by C. J. Box
At that, Reed leaned over to Joe. “He has two rates, I hear. Fifteen hundred per hour for ‘innocent Wyomingites’ and two grand per hour for ‘out-of-staters,’ as he calls them.”
Joe nodded. He knew it was true, because Hand had defended Missy several years ago when she was accused of being behind the murder of Bud Longbrake, her fifth husband. Bud’s body had been discovered chained to the spinning blade of a wind turbine. She was found innocent of the charges, even though she was guilty. Despite the outcome, she had still complained bitterly about Hand’s bill at the time.
Apparently, Joe thought, she’d made up with him. Or, more in keeping with Missy’s modus operandi, she’d discarded her most recent man in order to marry the money she’d spent. That, and to have one of the most successful trial lawyers in the nation on the next pillow in case she needed him.
“You want to delay these proceedings?” Mouton asked, red-faced.
“It’s only fair, Your Honor,” Hand said. “My client deserves—”
“Your client deserves nothing,” Mouton interrupted. “He and his white-trash family have been a stain on this county since as long as I can remember.”
Joe glanced over at Dulcie. She was mortified by Mouton’s statement. Joe was, too. He looked over to see Cletus Glatt ferociously scribbling Your client deserves nothing into his notebook.
Hand said, “A more prejudicial statement has rarely if ever been uttered in a court of law, and certainly not by a justice of the peace. If that’s how you feel, Your Honor, then the only way to proceed is to immediately recuse yourself and we can reschedule this hearing before a judge who has not already decided the outcome.”
Joe closed his eyes and sighed.
He didn’t open them when Mouton sputtered, “I’ve had enough with both of you. I’m hereby remanding Mr. Cates to stand trial for first-degree murder before District Court Judge Hewitt. Bail is set at one and a half million dollars.”
“That’s an outrageous amount,” Hand thundered. “Surely you’ll reconsider and release my client on his own recognizance—he is extremely well-known in this county as a professional rodeo champion.”
“That’s the problem,” Mouton said.
“I object!” Hand thundered. “This is insane. A million and a half for a young unemployed ex–rodeo champion?”
Mouton looked up. His face was red. “If he can afford you, he can afford that bail amount.”
He turned to Dulcie and said, “Surely as an officer of the court, you agree with me.”
She slumped over her desk and put her head in her hands.
Mouton pointed directly at Hand and said, “I’d suggest you stop objecting to everything and get ready to earn your outrageous fee. Judge Hewitt doesn’t dally. He’s the fastest judge in the West when it comes to scheduling murder trials.”
“But I’ll need sufficient time to present a proper defense,” Hand pleaded.
“That’s not my problem,” Mouton said with finality.
—
“I JUST PUT MY HEAD in my hands,” Dulcie told Marybeth. “I didn’t know what to say, because Marcus Hand was right.”
Marybeth took a sip and shook her head. “I don’t get it. How can Dallas Cates afford to hire Marcus Hand?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Dulcie said as she reached for the bottle wedged into the cushion between them to refill her glass. Joe knew it was their second bottle already, which was out of character for both of them. Lucy was right.
“Joe, how much does a rodeo champion make?” Marybeth asked.
“Not much, really,” Joe said. “It isn’t like these guys are NBA players or something. Most of them win just enough to keep themselves on the road. They pay for their own travel, entrance fees, medical bills—all of that.”
Joe knew quite a few men—and a few women—who had rodeoed. None of them banked enough of their winnings for it to last long. They reminded him of a quote he’d heard years before: Behind every successful rancher is a wife who works in town.
Lucy tapped on her phone and said, “Last year, the top cowboy won about three hundred thousand dollars. But number fifty in earnings made seventeen thousand.”
“Dallas was a champion for three years in a row,” April said. “I know he was making about a quarter of a million a year, because he told that to anybody who would listen to him. Plus, he had endorsements for jeans and shirts, stuff like that.”
“That’s a lot,” Lucy said.
“Not when you spend money like it’s going out of style,” April responded. “He always had the newest truck, the best trailer. He always popped for the highest-priced rooms to stay in.”
She smiled ruefully and said, “Dallas was never generous like the other cowboys. Those guys gave each other the shirts off their backs, and they helped each other out when they could. Not Dallas. He spent money on himself alone. I always hated that, even though I kind of benefitted for a while there when I was with him.”
“Three hundred thousand tops, maybe,” Dulcie said. “Minus travel, taxes, and all the overhead. So maybe a hundred thousand. And that was two years ago. He didn’t make any income in prison. So it’s still not enough to retain Marcus Hand.”
“Maybe Hand is offering his services pro bono?” Marybeth suggested.
Dulcie barked a laugh and Marybeth joined in.
“Maybe the Cateses had a secret bank account or something?” Marybeth speculated.
Dulcie shrugged. “I don’t know, but I doubt it. Either way, that’s the least of my worries now. Not only am I up against Hand and his team, but Judge Hewitt will likely schedule the arraignment within a couple of weeks to accommodate his hunting schedule. Hand complained about that, but I have the same problem: not enough time to prepare.
“And I just can’t wait until Cletus Glatt writes up the hearing for the paper. I’m up for reelection next year and Glatt needs to sell papers, so I can see him showing me in the worst possible light.”
“Glatt was there?” Marybeth asked.
“Yes. And he looked like he was really enjoying himself. Now he’ll get to make his points about our backward justice system and the good old boy network that runs the county. What really makes me mad is that he won’t be wrong this time.”
“What got into Mouton, anyhow?” Marybeth asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think Marcus Hand has a way of bringing that out in people,” Dulcie said.
“And then there’s the elephant in the room,” Lucy added from the table.
—
AS SHE SAID IT, the grille of the elephant’s Hummer H2 burbled up against the outside gate of the front lawn.
“There she is,” Marybeth said.
April and Lucy locked eyes. Joe reached again for the bottle of bourbon.
Marybeth addressed April, Lucy, and Joe. “I’m going to listen to what she has to say. I’ll be civil and listen and then send her on her way. After all, she’s my mother and your grandmother.”
“She’s the devil,” April said.
“I should go,” Dulcie said, grasping the arm of the couch to propel herself up. “I’ve probably had a little too much wine to keep myself contained around the opposing counsel’s wife.”
“You’re going nowhere,” Marybeth said with steel in her voice.
Dulcie sat back and looked uncomfortably from Marybeth to Joe.
“After I shoot her, I’ll turn myself in to you,” he said to Dulcie.
“That’s really not funny, Joe,” Marybeth said.
—
THERE WAS A LIGHT RAPPING on the front door, followed by the sound of it opening. Missy never waited for someone to open it for her before inviting herself in.
“Marybeth, honey? It’s me.”
Marybeth’s voice was flat. “We’re in here.”
And there she was in the doorway, peerin
g out from the dark mudroom into the light. Joe was reminded of a snake coming out of its nest to sun itself.
Although she was now in her late sixties, Missy had maintained her figure, and the designer clothing she wore showed it off. She was tiny and had the body of an actress: compact frame, curves where they should be, and an overlarge head that looked great in photos. Her heart-shaped porcelain face—with high cheekbones and blood-red lipstick—stood out across the room. Despite her age, she didn’t have a single gray hair.
“My goodness, look at you all!” Missy said musically behind a hundred-watt smile of perfect white teeth as she took in Marybeth, April, and Lucy. “You all look so beautiful! I’m so glad to see you at last after such a long time.”
Her voice dropped an octave when she noticed Dulcie. “You I don’t know.”
“This is my friend, Dulcie Schalk,” Marybeth said. She had yet to get up off the couch.
“Pleased to meet you,” Missy said.
“She’s the county prosecutor.”
Missy’s smile still dazzled, but the light dimmed behind her eyes.
The last Twelve Sleep County prosecutor his mother-in-law had encountered had tried to send her to the women’s prison in Lusk. Joe had no doubt Marybeth had introduced her friend that way intentionally.
Missy slipped it the way a boxer slips a jab and turned toward Joe in the kitchen.
“Good old Joe,” Missy said, dropping another octave as her tone twisted into barbed wire.
“Yup,” he said.
Then brightly: “All of you just stay right there where you are. I’ve got gifts in the car for all of you.”
—
MISSY VANKUEREN HAD SPENT her life trading up through five husbands, each wealthier than the last. The last time Joe had seen his mother-in-law, she’d been seated in a private plane next to a moneyed professional assassin named Wolfgang Templeton, who had headquartered his operation on his ranch in the Black Hills of Wyoming. The airplane had left the federal agents on the ground after they’d swarmed Templeton’s ranch.
After he’d fled, an international manhunt had been undertaken, to no avail.
Recently, though, Templeton had resurfaced in Jackson Hole and had turned himself in to the feds. He was facing nearly a dozen first-degree murder charges.
In the time Missy had spent near Saddlestring on the ranch of her fifth husband, Bud Longbrake, she’d made it clear countless times that Marybeth could have done better than Joe and that it wasn’t too late for her to trade up as well. The murder trial had revealed her to be more despicable and manipulative than Joe had even imagined her to be.
And now she’d landed husband number six.
—
HE WATCHED from his place leaning against the kitchen counter as Missy handed out presents. April got a silver-studded bridle for her horse, Lucy a MacBook Air. Although April and Lucy no doubt liked the gifts and thanked their grandmother politely for them, they both set the gifts aside until Missy left. It was their way, Joe thought, of showing their grandmother they weren’t as excited about the gifts as they truly were.
“And where’s Sheridan?” she asked.
“Working on a ranch,” Joe said.
Missy winced and shook her head with disappointment. Joe had no reason to tell her Sheridan’s ranch was likely one frequented by acquaintances of Missy herself.
“Can you get this to her?” she asked, placing a wrapped present on the end table. “It’s a computer like Lucy’s.”
“Thank you. I’ll make sure she gets it,” Joe said.
“And for my brilliant daughter,” Missy said. She whirled and handed Marybeth a small box. It was a pair of diamond earrings. Each stone was four times larger than the one on her wedding ring, Joe noted. He assumed the inevitable comparison was meant as a shot at him.
“I can’t take these,” Marybeth said, attempting to hand them back.
Missy would have none of it. “Please, let me do this one thing for you. You deserve a few nice things in your life.”
Another shot.
Marybeth sighed and showed the earrings to Dulcie, who tried to stanch the look of astonishment in her eyes, but couldn’t completely pull it off.
“And you,” Missy said, as she placed a heavy rectangular object in a brown bag in Joe’s hands. He peeked. It was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“Oh, thank you,” he said.
“It is your brand, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. So, did you make a deal with the feds to turn on Templeton before or after he dumped you?”
“Really,” she said with the big smile and cold eyes, “this should be a pleasant reunion where I can get reacquainted with my granddaughters—not a time for twenty questions.”
“I only asked one.”
She ignored him and turned back for the living room. As she did, she held his eyes in a moment-too-long withering glance that told him her opinion of him hadn’t changed a bit.
He wondered if the temperature in the house had actually dropped ten degrees since Missy entered it, or if it was his imagination.
—
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, after Dulcie had feigned an excuse about work and left, Joe washed dinner dishes as Missy caught Marybeth and the girls up on her life. He’d poured himself another drink and finished what was left in the bottle, but he vowed to himself not to open the Jack Daniel’s in her presence.
He half listened to her and kept up a silent revisionist commentary going in his head while he did.
“I got reacquainted with Marcus at a fund-raiser at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole eight months ago. I was quite blue, because the man in my life at the time had become quite unpredictable and his career took a strange turn . . .”
Joe translated it to say:
She learned she was about to be cut loose by Wolfgang Templeton. Her response to that was to contact Director and Special Agent Chuck Coon of the FBI office in Cheyenne to tell him she knew the location of the famous wanted fugitive she was living with in secret.
“It had been a few years since he’d been my lawyer, but we’d gotten along well, and it turned out he was in the process of recovering from a very contentious divorce. We were like two lonely ships in the night who happened to cross paths with each other at exactly the right moment . . .”
In Joe’s version:
While he had seven or eight cocktails at the fund-raiser, she simultaneously worked her charms on him and convinced him to represent her in making a deal with the feds. She’d turn state’s witness and testify against Wolfgang Templeton in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and the federal charges of aiding and abetting a fugitive would be dropped.
“It was a whirlwind courtship . . .”
She went to bed with him that night and left him begging for more with the tacit understanding that he wouldn’t receive the pleasure of her intimate company again until the immunity deal was placed in front of her for her signature.
“He is my soul mate for life . . .”
As have been the previous five (and a half, including Templeton) soul mates for life.
“We needed each other. We live on a beautiful country estate in a special neighborhood—it’s called Teton Shadows—outside of Jackson, with views of the Grand Tetons, which I want you all to come and enjoy when you can.”
She’s bored, restless, and lonely living in a gated enclave with retired millionaires and their trophy wives with firm legs and ridiculously perky breasts who have no idea how long it takes in the bathroom every morning to make Missy look like Missy, and she resents them for it.
“I have my space now, and I’ve really had the time to settle back and think about my life. I think about being blessed with all the advantages a person could want, but still feeling a hole in my heart. Nothing can fill it but family, and I’ve been missing you all terri
bly.”
Maybe there was some truth to that, after all. Maybe Missy had finally taken stock and mellowed. Why else would she have come?
Maybe he’d been too hard on her.
Except, Missy was Missy. She hadn’t asked Marybeth how she was doing or anything about her job. She hadn’t asked the girls what they’d been doing in the years that she’d been gone and out of touch with them, even on birthdays or Christmas.
—
JOE LOOKED over to see how Missy’s tale was being received. Marybeth looked like she wasn’t really buying it. Her only response to the long story was to murmur “Mmm-hmm” occasionally.
His wife looked relieved when her phone lit up and she looked at the screen.
“It’s Sheridan,” she said, gathering herself up quickly and leaving Missy on the couch.
Marybeth walked through the living room and kitchen and out the back door with the phone pressed against her ear.
Even though he was sure she’d done it as an excuse to get away from her mother—Marybeth knew the woman better than anyone ever had, and could no longer be taken in by her—Joe followed. He wanted to know if she believed any of what Missy had told them, and he wanted to say hello to Sheridan.
But when he opened the back door it was blocked by Marybeth, who stood still on the back porch. Her body language said something was wrong.
He heard her say, “You need to calm down, honey.”
“What is it? What happened?”
Marybeth’s eyes were big and her face had drained of color.
She lowered her phone and said, “Sheridan said she was doing her horse chores at the corral this afternoon and saw a woman who didn’t belong on the ranch. The woman approached her, but two other wranglers showed up and scared her off and she ran away.”
Joe felt his stomach clench.
“She said the woman was wearing a hoodie and she had tattoos on her neck.”
Joe said, “Tell her I’ll be down there first thing tomorrow.”