Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  Larry stared at him and Cody could feel his eyes on him in the semidark.

  “Cody,” Larry said, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “Investigating,” Cody said. “We’re investigators, remember?”

  “Fuck you. I’m saying accident and you’re not. You’re treating this as a homicide.”

  “I’m crossing every t and dotting every i,” Cody said. “You know, like they teach us.”

  “Bullshit,” Larry said, his voice rising. “You’re trying to show me up.”

  “Not at all,” Cody said, opening his case and finding the extra-large can of superglue Fume-It. In a closed room, the aerosol glue would fog up the space and collect on any latent fingerprints on the surfaces of the walls, counters, or mirrors. Fingerprints would show on the flat surfaces like floral flocking on wallpaper.

  “I’ll wait for you in the kitchen, you…,” Larry said, not coming up with the foul name he wanted that fit the bill.

  “Just be a minute,” Cody said. “Close the door.”

  Larry slammed it shut so hard the rest of the house shuddered.

  Before releasing the spray, Cody threw the briefcase on the bed and opened it.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Cody opened the door to the dining area. “Got some shots,” he said. “The man was cleaner than hell. He must have scrubbed his walls. But I got some prints. Make sure we get the evidence tech to lift them.”

  Larry stood in the dark in the kitchen and said nothing. Then he shouldered past Cody into the bedroom. The dissipating fog of Fume-It made him cough. When he emerged, he pinched the flashlight between his jaw and shoulder so he could use both hands to hold the ticket jacket up and open it.

  “Used tickets and a baggage claim check,” Larry said. “Our man flew here on Delta from Salt Lake City three nights ago.” He dropped the jacket on the table and opened up the wallet.

  “His name was…”

  “Hank Winters,” Cody said.

  “You knew him.”

  “Yeah. He was my sponsor.”

  3

  “Sponsor?” Larry said. “Sponsor?”

  As the realization dawned on Larry his face fell. “You mean, like Alcoholics Anonymous?”

  “Yeah,” Cody said. “He was my guy. I’ve been up here a couple of times. That’s how I knew where it was and who he was.”

  Cody shined his flashlight to where the east wall of the room would have been. “That entire wall was covered with books. Hank was a collector and he had some really valuable first editions. He bought them all over the country when he traveled. Some of those books were really old and dried out. When the fire got to them I bet they went up like cordwood and probably made the fire even more destructive because of the heat of burning paper.”

  “But you didn’t say anything. You were holding out on me.”

  “You mean knowing him? Or that I was in the program? Or that I think this wasn’t an accident?”

  “All of ’em, you son of a bitch. We work together. We talk to each other. No secrets. This is how you got in trouble down in Denver. This is why you’re back in Montana. Damn you, remember when I told you never to put me into a position I didn’t want to be in?”

  Cody didn’t shine his flashlight at Larry to see his face. He didn’t need to. Larry was angry, and hurt.

  “I wasn’t holding out,” Cody said. “I wanted your honest take on the scene. I wanted you to talk me out of what I was thinking. I hoped you would. You didn’t.”

  Larry threw the wallet down on the tabletop. He started to say something but caught himself. Then, mocking, he said, “My name is Cody Hoyt. I’m an alcoholic asshole.”

  Cody couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

  Larry looked up, surprised. “That’s funny?”

  “Yeah, it is. Tonight when I got the call, I nearly double-tapped a doper outside a bar for his twelve-pack of beer.”

  Larry looked at him. “How long have you been in AA?”

  “Two months. Just two months. Fifty-nine days, five hours to be exact. Hardest time of my life.”

  Larry chinned the direction of the body. “And he was your sponsor? I don’t know exactly how this works, but this guy Henry—”

  “Hank,” Cody corrected.

  “Hank was your sponsor. That means whenever you felt like taking a snort you called him and he talked you down? Like that?”

  Cody said, “Like that. But there’s a lot more to it. Nobody can talk a drunk out of a drink except a fellow drunk. He was good, too. He appealed to my best nature.”

  “I didn’t think you had one.”

  “I don’t,” Cody said. “But I’ve got a kid. I don’t see him much, but he looks up to me because he doesn’t know any better.”

  Larry’s face softened some. Not much.

  Said Cody, “My dad was a drunk. My mom was a drunk. My uncle was a drunk. My kid could go down the same road. I don’t want him to. So I want to clean myself up. Not give him a role model, you know?”

  Larry looked away. “I hate this kind of sharing. Men talk to each other, they don’t share. Sharing’s for assholes.”

  “Yeah,” Cody said, “believe me, I hate this Oprah bullshit. But it is what it is. I’m learning to find out what it’s like to be clean and sober. I’ve been pretty much drunk for twenty years. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It sucks. I don’t know how you people do it—too much reality. But Hank was good because he understood and didn’t try to act superior. He knew where I am now. He went through it himself, and he was a tough bastard. Marine. Desert Storm, in fact. And he did it all on his own. His wife left him years ago and he had no brothers or sisters. His parents were dead. He did the Twelve Steps on his own.”

  Moments went by. The rain thrummed on the roof.

  “Well, good for you,” Larry said. “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. But it seemed you were holding out, like testing me or something.”

  “I told you it wasn’t like that.”

  Larry took a deep breath and threw his shoulders back. “So can we get on with this now? Can we figure this stupid thing out?”

  “Yeah,” Cody said, grateful.

  “So what did Hank Winters do? Was he coming back here from a trip?”

  “Probably. He was on the road most of the time. A pharmaceutical rep. His territory was the whole mountain west, from what he told me. He didn’t tell me the specifics, but he was gone three out of four weeks a month. He stayed sober even though he was surrounded by temptation—all those airports and hotel bars. Think about it. He once told me, ‘Even if you’re not at home you can always find a meeting.’ And he did.”

  Larry nodded. “So how could he be your sponsor if he was gone all the time?”

  “I thought we put that away,” Cody said. “But since you asked, I called him on his cell. He’d answer me any time of the day or night, wherever he was. I pulled him out of some big meeting once with a hospital and he took the call and talked me down for forty-five minutes. A couple of weeks later he said he got beat out of a commission for five thousand bucks. But he took my call. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

  “A good guy,” Larry said.

  “Yes,” Cody said, looking down at his sodden boots and feeling his chest contract. “A saint. My saint. And not the type of guy who would buy a liter of Wild Turkey and drink the whole bottle alone. He just wouldn’t do that. No way. That’s why I think this wasn’t an accident.”

  “Who would kill him? Somebody local? Any ideas?” Larry asked. But it was obvious he wasn’t convinced.

  “No idea in the world,” Cody said. “But AA is its own world. We share—I mean talk about—the most intimate things in the world with each other. But other than his job, I don’t really know much about him. That’s the way it works.”

  Larry took a couple of steps toward Cody. His voice was low. He said, “Cody, I know you want to believe that. And you may be right. But shit, man, isn’t it ‘once a
n alcoholic, always an alcoholic?’ I mean, maybe something happened. Maybe he just fell off the wagon. You can’t say it doesn’t happen.”

  “Not Hank,” Cody said. But a kernel of doubt had been planted.

  “Maybe just this once he fucked up,” Larry said. “It happens. You know it happens.”

  “NOT HANK,” Cody said.

  “Okay,” Larry said, putting his free hand up, palm out. “I’m just sayin’.”

  “There’s something else,” Cody said, suddenly feeling as if the floor was buckling under his feet. “I checked out his briefcase.”

  Larry said, “And…?”

  “His coins were gone. He always kept his coins in a plastic sleeve in his briefcase. He’d bring them out whenever we met face to face and show them to me. He was so proud of them.”

  Suddenly, the kitchen flooded with light. Cars had entered the parking area. Cody could see Larry without lifting up his flashlight. In the glare of the lights through the rain-streaked windows, the surface of Larry’s face and head was patterned with shadowed rivulets that looked like channels in an ant farm.

  “Skeeter,” Larry said, chinning toward the window. “Maybe the sheriff, too. At least three units. A whole shitload of ’em.”

  Cody didn’t look over.

  “The coins,” Larry said. “Were they gold coins or something? Valuable? So you’re saying maybe it was a robbery and a murder?”

  Cody shook his head. “The coins weren’t worth shit.”

  “So what are you driving at?”

  “They’re AA coins,” Cody said softly. “Twelve-step program coins. One for every year from the local chapter. They’re probably worth twenty bucks each, if that. There’s a goddamned elk on the Helena Chapter ones. Hank had nine of them. I’m ten months away from getting my first one and I’ve never wanted something so bad. And they’re missing.”

  Larry shrugged. “So your point is what?”

  “They’re gone,” Cody said.

  Outside, he could hear the sound of doors slamming and loud voices.

  Larry said, “We better go out and fill them in.”

  Back out in the rain, Larry said over his shoulder, “My cynical cop mind tells me Henry, I mean Hank, tossed the coins away when he decided to go on a bender. You know, like symbolic.”

  “Not Hank,” Cody said.

  4

  Sheriff Edward “Tub” Tubman and Undersheriff Cliff Bodean arrived on the scene in identical beige GMC Yukons with LEWIS AND CLARK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT decals on the front doors. They parked side by side next to Larry’s rig. Dougherty jumped out of his car to greet them. Both hikers remained inside his vehicle. As Larry and Cody approached, Tubman was unfolding his rain suit. His new gray Stetson rancher—an affectation that appeared the day after he declared he was running for reelection—was on the wet hood of his Yukon, the top of it already darkened from the rain. Cody was annoyed the sheriff didn’t know enough to rest a good hat like that crown-down on a surface like real ranchers did.

  Bodean was still in his vehicle and talking to dispatch over the radio.

  The sheriff shot his arms through the sleeves of the suit but it got bunched around his head and he struggled. Cody was reminded of a turtle.

  “Let me help you with that,” Dougherty said, giving the back hem of the coat a yank. When he did, Tubman’s head popped through the material and he came up sputtering.

  “Damn thing anyway,” he said, reaching for his hat. “So what have we got, boys?”

  Tubman was short and doughy with a gunfighter’s mustache and a tuft of hair that circled his round head like a smudge.

  Larry and Cody exchanged looks, waiting for the other to start.

  “A body, right?” Tubman said, annoyed. “You’ve got a body?”

  “We’ve got that,” Larry said. “Likely three days old. Male. Burned up in the fire.”

  Larry briefed the sheriff on the crime scene and what they’d found. He offered no opinions or speculation, just a solid accounting of the facts as they’d found them. He did it with such authority, Cody thought, that on the facts alone there was only one conclusion. He appreciated that Larry didn’t even hint at their earlier discussion.

  “Accidental death then,” Tubman said with some relief. “Or what we like to call ‘death by misadventure,’ if you add in the empty bottle. Is Skeeter on the way?”

  “As far as I know,” Larry said. “Cody had him called.”

  “Let’s hope he shows up alone without his fan club,” Tubman said, shaking his head.

  The sheriff nodded toward the hikers in Dougherty’s truck. “Those folks the people who called it in?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dougherty said. “I questioned them separately.”

  “Did they check out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are they county residents?”

  Cody heard, Are they voters?

  “No, sir,” Dougherty said. “The man’s a college professor from MSU. The woman’s his student, apparently. They really don’t want their names out, if you catch my drift.”

  Tubman smiled. “Too bad. Their names will be in the report. So tell the professor he better start doing some damage control with his wife.”

  Dougherty laughed.

  “And get them out of here,” Tubman said. “Take them back to their car so they can go home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cody watched Dougherty get into his vehicle and start it up. He waited for the professor to remember his backpack in Cody’s Ford, but the professor looked distraught. The woman stared out the window, as if contemplating what the rest of the semester would be like now. As they left the two of them appeared to be engaged in an angry exchange, based on the waving of hands.

  Cody thought: They left the backpack.

  Then he thought: Fate.

  * * *

  The bad blood between the sheriff and the coroner had recently come to a boil when Tubman was quoted in the Independent Record declaring that the cause of death of a twenty-five-year-old drifter found in Lincoln was due to an overdose of meth. He used the opportunity to make a case for increased drug-enforcement funding for the sheriff’s department. The next day, Skeeter held a press conference for the newspaper and the two television stations and made a point of saying they were awaiting autopsy results and, “Maybe our local sheriff should just stop by my office to learn how we actually do our job, since he seems to somehow know things that haven’t yet been determined scientifically.”

  Although the victim was later declared to have died due to an overdose, the war had begun over which one of the two would be the official spokesman for law enforcement in the county when it came to dead bodies. Because both men were running again and wanted as much authoritative face time in the press as possible, it was often an ugly race to the cameras for both of them.

  Bodean opened his door and leaned out. “We’ve nailed down the owner of this place,” he said. “Local man name of Henry Winters, age fifty-nine. No record.”

  “We found his ID,” Larry confirmed.

  “It didn’t burn up?” the sheriff asked Larry.

  “The wallet was in his bedroom in the side of the cabin that’s still standing.”

  “I don’t know him,” Tubman said dismissively. Meaning Winters wasn’t influential with the city council or a campaign contributor.

  I did, Cody thought. He was angry with the sheriff’s gut reaction.

  Tubman took his wet hat off and looked at it in his headlights. “I gotta get me one of those plastic hat condom things so the felt doesn’t get stained.”

  Another set of headlights strobed through the lodgepole pine trees.

  “Who smashed up the unit?” Tubman asked, turning his attention to Cody’s dented Ford.

  “I hit an elk on the way up.”

  “I hope you’ve got good insurance,” Tubman said, not kindly.

  “I hope you’ve got a cow permit,” Bodean laughed.

  Cody cleared his throat. “I t
hink it’s a homicide.”

  Even in the diffused light from the headlights, Cody could see the sheriff’s face darken.

  “Larry thinks it could be accidental, but I don’t. I think somebody killed Hank and tried to cover the crime by burning the place down. If it wasn’t for the rain, he would have completely gotten away with it.”

  Tubman spat between his feet. “It sounds accidental, Cody.”

  “I’ll give you that. But I knew the man. It wasn’t an accident.”

  The sheriff turned on Larry: “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  Larry shrugged. “We’re still working it out,” he said.

  “Before Skeeter gets here,” Tubman said to Cody, “tell me why you don’t think this is what it appears to be.”

  Cody told him, leaving out the part about him being in AA. Leaving out the part about the missing coins. Saying he knew Hank Winters never drank alcohol.

  “That’s your reasoning?”

  “Yes.” Cody could feel Larry glaring at him but didn’t look over. Hearing in his head, Don’t ever screw me, and don’t ever put me in a position I don’t want to be in.

  Tubman crossed his arms and shook his head. “So what do I tell the press? What do I tell that fucking Skeeter?”

  “Whatever you want,” Cody said. “I’m investigating it as a homicide.”

  The sheriff set his jaw. “I know you sometimes forget this, Hoyt, but you work for me. And from what I’ve heard, it’s an accidental death. Do you dispute anything Olson told me?”

  “No.”

  “Then keep your theories to yourself until you’ve got something a hell of a lot better than what you’ve got. The last thing I need right now is an unsolved murder leading up to the primary. Do you understand? It’s an accidental death until you can prove to me it isn’t. Like if the autopsy boys in Missoula find a bullet hole in his skull or a knife in his gut. Then we’ve got something that changes the situation. Got that?”

  Cody felt a familiar rage building up in him. But he managed not to lash out.