They landed in Jackson at a little after one in the afternoon and changed into hiking clothes. It was about an hour and a half after that when they brought the Nissan Armada they’d rented at the airport to a stop at the rim of the hollow on Grand Teton.
“How you feeling?” Gannon said, looking over at Kit as he ratcheted back the emergency brake.
Kit stared out the window without speaking. She looked tense. She’d been silent on the ride up the base of the mountain. Silent pretty much since they’d landed.
“I guess the bears must have eaten all the crime scene tape,” she finally said.
“I can pretty much tackle this part alone from what you’ve already told me,” Gannon said. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Kit let out a breath.
“Appreciate you saying that, Mike,” she said, staring down at the glove compartment. “I’d be lying if I said there is where I want to be right now.”
She suddenly threw open her door.
“But that son of a bitch stopped me from seeing that crime scene once,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I let it happen again.”
It was bright and cool outside as they got their bags from the back. Gannon sat for a moment on the tailgate, staring up at the magnificent upthrusts of pale rock.
When he finally stood and turned toward the fall-off, he saw they were almost eye level with a cloud bank. He looked down where its shadow, big as a city, slowly moved across the land far below.
A minute later, he was following Kit slowly down the steep switchbacks into the hollow. He was sweating by the time they halted in a flat clearing.
“What do you need to know?” Kit said as she slung off her pack.
She showed him where they were all standing when the first shot killed the sheriff and where her partner, Dennis, had lost his life. Gannon pinned each location with a handheld GPS tracker he’d brought as Kit knelt down and then lay beside a low rock.
“The shots came from there,” she said, pointing.
Gannon squatted down beside her and followed her finger up a slope to their left. There were two rock ridges along the top of it, one in front of the other. She was pointing to where there was a kind of saddle in between them with a small stand of trees on the farther of the two ridges.
“Was he in those trees?”
“No. He was somewhere down in the rock in front of them.”
Gannon stood.
“Okay, you’re going to take a look at the victim scene over there, right?”
“Yes.”
“While you’re doing that, if you could leave your bag on the rock where the sheriff was shot, I’ll go up to take a look.”
Gannon walked across the stony ground. The slope was farther away than it had seemed from the clearing, the terrain dipping down into a dry creek bed before he made it to its base.
It had been like that in Afghanistan, he thought as he scrambled upward. The massive size of the mountains threw off your distance perception, made things look closer than they really were.
It was good twenty minutes of an uphill slog over the rock until he arrived where Kit had been pointing. He looked around. There was a different angle of the mountain summit from this new perch, and as he looked up, he could see what looked like ice was wedged in between the narrow chambers of rock.
It was a minute later of searching around before he came upon the flattop of a half-buried boulder.
He stepped up on top of it and looked down the unobstructed sightline into the clearing below where Kit was standing, taking a picture.
“Bingo,” he said as he took off his backpack.
He whistled as he pinned the GPS tracker and saw that the distance from where he was to the shooting scene was 1,110 yards.
“Eleven football fields and a first down,” he mumbled as he took out the Leupold Mark 4 spotting scope he’d brought. He telescoped out its tripod and took a knee behind it as he had a look down the steeply pitched terrain.
Even after he zeroed in the focus, Kit’s image danced and wavered behind the reticle. It was because of the distance. The phenomenon, known as mirage, happened because temperature variations along long distances to the target made the light refract like a straw in a water glass. The only thing good about that was, if you were experienced, you could get a decent read on your windage from it.
Kit was really moving around, not just left to right but also up and down, Gannon saw, which meant the erratic wind was pretty much playing havoc between their two points.
Gannon checked the barometric pressure reading off the tracker and took down some notes in a Moleskine notebook, getting his dope. After he was done, he collapsed the scope to rifle level and then took a good hard look around the boulder perch for snakes.
He had a history with mountain snakes. Once while in Afghanistan up in the mountains, one had slithered over the back of his left ankle as he lay half-asleep on the floor of a firebase. The wait before it was gone was among the longest in his life. Being a city boy and no Eagle Scout, he wasn’t sure if he should move immediately or stay still or shoot at it or what.
“Gannon mountain sniping rule numero uno,” he said as he finally lay prone down behind the scope. “Make sure environment is thoroughly snake-free.”
He dialed in on Kit again and mimicked holding a rifle, right finger along the trigger, left one in and under, firmly gripping an imaginary sandbag rest. He closed his eyes and listened. The sound of the wind, the soft warbling of a bird. The faint smell of the pines.
As he lay there with the cold of the stone underneath him, he could almost feel his cheek brushing the cheekpiece.
He thought about the eye that had been on the glass weeks before. The patience required.
“One,” he said, finally opening his eye before the spotting scope and mimicking the trigger pull.
He imagined the crash and buck of the gun as he touched it off, then slid the pretend bolt back and forth and shifted slightly to where the FBI agent was killed, then pretended a second pull.
“Two,” he said.