Chapter Twenty-Three
Two Days Before
He padded over to the window and parted the curtain. Outside, it was a surprise November maelstrom. Dense clouds of poker-chip snowflakes tumbled through the blue-white illumination of their single outside pole light, and he could see drifting across the road.
“Joe, what’s going on?” Marybeth asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Blizzard,” he said. “Big one.”
“Oh great,” she moaned as she rolled over.
“I think you can sleep in this morning,” he said.
—
In a way, he thought as he made coffee, it was great.
Joe was exhausted from being in the field at least twelve hours a day for the last month straight checking hunters, hunting camps, hung carcasses, wounded animals, trespass complaints, and landowner issues.
The blizzard, which hadn’t been predicted and had arrived with massive strength, would force all of the hunters to stay in their tents, mountain camps, and hotel rooms until it eased up.
There was no point in chaining up his tires and going out there only to get stuck in three-foot snowdrifts.
Joe was almost hopelessly behind on his office work.
There were dozens of emails to answer, reports to read, and directives from headquarters in Cheyenne that he hadn’t even opened.
In a couple of hours, he would contact dispatch and let them know of the weather situation and that he’d be available to respond to urgent calls if necessary.
Otherwise, he planned to spend the day on the huge amount of catch-up work that had been accumulating since the hunting seasons opened up.
As he did every morning, he opened his weather app on his phone, and then checked the Department of Transportation site.
Every highway in northern Wyoming was closed.
Nothing would be coming or going for a while.
The schools were also closed, as were county and local offices.
That meant Marybeth’s library would be closed for the day as well, as he’d predicted.
He knew day-to-day life could be hard on a game warden’s wife during hunting season, when he was often gone before she got up and not back until after dinner. It was worse now with the girls out of the house, more lonely he was sure. He’d always felt guilty about it, but Marybeth rarely complained.
So why not surprise her?
Joe looked through the refrigerator and pantry.
During hunting season, those locations became a mystery to him.
But there was flour, eggs, butter, milk, and half a pound of bacon.
He’d let her sleep in, he thought, then he’d make her breakfast and deliver it to her in bed.
Then he’d feed her horses in the barn and clean up the manure. She could take it easy for a change.
Then, maybe later…
—
Still in his robe and slippers, Joe sat down at his desk with a mug of coffee. He was pleased to find out that most of his unopened emails were perfunctory, and he mass-deleted them. He loved deleting emails, and it made him smile.
His new supervisor had requested an activity log for every month, and he was over two months behind.
So he retrieved his spiral notebook and opened it next to his keyboard so he could bullet-point his actions in chronological order.
While rifling through it, Joe was reminded of the many unresolved questions he needed to follow up on and that he’d postponed until he had the time.
Today, he thought he had the time. And almost all of the issues had to do with several local landowners.
The Double Diamond Ranch.
The Bucholz Cattle Company.
McElwee Land and Cattle.
—
He began with his visit to the McElwees and the photos he’d taken and the notes he’d scribbled down that day.
First, though, he opened an email from the state lab in Laramie. They confirmed that the soil sample he’d taken from the corral of the McElwee Ranch contained elk blood as well as an “unknown toxic substance” that would require further testing.
Then, on the screen of his phone, Joe enlarged the labels he’d seen on the containers within the house trailer on the hillside. Then he carefully keyed them into a search engine: sodium hydroxide, phenethyl bromide, tert-butoxycarbonyl, acetone, xylazine, propionyl chloride.
They were precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of fentanyl. He guessed that would turn out to be the “unknown toxic substance.”
Joe sat back and shook his head. There was no doubt that Twelve Sleep County was awash in the drug, as were so many other rural counties across the country.
But he’d never imagined that it might be being manufactured locally.
But it all fit: the remote location, the beakers, the cookware, the “ranch hands” who didn’t look like ranch hands.
He scrolled through his phone and found the contact details for Rick Orr, a special agent for the FBI that he’d met recently. Orr, unlike so many feds Joe had encountered over the years, seemed on the level.
Since it was two hours later in the eastern time zone, Joe punched Orr’s cell phone number. After twenty seconds, the man picked up.
“Joe Pickett,” Orr said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you again. Especially this early in the morning.” His voice was groggy.
“It’s five thirty here,” Joe said. “I figured you’d be up by now.”
“I would have been a couple of months ago before I retired and moved to Florida,” Orr said. “Now I get up when I want to, do a little fishing, drink a little bourbon, and try not to even think of D.C.”
“Sorry about that. I didn’t realize you’d moved on.”
“It’s okay,” Orr said. “They didn’t exactly throw me a big party. I was a thorn in their side, as you know. They were more than happy to see me go. So what’s up? Is Romanowski in trouble again?”
Joe chuckled and said, “Not that I know of. No, I was hoping you’d help me out with a matter I’m investigating. It’s a little out of my league.”
“I’ll try, and if I don’t have the answers I still have a few friends in the bureau I could call on. I do try to keep up with things, even though I’m officially off the clock. You know, it’s hard to completely walk away.”
“I get it. It’s about fentanyl,” Joe said. “I think someone is making it here. I was wondering if you found that to be unusual.”
Orr hesitated. Joe could almost visualize the man gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “A year ago, I would have said yes. I don’t think I’d say that now. And in a way, it makes sense to me when I think about it.”
“How so?”
“Fentanyl is big business, as you probably know. It used to be that China produced all of the ingredients, the precursor chemicals, and sent them to labs in Mexico, where it was manufactured and later distributed in the U.S. The CCP had deals with the cartels, especially the Sinaloa cartel.
“But the situation has changed, or is changing,” Orr said.
“We’re in a cold war with China, as you know, and we’ve really cracked down at the border and disrupted the distribution of pills.
It makes sense to me that instead of doing all the manufacturing in Mexico and sending finished product to the U.S. , they’d develop a work-around.”
“A work-around?” Joe asked.
“Ship the precursors directly to bad guys in the U.S. and cook it up here. Avoid the border completely. Of course, you’d still need experienced people who know how to make it.
But I could see it happening. Instead of shipping the finished product, the cartels send people who know how to make the finished product.
And the CCP changes the way they ship chemicals.
“You see, Joe,” Orr said, “the dirty little secret is that there are thousands of undocumented Chinese nationals all over the country. They’re mostly military-aged men, and they walked across the border with all of the others and vanished into the interior of the country.
We know this because of many verified reports of Chinese trekking through the Darién Gap along with all the other immigrants.
“I’m not current enough on the issue to know if the feds are locating and deporting them. In the meantime, who knows? Maybe they’ve formed a network to transport fentanyl precursors around the country to new labs.”
“And that kind of manufacturing could be done in the middle of nowhere?” Joe asked.
“I’d say yes,” Orr said. “There might be quality issues, but I’ve read where the chemists don’t hesitate to test the purity of the drugs on dogs, pigs, or cattle. If the animals die, they change the formula a little. That kind of thing.”
Joe sat up. “They test fentanyl on animals?”
“Probably people, too,” Orr said. “I wouldn’t put it past them. But it can’t be great business to kill all of your customers. So yeah, they do animal testing.”
“So a ranch with livestock and wild game could be a really good location for fentanyl production?”
“I can’t say for certain, of course,” Orr said, “but yes, a remote ranch would probably be ideal. Especially if it’s near to an interstate highway where the chemicals could be delivered.”
Joe recalled the “drunk” elk reportedly tied up in the McElwee corral. And suddenly it made more sense.
“Thank you, Rick,” Joe said. “You’ve been a big help.”
“I have?”
“You have no idea,” Joe said.
—
Marybeth sat up in bed and smiled slyly when Joe arrived in their bedroom with pancakes, bacon, and coffee on a tray. There were also two empty plates and silverware placed in a cigar box because he couldn’t find a better container.
“Oh my,” she said. “What brought this on? What did you do, Joe?”
“This time, nothing,” he said, slightly offended. Then: “We’re snowbound.”
“It’s a snow day? How lovely.”
When he clumsily placed the tray on the covers beside her, she deftly reached out and saved the tureen of coffee from spilling onto the quilt. Joe sat on the foot of the bed.
“The pancakes might be a little dry,” he said. “I’m out of practice.” Joe used to make pancakes for their daughters on Saturday mornings, but it had been years since all of them had been in the house together.