Chapter Twenty-Six
O’Bryan watched the Pickett house from behind the thick trunk of a spruce tree in the dark. He was eighty yards away, but he could clearly see the oldest daughter pacing past the kitchen window. It was the only room in the house with lights on.
On the way to Saddlestring, O’Bryan had found a photo on his phone of the Pickett family that came from the local library website under “Meet Our Staff.” Marybeth Pickett, the director of the library, stood proudly with her husband, Joe, and their three adult daughters.
The photo looked to O’Bryan like a campaign photo.
Although he’d fleetingly glimpsed the three daughters the day before in the woods when they’d pinned Peddy and him on the road, it helped to know which one was which.
O’Bryan recognized that the oldest daughter, Sheridan, was the one pacing inside the kitchen. That meant the middle one, April, and the youngest, Lucy, were asleep somewhere in the house. There were three vehicles parked out front. One had Montana plates.
As he watched, Sheridan stopped suddenly and looked at her phone. Then she called out something, probably the names of the dogs, and ushered her animals down a dark hallway.
Deputy Bowkley had obviously just sent the text, and this was O’Bryan’s cue to move.
He drew the dosing gun out of his coat and powered it up while he approached the house. He entered the backyard through a short gate and sidled along the exterior toward a back door. A horse whinnied from a barn somewhere out in the dark behind the house, and the cry startled him.
As Deputy Bowkley had theorized, the back door was unlocked.
O’Bryan opened it silently and stepped inside the kitchen.
There was an open laptop on the dining room table and a sheaf of loose papers scattered beside it.
The oldest daughter was still in the back of the house, presumably locking her dogs into their crates.
No dog barked or rushed him, for which O’Bryan was grateful.
He quickly moved to the staircase and climbed the steps. He balanced on the balls of his feet on each stair to reduce the sound of his footsteps and carried the dosing gun loosely at his side.
At the top of the stairs, he paused and let his eyes adjust to the gloom.
Bowkley’s description of the layout of the game warden station was more than helpful.
There was a large bedroom downstairs down the hallway, and two more bedrooms on the second floor.
O’Bryan could see four closed doors ahead of him, two on each side.
O’Bryan hated every second of his life at the moment, he thought.
And he hated Bowkley and his employer for putting him into this situation.
He had nothing against the three women, just as he’d had no beef with their father.
Yet here he was, standing in the dark hallway of an unfamiliar home, trying to guess who he’d kill first when he started opening doors.
—
The plan was simple, as laid out by Bowkley as they’d driven south.
Bowkley would send a text to Sheridan implying that he had important information to deliver to her in person and asking the woman to put the dogs in their crates for the night.
While she did it, O’Bryan would secretly enter the home and find April and Lucy in their bedrooms, where he’d administer lethal doses of fentanyl.
While he was engaged, Bowkley would come directly to the house in his uniform and knock on the front door.
Bowkley would then subdue Sheridan until a dose could be delivered to her as well.
Then, after, O’Bryan would hide out until Bowkley reported to his office that he’d discovered the bodies of all three sisters in their home.
All had apparently died from a bad batch of fentanyl.
Then both O’Bryan and Bowkley would get rewarded for their work and O’Bryan, at least, would leave this godforsaken state and never look back.
—
O’Bryan reached for the knob on the first door on the right. He turned it slowly and pushed it open. It was a bathroom. Crumpled towels covered the floor and the counter was covered with plastic bottles of hair and skin products.
He backed out and closed the door and turned to the room on the other side of the hallway. It had to be a bedroom.
O’Bryan grasped the dosing gun in his right hand while he opened the door with his left. Immediately upon entering the room, he knew he’d guessed correctly. Moonlight from a gap in the curtains revealed the lump of a figure in a bed ahead of him. He could hear her soft breathing.
It was the one with the crazy-colored hair, he saw. April. She was turned on her side away from him, but her white neck and shoulder was exposed. He inched toward her and raised the dosing gun.
That’s when he heard someone enter the room behind him and a female voice say, “Don’t take another step and drop that thing in your hand, whatever it is.”
—
Outside, Bowkley settled back in his seat behind the wheel of his SUV and checked his watch. It had been three minutes since he’d sent Sheridan the text. He’d changed into his uniform outside the vehicle and gotten back in. O’Bryan had walked off in the dark toward the house.
Bowkley was worried about O’Bryan. He wasn’t sure he could trust him. The man had obvious reservations about his assignment. Would he chicken out? If so, Bowkley would use the dosing gun on him, he vowed to himself. And another body would be disposed of in Savage Run Canyon.
Lost in thought, Bowkley didn’t notice the figure approaching his SUV from the trees bordering the road until his driver’s-side window exploded inward.
When he turned toward the shower of glass, he glimpsed a long-barreled revolver swinging through the opening and instantly crushing the bridge of his nose into flat pulp.
The sharp pain of the impact resulted in an eruption of yellow and orange spangles that blocked his vision.
As Bowkley cried out and reached up to stanch the gout of blood from his nose, the man threw open the door and pulled him from his seat and outside the vehicle.
Bowkley was hit again in the side of his head with the butt of the gun and was spun face down into the long grass.
The deputy was momentarily stunned, and he could do nothing to prevent his attacker from removing his weapon from its holster and tossing it away into the trees.
Then he felt the sharp pinch of his own handcuffs being closed around his wrists.
His assailant reached down and flipped Bowkley onto his back, then leaned down on his knee with all of his weight on the deputy’s chest. As the spangles in Bowkley’s eyes faded, he could see that the man above him was big and blond and his eyes were cold.
Nate leaned down into Bowkley’s face and bared his teeth as he spoke. “If any of those girls get hurt, I’m going to tear you apart with my hands and feed you to the wolves.”
“You can’t do that,” Bowkley spat through a mouthful of blood from his broken nose. “I’m a cop.”
Nate leered and grasped Bowkley’s right ear and twisted it a full forty-five degrees. The pain was unbelievable and the sound of the cartilage popping was loud.
Bowkley screamed.
“I knew you’d eventually come here,” Nate said. “All I had to do was wait and you’d come straight to me. Now, tell me who hired you.”
“No one hired me,” Bowkley said. “I was responding to a call from the Pickett house—”
Nate twisted his ear off and flipped it onto the deputy’s chest as if it were a poker chip. Then he grasped the man’s left ear and prepared to do the same.
“Who?” Nate asked.
After Bowkley confessed, Nate asked, “Who is with you and where are they now?”
At that moment, there were three sharp gunshots from inside the house.
Pop-pop-pop.
—
Sheridan tore up the stairs from putting the dogs away and thumbed on the light switch in April’s bedroom to find a dead man on the floor with three gunshot wounds in his chest. April was scrambling out of her bed to retrieve the handgun she’d placed for the night on the top of a chest of drawers.
Lucy was pointing her .38 revolver at the body splayed out at her feet. The room smelled sharply of gunpowder. She was obviously stunned.
“I heard him coming up the stairs and when I confronted him he gave me no choice,” she said. “He lunged at me and I remembered April saying just to point it and pull the trigger.”
Sheridan stepped past Lucy and knelt down near the body.
She recognized the object near his hand as a vaccine dosing gun, and her first thought was that Lucy had made a terrible mistake.
Then she saw the butt of a conventional handgun sticking out of the man’s belt, and she recognized him as “Marion Barber.”
Nate thundered up the stairs and burst into the room with his .454 Casull held out in front of him in a shooter’s grip. He paused when he saw the scene inside April’s bedroom.
“Who shot him?” he asked.
“Lucy,” April said.
“Good girl,” Nate said to Lucy. “But I think you can lower the gun now.”
In a kind of trance, Lucy quit pointing it and let the revolver drop along her thigh. Then she handed it back grip-first to Sheridan and said, “I never want to hold a gun again.”
“Who is he?” Nate asked Sheridan. “Do you know him?”
“I don’t know his real name,” Sheridan said. “But I recognize him from yesterday.”
“He was one of the guys following us,” April added.
Nate said, “He worked for John Bucholz. And so does the one-eared deputy I left outside.”
At that second, a group text arrived on all three girls’ phones. It was from Marybeth:
Your dad is conscious and talking. He seems okay! It was John & Shelby.
April looked up from her phone to Sheridan. “Maybe you should call your boyfriend.”