• • •

We pulled my truck up to the Turtle Pond just as dawn began to break and a few shards of pewter began chipping away the ironclad underside of the clouds. The Wyoming Highway Patrol cruiser sat with its warning lights tracing the hillsides and reflecting their colors onto the surface of the pond as Bob Delude came over and dripped in my rolled-down window. “Looks like it might rain.”

I thanked him for thinking of us and parking my truck on the road as close to the shack as possible. “I appreciate that both of you uphold the eight core values of Integrity, Courage, Discipline, Loyalty, Diligence, Humility, Optimism, and Conviction that are integral to the success of the agency and a hallmark of the Wyoming Highway Patrol.”

“Just tell Lucian to stop referring to us as triple A with guns.” He laughed. “McGroder figured that if the going got rough, that’s where you’d be coming out.” He glanced in the back at the huddled Lone Elks, and finally at Omar, who was sitting between Henry and me. “Looks like it got rough, all right.”

I threw a thumb toward the back. ”Enic shot the helicopter and Omar, Henry shot Enic, and then we had to go spelunking for Taylor and Jennifer.”

He shook his head. “His mother is fit to be tied.”

“I bet.” I glanced at the Highway Patrol car. “They say anything else?”

“They’ve just been bitching about being held, but I told them it was for their own safety.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Is it all right if I let them out so that they can come see that the boy wonder is safe and sound? ’Cause if that prick Randy kicks the back of my seat one more time, I’m going to find a hole to stuff him into.”

I thought about it as the rain settled into a light sprinkle. “Sure.”

As I got out, I flipped the safety strap on my holster, checked my .45, and then reholstered it. Bob approached the cruiser, opened the back door, and let Eva and Randy out. Thunder sounded over the high plains, and the smell of the wet grass and sage was intoxicating. I climbed out, opening the rear door and inviting the Lone Elk clan to get out of the vehicle. “C’mon, let’s have a little family reunion.”

Eva rushed over and grabbed Taylor’s face and held it close to hers. “Where have you been?”

He said nothing, but as she pulled his face down to her shoulder, she saw Jennifer. “What are you doing here?”

I interrupted. “Um, there have been some developments, Eva. It would appear that these two have gotten married.”

Yanking him out at arm’s reach, she glared at him. “You’re seventeen. You can’t get married without my consent!”

The teenager nodded toward the older man still seated on the edge of the backseat of my truck. “Uncle Enic signed the papers.”

I interrupted. “You three can work this out later, because right now we’ve got a more pressing question as to why Taylor attempted suicide.”

Eva turned to me. “He what?”

“Taylor here attempted to drown himself about ninety minutes ago.”

She turned to look at him. “What?”

I stepped between her and the boy, keeping my right hip toward Randy. “He said that somebody advised him to run because he gave his grandfather the whiskey and that’s what killed him. He also says that neither he nor Jennifer destroyed her computer back at the rock shop.”

I felt the tug as Randy, even handcuffed, deftly pulled the Colt from my holster and backed away from all of us. The Bobs immediately went for their sidearms, but I raised a hand and they stopped.

It was one of those moments where everything kind of comes to a halt; the breeze had stopped and it was almost as if the mist had frozen in midair. “What are you doing, Randy?”

He glanced at me, but his eyes shifted back to the Bobs. “I’m not taking the blame for this.”

Taylor took a step toward him, dumbstruck. “You told me—”

“Shut up, I didn’t tell you anything.”

I squared off, placing myself between him and the rest of his family. “Then why are you holding my gun, Randy?”

He backed away toward the Turtle Pond. “I’m not getting railroaded.”

I shook my head and stepped toward him. “You’re not—I really already knew it was you, because you’re the one who always placed that ceremonial turtle rattle in your father’s hands when he was sleeping, and you’re the only one in the family who would’ve known about the dangerous amounts of arsenic, lead, DDT, and mercury that those artifacts have after having been treated by the museums.” I took another step toward him. “It was only after Dave told me about the contamination that I started putting two and two together, but the only ones I could think of who would possibly know about that problem were Dave and Jennifer here. But then I remembered that you had worked in the labs up in Bozeman.”

“Stay back.”

I took another step forward, forcing him to the edge of the pond. “And the two of them would never have had the access to your father like you.”

He glanced at the Bobs, both still with their hands on their sidearms. “Don’t either of you move.”

I, on the other hand, took another step, narrowing the twelve feet between us. “Those years after college you said you had a job up in Montana? I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it was doing archival work. When you told me you didn’t want me touching the rattle, it wasn’t so much because it was a treasured family relic, was it?”

He raised the barrel of my Colt, pointing it directly at my face. “You don’t have any proof.”

“Not a lot, which is why I didn’t arrest you before now, but once Taylor here tells us it was you who talked him into giving your father the poisoned whiskey, we’ll be well on our way—besides, innocent men don’t grab an officer’s gun and point it at him.”

He pulled the hammer back on my Colt. “I’m going to do more than that.”

I took another step toward him. “You got greedy, didn’t you? The rattle and the mercury-laced turtle food had been doing their work for a year’s time, ever since you found out about your father’s meetings with the Conservancy, but once the dinosaur was discovered you thought you’d speed things up, huh? The Conservancy was going to get the ranch, the museum was going to take Jen, and you’d be left with nothing. But what if you could stop that from happening? The clock was ticking. Danny could sign the papers any day, you thought, so you decided to help things along by putting mercury in the flask. Lucian drank some, but his stomach wasn’t acidic enough to cause the mercury or the arsenic to absorb enough to kill him.”

“I don’t want to shoot you, Walt, but I will.”

I took another step, bringing me within arm’s reach. “It makes me sad to think of that old man out wandering the countryside with symptoms of alcoholism even when he wasn’t drinking, talking to himself, and being baffled by the fact that every time he woke up in his chair he was holding that magical turtle rattle.”

“Don’t come any closer.”

“I’m betting that your father was only tempted this once.” I sighed. “The first time I met him he told me that he worried about disappointing his ancestors.” I took the final step, pressing my chest against the barrel of my .45 and looking him in the eye. “I think that’s something you should’ve considered.”

He pulled the trigger, and we both stood there looking at each other, the loud click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber sounding like the turning of a key that could never be reversed.

“You should have trusted your father to not disinherit you, Randy. He wasn’t going to cede the ranch to the Cheyenne Conservancy and leave all of you penniless. He knew that none of you really wanted to be here, so he was planning to sell the ranch to the Conservancy and give you the proceeds. That is, until Jen was discovered, and he decided to give the ranch to the Conservancy and divide the proceeds from Jen among all four of you. I guess he figured more than two million apiece was pretty good.” Calmly placing my hand over the slide action, I twisted the weapon away from him, took the magazine from my pocket where it had been all along, replaced it in my sidearm, and slipped the 1911 snug in my holster.