Chapter 2
It’s Just a Shot Away

Sally straightened up, the peanut butter sandwich she’d had for lunch a new and unpleasant return visitor. Hawk, using his own personal mojo combination of Yankee self-control and desert survivor stillness, had managed to keep from throwing up, but he was white-faced and wide-eyed.

She knelt down, took off her daypack, and balanced it on a rock. Rooting around, she found a bottle of water. She twisted off the top, took a big swallow, and spat to get rid of the sour taste. No help there. She drank some, then poured half the rest over her head.

Shit, Monette. Why?

“We’ve gotta call Dickie,” Sally said at last.

“Call?” asked Hawk.

She dug back in the pack and pulled out a cellular phone. She’d given it to Hawk for his birthday, hoping he’d take it with him when he went out in the field, but he’d so far refused to have anything to do with it. He liked being where nobody could reach him. Cell phones, he said, were wrecking the world, cluttering up the land-scape with cell towers, making every place the same as every other.

“Handy to have that,” he conceded, “but it probably won’t work up here.”

“Maybe not. It’s worth a try,” she told him. “Every day you see them putting up more towers. We could be in range.” She stuck the phone in the pocket of her shorts and climbed up out of the dip, back through the gap between the two upended rocks, hoping to pick up a relay.

She turned on the phone, and was relieved to see the icon for the cell tower appear. Punched in 911. A dispatcher answered.

“My name is S-Sally Alder,” she stammered. “I’m up in Vedauwoo, somewhere around the Devil’s Playground, and, uh, I’ve f-found a body. That is, we’ve found a b-body.” She took a deep gulp of air, exhaled. “Ah, you’d better tell Sheriff Langham to get up here.”

“Calm down, ma’am,” said the dispatcher. “Can you give me your exact location?”

That was too much for Sally. About all she knew was that she was in the Laramie Range. When it came to knowing where the hell she was, she usually just looked at the scenery and left the locating to Hawk.

“Just a minute,” she said, as he came out of the declivity and she handed him the phone.

While Hawk was unfolding his map, talking to the dispatcher, giving directions to the nearest Forest Service road, Sally entertained a series of irrational thoughts. She should have made a point of talking to Monette right that morning, as she’d watched the girl deal with those guys in the line. Should have warned her. Or she and Hawk should be running around, seeing if they could find whoever had put Monette in the crevice. Or maybe she should pick up all the litter. She stooped down and scooped up an empty cigarette package, shoving it in her knapsack.

But this was a crime scene. Sally realized suddenly that she shouldn’t mess with anything. She could already see the prints of her hiking boots and Hawk’s on ground scuffed by other shoes, including somebody’s pointy-toed cowboy boots. The cops would want to see those tracks. She’d better sit down.

Moving toward rational thought, anyhow. And then a rational question occurred to her: What were she and Hawk doing hanging around someplace way out in the outback, with the cops at least an hour away, where one person had already been murdered? How freaking brilliant was that?

She ran to Hawk, just ending the call with the dispatcher, yanking his arm. “We have to get out of here! What if whoever did this is still around? Come on, hurry—we’ve got to run!”

Trust Hawk to be reasonable at a time like this. “Run where? We’ve just been calling the cops. They’ll be here in half an hour. If I’d done that”—he tossed his head back in the direction of Monette’s body—“I’d get the hell out, fast. And if, for some reason, I was still hanging around when a couple of hikers showed up, and then heard them phoning for the police, I’d figure it was high time to split.”

“What do you mean, the cops will be here in half an hour?” Sally demanded. “We’ve been walking all afternoon. How could they get here that quickly?”

“Sal, we parked all the way back at the Lincoln Summit and set out for a summer stroll. You can get here a lot faster by pulling off the highway at the Vedauwoo exit and then coming up the dirt roads. Trust me, they’ll be here before you know it. And meanwhile, we’re supposed to sit tight.”

By now she was shivering. He peeled her hand off his arm, so that he could hold her. Dickie Langham and two deputies found them still wrapped together, not quite forty minutes later.

The outcrop where they stood was only a few hundred yards from the road, but Dickie was huffing and puffing as he walked toward them. That’s what came of being forty pounds over your game weight and smoking two packs of Marlboros a day. Sally had tried to get him to quit smoking, and Dickie’s sister Delice was constantly on his case about losing weight. He always responded that he’d give up smoking when they invented a way where he didn’t have to wear a stupid patch or enter an insane asylum to do it. And as for being overweight, he didn’t see how Delice could put him on the kind of diet where he couldn’t eat the burgers and fries and cattle-men’s coronary breakfasts she was so glad to serve everybody else who came into the Wrangler Bar and Grill, the dance hall and grease haven that Langham women had been running for more than half a century. The fancy food they served at the Yippie I O café, the restaurant in which Delice was a partner with their cousin Burt and his chef boyfriend, was a little healthier than the stuff at the Wrangler, and Delice often claimed it was too wholesome for her taste. So Dickie said he’d rather be fat than a hypocrite like Delice, and that usually shut her up for a while.

It wasn’t like he was trying to destroy himself. Dickie had done that years ago, when he’d been a beanpole of a coke-dealing bartender who got a little too fond of the merchandise. He’d ended up on the run, gone missing for eleven years, come back to Mary and the kids fatter and wiser and sober and ready, at last, to settle down. He’d never been convicted of a crime, but that fact was more a product of police neglect and incompetence and his own skill at evasion, than of model citizenship. Not everyone would have thought of a law enforcement career under those circumstances, but Dickie had always had an original mind.

And a warm heart. Maybe that was why the good citizens of Albany County had seen fit to elect him sheriff.

He took one look at Sally and Hawk and folded them both into one of his patented I’m-big-but-I’m-gentle Dickie Langham hugs. Then he beckoned to a deputy holding a giant travel mug of extra-strength coffee from the Kum ’n’ Go Gas and Convenience Store. “Brought you some coffee,” he said. “Have a jolt while we have a look around, and then we’ll talk.”

Sally took a swig of the coffee. It was bitter and muddy, but from a chemical standpoint, it worked. She could speak. “You know, don’t you? You know who . . .”

“Yeah,” said Dickie, his face unreadable, coplike. He’d shifted from friend to pro. “Hawk told the dispatcher. Monette.”

“We weren’t completely sure,” Hawk explained. “We couldn’t actually see the face. She’s all jammed up in that crack . . . but from the hair, and what we could see of her body, and, well, the uniform.”

Dickie didn’t say anything, but his eyes shifted. His deputy had clambered up over the rocks and was calling for him. “We’ll take it from here. Stick around. We’re going to want a statement.”

He turned to the deputy. “Did you call the county attorney?”

“Yeah,” the deputy replied, “but he wasn’t in the office. I called his house and his wife said he went fishing and he won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“Goddamn it,” said Dickie. “I guess that’ll have to be soon enough. If we need a warrant before then, we can manage. What about Scotty?”

“He’s on the way,” the deputy answered. “So’s the coroner. And I called the crime lab in Cheyenne.”

“Good,” said Dickie, turning back to Sally and Hawk. “Detective Scotty Atkins is our investigator. He’ll be here any minute, and he’ll want you guys to answer some questions. If you don’t mind, I’ll listen in.”

“Thanks,” said Sally.

“Nothing to it,” Dickie replied. “Where’re you parked?”

“We left the truck back at the summit,” Hawk said.

“Okay,” Dickie said. “We’ll give you a lift back there when we’re finished with you.”

By the time they were all done, it was well past dark. Sally and Hawk sat on rocks and watched as the police did their thing. In a perfectly gruesome way, it was fascinating. The state crime lab van arrived from Cheyenne, not long after Dickie and his deputies. They took about a million photographs and drew sketches, then searched the surrounding area, looking for footprints and taking more pictures. They cast latex impressions of the best footprints, including the waffle tread of Sally and Hawk’s boots and the cowboy boot print Sally had noticed, along with an imprint of a square-toed platform shoe. From Sally’s point of view, the cops weren’t adding to the scenic beauty of the place. The few straggling wildflowers left in the glen leaned at angles, trampled and half broken at the stems. Even the ants didn’t want to hang around. Sally watched as a stream of them marched off to their hole, carrying a yellowed and dried stalk of grass, straight and thin as straw.

The techs put on surgical gloves and went around picking up every beer can and cigarette butt, putting the refuse in plastic baggies and tagging each bag with the location of the contents. They took particular care with the Skoal tin. It had been crushed, and the techs speculated about whether they’d get any decent prints off it.

And now here came another man, tall and spare with thinning sandy hair, taking the same hill that had gotten Dickie winded, in long, easy strides. He wore Dockers, running shoes, and a button-down shirt with a pony on the pocket. As he came closer, Sally saw his eyes, sharp and very light green, sweeping over the scene and lighting on her briefly, then on Hawk.

“Hey, Scotty,” said Hawk.

“H’lo, Joe,” the man replied.

Most people in Laramie knew Professor Josiah Hawkins Green not by his college nickname but as Joe, the given name he used professionally. This guy—Detective Atkins, presumably—must be a recent acquaintance, Sally surmised.

“We play basketball three times a week,” Hawk explained, reading her mind, offering an introduction. “This is Professor Sally Alder.”

“Professor Alder,” said the man, shaking her hand with both of his. “I’m Scott Atkins. Sorry about this.” He let go of her hand. “I’m handling the investigation for the Sheriff’s Department. I understand that you two found the body. In a little bit, I’ll be needing to ask you some questions.”

“We’ll tell you what we can,” said Hawk, but Atkins had already turned away, getting out a notebook and walking toward the body.

This Atkins didn’t waste time. “How’s he on the basketball court?” Sally asked Hawk.

“Hell on defense, great jumper from the top of the key. I guess he was a hero at Laramie High in his youth, but blew out his knee his freshman year at UW,” Hawk answered.

Sally waited for more. “Good teammate, bad opponent,” Hawk said.

The Albany County coroner showed up just as the sun was slipping below the horizon. He and Dickie talked briefly, then he went over and took a look down at the body in the crevice. The coroner took some pictures and made some notes of his own.

And then it was time to get Monette out of there. Sally didn’t want to watch, but some flaw in her personality made her climb back into the declivity to get a view anyway. Hawk, it seemed, had the same character weakness. He was right behind her.

It wasn’t pretty. Monette’s body had stiffened up with death, and the rocks she was stuck between were way too big to move. The crime lab techs were as careful as they could be, trying to preserve the body in the condition it had been left, but they had to get the deputies to help them pull and haul for minutes that seemed like hours, cursing and sweating. Dickie, the coroner, and the detective stood to one side, talking in low voices, watching intently, their faces blank. Sally could hardly believe how calm they all were. Once she thought she heard the crunch of breaking bone, but it might have been nothing more than the sound of her own senses stretching to the snapping point. Suddenly she was aware of sitting spraddle-legged on a hard lumpy rock, elbows on her thighs, the almost empty Kum ’n’ Go mug dangling from her forefinger. She drank the dregs of the cold coffee and nearly barfed all over her hiking boots.

Hawk must have been watching her. The next thing she knew, he had his hand on the back of her neck and she had her head between her knees and he was saying, “Deep breaths. Come on, Mustang. They’ve got her out of there now. They’ll be talking to us soon. Don’t mess up the second pair of shoes in one day.”

She finally looked up again. Couldn’t help herself. She’d never looked at a corpse before.

In the waning daylight, the coroner had set up battery-powered lamps, aimed at what was left of Monette Bandy. And then he started handling the body, making more notes, mumbling into a tape recorder. The crime lab techs set to work beside him, but Sally couldn’t quite see what they were doing. The coroner’s body partially blocked her view.

But she could see that Monette’s uniform shirt was torn and bloody. Sally searched her memory. The Life-way checkers wore a uniform polo shirt with whatever pants they favored. That morning Monette had been wearing black jeans, a little too tight. The coroner got up from where he was squatting and went around to work from another angle, giving Sally a better (was that the word?) view. Monette wasn’t wearing jeans, or anything else on the lower half of her body, now, and there was a lot more blood, dried grass sticking to her legs, and between them. She’d been shot. God.

One of the crime lab techs had gone down into the crevice and pulled out the jeans. Now Sally saw them draped over a rock, the techs looking in their kit for a bigger plastic bag to put them in. “Hunh,” said the tech. “No blood. The guy must’ve got these off her before he shot her.” That was about as much as Sally could stand. She turned away.

And registered, distinctly, for the first time, what the coroner had been saying in his soft voice. “Shot twice at point-blank range with what appears to be a small caliber weapon . . . head, abdomen . . . likelihood of sexual assault . . .”

Only that morning, Sally thought, she’d talked with a living human being, somebody she’d pitied more than liked, but a person nonetheless. Sally couldn’t remember exactly where Monette Bandy had grown up—one of the energy boomtowns, Newcastle or Gillette? She’d come to Laramie to widen her horizons, a young woman, probably damaged by a girlhood that hadn’t offered much in the way of comfort or encouragement or pleasure. (Sally could see her holding up that bag of artichokes: “What’re these?”) Monette had just been looking, as she’d said, to “get it on.” Rape murder, it’s just a shot away.

“Pull it together, girl,” said Hawk, putting out a hand to help Sally up from her seat on the rock. “The detective and the sheriff want to talk.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Atkins said, all business.

“I didn’t expect we’d have such a tough time getting the body out of that crack,” Dickie added. “Wish you hadn’t had to watch that.”

“I assume that was where you found her?” Atkins asked.

“Yes,” Hawk said. “We were headed up this way, and saw vultures overhead. We figured something was wrong. Came up to take a look. I got here first, but Sally was right behind me.”

Atkins just nodded, taking notes. “And you didn’t disturb anything? Didn’t pick up any beer cans or kick things around?”

“No,” said Sally. “Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I did. Here.” She dug the cigarette pack out of her knapsack and noticed, for the first time, that somebody had torn the foil on top into strips, like the fringe on Buffalo Bill’s jacket. She handed the pack to Atkins, who gave her a look that said, “Real bozo move, girl,” and then handed it to a tech, who bagged it.

“Sorry. I guess you’ll find my prints on that one. But that was all I touched. We were careful. Still, when I saw her arm, I did go over there and look down into the crevice. That’s how we knew who it was.” Sally shook her head, fighting a small wave of nausea. “What was that cord on her wrist?”

Dickie looked up, his eyes grim, revealing nothing. “A piggin’ string. The calf ropers use them to tie animals down. There were rope burns on both her wrists.”

“That’s not for public consumption,” said Atkins, giving Dickie a quick glance. “I reckon we’ll ask the questions, Professor Alder.”

But Sally wasn’t really listening. The shock had fallen away, and anger was taking over. “Some fuckhead cowboy brought her out here for a party, tied her up, attacked her, shot her? Is that what you think happened here?”

“We don’t have any idea,” said Dickie. “We’re just collecting evidence.”

“Not our job to jump to conclusions,” Atkins added.

“Bullshit,” said Sally. “Tell me that isn’t what it looks like. Beer cans, butts, even a can of chew? Cowboy boot prints in the dirt? A piggin’ string?”

“We know what it looks like,” Dickie told her, with labored patience. “But at this point, that’s all we know. Lot of work to do on this yet, Sally.” He looked over at the crime lab guys and the coroner, getting ready to put Monette into a body bag. “We’re just beginning.”

And there was no time to waste. If Monette had been killed by some kinked-up bastard who’d come in Monday morning just for the rodeo and started his week off with a bang, Sally knew he might be gone already. Might stick around for the week, wreaking more havoc. Potential witnesses might only be passing through. Dickie and his people would have to work fast to get their man before the week was out. After that, the trail would get colder than a fence post in February.

Cold bloody murder and hot brutal rape. They just had to find the guy who did it and make him pay and pay. But what could Sally do?

Hawk was a step ahead of her. “You saw Monette this morning at the Lifeway, didn’t you?” he asked her.

“Yes. She checked me out this morning,” Sally told Dickie and the detective.

Poor Dickie. For a moment the wretched man leaked through and showed in the eyes of the dispassionate cop.

“Yeah. She got promoted this week. Mary was real proud of her.” He looked down at the ground, swallowed, got possession of himself. When he looked up, the man had gone back inside, and all that showed was the cop. “So did you talk to her?”

“Yeah, I did. Small talk. She was pissed off that she’d have to work nights most of the week and would miss the fun.”

Atkins, the investigator, wrote it all down. Dickie stared off into the distance, at something that had him swallowing hard again. “Monette had a fucked-up idea of fun,” he said.

And just the way he said it made Sally forget her own mad and sad, and remember that Dickie was the dead girl’s uncle, and a man who’d had, and paid for, more than a few wrongheaded notions about fun in his day. “I know what you mean. So when I was checking out, I was in line between a couple of guys who looked like the human versions of a sloth and a salamander—or maybe that’s not fair to the animals. Maybe they were lower species. A blob and a virus. Anyway, Monette hit on both of them. Told one guy she knew ‘all the best places’ in town to get a beer. Seemed like she was determined to hook up with a man, any man, the nastier and rastier the better.”

“Did the men act interested?” Atkins asked.

“The guy in front of me did. Said he’d love to ‘get a little something.’ He was a real wit, a regular Bob fucking Hope. He bought a carton of Kools for his wife.”

“Did you happen to notice whether he smoked them himself?”

“Couldn’t say. He acted like it was his wife who needed them, but she couldn’t come in and get them herself, because their baby was acting up, so she was out in the truck nursing. Great, huh—nursing and smoking? You ought to arrest her.” Sally was a real prohibitionist when it came to cigarettes. “Did you find any Kools butts?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see about that when we get things over to the lab. What about the guy in back of you?” Atkins asked.

“I don’t know. By the time I left, he hadn’t said much of anything. Just stood there looking stupid and revolting.”

Atkins glanced up from his notes and gave her a wisp of what almost looked like a smile. “Do you think you could give us a more precise description of these guys than that?”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to get the clearest possible mental picture of the two men. “Sure. I can even tell you what the first guy’s truck looked like. An old white Chevy pickup, maybe a ton and a half, rusty and dented. I didn’t notice the plates, but he said he was from Worland. And, of course, he was traveling with a woman and a baby.”

“That’s good. Let’s get down to details.”

“Okay,” Sally agreed. “The second guy was a biker, kind of scrawny and squinty-eyed, had that worked-over, windburned look.” But then she hesitated. She put her hand on Dickie’s arm, gave it a squeeze, and then said, “Look. I hate to say this, but the way Monette was going, there’s no telling how many guys she flirted with before she found Mr. Wrong. It’s not like she was being discriminating.”

As Scott Atkins recorded what Sally was saying, Dickie worked his lips, like a man who’d taken a drink of milk that had gone off. When he raised his eyes, they were glittering. “I’m not sure Monette Bandy ever had the luxury of being discriminating,” he said.