Page 74 of Dark Sky

Tibbs stepped out onto the threshold and eased the door partly shut behind him while he pushed at the storm door with a quizzical expression on his face.

“Mrs. Pickett,” he said in a slow western drawl. “What can I do you for?”

“You can answer your phone, for one thing.”

“What?”

“I’ve left half a dozen messages for you at your office today. You didn’t call me back. Then your receptionist gave me your county cell phone number, and it went straight to a recording that said you hadn’t set up your mailbox yet. I’ve sent you four texts and two emails. Since you didn’t respond to any of them, I didn’t have much choice but to come over here and roust you.”

Tibbs rubbed his face and then his eyes. “It’s pretty late,” he said.

“I know that.”

“It’s a good thing my wife is away,” he said. “She doesn’t like being awakened in the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry,” Marybeth said in an acid tone, “I thought you were the sheriff.”

“Iamthe sheriff. Look, I can see that you’re upset about something, but I don’t neglect my duties. We’ve got staff on call during the night. I think Deputy Steck is on call tonight, in fact. You didn’t need to come straight to my house.”

Marybeth noted that he’d stepped farther out onto the porch and had eased the door almost but not quite fully closed behind him as he did so.

“That concrete has to be cold on your bare feet,” she said. She leaned to the side so she could get a peek inside his house through the thin opening. “What is it you don’t want me to see in there?”

Tibbs looked like he was thinking it over.

“This better be an emergency,” he growled as he stepped back and welcomed her in.

“It is.”

The house was warm inside and nicely appointed, she thought. There was a single lighted lamp near an overstuffed chair in front of the television set and a bar of light on the floor from an open door down the hallway. She hoped he’d turn on more lights because the setting was a little too intimate.

Tibbs retreated to the chair and settled heavily into it. He looked annoyed, but he gestured toward a hardback chair near the door for her to sit in. She didn’t.

“So, what’s the big emergency?” he asked.

“My husband, Joe, is guiding elk hunters in the mountains and we haven’t heard anything from him in thirty-six hours.”

Tibbs paused, then scoffed. “I’ve been hunting in the backcountry before, although it’s been a few years now. Thirty-six hours is nothing. I remember not talking to my wife for a week.”

“We’re not like that,” Marybeth said, her voice rising. “Believe me, coming here tonight was the last thing I wanted to do. But you don’t understand. Joe checks in every night he can when he’s gone. He has a satellite phone even if he has no cell signal. Under no circumstances would he forget two nights in a row. Something has happened up there,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the Bighorns.

“There’s a lot more to this,” she said. “You know that Steve-2 Price and his ConFab people came here to go hunting?”

“Yeah, the governor gave me a heads-up on that. He said to treat this guy like a big VIP, so we closed the road to the airportto keep people away from him when he flew in. So Joe is the one guiding him, huh?”

“Yes. And another thing: Steve-2 constantly posts his movements and thoughts to all of his followers, and there’s millions of them. Other than a weird post last evening, he’s gone completely off-line as well.”

“What do you mean, a weird post?” Tibbs asked. “I’m not up on this social media hoopla.”

“My daughter noticed it,” Marybeth said. “The photo in it was taken the day before because there is no snow in the background. Why would Steve-2 post a day-old photo?”

“Beats me,” Tibbs said. Then: “Do they have plenty of food and clothing?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re not worried about them starving and dying of exposure up there.”

“No.”

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