by Mike Lawson
Sam Clarke had ratted him out to Turner before, telling Turner who he was when he’d checked into the motel. Maybe Sam had told Turner that he’d received a package and then Sam later saw DeMarco sitting outside his room, reading a stack of unbound pages, and he also passed this on to Turner. So maybe Turner had deduced that he’d received a copy of something related to Shannon’s work, but it seemed pretty unlikely that a deputy sheriff would bash him over the head to get a look at what he was reading. If Turner thought he’d obtained Shannon’s backup files all the guy had to do was ask, saying he had a right to look at the files as they might help him solve Shannon’s murder.
So who else knew he had the journal? There were a lot of people in the Hacienda Grill who saw him reading it while he was having dinner, including Hiram Bunt, but how would they have known what he was reading? One possibility, although DeMarco thought it was pretty unlikely, was that Agent McCord had told someone that he had given her a copy of Shannon’s journal and she passed this information on, either intentionally or inadvertently, to the person who’d attacked him. Yeah, maybe, but doubtful.
But whoever had stolen his copy of the journal should have known it was printed from an electronic file, meaning this person should have known that stealing DeMarco’s copy and destroying it wasn’t going to prevent him from getting another one. The objective of stealing the copy had not been to destroy it or even to prevent DeMarco from learning something that might identify Shannon’s killer. Most likely the person who had hit him on the head was the same person who’d killed Shannon and he was desperate to learn what was in the journal so he could better protect himself. Forewarned is forearmed as they say.
DeMarco thought for a moment about calling Neil and telling him to FedEx him another copy of the journal then decided not to do that. The copy would have to be FedExed to the motel and he’d just as soon not have Sam Clarke or anyone else see him getting another package. He couldn’t trust old Sam. Neil had said that he’d emailed him a copy of the journal. DeMarco got off the bed and turned on his laptop. Yep, Neil had sent him an email with an attachment. He needed to finish reading the journal, which he hadn’t yet, and he needed to read everything he’d already read more slowly. The first time he’d pretty much just skimmed the journal looking for anything connected to the BLM agent’s death. Maybe tomorrow he’d go into Rock Springs, which was big enough to have a FedEx or a Staples. He’d move the email attachment to a flash drive and have it printed out again.
Knowing he would have a hard time falling asleep, DeMarco stepped outside to breathe in some fresh air before going to bed. The night was clear and a million stars were blinking in the heavens; a full moon sat low over the sagebrush landscape. The place was definitely more attractive in moonlight than it was in the harsh light of day.
He looked across the highway and at that moment saw a single light come on in the darkened café and watched someone—it had to be Harriet—take a seat at a table near a window. He glanced at his watch and saw it was about eleven and wondered why she was sitting there. He thought for a moment about going over and rapping on the café window and asking if she would talk to him. Then he decided: screw it. He’d talk to Harriet later.
But he needed to do something. He needed to change the status quo.
Right now, nothing was really happening when it came to finding out who’d killed Shannon. All Turner was currently doing was waiting to hear if some trucker who’d passed through town might be a viable suspect, but he wasn’t investigating to see if anyone local could have killed her. The FBI wasn’t looking into Shannon’s murder because it wasn’t under its jurisdiction, nor was the FBI buying his theory that Sonny Bunt might have killed Shannon because she’d learned something connecting Sonny to Jeff Hunter’s murder. As far as DeMarco was concerned, Sonny Bunt should have been at the top of everyone’s suspect list. C.J. McCord clearly thought Sonny might have killed Hunter, and based on what McCord had told him about Sonny’s character, DeMarco could see Sonny killing Shannon if she had any information that tied him to Hunter’s death. Which also placed Sonny at the top of DeMarco’s list as the person who might have mugged him. The problem when it came to Sonny was that the FBI was powerless to get a search warrant to see if his rifle had been used to kill the agent or if he owned the pistol that had killed Shannon.
Well, the FBI may have been powerless because they were following the law—but when it came to catching Shannon’s killer, DeMarco didn’t give a damn about the law.
17
Sonny Bunt lived in an unimpressive, single-story, ranch-style home about three miles from his father’s much grander home. The house had an attached two-car garage, and on one side of the house was a vegetable garden and on the other side was an open shed, like a carport, containing a trailer on which an ATV sat. In front of the house was a small patch of lawn so green that DeMarco wondered if it was Astroturf, and a few yellow flowers—daffodils?—were planted near a small front porch.
DeMarco had parked on the road that ran in front of the house at five a.m. It was now six. He felt groggy from only getting a few hours of restless sleep and his head ached dully. He sat watching the house drinking coffee he’d purchased at the truck stop. He was a bit concerned that some early riser, like maybe the cowboys who worked for Hiram, might pass by on their way to work and see him parked near Sonny’s place. Considering what he was about to do, he should have been more concerned about that possibility, but oddly enough, he wasn’t. He was already committed and wasn’t going to change his mind.
He knew from Shannon’s journal that Sonny’s wife was a teacher in Rock Springs, forty minutes away. He also knew schools were still in session because he’d checked online. The school year had been extended because of winter snows. At about six o’clock, as DeMarco had been hoping, a sedan with a woman driving pulled out of the garage, turned out of the driveway, and headed in his direction. Since he didn’t want Sonny’s wife to see him parked on the side of the road, he started his car and began driving, heading in the opposite direction Sonny’s wife was going and they passed each other. He didn’t know if Sonny’s wife knew who he was, but he turned his head away as she went by him so she wouldn’t get a clear look at his face.
After Sonny’s wife’s car disappeared in his rearview mirror, DeMarco made a U-turn and drove back and parked where he’d been before. All DeMarco knew about Sonny was that he worked for his father, but he didn’t know what time he went to work and or exactly where he worked. He’d just have to play it by ear.
At seven, DeMarco was pleased to see the garage door open and a black Ford F-150 pickup pull out of the garage. The pickup turned out of the driveway and headed in the direction of Hiram’s house, going away from DeMarco and not toward him. DeMarco didn’t know if Sonny had noticed DeMarco’s car parked on the side of the road; if he did, he didn’t do anything about it, such as coming back to see who was sitting in the car.
DeMarco figured that hesitating wasn’t to his advantage; if he was going to do what he was planning, he needed to move quickly and decisively. There was always the chance that Sonny might return home if he’d forgotten something or that he might have gone on a short errand and would be back soon. If that were the case . . . Well, the best scenario was that DeMarco would be arrested. The worst was that he’d be shot and killed. He couldn’t help but recall Jim Turner saying that there were more guns per capita in Wyoming than any other state in the Union and the likelihood of Sonny walking around with a gun was probably higher than average.
DeMarco pulled into Sonny’s driveway. An unpaved road ran next to the house, passing between the shed containing the ATV and the house, and DeMarco followed the road to the rear of the house where he saw a small corral containing two horses and a shed that probably held oats or hay or whatever it was that horses ate.
Satisfied that his car wouldn’t be visible from the road in front of Sonny’s house, DeMarco got out of the car and approached the b
ackdoor of the house. He didn’t see any signs advertising that the house had a security system. Nor, thankfully, did he hear a dog inside the house barking. A dog would have really complicated things.
The backdoor to the house was a sliding door that opened onto a small concrete patio where there was a barbeque and a couple of folding lawn chairs. DeMarco tried the patio door but it was locked. He moved along the back wall of the house and came to a window and tried to open it, but it too was locked. Shit, he really didn’t want to break a window or the sliding door to get in, but he might have to. He wished he knew how to pick a lock.
He reached the corner of the house and turned to try the windows on the side of the house that faced the vegetable garden. Near the corner was a rain barrel that was slightly elevated, sitting on concrete blocks. A hose ran from the rain barrel to the garden. DeMarco hadn’t counted on the rain barrel but it was perfect for what he had in mind. He proceeded to the next window, placed his hands against the glass, and tried to slide it upward—and the window moved. He slid the window all the way up, pushed a curtain aside, and saw he was looking into a small bedroom.
He crawled through the window and began walking rapidly through the house, looking into closets as he walked. He passed through a kitchen, the breakfast dishes still sitting on the table, and into a living room. He didn’t see what he was looking for there. He proceeded down a hallway, came to what looked like the master bedroom, one containing an unmade queen size bed. The bedroom had a walk-in closet. He looked in there and didn’t see anything but clothes. He looked under the bed—nothing but dust bunnies—then checked a nightstand on the right-hand side of the bed. In the nightstand he found a large revolver with a chrome-plated barrel and a walnut handle. DeMarco didn’t know much about guns but he thought the pistol might be a .45 or .357 caliber. It was a big bore weapon, not the .22 that had killed Shannon. He put the pistol back where he found it and checked the nightstand on the other side of the bed. There was nothing in it but reading glasses, cough drops, a romance novel, and a pair of earplugs.
He walked to the next room down the hallway. It appeared to be Sonny’s den. There was a large screen television set, a recliner facing the TV, a controller for playing video games, and a low bookshelf that contained mostly magazines. A trout, over two feet long, was mounted on one wall and there was a photo of Sonny posed standing over a dead Grizzly bear, holding a rifle and smiling broadly. Lastly, there was the object DeMarco had been looking for: a gun cabinet. It was a cabinet with double glass doors, not a metal gun safe. Visible inside the cabinet were two shotguns and two rifles. One of the rifles had a scope. DeMarco tugged on a handle and one of the doors opened. He would have definitely broken the glass if it had been locked.
He pulled out the rifle with the scope. It was a Remington and had a Leupold scope. It was the hunting rifle that Agent McCord said that Sonny owned and the weapon that might have been used to shoot the BLM agent. DeMarco opened the breach to see if the rifle was loaded. It wasn’t.
Beneath the upper, glass-enclosed section of the cabinet, was a lower section that had drawers. DeMarco opened one of the drawers and found two pistols, both semi-automatics. One was a large-caliber weapon, the bore similar to the bore of the revolver he’d found in the bedroom. The other was a small gun, small enough to fit in a woman’s purse or in someone’s back pocket. A .22? He didn’t know. He checked the gun’s magazine and saw it was full.
In a drawer next to the drawer with the pistols, were boxes of ammunition. One of the boxes contained .308 caliber bullets. He took one of the bullets from the box and loaded it into the Remington rifle. Carrying the rifle and the small-caliber pistol he started to leave Sonny’s den, then stopped and walked over to the bookcase and grabbed about a dozen magazines. He noticed that the magazines were about guns, hunting, fishing, snowmobiles, and ATVs.
He walked to the sliding backdoor of the house, unlocked the door, stepped outside, and walked over to the rain barrel he’d seen on the side of the house near the garden. The rain barrel was about half full. He didn’t know if that was enough water or not. He saw an outside faucet that had a hose attached to it. He pulled the hose over to the rain barrel and filled the barrel almost to the top. He’d now been at the house for almost ten minutes; he needed to speed things up.
He dropped the stack of magazines he’d taken from Sonny’s den into the rain barrel, letting the magazines settle to the bottom. He then took the small-caliber pistol, put the barrel of the pistol under the surface of the water to hopefully reduce the sound of a shot and pulled the trigger. The pistol emitted a small crack; hardly any noise at all. He then did the same thing with the rifle: shoved the barrel of the rifle into the water and pulled the trigger. He didn’t care if the water might fuck up Sonny’s guns. The sound of the rifle shot was louder than the pistol, but there was nothing he could do about that. Thankfully, Sonny’s closest neighbor was his father, three miles away.
He placed both weapons on the ground a few feet away from the rain barrel, tipped over the barrel, the water pouring onto the concrete patio. He reached inside the barrel and pulled out the magazines and after a brief search found the two slugs embedded in the magazines.
He put the slugs into a pocket, righted the rain barrel, tossed the wet magazines into it, put the hose back where he’d found it, then picked up the rifle and the pistol and went back into the house. Using a towel he found lying on the floor in the master bathroom, he quickly wiped the moisture off both weapons and put them back in the gun cabinet. Before he left the house, he closed the bedroom window he’d opened to enter the house and then walked out the backdoor, leaving the door unlocked.
The whole operation had taken less than half an hour.
Next stop, Casper, Wyoming, office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Fuck a bunch of search warrants.
18
DeMarco called Agent C.J. McCord when he was about an hour away from Casper, telling her that he was on his way to her office with something that might solve the murders of Jeff Hunter and Shannon Doyle.
“What are you talking about?” McCord said.
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Will you be available around eleven? I’ll be in Casper by then.”
“No. I have a meeting that starts at ten and won’t wrap up until noon.”
“So meet me someplace for lunch. Give me the name of a restaurant near your office.”
DeMarco arrived in Casper about eleven as he’d predicted and found the restaurant where McCord said she’d meet him, a diner called Peaches’, a few blocks from the federal building. He was hungry as he’d been up since the crack of dawn and hadn’t eaten, but he didn’t order any food as he’d be having lunch with McCord. That turned out to be a mistake.
He ordered a Coke from a slow-moving waitress then turned his attention to the television mounted on a wall near his table. The television was tuned to FOX News. The anchorman could have gotten a job as a young George Clooney’s stunt double and his female co-anchor probably had a trophy case filled with tiaras from beauty pageants. DeMarco couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an old, homely commentator on television; he figured the TV executives must jettison their newscasters when the first wrinkle appears. He wasn’t able to hear what the fetching couple was saying as the TV was muted, but he could follow the story with the closed captions on the bottom of the screen.
The anchorwoman laughed about something and pointed to a graph that magically appeared on the screen. The graph showed the stock price of a company that made hardware for the military and that was in competition with a similar company for a Pentagon contract. Per the graph, the company’s stock had risen significantly after the president was caught on a hot mic saying that he played golf with the CEO of the company and thought he was a much better manager than the female CEO of the competing company. And that’s all it took—a casual remark from the president, not intended for public
consumption—to make the company’s stock price take off like a North Korean missile.
And DeMarco thought: Hmmm.
He’d never given any thought to Mahoney’s leaker in the context of the stock market. Mahoney’s only concern had been the political fallout resulting from the leak, namely that it made Mahoney look bad to the Democrats who were opposed to the merger. DeMarco took out his phone, and because he didn’t know what he was doing, it took him half an hour to confirm what he’d expected: The stock prices of the two telecommunication companies that had been planning to merge shot up by about twenty points after Mahoney’s meeting with the CEOs was leaked, then dropped by about twenty points after Mahoney denied that he supported the merger.
And DeMarco thought: Hmmm.
At ten after twelve, McCord walked into the restaurant and saw DeMarco seated at a table for two near a window. She was wearing a blue blazer over a white T-shirt that only partially concealed the Glock on her hip.
She sat down across from him and said, “So. What’s this all about?”
“You want to order some lunch?”
“No, I don’t have time for lunch.”
Well, shit, DeMarco thought. He was going to faint if he didn’t get some food in his belly soon. At that moment the waitress who’d served DeMarco a Coke walked over to the table and asked McCord if she wanted anything. McCord said no. DeMarco told the waitress, “Give me a few minutes. I’ll order lunch after my friend leaves.”