Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery

Also by Craig Johnson

The Cold Dish

Death Without Company

Kindness Goes Unpunished

Another Man’s Moccasins

The Dark Horse

Junkyard Dogs

Hell Is Empty

As the Crow Flies

A Serpent’s Tooth

Spirit of Steamboat

Any Other Name

Wait for Signs

VIKING

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Copyright © 2015 by Craig Johnson

The series
Longmire
™ is copyrighted by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. which also has a trademark in the series title.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Johnson, Craig, 1961–

Dry bones : a Walt Longmire mystery / Craig Johnson.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-698-15751-4

1. Longmire, Walt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Sheriffs—Fiction. 3. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3610.O325D79 2015

813’.6—dc23 2015001102

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Joe Tuck,
because Heaven needs drivers,
and the Lord likes to keep his blacksmiths close . . .

Them bones, them bones gonna walk around

Them bones, them bones gonna walk around

Them bones, them bones gonna walk around

Now hear the word of the Lord

Disconnect them bones, them dry bones

Disconnect them bones, them dry bones

Disconnect them bones, them dry bones

Now hear the word of the Lord

I was wandering through the Natural History Museum in London with my granddaughter when we stumbled onto a
T. rex
—from all places, Wyoming. I asked my friend paleontologist Bill Matteson and he informed me that the majority of
Tyrannosauri
populating the museums of the world were from around our area, here in the Northern Rockies.

I vaguely remembered a situation in the ’80s that had escalated among the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, an Indian rancher, his tribe, and the FBI over the largest, most intact
T. rex
fossil that had ever been found—all of which seemed rife for a Walt Longmire mystery.

Attacking the subject with half-remembered scenarios and forty-year-old public school science would’ve been a mistake, so I jumped into the dig with both feet, reading as much as I could about the creature itself, the history of the dinosaur wars here in Wyoming, and finally the titanic cluster that took place right across the border in South Dakota. Many books, including Peter Larson and Kristin Donnan’s
Rex Appeal
and Steve Fiffer’s
Tyrannosaurus SUE
were essential to understanding what had happened in the tiny town of Hill City, South Dakota, along with the marvelous documentary,
Dinosaur 13
. Two more fabulous sources, which convinced me how little I knew about dinosaurs, were Robert T. Bakker’s
The Dinosaur Heresies
and Peter Larson and Kenneth Carpenter’s
Tyrannosaurus rex: The Tyrant King
.

To dig up a good story you need a team and mine starts with Gail “Hylaeosaurus” Hochman, and Marianne “Mosasaur” Merola at the office in Times Square, one of the most unpredictable hunting grounds in the world. Down island in the West Village epoch reside the fiercely loyal Kathryn “Carnotaurus” Court and her hunting partner Lindsey “Stegosaurus” Schwoeri. Barbara “Compsognathus” Campo reads the fossil imprints and Victoria “Spinosaurus” Savanh handles the details, both large and small. Carolyn “Conchoraptor” Coleburn keeps an eye to the horizon while Ben “Parasaurolophus” Petrone and Angie “Megalodon” Messina keep the herd moving in the right direction and away from extinction.

There’s always a big thanks to Marcus “Rhabdodon” Red Thunder.

Then there’s Judy “Tyrannosaurus rex” Johnson, who makes my cold blood run warm.

She was close to thirty years old when she was killed.

A big girl, she liked to carouse with the boys at the local watering holes, which of course led to a lot of illegitimate children, but by all accounts, she was a pretty good single parent and could take care of herself and her brood. One night, though, a gang must have jumped her; they were all younger than she was, they had numbers, they might’ve even been family, and after they broke her leg and she was on the ground, it was pretty much over.

There was no funeral. They killed her and left what remained there by the water, where the sediment from the forgotten creek built up around her, layer after layer, compressing and compacting her to the point where the bones leeched away and were replaced by minerals.

It was as if she’d turned to stone just to keep from being forgotten.

It’s interesting how her remains were found; her namesake, Jennifer Watt, was traveling with Dave Baumann, the director of the High Plains Dinosaur Museum, when they got a flat—not an unusual occurrence on the red roads the ranchers used for the more inaccessible areas of their ranches where the larger chunks of shale attacked sidewalls like tomahawks. The bigger rock is cheaper, but it’s also the size of bricks and has lots of sharp edges, edges that like to make meals of anything less than ten-ply.

Dave had been trying to squeak another season out of the tires on the ’67 Land Rover, but there they stood, staring at a right rear with a distinct lack of round, in the middle of the Lone Elk Ranch. While he fished the jack and spare from the hood and began the arduous task of replacing the tire, Jennifer unloaded Brody, her Tibetan mastiff, and went for a walk. Hoping to meet a friend on the place, she followed a ridge around a cornice, but the dog, who was 150 pounds with a heavy coat, began panting. Before long Jen decided that it might be a pretty good idea for the two of them to try and get to some shade, not an easy proposition out on the Powder River country; luckily, there was a rock overhang along the ridge with plenty enough room for her and the dog to get out of the late afternoon sun.

She wore her blonde hair in a ponytail that stuck through the adjustment strap of her Hole-in-the-Wall Bar ball cap, and, pulling the collapsible dog bowl from her pack, she slipped out a Nalgene bottle, took a swig, and then poured the mastiff a drink.

Jennifer looked out onto the grass that undulated like a gigantic, rolling sea. It was easy to imagine the Western Interior (Cretaceous) Seaway or the Niobraran Sea that had once covered this land, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The great sea had stretched from Mexico to the Arctic and had been over two thousand feet deep. Jen settled under the rock and petted the dog, her green eyes scanning the landscape.

She pulled her video camera from her pack and panned the distance, seeing things out there on the high plains, things that didn’t exist, at least not anymore—predatory marine reptiles like long-necked plesiosaurs and more alligator-like mosasaurs almost eighty feet long. Sharks such as
Squalicorax
swam through her imagination along with giant, shellfish-eating
Ptychodus mortoni
.

When she’d been six, her father had brought her to this country from Tucson, Arizona, and had dragged her along on his private excavations that helped support his rock shop on the old highway out near Lake DeSmet between Durant and Sheridan. She still remembered what she’d said one day as they’d gotten out of his battered pickup, her fingers climbing up his pant leg until she found the reassuring hand with gloves worn like saddle leather, the adjustment straps with the transparent red beads. “There’s nothing out here, Daddy.”

He surveyed the rolling hills that led from the Bighorn Mountains to the endless Powder River country, smiled as he pushed back his straw hat, and spoke gently to her. “There’s everything here; you just have to know where to look.”

Jennifer had learned to look and had never stopped; Dave Baumann’s hands and hers were in the excavations that had led to the displays that crowded the High Plains Dinosaur Museum in Durant, and at twenty-six, she was still searching.

Truth be told, Jen liked dead things better than live ones—they were less trouble, the conversations being one-sided. A lot of investigators and paleontologists are more comfortable that way, able to accept the consensus of truth, disregarding the absolute as something that always carries the danger of being overturned by some new and extraordinary piece of evidence.

She lowered the camera, took another sip of water, and poured her dog more. Brody sighed and shook his massive head, and Jen leaned back under the rock overhang to try to decide what she was going to do with the old man’s rock shop, a ramshackle affair near the lake that had started out as a trailer but through the years had evolved into a labyrinth of wooden fences lined with geodes, gems, quartz, and rock samples, most of them worthless.

He had died the year before, and she knew the land was more valuable than the structure itself, but she’d grown up there and loved the old place, as cluttered and tacky as it might be. She pulled the cap over her eyes and dozed until she became aware of a protracted growl in her dog’s throat. She swatted at him, but he continued to rumble a warning until she finally lifted the bill of her cap to look at him. He was looking directly up. Jen’s eyes followed to where a two-fingered talon stretched out of the rock ceiling down toward her, almost as if it were imploring. She grabbed the camera and began to film what would become one of the greatest paleontological discoveries in modern times.

 • • • 

Victoria Moretti sipped the coffee from the chrome lid of my thermos, leaned forward, and, peering through the windshield, watched the man with an intensity that only her tarnished gold eyes could command. “Is that some weird-ass Wyoming fishing technique I don’t know about?”

I could see that Omar was tossing something into the water from the banks of the man-made reservoir.

“What the hell is he doing?”

Ruby, my dispatcher, had received a call from him early in the morning and had bushwhacked Dog and me with it when we came in the door. I had filled up my thermos and in turn bushwhacked Vic before heading out to the ten-thousand-acre Lone Elk place to find out what was up.

Outdoor adventurer, outfitter, and big-game bon vivant, Omar Rhoades had contracts with all the big ranchers and sometimes used their property for extended hunting and fishing junkets. Usually he kept his spots secret, but this time he’d told Ruby where he was and that I might want to come out and meet him.

Most everything was in bloom in late May, and I breathed in the scents from the open windows of my truck. As I stared at the aspens and cottonwood, they all began stretching to the sky like those cypresses in Italy that looked like thumb smudges.

My undersheriff turned and looked at me some more. “I thought he was in China.”

“Mongolia.”

The Custer look-alike was dressed in a state-of-the-art fishing vest, waders, and his ever-present black cowboy hat with more flies stuck in it than Orvis has in its catalog. All in all, I estimated the total worth of his outfit at somewhere close to two thousand dollars, and he wasn’t even carrying the fly rod, which was sticking out the rear of his custom-made SUV that dwarfed my three-quarter-ton.

I leaned forward and stared through the windshield. We watched as he drew something from one hand, carefully took aim, and tossed whatever it was onto the smooth surface of the water, black like an oil slick.

Vic turned to look at me as she reached back and scratched the fur behind Dog’s ear. “Do you think he’s finally lost it?”

I pulled the handle and climbed out of the truck, careful to keep the Saint Bernard/German shepherd/plains grizzly inside. “Let’s go find out.”

The beauty of Italian descent followed with my thermos as we glided our way through the morning dew in the buffalo grass. “You know, the landed gentry get like this when they spend too much time alone.”

I whispered over my shoulder, “Like what?”

“Fucking nuts.” She increased her pace and caught up with me. “He’s not armed, is he?”

“If he were, I don’t think he’d be throwing rocks.” I stopped at the worn path surrounding the reservoir, curious, but still attempting to abide by the protocol of the high plains angler so as to not upset the fishing—if, in fact, that was what he was doing.

“Hey, Omar.”

He started, just visibly, and spoke to us over his shoulder as he continued throwing pebbles into the water. “Walt. Vic.”

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at us but then tossed another stone. “Trying to keep those snapping turtles off that body out there.”

We tiptoed to the edge of the bank in an attempt to keep the water from seeping into our boots, and Vic and I joined Omar in his target practice, Vic showing her acumen by bouncing a flat stone off the shell of a small turtle that skittered and swam into the depths. “Any idea who it is?”

Omar leaned forward and lifted his Oakley Radarlock yellow-tinted shooting glasses to peer into the reflective surface of the water at the half-submerged body. “I’m thinking it’s Danny.”

I stared at the corpse, which was a good forty feet from the bank, and tried to figure out how we were going to retrieve it, in that we had no boat. “Himself?”

My undersheriff squinted. “How can you tell?”

“Not everybody has hair like that.” Omar nailed a big turtle that had risen beside the body like a surfacing submarine and had gotten caught in the mass of silver locks that had fanned out from the body. “Danny always had nice hair.”

Omar reached behind him and, pulling out a fancy, stainless steel thermos of his own, poured the tomato-red contents into a cut-glass double-old-fashioned tumbler. “Libation?”

She stared at him, one hand on her hip. “It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”

He shrugged and sipped. “Sun’s over the yardarm somewhere.”

Omar and I watched as Vic expertly skipped a pebble across the glossy surface of the water, the pellet deflecting off another turtle. “How many turtles are there in this damn thing, anyway?”

Omar grunted. “Danny and his brother Enic protect them; nobody is allowed to hurt them—they’re sacred to the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne.”

Vic shook her head and nailed another. “Is there any living thing that isn’t sacred to the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne?”

I tossed a stone but missed. “Nope.”

Omar sipped from his Bloody Mary. “They’re a totem for fertility, protection, and patience.” He turned to look at me. “How are your daughter and granddaughter?”

There was a silence as I formulated an answer, but before I could speak, Vic chimed in. “Excuse me, but did I miss a transition in the conversation here?”

I tapped my shoulder. “Cady’s got a tattoo of a turtle—reminiscent of her willful youth at Berkeley.” I glanced back at him. “Should be here the day after tomorrow.”

He nodded. “Lookin’ forward to meeting Lola.”

I smiled and picked up my thermos. “Any ideas on how we get him out of there?” I glanced at the big-game hunter. “You’ve got your waders on.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. The bank drops off ten feet out, and the reservoir is about sixty feet deep—used to be a shale pit.”

I nodded and drank some coffee as Omar refilled his glass and Vic tossed a rock, this time missing her shelled target but causing it to duck its head and silently retreat into the depths. “Can I assume that nine-thousand-dollar Oyster fly rod of yours will do the trick?”

Vic crouched at an inlet on the other side of the pond. “I’m trying to resist saying something about the ironic aspect of a guy who protects the turtles but then falls in his own pond and becomes snapper chow.”

“We don’t know it’s him.”

“Sure we do.” She held up a paper bag. “I found his lunch, and it’s got his name on it.” She read, “Daddy-O.”

“Topflight detecting, that’s what that is.” I watched as Omar flipped the fly rod back and forth, trailing the line in cyclical patterns, reflecting in the morning sunshine. “Think you can get him on the first try?”

He ignored my crass remark and flipped the fly forward, yanking it back to set the hook in what appeared to be the sleeve of a green canvas shirt. The outdoorsman carefully walked the banks and reeled in the body as we watched who we assumed was Danny Lone Elk spin slowly with his one arm extended like a superhero in flight, a trail of disappointed turtles in his wake.

As the body came alongside the bank, I reached in, grabbed it by the collar, and dragged the upper part of him onto the grass. “He weighs a ton.”

“Lungs are probably full of water.” Vic leaned over and grabbed the other side of his collar and we both heaved the deadweight onto the bank, a forty-pound snapping turtle with a carapace the size of a washbasin attached to the dead man’s left hand.

Vic dropped her side and backed away from the radially set iridescent eyes, the color not unlike her own. “What the fuck?”

The aquatic monster released the dead man’s hand, hissed like a steam train, and extended its neck toward us, evidently not willing to give up its breakfast.

Vic drew her sidearm, but I pushed it away. “Don’t. It doesn’t mean any harm.”

“The hell it doesn’t; look at him.” She considered. “I’ve shot people for less than that shit.”

I kneeled down, and the beast stretched out its neck even further and struck at me with snakelike speed, the reach surprisingly far. “You know these things are seventy million years old?”

Vic reluctantly holstered her weapon. “This one in particular?”

“They appeared before the dinosaurs died out.” I picked up a stick and extended the end toward the animal’s open mouth. “See the little wiggly red thing at the end of its tongue?”

Vic raised her eyebrows. “What, that means he’s popular with the ladies?”

“That’s what he uses to ambush fish—they think it’s a worm.”

“That’s disgusting.”