Cold Dish (28 page)

He shrugged again; it seemed to be his favorite form of communication. “I don’t know. Hell, how come I don’t know you?”

I looked down at my civilian clothes, my sheepskin coat, and the brim of my unadorned silver-belly hat. “Al, I’m the sheriff of Absaroka County.”

“Really?” He processed the information for a moment. “Where’s that?”

“You’re in it.”

He looked around as if there might be a sign. “I thought we were in Big Horn County.”

I studied him for a moment. “You a bartender, Al?”

“Thirty-two fuckin’ years.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Buddy’n me partnered up and bought it off some asshole in Kemmerer.”

“That where you live the rest of the year?”

“Lander.” He took another sip of his martini, and I took the first sip of my coffee; it wasn’t bad, and it was hot. “I need to ask you some questions.” I tried not to concentrate on the fact that my primary witness had been drunk for the last three days. “Hear any loud noises early this morning?”

“Like that goddamned howitzer that went off just before dawn?”

Our eyes met. “Hear that, did you?”

“Well, hell, it’s hunting season, so it’s been soundin’ like a small arms war ever since I got here. Had to tie ribbons all over Sally, so the simple-minded bastards wouldn’t shoot her.” He paused for a second, remembering. “But this was different, closer; and it was early, real early.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed what time it was?”

He sniffed. “Oh-five-twelve.”

My eyes widened after making the translation. “You’re sure of that?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” He gestured to the large windup alarm clock that sat on the table. “Looked at my clock.”

“Then what?”

He gestured. “Went over here to the door and shouted for ’em to knock that shit off.”

“Why did you go to this door?”

“S’where the shot came from.”

“East or west?”

He shook his head. “Directly up the hill.” I nodded as he sipped his martini. “That what killed that boy?”

“Maybe.” I leaned forward and rested the coffee cup on my knee; it was still very hot. “When you went over to the door, did you open it and look out?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Saw somebody walkin’ back up through the tree line with their back to me.” My expression was probably easy to misinterpret. “This any help?”

“I never had it so good. What’d they look like?”

“Pretty big, near as I could tell. It was early, and there wasn’t much light.”

“Any distinguishing features? Hair?”

He shook his head no. “Wait.” I could feel my heart beating. “It was long.”

I’m pretty sure I skipped a beat. “Long hair . . .”

“Yeah, now that I think about it. Yeah.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yeah, long hair.”

“How long?”

“To the shoulders, at least.”

“Color?”

“Dark?” But then he shook his head. “Not enough light to tell, but dark, I think.”

“Hat?”

“Nope.”

“Could you tell what kind of clothing?”

He nodded slowly. “Overalls, one of those insulated jobs.” He waited for a minute. “You okay?”

It took me a moment to think of a word and get some moisture in my mouth. “Yep. This individual was carrying a weapon?”

“Yeah, a big one.”

“Type?”

“Couldn’t tell you. I mean, I could see ’im carryin’ something, and from the way he carried it . . .”

“Both hands?”

“Nope, one. Hanging down to the side.”

“Why do you say big?”

He sat his martini glass down and spread his hands apart by more than four feet. “Long.”

“Anything else? Wooden stock?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Anything hanging off the rifle?”

He continued to shake his head. “Sorry.”

“Anything else? Anything at all?” He stared at the arm of his chair and shook his head. “You want to revise or amplify anything in these statements?”

He looked confused. “Wha’? I’m under arrest or somethin’?”

I shook my head and smiled. “No, you just made a very important statement in a homicide investigation. I want to make sure there isn’t anything you might have left out.”

He looked around for the invisible signs that were supposed to tell him where he was, what he was doing, and when he should do it. I was starting to understand Al’s relationship with the clock. “Something might come to me?”

“That’s fine. When did you notice the truck over there that was running?”

“Didn’t.”

“You didn’t. All day?”

“Nope, went back over to the sofa there and went back to sleep.” He stopped and then looked around at the painted concrete floor for the thought he had lost. “Did notice it around lunchtime. Got up and heated some stew.” He started to get up now. “You want some?”

I stopped him with a hand. “Maybe later. What time was that?” “Twelve hundred forty-seven.”

I glanced over at the kitchen table at the two-handed face that told me it was now one. “You look at the clock a lot, Al.”

“Thirty-two fuckin’ years of waitin’ for closin’ time.”

He confirmed the fact that he had yelled at the two guys in the Hummer at exactly twenty-one hundred twelve. As I went off to check the ridge, I asked Al if he would hitch up the one-mule team and take my ardent deputy a cup of coffee and some stew. He said he would be fucking happy to.

 

The hill was steep, and the fact that I was wearing cowboy boots didn’t help. The snow had tapered off, but the wind remained persistent, and by the time I got to the top I had worked up a decent sweat. I stood there, catching my breath and looking down at the lights of Al’s cabin and at the red-and-blue emergency lights revolving from our vehicles in the parking lot. The only consistent sounds were the wind, Sally munching, and the revolving click of our lights. It was a beautiful place, peaceful, terminally peaceful for Jacob Esper.

It was a four-hundred-yard shot if it was an inch. It was colder this morning, probably with a slight to negligible headwind and an approximate scale of elevation would be eighty at four hundred yards. I sighed a full breath and watched the steam blow back in my face. It was quite a shot, even with a scope.

I started at the first few trees at the ridge’s edge, shining my flashlight down along the partially covered ground. Al had said that the shooter was big, but Al is short, so I was beginning to wonder how big
big
meant. There were no telltale signs in the stiffening grass, so I began using this trail as my pathway as I searched the surrounding area on both sides. If I were shooting someone, would I use the trail? Probably not. I kneeled by the end of the opening that faced the lake and went over each blade of grass. If I were shooting someone from four hundred yards, would I lie down? Probably. There was something funny about the slight depression in the grass to my right, so I walked out of my safe area and looked back where the grass seemed to lay in an odd pattern. I kneeled down and looked back into the hypotenuse of a thin triangle: All the blades bowed in my direction.

Blowdown. This is where it had all started, all .45 caliber seventy grains of it. There was a weak swipe where someone had scuffed a foot across the area in an attempt to hide the marks, but Al Monroe’s appearance must have curtailed such activity. I extended my view and looked straight back through the trees. I suppose somebody my size could make it through, but their ability to limbo would have to be considerably better than mine. I went back to my path and began working my way deeper into the woods, searching the narrow area for footprints but finding none. If they were big, they were light on their feet. I transferred my search to above ground, looking for any disturbance in the thick foliage of the pines. Nothing.

I thought about Henry and took my first full breath since Al had made his partial identification. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and tried to convince myself that a man with 4.2 blood alcohol content would be lucky if he could properly identify his own mule. It wouldn’t wash; he had been too precise about all the other points. Al might be a professional alcoholic, but he was an observant one.

Why would Henry do it? There was the immediate connection with the family; the oldest of motivations, revenge. If somebody had done this to my niece, how would I react? I kept thinking about Omar’s remarks about Henry; was it productive to look at those who had killed when looking for a killer? It wasn’t easy to do, take a life. Henry had killed men, but so had I. Try as I might, I couldn’t develop Omar’s line of thought and went back to the one I liked best, the rationalization of why it didn’t have to be Henry.

With Al’s partial physical description, we were looking for a largish person, probably male and possibly Indian. Sticking with motivation, it had to be someone connected to the victims’ victim, Melissa Little Bird. And that meant Artie Small Song or Henry Standing Bear. I was going to have to have a conversation with Artie Small Song.

Did long hair necessarily mean Indian? Omar had long hair and half my staff had longish hair. Vic and Turk both had hair at least to their shoulders. Vic had been growing hers for the last two years, and Turk’s hockey hair was perennial. I always tried to keep an open mind when lining up the suspects. Law enforcement personnel were people, too, which meant they could commit murder just like the rest of us. If I was going to play the game, everybody got a piece.

Why would Vic do it? She was a pretty militant female, a master in ballistics, and she was also the first on both crime scenes. I had talked her into joining up about two years ago, when these boys had been handed down their suspended sentences. I looked down at the revolving lights, at the flickering shadows cast on the sides of the vehicles, and at Jacob’s shadow-smear that didn’t move. Her sense of justice just didn’t seem to fit. She didn’t have any reason to do it, and she wasn’t big, even if she had the hair.

Why would Turk do it? Just being a prick wasn’t enough, and the fact that I was looking forward to our next meeting like Grant did Gettysburg shouldn’t interfere with my abilities to investigate. Did he want my job bad enough to try and make me look this bad? None of it seemed likely, but he was big, his name was on Dave’s list, and he had the hair.

Why would Omar do it? Omar could make this shot, but what could his motivations be? I started thinking about which grade B actor would play Omar in the television movie of the week and quickly dropped it. But he was big enough, had the hair, had a Sharps, and knew how to shoot.

Why would Artie Small Song do it? And why wouldn’t he have used a rocket launcher or a bazooka? This spoke to the violent-death side of the case, and his family connections loomed large. Basic investigative technique was jumping up and down and screaming it was Artie. He was large, might have the weapon, and he had the hair.

Why would Henry do it? I didn’t believe he did, and that was all there was to it. But . . . he had been late running yesterday morning; he hadn’t gotten to my house until after eight. I thought back and tried to think of what time it had been when he arrived, but I didn’t have Al’s gift for chronographic pinpointing. If the Cheyenne Death Rifle was the one he used, how did he get it back to Lonnie in time? Two men could keep a secret if one of them is dead, or so the old saying goes, but I didn’t think it was possible to get from here to the Rez and back to my place in three hours.

I took one last look around, satisfied that I had done as much as I could, and started down the hill. By the time I got to the path, Al was making the return journey to his cabin. “Al, how long are you going to be here?” He truly was a vision atop his mule with his floral print trunks in full display.

“I was thinkin’ about getting the hell outta here tomorrow, but with all this stuff happenin’ I might just stick around.”

“Well, if you do decide to head back, would you mind checking in at my office? It’s down in Durant, behind the courthouse, or you can just give me a call.” I handed him a card. “This’s got my home phone on it, along with all the office numbers. If you think of anything else, anything at all, be sure to call me. There’ll probably be somebody over later to ask you the same questions and get your personal information. Do you want me to tell them to wait till the morning?”

“What time is it?”

I started to laugh, then pulled out my pocket watch. “Oh-two-hundred.”

“Aw, hell, it’s the shank of the evenin’. Send ’em on over.”

I got out of the mule’s way and started the long slog around the lake. When I got to the scene, Vic was warming up in her unit. I walked over and kneeled beside Jacob Esper. Something was bothering me, something had been niggling at me for the last few hours. I looked at the body and back over my shoulder. It was a clear shot and had planted the young man squarely against the side of the truck. How did the perpetrator get the feather onto the body? Granted, there seemed to have been long periods of Al’s drunkenness where somebody could’ve planted an entire aviary on Jacob, but it did add to the time that it would’ve taken Henry to complete the journey to my place. It was another reason my buddy couldn’t have done it, and I was feeling a little better. Even if I was feeling better, the niggling thought remained like an itch at the middle of my back. There was something here, something I’d seen that was out of my reach. I stared at Jacob Esper, just like I’d stared at Cody Pritchard, and I hoped like hell that I came up with better answers.

 

“Unlock the door.” She reached across with a yawn and flipped the small knob up. I must have woken her. It was like a nest, with little pieces of paper and equipment scattered and stuffed into every available spot. I pulled a collection of duty notebooks from under my ass, sat them on the floor beside my wet boots, and thought how much her truck reminded me of Al’s oasis across the lake. Two Thermoses rested against the four-wheel-drive shifter; evidently she hadn’t saved me any coffee. I got settled and looked over at my deputy, whose face was resting against her door. She appeared to have fallen back to sleep.