she seemed to be thinking about whether to tell him the truth.

“I’m an activist,” she said.

“I meant your name,” Nate said through clenched teeth.

“Bethany,” she said. “I knew Axel a long time ago, and he came back into my life and sweet-talked me into coming with him. No other dude I’ve ever known could do that, and I’m still a little surprised it happened. But I didn’t know what kind of heavy shit he was into.”

Nate believed that her name was Bethany and that she’d known Axel from before. And that Axel had the ability to talk Bethany into coming with him. He had that kind of charisma. But Nate didn’t believe she was telling the truth. There was no way she didn’t have a clue about what the man was involved in.

“Where did Axel find those two goons?” Nate asked, gesturing with the muzzle of his .454 to the first floor.

“Constantine and J.R.?” she said. “Denver. I really didn’t know them very well,” she added quickly. “I mean, I saw them around on the streets during rallies and shit like that, but we weren’t close. They’re not my type, you know? And I really didn’t like it that Axel left me here with them. All they did was get high, shoot guns, and sleep all day. So what do you want with Axel?”

“I want to kill him,” Nate said.

“Oh.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Axel has a lot of enemies,” Bethany said.

Nate lowered both weapons and slid his .454 into its shoulder holster. “If he comes back, tell him Nate Romanowski was here. He’ll know why.”

Bethany indicated that she understood. “I’ve heard that name before. Probably from Axel.”

“Probably.”

Nate felt a little bad about scaring her. She was a dim bulb from Axel’s past and likely one of the street people Axel collected, but that was no reason to put her through more torment. As far as he knew, Bethany hadn’t been part of Soledad’s murder spree the previous months.

With a quick nod of his head, Nate indicated that they were done, and he turned for the open door.

That’s when he heard the distinctive snick-snick of a revolver being cocked. Without hesitation, he threw himself to the left as she fired at him, and a bullet slammed into the opposite wall of the hallway where his head had just been.

In a single motion, he half spun and dropped and fired the Judge beneath his left armpit, taking off the top of Bethany’s head and painting the wall behind her. But not before they locked eyes for a split second.

—

With his ears ringing from the gunfire, Nate went back down the stairs. He found a plastic bottle of kerosene in a utility closet and emptied it on the hardwood floor. Then he lit the curtains on fire at each downstairs window and exited the building.

As he strode toward the river, the lodge behind him went up quickly. He could hear the fire popping as it consumed the pine paneling and climbed the staircase where Bethany’s body lay. When he turned around near the bend of Piney Creek, the entire structure was engulfed in flames.

Nate didn’t bother to pull on the waders when he entered the creek this time. The icy water stung him and soaked through his clothing. Almost as an afterthought, he tossed the Judge handgun to the side and let it sink to the smooth river rocks of the creek.

—

It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right. Three dead, including a woman by his own hand, and no Axel Soledad. They’d all been armed and dangerous, and the woman had fired at him. But he’d invaded their privacy, and a case could be made that each had responded in self-defense.

None of it would have happened if he hadn’t forced the situation on them. He felt dirty, guilty, and bitterly confused.

And he felt inept and thug-like. He’d looked into Bethany’s eyes and closely watched her emotions play out along with her words. Not once had he picked up the tell that she was gripping a handgun under the sheets and waiting for him to turn his back. Not until that last nanosecond when he looked back at her before pulling the trigger did he see true violence in her eyes.

Nate tried to hold himself together until he got back to his Jeep.

As he approached it, he saw the outlines of two of his falcons perched on top of the back seat. Despite the fact that they wore leather hoods, he could feel their contempt for him.

He was ashamed of himself, and he asked himself out loud what he’d become.

Before climbing into his Jeep, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew his cell phone. He’d left it turned off because he didn’t want to be tracked and he didn’t want to be reached by anyone, either. The device was his last real connection to the modern world.

Which was why he propped it up in the elbow branch of a nearby tree and obliterated it with two rounds from his .454.

He’d never been in such a dark place before. But he knew where he might seek out light.

—

Five days later, FBI Special Agent Rick Orr walked through the compound accompanied by a sheriff’s department deputy and the local coroner. The light snowfall created a hush and the flakes sifted through the tightly packed trees that bordered the buildings. His primary escort was Laurie Urbigkit, a local large-animal veterinarian who also served as the coroner for Sublette County, Wyoming. The deputy faded away back to his SUV to take a call on his cell phone.

Orr had often been told that he looked more like a studious, well-meaning college professor than a G-man, and he knew it was true. He was in his early sixties with wispy gray hair and round metal-framed glasses. He wore a thigh-length, belted beige trench coat, slacks that were not made for cold mountain weather, and slip-on leather shoes with smooth soles that provided no grip on the slick, snow-covered grass. He struggled to keep up with the coroner as she stepped under the yellow crime scene tape and strode toward the charred remains of the lodge.

Urbigkit was a slim and fidgety woman with long, silver-streaked hair braided into two lengths on each side of her head. They bobbed when she moved.

She’d been utterly shocked at Orr’s arrival that morning and said that she’d never met an FBI agent before in her life and that she didn’t know whether to be impressed or intimidated.

“Two of the victims were found in there,” she said, gesturing toward the burned structure. “One male, one female. Those bodies were pretty crispy, I’ll tell you. It took some time to figure out what happened to them, but I can say with confidence that the male was hit twice. Point-blank shotgun blasts. There must have been two dozen pellets in him, and of course shot like that is untraceable to the weapon that used it. Maybe the crime lab in Cheyenne can figure something out, but I sure couldn’t.

“The female victim was shot once in the face, also by a shotgun blast.”

With that, she paused. But before Orr could respond, Urbigkit continued. “I can ask the sheriff to let you see all the crime scene photos. I’d warn you, though, that if you’ve never seen burned bodies hit with shotgun blasts or high-powered rounds—”

“I’ve seen plenty,” Orr said. Despite the cold and the days since the incident, Orr noted that the scene still smelled strongly of blood and ash.

He knew from talking to the sheriff that the crime scene had been discovered by a local trapper placing leghold traps along the river. If the man hadn’t trespassed on the property, the sheriff said, it might have been weeks or months before the crimes were reported. There had been no missing-persons calls and no one had inquired about the well-being of the victims.

The coroner darted into the ash and snatched a singed, lint-covered stocking cap from the debris. She handed it to Orr. “Here, put this on. You look cold.”

Orr took it reluctantly. He was used to being around forensics personnel who were meticulously anal about anyone besides them entering a crime scene. Even Orr, who had been with the bureau for over thirty years. Never before in his experience had a crime scene investigator cavalierly lent him an item of clothing from a victim. This, Orr said to himself, was amateur hour.

—

Orr sniffed the cap. It smelled of both wood and stale marijuana smoke. When Urbigkit turned her back and headed toward the outhouse, Orr tossed the stocking cap aside and followed.

“This is where we found the third victim, the other male,” she said, chinning toward the structure. He stepped under the crime scene tape and opened the door. It was a two-seater with a roll of toilet paper sitting on the plywood sheet between the holes. The coroner made a face and pointed toward the left hole.

“The body was found down there,” she said. “Two days after the sheriff’s department got here. One of the deputies went inside to take a dump and he looked down into the toilet vault and saw the body. It scared the shit out of him, so to speak. My opinion is that the killing took place in the yard where you’re standing, and the shooters dumped the victim into the vault. Pulling that body out of there was no fun for anyone.”

“I can’t imagine that it was,” Orr said. “So this victim was shot with a high-powered rifle instead of a shotgun?”

The coroner stepped into the outhouse and addressed Orr. As she did so, she placed her index finger on the coat fabric over her heart.

“He was hit right here,” Urbigkit said. Then she turned and pointed to a clean hole in the back of the outhouse about shoulder high. “The round went straight through the victim and out through the back wall. And take a look at that hole.”

She stepped aside so Orr could enter. He bent forward and looked through the large opening. He could see cottonwoods in the meadow.

“That bullet hole doesn’t look like the results of any rifle round I’ve seen go through wood,” she said. “It looks like it was done with a sharp drill bit. It went through the victim and through the outhouse and just kept going, probably to the next county. We’ll never recover it. But whatever it was, it was a powerful weapon.”

Orr recognized the features of the bullet hole, but he didn’t reveal them to Urbigkit.

He asked, “Did you find anything else on the grounds? Fingerprints? Footprints? Hairs? Fibers?”

Urbigkit sighed and shook her head. She said, “You know, since I’ve been coroner in this county we’ve had exactly two murders in the last fifteen years. These three victims make five. What I’m trying to say is that none of our guys—including me—has a lot of experience in violent-crime forensics, you know? The two murders I mentioned were open-and-shut. The shooters were on the scene blubbering when the cops showed up. One was a guy who thought his wife was cheating on him—she was, by the way—and the other was between two Natives high on meth who got into a knife fight.”

Orr remained silent.

“We don’t do a lot of this,” the coroner said.

“What’s your theory?” Orr asked Urbigkit.

“The sheriff and I are on the same page here. You can ask him if you don’t believe me. What we think is that the murders are gang-related and the shooters were sent to kill them. All three victims were from out of state, and so were the killers, we think. When you look at the autopsy photos, you’ll see that all three of ’em were tattooed hipster types from the city. Two of ’em had IDs from Denver, so they weren’t from around here. I figure they found this place online and rented it out. Nobody around here knew any of them.

“Our preliminary conclusion, I guess, is that this was a horrible crime, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us. As far as we know, there are no local connections with the victims, so this is random and frankly not a high priority. We’re here to serve our constituents, not to get involved in gang-related activity from other states. I’m surprised the FBI sent you.”

“Actually, I sent myself,” Orr said. Then: “How many shooters did it? What is your professional judgment?”

“Two at the minimum,” she said. “One with a shotgun and the other with that high-powered rifle. Maybe they had a lookout as well.”

Urbigkit leaned in toward Orr as if to share a secret. “I think we’re dealing with professional hit men,” she said. “They were sent up here to take care of some targets. The shooters didn’t take anything that we could figure out, and they did their work and left. I wish they wouldn’t have burned the lodge down, because we might have learned more about the crimes, but they knew what they were doing.”

“How did they get here and get away without leaving any trace of themselves, or tracks?” Orr asked.

Urbigkit shrugged. “That’s what I’d like to know. Maybe you’ll be able to figure something out when you read the reports and look at all the crime scene photos.”

“I plan to do exactly that,” Orr said.

The coroner looked at Orr closely. “You might want to buy some warmer clothes if you plan to stick around here for a while. Do you know what they used to call our county back in the day? Back when they did national weather reports?”

“No.”

“They called us the ‘Ice Box of the Nation,’?” Urbigkit said. Then: “That’s a hell of a thing to be known for, but it keeps the riffraff out.”

“Until now,” Orr said, gesturing toward the burned-out lodge.