Sign Off (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 1)

by Patricia McLinn

  Ames Hunt was not amused. He used a snowy handkerchief to wipe at the lapel of his jacket. His finely cut lips disappeared into a compressed line as he then used the handkerchief to wipe his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “I really am sorry.” I stopped brushing at my jacket, which needed it, and gave a placating swipe at his, which didn’t. “I guess I forgot hallways aren’t like the highways around here. I’ve gotten lulled by Wyoming traffic, where I’m practically the only car on the road. No, make that I am the only car on the road, because everybody else drives a pickup.”

  His lips unfolded. “Not everybody. I’m partial to sedans, myself. And please, call me Ames.”

  “Thank you. And I was hoping to talk to you for a few minutes.” I hadn’t really intended to talk to him, but I figured it would be worth my time to smooth any remaining ruffled feathers, and there was nothing a politician liked better than to be sought-after. “That is, if you have time?”

  “A few minutes, perhaps,” he allowed, then smiled. “As long as we don’t tell my assistant you didn’t have an appointment.”

  We went up three flights of side stairs to the top floor of the old building.

  Without introducing the busily typing fifty-something woman whose nameplate said Mrs. Martin, he ushered me to his inner office. Like Claustel, Hunt had a corner office, but his was in the back of the old building. It had a view of the courtyard and, over the roof of the addition, to Basin Street.

  His office was more modern and less aggressively Western than Judge Claustel’s. A computer occupied a wing extended from the desk. The in and out trays on the main desk were filled but not overflowing, apparently the sign of a man who had finely balanced what he could handle in a day.

  He removed his suit coat, hung it on a wooden hanger and hooked that on a peg of the standard coat tree beside the door. He waved me to a chair with tweed upholstery and wooden arms while he settled into the ruby red leather chair behind his desk with a satisfied sigh.

  “I understand you went to Tom Burrell’s ranch,” he said. “Do you think that was wise?”

  Not knowing which to react to first, I covered my hesitation by rearranging myself in the chair, then ignored both how he knew I’d been there and his cautioning me, and went straight for the hot-button issue.

  “Do you think Burrell killed Deputy Redus?”

  He tipped his head then shook it—a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger reaction. It was marginally better than Sister Mary Robert’s wagging finger in fourth grade catechism. “You know better, Elizabeth. As county attorney I cannot comment.”

  “But you’ve known him since you were kids.”

  He started to shake his head again, then stopped. His eyes fixed over my right shoulder with a wide, unfocused stare.

  “In high school it would have been unthinkable.” He spoke slowly. “Tom Burrell had unlimited potential—athletic, academic, professional. He’s the one everyone expected to have it all. I suppose that looking at what he’d once hoped for and what he actually had could push a man to an extreme. The years of frustration could build up until they formed a burden too heavy for any man to bear.” He looked at me. “That was off the record, Elizabeth.”

  I raised my hands to remind him they were empty of notebook or recorder. “All on background. Tell me about Redus. I’m having a hard time getting a feel for him. But you’re observant . . .” There’s something in the Bible about flattery being a trap, but only if the mouse is greedy for that cheese. “So tell me what he is like.”

  “He seemed to be attractive to a number of women,” he answered with more dryness than I would have expected from him. There might even have been a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.

  “So I understand. Did he, uh, cultivate the women’s interest?”

  “With the thickest layer of manure you’ve ever seen.”

  We both laughed.

  “What kind of deputy was he?”

  Caution settled over him like dust. “A zealous officer.”

  “A lot of his arrests didn’t result in convictions. So, I have to wonder why you went along with his being liaison to the courthouse.”

  His caution thickened. “That was not my decision to make or oppose.”

  I tried again. “Was it to keep an eye on him?”

  “I can’t confirm or deny—”

  “Oh, c’mon, Ames. This is on background. The courthouse obviously isn’t in dire need of a liaison with the sheriff’s department—you haven’t replaced Redus. So there must have been another reason. Was Redus a loose cannon?”

  “Let’s say he made decisions that raised concerns about his judgment.” Lord, this guy was in full Washington form, and he hadn’t been elected to the state level yet. “It was decided moving him to the courthouse would be best.”

  “Who decided? You?”

  “That wouldn’t be my decision.”

  “So whose was it? Widcuff’s? Somebody else’s?”

  He wasn’t going to answer, and I’d instigated this conversation to smooth over his dented dignity. I raised my hands in surrender.

  “Okay, Ames. No more questions.” I stood. “For now.”

  “You’re welcome any time.” He could afford to be gracious, he hadn’t told me squat. “Elizabeth . . .” I turned to see the corners of his mouth lift in a tight smile. “I’ll tell you this, Foster Redus wouldn’t ever die of low self-esteem.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  INSTEAD OF HEADING east toward the station across land so flat they call it the Jelicho Table, I went west, straight toward the Rockies.

  It was hard to recognize that the ground was rising here, because the mountains ahead gave the impression of jutting straight up from the level ground. Then I’d glance in the rearview mirror, and it was as if the world fell away behind me.

  The rodeo grounds sat where the highway to O’Hara Hill intersects with U.S. 27. Three miles beyond that, and the only sign of human habitation was a wire-fenced compound with road construction behemoths sitting behind a trailer. A white sign with red lettering said Burrell Roads.

  It was the sort of trailer you couldn’t imagine ever being mobile. Three concrete steps led to the door marked Office.

  The wind playfully tried to wrench the car door out of my hand and plastered the fabric of my slacks to my legs. The wind always seemed a presence in Wyoming, like languid humidity in New Orleans or heat in Phoenix or mist in San Francisco. Out here, unfettered by the manmade buffers of Sherman or the natural barriers of the mountains, it reigned.

  I knocked and waited.

  The equipment had a settled-in air. That and the fact mine was the only vehicle out front gave the place an even more forlorn air than nature and heavy-machinery designers had intended. I knocked again. No answer.

  But the handle turned. The door wasn’t locked. I hesitated then pushed in. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, and they didn’t bother to lock—

  “Oh! I didn’t think anybody was here. I didn’t hear you answer my knock.”

  Tom Burrell sat on the corner of a desk straight ahead of me, one long jeans-clad leg hooked over the edge. One hand rested on a pile of dusty-looking folders sitting beside him on the desk. A battered straw cowboy hat rested on the far corner, and a dent rimming his head attested that it had been in use recently.

  “I didn’t answer.”

  “The door wasn’t locked and—”

  “Not answering a knock’s enough around here for most people to stay out.”

  I shrugged. “As you’ve pointed out, I’m not from around here.”

  He stood and circled around behind the desk. “What are you doing here?”

  “I saw this building as I was passing—” That was a fib. I’d looked up the address for his road construction business. “—and I wondered why it was way out here alone on the highway, nowhere near the rest of your property, so I just—”

  “This is part of the Circle B.”

  “It must be huge,” popped out. “How many acres—”
/>
  “Not considered polite to ask a man about the size of his holdings out here, E.M. Danniher.” He gave holdings just enough emphasis to layer in a second meaning. The glint in his eyes was half humor, half point-scoring. And he picked up smoothly, “And being by the highway makes sense for a road construction operation. But I meant Wyoming. What are you doing in Wyoming?”

  We’d shifted to more familiar ground. Not necessarily comfortable ground, but familiar. I pulled the door closed behind me. “I thought everybody had heard the details of my exile to Sherman by now.”

  “You could have said no,” he said, proving he had heard. “You could have done another sort of job.”

  My heart accelerated. It took my brain another half minute to recognize why. A temptation to pour out right here and now the pitfalls and snakepits that stretched out in every direction from this crossroads I’d been dumped at. In the middle of Wyoming, for God’s sake. My career, my life, my priorities, maybe my sanity. All trying to peer down faint tracks in the hard ground that surrounded me. Trying to figure out which one of these paths shimmering under the hard sky might lead to an Eden. Or was Eden behind me? Maybe I was fighting to hold on to something that had crumbled to dust in my hand.

  Yeah, pour all that out to him. This stranger suspected of murder. Right.

  “Maybe I like doing this job,” I said.

  “Digging into other people’s lives?” And deaths. That potential addition to his statement hung in the dust-mote plagued air between us.

  “Finding out the truth.”

  “And you expect to find it in the offices of Burrell Roads?” His tone cut a fine line between polite disbelief and sneering.

  “I thought it might give insight to what’s been happening,” I said mildly.

  “See for yourself. Nothing’s been happening here.” The tip of his head encompassed the trailer.

  Along the back wall were another desk, a glass-fronted cabinet with a rifle and a pair of shotguns, and a squat, iron gray safe. On the opposite wall were shelves topped by a window, and a closet-sized enclosure with an open door showing a toilet and sink. Across the narrow end was the boss’s desk. It had to be the boss’s desk because it was nearly as wide as the trailer and as neat as Burrell’s truck and house.

  Through the angled glass of the cranked-open back window I saw the roof of a white pickup, and, beyond it, the corralled equipment.

  “People aren’t hiring because you’ve been a suspect in a possible murder?”

  The lines at the corners of his eyes flickered deeper like he’d fought a flinch. He sat on the desk again, on the back corner, resting one forearm along his thigh and twisting his torso to face me. He moved without hurry, yet there was power in the deliberateness. And when he was still, he gave the impression of being both at rest and prepared for motion.

  I hadn’t advanced from beside the door.

  “It’s not a total washout, but I wasn’t going to hold people to a contract they were itching to get out of, and some left. With less work for my people, some hooked up with other outfits.”

  “Some? But not all.”

  “No. Not all.” I remembered what Mike had said about Burrell being liked and respected in the county.

  “So you have enough people to do the work that’s left?”

  “Slowly.”

  “Can you recover? I mean the business.”

  Under those would-be sleepy eyelids, his eyes had flashed to me at the question, their sharpness easing at my clarification.

  His shrug was fluid fatalism. But the lines in his face told another story.

  “Why do you even have this business? You’ve got a big ranch—a high-side ranch, right?—and that’s—”

  “High-side, huh? Somebody’d think you were planning on staying ’round here, with you learning the lingo and all.” His eyes got that out-of-the-cave look again. It made his whole face lighter. I wondered what he’d look like if he actually smiled. “Yeah, the Circle B’s a high-side ranch.”

  “And the Circle B is doing fine—so why have this other business?”

  “It’s a hard life. Even for a high-sider. You want a hedge against drought and low cattle prices. And then you want a hedge against dips in your hedge, like happens if the bottom drops out of oil prices or tourists stay home, so nobody needs roads fixed. Or if people go elsewhere to have their roads fixed.”

  He stood. I backed up. And he was back in the cave before I could blink.

  “Tom—”

  “Don’t mean to be rude, Ms. Danniher, but I’ve got a lot of work to do here.” His level gaze was smooth as marble.

  As I left, I realized that neither of us had once mentioned Foster Redus.

  I was falling into the same trap as everyone else, making this the Burrell case. If it was a case at all.

  * * * *

  I PULLED OPEN ONE of the station’s glass double doors at lunchtime Friday, as Mike pushed out the other. He snagged my arm and spun me around the opposite direction.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  We ended up at the Dairy Queen. It wasn’t the food I minded (a chef’s salad for me and a quarter of a cow plus French fries for Paycik) it was the ambiance—Paycik insisted on eating in his four-wheel drive. Eating in bed can be cozy, even romantic, but eating in a car is never anything but undignified. Yes, I dribbled salad dressing down the front of my blouse.

  “All right, Paycik, why’d you hijack me?”

  “I thought you’d like to come along to the high school. I’m going to talk to a jumper.” I must have looked blank. “Track and field,” he supplied. “Rog Johnson ran track. These kids knew him. They know Frank Claustel, too. You could ask questions while I’m doing the interview.”

  “Paycik, don’t ever consider a career change to espionage. You’re transparent.” Especially after Tom Burrell. “You know something about what these kids might say about Rog and Frank, so why not just tell me?”

  “I can hide things.” His voice had an edge to it I hadn’t heard before. I’d definitely stepped on some psychological toes. “There’re a lot of things about me you don’t have a clue about.”

  And he wasn’t telling me—not what he knew or suspected the high school kids might tell me and not whatever he believed I didn’t know about him. I was just going to have to find out for myself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  TRACK IS ONE of those disorganized sports, like gymnastics or horse shows, where there’s lots going on at the same time. The few times I’ve attended those events, I always seem to be watching someone warm up or adjusting equipment or arguing with a coach, while someone else is setting a world record.

  “That’s the varsity,” Mike said with a gesture to youngsters contorting their thin, young bodies in hideous ways I suppose were meant to stretch muscles.

  Paycik took off diagonally across the football field toward a grassy area near the school building where a cameraman named Jenks stood with two adult men and a skinny boy. I waited until a trio of runners loping around the track passed before venturing across it. About a dozen boys were doing basically the same contortions without any discernible leader or direction.

  “Hey, guys! Can I talk to you for a minute? Yes, you. All of you.” With little visible enthusiasm or curiosity, they gathered around me. “My name’s Elizabeth Danniher, I’m consumer affairs reporter with KWMT-TV.”

  “Fletcher lodge a complaint about his rubber breaking again?” asked a voice from the back.

  Laughter came from every direction. A couple faces turned red. I ignored the hormone humor.

  “So, I understand you guys knew Rog Johnson?” A few nods. “I’ve talked to his parents. It must’ve been hard on all of you when he died.”

  I got the standard teenaged male response of mutters and shuffling feet.

  “He was on the track team, right? What event?”

  “Relay mostly,” offered a voice from the second row, a boy with the ropy muscles and gaunt look of a dis
tance runner.

  “Was he good?”

  The boy shrugged. “He was okay. He’d fill in if the team needed him.”

  A new voice spoke up. “Rog didn’t have a big head. With him, the team came first.”

  The new speaker was a hefty boy standing to my left. His words had an edge. I wondered if he meant to score points off the first speaker, whose face tightened, or to protect Rog Johnson’s memory.

  “How about Frank Claustel? Do any of you know him?”

  All eyes shifted to the burly boy to my left. “He’s older’n us. He’s graduated,” he said.

  “I know, but I thought you might know him—”

  “He didn’t hang around with us.”

  I scanned the other faces and got a few head shakes. They weren’t talking. Not about Rog Johnson, and not about Frank Claustel.

  “How about Deputy Redus? Any of you had contact with him?”

  “Asshole,” came as a mutter from two directions.

  I shook my head. “There’s no generation gap on that opinion.”

  The tension eased, and a freckled towhead grinned. Again, the distance runner in the second row spoke. “Most of the deputies, well, if you’re not hurtin’ anybody they won’t hassle you, you know, if you and a girl are parkin’ or something. But Redus, it was like he was watchin’ and waitin’ ’til you got the most, uh, involved, then he’d show up, makin’ you get out, and the girl, even if her clothes—”

  “Shut up, Terrant.” It was Hefty Guy. “We’re not answering any more questions. She’s poking her nose in all over. Been to the Circle B and—”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, Hanley,” shot back the distance runner. “Just because—”

  “All right you guys, get a move on! We’re not going to beat Central by standing here talkin’.”

  The coach’s roar cut off Terrant. When I looked up, Mike gestured from the other end of the field to meet him at the car.

  First, I snagged the beefy boy’s arm. The others had taken off.

  “Hanley?” The face he turned to me was not friendly. Was his reaction about Rog? Or was the fact he knew I’d been to Burrell’s ranch significant? Was he another of Burrell’s loyalists? “You were a friend of Rog’s, weren’t you. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened to him?”