Cold Skies

The third installment in Thomas King's DreadfulWater mystery series opens when Bob Tatum, a traveler arriving at the small regional airport in Chinook, Montana, discovers a man slumped across the front seat of a rental Jeep Cherokee. Unable to rouse the figure, Tatum retreats to the terminal to report the problem.

Thumps DreadfulWater, a Cherokee ex-cop turned fine-art landscape photographer, is introduced amid unexplained fatigue and frequent urination. His friend Archimedes "Archie" Kousoulas, owner of the Aegean bookstore, suspects Thumps has diabetes or another serious condition. At Al's café, Sheriff Duke Hockney asks Thumps to serve as acting sheriff while Hockney attends a summit in Costa Rica, sweetening the offer by promising to buy the gas stove Thumps has been coveting. Thumps refuses but accompanies Hockney to the airport, where they learn that Norm Chivington, the car dealer who owns the rental agency, handled the situation without calling police.

A phone call sends them to the Wagon Wheel motel, where a dead man lies in Room 10. The victim, identified as James Lester of Sacramento, has a gunshot wound to the head. County coroner Beth Mooney, who doubles as the town's family doctor, notes the body was moved: The chair cushion beneath Lester is clean despite expected post-mortem fluids. The revolver beside him has three rounds fired but only one bullet wound, and the Jeep Lester rented is missing. Hockney traces it to Chivington Motors, where it has been freshly washed with ammonia, which destroys blood evidence.

Archie shows Thumps a conference brochure featuring Lester as keynote speaker. Lester's company, Orion Technologies, developed Resource Analysis Mapping (RAM), a method for measuring underground water reserves, and has been testing it on the Bear Hump, land that was part of the tribal reservation under an 1836 treaty but removed by the U.S. Senate before ratification. The tribe's land claim is back in court. Beth's autopsy reveals Lester's heart had stopped before the gun was fired. The gunshot was staged to simulate suicide.

Days later, Cooley Small Elk, Claire's nephew and a tribal member, drives Thumps to visit Moses Blood, an elder who has noticed buzzards circling a monitoring station on the Bear Hump. They find Margo Knight, Lester's business partner and the scientific mind behind RAM, shot in the chest and the head. Knight wears a dress and heels entirely wrong for the prairies, suggesting she did not come willingly. The two missing bullets from Lester's revolver match Knight's wounds. Beth determines both victims were drugged and that Lester suffered cardiac failure before he could be shot.

Several outsiders converge on Chinook. Boomper Austin, a wealthy Texan heading Austin Resource Capital, arrives with his bodyguard, Cisco Cruz, a former San Francisco homicide detective. Austin wears a ring set with red beryl, an extremely rare gemstone. Cruz privately requests forensic reports from Thumps, reasoning that suspicion could fall on Austin if the deaths were murders. Archie introduces Thumps to Jayme Redding, an investigative reporter from Sacramento who explains that Lester handled Orion's finances, Knight held two Ph.D.s, and the RAM patent could be worth billions. Redding traces a corporate chain back to Austin and references the Obsidian Murders, unsolved serial killings on the Northern California coast that claimed Thumps's partner, Anna Tripp, and her young daughter, Callie, among ten victims. The case went cold, and Thumps resigned from law enforcement and drifted to Chinook.

Oliver Parrish, Orion's chief operating officer, presents himself as a mere office manager and volunteers his .22 caliber pistol, identical to those all executives carried. Knight's matching pistol is missing. At a party Austin hosts at Shadow Ranch, Beth tells Thumps he is diabetic and later teaches him to manage the condition. Thumps learns that Austin had a dinner reservation for three the night of the killings, but Lester and Knight never appeared.

Claire Merchant, the tribal chief and Thumps's on-again, off-again romantic partner, visits that night and reveals she has breast cancer and will need surgery in Seattle. They spend the night together. The next morning, Moses and Cooley deliver an envelope from Roxanne Heavy Runner, the tribal secretary and head of the Magpie women's society, containing instructions for looking after Claire.

Archie's research reveals Redding previously worked for Austin's holding company. Thumps confronts Redding about breaking into Knight's motel room, but Redding slips away with Cruz, stealing an envelope from Thumps's car containing files from the victims' devices. Austin later reveals he purchased RAM for just over four million dollars, viewing it as corporate leverage, and has agreed with Claire not to extract water from the Blackfoot Aquifer.

Redding is found dead in her hotel bathtub. Beth determines she was placed in an empty tub, struck against the porcelain, then held under water until she drowned. The wineglass beside the tub was staging. Beth's autopsy reveals Redding was two months pregnant. Cruz confirms the wineglass proved the death was murder: Redding had written extensively on alcohol and birth defects and would never have been drinking.

A body found in Sacramento is identified as Amanda Douglas, the latest victim of the Kanji Killer, a serial murderer Redding investigated. Thumps recognizes Douglas as the woman in a covert photograph on Lester's phone. Stanley "Stick" Merchant, Claire's son and the sheriff's technical analyst, confirms the photo was emailed from Knight's phone but erased from her device. Meanwhile, Cooley and Moses excavate trenches near a Bear Hump monitoring station and find gem-quality red beryl, the same stone in Austin's ring. Austin admits the beryl came from Bear Hump, not a Utah mine as he claimed, and Claire begins negotiating mining terms.

That night, Thumps returns to Claire's condo to find her drugged and semiconscious. Parrish sits in the shadows holding Knight's missing pistol and reveals himself as both the killer of Lester, Knight, and Redding, and as the Kanji Killer. He lured Lester and Knight to the monitoring well with a fabricated offer, drugged their champagne, shot Knight, drove the dying Lester to the airport to stage a suicide, and returned to Great Falls for his morning flight. He killed Redding by drugging her and staging the drowning. His critical mistake was mentioning the stolen envelope's location on Redding's coffee table, which he could only have known by being there. Knight had found his covert photograph of Douglas, mistaken her for a romantic rival, and forwarded it to Lester. Parrish forces Thumps and Claire toward the parking lot at gunpoint.

Cruz is waiting. Alerted by Deanna Heavy Runner, Roxanne's sister, who noticed Claire looking unwell with Parrish at the resort, Cruz disabled the vehicles and positioned himself in the darkness. When the car fails to start, Cruz steps out with his SIG Sauer. Parrish fires once, grazing Cruz's shoulder, then raises his hands. Cruz fires four shots into Parrish's chest, killing him, and states the first was for Redding and the rest for his unborn child.

The sheriff cannot build a case against Cruz: Parrish shot first, Cruz was wounded, and Claire saw nothing. Cruz departs for his hometown of Pie Town, New Mexico. Claire agrees to let Thumps accompany her to Seattle for surgery. Thumps drives toward Canada but turns around before the border, unable to outrun what happened. He reflects on what he would do if he found Anna and Callie's killer, acknowledging there is only one way to find out.