Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery (16 page)

“Did you check the museum?”

“I did earlier.” He shook his head. “She’s been disappearing a lot lately.”

“Call again.”

He pulled out his cell and hit speed dial. “If she was there, she’d have her cell phone on her.”

“Maybe she’s charging it in her van, which, by the way, doesn’t appear to be here.” There was a Northern Cheyenne Fancy Dance fan under a Plexiglas cover on a side table, and I removed the top to look at the thing. Ancient, the seed beads were encrusted with ash and the feathers tattered, but it was still beautiful.

“Don’t touch that!”

I turned to Dave. “Sorry. It’s sacred?”

“It’s poisoned is what it is.” He eyed me as I carefully replaced the top. “That one was recovered from the Peabody Museum at Yale. The things are coated with dangerous amounts of arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals. Back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the museums used about a hundred different pesticides to keep insects and rodents from eating the things.”

I studied the artifact. “Where did Jennifer get it?”

“Hell if I know.” He gestured with his phone. “Nothing, just the answering machine.”

I started toward the door to the left that hung partially closed and pushed the thing open slowly—there was an old four-poster bed that had been slept in and an ashtray sitting on the nightstand, full of butts. There was a mess, but nothing to indicate foul play.

A large dog bed was on the floor by a dresser, a few chew toys lying about. I glanced back through the doorway. “She has a Tibetan mastiff, right?”

He nodded.

“Not here, either.”

“Hey, Sheriff?”

I glanced at the museum curator. “Was that you or is that McGroder?”

“McGroder, and it’s not a theory; I can see him.”

I stepped out of the bedroom. Mike was standing by the back door, his sunglasses in his hand. “You’d better come see this.”

I gave Baumann a look as I passed, but he seemed content to stay where he was.

McGroder stepped back through more tables piled with rocks before stopping in what appeared to be a mudroom that was lined with old, paned windows that had been nailed together. “The door was ajar.” The agent tucked his regulation Ray-Bans in his jacket pocket. “Honest.” Pointing to the steps outside where it looked like someone had taken a hammer, or a rock for that matter, to a piece of electronics, he leaned against the back doorjamb. “I think that’s what’s left of a desktop computer.”

I kneeled down and picked up the pieces. “Have you got people who can patch it back together and get the information out of it—video files, specifically?”

He shook his head, doubtful. “I’ll have Jarod look at it, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.”

My attention was drawn to a collection of brown drops on the chipped linoleum, about the amount that might be held in an eyedropper.

McGroder’s voice echoed my thoughts. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” He took a step toward me. “I mean I haven’t been in the field for a while, but that is what I think it is, right?”

“I’m trying to figure out who would benefit from both Danny Lone Elk’s death and Jennifer Watt’s disappearance.”

Lucian sipped from the plastic cup that had been on his tray but ignored the so-called food and glanced at his granddaughter, Lana Baroja, who stood with Henry, both of them leaning against the wall. “I’m tryin’ to figure out who benefited from you lazy bastards not bringing me anything to put in this horseshit orange juice.” He placed his book on his chest and looked at the cup. “God, that tastes nasty. What is that, Tang? Damned astronauts should’ve left that on the moon.” He held the cup out to me. “Here, taste this.”

Clever that way, I declined. “No, thanks.” I sat back in the visitor chair and listened to it squeal in protest. “I guess you didn’t learn anything from this last experience, huh?”

“What, to not drink poisoned liquor?” He gestured toward the Bear, watching him with a bemused expression. “Indians’ve known that for centuries, right?” The old sheriff’s eyes dropped to his tray, and he made a peace offering. “You want some . . . hell, I don’t know what it is, Ladies’ Wear, but you can have it if you want.”

The Cheyenne Nation shook his head. “No, thank you.”

Lana pushed off the wall and crossed to put a hand on Lucian’s shoulder. “I’m getting out of here so that you fellows can talk shop.”

I got up with my hat in my hands, uncomfortable at having taken her seat, even at her insistence. I guess I was looking tired. “How’s the Basque bakery business?”

She smiled at my mention of her going concern. “Like everything else, picking up with the tourists.”

“Good.”

“We’ve got an impromptu jazz trio on Friday nights, and I hear you do a mean Ramsey Lewis impression of ‘Wade in the Water.’”

I stretched my fingers as if covering a few octaves. “I don’t know—my fingers are getting a little stiff these days.”

“You should stop by.” She moved to go but then paused and looked at me. “Did you know I bought that house that’s been for sale forever—the Victorian on the corner of West Hart over by the golf course?”

Aware that she had received a healthy inheritance from her grandmother a few years ago, I knew her sole financial future was not tied to the bakery. “The Buell Mansion?”

She looked embarrassed. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a mansion, especially with the work that has to be done.” She playfully slapped my shoulder and pointed a warning finger at the Bear, who pointed one back at her like they were a matched set of crossed sabers. “Take care of my grandfather; he’s the only family I’ve got left.”

I watched her head out the door and turned to look at the old sheriff. “She’s coming up in the world, huh?”

He shrugged. “Wants to remodel the carriage house behind the place and move me in there.”

“Sounds like a good deal.”

He frowned. “I like my freedom.”

I studied the man who’d been born when automobiles had been a novelty. “Um, I don’t think she’ll put a curfew on you.”

“I guess if you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, then you might as well give it a place to live.”

I waited a moment and then asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.” He picked up
The Middle Parts of Fortune
by Frederic Manning, and looked at me. “Why’d you come in here?”

“Isaac said he could run a quick analysis on the blood flakes we found at the Lake DeSmet Rock Shop and get us a preliminary, so I thought we’d check and see if you were dead yet.”

“Not yet.” The gimlet gleam returned to his eyes as he set the WWI memoir on the nightstand. “Make you a deal?”

“What?”

“Get me out of here, and I’ll help you with the case.”

Just what I needed. “I’ll think about it.”

He set the plastic cup down on the tray with a flair of finality and crossed his arms. “Then the hell with the lot of you.” He glanced around as the Cheyenne Nation moved to the window and sat on the ledge. “Where’s my damn leg?”

Henry smiled. “I do not have the slightest of ideas.”

The room was silent for a while, and then Lucian leaned toward me in a conspiratorial manner. “C’mon, get me out of here. It’s just that observation shit. Hell, you don’t stay in here for more than twenty minutes, and I been in here bein’ observed for over twenty-four hours.”

“No.”

He didn’t move but his voice dropped a few octaves, and he attempted to sound innocent. “I’m gonna start causing trouble.”

I turned and looked at the Bear, both of us knowing the width and breadth of the type of trouble of which Lucian Connally was capable. “Lucian, it’s not up to me. What if I took you out of here, and you had another attack on the sidewalk?”

He worked his jaw. “There’d be a great deal of celebration in some quarters.”

“Not from your granddaughter.” The first lesson of sheriffing—when in doubt, defer. “If Isaac says you can go, then you can go.”

“All right then.” Satisfied with the track of the conversation, he leaned back onto his stack of pillows. “Lot of blood?”

“A few drops.”

“Any other traces?”

“Nope.”

He thought about it. “No drip, spray, or splash?”

“Nothing.”

He ruminated on the scene he hadn’t seen. “That’s queer.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Thinkin’ somebody just cut themselves beatin’ the livin’ daylights out of that computer.” I nodded and let him continue to think. “So you got the Highway Patrol out on the girl’s vehicle?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head. “Well, it ain’t gonna do you a hell of a lot of good either way; them triple A with guns couldn’t slap their ass with a patented ass-slapping machine.” He thought about it a while longer. “You want my learned opinion on this?”

“Sure.”

“Runner.”

I crossed my scuffed boots and studied him. “I thought about that.”

“Got served a subpoena by the FB of I and figured she was going to have to testify against her friends over there at Jurassic Park.”

“The High Plains Dinosaur Museum.”

“Pile of bones in an old carpet store is what I call it. Whatever. She took that vehicle of hers and has it parked in the middle of nowhere. Hell, she’s one of those archeology types, so she’s sittin’ out there somewhere with a pith helmet, a piña colitis, and toilet paper.” He glanced up at Henry. “In my experience, a woman won’t go anywhere there isn’t toilet paper.”

I looked back at the Bear, who shook his head at the malapropism.

The old sheriff continued. “I bet if you check the grocery stores around here, they’ll tell you that she loaded up and headed out for the territories.”

“What about the blood?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe that dog of hers killed a pack rat back there or something.”

I shook my head. “There would have been more of a mess.”

“Well, maybe somebody butchered a western cottontail.”

The door opened, and the chief of medicine entered the room and adjusted his glasses, but before he could say anything, Lucian spoke. “Isaac, I gotta get out of here.” He gestured toward me. “The current sheriff and full-time layabout and his redskin sidekick need my help.”

The old doctor glanced at us. “Is that true?”

Both Henry and I answered simultaneously and with a great deal of emphasis. “No.”

He shook his head at Lucian and adjusted his glasses. “It’s blood, all right.”

“How old?”

“Less than twenty-four hours.”

I turned to look at Henry, who in turn looked at Isaac. “Human?”

“Within the ABO group with two distinct antigens and antibodies, B-type. With my limited facilities it could also be another primate, but here in Wyoming monkeys are rare so the chances of that are slim.”

Lucian pushed his rolling tray away. “Well, thanks a lot, Doc. You just shot my theory in the ass.” He looked at me, snapped his fingers, and pointed one at me like a gun. “She got a pet monkey?”

“No.”

He dropped the weapon and turned back to Isaac. “What the hell else can you tell us?”

Isaac pulled his ever-present clipboard up and pretended to read from it. “Female, blonde, approximately twenty-six to twenty-eight years of age . . .”

“Damn, you’re kidding.”

He lowered the clipboard. “Yes, I am.”

Lucian turned to me. “You know, the smart-ass quotient in this county has sure gone up since you took over.”

I stood, and Lucian cleared his throat, which forced me to direct my attention to the doc, as much as I was trying to avoid it. “Isaac, he wants to know if you’ll release him.”

“Please.”

I stared at him, hoping I had misheard. “What?”

“Please get him out of here this afternoon—I’ve got two RNs in this wing who are threatening to put him out of their misery.” He gestured toward the door. “If he stays any longer, I really can’t vouch for his safety.”

 • • • 

“So, what are you going to do?”

Sharing the information that my son-in-law had been killed might not have been prudent, but it didn’t seem right not to tell him, as Lucian was Cady’s unofficial great uncle and ersatz grandfather. “Wait for word from Philadelphia to see if there’s anything odd about what happened.”

He sat back in his seat as I made the turn on Fort and drove on toward the first grocery store on the way toward the mountains. “I don’t have to tell you what I’d do if somebody shot my son-in-law.”

“No, you don’t—you’d go to Philadelphia and shoot somebody whether it was the right person or not.”

“Makes you feel better when you shoot people . . . You ought to try it sometime.”

I pulled up and waited at one of our three stoplights. “I’ve shot people before, old man, and the last thing it ever made me feel was better.”

He turned and looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “What do you say?”

“Leave him out of this.”

He nodded as he turned back in the seat. “That’s just what I thought.”

“When I first started out, you taught me to make sure I was right and then go ahead with all of my abilities. Well, this is the make-sure-I’m-right part. I’m not going to go kill a man because I’m angry about losing Michael.”

“The son of a bitch has already got an irrevocable contract out on you, and you don’t think that’s reason enough to go exterminate his ass?”

“If I go after him, it’ll be for a specific reason and not a general feeling.”

“Well, till that time, you and yours are going to be marching around like tin bears in a shooting gallery.” He glanced back at the Bear. “No offense.”

Henry rumbled, “None taken.”

I pulled my truck into the grocery store lot and saw the S
AVE
J
EN!
banner on the side of the building.

The old sheriff leaned forward, looking through the top of the windshield in the other direction and pointing toward the towering fork and spoon with the words S
ETTINGS F
OR
Y
OUR
T
ABLE
outside the IGA where we sometimes shanghaied jurors for court duty. “I remember around the Fourth of July back in ’60 when Robert Taylor backed his Cadillac into that sign.”

“No, you don’t.”

He turned to look at me, the indignation sharp in his eyes. “The hell I don’t; it was a big ol’ boat of a thing, white convertible with a red and white interior.”

I pulled my truck up in front of the sign and parked. “You might remember the car, but you don’t remember the incident because you weren’t there.”

He unclicked his safety belt, pulled the handle on the door, stepped out with his new four-prong cane, and then opened the suicide door for Henry, who slipped out but left Dog inside. “And how the hell do you know that?”

Having climbed out myself, I came around the front and joined them on the sidewalk. “Because
I
was there, and it was later than that. I remember because he was filming a movie called
Cattle King
.”

He shook his head, looking up at the bulbs that ran the circumference of the kitschy sign. “Nope, you didn’t start working for me till in the seventies, after Vietnam.”

“That’s right, but before that I witnessed Robert Taylor backing not only into this sign but also into Ida Purdy’s husband’s ’57 Apache pickup.”

We started toward the front of the grocery store, and I slowed to allow Lucian to keep up.

He looked at me. “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I became aware of you.” As we stood there, the automatic door slid open and he walked in like he owned the town, which he pretty much had for nigh on sixty years. “Where are the pickled pig’s feet in this damned place?”

A long-haired teenage bagger at the checkout raised a fist. “Save Jen!”

I raised a fist in return and watched as Evelyn Clymer, an elderly woman who I remembered used to work at the hardware store but must have changed jobs, smiled at the old sheriff. “Hello, Lucian. We heard you had a stroke?”

He limped toward them. “I did, but it must’ve been a backstroke because here I am.”

The coy smile remained on her lips. “Well, I know that to be the truth.”

The teenager looked Native, and when he turned I finally realized who he was, even though his hair was pulled back and he wore an apron. He spoke to the Bear first. “
Nahkohe
, what’s up, innit?”

“Just prowling, Taylor, and you?”

The young Lone Elk leaned against the counter and gestured around him. “Living the dream.”

He glanced at me. “Didn’t know I had a job at the market?”

I shrugged. “No, I just figured you ran away for a living.”

“I mostly walk into town.”

“That’s close to twelve miles.”

He smiled. “I run it most times.”

Evelyn rested an elbow on the check-writing stand, propped up her pointed chin with a freckled hand, and glanced over Lucian’s shoulder at us. “Something tells me this is a business call.”

The old sheriff turned to me. “What’s her name?”

“Jennifer Watt, blonde, about five-seven, midtwenties, might’ve been in here in the last day or so?”

Evelyn shook her head. “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell, but I don’t know everybody—especially this time of year.” She reached behind her and picked up a phone. “Dan, the sheriff and his bodyguards are down here.” She hung up, and we watched as a middle-aged man in glasses approached from the offices to our left. “They’re looking for a young woman by the name of Watt.”