Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Sheridan then recapped her drive to the Bucholz Ranch, the convoy of vehicles she’d observed, and the forced confinement of Uncle Hank. When she showed photos of the man on her phone, even April was fascinated and seemed to have put her dispute with the sheriff to the side.
“It’s kidnapping if nothing else,” Sheridan said.
“There are probably about a half dozen other serious charges to bring against John and Shelby. So of course I wonder if Dad caught a glimpse of him when he visited the Bucholz Ranch a couple of weeks ago. Was he going out there that morning to confirm what he’d seen?
Did John and Shelby set up an ambush to stop him? ”
“Wow,” Sondergard said. “That took a turn I didn’t expect. John and Shelby completely fooled me.”
“That’s what they do,” Sheridan said.
“Are you sure there are explosives around this guy’s neck?”
“There’s a locked collar around his neck for sure,” she said. “I have no idea if they’re real explosives. But he believes it.”
“But why would they do that to him?” Sondergard asked. “Why keep him confined like that?”
“He claims it’s for his own good, like I told you,” she said. “But I think it’s more complicated than that. He must have some kind of legal claim on the ranch that John and Shelby want him to grant them. Otherwise, why keep him alive? But it’s all too twisted to figure out.”
Lucy raised a finger in the air. “Maybe it’s all about his masterpiece,” she suggested. “Maybe he told John and Shelby that he’d sign over the ranch to them, but not until his work is finished. That would be a reason to keep him around.”
“That makes sense,” Sheridan said. “I never thought of that.” She was impressed with her youngest sister and reminded once again that Lucy had matured. Sheridan too often tended to think of Lucy as the child she once was, she realized.
“What about the white trucks you saw?” Nate asked Sheridan. His entry into the conversation made all three sisters and Sondergard turn their heads to him.
“Do you mean the Global Exploration trucks?”
Nate nodded.
“I don’t know how they fit in,” Sheridan said.
“I did a quick Grok search before you all got here.” She scrolled on her phone to find what she was looking for, and she read aloud from the screen: “ ‘Global Exploration (United States) is primaily a uranium miner, but is expanding into rare earths via the Aliende Project in Brazil and the Roundtop Mesa Mill in Utah. Headquarters are in Houston, Texas, and they have a market cap of three point one billion dollars.’ There isn’t really a lot more information that I could find before you got here. ”
“Uranium?” Sondergard asked aloud. “Do we have that here?”
“This state has a lot of it,” Nate replied. “Along with everything else.”
“So what are they doing on the Bucholz Ranch?”
“No idea,” Sheridan said. “Did John or Shelby mention anything about an energy company looking at their ranch when you talked to them?”
“No.”
“See how they are?”
—
They discussed their findings and theories for forty minutes. Nate again receded into silence.
Sondergard said he’d investigate the situation at the Bucholz Ranch in regard to Uncle Hank. He said he’d wait for his new deputy to return from his day off.
Lucy introduced the idea that perhaps all three ranches had colluded in the ambush, since all of the ranchers seemed to have motives for going after their father. April disagreed, saying that the McElwees had such animus for their neighbors that she couldn’t see them cooperating on anything at all.
Finally, Sheriff Sondergard sat back in his chair and said, “I’m impressed. My guys didn’t get near this much. I’ve got a lot to think over.”
“We aren’t done yet,” Sheridan said to him. “Did you locate the missing notebook and cell phone?”
He shook his head. “I put Deputy Bowkley on that one. I haven’t heard anything either way.”
For a while, Sheridan had started to wonder if someone in Sondergard’s own department had actually found the items—and not told him. Which made her wary.
Although she wanted to trust Sondergard completely, she wasn’t there yet.
He’d need to convince her over time, she thought.
That he had withheld the information about the investigation into the McElwee sisters showed he was capable of misdirection and deception.
Or maybe that was just a prerequisite for being a county sheriff.
—
“When did you say your father might regain consciousness?” Sondergard asked.
“We don’t know,” Sheridan replied. “We’re waiting for the call from our mother.”
“If he could shed some light on this, like where he was going that morning…” As his sentence trailed off, Sondergard looked hard at Nate.
“You haven’t said much. You listened to everything tonight. What is your theory as to who could have done this? Do you have one?”
“Yes.”
“Can you enlighten us?” The sheriff was clearly annoyed, Sheridan thought. She hadn’t seen that side of him before.
Nate paused a long time. He looked over Sondergard’s shoulder and said, “Kestrel’s out for the count. I need to take her home.”
“But what is your take on this case?” Sondergard pressed.
“We won’t know until Joe wakes up and tells us who did it,” Nate said.
“That’s it? I thought you had special powers.”
“I never claimed I did,” Nate said softly.
Sondergard grinned, but not in a kind way. “Sheridan says you have this unique way of looking at the world. I’m just wondering what it is.”
There was more than a little aggression in Sondergard’s tone, Sheridan thought.
Nate again paused a long time before responding.
Finally he said, “Every year, I fill all my hunting tags: elk, deer, pronghorn, wild turkey, and all the waterfowl I can eat. I used to get asked a lot why I was such a successful big-game hunter. People asked me that question because they might have observed me getting into my drift boat with a simple bow and arrow and floating down the Twelve Sleep River. By the time I rowed into the river access near Saddlestring, my boat could barely float because of the weight of all of the dead game in it.”
“Yes?” Sondergard said, prompting for an explanation.
“They asked me, how do you hunt from a boat?” Nate said. “I told them I don’t hunt from a boat. I connect with my surroundings, and I let the animals come to me. Simple as that.”
“What are you saying?” Sondergard asked. He was clearly perplexed. He looked to Sheridan. “Is that some kind of secret code language?”
Sheridan shrugged.
“I have a little girl to get home,” Nate said. He stood up and walked into the family room and scooped up Kestrel.
—
Three and a half hours to the northwest, Marybeth was fighting sleep in a chair next to Joe when the supervising night nurse entered the hospital recovery room. She’d introduced herself as Barbara Peters, and Marybeth found her to be pleasant and professional.
“Has there been any sign of consciousness?” she asked Marybeth.
“Not yet. He’s sleeping very peaceably, though.”
The top of Joe’s head was swathed in bandages that stretched down to his eyebrows. Tubes sprouted from his body like an old potato growing roots. Wires attached to probes snaked out from beneath the covers and connected to several banks of electronic gear.
Nurse Peters walked to the side of Joe’s bed and glared at the monitor above the headboard that displayed his vital signs. Then, after a few seconds, she hit the side of the monitor with an open hand in a gesture much like smacking a television that refused to work.
“Well, shoot,” she said. “It’s not showing his oxygen level. They told me they’d fixed this machine, but apparently not.”
She turned to Marybeth and said, “I think we’ll need to move him into a room where everything works. I’ll go check on availability.”
With that, she turned on her heel and strode out of the room.
Marybeth was fine with that. Joe shared a room with a middle-aged man named McWilliams, who was apparently recovering from surgery as a result of a car accident that happened on the interstate near Laurel, Montana.
McWilliams was obviously heavily medicated and his head was bandaged up as well, but at least once an hour he opened his eyes, stared at Marybeth with wide-eyed appreciation, and whispered, “Hey, you, sweetheart. Why don’t you come over here and sit on my face?
” And, “Come over here and lay on top of me and wriggle around a little.”
Then his eyes would close and he’d fall back asleep and leave Marybeth both insulted and annoyed. Until the next time he came to.
Nurse Peters showed up with an attendant a few minutes later.
“We’re going to move your husband down the hall,” she said. They unplugged him from the machines in the walls, but they didn’t remove his IVs from the stands with rollers. The attendant pushed Joe’s bed out into the hallway while Nurse Peters rolled the stands along beside him. Marybeth followed.
The new room, three doors down from his old one, had no other patient in it. Marybeth’s first thought was she hoped the hospital wouldn’t charge them extra for a single room, but she didn’t say it.
Nurse Peters and her colleague fitted all the loose couplings into monitors and rebooted the equipment. The screens lit up, and Peters observed them carefully and said, “That’s better. Everything’s working like it should be.” Then, “Try and get some sleep, Mrs. Pickett.”
The new room allowed Marybeth more privacy and fewer lewd suggestions. She settled into a reclining chair and was asleep beside Joe in minutes.
Marybeth slept deeply, and she didn’t hear the footsteps outside in the hallway from two men who’d accessed the ward from the elevator.
—
She was jolted awake by a commotion in the hallway about a half hour later. Marybeth saw Nurse Peters jog by the open door and shout something over her shoulder. Another nurse quickly followed her.
Marybeth rubbed her eyes and sat up. Joe’s condition was unchanged, and he didn’t stir.
She rose and stepped out into the hallway.
To her right, the floor receptionist behind the counter said to another nurse, “I don’t know what happened.
I was talking to some guy for a few minutes.
He said he was lost in the hospital and I gave him directions to the cardiac unit, where he said his father was.
I told him visiting hours were over, but he was quite insistent.
But I didn’t see him go down there into that room, I swear. ”
Nurse Peters emerged from a room to Marybeth’s left. She declared, “We’ve lost Mr. McWilliams…”
As she said it, she looked up and met eyes with Marybeth.
The declaration had obviously not been for the visiting wife of a recovering patient, but for the other personnel in the hallway.
Nurse Peters was embarrassed, and she said to Marybeth, “I’ll need you to step back inside for a few minutes. I’m sorry, but we’ve got a situation.”
“What happened?” Marybeth asked. “He seemed okay a couple of hours ago.”
“Yes, he did. I don’t know what happened. Some kind of seizure, I think. His vitals were steady until they lit up like a pinball machine…then nothing.”
Emergency room technicians appeared and rushed down the hall in front of Marybeth. She recognized that one of them wielded a heart defibrillator.
Ten minutes later, Marybeth went back to the doorway as orderlies wheeled a gurney down the hallway into the room. The patient, McWilliams, was obviously dead. Yellow foam clung to the sides of his mouth.
Only then did she realize that the whiteboard attached next to the room had not been amended earlier. It still read:
T. McWILLIAMS
J. PICKETT