Free Winterkill by C. J. Box

there at all, butting in on his investigation.
    Joe said nothing, accepting the fact that Barnum had a problem with him. The feeling was mutual.
    But if Joe had been given the choice to decide who would head up the investigation—Sheriff Barnum or Melinda Strickland—well, he was glad he didn’t have to choose.
    The chain saw coughed and then started, the high whine of it invasive and loud, cutting a swath through the silence of the morning.
    J oe slowly cruised through the meadow on his snowmobile, half-standing with a knee on the seat, studying the tracks and re-creating what had happened. There had been at least three snow machines in the meadow, he judged. Two of them were similar, with fifteen-inch tracks and patterns. The third track was slightly wider, with a harder bite, and the machine that made it had been towing some sort of sleigh with runners. The visitors had been there the evening before, since a few fingers of fresh white snow had blown into the tracks during the night.
    Whoever had been there had ignored Gardiner’s pickup, which was encased in snow near the tree line. Two deputies were in the process of digging their way to it so they could photograph the inside of the cab.
    The piles of snow he had seen from above were where the elk had been found and butchered. The visitors had found all of them.
    The discoloration in the snow was from flecks of blood, hair, and tissue. The hindquarters and tenderloin strips had been removed from the elk and, Joe assumed, loaded onto the sleigh. He noted scald marks in the snow, and tissue blowbackfrom where the cutting had been done. They’d used chain saws. Although Joe was grateful that the meat hadn’t gone to waste, the circumstances of its harvesting were bizarre. It wasn’t likely that three snowmobilers had been out for recreation the night before, as the storm finally let up. Their tracks showed that they had entered the meadow from the west, from the Battle Mountain area, and had left the way they’d come. They had driven directly to the meadow, then scouted it in wide circles until they began to find the lumps of the carcasses. He could see that their tracks dug deeper on the way out than when they entered, no doubt due to the thousand pounds of meat they had hauled.
    More than a thousand pounds of meat, Joe thought, and whistled. Who had the manpower, the equipment, and the acumen to butcher five elk during a mountain blizzard? How had the visitors known the elk were there? And, obviously, was there a connection between the snowmobiles in the meadow and the murder of Lamar Gardiner?
    Joe used his hand-held radio to contact Barnum and Brazille.
    “They took five elk somewhere on snowmobiles?” Barnum asked. He heard Brazille ask Barnum for the radio.
    “Can you see any tracks heading up this direction?” Brazille asked.
    “Nope,” Joe said.
    “Then it’s unlikely these meat-lovers knew about Gardiner being up here, or I think they would have checked on him,” Brazille concluded.
    “That’s possible,” Joe said. “But they could have done that earlier. It’s been two days. There’s been a lot of new snow since Gardiner was killed, so it’s impossible to see if they were up here before last night.”
    “Hold on just a second,” Brazille asked, and clicked off.
    A few minutes later, Brazille came back on and asked for Joe.
    “McLanahan found some yellow snow near the other road,” Brazille reported. “He bagged it. So we’ve got a little something to go on.”
    The thought of McLanahan grumbling and digging through the powder made Joe smile to himself.
    “I think I’ll find out where these tracks end up,” Joe said. “They go west toward Battle Mountain.”
    He heard Brazille consulting with Barnum for a moment, then Brazille came back on.
    “Don’t confront anyone if you find them,” Brazille said. “And keep your radio on at all times.”
    “Will do,” Joe said.
    “Sheriff Barnum asked me to tell you not to do anything that