Chapter Thirteen
Sheridan found Sheriff Sondergard in the break room pouring coffee into two paper cups. His uniform was discolored from soot, and his eyes were red from exhaustion. “It’s bad coffee,” he said. “Do you want a cup?”
“That’s okay, I’ll pass.”
She entered the room and then backed quickly away.
“I know,” he said wearily. “I reek. I just spent the whole afternoon at the scene of a camper trailer fire in the middle of nowhere. It was amazing how fast that thing burned down to nothing. And then our tech guy showed up and found a body inside. Do you know what a human body smells like that’s been burned to a crisp? ”
Sheridan shook her head.
“It smells like roast pig,” he said. “You know, when they take the whole pig out of the pit?”
“I get the idea.”
“Anyway, it’s been a rough day.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“It’s too early to say,” he said. “The tech guy thinks accelerant might have been used to start it. We won’t know until more testing is done. It could be suicide or an accident, but it could be murder. Man—a shooting one day and a possible arson and murder the next. What’s going on in this county?”
“Nothing good,” Sheridan said. “Is the trailer fire related in any way to what happened to my dad?”
“I thought about that, of course,” Sondergard said.
“If they’re related, I can’t offer a plausible connection.
But it’s still early. The tech wouldn’t have been there so quickly, but he was just a couple of miles away at the junction where the shooting took place.
So it’s all in basically the same area.”
“Do you know who it was?”
Sondergard nodded. “We’re pretty sure. A guy from Casper named Budd Betts. We ran his plates. But please keep that confidential until we can notify the next of kin. That’s another thing I’m not looking forward to.”
“What about the guy who called in the shooting?” Sheridan asked.
“He’s in the witness room. I know I probably shouldn’t do this—asking you to sit in. But since we’re sort of working together, I made that decision. I haven’t started with him yet. He said he’d like a cup of coffee.”
Sondergard pointed at the second cup and said, “After he tastes this, he might not want to talk to us.”
—
Sheridan followed Sondergard into the small room off the lobby that was used for staff meetings, witness statements, and interrogations.
It was bare-bones except for a faded photo of the Tetons on the east wall.
There was no one-way mirror, although there was a video camera mounted in the top south corner and a digital recorder on the tabletop.
The witness thanked Sondergard for the coffee, then winced when he sipped it.
“Sorry,” Sondergard said. He sat down in a hardback chair across from the man and motioned for Sheridan to take the other one.
“This is Sheridan Pickett,” Sondergard said. “I asked her to sit in.”
The witness nodded as he studied her closely.
He was not as dirty as Sondergard, but it was close, Sheridan thought.
He was in his midthirties, with a long unkempt beard.
His eyes were startlingly blue, and he had an axe-like nose and thin lips partially obscured by facial hair.
He wore buckskin trousers that were shiny from use, and a rough cotton tunic decorated with tiny colored beads.
The skin of his hands was darkly tanned.
He looked like someone who had just stepped out of a tipi at a mountain man rendezvous in 1829, Sheridan thought.
Except for the cell phone that was facedown on the table in front of him.
Sondergard reached out and pressed the Record button on the machine.
“It’s eight forty-two p.m. on Wednesday, November 16. I’m speaking to Earl Wright of Yoder, Wyoming. With me is Sheridan Pickett, the daughter of the game warden who was shot yesterday morning.”
Wright frowned. “He was your dad?”
“Yes.”
“Damn, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“He’s not dead.”
Wright’s eyes enlarged. “He’s not?”
“No, he’s hanging in there.”
“He sure as hell looked dead to me.”
“Well, he isn’t. Nevertheless, we’re hoping that what you tell us can help identify and catch the shooters.”
“That’s a lot of pressure on me, isn’t it?” Wright asked rhetorically.
“Excuse me,” Sondergard said, shooting Sheridan a Cool it look. “Can we start this at the beginning? Mr. Wright, you told me earlier that you were hunting by yourself yesterday morning around ten o’clock. Let’s start there with just the facts.”
“Yup, I can do that. How detailed do you want me to be?”
“As detailed as possible, Mr. Wright.”
Wright sat back and stared at the ceiling for at least a minute. Sheridan presumed he was gathering his thoughts.
Sondergard flipped to a fresh page on a legal pad and poised his pen over it.
Sheridan was impressed that the sheriff planned to take his own notes, even though the interview was being taped and filmed.
It showed professionalism, she thought. It had been a long time since “professionalism” and the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department had been considered together in her mind.
“Okay,” Wright said, “I got up about an hour before the sun rose. It was damned cold with all that snow on the ground, and my fire had gone out during the night. So I spent about forty-five minutes getting a new one going. Are you familiar with a bow drill?”
Sondergard looked at Sheridan for clarification.
“It’s a primitive fire starter,” she said. “You wrap a stick with string or twine and rotate it quickly to create enough friction at the base that sparks make a fire.”
“Exactly right, little lady,” Wright said. “On TV it looks pretty easy. But in the dark without perfectly dry kindling and your muscles trembling because it’s so damn cold—well, it takes a while. But it finally worked and I got my fire started.”
“Why not use a match?” Sondergard asked.
Wright grinned. “Then that wouldn’t be pure hunting now, would it?”
“Pure hunting?”
“Some folks call it primitive hunting, some call it traditional hunting. It’s a thing I’m into.
I head out into the field with the least amount of gear possible.
In my case, it’s the recurve bow I made myself, and my homemade arrows, and nothing to sleep under except an elk hide that I tanned myself.
No matches, no optics, no ATV, no tent. It’s basic survival hunting. It’s Zen hunting.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Sondergard said.
“Like I said, it’s as close to nature as you can get,” Wright explained.
“I’m not one of those idiots with a custom rifle who bangs away at game animals from a thousand yards away, or sleeps in a lodge on fresh sheets.
I do it my way. And when I’m blessed enough to harvest an animal, I process it myself and use every bit of it. ”
“Yet you have a cell phone,” Sheridan said.
“My wife insists on it,” Wright moaned. “It’s my only concession to the modern world. I hate having it, and I wish I didn’t. But she wouldn’t let me go out unless I promised her I’d take it.”
“Anyway,” Sondergard said, “you started a fire. Go on.”
“Once the fire burned down to coals, I roasted half of a rabbit for breakfast. I’d eaten part of it the night before. It sure was good.”
Sheridan had been around her father enough over the years that she wondered if Wright had a small-game license with him for the rabbit. But for the sake of getting on with the story, she held her tongue.
Wright slowly recounted how he’d left his camp on foot with his bow and arrows.
He found a small herd of mule deer in an arroyo, but after a half-hour crawl, he was unable to get close enough to get a shot at the buck.
He stayed within the network of draws and arroyos in pursuit of the deer, trying not to make a sound.
Around eight thirty, he guessed, he heard the sound of a motorized vehicle ahead of him. The wind picked up and drowned it out, so he presumed whoever was driving it had left the area.
But as he topped a sagebrush-covered hill, he saw that he’d been wrong.
The ATV he’d heard was parked about a mile away on a slope opposite him, and Wright watched as two men worked their way down to the bottom of the swale on foot.
They both had rifles slung over their shoulders as they walked, and they were dressed in camo.
“I couldn’t figure out what their game was,” Wright said. “I thought they must be hunters, but I couldn’t figure out their strategy. They were walking from their ATV toward the road. I mean, that area is a known migration route for game, but that’s not how you’d hunt them.”
Wright said he hid behind a six-foot lone juniper bush and he watched the two men through the branches.
When they reached the bottom of the swale, he said, they split up.
The bigger one hunkered down behind a large sagebrush on one side of the road, and the shorter man stretched out in a slight depression twenty yards from Antler Creek Road.
They both set up facing east toward the road before it split off into three directions.
“That’s when I saw the pickup,” Wright said. “It was coming from the south. A green Ford, I think.”
“My dad’s truck,” Sheridan said.
“It wasn’t until that minute that I knew what was going on,” Wright said.
“It was an ambush. They were waiting for him like they knew he’d be coming, and when.
There was nothing I could do to stop it.
The truck was too far away, and the wind was blowing so that even if I started shouting no one would hear me.
“Then I saw those two fellows raise their rifles and pop-pop-pop-pop! They both just kept blasting away until the pickup stopped not far in front of them. I could see holes all over the truck and bullet holes in the windshield. It was a hell of a thing. Then them guys got up and started walking back to their ATV. It looked like they was arguing about something.”
Sheridan asked, “Could you tell which road my dad was planning to take at the junction?”
“No. He never got close enough to take one.”