Part 6
“He went to make sure you had kept your word,” Maribel said.
Burke nodded. He had removed the traps, but not by sundown. Eli found one still set above Cottonwood Draw and photographed it. Freezing rain began while he was coming home. The highway patrol report’s conclusion had never been in doubt: ice, a narrow shoulder, and a truck moving too fast for both.
Nothing in the original investigation placed Burke on the road or suggested another vehicle had been there. He had simply let everyone believe Eli’s trip was an ordinary survey run because the truth would have exposed him.
“I told myself his reason for being up there didn’t cause the ice,” Burke said.
“It didn’t.”
He looked startled.
For fourteen months, part of Maribel had searched for someone who could be made to hold the entire weight of Eli’s death. Burke had given Eli a reason to be on the ridge. The ice had taken the truck off it. When Lena asked, Maribel would have to say both.
“But Eli gave you another chance,” she said, “and you used it to keep lying.”
Sam closed the vehicle door.
At the ranch house, Lena recorded Maribel’s statement at the kitchen table while Tessa waited in the mudroom with Huck.
Maribel described Burke’s key, the grazing lease, the canvas pack, and the conversation on the porch. Then she described her first answer in the barn.
“I knew Burke had taken Eli’s equipment,” she said. “I knew he still had access. I said I didn’t know.”
Lena stopped writing. “Why?”
“Because I knew what the answer would mean. I still needed him to be the man who helped me after Eli died.”
Lena kept writing, and Maribel continued.
She brought Eli’s notebook from the field room and placed it beside Lena’s recorder. The pages showed that Burke had used illegal traps on the property before and that Eli had confronted him. They also contained Maribel’s request that Eli wait before reporting him.
“You understand this may become part of the case,” Lena said.
“All of it should.”
Maribel signed consent for officers to search the areas of her ranch Burke had accessed. She also gave written notice revoking his access to every building and beginning termination of his grazing lease. It meant losing his spring payment unless she found another lessee, and it meant checking the north water system herself while runoff turned every repair into twice the work.
Her hand shook once above the signature line. She signed anyway.
Before Lena left, Maribel walked her through every place Burke had been allowed to enter: the pump house, the calving shed, the locked cabinet where veterinary supplies were kept, and the desk drawer that held old gate combinations.
At the foaling stall, Lena asked whether Maribel wanted the door sealed until the search was complete.
“No,” Maribel said. “Photograph what you need. When you release it, I’m cleaning it.”
Tessa stood in the aisle with Huck leaning against her knee. Her anger had not disappeared, and Maribel was grateful she did not pretend otherwise.
“We lost most of yesterday,” Tessa said. “Another night in that trap could have cost her the foot.”
“I know.”
“I should have told you in the barn,” Maribel said.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tessa nodded once, then returned to the inventory Lena had left on the tack-room shelf. Before dark, Maribel changed the north-gate combination and replaced the barn lock.
Near midnight, Rowan called. The mother had reached an authorized wildlife-care facility. Circulation in the trapped foot had improved. Imaging showed no fracture, but the laceration required treatment, and the next two days would determine whether infection or tissue damage changed the prognosis. The kits remained stable.
“And Daisy?” Maribel asked.
“Offended, hungry, and trying to open every cabinet in my clinic. In other words, Daisy.”
Maribel laughed before she could stop herself. The sound felt unfamiliar in the kitchen. Huck raised his head from the rug and thumped his tail.
Thirty-six hours later, Tessa met Maribel at Rowan’s clinic. Daisy was ready to go home, but Tessa asked Maribel to wait in the treatment room first. A monitor on the wall showed a dim enclosure at the wildlife facility.
The female wolverine had recovered enough from sedation to stand. Her injured foot touched the bedding lightly. She paced once along an interior barrier, nose pressed to the seam.
On the other side, the two kits shifted inside a covered transfer box. One made the rough, rusty chirr Maribel had heard in the barn.
No one was in the enclosure. Staff watched from another room. If the female reacted aggressively or failed to accept them, the barrier could be closed without anyone entering.
Rowan stood by the door, giving Maribel the whole chair rather than taking the one beside it. Tessa remained near the monitor, eyes on the animal’s gait. “They’ll raise the gate,” Tessa said. “If she accepts them, nobody goes in. If she doesn’t, they close it.” On the screen, the interior gate began to rise under the facility staff’s remote control…
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