Left Hanging

by Patricia McLinn

  “Easy. As soon as . . . as soon as I can.”

  “Excellent. The last thing, Jenny—”

  “Jennifer.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Jennifer—be careful when you give me the answers. For the same reasons.”

  “Sure thing.”

  TRIANGLES APPEARED beside the names I’d written on a pad.

  The names were Vicky Upton, Sonja Osterspeigel, and Linda Caswell with a question mark. Also the name Keith Landry, surrounded by lots and lots of triangles.

  I wrote rodeo queen. Then not every year. Finally, Oren Street’s list of three things that mattered to Landry: money, women, and power. I wrote one on each leg of the biggest triangle around his name. I drew a triangle around each word: money, women, power.

  I had my hand on the phone to redial Jennifer, when it rang.

  “I’m on my way to the station to get you,” Mike said.

  “Oh? Are we going somewhere?”

  “Yes. I finally got Lloyd Sampson off by himself, fed him lunch. And got some info about the beam. The experts think the straight marks were made before—probably shortly before—the angled ones. They hedge it around with a lot of scientific stuff, but that’s what it amounts to. Also, they believe the angled marks were from when Landry was hanged.”

  “Good work, Mike.” A far more productive lunch than mine.

  “There’s more, and it’s better. I told Lloyd that I saw what they found caught in the wood post. Told him I saw a piece of green string held in tweezers.” He drew in a breath. “He said it wasn’t green. It was pink.”

  “Very good, Mike.”

  “Just wait. A shred of pink shiny cloth, like it was torn off a piece of clothing. Like maybe a girl’s fancy shirt.”

  I recalled the conversation we’d overheard between Heather and her mother Saturday night. “The famous torn pink shirt.”

  “My thoughts exactly. So do we tell Richard? Or what?”

  FROM DOWN THE street, we watched Cas Newton’s truck pull into the sun-dazzled Upton driveway, Heather emerge, an exchange of waves, Cas drive away.

  Vicky was at her job as a guide at the big museum in town. Heather was home for her customary break between her part-time job at the Sandwich Shop and her evening duties as rodeo queen. As always, Aunt Gee’s reconnaissance was one hundred percent accurate.

  Heather swung the door open with an air of impatience. “I told you—” She broke off when she saw who was at the door.

  “Hi, Heather. We want to talk to you for . . . for a story.”

  Her eyes sharpened. “This is in addition to the one Leona is doing for next weekend, right?”

  “Yes.” And it was not a lie. Leona D’Amato was KWMT’s fluff specialist. If a story came out of what Mike and I were pursuing, it would be completely separate from what Leona did.

  “I don’t have long. I need to rest before tonight’s rodeo or I’ll look as old as . . .” She let it die after flicking a look toward me. Clearly, tact was not a required element on the rodeo queen committee’s checklist.

  The house seemed familiar. From the front door, we looked straight ahead into the kitchen where an ironing board was set up. It was the only element out of order. To the left was a hallway that presumably led to the bedrooms. To the right, the living room.

  Heather led us three steps to a couch under the front window. An out of date TV sat across from it. On the end wall, surrounded by plaques and awards, was a two-by-three-foot framed photo of Heather, complete with tiara. Vicky had wasted no time.

  “How can you do a story with no camera. Not that I’d be on camera like this.”

  “You look great,” Mike said with his smile. “But this is background, so no camera.”

  She nodded wisely. “Background. Like about me growing up and how hard I’ve worked to be rodeo queen.”

  “That’s more for Leona,” I said, keeping my tone light. “What we’d like to know is what you saw and did Wednesday night at the rodeo grounds.”

  Her eyes flickered, and the color in her face washed out. But she did not buckle at the knees. “It was like any other rodeo night. I did my run-through for the queen, because my first warm-up queen’s ride was the next night—Thursday. Though I won’t do it for real until the Fourth of July. That’s the important one. That’s—”

  “On Wednesday—”

  “I placed second in barrel racing.” She emitted a dissatisfied huff. “Should have won. My concentration wasn’t—”

  “Later that night, Heather. Much later. After everyone else was gone.”

  “I wasn’t there. I left and came home like always—”

  “You and Keith Landry were by the bull pens.”

  “—and stayed here. I—”

  “We know you were there, Heather.”

  “You’re wrong. I wasn’t. I told you—”

  “The tear in your pink shirt proves it.”

  She froze with her mouth open.

  I kept on. “A piece of fabric the sheriff’s department found at the scene will precisely match that tear.” It was a bit of a gamble, but not much.

  She closed her mouth, her eyes remained wide.

  “You have a choice, Heather. You can tell us what happened for background, with no camera, just as we said. Or we can take what we know to the sheriff’s department right now, and you can tell them, a conversation that will not be on background, and certainly will be on the news.”

  I didn’t mention that no matter what, at some point very soon, we’d have to tell Alvaro about the matching torn shirt. Especially if he went public with discovery of the pink fabric. Because then we could not pretend we didn’t know what he didn’t know we knew.

  “That shirt is not the only item that shows you were there.” I avoided the word evidence for now. “And what you did.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. But why you did what you did can make all the difference in how this plays out, Heather. We want to know why. Why you did it.”

  “I . . . I was caught.”

  “Caught?” I repeated when it seemed she might not say more.

  “On that pole, the old one, the wood one.”

  It took me a beat to realize she was answering my why you did it with an explanation of how her shirt ripped. “What were you doing there?”

  “It was because of the bulls. I couldn’t go straight through, because the bulls were in those pens. I don’t know why. They shouldn’t have been there . . . and he was coming at me.”

  “Who?”

  “Him. The one who died.”

  “Landry? Coming at you? Threatening?”

  “Yeah.” She’d gone pale, her lips even paler, like she might be sick to her stomach. “The things he was saying, and that smirk. It was bad enough at lunch when he’d pawed at me, but then . . .”

  Again, she seemed about to get stuck. I nudged, “So, you’re by the chute, and Landry is coming at you . . . But how did it start? He didn’t just start—what?—leering at you and coming at you.”

  “Yes, he did! When he saw me, he did. That’s exactly what he did.”

  “Back up, where were you when he first saw you?”

  “I told you. Stuck by that chute. I’d tried to slip away when I heard him, and that’s when my shirt—”

  “You heard him. Doing what?”

  “Yelling at somebody. On the phone.”

  “About what? Do you remember anything he said?”

  “Something about damn well get your ass here, and do it now, and do what you were supposed to do or there’d be hell to pay,” she said with some of her customary snap.

  “Did you get any sense of who he was talking to?”

  “No.”

  I eyed her. I wouldn’t have bet a nickel eit
her way. “Then what?”

  “He must have spotted me, because he hung up fast and started in that awful, slimy voice about wasn’t I the eager one, and no need to be shy, and this was even better than he expected and . . . and the other stuff.”

  “Other stuff?”

  “What he’d . . .” She swallowed audibly. “Do.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I told him he was crazy and disgusting, and I’d never—I kept yelling at him, but he wasn’t listening. It was like . . . He wouldn’t stop. And the flounce from my shirt was caught in the wood of those old posts. I tried pulling away, heard the material start to tear, and knew Mom would skin me alive. But I had to stop him. I had to, because . . .” She sucked in a breath. “I’d done a trick over a bar to rope a cow. I knew I could make the toss. Got him first time.”

  Mike twitched. I empathized. Was this girl such a rock-hard killer that she took pride in putting the rope around a man’s neck on her first try? But if she wasn’t such a rock-hard killer . . .?

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Danniher. One question at a time. “What happened next?”

  “I tied off the rope—”

  A damned casual way of saying it if she meant she’d yanked the rope tight until a man died from hanging.

  “—so I had both hands to get the shirt out without tearing it worse.” Yet left a fragment of pink fabric. “I got out of there. With him yelling at me the whole time, saying he’d see to it I was dumped as queen, and I’d have to give back the scholarship, and there’d be a scandal and everything.”

  “Yelling?” I repeated.

  “Yeah. He started off sort of laughing, you know, when I swung the loop and it settled over him, like I was being . . . cute or something. When I snugged it up, he started yelling.”

  “He could yell?”

  She frowned. “Sure.”

  “Heather, where was the rope?”

  “I told you, tied off on the chute.”

  “The part of it around Keith Landry—where was that?”

  “Around him, like I told you.”

  She sounded impatient, and I felt the same way, but I didn’t want to put words in her mouth—or take them out.

  She resolved the issue with a hunched shoulder gesture that might have been part of a shrug, except she drew both elbows in tight to her waist and clamped her hands to her sides. “Like that,” she said.

  “Because the rope was . . .?”

  “Around his waist, holding his arms in tight. I saw him trying to work his arms to loosen it up, but he would’ve still had a ways to go.” Her chin wobbled. “I suppose that’s why he didn’t get away from the bulls, though why—”

  “None of that’s clear yet,” I said firmly. I couldn’t tell her the truth. If she wasn’t innocent, it might help a murderer go free. If she was innocent, it could compromise the investigation. And either way, if it ever got back to Quantico that I’d shared details with a suspect, I would not only never get another piece of information from Dex, he’d probably feed me to the squirrels. “Let’s get this straight. Landry walked through the bull pen, and—”

  “Through? No way. He’d’ve been an idiot to do that. He came down the aisle next to it, toward the chute. That’s what I don’t understand, how he got in the pen. It doesn’t make sense. When I left he was in the aisle. Why would he go in there?”

  I shook my head to say I had no answer.

  “What were you doing there that late?” Mike asked.

  Her face changed slightly, her mouth went mulish.

  “If you were meeting Landry, it’s not—” he added.

  “No! I wasn’t meeting him. I didn’t want anything to do with him, not ever. I—I’d left gear behind. I didn’t sleep for remembering it and went to get it.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Heather—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were the security lights on?”

  “Those, and ones around the office, where . . . he had come from.”

  “Was there a light on in the rodeo office?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention to that.”

  I gave Mike a chance to ask more, then picked it up. “Last question: Why not rope him regular, instead of over the bar?”

  A flicker of You-Stupid-Easterner expression appeared. “Roping’s for pulling something toward you, or dragging it behind. That’s what a regular throw would’ve done. But I wanted to stop him coming toward me, and I sure didn’t want him dragging behind. I wanted to slow him down enough to get out of there. And that’s what I did.”

  MY PHONE RANG as we drove to my house to talk this through—no way could we discuss it a KWMT, not with Fine prowling.

  “It’s the person who put together your computer,” came a hushed voice.

  “Jen—Jennifer?”

  “Shh, don’t say. For the usual reasons.”

  “Jennifer, if Fine’s near you, he already knows who you are.”

  After a pause, she said, “Right. I won’t say—you know—the other part.”

  “Good. Don’t name me or anything to give away what we’re talking about.”

  “Yeah . . . Yeah, okay. So,” she said in her normal voice, practically blasting my ear because I’d been listening closely. “That birthday party we were, you know, planning? That’ll be on April 20. To celebrate his eighteenth birthday next year.”

  “Heather Upton’s birthday is April 20.”

  “Right.”

  “She’ll be eighteen next year. Was Landry involved with the Fourth of July Rodeo the year before she was born? That would be nineteen years ago this month.”

  “Exactly! Right the second time.”

  “That was the second year he was stock contractor here?”

  “Perfect. That’ll be a perfect present.” I heard a male voice in the background. “Gotta go.”

  “One last thing. Can you come by my house tonight? Remember where it is? After you get off? When is that?”

  “Nine. Yeah, I can. And, yeah, I remember.”

  She hung up, and I turned to Mike.

  “Got it,” he said. “A good chance Heather is Landry’s daughter. He couldn’t have known, not going after her the way she said. God, he couldn’t have known.”

  “No idea. The other two questions we don’t have answers to are if she knew he was her father, and if she was telling us anything like the truth.”

  “KEITH LANDRY was outside the bulls’ pen with the rope holding his arms tight around his waist. Then what?” I demanded of Mike, as we sat in my rental’s living room.

  “Sounds like Colonel Mustard in the library with the wrench. Okay, quit groaning. It wasn’t that not-funny. Of course, that’s assuming Heather told us the truth.”

  “True. But would she have told us anything if she’d hanged him? I’d have expected her to throw us out. Deny, deny, deny.”

  “Could be an act, to make us think the way you’re thinking.”

  “True again. Though if she’s that good, forget rodeo queen, she should be on Broadway. Also, her story explains things we hadn’t understood.”

  “Like why Landry let himself get roped at all.”

  I nodded. “Sounds like he thought it was some sort of foreplay at first. On the other hand, her story leaves new questions. Like how did the rope go from his waist to his neck, which it had to do for him to be hanged? What happened to the rope? How did he get in the pen with the bulls?”

  “Still assuming she’s telling the truth, whoever got the rope from his waist to his neck probably took it. In other words, the murderer.”

  “Maybe, but not necessarily. And how would he or she get it while the bulls were—you know. Plus, another new question
, who was he meeting there?”

  “Again, probably the murderer.”

  I repeated, too. “Maybe, but not necessarily. Let’s start with the first question, how the rope got from his waist to his neck. I have an idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE KNOCK AT the door came at the worst possible moment.

  “Stay there,” I ordered Mike. “Don’t move.”

  “Forget it. I’m sitting . . . if I can.”

  Impatient, I opened the door. Tom Burrell’s tall form filled the frame.

  “Elizabeth,” he said. I saw him focus over my shoulder, then back to me. “Looks like I came at an inopportune moment. I have something I think you’ll want to hear, but I can come back later.”

  “You can come in and rescue me,” Mike called from the other side of the living room, where he sat on the edge of a wooden chair.

  “I don’t want to interrupt if you two are uh, otherwise tied up,” Burrell said, his tone what my grandmother called half-kidding, whole-earnest. His eyes became serious when he met my look, and he said very low, “It’s not as black and white as you—”

  Mike called, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Let him in, Elizabeth.”

  With reluctance, I let the door swing wide. Burrell entered with a glance at me that acknowledged this was not done.

  “No more tied-up jokes, Tom,” Mike added.

  “Well, you can understand my wanting to be a bit delicate with . . . what is that you’re tied up with?”

  “Extension cord,” I said. “We’re recreating what might have happened with Keith Landry.”

  “I didn’t think an extension cord figured into it,” Burrell said.

  “I tried to tell her . . .”

  “We had to improvise,” I said firmly, heading off a resurgence of that dispute.

  “You’ve gotta hear what we found out, Tom,” Mike said.

  I shot him a look, but he wasn’t looking at me, and I could hardly complain, since I’d told Burrell it was murder.

  Mike recapped what Heather had told us, and how that led us to the question of how the rope went from around Landry’s waist to around his neck. Which led us to this demonstration.

  At the end, Tom gazed at the extension cord tied around Mike’s waist, pinning his arms to his sides, for a long moment before saying, “Elizabeth, you know a lot more about the world outside Wyoming. But I know a sight more about things here.”