So it wasn’t just for me.
Sandy squeaked in his leather chair. “Sheriff Longmire is continuing the investigation into Holman’s death, and we’re going to help him in any way we can.”
The inspector jiggled his car keys and some loose change in his pocket.
“He’s wanting to know about Holman’s caseload.”
“It’s all in the file I gave you.”
He sounded as if he was from the Southwest somewhere. “I’d like the individual files.”
Harvey glanced at Sandy. “Those are ongoing investigations.”
Sandburg smiled. “In any way we can, Inspector; now why don’t you take the sheriff here down to your office and get him those files?”
Harvey tilted his head just a little, glanced at me, and then back to the Campbell County sheriff. Without any further word, he turned on a cowboy heel and started toward the door as Sandy called out.
“You’re excused, Inspector.”
The fence pole paused at the door and looked back at me. “You coming?”
I glanced at the sheriff, who was grinning, and followed the inspector down the hallway; taking a hard right, we passed Lucian, who continued to inspire the troops with tales of yore, stood at the elevator, and waited for the car to arrive.
“Phoenix.”
He stared at me without a smile. “Albuquerque.”
“Retired?”
“Once.”
I nodded and watched the numbers rise. “How long have you been here?”
“Ten with Arizona Corrections, ten with the APD, seven with Denver, and then transferred up here from the DCI Field Office about six months ago.”
“Decide you wanted to shovel snow?”
“Something like that.”
“Sandy trying to get rid of you?”
He glanced at me and nodded. “I don’t think he likes me.”
“As charming as you are—how can that be?” The small car arrived, and he gestured for me to step in. “Probably thinks you’re going to take his job.”
Harvey joined me in the elevator and punched the button, then studied me for a moment and stuck out his hand. “Richard.”
I shook it as the doors closed, and the car silently descended. “Walt.”
—
Appropriately enough, the Cold Case Files Division of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department was located adjacent to the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department file room in the chilly basement of the building, and was devoid of the charms above.
I sat in what was certainly a cast-off green metal office chair beside what had surely been an abandoned green metal office desk out of which Harvey pulled a few file folders about an inch thick; resting them on the corner of the desk, he sat in the twin green chair. “Merry belated Christmas.”
“Any order to them?”
He shook his head. “Not that I can tell, but he had them on the desk just like that.”
I glanced around at the locked cages surrounding the file areas and could see only one window up near the ceiling, where people’s feet, clothed in various winter footwear, walked by on the sidewalk above. “He worked down here alone?”
The inspector leaned back in his chair and placed his pointy-toed boots up on the surface between us on top of the files. “Now you know why he killed himself, right?”
I looked at the folders under his polished wing tips and even went so far as to flip the corners through my fingers. “Pretty skimpy.”
He ignored my remark and glanced up through the abbreviated window. “I started trying to guess what people did for a living by looking at their shoes, but then I figured out they were mostly all cops and quit.”
“There are a lot of them around here.”
“Uh huh.” His eyes returned to mine. “How ’bout you?”
“How about me what?”
“You a cop?”
I smiled, not making it easy on him. “In what sense?”
He didn’t smile back. “Are you one of them, or are you one of us?”
“I’m just me.” I closed my fingers around the files and yanked them from under his boots.
He slipped the lizard skin boots from the desk and stood, and I was standing right there with him, nose to nose.
“Gerald Holman was a friend of mine, and I don’t want his name dragged through the mud.”
I slipped the files under my arm. “Are you trying to tell me something, Richard?”
He didn’t move. “I want to be sure about who you’re working for.”
“That would be my business.”
He nodded toward the files securely compressed under my arm. “Those are now mine and that makes it my business, too.”
“You want to wrestle for them?”
He looked me over. “You think I can’t?”
“I think I’ve got you by about sixty pounds, and the first thing I’m going to do is grab that .357 on your hip.”
“Well, I’ll be grabbing that .45 at the small of your back.”
I glanced around. “Boy howdy, I sure hope no one comes in down here while we’re doing all that grabbing.”
His face was stony, but after a few seconds fissures started to break through the façade, and finally the cracks formed a grin underneath the extravagant mustache and he chuckled. “Gets lonely down here.” He laughed, outright, and then sat on the edge of the desk. “I hear you’re pretty smart.”
“For a Wyoming sheriff?”
He continued to smile. “You get a lot of press.”
“Meaning?”
He drew a wide palm across the lower part of his face but somehow didn’t disturb the mustache. “Look, Gerald was a good guy . . .”
I sat and leaned back in the guest chair. “We all seem to be in agreement about that, but he’s dead and his wife wants to know why. So, in answer to your question, I’m working for her.” Confrontation largely avoided, I started shuffling through the files. “This is all he was working on?”
“The only things of any importance.”
I nodded and left it at that. “His wife mentioned something about a missing persons?”
“Missing girl from out near Arrosa, a little crossroads east of here along the railroad tracks.” He leaned forward and took the stack from my hands and flipped through until finding the one marked with a name—Jone Urrecha. “Classic case from the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club out there; got off work and disappeared, never to be heard from again.”
He handed the folder to me, and I opened it. “Dancer?”
“Sure, if you say so.”
“Missing five weeks . . .” I glanced up at him. “Not exactly a cold cold case.”
“Nope, but Holman got all the leftovers.” He glanced around the dungeon. “And shit flows downhill.”
I rested my eyes on the photo of the young woman and found her features familiar. “Urrecha, that’s Basque.” I looked up at him. “I met a woman at the Wrangler Motel last night by that name.”
“The sister—she’s been talking to the press and harassing the department about our handling of the case—everybody around here just wants her to go home.”
I glanced up at him. “How is our handling of the case?”
He pointed at the folder. “As near as I can tell the report got filed by another dancer about a week after the incident. A deputy took the statement, a detective followed it up, but there was nothing to indicate foul play. Her apartment was empty, and her car was gone, so it’s a pretty good bet that she flew the coop—something she has been known to do.”
“You contact Boise?” He looked confused. “Where she’s from?”
“Hey, this wasn’t my case until a week and a half ago.”
I gestured with the file. “This one was on top?”
“Yeah.”
“Any c
hance that she was involved with Holman?”
He made a face. “You’re kidding, right?”
My turn to shrug.
He thought about it. “I know it’s a reasonable avenue of suspicion, but he was three times her age and just not the type.”
I looked at the next file—a waitress from the Flying J Travel Plaza on South Douglas Highway by the name of Roberta Payne. “Another missing woman?”
He nodded. “Three months ago.”
I flipped to the next file and another missing woman—a housewife from east Gillette from seven months previous, Linda Schaffer.
“These files are all missing women.”
He studied me. “I know what you’re thinking—Powder River serial killer, but there’s nothing to connect them other than the fact that they were women and are missing, and the time span is not consistent.”
“You think he just fixated and burned out?”
“It happens.”
He was right, it did happen with an alarming frequency—police officers who grew so close to their cases that they simply couldn’t accept the loss or the failure. I tucked the folders into my chest. “Do you mind if I take these and go through them?”
He stroked a hand across his mustache again and sighed. “Hey, I’m sorry about that, before . . .” He thumped my chest with the back of his hand. “The only thing I ask is that if you come up with anything you get in touch with me first.” He stuck the same hand out. “Deal?” We shook, and I stood. “Where are you going to start?”
I glanced down at the file on top, just as Gerald Holman had left it. “Evidently, at the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club.”
He smiled. “Never a bad place to start.”
“But first I have to go to Kmart.”
—
Whether from guilt or a sense of retail avoidance, Lucian decided to stick around at the sheriff’s office, while Dog and I headed south on the Douglas Highway to the fabled Kmart; I parked and turned to look at him. “You want dog treats, or should I just go over to the meat section and get you a ham?”
His ears went up at the word ham; they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure seventeen of Dog’s were ham.
Having taken his order, I got out and started in. It took me a while, but I found the ham and then the coffee urn. Vowing to get Lucian to reimburse me, I made my way out with the cumbersome box but stopped as I passed the bulletin board at the entryway where a shapely lass in a green Stormy Kromer hat and a vintage plaid hunting jacket was replacing a homemade missing persons poster using a heavy-duty staple gun.
After she secured the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet on the cork with a slap, she turned and looked at me with the remaining posters hanging over her arm and the staple gun at the ready. “I’ve got permission to do this.”
I looked down the barrel of the device and raised my one available hand. “Okay.”
She studied me, probably noticing I wasn’t wearing one of those nifty red Kmart vests. “Do I know you?”
“Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County—we met last night. I’m staying at the Wrangler.”
“The what?”
“The Wrangler Motel.”
She nodded as the pneumatic doors opened and closed behind me, ushering in repeated arctic blasts from the outside. “Yeah, yeah . . .”
I pointed toward the poster behind her. “That your sister?”
Her chin came up. “Yes.”
I lowered my finger, gesturing toward the remaining posters. “Can I have one of those?”
The chin remained steady, as did the gaze. “Why?”
The doors continued to open and close, so I stepped to one side to avoid the sensors. “I thought maybe I could help.”
She snorted, and it was an ugly expression on such a pretty face. “Well, if you’re as much help as the rest of the guys that are supposed to be looking for her . . .”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “I think I might’ve discovered why there’s been a little slowdown in the investigation.”
“And why’s that?”
I glanced around with as little drama as I could to make sure that no discount shoppers were in earshot. “The detective that was working on the case is dead.”
“What’d he die of, old age?”
I stood there for a long time, giving her what my daughter used to call the nickel-plated stare. “Evidently it was a suicide.”
She looked back at the poster. “Good, maybe the next guy in line will do a better job.”
I glanced around again, a little embarrassed. “Maybe.”
She stared at me. “You?”
I nodded. “Uh, kind of.”
She didn’t move at first but then clutched the posters a little closer and dropped her arm that held the staple gun. “I’m sorry; that was awful.”
“It’s okay.”
She sniffed and then rubbed the red of her nose with the back of a fingerless wool glove. “The old guy?”
“Gerald Holman.”
“Yeah, him.” She moved to the side with me. “That’s why there was a different cop when I went in there last week; Wyatt Earp, the guy with the mustache.”
“Yep.”
She stared down at her fur-lined, lace-up Sorels and then handed me one of the posters without looking up. “Really, I’m sorry.”
I took the piece of paper and studied the copied photo of a beautiful young blond woman looking off to the right, laughing at something someone off-camera had said. “Pretty.”
“Yeah.”
“No other siblings?”
“No.”
I glanced at the bulletin board. “How often do you change the posters?”
She looked back. “Every couple of days; I use a different photo each time. She was like that; no two photos ever looked the same.”
I waited a moment before asking. “Can I buy you lunch?”
—
The Flying J Travel Plaza #762 off exit 126 on I-90 isn’t all that different from the rest of the six Flying Js in Wyoming, other than its location next to the Kmart on the Douglas Highway, but it was convenient and had a nice view of the parking lot and my truck, where Dog sat in the driver’s seat looking in at us longingly.
“Where did you get the plains grizzly?”
I sipped my coffee. “The Forest Service, he’s Smokey’s evil twin—at least when he’s around ham.” The truck stop groaned with the wind that had started up, and snow sandblasted the glass, pressing on the casings as I looked down at the poster on the corner table between us. “They said her apartment was empty, and her car was gone.”
Lorea held her hot chocolate close to her mouth and blew in it. “Trailer.”
“Excuse me?”
“She didn’t have an apartment; she lived in a trailer behind Dirty Shirley’s, the place where she worked.”
“The strip club is called Dirty Shirley’s?”
She looked at me over her mug. “Yeah.”
“No one has heard anything from her at all, phone calls, letters?”
“No. We were close and used to text each other all the time and suddenly she just stopped.”
“Credit card receipts—”
“Nothing.”
I studied the poster some more. “Five weeks.”
She took a sip and looked out the window at the monochromatic landscape of concrete and blowing snow. “Yes.”
I was trying to figure a way of getting around to the subject and could come up with nothing better than just asking. “I hope you’re not going to take offense to this, but—”
“What was a nice girl like Jone doing in a dump like Dirty Shirley’s swinging from a pole with nothing on but body glitter?”
“Something like that.”
Her eyes turned back to m
ine. “Upward of three hundred and fifty dollars a night, I’d suspect.” She pushed herself into the booth with her back against the window. “She was an education major at State until the money ran out.” As she curled her black legging-clad knees up under her chin, her dark hair draped around her face. “She said she’d gotten a job here in Wyoming with one of the methane outfits, which she said was only until she saved up enough money for next year. But my parents started hearing from her less and less—”
“What do they know?”
“That she’s missing, and that’s all.” She glanced at me, the wool hunting cap casting shadows over her eyes. “They’re older; there’s nothing they can do, and I don’t think they need to know that Jone was—”
“Was dancing all she was doing?”
She was about to answer, and possibly in a vehement way, when the waitress reappeared with a pot in hand. “You need a refill?”
I nodded and slid my mug toward her, glancing at Lorea, who was still giving me a hard look, as I slipped my hand down and opened one of the folders that I had at my side and held up a photograph for the middle-aged waitress to see. “Know this woman?”
She immediately looked sad. “Roberta Payne, she worked here over the summer.”
I stuck out a hand. “Walt Longmire, I’m the sheriff over in Absaroka County.”
She filled my mug, sat the pot at the edge of the table, and extended her hand in return. “Jane Towson. The cops come in here periodically to ask questions and retake statements.” Her face brightened just a little. “You know Inspector Holman? He comes in here a lot.”
“He’s dead.”
We both looked at the young woman seated across from me, and then I turned back to the waitress. “He passed away a couple of weeks ago—”
Lorea’s voice stayed sharp. “He killed himself.”
Jane slowly turned back to me, unsure of what to make of her tone. “I . . . I’m sorry to hear that. He seemed like a nice man.”
Gesturing with the photograph, I brought the subject back to Roberta Payne. “Did you know her well?”
“Um, not really. I mean we worked here together and we were in a book club for a while, but I didn’t know her really well . . . She was only here for a couple months before she disappeared.” She picked up the coffeepot and glanced at Lorea before asking me, “Do you think it’s possible that she’s still alive somewhere?”
Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery Page 4