Omar was a local enigma, the big dog of outfitters along the Bighorns. You could run the entire length of the range along the mountains and ownership would concede seven names, one of which was Omar Rhoades. His ranch followed the north fork of Rock Creek at the top of the county, stretched from I-90 to the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, and was about half the size of Rhode Island. He was originally from Indiana and had inherited the place from a rich uncle who had despised the rest of the family. Omar knew everything there was to know about hunting and firearms. His personal collection was known worldwide, and the number of international hunters he wooed as a clientele was legion. He had his own airport on the ranch, but after the FAA had curtailed the size of his landing strip, the hunters that arrived in larger aircraft landed here.
I pulled through the chain-link fence and parked alongside the control tower. Old concrete pads patched with asphalt stretched across the flat surface of the bluff, and a frayed windsock popped in the strong breeze. I walked past the white cinder block building, which proclaimed DURANT, WYOMING, ELEVATION 4954; I guess they felt compelled to put the state on there just in case somebody really got lost. I had a great affinity for the few old Lockheed PV-2s parked along the end of the runway that dwarfed the three Cessna 150s chained to the tarmac in front of the building. There were no contracts for the naked aluminum birds, and they sat there with their cowlings and nose cones becoming a flatter and flatter red. The Pratt and Whitney engines slowly seeped aviation grade oil on the concrete, and the Bureau of Forestry decals had begun to peel away. At the end of the building, I looked down the flight way and saw what I was looking for: George Armstrong Custer leaning against a custom crew cab.
To say that he looked like the General was partly slighting to Omar; Omar was better looking and, I’m sure, a head taller than Ol’ Goldilocks. A carefully battered silver-belly Stetson sloped off his head, and his arms were folded into a full-length Hudson blanket coat with a silver-coyote collar. The locals considered him to be quite the dandy, but I figured he just had style. We had gotten to know each other through a lengthy series of domestic disturbances. Omar and his wife Myra had attempted to kill each other in an escalating process of more than eight years that had started out with kitchen utensils and ended, as far as I was concerned, with a matching set of .308s that had been a wedding gift from the uncle. They were both crack shots and incredibly lucky that they had missed; they could live neither with nor without each other. At the moment, they were living without, and things had become considerably quieter on Rock Creek. He always looked like he was asleep, and he never was.
“So, if a man wanted to kill an innocent animal around here, what would he do?”
“Move. There isn’t any such thing as an innocent animal, especially around here.”
I leaned against the shiny surface of the Chevrolet and wondered how he kept all his vehicles so clean. He probably had about twelve guys on the job. “Didn’t you watch the
Walt Disney Hour
on television?”
“I was more partial to Mutual of Omaha’s
Wild Kingdom.
” He yawned and tipped his hat back. His cobalt eyes squeezed the distance to the mountains, and you could almost hear the clicking of his internal scopes as they measured the yards and calculated the trajectory. “Anyway, the animal you’re looking for is about as far from innocent as you can get.”
I pulled the plastic bag from my coat and held it up in front of him. It looked like a Rorschach test in lead. “Which brings me to the point at hand.” His eyes shifted to the Ziploc, and he looked more like a lion than anything else.
He yawned again. “Somebody meant business.”
He held out a hand, and I dropped into it the most important piece of evidence in our case. He palmed it for a moment, bouncing it between the band of his gold-trimmed Rolex and the three turquoise rings on his right hand. Omar was ambidextrous. Style. “Soft?”
“30 to 1, lead to tin.”
“Anything else?”
“Some sort of foreign substance, SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.”
“Lubricant made specifically for black-powder cartridge shooting.”
“Black-powder cartridge?”
It was the first time he looked at me. “How many people have seen this?”
“Vic, T. J. Sherwin at DCI, Chemical Analysis at Justice, and Henry.”
He blinked and continued to look at me. “The Bear didn’t know what this was?”
I paused. “We figured it was an antique shotgun slug, black powder?”
“Hmm . . .” He could noncommittal
hmm
almost as good as me.
“Something?”
He handed me back the baggie and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I could tell you, but I’d rather show you.”
“You’re that sure?”
He looked at the pointed toes of his handmade, belly-cut, alligator-skin Paul Bond boots. “I’m that sure.”
I ran through the rest of my day. “After 5:30?”
He looked again to the sky above Cloud Peak. “Tomorrow morning would be better, Sheriff. I’ve got a business to run.”
“What time?”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m always up.”
* * *
By the time I got back to the office, a green Dodge with a flat bed and fifth wheel was pulled up to the building, and the woman in the front seat made a point of not seeing me as I went in. Barbara Keller did not believe her child was guilty and never would. I went in the office and motioned for the two men to follow me. “Get you fellas some coffee?” Jim Keller shook his head, and Bryan studied his hands. “You sure? It’s been brewing since about eight this morning. Should be about right.”
“How can we help you, Walt?” Of all the young men in the group, I had found it the hardest to believe that Bryan had been involved with the rape. I wasn’t sure if he had always looked so sad or if the look had just intensified since the trial. “Jim, you own that land out next to the BLM where Bob Barnes runs Mike Chatham’s sheep?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where we found Cody Pritchard.” I glanced at Bryan. “You didn’t have any contact with him in the last couple of weeks, did you?”
“He has not.” I turned to look at Jim. Jim in turn looked at Bryan, who in turn looked at his hands. “Have you?”
Bryan found his hands even more interesting. “No, sir.”
“Jim, your wife is looking a little upset out there in your outfit, maybe you ought to go check on her?”
He gave Bryan another look. “You tell this man anything he wants to know, and you better damn well tell him the truth.”
I let the directive settle till the front door quietly shut. Bryan Keller was a handsome kid with wide cheekbones, a strong chin, and a small, hooked scar at the jawline. He had taken life on, and life had kicked his ass. I looked at the young wreck and felt sad too. “Bryan?” The jolt was two staged, and his eyes briefly met with mine. “Did you have any contact with Cody?”
“No, sir.”
“None at all?”
“No, sir.”
I believed him. Shells don’t lie, mostly. I stretched and laced my fingers behind my head. “Have you had anything to do with him since the trial?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you aware of any threats that might have been made toward him? Any enemies he might have had?” This got a brief exhale. “Other than the obvious?”
“I’d liked to have killed the son of a bitch.”
I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. “Really?”
His eyes darted back to his hands. “Is sayin’ that gonna get me into trouble?”
“No more than the rest of us.” I went out into the reception area and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You sure you won’t have some? It really isn’t that bad.” He said okay, probably because I asked him twice and he had been taught that if somebody asks you something twice you say yes, no matter what it is. It looked like a heated conversation going on in the truck out front, and I thought about my child. I don’t know how you get them to make right choices, how you keep them from ending up like the two-parent pileup that was sitting in my office.
I brought Bryan his coffee and sat down in the chair beside him, taking off my hat and tossing it onto the desk. My gun belt was digging into my side, but I was ignoring it. We were both ignoring it. I sipped my coffee. “Bryan . . . Just for the record, I don’t think you killed Cody Pritchard . . . As I recall, your statements and testimony indicated that you didn’t participate in the rape.”
“I didn’t.” His eyes welled up, and I wished I washed cars for a living.
“You were only convicted as an accessory, with suspended sentence.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that’s a good thing.”
He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “There are days when I just can’t stand it.” He was crying openly, and I watched the tears stripe his face and drip onto his shirt.
“Stand what?”
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his Carhartt. “People . . . the way they look at me . . . like I’m not worth shit.”
“Well, at the risk of sounding trite, I guess it’s up to you to prove them wrong.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop yes-sirring me.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
I bought shampoo on the way home. When I got there, the substructure of a porch ran the entire distance of the cabin. Six six-by-sixes stood unflinching in the growing wind, and the little red Jeep was gone.
5
I left the house around 5:30 in the morning and succeeded in avoiding Red Road Contracting and Henry. I wasn’t sure if he was going to make me run two days in a row, but I didn’t want to risk it. It was partly cloudy, but the sun was making a valiant attempt at clearing the sky, and it promised to be warmer than it had been in the last few days. I sometimes thought about moving south, following the geese, shooting through the pass at Raton, and seeing if there were any sheriff openings in New Mexico. Good Mexican food was hard to come by north of Denver. I liked Taos, but Hatch was probably my speed.
I took 14 to Lower Piney and cut across 267 to Rock Creek, slowly tacking my way up the foothills. I thought about Vonnie and missed her a little bit. It was probably way too early for that. I was going through that little bit of worry that I had said or done something wrong and that she might not want to see me again. I saw me every day, and I wasn’t so sure I was that fond of my company. I promised myself that I would call her up and make a real date, maybe a lunch of lessening expectations.
As far as I knew, Ruby hadn’t gotten any response from the Espers. I was going to have to swing out to their place and square things up on the way back from Omar’s unless I radioed in and got Vic to do it. With Turk back in Powder, I was shorthanded. I thought about Turk and forced my train of thought elsewhere. It was a big train. I waited till I got to the top of one of the ridges to tell Ruby to send Ferg out to the Esper place. She reminded me that I hadn’t taken my sweatpants and that Vic’s feelings were probably going to be hurt.
“Is she there?”
“Talking on the phone with Cheyenne.”
“This early? Well, tell her that the evidence stuff is on my desk from . . .”
“She’s already got that.”
“Oh.” I waited for a moment, but she didn’t continue. “Anything you need from me?”
“Like where you are?”
“Yep, like that.”
“No, we don’t care.” I thought I heard someone laughing in the background, but I wasn’t sure.
Palace Omar was made of logs, same as mine, but that was where the likeness ended. Unlike Vonnie’s, you had to park in a circular holding area after being buzzed through the gate, which was about a mile back down the asphalt road. No one said anything, but the gate had slowly risen, and I smiled and waved at the little black video camera. I looked up at the house and wondered how many cameras were on me now. The place was impressive, as multimillion-dollar mansions go. The architects from Montana had used a combination of massive hand-hewn logs and architectural salvage to produce a combination of old and new and all expensive.
I knocked and made faces at the security camera at the door, but no one answered. Entering Omar’s house unannounced was less than appealing, but I could hear a television blaring in the depths of the structure and decided to risk it. I pushed open the doors, listened to the satisfied thump as the metal cores closed, and walked into the two-story atrium that made up the entryway. I counted the mounted heads that were hung down the great hallway to the kitchen in the back. There were twenty-three. I knew the inside of the house pretty well; I had followed Omar and Myra through the majority of it while listening to their running, psychosis-ridden monologues on how they were going to kill each other.
As I made my way toward the kitchen, the sound from the TV became more distinct, and I was pretty sure some pretty dramatic lovemaking was going on. Obviously Omar got a lot better reception than I did. When I got there, Jay Scherle, Omar’s head wrangler, was standing at the counter and watching a watered-down version of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
which I gathered was taking place in a hayloft somewhere. Every time the leading lady became overcome with passion, the camera would drift to the casually billowing curtains at a window. Jay was dressed for work, complete with chaps and spurs. I asked if Omar was up. His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I’ve worked here for seven years, and I’ve never seen the son of a bitch sleep.”
I nodded and watched Jay watch the flip-down flat screen that was hung under the kitchen cabinets. I wasn’t sure if D. H. Lawrence would have recognized his work, but the plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement would have recognized his.
“Where is he?”
“Out back, getting set up.”
I looked at the screen, a curtain again. “Set up for what?”
“Hell if I know . . . took a pumpkin with him.” After a moment, he spoke again. “You ever seen a barn with so many damn curtains?”