House Standoff

by Mike Lawson

  Shannon must have lied to her!

  Then she realized she was being ridiculous. If it had been the man she’d known in Chicago, he would have been in his seventies by now; the guy sitting at the table was in his forties. And except for his nose and the color of his hair and the way it was combed, he really didn’t look at all like the man she’d thought he was. She had to get a grip on herself. Shannon had turned her into a basket case.

  She walked over and took his order, hoping he didn’t notice how her hand was shaking when she wrote it down. She didn’t like it, however, when he’d asked when the café closed. It may have been a reasonable question for someone staying at the motel, but it was almost the same as asking: When will you be alone?

  While waiting for his lunch, DeMarco pulled out his phone and was pleased to see that the café had a wireless network, probably to accommodate the truckers. DeMarco was curious about the Sweetwater County Sheriff.

  A website contained a photo of Sheriff Clay Webber and confirmed that Webber had held the position for twenty-five years. The photo showed a narrow-faced man in his sixties with short gray hair and a white-brush mustache. The smile on his face looked forced, as if smiling wasn’t something he did very often.

  DeMarco learned that the sheriff’s office employed seventy-five sworn officers and about twenty-five other people who handled administrative tasks. The main office was in Rock Springs. He also learned about the various functions overseen by the sheriff, which included emergency management, search and rescue, animal control, and management of the county detention center. No information was provided about Deputy Jim Turner, the man leading the investigation into Shannon’s death.

  The impressive thing was that although the sheriff only served about 45,000 citizens, his jurisdiction was all 10,500 square miles of Sweetwater County. The area of Sweetwater County, Wyoming was almost identical to the area of the entire state of Massachusetts.

  DeMarco finished lunch, and as he was paying his bill, he asked Harriet, “Can you tell me where I can find a sheriff’s deputy named Jim Turner? I was told he lived here in Waverly.”

  He could tell Harriet was reluctant to answer the question but finally she said: “He’s usually out riding around, but he has an office in the municipal building on McCormick Road. I’m not going to tell you where he lives. I’d suggest you drive over to the municipal building and see if he’s there. Or I imagine you could call the sheriff’s office in Rock Springs and they could get word to him that you need to see him.”

  “Thanks,” DeMarco said, thinking Harriet wasn’t exactly the friendliest person he’d ever met and he wondered how hard it was going to be to get her to talk to him about Shannon.

  Harriet watched DeMarco walk back to the motel. He may not have been the man she’d thought he was when she first saw him—when he’d almost made her heart stop—but there was something about him that made her leery. He obviously wasn’t a trucker or a gas worker; he just didn’t have that look about him. And why did he want to talk to Jim Turner? For her own protection, it would be good to know more about him and see what he was doing in Waverly. She picked up the phone and called Turner.

  She said, “I thought you’d like to know that a man who just left my place asked me where he could find you. I told him you might be in your office.”

  “Who is he?” Turner asked.

  “I don’t know, but he’s staying over at the motel.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Dark hair. Maybe six foot. He was wearing a dark blue golf shirt with the name of some golf course on it.”

  Harriet hung up, thinking tomorrow she’d find an excuse for calling Turner and see if he’d tell her anything about the guy, whoever he was.

  9

  DeMarco found the municipal building and was pleased to see a dusty, white sedan with a light rack on the roof parked in front of the building. On the sides of the vehicle was the word “Sheriff” in large letters placed over a seven-pointed star that said “Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office.” He walked into the building and found a young woman standing in front of a vending machine studying the selection of candy, chips, and cookies. DeMarco asked her if she knew where he could find a deputy named Jim Turner.

  She pointed to her left. “End of the hall,” she said without looking at him. She appeared to be having an intense, internal debate with herself as to whether or not she should get a snack.

  DeMarco walked down the hall and came to an unmarked office with an open door and found a man sitting behind a desk, his black ankle-high boots up on the desk. He was wearing a uniform consisting of hunter green pants, a short-sleeved gray shirt, and a wide belt holding a pistol, handcuffs, a radio, and all the other typical law enforcement paraphernalia. On the desk was a half-eaten sandwich and a can of Coke, and he was holding a catalog from a sporting goods store named Cabela’s. On the front cover of the catalog was a deer with an enormous set of antlers. The deer looked glassy-eyed and DeMarco suspected it was dead.

  The man stood up when he saw DeMarco standing in the doorway. He was at least six foot four with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and was probably the handsomest son of a bitch that DeMarco had ever seen who wasn’t a movie star. He had wavy dark hair, full lips, a blunt chin, and a perfect, straight nose. He reminded DeMarco of Rock Hudson or maybe a young Tom Selleck. In a cowboy hat, Turner could have been one of the models who’d posed as the Marlboro Man.

  “Can I help you?” Turner said.

  “My name’s Joe DeMarco. I wanted to—”

  “Yeah, I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Expecting me? How did you know—”

  “Sam Clarke told me you’d checked into his place and was asking about the Doyle woman’s murder. I also got a call from Harriet Robbins who said there was a guy who wanted to see me and she described you.”

  Talk about jungle drums. Or maybe smoke signals would be a more appropriate analogy.

  Turner sat back down and pointed DeMarco to a chair.

  “Ol’ Sam gave me your address and I looked you up on the Internet. I was surprised to see you were accused of killing some congressman.”

  “I was proven innocent.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, but that’s not the only thing that got my attention. One of the articles I read said you’re John Mahoney’s fixer.”

  Fucking Internet. “The article’s wrong. I’m not anyone’s fixer. I’m just a lawyer who works for Congress. And the only reason I’m here is because Shannon was a good friend of mine and I want to understand what happened to her. I’m not here in any official capacity.”

  “You’re telling me you flew out here on your own dime?” Turner sounded skeptical.

  “Yeah, I did. This is personal for me.”

  “So you’re not here on behalf of Mahoney, a man I have to tell you isn’t all that popular in this state.”

  “Mahoney isn’t involved at all. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”

  He could tell Turner didn’t believe him.

  “So what exactly do you want, Mr. DeMarco?”

  “I want to know who killed Shannon Doyle and why. And I’ll be frank with you, Deputy. I’m having a hard time believing that some trucker passing through just happened to see her going into her motel room and decided to rob and kill her.”

  “How do you know that’s something we’re investigating?”

  Whoops. DeMarco couldn’t say he knew that because he’d listened in on a call between the sheriff and Congressman Burns. That could be a problem for Burns. He said, “I talked to a reporter who worked on the story and that’s what he told me.”

  “Well, the reporter’s right, but if I get my hands on the guy who talked to him, I’ll make sure he’s fired. But right now that’s the best theory we have, that someone passing through town, most likely a trucker or someone who’d stopped late at night at the truck sto
p, saw Miss Doyle, decided to rob her, and killed her in the process.”

  “But how do you know it wasn’t someone who lives here, someone local?”

  “I don’t for sure, but that seems pretty unlikely. She was only here in town for a couple of months and didn’t make any enemies that I could find. Everyone I spoke to about her liked her, including my wife.”

  “Did you know Shannon?”

  “No. I’d seen her around town and in the Hacienda Grill a few times, but I never spoke to her. But my wife met her when she came to talk to this book club that Carly belongs to. Anyway, Mr. DeMarco, we’re doing everything we can to find out who killed her. We collected about a million fingerprints from her motel room but none of them has led to someone with a record. And none of the prints in the room belong to anyone here in Waverly other than Sam Clarke’s daughter who cleans the rooms. The slug that was taken from her body was a .22 caliber but we have no way to trace it to a specific weapon. There was no shell casing in the room, so the killer either used a revolver or picked up the casing. And Miss Doyle never told anyone, including the sheriff’s office, that anyone was bothering her or harassing her or threatening her or anything like that.

  “What we’re doing right now is running truckers who passed through that day through law enforcement databases, looking for anyone who stands out. But most long-haul drivers don’t have felony records because the trucking companies usually won’t employ them if they do. So we’re going the extra yard when it comes to Miss Doyle, and a couple of clerks in the office in Rock Springs are contacting law enforcement where these truckers live to see if any of them have had run-ins with the law, like drug issues or beating up their wives or getting into fights with their neighbors, anything that might set off any alarm bells. But that’s going to take some time because a lot of trucks roll down that highway every day.

  “We also took photos of the slug removed from Miss Doyle’s body, you know, photos showing striations from the barrel, and sent them to the FBI to see if the same weapon was used in another crime. So far we haven’t heard back from the bureau, but as it’s only been a few days, that’s not surprising.”

  DeMarco was surprised that Turner was being so open with him regarding the status of the investigation. And although it sounded as if he was doing a lot, it still bothered DeMarco that Turner didn’t appear to be looking at all in the direction of a local who might have had a motive.

  DeMarco said, “What about the people who live in the trailers behind the motel?”

  “I’ve checked out all of them. They’re all gas workers and most of them have been here for months and have never gotten into any kind of trouble other than drinking too much. They also make decent money and wouldn’t have much reason for stealing a woman’s purse. Anyway, like I said, I checked them all out and none of them struck me as a likely suspect.”

  DeMarco said, “Did you think about seeing if anyone here in Waverly owns a .22.”

  Turner smiled. “Mr. DeMarco, you’re in Wyoming. Now I don’t know if it’s true, but I read somewhere that there are more guns per capita in Wyoming than in any other state in the country, and it’s the state with the fewest regulations when it comes to owning, buying, or carrying a firearm. There’s no central firearms registry. People in this state wouldn’t stand for that. If you buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer there’s a little paperwork, but if you buy one at a gun show or from your neighbor or inherit one from your daddy, there’s basically no paperwork at all. So there’s no way I could possibly find out who owns a .22 in this town and if I was to go around asking people if they did, they’d be within their rights to tell me to go to hell.”

  So much for that bright idea. DeMarco thought for a moment about asking about the BLM agent who was killed then decided not to. According to Gloria, that investigation was being handled by the FBI and he’d rather talk to the FBI than a guy who worked for an outfit that apparently didn’t have a problem with Hiram Bunt’s cowboys pointing weapons at federal officers.

  Turner said, “Now if there’s nothing else, I need to finish my lunch and get back to work.”

  “Just one other thing,” DeMarco said. “I know Shannon was interested in an incident that happened here involving a bunch of wild horses that were killed. I know this because she told her sister and her literary agent. Did you ever solve that case?”

  “Well, first of all, it wasn’t my case to solve. The horses were shot on federal land and the BLM was leading the investigation. But I’m about a hundred percent sure I know who did it, and I told the BLM, but they couldn’t prove it any more than I could.”

  “So who did it?” DeMarco asked. “I read an article that implied that a man named Hiram Bunt might have killed them because of some dispute with the BLM over the horses being on his property.”

  Turner laughed. “Hiram would never do that. I mean, he might have wanted to but his wife loves horses and she would have killed him if he ever did.”

  “So who killed the horses?”

  “A guy named Brodie Miller, who was still living with his mother when he was forty. His father used to beat the hell out of both Brodie and his mom until he broke his neck falling off his own front porch when he was drunk. Anyway, when Brodie was a teenager, he used to go around shooting cats with a bow and arrow until he shot the wrong person’s cat and got the crap knocked out of him. He liked to shoot prairie dogs and birds with a shotgun loaded with double-ought shot because he got a kick out of seeing them blown apart. And I’m pretty sure he shot the horses because of the weapon that was used, which is fairly rare, but not unique, and Brodie owned that kind of weapon. Brodie just likes to kill things.”

  “Jesus. Does this guy live in Waverly?”

  “Not anymore. Brodie’s currently residing at the state penitentiary in Rawlins. He raped a retarded girl, and because of that, and because the judge knew Brodie was going to end up killing a person someday, he was sentenced to twenty years.”

  “I see,” DeMarco said.

  “Anything else, Mr. DeMarco?”

  “No, I guess not. And thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” DeMarco said.

  “So what are you going to do now? Personally, I think the best thing would be for you to fly back to Washington and let me do my job.”

  “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do next. Since I’ve never been in this part of the country before, I might do a little sightseeing before I leave.”

  Turner stared at DeMarco for a couple of heartbeats. “Sir, I have to tell you something. As you’re not law enforcement and have no jurisdiction when it comes to Miss Doyle’s murder, I won’t tolerate you doing some sort of independent investigation and going around questioning folks.”

  “Really,” DeMarco said. “You’re going to stop me from talking to people?”

  Turner’s jaw clenched. “You don’t want to aggravate me, sir. I’ve been pretty pleasant towards you but that can change in a hurry.”

  Turner didn’t know what to make of DeMarco

  The sheriff had sent him to New York once to take an anti-­terrorism class put on by Homeland Security and the NYPD. Sweetwater County, Wyoming, wasn’t a likely terrorist target, but attending the class was mandatory for the county to get some of those anti-terrorism federal funds.

  He met a couple of NYPD detectives at the class named Morelli and Carlucci, and they took him to one of those bars in Manhattan where cops never paid for drinks. Morelli and Carlucci were hard-looking bastards who seemed laid back, but their eyes were constantly in motion studying everyone around them. They wore cheap suits and rubber-soled shoes and carried saps in their back pockets. After a few drinks, they admitted that the way they often dealt with New York’s habitual criminals was to take them into an alley and pound the snot out of them.

  DeMarco reminded him of the two detectives. He even looked a bit like Carlucci. And he didn’t look like some pol
itician’s flunky or what Turner thought a political flunky would look like. He didn’t have the requisite air of slickness about him. As for him being Mahoney’s fixer, he didn’t know what that meant or what a fixer did. The only fixer he’d ever heard of was that guy who went to jail for paying off a porn star who’d slept with the president. Whatever the case, Sweetwater County wasn’t Washington, D.C. and DeMarco was completely out of his element.

  He wondered if she knew that DeMarco was looking into the writer’s death. If she didn’t know already, she’d probably know before the day was out, the way news traveled in this town. What he really wanted to do was ask her that if she had done it, had she been smart enough to dump the gun and the writer’s laptop someplace they couldn’t be found. But, of course, she was smart enough—and no good could come from him asking a question like that.

  10

  DeMarco was impatient to talk to Harriet but figured he should wait until tonight and try to catch her just before the café closed. Until then, he’d do a little sightseeing as he’d told handsome Jim Turner, and get the lay of the land.

  Before setting out he drove over to the truck stop convenience store to top off his gas tank and buy a couple of bottles of water. While paying for the water, he asked the clerk if he could tell him where Hiram Bunt’s ranch was. If the clerk asked why he wanted to know, DeMarco would have said that he wanted to see the place where the famous standoff had occurred—maybe adding that he really admired what Hiram had done—but the clerk never asked. He told DeMarco to head east on I-80 and then take County Road 23 north and look for a big sign saying Bunt Ranch.

  The land near Waverly was sprinkled with rocks and sagebrush—and not much else. The vista was mostly the pale-yellow color of dry grass or hay, with the occasional splotch of green. He didn’t see a single tree unless it was planted in someone’s yard. DeMarco’s overall impression was: flat, dusty, dry, and unappealing. Shannon certainly would have found something complimentary and poetic to say about the ­landscape—capturing in words its vastness and the subtle splendor of the high desert foliage—but to DeMarco, flat and dry was good enough. He didn’t see any of the wildlife known to inhabit the area, no pronghorn, mule deer, or wild horses. He didn’t even see a rabbit. He did see a lot of barbed wire fencing, a bunch of tanks he assumed were for storing natural gas, a couple of windmills, and a few cows. He tried to imagine the area without signs of human habitation and industry—the way it had looked when millions of buffalo roamed the plains—but couldn’t. Mankind had made too much of a negative impact. It just struck him as a stark, wind-whipped place to live. He suspected that the natives would take exception to his opinion and wouldn’t appreciate an east coaster’s view of their habitat, but the truth was that it wasn’t Chesapeake Bay.