by Mike Lawson
About fifteen miles from Waverly, he saw a sixteen-foot wide metal gate and on the gate was a wooden sign that said “Bunt Ranch.” Below the words, burned into the sign, was the letter B inside a circle. He figured that was Bunt’s brand, which made him wonder, in an era of GPS tracking devices and barcoding, if ranchers still branded their cattle. Off in the distance was a brick three-story house with white columns supporting a second-story balcony. It looked a bit like a Southern plantation house transplanted from Georgia.
There were several outbuildings, which he guessed were stables or barns or equipment sheds. He also noticed a couple of fenced-off areas containing a complex assembly of gauges and valves and red-painted pipes, which were possibly associated with natural gas collection or distribution, but he didn’t know for sure.
He tried to imagine Hiram Bunt standing defiantly in front of the gate alongside a bunch of guys in cowboy hats carrying rifles, facing off federal agents dressed in tactical gear. The feds should have never let the arrogant asshole get away with it.
About three miles south of Hiram’s place, DeMarco saw a black, lockable mailbox with the word Bunt on it. A closer look revealed the names Steven and Elaine Bunt, who he assumed were people related to Hiram.
After driving around aimlessly for a couple of hours, he headed back to Waverly. As he was entering the town, he spotted a restaurant called the Hacienda Grill. The parking lot was about half full. He decided to stop for a beer.
The dining room had a Mexican motif—sombreros hanging on the walls; bright, multicolored placemats on the tables; a couple of small, artificial Saguaro cacti in the corners. At the back of the place was a bar with a small dance floor.
He remembered Gloria Brunson telling him how Shannon had danced with some of the cowboys and had a momentary twinge of jealousy. He had never taken Shannon dancing because he always felt like an uncoordinated doofus trying to dance to the fast songs. Now he regretted that.
Walking into the bar he had the feeling of being in an old western movie, the one where the gunslinger walks into the saloon and everyone in the place turns to stare. At the bar were four men dressed in smudged jeans and T-shirts, as if they’d just come from work. There were only three women in the place, one behind the bar pouring the drinks and two others sitting with men at tables near the empty dance floor.
DeMarco went up to the bar and ordered a bottle of Bud and took it over to a table where he could see a baseball game playing on a television over the bar. The Rockies—the closest major league baseball team to this part of Wyoming—were playing the LA Dodgers. DeMarco didn’t care which team won. He normally rooted for the Nationals and booed the New York Yankees just because they were the Yankees.
He’d only been there about ten minutes when a group of four men entered the bar, all of them wearing cowboy boots, two of them wearing cowboy hats. They took a seat at a table a few feet from DeMarco and one of the men walked up to the bar to order drinks.
The man was about six feet tall with a lanky build. He would have been handsome if he’d had a bit more chin. His hair was a dirty blond color and long, touching his collar. He went to the end of the bar and crooked a finger at the bartender, a pretty Hispanic woman wearing a frilly white blouse that left her shoulders bare. She walked down to the end of the bar and they put their heads close together. The man must have said something funny because the bartender tipped back her head and laughed. She had a long, graceful neck.
Four beers in hand, he walked back to the table where his friends were sitting and one of them said, “You keep messing with that, Sonny, you’re gonna wake up some night like that one guy did and find your wife holding a knife in one hand and your little dick in the other.”
The man sounded serious but Sonny laughed.
DeMarco returned to his room; he still had a couple of hours to kill before going to see Harriet. He flopped down on the bed and turned on the television and saw it was tuned to CNN—and there was Mahoney’s white-haired head and large red face filling the screen. The story was about Mahoney’s so-called trade mission to China, and he was sitting at a banquet table with Chinese president Xi Jinping, smiling, a glass of some brownish liquid in front of him that DeMarco suspected was bourbon. The picture changed to the grinning face of Anderson Cooper, who had apparently decided to make Mahoney his bitch after the merger story. Cooper was saying how Mahoney was supposed to be in China giving Jinping a hard time about Chinese trade practices but had spent the day touring Chinese distilleries. DeMarco hoped that Mahoney didn’t see the story and decide to call and ask him what he was doing to find the leaker. He tapped buttons on the television remote until he found the golf channel.
At eight, he headed over to the café. There were only two other men in the place. He again sat at a table by himself and ordered meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner. Billy, the guy who’d cooked his lunch, wasn’t in the kitchen and Harriet was functioning as cook, waitress, and cashier. The meatloaf was mediocre.
By eight forty-five, DeMarco was the only customer in the café. Harriet was in the kitchen, cleaning up in there, and DeMarco walked over to the counter and said, “Could I get another Coke?” The café didn’t serve alcohol.
“No, I’m closing up. You ready to settle your bill?”
“Why’d you rat me out to the deputy, Harriet?”
She turned and scowled at DeMarco. The lady had a first-class scowl. “What did you say?”
“I went over to see Turner after I had lunch here today, and when I got to his office he told me that you’d called and told him I was looking for him. I’m just curious as to why you did that.”
Harriet didn’t answer him immediately, then said, “Like I told you, I’m closing and it’s time for you to settle up.”
“Harriet, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I was a friend of Shannon Doyle’s.”
Harriet raised a white eyebrow. She said, “Huh. So you’re DeMarco. Shannon told me about you. Made it sound like you were the one who got away.” This was the same thing Shannon’s sister had said, although the way Harriet said it, it was as if she couldn’t imagine DeMarco being a catch worth keeping.
DeMarco said, “I didn’t get away, Harriet. I was in love with Shannon but when her book hit it big, she moved out to Hollywood and left me behind. It wasn’t my choice.”
“Shannon told me you work for that blowhard, John Mahoney.”
“I do work for Mahoney in a way, but Mahoney isn’t the reason I’m here in your lovely little town.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I want to know what happened to Shannon. I want to know who killed her and I’m not buying the story being peddled by the sheriff that some trucker did it. So talk to me. Tell me what you know about what she was doing here. Tell me if she could have gotten cross-wired with someone local who might have killed her.”
Harriet shook her head.
“Harriet, I was told that you spent a lot of time talking to Shannon and that you were close to her.”
“Who told you that?” To DeMarco that didn’t sound like a casual question. It was as if Harriet was seriously concerned that someone knew she’d been talking to Shannon.
“A writer named Gloria Brunson who lives in Rock Springs. She was the one who introduced Shannon to the Waverly book club. And if what Gloria said is true, I figure you might have a better idea than anyone about something that Shannon might have done that would have given someone a motive for murdering her.”
Again Harriet shook her head.
“Did you like Shannon, Harriet?”
Surprisingly, Harriet’s eyes welled up with tears. “I loved that girl. But I don’t know you and I’m not talking to you.”
DeMarco studied her for a moment then said, “What are you afraid of, Harriet?”
“I’m not afraid of a damn thing. Now you have to leave.”
Harriet flipped the sign o
n the door to closed after DeMarco left, then stood watching as he headed over to the truck stop convenience store and then back to the motel. She finished cleaning the kitchen, started the dishwasher, and got the coffee ready to go so all she’d have to do in the morning was turn on the coffee pots.
She took the bottle of Jim Beam out of the cabinet under the cash register, splashed two fingers of bourbon into a water glass, and added a cube of ice. She then turned off all the lights in the café and went to sit in the dark at a table near a window. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.
She sat there watching the trucks roaring down the highway, thinking about Shannon. She’d only known her for two months, but as she’d told DeMarco, she’d just loved her. She’d never met anyone so bright, so full of life, so insightful. In fact, her being so insightful was what had probably gotten her killed. But Shannon saw the world in ways that Harriet couldn’t, observing things about the land and the people that Harriet never would have noticed, much less been able to write about. She’d read Lighthouse twice, once before she met Shannon and once afterward, and she couldn’t ever match the woman who talked like an ordinary person to the person who had written such a beautiful story. Harriet had never considered herself an emotional person, but that book had made her cry and at the same time, soar with joy. No other book she’d read had ever affected her that way, and now the brilliant woman who’d written it would never write another one—and there was nothing DeMarco or anyone else could do to bring her back.
DeMarco scared her—but these days it seemed as if everything scared her, and nothing scared her more than the future and the possibility of her secret getting out. When on earth had she become such a coward? She supposed it wasn’t long after Gene died and left her all on her own. With her mannish haircut and her brusque attitude and the way she talked to the truckers, people would never guess how frightened she was of what lay ahead. If Gene were still alive she knew she wouldn’t have felt so insecure.
Unlike her, Gene had been skinny as a rail and then he goes and drops dead one morning of a heart attack neither one of them had seen coming. Gene had always been the optimist, even in the worst of times—and there’d been some really bad times—but he’d always allayed her fears and told her they had nothing to worry about, that everything would be all right. And maybe if he’d still been alive she wouldn’t have been so lonely and spent as much time talking to Shannon as she did. But Gene was gone and now she had no one. No kids and no relatives, at least none that she could call upon to help her. She didn’t even have any close friends in Waverly, which in a way was surprising considering how long she and Gene had lived there. Gene had always said they couldn’t afford to have close friends, and she knew he’d been right, but with him gone, she now regretted that. What was going to happen to her when she was too feeble to work? She had hardly any savings; she barely scraped by with Social Security and the little she made off the café. She didn’t have the money to move into some assisted living place, not that there was such a place in Waverly. All she knew was that the last thing she could afford to do was alienate the people in this town and she wasn’t going to tell DeMarco anything.
DeMarco. He was a good-looking man and she could see why Shannon might have been attracted to him, but Harriet sensed that there was a hard side to him that he usually kept under wraps. Shannon had told her how she met him when she was living in Boston, while she was still tending bar there, before Lighthouse was published. She said DeMarco had gotten involved in a case in Boston involving a devious female lawyer who’d embezzled from a young girl’s trust fund and tried to kill her and then fled to Montenegro to avoid being arrested. According to Shannon, DeMarco had gone to Montenegro and literally kidnapped the lawyer and brought her back to the United States to stand trial. Yeah, no doubt DeMarco was a ruthless, tricky son of a bitch—but was he as good as Shannon seemed to think he was?
She wondered if maybe there was a way to steer DeMarco—just give him a little nudge to point the way—but in a manner that he wouldn’t know she was the one doing the nudging. She sipped her bourbon and thought about that.
No, forget it. She didn’t have the guile or the subtlety. Gene could have done it; he’d misled people for thirty years before he died, but she didn’t have that ability. No, she wasn’t going to point DeMarco anywhere. She was going to keep her head down, her mouth shut, and hope for the best.
And pray that Shannon hadn’t lied to her.
11
DeMarco bought a couple of cold beers from the convenience store at the truck stop and walked back to his motel, where he filled a bucket with ice and put one of the beers in the bucket.
Something was going on with Harriet, but he didn’t know what. All he was certain of was that she knew more than she was willing to talk about and his presence in Waverly frightened her, but he couldn’t imagine why. Rather than waste his time thinking about Harriet, he decided to find out more about the death of the BLM agent.
He placed his laptop on the small desk in the room, took a seat, opened the beer he hadn’t put in the ice bucket, and booted up the computer. He googled the BLM agent’s death and found an article posted by a Wyoming newspaper.
The agent’s name was Jeff Hunter. He was twenty-four years old when he died. He’d been an army veteran, earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, and was survived by a wife and a two-year-old daughter. As DeMarco continued to read the article, he reached for his beer without looking—and almost knocked the bottle over. Luckily, he caught the bottle before it tipped and spilled twelve ounces of Bud into his laptop—which made him remember an incident that had happened when he’d been dating Shannon.
He’d been at her apartment in Boston and she’d been preparing dinner, having warned him in advance that she was a lousy cook. (It turned out she really was.) While she was cooking, DeMarco had opened a bottle of wine and poured each of them a glass. At some point, DeMarco wandered over to the table where she worked. Her laptop was on the table, next to a stack of photographs that he learned were photos of the coast of Nova Scotia. Anyway, when he’d placed his wine glass on the table to reach for one of the photos, Shannon had shrieked: “Don’t put your glass there!”
“What?” he’d said, wondering if she meant he was supposed to put his glass on a coaster, although the table was so battered he couldn’t imagine why she would have cared.
She’d rushed over and picked up his glass, put in on the kitchen counter, then picked up her laptop and moved it away from the table. She said, “Sorry, I freaked out. Six months ago, I was drinking a can of Coke while I was working on my book and the can slipped out of my hand and almost all the Coke ended up on the keyboard of my laptop. It destroyed the damn computer and the geeks at the Apple Store were only able to save about a dozen files. One of the files they couldn’t save was my book, and because I hadn’t backed up the file for a couple of days, I lost an entire chapter that I had to completely recreate. Since then, I don’t put any kind of liquid near my computer.” Fortunately, after that, the evening proceeded to more pleasant things and he ended up in Shannon’s bed.
DeMarco took out his cell phone and called Gloria Brunson. It was only nine p.m. and he figured the writer would still be awake.
When she answered he said, “Hi, this is Joe DeMarco. I’m sorry to bother you so late—”
“It’s fine. I don’t usually go to bed until midnight. What’s going on?”
“I want to know how Shannon would have backed up her computer files.” He went on to tell the story of how Shannon had reacted when he’d put the glass of wine near her laptop. He concluded with, “If I could find the backup files, it might give me a clue as to what she was doing out here.”
“I see,” Gloria said. “Well, I’m pretty old-fashioned, not to mention practically broke, so I back up my work to a flash drive. Other writers get more sophisticated. Some of them attach an external hard drive directly to their computer and files
are backed up continuously to the hard drive as the writer works. I’ve heard other writers back up their files to the cloud but I don’t know anything about that.”
He chatted with Gloria a bit longer then disconnected the call and sat back to think. If Shannon had backed up her files to a flash drive or an external hard drive, those items should have been in her room when she was killed and might now be in the possession of the sheriff’s office. Tomorrow he’d call Jim Turner and ask if he’d found a flash drive or a hard drive. If Turner had, however, DeMarco doubted that Turner would give him access to the device. Then something else occurred to him, but he realized it was almost midnight on the east coast. He’d make the call tomorrow morning.
He went back to reading the article on the BLM agent and concluded there wasn’t anything in the article that was useful. It didn’t say what Hunter was doing when he was shot or even exactly where he’d been shot, just that it was on public land somewhere northeast of Waverly. The article did mention the standoff between Hiram Bunt and the BLM, and while making it clear that there was no indication that Bunt had been involved at all in Hunter’s death, made the point that tensions were known to run high between local ranchers and the agency. The story concluded by saying that the FBI was pursuing all avenues of investigation and if any good citizen had any information, they should contact the FBI’s office in Casper.