"I would wager that by Wedding Five, Missy will have figured out how to get rid of it."

"Dad!"she whispered fiercely. But the corners of her mouth tugged with a conspiratorial grin. He winked at her, and she rolled her eyes, turning back to the wedding that was about to begin.

There was a growing murmur as the bride appeared, on cue, beneath an arch of pink and white flowers. Joe and Sheridan rose to their feet with the rest of the crowd. Applause rippled from the front to the back as Missy appeared, glowing, wide-eyed, looking demurely at the throng she had turned out.

"I can't believe that's my grandmother," Sheridan said to Joe. "She looks …"

"Stunning," Joe said, finishing the sentence for her. Missy looked thirty, not sixty, he thought. She was a slim brunette, her face and hair perfect, her eyes glistening in a too-large head that always looked great in photos. She held a bouquet of pink and white flowers against her shimmering plum dress.

Joe heard Bud Longbrake say, in a reverent tone of appreciation he usually reserved for great cutting horses or seed bulls: "There'smy girl."

The reception was held behind the huge log home, under hundred-year-old cottonwoods. A swing band from Billings played on a stage, and couples spun on a hardwood floor that had been moved to the ranch just for the occasion from a vacated mid-forties dance hall in Winchester. The floor was unique in that it was mounted on carriage springs and had been used for Saturday night dances when big bands used to stop over in Wyoming en route to real paying gigs on the east or west coasts.

Joe ushered Sheridan through the reception line, shaking hands. Bud Longbrake slapped him on the shoulder and said, "Welcome to the family."

I've got a family,Joe thought.

Missy reached for Joe, and pulled his head down next to hers. He felt the bouquet she still clutched crush into his hair. "Never thought I'd pull this one off, did you?" she whispered.

Surprised, he pulled away. She grinned slyly at him, and despite himself, he grinned back. She was a substantial adversary, he thought. He'd hate to meet her in a dark alley.

"Congratulations," he said. "Bud is a fine man."

"Oh, I think I got the best of the deal," Bud said, wrapping his arm around Missy's slim waist.

"You did," she said, flashing her wide smile.

And her name is already on the ranch deed,Joe thought. She owns half of everything we see as far as we can see it. She pulled it off, all right.

Marybeth was next, and had been carefully watching the exchange that took place a moment before. "You look wonderful," he said.

Thank God it's over,she mouthed. He nodded back, agreeing with her.

"Welcome to the family," Bud was telling Sheridan. Joe shot him a look.

"Joe, are you sure she said that?"Marybeth asked later, as they sat at a table under the trees with their plates of appetizers. Joe had waited for Sheridan and Lucy to find their friends before he told Marybeth about her mother.

"I'm quoting."

Marybeth shook her head, looking hard at Joe to see if he was joking. She obviously determined he wasn't. "She's something else, isn't she?"

"Always has been," Joe said. "What I can't figure out is how you survived."

Marybeth smiled and patted his hand. "Neither can I, at times."

Joe sipped from a bottle of beer that had been offered to him from a stock tank full of ice.

"You two have a very strange relationship," Marybeth said, looking across the lawn at her mother.

"I didn't think we had one at all."

Missy had never made a secret of the fact that she felt Marybeth had married beneath herself. Instead of the doctor, real estate magnate, or U.S. senator Marybeth should have chosen, Missy thought, her most promising daughter wound up with Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden with a salary that capped out at $36,000 a year. Marybeth's career as a corporate lawyer or a politician's wife, in Missy's view, had been unfulfilled. Rather, Marybeth stayed with

Joe as he moved from place to place in their early years together, before Joe was named game warden to the Sad-dlestring District. Then Sheridan came along, followed by Lucy, and in Missy's eyes it was all but over for her daughter. Because of incidents relating to Joe Pickett and his job, Marybeth had been injured and could have no more children. Then a foster daughter had been lost. It was frustrating for Missy, Joe thought. There she was, providing a living example of how to keep trading up-casting off husbands in exchange for newer, wealthier, and shinier models-and her daughter just didn't get it. Missy literally tried to show Marybeth how it could be done by marrying Bud Longbrake right in front of her, Joe thought.

Marybeth still had fire, intelligence, beauty, and ambition, Joe and Missy both knew. She also had a growing melancholy, which she tried hard to overcome.

"Look at Bud's kids," Marybeth said, nodding toward a table set as far away from the others as possible while still being in the shade. "They just don't look happy. Don't stare at them, though."

Joe shifted in his chair. Bud had a son and a daughter from his previous marriage. The son, Bud Jr., had flown in for the wedding from Missoula, where he was a street musician and a professional student at UM. Bud Jr. wore billowy cargo shorts, leather sandals, a T-shirt, and a sour expression. Missy had told Joe and Marybeth that although Bud Jr. had never wanted anything to do with the ranch while growing up, he was content to wait things out, wait for Bud to pass along or sell the ranch. Even after taxes, Bud Jr. stood to gain a huge inheritance. It was the same with Sally, Bud's daughter. Thrice married (like her new stepmother, who had just surpassed her in the race), Sally lived in Portland, Oregon, and was currently between husbands. Sally was attractive in a wounded, Bohemian way, Joe thought. He had heard she was an artist, specializing in wrought iron.

Joe turned back. "No, they don't look happy."

"They don't like it that Bud made Missy cosignatory on all of this," Marybeth said, waving her hand to indicate literally all they could see. "Bud Jr. got hammered at the dress rehearsal last night and shouted some things at his father before he passed out in the bushes. Sally was there last night for about a half an hour, before she disappeared with one of Bud's ranch hands."

"Welcome to the family," Joe said to his wife.

The new Twelve Sleep County sheriff, Kyle McLanahan, stood in front of Joe and Marybeth in the food line. The piquant smell of barbecued pork and beef hung heavy in the light mountain air.

"Kyle," Joe said, nodding.

"Joe. Marybeth. Congratulations are in order, I guess."

"I guess," Joe said.

"Same to you," Marybeth said coolly. "I haven't seen you since the election."

McLanahan nodded, hitched up his pants. Looked toward the mountains. Squinted. "We've got a lot of work to do."

"Yup," Joe said.

Kyle McLanahan had been the longtime chief deputy for local legend O. R. "Bud" Barnum, who had been sheriff for twenty-eight years. Barnum had owned the county in a sense, having a hand in just about every aspect of it. His downfall came over the past five years, as his reputation eroded, then rotted and tumbled in on itself. That Barnum's decline coincided with Joe's arrival in Saddlestring was no coincidence. The Outfitter Murders, mishandled by Barnum, had begun the slide. Barnum's shadowy involvement with the Stockman's Trust continued it. The ex-sheriff's complicity with Melinda Strickland in her raid on the Sovereign compound started the local gossip that Barnum had lost his commitment to the community and was looking out only for himself. The sheriff's deception during the cattle mutilations had turned the weekly Saddlestring Roundupagainst him. Joe had been in the middle of everything, one way or another. Seeing the writing on the wall (and in the newspaper), Barnum withdrew from the running two weeks before the election. Instead, McLanahan had stepped into the race, as had Deputy Mike Reed. In Joe's opinion, Reed was an honest cop and McLanahan was McLanahan- volatile, thickheaded, a throwback to the Barnum style of politics and corruption. McLanahan won 80 percent of the vote.