The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (26 page)

There was this incident back in ’49 where Lucian did this routine pullover of an older Indian couple who were driving just outside of Durant and were headed for the reservation. He said it was one of those wonderful winter nights when the wind had died down and the snow looked like scalloped icing on a vanilla cake. The moon was full and bright, bright enough for him to spot this old Dodge slide through a stop sign, make a right, and head for the Rez with no taillights. Lucian wheeled the old Nash around and pulled in behind their car to just give them a warning about the lack of illumination aft. He said it took two miles for them to pull over, and they were only doing about twenty miles an hour.

I could just see that little bandy rooster straightening his belt and buttoning up his old Eisenhower jacket as he got out and walked on two then solid legs up to the ancient, black-primer Dodge. I could see him pushing his old campaign hat back with a thumb, like he used to do, and leaning on the back of the Dodge’s windowsill as the window rolled down. “Hey, Chief.” He wasn’t joking; Frank Red Shield was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne. “I pulled you over ’cause you’ve got a couple ’a taillights out back here.”

He said the old chief ’s eyes twinkled, and he patted Lucian’s arm that rested on the car. “Oh, that’s okay. I thought you were pulling me over ’cause I didn’t have no license.”

Lucian said he nearly bit his lip to bleeding trying to not laugh until Mrs. Red Shield slapped her husband across the chest and said, “Don’t pay no attention to him, Sheriff. He don’t know what he’s sayin’ when he’s been drinkin’.”

* * *

I smiled and laughed to myself. Maybe the old guys in the rifle were already helping me. I was aware of some movement from the sofa and looked up to find Vonnie holding the phone out to me. I had been so wrapped up in my musings that I hadn’t even heard it ring again. Her face was immobile, and her shoulders shook like she was cold. “It’s for you.”

I looked at the phone, back to her, and then reached over and took it from her. She looked scared, and I suddenly felt very tired. I heard my voice say, “Sheriff.”

I listened to the static of the mobile phone and the pitched battle the wind was having with her, wherever she was. Her voice was tight, and she was straining to be heard over the howl that seemed to match its brother in the fireplace perfectly. “Well . . . we found one of the Espers.”

9

“Welcome to Hooverville.” It was creeping up on midnight, and she was trying not to look like a turtle with her head ducked down in the artificial brown fur of her duty jacket.

“Where is he?” She turned into the steady wind, with her hands buried in the depths of her coat pockets, and led me over to where all the headlights were shining. The pulse of the blue and red lights reflected off the frozen gravel of the impromptu parking lot that had been set up along the barbed-wire fence.

Hooverville referred to the assortment of little shacks that surrounded Dull Knife Lake at the southern part of the Bighorn Mountains and was known by the locals as the South End. Outside the jurisdiction of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area and the federal government, numerous lots had been bought and sold and built upon until the surrounding shoreline resembled a collection of chicken coops. Some of the little cabins weren’t bad, but the majority were hunting trailers with little annexes attached that had been towed in a long time ago. The fishing was good all around the lake, but the view was better at the northern part where the shore got steeper and the water disappeared into the thick forest. I thought about the original Hooverville in Washington, D.C., where WWI veterans had been chased out of town and figured it would take a young Patton and MacArthur to clean this one out, too.

I shined the beam of my flashlight in the path and saw that the single set of tracks leading to the body were slowly filling in. I gave Vic my keys and asked her to repark my truck so that it would form a snow fence that would knock down the wayward flakes that were impeding the crime scene investigation.

It was Jacob Esper all right, sitting with one foot folded underneath him and the other sticking straight out. He was leaning against the rear wheel of his truck and had a quizzical look on his face. There was a small torn spot at the center of his Carhartt jacket, and he was surrounded by a frozen liquid with brown shading. Dried blood, discounting the temperature, thirty minutes to two hours. I didn’t have to worry about his back, since most of it was a frozen smear on the side of the dirty truck. It started with the explosion behind the door and trailed to where he now sat. His eyes were open, but tache noire had already set in. Three hours. I reached out and tugged at his boot; the body was stiff with fully developed rigor. Six to twenty-four hours. We needed a body core temperature, and we weren’t going to get it for another seven hours.

One of the footprints behind Vic’s yellow nylon barrier was close to me, so I blew into it and examined the impression: about a size nine, medium width. At the arch was a registered trademark, SKYWALK, with a medallion print of some kind with words around the edges and a diminutive mountain range. The headlights subsided in shadow for a moment. “Where are they?”

“Over there in the Hummer. They’re about to run out of gas from operating the heater, so they’re in a hurry.”

“Oh, really?”

“I told them you’d be real concerned.” She stamped her feet, trying to get some feeling back in them. “I wasn’t sure about how to secure the sight, but Ferg and I thought we could zip-tie the tarp to the top of the truck and then tie it off to another vehicle. It’s probably going to flap like a Windjammer cruise, but . . .”

“Yep.” I looked around me, trying to absorb it all because in another hour it might look like Stalingrad. There were trailing wisps of snow dunes arching away from the higher points of Jacob’s body already. “Tire tracks?”

She kneeled down beside me. “Only those guys, pulling in once, circling back out, and then pulling in again.”

“How did they call?”

“Cell phone.”

“Why did they pull out?”

“Bad reception.”

“You look at the boot prints?”

“Yeah, Vasques. So’s the dearly departed and one of the execs.”

“Popular boot.”

“Popular size.”

We both shrugged and looked at Jacob. “No sheep?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No sheep. Preliminary triangulation indicates an area across the lake, maybe even over where those really shitty-looking cabins are.”

I turned in the opposite direction from the truck and peered through the darkness and the snow. The headlights of Vic’s unit weren’t helping. We stood up to escape them and strained our eyes into the darkness. “Where would you shoot from?”

“Top of that ridge, along the tree line.”

I turned to look at her. “Any local activity?”

“They say they heard somebody shouting over on the other side about the time they pulled in, around nine.”

“What’re they doing pulling in here at nine o’clock at night?”

“Supposed to borrow a cabin from Dave McClure; drove up from Casper after work. Now they’re not sure if they have the right day.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

She nodded. “That fact’s been established and corroborated. Ferg is checking with Dave about their plans.”

I thought about the next move. “Get the tarp tied down as soon as Ferg gets off the radio.”

She stomped her feet again. “DCI in Wheatland by now?”

“Weather permitting.”

She was looking at the side of my face as I looked at Jacob. “We’re not going to be able to keep them out.” I continued to look at Jacob. “Walt?”

“Get Ferg to help you get the tarp done. Then tell him to get that metal detector he has at home and check that hillside over there when he gets back . . .”

“Gets back?”

“Then get in your truck, put on your winter gear, and warm up.” She stopped stomping, looked at me for a while longer, and then went off to check on Ferg.

She was right. We had gone from a sleepy little death by misadventure to a multiple homicide, and the Division of Criminal Investigation was going to want their pound of postmortem flesh. The nagging voice of reason kept reminding me that their experience and technical capabilities gave them a much better chance of breaking the case, but then a stronger voice came in and stated flatly that this was my case and my county. Along the way, it had gotten personal. The first thing I had to do was get the two remaining boys out of county, out of state, out of the country if I had to. Lucian would say there was a fox in the henhouse, and I would say it was time to get the chickens on down the road. I turned back to Jacob. He hadn’t changed much. Dead men don’t tell tales, but I always expect them to pop up and tell me it had all been a big joke. In thirty years of law enforcement, I had been deeply disappointed.

The interior light of Jacob’s truck was on, but very dimly. The door was ajar, key chain hanging from the ignition. I looked under the truck at the exhaust where a few drips of condensate were frozen at the bottom of the tailpipe. There was a shallower impression in the snow where the exhaust would have blown out and a large slick of ice under the engine. I glanced down the fender for insignia and, sure enough, it said diesel. Jacob had started his truck to let it warm up, and whatever had happened had happened when he was exiting or reentering the vehicle. With the orientation of the body, I would think that he was getting out. I’m pretty sure he had been sitting here, like this, and the truck had run out of fuel.

There were no fishing rods lying about, and he wasn’t wearing a vest, waders, or any of the other accoutrement that fisherman usually wore. I stood up and walked around the truck to get a look inside. The passenger-side door was locked; hardly anybody ever does that in Wyoming. There was frost on the inside of the windows, but I could still make out a couple of aluminum fly-rod cases lying along the seat, two vests, and a small cooler. The cooler was a battered old thing with a bumper sticker on it that read CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT.

Working with the preliminary observations, without checking for discoloration of the right and left sides of the abdomen, the victim had been dead approximately, and I was guessing, fourteen to sixteen hours, which placed the TOD at the earliest at five o’clock this morning. If there were trout in the cooler, I could reasonably assume that Jacob had been fishing early. Before dawn? I looked around the rest of the truck for a tent, sleeping bag, or any other evidence that he might have spent more than one day. There were the cabins, but we were going to have to do a sweep of them anyway.

I walked back around the truck and looked at the spot where the gore of his heart and part of a lung had sprayed against the edge of the bed. That meant there was lead in the hillside adjacent to the gravel lot, or in the truck, or in Jacob. Maybe. Something moved under the truck, and I lowered my perspective to see what it was. Jacob’s black cowboy hat had blown under the transfer case and had lodged against one of the front wheels. There was a small collection of feathers stuck in the side of the headband. I looked back at the boy’s dull eyes, shining my flashlight along his body, and got to wondering. I stood, leaning over the body, and extended the flashlight to the open section of his jacket and pushed it back, just enough to reveal the pristine tip of a bleached, straightened, Minwaxed turkey feather.

“What the hell is going on over here!”

I’m pretty sure I stood up and turned around faster than I ever had before. He was a little older than me, well below medium height but nowhere near medium build. He had a face like an old prizefighter, bulbed and knobby wherever it protruded. It was like life was bound to come out even if circumstance was bound to pound it in, and circumstance was standing over him at the moment. Circumstance also noted the broken blood vessels and the flaccidness of the rest of his face; this was not an amateur drinker but a full-blown alcoholic. As my eyes traveled down the open, olive drab parka, past the polyester fur around the hood and the red-and-white-striped tank shirt to the bulging stomach, I noticed the floral print swimming trunks and the thin, birdlike legs that extended into a pair of unlaced arctic boots. I also noticed the drink in his hand, in a martini glass, complete with a sour apple slice and a little green paper parasol. “Who are you?”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me but had leaned to one side to get a better look at the crime scene. “Holy shit!”

I moved over a little, blocking his view. “Excuse me?”

He looked back at me and actually saluted. “Sorry, General. What’s up?” I sighed and repeated the question. “Al Monroe, I got one of them cabins over by the lake.” He listed farther to the side. “Jesus, he’s deader than hell.”

“Mr. Monroe, have you been up here long?”

“Last three days, had a hell of a drunk goin’ till I saw all these damn lights over here; thought somebody’d died.” He took a sip of his martini and looked at me thoughtfully. “Looks like somebody fuckin’ did.”

As I stared at the spectacle of Al Monroe, a thought occurred to me. “Al, can you make coffee over at your cabin?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Best coffee on the mountain.”

“Would you mind going over and making us a big pot? It looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”

“You damn well bet!” He saluted again and traipsed off toward the lake.

“Al”—he turned as Vic came up beside me—“which one of the cabins is yours?” He pointed in the vague direction of one of the dilapidated shacks across the water. He saluted again before he climbed onto an enormous mule with only a rope lead and disappeared into the darkness without spilling a drop of his martini.

Vic looked after the departing vision. “Who the fuck was that?”

I looked sidelong at her. “You two are going to get along.”

* * *

The two execs in the Hummer calmed down when I explained that they wouldn’t have to worry about a place to stay and that the Sheriff of Absaroka County always had a few extra beds he could share with the primary witnesses to a homicide. I told them that I would be happy to put them up for three to six weeks, meals included. They said no thanks. Maybe they’d heard about the potpies on weekends but, either way, they got a lot more cooperative and that was all I was really after.