An Obvious Fact

by Craig Johnson

  I hit the button and held the device to my ear. “Howdy.”

  “Walt, it’s Corbin.”

  “Hey, Deputy Dawg, what’s up?”

  “He was wired.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Brady Post, the ATF agent? He was wearing a wire.”

  11

  “Why didn’t they find it?”

  “Who?”

  DCI combed the interior of the Cadillac, the halogen work lights that they had brought with them augmenting those in the Hulett Police annex building. Mike Novo and I were standing in an area draped with plastic sheets where the agent’s body now lay.

  “The person who killed him.”

  Mike pushed some hair from his eyes and stared at the dead man. “They didn’t look. Whoever shot him just shot him; there’s no evidence that he was searched or tampered with after the murder.”

  I held the device, about half the size of a pack of matches. “This thing actually records?”

  He nodded, handing me the thin wire and the mic bud. “Yeah, much smaller now that they’re digital, but you still have to have an exterior mic for sound quality. He wasn’t recording at the time of his demise, and it was in the inside pocket of his vest with the mic and cord under his shirt and around his neck.”

  I held the thing up between us. “I don’t have to tell you that this is Christmas, right?”

  “No, but you do have to tell the ATF.”

  I turned to look at the woman with the familiar voice. “Hey, T. J.”

  T. J. Sherwin, the head of DCI’s lab unit, trailed numerous nicknames in her wake. I called her the Little Lady, but there were others who referred to her as the Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Bag Lady, a sobriquet that referred to the defunct supermarket that served as the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s headquarters in Cheyenne—i.e., cashiers and bag boys and bag girls.

  “They’re going to want these files before anybody else, and in my experience they don’t play well and share, at least not without a federal court order.”

  “Files?”

  “Still a dinosaur, I see.” She took the recorder from my hand and held it up to a light. “There’s a plug-in that transfers the information to a zip drive and then you download it onto a computer in an audio file. You can actually hear it, just like a real phonograph.”

  I stared at her. “C’mon, Little Lady, help a cowboy out?”

  Sherwin glanced at Novo. “Go away.”

  He stood there smiling.

  “Now.”

  “Oh. Right.” He disappeared, and T.J. indicated that I should follow her toward the back of the shop where they had set up an event table with computers and lab equipment.

  “Anything on the weapon?”

  She handed me back Lola’s .38 in a ziplock bag. “Not this.”

  “Then what?”

  She sat and began attaching cables to the tiny recorder and another thingamajig that attached to a laptop and a small black box, which swallowed a recordable CD. “Forty-gauge semi, probably a Glock, possibly a model 22.”

  She sat back in the folding chair and studied the freshly bagged gun. “Girlfriend of yours?”

  “Henry’s.”

  T. J. glanced past me to where the Bear was leaning against the fender of the DeVille. “Well, that doesn’t narrow the field.”

  “It’s Lola’s.”

  Her eyes widened just a bit. “The Lola, the one the T-bird is named for?”

  “The Lola.”

  “Oh, my.”

  I took the empty revolver from the bag and stuffed it in my jacket pocket. “It’s her son who is in Rapid City Regional Hospital.”

  “The donor cycle rider?”

  I handed her the bag. “Yep.”

  She tossed it on the table and sighed. “I was wondering what you were doing over here in Crook County.”

  “Me, too.”

  She pulled a CD from one of the devices, placed it in a paper cover, and handed it to me. “Just so you know, I have broken numerous state and federal laws by giving you this, so whatever you find, I’d just as soon you listen to it and then destroy it. The ATF will have a copy that’s permissible in court as federal evidence, so you’ve got that to fall back on, but as far as you and I are concerned this CD doesn’t exist.”

  “What CD?” I stuffed it in my jacket. “Anything else I need to know as I attempt to break the big case?”

  “He had sex.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The deceased engaged in copulation with a female no more than an hour before his death.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “For him or her?”

  I glanced at the Cheyenne Nation, who was still leaning on the Caddy but now was looking at us. “Both.”

  • • •

  “So, who else could he have fucked?”

  I made a gesture for her to lower her voice as the waitress at the Ponderosa Café brought her another medicinal Bloody Mary. “Oh, how about any of the thousands of biker bunnies bouncing around here this week?”

  My undersheriff sipped the drink from a straw, the liquid perfectly matching her fingernails. “The fuckee was Lola.”

  “Boy, both you and Henry have it out for her, huh?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I know women, he knows her, and you don’t know shit.”

  “I’m beginning to think you both might be right.”

  “So, it was a .40 that killed the agent?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that lets her off the hook for this one.” She studied me as I stared at the table. “What?”

  “Somebody mentioned a model 22 Glock.”

  “Recently?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, it would be important to know who that was.” She leaned back in her chair and massaged her temples. “So, how come nobody mentioned that I shot myself in the head at the competition last night?”

  “You don’t think the half-dozen double dirty martinis had something to do with it?”

  She yawned. “Your dog takes up the whole bed.”

  “Yep.”

  I waited, and she began studying the surface of the table as I had. “Just because it wasn’t a .38 doesn’t mean she didn’t do it.”

  “No, but—”

  “What the hell—did you decide to adopt her while I was knocked out?”

  “Gimme a motive. I just don’t see what she would’ve gained by killing Post.”

  She belched loudly. “Something she couldn’t get by fucking him.”

  I leaned in. “Are there such things?”

  “Not with me.” She cocked her head coquettishly. “Her son.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She repeated in a remedial fashion, “If the G-man was after her son—”

  I had to concede the point but then brought up my own. “Look, as far as we know she’s never killed anybody before.”

  “As far as we know.” She studied me now. “More important question: Who else have you got?”

  “Billy ThE Kiddo.”

  “The South Dakota Nazi?”

  It took me a long time to respond because suddenly the spokes in my wheel of thought began spinning. “Yep.”

  “Something?”

  “When I was talking to Irl, he mentioned a Glock 22 in Kiddo’s past, something about a lawn mower.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope; as I recall, he shot his neighbor’s lawn mower with a .40 Glock.”

  She finished off the rest of her Bloody Mary with a strong pull and then set the glass down between us. “Are we really going to go dig up some guy’s lawn?”

  I gathered my jacket from the back of my chair and looked down at her. “After I take a nap, we go have a
chat with Billy ThE himself.”

  “Where are you taking your nap? Henry has one bed and Dog has the other.”

  “Probably in Lola.”

  She shrugged, getting up after me. “Why not? It appears to be where everyone else is sleeping these days.”

  There wasn’t much human traffic, so we made quick time to the Hulett Motel’s parking lot. I opened the door to the vintage convertible and looked at the center console in the front and then at the backseat, which didn’t look nearly as big as I’d remembered.

  “I don’t think I’m going to fit.”

  She glanced in the back, spotting the Cheyenne Nation’s blanket, and then, in the passenger seat, she saw the Annotated Sherlock Holmes. “Grab the blanket and book and we’ll go down by the river and have a picnic.”

  I retrieved the supplies and shut the door. “We don’t have any food.”

  “No, but I can read and you can put your head in my lap.”

  “Sold.”

  • • •

  “Did you know that Doyle almost named Holmes Sherrinford?”

  “In some of the early drafts, but he settled on Sherlock because of a cricket player he remembered.” I kept my eyes closed, knowing full well that opening them would only encourage her.

  “Did you know the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, was a flop?”

  “Yep, but the second was a hit after Joseph Stoddart convinced both Doyle and Oscar Wilde to serialize stories for his Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The Picture of Dorian Gray was the only novel Wilde ever wrote.”

  “Does the name Sherlock mean anything?”

  “Fair-haired.”

  I listened as she flipped a page. “Second most-filmed fictional character?”

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  There was a long pause as she puzzled on something that wasn’t annotated in the book suspended above my head. “Who the hell is first?”

  “Dracula.” I opened my eyes and looked up at her. “Hey, I thought I was supposed to be taking a nap.”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  “You.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” She closed the book and set it aside. “An arrogant, drug-addicted sociopath—why do you suppose the character has been so popular through the years?”

  “His perfect humanity.”

  Her face dropped to look at me. “Explain?”

  “He’s flawed, but he has an encyclopedic mind and relies on the human element of uncanny intuition, so when scientific method runs amok, he uses his brain. Contrary to popular belief, the method Holmes uses is abduction, not deduction. Abductive reasoning is based on conclusions drawn from observation, whereas deduction is a conclusion drawn from available data and is always true.”

  “I thought Sherlock Holmes was never wrong?”

  “That would be a dreadful disadvantage to a true detective; you have to always be ready to rethink your abductions in the face of the evolving information in any case.”

  “Elementary, my dear Longmire?”

  “He never said that in a single story or novel.” I rose up and supported myself with a stiff arm. “How long was I asleep?”

  “Less than you want to know.”

  “I guess I’m done.” We stood, and I shook off the blanket, folded it, and placed it under my arm. “Any sign of Henry?”

  She closed the book and glanced around. “Nope—must still be asleep in the room.”

  “I guess we’ll leave Dog with him, then, and head over to the police station to have a chat with Billy.”

  “Sounds like a charmer.”

  We started toward the T-bird. “Oh, he is.”

  • • •

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “Made bail, so he’s scot-free.”

  “How?”

  “Somebody moved up the bail schedule, and the judge ruled him a low flight risk in that he’s a business owner and a celebrity.”

  “What about the fact that that business is in another state, as well as the assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer?”

  “The judge let that one slide because of the previous cease and desist that said you weren’t supposed to be within a hundred feet of him. Not sure about the rest.”

  Vic sat on the edge of Corbin’s desk. “What was bail?”

  The patrolman smiled. “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “Wowza.”

  “I guess the judge decided that even though he might be a low flight risk, he was going to make it tough on him by hitting him in the wallet, but Kiddo called the bluff.”

  “Where did he get a quarter of a million dollars?”

  “It was a blanket bond from one of that bunch down in Cheyenne—Liberty Bail Bonds.”

  “Libby Troon? Hard to believe she’d pop for that without a percentage as collateral.”

  He picked up a square card and tried to hand it to me. “I’ve got her number here. You could call her up and ask her who’s fronting for Billy?”

  “No, she doesn’t care for me very much. She’s contacted me and Henry about freelancing as bounty hunters for a few of her skip jobs and we’ve never bit.”

  “You could tell her it involves a murder case.”

  “That is the last piece of information I’d want Libby Troon to have.” I looked out front and could see Chief Nutter herding some bikers away from the annex building. “Who picked him up?”

  “Nobody. He just walked out and disappeared down the street.”

  “So, you think he’s still around?”

  “No, he said he was done with the rally and heading home. He also mentioned a lot of stuff about suing you, your dog, me, the city, the county, and all the fish in the Belle Fourche River.”

  “So, do you really think he went home?”

  “It’s likely.”

  “What’s the address?” He stared at me. “I’m not hunting him; I just might be able to get a piece of evidence from his next-door neighbor whose lawn mower he may have shot.”

  He stared at me some more. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Address, please?”

  He clicked on the computer and wrote it down on a Post-it, and handed it to Vic, who was closer. “It’s actually a nice part of town. From what I could tell it was his mother’s.”

  Vic stuffed the piece of paper in her shirt pocket. “I’m sure she’d be proud.”

  We walked out just as Nutter Butter shooed away the bikers and turned to look at us. “As one professional to another, have you lost your mind?”

  “I’m not so sure I had one to begin with, but thanks for adding me to your professional circle.”

  He lowered his voice. “A dead federal agent in my annex building?”

  “We weren’t sure where else to put him—or the car.”

  “You know, this shit seems to follow you wherever you go.”

  “It’s an interesting life.” Vic and I leaned against the front grille of the monstrous MRAP. “If you’re not nice to me, I won’t tell you how to start your truck.”

  He ignored me and continued. “Plus the entirety of the Division of Criminal Investigation are back there.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to handle that part.”

  “I don’t want to handle any of it.”

  I nodded toward the annex. “One of ours is dead.” The chief calmed down and took a deep breath as I continued. “Somebody in your town killed him, and I think it has to do with Bodaway Torres. Now, you know as well as I do that if we keep this quiet, whoever did it is going to start worrying, and then they’re likely to do something stupid as opposed to doing the smart thing, which is loading up and getting the hell out of here. So, you tell me what you would’ve done differently.”

  “It’s a hell of a mess.”

  �
�And our job.”

  He sighed. “You think that turd Kiddo had something to do with this, then.”

  “Yep, but I’m still trying to figure out where he came up with the bail money.”

  “TV, I guess. You think he’s got ties in Cheyenne, too?”

  “No, it’s just that Liberty Bail Bonds is the only one with pockets deep enough for a surety bond like this, and it just happens to be located in Cheyenne.”

  He shook his head, and we all sat on the bumper of the military vehicle in a dejected fashion. “Must be a lot of money in fixin’ up motorcycles on TV.”

  “He does have some other rather odd preoccupations.”

  He turned to look at me. “Like what?”

  “The back room of his cycle shop looks like a bunker for the Nazi Rotary League.”

  He absorbed that one for a while, started to say something, then stopped and started again. “How the hell did you find that out?”

  “Broke in last night and had a look-see.”

  He stood, took two paces, and turned to look at me. “You really have lost your mind, haven’t you?” He glanced at Vic. “You wanna talk to your boss here?”

  She shrugged. “I’m usually not a calming effect.”

  “What if they had caught you in there?”

  I made a noise between my compressed lips. “They did.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Irl Engelhardt did.”

  “Is there anybody else that doesn’t know what’s going on here besides me?”

  “No, I think you’re about it.”

  He closed his eyes. “Hey, do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s pretend like this little conversation didn’t happen so that I can go back to being as dumb as I have pretended to be.”

  I laughed, unable to help it. “You’re going to pretend that you’re oblivious enough to not know that a dead federal agent and an entire field laboratory from DCI have set up shop next door to your office?”

  He took a deep breath and hooked his thumbs into his Sam Browne. “I’m about a year and a half from retirement, Sheriff Longmire, and you’d be amazed at the lengths I’m willing to go to to secure the stupidity I have acquired.”