by Mike Lawson
Liked them? How in the hell could she have liked a bunch of assholes who’d get into an armed confrontation with FBI agents?
“What about Bunt? Did she ever talk to him?” DeMarco asked.
“I don’t know. I imagine she would have wanted to, but I don’t know if she ever did.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I know his family has owned the Bunt Ranch going back to the days before Wyoming was even a state. His ancestors actually fought the Shoshone and the Ute when they first arrived out here. He’s rich. In addition to what he’s made from raising cattle, he’s made a lot of money off natural gas. The area around Waverly is loaded with natural gas. He also owns property and businesses in Waverly and Rock Springs and Red Desert and the other little towns along I-80. When it comes to Waverly, he’s basically a feudal lord. He handpicked the mayor and the city council, and the county sheriff probably wouldn’t arrest him if he committed murder in broad daylight.”
“I don’t understand that. Why would the sheriff be close to a guy who got into an armed standoff with the government?”
“Well, first of all, Wyoming is no different than any place else. Politicians cozy up to rich people because rich people help them get elected. And Sheriff Clay Webber may be a cop, but he’s also a politician who has to get elected every four years and Hiram Bunt helps make that happen. But you also have to understand that a lot of people in Wyoming take a dim view of the federal government in general. As far as most Wyomingites are concerned, the people in Washington, D.C. are representing the interests of city dwellers who live in California and New York, cities where millions of people live, and places that have nothing in common with the towns in Wyoming. People here don’t want the federal government imposing a bunch of rules on them; they figure they can make up their own rules without any outside help. As for the standoff, the sheriff and other state politicians are basically on Bunt’s side when it comes to the federal government having too much control over the use of public lands and the sheriff refused to get involved. He said Bunt hadn’t broken any county laws and the feds were going to have to resolve the issue without his help. He never said he approved of Bunt’s facing down the agents, but he never said he disapproved.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said, thinking that Congressman Wilbur Burns, for either personal or political reasons, had also sided with Hiram Bunt in his battle against the government. What the hell was wrong with these people? But he didn’t see how the sheriff’s position on the standoff would be connected to him investigating Shannon’s death. Murder wasn’t a federal crime; it was a local one.
“Let me ask you this,” DeMarco said. “Did anything at all happen in Waverly while Shannon was there, something big, something involving Bunt, that might have interested her?”
“The only noteworthy thing that’s happened in Waverly recently was that a BLM agent was killed near Bunt’s ranch about a month ago.”
“Really. Who killed him?”
“No one knows. But the case is being investigated by the FBI, out of their office in Casper, and not by the sheriff.”
“Was Shannon looking into the BLM agent’s death?”
“I don’t know, but I doubt it. Shannon didn’t write true crime or crime fiction. But I know she knew the BLM agent. She told me he was a sweet young guy who she’d see having dinner by himself at the main restaurant in Waverly and she felt sorry for him. He ate by himself because folks in Waverly mostly consider the BLM the enemy.”
Gloria paused and said, “You know, the person who might be able to tell you more about what Shannon was doing is an old gal named Harriet Robbins. She owns a café directly across the highway from where Shannon was staying, and Shannon told me that Harriet was the best source of gossip in Waverly. Anyway, I got the impression that she and Shannon became close. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you, but you might want to give her a try.”
7
The town of Waverly, Wyoming is about a forty-minute drive east of Rock Springs. It straddles I-80 for about two miles and is a ramshackle collection of small businesses, gas stations, modest houses, a single church, an elementary school, and a couple of restaurants. There didn’t appear to be any zoning laws. Next to homes were fenced-in areas containing equipment and bundles of pipe that DeMarco assumed were used for extracting or transporting natural gas or oil. The houses ranged from dilapidated shacks to well-tended middle-class homes. Surrounding the town were miles of flat land covered by sagebrush. He didn’t find the place the least bit picturesque and he doubted it was a magnet for tourists.
DeMarco’s first stop was the motel where Shannon had been staying. Behind the motel were approximately thirty travel trailers and RVs, ranging in size from twenty to forty feet. The motel itself was a two-story structure with twenty-four rooms, twelve rooms on each floor. As he’d learned when Congressman Burns talked to the Sweetwater County sheriff, Shannon had been staying in a room on the ground floor, but DeMarco didn’t know which one. Across the highway from the motel was a café, a truck stop with an array of gasoline and diesel pumps, and a 7-Eleven-like convenience store. All the rooms in the motel faced the truck stop.
DeMarco hadn’t bothered to call ahead to reserve a room, figuring that finding accommodations in a small town in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t be a problem. What he didn’t realize was that thanks to natural gas drilling and exploration near Waverly, every room in both of the town’s motels, as well as bedrooms rented out in private homes, were almost always filled with workers. DeMarco saw one of the rooms on the ground floor of the motel had a sign on it saying Office. He walked over to it. The door to the room was open and there was a stout man sitting on a couch, legs up on a small table in front of him, watching television. He appeared to be Native American, his skin reddish-bronze and grooved with creases, and he had two long, gray braids hanging down to his shoulders. He could have been anywhere in age from sixty to eighty; it was impossible for DeMarco to tell. He was wearing a turquoise Western shirt with snap buttons, worn jeans, and scuffed cowboy boots.
DeMarco said, “Hi. I’d like a room.”
The man studied DeMarco for a moment, then said, “Well, you’re in luck. A guy just checked out because he had some kind of family emergency and had to get back to Texas. How long you going to want the room for?”
“I don’t know. Probably just a couple of days. Can I pay day to day?”
“Sure, if you got a credit card that works.”
DeMarco smiled. “I do,” he said.
The man got off the couch with a grunt; he was about five foot six and bowlegged. He limped over to a small dining area with a table that would seat two; there was something wrong with his left leg, maybe a bad hip. Near the table was a two-burner propane stove and a half-size refrigerator. He took a plastic box off the top of the refrigerator, a box that might have once been used for holding fishing tackle, and pulled out a registration form printed on a five-by-eight index card. He put a credit card reader on the kitchen table and plugged it into a phone jack. Not a high-tech operation. He handed the registration form to DeMarco and said, “Fill that out.”
DeMarco completed the registration form and handed it back to the motel manager. The manager looked at it and said, “Washington D.C. We don’t get too many folks from back east out here. What brings you to Waverly?”
DeMarco thought for a second about saying he was on vacation and just wanted to see Wyoming. Then he thought: Why lie? The whole point of him being in Waverly was to find out what had happened to Shannon and to do that he needed to talk to people and ask questions. He wasn’t on some secret mission; the more people who knew what he was doing the higher the likelihood of someone telling him something useful.
DeMarco said, “What’s your name?”
“Sam,” the motel manager said. “Sam Clarke.”
“Call me Joe,” DeMarco said. “And the reason I’m here is a good frien
d of mine was killed right in this motel.”
“You talking about that pretty, writer lady?”
“That’s right. Shannon Doyle. She meant a lot to me and I’m just trying to understand what happened to her.”
“Jim Turner thinks— “
“Who’s Jim Turner?”
“The deputy in charge of the investigation. He thinks it was some trucker passing through, maybe some guy addicted to drugs who needed money, and he spotted Miss Doyle going into her room and decided to rob her.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard too, but I have to tell you, Sam, I’m having a hard time buying that story. I mean, and no offense intended, but this motel doesn’t strike me as catering to a rich clientele. Why would anyone think that someone staying here would have much money on them?”
“Hell, I don’t know. And what doesn’t seem like much money to you can be a lot of money to some guy who’s broke.”
“That’s true. But do you have any other theories as to what might have happened to her? For example, could she have made an enemy out of someone living here?”
“That girl? No way. Everybody liked her. I liked her. Plus people here don’t go around killing people. The last time somebody was murdered in Waverly was ten years ago. This poor vet who had PTSD and shot his wife, then killed himself.”
“What about that BLM agent who was killed recently?”
“That didn’t happen here in town. And except for Miss Doyle, that’s the only other murder that’s happened in, like I said, at least ten years.”
“Anyone know why the BLM agent was killed?”
For the first time, Sam looked away and seemed uncomfortable. “No one knows what happened to that kid. The FBI is investigating that one. Look, I need to track down my daughter and get her over to clean your room. Why don’t you go get some lunch and your room should be ready by the time you’re done.”
Seeing he wasn’t going to get much more out of Sam, DeMarco said, “The food in that café across the highway any good?”
Sam smiled. “Depends on who’s cooking. If it’s Harriet, the lady who owns the place, it’s pretty mediocre. Sometimes worse than mediocre. If it’s Billy, then it’s okay. When you walk in there, if you see a Mexican-looking guy in the kitchen you can order anything on the menu. If Harriet’s cooking, I’d stick with a sandwich.”
Sam stood in the doorway to his room/office, watching as DeMarco crossed the highway and proceeded to the café. He didn’t know what to make of DeMarco. For some reason—and maybe only because of the way he combed his dark hair straight back and had an Italian sounding name—he reminded him of the hood played by Robert De Niro in that mafia movie Goodfellas. But it was hard to imagine why a mafia hood would come to Waverly. Plus the guy was from D.C.—a place known for crooked politicians, not gangsters.
He pulled his cell phone out of a pocket and called his daughter.
She answered the phone, sounding groggy. He said, “Are you still in bed?”
“No,” she said. “I was just doing some things around the house.” He was sure she was lying and he’d woken her up. He was also about ninety percent certain she was using again. And he suspected that might not be the biggest problem she had, although he found it hard to believe she could have done something like that.
“You need to get over here and start cleaning the rooms. And start with Room 9. A new guy just checked in and I imagine the guy who checked out left a mess.”
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” she said.
Goddamnit, he thought. She was destroying her life. It was a good thing her mother wasn’t alive to see what she’d become and that none of the assholes she’d dated had knocked her up. And now, as if her luck couldn’t get any worse, some guy from Washington was poking into the writer’s death. He had to find a way to ask her about the gun, not that she was likely to tell him the truth. And about the earrings too, to see if he could get her to admit what she’d done, but at this point the earrings hardly mattered.
After he spoke to his daughter, he sat for a bit gnawing on a toothpick. It occurred to him that maybe the best thing to do when it came to DeMarco was to get the law involved. That was dangerous because Jim Turner might decide to help DeMarco, but he doubted that. Turner wouldn’t want an outsider digging into his business. Then there was the fact that Turner had his own big secret he was trying to keep. No way would he want that getting out, not if he wanted to keep his job. Yeah, Turner might just move DeMarco along.
He called Turner, saying, “Jim, it’s Sam Clarke. I thought you might want to know a guy from Washington just checked into the motel.”
“Washington?” Turner said.
“Washington, D.C.”
“Okay, but why are you calling me?”
“Because he said the reason he’s here is he’s looking into the death of that writer who got killed.”
Sam heard Turner inhale sharply and he didn’t say anything for a beat. “What’s this guy’s name?”
“DeMarco. Joe DeMarco. I got his address if you want it.”
“Yeah, give it to me.”
Sam read off the address written on the registration card.
Turner said, “You got any idea who he is? I mean is he a reporter or a private investigator or a cop, anything like that?”
“I don’t know. All I know is what’s on the registration form. And he didn’t tell me anything about himself. Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know about him being here.”
“I appreciate that, Sam. And do me a favor, will you?
“What’s that?”
“Keep an eye on him and if you learn more about him or if he does anything that strikes you as strange, let me know.”
Turner disconnected the call and closed his eyes, thinking: Would this nightmare never end?
He didn’t think she’d killed the writer—but she might have. She had the stones to do something like that, particularly if she felt threatened, and Doyle had posed a threat. And as bad as he felt about what had happened to Doyle, he had no intention of doing anything more than he was already doing. He wasn’t going to probe any deeper. He wasn’t going to risk everything—her, himself, his family—for a person he’d barely known.
He sat for a moment, mulling things over, then called Clay Webber and told the sheriff that there was a guy from D.C. in Waverly who appeared to be looking into Shannon Doyle’s murder. As much as he hated to tell his boss anything, he had to keep the sheriff in the loop when it came to such a high profile case. Naturally, the sheriff wasn’t happy to hear about DeMarco, but only because he didn’t want any outsider poking into a crime under his jurisdiction, and particularly not someone from D.C. As he’d expected, the sheriff told him to find out more about DeMarco, to keep tabs on him, and to keep him informed.
He sat a bit longer, then made a second call, figuring it couldn’t hurt. And maybe it might even help. Hiram had his own way of dealing with folks he didn’t like hanging around town.
A gruff voice answered, saying, “Yeah?”
“It’s Jim Turner.”
“I can see that on my phone. I’m in the middle of something. What do you want?”
What a prick. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Bunt, but there’s something I thought you should know.”
8
The café had a counter fronted by six red-topped stools and there were eight tables with white Formica tops and red Naugahyde-covered chairs. On the walls were photos of what DeMarco suspected was the land around Waverly: large, grassy areas that seemed to go on forever, striking red rock formations, windmills standing like sentinels, everything photographed with dramatic morning or evening skies in the background.
Four men were in the café, all wearing jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps. One man wore a Peterbilt cap, and DeMarco figured the men were most likely truckers who’d parked their rigs at the nearby truck stop. Tw
o were sitting at the counter; another was at a table by himself fiddling with an iPad. The fourth man was standing near the cash register paying a stout, gray-haired woman. The woman’s hair was thick and cut short, no more than an inch long. She wouldn’t have to brush or comb it in the morning; all she’d have to do was rub her hand across her head. She was a tough-looking old bird.
DeMarco took a seat at one of the tables where he could see the motel across the highway. From where he was seated, it would be easy to observe people going in and out of their rooms but it would be difficult to see their faces clearly. DeMarco was also relieved that a “Mexican-looking guy” was in the cooking area behind the counter standing in front of a grill flipping burgers. He picked up the menu and glanced at the offerings, and a moment later the woman who’d been at the cash register came over and said, “What’ll you have?”
He figured the woman had to be Harriet, but DeMarco decided not to introduce himself. He wanted to talk to her when she was alone. He said, “I’ll have a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke.”
She jotted down his order and turned to leave but he said, “Oh, what time does this place close? I’m staying at the motel over there.”
She hesitated then said, “Nine, unless I feel like closing earlier. Or later.”
Harriet had barely noticed the man walk into the café and take a seat at a window table. After she’d collected the money from the trucker who’d just finished his lunch, she reached for an order pad and started toward his table—and stopped abruptly. Oh, Jesus! The guy was the spitting image of a man she’d known in Chicago, a man she knew had killed half a dozen people.