Sign Off (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 1)

by Patricia McLinn

  I will never know what I said—or wheezed—over the next sixty seconds. I refuse to ever watch it.

  * * * *

  THE SPECTATORS QUICKLY dispersed after that.

  We decided to divide in hopes of conquering.

  Mike and Jenny went to the station and traded the camera for Jenks, then went to check out Judge Claustel’s home, south of town. The camera’s return to the station was a Haeburn edict, since Diana was still on vacation—and who knew what might happen to it left in my officially suspended hands?

  Diana and I stayed at the jail. Widcuff had to come out sometime, didn’t he?

  Although the fact that at midnight all the exterior lights except a solitary security light behind the jail turned out, and that only the dimmest glow came from a couple windows of the jail seemed to indicate Widcuff and his deputies had called it a night. Of course, that could be a ploy, just as his statement on the front steps had been.

  But for now, it was dark, quiet and boring.

  I wondered if Tom Burrell, in his cell inside the jail, knew what had been happening tonight.

  To pass the time as we sat in the front seat of my car, Diana played back what she’d shot in Claustel’s office.

  We’d just finished a second playback from the camcorder. The quality looked like a sting operation from the 1980s. Come to think of it, that was probably the vintage of the first camera Diana had used to tape Claustel.

  “Let’s see just that last part again,” I said.

  Diana nodded, rewound it to where Claustel said he’d never killed anyone in his life, and started it again.

  Precautions. What had that meant? And that look around the room—had he been looking from face to face? Sending a message to one person in particular? Was it the instinctive checking of a hiding spot? Or the bluff of a desperate man.

  “Again?”

  I nodded.

  If precautions meant something physical, it could wrap up the whole case.

  On the other hand, if there was something up in the office, with Claustel free and Widcuff apparently snoozing, what were the chances it would ever be found?

  A flicker beyond the windshield caught my eye.

  I ducked my head for a better angle and stared, as I asked, “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “A shadow. Like the back door of the courthouse opening.” I shook my head. “Maybe nothing.”

  She’d dutifully peered out the windshield, but even the dim light of the camera screen made it hard to see into the layers of dark beyond us. “Probably nothing, since we saw Widcuff lock that door, and nobody’s around.”

  “Probably,” I conceded.

  But I kept staring.

  Oh, hell.

  I got out of the door, closing it quietly behind me.

  “What are you doing?” Diana demanded, out of her door now, too.

  “I’m just going to check. If it’s locked . . . well, it’s locked. But I want to know it’s nothing.”

  “Not without me you’re not. Wait up.”

  I turned back and saw her hoisting the big camera into place on her shoulder.

  “What—”

  “If it is something, the camcorder will never pick it up. Old Faithful here just might.”

  “EBay, really?”

  “Sure. Why not? Got a great deal. Can pick up spare parts the same way. And it comes in handy sometimes, as you saw.”

  “Yeah, but it must weigh—”

  “Less than a bale of hay.”

  She’d caught up with me, and I shrugged. A gesture she probably didn’t see now that we were in the total dark beyond that solitary security light, with even that partially blocked by a corner of the jail.

  We were silent as we reached the door. I found the knob by feel more than sight. It turned.

  “Open,” I breathed.

  The silence continued as we headed for the staircase, tacitly ignoring the noise of the elevator. The stairs creaked a bit under our feet, but they also creaked a bit where we weren’t walking, so I hoped our ascent wasn’t noticeable.

  On the third floor, faint light from the open outer door of Claustel’s office formed a dim trapezoid in the hallway. I felt a reluctance to step into that light, but there was no way to see inside otherwise.

  From the hall doorway, I looked past the assistant’s dark space and into the judge’s office, lit only by the lamp on his desk.

  As I eased into the assistant’s office and could see into the room, the first thing I noticed was that whoever was in there hadn’t bothered to close the blinds on the side window. But there was no one to see the light, not from the deserted streets of Sherman, Wyoming at this hour.

  A man’s sports jacket was folded over the back of one of the leather chairs, while the jacket’s presumed owner leaned over the other chair at an odd angle. Only when I stepped inside the office could I see that his hand was down in the crevice between the seat cushion and the side of the chair.

  And that the man was Ames Hunt.

  Behind me, Diana emitted a faint sound—a breath more than a gasp. But it was enough.

  He spun around, jerking his hand free from the chair, and took an awkward step backward, his eyes wide behind the lenses of his glasses. “Elizabeth.”

  “What are you doing, Hunt?”

  His lips lifted slightly, clearly recovered from the momentary fright. “You mean until you and . . .” He peered past me. “Ms. Stendahl scared a couple decades off my life? I would imagine the same thing you came to do. Looking for whatever it is Claustel hid away as his insurance.”

  “Shouldn’t you leave that to the sheriff?”

  “Shouldn’t we, you mean?” he asked sweetly, then exhaled a cynical huff. “Not if we hope to find it. You’re thinking about not interfering with the crime scene? The experts getting a second chance? Sure, that was true of the trailer. Like you said, a crime scene entirely different from Three-Day Pass. But that was a crime scene Widcuff couldn’t ignore. This isn’t. He’ll ignore it just fine. And with Claustel free . . .”

  Having echoed my own earlier thoughts, he shrugged, then added. “So it’s up to us to find . . . well, whatever it is.”

  “And what is it?” Diana asked him.

  “I have no idea. Do you, Elizabeth?” he added to me.

  “Not a clue. Guess we’ll know it when—if—we see it.”

  “Then we better get started. When the judge looked around earlier, I thought he focused on these chairs, but I haven’t found anything. I’ll try the cabinets.” He tipped his head toward a double-wide set of filing cabinets near the side door.

  “We’ll take the desk.”

  Diana and I skirted the chairs and the desk. She deposited the camera on one corner, then pulled open the lap drawer. I opened the top drawer on my side.

  The third time I moved a tin holding paperclips, I realized my mind wasn’t on this task.

  I felt like I had when I was a little girl watching A Wonderful Life, when everyone’s feeling so sentimental about his friends helping George Bailey, and nobody’s paying attention to what Mr. Potter got away with. “Hey,” something in me kept shouting, “Look over here! Look at the spider web instead of the flies caught in it.”

  Frustrated, I closed the drawer and moved to the bookshelves by the side window. A spider web connected from the frame of the window to the edge of the case.

  It felt like Mr. Potter and fate, laughing at me.

  With my body blocking what little of the lamp’s light reached this corner, I blindly reached for a book with some notion of starting to shake them out one by one, and caught a flash of color from the corner of my eye.

  “What?” Diana demanded.

  “What what?”

  “You made a sound.” She straightened, stretching her back. Across the room, Hunt paused, too.

  “Sorry. I thought I saw something, but it was just a reflection in the window. My sleeve, I guess.” I moved my arm again to show her.

  She
and Hunt grunted in unison, returning to their tasks. Diana opening the bottom drawer, Hunt moving the chair holding his jacket to give him better access to a drawer.

  But I kept looking at the window. I’d seen a flash of red. Not the blue of my jacket.

  Red. Like the car spotlighted by that solitary security light behind the jail. Spotlighted, yet unlikely to be seen, since the corner of the courthouse would hide it from the jail and a stand of pine trees screened it from the deserted side street.

  I moved my arm again.

  No blue. Just red.

  Which came from outside, not inside the window.

  “Wait a minute,” Diana said. Her voice suddenly seemed far away.

  “What?” Hunt responded from that same distance.

  The trailer. The blood. The gun cabinet. The spider web. And the window.

  The window wasn’t red from the blood inside. It was red from outside.

  Yes, there’d been blood on the spider web, but not enough to flood the surface of the window with red the way it had been.

  The window was cranked open, tilted.

  “What’s that?” Diana asked. “That shiny thing by your foot, Hunt.”

  “I don’t . . . oh.”

  And the scent. That lingering scent of Mona’s. Along with a faint undertone of acrid smoke and another, even less pleasant odor.

  A waft of it had just reached me—a memory stirred by thinking of the trailer that day? Now it was fading.

  I turned my head and saw Ames Hunt’s well-tailored jacket folded over the back of the chair nearest him. The chair he’d been bending over, sliding his hand into the crevice . . .

  “It’s a key,” he said.

  I watched him open his hand, displaying the small silver key he’d retrieved from the floor.

  “It’s small,” Diana said. “No way would that open a door.”

  “Maybe a cabinet?”

  The gun cabinet.

  The spider web.

  The window.

  I’d kept thinking there hadn’t been a vehicle behind the trailer because I hadn’t seen it through the window the way I saw Burrell’s white pickup the first time I was there. But a sedan wouldn’t have been visible from the window, yet the sun hitting its roof could reflect into the tilted window. A sedan parked behind the trailer. A red sedan.

  Like Fine drove in emulation of the man whose coattails he expected to ride. Like the one out in the parking lot right now.

  “Maybe. Have to be an awfully small cabinet. It’s too small for a safety deposit box.”

  Just right for a leather case, though.

  I felt as if my mind had split in two, remembering words that now belonged to parallel universes. The words I’d spoken earlier this evening, the words I’d just listened to again in the car . . . and words about preserving the crime scene at the trailer for the forensics experts.

  Like you said, a crime scene entirely different from Three-Day Pass.

  Yes, I’d said that. I’d said it when only Mike and I were in the trailer. Mike and I—and a murderer who’d been interrupted before he could place the murder weapon in Tom Burrell’s cabinet.

  “What do you think, Elizabeth?”

  And I was seeing in parallel universes. Seeing the spider’s web and the flies, but still searching for the spider.

  Then I saw it.

  The same facts, a different view. The picture clicked into sharp, cold focus. The entire spider web.

  I stared into the face of the spider at the center of the web.

  Ames Hunt.

  Who was between Diana and me, and our way out.

  Who was looking at me with sharp eyes.

  Who still held the small silver key in the palm of a hand he’d covered with the handkerchief.

  A handkerchief to prevent covering fingerprints. Or to avoid leaving them.

  Of course. He’d been planting that key when we interrupted him. The key to Foster Redus’ leather case that Mona had to break open to get the cash for her Grey Poupon. The key taken from Redus’ chain, while all the rest of the keys were tossed into the truck before it was sent over the edge.

  The key that being discovered here would not only tie Judge Claustel to Redus’ scheme—as accomplice, victim or both—but also tie a bow onto his motive for murder.

  “I think this is just what we were looking for.” I forced the words out. “We should call the sheriff right away. And the state folks.”

  “But we don’t know if it’s really anything at all,” Diana protested. “It could be entirely innocuous.”

  “Why take the chance on compromising important evidence?” I dug in my pocket for my phone, at the same time trying to edge Diana out from behind the desk and toward the hall door. “And we should leave, so Widcuff doesn’t have a fit.”

  I had the phone. Still in my pocket, I was feeling for buttons.

  “Get the camera, Diana.” She’d protest leaving without it, so we’d just have to take it.

  “But—”

  I overrode her voice. “So you make the call, Ames, and we’ll—”

  “Put down the phone, Elizabeth.”

  Since he knew what I was doing, there was no point not going for speed. I pulled it out. “Pick up the camera, Diana,” I repeated, and she hoisted it up.

  He reached toward me. Before I could pull back, he’d knocked the phone out of my hand to the floor. That was because his reach was longer than I expected—by the length of a handgun equipped with a silencer.

  “What the hell?” Diana started. “What’s going on?”

  “Your friend is a little too smart for her own good. And yours.” He turned to me. “Aren’t you, E.M. Danniher?”

  He’d never buy a lie. What I had to do now was play for time.

  “I understand about Redus.” Without taking my eyes from Hunt, I made a slow small gesture to Diana to start the camera resting on her shoulder. “He was going to ruin your careful plans, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a moron,” Ames Hunt said, the bland features showing no emotion. “He started hinting that he knew how I was building my political capital, as if that were all I had to offer. Then, he said he’d cut me out by not arresting prominent people in exchange for money. He practically dared me to complain. I could have called his bluff, but it could have been, shall we say, inconvenient? I had him transferred here to limit his opportunities for arrests, lulled him into thinking I’d accepted him as partner and bided my time for a permanent solution.”

  It couldn’t be good that he was telling us this. Or that he had a gun.

  Don’t think about that. Just keep him talking. And think—think.

  “But Redus wasn’t the only enemy, was he? The way years of frustration could build up in a man. You said that. You meant for me to think about Tom Burrell, but it was really yourself you meant.

  “It was bad enough when you were kids,” I said. “Then later, when he didn’t even get a degree, and you came back as a lawyer, but people still thought he was special. And, the final straw, when Claustel talked about nominating Burrell for the state legislature—well, that must have been hard to take. They were practically begging him to take what you had earned. And then you saw a way to eliminate both irritants at once.”

  Keep him talking. Keep him talking.

  I saw a glowing satisfaction in his eyes. “It had to be both. I knew Burrell would play knight in shining armor, even for Mona. Really, what did it matter if Redus beat her? But Burrell was as predictable as ever. I could get him to do battle with Redus any time I wanted. But if he brought Redus down, Redus wouldn’t have hesitated to bring me down, too. Yes, it had to be both.”

  With a hand behind my back, I gestured to Diana, who stood enough to the side to not catch his attention, to start backing toward the hallway. She did. Slowly.

  “I was glad of the opportunity to get rid of Redus. But Burrell . . . that was the beauty of it. Thomas David Burrell.” He smiled. A sweet, genuine smile that could win many a vote.


  My stomach heaved. I masked the reaction by shifting my weight, ending a few inches closer to the hall.

  “I planned that. Just as carefully as I’ve planned my career. I’ll win that race for the state senate, you know. I’ve built a base of power. I know the right people. And nothing can change that Redus is dead and Burrell knows what it’s like to no longer be the favorite son.”

  If Diana could get out, she could get help. If I could stall him. If he was so wrapped up in what he was saying. If . . .

  “You did that very well,” I said, softly. “What about Mona?”

  He chuckled a little. “Ah, Mona. Mona was true to form. Not as stupid as she acted, not as smart as she thought, and greedy to the end. And a liar, of course. She said to meet her at the trailer at five. I went straight from the meeting in O’Hara Hill and arrived an hour early so I could do everything in an orderly manner. But she was already there, pawing through Burrell’s safe.”

  Diana was about two feet from the hall door.

  Hunt never took his eyes off me. “Mona said she’d seen my car coming out of Three-Day Pass Road the day Redus, uh, disappeared. It’s possible. But then, she said Redus had told her I was his protector and she had proof. That was a lie, and I told her so. She said I wouldn’t dare risk it, so I better hand over money to give her a start in Mexico. Said she was going to tell Paycik the whole story as her insurance when he showed up at four thirty—the stupid bitch didn’t even realize she’d let it out that she hadn’t told anybody yet.” He shrugged. “I shot her. It was tidier that way.”

  Diana took another step toward the hall door.

  Hunt brought the gun up in a professional-looking two-handed grip to aim at my forehead. His hands didn’t shake at all.

  “Oh, no, that’s not a good idea,” he said in exactly the same voice he’d used to say that shooting Mona Burrell in the head with a shotgun was tidier. “Move back toward the center of the room, Ms. Stendahl. I will shoot Elizabeth if you take another step toward the door, and then I will shoot you. I’m an excellent shot.”

  Diana looked at me, I knew that, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun.