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A few more miles of ranch land sped past us when he said, "I want to get a hotel room in Walsenburg, to be closer to the courthouse."
We packed that night, and in the morning found a place to make camp for the duration.
The next day saw Ben working on building his case. Mostly, this involved talking to people, legwork, phone calls. He went to Alice, Joe, Tony, and Sheriff Marks. They were Cormac's defense. I offered to come along, but Ben said no. Cormac's lawyer needed to handle this, he said. My being there would muddy the issue. Remind them of their biases. Maybe he was right. Cormac told me not to let Ben out of my sight. But I let him go.
Besides, I had a research project of my own.
The public library, a couple of blocks down from the courthouse, had several computer terminals. I went to one and started searching. After a half an hour, I took my notes to the reference desk.
"Do you have copies of the Denver Post from these dates?"
The nice lady at the desk set me up at a microfiche machine, and away I went. It took about three hours of hunting to find the whole story.
Starting about fifteen years ago, a group of Front Range ranchers began protesting new restrictions and higher fees for grazing their cattle on public lands. Millions of acres across the West were owned by the government, and ranchers had been given access to those lands. To a lot of people, federally owned was the same as public, and anything that barred their access to those lands impinged on their rights as citizens. Some of them did the sane thing: they lobbied Congress, lodged complaints, took the issue to court. Others, though, turned to militias. They stockpiled arms and began to prepare for the violent overthrow of the government they saw as inevitable.
A man named David O'Farrell showed up in a series of articles. This was Ben's father, who at the time owned a ranch near Loveland. He was arrested several times on illegal weapons charges and went straight to the top of the fist of people suspected of being the head of the Mountain Patriot Brigade, one of a network of paramilitary groups that gathered and trained in the backcountry, with the ultimate goal of defending by force their right to use public lands. Through the early nineties they had almost constant confrontations with local law enforcement—except in a few cases where local law enforcement happened to be members.
Eight years ago, after lengthy FBI surveillance and a carefully prosecuted case, Ben's father had been convicted on various felony weapons violations and conspiracy charges. He was still in prison.
The name Cormac Be
I found another newspaper article, from a couple of years earlier than all the Mountain Patriot Brigade business, that featured Cormac. It reported on the strange death of Douglas Be
It was deja vu, this disagreement between the witnesses and the coroner's report. And Cormac had been in this situation before. Cormac had killed his first werewolf when he was sixteen years old. I didn't even know what to think about that. Once, I asked Cormac how he'd become a werewolf and vampire hunter, where he'd learned the tricks of it. He said it ran in the family. Which might explain why Douglas was in a position to get mauled to death in the first place, and why Cormac was there to witness it: Douglas had been training him.
I wondered what his mother would have thought of that, if she'd been alive to see it.
I printed off that article and a dozen or so others. By then, it was di
When I got back to the room, Ben was there. Doing a little of both, it seemed: my laptop was on, plugged into the phone jack, and papers were spread over the table and half the bed. But he sat in the chair, staring at the wall. I couldn't even say that he was thinking hard. He was back in that fugue state.
He jumped when the door opened, clutched the arms of his chair, his mouth open slightly, like he was about to growl. He calmed down almost immediately, slouching and looking away. Tense—just a little.
"Hungry?" I said, trying to be nonchalant.
"Not really."
"When was the last time you ate?" He only shook his head. "You ought to eat something."
"Sure, Mom." He gave me the briefest flickers of a glance—half accusing, half apologetic. I must have glared at him. I didn't appreciate the label. I didn't appreciate having to behave like that label.
He cleared a spot on the table where I deposited the pizza.
I pulled my stack of papers out of my bag and set them between us. I'd put the one about Cormac's father on top. A grainy, black and white picture of the man occupied the middle of the page. He'd been lean and weathered, with short-cropped, receding hair. In the picture, a candid snapshot, he was smiling at something to the left of the camera, and wearing sunglasses.
Ben stared at it a moment, his expression blank. I thought I knew him pretty well by now, but I couldn't read this. He was almost disbelieving. Then, his lips quirked a smile.
Finally, he said, "I'd forgotten about that picture. It's a good one of him. Uncle Doug." He shook his head, then looked at me. "You've been busy."
"Yeah. It's fu
He started shuffling through the articles. "Real busy."
"Just remember that the next time you think you can keep a secret from me."
"Why go to the trouble?"
"I wanted to make sure that you and Cormac aren't bad guys. I have to say, you have kind of a creepy past. When you say this stuff doesn't matter, I really want to trust you."
"I'm not sure that's such a great idea. You might be better off on your own. Get out of Dodge while the getting's good."
We were pack. I'd see this through. "I'll stick around."
"I haven't seen my father in over ten years. We had a throw-down screaming match over this Patriot Brigade garbage. I was twenty, first one in my family to go to college and so full of myself. I was educated." He gave the word sarcastic emphasis. "I knew it all, and there I was to throw it back in the face of my poor benighted father. And he was so full of that right-wing nut-job rhetoric… I left. Cormac was still there, helping him work the ranch. That's the only reason he got tangled up with that crowd, was because of my father. When I left, so did he. I still don't know if it was something I said that convinced him. Or if we'd just spent so much time looking out for each other—we were already kind of a team, then.
"Dad called me right before that last trial. I'd just passed the bar. He wanted me to represent him. I said no. I'd have said no even if we were on good terms. He really needed someone with experience. But all Dad heard was that his only son, his own flesh and blood, was turning his back on him. The fu