by C. J. Box
But Dallas Cates?
—
JOE TURNED on his headlights and rolled his pickup down from the perch to illuminate the old two-track road. He’d waited fifteen minutes since the exchange between Spivak and Reed. He guessed it was long enough for Reed to climb into his specially equipped van, stop at Judge Hewitt’s house just minutes away to get the search warrant signed, and be en route on the state highway to meet up with Spivak and Steck.
A jackrabbit ran down the two-track ahead of the pickup. It feinted to the left, then the right, but kept going straight ahead.
Reed picked up on the first ring.
“We got him, Joe.”
“I heard everything over the radio. How long can you hold him on expired tags?”
“Overnight at the most. I know it’s weak, but it’s a start.”
“So he didn’t struggle?”
“Spivak said he argued a little bit, but he was cooperative. I think he knows better than to try and resist.”
Joe knew exactly what that meant. The deputies were likely prepared to take out Dallas Cates once and for all if given the slightest provocation. Cates would certainly know that.
“Has he said anything?”
“I haven’t questioned him. He’s in the back of Spivak’s unit, so he’s got time to stew. We won’t formally interview him until we get him back to the shop. You heard about the rifle, right?”
“Yup.”
“Those were .223 casings we found at the murder scene. If we can match them and the slugs with this rifle . . .”
Joe nodded to himself. “Was that the only weapon he had with him?”
“As far as I know. We haven’t done a thorough search of the pickup or the compound yet. I’m sure we’ve also got him on multiple parole violations,” Reed added. “He’s not supposed to be in possession of firearms or liquor. The clerk at the store said he bought groceries and six bottles of the hard stuff. So, bottom line: we can hold him long enough to firm up the arrest. I’ll talk to Dulcie, but I’d like to overcharge him to the point that he’ll have trouble making bond. I don’t want him out on the street.”
Joe winced at the word overcharge. He was grateful they were having the conversation over their cell phones and not over the radio, where a civilian might hear it on the police band.
“What’s the plan with his buddies?” Joe asked.
“We’re going to surround the house and ask them to come out peacefully. We’ll tell them we have Dallas in custody. When they come out, we’ll put them in separate units and keep them that way.”
“On what grounds?” Joe asked.
“Who are you—Dulcie?” Reed asked.
“Just curious.”
“We’ll come up with something,” Reed said.
Which meant, Joe knew, that Reed was planning a high-risk interrogation squeeze play. No doubt it had been okayed by Dulcie, or Reed wouldn’t be proceeding with it. In the squeeze play, the suspects would not have the opportunity to get their stories straight with one another before they underwent isolated individual preliminary interviews.
It was almost unfair. Even if the suspects were entirely innocent, which was doubtful, it was almost impossible for three human beings to tell exactly the same story about their whereabouts over the last few days with exactly the same detail. Joe knew this from his own family. After an event where all of the girls were present, like a trip to the county fair or an argument about something, all three would present different versions of what had happened, even though they all were in the same place at the same time.
It was the same with multiple-party interrogations. There would be errors and omissions. Reed’s interrogators would compare notes and go back to each suspect with a list of discrepancies they’d found and hint that others in custody were telling either completely different versions of where they’d all been the day before or hint that the others were implicating the suspect in question.
The idea was to get one of the men in custody—or maybe all of them—to cut a deal and rat out their buddies. The understanding would be that the first man to point his finger at the others would be treated with the greatest leniency, or maybe even be given immunity in exchange for his testimony.
All of this needed to be done quickly and before Dallas and his friends demanded lawyers and stopped the questioning. There weren’t three public defenders in Twelve Sleep County—only Duane Patterson—and it would take time to get out-of-county counsel to get that all sorted out. Time and confusion was on the side of law enforcement, which would continue to apply pressure in the form of detaining the men in separate cells and implying—but not outright saying—that their buddies were singing to the cops like birds.
It had the makings of a slam-dunk case.
And it made Joe uneasy.
“Mike, is this coming together as smoothly as it seems to be?”
There was a beat before Reed asked, “What are you asking, Joe?”
“I’m not sure.”
“This is good police work, is what it is,” Reed said defensively. “We might be able to put Dallas Cates away before he does any more damage to anyone in this county. You of all people should be happy about that.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t happy.”
“Good. Now, I’ve got to go. I’m meeting my team before we go out to the Cates compound.”
“Be careful and please let me know what you find,” Joe said, and disconnected the call.
He felt bad for casting a pall over the proceedings, especially if Dallas Cates and his friends could be put on ice.
—
JOE KNEW SOMETHING WAS wrong when Marybeth came out of the house to greet him holding her cell phone away from her body as if it were a dead mouse she’d like to dispose of.
Before he could swing fully out of the truck, she said, “I just talked with April. She’s at the hospital in Powell. The police are there with her. Someone stabbed Joy right in front of her in their rental house.”
Joe’s insides clenched. “Say again?”
“Joy answered the door tonight and she was attacked. April got a look at who did it, but the woman ran away.”
“A woman? Is April on the phone?”
Marybeth said, “April, it’s your dad,” and handed Joe the phone.
“April, how is Joy?”
“She was alive when they brought her in,” April said. Her voice was distant, as if she were in shock. “There was a lot of blood and she couldn’t talk. She’s in the ER now. Man, you know how I hate hospitals.”
“Tell me what happened.”
April recounted the attack, from when she heard the knock on the door until she called 911 on her phone. Joe winced as she told it. He walked shoulder to shoulder with Marybeth from his pickup to inside the mudroom of their house. Marybeth kept close enough to him so that she could overhear what April was saying.
“You don’t know who the attacker was?” Joe asked.
“No. If you’re asking me if she was a student or not—I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her before. She looked older.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know,” April said, her voice breaking. “Maybe thirties . . .”
Marybeth cautioned Joe to go easy. He softened his tone and asked, “Could you identify her if you saw her again?”
“That’s what the cops asked. I said maybe. She was wearing a hoodie, so I couldn’t see her face very well. She was taller than me and really skinny. I definitely saw her teeth, and I saw ink on her arm.”
“Ink?”
“Tattoos. Like she had full sleeves.”
Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks. Wanda at the Stockman’s had told Spivak the woman with Dallas Cates that night had worn a hoodie and had full-sleeve tattoos. But it made no sense.
“The cops are out looking for he
r,” April said. “I don’t think they’ve found her yet. I don’t know whether she’s driving or on foot. They asked me if I heard a car start up outside, but I didn’t, I don’t think. Joy was bleeding on the floor . . .”
“It’s okay, April,” Joe said. “You did the right thing. Maybe they’ll grab her tonight in Powell. It isn’t very big.”
“I couldn’t get to my gun in time,” she said.
Joe said, “You’ve got a gun?”
“She’s got a gun?” Marybeth echoed.
“When I found out about Dallas being out, I thought I needed more than pepper spray,” April said defiantly. She was good at being defiant, Joe thought.
He felt his own cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out. Reed.
“I’ve got to take another call,” Joe said to April. “Here’s your mother. You can explain the gun to her.”
He handed Marybeth her phone and stepped away.
—
“IT LOOKS LIKE we got here too late,” Reed said with obvious disappointment in his voice. “We didn’t miss them by much, though. The lights were on and there are dirty dishes in the sink. The house is a mess. One of my deputies who’s been out here before thinks there might be an ATV missing from the shed, but we can’t confirm it.”
“No idea where they could have gone?” Joe asked.
“Not yet, and it’s too dark to pick up any tracks. We’ll leave a couple of guys here and come back out first thing tomorrow. If they’re in an ATV, they can’t have gone too far. But if they’re in an ATV, they could have gone anywhere in the mountains.”
“Gotcha. Could you tell if there were two or three of them there?”
Reed said, “Hold on.”
Joe could hear the sheriff cover the mouthpiece and ask his deputies if they’d been able to discern how many people had been occupying the house.
After some muffled back and forth, Reed came back on and sighed. “Bottom line is, we don’t know. It looks like three beds have been slept in, but that could mean three or up to six, if they had sleepover partners. And who knows—maybe more. We’ll check for prints on the surfaces and DNA in the sheets, but we won’t know for a while.”
Joe said, “I’m wondering about the woman Wanda told Spivak about. Any sign of a woman there?”
“Unknown at this point,” Reed said. “Why do you ask?”
Joe gave him a thumbnail sketch of the attack in Powell.
“April thinks the attacker was going after her, and Joy answered the door in her coat.”
“Jesus,” Reed said. “Poor Joy. She’s a great little girl, you know? Does Dan Bannon know?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “This all just happened.”
“Jesus,” Reed said again. Then: “Hang tight. I’m going to go ask Dallas if he knows where she is.”
—
TEN MINUTES LATER, while Marybeth was still on her cell with April, Joe’s phone lit up. Reed again.
“The son of a bitch says he has no clue about the woman in the bar with him,” he said wearily. “Dallas said some gal tagged along with them the other night, but he never got her name. He says women kind of glom on to him all the time and that it’s no big deal. Like he’s a rock star or something. I think he’s lying about knowing her, but I can’t prove it yet.”
Joe cursed to himself.
“I asked him where his friends went,” Reed said. “He claims he has no idea about that, either. He says he’s not their boss, and they might just have left of their own free will.”
“Did he tell you who they were?”
“He was cagey. He said he met them in prison and they all got released about the same time. He claims he really doesn’t know them all that well and he doesn’t even know their real names, just their prison handles.”
“Which are?”
“Brutus and the Weasel.”
Joe took a deep breath and expelled it through his nostrils. Dallas knew that without his friends apprehended, he didn’t need to talk.
“I asked him again,” Reed said, “and he just shrugged and said maybe they went out trick-or-treating tonight.”
“He said that? Those words? Trick-or-treating?” Joe said through clenched teeth.
Marybeth overheard and her eyes widened and she lowered her phone.
Joe could hear April’s tinny voice say, “What was that about trick-or-treating?”
PART TWO
How easily murder is discovered!
—Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
8
“The prosecution calls Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett,” County Attorney Dulcie Schalk said the next day from her small table in front of Justice of the Peace Tilden Mouton.
Joe sat in between Sheriff Reed and Deputy Spivak in the first row behind her. They, like Joe, were in full uniform. Instead of benches in an actual courtroom, there were two rows of dented folding chairs in a small closet-like room in the oldest wing of the Twelve Sleep County Building.
He rose and shinnied out of the row of chairs and pushed through the batwing doors toward the witness stand next to Mouton’s bench.
It was the preliminary hearing of Dallas Cates. The night before, he’d been formally arrested and charged with the first-degree murder of Dave Farkus. The purpose of the proceeding before the justice of the peace was to establish if there was probable cause to bind Cates over to Judge Hewitt’s court for trial.
Mouton still ran the largest feed store in town, although he claimed to be retired from it, and he was still one of the biggest benefactors to the county itself when it came to sponsoring school teams, buying the prize 4-H steer and lamb every year at the county fair, and donating the labor of his employees as well as hundreds of sandbags during the last seasonal flood of the Twelve Sleep River in May. Joe knew from being in the tiny room before that JP Mouton would rubber-stamp whatever the prosecution brought before him. That’s what he’d done for nearly twenty years in the part-time job.
Mouton enjoyed being one of the longest-serving justices of the peace in northern Wyoming, and he knew he could hold on to the job for as long as he could sit behind the bench. And it was understood that he could sit behind that bench as long as he didn’t buck local law enforcement and stir them against him.
Mouton was short and bald and portly and he looked more and more like a cartoon caricature of a well-fed and slightly daft small businessman—which he was. As his belly grew each year, his belt line rose so that his buckle was just a few inches below his chest. His round face had gotten rounder. He wore glasses as thick as goggles, which he took off only to jab in the air while he made a point.
Joe could feel Dallas’s eyes on him as he passed the defense table. Dallas wore an orange jumpsuit with TWELVE SLEEP COUNTY JAIL stenciled across the back. His wrists were bound together with manacles, as were his Croc-clad feet under the table. Next to Dallas was Duane Patterson, the state public defender. Patterson wore an ill-fitting gray suit that looked two sizes too big. He was reading over notes scribbled on a legal pad.
Patterson was a decent man with a very tough job who routinely found himself overmatched in the courtroom. Joe didn’t envy him. Patterson had likely met Dallas for the first time that morning and was now charged with representing him in a murder trial. The deck was stacked against him and his client, which is how those in law enforcement preferred it.
In addition to Reed and Spivak, in the courtroom were two observers: Saddlestring Roundup editor T. Cletus Glatt, who sat in the first row across the aisle with a reporter’s pad on his lap. His reading glasses were perched on the tip of his nose, and he had a disdainful pout on his mouth. In another row, an older woman clicked her knitting needles together while she made a blanket of some kind.
Joe knew that the woman was at every court hearing in the county—it was her hobby. Glatt rarely ventured out from behind his desk at
the newspaper, where he spent his time taking potshots at state and local officials, teachers, law enforcement, and “the backwards local culture” of the small community he’d wound up in after being let go from ever-downsizing newspapers across the country. He was a bitter man. Joe had trouble identifying good qualities in him.
“Joe, hold up for a minute before you get sworn in,” Mouton said. Joe paused at the swinging gate.
Mouton turned to Cates and spoke directly to him.
“I want to make sure you understand what’s going on here today, Mr. Cates. This is a hearing to establish whether there is probable cause to hold you over for a felony trial in district court. The charges have been read by the prosecution and they’ve presented a copy of the information to Mr. Patterson. Your appointed counsel has indicated you plan to plead not guilty of all the charges. Is that correct?”
“You damned right,” Cates said.
“There will be no cursing in my courtroom. So you’re pleading not guilty?”
“I’m pleading not guilty.”
“Okay then,” Mouton said. “So, back to where we were. If probable cause is established here today, bail may or may not be set, or you may be released on your own recognizance until the felony trial. Do you understand all of that?”
Cates shrugged that he did.
“Speak up for the record, Mr. Cates.”
“Yes, Your Honor. I understand that I’m being railroaded.”
“That’ll be enough of that, too,” Mouton said. Then: “Joe, come on up now.”
—
DULCIE WAS WEARING a bright red dress and she had her hair pulled back. Joe knew she wore red when she was out for blood. He assumed JP Mouton knew it too.
Dulcie was a relentless and well-organized prosecutor. She was known for not bringing a case to trial unless she was convinced she could win it, and that strategy had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her conviction rate was more than ninety-five percent. She was also a straight shooter, Joe knew. He’d learned not to even bring a case to her unless it was bulletproof. She didn’t play political games or overreach. The only time she’d overcharged a defendant was when she’d piled on as many charges as ethically possible to send Dallas Cates to prison almost two years before, which had surprised Joe at the time. That’s how badly she’d wanted him to go away.