The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (119 page)

“You’re sure?”

“Yep.”

I glanced at Den, who was blinking too much. "Den?”

He shrugged. “I went over to the edge of the culvert and yelled at her.” He blinked again. “I thought she might be asleep. Then I saw she wasn’t breathin’.”

I had Den show me the exact route that he had taken, and then I retreated to the top of the culvert with my two deputies, where it was unlikely anybody had been. I squatted down in a hunter’s crouch and listened as Cox dismissed the Dunnigan brothers.

I turned to Chuck. “You know how to open a baler?”

The sandy Vandyke smiled back. “Born to it.”

“Go crack that one open and check the contents and then split the last two bales northbound. If she was walking or running from somebody, then she might’ve dropped her purse or something along the way.” Frymyer paused for a moment, and I looked at him. “You need help?”

He glanced back at the one-ton bales. “Yes.”

I looked at Double Tough, and he started off with Chuck.

There was still a lot of light—it was like that in the summer this far north—and you could plainly see where the young woman had played out the last moments of her life. She was provocatively dressed, inappropriate for the surroundings. She had on a short skirt, a pink halter top, and no shoes. Her long, dark hair was tangled with the grasses; it had been blown by the ever prevalent Wyoming wind, and you could see her delicate bone structure. The eyes were closed, and you might’ve thought she was asleep but for the blue coloring in her face and a swollen eye, and the fact that, from the angle, it was apparent that her neck had been broken.

I listened as Cox came up and squatted down beside me. "You losing weight?”

“Yep, I’m in the gym with Cady every day.”

He nodded. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s good, Karl. Thank you for asking. Hey, speaking of Cady, could I get you to have Rosey call into our dispatch and ask them to tell her I won’t be coming home tonight?”

“You bet.” He tipped his campaign hat back. “DCI’s on the way. I think you got the wicked witch of the west herself.” I nodded. T. J. Sherwin was always looking for a reason to come up to the mountains in the summertime. The division lieutenant plucked a piece of the prairie and placed the harvested end in his mouth. “We checked all the way back to Casper, Walt, but no abandoned vehicles.” He glanced after my deputies. “Your guys gonna check the baler?”

“Yep.”

“Good. My guys wouldn’t know which end to look in.” He studied the body of the dead girl and then looked up at me. “I’ve got men checking all the Chinese restaurants in Sheridan, Casper, and Gillette to see if anybody’s missing....”

“Don’t bother.” I ran my hand over my face. “She’s Vietnamese. ”

2

“She wasn’t walking, not without shoes.” T. J. Sherwin watched as the technicians zipped up the black plastic bag and carefully placed the Asian woman’s body onto a gurney under the constant racket of the generators. The flat, yellow shine of the emergency lights made even the living look jaundiced.

I closed my eyes. “Fresh?”

It was getting late, and the warmth of the sun was long gone, replaced by the stars and the clear, cool air creeping down from the Bighorn Mountains. It hadn’t rained in more than a month.

She hugged herself. “Less than twelve hours.” I put my arm around her because I wanted to keep her warm and because I wanted to. She’d been the chief forensic pathologist for Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation for half of my tenure in Absaroka County. She’d thought me antiquated, but in seventeen years I’d grown on her. “She wasn’t killed here. Preliminary says asphyxiation, manual strangulation by someone very powerful. Whoever it was, they started by strangling her and then broke her neck.”

“They didn’t do a very good job of hiding the body.”

I could feel her eyes on me. “No, they didn’t.”

I took a quick look ahead to the county road, toward the highway. “There’s an exit only a mile up.” I looked at the uncut grass on the other side of the culvert. “We’ll have to look for drag marks or footprints farther north. We’re going to need to check the roadside back to 249 and down to 246 at the south fork of the Powder.” She shivered and snuggled closer under my arm. “My guys about through with the bales?”

She snickered. “They’re gonna love you.”

“Yep.” I watched as the bag boys loaded the dead woman into the Suburban for transport to Cheyenne. “So, you’re not going to stick around?”

“Too much to do.” She left my protection and started back up the slope toward the emergency vehicles splaying their revolving blue, red, and yellow lights across the wildflowers that were blooming under the sage.

I started to follow but stopped, sighed to myself, and called after her. “Anybody check that thing yet?”

She turned back to me. “The tunnel? No, I think they were going to wait until daylight.”

* * *

“You wan’ company?” Double Tough gave me his Mag-Lite.

I took half an egg sandwich and shook my head. “Nope.” The food had just arrived, and I knew they were hungry; I figured I could prowl around on my own. “But I’ll take one of those cups of coffee.”

It was a clear night, and the full moon and thick swath of the Milky Way gave plenty of illumination on the area surrounding the tunnel, if not the hole itself. I threw a leg over a guardrail and started down the embankment to the entrance on the other side of Lone Bear Road. I wasn’t expecting to find a culprit shivering at the mouth of the thing; I figured that whoever had killed the young woman had walked back to his vehicle and driven away, but it never hurt to look.

I opened the Styrofoam cup, shook off the lid and stuffed it in my back jeans pocket in an attempt to keep Absaroka County clean, and stepped down into the three-quarter inch of Murphy Creek.

I sipped the coffee, listened to the distant sound of the eighteen-wheel trucks on I-25, and shone the beam of the four-cell flashlight into the black opening of the drainage tunnel; there was something blocking a complete view of the other side. I took a step and listened to it resound off the hardened walls of the concrete. In the most likely scenario, it was a yearling that had followed the creek bed and gotten stuck or confused; few things in the natural world are as easily confused as a heifer— just ask any cowboy.

There were some rabbit carcasses and a few deer bones a little farther into the tunnel, and I could see that there were some broken pieces of two-by-fours and truck skids piled at one side with a collection of blankets, tarps, and cardboard boxes gathered on them. It was possibly the regular flotsam and jetsam of Murphy Creek, but I didn’t think the water flow was that strong.

I thought I’d seen a small movement, but it was probably the shadows of the flashlight. The refuse pile smelled like something dead and got worse as I leaned in closer and nudged one of the blanket layers of the sofa-sized bundle—more cardboard. Something must have been using the blockage as a nest, and the stench made my eyes water.

An old warning bell went off, so I transferred my cup of coffee to the flashlight hand and pulled the Colt 1911 out and to the right, cocked and locked. I clicked off the safety and stooped down as close as I dared, recognizing the quilt as a packing blanket from a rental truck place.

I had pulled my sidearm on a pile of trash.

I started to resafety and reholster my weapon when something in the pile shifted, and the entire collection of blankets, cardboard, and smell exploded straight at me, lifting me completely off the ground and against the far side of the tunnel. The flashlight disappeared, coffee went everywhere, and the .45 in my hand fired as my fingers contracted on impact with the cement wall. The compressed sound of the big Colt plugged my ears like a set of fingers. All the air in my body hung there as I fell forward.

Whatever it was, it was bigger than me, and hairy, and it caught me by my chest and pushed me back. It was roaring in my face as it slapped me, the Colt splashing into the water.

My head felt like it was coming apart, but I thrashed at whatever it was, bringing my arms forward and kicking with my legs. It pressed against me with the force of a front-end loader. My only hope was to get away from the thing before it sunk its claws into me or took off half my face in one bite.

I got a lucky punch at its head, but it still threw me sideways, where I slid along in the muck. The thought of being mauled to death or eaten alive in the darkness of an irrigation tunnel renewed my fortitude for fighting; I leveraged a fist loose and brought it forward with all the force my clumsy position would allow. There was a bit of a lull, and I took advantage and raised my head, but it was back on me in an instant.

I shouldn’t have exposed my throat because it started to choke me. I flailed with both fists, but I might as well have been striking the concrete floor. I kicked, but the weight of the thing held me solid, and I was just beginning to feel the blood vessels in my head explode and my vision fail.

I could see flashes of light where there were none, and I could see faces in the flashes; women, they were all women. I could see my mother on a grassy hillside, the summer sun shining through the sides of her pale blue eyes. I saw my wife, the first time I asked her to dance, and the gentle way her fingers first reached for mine. I saw Victoria Moretti, lowering her face to me with her bathrobe undone. I saw my daughter, her determined look in the weight room, and could only think,
Ish okay, Daddy
.

There was splashing, and there were other voices above the roaring of whatever had me and whatever I had. I made one last struggle to bury my thumbs into the front of its throat and could just feel my fingers making headway into the fragile, egg-carton-like cartilage of its larynx, a method I’d used to stay alive in Khe Sanh.

If I was going to die, something was going with me.

I heard a loud crack and felt a shift in the thing’s weight as it toppled to one side, just before the women’s faces disappeared and it all faded to black.

* * *

I sat there on the bank of the hillside as the EMTs worked on the back of my head. I continued to clear my throat and massaged my forefinger and thumb into my eye sockets in an attempt to replace the stars in my eyes with real ones.

Double Tough stood by as T.J. handed me another cup of coffee. I wasn’t sure I could swallow it, but it was reassuring just to be able to hold it. We all watched the faint glow of the sunrise on the horizon toward Pumpkin Buttes and Thunder Basin. I nodded thanks and cleared my throat, still unable to speak.

T.J. glanced back at the EMTs, who were finishing up the job. “I assume he’s going to be okay?”

Cathi leaned around and looked at the front of me as she finished doctoring the back of my head. “The long arm of the law’s gonna have a lump, but we’ve patched him up before.”

Double Tough smiled his slow grin and looked across the grassland to the wall of red rocks. “Lord Almighty, you see the size’a that son-of-a-bitch?”

I swallowed and tried a sip; it tasted pretty good but set off another coughing attack. “What did you use to get him off me?” My voice sounded rough and wheezy.

“One’a them pieces’a two-by-four.” He thought about it as Cathi and Chris gathered up the rest of their equipment to change venue. “I think ya surprised him.”

“Not as much as he surprised me.”

The creature from the cave was as big as a grizzly, and it took four men to carry him out of the tunnel. I noticed they used ankle bracelets at his wrists because the handcuffs would’ve been too small. He was an Indian, Crow from what we could make of him.

I started to get up but felt a little dizzy and sat back down. T.J. placed a hand on my shoulder and held me there. “Easy.”

I sighed. “He still alive?”

Double Tough snorted. “Yeah. I hit him hard enough to fell a mule, but he’s still breathin’.”

I watched as Chris, Chuck, and two HPs carried the now unconscious man up the hillside, his hair trailing all the way to the grass, snagging here and there as if it were trying to stay the progress. It was as if his hair, like the Vietnamese girl’s, had wanted to remain here until all the questions had been answered. He was wearing an old army field jacket, torn and ragged, with the remnants of a denim shirt and a wool sweater underneath. His legs were swathed in tatters of plaid-lined overalls. Everything was frayed and filthy except the intricately beaded moccasins that were on his gigantic feet. They were a design I’d never seen.

I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, and I staggeredup the hill with Double Tough’s help. “Anybody checking all that stuff in the tunnel?”

“They’re gonna, but they’re not gonna be happy about it. The place smells bad enough to gag a maggot off a gut wagon.”

I nodded toward the giant. “What about him?”

“He’s goin’ to the hospital, and then he’s most likely gonna be in our jail.”

“Find anything in the tunnel to connect him with the Vietnamese woman?”

He shook his head at me. “Not yet, but we figured tryin’ ta choke the life out of the sheriff was good enough reason to hold ’im.”

We watched as they loaded the gurney into the EMT van, the rear suspension compressing with the weight of one woman, four men, and one very large Indian. “You guys knock him out with something?”

Double Tough gave a halfhearted laugh. “We didn’t have to. You jus’ about collapsed his larynx, and I pretty much battered his head in.”

They closed the van doors and departed toward Durant Memorial Hospital. After the sirens died down, he spoke in a soft voice. “That is one FBI.”

I didn’t bother to translate the acronym, but I knew he didn’t mean Federal Bureau of Investigation.

* * *

T.J. had left with her DCI crew and said she’d be in touch as soon as they knew anything, so Rosey gave me a ride back to the office. It was still early morning, and the darkness was slow to release its grip on the county. Ruby, my dispatcher, was always first in, but she was Dog-sitting and hadn’t gotten there yet. My dog, Dog, still didn’t have a name and after calling him Dog for the better part of a year I was concerned that he would be confused if I gave him a real name or maybe I was concerned about confusing myself.