Badwater (22 page)

thirty

C
esar’s was busy. And like the last time I was there, it was only at the bar that the crowd was gathered. The restaurant section remained as dark and silent as a cave except for the firefly flickers of a few red-globed candles. I checked out the crowd of mostly oil workers and their dates, wary of again running into the Mann twins. It was a relief that they weren’t there. I had enough problems this evening. I was too tired and too angry and too stoned for another confrontation.

Wading into the gloom of the restaurant portion with dark red vinyl booths and black walls, I could spot only one customer ignorant of the restaurant’s terrible food. He looked as if he belonged in the darkness.

“Howdy, Ross.”

“QuickDraw” came a grumble from the shadows.

Ross McGee was hunched over one of the red-globed candles, his features colored crimson. Both beard and eyebrows bristled with stiff white hair. He resembled a troll king more than a lawyer and now bureaucrat. But I had enormous respect for the man. As a prosecutor, he’d put more people away for life than anyone in the state. He was the go-to guy when someone very bad needed to be put away for a very long time. When he was at the height of his powers, just his appearance at an arraignment could make defense attorneys swoon. But that was before poor health and increasing cantankerousness had forced the office to chain him to a desk. His eccentricities, once considered charming, were now labeled profane. Because of his harmless flirting with every woman he came across, the whole office was forced to go through sexual harassment training annually. For years they’d been waiting for him to quit or die—he knew where all the bodies were buried so he could never be fired. But he just kept hanging on. He would have made a hell of a climber.

“You’re looking good,” I told him, lying.

McGee was obese, his tobacco breath came in rasps, and his eyes were yellow and watery but somehow still fierce.

“Bite me,” he replied.

I slid into the booth. The waitress appeared—the same one as the last time I’d been here, the one with the sticky curls and the four-inch bangs ironed up like a cresting wave. She listened to me order a margarita on the rocks before walking off without a word.

“You must have already shown her your considerable charms, Ross.”

“She keeps up that attitude, I’m not going to show her. I’ll keep my belt buckled and my zipper high and tight.”

“That’s cruel, Ross. Really cruel. How long are you staying for, anyway?”

“I’m going to stay in this backwards-ass town as long as it takes. Your little stunt in today’s paper was the last straw—probation’s revoked. You’ve got a new baby-sitter, QuickDraw. Until this trial’s over.”

“What’s going to happen then?”

He kissed his fat fingers and then blew on them.

“Then you’re gone.”

I met McGee’s watery stare over the candle.

“Gone? You mean I’m fired?”

McGee shook his head. “No. You’re going to resign. You don’t, and they’re going to make it hard for you. Harder, I should say. Much harder.”

For the eight years I had been a cop, McGee had been my protector. He backed up all the agents. He would go toe-to-toe with the administration whenever they tried to scapegoat some legal disaster off on the cops. And he’d win. More important, he would back us up even when we, in his words, screwed the pooch. He only asked one thing in return, and that was loyalty to the spirit and letter of the law. You failed that, and you were gone. Luke had been fired years ago and gone off to law school. I, despite having “screwed the pooch” on numerous occasions, stayed on because McGee had always thought he’d seen something promising in me.

But now it was clear he wasn’t seeing it anymore. McGee’s words and tone indicated that he wouldn’t be backing me up this time. And that stung, even though I’d been expecting it. I doused the pain by getting mad instead.

“Tell them they can go fuck themselves. They don’t have the balls to do it.”

Like McGee, I knew some of the skeletons in the department’s closet. I knew which administrator’s wife had gotten off on a DUI, who’d slept with their secretaries, and whose kids had their drug charges quietly dropped.

McGee just grinned at me.

“They’re talking about starting an investigation into your activities in Mexico during your leave last summer. They want you to cooperate fully with the DEA. That is, unless you resign and disappear.”

I realized the difference between me and McGee—we both knew about the office’s skeletons, but the office also knew about some of mine. Or at least suspected their existence. McGee, the decorated former Marine colonel, was too straight to have any rattling bones lying around.

My manufactured anger lost some of its potency.

“Shit” was all I could say. And I could no longer meet McGee’s eyes.

The surly waitress appeared with my drink. She ignored McGee when he raised his glass and gestured with it.

When she turned to go, McGee barked, “Hey. Girl. Come back here.”

She turned slowly, rolling her eyes. Then she gave him a dazzling fake smile, cocked her head, and said pertly, “You want somethin’ else, old fella?”

I felt my anger return—for real this time. I could handle the waitress’s rudeness, but not when it was directed at McGee. I wanted to toss my drink right at the pale roll of flesh that spilled over her jeans and say something like “You don’t have the right to even
look
at him like that. This old man fought five tours in Vietnam, got wounded twice, served this state for the next thirty years, locked up child molesters and wife killers, stood up to politics and industry, and protected his agents with the ferocity of a wounded grizzly. And he was my best friend, you smug, stupid bitch.”

But I said nothing.

When she was gone, McGee said, “I should have fired you last year. You’re worse than useless. The only reason I kept you on was for Rebecca. And Moriah.”

I slid out of the booth. I started to walk away. Again. Just like I had at Brandy’s motel that morning.

McGee’s low growl of a voice followed me.

“You’re not a cop anymore, QuickDraw. It’s unofficial until this trial’s over, so you can keep your badge for now, but you’re not a cop. So stay out of trouble or else I’ll lock you up myself and throw away the key. Understand? You hear me?”

thirty-one

I
t would be almost twenty-four hours before I would learn that Brandy Walsh’s day was even worse than mine, if you can imagine that.

After discovering what Bogey had done—when he woke her up and showed her the papers, begging for forgiveness—she got in her car and drove up into the Shoshone. She wanted to get away from him and from everything and clear her head with a long, long ride. She spent the afternoon on her mountain bike, tearing around on remote trails in the forested hills.

The night came on as a surprise. The sun just dropped like a stone behind the peaks. There were no storms that afternoon, and the sunlight had seemed like it would last forever until it suddenly went out. The looming darkness caught her on top of a ridge where she had to dismount and carry her bike across a knife-edge before getting back on the trail. She realized she was more than five miles from where she’d parked her Jetta at the gated end of a fire road. Suddenly she was a little scared, not sure if she’d make it back before the night became complete. And she was weak and dizzy, too; she’d been too caught up in her guilty thoughts to have bothered with things like eating and hydration.

Clipping a light onto the handlebars, she started riding fast. She rolled downhill, around twists and turns, like she was dropping in on a wave that was a little too big for her abilities, like she was in over her head. She tried to slow down. She had seen only one other rider all afternoon, and if she got hurt it could be days before she would be found. The only other human sign was the sound of four-wheelers tearing around on the logging roads down by her car. But she was racing the dark, and her hands kept easing off the brakes.

After twenty minutes she skidded onto the gated fire road and felt a surge of relief. It was just another few miles to the gate that kept it closed to motorized traffic and her car. She was relieved, too, not to be so closely confined by the trees. The road was wide and graded. It seemed less likely that a bear would jump out at her here.

But soon she could see a hazy orange glow down-valley, about where her car should be, and it alarmed her. A mile farther on, the glow was brighter and she could smell smoke. She wondered if someone had lit a bonfire near the picnic tables by her car. She really didn’t feel like talking to anyone, particularly drunken kids roasting hot dogs. But then maybe they’d have a spare hot dog. And a beer. The smoke had a funny smell to it, though. Like gasoline. Without really thinking, she began to pedal faster.

Brandy leaned around a final hairpin turn, saw the access gate across the road glittering in her headlights, and swerved around it. She skidded to a stop.

There were no picnickers, no hot dogs, no party. There wasn’t even a fire. There was just a smoldering pile of metal that had once been her car.

She stared at it, shining the bike’s light over the blistered paint and blasted windows. Gray smoke trailed up toward the stars from bumper to bumper. The ruin crackled and popped, spitting sparks from the smoldering upholstery. She dropped her helmet on the ground and just stared.

“Lady, do you need some help?”

The voice came from the other side of the road, from a place where she remembered seeing the graffitied picnic tables and fire pits in the daylight. Brandy turned the handlebars in that direction, but the light wouldn’t penetrate the darkness far enough to see anything.

“I don’t know. That’s my car. Do you know what happened to it?”

There was a laugh.

“I got no idea. But it looks like it got cooked.”

The voice was that of a young man. It had a strange quality to it, a hysterical edge, that made her wonder if whoever it was might be drunk. Or stoned. Or crazy.

“We can give you a ride into town on a four-wheeler. You’re that lawyer, aren’t you?”

We? He was walking toward her; she could hear his feet on stones and leaves. But all she could make out in the light were some aspen trees. Brandy put her left foot onto the pedal and clicked it in. Then she had to turn her head when, on the other side of the road, her car hissed out a shower of sparks from the back window. She turned back just in time to see a figure standing close to her. But a little bit behind her, where she couldn’t illuminate him with the light.

“Come on. Hop off that bike. We can stash it in the trees somewhere.”

Brandy didn’t.

“Thanks, but I’ll just ride into town.”

She pushed forward and lifted her right foot, trying to clip it in, too.

“Hey,” the figure said.

One-footed, she pedaled a couple of strokes, picking up speed and still trying to clip in her right foot.

“Hey! Where you going, lady? I said we’d give you a ride.”

She could hear his feet scuffing the dirt as he began to run alongside her. She didn’t turn to answer him, though. She focused on not running off the road and on getting her shoe to clip into the pedal. She held on tight to the handlebars.

She was suddenly aware of someone else running up on her other side. The “we.” They were catching up to her, as was her panic. They were on both sides. She could feel the wind their bodies made on her bare arms. She gave up on clipping in her foot and just began to pedal.

But she’d only made a couple of strokes when one of the shadows lunged forward and jabbed something into her front wheel. A stick. The effect was immediate. The wheel locked and she was instantly airborne.

She hit the hard dirt headfirst. There was a flash of luminosity like a lightning strike and then only blackness.

thirty-two

T
he blackened car was still warm to the touch, although it might have just been from the sun. But by laying my palm on it, I thought I could picture flames in the night. I thought I could hear a scream, too. And laughter. But my imagination didn’t tell me why it had happened or who had done it. It didn’t even have any suggestions, either, as to whether or not she was still alive.

I hadn’t gotten the call until almost eleven o’clock. The county fire chief and sheriff had left long before I arrived. But even though I was no arson investigator, I could make a few assumptions.

The accelerant had been gasoline. I could smell it. But the gas tank was still intact, so it had come from another source. It had been poured over the hood and roof, because it was there that the paint was the most blistered. The fenders and doors were barely scorched. Also, chips of glass lay all over the cooked interior, but only a few were on the dirt outside, indicating that the car had been vandalized before it was burned. Inside, there were the charred remnants of the biking gear I remembered seeing at the river—I couldn’t tell if anything had been stolen. Brandy’s expensive mountain bike stood nearby, leaning against a picnic table, covered with gray fingerprint powder. Theft had definitely not been a motive.

“All right, you’ve seen enough. Now get away from that car,” Luke commanded.

Dressed in a suit for the benefit of newspaper photographers and curious locals and tourists being kept down the road, he had been glaring at me with his hands on his hips.

“Don’t be a jerk,” I said. “Tell me who’s in charge. Who’s doing the investigation?”

Luke shook his head.

“I’m the goddamn county attorney, QuickDraw. I’m in charge, at least when you’re not usurping my authority and conspiring to ruin me. The sheriff’s going to assign someone to do the footwork, but I’m running things at the top.”

I tried to keep my temper.

“Okay. Just tell me what you’ve found.”

Still glaring, he snapped, “It’s right there in front of your face. We’ve got a burned-out car and a pain-in-the-ass defense attorney who didn’t go back to her room last night. That’s it. That’s the sum total of what we know. Except for the obvious fact that it’s probably a big hoax. Now you’re going to stay out of it. I’m going to ask you some questions and then I don’t want to see your face until the trial next week.”

“A hoax?”

“Another bullshit publicity stunt. Trial date’s almost here, and old Bogey’s not getting enough attention from shitting on the hood of his own car. Or from a certain scumbag DCI agent who’s feeding him inside information. So he pulls this.
Lawyer disappears—kidnapped in the town that’s trying to frame her client
. Bogey will look great screaming it on TV, don’t you think?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Screw you, Burns. Why else would someone torch the car? No one’s that stupid.”

He had a point. Who would kidnap a lawyer and call attention to it by burning her car? Idiots. That was one explanation. You had to be really dumb to light a car on fire when you could simply dump it in the millions of acres of forests. In Wyoming, where something like ninety percent of all crime could be tied to methamphetamine, it was most likely that the idiots were tweaking.

It was either that, or Luke was right and it was some bizarre ploy for media coverage and to possibly influence potential jurors. After the way I’d been screwed—literally and figuratively—by Brandy Walsh, I now believed she was capable of just about anything. But I also knew she was smart, and I just couldn’t imagine her participating in such a harebrained scheme.

“We knew a couple of guys once who were dumb enough to torch a car,” I reminded Luke.

Almost eight years ago, when we were partners, we’d been flying with a contract pilot looking for a rumored marijuana farm in the Medicine Bow Mountains. We’d seen a lot of black smoke rising from a remote canyon and had flown over it. Below, a van was on fire, and a car was hurrying away from the scene. A swoop over it had given us the license-plate number. It turned out the owner of the car and a buddy had stolen the van from a retirement home and used it for a series of armed robberies in Wheatland. For some reason the idiots had thought burning it would destroy any evidence left inside. Instead all it did was draw attention and get them caught.

Luke looked like he might smile at the memory, but successfully maintained his frown and instead just rolled his eyes.

“You don’t come across morons like that more than once in a career. But your remembering that brings up another point: Where the hell were you last night?”

I rubbed my eyes.

“Bite me, Luke.”

McGee came slowly stumping up the dirt road from beyond the line of fire-department tape. He was breathing hard, both hands on his cane.

I called to him, “Luke thinks I’m in on an elaborate hoax to make him look bad by burning cars and kidnapping defense lawyers.”

McGee grunted out a chuckle.

“Get a grip on yourself, Endow. QuickDraw may be capable of a lot of things, but that’s not one of them. If he really wanted to make you look bad, he’d just shoot you and leave your fat ass in the woods to rot.”

“Thanks a lot, Ross.”

“You’re one to talk about fat, McGee. But maybe it isn’t a hoax,” Luke persisted. “Maybe he killed her last night for revealing his role as a defense plant.”

McGee looked at me, considering.

“Screw you both.”

I shook my head and walked toward the access gate that blocked the road. Several pieces of paper wrapped in plastic had been wired to one of the bars. The first was titled “Notice: You Are in Grizzly Bear Country.” Below was well-meaning but useless information and advice, like playing dead if a charging bear appears to be only protecting its territory, but fighting back if it acts in a predatory manner. How do you tell the difference when it’s gnawing on your head?

I wondered if Brandy had seen the notice. She was obviously—and for good reason—afraid of large carnivores. But I knew a bear wasn’t responsible for her disappearance. Bears don’t torch cars.

Another notice on the iron gate stated that only hooves, knobby bike tires, and boots could touch the ground on the other side. To one side of the gate there was an opening for people and horses to slip through. There was a puddle of mud there, although it was almost dry. Tire tracks could clearly be seen in the dirt. No footprints, though. But more than one bike had been in and out.

I walked back to the car and studied the ground around it. The dirt road was angled just a little to drain water, and well graded. There were no obvious puddles. I couldn’t make out any tracks on it—not even those of the car itself.

“Did you have someone come out to look for footprints or tire treads?” I asked Luke.

Luke just squinted at me angrily.

“Are you going to call in the FBI? You should get them in here as fast as you can. You need dogs and planes with heat-sensitive cameras. Are you on top of this?”

He shook his head and managed a bitter laugh.

“Hell no, you fool. That’s just what Bogey wants. And I’m not going to do that unless I get some information that this is more than just a stunt. What do you care, anyway?” In a lower voice he added, “Didn’t you hear the old man last night? You aren’t a cop anymore.”

“I’ve still got my badge. That’s more than you’ve got.”

Luke spat in the dirt.

“But you know what? I can have you arrested. For obstruction of justice, if you don’t get out of here right now. You’re interfering with my crime scene. All I have to do is whistle for those deputies down by the tape and they’ll come up here and throw your ass in jail. Where it belongs.”

I smiled at him.

“You do that, Luke, and your case will really turn to shit. It’s pretty funny. Until the trial’s over, McGee can’t take away my badge, and you can’t arrest me. Fuck you both, then.”

While Luke and McGee bickered about what had happened and how it might affect next week’s trial, they were allied in giving me dirty looks. I wandered in ever-growing circles around the burned-out shell of the car. The lodgepole pines and stands of almost bare aspens grew close together on the sides of the road, where they fought for light. But just beyond that tight wall the woods opened up into the picnic area. The ground there was rocky, full of pine needles and fallen leaves.

I found a lot of stuff. Beer bottles broken and whole, fast-food litter, soda cans, cigarette butts, shotgun shells, and a washing machine shot full of holes, but nothing that looked relatively fresh.

I was making one last, wide perimeter circle when I found a trail.

It was an old trail, but with fresh tracks. I knelt and examined them where they went through some drying mud. The tires were wide but close-set. A four-wheeler, or maybe more than one.

I walked back to the road. Luke and McGee were still growling at each other over aspects of the case against Jonah Strasburg and how a lawyer’s disappearance might affect it. I didn’t tell them what I’d found. Screw them.

But I did mention, “Isn’t it wonderful, the way I’ve brought you two together again?”

Under the weight of their combined glares, I headed down the road and ducked under the yellow tape. The Pig was waiting there. I took my H&K from the lockbox under the seat and slid the paddle holster under the waistband of my pants. Then I snapped a leash to Mungo’s collar—something she hated—and let her out. She kept shaking herself and tugging in different directions to make clear her objection. But I dragged her into the forest and started to lead her back to the ATV trail I’d found.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Luke shouted.

“To check something out. Follow if you think you can keep up.”

Luke cursed me but came after me.

I began to jog, still dragging Mungo on the leash. There were more mud puddles and more fresh knobby tracks. There were definitely two vehicles, I decided. I could see where they’d played around, highballing at some corners and tearing up some small meadows. I ran on. The tracks met up with an old logging road and disappeared down it.