CHAPTER 4

JAN’S CELL PHONE RANG, and he heard the sheriff’s voice.

 “Coming off Orchard Bench onto County 48,” Sheriff Broadbeck said.  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

***

Jan had misplaced the summer of Emma’s death altogether.  It went up in the smoke of the explosion, clouding his mind for months. He drifted in a sea of self-pity, alcohol, and grief until he slowly began to function.  By the following summer—last summer—he was at least able to begin to work again.  And when he began to work, his focus shifted.

Jan and Emma had moved to Wyoming after Jan retired from the Associated Press in Los Angeles at age fifty-two.  They purchased the ranch and supported themselves through his freelancing and her real estate business.

Jan had freelanced for a variety of magazines and newspapers.  He interviewed celebrities who retired to the Wyoming mountains or who had summer homes in Jackson Hole, or near Sheridan, or Cody, or Bozeman, Montana.  He also did some work in Utah and Nevada.  Occasionally he worked political stories in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and at least once in New Mexico.

At first Jan had taken on the Hansen cult as simply another intriguing story.  Of course he realized that journalists sometimes touch nerves and get into trouble.  He had received death threats when he investigated organized crime in Southern California.  That’s when he started carrying a SIG-Sauer pistol.  But it simply hadn’t occurred to him that the stories he wrote on the Hansen cult would place him in danger in Wyoming.  Certainly it had never occurred to him that he would endanger Emma.

As the fog began to clear from his mind in the months following Emma’s death, he was stunned by the thought that Ronald Hansen might be behind the murder.  At first, Jan suspected the murder had its origins in an old Mafia grudge from his LA days.  But as his mind began to clear and information began to filter through Monster to him, it became clear that Hansen had ordered the hit—the hit meant for Jan.

Jan had struggled to see Hansen as the murderer.  He remembered Hansen from grammar school.  A memory going back more than fifty years to their first grade class resurrected itself.  Hansen—Jan could see him in his mind’s eye—dressed in farmer-style overalls, common enough then in the small rural community.  Hansen had brought for show-and-tell a working model of a hay bailer.  He had made it by hand, carving each wooden piece with skill far advanced for a child of six.  He had a toy John Deere tractor to pull the bailer.  Jan had been impressed.

Jan thought Ronnie Hansen’s life peaked in the first grade.  As the years wore on, Ronnie became less and less like his classmates.  His clothes were hand sewn and from an earlier era.  Jan remembered him as quiet with a superior air about him.  He didn’t participate in team sports or other extracurricular activities in high school.  He didn’t date.  He often spent his lunch hours reading the Book of Mormon.  And, although Big Horn County hosted a large Mormon population, the Mormon students had nothing to do with him.  Jan had not really understood why.  He had heard something about polygamy.  He also heard the word “apostate” applied to Hansen, but he didn’t even know what the word meant.

Basin High School graduated eighteen students in 1960, Hansen among them.  Jan, troubled after his parents’ divorce, had dropped out of school the year before and joined the Navy.  Only later, long after his stint in the Navy, did he rethink higher education.

Jan finally accepted that Hansen was behind Emma’s murder; the revelation stunned him.  He was amazed to discover that, mixed with the rage he felt toward Hansen, he also felt pity for him.  The picture of little Ronnie and the hay bailer in the ridiculous overalls and mop of blonde hair superimposed itself over the now tough, sophisticated Ronald Hansen III, leader of a large, prosperous, and weird sect.

Finally, however, Jan began to see that Hansen viewed any attack on himself as an attack on the Kingdom of God.  Of course Jan had not known that before Emma’s death, back when he published his New York Times story: “Mormon Polygamous Sect Stockpiling Weapons and Hatred in Wyoming.”  He had no way of understanding that the story immediately targeted him for removal by Hansen.  Jan had finally come to realize that he was on a certain collision course with Hansen.  Monster fully shared Jan’s convictions.

As the impact of Hansen’s responsibility dawned on Jan, he discovered other feelings within himself—fear, hatred, rage, and a desire for vengeance.  Those feelings grew in intensity, although he tried not to nurse them.  He tried to subdue them.  He thought he was going crazy.  Fear totally overcame him.  He was afraid to walk from his house to his pickup.  It was then that he invested several thousand dollars in electronic security at the ranch—security that had paid off and saved his life two nights earlier.

After Jan lived through the raw emotions, he settled into a studied determination.  He realized he had been driven into a death struggle that required a response. He determined to rise to the challenge. Hansen had not only killed Jan’s wife, but he was committed to kill Jan as well—no matter how long it took.

Jan weighed other options besides confrontation.  He could run—a very real option for a while—but he finally realized he could not run from the idea of a smirking prophet with Emma’s blood on his hands.  He tried to convince himself that his desire to get Hansen was rooted in some kind of moral high ground—like justice.  Revenge was a worthy passion.  But Jan considered himself neither philosophical nor religious.  He discovered he did not have enough faith to leave revenge to God.  Jan admired people who understood things like revenge and justice—the Nazi-hunting Jews, for example, determined to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice—but those abstract concepts did not move him personally.

Jan admitted that he was mainly driven by rage.  This rage was different from anything he had ever known.  Anger was no stranger to him, and impatience, he had often been told, was one of his primary faults.  But rage was only a word until it dawned on him that Ronald Hansen had murdered his wife—atomized her body in an instant.  One second she was here, her kiss still on his cheek, the next she was gone.  The rage he felt became palpable, like an evil twin stalking him.  And he knew it would never go away.

Actually, it was worse than that.  The rage might be mitigated, but at what cost?  Early on, Jan thought of “bringing Hansen to justice.” Problem was, given Hansen’s resources and the government’s state of paralysis, justice would never be served by simply making some sort of legal case against the prophet.  So, Jan reasoned, he would have to kill Hansen.  No, that was not right.  He had to murder him.  Taking a man’s life—with forethought and without the warrant of a trial before men honest and true—was murder plain and simple.  Jan wanted to be straight with himself about that.  He also counted the cost of such an action.

He had known cops in LA who had “crossed.”  They crossed over and took up the methods of the criminals they pursued.  Frustrated by what they viewed as a legal system that protected the worst of men from their victims, they strayed outside the bounds of the oaths.  No question: They went from being the good guys who used civil methods to being bad guys who used evil methods.  Their motives and methods became hopelessly scrambled.  In the end, they “crossed.”

Jan knew the damage done to men who did such things.  He discussed it with Monster.  “Yep,” Monster had said, “that’s true.  When you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change, you change.”  So, where, Jan had asked, was Monster in all this?  Had he sold his soul?  Monster had simply shrugged.

Jan had looked for the warm autumn days of a man in full maturity, but he found instead a winter.  Ronald Hansen had turned his life topsy-turvy.  So now, Jan asked himself, “Will I cross?  Will I become a murderer?”  If Ronald Hansen had forced that upon him, it made him hate the Prophet even more.

***

By the end of the first year following Emma’s death, Jan frantically searched for a foothold.  He couldn’t sleep, he was drinking, and he was neurotic.  He needed something: a reason to live, a reason to hope; he needed some positive aspiration to counter his dark desire to eliminate Hansen.  He needed—what—to take him through the darkness.

Jan mentally retraced the steps that had brought him back to Wyoming.  Though the answer he sought may be far beyond the conclusion he reached, at any rate he reached a conclusion.  As he surveyed the muddy water and the badlands, in his mind he saw the thickets along the river where deer sheltered from the heat; he saw dens where coyotes panted, waiting for the evening chase; he smelled sage and cedar and sensed—always—the overshadowing cottonwoods guarding the sparse watercourses like Tolkien’s Ents. 

This land—this place—had drawn him across forty years.  Called him home and called his Emma, too.  Now she was gone and soon, he knew, he would be.  He sighed.  This place was alive, though she was dead.  And now, he knew, he must draw life from the land, as the other creatures did; he must suck it up from the dry, warm, eternal earth.

So it was that finally, even as he continued to live in the palling shadow of Hansen, he had begun to feel life rising up from the good earth of his ranch.  He drew life, as well, from the hot Wyoming wind on his face, the view from the crest of Mount Baldy, the drift in the muddy Big Horn.  He was no conservationist, no New Age tree-hugger, no mystical medicine man, but somehow this home moved him.  Across the river, the serene silence of Dead Horse Gulch carried him to a place in his memory that perhaps had been what had drawn his great-grandfather here a century earlier.  If ever he was in love with something other than Emma, it was this place.  He believed in the land as strongly as Hansen believed he was God’s mouthpiece.

***

Jan placed his overnight bag by the door and took the metal pistol case from the closet.  He unlocked it, and placed into it the nickel-plated SIG-Sauer with tritium night sights.  He put two boxes of ammo—380 APC slugs, 9mm shorts—into another lockable container along with an extra clip.  These two boxes could be legally checked through from Billings to Seattle.

The wedding clock on the piano was gently chiming 11:00 a.m.  He walked to the first bedroom down the hall from the living room.  Opening the closet, he slid the suits and dress shirts to the center.  On the back wall of the closet at the far right end was an almost invisible finger hole.  Placing his finger in the hole, he slid the dark panel to reveal an opening through the back of the closet.  He entered a narrow passage that housed a stairwell. Going down the stairs, he entered what had been his home more than fifty years earlier—the basement house.

The basement house had been constructed as merely four poured concrete walls that rose three feet above ground.  A flat roof had covered the structure, which included a kitchen, a living room, and three bedrooms.  The whole area comprised barely more than 1,000 square feet, but it had housed his mother, father, and four children.  They lived there until he was six years old and then moved to town.  Jan had repurchased the land from the lawyer who had bought it from his mother thirty-five years earlier.  He had considered filling the basement in, or building the log house somewhere else on the 500 acres, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do that.  He built the new house directly over the old one.  Now the basement was a storage area, filled with filing cabinets and outdated computers.

There was a hole in the wall Jan had broken out with a sixteen-pound sledge.  It was three feet wide and led into a dirt passageway.  Last summer, as Jan had begun to understand the depth of the peril he faced from Hansen, he had used his backhoe to dig a trench from the outside wall of his home toward the river—to the boathouse.  The trench was six feet deep and three feet wide.  He had covered it with corrugated metal sheets and pushed a foot of dirt over the top.  The trench ended under the boathouse, a hinged door opening through the floor.

Jan went to an old dresser and pulled open the top drawer.  He withdrew a leather shoulder holster and went back upstairs.  There he put the shoulder holster in his overnight bag, and then he stepped out on the porch to wait for Monster who would drive him the hundred miles to Billings.  Since Emma’s murder, the sheriff always insisted on accompanying Jan on any drive that took him more than twenty miles from home.  He especially worried about the long stretch of Highway 310 between Greybull and Lovell.  “Great place for an ambush,” Monster had once said.