Lucian sipped his coffee and smiled, watching the two of us talk like it was Wimbledon.
“How was Belize?”
“I got a tan.”
“So I noticed.”
The old sheriff choked, swallowed, and then interrupted. “Got any lines?”
Victoria Moretti pushed a handful of blue-black hair back from her face and sipped her own coffee, sat the mug down, placed an elbow on the table and leaned in, looking back at him with a full load of tarnished gold. “You wanna try and find them, old man?”
He blushed, and I believe it was the first time I’d ever seen him do it. “I don’t know if my heart is up to it.”
“Maybe if you’d stop looking at my tits and look me in the face you could work up the nerve.” She grinned at him, showing the elongated canine tooth. “Don’t feel bad—many are called, but few are chosen.”
“I didn’t take you for a Sunday schooler.”
She reached over and took a piece of my bacon, along with a little bit of my heart. “That’s where the phrase is from—damned if I knew; I’m schooled in other stuff.” She bit into the bacon and narrowed the aperture of the cannons. “Why, you need a little teaching?”
He cocked his head as he slid out of the booth the oil workers had occupied last night and glanced at me for a moment. “I think I’m gonna go walk your dog.”
Vic watched him slip on his coat. “Stay warm out there, thinking about me.”
He pushed through the glass door and then stood still, frozen by her words for an instant. “I believe I’ll do that.”
I watched him head back for what had been our communal room and Dog. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him scamper.”
“I want to talk to you alone.”
“I figured.”
She slid out and switched over to the other side and took another piece of my bacon, being, after all, a carnivore. As she chewed I took the time to drink her in. She had gotten a tan and the blond streaks in her hair were incongruent in the depth of the Wyoming winter—a look I was more used to in the summer. Studying her was something you had to handle with care; volatile, like nitroglycerine.
“So, miss me?”
“Yep.”
“A lot?”
“Yep.”
She chewed and studied me. “Are you going to say something other than yep?”
“Yep.” She waited, her eyes widening in comic expectation as I finally spoke.
“I’ve got a great scar.”
“I know; I’ve seen it.”
She nodded with a smile, staring at me in a way that made me think she hadn’t had a really good look at me last night; not a feeling I was comfortable with. “Don’t you think scars make better stories than tattoos?”
I fingered that little piece of my ear that was missing and draped an arm over the back of my seat. “If that’s the case, then I’ve got a whole library on me.”
“I’ve read it.” She continued smiling and chewing. “And I really liked the ending.”
She leaned back in the booth and looked out the fogged window of the Aces & Eights, a corpuscle-colored fingernail coming up and chipping at the frost cornering the edges. “The windows in Belize don’t do this . . . Shit, who am I kidding, they don’t have windows in Belize.”
A quiet spread out over the table between us like a blank page covered with abandoned plates, glasses, and cutlery—but no words. “You stay at Jim Seale’s place?”
She nodded. “Hotel del Rio, yeah. He’s from around here, right?”
“Banner, over in Sheridan County.”
“You ever been to Belize?”
“Nope. I think he’s had that place for twenty years. He keeps asking me down . . . But I just never get away.”
A smirk traced itself across her lips. “Look who I’m asking—you never go anywhere there isn’t snow.”
“I’ve spent some time in tropic climes.”
She dismissed me with another flap of the hand. “The Vietnam War doesn’t count.”
“I spent six weeks on Johnston Atoll.”
She stopped moving and then slowly turned her face toward mine. “After Vietnam?”
“Yep.”
Her eyes sharpened to flints. “Okay . . . That’s a month and a half of the two lost years unaccounted for after Vietnam in the saga that is the life of Walt Longmire. Where the hell is Johnston Atoll?”
I sipped my coffee, enjoying her full attention. “Seven hundred and fifty nautical miles west of Hawaii on a coral reef platform; it’s one of the United States’ minor outlying islands—about 1.3 square miles.”
“A postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a single palm tree like you see in those cartoons in the New Yorker?”
“Something like that.”
“What, were you shipwrecked or something?”
“No.”
She glanced around, enjoying the illusion of covert activity. “What’s there?”
I leaned back in my seat and studied her. “An air base, a naval refueling depot, and a weapons testing area, but not anymore.”
“What kinds of weapons?”
“Nuclear, among others.”
She leaned in. “No shit?”
“A dozen thermonuclear weapons were exploded there before the ban in ’63, but they also had a twenty-five-acre landfill full of Agent Orange, PCBs, PAHs, dioxins, and sarin nerve gas from East Germany.”
“Sounds horrible.”
“Nope, it was beautiful . . . Well, not the landfill so much, but the rest of it was an island paradise.”
“Swam, ate fish, fed the sharks, and sunbathed.”
Her head kicked to one side. “For the government—you must’ve still been working for the military.”
“Security.” I shrugged. “I was on medical leave from the Marines and still attached to the Air Force through the provost marshal, so they shipped me off to a quiet place for the rest of my tour.”
“Was it?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Quiet.”
I thought about it. “For a while.”
She wiggled on her seat. “Okay, let’s hear about it—”
“Maybe some other time.”
“C’mon.”
I laced my hands behind my head. “So, how did Lena like Hotel del Rio?”
She whined. “C’mon.”
“I want to hear about your trip, not mine; I know how mine was, and it didn’t end well.” I glanced out the window at the snow, the ice, and the cold, which was seeping through the windows in an attempt to freeze us solid. “I need a break from the winter; tell me about the sand, the surf, and how you got your tan . . .”
“Okay, but this isn’t over.” I sat there not looking at her and listened as she settled into her seat. “Mom stayed for a week but then got tired of watching me drink and went home.” I turned back, and her eyes were now drawn to the frozen wasteland of the parking lot and the glaciers of snow piled against the building by the plows. “It was incredible; we had this cabana on the second floor where you could look at the ocean between the mangrove trees—the water was all shades of turquoise.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “After the stitches healed up, I’d go lie in the salt water at the end of the pier and just soak in the warmth.”
I thought back about a conversation I had had with her uncle Alphonse and his description of the teenage Vic who, walking down Christian Street in a one-piece bathing suit, had enticed most of the men back in her native Philadelphia onto the stoops when she’d sauntered by. “Sounds pretty great.”
Her eyes remained closed. “These guys would come by with conch fritters and cashews, so you didn’t even have to get up for lunch—just roll over and hand them some of that Belizean Monopoly money.”
“And drink.”
Her eyes opened with an ore wagon full of tarnished gold. “You weren’t around and most people bore the shit out of me, so don’t make it an issue.”
“Right.”
“I got enough of that crap from my mother.”
“Right.”
“I dove the Great Blue Hole.”
I was surprised by the revelation. “You scuba dive?”
After a brief warning look, the eyes closed again. “They have this beer, Belikin, that comes in these really heavy, recyclable bottles—I did my part.” Her head cocked to one side. “There was a little place about a quarter mile down the beach in San Pedro, The Sandbar—best pizza south of South Street . . . I’d go down there in the evenings and eat and drink. Sometimes I’d have mai tais, but mostly I drank the beer.” Her eyes opened, and she reached down, gathering our plates and stacking them at the end of the table where Haji could retrieve them. “I’d get toasted, and then Brittney and David, the owners, would drive me back up to the hotel in a golf cart and carry me up the steps.”
“Sounds pretty nice.”
“Yeah, I only had one rough spot.”
I reached out and enclosed one of her hands, but her eyes remained closed. “What was that?”
“Well, like I said, they’d drive me home most nights, but they warned me that I needed to be careful walking home that late because there were a few bad characters around.”
I squeezed the hand. “What happened?”
“Oh, they had a wedding at the restaurant, so I stumbled up the beach on my own; some guy got fresh and I told him to buzz off, but he got physical . . .” The eyes opened again, and she pulled her hand away as she slumped back into the bench seat. “I told you how thick those beer bottles were, didn’t I?” She shrugged. “Turns out he was the police chief’s nephew.”
I nodded and then waited a permissible amount of time before bringing the subject up. “I’ll ask again, how are you feeling?”
“I figure I’m just a hair’s width away from having syndrome attached to the end of my name.” Her eyes came back to me, and she cocked her head. “Now, huh?”
“Now what?”
“We’re going to have this conversation now?”
I shrugged, thinking about the actions that had led us to the now—a very bad man, a knife, revenge, the loss of a child she may or may not know that I was aware of, her inability to ever have children, and a tsunami load of water under the bridge. “Why not?”
Her voice took on an authoritarian tone as it had with Lucian. “Question.”
“Tell me Tomás Bidarte is dead as Kelsey’s nuts.”
The very bad man.
I reached in the inside pocket of my sheepskin coat and tossed a long horn-handled switchblade knife that I’d been carrying for months with a clatter onto the table between the plates and us.
The knife.
She looked at it for a moment and then picked it up, sliding back the safety and pushing the button, the eight-inch blade slapping open with a deadly snik. “Tell me he’s dead.”
Revenge.
I said nothing.
She put a fingertip at the point, something she was wont to do in any circumstance. “If this is when we’re going to have this conversation, you’re going to have to do more in holding up your end.”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone as in to the hereafter and buried by you and Henry in a shallow grave for a coyote buffet and then carried away in tiny, antlike bites, or simply gone?”
“Simply gone.”
She stared at me, incredulous. “Henry Standing Bear couldn’t find him?”
“No.”
She smiled and shook her head. “There’s no way I missed that son of a bitch with that many rounds.”
“No.”
She looked back out the window and set her jaw. “Maybe he is a ghost.” She took a deep breath, and the eyes returned to mine. “So, where do you think he is?”
“Far, far from here.” I waited a moment before adding, “Isn’t that where you’d be?”
She laughed a laugh with no joy in it. “I’d like one more shot at him.”
“Personally, I hope that never happens.”
She sat forward and placed her hands between her knees, her voice suddenly low. “The doc says I can’t have kids, not that I was looking to have any anyway.” She stared at the leftovers on Lucian’s plate. “I’ve got four brothers, so it’s not like the Moretti name is at stake . . .” Her face came up, and her eyes were washed with salt water. “I just would have liked to have a say in the thing, you know?”
I slid out and moved around the table to sit beside her. “I know.”
She wiped her eyes and laughed. “So much for hearth and home, huh?”
I gently placed an arm over her shoulders and pulled her into me where she pushed the lapel of my jacket away and stuffed her nose into my chest, and we stayed like that for a long time, her muffled voice finally rising up to my ears. “You smell good.”
“That’s because I smell like you.”
She laughed.
“You could always adopt.”
She laughed again, thank God, and then snorted and hiccupped as she tried to stop, even going so far as to playfully pound my chest with a fist.
“Heck, seems like you adopted me years ago.”
She pulled me in closer, and we stayed like that, but nothing more was said about the very bad man, the knife, revenge, her inability to ever have children, the tsunami load of water under the bridge—or the losing of a child I was now sure she thought I knew nothing about.
—
She nudged the blue plastic bag at her feet as I pulled from the parking lot. “Tell me again why we went to Kmart?”
I glanced down at the bundle I’d put on the floor in front of her seat as she held out a wrist for Dog to lick. “I needed a chess set to distract Lucian so that he stops driving me crazy, and I can’t count on you because he might take you up on one of your offers.”
“To coin one of your phrases, a dime’s worth of me and a Fresca would kill him.” She slid the files from the center console and began perusing them.
I cocked my head to one side. “He’d die happy.”
She propped her boots up onto my dash, and I felt a surge in my heart at having her there. “So, what are we working on?”
I told her about Gerald Holman, the missing women, and about the sheriff of Campbell County not being particularly informed about the situation, resulting in a predictable summation.
“Fuck me.” She thought about it. “What’s the Clod Case replacement investigator’s name?”
“Did you just call it Clod Case?”
She brushed my question away with a flap of the Dog wrist. “A Philadelphiaism.”
“Inspector Richard Harvey.”
“What’s he like?”
I lowered my voice. “A dick.”
She seemed preoccupied by the files. “A what?”
“A dick.”
Her eyes widened in mock horror as she turned to look at me. “Oh my, Sheriff . . . Did you just call someone a dick?” She placed her chin in her palm. “A dick.” She marveled, pretending to adjust a pair of make-believe glasses. “A dick by your reserved standards means he is some kind of colossal prick of proportions unlike we’ve ever encountered.”
I shrugged and drove, trying to keep from smiling.
She glanced through the windshield and postulated in a pseudoscientific voice like some film you watched on a projector in high school. “Perhaps at one time he was a normal cock, but through contact with radioactive material in the deserts of New Mexico—”
“One of those blue-line guys.”
Her hands flew up and out, measuring. “He grew to colossal magnitudes of dickdom!”
Dog barked, and I sighed. “I just think that he’s more concerned with making sure that Holman’s name goes unsullied than finding out why the man might’ve killed himself.”
“Dickdom of a scale noticeable even to the demure sheriff of Absaroka County.”
I mumbled, “Oh, good grief.” But she ignored me.
“Dickzilla!” She shook her head, grinning as her attention, thankfully, returned to the files. “I gotta meet Dickzilla.”
“Good, because we’re on our way to the sheriff’s office to give these files back to Sandy so he can read them—and did I mention that Tommi, female, by the way, and owner-operator of the strip club, is the sheriff’s sister?”
“Wow.”
“Yep.”
“A dick.”
I drove on, my diversion not having worked.
I laid the files on Sandburg’s desk. “Richard’s not here?”
“Probably out rogering the countryside.”
I glanced at my undersheriff, then back to Sandy, and continued. “If you could make copies of these files for us, that’d be great.”
The sheriff smiled at Vic and buzzed a secretary in, handing her the files. “One copy of all of these, Brenda.”
“Two.”
He nodded to the woman, swiveled in his leather chair, and looked at Vic. “So, is there anybody working over in Absaroka County?”
She propped her feet onto his handsome, vintage mahogany desk. “We’ve got people for that, kind of like you’ve got people to read your reports for you.”
He stared at her boots but gave it up when it had no effect. “Well, we have a little more business over here—”
“Obviously more than you can handle.”
He glanced up at me. “You wanna call her off?”
“I wish I knew how.” I went ahead and sat in the other visitor’s chair, not putting my boots on his desk, figuring there was only so much the poor guy could take. “Sandy, how involved do you think your sister is in all of this?”
“All of what?”
Vic interrupted. “Whatever.”
He cleared his throat and thought about it as he pivoted back and forth in his chair. “She’s a rough cob, believe me I know, but I don’t think she’d be involved with anything that had to do with putting her girls in danger.” He laughed. “I ever tell you about the time we raided the place and brought everyone down here and arraigned them—she posted their bail and paid their fines with singles; the girls in accounting put on plastic gloves to count all the one-dollar bills.”
“Any other women ever disappear from there?”
He shook his head and kept his eyes on me. “You’re sure there’s a connection between Gerald Holman’s suicide and this missing stripper?”
“No, but I’m sure there’s a connection among the three missing women.”
His voice was derisive. “A serial killer?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He sighed and dropped a hand onto his blotter. “Because you know what a shitstorm that’s going to cause.” He shook his head. “I can see the stories in the News Record now—”
“I could be wrong.”
“You’re not.” Vic’s voice was sharp. “It’s possible that whoever he is, he hasn’t worked himself up to serial level, but he’s working on it; he’s borderline, one more and it’s official.”
Sandy shook his head. “He, huh?”
“Only fifteen percent of serial killers are women.” When I turned in my chair to look at her, she glanced back. “I assisted on a few cases in Philadelphia when I was going for my shield—before I gave it all up to herd cows with a cruiser.” She studied Sandy’s worried face. “Look, we could be wrong, but we’d be idiots not to approach this as a possibility in the investigative process.”
The door opened and Brenda returned, placing the original files with the copies on the sheriff’s desk and then quietly leaving in the silence.
Sandy shoved them toward me, picked up the originals, and dropped them in his lap to look through them. “Why didn’t Gerald report this to me, and why the hell didn’t Richard Harvey?”
Vic turned to me. “The dick?”
I nodded. “The dick.”
Sandy’s head came up. “Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
Vic stood, stuffing her hands in her jeans, and walked to her right where a large, matted, framed map of Campbell County hung on the wall. Her fingernail traced an area south and just a little east of Gillette. “All three are missing from this area; no more than twenty miles in radius.” She turned to look at him, her fists now on her hips. “You’re going to have to check and see if there are more.”
“I’ll put—”
“Don’t put Richard Harvey on it.”
He turned to look at me. “You really think Harvey is compromised?”
“Do I think he’s involved? No—but he’s not doing his best to come up with any answers, either. Is there anything you can do to get him out of our hair for a few days?”
He thought about it. “I’ve got an extradition of prisoner down to the psychiatric hospital in Evanston; that’s at least a day down and a day back.” He looked up at me. “Two days do it?”
I scooped the copies up from his desk. “Yep.”
“Or I could fire him.”
“Don’t do that. I think he’s a good man, just the wrong one for this job—maybe a little too close to Gerald or maybe somebody else?”
“But we’ll be a man short.” Sandy thought about it. “I could pull one of the guys from—”
“Actually . . .” They both looked at me as I thumbed the business card from my shirt pocket and held it out to him. “I’ve got someone in mind.”
—
Patrolman Dougherty was surprised to be placed on loan from the Gillette City Police Department to the Campbell County Sheriff and had been doubly confused when we told him he could show up in jeans and a sweater.
He glanced between Vic and me, standing in the tomb of the cold case files and looking through the wire mesh into the room proper. “Have you checked with my shift sergeant on this?”
I leaned on the chain link that protected the file area and pushed my hat back to get a little light on my face in an attempt to let him know I was serious. “I didn’t, but the sheriff spoke with your chief of police and he said we could have you.”
His eyes stayed on the rows and rows of dented, green metal file cabinets. “To do what?”
I handed him the three folders and stuffed the other set of copies under my arm. “We need you to look for any cases that might pertain to the individual who we think abducted Linda Schaffer, Roberta Payne, and Jone Urrecha.”
He looked at me. “You’re serious.”
Vic sat on the edge of Harvey’s desk and punched Dougherty’s cell number into her own. “As a heart attack.”
He glanced at Vic as she handed him back his cell phone. “You really think it’s the same guy?”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
Walking over to the grating that held the mountain of files captive, he threaded his fingers into the wire. “How long do I have?”
“About forty-eight hours.”
His eyes widened. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
I handed him the keys to the door. “You said you wanted to help . . . By the way, if a tall guy with a handlebar mustache should show up, tell him you were sent down from administration to straighten the files.”
As Vic and I started for the steps, he called out after us. “What kind of connections am I looking for—what kind of suspect?”
Vic stopped and spoke over her shoulder. “Probably white, thirties to fifties, a loner with a reasonably high IQ involved with a menial job that he considers beneath him.”
His voice echoed after us as we climbed the stairs. “That would be me!”
She shouted back, “Well, then, put yourself on the list.”
At the top of the stairs, we buzzed ourselves out and turned the corner only to be confronted with Investigator Richard Harvey, standing in the hallway talking with another plainclothes officer.
As we approached, Harvey broke off the conversation and turned to face me, but Vic stepped between us and raised her hand. “Dick, so glad to meet you.”
He glanced at me, but then took her hand, looking more than a little confused. “Richard Harvey, sheriff’s investigator.”
“Special Agent Vic Moretti, I’m supervising the sheriff here.” She looked past him toward the outer office. “No offense, but you better scoot it up to Sandy Sandburg’s office; I think he’s got an assignment in connection with the Bureau that’s of utmost importance.”
He nodded, still looking a little off balance. “Okay, but I need to go down to my office and—”
She physically turned him around and escorted him back the other way in a slow walk. “I think you better talk to the sheriff very first thing, he mentioned something about a high-priority situation that was going to need special handling and that you were the man for the job.”
He paused for a moment. “Excuse me, but what did you say your name was?”
“Moretti, Victoria Moretti.”
He nodded and then glanced back at me. “Sheriff.”
“Investigator.”
Without another word, he turned and continued down the hall.
Vic called out. “Nice meeting you, Dick.”
He kept walking. “Richard.”
“Right.”
After he was gone, she turned and looked at me. “What?”
I shook my head as I walked past her.
“Don’t you think I’m special?”
We stood at the door zipping, buttoning, fastening; it’s what people in Wyoming do before they go outside in late December.
“What could these three women have in common?”
She snapped her fingers at me. “They’re all missing.”
We climbed into my truck and the atmosphere of Dog breath that had clouded all the windows. “I just keep going back to Gerald Holman.”
“Maybe there’s no connection at all; I mean, maybe he’d just had it.”
“Why shoot yourself twice?”
“He was a lousy shot?” She tugged at her jacket. “Start this thing up and get the heat going. My blood must’ve thinned while I was in Central America—I’m freezing to death.”
I fired the Bullet up and flipped on the heat. “A housewife, a waitress, and a stripper.”
“Walk into a bar . . .”
I shook my head at her, and she rested her chin in the palm of her hand and smiled. Against my will, I smiled, too.
The Browning tactical boots lodged themselves onto my dash. “You did miss me.”