Free Fire by C.J. Box Read Free Book Online

my constituents. If you aren’t from Wyoming, you need to call your governor.”
    Joe said, “Governor, Joe Pickett. I accept the job. I do need to get a little more information, though. Like whom I work with in your office, how you want me to stay in contact . . .”
    The governor picked up. He’d obviously been listening.
    “Don’t call me again,” he said brusquely.
    “But . . .”
    "Chuck Ward will be in touch with you. Deal with him for everything.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And don’t call me sir.” Joe could hear the governor smackinghis receiver with the palm of his hand, or hitting it against the wall. “This is a bad connection. Who did you say was calling?”
    Joe went into the bedroom with a vague sense of unease after his conversation with the governor. He set the feeling aside when Marybeth shut off the lights, came to bed, and started kissing him with an intensity and passion that surprised and delighted him.
    He turned toward her and soon they were entwined. With each movement, the old bedsprings squeaked.
    When they were through, she said, “I feel like I need a cigarette,” although she had never smoked.
    “How about another glass of wine?”
    “No, I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”
    “I’m jazzed up,” he confessed.
    “You haven’t been jazzed up in a while.”
    “Thanks to you.”
    She smiled and stroked his jaw. “Good night, Joe.”
    “I’m going to read for a few minutes.”
    “What, the file?”
    He nodded.
    “Not too long,” she said, and rolled over.
    He knew about the crime in general. What he didn’t know until he read the file were the specifics. He read over the incidentreports filed by the national park rangers, as well as clippingsfrom the West Yellowstone News , the Idaho Falls Post-Register , the Bozeman Chronicle , the Billings Gazette , the Casper Star-Tribune , and a long feature in the Wall Street Journal that summarized them all. It was the worst crime ever committedin Yellowstone National Park. But that was only half the story.
    On July 21, a West Yellowstone lawyer named Clay McCann parked his car at the Bechler River Ranger Station in the extremesouthwest corner of the park, checked in with the ranger at the desk of the visitor center, and hiked in along the trail that followed, and eventually crossed, Boundary Creek. Later that morning, he returned to the center and confessed to shooting and killing four people in a backcountry campsite.
    Investigating rangers confirmed the crime.
    The victims were found near the bank of Robinson Lake, two miles from the ranger station. All were pronounced dead at the scene, although the bodies were airlifted out to the Idaho Falls hospital.
    Jim McCaleb, twenty-six, was a waiter in the Old Faithful Inn and a five-year employee of the park’s concessionaire, Zephyr Corporation. Zephyr ran all the facilities and attractions in the park under contract to the government. McCaleb was shot four times in the torso and once in the back of the head with a large-caliber handgun. His body was found half-in and half-out of a dome tent.
    Claudia Wade, twenty-four, managed the laundry facility near Lake Lodge. Wade’s body was in the same tent as Mc-Caleb’s. There were two shotgun blasts to her back, and she’d been shot once in the head with a handgun.
    Caitlyn Williams, twenty-six, was a horse wrangler at Rooseveltfor Zephyr. Williams’s body was sprawled over the campfire pit with a shotgun blast to her back and a single large-caliberwound to her head.
    Rick Hoening, twenty-five, was a desk clerk at the Old FaithfulInn. His body was located twenty yards from the others in the campsite, near the trail. Investigators speculated that he’d been the first to encounter the gunman and the first one killed. He’d been shot three times with a handgun, twice with a shotgun, and, like the others, had an additional single shot to the head.
    Wade, Williams, and Hoening were also Zephyr Corp. employees.All four victims listed their original