We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I start thinking that I’m funny.
“I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”
T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”
Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30-30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.
I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”
T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.
When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.
“He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.
“Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.
“Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”
“You don’t think it was an accident?”
I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”
“You have a feeling about this?”
I started to give her the old Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-the-candlestick routine, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t.”
When we got back, the Bag Boys had already zipped Cody up and loaded him onto a gurney; some of the others were still processing evidence into freezer bags. One of the boys was dropping a tattered eagle feather into a plastic envelope. He looked up as we approached. “Looks like everything out here’s been making a meal of this poor guy.”
T.J. turned to me. “Walt, are you going to be the primary on this one?”
“Do you mean am I going to be riding in one of those Conestoga wagons of yours for five hours down to Cheyenne?”
“Yes.”
“No.” I pointed to the group of vehicles where Vic was busy putting away the photography equipment. “At the bottom of this hill, you will find my somewhat agitated, but highly skilled, primary investigator.”
T.J. smiled. She liked Vic. “She have any cases pending?”
“Well, she’s been hanging Christmas lights in town, but I figure we can let her go for a few days.”
“It’s not even Thanksgiving.”
“It’s a city council thing.”
We followed the body down to where the rest of our little task force had congregated. Someone had brought a number of Thermoses full of hot coffee and a few boxes of donuts. I got a cup of coffee; I don’t eat donuts. I spotted Jim Ferguson, one of my deputies and head of Search and Rescue, across the bed of the truck and asked him if they had turned anything up on their walk around. His mouth was full of cream-filled, but the gist was no. I told him I was going to replace his staff with the sheep.
“We did a three-hundred-yard perimeter, but the light wasn’t so good. We’ll do another soon as everybody gets a donut and some coffee. You think this guy left brass?”
“I hope.”
I took my coffee and moved over to where T.J. and Vic were seated on a tailgate. They were looking at some of the evidence; hopefully, they were discussing something I could understand.
“Single shot, center, didn’t get too much of the sternum.” Vic held a bag up to the rising sun and looked at the metal fragment inside. “Fuck, I don’t know.” T.J. patted the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, and I sat. Vic continued, “It looks like a slug. I’m thinking 12 gauge or something just a little bigger.”
“Bazooka?”
She lowered the bag, and her eyes met mine. “You’re getting rid of me?”
I nodded my head. “Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a big pain in the butt.”
“Fuck you.”
“And you talk dirty.”
She handed the bagged bullet to T.J. “You’re going to be stuck up here with Turk.”
“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get the Christmas lights put up together.” Vic snorted and readjusted her gun belt. “Besides, you’ve forgotten more about this space-age stuff than I’ll ever know. You can relay information back to me.” The tarnished gold stared at me, unblinking. “You’ll only be down there for two days. It will take us that long to round up all the usual suspects.” I was the old dog who had learned his fill of new tricks, and it was only logical that I work the county and the people.
She poked me in the belly. Her finger remained in one of my fat rolls, and she poked each word for emphasis, “If Search and Rescue don’t find anything, you gonna call Omar?”
“That’s another reason for you to leave, you don’t like Omar.”
She poked me again. “You be careful, all right?”
This all sounded very strange coming from Vic’s mouth, but I took it as affection and punched her on the shoulder. “I’m always . . .” She knocked my hand away.
“I mean it.” She didn’t have kind eyes, they rarely looked away, and they always told the truth. I could use eyes like that. “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this.”
I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub w
eed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills. “Yeah, well you got five hours to talk to T.J. about this woman’s intuition thing.” The next poke hurt.
I hung around the scene until Search and Rescue had finished their second sweep; I sat in the Bullet and filled out the reports. Ferg strolled up with a cup of coffee and another cream-filled. “Anything?” Fortunately, I caught him between bites.
“Nothing. We got a lot of sheep shit and tracks.”
“Any suspicious sheep tracks?”
“Nope, no suspicious sheep shit, either. It’s like the Denver stock-yards up there.”
I thought about how you could kill a victim only once, but how a crime scene could die a thousand deaths. I hoped that whatever useful information could be deducted from this patch of God’s little acre was traveling safely in plastic bags toward Cheyenne. Motives are all fine and good, but if we could find out the how, we’d have a shooting’s match chance of finding out the who. I had the niggling feeling I was going to have to call Omar.
On the drive over to the Pritchards’ place I thought about the last time I had seen Cody alive. He was a heavyset kid, built like a linebacker, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains. I had pulled him out on three occasions, the last being the rape case. Cody had endeared himself to the local Native American community by being quoted in the Sheridan paper as saying, “Yeah, she was a retard redskin, but she was asking for it.”
The Pritchards had a place on the outskirts of Durant and, by the time I got there, there must have been eight or nine cars and trucks in the drive. Word carries fast in open spaces. As I cut off the engine, the full impact of what I was going to have to do hit me like a Burlington Northern. How do you tell parents that their child is dead? Sure, they’d heard it through the grapevine, but I was the official word. I allowed myself a long sigh.
There were field swallows swooping near the Bullet. I was probably disturbing their family, too. Seemed to be my day for it. It had been longer than twenty-four hours since sleep. It’s easy to work all night because the sun doesn’t come up, but when it does, my eyes start to sting and the rest of me gets a little shaky. I’ve always been this way. I was focusing my eyes when I heard the screen door slam and saw John Pritchard walking down the drive. I never cared too much for John; he was one of those guys who always had to be in control. The conversation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The pertinent information from him was that Cody had left the house twenty-seven hours ago with an extra doe license. The pertinent information from me was that he wasn’t coming home.
I did the best I could, drove the seven miles back to my place, and sat on the porch—well, the front doorway—but not for very long, because it was cold. I had the presence of mind to fall into the house instead of out of it. I drifted in and out of consciousness until the phone rang, and the answering machine my daughter made me buy picked up. “You’ve reached the Longmire residence. No one is available to answer your call right now, ’cause we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats. If you leave a message after the tone, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Happy trails!” She had taken a great deal of joy in recording the message printed in the instructions, with a few minor alterations. I smiled every time I heard it.
“It’s Pancake Day!” The voice resonated through the lines from fourteen miles away. Jim Ferguson was not only head of Search and Rescue and my longest standing part-time deputy, but he was also the man in charge of driving around Durant once a year at dawn in the fire department’s truck, proclaiming through a bullhorn, “It’s Pancake Day, Pancake Day!”
There are only three major vote-getting days in Absaroka County, and I can’t remember the other two. “Oh God, no. It’s Pancake Day.” I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headline: SHERIFF SHOOTS SELF, UNABLE TO FACE PANCAKES.
“It’s Pancake Day!” Ferg really enjoyed his work. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour, just thought somebody ought to call and remind you. But if you really are gonna retire next year, then who gives a shit?”
I stumbled to the phone beside the recliner. “Is it really today?”
“If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’.” There was a pause. “Hey, Walt, if you want, I can just tell ’em we were up all night.” Ferg was slightly in the Turk camp for future sheriff, but I had other plans. If Vic was going to be the first female sheriff in Wyoming, I only had a year to pull in all my political markers. I could last an hour of Pancake Day with the Elks, the Eagles, the Lions, the Jaycees, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and, of course, the AARPs.
“I’ll be there in a half hour.”
“Remember, it’s at the Catholic church this year.”
“You bet.” I plugged in the coffeemaker and dumped enough coffee for eight cups into the filter with only enough water for four. I took a shower while it was perking. The plumbing was somewhat makeshift, but the water that came from above went away below. It went away below through a bathtub that Henry had found for me for twenty dollars. Somebody on the Rez had used it for target practice with a .22 but had only chipped the porcelain. Then there was the shower curtain. I don’t know what the exact physical dynamics are that cause a shower curtain to attach itself to your body when you turn on the water but, since my shower was surrounded on all sides by curtains, I turned on the water and became a vinyl, vacuum-sealed sheriff burrito.
I slid behind the wheel of the Bullet and started driving the fourteen miles to town. Durant is situated along the Bighorn Mountains and, because there is abundant fish and game, it’s become the retiree capitol of Wyoming. In Absaroka County, to ignore the octogenarian vote is to pump gas at the Sinclair station for a living. Service jobs are about all there are in Durant, somewhat stunting the younger generation and forcing the majority out by age nineteen; but the retirees keep coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, with the odd Texan and Californian thrown in for spice. They come looking for the romance of the west that they had paid shiny quarters to view on Saturday afternoons in flickering black and white. They waited half a century of stamping out automobile bumpers to get their western dream; they paid for it and, by God, they were going to have it. Most ended up picking up and moving out, headed for Florida, Arizona, or wherever the weather was easier. I liked the ones who stayed. You’d see them out after the blizzards, shoveling away, and waving at the Bullet like it was the circus come to town. Hell, I’d stop and talk to them. Sheriffs have to get elected in Wyoming, so we have to be liked. I imagine that, if you had to elect the average police force, the turnover rate would spin your Rolodex.
When I first started out, it was the part of the job that I enjoyed the least, courting the public. But as time wore on, it got to be the part that I enjoyed the most. Martha was right when she said that I needed a bumper sticker that said BORN TO BULLSHIT. The debates were the best part. In ’81, old Sheriff Connally planned a peaceful takeover. He ran against me so no one else could and had lofted softballs to me so that I felt like Harmon Killabrew by the time the debate was over. I was elected. Lucian retired and was now living the high life in room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I still went over on Tuesday nights to play chess, and he still kicked my ass, to his unending delight.
I looked at the inch of snow that dappled the sagebrush. It looked like a Morse code of white dots and dashes leading down the road. If I could read the message, would it tell me the story I wanted to hear? The truth still stood that I was a sheriff who had survived by the cult of personality, and that, if the trend were to continue, my heir-apparent would not be elected. Was I just trying to force Vic down the throats of the county because I could? No, she was the best person for the job and that was the reason I was going to have to keep pushing. Pancake Day, Pancake Day.
I idled down into second gear at the corner of Main and Big Horn and looked down the street to see Turk’s Trans Am parked at the office. Just seeing his car
made my ass hurt. I didn’t feel like facing him on an empty stomach. I hoped he would have already contacted Lavanda Running Horse over at Game and Fish for any information we could get about last night’s incident. I circled quickly around the courthouse to avoid being seen and made a beeline for the Catholic church. The place was mobbed, and there was no parking. I wheeled the Bullet onto the concrete pad beside the HVAC unit and cut the engine. I figured the Pope wasn’t coming today.
“Well, if it isn’t the long arm of the law.” It was an old joke, but one I didn’t mind. “Longmire, pull up a chair and sit yourself down.” Steve Brandt was the mayor of Durant and the de facto president of the Business Associates Committee, a loosely affiliated group of warring tribes that made up the commercial facet of the downtown. He also owned the screen-printing place on Main and had done the T-shirts for the annual Sheriff’s Department vs. Fire Department softball game, but the less said about this the better. Next to him was David Fielding of the Sportshop, Elaine Gearey who had the Art Gallery, Joe of Joe Benham’s Hardware and Lumber, Dan Crawford from the IGA, and Ruby.
“What are you doing here?” Ruby’s chin rested on her palm, fingers trailing into the hollow below her cheekbones. I figured cheekbones were one of those things you gained from speed walking five miles a day.
I slipped off my coat and sat on it. “Well, I’m here to support the courageous Durant Volunteer Fire Department’s men in nonflammable nylon . . . Do you think their hats are cooler than ours?”
“Shouldn’t you be home, in bed?”
I took my hat and perched it on her head. It looked jaunty. I turned to the others at the table. “This is the problem I have with all the women I know, they’re always trying to get me into bed.” There was a derisive chuckle around the table, and Ruby took my hat off, sitting it on the table brim up—good Wyoming girl. “It’s ’cause I look so much like Gary Cooper.” General opinion at the table projected their cinematic consensus to more like Hoot Gibson, whereupon I changed the subject. “So, how are the pancakes?”
Cold Dish Page 4