CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We waited another half hour for Agent Fuchs. He was driving his own Explorer with bike racks and not the usual government sedan. He pulled in as the fire crew was just mopping up the flames from the gas tank and bobtail. Aaron was half-buried in a North Face fleece and a Heavenly Valley ballcap and looked like he just got out of bed, though as it was close to four in the morning, he had to have been up for hours. We sat on the tailgate of the Silverado, the three of us and Audie, just as we had more than once at the pack station. Audie slept on Sarah’s lap, and we drank lukewarm Indian Casino coffee from cardboard cups that Aaron had brought us. I told him the story that began the night before at Little Meadows with Erika showing up out of nowhere. I stopped a few times when he asked questions. He basically called me nuts for the dead-run horseback stunt but allowed it had worked pretty well.

The wind picked up and scattered the clouds, letting the setting moon shine. The wind slackened, and we caught the smell of wet sage from across the highway and the rotten burned smell of the old house and the gasoline fumes from the big tank and burnt vinyl and flesh of the bobtail’s interior. Fresh gusts stirred up embers from the house. Jack walked over just stiff as hell when the last EMT left. He leaned against the bed of the truck like it hurt. His bloody shirt was gone and he was wearing a red Frémont County Fire jacket. He pulled a pint of Knob Creek from the pocket.

“Compliments of the volunteer fire department,” he said. “So where do we go from here?”

“You’re going straight to the emergency room in Mammoth,” Sarah said.

“I gotta write my report,” Jack said. “It’s gonna be freaky-deaky.”

Sarah started to say something, then just laughed. We passed the Knob Creek around, watching the county medical examiner’s crew wheel VanOwen’s burned body away. I thought I saw Audie’s eyes open for a second to follow the corpse. If she was watching, I didn’t try to shield her from it. The kid was tougher than most grownups. Just as tough as a rasp.

“Well,” Aaron said, “poetic justice for an arsonist.”

“If Erika were still alive,” Sarah said, “what would the government have done with her?”

“I learned a long time ago never to count on what should happen,” he said, “only what does.”

“That’s a pretty mealy-mouthed answer.”

Aaron almost laughed.

“Well,” Sarah said, “she died thinking she was saving her brother’s life.”

Audie raised her head. “That’s pretty brave, ain’t it?” I don’t know how long she’d been listening. “She was hella brave then, right?”

The four of us didn’t quite have a grownup comeback to that.

“Yeah, sweetie,” Sarah said. “It was totally brave.”

Audie crawled deeper into Sarah’s arms and closed her eyes again. We chased the Knob Creek with the dregs of our coffee, then emptied what was left of the coffee on the dirt. Sorenson walked over and told Aaron he’d found the second rental truck exactly where VanOwen told me it would be, just off the highway less than a mile south. There was no trace of Carl. We watched Sorenson walk off.

“So, Tommy,” Aaron said, “what about the money?”

I pulled the thumb drive out of my jacket and held it out to him. He looked down at it a minute before he took it.

“Doesn’t exactly look like a million bucks,” he said.

“She got killed trying to get it to you.”

Aaron took the drive and bounced it on his palm.

Sarah told him what we’d learned from Erika about the account in the Cyprus bank. He made notes for his financial crew.

“If she’d survived,” Aaron said, “all this would’ve helped her.”

“That poor dope,” Sarah said. “What a waste of a life.”

Finally, Sarah, Audie, and I drove out of the yard past the firetrucks and county law vehicles and the last milling first responders. Mitch gave us a wave as we drove by.

“What? We’re all pals again?”

“No,” Sarah said. “But I bet he’s relieved. Now he can close the book on a pretty big crime that’s stumped our department for almost a year, plus take part of the blame off somebody who still has a lot of friends in this valley. No matter how tough he talked, Mitch wasn’t looking forward to slapping the cuffs on Erika. The downside for him is he has to share the credit with you and Aaron.” She put an arm around my shoulders. “You always seem to frost his cookies. One of the many things I like about you.”

We picked up Lorena from Becky Tyree and spent a quick fifteen minutes at her kitchen table telling her how her friend died. Becky sat in her bathrobe listening, dry-eyed but drained.

“I’ve spent all night thinking about how a family that had everything going for it could just fall apart so fast,” she said.

After a few more words, she thanked us and we left. We drove out her lane to the Summers Lake Road close to sunup. The dawn glow from the eastern hills was smudged with oily smoke.

I was driving and Sarah was dozing. Audie slept between us, and the baby was secured on the back seat. I remembered the bit of wire in my shirt pocket and rooted around for it long enough to catch Sarah’s attention.

“What is it, babe?”

I held it out to her and she took it. She didn’t look impressed.

“It’s Erika’s,” she said. “Erika’s earring.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I saw her wearing them last night. I hadn’t seen her for years but she always wore those dangly things.”

I crossed the tip of the sagebrush moraine just as the first bit of sunrise hit the timbered ridge up ahead.

“Why?” she said. “Where did you get it?”

“It was on the floor of the slaughterhouse right near the drain. Not three feet from Buddy’s body.”

Sarah took it all in for a minute.

“Then Erika knew he wasn’t in the house,” she said. “That he was already dead. My god, Tommy, she knew.”

“Yeah. She wasn’t trying to save him.”

“No. She was trying to join him.”

The day after the killings at the Hornberg ranch, Harvey and I got back to work. We saddled up four horses for the Newport Beachers plus the two we would ride and four mules to pack out our party from their camp at Little Meadows. We saddled a fifth mule just for Harvey’s bedroll.

I filled him in on what Bill had told me on the ride up. How his wife and Scottie had tracked me down so they could meet the stony-cold cowboy killer from the tiny article in the Los Angeles Times, which would be me. I knew I was in for a world of crap from Harv that would only last a year or two, but I wanted him to know why I was planning on being silent about the mess at Hornberg’s.

It was a cloudless June morning with only a slight breeze waving through the early summer grass and fluttering the aspen. Bonner and Tyree cows and calves meandered across the meadows and hid in shady thickets and bogs along the creek. Snowmelt was running high, and the water was clear and chest deep on the horses in the crossings. Becky and Dan had packed Twister Creed’s body out for the county the day before.

We climbed out of the canyon through the timber into the Wilderness Area, then kept climbing the trail to the pass. We reached the camp at Little Meadows by early afternoon. We hobbled the stock out to graze, then had some pricey IPAs Tess had chilled in the icy creek, and they told us about their adventures. Drew and Scottie climbed Hawksbeak the morning after Erika and I blasted out of their camp. Bill had hiked to Beartrap Lake to fish. Drew told me the morning had been windy and overcast, and they’d hit some snow, ice, and slick rock from the storms just like I said they might, but that with caution, they stayed out of trouble, and by the time they made it to the top the sun was out. He showed me pictures he’d taken from the summit. The country looked huge from that altitude, with no human scar to be seen and no human stain on the landscape.

Bill said he expected Beartrap would be murky from storm runoff. Instead, the sky was breezy but cloudless and the lake was clear. He landed some nice brookies that he cleaned and packed in snow. This morning he and Drew had headed out early and climbed Tower Peak, while later Scottie and Tess hiked to an old Forest Service cabin to explore, then spent the afternoon reading Anne Cleeland mysteries and napping and drinking creek-chilled chardonnay. It was one of those perfectly warm but crisp days, and the four of them said it made the whole trip.

“How about you, Tommy?” Tess said. “Any new adventures for the fearless wilderness guide?”

“Nope.”

“We didn’t get our extra days with you.” She laughed. “You owe us, cowboy.”

“Don’t I know it.”

I felt a little guilty lying to them, especially Bill, but I didn’t want to rehash the last couple of days. Harvey pushed the people to get their gear semi-organized for the next morning. Later he cooked us all dinner with Dutch oven biscuits, wild rice in garlic butter, steak tenderloin, then brook trout stuffed with elk sausage, plus cow-camp coffee and a couple kinds of outstanding wine that the folks shared with us poor packers, finished off with a Dutch oven chocolate cake. But not before he gave them a start by hauling out a cloth sack of potatoes and onions plus a can of Folgers.

Riding out the next day we reached the forks by late morning. Though Creed’s body was gone, I’d kept a brisk pace as we passed the snow cabin. We took a lunch break at the Blue Rock, then I let Harvey take the lead with his string and had three of the folks follow him close. Coming into the second meadow I asked Bill to drop back to where I was leading the last three mules, and I told him what happened and asked him to keep it to himself. At least until they got back to civilization. He listened without a word. When I finished, I pulled up my horse.

“I don’t feel good about any of this, but at least we got those kids out safe.”

Bill sat his horse just as still as could be. Then he laughed, his eyes down-trail on his friends skirting the meadow.

“They are just going to flip out—a gunfight with bank robbers and sex traffickers breaking bad just across the valley while we were all so close, but having no damn clue?” he said. “They will be so pissed.”