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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Double Diamond Ranch

T WO DAYS LATER in the midafternoon, Joe followed a Game and Fish Department SUV driven by Brody Cress and Jennie Gordon down a county road toward the Double D Ranch. The SUV was speeding and its wigwag lights were flashing red and blue. Joe kept his distance behind them in his pickup to avoid the dust cloud trailing the vehicle.

Clay Hutmacher had called thirty minutes before and reported that the grizzly bear was back on his ranch. He’d found it feeding on a freshly killed Angus heifer in a pasture just beyond the corrals. Hutmacher said he’d unloaded his .300 Winchester Magnum rifle at the grizzly and he was pretty sure he’d hit it at least once before it ran away.

Clay sounded both ecstatic and half mad as he explained what had just happened.

The day before, Bill Brodbeck had died in the hospital from his wounds. Somehow, Judge Hewitt was still hanging in there.

*

T HEY FOUND H UTMACHER in the pasture next to the carcass of the disemboweled heifer. The rancher pointed to a rock outcropping halfway up a hill to the east.

“That’s where he went,” Hutmacher said, pointing with the muzzle of his rifle. “Up in those rocks. I’ve been glassing it since I called and I haven’t seen him come out.”

Cress raised a pair of binoculars and stood next to the rancher.

“I don’t see him,” he said.

“That don’t mean he’s not there,” Hutmacher responded.

Joe found Gordon looking not at the outcropping but at him. She had concern on her face.

“Joe, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I need you to be fully here with us when we go after that bear.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“You don’t look like it,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

*

J OE HAD BEEN in a kind of fugue state the thirty-six hours since he’d found Nate and Dallas Cates on the compound once owned by the Cates family. The scene he’d happened on still chilled him, and the peripheral events surrounding it puzzled him because they were filled with unknowns that may or may not be connected.

Why had it taken Jackson Bishop over an hour to show up at his home that night? According to Sheridan and Marybeth, Bishop had displayed no sense of urgency at the scene, and he’d arrived without backup. He claimed he couldn’t rouse the deputies quickly enough in time to respond, but that excuse came across as baffling to Joe. Wouldn’t eager, young Fearless Frank Carroll have jumped on the chance to confront the bad guys who had earlier eluded him? It didn’t jibe, and Joe had disturbing doubts about the man who would inevitably become the local sheriff.

Axel Soledad’s involvement had come as a shock as well. Joe was all but certain the man had bled out in an alley in Portland, the result of Geronimo’s and Joe’s fusillade of shotgun blasts, but it appeared he’d somehow survived and joined up with Dallas Cates. And now he was in the wind.

Marybeth had asked her board for a leave of absence while Kestrel settled into their lives. The little girl still wasn’t sure what had happened to her parents, and she looked expectantly at the outside door whenever it opened and she frequently asked for her mother. Marybeth put on a brave and cheerful face and she slipped easily back into the role of caretaker for small girls that she’d mastered dozens of years before.

Nate was gone, his house empty and his Jeep missing. He’d assured Joe he’d be in touch once he “worked things out.” But there had been no word from him and his cell phone had been apparently discarded.

The fact that Joe’s estranged birth mother, Katherine Pickett/Cotton, was identified as the murder victim left on the side of his county road was baffling. Had she literally followed Sheridan back to Wyoming? Why? Was her purpose to try to reconcile? The thought of that both confused and chilled him.

The disappearance of Axel Soledad and the discovery of his mother’s body in around the same location was more than a coincidence.

The story, whatever it was, was bound to be continued.

*

T HEY FOUND THE dead grizzly bear wedged between two large boulders in the center of the outcropping. A weathered telemetry collar was around its neck, the battery long ago depleted. The grizzly was splayed out as if sleeping, its rear paw pads facing up and legs stretched out.

“It’s over,” Cress said as he shouldered his rifle. “It sure looks like the bear we saw in the river.”

“She never left the area,” Gordon said with quiet awe. “We chased her all over the state and she never really left.”

Joe arched his eyebrows. “She?”

“It’s a female,” Gordon said. “That kind of surprises me.”

“Are we sure it’s the same bear?” Joe asked.

“We’ll do some forensic testing, but I’d guess the odds to be ninety-nine-point-nine percent it’s the same bear that attacked Clay Junior and Brodbeck.

“See here,” Gordon said, bending back a tuft of thick long hair on the far left thigh of the animal to reveal a scabbed-over bullet wound. “One of us hit her like we thought. Maybe that’s why she didn’t go very far. She must have hunkered down in the woods until she felt good enough to move again.”

“That poor old girl got blamed for a lot of bad acts,” Cress said. “I kind of feel sorry for her. Almost.”

“Now for the moment of truth,” Gordon said as she bent down next to the bear’s massive head.

Joe was confused for a moment until he saw Gordon pull on a pair of nitrile gloves and reach down to the grizzly’s snout and peel back the thick upper lip.

There, on the pink underside of her lip, he could clearly see the numbers 4-1-3 stenciled in dark ink.

“Oh, no,” Gordon sighed. “ Oh, no .”

“Tisiphone,” Joe said. “The Mama Bears were right.”

Gordon looked up at Joe and implored him with her eyes to never speak of this again. She did the same to Cress, who nodded his agreement.

“Let me get my knife,” Cress said. “We need to get rid of that tattoo.”