Long Range

by Box, C. J.

  Joe thought about it. Although he couldn’t rule Dallas out completely, the timeline of when Cates went into solitary and when the shootings took place in Twelve Sleep County were a real problem. Would a shooter—even if he was sympathetic to Dallas’s new ideology and under his influence—wait forty-five days to do Cates’s bidding? Without even checking in with the man? Would a team of two men?

  “It doesn’t really work,” Joe said to Vieth. “I can’t scratch him out completely, but he goes a lot farther down the list, based on what you’ve told me.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “Dallas likes to talk because he really does think he can charm anyone who’ll listen to him. I’ll play along, but I’ll be very subtle. I think between the psychologist and me, we’ll be able to tell if Dallas knows anything at all about the shooting. He wouldn’t admit it outright if he did, but there might be a tell when we talk to him.”

  “Please let me know when you do,” Joe said.

  “I’ll get right on it,” she promised.

  “Thank you, Sarah.”

  “You bet, Joe. We can’t have our guests putting out hits on sitting judges—or their wives.”

  *

  THE TALK WITH Sarah Vieth prompted Joe to make another call to check on someone he hadn’t considered earlier: Dallas’s mother, Brenda Cates.

  Brenda was also in prison, but across the state in Lusk at the Wyoming Women’s Center. Brenda was a quadriplegic incarcerated for life for kidnapping and murder, and she’d almost maimed Joe a few years before with her high-tech wheelchair when he went to question her. Dallas was a chip off the old block when it came to Brenda.

  Whereas Joe doubted Dallas had been behind the sophisticated shooting at the Hewitt home, Brenda was mean and diabolical enough to have arranged for something like that to happen. She’d once had a stash of money that she’d used to hire people to get jobs done, and although the account had been seized, it was possible she had more funds squirreled away somewhere to pay off an assassin.

  The warden of the Women’s Center, Martha Gray, took Joe’s call. After catching each other up on their families and the weather, Joe asked, “So how is Brenda doing?”

  “Not well,” Gray said. “She’s in Stage Five.”

  “Meaning what?” Joe asked.

  “There are five stages of isolation in East Wing,” Gray said. “One being the most lenient and five being the most severe. Brenda is the sole occupant of the Stage Five ward.”

  “Like mother like son,” Joe said. “What did she do to deserve that?”

  “Oh, she’s so clever,” Gray said. “You know—you’ve met her several times. She looks and acts like everybody’s sweet old grandma. After you were here and she attacked you in that wheelchair, I foolishly thought that she was getting old enough and sick enough that the fight had gone out of her. We put her back into the general population and she was a model prisoner. After a year, since she miraculously regained the use of her hands, she got a job in the kitchen because whatever else you say about Brenda, she can cook.”

  Joe waited for the rest of the story.

  Gray said, “Of course, that lasted until one of our girls disrespected her in the dinner line, as Brenda put it. So Brenda bribed one of the girls who works in our Aquaculture building to smuggle out some items for her. At the next meal, the girl who disrespected Brenda started choking horribly and grabbing at her throat. It seems Brenda had put a handful of fishhooks into her stew. They nearly killed that poor dumb girl.”

  “Yikes,” Joe said, inadvertently reaching up and touching his own throat.

  “So Brenda got moved back to the East Wing,” Gray said. “She’s had no communication with the outside world and there are no visitors allowed. We know she figured out how to thwart us before, but believe me, she can’t do that this time. We took away her fancy chair, too. She’s absolutely miserable, but at least she’s not a threat to our COs and other girls. And I’m not falling for her sweet grandma act ever again.”

  “Yikes,” Joe said again.

  “I’m two weeks away from retirement,” Gray said. “I have good people here, but I won’t miss this place for a minute.”

  *

  JOE REVIEWED HIS NOTES further and then confirmed that Darin Westby had indeed picked up a new snowplow at the implement dealer in Casper on the day of the shooting. Joe spoke to the salesman who had helped Westby load the item at three in the afternoon and saw him drive away after that. There was no way Westby could have been back to Saddlestring and the club by the time the shooting happened.

  That left two groups of suspects on his list. He checked with headquarters in Cheyenne on the two antelope hunters from Greeley. As he guessed, their names were in the database because they’d been drawn for the specific hunting area that bordered the Eagle Mountain Club. They hadn’t given bogus names or address details to Westby when he met them. It was incomprehensible to Joe that if the men were anything other than what they claimed to be, it made no sense to try to gain access to Judge Hewitt in such a convoluted way. The deadline for the antelope tags had taken place May 31—five months prior to the shooting. Especially when their odds of drawing the antelope tag in the first place weren’t assured.

  The last item to check off in his notebook was: Club member? Ask Judy.

  Judy ran the administrative office for the club and she was a full-time employee. Joe didn’t know her well enough to call and interview her, he thought. That needed to be done in person.

  But, as Westby had mentioned, a club member targeting Judge Hewitt was unlikely. Two members teaming up to make an extreme long-distance shot bordered on the unbelievable.

  Joe’s list of suspects was all but cleared. That meant the shooters had a motivation that wasn’t likely related to Game and Fish violations, he thought. Because Duane Patterson had been targeted as well, Joe theorized the assailants likely came from a pool of individuals who had been involved with both Patterson as a public defender and later prosecutor and Hewitt as the presiding judge. The combination of the two of them could include scores of cases over the years, Joe guessed.

  He’d need to talk to the judge again. Patterson and Hewitt needed to get together and come up with a list of suspects they both knew and had interacted with in some way. Perhaps, Joe thought, the shooters were in plain sight.

  Just then, a text message from Marybeth appeared on the screen of his phone.

  Where are you?

  It was accompanied by an emoji with steam coming out of its ears.

  Joe typed back: On my way. He didn’t do emojis.

  To Daisy, he said, “Why couldn’t you be the kind of dog that bit people if they came to our house?”

  Daisy sighed and closed her eyes.

  FOURTEEN

  CANDY CROSWELL GLIDED THROUGH THE BIG HOUSE WITH a glass of wine in her hand and the playlist she’d titled Chillax, for chilling and relaxing, on the internal sound system. She played it loud—Sade, Jai Wolf, Chet Porter, Nujabes, J Dilla—and she swayed to the rhythms and caught glimpses of her reflection in mirrors and glass-covered bookshelves as she did so. She looked happy, she thought, and she was. The tunes coursing through the home gave it an aura of high-tech élan, and Candy reveled in it. Tom had once surprised her when he arrived home unexpectedly while she was dancing alone to Chillax and he’d been delighted with her tasteful and obscure taste in music, he’d said. So cool, he’d said.

  Honestly, she hadn’t curated or assembled the playlist herself, although Tom didn’t know that. She wasn’t that sophisticated, and she’d taken herself out of years of hot-take pop culture by diverting to North Dakota and Alaska for all of those years. Candy had downloaded the playlist to her phone from a yoga instructor who’d taught at the resort in Whitefish where she’d met Tom. Candy was unfamiliar with most of the music and nearly all of the artists, but she was trying hard to appreciate and understand the tunes. It was fun playing the role of the cool girl, and the wine helped.

  One would think, Candy muse
d, that being alone in a big house day after day would be boring. And it was, at times. But Candy knew boring. Boring was a double-wide trailer in Williston or a one-room log cabin in Alaska.

  *

  AS SHE REFILLED her glass and before she set out on a second hip-swaying tour of the residence, she recalled the odd conversation she’d had with Tom before he’d gone to work an hour and a half before. He’d been at the breakfast bar filling a thermos with the strong coffee that he always took with him to keep him alert during his shift.

  She had said, “You know, I noticed you had your target rifle in your pickup this morning.”

  “I didn’t know you spied on me,” he had said coldly.

  His reaction surprised her. She hadn’t seen that look in his eyes before: a startled mixture of anger and panic. He was instantly very tense.

  “I wasn’t spying, Tom,” she said with a warm grin designed to defuse the situation. “I was going out to the studio to work out. Your equipment was in the back of your truck in plain sight.”

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “Don’t get so defensive, honey,” she cooed. “I wasn’t giving you a hard time about anything. I just wanted to say, for the record, that I’d love to go shooting with you sometime. I got to be a pretty good shot up in Alaska. I might surprise you.”

  His expression softened considerably as she talked. She noticed that his shoulders relaxed.

  “Really,” she said. “It might be fun.”

  Then he had grinned. “You continue to surprise me,” he said.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s good,” he said. “It’s just hard to picture you with a high-powered rifle in your hands. But I kind of like the idea. You’d look pretty hot.”

  She laughed and batted her eyes at him in a theatrical way.

  He said, “Maybe tonight you could . . .” And he didn’t finish his sentence. She could tell he wanted to ask her to do some play-acting, something he’d asked her to do before, although he’d seemed ashamed of it at the time. Candy had obliged. Once, she’d dressed up as a French maid. Another time it was a candy striper. Both outfits had really revved him up.

  “I could, what?” she asked.

  Tom shot out his sleeve and checked his watch. He said, “I’ve got to get going. Maybe I’ll text you while I’m on shift.”

  “Do that,” she said, pretending she was eager to take up the challenge, which she wasn’t. “Just give me enough time to, you know, get ready.”

  Costumes were hard to come by in Saddlestring. Her previous outfits had been cobbled together from items she found at the thrift store. The women clerks there didn’t make eye contact with her as she paid for them, which was a reminder that nothing was private in a small town. But dressing up as an armed temptress? That wasn’t a problem. Camo tube top, bikini bottom, knee-high hunting boots . . .

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said as he carried his coffee away.

  Her smile had faded the minute he walked out the door to get in his pickup. What remained was the afterimage of his face when she mentioned the rifle.

  If he didn’t want her to know he was going to the range on his breaks, why would he leave his rifle in his pickup in plain view?

  Then she had a thought that chilled her for a moment. What if Tom was taking someone else to the range? What if there was another woman?

  *

  CANDY TRIED NOT to let that suspicion eat at her. She didn’t want to taint the wonderful situation she had with Tom. She didn’t want to be the jealous or suspicious lover. Candy couldn’t abide women like that, and she knew Tom felt the same way. His ex, after all, had been one.

  So although she was almost entirely able to convince herself that Tom wasn’t straying—why would he when he had her at home?—there was still that jarring moment when he’d revealed something from inside him. She knew Tom had secrets, and he wasn’t a man who liked to share much. His past before he’d divorced and moved to Wyoming was unclear to her. He said he preferred to live in the present.

  Which was fine with her, but it didn’t really explain what he’d been doing with his rifle and shooting gear, did it?

  Candy knew that often there was one thing that could turn a relationship sour if it wasn’t resolved. From that moment on, everything could go downhill. The assumption was that it would all have to do with lying, but she knew better. That one thing was sometimes too much honesty. That one thing could be when one person in a relationship revealed something very personal that turned the other one off. With Brent, the one thing had been that ridiculous yellow Corvette. With Nicolas, it was when he’d announced he was going bear hunting with his buddies for two weeks without discussing it with her beforehand.

  She hoped with Tom that the one thing wasn’t her discovery of his rifle in his pickup truck. She vowed to herself to not let it be. But as she danced through the rooms of the house and into Tom’s book-lined den, she realized she was looking at his possessions with a keener eye than she ever had before, although she didn’t know what she was looking for.

  Most of the books on his shelves were dry and uninteresting to her, but they were obviously of professional interest to him. There were lots of college textbooks and very few novels. There was a section on big-game hunting and firearms, but she was used to that.

  Candy rarely spent much time in his study. Frankly, neither did Tom. It consisted of floor-to-ceiling books that she’d never seen him read, an overstuffed chair and lamp, and a small antique desk she’d never seen him occupy. There were two stacks of papers on the desk and a legal pad with no writing on the pages. One stack was of opened and unopened bills. The second stack, which was nearly an inch deep, appeared to be of personal checks made out to Tom but not yet cashed. She thumbed through them and was struck by the fact that nearly every one was for five thousand dollars.

  The desk had a single drawer in it where he stored an array of pencils and pens. She got the sense from the room that Tom wanted to say he had a study, but he never really used it for anything.

  As she strolled by the desk, she reached out and opened the drawer and then quickly closed it again in embarrassment. She looked around the room to see if there were any cameras watching her, but she saw none and she hadn’t noticed any other security cameras on the interior or exterior of the house.

  Occasionally, Tom came back to his home for something he’d forgotten during his shift, but when she parted the curtain and looked out the window, she didn’t see his pickup.

  She asked herself: So what was she doing? Was she really spying on him as he had accused her of?

  Nevertheless, she reopened the drawer and did a quick inventory of the items in it. There were, in fact, only pencils, pens, and paper clips.

  Then she thought: Where would a man hide something he didn’t want found?

  *

  IN THE GARAGE, she looked out the window of the door to once again make sure Tom wasn’t driving up the road to surprise her. The road was clear.

  She turned toward Tom’s workbench and tools in the front of the garage. She’d only ventured there once before and that was to borrow a screwdriver to open plastic clamshell packaging containing cosmetics.

  Men hid things among their tools, she’d learned from experience. Brent used to hide bags of weed and pornographic DVDs in the bottom of his toolbox. The DVDs were old, from before Brent met Candy, but they must have held sentimental value to him. She didn’t mind that he hid the weed there because if he was ever arrested for possession, she could plausibly deny she knew anything about it. So she’d never said a word about her discovery to him.

  Nicolas hid cigarettes in his workbench. He’d made a point to confess to her that he’d once been a two-packs-a-day man but that he’d quit cold turkey back in North Dakota. But she knew he still sneaked cigarettes when he was outside because she could smell smoke on his heavy clothing when he came in.

  Like everything else in Tom’s life, his workbench and tools were organ
ized and fastidious. He’d used a black marker to outline the shape of hand tools he hung on the pegboard backstop so they could be returned to their proper place. In his big red rolling toolbox, one drawer was devoted to wrenches, another to screwdrivers, another to dozens of trays of screws, nails, washers, and other things Candy didn’t know the names of.

  It was in that catchall drawer, in the back, that she found the cell phone.

  She knew Tom had his iPhone with him. She’d seen him snatch it up from the breakfast bar and place it in his pocket. The phone she’d found was new and she’d never seen him with it before.

  Candy looked around again before she drew it out. She now recognized it as a design knockoff of an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy and she recalled seeing something similar in the prepaid phone section at the local Walmart. She was familiar with prepaid burner phones because that’s how she’d communicated with Nicolas before her divorce from Brent had become final. Brent had been a snoop who knew the password to her regular phone. She didn’t want her soon-to-be ex-husband to read the text threads she was running with Nicolas at the time because they had very little to do with financial planning.

  Although she knew deep down that what she was about to do might really impact her relationship with Tom and the way she might think about him going forward, she couldn’t help herself and she powered up the phone. The display required a seven-digit password to open.

  Candy tried 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 and nothing happened, so she reversed the sequence to the same result.

  Then she entered Tom’s home landline telephone number. Why? Because that’s what she used on her burner when she was cheating on Brent.

  It opened up.

  Candy spent the next several minutes navigating around the icons. There were no names or numbers in the contacts. The call history was blank. There were no suspicious apps and the history on the web browser revealed only preloaded sites. She felt both immense relief and shame at the same time. Tom obviously didn’t even use the phone, much less to communicate with his secret mistress. She was ashamed of herself for suspecting him.