“Diana said that?”
“No. I did.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Burrell’s blue truck was parked in front of the house. I pulled up to the right and behind it.
As I passed the truck a sound caught my attention. The pinging of an engine cooling came from beneath the pickup’s hood. A palm to the hood confirmed more heat than the filtered sunshine would have produced.
“Mike.” I stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “At the trailer, when I said it smelled like something burning, you started to say something but stopped when . . . when you saw Mona. What were you going to say?”
He frowned in an effort to remember, then grimaced and laid his hand over mine. “It smelled like a gun had been fired. That’s the burning you smelled. The powder and gasses.”
“How long?”
My eyes went to the shotgun in the rack behind the blue pickup’s seat. I debated getting in for a close-up smell of the gun, but the lab guys would do a hell of a lot better job of that, and we didn’t have much time.
“Not long. The office was closed up, but the smell was strong. And the blood . . .” He cleared his throat over the was still wet that might have ended that sentence. “A few minutes, maybe ten—but I’m guessing.”
As we started forward again, Mike put a hand at the small of my back. The contact was reassuring. Though I still needed to focus a lot of energy on not getting sick.
That’s why it took me an extra half step after Mike stopped to do the same. Burrell stood on the top step, with the half-closed door at his back, arms crossed over his chest. He was looking at Mike, his face as granite-like as the Lincoln Memorial and considerably less expressive.
As if aware of my attention, he glanced at me, then back to Paycik. “Mike.”
Paycik nodded and murmured, “Tom.”
Burrell looked at me again. “What do you want?”
Mike stepped next to me. “Tom, we have—”
I cut him off with a hand to his arm. “Burrell, where were you just now in your truck?”
His eyes had followed the movement of my hand to stop Mike’s words, but now they came to my face. “Why do you want to know?”
“It’s part of our investigation into—”
“I told you to leave it alone.”
“I can’t!” That was strident enough to raise a protest from two neighboring birds, crease Burrell’s forehead and surprise myself. I took a deep, calming breath. “We have to ask where you were in your truck.”
He never took his eyes from mine, not as if he wanted to convince me of the truth of his words, but as if he wanted to read what was in my head. “Up the mountain.”
“Anyone with you?”
“No.”
“You have no one to corroborate your whereabouts, no one who could testify you weren’t at your office this afternoon?”
“My office? What were you doing . . . ? What the hell is going on?” His arms dropped to his sides, and he shifted his glare to Paycik. “What’s going on, Mike? Were you two at my office?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Mike mounted the first step and put one foot up on the second. “I had a call from Mona. She asked us to meet her there. She—”
“Mona . . .”
“She’s dead, Tom. Murdered, looks like. In your office.”
“Tamantha?” It was barely a whisper through lips almost blue against skin gone gray under his tan.
“She wasn’t there,” I said.
He pulled in an audible breath, then closed his eyes.
When he moved, it was so sudden, both Mike and I stayed rooted as he grabbed a ring of keys off a hook inside the door and plunged down the steps toward his truck.
“Tom!” Mike shouted. “What are you doing? You can’t run.”
With less ground to cover, I beat Burrell to the truck and stood in front of the door.
“Burrell, listen.” He shoved me out of the way and opened the door. “They’ll be on you before you’re halfway to town.”
With one hand on the top of the door frame and the other on the roof of the truck, he stopped, staring straight ahead.
I kept talking. “It’ll only make you look more guilty. That won’t help Tamantha.”
His head dropped forward, hanging between his spread arms like a figure on the cross. I reached to touch him, almost afraid of what I’d feel.
The skin of his forearm was very warm, very human.
“Shit.” The single, explosive curse ripped any image of saintliness, and almost startled a nervous laugh out of me.
Burrell didn’t notice. He was on the move again. Slamming the truck door, striding past me, then Mike, up the stairs and inside.
Exchanging a look, Mike and I followed.
Burrell let the dial of an old rotary phone pivot back in place after dialing a final number, then waited, staring out the back window, giving no sign of awareness of Mike or me.
Tires rattled across the wooden bridge, and I thought Burrell’s hand would crush the sturdy black plastic of the old-fashioned receiver.
Mike squinted outside. “It’s the van,” he said. “Diana.”
“Our camerawoman,” I added.
Burrell flicked a look at me that might have raised blisters if it had lasted more than a second, but his voice was absolutely calm as he spoke into the phone, asking for James Longbaugh. His lawyer, I knew from the clips.
Diana parked beside Mike’s vehicle.
“James? Tom Burrell. Listen, Mona’s been killed. Listen, dammit, I don’t have much time. Some people found her and they came and told me. The sheriff’s on his way . . . Yeah, I expect so . . . No. That doesn’t matter. I want you to get Tamantha. Right now. Get her to my sister in Red Lodge. Do it yourself. Tell Jean-Marie what happened. Will you do that?”
Red lights strobed through the trees as more vehicles turned to cross the bridge. Burrell blinked at them, and the tension in his face eased.
Diana came out of the van, already shooting video of the cars, then shifted to the house’s open doorway.
“Thanks, James . . . . Yeah, I expect I’ll be there waiting.”
He hung up as the first vehicle pulled in crossways to block the truck and Mike’s four-wheel drive. Burrell passed us in the doorway and started down the steps. A deputy I didn’t recognize crouched behind his car, with a rifle aimed across the hood. Richard Alvaro, followed by Widcuff, stepped into the open.
“Stop that damn camera,” Widcuff shouted at Diana.
She ignored him.
Widcuff shot a glare toward Mike and me before addressing Burrell. “Since you’ve already got the news, there’s no use trying to ask you questions here, so I’m placing you under arrest—” his voice resonated with officialdom, “—Thomas David Burrell for the murder of your ex-wife, Mona Burrell. Put the cuffs on him, Alvaro.”
Burrell placed his hands behind his back and turned to make the job easier. Impassively, he stared straight ahead until the locks clicked home and Alvaro put a hand on his arm to lead him away. Then Burrell looked up and said with something near a smile, “Thanks for the warning.”
Widcuff glared at us as he followed Burrell and Alvaro.
“Sheriff! One question. How’d you know Tom Burrell and Foster Redus had a fight here?”
“Anonymous tip.” He’d answered automatically, snapping his mouth closed too late. “That’s all I’m saying.”
All the while, Diana and her camera followed the action.
“Was he going to run or was he just trying to get to Tamantha?” Mike asked as the sheriff’s department vehicles headed out.
“The hell if I know.”
* * * *
“You’re suspended. All three of you. One week, no pay.” Like many weak men, Les Haeburn stated every position with absolute certainty.
“Don’t you want to see the video of Tom Burrell being arrested?”
“No. It might be interesting footage—”
“Int
eresting?”
“—but you got it by interfering with an investigation. This station will not stoop to such levels.”
Especially not when it would irk Thurston Fine’s good ol’ boy network.
“Unless you want the suspension to become permanent, you will go directly to the sheriff’s department office from here and answer all questions you are asked. You’ll be lucky if Sheriff Widcuff is too busy to lock you up.”
I felt the instinctive journalist’s aversion to answering all questions shudder through my bones. Or perhaps it was journalists who’d gone to the great news conference in the sky rolling over in their grave.
“One week. Without pay.” Haeburn appeared to be running out of steam. “While I take up this matter with the general manager and owners.”
The smirk that had stretched Fine’s mouth since Mike, Diana and I stepped into Haeburn’s office dipped.
It was a measure of the magnitude of this story that both Haeburn and Fine had come into the office on a Saturday night, especially since both had been at the barbecue with the political movers and shakers.
No doubt Fine had wanted us fired, perhaps tarred and feathered, without consulting the higher-ups who might be swayed by such issues as the incredibly hot stuff still in Diana’s camera.
Or maybe not still in Diana’s camera. With luck, the technician Diana trusted had retrieved it and started copying it as she’d instructed during our slight detour on the way to Haeburn’s office.
There’d been no doubt Widcuff would call Fine to complain about us, and that Fine would go to Haeburn. We’d hoped to get to KWMT before Haeburn. When we saw his four-wheel drive and Fine’s red sedan there, the only question was protecting the footage, in case someone got, shall we say, overzealous.
I wished I could have protected Mike and Diana, too, since I’d led them to the Circle B. “Les, don’t take it out on them. I’m the one who made the decision, so—”
Fine interrupted. “You’ve been so busy trying to prove you’re hot shit—”
“I make my own decisions.” Mike leaned past my shoulder, the better to fire his indignation at Fine. “And . . . . What the hell? What happened to your head, Elizabeth?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”
Haeburn said, “She got herself attacked here in the station.”
“Attacked?” Mike repeated.
“I didn’t invite the attacker in, you know, Les.”
“You might as well have.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. If you want to ask anybody about that episode in the library, ask Thurston. He happens to drop by and not an hour later, somebody’s bashing me on the head. Quite a coinci—”
“Me?” Thurston recoiled with both palms to his chest. “You’re accusing me?”
The red in Haeburn face ratcheted up another notch to neon. “You can’t go making wild accusations like that. If I didn’t have orders—”
My radar for secrets flared to life. “Orders? What do you mean orders?”
“Who attacked you? What the hell happened?” Paycik demanded.
“They can screw their orders,” Haeburn shouted over all other voices. “I don’t care. I’m saying it now. You’re all suspended! Without pay!”
While I came up with no answers to who they might be, and what orders Haeburn was in the process of screwing, Fine, Paycik and Haeburn bellowed in a testosterone trio that, finally, Diana’s mother-of-two voice cut through.
“You can’t suspend me without pay.”
“I most certainly can,” spluttered Haeburn, his sunken cheeks mottling from neon to magenta.
“No, you can’t,” Diana repeated calmly. “That form you signed before we left O’Hara Hill was authorization for me to take vacation time next week.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I felt ashamed.
Snagged by a formidable little girl, irked by a competitive colleague, tempted by Paycik’s flattery, and yes, craving a distraction from my limbo, I had meandered into this investigation, taking individual steps seriously enough but acting as if the end result was vaguely frivolous.
Perhaps worst of all, I’d used it like a training program to get my investigating skills back in shape. A challenge to shake off the mothballs of the past months of brain fog and the past years of forty-second sound-bite reporting of political maneuvering. I’d had twinges, talking to Tom Burrell and the Johnsons, but it had taken Mona’s death to slap me across the face. I was ashamed I hadn’t treated it as deadly serious all along.
As a number of religions know, guilt can be a great motivator.
It can also outshout self-centered whispers about an unknown they, their mysterious orders, and other anomalies of E.M. Danniher’s career at KWMT. That mystery would have to wait.
We’d spent three hours at the sheriff’s office answering questions. There are only so many ways you can say you touched nothing except the door handle and you didn’t tell Tom Burrell any specifics. That didn’t mollify them much. They were peeved we had left the scene and even more peeved we’d gotten to Burrell first. But, after a lot of blustering, repetition and bad coffee, Widcuff cut us loose.
Mike and I set up headquarters in my small living room, trying to work through the implications of Mona’s death, aided by legal pads, coffee, cola, chips and salsa—mild for me, make-your-ears-sweat hot for him.
He left close to two and was back by eight the next morning. It wasn’t enough sleep to rid me of my headache or stiff neck, but it was plenty of time for the bruise on my temple to blossom into gaudy color.
“Do you know you have a dog in your back yard?” he asked as he came in.
Great. I fed and watered him, and the dog showed himself only to visitors. “No I don’t,” I’d grumbled. And Mike hadn’t argued. The guy definitely had some smarts.
Punctuated by phone calls, we’d been at it for nearly five hours, and we were beginning to go in circles.
Mike walked back in from the kitchen. He’d made a pit stop, with a detour to the kitchen for a couple phone calls, one to let his Aunt Gee know where we were in case she discovered anything, the second one to Diana.
Getting her week’s vacation lined up had been the small chore Diana had done before heading to Burrell’s ranch. With two kids to feed, she’d figured it was a necessary backup.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Great. She’s planning to paint a couple rooms and put up a new storm door this week. That woman’s amazing.”
“Because she knows how to use a paint brush and a screw driver?”
“No, because she sounds as if she’s looking forward to it.”
We grinned at each other. “Any news from the station?”
“Yeah, Diana said Billy, her technician friend, made two copies. He’s got one squirreled away and gave her the other. Apparently he made them in the nick of time, because Thurston commandeered the camera and managed to ruin most of the original—purposely or through ineptitude, nobody seems to know.”
With the copies safe I didn’t spare more than a grunt for Fine.
“Okay, where were we?” Mike settled into his corner of the couch.
“Mona’s murder.”
Mike paled—he wouldn’t forget what he’d seen in that trailer any time soon—but he nodded. “Doesn’t this narrow our list of suspects?”
“Who would you knock off?” I winced. “No pun intended.”
He waved that off. “I’d say this eliminates Gina, Widcuff and the Johnsons. I can see their motives for killing Redus—scorned and discarded wife, boss trying to hold off an ambitious subordinate, revenge-bent family—but how would they apply to Mona?”
“Same way Burrell’s motives do—he killed Foster to protect his daughter, then killed Mona because she was a threat to his being caught. She could be just as much a threat to anyone else if they killed Redus.”
I swept crumbs off a legal pad and consulted a list made the night before. “We still have the Johnsons for revenge, Gina
for revenge, Widcuff to get rid of a rival and Judge Claustel to either keep his son’s homosexuality quiet or possibly to get rid of a blackmailer.”
“Okay, if motive’s open, and means is open since every pickup in this county has a shotgun—”
“Are you sure about the gun?”
“She was shot with a shotgun,” he confirmed grimly.
I wasn’t going to argue. “You know there was one pickup that should have had a shotgun but didn’t.”
“Redus’,” Paycik agreed. “So the murderer took Redus’ gun last November and held onto it all this time . . .” He tapped his pen against his chin. “Actually, it wouldn’t have been that risky, because there are enough shotguns around that it wouldn’t stand out.”
“So even people who don’t own shotguns can’t be eliminated because anyone who killed Redus could have used his shotgun to kill Mona.”
“And that brings us to opportunity.” Paycik took the legal pad off my knees and flipped over several pages.
“Gina,” he read. “Says she was returning to O’Hara Hill from shopping in Sherman. She’d go right past the trailer.
“Roger Johnson. Says he was talking to a rancher near Cody about his overdue fuel oil account. The rancher confirms Johnson was there, but is vague about the time, and Johnson could have easily gone by the trailer.
“Myrna Johnson. Says she was cleaning house. No witnesses. She could have taken back roads and not been seen.
“Sheriff Widcuff.” Paycik was pleased with himself for calling Widcuff and asking where he’d been when he heard the news about Mona. Widcuff had answered before a voice in the background, identifiable as Thurston Fine’s, demanded to know what was going on. He’d been in Widcuff’s office doing an “exclusive” and sounded as if he was about to burst a blood vessel when he realized who had interrupted. “Says he was driving back to Sherman from O’Hara Hill, where he’d been attending a public meeting on expanding the substation, and heard the news over his radio. His attendance at the meeting, which also included Judge Claustel, County Attorney Hunt, two county supervisors, three ministers, our esteemed news director and anchor, along with fifty some citizens, was captured on video by KWMT’s own Diana Stendahl.”
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