Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

heard the residents have left for the winter.”
    “You do remember who reported that piece of information? The same deputy who visited Kingdom Come again and again. And never saw anything wrong there.”
    Cathy said, softly: “Bobby Martineau.”
    Jane nodded at the Harley. “Based on what we’ve found here, I don’t think we can trust anything Martineau said. Someone’s been paying him off. Someone who has plenty of money to do it.”
    Neither one of them had to say the name aloud.
Jeremiah Goode
.
    “Let’s pay a visit to Kingdom Come,” said Jane. “I’d like to find out what we’re not supposed to see.”

T HROUGH THE CAR WINDOW, JANE SPOTTED BROWN HUMPS DOTTING a vast field of white. They were bison, huddled together against the wind, their great shaggy coats dusted with snow. Wild animals, belonging to no one. That was a novelty for a girl from the big city, where all pets were leashed and tagged and registered. But pets were fed and sheltered, not left to fend for themselves in the brutal elements. Here is the consequence of freedom, she thought, staring at the bison, a consequence that Julian Perkins had accepted when he fled his foster home with only a backpack of food. How could a sixteen-year-old boy survive in that unforgiving world?
    How could Maura?
    As if reading her thoughts, Cathy said: “If anyone can keep her alive out there, it’d be Julian. He grew up with a grandfather who knew every trick of living off the land. Absolem Perkins is a legend around here. Built his own cabin by hand, up in the Bridger-Teton Mountains.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “It’s that mountain range over there.” Cathy pointed.
    Through the swirling dust of snow kicked up by the tires, Jane saw impossibly rugged peaks.
“That’s
where Julian grew up?”
    “It’s national forest now. But if you go hiking up there, you’ll come across a few old homesteads just like Absolem’s. Most of them are down to nothing but foundations, but they remind you how hard it was just to stay alive back then. I can’t imagine going a day without flush toilets and a hot shower.”
    “Hell. I can’t imagine a day without cable.”
    They were climbing into foothills now, through terrain where the trees grew thicker and buildings vanished. They passed Grubb’s General Store, and Jane spotted the ominous sign: LAST CHANCE FOR FUEL. She couldn’t help an anxious glance at Cathy’s fuel gauge, and was relieved to see that they had three-quarters of a tank.
    It was almost a mile farther down the road before that name suddenly struck her as familiar. Grubb’s General Store. She remembered what Queenan had told her about the many sightings of Maura. That people had reported seeing her all over the state, at the Dinosaur Museum in Thermopolis, in the Irma Hotel in Cody. And at Grubb’s General Store in Sublette County.
    She pulled out her cell phone to call Queenan. Zero bars, no reception. She put her phone back in her purse.
    “Well, this is interesting,” Cathy said as they turned off the highway onto a much narrower road.
    “What?”
    “It’s been plowed.”
    “Is this the road to Kingdom Come?”
    “Yes. If Bobby told the truth, and the valley’s deserted, why would anyone bother to clear the road?”
    “Have you been up this way before?”
    “The one time I drove up here was last summer,” said Cathy as she steered around a hairpin turn that made Jane instinctively reach for the armrest. “I’d just become Julian’s caseworker. The policecaught him in Pinedale, where he’d broken into someone’s house and was raiding the kitchen for food.”
    “After he got kicked out of The Gathering?”
    Cathy nodded. “Another one of their Lost Boys. I drove up here, hoping to interview his mother. And I was worried about his sister, Carrie. Julian told me she was only fourteen, and I know that’s the age when the men begin to …” Cathy paused and took a deep breath. “Anyway, I never made it to Kingdom Come.”
    “What happened?”
    “I turned onto their private road and was just heading down into the valley when a truck came roaring up and intercepted me. They must have some sort of warning system that tells them when someone’s entered their property. Two men with walkie-talkies demanded to know the purpose of my visit. As soon as they found out I was a social worker, they ordered me to leave and never return. I got only a glimpse of the settlement from the road. They’d built ten houses, and there