Twelve

A police cadet in a crisp blue uniform escorted Arn to the second floor of the new public safety building the Cheyenne police department had just moved into. It housed all emergency services except the sheriff’s office, and Arn was glad for an escort. It would look foolish to get lost in the building.

The cadet led Arn to Ned Oblanski’s office. The lady-wrestler-turned-secretary-to-the-chief, the always hirsute Gorilla Legs, stood guard outside Oblanski’s office. She frowned at Arn when she motioned him in. “Be quick,” she said. “The chief’s got a budgetary meeting with the town council in twenty minutes.” Arn and Gorilla Legs had never bonded, but at least he thought she’d be glad to see him after these many months away. He was wrong.

When Arn stepped into the office, he was impressed by the size of the room: it was fully twice as large as the chief’s office had been in the old telephone building. Oblanski even looked small sitting behind his oversized mahogany desk. He looked up from studying a spread sheet and dropped his glasses on the desk. “Thank God you’re here.”

Arn looked around to see if Oblanski was talking to someone else. “Why, thank you.”

“Don’t get a big head, Anderson. Only thing I meant was that you give me an excuse to push these damned figures aside. Shut the door.” Oblanski walked to a new coffee bar at the other end of the room. Arn almost missed the old pot, with its quaint odor of scalded coffee that smelled like old feet from sitting on the burner all day. The chief turned to Arn. “Latte?”

“Don’t you have just coffee?”

“We’re expanding our horizons,” Oblanski said. “Think yuppie.”

“Okay then, Americano if it’ll make it.”

Oblanski punched a button. “It will. It’s an amazing piece of technology. Fresh-brewed will be ready in a moment.” He nodded for Arn to sit on a chair and said, “I saw Ana Maria’s special last night.” He walked back to his desk and sat on the edge. “I thought you were done with consulting. Rumor has it that you’re positively orgasmic about being a range detective. Now why would you want to get back into the consulting business?”

“If all I wanted to do was smell cow crap and sheep shit all night while listening to them whine, I’d be thrilled. I’m out there nights doing anything I can to stay awake. Even listening to nighttime talk radio. No, I’m about as happy being a stock detective as you will be cleaning up that mess.”

“What mess?”

“That mess.” Arn pointed to the espresso machine. It had filled Arn’s cup and kept running. And running. Oblanski sprang to the machine and unplugged it, but not before it had soaked the new beige carpeting. He frantically tore paper towels off a roll and squatted beside the spill, patting the carpet.

“Why not just call your lovely secretary out there to clean up?” Arn said with a grin.

A look of terror crossed Oblanski’s face. “Lower your voice. She’d have my nuts in her pocket if she found out I messed up this carpet.”

After two rolls of Bounty, the spot was nearly invisible, and Oblanski wiped sweat off his forehead and nearly bald head with the last paper towel. He tossed the wet mess in the trash can and sat in his chair. “You were going to tell me how you got roped into another consulting gig,” Oblanski said, one eye on his office door, the other on the evil coffee machine.

“DeAngelo Damos made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ll be able to put central air in with what he’s paying me.”

“If you solve Jillie Reilly’s murder,” Oblanski said. “And before Sergeant Slade does, I’ll bet.” He walked to the machine. He eyed it warily as he plugged it in again, the sound of water heating cutting through the air. As if it would actually work this time. “It’s no secret the pissing match between DeAngelo and Sheriff Grimes goes back years.” He smiled. “My guess is that’s why Slade will give you inside info—’cause rumor has it that big SOB intends to challenge Grimes the next election.”

“I heard that scuttlebutt too,” Arn said. “And have you heard any scuttlebutt about the Reilly homicide?”

“You know I can’t say anything”—Oblanski looked past Arn to the door—“officially. Unofficially, Slade went to the county and asked that a ten thousand dollar reward be offered for information. He’ll go on air and publicly once again say that Jillie was one half of a duo the ranchers have dubbed the Midnight Sheepherder.”

“That’ll devastate her father.” Arn stood and paced in front of Oblanski’s desk. “Little Jim doted on her. Spoiled her, from what the ladies at the courthouse say. And it didn’t matter to him that she partied too heavily and too often.” He faced Oblanski. “I don’t think Jillie had anything to do with the rustling. Slade will just muck things up. Make it harder to ferret out the real killer.”

“And this is not because you haven’t been able to catch the rustler after all these months?”

“No,” Arn said. “It would make it easy for me if Jillie was the thief. But I don’t get the feeling she was, at this point. So what can you tell me?”

Oblanski grabbed a pencil and began chewing the end. “I might be able to confirm or refute a guess. Give me your best shot, and I’ll tell you if you’re full of it.”

“Okay,” Arn began. “Here’s what I found out so far: Jillie danced with Eddie Glass that night at the Boot Hill, then she went to the crapper. When she came back, Bonnie Johns was dancing with Eddie, and the fight was on. Evict one Bonnie. That soured Jillie and she started coming on to some other guy sitting by himself, and Eddie retaliated by dancing with some married woman just to make Jillie jealous.”

“I don’t see anything there that contradicts Sergeant Slade’s theory.”

“And nothing that supports it,” Arn said. “Jillie taunted the guy she was talking with. Threatening to tell on him. Followed him outside.” Arn held up his hand. “Before you ask, believe me when I say I haven’t been able to find out what it was she was going to rat him out about. Flo Martin believes Jillie had an affair with the guy and had decided to expose him that night. But Flo figures it was the booze talking.”

“And Flo would know about that,” Oblanski said. “So you’re saying Jillie chased the guy outside—”

“She chased the guy out of the bar while Eddie was fighting with the husband of the woman he’d danced with. After he waylaid the guy he ran after Jillie. Eddie claims he never saw her outside the bar. But he never came back in the bar that night, either.”

Oblanski rifled through daily call sheets and settled on Saturday’s police calls. “We never got a fight call to the Boot Hill Saturday.”

“If I recall from working here, bars in Cheyenne usually take care of their own problems. I bet you rarely get fight calls to any of them.”

Oblanski laughed. “Especially with that mean little midget Karl bouncing for Flo.” He flicked the coffee machine on and off again and lorded over it. Just in case. “Again, how does all this dispute Slade’s theory about Jillie being one of the rustlers?”

Arn fished the envelope with the paint chip out of his pocket. “Because of this. I found it embedded in the wooden gatepost at Wooly Hank’s after a truck had fled the pasture—and the truck wasn’t the killer’s.” Arn sat back in his chair and took off his hat. He unwrapped the sliver of side marker light and showed it to Oblanski. “It’s my belief that either Eddie or the guy Jillie chased out of the bar killed her. I think the Midnight Sheepherder witnessed the murder while he was in the process of stealing sheep, and he fled before the killer could catch him.”

“Run that by me again.”

“The guy that Jillie chased out may have grabbed her and drove off to Wooly Hank’s. Or, Eddie caught up with her outside the bar after the other guy motored away, and he drove her to the pasture. Either way, we know the outcome.”

“She was a wild one. Never had much sense when she was drinking, if I remember my rookie days.” Oblanski searched his desk for another victim-pencil to chew on. “But I hoped she’d settled down after she started working for Dr. Oakert.”

“Any rumor there that the doctor was … bedding her?”

“For all I know he’s as pure as the driven snow,” Oblanski said. “When he first set up his practice, he presented the council with a proposal whereby he would treat officers needing counseling. Before you knew it, we and the sheriff’s office were sending all our officers to him when there was a shooting. Or when officers just had emotional or psychological problems with work, or problems at home. He came with unusually good credentials for a town this small.”

“How good?”

Oblanski handed Arn his coffee. “Oakert used to be in charge of a big mental hospital in California.” He punched more buttons on the espresso machine and remained beside it, still not trusting such an amazing piece of technology. “Jillie Reilly worked for him from the first day he opened his practice here. She did everything in his office. Made things kind of homey. I saw her when I met him there initially, about his services. She remembered me arresting her once for public intox, but she was still friendly. Professional. But you know how rumors spread. A few of our officers even dated her, but she was too wild for them.”

Oblanski spit a piece of eraser into the garbage can by the coffee bar. “Nothing explains why she was killed,” he said. “How about if neither Eddie Glass nor the guy she confronted killed her? How about it was some other guy Jillie picked up at one of the other bars? You can damn well bet if it wasn’t closing time, Jillie would have continued bar hopping.”

“Maybe she took a ride with one of the guys,” Arn said. “I just don’t have enough information right now to do much more than speculate.” He turned his Stetson over in his hands.

“You got nothing.,” Oblanski said. “You don’t even have enough to speculate. Maybe if you knew what Jillie was going to rat that guy out about—whatever the hell she had on him—it might help.”

“Believe me, I laid awake half the night thinking just that.” Arn added sweetener and crème to his Americano and stirred. “Here’s my last … speculation,” he said. “A long shot is that Jillie transcribed all of Dr. Oakert’s notes. She knew what the doctor knew, and she threatened the guy in the bar to ‘tell on him.’”

“But she was bound by the same ethical standards that Dr. Oakert is. She wouldn’t dare reveal anything about one of his patients.”

“Except it was the booze talking,” Arn said. “She may have gotten way over her head with one of the patients—one of Oakert’s dangerous and volatile patients—and threatened to expose him. But he couldn’t chance it getting out.”

Oblanski tossed his pencil stub in the trash can. “That’s some tin-foil theory you’ve concocted. I liked it better when Eddie Glass was your prime suspect. He’s pure mean when he’s drunk, and an SOB that our officers have to fight every time he’s arrested. Either way, you have your hands full.”

“Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

“Not this time. Jillie’s death is so far out in the county, my department will never get involved.”

Oblanski could say nothing more about it, and he and Arn talked about the Cowboys’ last season and who they might field in the fall. Oblanski had been a running back for Wyoming before dropping out to take a job with the police department, and Arn had played high school ball before a horse threw him and sidelined him with a busted leg.

Arn had finished his coffee and was starting to leave when Oblanski stopped him. “By the way, I checked hit-and-runs for this weekend like you asked. We had two and the county had one. All more damage than you described.”

“Thanks,” Arn said. Perhaps Bonnie was so drunk that she’d even got the date wrong on her accident. Or maybe it was the guy driving her truck home from the bar who’d run into something.

Arn walked a block down the street to the sheriff’s office. The midday sun reflected intense heat from the pavement, and he wiped the inside of his hat band with his bandana. He stepped into the lobby of the SO and asked for Sergeant Slade. After a forty-five-minute wait, in which Arn was forced to read year-old copies of The Smithsonian and Woman’s World, Slade came into the waiting area. “You could have called first, Anderson.”

“I did. Three times. I even left a message. I just assumed you would rather see my smiling face in person.”

“So call me busy with this homicide. What bullshit you after now?”

“Jillie’s murder—what can you tell me about it?”

“Nothing. You’re a civilian.” Slade smiled. “Or should I say you’re a range detective.”

“Sheriff Grimes says otherwise,” Arn bluffed, hoping Slade hadn’t talked with his boss lately. With rumors of Slade running against Grimes for sheriff this next election, the chance they’d spoken recently was slim. “He said if you failed to cooperate to call him. Immediately.”

Slade rubbed his forehead and checked the clock. It was a quarter past noon, and Arn knew Grimes would be down at the Eagles Nest for lunch and a highball. If it hadn’t been lunchtime, Slade would probably have called Grimes and given Arn the bum’s rush when he found out Arn had just lied to him.

“I’d hate for you to get in trouble”—Arn saw his opening—“right before the election.”

Slade sighed and rubbed his forehead. “All right, mercenary bastard. What do you need to know?”

“Out here? Perhaps we better speak more privately.”

The deputy led Arn into a side office stacked with desks and chairs and office supplies and closed the door. “All right. Again, what do you want to know?”

“That theory of yours about Jillie Reilly being half a rustling team—any traction on that?”

“Not yet. We put out the reward just yesterday.”

“I’ll bet if you talked with the TV station, got more exposure on air—”

“Sheriff Grimes and DeAngelo Damos don’t exactly swap spit. I was lucky to get on Ana Maria’s special one night.”

“But you could be above that fray. Solve the case, and next election you’ll be a leg up with the voters. What do you say—want me to put a word in with Ana Maria and see if she can give you additional air time?”

“The sheriff won’t be happy.”

“But the case might just get solved.”

Slade mulled it over. “Give her my office number, and I’ll go on air however many times it takes. Anything else?”

“What did you find out at autopsy?”

“Jillie had a blood alcohol of .22.”

“Qualified her for a toaster at the Boot Hill.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” Arn said. “Just something Flo Martin likes to do. Anything else?”

Slade remained silent, as if debating giving Arn more information.

“What’s the worst I could do—help you solve the murder?” Arn asked.

“You’re not going to solve it with what little we found at autopsy.” Slade wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. “But we did find one thing that has us stumped. Jillie was strangled with some type of thin rope. Leather thong. Electrical cord perhaps. That will be easy enough to determine once we find a suspect. But the ligature marks on her neck clearly show the killer tried several times to strangle her.”

“And you wonder if she fought hard enough that the killer lost his grip on the cord?”

“Something like that.”

“Can I take a look at the photos?”

“You’re going to bug my ass until I show them to you.”

Arn shrugged.

Slade kept silent. “Follow me to my office,” he said at last.

He led Arn through the sheriff’s office into a small room occupied by a gun-metal gray desk, two straight-backed chairs, and a dilapidated office chair with one arm. He sat in the chair and opened his desk drawer. “I never showed these to you. Deal?”

“Deal,” Arn said. He pulled up a chair across from Slade.

Arn opened the manila folder and spread the autopsy photos out on top of Slade’s desk. When he came to one showing the marks around Jillie’s throat, Slade traced the marks with the back of his pen. “There were these three distinct marks encircling her neck that pooled blood. Three times, like she was fighting him.”

Arn picked up the photo and held it to the light. The quality was less than he was accustomed to from working Denver Metro, but the photo was clear enough. “He wanted her to suffer.”

“How’s that?”

“Jillie’s killer wanted her to suffer, and he prolonged her agony so he could enjoy it.” Arn put the photo back on the desk and began to pace the room. “I investigated a case in Denver some years back where a man abducted his former wife and locked her in his basement. Every day when he’d come home from work he’d go down there and—just for an evening’s pleasure—strangle her to the point of death. Then he’d back off. He ultimately went too far one time and she died. Thank God for nosy neighbors. One called in that she hadn’t seen the husband for weeks. Newspapers stacked on the porch. Junk mail overflowing the mail box. You know, everything you’re taught not to do when you kill someone and flee. Anyway, patrol officers made entry and found her.” Arn took a deep breath. “At autopsy, it looked like he’d made numerous attempts to strangle her but changed his mind. He was captured in Austin and extradited back to Colorado. When I interrogated him, I asked if he’d had a change of heart all those times he let her live. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I got off watching her come so close to death before I let up. You’d think the bitch would be grateful that I let her live all those times. But she never was.’”

“So we’re looking for someone who enjoys watching people suffer?”

“That’s about it. Prisons are full of them,” Arn said. “And some asylums. How much struggle did Jillie put up?”

“Considerable. She wasn’t big, but she was a born ranch girl and tougher than boiled whale shit. She bit her attacker, and the lab is working up DNA on blood the ME recovered from the back of her teeth and from one tiny piece of flesh she ripped out.” Slade flipped through the papers. “And tissue samples were taken from under her fingernails. But that’ll only be helpful if the killer had his DNA sample taken somewhere.”

“Let’s hope so,” Arn said. “Before he kills again.”

Slade placed the folder with the autopsy pictures back in his desk.

“I don’t expect to look at your incident report,” Arn said, “but maybe you can enlighten me on some things.”

Slade leaned back in his tattered office chair, and it creaked loud enough Arn thought it would break. “What things? And you’re right—if you want to see official reports, the sheriff himself will have to approve it. Even I can’t go over the old man’s head.”

“Fair enough.” Arn nodded. “But you can tell me if you learned anything from the bar patrons about that night?”

“That I can,” Slade said. “Only because there’s nothing there you don’t already know about. They all recalled the fight with Eddie and the married guy, but nobody remembers Jillie chasing some dude out the bar.”

“And Karen Glass?” Arn asked. “From what Flo Martin’s bartender said, Karen came in earlier in the evening looking for Eddie. Have you talked with her?”

Slade shrugged. “No reason to. She waltzed into the bar long before Eddie arrived for a night of drinking. And long before the fight with that married dude. I can’t see her sticking around and waiting for Eddie to maybe come to that bar when there were so many others in town he could be at.”

Arn jotted Karen’s name down even though Slade didn’t think it important that she be interviewed. He’d learned through the years at Metro that people only remotely connected to a case should be talked to. It had paid off more times than not for him. “I think I’ll visit with her.”

Slade shook his head. “You watch yourself. Karen can be a nightmare when she’s got a temper on. “

“That’s what Flo told me.”

“And it’s good advice. Karen’s been arrested for drunk driving. Fighting in public. She pulled a shiv on another woman at a bar in Ft. Collins a few years ago. That was before she settled down and had a baby. But she’s still as mean as she always was. You watch yourself. That woman’s a holy terror.”

Arn checked his watch. The afternoon was early: he had time to visit Karen Glass and see just what a holy terror looked like.