by Mike Lawson
Shannon Doyle was on her back, on the floor. There was a spot of blood the size of a silver dollar on her blouse, directly over her heart.
47
“So which one of them did it?” DeMarco said. He was frustrated. Morse’s timeline of what had happened that night didn’t clarify anything.
“None of them did it,” Morse said. “They all told me the truth.”
“Well, shit,” DeMarco said. “Then why did you tell me you know who killed Shannon?”
Morse said, “One of the first things Jim Turner did at the beginning of the investigation was get the names of all the truckers who passed through Waverly that day, and people in the sheriff’s office followed up to see if any of them had records.”
“Yeah, I already knew that,” DeMarco said. “Turner told me. But Turner also told me they hadn’t found anyone who was a likely suspect.”
“That’s true. But the other thing Jim did was send the ballistic test photos of the slug used to kill Ms. Doyle to the FBI in Cheyenne, and asked them to check their database to see if the gun had been used in another homicide. Well, Jim never heard back from the FBI, but this morning Agent McCord, who works out of the Casper field office, dropped in on me.”
“So?” DeMarco said.
Morse said, “A year ago, a woman in a house close to a highway rest stop outside of Fallon, Nevada was shot to death and robbed. The rest stop is a place where long-haul drivers will spend the night. The cops in Fallon never found out who killed the woman but the weapon used was a .22.
“Four months ago, an old man who lives in a trailer park in Kearney, Nebraska was shot. He opened his door, someone shot him, took his wallet and his watch, and split. The old man didn’t die but all he could tell the cops was that a kid wearing a hoodie had shot him and he couldn’t describe the kid. The cops in Kearney took the slug they dug out of the old man’s chest, noticed it was a .22, and placed it in an evidence envelope, but that’s all they did with it. They didn’t bother to notify the FBI. Next, Shannon Doyle was killed.”
“Shit,” DeMarco muttered. He could already see where this was going. “So who—”
But Morse wasn’t through. He said, “Two days ago, a woman, a tourist from Germany, staying in a motel outside of Salt Lake was shot and killed. Like Ms. Doyle, she had a ground floor room in a motel near a truck stop and she opened the door to whoever shot her. But the Utah cops got the shooter. It was one of those fluke things where a state cop just happened to be passing by when the shooting occurred. Someone heard the shot, called 911, and the trooper sees someone running from the scene and gets her.”
“Her?” DeMarco said.
“Yeah. She used a piece of shit .22 revolver to kill the tourist.”
Morse said, “At that point, it all comes together, although I don’t know who connected the dots—it could have been a computer, for all I know—but someone finally realizes that Salt Lake City, Fallon, Nevada, and Kearney, Nebraska are located on I-80. Like Waverly. Then someone remembers the Doyle case, mainly because Doyle was a celebrity, and they find the ballistic test results that Jim submitted, which were still waiting to be entered into their database. Eventually, the FBI concludes that the same weapon was used in all four crimes. Right now they’re looking to see if any other people were shot in towns along the highway.”
Morse took out his phone and showed DeMarco and Tommy a photo. It was of a girl, maybe sixteen years old, with a thin, acne-scarred face, dull brown eyes, and long dark hair. Morse shook his head and said, “The media will probably end up calling her the I-80 Killer.”
Morse said, “That girl’s father is an independent trucker and his route is I-80 from Sacramento, California to South Bend, Indiana. She travels with him, doesn’t go to school or anything. They sleep in the truck and take showers at truck stops. The father was one of the truckers who passed through Waverly when Ms. Doyle was killed. The cops in Utah who nabbed the girl are about ninety percent sure her father’s molesting her, although she hasn’t admitted it yet. Mentally, she’s slow and all fucked up, pardon my language. When she was asked why she killed these people she said it was to steal things so her father wouldn’t get sick.”
“Sick?” DeMarco said.
“The guy’s an opioid addict. After he was threatened with being indicted as an accessory to murder, he admitted his daughter would sometimes steal things and he’d pawn what she stole, but he said he had no idea she’d used his gun to shoot anyone. So far he hasn’t admitted to pawning Ms. Doyle’s laptop but I’m guessing he eventually will.”
Pat Morse paused and said, “So Mr. DeMarco, now you know who killed your friend.”
Before DeMarco could say anything, Morse said, “And now what I’m hoping is that you’ll get the hell out of Waverly. You came in here like a wrecking ball and destroyed a lot of lives and I’d like to see you in my rearview mirror.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tommy said. “If it wasn’t for Joe, the guy who killed the BLM agent would never have been caught.”
“That’s probably true, but if it wasn’t for Joe stirring the pot, Lisa Bunt wouldn’t have felt the need to kill him. Her life is destroyed. And because of what’s going on with Lisa and Sonny, the stress is really getting to Hiram. Last night they had to send an ambulance to his place because he was having chest pains.”
“Fuck Hiram and his chest pains,” Tommy said
“And Jim Turner is most likely going to lose his job. That’ll be up to the sheriff but if he does lose it, I don’t know what he’ll do to support Carly and his boys.”
DeMarco didn’t bother to say that the other life that was almost ruined was Harriet’s. And maybe it still would be depending on what John Bradley did.
DeMarco said, “I’ll be leaving this afternoon. Thanks for—”
“Good,” Morse said. He put on his hat and left the trailer.
48
Driving west on I-80, toward Salt Lake City to catch a plane back to D.C., DeMarco took in—and hopefully for the last time—the rolling, sagebrush landscape. There was an unforgiving, harshness to this place that he found disheartening and he couldn’t even imagine what it would be like in the winter, with the wind whipping the snow across the plains.
He rounded a curve and glanced to his right and on a low hill near a striking red rock formation he saw a group of horses. He pulled to the shoulder of the highway and got out of the car. There were five of them, four clustered together, heads down, grazing—and a large black horse that he assumed was a stallion, standing apart, like a watchful sentry.
He wondered how Shannon would have described the scene. All he knew was that the wild horses on that hill somehow captured the spirit of the people who lived here and for the first time, he could see the beauty of this part of Wyoming and could understand why Shannon had chosen to set her novel here. But he’d never know, nor would anyone else, how she would have woven the setting into the story she’d planned to tell.
He missed Shannon, but more than anything else he was saddened that the world had been deprived of someone with her talent and that her life had been cut short before she’d been allowed to experience all that she might have. He remembered when he’d taken her to a celebration dinner in Boston when she got her first publishing deal, not just how lovely she’d looked that night, but the way she’d spoken about her good fortune. She’d said, “Joe, I’m the luckiest woman on this earth, getting the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted. I’m truly blessed.”
He supposed she had been blessed, but it had been a short-lived blessing.
He decided that he didn’t feel at all bad about what he’d done. Morse had said that he’d come into Waverly like a wrecking ball and destroyed people’s lives—but that hadn’t been his intention. He’d just wanted to make sure the cops were doing their job, and when he could see they weren’t, he gave them a gentle shove. And he suspected, even if he couldn’t
prove it, that if he hadn’t stirred the pot that the FBI might never have connected the I-80 killings. Certainly, Sonny Bunt wouldn’t have been arrested for killing Jeff Hunter. As for Lisa Bunt, he hadn’t forced the woman to try to kill him. That had been her desperate choice and hers alone.
The only one he had any sympathy for was Carly Turner.
When he got back to D.C., he’d go see Congressman Burns and ask him to use his influence to keep Jim Turner from being fired. Demoted maybe, but not fired. Turner hadn’t investigated the people who might have killed Shannon because he’d been worried that his lover was one of those people. But in the end, Turner’s failure to investigate Lisa Bunt, Lola Clarke, and his own wife hadn’t really mattered. If Turner hadn’t been married and a father, DeMarco wouldn’t have done anything to keep Turner from losing his job, but he didn’t want to see Carly Turner and her two boys suffer. And Jim Turner probably wasn’t a bad cop when he wasn’t screwing the people he was supposed to be investigating.
For some reason, at that moment, the stallion reared up on its hind legs and all the horses bolted and galloped over the low hill and disappeared from sight. DeMarco wondered what had spooked them. Some invisible predator? He wondered if wolf packs roamed this part of Wyoming.
Tomorrow he’d be back in D.C.—a place definitely inhabited by a variety of wolves.
He had no intention of investigating the freshman congresswoman from New York as Mahoney had directed. He’d spend a couple of days doing yard work that he’d been neglecting, and maybe reread Lighthouse to feel close to Shannon again. Eventually, he’d call Mahoney and tell him that the young congresswoman was as pure as the driven snow—although DeMarco knew she wouldn’t remain that way. No one who worked in Washington remained pure.
He certainly hadn’t.
Author’s Note
This book was based in part on events that actually happened. A rancher in a Western state refused—for about twenty years—to pay the fees for grazing his cattle on public land. When the amount he owed added up to over a million bucks, the Bureau of Land Management decided to round up some of his cows and an armed standoff occurred. I also learned that there are ongoing problems in Wyoming and other Western states when it comes to wild horses. It appears as if there are too many wild horses competing for rangeland needed for grazing livestock and there have been few instances where the horses have been illegally killed. It’s a complicated situation when it comes to the wild horses.
In case you haven’t figured it out, there is no town in Wyoming named Waverly. Waverly is roughly based on the town of Wamsutter, Wyoming, which is located on I-80 where I placed Waverly. I decided not to use the name of the actual town because some of my descriptions of it and its inhabitants—descriptions I sometimes invented for the sake of the story—are less than flattering and I didn’t want to offend those who live in Wamsutter or cast aspersions on the town in any way.
In the book I talk about Shannon spilling a can of Coke onto her laptop. This actually happened to me, although it was an eight-ounce glass of water that I tipped into my laptop. At the time, like Shannon, I hadn’t backed up a book I was working on and had to rewrite a good chunk of it when I couldn’t recover the file. Since then I’ve gotten religious when it comes to backing up my work.
Also in the book, I describe the town barber’s experience with Vanity Fair, which also happened to me. My senior year in high school, an English teacher—one of the good nuns of the Sisters of Charity—required the class to read Thackeray’s book, which, as I said, is about seven or eight hundred pages long. This was when I, too, discovered CliffsNotes. I learned in the course of writing this book that CliffsNotes were invented by a man named Clifton Keith Hillegass, to whom I shall be forever grateful and may he rest in peace.
