Lucy looked over and said, “Does that mean those Cates people are lying?”

“I think it does,” Joe said.

—

HE WAS FEEDING THE HORSES in the barn after dinner when Marybeth called. She sounded shaken.

“The doctors say April has severe brain damage. She was hit multiple times in the head. There’s swelling around her brain.”

“Oh no,” he said, once again feeling his knees wobble.

“They say they want to put her into a medically induced coma.”

“A what?”

“A medically induced coma.”

“How bad is it, Marybeth?”

She said, “They really don’t know. They say she’s on the low end of the Glasgow Coma Scale, whatever that means. There’s no eye, verbal, or motor response. They need our permission to put her under, so I wanted to talk with you first.”

Joe shook his head. As if Marybeth could see him do it, she said, “The idea is to keep her unconscious and healing until the swelling in her brain goes down. They want to give her a drug called propofol to put her into the coma. The doctors say shutting down her functions will lower her blood pressure and reduce the swelling in her brain in case they have to do surgery later. It’ll give the brain time to heal. It’s what they did for Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. representative who got shot in the head in Arizona, and what they do with other victims of blunt force trauma.”

Joe recalled the Giffords incident. He asked, “What do you think?”

“If they leave her the way she is, her body may shut off blood flow to the damaged parts of her brain. She’d be brain-dead.”

“Oh, man.”

When Marybeth didn’t speak for a moment, he realized she had lowered the phone to cry. He waited.

“It’s not a sure thing, so we have to brace ourselves,” she said after a moment, once she’d gathered herself together. He could imagine her wiping away tears on her cheeks as she talked. “It’s possible she’ll never come out of it. It’s also possible that they could bring her out of it, but there’s been so much damage, she’d never really be the same. But they’re good doctors and I trust them. They have a neurosurgeon on call in case they need to do surgery. All we can do is trust them and pray for her.”

Joe tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

“How long?” he asked.

“Days, weeks, maybe months. They use propofol because it’s easily controlled and it has a short length. That’s so they can reduce the dosage when the swelling goes down and bring her out of the coma periodically. When they do, they can measure her Glasgow scale to see if she’s responding. They also measure brain activity through catheters in her brain.”

“Then we have to say yes,” Joe said.

“I agree. I’ll go sign whatever it is I have to sign and I’ll call you later tonight.”

—

JOE WENT INSIDE and told Lucy what Marybeth had said. Lucy nodded, wide-eyed, then got up and started toward her room to call her big sister, Sheridan.

In the threshold of the doorway, she asked, “Did April say for sure who did this to her?”

Joe shook his head.

“Will she ever be able to tell us?”

“We don’t know, Lucy.”

Lucy closed her eyes briefly, then shut the door behind her.

—

WHEN JOE’S CELL PHONE lit up an hour later, he lunged for it. He was halfway through his first bourbon and water. The television was on, but he had no idea what network it was tuned to.

He looked at the phone screen and scowled, then punched it live.

Annie Hatch said, “It’s a blizzard up here, Joe. We can’t see well enough to find the road to get back to town. Revis and I were hoping you could drive up here and kind of lead us back.”

“Did you find the site?”

“We think so, but we’re not sure. There’s so much snow in the sagebrush—”

“I told you not to go up there tonight,” he said.

“I know, I know,” she said wearily. “Do you think we wanted to call you?”

“Sit tight,” Joe said with irritation. “Don’t keep driving around. Just sit tight with your headlights on. How far did you go off the county road?”

“Not far, I don’t think.”

“Tell him to hurry,” Wentworth said in the background.

She didn’t, but Joe said, “Wentworth better keep his mouth shut or you’ll both be there all night.”

He heard her shush her partner.

As Joe laced on his boots in the mudroom, his phone lit up again. Reed.

“Mike,” Joe said.

“Are you sitting down?”

Joe braced for it, whatever it was.

“After you left this afternoon, the dispatcher got a 911 call. The reporting party said she heard about April through someone she knows at the hospital, and she recalled seeing a man she identified as Tilden Cudmore force a girl matching April’s description into his vehicle on the highway yesterday morning. She said she didn’t call it in at the time because she thought maybe Cudmore was her father and the girl was a runaway or something.”

Joe tried to process what Reed had just told him.

“Who made that call?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “She wouldn’t identify herself to the dispatcher.”

“But you think it was legitimate?”

“Yeah,” Reed said. “We’ve had run-ins with Cudmore a few times. He’s a survivalist type who lives by himself in a trailer out in the county. He’s a real piece of work. There have been rumors about him cruising the highways, driving well below the speed limit, like he’s looking for somebody, but we couldn’t hardly pick him up for that.

“Anyway, I sent a deputy out to his place, but he wasn’t home and his Humvee was gone. The deputy happened to look in the man’s dumpster and he found a purse inside with April’s ID. There’s also a backpack and some clothing we hope you can identify.”

Joe said, “Tilden Cudmore. You’ve thrown me for a loop.”

“Join the club,” Reed said. Then: “Here’s the address. I’m on my way out there now.”

—

JOE KNOCKED AND OPENED Lucy’s bedroom door. She was still on the phone with Sheridan.

He said, “Get dressed and bundled up. I need your help. They may have found some of April’s things and you’ll be better at recognizing them than I am.”

“Did Dallas Cates have them?” Lucy asked.

“Some guy named Tilden Cudmore.”

“Who’s he?”

“I have no idea,” Joe said. “But we’re going to find out.”

5

Tilden Cudmore, fifty-two, lived alone on a sagebrush-covered swale by the wastewater treatment plant six miles west of Saddlestring. From the county road, Joe saw the pulsing lights of the law enforcement vehicles, so he knew where to turn.

He and Lucy passed under a wrought iron archway that was strung with bleached-white animal skulls, a naked and shackled storefront mannequin made to look as if it were being frog-marched to meet its fate, and a tattered DON’T TREAD ON ME Gadsden flag that rippled in the cold, light breeze.

“This place is creepy,” Lucy said, her eyes wide.

Joe grunted a response. He tried not to think of April being brought here the night before. That shackled mannequin alone, if she had seen it, seemed to foretell a horrible fate.

Lucy hugged herself. No doubt she was spooked, Joe thought. While Sheridan often used to ride along on his patrols and had experienced crime scenes, raucous elk camps, and sometimes tense confrontations, Lucy had never been eager to accompany him into the field. He understood. Lucy preferred happy situations and happy people, while Sheridan was intrigued by the procedures involved with law enforcement. Joe appreciated the differences in the way each girl was wired since birth.