An Obvious Fact (18 page)

“It's an interesting life.” Vic and I leaned against the front grille of the monstrous MRAP. “If you're not nice to me, I won't tell you how to start your truck.”

He ignored me and continued. “Plus the entirety of the Division of Criminal Investigation are back there.”

“I didn't think you wanted to handle that part.”

“I don't want to handle any of it.”

I nodded toward the annex. “One of ours is dead.” The chief calmed down and took a deep breath as I continued. “Somebody in your town killed him, and I think it has to do with Bodaway Torres. Now, you know as well as I do that if we keep this quiet, whoever did it is going to start worrying, and then they're likely to do something stupid as opposed to doing the smart thing, which is loading up and getting the hell out of here. So, you tell me what you would've done differently.”

“It's a hell of a mess.”

“And our job.”

He sighed. “You think that turd Kiddo had something to do with this, then.”

“Yep, but I'm still trying to figure out where he came up with the bail money.”

“TV, I guess. You think he's got ties in Cheyenne, too?”

“No, it's just that Liberty Bail Bonds is the only one with pockets deep enough for a surety bond like this, and it just happens to be located in Cheyenne.”

He shook his head, and we all sat on the bumper of the military vehicle in a dejected fashion. “Must be a lot of money in fixin' up motorcycles on TV.”

“He does have some other rather odd preoccupations.”

He turned to look at me. “Like what?”

“The back room of his cycle shop looks like a bunker for the Nazi Rotary League.”

He absorbed that one for a while, started to say something, then stopped and started again. “How the hell did you find that out?”

“Broke in last night and had a look-see.”

He stood, took two paces, and turned to look at me. “You really have lost your mind, haven't you?” He glanced at Vic. “You wanna talk to your boss here?”

She shrugged. “I'm usually not a calming effect.”

“What if they had caught you in there?”

I made a noise between my compressed lips. “They did.”

“What?”

“Well, Irl Engelhardt did.”

“Is there anybody else that doesn't know what's going on here besides me?”

“No, I think you're about it.”

He closed his eyes. “Hey, do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Let's pretend like this little conversation didn't happen so that I can go back to being as dumb as I have pretended to be.”

I laughed, unable to help it. “You're going to pretend that you're oblivious enough to not know that a dead federal agent and an entire field laboratory from DCI have set up shop next door to your office?”

He took a deep breath and hooked his thumbs into his Sam Browne. “I'm about a year and a half from retirement, Sheriff Longmire, and you'd be amazed at the lengths I'm willing to go to to secure the stupidity I have acquired.”

I stood up. “Consider yourself untold, then.”

“Good.” He nodded down the street. “I am now on my way to the Pondo for lunch if you two would like to join me.”

“Thanks, but I think we're going to go listen to a new CD I've got.”

“Who's on it?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Roger that.” He started to walk off but then paused. “Just so we're clear: if this turns out to be the case of the century, I'm going to want back in and with full credit for how magnificently I coordinated the whole thing.”

“Of course.”

He waved and turned his back on us in more ways than one, disappearing into the crowded street.

I turned to Vic. “The brotherhood of blue.”

“No shit.” She glanced behind her. “What the hell is this thing I'm sitting on?”

“It's an MRAP, or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, the centerpiece of the Hulett Police Department's motor pool.”

“You're shitting me.”

“Nope.” I pulled the DCI envelope from my jacket pocket. “And believe it or not, it has a CD player.”

• • •

Fortunately, Chief Nutter hadn't seen fit to remove the keys from the Pequod, probably because even with the keys most people wouldn't know how to start the damned thing.

The CD player was proving to be almost as difficult. “Where do you suppose the volume is?”

She studied the dash along with me. “Maybe the key needs to be turned to accessory?”

“I thought it was.”

She glanced around the cab of the oversized military vehicle. “Why in the world would this thing have a sound system?”

“Nutter ordered it with all the bells and whistles.”

She reached overhead to a console and a button that read
AUDIO
and flipped the switch. “Wonder what this does?” Her voice echoed off the building in front of us as the PA system projected her words over the valley. “Oh shit. . . .” Which also carried through town.

I reached up and flipped the toggle switch. “I don't think that's it.” I looked at the dash again. “How about I just stick the thing in and see what lights up?”

“Always been my method of operation.”

I ignored the remark and looked for the slot where the disc might be inserted, finally seeing what could've easily been mistaken for a design element. The slot accepted the CD, and it slowly disappeared.

She lodged her feet up on the dash, her Doc Martins in their usual position. “That it?”

“That, or I just lost the only copy we've got.”

There was a popping noise and then someone counting. “One, two, three . . . testing one, two, three.”

I listened to make sure the PA system was off.

“This is agent Brady Post of the ATF recording a meeting with CI Apelu concerning the activities of the Tre Tre Nomads and specifically Bodaway Torres and Operation Bad God.” There was some scrambling and then the mic switched off.

“Who the fuck is Apelu?”

“More important, what's Operation Bad God?”

The mic came back on, and this time there were voices in the background along with some music and ambient noises, probably a bar from the sound of it. Brady's voice was low, as if speaking to someone confidentially. “So, I need a meet.”

The next man also spoke quietly, but his voice was powerful, with just a touch of an unidentifiable accent. “No way.”

“Hey, I don't work for anybody I never met, man.”

“He don't meet people.”

“What, he's a fucking hermit?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause. “Look, B-way wants me in on this, but without knowing where the juice is coming from . . .”

“Don't do it, then.”

Another pause. “Look, I want in, but I just want to know who I'm in with, you know?”

“I read you, brother, but it ain't gonna happen.” There were more noises, and I assumed the other man was adjusting himself in his chair or in the booth, or whatever it was. “This is on a need to know basis—and you don't need to know.”

Post mumbled something indiscernible.

“Hey, there's no need to disrespect me, motherfucker.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” There was more fumbling around and then the unmistakable sound of the slide mechanism on a semiauto being pulled back. “Hey, man . . .”

The voice became louder, and I was pretty sure the man was leaning in very close. “Let me explain the situation. B-way works for us, and he says you're the real deal, but we don't know that now, do we?”

“B-way and me go back long before Bird City.”

“Dude, I don't care.” There was another pause, and then the noise of the safety being engaged and the gun being put away. “You don't get to meet the man, and that's it.”

There was some more noise, and then the mic cut out.

“Okay, we need to know what Operation Bad God is and who Apelu is, for starters.”

“Well, the original name for Devils Tower was Bad God Tower, so it might just be a geographic reference to this area.” There were more noises from the sound system, so I hurried the rest. “Torres is supposedly Apache, so this Apelu might've been one of his buddies.”

The noise on the CD subsided, and there were mumblings but not much else when suddenly we could hear Post's voice. “Well, I gotta go to the can.” We could hear him walking before closing what I assumed was a bathroom door. “Shit, shit, shit.” There was more fumbling and then a sudden noise that sounded like a window opening. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Vic glanced at me. “What the hell?” More undefinable noise and then nothing. After a moment there was a rhythmical sound. “What is that?”

It took me a moment to place it, but then I laughed. “Frogs.”

We sat there listening to the croaking.

“He ripped off the mic?”

“And dropped it out the window, near the river I'd say.”

We sat there as the frogs croaked, and I could feel a little ennui overtaking me.

“How long does this shit go on?”

I adjusted my seat back and pulled my hat over my face. “Let me know.”

• • •

“More than an hour I listened to croaking frogs.”

I yawned. “Nothing else?”

“No, just the sounds of the recently departed coming back to fetch his wire.”

“Well, whoever it was, he must've made him plenty nervous.” I flipped off the accessory switch, checking the battery levels first to make sure I hadn't killed the Hulett Police Department's apocalyptic auto. “There wasn't a lot on that recording.”

“No.” She studied me. “Now that you're rested, what's next?”

“We need to go see if we can find anything about where Post was staying—he mentioned the Pioneer Motel to the north of town.”

She pulled the handle and began the long climb down. “Did he mention a room number?”

Hopping out myself, I reached up, shut the door, and met her at the front of the Pequod. “No, but I'm betting DCI has already found a key on his person.”

Her eyes came back to me as she shook her head. “
Pequod
—really?”

“It's big, it's white, and it seemed appropriate.”

After retrieving the motel's magnetic keycard, we borrowed Chief Nutter's vehicle and drove south a quarter mile to the Pioneer Motel. “Couldn't we have walked?”

I shut the door and headed toward the pleasant-looking strip of rooms only slightly blighted by the bikes and bikers littering the parking lot. “I didn't think you liked walking.”

“I don't, but jeez, this seems a little like overkill.” She stopped by the office and turned to look at me. “How are we playing this? I mean if we just go over and walk in, isn't anybody involved going to be suspicious?”

“We'll just flip the place and look around and maybe there'll be something else we might find along the way.”

“There's this thing called a warrant? And inadmissable evidence?” She sighed and followed me into the office, the doorbell tinkling from the facing.

“Howdy.”

A middle-aged woman looked up from reading the
Rapid City Journal
. “Sorry, we're full up through the rally.”

“We're not looking for a room to stay in; we were just wondering if you might know which room this key goes to?”

She took it from me and examined it. “No way to tell; we just punch in the room number and then slide it through and encode it magnetically.”

“Hmm.” I took the key back. “You wouldn't happen to have a room registered to a gentleman by the name of Brady Post?”

She opened an honest to goodness file box and pulled a card out. “Room number twelve, on the end out there.”

“Do you mind if we take a look?”

She stared at her paper again and then at me. “Well, I don't know who he is, but it can't be good if Sheriff Walt Longmire is looking for him.” She turned the Rapid City paper around and held it up for me so that I could read the feature article about the progress of the Save Jen campaign and the High Plains Dinosaur Museum—along with an enormous photo of me.

“That case was a good two and a half months ago; what the heck are they doing running an article on it now?”

Vic continued to read the borrowed paper. “It's more about the addition to the museum than the case. More to the point, where did they get this really hideous photo of you?”

I ignored her and slipped the card into the electronic mechanism, watched as it blinked from red to green, and pushed the door open. I have, in my time as the father of a teenage daughter, seen scenes of chaos and anarchy that no man should ever witness, and this was another of those. The furniture was turned over with the bed pushed against the wall, clothes and personal effects everywhere. Pictures had been thrown on the floor, and the closet doors had been pulled from the sliders.

Vic peered in after me. “So, you think they were looking for something?”

I tipped the mattress from the wall for a look behind it, just making sure there weren't any bodies lying about, and then leaned it back. “Where do you want to start?”

She stepped over a pile of clothes and put the newspaper on a windowsill. “Can we rent a backhoe?”

Carrying the larger pieces of furniture outside onto the
sidewalk under the curious eyes of the bikers coming and going from the parking lot, we finally got to where we could move around in the place without tripping.

Vic started by going through the clothes that were scattered all over the room, making a pile in the corner with the ones that she had examined, as I went through the drawers and the closet. “This was a real toss. If they found what they were looking for, it wasn't till the end of the search.”

I felt along the top shelf of the closet under a blanket. “Whatever it was, they were looking hard.”

There was a noise at the door, and we turned to find a drunk biker in a leather jacket and do-rag standing in the doorway with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Hey, what are you guys doing in Brady's room?”

“Straightening up a little.” I glanced around and then studied him. “Somebody trashed the place.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Why did they do that?”

“Probably looking to see if the tags were still on the mattress.”

“Do they still check those?”

I ignored the question. “Were you here when the place got torn up?”

He threw a thumb. “Two doors down.”

“What time?”

“Late—after midnight.”

“What'd they look like?”

“I don't know, a couple of guys in black polo shirts. One of 'em was really big.”

“Bigger than me?”

“Yeah. Hey, are you guys cops?”

I ignored this question, too. “What about the other one?”

He leaned against the doorjamb. “He was smaller, but still a big fucker.”

“What did they look like, other than their size?”

“I don't know.”

“I thought you said you saw them?”

“Well, for a minute. I mean, I wasn't wearing any clothes, and there was all this noise, so I stuck my head out the door and yelled, but they told me to shut the hell up and disappear or they were gonna stuff me in a trash can.” He thought about it. “And it was dark.”

“How do you know Brady?”

He shrugged. “We had a beer out here at the picnic table a couple of nights back.”

I nodded, figuring I'd gotten as much out of him as I was going to get. “What's your name?”

He deposited the cigarette into his beer bottle and stuck out his free hand. “Gogo.”

“Gogo?”

“George, George Lance, but everybody just calls me Gogo.”

I shook the hand and gave him one of my cards. “Nice to meet you, Gogo. Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County.”

He studied the card. “Cool.”

“If you think of anything else, you might let us know?”

“Sure.” He pushed off the door facing and disappeared.

“You want to know what's amazing about that exchange?”

I turned to look at her. “What's that?”

“That you actually had cards.” She went back to sorting through Brady's personal effects. “What phone number have you got on there, anyway?”

“The office number.” She mumbled something—I wasn't sure what it was, but I figured that it wasn't complimentary—and went back to searching. “I'm checking the bathroom.”

“I'll alert the press. You want some reading material? There's a lovely article in the paper on the sill you can wipe with.”

“Thanks. I don't plan on being that long.” Thinking it was a heck of a lot easier to search for something when you knew what it was you were searching for, I went into the bathroom. Knowing that the space for contraband on motorcycles was relatively small helped but not much.

I opened and closed the medicine cabinet and tried not to look into my tired eyes in the mirror. The shower curtain had been torn off the rings, and the towels were on the floor. After checking the back of the toilet, I piled the stuff on the seat and looked in the shower stall, the trash can, and on the windowsill.

Nothing.

I was about to turn and walk out when one of those old-fashioned ceiling fixtures with a rectangular glass shade caught my eye. I had had one just like it when I was a kid, with cowboys roping from horses painted on the inside of the surface, but there was a small shaded square in one corner on this one that didn't match.

I carefully stepped up on the toilet in the hopes that I wouldn't rip it from the floor and unthreaded the nut on the bottom of the shade, palming it so that I could pluck out the strange item.

I put the shade back on, and looked at the small object. It was a plastic cube of some sort, khaki in color, and about two
inches square. If it was a box, I had no idea how you would open it since there were no ridges, creases, or cracks. “Hey, Vic?” I came out and offered the thing to her. “Any idea what this is?”

“A ring box?”

I handed it to her. “Open it.”

She turned it in her fingers just as I had and then weighed it in her palm. “It's plastic but heavy.” She examined it closer. “Where did you find it?”

“In the light fixture.”

“No way it's part of the thing?”

“No, and it's a strange color if it's for any kind of construction.”

She handed it back to me. “A Rubik's Cube for morons?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, this pisses me off. We go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and all we find is something that we have no idea what it is?”

• • •

“It's a plastic cube.” Mike Novo turned the thing in his hand. “Solid, by all accounts.”

Vic was annoyed. “So, what's it for?”

“Hell if I know. I mean it's not styrene or anything—it's hard.” He handed it back to me. “Maybe it's a spacer of some kind.”

I handed it back to him. “I need to know.”

“You want me to send it to Cheyenne?”

“Yep.”

“And then what?”

“X-ray it, test it. A federal agent possibly lost his life because of it, Mike. Do whatever it is you people do and find out what the heck it is.”

“Okay.” He stood and pulled out a FedEx box.

“T.J. get anything more from the body?”

He nodded toward the back. “You can ask her—she's finishing up the autopsy in the pop-up lab.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Henry was by here looking for you. He had your dog with him.”

“He say where he was going?”

“The Ponderosa Café. He said Dog was hungry, and they were going for a late lunch/early dinner.”

I turned to look at Vic. “Hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Let's go talk to T. J., and then we'll grab something to eat.”

She followed me as I led the way. “Dead people and dinner, my favorite night out.”

The Little Lady was pulling off her latex gloves when we shoved the plastic aside and stepped in. “No other traces. The killer placed the muzzle of the .40 against his chest and pulled the trigger.” She threw the gloves in a nearby trash can. “From the angle of the shot, I'd say your friend here was asleep.”

“Nothing else?”

She picked up a clipboard and began writing. “As noted, the decedent had sex before being shot; he'd eaten a little before that, and he also ingested a schedule IV controlled substance, probably Lorazepam, a high-potency, intermediate-duration, 3-hydroxy benzodiazepine drug, often used to treat anxiety disorders.”

“Like being worried that somebody might shoot you in the chest?”

T.J. glanced at Vic, noting the fact that she had on her sunglasses in the gloom of the annex. “Exactly like that.” Sherwin extended a hand. “How do you feel, Vic?”

My undersheriff looked dubiously at the hand for a moment and then shook. “Still hung over; how 'bout you?”

“Just tired. At least hung over means you
had
fun.”

She glanced at me.

• • •

“You ordered without us?”

The Bear chewed a bite of his cheeseburger. “Dog was hungry.” He fed him another fry. “He is always hungry.”

Vic and I pulled out chairs and sat. “We found a plastic cube in Brady's motel room.”

Henry wiped his hands on his napkin. “A what?”

“Plastic cube, about two inches by two inches by two inches—perfectly square and khaki in color. Any ideas?”

He puzzled. “Hard plastic?”

“Very.”

He shrugged. “Let me see it.”

“DCI's job. I gave it to Mike Novo to ship off just now.”

Dragging another fry through the ketchup, he fed it to Dog. “Nothing else?”

“Nope, no more wire equipment, computer, nothing.” The waitress arrived, and we ordered up. “Somebody destroyed the place, and I'm assuming they got everything.”

“Except the cube. Whatever that is.”

I glanced out the window at the comings and goings of a couple thousand motorcycles in the early evening. “He hid it in the light fixture, so he knew it was a possibility that someone was going to be looking for it.”

The Bear nodded and split the last fry with Dog. “It would be nice if we had access to the ATF agent's control officer. It is possible that he might know what Post was working on.”

I leaned back in my seat. “I'm still waiting on McGroder to get back to me.”

Vic rested an elbow on the table, pushing a wave of blue-black hair from her face and supporting her chin with a palm. “How?”

“Excuse me?”

“How is he supposed to get in touch with you?”

Satisfied with myself, I smiled and patted my jacket pocket. “I've got Bodaway Torres's cell phone.”

“Have you checked it?” I suddenly felt a little less sure of myself as she reached over and pulled the phone from my pocket, thumbed a few buttons, and studied the screen as the waitress came back with our drinks and I sipped my iced tea.

The Cheyenne Nation studied Vic, still wearing her sunglasses. “How is your head?”

“Shitty. How's yours?”

“Fine, but I did not drink a vat of dirty martinis last night.”

She turned the screen toward me. “Eight phone messages and three texts from the regional office in Denver, Colorado, of the FB of I.”

“Oh.”

“You hit the button that silenced it.”

“Oh.”

The phone suddenly spoke. “Hello?”

Vic gestured with the device. “Take it; it's McGroder.”

I took the thing and held it to my ear. “Hey, Mike.”

“Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to get you for what seems like days.”

“This cell phone thing is kind of new to me. Have you got something?”

“This is a shit storm of incomparable magnitude, and none of us have an umbrella. This Post guy was a real deal, and an undercover operative for the last thirteen years with all the biker gangs. He was involved in a major bust on weapons in the Southwest, but evidently he had gotten into something even bigger.”

“Like what?”

“The control officer wouldn't say.”

“So big the ATF won't tell the FBI?”

“Apparently.”

I thought about it. “What's he want done with Post?”

“Amazingly enough, he went along with your assessment of the know-and-go, but get ready because he's on his way there.”

“Coming to Hulett?”

“Left today from Phoenix.”

“Okay.”

“His name is John Stainbrook.” There was a long pause, and I listened as the FBI man shuffled papers on his desk. “Walt, don't jerk this guy around; he's the real juice, and unless you and your pals up there in the Wild West want to end up in an undisclosed facility in the Arizona desert, just tell him everything you know.”

“Well, that won't take long, considering we don't know a lot.” I reached down to pet Dog. “Hey, Mike, we found something in Post's motel room—”

“You searched his room?”

“Don't worry about it; we weren't the first. Anyway, we found a plastic cube, khaki in color, about two inches square—any idea what that might be?”

He sighed. “Walt, are you on drugs?”

“That's the only thing of interest we found.”

He sighed. “I have no idea.”

“Oh, well. Maybe the Stainbrook guy can help us out.”

“There's one more thing.”

“I'm listening.”

“Post wasn't alone.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The ATF has two undercover agents there in Hulett.”

• • •

I watched as Henry continued to tinker with the metal detector we'd purchased at High Plains Pawn, in an attempt to get the thing to light up or do something that might indicate it was operable.

Vic looked out the window of the Dodge at the gathering gloom of one of suburban Rapid City's nicer neighborhoods, her eyes rising to the gigantic cottonwoods that wreathed the street. “I figure if I lived in a place like this I'd shoot myself.”