Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  As he headed back into the house, his phone rang. It was Ole. “Patty says Tel Sigurdson’s finally back in town. You want to run out this morning and talk to him about the phone call and where he was the night Prue Stalking Horse died?”

  “Sure. I thought you’d reached him by phone.”

  Ole sounded harassed. “I been playing phone tag with him for three goddamned days. And now I got Laddie Kennedy and the DCI is apparently all over it again and wanting to know what I’ve got and why I don’t have more, which is exactly what I’ve been asking them. Plus I got dead cattle and someone broke into an empty house over on Second. And Mazzolo’s got the goddamned flu or something.” Like Sally had done it on purpose.

  “It’s not a problem,” Boyd said. He was happy to have something to do. “I’ll go.”

  “Good. You can pick Gerson up at the Stalking Horse place at eight thirty.”

  Boyd wondered if Ole had decided not to interview Tel himself because he didn’t want to take the DCI agent with him. Mostly Ole was cooperative, cooperated with Templeton police, cooperated with the state agencies and even occasionally the feds and the reservation police, but you didn’t want to annoy him—and he was easy to annoy.

  “That’ll work,” he said. Then, “Who’s William Packer?”

  There was a brief silence; then Ole said, “Gerson told you, did she? Well—” He drew the word out, like it was several syllables. “—it was before I was sheriff, little bit before I came. He was one of the Packers, you know who I mean?”

  “The old ranch,” Boyd said.

  “Was a pretty decent spread at that time, as I understand it,” Ole said. “Anyway, William Packer. They called him Billie. He was the second son. Jack and Billie. They were football stars, played baseball in the spring. Jack went up to SDSU got a degree in agriculture or something. Billie took classes, worked at the grain elevator for a while. Drank some. Then he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared.”

  “Took off one day is what people said. Everyone figured he left with some girl he’d been dating. His parents retired and moved to Flagstaff not long after I started here. And Jack never talked about it. At least not to me.”

  “Where’s Jack now?”

  “Bank would know,” Ole said, like if he wasn’t in trouble or breaking the law in Taylor County, Ole wasn’t all that interested.

  “This was twenty years ago?” Boyd asked.

  “About then, yeah,” Ole said.

  “A lot of things happened twenty years ago,” Boyd said. “Isn’t that when Jasper was flattened? And Prue’s sister disappeared then too.”

  “I assume Prue’s sister was the girl Billie Packer left town with,” Ole said. “Though I guess he didn’t actually leave town, as it turns out. Huh.”

  Boyd didn’t have his uniform with him, and he didn’t have a clean one anyway; everything at his house smelled like smoke. He did have his badge and his pistol with him, and he stopped at home to get a belt holster before heading over to Prue’s to meet Gerson.

  She hadn’t arrived, and when he looked at his watch he realized he was almost fifteen minutes early. The street was pretty much deserted. One car parked a block away and a pickup truck three driveways up. Yellow tape fluttered in the wind in front of Prue’s house.

  He sat for a minute, then got out and walked across the street and through the small cemetery to the frozen empty field where they knew the shot had come from. He could see crime scene tape fluttering in the wind here too. He was glad he was wearing boots as he made his way across the rough ground. When he stood just outside the cordoned-off area, he stopped and looked back toward the house.

  The spot was a fair distance away from the house, but perfectly possible for someone with a high-powered rifle and a good night scope. He could see it—what the killer had seen—the light on the porch, the clear, cold night. The cemetery between where he stood and the street took up the equivalent of three empty lots, with houses to Boyd’s left, but the shooter had been beyond those, beyond, in a sense, the edge of town. Everyone asleep and waiting. Did he plan for Boyd to come? For Prue to open the door and let Boyd in? Had the shooter killed her like this, from far away, so he didn’t have to look her in the eye, so she wouldn’t be completely real?

  No one in Taylor County really knew who Prue Stalking Horse was or what she’d done before she came to live in West Prairie City and work at Cleary’s more than twenty years ago. When people asked, she’d smiled at them and gone back to what she was doing. But not knowing where someone came from or what their past was, didn’t make them less real, didn’t mean their heart didn’t beat like everyone else’s, that blood didn’t run through their veins, that they didn’t laugh or love or deserve their life. Shooting someone from far away was still murder, still the same consequences, still just as bloody and cruel and wrong as putting your hands around their neck and watching them die.

  Boyd walked around the cordoned-off area, but there wasn’t much to see. The only reason they’d identified it as the place the killer had waited was the packed-down grass and the clear path leading away, not toward the street, but behind the houses, where it finally faded away completely in a stubble field a quarter mile farther on.

  He followed the path about half its length before he noticed a second track intersecting the first. It was probably a deer trail, but he followed it anyway for a ways farther out into the prairie beyond the town’s outskirts. It ended abruptly in a shallow dip where a small doe had died, its carcass partially eaten.

  Boyd took a step back, studied the area. There was something odd about the deer carcass, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Something both familiar and unfamiliar. Not smell or even the look of the thing. It was the sense that something was missing, something he was expecting. He thought it might be from a dream he’d had because the feeling itself was a familiar one. He’d check his journals next time he had the chance.

  He looked at his watch, realized it was time to meet Gerson, and headed back across the field.

  When he reached the cordoned-off area again, a mist similar to what he saw that morning near where Laddie’s ghost had been drifted between him and Prue’s house, not like ground fog rising from the field, not wide and low, but a patch of something that wasn’t quite even mist, more a haze, something vaguely different from the surrounding air. He walked toward it. It didn’t disappear and it didn’t become clearer. He hesitated, then put his hand out, foolish maybe, definitely not careful, but if he was learning anything about the world he lived in these days, it was that careful wasn’t the only path.

  He felt a snap, like an electric shock, then an intense cold, like he’d plunged his hand into a bucket of ice-cold water. He had a quick sense of something dark and old; then it was gone along with the mist.

  When he got back to the street, Gerson was pulling up behind his car.

  “Thanks for driving,” she said as Boyd unlocked his SUV.

  * * *

  The entrance to the Sigurdson ranch was bounded by two stone pillars with bronze eagles, their wings spread a full six feet wide, perched on top of them. Arching above was a sign that read FLYING DOUBLE EAGLE with crossed branding irons: double chevrons with wingtips.

  The ranch itself could be seen from the county road, a quarter mile back and to the north. The pasture in front housed a small herd of Angus steers gathered around two round bale feeders. Near the house was a big horse barn with brick running along the base and a large paddock attached. The house itself was also brick to the windows, split logs above with a massive front porch and big windows facing west. Not new, but remodeled in the last few years so it looked new with a stone chimney on the south side.

  On the drive out, Boyd and Gerson had talked about what they both knew: Tel Sigurdson was in a twenty-year-old picture along with Prue Stalking Horse, Laddie Kennedy, William Packer, and a woman they hadn’t identified yet, that the phone in the Sigurdson barn had been one of the numbers Prue called the night she died. Boyd told Ag
ent Gerson what Hallie had told him, that Brett had seen Tel that same night in West Prairie City and what Meg Otis had told him, that the Sigurdsons had invested heavily in Uku-Weber and were currently having cash-flow problems.

  “His hands told us he was in Pierre,” Gerson said.

  “Yeah,” Boyd said. “I think he was in town two nights ago when my house exploded too.”

  Gerson looked grim. She asked Boyd what he personally knew about Tel and the Sigurdson ranch.

  “Whether he’s having cash problems right now, in general, he’s got more money than anyone else in the county,” Boyd offered. “But he’s generally well liked. Goes to church on Sundays. Gives money to the volunteer fire department every year to put together a Christmas party for local kids. He funds a couple of scholarships for graduating seniors. He’s involved in anything of significance that happens in West PC.”

  “Huh,” Gerson said in a tone that implied that funding Christmas parties or local charities or buying drinks at roadhouses didn’t mean you couldn’t kill people with a long-range rifle in your spare time, which Boyd had to agree was pretty much true.

  Tel Sigurdson and a ranch hand Boyd didn’t recognize came out of the tack room as Boyd pulled into the graveled area next to the barn. Tel was tall, probably in his early fifties, wearing a tan Stetson, a tin cloth field jacket, leather work gloves, and blue jeans. The ranch hand—Boyd was momentarily surprised to see that it was a woman, then surprised that he was surprised—was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a sheepskin-lined vest over the top, flannel-lined jeans with turned-up cuffs, and a bright green wool cap with the earflaps turned down. She took the coil of rope that Tel had been holding and headed off around the near side of the barn, only casually interested in Boyd’s SUV and who might be in it.

  The wind hit like the blast from a deep freeze when Boyd got out of the car. He heard the low thunk of the passenger-side door and the crunch of Gerson’s shoes on the frozen gravel as she rounded the car. Tel tipped his hat back when he saw who it was. “Deputy,” he said, his voice reserved, which was unusual for Tel. He was one of those people everyone knew, everyone had a story about, and almost all the stories were good or at least not bad.

  Boyd introduced Special Agent Gerson. Tel nodded once in her direction, then turned his attention back to Boyd, as if Gerson, coming in from outside, might be less trustworthy. “Laddie Kennedy was shot and killed yesterday,” Boyd said.

  “I heard that,” Tel said. “It’s a damned shame. That boy never had any luck, not his whole life. Got any idea yet who did it?”

  “That’s what we want to talk to you about,” Boyd said.

  Tel gave a quick laugh. “Don’t tell me you think I had anything to do with it?”

  Boyd didn’t smile back. “Two deaths, both shot, and close together,” he said. “It’s not a laughing matter.”

  Tel gave him a hard, level gaze. “No,” he agreed. He glanced quickly up at the house. “Let’s not stand out here in the cold. We can talk in my office.”

  He led them through the tack room and into a small but well-furnished office with an old oak desk, two leather chairs, an expensive wool rug, and a gas fireplace, which he turned on as they entered with a switch by the door. Tel hung his hat and coat on hooks, gestured for Boyd and Gerson to do the same, then ushered them into the leather chairs by the fireplace while he perched himself on the edge of his desk. He looked relaxed, easy, but Boyd could see the way his mouth formed a thin hard line and he kept looking at the wall above the fireplace and not at Boyd or Gerson.

  Boyd waited for Gerson to say something, but when he looked over, she seemed to be busying herself with her pen. He tapped his right index finger against the left cuff of his jacket, then said, “The night Prue Stalking Horse was shot.”

  “A week ago,” Tel said, interrupting him.

  “Yes,” Boyd said. “Early Wednesday morning. She called you Tuesday evening.”

  “No,” Tel said steadily. “She didn’t.”

  “You have a phone out here.”

  “Oh.” Boyd thought he could see something, a certain relaxation of an expression he hadn’t realized was tense. “Everyone uses it.” He waved a hand toward an old-fashioned wall phone near the coat hooks. “She could have been calling anyone.”

  “We expect she was trying to call you,” Boyd said, though he didn’t think any of them had any evidence that this was true, just questions layered on questions.

  “I wasn’t here,” Tel said. “Pat and I were over in Pierre at an estate auction.”

  “Would she have known that?”

  Tel looked amused. “Are you asking if we lived in each other’s pockets, Deputy? She didn’t know my cell number. Didn’t have any reason to. And I don’t know any reason she’d have known where I was that night.”

  “So she could have been trying to reach you when she called your barn number?”

  “Could have been, I guess.” Tel folded his arms across his chest.

  “We have a witness who says you were in town the night Prue died.”

  “The hell you say,” Tel responded, but his eyes shifted left, away from Boyd’s, as he said it. “Someone says they saw me at three o’clock in the morning in West Prairie City?”

  “Four.”

  “Four. Well, hell, they were probably drunk.”

  “They weren’t drunk.”

  Tel shrugged like he didn’t set much store by the witness or Boyd either. He stood and walked to the fireplace, where he opened a small panel to the left of the hearth and fiddled with the controls.

  “Were you in West Prairie City on the night Prue Stalking Horse was killed?” Boyd asked.

  “Pat and I went to Pierre that morning to an estate auction.” Which was exactly what he’d already said.

  “That’s not what I asked,” Boyd said.

  “You think someone saw me here,” Tel said. “I’m saying they were mistaken.”

  “We’ll need to talk to your wife,” Gerson said. “For verification.”

  “Sure,” Tel said. His voice flat. “She’s gone on over to Sioux Falls to visit her sister, but she’ll be back the end of next week.”

  “If you give me the address, I’ll send an agent over to talk to her,” Gerson said.

  Tel looked at her; then he went to his desk, scrawled something on a blue notepad, tore off the top sheet, and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Boyd said, “I understand you’re having cash-flow problems.”

  That actually made Tel laugh. “My whole life is cash-flow problems, Deputy. I’ve never killed anyone over it yet. I heard you’ve been having some housing problems yourself,” Tel said, still turned toward the fireplace.

  “Heard it? Or saw it?” Boyd asked. He generally liked Tel, though he didn’t know him well, but he wasn’t sure what game he was playing now. If he’d been in town two nights ago or the night Prue had died, why didn’t he just say so?

  A ranch hand entered the room, a tall man with a dark face and big hands. A battered Stetson shaded his eyes. He didn’t say anything, just came into the room, moved to one side, and closed the door behind him.

  Tel turned away from the fireplace, glanced at the silent ranch hand and said with the hint of a smile. “I told you, Deputy. I went to Pierre a week ago to an estate auction. I bought a feed wagon and three sets of oak bookcases. You can check.”

  Boyd stood. His back deliberately to the ranch hand and the door, facing Tel square. “Stop stonewalling me,” he said.

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Deputy.”

  26

  In the general way of things, Boyd was more patient than most men. He asked questions and gauged reactions, came back with a new set of questions or the same questions asked a different way. But not today. Today, two people were dead. He had a hole the size of Cleveland in the side of his house. Hallie had Death knocking at her door, and he couldn’t even begin to do anything about that. But this? This was somethi
ng he was getting to the bottom of.

  “We have a photograph,” he began. “We found it with Laddie Kennedy. It was a picture of—”

  Again, Tel interrupted him. “Oh, I know what it’s a picture of. Laddie called me about that picture last week.” He rubbed the back of his neck; then he let out a long sigh, leaned back so his shoulders rested against the fireplace mantel. He looked across the room at Agent Gerson, who was sitting comfortably in her chair, somehow managing to watch Tel and the ranch hand both.

  “To tell you the truth,” Tel finally said. “I haven’t seen that photograph in at least fifteen years. Back then…” He paused. “Well, back then, when that picture was taken, I’d just turned thirty-five. Laddie was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, and he’d just gotten out of the army. Prue wasn’t new in town, but something had changed recently about her, like she’d learned some basic secret about the world.”

  “And the other people?” Boyd asked. “There were five of you in the picture.”

  “Is that really important?” Tel asked. He looked at Gerson, looked back at Boyd.

  “We don’t know what’s important,” Boyd said. “Right now, everything’s important.”

  “Laddie carries a stone,” Tel said.

  “I know,” Boyd said. Then, he added, “Agent Gerson knows too.”

  Tel nodded, but didn’t say anything. He pushed himself away from the fireplace and began to pace. Finally, he looked at the ranch hand by the door as if he’d just realized the man was standing there. He waved a hand, like a silent signal, and the man went back out the office door as quietly as he’d entered. Tel stopped pacing, back in front of the fireplace again.

  “You say you know about Laddie’s rock,” he said, his voice gone two levels quieter. “Do you really know?”

  “I know dead people talked to him,” Boyd said evenly.

  Tel huffed out something almost like a laugh. “Yeah. Lucky Laddie. That was what we called him, you know, back then. Not because he was. Lucky, I mean. Or, I mean, that was why. Because he was never lucky. Not after he got that stone.”