19

Stevens and Windermere spent the night in the only hotel in Butcher’s Creek, the unimaginatively named Northwestern Hotel. The rooms were army-barracks sparse: twin beds, plywood furniture, and broken TVs. Meant for train crews, Kerry Finley explained. “They don’t see many tourists this far off the highway.”

“Makes no difference to me,” Stevens said, yawning. “I feel like we just about crossed the Rubicon to get here.”

He slept fitfully. Woke up to the phone ringing, light shining in through the windows, a blinding glare from the snow that covered the town.

“Deputy Finley is downstairs with the sheriff,” Windermere said when he answered the phone. “You want me to tell them you need your beauty sleep?”

“No amount of sleep is going to save me,” Stevens replied. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

He dressed in a hurry, brushed his teeth, patted down his unruly hair. Found Windermere and Finley in the lobby with an older man who must have been the sheriff. He fit the mold: the mustache and the Stetson, the air of quiet competence, like he’d been bred specifically to keep order in mountains like these.

“Judd Parsons,” he said, shaking Stevens’s hand. “Sheriff of Lincoln County. I hear you’ve met Kerry already.”

Finley nodded. “Morning, Agent Stevens.”

“Well, you sure look like federal agents,” Parson said, studying Stevens and Windermere. “And two of you, to boot. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the government doesn’t believe I can conduct a real investigation.”

“We’re looking for a connection between your Jane Doe here and the unknown victim on Sheriff Truman’s caseload in Boundary County,” Stevens told him. “If we can’t find a connection, we’ll get out of your hair, let you do your thing the way we’re sure you know how. But if there is a connection between your Jane Doe and Sheriff Truman’s, it means—”

“You can stop calling her Jane Doe,” Parsons said, interrupting. He held up his hands, a peace offering. “All due respect, agents. But we made her ID while you were on your way up here.”

—

The town was tiny, hardly more than a village. There was a big Northwestern tanker train slowing to a stop on the main line; as Windermere watched, two men stepped out of a crew cab pickup and disappeared inside the lead engine. A moment later, two different men emerged from the locomotive and climbed in the backseat of the truck, which drove away from the tracks, across the town’s main street, to stop in front of the Northwestern Hotel.

“Kelly-Anne Clairmont,” Sheriff Parsons told them, leading them out to his Lincoln County SUV. “She’s an Indian girl, lives in the village here. We found her ex-husband’s car abandoned on a forestry road behind the Benson property. It’s stuck pretty good in the snow back there, three miles or so from town.”

Stevens and Windermere followed Parsons into the truck and buckled their seat belts as the sheriff pointed his vehicle down the main road out of Butcher’s Creek.

“Your team get a read on the state of the body?” Stevens asked. “You’re treating this death as suspicious; must have been some sign of—”

“The state of the body was bad,” Parsons said. “That old wolf saw to that. I’m treating the death as suspicious because of the carnage, but I’m betting we’re going to find what killed Kelly-Anne wasn’t so suspicious at all.”

“Anyone talk to the ex-husband?”

Parsons gave him a look, like What kind of backwoods bumpkins do you think you’re dealing with? “Called him as soon as we found the car,” the sheriff said. “Asked him if he knew where his car was. He said Kelly-Anne took it to the bar a few nights back, never came home. Said give him a heads-up if we knew where it was, he could use the damn thing back.”

“The bar,” Stevens said. “That’s the one in town there?”

“The Gold Spike, yessir. Only bar between here and Eureka. Kelly-Anne was a . . .” The sheriff laughed. “You could say she was a local favorite around there.”

“Does the ex have a story for the last couple of days?” Windermere asked. “What’s he been up to while Ms. Clairmont was missing?”

Parsons found her in the rearview. “You’re pretty sure this is a homicide, huh?”

Windermere held his gaze. “We got a young Native woman the next county over, strangled to death and dumped in the snow. Now we have another young woman’s body here. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pattern to me.”

“If we started trying to link every dead Indian around here, Agent Windermere, we’d drive ourselves crazy.” Parsons chuckled to himself. “Now, I don’t know what Sheriff Truman has been telling you, but deaths like these aren’t exactly uncommon in winter.”

He slowed the truck. They’d reached a snowy forestry road. “These are the mountains, young lady,” he said over his shoulder. “You make too many mistakes, it’ll cost you your life.”