Breaking Point

anything.”
    Reed sighed and shifted his weight in his wheelchair from his left to his right side. Joe noticed the grimace on his face as he did it, and realized Reed was in pain. He hadn’t considered that Reed still hurt from the gunshot wounds.
    Joe asked Reed when the sheriff’s office had first gotten the tip to check out the Roberson lot.
    “This morning,” Reed said. “Somebody called it in. Said he knew of two federal agents who were headed up here last night who never checked into the Holiday Inn.”
    “Who called?”
    “He didn’t give his name at first, but we tracked him down.” Reed dug a notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers guy out of Cheyenne named Kim Love,” he read. “He said he was supposed to come up here with the two EPA guys, but he got cold feet, or he felt kind of sick and needed to lie down. He said both things, so his story is a little hinky. I asked the guy to stay another night at the hotel before he headed back to Cheyenne so we could talk to him a little more. He said he’d check with his supervisor. That pissed me off, so I told him if he tried to leave my county tonight I’d have
him
arrested,” Reed said with irritation.
    Joe asked, “He didn’t say why he and the EPA guys were here in the first place?”
    Reed said, “Something about serving a compliance order. I didn’t quite understand at first. Not until I talked with Pam Roberson.”
    Joe was confused. “I haven’t heard a thing about any conflict between the Robersons and the EPA. I’m pretty sure Marybeth doesn’t know anything from Pam or she would have told me. Why is the EPA poking their noses around here, anyway?”
    Reed snorted and said, “You won’t believe it when I tell you. You’ll want to be sitting down, if what Pam told me is true.”
    Joe waited, but Reed changed the subject.
    “This might turn out to be my first murder investigation as sheriff,” Reed said. “I used to be damned hard on McLanahan for the way he ran things. But now all I can think of is what we’re missing or forgetting to do so some defense lawyer doesn’t rip us up in court. This isn’t easy, Joe. And I don’t even have to tell you what a shit storm we’re going to have if there are two dead Feds in my county.”
    Joe looked up. He said, “No, you don’t.”
    “We heard they’re on their way now. A couple of Fed big shots from the regional headquarters in Denver and some folks from Washington, D.C. They want to get up here and make sure we know what we’re doing, I guess. They want to make sure I don’t botch the investigation.”
    “You won’t,” Joe said, feeling bad for his friend.
    “I should just tell them to turn around and go back. That we can handle it.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Because they didn’t exactly ask my permission,” Reed said, narrowing his eyes in anger. “You know how they can be.”
    —
    O NE OF THE DEPUTIES digging into the mound gave a shout, and Gary Norwood jogged over to him. Joe and Reed saw the pops of a camera flash, then watched the evidence tech drop something into a paper evidence bag before he walked it over to show the sheriff.
    Joe looked inside as the tech opened the top.
    “One of our guys said it’s a .40 Sig,” Norwood said. “I sniffed it, and it doesn’t appear to have been fired. We’ll know for sure once we take it down to the lab and run it through tests.”
    Reed sat back in his chair and whistled.
    Joe said, “Hold it. These guys were
armed
?
Armed
EPA people?”
    “We haven’t found any bodies yet,” Norwood cautioned Joe.
    “Still,” Joe said, incredulous.
    —
    T EN MINUTES LATER one of the deputies with a shovel called out, “Got a body.”
    Sheriff Reed pursed his lips and rotated back on his wheels, then set the chair down. It was an involuntary reaction, Joe thought, as if Reed were shuffling his feet after hearing bad news. Reed whispered, “Damn it.”
    Another deputy said, “I’m pretty sure we’ve got two.”
    Norwood hovered around the pit taking photographs, the flash popping.
    Joe left Reed and walked to the mound, which was now a shallow pit. He saw a young, waxen, square-jawed face that appeared to be looking up and out of the ground, eyes open. There was a single black hole in the brow. Next to the face was the profile of another man, older, turned on his side, his eyes closed as if sleeping. The arm of the older man was flung over the chest of the first, as if