Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery (5 page)

“Something like that.”

Her eyes turned back to mine. “Upward of three hundred and fifty dollars a night, I’d suspect.” She pushed herself into the booth with her back against the window. “She was an education major at State until the money ran out.” As she curled her black legging-clad knees up under her chin, her dark hair draped around her face. “She said she’d gotten a job here in Wyoming with one of the methane outfits, which she said was only until she saved up enough money for next year. But my parents started hearing from her less and less—”

“What do they know?”

“That she’s missing, and that’s all.” She glanced at me, the wool hunting cap casting shadows over her eyes. “They’re older; there’s nothing they can do, and I don’t think they need to know that Jone was—”

“Was dancing all she was doing?”

She was about to answer, and possibly in a vehement way, when the waitress reappeared with a pot in hand. “You need a refill?”

I nodded and slid my mug toward her, glancing at Lorea, who was still giving me a hard look, as I slipped my hand down and opened one of the folders that I had at my side and held up a photograph for the middle-aged waitress to see. “Know this woman?”

She immediately looked sad. “Roberta Payne, she worked here over the summer.”

I stuck out a hand. “Walt Longmire, I’m the sheriff over in Absaroka County.”

She filled my mug, sat the pot at the edge of the table, and extended her hand in return. “Jane Towson. The cops come in here periodically to ask questions and retake statements.” Her face brightened just a little. “You know Inspector Holman? He comes in here a lot.”

“He’s dead.”

We both looked at the young woman seated across from me, and then I turned back to the waitress. “He passed away a couple of weeks ago—”

Lorea’s voice stayed sharp. “He killed himself.”

Jane slowly turned back to me, unsure of what to make of her tone. “I . . . I’m sorry to hear that. He seemed like a nice man.”

Gesturing with the photograph, I brought the subject back to Roberta Payne. “Did you know her well?”

“Um, not really. I mean we worked here together and we were in a book club for a while, but I didn’t know her really well . . . She was only here for a couple months before she disappeared.” She picked up the coffeepot and glanced at Lorea before asking me, “Do you think it’s possible that she’s still alive somewhere?”

“Sure, it’s possible.”

The young woman on the other side of the booth shimmied out and stood there for a moment as she counted out some change, her voice rote. “Reports of missing persons have increased sixfold in the last twenty-five years, from roughly 150,000 in 1980 to 900,000 this year . . . More than 2,000 a day.” Lorea tossed the change on the table but glanced at me. “Nobody gives a shit, lady.” She walked away from the booth, her voice a shadow. “Nobody.”

Linda Schaffer, the first of the women who had gone missing, had lived in East Gillette in a modest home, but the house was empty, the windows were boarded up, and there was a
FOR SALE
sign in the yard. There were shingles missing from the roof, and dead, dried weeds jutted out from the snow-filled, raised-bed boxes. A graffiti artist had spray-painted something colorful but illegible on the corner where a few bricks had fallen away—like a place that Vic once said had probably contained a lot of rage.

I thought about what happened when an integral part of a structure was removed, about how things can so easily fall apart. There was a period, after my wife died, when I don’t think I left the house for two months. Dark days that got a little better, but almost drove my daughter away from me—the one thing my wife would not have wanted under any circumstance.

Delicate little families.

One of the members of my family whined, and I turned to look at him. “What?”

He smiled and wagged his tail.

“You and me, pal.” I sliced off a piece of the half-unwrapped
ham in my hands with my pocketknife and handed it to him. “You’re not going to get married and run off, are you?”

He dire-wolfed the ham and continued wagging, his tail thumping the inside of the door like a leather quirt.

I peeled a piece off for myself, stuffed it in my mouth, and chewed as I looked at the empty house and thought about my daughter, and more important, the trip I’d put on hold for this investigation. Richard Harvey, for all his rough edges, seemed like a competent investigator; with all those years in correction, Albuquerque, Denver, and the Division of Criminal Investigation, he was more likely to break the cases that had led to Gerald Holman’s suicide than I.

The radio under my dash sprang forth with the voice of Ruby, my dispatcher, moral compass, and practitioner of proper radio procedure. Static. “Come in unit one, this is base. Over.”

I plucked the mic from my dash and keyed the button. “Ruby, can’t you just say Walt?”

Static. “Unit one, is that you?”

I growled into the mic. “Yep.”

Static. “I have Cady on line one from Philadelphia, do you want me to patch her through? Over.”

“You mean unit one and a half?”

Static.

I keyed the mic again. “Or is it one and three-quarters?”

Static. “Do you want the call? Over.”

“Yes, ma’am, please.”

There was a brief squelch, and then my daughter’s voice came on the line. “Where are you?”

I glanced around. “Gillette.”

“Why?”

“Helping Lucian with a case.”

“Uncle Lucian is retired, so he doesn’t have cases.”

“A friend of Lucian’s, the wife of a man who committed suicide—a sheriff’s investigator.”

“That’s Campbell County.”

I glanced around some more. “My powers of deduction have ascertained that, yes, you are correct in that I am in Campbell County.”

“Why isn’t Sandy Sandburg taking care of this?”

“It’s complex—”

“It always is.” She sighed. “Anyway, it’ll be convenient since you’re flying to Philadelphia out of Gillette.”

“I am?”

“You are; four days, which means Thursday at noon—got it?”

“Noon patrol. Roger that.” I listened to the quiet and got a little worried. “What’s up, punk?”

“It’s nothing.” I waited, and her voice became quieter and carried a different tone; one of those tones that when someone you love adopts, you feel like you’re falling down a mine shaft. “Um, they say the baby’s in a difficult position and that it might cause complications in the delivery.”

I felt feather tips scouring the insides of my lungs. “What kind of complications?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve got a conference with them later today. I’ll call you after.” She paused. “Did Mom have any problems along these lines when she had me?”

As always, I dropped back and punted with humor, even though the panes of my heart were cracking like ice in a warm glass. “No, she dropped you in the field and kept hoeing sugar beets.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, honey . . . I don’t remember anything like that, but
that was back in the dark ages when they made the father sit on a bench in the hallway.”

She laughed, and I could hear her wiping away the tears. “Well, you’ve got a front-row seat on this one, pal. They said I could have one more after Michael and his mother, and you’re it.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

“Noon, Thursday. Which means you have to be at the airport an hour early, okay?”

“Okay.” I remembered the first time I held her; how amazed I was that anything that small could contain the amount of love I was pouring into her.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, punk.” The line went dead, and I hung my mic back on the dash and stared at the lifeless windows of the abandoned house.

Delicate little families.

I could just take Dog back over to Durant and drop him off with Ruby and run up to the larger airport in Billings and catch a flight to Philadelphia today, but the weight of my responsibilities held me grounded. I had responsibilities to Lucian, to Phyllis Holman, and in a way to Sandy Sandburg and Richard Harvey.

In a way, I also had a responsibility to Lorea Urrecha, but the real weight lay with Gerald Holman, Jone Urrecha, Roberta Payne, and Linda Schaffer.

Dead weight.

I sighed, placed the ham on the dash, and pulled out the aluminum clipboard from the side-door pocket along with the nifty flashlight pen I’d stolen from a highway patrolman a couple of years ago who was also now deceased. I scribbled down the phone number and address of the local realty firm
that had the listing along with the address of the lonely house on East Boxelder Road.

I was about to pull out as a Gillette city cruiser slowed and parked beside me, the driver rolling down his passenger-side window and leaning across the seat to look up at me. I rolled my own down, and I judged his age to be late twenties. “Howdy.”

“Sheriff Longmire?”

I smiled back, thinking he looked vaguely familiar. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“You got warrants?”

He laughed. “Nope.”

“You date my daughter?”

“I did.” He blushed up to his blond crew cut. “The first time I came to pick her up you tossed me a shotgun shell.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, you said they went a lot faster after eleven o’clock.”

I nodded. “I used to think I was a tough guy.”

He pulled off a black leather glove and stuck out a hand. “Corbin Dougherty.”

“Your parents the ones that had the place near Spotted Horse?”

“Still do.” He glanced around but mostly at the house. “Why are you in Gillette?”

“Gerald Holman.”

He nodded. “I figured as much.” I looked at him questioningly, and he continued. “As soon as a cop gets killed in this state, all the old-timers say we need to bring in Walt Longmire.”

I ignored the flattery and threw a thumb toward the house. “Linda Schaffer was one of Holman’s cases?”

He sighed. “And mine.”

“Yours?”

“One of my first, and boy did I screw it up.”

“Tell me how.”

He got out of his car and shook his head. “Stupid rookie shit . . . I kept telling the husband and the little boy not to worry, that she’d be back any time.” He looked at the abandoned house, and I could see a shudder run through him. “Turns out they had a perfect reason to worry.”

“What happened?”

“She went to work one evening and just didn’t come home.” He glanced around the lonely strip of a road, not really country, not really suburbs, but the transition land between. “I would stop by periodically just to see if they’d heard anything, not only from us but from anybody.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head and leaned away from my truck, still holding on to it in a modified push-up to drain some of the anxiety. “I kept coming by to check in, but one day they were gone. I guess it got to be too much for them, waiting for her to come home. I couldn’t stand it and ran a check—they moved back to Spokane, where they were from originally.”

I picked up the file from the center console, glancing through it but not finding the information I wanted. “Where did she work?”

“Kmart.”

I glanced at the coffee urn on the passenger-side floor and then looked up at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope, why?”

“There’s another woman who worked at the Flying J Truck Plaza, which is right across the parking lot, who has been
missing for about three months, name of Roberta Payne.” I shuffled through the folders. “And then another woman missing about five weeks now by the name of Jone Urrecha out near Arrosa, which is east of town?”

“Yeah, about eighteen miles—just go straight up Boxelder, left on Fox Place Avenue, and then a right on 51. You’ll run right into the middle of the town or what there is of it, ’bout five hundred people.”

I rested the files back on the console. “Thanks.”

“You think there’s a connection?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure they already thought of that what with the two missing women separated by only a parking lot, but the other woman ten minutes out of town—”

“Seems odd.”

“Yep. You never heard about these other women in squad meetings, nothing?”

“No.” I looked at him as he dropped his Oakley sunglasses and glanced in the direction of Arrosa. “Any of this have to do with that strip club?”

I nodded. “The Urrecha woman worked there.”

He whistled under his breath. “Be careful out at that place.”

“Meaning?”

He threw a shoulder in a half shrug. “We get warrants, do raids, they pay the fines, and nothing seems to happen.”

“Somebody’s connected?”

“All I’m saying is that nobody ever seems to go to jail, you know what I mean?”

He said nothing for a moment and then pulled a business card and a pen from his pocket, scribbled a number on the back, and handed it to me. “You need any help—day or night—you let me know?”

I glanced at the printed number on the front and then the written one on the back with a 509 area code. “What’s this one?”

“Mike Schaffer’s in Spokane, just in case you wanted to talk to him.”

I held the card and noticed the pressure he’d used in writing it, almost as if he’d been engraving the paper. “You have it memorized?” He said nothing, and I watched as he climbed back in his unit, pulled out, did a U-turn, and headed back toward town without another word.

—

I made my own requisite turns, passing the Gillette Country Club, which I hadn’t known existed, and then backtracked on 51 under the highway to make a quick stop at the Wrangler so that I could drop off the coffeemaker with the disgruntled owner.

As I headed east, the houses began thinning, but there were a few businesses along the way, including the Gillette Lightning Speedway, High Mountain Shooters—with a neon sign advertising
GUNS & AMMO
and an indoor shooting range—and then a Wyoming Department of Transportation Office, all of which were overshadowed by a rail yard and the monstrous tipple of the Black Diamond Mine that stretched across the wide valley and up into the sky far enough to be seen from Gillette proper.

I crossed some tracks and pulled up to the only stop sign in town, which was at the Arrosa Elementary School,
HOME OF THE MUSTANGS
, and the post office, and pulled through the intersection into the parking lot of a small bar with a large sign that read
SIXTEEN TONS, BEST BAR IN ARROSA
.

Glancing around for any other bar in Arrosa, I gave up, turned off the ignition, and pivoted in my seat to look at my faithful companion. “What do you think—post office or the bar?”

He stared at the dash and the red foil package.

“Ham is not an answer.”

He continued to stare at the dash.

“I bet they’ll let you in the post office.” I opened the door, and he jumped out just as the railroad barrier arms dropped across the road that I’d just passed, the lights flashing and the bells ringing. “Hah, beat you.”

I stood there watching the orange and black Burlington Northern Santa Fe thunder by, shaking the little hamlet of Arrosa like a righteous fist.

Beyond the freight, farther down the road, there was an illuminated sign at the top of a pole of a blond woman with impossibly blue eyes, her fingernail provocatively placed between her smiling teeth, and the words
DIRTY SHIRLEY’S EXOTIC DANCING
under her high heels. Down below was a lettered sign that could be changed daily which read
TITTY TWISTER TUESDAY
and below that,
HUMP DAY
AMATEUR STRIP-OFF.

I called Dog and walked across the parking lot to the modest post office, pushed open the door, and allowed the beast to go first.

“This is a federal government facility, and dogs aren’t allowed.” The voice came from an area beyond the P.O. boxes to my left behind one of those roll-up steel gates, where a handsome, lean man stood on a stool; he was taking down garland that must’ve decorated the federal government facility for the holidays just past.

“He could be a service dog.”

He looked at Dog and then at me doubtfully. “And what kind of service does he provide?”

I walked to the counter, and Dog followed as I leaned a hip against the edge and pulled out my badge wallet and watched it
flip out of my hand again and fall onto the floor. Dog nudged it with his nose and then looked at me.

Stooping down, I scooped the thing up and stood, badging the inspector general with the star of the Absaroka County sheriff. “Obviously, he’s not a retriever.”

He studied my star through wire-rimmed glasses, and I noticed he had a prodigious ponytail hanging down the middle of his back. “You’re in the wrong county.”

“I’m looking for a girl.”

He stuffed the Christmas decorations in a box on the counter. “Aren’t we all?”

“Her name is Jone Urrecha.”

He sighed, walked away into the bowels of the office, and returned with one of those white plastic bins; scooting the decorations box aside, he replaced it with the basket. “I’ve called the number that detective gave me about a half-dozen times but nobody ever answered, so I was about to send them back.”