Yellowstone Standoff Read online

  “I like it,” Chuck said.

  Lex said to him, “I want you to tag along.”

  “Lex doesn’t trust me,” Keith said with a smile.

  “I don’t trust anyone right now,” the ranger pointed out. “But the fact is, two heads are always better than one. And in your case, Chuck, you’re probably as good at finding things on your own as Keith is with Chance.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Chuck said. He turned to Keith. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

  His family sat at one of the tables in the front half of the mess tent. The aroma of sautéed onions and red chili filled the tent. The girls sipped hot chocolate between bites from enormous oatmeal cookies.

  Janelle conversed in rapid-fire Spanish with Jorge, who stood at the far end of the table. She turned to Chuck. “Jorge thinks Lex is right: somebody took the phone. He’s sure they’ll give it back.”

  Jorge turned to stir huge pots bubbling on the stove. Chuck studied the man’s back. Why was the cook so sure Lex’s theory was correct?

  Chuck explained Keith’s idea of the perimeter search and Lex’s request that Chuck go along. As he talked, her lips drew tighter together.

  “I’m coming, too,” she said. There was no give in her eyes. “Bears attack ones or twos, not threes.”

  “We’ll be right at the edge of camp, and I’ll have the .357 with me.” He gave the bottom of his daypack a tap.

  “So much the better for me to join you, then. The girls will be fine here with Clarence. You said it’ll only take an hour.”

  “How about if Clarence comes along instead?”

  “I want to come for my own sake as much as anything else. We only have a few days out here. I want to see everything I can.”

  “We’ll be back in the trees. It’ll be wet and muddy. There won’t be much to see.”

  “Everything out here is new to me—the moss on the tree trunks, the ferns, the mushrooms poking out of the ground.”

  Chuck smiled. This was the Janelle he’d fallen for two years ago. He reached out and touched her shoulder. “It’ll be great to have you along, cariña.”

  They left the girls with Clarence and met Keith and Chance where the trail climbed past the east end of tent row. A thick grove of lodgepole pines rose beyond the trail.

  “The trees are closest to camp here,” Keith said. “I figure this is where anyone who took the phone would’ve headed.”

  Chance, tail wagging, led them into the forest. A hundred feet into the trees, Keith turned so they moved through the woods parallel to the path.

  “Logic says whoever took the phone hiked up the trail away from camp, then veered into the trees once they were over the hill and out of sight,” Keith said as Chance tugged him forward. “If we’d have headed up the path first, Chance couldn’t have teased out the scent at the departure point from among all the other trail users. But by working our way alongside the path back here in the trees, we’ll cut the scent of anyone who came this way.”

  A patch of low sky, gun-metal gray, showed through a break in the forest canopy. A blast of wind whipped the tops of the trees, sending heavy drops of water, clinging to the branches since the rainstorm, cascading to the forest floor. Chuck hunched his shoulders against the cold as he walked, but Janelle looked as if she were out for a stroll along the paved river trail back home in Durango, her shoulders back and arms loose, the hood of her rain jacket down, her black hair glistening with fallen drops.

  Chance pivoted ninety degrees and leaned hard into the leash. Keith clicked a button on the retractable lead, allowing Chance to shoot twenty feet ahead, the nylon cord unspooling with a high-pitched zing from the reel.

  “Got something.” Keith retracted the lead in arm’s lengths until he again stood just behind Chance.

  “Human?” Chuck asked.

  “Can’t say for sure. Something big, though. Chance’s excitement level tells me that much.”

  Keith locked the shortened leash with a click. Chance strained forward, collar taut.

  “Cripes,” Keith said as Chance pressed ahead, deeper into the forest. “It’s almost like he’s on a blood scent.”

  33

  Chuck followed Janelle and Keith through the trees as Chance pressed ahead. The dog’s paws tore into the duff on the forest floor, sending pine needles flying. The smell of must and decay rose from the ground into the damp air.

  Peering ahead, Chuck spotted something glinting in the weak afternoon light.

  “Ka-ching,” Keith declared.

  Chance came upon the rectangular storage case for the satellite phone. The black plastic case, lined with gray foam rubber, lay open on the ground, empty. White plastic shards littered the forest floor beyond the case. A fist-sized rock rested among the plastic pieces.

  “The phone,” Keith said, disbelief in his voice. “Somebody smashed it to bits.”

  Chance sniffed at the case and phone shards, then looked deeper into the forest. The dog stood in place, trembling. It lowered its head and keened, the mournful sound almost human.

  The trunks of trees and the needle-carpeted forest floor stretched as far ahead as Chuck could see.

  Keith used the shortened lead to urge Chance forward, but the dog cowered, refusing to move.

  “What do you smell, boy?” Keith asked. “What is it?”

  He took hold of Chance by the scruff of the dog’s neck and tugged the animal past the phone shards. Chance straightened at Keith’s side.

  “Are you ready now, boy?” Keith asked.

  Chance answered with a short, sharp bark.

  Keith cursed. “It’s a blood trail, all right.”

  Chuck studied the floor of the forest. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s an air scent. That’s what Chance’s bark means. Straight ahead.”

  Keith moved beyond the smashed phone, his steps deliberate. Chance advanced with him, pressed to his leg.

  Chuck considered digging the .357 from his pack, but there was nothing yet to see—or aim at.

  Keith and Chance made their way through the trees, Janelle and Chuck trailing behind. No one spoke. Chance panted, no longer sniffing.

  “There!” Keith exclaimed, his voice shaking.

  Fifty feet away, a human body lay crumpled at the base of a lodgepole pine. The body, twisted and unmoving, wore brown work jeans and an insulated jacket in a camouflage print.

  Sarah.

  Part Three

  “Where we are, there are no wolves; where the wolf lives, there is wilderness.”

  — Ecological biologist Daniel Botkin

  34

  Chuck ran toward the body. He stumbled over the knuckle of a root protruding from the ground, caught himself, and kept running, dodging trees, his breaths coming in harsh gasps, until he fell to his knees beside Sarah’s still form.

  She lay on her back in the shadowed forest, her torso wrapped around the trunk of the tree, her arms and legs askew. Blotches of blood, the color of dark cherry in the shadowed forest, soaked through her jacket. Numerous cuts slashed the jacket’s camo-print exterior, revealing a puffy white layer of insulation, stained with blood in several places. Sarah’s bare head was flung back, her eyes open but unseeing.

  Chuck knew in an instant Sarah was dead—her face was ashen, her eyes collapsed into their sockets, her lips drained of color—but he threw himself into action nonetheless, anything, anything to keep from acknowledging the horrible truth before him. He unzipped Sarah’s jacket. A number of knife wounds—more than a dozen at first glance—had gone through her jacket and torso-hugging T-shirt. Some of the wounds slashed diagonally across Sarah’s body, flaying open her ribcage. Others were stab wounds straight into her chest cavity. It was obvious from the severity of the stabs and slashes that Sarah had not suffered long after sustaining her injuries.

  Janelle fell to her knees beside Sarah. Chuck cupped the back of Sarah’s neck and lifted, clearing her air passage. Already, however, her neck was stiff with death. A
whiff escaped Sarah’s lips, the result of the opening of her throat, but that was all.

  Chuck looked across Sarah’s motionless body at Janelle. “She’s gone. There’s nothing we can do for her.”

  His stomach lurched. He put the back of his hand to his mouth, fighting the urge to vomit. Little more than an hour ago, Sarah had stood with everyone in camp, listening as Lex spoke in front of the cabin.

  The skin at the back of his neck tingled. He spun on his knees, scanning the surrounding forest. Was Sarah’s murderer watching?

  He looked up at Keith, who stood at Sarah’s feet, staring. Chance quivered at his side.

  “Can Chance follow the trail of whoever did this?” Chuck asked.

  Keith lowered his hand to the dog’s head. His face crumpled. “No,” he managed, his voice hoarse. “The blood will have overwhelmed Chance’s olfactory system. Besides, whoever did this is sure to have gone back the way they came.”

  “You mean, to camp?”

  Keith nodded. “They wouldn’t have gone deeper into the forest.”

  “You don’t think an outsider could have done this?” Chuck asked, even though he knew the answer.

  “Some crazy person who happened to be waiting in the woods, miles from anywhere, just when Sarah wandered out here with the phone?”

  Chuck sank back on his heels and closed his eyes. Tears pressed at his eyelids. “I know. You’re right.” He blinked, freeing the tears, and gazed at Sarah’s pale face.

  He forced himself to accept the truth. Someone from camp had killed Sarah, and her killing must have had something to do with the satellite phone.

  Janelle’s eyes went to the woods around them. “We should go.”

  Chuck worked his arms beneath Sarah and straightened, lifting her to his chest. Crime scene be damned; he wasn’t about to leave her body alone here in the woods. He held her tight and turned a slow circle, taking in the site of Sarah’s murder without any idea what he was looking for. No bloody knife lay on the forest floor. Nothing.

  They paused on their way back through the trees long enough for Janelle to pile pieces of the satellite phone into the plastic case and snap it shut. She trudged on through the woods, case in hand. Chuck followed, Sarah’s body heavy in his arms. Keith and Chance brought up the rear.

  When they approached the edge of the grove, Janelle turned and headed down the slope past tent row while remaining well back in the trees and out of sight of camp.

  “Best not to set off a panic,” she said over her shoulder to Chuck and Keith.

  “For as long as we can, anyway,” Chuck agreed.

  They left the forest at the bottom of the slope, below the latrines, and made a beeline for the cabin. A misty fog swept low across the valley floor, obscuring their movements from those on the tent platforms above. No one stepped out of the mess tent as they hurried past. Janelle opened the cabin door without knocking and stepped aside, ushering Chuck past her. He edged sideways through the doorway, holding Sarah’s body.

  A long, wooden table surrounded by chairs took up the center of the cabin’s single room. Built-in benches topped with foam pads lined the log walls, providing couch-like seating by day and dorm-style sleeping at night. At the sight of Chuck with Sarah in his arms, Lex and Toby shot to their feet from where they were seated at the center table, their ladder-back chairs scraping the scarred, plank floor.

  Lex swept notepads, crumb-speckled plates, coffee mugs, Toby’s laptop computer, and a squat LED table lantern to the far end of the table. The light of the lantern and the feeble illumination through the room’s sole window in the cabin’s west wall created a subdued glow. A fire, burned down to coals, cast heat into the room from a stone fireplace set in the back wall. Wooden pegs lined the chinked logs above the benches, serving as hanging storage for an assortment of fleece coats, rain jackets, and daypacks. The combined odor of wet nylon, sweat, and woodsmoke was strong in the confined space.

  Chuck laid Sarah’s body on the table as Keith entered the cabin with Chance. Janelle closed the door behind them.

  Lex put a hand to his mouth. “Dear God.”

  Chuck eased Sarah’s eyes closed with his thumb and forefinger. He straightened her arms at her sides, his movements gentle.

  Lex reached to touch Sarah’s hand. “She’s...she’s...?”

  “Yes,” Chuck said. The sound of his voice surprised him. “She was in the forest. Chance found her...Keith...the phone...”

  Toby clasped his hands together. Tears built in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks into his mustache. “Sarah!” he cried, his voice breaking, his gaze fixed on Sarah’s face.

  The tip of her tongue showed between slightly parted lips. Her mohawk fell to one side and her earrings glinted dully in the dim light.

  Lex grasped the personal locator beacon hanging from a zipper tab at the back of Chuck’s daypack and pressed and held the button at the beacon’s base.

  “Oh,” Chuck said. “Right.” The thought of the beacons hadn’t even occurred to him.

  During the seconds required for the light next to the button to activate, Lex gulped repeatedly, battling for each breath. The instant the beacon lit, he spun to the wall of the cabin and pressed and held the buttons, in turn, of the emergency beacons attached to his and Toby’s daypacks, hanging on the wooden pegs above the benches, until their tiny LED lights glowed red, too.

  “What?” Lex demanded. “How?”

  Chuck explained in fits and starts—their passage through the woods, the discovery of the phone in pieces, Sarah’s body at the base of the tree. He described their return to the cabin under the cover of the mist and gathering darkness.

  “Whoever did this had to have seen you. They’d have been watching for you,” Lex said, his voice grim. “Help will be here soon. We’ll evacuate the camp. Everyone will be questioned.”

  “I’m not sure how soon help will be able to get here,” Chuck said. He looked out the window at the wind-whipped fog racing across the meadow. “Helicopters won’t be able to fly in this, and the wind and darkness are likely to keep boats off the lake, too, maybe until morning. They’ll come as soon as they can—at daylight, for sure—but they won’t risk the lives of responders in bad weather for what, as far as they know, may be nothing more than a sprained ankle.”

  “I activated three beacons. We could activate more.”

  “They’ll be freaking out all right. But I still think we have to plan on no one making it here before dawn.”

  Lex looked at Sarah’s body. “She was so much like my Lucy, our Lucy.” He shook his head, his cheeks wobbling. “When Joe and Rebecca were killed, it tore Jessie up. She kept seeing Carson and Lucy in those two. She couldn’t get it out of her mind, even when the kids were home for Christmas. Everything should have been fine—we were all healthy, happy—but it wasn’t. It was like there was a shadow over us. And then, a month later, the cancer came.”

  He drew a halting breath and pressed a finger to the base of his nose. A single tear dangled at the corner of one eye.

  “She said she’d felt it for months, that she should have done something. But the doctors said there was no way she could have known. And of course, at that point, what could they do? Poison her with chemo. Burn her up with radiation. All for just another year. But she took it. She took it all. Those last weeks with Carson and Lucy, she made them count. She never once let them see how much she hurt.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. The tear rolled down his cheek and fell to the floor, making a dark spot on the wood. He opened his eyes, taking in Sarah on the table before him. “This attack may have been personal.” He looked across the room at Janelle. “Your brother, wasn’t he...?”

  Janelle’s eyes flashed. “Yes, he was. But he was in camp with Chuck between the time you spoke with everyone and when we found—” She stopped, licked her lips, began again. “Chuck and I left him with the girls when we—” A yelp escaped her. “The girls,” she said, fear rising in her eyes. She whirled for the door.r />
  “Wait,” Lex said. “Please.”

  She turned to him, her fingers on the handle. “I’m going to bring them here,” she said, her voice firm. “I want them inside. They will be inside, with me, until help comes.”

  “All right,” Lex said. “Understood. But we shouldn’t scare them. I don’t want to scare anyone.” His eyes went back to Sarah. “Most of all, I don’t want to scare whoever did this to her.” He looked around the room. “Everyone got that? We’ll be like Jessie. We’ll be strong. Together.”

  Toby clung to the edge of the table, bent over Sarah’s body. Chuck caught Lex’s eye, then directed his gaze at the folding knife belted to the waist of Sarah’s ex.

  Toby glanced up, catching Chuck’s look. “I’ve been here, in the cabin, the whole time since the meeting.” He looked at Lex. “Haven’t I?”

  Lex nodded.

  Chuck stared at Sarah. To his surprise, he found that the killing itself didn’t shock him as much as he’d have expected, coming as it did on the heels of everything else—the appearance at camp of the grizzly and wolf, the arrival of the wolf pack in the valley, the destruction of the satellite phone—almost as if Sarah’s murder was part of a pattern he couldn’t quite recognize.

  “We have to play for time,” Lex said. “We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

  “We can’t take people’s knives away from them,” Chuck said. “That would set everyone off. But we do need to gather everyone together. Sarah was alone; we don’t want anyone else to end up in the same situation.”

  Lex squeezed his hands together, his fingers intertwined. “Sarah,” he murmured.

  “We’ll put her in a sleeping bag,” Chuck told him. “We’ll tell the girls she’s asleep, that she’s not feeling well.”

  “We’ll have to tell Clarence,” Janelle said. “He’ll ask. He’ll demand to know.”

  She waited until Lex met her gaze.

  “Okay,” he said, his mouth sagging, his voice weary.

  She left the cabin, pulling the door tight behind her.