Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery (10 page)

“A dick.”

Her eyes widened in mock horror as she turned to look at me. “Oh my, Sheriff . . . Did you just call someone a
dick
?” She placed her chin in her palm. “A
dick
.” She marveled, pretending to adjust a pair of make-believe glasses. “A
dick
by your reserved standards means he is some kind of colossal prick of proportions unlike we’ve ever encountered.”

I shrugged and drove, trying to keep from smiling.

She glanced through the windshield and postulated in a pseudoscientific voice like some film you watched on a projector in high school. “Perhaps at one time he was a normal cock, but through contact with radioactive material in the deserts of New Mexico—”

“One of those blue-line guys.”

Her hands flew up and out, measuring. “He grew to colossal magnitudes of dickdom!”

Dog barked, and I sighed. “I just think that he’s more concerned with making sure that Holman’s name goes unsullied than finding out why the man might’ve killed himself.”

“Dickdom of a scale noticeable even to the demure sheriff of Absaroka County.”

I mumbled, “Oh, good grief.” But she ignored me.

“Dickzilla!” She shook her head, grinning as her attention, thankfully, returned to the files. “I gotta meet Dickzilla.”

“Good, because we’re on our way to the sheriff’s office to give these files back to Sandy so he can read them—and did I mention that Tommi, female, by the way, and owner-operator of the strip club, is the sheriff’s sister?”

“Wow.”

“Yep.”

“A
dick
.”

I drove on, my diversion not having worked.

—

I laid the files on Sandburg’s desk. “Richard’s not here?”

“Probably out rogering the countryside.”

I glanced at my undersheriff, then back to Sandy, and continued. “If you could make copies of these files for us, that’d be great.”

The sheriff smiled at Vic and buzzed a secretary in, handing her the files. “One copy of all of these, Brenda.”

“Two.”

He nodded to the woman, swiveled in his leather chair, and looked at Vic. “So, is there anybody working over in Absaroka County?”

She propped her feet onto his handsome, vintage mahogany desk. “We’ve got people for that, kind of like you’ve got people to read your reports for you.”

He stared at her boots but gave it up when it had no effect. “Well, we have a little more business over here—”

“Obviously more than you can handle.”

He glanced up at me. “You wanna call her off?”

“I wish I knew how.” I went ahead and sat in the other visitor’s chair, not putting my boots on his desk, figuring there was only so much the poor guy could take. “Sandy, how involved do you think your sister is in all of this?”

“All of what?”

Vic interrupted. “Whatever.”

He cleared his throat and thought about it as he pivoted back and forth in his chair. “She’s a rough cob, believe me I know, but I don’t think she’d be involved with anything that had to do with putting her girls in danger.” He laughed. “I ever tell you about the time we raided the place and brought everyone down here
and arraigned them—she posted their bail and paid their fines with singles; the girls in accounting put on plastic gloves to count all the one-dollar bills.”

“Any other women ever disappear from there?”

He shook his head and kept his eyes on me. “You’re sure there’s a connection between Gerald Holman’s suicide and this missing stripper?”

“No, but I’m sure there’s a connection among the three missing women.”

His voice was derisive. “A serial killer?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He sighed and dropped a hand onto his blotter. “Because you know what a shitstorm that’s going to cause.” He shook his head. “I can see the stories in the
News Record
now—”

“I could be wrong.”

“You’re not.” Vic’s voice was sharp. “It’s possible that whoever he is, he hasn’t worked himself up to serial level, but he’s working on it; he’s borderline, one more and it’s official.”

Sandy shook his head. “He, huh?”

“Only fifteen percent of serial killers are women.” When I turned in my chair to look at her, she glanced back. “I assisted on a few cases in Philadelphia when I was going for my shield—before I gave it all up to herd cows with a cruiser.” She studied Sandy’s worried face. “Look, we could be wrong, but we’d be idiots not to approach this as a possibility in the investigative process.”

The door opened and Brenda returned, placing the original files with the copies on the sheriff’s desk and then quietly leaving in the silence.

Sandy shoved them toward me, picked up the originals, and dropped them in his lap to look through them. “Why
didn’t Gerald report this to me, and why the hell didn’t Richard Harvey?”

Vic turned to me. “The dick?”

I nodded. “The dick.”

Sandy’s head came up. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

Vic stood, stuffing her hands in her jeans, and walked to her right where a large, matted, framed map of Campbell County hung on the wall. Her fingernail traced an area south and just a little east of Gillette. “All three are missing from this area; no more than twenty miles in radius.” She turned to look at him, her fists now on her hips. “You’re going to have to check and see if there are more.”

“I’ll put—”

“Don’t put Richard Harvey on it.”

He turned to look at me. “You really think Harvey is compromised?”

“Do I think he’s involved? No—but he’s not doing his best to come up with any answers, either. Is there anything you can do to get him out of our hair for a few days?”

He thought about it. “I’ve got an extradition of prisoner down to the psychiatric hospital in Evanston; that’s at least a day down and a day back.” He looked up at me. “Two days do it?”

I scooped the copies up from his desk. “Yep.”

“Or I could fire him.”

“Don’t do that. I think he’s a good man, just the wrong one for this job—maybe a little too close to Gerald or maybe somebody else?”

“But we’ll be a man short.” Sandy thought about it. “I could pull one of the guys from—”

“Actually . . .” They both looked at me as I thumbed the
business card from my shirt pocket and held it out to him. “I’ve got someone in mind.”

—

Patrolman Dougherty was surprised to be placed on loan from the Gillette City Police Department to the Campbell County Sheriff and had been doubly confused when we told him he could show up in jeans and a sweater.

He glanced between Vic and me, standing in the tomb of the cold case files and looking through the wire mesh into the room proper. “Have you checked with my shift sergeant on this?”

I leaned on the chain link that protected the file area and pushed my hat back to get a little light on my face in an attempt to let him know I was serious. “I didn’t, but the sheriff spoke with your chief of police and he said we could have you.”

His eyes stayed on the rows and rows of dented, green metal file cabinets. “To do what?”

I handed him the three folders and stuffed the other set of copies under my arm. “We need you to look for any cases that might pertain to the individual who we think abducted Linda Schaffer, Roberta Payne, and Jone Urrecha.”

He looked at me. “You’re serious.”

Vic sat on the edge of Harvey’s desk and punched Dougherty’s cell number into her own. “As a heart attack.”

He glanced at Vic as she handed him back his cell phone. “You really think it’s the same guy?”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

Walking over to the grating that held the mountain of files captive, he threaded his fingers into the wire. “How long do I have?”

“About forty-eight hours.”

His eyes widened. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

I handed him the keys to the door. “You said you wanted to help . . . By the way, if a tall guy with a handlebar mustache should show up, tell him you were sent down from administration to straighten the files.”

As Vic and I started for the steps, he called out after us. “What kind of connections am I looking for—what kind of suspect?”

Vic stopped and spoke over her shoulder. “Probably white, thirties to fifties, a loner with a reasonably high IQ involved with a menial job that he considers beneath him.”

His voice echoed after us as we climbed the stairs. “That would be me!”

She shouted back, “Well, then, put yourself on the list.”

At the top of the stairs, we buzzed ourselves out and turned the corner only to be confronted with Investigator Richard Harvey, standing in the hallway talking with another plainclothes officer.

As we approached, Harvey broke off the conversation and turned to face me, but Vic stepped between us and raised her hand. “Dick, so glad to meet you.”

He glanced at me, but then took her hand, looking more than a little confused. “Richard Harvey, sheriff’s investigator.”

“Special Agent Vic Moretti, I’m supervising the sheriff here.” She looked past him toward the outer office. “No offense, but you better scoot it up to Sandy Sandburg’s office; I think he’s got an assignment in connection with the Bureau that’s of utmost importance.”

He nodded, still looking a little off balance. “Okay, but I need to go down to my office and—”

She physically turned him around and escorted him back the
other way in a slow walk. “I think you better talk to the sheriff very first thing, he mentioned something about a high-priority situation that was going to need special handling and that you were the man for the job.”

He paused for a moment. “Excuse me, but what did you say your name was?”

“Moretti, Victoria Moretti.”

He nodded and then glanced back at me. “Sheriff.”

“Investigator.”

Without another word, he turned and continued down the hall.

Vic called out. “Nice meeting you, Dick.”

He kept walking. “Richard.”

“Right.”

After he was gone, she turned and looked at me. “What?”

I shook my head as I walked past her.

“Don’t you think I’m special?”

We stood at the door zipping, buttoning, fastening; it’s what people in Wyoming do before they go outside in late December.

“What could these three women have in common?”

She snapped her fingers at me. “They’re all missing.”

We climbed into my truck and the atmosphere of Dog breath that had clouded all the windows. “I just keep going back to Gerald Holman.”

“Maybe there’s no connection at all; I mean, maybe he’d just had it.”

“Why shoot yourself twice?”

“He was a lousy shot?” She tugged at her jacket. “Start this thing up and get the heat going. My blood must’ve thinned while I was in Central America—I’m freezing to death.”

I fired the Bullet up and flipped on the heat. “A housewife, a waitress, and a stripper.”

“Walk into a bar . . .”

I shook my head at her, and she rested her chin in the palm of her hand and smiled. Against my will, I smiled, too.

The Browning tactical boots lodged themselves onto my dash. “You did miss me.”

“So nobody’s died since Holman’s suicide?”

I turned and looked at her as we sat in the parking lot of the Kmart, within eye-view of the Flying J Travel Plaza in the aftermath of an afternoon storm as a plow service pushed the never-ending snow over to the dividers. “As far as we know.”

She skimmed through the reports. “I’m just sayin’.”

I gripped the steering wheel of my truck with one hand. “He doesn’t fit the profile at all.”

She flipped a page. “Wouldn’t be the first.”

“Read to me about Linda Schaffer.”

She shook her head and dropped the files in her lap. “If I know you, and I think I do, you’ve already read it to yourself about forty-seven times.”

“Maybe forty-eight will be the charm—anyway, I like listening to you read.”

She picked up and reshuffled the reports and held a hand out for the ubiquitous quarter I always paid her for the service.

I deposited the coin from my pocket into her palm as she began her dramatic interpretation. “Housewife with a full-time job at Kmart; worked there for three years . . .” She flipped a
page. “I’m assuming after her son Michael was old enough to go to first grade. There are lots of notes . . .” Her face turned toward mine. “Was this Patrolman Corbin Dougherty’s first investigation?”

“He kind of fixated on it, huh?”

Her eyes widened as she looked through the file. “Maybe we should take a look at him.”

“He used to date Cady.”

“So that means he’s innocent?”

“I think he just got . . . too close.”

“And now we’re dragging him back into it?”

“Yep.” I sighed. “If we need anybody to contact them, I guess we could have Corbin do it; I think he keeps in touch.” I thought about it. “The husband . . . The one that moved to Spokane with his son?”

“Mike.”

“Where did Mike work?”

“High Plains Energy, Inc. He’s an engineer; designed coal mining equipment or modified it for use in HPE’s three divisional operations here in Campbell County.”

“How about the waitress, Roberta Payne?”

She flipped the pages again. “Divorced.”

“Anything on the ex-husband—where he worked?”

“No.”

“Phone it in to Dougherty.”

She pulled out her cell and pressed the number. “He’s going to love you.” I listened as she relayed the request to the patrolman and then waited. “Corbin says her ex, Bret Bussell, works at a gun shop/shooting range on Boxelder Road, back toward Arrosa—High Mountain Shooters?”

“He still there?”

She conferred. “Corbin, the font of all knowledge, says yes.” There was a brief pause, and Vic looked back at me. “And, stroke of luck, he says that Schaffer is here in Gillette signing papers to sell his house. He says he can talk to us at four.”

I looked at the clock on my dash. “In the meantime we can go over to High Mountain Shooters.”

Vic nodded and turned back to her phone. “Hey, Corbin, do you have a girlfriend?” There was a pause. “Well, you need to get one.” She ended the call and looked at me as I started my truck.

“Kids?”

“No thanks, via nonelective surgery, I’ve chosen an alternative life plan.” She grinned at me, but it was thin. “You can laugh—that was a joke.” She studied me for a moment more and then went back to the pages. “No children at the time of her disappearance.”

“Linda Schaffer had a son—how old?”

“At the time of his mother’s disappearance, nine.” She looked through the windshield at the skiff of snow swirling through the parking lot and dusting the cars with gray rime as I slipped into gear, circled around, and headed back toward Boxelder Road. “I don’t know where you’re going with the kid stuff, because the stripper didn’t have any children.”

“Far as we know.”

Her tone became exasperated. “What, you think they’ve got day care over at Dirty Shirley’s or they hitch ’em to the pole?” She sat the files on the console. “And she didn’t have a husband, either.”

I caught the end of a green light. “Far as we know.”

“Will you stop saying that?”

I remained silent.

She stretched her arms out and laced her fingers, pivoting the arms and popping her knuckles. “Maybe they all shopped at Kmart, or maybe they all ate at the fucking Flying J . . . I don’t know; it’s like trying to find a needle-dick in a whorehouse. I hate cases like this.”

“Gerald Holman.”

Her arms dropped. “Gerald Holman.”

“What did he know that made him kill himself?”

She chewed on a thumbnail. “Something bad.” Then she completed the statement. “Far as we know.”

—

“High Mountain Shooters, really? I mean, as near as I can tell we’re hours away from any friggin’ mountains.”

We both leaned forward and looked up through the top of the windshield at the smiling mountain man holding a rifle. “I guess they’re trying to capture the spirit of the thing.”

We got out, and Vic gazed at the towering twenty-five-foot giant, complete with coonskin cap, beard, and a musket the length of a car. “I used to see these things over in Jersey when I was a kid, and they have always creeped me out.”

“Why?”

She looked up at the slightly smirking face that all the statues displayed. “That is the classic expression of a child molester.”

“They’re called
muffler men
.”

“Why is that?”

I looked at her for a while. “Because they started out holding mufflers.” Walking over, I rapped the giant’s leg with my knuckles. “Fiberglass; there was a boat maker who started putting
these things out in the sixties, and they used to hold all kinds of things, mufflers, tires, axes, you name it . . .”

As she pushed open the glass door, she shrugged. “I’ve never seen one holding a muffler, but you should see what the one in front of the XXX Theatre in Camden is holding.”

It was a well-lit, tile-floor sort of place done up in weenie-wood, which for the uninitiated is the bark-covered cast-off slabs from local, rough-cut sawmills. There were glass cases of pistols and revolving racks of modern rifles, but it was easy to see that High Mountain Shooters’ heart lay in supporting the habit of reenactors; there were numerous assorted black-powder rifles on the walls, along with period clothing and accessories including a lot of coonskin and other assorted fur hats that mountain men might, or might not, have worn.

Vic plucked a fur hat from a mannequin head on the nearest counter and plopped it on her own, the fluffy tail and forearms draping onto her shoulders. “How do I look?”

“Cute.”

She glanced around, finally locating a full-length mirror between the counters. “I look like a badger is humping my head.”

“Umm, can I help you?”

We turned to find a middle-aged man in spectacles and a gray cowboy hat squeezing his way down behind the counters. “I’m looking for Bret Bussell?”

“Concerning?”

Vic took the hat off and placed it back on the mannequin backward. “We’d rather discuss that with Mr. Bussell.”

The pleasant man adjusted his glasses and smiled. “Well, you are; I’m his father, Jim.”

I went to badge him, but my new wallet flipped from my grasp and once again fell on my boots as he and Vic watched. I
bent over, picked it up, and stood, stretching my star out for him to read. “Absaroka—”

He finished the introduction without looking at the wallet. “County Sheriff’s Department.” He gestured toward some monitors in the back corner. “Saw your truck when you pulled up in front of Jeremiah.”

“Jeremiah?”

“The giant out front.” He squinted his eyes at me. “Are you Walt Longmire?”

“I am.”

“Saw you on the television last month, K2 out of Casper.”

I shrugged. “You want to look at my badge, since I went to all the trouble of pulling it out?”

He nodded. “We’ve got a mirror over there if you want to try your quick draw; looks like you could use some practice.”

“New wallet.”

He gestured toward a leatherworking bench in the next room. “Want me to loosen it up for you?”

I removed the badge and handed it to him. “I’d appreciate that.”

He flipped the piece of leather back and forth. “Cardboard.”

I made a face. “It’s supposed to be leather.”

He held the edges up for me to see. “On the outside, but inside is cardboard; cheap Chinese shit. It’ll fall apart before it breaks in.” He dropped it on the counter. “I can make you a new one, but I’ll need the badge.”

“I’m afraid I’m working and need it.”

He folded his arms and looked at me. “Working on what?”

“Roberta Payne.”

He nodded to himself and then raised his face to look at the two of us. “You find her?”

I studied him back. “No.”

He waited a moment and then responded, sort of. “Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?”

He smiled. “I’ll make you another badge wallet in twenty minutes, thirty if you want basketweave. I’ve got dark brown leather on the bench right now that’ll match that holster you’ve got high on that right hip.”

I smiled back at him and handed him my badge, something I rarely did with anybody. “Basketweave.”

He nodded and looked at my star as if he were memorizing it. “Bret’s in the back putting the finishing touches on a holster for a genuine Colt Walker—you can go back there if you want.” As we followed him through the swinging saloon doors in the rear, he called after us, “I can make one to match that Glock that you’ve got, too, young lady.”

—

Texas Ranger and then captain of the United States Mounted Rifles Samuel Hamilton Walker wanted a handgun for the war with Mexico, a weapon that would kill both man and horse at a hundred yards, and as the story goes supposedly sent the specs for just such a pistol to Sam Colt.

He made roughly 1,100 of the famed Colt Walker .44s, which in many ways turned out to be a touch too big, even for the great Captain Walker. End to end it is fifteen and a half inches long and weighs just less than five pounds, smokes a lot when fired, and was even known to blow out the chamber walls when loaded with sixty grains of black powder. The much-vaunted Sharps .45-70, with which I had a long and storied past, has a .45 round loaded with seventy grains of black powder; the Colt
Walker has a .44 caliber round holding sixty, and the Walker held six of them.

Full discharge of a round usually resulted in the loading lever dropping and effectively jamming the gun by sending the ram into a chamber’s mouth. You had to check the lever every time you fired the thing, which proved more than cumbersome, but old-timers learned to loop a piece of rawhide around the rod and the barrel to hold it in place.

Later, the pistols were downsized and there were dozens of reproductions, but the one in Bret Bussell’s hand when he turned to meet us was the genuine, unadulterated
Shooting Iron
.

“Howdy.”

Bret was a small man, kind of a miniature Grizzly Adams, which did nothing but make the big Walker in the custom, four-point shoulder holster look even larger; the fact that he was dressed in buckskins from head to moccasined toe completed the incongruousness. “Can I help you?”

“Bret Bussell?”

He pulled some blond hair from his face and glanced at Vic. “Yes?”

“Undersheriff Victoria Moretti.” She gestured toward me, and I was just glad she’d correctly and legally identified herself this time. “And this is—”

He slowly extended his hand. “Walt
Long-Arm-of-the-Law
Longmire.”

I shook the hand as I looked through the wooden stands at the walls of stacked tires that protected the tin building’s shooting area. “Have we met?”

“Nope, I saw you shoot once, though. I’ve got an uncle who’s with the Highway Patrol and got to see you qualify for your certification down in Douglas when I was twelve.”

I suddenly felt very old. “How did I do?”

He smiled a sad smile through the fur on his face. “Passable.” With a quick spin, he twirled the big Colt like the protagonist of some Saturday gunslinger serial and slipped it into the patterned holster, complete with matching powder flask and a possibles box.

“Ahh.” I pointed at the Colt Walker. “Is that thing real?”

He slipped it back out and held it toward me, handle first. “The genuine article; had a guy on the Internet offer me $11,400 for it about a month ago.”

“I’m not touching it then.”

He shifted toward Vic and held the big revolver out to her. “Go ahead, it doesn’t bite.”

“Loaded?”

He gestured toward the lubricants, percussion caps, box of lead balls, and bits of deer antler lying on the surface of the shooting bench, comprised mostly of the same weenie-wood as inside. “No, I was just getting ready to run a few rounds through it, but you can have a look first.”

She took the magnificent weapon and held it up, marveling at the patina on the thing.
Hog Leg
,
Horse Pistol
, and
Smoke Wagon
are some of the names coined for the 1847 Colt Walker, the first commercially produced large-caliber revolver that then gave birth to the Colt Dragoon, named for the famed French dragon guns, and the 1873 Peacemaker—a couple of relatives of the semiautomatic I had high and tight on my right side.

Mexican soldiers, mistranslating the meaning of the word
revolver
,
believed that the rounds fired from the weapon could actually turn corners and change directions, following the intended target as he ran.

“You actually fire this fucking thing?”

He nodded. “That’s what it’s for.”

My undersheriff handed it to me. “Where in the world did you get it?”

“An old cowboy my dad knew out on the Powder River called him up one day and then brought it in. I told him I couldn’t pay him what it was worth, but he insisted that he wanted to sell it to me, so my dad made me a loan for about half of what it was worth, and I bought it off him.” I handed the Colt back; he twirled it again and placed it in the holster. “So, you needing some leather or hardware?”

“Actually, we’re here to talk to you about Roberta Payne.”

He looked like he could’ve been tipped over with ten grains of black powder. “You found her?”

The exact thing his father had said. “No, I’m afraid we haven’t, but there are some other women who may have gone missing, so—”