“Nina ran off into the trees. Then I heard another shot. I think they came from down by the road, out in the woods. I couldn’t swear to it, but that’s what I think. If it helps any.”
Dickie’s cell phone rang. “Langham,” he answered. Sally could feel herself slipping into impossible despair. She fought that slick downhill slide in the only way she knew. She had to find a way to be of use.
That had to explain why she was listening hard to Dickie’s voice, speaking a little too loudly into the cell phone.
Some would say she was eavesdropping. Others might call her fatally nosy. Fuck ’em. She preferred to think of herself as possessing a lively curiosity and using her powers for good, even as her nose felt as if it might fall off and her feet were turning into lumps of ice.
“Yeah. Yeah. Three-point-four miles up the Fox Creek Road from Wood’s Landing,” Dickie said, giving the location of the turnoff for Shady Grove. “The parking area at the ranch is pretty jammed right now, but by the time the DCI guys get here with the lab, we’ll have finished interviewing at least some of the witnesses. Course, by then the weather may be too bad to send these folks to town. They aren’t from around here. I kind of doubt they know much about driving in snow.”
So the sheriff had called in the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigations, and was expecting the arrival of the big RV that housed the state DCI’s Mobile Crime Lab. Sally wondered whether that was the usual procedure in what anyone would assume was a tragic firearms accident on the first day of hunting season.
“What?” Dickie was saying now. “They’re where? How long? Okay, okay. Tell ’em we want ’em out here as soon as possible, whenever that is. Okay. All right. Call me when you hear.”
He hung up.
Sally looked at him expectantly. “The crime lab?” she said.
Dickie looked grim. “Backed up to hell and gone. A pissed-off trucker shot at somebody who’d aced him out at a pump at Little America and nearly blew the whole goddamn place to Nebraska. And they just found three kids, a mom, and a dad on a ranch outside Torrington, every one of them shot through the head. Model family, the neighbors are saying. My guess is that Dad had a very, very bad day. We’re third in line for DCI’s loving attentions.”
“But they’ll be here, right? Even if something else happens,” Sally said.
Dickie began to walk toward the aspens. “This is a high-profile shooting. If we don’t put half the state’s annual crime-fighting budget into the investigation, next thing we know they’ll be skinning us alive on Entertainment Tonight: ‘Did a yahoo Wyoming hunter mistake an international celebrity for a mule deer? Or was this one more violent interlude in the great American culture wars between California and New York, and everybody else?’ ”
“And which do you think it was?” Sally asked, blinking her eyes against the snowfall as she padded along next to him, into the trees.
He stopped walking and turned to her. Dickie Langham was a placid man, but she was pushing too hard. “My dear darlin’ Mustang Sally Alder,” he said. “The Albany County Sheriff’s Department is currently in the process of securing the scene of a fatal shooting. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is in pursuit of whoever trespassed onto private land prominently posted as off-limits to hunting, took a deer, and, in an apparent act of wanton waste, left the carcass to rot. Odds are this was a horrible hunting accident. We are just barely commencing to collect evidence and interview witnesses. And right now, we’ve gotta deal with the damn parking problem and slog around in the woods, hoping to find some tracks that aren’t already buried in snow. I’ve been banging the DCI to get the crime lab in here, but by the time they get around to it, if indeed they can actually manage to get here in this weather, most of our evidence will be snowed over or frozen up or melted down or washed away or otherwise fucked. Why in holy hell would you think I had any idea what happened here?”
Sally held her hands up. “Okay, okay, sorry. Just trying to help.”
“Right. Thanks,” he said. “ I know you’re upset. I think you should just go on inside and wait with the others. Get warm. Have a cup of tea. Let us do our job.”
She knew what that meant. The county medical examiner, working on the body, taking a million pictures and five million notes. Deputies trying to comb the site without destroying evidence, in the middle of the rising blizzard. These guys earned their keep.
And she should get out of the way. She probably should just go inside. Sally became aware, for the first time, that the snow had cascaded up over the tops of her boots, seeping in, soaking her socks. No wonder her feet were freezing.
Dickie Langham walked off into the woods. Sally turned to head into the house. Then she stopped, listened, and turned back toward the driveway.
Another vehicle appeared. A battered Toyota 4Runner, with new County 5 plates.
Detective Scotty Atkins, chief investigator for the Albany County Sheriff’s Department, in his private ride. Off-duty that day, Sally deduced, but they must have called Atkins in on the emergency. He’d finally taken the Casper plates off his truck. Sally found herself wondering if that meant anything in terms of Scotty getting over his divorce from the ex who still lived up in Natrona County.
He wore flannel-lined khakis, Redwing boots, and a corduroy- collared barn jacket. Short, slightly wavy hair; no hat. Scotty Atkins was a long, lean, cold-eyed Wyoming cop who dressed like a preppie and moved like a cat. He liked his rock music dark and moody. Sally wasn’t sure what else he liked. She kind of thought he liked her, but she was trying not to think about that.
Scotty played basketball with Hawk three mornings a week, and sometimes at noon. The two seemed to enjoy and respect each other. But those games occasionally got physical. Both men were taciturn and restrained. On the surface. She knew quite a bit about what Hawk was like under the surface. She had her suspicions about Scotty. She did not like to think about anybody getting a hard elbow in the mouth in a tussle for control of the ball.
“Professor Alder,” said Atkins, towering over her, his pale green eyes searching hers quickly, then flicking down to her waterlogged boots. “Don’t you have enough sense to get in out of the snow?”
Sally was just composing her answer to this egregious opening insult when the game warden emerged from the trees, carrying something weighty in a plastic garbage bag. He headed to his truck and gently tossed the bag into the truck bed. Then he pulled out a cell phone and punched in a number. He spoke briefly into it, finished the call, and walked over to where they were standing.
“Detective Atkins,” said the warden, introducing himself. “We were at the law enforcement academy in Douglas together.”
“Been a while,” said Atkins, nodding a greeting. “You find the shooter?”
“Unfortunately, no,” said the warden. “There are two sets of boot prints leading off toward the road, and some tire treads that look like they came from a pickup or a big SUV, over some other treads. All of it already pretty snowed over. Those guys are long gone. There might be prints in the mud under the snow, but we won’t know until it melts, and by that time they probably won’t be worth much.” The game warden reached inside his jacket, pulled out a soggy pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and spent a few moments lighting a limp Vantage.
“So what’s in the garbage bag?” Atkins asked.
The game warden shut an eye against the smoke piling up under his cowboy hat, assessing the mess of vehicles in the turnaround. “The head. The sheriff asked me to leave the rest of the carcass.”
“The head was separated from the body?” Sally said, wondering what the hell kind of gun you would use to blow a head clean off a large mammal.
“Nope,” said the warden. Sally had the impression that the man might be deciding that she was an amazing idiot. “I cut the head off.”
“Cut it off?” she echoed, maybe confirming his impression.
“Have to get the brain to the state vet lab in Laramie. Standard procedure when we find an animal with spo
ngi-form encephalopathy.”
Scotty closed his eyes.
“What do you mean?” Sally asked.
“Chronic wasting disease. It’s been in the deer and elk herds around here for eight, maybe ten years, but it’s really taken off in the last year or two. Nobody knows why. These days, the vets are spending a lot of time looking at brain tissue.”
“So where was the deer shot?” Scotty asked.
The man sucked smoke, exhaled, jerked his head toward the aspens. “Out there in the woods,” he said.
Cop hilarity.
“Where on its body?” Scotty tried again.
“Right through the heart. Looks like the slug’s buried good in the chest cavity.”
“The deer’s brain is your problem,” Atkins said, as a deputy arrived to take him to the place in the grove where Nina Cruz’s body lay. “Make sure we get ballistics on the slug.”
Chapter 4
Professional Law Enforcement Officers
She stood in the parking area a moment more, snow falling around her. Sally pulled her cell phone out of an inside pocket in her jacket and called Hawk’s office. He’d be in class right now, but she could leave a message on his voice-mail. The message she left was this: “Hi, honey. Some stuff has happened out here at Shady Grove that I’d rather not discuss in an answering machine message. I’m fine, but I’ll be later than I thought getting back. You can try calling me on my cell, but the reception out here isn’t that great. I’ll try you again later. Seriously, I’m fine, so don’t worry. I love you, Jody,” she finished, calling him by the nickname she usually reserved for intimate situations. As she hung up, she realized that her use of her secret name for him was certain to alarm him. She hoped to hell he wouldn’t decide to leap into his pickup and snowplow his way out to Albany. So she called again, got his machine again, and said, “I mean it, Hawk. Don’t worry. Don’t come out here. There’s no place for you to park your truck. Dickie’s here, so if the weather and the roads are too bad for me to drive the Mustang home, I can hitch a ride with him.”
Oh yeah. Telling Hawk that Sheriff Dickie Langham was on the scene was dead certain to reassure him.
Then she made a call to another cell phone. Stone Jackson answered on the third ring. She’d found him, he said, at the McDonald’s in Riverton, where snowblindness had forced him off the road on his way to the Busted Heart. “Lovely weather you have around here. My favorite colors. White on white,” he said, clearly getting ready to launch into an extended discussion of the storm. Jackson might be from Lexington, Virginia, and Santa Monica, California, but he’d developed the Wyomingite’s habit of assuming that everyone else was, or ought to be, fascinated by shitty weather. This kind of talk would go on throughout the state for nine months or so, until summer came.
“Thomas,” said Sally, “there’s been a terrible accident.” She told him what had happened.
“I’m coming down there,” he said, talking over the din of a fast-food place capitalizing on the vulnerability of motorists to the inevitable fact of winter. He sounded wired, the way people who have just taken an unendurable blow will sometimes sound, inappropriately chipper. “I’ll just get a cup of scalding hot coffee, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Stone,” said Sally, “most of the roads between where you are and where I’m standing are closed. If they aren’t, they should be. If I were you, I’d go on down to the best motel in Riverton and let them know you’re a famous guy who needs a room even if they have to kick out some family with six kids and a hundred-year-old grandma.”
“Sally,” he said, “you’ve just told me that Nina’s dead. Somebody shot her to death, and the cops don’t know who it was. If I have to stay in some motel in Riverton, I’ll go fucking crazy. I need to be there.”
Of course he did. If Hawk had been hurt, let alone killed, she’d be fighting her way through snow wallows and roadblocks until she got to him. Through alkali wastes, boulder fields, muddy morasses of slickrock gumbo, even hails of flaming arrows. Thomas Jackson had first come to see Sally because he was worried about Nina, and now here she was calling him to say that his worst nightmare had come true. She could barely begin to imagine his state of mind.
“Look, I can’t fathom how you feel, but I understand why you need to be here,” she told Jackson. “It’s just that right now, there’s no way in hell you could get here. Come tomorrow. They’ll have opened some roads—maybe they’ll even have plowed a couple. All you’ll miss is the interrogation.”
“Interrogation?” he asked. “Did they catch the hunter?”
“No. They’re still looking, but the police are going to question everybody here. About twenty all told, presumably the staff and wannabe staff of the foundation. Most seem wacky and mildly incompetent—I can see why you call ’em Dub-Dubs. But there’s one guy, this ex-surgeon, who’s got something on the ball. He was the one who found the dead deer, and it really freaked him out. Still, the minute he found out Nina’d been shot, he snapped back into emergency mode.”
“Nels Willen’s there?” said Stone.
“Yeah, that’s his name. Do you know him?” Sally asked.
“Only forever,” said Jackson. “He’s a good ol’ Texas boy. We used to go skiing at Aspen. He was the top orthopedic surgeon in town. Half the people I know had their knees scoped by him, and Nina and I got to be friends with him when we had a place out there. Twenty years ago, she ripped up her left ACL skiing in the backcountry at Zermatt, and Nels flew all the way to Switzerland to staple her back together. I’m glad to hear he made it up there.”
“Wasn’t he here when you came out to visit yesterday?” Sally inquired.
“No. Actually, I called him and asked him to come up, and he said he’d get right on the road. Must have arrived last night. He was always an environmentalist, but lately he’s gotten real passionate on the subject of animal rights. Nina told me a couple of weeks ago that she’d recruited him to help with the fund-raising for Wild West, so I knew they were in touch.
“When I saw how weird she was acting, I wanted somebody with medical expertise to take a look at her and see if I was just overreacting, or if there might really be something wrong with her. Nels hasn’t practiced medicine in five years or so, but he’s a smart guy, and I trust him. When I told him how sketchy she’s been, how she was losing weight and throwing tantrums, he sounded really worried. I didn’t find that too reassuring.”
“What part do you think worried him the most?” said Sally.
“All of it. He’d seen her in August and noticed some of the same stuff, but not to this degree.” Jackson slurped something. Must have gotten that cup of Mickey D’s litigation coffee.
“So Willen would have been bothered enough by what you said that he’d have managed to get himself here by last night?” Sally said.
“He’s got a spread up in North Park, Colorado, now, outside the town of Rand. He could have been at Shady Grove by dinnertime yesterday, no problem. He’s lived up in the high Rockies for a long time, so the likelihood of a little snowstorm today wouldn’t scare him. For Nina, he’d get there as quick as possible, no questions asked.”
“Why?” Against the cold and the horror, Sally could feel a puzzle beginning to buzz in her brain.
Jackson sighed into his cell phone, while somebody in the background took somebody else’s order for a Quarter Pounder meal, supersized. “He loves her. Half the men who ever met Nina Cruz have fallen in wicked love with her. Hell, half the women, too. But Nels has a little more at stake than your average Nina-phile. When she left me all those years ago, she went straight to Aspen. Lived with him for two years.”
“They were lovers?” Sally couldn’t believe she was having this conversation in the middle of a crime scene in the middle of a blizzard.
“Everyone assumed so. I couldn’t say for sure. Those were the years I spent a lot of time with swarms of imaginary bats flying around my head. I’ve chosen to believe that Nels was a kind of father figure to her, taking her i
n to help her heal from all the damage I’d done. Made it easier for me to revive a friendship with him when I got my shit together. Anyhow, I’m glad he’s there. Tell him to stick around until I get there tomorrow.”
Sally had the feeling that pretty much all of the Dub-Dubs might be sticking around, given the investigation, the weather, and the likelihood that by the time they were able to get out, every motel in Laramie would be overflowing.
“Meantime,” said Jackson, “I’d better put in a call to Cat. She’s gonna have to come back from Brazil. Nina’s parents are dead, so Cat’s her next of kin.” His voice broke on the word kin.
“I’m really sorry, Thomas,” said Sally, wishing, in vain, for adequate words.
“Yeah,” he said, breathing through tears. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll be there tomorrow. Think I will try to get that motel room. Meantime, call me with whatever you know, and tell Nels to do the same.”
“Sure. Of course. What else can I do for you?” Sally asked him.
“Remind me that it’d be a real stupid thing for me to pick up a bottle of Chivas on the way to the motel.”
“You don’t need reminding,” Sally ventured.
“The hell I don’t. But I won’t. Keep in touch.” He hung up.
The scene inside Nina’s house was moving out of chaos and into a surreal order. As Sally entered, everyone seemed to be talking or whimpering or sobbing. Then Dickie Lang-ham, standing in the center of the great room like a human tent pole, cut through the cacophony. “I need quiet, right now,” he hollered.
He got it.
“Could somebody turn a few lights on in here?” Dickie asked.
Come to think of it, the house did seem dim. A couple of people walked around plugging in lamps and turning them on. Sally had to hand it to Nina Cruz. Not many people worried about phantom load, the quantity of electricity consumed by appliances that were plugged in but turned off. Nina walked the walk.
“Allow me to introduce myself to all of you,” Dickie told the group. “I am Sheriff Langham of Albany County, Wyoming, and this here sympathetic soul is Detective Scott Atkins.” Dickie waved an arm at Scotty. Scotty surveyed the room without blinking.
Bye, Bye, Love Page 4