Chapter Fifteen
Two Weeks Before
Joe always dreaded making the journey to McElwee Land and Cattle. He never knew what to expect, and more often than not his experience there went pear-shaped.
Sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee were notorious well beyond Twelve Sleep County, and their names bubbled up anytime there was a criminal conspiracy anywhere in northern Wyoming and southern Montana.
Since he’d arrived to take over the Saddlestring District, the McElwee sisters’ names had been linked to a large car theft ring, a big-game poaching scheme, a cattle-and-horse-rustling operation, and the disappearance of several undocumented transient workers in the area.
It worked for years. His scheme hadn’t been exposed until he was caught on a remote Wyoming Department of Transportation webcam that was used to monitor the condition of the highway.
In the video, the trooper could be seen throwing duffel bags of drugs or cash into the trunk of his cruiser while the driver and passenger were detained within his vehicle.
After the transfer was made, the out-of-state travelers were kicked out of the cruiser and left gesticulating on the side of the road.
Although the trooper didn’t overtly implicate the sisters in his crimes, there was no doubting that nearby I-90 bordered the northern edge of McElwee Land and Cattle, and that very little of the contraband was ever recovered.
The rumor was that, after the trooper made a score on the interstate, he quickly laundered it via the McElwees and got it out of his hands.
The sisters weren’t arrested, however. In fact, the trooper never got the chance to implicate Lisa and Lainie.
On the day of his arraignment in Cheyenne, the trooper and his lawyer were the victims of a deadly car crash on I-90 when the lawyer’s SUV plunged though the guardrail into the maw of a steep canyon below, killing both of them.
There were no witnesses to the incident, although paint scrapings and broken glass found on the pavement above suggested that they’d been forced off the highway by another vehicle.
The canyon itself was located on the McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch. The McElwee sisters charged the county a trespass fee to access the smashed vehicle and to recover the two bodies.
—
Joe knew a little about the history of the ranch, and how unusual the sisters were when it came to fitting into the tapestry of the local ranching community.
Unlike neighboring ranches, where the owners helped each other out when it came to fixing fences, gathering cattle, pulling pickups free of mud or snow, or lending equipment, no one had anything good to say about the McElwee sisters after the patriarch, Buck McElwee, died in the 2010s.
Joe knew that the vast majority of local ranchers were hardworking, community-minded, and stalwart guardians of the land.
Lisa and Lainie stood out from them. And although the two sisters had created mayhem in Saddlestring and Winchester when they came to town and started drinking, the troubles hadn’t really started until they’d inherited the ranch from their father.
Apparently, Buck had been able to keep them under control.
Buck himself had been known as a tough negotiator and a hothead who sometimes stole water from his neighbors when he had the opportunity, but he’d generally gotten along with his fellow landowners—and the local game warden, whom he treated like a somewhat necessary but irrelevant “pain in the ass,” as he’d referred to Joe.
When Buck was still around, the McElwee Trophy Hunting operation, which was run by Buck, had had sometimes questionable clientele with Italian surnames from Chicago and Rhode Island.
Although ninety-five percent of the hunters Joe had checked over the years were legal and law-abiding, it was the five percent who were the problem, and some of Joe’s thorniest cases over the years had involved clients of Buck McElwee’s.
In addition to killing the wrong species, like taking a trophy mule deer during elk season, or a bull elk during cow/calf season, some of Buck’s hunters had performed remarkable feats of malfeasance.
There was the “accountant” from Providence who’d shot Lorne Trumley’s best mule, thinking it was a moose.
And the “management consultant” from Chicago who’d sprayed a herd of cow and calf elk with bullets from a Thompson submachine gun and posted the video to social media.
Somehow, Buck was always able to make the case that he hadn’t been present during the infraction, and Joe could never prove that he was.
But dealing with Buck McElwee was one thing. His daughters were something else entirely.
When Joe had departed the house that morning and left Biscuit at home for her own safety, Marybeth asked where he was going.
“McElwee Land and Cattle,” Joe replied.
“God be with you,” Marybeth said. “And please come home in one piece.”
—
The issue this time was a fairly outlandish report from an archery hunter who’d said he’d been after mule deer on public land that bordered the McElwee Ranch.
The hunter said he had climbed into the timber on the side of a mountain that overlooked the property and the ranch headquarters.
From his stand near a game trail, he’d focused his binoculars on the corrals that adjoined the main house.
According to the archery hunter, he could see a magnificent six-by-six bull elk inside of one of the horse corrals.
He said there was a short rope around its neck tethering it to a snubbing post in the center of the corral so it couldn’t jump out.
As he watched, the RP said a man emerged from one of the cabins behind the main house and approached the corral.
Soon after, two other men joined him to watch the first man pull a semiautomatic pistol out of a shoulder holster and start firing.
It took ten shots to bring the bull down.
“They didn’t exactly look like hunters,” the RP said.
What exactly that meant, Joe didn’t know. The comment had been relayed to him from dispatch in Cheyenne.
“One other thing,” the dispatcher told Joe. “The RP said the bull elk was staggering around.”
“Staggering around?”
“Like it was drunk or something.”
—
What Joe did know was that it was highly illegal to forcibly restrain a big-game animal, or to hunt with a weapon of small caliber incapable of dispatching the elk in a humane fashion.
And if the antlers were sawn off and the carcass left to rot, like the RP suggested, it was a case of wanton destruction for which Joe would happily charge the perpetrators—and the ranch owners who set it up and allowed it to happen.
Out-of-state hunters often joked with landowners that they’d appreciate it if a trophy animal was roped and tied to a tree so they’d be assured of success. Joe had never heard of it actually happening. Or alleged to have happened, in this case.
—
The McElwee Land and Cattle headquarters was located on the other side of Eagle Mountain from the Bucholz Ranch, with the dividing line somewhere near the summit.
The road in was rough; it hadn’t been graded for years.
Water-filled potholes made it slow going.
Football-sized rocks migrated from beneath the surface into the road itself, making it even more hazardous.
Two miles from the headquarters, Joe flinched as a bald eagle nearly grazed his windshield, and he followed it as it flew away toward the mountain.
As the eagle gained altitude, its talons folded up below it like landing gear.
Then it suddenly veered to the north above a copse of aspen trees.
The tree stand was a quarter way up the mountain slope.
It was as if the bird didn’t want to fly through the airspace above it.
Upon closer examination, Joe saw flashes of white among the aspen trunks and he brought his pickup to a stop. Something was in the trees that he’d never noticed before.
He fitted a spotting scope to his quarter-open driver’s-side window and focused in on the aspen.
When he did, he saw there was a two-track road through the sagebrush to the trees, and what looked like a camper trailer hidden inside.
He thought that in the summer, when the trees were leafed out, it would be impossible to see the unit. But the lack of leaves exposed it.
“Hmmm,” he said as he unfastened the spotting scope. “Why would they need a trailer all the way up there?”
—
The two-story McElwee home was built of logs and it sprawled across the eastern side of the headquarters compound.
There was a rough gravel lot in front of the home, with a series of open lean-to garages on the west side.
To the north was an ancient barn also made of logs, and several large corrals behind it.
Old and new vehicles filled the garages, as well as haying and stacking equipment.
Before entering the compound yard, Joe searched the distant mountain to the south.
It was timbered, and he could see a border fence stitched up the slope until it disappeared in the pines.
On the other side of that fence, he knew, was where a section of public land was located.
He guessed that to be the location where the archery hunter had set up, and where he had reported seeing the elk in the corral.
Before Joe parked, he made a loop around the ranch yard so he could take a quick look at the corral.
He was looking for an elk carcass, or possibly a gut pile or large bloodstain on the packed ground.
He saw neither, although it did look like someone had raked over fresh dirt near the snubbing post, possibly trying to conceal the crime scene.