Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty (3 page)

The Salt Lake City agent immediately approached Joe. “Thank you, Sheriff Iron Cloud. We won’t be needing you.”

Joe kicked his face sideways with a grin. “Excuse me?”

McGroder repeated himself.

Iron Cloud stood there for a minute more, then shrugged and turned toward the rest of us. “Hey, hey, must be north of here, boys. But then again, these federal agents have a long-standing dislike of us Indians since Pine Ridge.”

Knowing better than to hang around when he wasn’t needed, Joe shook all hands and started off toward his vehicle with his deputy. As he passed Saizarbitoria, he pulled out a pack of gum and offered the Basquo a piece, which he took. Joe spoke in my deputy’s ear.

Sancho laughed and then unwrapped the gum, stuffed it in his mouth, and began chewing.

McGroder stuck his hands in his coveralls as the Washakie County truck pulled away and then considered me. “I’m sorry, Sheriff Longmire. It’s Longmire, right?”

“Yep.”

He continued to study me like a multiple-choice question. “You’ll have to come with us, Sheriff—it appears that our plans have changed.”

It was a short distance on a snow-covered gravel road until we reached the corrals at the junction of 422 and the spur of 419 that straddled the line between Tommy Wayman’s county and mine; both portions were overlapped by the Bighorn National Forest.

Raynaud Shade sat in the middle seat of our van with McGroder on one side, Pfaff on the other, Benton still behind him; the agents were talking in low voices as Saizarbitoria drove.

When we got to the corner, the prisoner spoke. “Here.”

The Basquo slowed and even went so far as to put on his turn signal for the Suburban that followed us; the other federal vehicles and the Ameri-Trans transport with Otero and Popp had gone ahead to Meadowlark Lodge.

Pfaff was talking to Raynaud Shade with the familiarity that a doctor had with a patient. “You’re sure? It was a while ago.”

I could see the reflection of his one eye getting the lay of the land. “I’m sure.”

The road got bumpier as we left the loop and headed north toward Baby Wagon Creek. We got to a turn where I’d remembered a Basque sheep wagon being parked during a fly-fishing trip with Henry and the Ferg. It was going to get a lot rougher from here on in, and I was relieved when Shade spoke again.

“Here.”

Saizarbitoria eased the van to a stop, and it shifted a little down the incline toward the creek.

I turned in my seat. Agent Pfaff stared at the side of the prisoner’s face, and McGroder, holding a plastic-sealed quad sheet for comparison, read the LED display on a handheld global tracking device. “It’s within a hundred yards of where he said.”

Shade looked past me through the windshield. “We can walk from here.”

I turned to look up the creek bed and could see a number of rock outcroppings sticking up through the snow before the dark shadows of the fir trees blocked everything out. It was getting late, and up this high the shadows were long.

We unlocked Shade from the floor, threw a blanket over him, and he walked with one of the Feds on either side. Pfaff followed, and McGroder, Saizarbitoria, Sheriff Wayman, Marshal Benton, and another of the field agents pulled up the drags.

McGroder continued to read the GPS with the assistance of the map but surprised me by speaking as we trudged through the snow. “So, did he say anything while he was in your custody, Sheriff?”

I thought about the things Shade had uttered over the last day, most of it indiscernible. “He said that two men had sent him a bone in the mail—about wanting the money.”

The agent’s eyes slipped up to mine. “Is that all he said?”

I thought about it some more. “He also said something about voices and testing me, but I think that was mostly guff.”

McGroder nodded.

Up ahead, Shade turned, the heavy wool blanket forming a makeshift hood that shadowed his dark face and, like a malevolent monk, he looked directly at me. “Here.”

The group assembled around a slab of moss rock about the size of a door. “I buried him here.”

McGroder checked the GPS one last time and looked at his map before turning to look at Tommy. “Thank you for your help, Sheriff Wayman. I’ll have one of my men drive you back down to your vehicle.”

He turned to me.

“Not your lucky day, Longmire.”

3

The temperature had shifted to slightly above forty degrees, and the booming in the distant, dark clouds promised a freezing rain if we weren’t lucky. We continued to watch as the younger agents and Saizarbitoria, under the attentive eye of Special Agent Pfaff, excavated the snow from around the boulder.

McGroder and I were too old for that kind of foolishness and were sharing a thermos of really good coffee in the cab of one of the Suburbans. “And those’re the two other convicts who were in the Ameri-Trans van?”

“Yes.” He blew into his stainless travel mug—even it was black. “I’m sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but we’re on a need-to-know basis and, until I could verify which county we were dealing with, I had to keep my cards close to the vest.”

I nodded.

He drank from his mug. “I was just as happy to not have it be Sheriff Iron Cloud’s jurisdiction.”

“Because?”

“The victim is Native American.” I looked at him as he continued to sip his coffee. “Crow, to be exact; taken from a vehicle parked at a bar/bait shop near Hardin, Montana. Shade ID’d the victim, even though the child was never reported missing.”

There was a long pause, and while I thought that one over, I heard a few frigid drops of sleet, sounding like pebbles, hit the top of the Chevrolet. I gestured toward the other Suburban.

“And those two?”

“Just your garden variety psychotic scumbags; Calvin ‘Fingers’ Moser is the one with the stringy hair, and Freddie ‘Junk-food Junkie’ Borland is the one who can’t keep still. A couple of fun-loving drug abusers from Arizona who liked to get high, kill people, and then sell the body parts.”

“Charming.”

“Isn’t it though? Through Shade they had a medical connection in Mexico to which they gave a running supply of kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and eyes. Years back, on some PCP-induced binge, they killed an elderly couple near Sedona and buried their bodies out in the desert. Borland was working at a livestock dismemberment plant when Shade turned them on to the guys in Central America. They pretty much drove around killing people and selling the parts.” He sipped his coffee some more and then waxed financial. “You can get forty to fifty thousand dollars for a healthy kidney on the open market. Some guy had one for sale on eBay.”

I interrupted, mostly so that I wouldn’t have to hear more. “Is that your specialty, organ trafficking?”

“No.” We continued to watch as the working class finished shoveling around the boulder, and we were faced with the eventuality of getting out of the SUV. “Pfaff’s the specialist—psychotic schizophrenia—and Ray ‘No’ Shade is the textbook for psy-schiz. No-Shade’s first American homicide was this Native American child abduction across state lines; then there’s the supposed missing 1.4 million dollars . . .” He grew silent but finally spoke again. “You pull up the file?”

“Only part of it. What I did read sounds like a horror movie.”

He finished off his coffee and placed the travel mug back in the holder. “That it does.”

I swallowed the rest from my thermos top and did the same, closing the doors behind us and tromping across the trampled snow to where the crew was working. They had produced a pry bar, were laboring around the edges of the rock to unfreeze it from its surroundings, and had connected a tow strap to the back of one of the Suburbans as well. There was a nudging sound, and with one more spot of leverage the boulder broke free and shifted a few inches.

“That’s enough.” McGroder produced a Maglite from his breast pocket and, shining the beam behind the rock, slipped between the other men. “Difficult to see; we’re going to have to move it further.”

A large man in one of the tactical uniforms moved to one side of the rock while another went to the opposite side. They braced themselves and heaved mightily as the tires of the Suburban spun and the distant thunder echoed off the surrounding peaks.

Nothing happened.

With a quick estimation, I figured the boulder weighed close to five thousand pounds.

They tried again but with the same results.

I glanced at McGroder. “Shade supposedly moved this by himself?” I spoke to the nearest agent. “Climb up on top and push with your legs, and I’ll try this side.” I stepped past the Fed on the left, planted a foot against the embankment, and worked my hands behind the cold surface of the rock as the agent braced his boots against it. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

Same result.

I looked up at McGroder’s arched eyebrow. “Well, even Atlas shrugged.”

I worked my hands in deeper than before, and on the count of three the rock shifted and revealed its egglike shape, with the more narrow portion being the part we’d been pushing on. We hadn’t so much moved the boulder as repositioned it, and if we were planning on doing any more, we were going to have to break out a hydraulic jack and pray we got it done before the sleet began in earnest.

McGroder leaned over the boulder with the flashlight. “That’s all we need for now.”

“They mailed him part of the jawbone in prison to get him to tell them where the money was?”

McGroder looked out at what would have been the panoramic view from Meadowlark Lodge as the sleet pounded the plateglass windows. “Shade had given the boy’s bone to them—who knows why? Maybe as a gift, maybe as a warning, but Moser and Borland still wanted their part of the 1.4 million the three of them had supposedly extorted from the organ-donor business. The bone arrived in a brown paper wrapper at the Draper, Utah, prison where Shade was being housed, with a post office box return address in Bisbee, Arizona. That’s where we apprehended the two. These guys are not exactly destined for Mensa.”

The agent mentioned Shade’s residence in Draper like the killer was renting an apartment rather than being housed in the maximum security prison for only the most violent and escape-prone prisoners in the country. “What was his name?”

“Who?”

“The boy.”

“He said it was Owen White Buffalo.”

There are moments in your life when you hear that first click of the dominoes, and you know that whatever happens from that point, it’s all going to be bad. I sat there in that moment listening to the noises inside me—my heart, the blood surging through my veins, the unwanted adrenaline that was now causing my hands to grow still and my face to become cool.

“Jesus, Sheriff. I haven’t seen a response like that in quite a while. You knew this kid?”

My mouth was dry, and I suddenly wanted more coffee. “No, but I know the family, and up until now I thought I was conversant with all their miseries.” I fought the weight in my chest by asking more questions, unsure if I was going to like the answers. “From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t fit Moser and Borland’s MO. Can you even take organs from a child that young for transplant purposes?”

“The boy was before they partnered. That’s why the other two are so quick to give Shade up—they had nothing to do with this one. Personally, I don’t think there is any money, but it got the other two to surface and that’s good enough for me. We were just going to use Shade to find the body, but I needed confirmation and that’s where the other two come in.”

The conversation we were having was only made worse by the immediate surroundings. The lodge at Meadowlark Lake had been closed for a couple of years and Holli and Wayne had not planned on renovating it until they finished with South Fork and Deer Haven, which was a couple of miles west. We sat in the empty café and listened to the coolers cooling nothing and the sleet hissing on the tin roof, an accompanying wind skiff kicking up snow devils across the icy surface of the lake. By all rights it was spring, but every year somebody forgot to tell the mountains.

Most of the FBI agents except McGroder were still at Baby Wagon Creek; the agent and I had elected to retreat to Meadowlark in the wake of the prisoners.

“Raynaud’s something of an opportunist. You noticed his eye?”

I tried to focus on something other than the name White Buffalo and watched the lightning strike in chains across the big lake. “I did.”

“Plucked it out himself.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that and was saved by a melodramatic clap of thunder.

“During the stint in Draper. There was an altercation between Shade and another prisoner over a female correspondent.”

I still wished we had more of the good coffee, but supplies were slow coming from South Fork Lodge, where we’d had lunch. My stomach gnawed on itself, reminding me that it was coming up on six o’clock at night. It was a Friday, which also reminded me that I hadn’t called to cancel dinner with Vic and Henry. “Shade killed him?”

“Yeah, Raynaud had a postal affair going on with the woman, and this other guy made some remarks which cost him his life. Carved him up with a homemade knife, but at the time it appeared as if he’d lost an eye in the fight, which got him sent to the medical unit, where he escaped. They consequently discovered that he’d plucked the eye out himself and cut it loose with the same shank. Shows a specific type of determination, doesn’t it?”

I looked out the window to see Saizarbitoria rushing by the parked but still running vehicles with a couple of sacks containing what I assumed was the first round of supplies from South Fork Lodge.

I wasn’t sure if I was still hungry.

My eyes stalled on the fogged windshield of our borrowed WYDOC van, where Raynaud Shade sat chained in the center with Marshal Benton sitting behind him and another marshal seated in the driver’s seat. The other prisoners, all four of them, were awaiting departure in the Ameri-Trans van under the careful eye of yet another marshal and the three Ameri-Trans employees.

The Basquo booted open the front door of the lodge with his foot. He glanced back to where Beatrice was pulling more bags from the passenger seat of her Blazer, which she had parked under the overhang of the building. “We’ve got more, but I’m not sure how you want to feed the prisoners.”

McGroder, a little daunted by the deluge outside, stood and picked up his satellite phone from the table. “In the vans and locked down. I’ll go get things coordinated with my guys.” He paused as Sancho pulled out a waxed-paper-wrapped club sandwich. “Save one of those for me, will you?”

The Basquo smiled and pulled out two more. “You bet.”

Beatrice entered with more sacks and rested them on the table. “Boy, the roads are bad from the lodge to here. This is the last of it.” She glanced at me. “Are you paying again, Sheriff?”

I gestured toward McGroder. “The federal government will be picking up the tab this time.”

The Fed took the receipt from the woman. “Don’t we always.”

He proceeded out the door with her to implement “Operation Dinner” as Saizarbitoria, still dripping from the thawed sleet, handed me a sandwich and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “I called in and Marie said she could put Antonio down on her own. She also said that NOAA reports we’ve got a heller of an ice storm coming in—going to last the entire weekend. Any time now, it’s supposed to turn from sleet to frozen rain and then snow by morning.” He folded the wrapper down and placed his paperback on the table. There was a red, cellophane-flagged toothpick in his sandwich that he extracted and pointed toward me. “By the way, you’re in trouble.”

I broke my reverie of White Buffalos and thought about my more personal problems. “Henry or Vic?”

“Both.”

“I am in trouble.” I considered. “Can I borrow your cell phone?”

He handed the device over, and I watched as he began devouring his food—he spoke through the bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes: “Just hit SEND; they’re at her house.”

I punched the green button, held the phone to my ear, and waited.

There was an immediate answer. “Fucker.”

I sighed. “It’s not my fault.” She remained silent. “Did Saizarbitoria explain?” I glanced up, and the Basquo nodded.

“I made my Uncle Al’s lasagna rustica; do you know how long that takes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“The Cheyenne Nation, your dog, and I are all drinking wine and talking about what a shit you are.”

“Dog is drinking wine?”

She exhaled audibly. “Well, I poured him some; so far he’s just looking at it.” There was a long pause on the line. “Sancho said it was something to do with the Feds—a body?”

“Yep, and we caught the jurisdiction.” I sighed again. “Seven-year-old boy, almost a decade deceased, but there’s a very big twist. The victim’s name is Owen White Buffalo.”

I glanced up and could see the Basquo’s dark eyes grow enormous, and he stopped chewing. I nodded to him briefly and then listened to the phone. It was, by far, the longest pause yet, and her voice sounded strained. “You’re shitting me.”

“I wish I was.”

Her pitch softened a little with the wonder of our predicament. “What does this have to do with the prisoner transport?”

“One of them may have been involved with the murder in a primary way.”

I listened as she readjusted the phone. “The Shade guy?”

“Yep.”

“Figures. The voices in that fucker’s head are singing barbershop.” It was quiet, and I listened to her breathe. “Here’s Henry—you better talk to him.”

I could hear her hand him the phone, and my lifelong buddy came on the line, a man with whom I’d endured the Wyoming public school system and Vietnam. “You are in trouble.”

“More than you’ll ever know.” I explained the situation. “Do you have any idea if any of the White Buffalos had any children who might’ve disappeared about nine years ago?” I waited as he absorbed it all. I tried not to mention the four-hundred-pound Indian in the room. “Can you make some phone calls?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have Eli’s number over in Hot Springs?”

“I do.”

“Could you check with him and then call me back here on Sancho’s cell?”

There was talk in the background, and Henry spoke again. “She wants to know if you have eaten.”

I stared at the sandwich that was still wrapped on the table in front of me. “Not yet, so tell her to save me some lasagna.” There was more talk, but I interrupted. “Hey, Henry?”

“Yes.”