“Good morning, everyone,” said Dickie, taking a big swig from the mug, and smiling again. “I want to personally thank you all for your cooperation last night, and in the weeks to come. I’m sure you understand that we’ll be keeping in contact with you, in case we need a little more help. We would prefer that you stay in the area, but we understand that most of you don’t live here. Given what’s happened, those of you who’ve been contemplating a move to Laramie may be reconsidering your plans. Several of you have already told me that you intend to leave the state as soon as weather permits, and go back to California, or Oregon, or wherever.”
Boy howdy, Sally thought. Most of them would have been gone like a cool breeze yesterday, before the police ever arrived, had it not been for the combination of Nels Willen and Wyoming weather.
“We’d like it if you’d stick around, but we can’t force you to remain in Albany County. So we have to make reasonable accommodations. When we talked with you yesterday,” Dickie continued, “we got home addresses for all of you, or at least post office boxes and e-mail addresses and cellular telephone numbers. If you expect to change any of that information, or to stay with friends, or to take a trip to Jamaica or whatever, we ask that you get in touch with us at the Albany County Sheriff’s office, and give us new information. Most likely we won’t ever need to contact you again, but you never know.”
The Dub-Dubs groaned as one. Sally figured most of them had never been involved in a shooting before. Unhappily for her, she had. Dickie was being unusually lenient. He actually might have been able to force them to stay in the county, or at least to fake them into thinking he had the power to do so. But since he hadn’t been born in a barn, thought Sally, he must have decided that the negative press he’d get from detaining peace-loving coastals in gun-toting Wyoming wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Be sure to take one of those cards my deputy is handing around,” he said. “And yes, in case you’re wondering, some of those cards actually are refrigerator magnets. We had them made up two years ago as a fund-raiser. Consider them our gift to you, in gratitude for helping us figure out what happened to Ms. Cruz.”
Pammie stuck her Albany County Sheriff’s Department magnet on the refrigerator in the kitchen and requested another for the Yippie I O Café.
The boy with the blond dreads raised his hand. “I’m, like, not sure where I’m going to be in the next few months. There’s a Rainbow Family gathering, and a Wood Nymph convocation, and I might check out a couple Phil Lesh shows. I don’t have a phone or e-mail or any of that other bourgeois crap.”
“Luckily, in your case,” said Scotty, not managing to suppress a sneer, “we have your parents’ names, addresses, and contacts. They’ll at least know which gathering they’re sending the checks to.”
Dickie took a less sarcastic, but more disconcerting line. “We understand that this will be complicated for some of you. But in addition to needing your help with our work, we’re concerned about your safety.”
“You don’t think whoever shot Nina is after any of the rest of us?” a girl spoke up, her voice rising to a squeak on “us.” “I thought this was a hunting accident.”
Of course it was. But Sally thought about Willen’s gun; it had clearly been fired recently. And she thought about the letter in her bag. Whoever had written it had mentioned “enemies.” She’d be jumping to conclusions to assume that Nina had been the recipient, but she had, after all, found it under Nina’s desk. The fact that it had been wadded up and tossed in the direction of the wastebasket suggested to Sally that Nina hadn’t welcomed the offer of help. But who had written it? Who were the enemies? What did they intend?
And what kind of good-bye had been exchanged between the writer, who “dwelled too often in the dark,” and the reader, Dearest to—somebody’s—Heart?
Was the note from somebody who lived at Shady Grove? As both a historian and a former hippie, Sally knew a little something about the dynamics of communal households. When people who lived together started communicating in writing, instead of talking face-to-face, it was definitely bad news for the future of the group. To say nothing of the relationship between writer and intended reader. She recalled once leaving a note for a particularly odious housemate in a fast-deteriorating collective pad, telling him to get food and kitty litter for his badly neglected cat, or else she’d take Little Whiskers to the animal shelter. The guy had written back to say that kitty litter was a housewife’s affectation, and if Sally did anything to his cat, she’d better watch her back. Not exactly Woodstock Nation.
But this wasn’t the moment to lose herself in reflection on old rages or, for that matter, speculation on the sociology of communes. Dickie was explaining to the group that he’d called the county to get them all plowed out, so they would soon be able to leave and head to Laramie, if not to other destinations. It might take a couple more days before all the roads were open again. While they waited for the plow, he was also happy to report that they’d located a snowblower in the barn, and he asked for a volunteer to clear the parking area. “You don’t want the plow doing that little job,” he said. “Or at least not if you don’t want your cars buried.”
Your average Wyoming snowplow driver would enjoy nothing more than avalanching a bunch of Volvos with outof-state plates.
Within the hour, the plow came and set them free. To Sally’s surprise, Dickie asked if he could ride back to town with her. “No point waiting for the DCI Mobile Crime Lab,” he said. “They’ve got messes to clean up all over the state. Seems that sometime between the mishap at Little America and the family tragedy at Torrington, a meth lab blew up in Thermopolis. The soonest those guys could get here would be tonight, more likely tomorrow, celebrity or no celebrity.” He inspected the blazing blue sky. “By then, the snow will have melted and frozen and melted and the weather will have screwed whatever forensics weren’t wrecked by the storm in the first place. Atkins is as good a crime scene guy as any cop in the state. We’ll just have to manage on our own for the moment. The coroner will take the body, and Scotty’ll go over this place with an electron microscope.”
“I hope I didn’t screw up any fingerprints on that gun,” Sally said in a very small voice.
Dickie just rolled his eyes.
“Oh, by the way,” Sally added, “I found something out in Nina’s office.”
She reached in her shoulder bag, pulled out the crumpled piece of paper, and handed it to Dickie.
He pulled the note flat with his fingertips, spread it out, and read it without comment.
“That was on the floor under her desk,” said Sally, trying to gauge his reaction.
“Thanks,” he said, reaching down into his briefcase, extracting a medium-size plastic bag, putting the note inside, and zipping the bag shut. He put the bag in his briefcase and went on with the conversation they’d been having before she told him about the note as if nothing had happened.
Then he asked one of his deputies to drive his Blazer back, helped Sally chain up the Mustang, and now sat in the passenger seat, as he said, just to keep her company. Their breath froze into little streaming clouds in the cold car. Her tire chains cut into the plow-packed snow. She turned on the heater and prepared to be cold for the next ten minutes while the Mustang heater labored toward warmth.
“I fucking hate dead bodies,” he said at last. “I hate violence. I don’t even much like it when Mary and I have a fight. A lot of cops are like that. That’s why cops are so weird.”
“So how do you deal with it?” Sally asked.
Dickie reached inside his jacket, took out his pack of Marlboros, and looked at her. She decided that it would be churlish to tell him he couldn’t smoke in her car. She made a face, but nodded.
He cracked open his window, lit up, inhaled, blew smoke toward the crack. “You don’t deal. Sometimes the mind is merciful. The worst stuff you see doesn’t register immediately. Your brain turns off long enough to secure the scene, get the investigation started, calm down the
bystanders, and, God help us, call the relatives. You just keep doing your job.
“You think you’re all right for a couple of days. Then you start forgetting stuff, like where you were going when you got in the car, or how to stop at a red light. You get the shakes for no reason. You feel like shit a lot of mornings. Not that it’s news to you, Mustang, but lots of cops drink.” When she shot him a questioning glance, he added, “I been down that road, as you know. So far, I’m still headed in the other direction.” He took another drag. “Good thing we catch the bad guys now and then.”
Sally took a deep breath, nearly choked on secondhand smoke, cracked her own window. “So, what do you think about this one? Did some reckless trespassing hunter get his deer, then leave it, then accidentally shoot Nina?”
“More likely, some nearsighted hunter mistook her for a deer.”
“I’d buy that if there were two hunters. One who shot the first deer, and then the second who shot her. There were two sets of tracks, right?”
“How’d you know that?” Dickie asked her.
“I heard the game warden tell Scotty,” she said.
Dickie shook his head. “Well, at least I’m not the only leak in this police operation. Keep this shit to yourself, Mustang.”
She nodded.
“There’s another obvious possibility. Ms. Cruz went out into the woods, saw the deer, and confronted the shooter, who panicked and shot her,” Dickie said.
Sally thought a minute. “That makes sense,” she said. “Except that I didn’t see the deer anywhere near Nina’s body.”
Dickie closed one eye, squinted at the glowing coal of his cigarette. “When you put it that way, it sounds pretty unlikely.”
“I’d say so. Especially when you’ve got this deer rifle of Dr. Willen’s that ended up in her woodpile, recently fired, sometime in the middle of a morning when there were— what was it, eighteen people?—milling around her place.”
“Nineteen, counting you,” Dickie said.
“I wasn’t milling when those shots were fired,” said Sally. “I was ducking.”
“You still count. As a witness, if nothing else,” Dickie said.
“So you don’t consider me a suspect?” Sally asked.
“Theoretically, I suppose, you are, but since you were seen out in the parking area by more than one person at the moment that Nina Cruz was shot, I consider you an unlikely possibility.”
The car skidded a bit on an icy patch, but Sally steered into it, and the chained tires found purchase. “Watch the road,” said Dickie, “but keep talking.”
Sally thought about what she’d seen and heard over the course of the day and night. “I can’t say anything about hunters lurking in the woods, but as far as I can tell, there were three people who couldn’t have shot Nina. Pammie and Quartz came running out of the woods right after the shots, and they didn’t have a stitch of a place to hide a hunting rifle. Then they went into the bus to get some clothes on. Randy Whitebird was on the porch, putting on his shoes.”
“Interesting that so many of those people were going around at least half naked, blizzard or no blizzard. You think that goes on a lot out there?” Dickie asked.
“Nina never struck me as the get-naked-with-everybody type. But then, I didn’t know her very well. Of course, up until yesterday the weather was still really nice, but for all I know, being naked in the snow is the latest health craze in California. I’ve been gone a couple of years,” Sally said.
“Nels Willen wasn’t naked,” Dickie observed. “The man was dressed for the cold, and shortly after the shootings, he came out of the woods covered with blood. Judging by the holes—sorry Mustang—judging by the wounds in Ms. Cruz and the deer, it appears that a gun a whole lot like the one Willen brought onto the Cruz property was used in the shooting.”
“So despite Willen’s supposed hatred of bloodshed, you assume he was the one who shot both the deer and Nina Cruz. I don’t know why he would have, but then, it’s up to you guys to figure that out, isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t want to presume to interfere in police business—”
“Of course not, although that would be a first,” said Dickie, lighting another Marlboro off the butt of the first, and flicking the butt out the window. “Look, Sally,” he said, turning her way, “I am very much inclined to believe we’ve got a hunting accident on our hands. But we’re covering the bases. Every fucking sensationalist reporter in the country will be hollering murder by tomorrow morning. And what if it is murder? Just in case you’re interested, we police officers believe that when we have a weapon, the individual who brought it onto the scene is generally the person who intended to use it.”
“There is one small problem with that finding,” Sally said. “Willen came out of the woods right after the shots were fired. The next thing he did was to go back up to where Nina was, and then he was down in the driveway, talking to people. He wasn’t out of my sight until he went in the house, so if he fired the shots, he’d have had to have ditched the gun, gone back for it, and then put it in the woodpile. That would have taken some pretty careful planning in what seemed to me like a frigging free-for-all situation. And he looked completely flipped out, except when he was dealing with people even more freaked than he was.”
Sally felt the trembling building in her chest. She could see why Dickie considered this moment a good one for chain-smoking. She listened to the clicking of tire chains on snowy pavement, looking for some way to focus her mind, and at last she had a couple of coherent thoughts. “Okay, Dick. What about Lark, the woman who found the body? She was dressed for the weather. Admittedly, she seemed as distraught as Nels Willen, but she was the first one on the scene, and she might have had a little time to hide the gun in all the chaos afterward.”
“We’re checking her out,” said Dickie, declining to elaborate.
Sally could see she wouldn’t get anywhere on that tack. “Okay. Another question: Who else, if anybody, knew that Nels Willen had brought a rifle with him to Shady Grove?”
“Good question,” said Dickie. “So far, nobody admits to having known. But we’ve got some hunches we’re looking into.”
She could just imagine. Scotty Atkins, looking into a hunch, would be Wyoming’s version of the Spanish Inquisition. “Guess you also have to find out whether Willen’s gun fired the shots that killed the deer and Nina. Do you know whether it was fired more than once?”
Dickie declined to answer.
“And then, there’s the matter of whether the same gun killed both,” Sally continued, hoping to get him talking again.
“That’s the thing about doing an investigation. You’re liable to find out all kinds of things you didn’t know before,” said Dickie evasively.
“Like the fact that out of all the people who were there, there was at least one who should have been and wasn’t,” Sally said.
“You’re referring to the foundation administrator, a woman known as ‘Kali,’ ” Dickie said.
“Nothing surprises you,” said Sally.
“Not much,” Dickie answered. “I’m not even surprised at all the stupid hippie names these Wild West people are still using. Lark. Quartz. Whitebird. Kali.”
“Quartz is short for—”
“I know,” said Dickie. “Quentin Schwartz, Oregon greenie boy. Getting it on with little Pammie Montgomery.”
“You know Pammie?” Sally asked.
“Sure. She and my girls went to Laramie High together. Everyone’s expecting her to open a restaurant and put the Yippie I O out of business,” he said, proving once more that Laramie was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone, sooner or later.
“Quartz says Pammie’s his soul mate,” Sally noted.
“Which proves Quartz is a schlocky name,” said Dickie.
“What do you know from schlocky?” Sally protested. “Or from Schwartzes?”
“Enough to know that he’s an airhead like the rest of ’em. At least in his case we’ve got a real name. The ones with j
ust one nature-type name, or an alias like Whitebird, will be a whole lot harder to trace and keep track of, unless they have police records and got in trouble using the same name.”
“Or friends who know their other names,” Sally said. “Pammie told me that Kali had gone away for the weekend, back to Utah where she used to live.”
“Did she say why?” Dickie asked.
“No. But I bet Whitebird knows. He’s the foundation director; she works for him. According to Pammie, they weren’t exactly tight. More like rivals than boss and employee, or fellow activists, or whatever. Pammie said Kali was Nina’s shadow, and Whitebird evidently didn’t dig it.”
“From what I heard, he wasn’t the only one who didn’t exactly cotton to this Kali woman. We heard of at least one other person who didn’t like the way she’d appointed herself as Nina Cruz’s gatekeeper.”
Sally thought about what she knew. “I’m guessing you’re talking about Stone Jackson,” she said. “No need to worry about him. When I got him on his cell phone, he was stuck in Riverton, at a McDonald’s, on his way to the Busted Heart Ranch.” She thought a moment. “Then again, since it was a cell phone, he could have been anywhere. But I know it was a McDonald’s. I distinctly heard somebody order a Quarter Pounder.”
“Just like I do, three days a week, right back home in Laramie. You’re really something, you know, Sal? A full-grown kick-ass feminist like you getting all googly over some geek with a guitar.” Dickie cocked his head and gave her a narrow-eyed glance, then tossed his spent butt out the window, but not before using it to light yet another Marlboro.
“You know what happened to the Marlboro Man,” Sally nagged.
“Yeah,” said Dickie. “He got to go on Sixty Minutes.”
They rode on without speaking for a while. At last Sally said, “I’ve never seen anybody die before.”
“It’s a big drag, isn’t it?” Dickie said, patting her right hand as she gripped the wheel.
She expelled a no-longer-frosty breath. “Worse for the victim,” she answered.
“Far as I can tell,” said Dickie. “But then again, for all I know, Angelina Cruz could be up in the great blue beyond, floating on a cloud and singing beautiful harmonies on radical labor ballads with the Weavers and Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill. It’s worth at least imagining the possibility,” he added. “Beats hellfire or whiskey.”
Bye, Bye, Love Page 7
