“Man, I gotta run. Early morning tomorrow.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing, just dead-guy stuff,” the anthropologist said. Morgan felt brushed off.
Dr. Cowper leaned over and kissed Claire on the cheek, then clapped Morgan on the shoulder. He walked a few steps down the path toward the house and disappeared into the dark.
Claire gathered Colter in her arms as Morgan squinted to see if Dr. Cowper was out of earshot.
“What was that?” he whispered, a little peevish.
“What?”
“That kiss.”
“What kiss?”
“He kissed you.”
Even in the guttering citronella light, he saw Claire roll her eyes.
“On the cheek.”
“A kiss is a kiss.”
“Yeah, Jeff, I saw that movie.”
“C’mon. I get home late, there’s a guy here, you’re having a grand time, and as soon as I show up, the party’s over and a guy kisses my wife. Goddammit, and howdy-do to you, too.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Why is he even here?”
“Shawn brought something for you.”
“Shawn? Shawn? That’s a little familiar, isn’t it?”
“For god sakes, Jeff, it’s his name,” Claire said. “You’re overreacting. You’ve got yourself all worked up over nothing.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen Doc at work. He’s smooth. He quotes books of erotica … from memory!”
Claire fixed him in her sights. The air around them was pungent, but only part of the bitterness was citronella.
“And you think he’s hitting on me, is that it? I mean, he’s so smooth he’d do it right in front of you, is that it?”
Morgan weighed his words carefully.
“A single guy. A smart single guy. A pretty woman who’s maybe a little, I dunno, understimulated. A warm night in the dark. A few high-octane cocktails. Husband’s not around. Kid’s asleep. A … single guy …”
Claire cocked her head as if he were speaking a foreign language, but she still didn’t like what he was saying.
“Blow out the light. Dinner’s in the fridge. Good night.”
As she carried their sleeping son back to the house in the dark, Morgan heard the bug-zapper sizzle.
Claire slept on the far side of the bed that night, still and cold as death, cast-off sheets crumpled like a range of mountains between them.
Morgan lay awake most of the night. He watched a gibbous June moon transit the open bedroom window. A distant train mourned as it crossed the grasslands below. The summer night exhaled through the lace curtains. Drifting toward sleep, he half-dreamed, half-imagined a train to the prairie moon, a poetic image of absolutely no use to him. He was where he wanted to be, and he desperately wanted to apologize, but couldn’t, partly from fear of saying the wrong thing again. He’d spoken from the heart, yes, but he knew it came from one of the shameful chambers deep in the heart of his heart.
He turned the pillow, seeking the coolest part. Then turned it again. No part of him was comforted.
Sleep took him unwilling before the right words drifted through his troubled mind. Somewhere in the night, he waved goodbye to a train carrying Claire and Doc and Colter and all his ghosts to the moon, issuing a meteoric silver tail of primrose petals on its way to its last stop on the other side of the mountains.
And the porter served grappa.
A crow caviled through the open window as the sun rose above the trees. Jeff awoke no more comforted than when he fell asleep, and a whole lot more ashamed.
He reached across the bed to touch Claire, but she was already gone. It was a summer Saturday morning, already nine o’clock, and he expected to hear the clangor of pots and pans in the kitchen, or a door slamming, or a vacuum-cleaner humming, or Claire in the shower, or the blip-bloop of cartoons on the television, or Colter giggling or singing or talking earnestly about anything that captured his boundless imagination.
But the morning was deathly quiet, except for the crow.
The house was empty. Still in his boxers, Morgan padded barefoot from room to room, like a lonely puppy. The coffee in the pot was cold, and the leaky faucet dripped into a bowl of soggy cereal. Colter’s bed was made, and Claire’s Volvo was gone.
A fat FedEx envelope sat on the breakfast table. It had already been opened. The invoice behind the plastic sleeve came from a lab in Denver, and a yellow stickie note was pasted to its front: Jeff — John Doe tox — Shawn.
“Fuck,” was all Morgan could say.
The phone echoed in the vacuum his morning had become.
“Jeff, it’s Shawn. I get you up?”
“No, I’ve been up.”
“You looked at the John Doe tox screen yet?”
“Just the envelope.”
“I can summarize,” Dr. Cowper said. “Mr. Doe is saltier than a nut roll.”
“Salt?”
“Packed in it, like a ham. The salt leached him dry and preserved his skin. He’s more pickled than a pickle.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, Jeff. For some reason, his killers held on to him for a while. Wyoming must have sixty billion square miles of earth untouched by man. They could have driven twenty miles out of town and buried his corpse in a gully, and it would never be found. They could have chopped him up and fed him to coyotes, hawks and badgers. They could have rolled him over a cliff into an inaccessible canyon. Why didn’t they? That’s just one of the unanswered questions I have.”
“What’s another?”
“Why put him in Laddie’s crypt?”
“You gotta admit, the cemetery is a pretty good hiding place for a corpse.”
“Good point,” Dr. Cowper admitted, “but were they trying to hide him, or did they want him to be found?”
Second-guessing killers was fruitless, Morgan knew. Every scenario prompted a dozen more questions. Mob hits often followed a certain logic, but serial killers might see a falling leaf and interpret it as a message from their twisted, personal gods. The rituals of murder ran the whole blood-colored spectrum from efficiently businesslike to fanatically bizarre. On the crime beat in Chicago, he learned fast not to dismiss any peculiarity as impossible, no matter how illogical it might sound. Morgan knew logic could be a help or a hindrance when trying to understand murder, but it was the only tool he had.
“Okay, but if they wanted him to be found, why pack him in salt for God knows how long?” Morgan asked. “Why not dump him on Main Street? None of that makes any sense if his killers intended for John Doe’s corpse to be discovered. And if they wanted him to be found, they’d want him to be identified, so why cut off his head?”
“Shock value. Souvenir. Ritual. I don’t know exactly, but they weren’t trying real hard to obscure his identity by whacking off his head. If they were, they’d have cut of his hands, too.”
“Have you heard anything from the FBI on the fingerprints?”
“No, I was hoping to hear yesterday. Once they digitize the prints, it only takes a couple hours to find a match. Not likely to hear anything today because it’s Saturday. Maybe Monday.”
Patience wasn’t Morgan’s strong suit, but he decided to wait … at least on particulars about John Doe. Not on Claire.
“Doc, about last night …” he started.
“You golf?”
“Golf?”
“Yeah, you know, it’s a game just like marbles, except you use a stick.”
Morgan huffed impatiently.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. And yeah, I’ve golfed, but I wouldn’t say I’m a golfer.”
“Let’s play.”
“Now?”
“It’s Saturday, it’s sunny, and you might be in jail on Monday, so why not?”
“Doc, I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Claire isn’t here and I just … don’t know.”
“We have some things to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“I think maybe you got the wr
ong impression about some things.”
“Like what?”
“C’mon, Jeff. Claire told me.”
“When?”
“She called this morning. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean …”
“Goddammit. This is starting to piss me off, Doc.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Let’s go golfing and breathe a little fresh air and talk. My treat.”
Morgan agreed, reluctantly. Claire still hadn’t returned by the time he showered and dressed, so he left a note on the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry” was all it said.
The nine-hole Squaw Nob Country Club was known locally as The Weed.
It passed for a golf course in the same way Winchester’s hackers passed for golfers. In a loathsome landscape where the golf season was shorter than the hunting season, where citizens worked doubly hard to disguise their material ambitions, and where the word “par” sounded suspiciously foreign, golf could never be a profound pursuit.
On The Weed, divots went unrepaired simply because nobody knew any better, so fairways tended to resemble test ranges for cluster bombs.
The greens were worse. In fact, they were actually several dozen shades of green, an optical (and horticultural) illusion that psychologically damaged long-putters.
The rough was very rough. Knee-high buffalo grass concealed those errant drives not gobbled up by cactus and sagebrush. Prairie washes split slopes like raggedy gashes. Barbed-wire fences, grasshoppers and blood-sucking ticks proved the rough wasn’t truly barren, but it was certainly inhospitable enough that almost nobody looked for lost balls.
And The Weed’s hazards made it more obstacle course than golf course: Pronghorn antelope grazed on the fairways, sage grouse flocked unruffled in the tee boxes, badgers burrowed in the margins, and rattlesnakes lounged in the cool, watered grass. When the course was built, monstrous boulders were simply left where they sat — even in the middle of fairways. And sand traps were not sand at all, but pea-gravel from the river bottom, quarried and dumped by the county’s road crews far more cheaply than imported sand.
The only water feature on The Weed — apart from the alkali-crusted cow wallows dating back to Squaw Nob’s days as a pasture — was a stock pond beyond the seventh green, which could be reached only by driving over a working cattle ranch. It was America’s only Par 9 hole.
Suffice it to say, good shots generally went unrewarded, while bad shots were punished severely. But since nobody in Winchester golfed well enough to be disappointed, the course’s sadistic peculiarities were never fully appreciated.
Still, The Weed had its rewards: any golfer who survived all nine holes with the same ball earned a bottle of Moose Drool Ale for half price in the “clubhouse,” which was, in fact, a Tuff Shed and an ice-filled Igloo cooler. But since country clubs elsewhere were known to cater to the affluent, Squaw Nob Country Club charged double for beer, so the big prize was a wash.
Dr. Cowper wouldn’t be drinking any half-price beer. He lost three balls on the first two holes; one extraordinarily true, two hundred fifty-yard drive ricocheted off a sandstone boulder into the malpais, where it would likely rot before it was found. Morgan whacked a worm-burner into the dense brush and scared up a covey of quail.
“About this stuff with Claire,” Dr. Cowper finally said as they milled around in the third tee-box. “I’m really sorry. I was too familiar.”
Morgan traced a gash in his rented driver with the sharp end of a wooden tee, and said nothing.
“You and I hit it off as friends, and I guess I just naturally included Claire in the little circle,” Dr. Cowper continued as he chose his next club. “She said you were a little jealous, and I just wanted to clear the air right away …”
“I figured a smart, single guy like you would have no trouble finding admirers,” Morgan snipped. “Single admirers.”
Cowper sighted off about a thousand yards to where he imagined the next green should be. He shielded his eyes against the sun, but saw nothing.
“Well, I suppose I do, and single ones are the only kind, I assure you. A friend of mine once said a cowboy’s gotta have a few different ponies in the remuda: an easy rider, a sporting mount, one with a little sass, a cutter, and one to eat.”
Morgan managed a thin smile of forgiveness, although a wicked image flickered through his dirty mind.
“Friends, huh?” Morgan asked.
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“So how come you never kissed me?”
Cowper shook his head and squinted down the fairway to a ragged flag poked in a circular patch of green four hundred yards away. Maybe five hundred.
“You know, your humor pops up at the oddest moments,” he observed.
At the fifth tee, they caught up to the rag-tag foursome ahead. Morgan recognized them all: Duncan and Angus McBeth, two brothers who ran cattle on a modest spread south of town; bank president Hamilton Tasker, to whom Morgan owed nothing; and Ben Pomeroy, the mercurial owner of KROK-FM who hated Morgan simply because they competed for the same advertising dollars. They weren’t golfing at the moment, just standing around drinking beer.
Cowper nudged Morgan and pointed at one of the golf bags propped against a buckrail fence. A holstered pistol, presumably loaded, was strapped to it.
“Snakes,” Morgan murmured.
Ben Pomeroy tipped a beer bottle up and swigged the last of it.
“One more dead Indian,” he said. He winged the brown bottle into the rough, where it shattered with a sharp, distant chink.
“Hey, Ben, in California they’d give you a nickel for that bottle,” Morgan said, wiping antelope shit off his running shoe.
“Yeah? Well, maybe you oughta go out there and glue all them pieces back together, then drive out to La-La-Land to get your nickel,” Pomeroy sniped. The McBeth brothers thought it was funny.
Morgan smiled.
“I might,” he said. “Say, you been able to get back on the air since that weird outage yesterday?”
Pomeroy stared at Morgan.
“Wasn’t an outage,” he seethed. “Fuckin’ computer network went haywire. You guys gonna golf or circle-jerk?”
Tasker sliced his ball far into no-man’s-land, eager to move on. He didn’t even bother to take the mulligan, just picked up his tee and his bag, and hustled Pomeroy and the McBeth brothers down the fairway.
Morgan and Cowper watched them fan out across the fairway in almost every direction, looking for wayward balls.
“I thought small-town folks were supposed to be friendly,” Cowper said.
“Most are,” Morgan admitted, “but there’s always one turd in the punch.”
Cowper’s cell phone chirped and he plucked it off his belt.
“Cowper,” he said.
A meadowlark trilled somewhere in the domestic wilderness call Squaw Nob Country Club. Morgan swung his driver idly.
“You’re shitting me, right?” Cowper said, a finger in his open ear. “How sure? … Jesus. Okay, hold on, let me get this down …”
Cowper unfolded their scorecard and scribbled with his dwarf pencil. He glanced at Morgan, his face drawn as if a ghost had appeared before him on the fifth tee of The Weed.
“Gabriel Antonio Rodríguez … thirty-two … July, nineteen-ninety-eight … when will your guys be here? Know anything else? Yeah, yeah, fine. That’s plenty. Dave, I am really grateful, and, well, I’m sorry, too. Thanks, I’ll call you when I get to the file. See ya.”
Cowper stood looking at his notes in the margin of the scorecard for a long time. Morgan’s curiosity got the best of him.
“Well … what?” he asked.
Cowper looked up.
“John Doe isn’t John Doe anymore,” he said. “He’s Gabriel Antonio Rodriguez, age thirty-two, reported missing sometime in July ‘Ninety-eight. The FBI matched his prints.”
“So he had a criminal record?”
Cowper laughed weakly.
“No.”
“Military?”
> “No.”
“Then how’d the FBI have his prints?”
“Gabriel Antonio Rodriguez,” Cowper said as he picked up his golf bag and started across the badlands toward the parking lot, “was an undercover ATF agent.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gabe Rodriguez suffered, and that was precisely his killers’ intention. He died in pain, spiked and splayed like a flensed coyote, smelling his own blood.
While Cowper searched for lost pieces of the late agent’s mutilated body, Morgan hunted for his interrupted soul. But the secrets of Gabe Rodriguez’s shadowy life as an undercover federal agent were harder to kill than he was.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wasn’t any help. Two days had passed since the FBI’s fingerprint lab identified Rodriguez, but the ATF’s media affairs office in Washington, D.C., was apparently clueless about the case and promised to call back after making a few inquiries.
The FBI wasn’t talking, on or off the record, but the Bureau’s media spokeswoman was unctuously gracious in her rebuff. A decade of FBI embarrassments — such public contretemps as Waco, Wen Ho Lee, Olympic bombing, Whitey Bulger, Robert Hansen and more — had resulted in better phone manners if not more openness. But the ingratiating FBI spokeswoman also promised to call back after making a few inquiries.
The secretary who answered the phone at the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, which had no need for a media spokesman because it never revealed anything, made no promises to call back and no effort to make any inquiries. With a petulant sigh, she took Morgan’s name and telephone number, and said she’d pass it to the Director if she saw him. Then she hung up.
Morgan didn’t wait for calls that might never come. Cops didn’t respect newspapermen’s deadlines unless it made cops look good, and he had two days to flesh out Gabe Rodriguez, aka John Doe, for The Bullet. Who was he? What mission sent him undercover? Did he have a family? Who saw him last? What kind of man was he? Is there anyone out there missing him?
For now, all he had was a name. He needed more, and he needed it fast.
Morgan spun his Rolodex and plucked a smudged card from the O’s.
Jerry Overton had just retired from the ATF after 30 years in the Chicago office. He’d been the bureau’s point man on radical religious extremists, white supremacists and dozens of underground militia groups. It was the perfect job for the former Methodist seminary student who quit school to serve two tours with the Marines in Vietnam. After he got back to the World, he eventually earned a master’s degree in forensic psychology from the University of Illinois.
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 10