Chapter Twenty-Five
“Doesn’t look like they found him,” he said.
“It might be a few days,” Bowkley said. “Law enforcement on the res leaves a lot to be desired.”
It was well past midnight, and there had been fewer than five oncoming cars in the last hour. The only signs of life were the green-eyed reflections of mule deer poised on the shoulder to cross the highway.
O’Bryan felt sleep coming on as the adrenaline rush he’d had earlier began to recede.
It had all gone off without a hitch, just as Bowkley had said it would.
Bowkley had distracted the night nurse with a story about being lost in the hospital, while O’Bryan scanned the names written outside each hospital room until he found the one containing J. Pickett.
He’d slipped into the room without being seen.
O’Bryan had pulled his hat down low on his head and had concentrated on looking down at his boots as he did so, knowing there were likely closed-circuit cameras mounted in the ceiling of the outside hallway.
The livestock vaccine-dosing gun was inside his coat, out of view.
It had taken a moment for O’Bryan’s eyes to adjust to the darkness within the room.
He’d heard the rhythmic pulsing of diagnostic machines and the digital readouts on monitors emerged slowly from the gloom.
Then he’d heard the labored breathing of his target from the bed.
Despite two names written on the whiteboard, there were no other patients in the room. For that he was grateful.
O’Bryan had wasted no time. He’d opened his coat and grasped the pistol grip of the dosing gun, then powered it on.
He wanted to do his job and get out of there as quickly as possible.
He could hear Bowkley engaging with the nurse, asking for directions, pretending he was confused by which elevator to take.
Pickett’s head was turned aside, exposing his white neck. O’Bryan padded to the side of the bed and gently pressed the tip of the gun to the skin.
Click.
Pickett thrashed soundlessly and arched his back. O’Bryan stepped back and powered the gun down and slid it back under his coat.
“Don’t scream,” he whispered.
Within a few seconds, Pickett’s body went rigid and then became limp. The man’s left arm slid out from beneath the sheets and hung lifelessly near the side of the bed.
O’Bryan felt nothing. He’d never met Joe Pickett, and he’d had no personal animus with the man. In fact, O’Bryan had been more affected by the sudden death of Leonard the Indian Flagger.
O’Bryan exited the room the same way he’d come in: head down, shoulders hunched, not exposing himself to the cameras.
—
Now in the passenger seat, O’Bryan held up the dosing gun. “Should we get rid of it somewhere?” he asked Bowkley. “Like we did that phone and notebook?”
“Absolutely not,” Bowkley said sharply. “We’re going to need it later tonight.”
O’Bryan frowned in the dark. “Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
The deputy turned his face to O’Bryan. “I’m putting it all together in my head—how we’re going to do it. But it’s hard to concentrate when you keep interrupting me.”
“Do what?”
“We’re going to silence those three girls,” Bowkley said. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
O’Bryan shook his head. “I didn’t sign on for this. Not three young girls.”
“They’re not that young,” Bowkley said with a leer. “One of them is a real cunt, believe me. But it is what it is. Those damned girls are figuring things out. We need to protect ourselves. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, do you?”
“No, but this is too much,” O’Bryan said, his voice rising. “This is…terrible.”
“Don’t you want to get paid and get out of here?”
O’Bryan nodded emphatically. “I never want to see this place again for the rest of my life. But three girls?”
“It is what it is,” Bowkley said again. “And we’ve got to do it tonight.”
—
O’Bryan leaned back in his seat and moaned.
“Kids are dying all over this country from fentanyl overdoses,” Bowkley said. “They think they’re buying cocaine or meth, and they find out too late that it’s dosed with fentanyl. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world to find out that these three made that same mistake.
“Not only that,” Bowkley said, “I can make sure I’m the first responding officer on the scene. And when I look around, what do I find? A little bag of fentanyl on the kitchen table.”
O’Bryan moaned again.
“Then it’s over,” Bowkley assured him. “We part ways, take our money, and we’ll never have to see each other for the rest of our lives.”
“Don’t you think it’ll look ridiculously suspicious that a father and all three of his daughters die of fentanyl overdoses on the same night?”
“Yeah, it isn’t perfect,” Bowkley said. “But it isn’t impossible, either. Fentanyl is a bitch. Like I said, people are dying of it all over the fucking nation. It’s a tragedy, yada yada yada.”
“Tonight?” O’Bryan said.
“Tonight. While they’re sleeping. What I’m trying to figure out is how to handle their dogs. If those dogs start barking they’ll wake everybody up and make it harder to get the job done.”
—
At the same time, Sheridan sat at the kitchen table with her laptop, dutifully inscribing what she and her sisters had learned yesterday on the three ranches.
When the report was complete, she planned to send it to Sheriff Sondergard as well as to her mother.
Sondergard had promised to send his files on the case to her as well, but it was after midnight and he’d yet to fulfill his promise.
Sheridan’s hope was that her written record, plus the sheriff’s case file, would combine to present a clearer picture on the suspects and where they were at with the investigation.
Earlier in the evening, they’d talked on speakerphone with Marybeth. Their father was still unconscious, but their mom said she’d noticed a few promising indications that he was coming out of it. He’d sighed and yawned involuntarily, but he’d not yet opened his eyes.
“When he does,” Sheridan had said, “ask him where he was headed that morning.”
“Oh, I will,” Marybeth promised.
“And call us the second you find out,” April said.
When Sheridan told her mom about the investigative report she was about to compile, it jogged her mother’s memory.
“Let me send you some photos he took at the airplane hangar,” her mom said. “I want to see if you come up with the same conclusion I did.”
After a pause, Marybeth said, “You know, I never did get to discuss my theory with your dad. I was going to, but that’s when all of this happened.”
—
Because it was late and her sisters had already gone to bed, Sheridan had muted her phone. So it startled her when the phone lit up and vibrated and skittered across the tabletop.
She hoped it would be her mom with good news, but the screen read Steve Sondergard.
“Sorry to call so late,” he said. “Did I wake you?”
“No. I’m working on the report. I’ve got some photos to research that my mom sent along, and then I think I’ll be done.” Then: “You must be working late as well.”
“Ten-four,” he said. “When I was out there this evening, the records on your dad’s phone we’d requested from the service provider came in. We had to go that route because we couldn’t look up the recent activity directly off your dad’s phone.”
Sheridan sat up, suddenly alert. “What did you learn?”
“Something interesting in regard to the last calls on the register,” Sondergard said.
“Not counting the last one, which was your mother’s call to his phone that morning.
Two calls preceeded that. One incoming and one outgoing.
The first call to your dad lasted three and a half minutes and it was from the night before.
Then the morning it happened, your dad apparently called the number back and talked for five seconds. Both from and to the same number.”
“What was the number?” Sheridan asked.
He read the number: 272-320-5768.
“Where’s that?” she asked as she copied down the number on her laptop.
“I just checked. It’s an area code for northeast Pennsylvania.
I’ve made a request to the provider to find out who has that number, but I probably won’t hear back from them until tomorrow, when their customer service office is open.
” Then: “Of course, we shouldn’t assume that the call was literally from Pennsylvania.
That doesn’t make any sense. So it had to be someone local with a cell phone they obtained in Pennsylvania.
Just because the area code is out of state doesn’t mean the call originated from out of state.
Hell, I have a Montana area code associated with my phone and I haven’t lived there since college. ”
“I agree,” Sheridan said.
“Do you think it was a hunter? There are lots of hunters from Pennsylvania out there.”
“I don’t know,” Sheridan said, her mind racing. “But it sounds like this person called my dad on his cell to tell him something the night before. Maybe to request a meeting in the morning. And my dad called the number back that morning to confirm that he was coming.”
“That’s what I came away with as well,” Sondergard said. “So whoever called him could have been the shooter, or set up the ambush.”
“I think a hunter would have called my dad on his office phone, not his cell phone,” Sheridan said.
“A hunter would look up the game warden station on the internet and call that number. Dad’s office phone transfers to his cell if he’s out in the field, which is most of the time.
But the caller wouldn’t know that. My dad’s cell phone number isn’t public knowledge. ”
“We might finally be getting somewhere,” Sondergard said.
“Thank you, Steve. This is important.”
“I agree.” Then: “See, I do know how to do my job.”
She could imagine him smiling as he said it.
“You should have my report within the hour,” Sheridan said. “I just have one more thing to do.”
—