The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volume 1-4 (117 page)

* * *

"Sheriff Longmire?”

I turned and looked up at Rosey Wayman, one of the few females in the Wyoming Highway Patrol. She’d been transferred up from the Elk Mountain detachment about six months ago and had been causing quite a stir here in the Bighorns. “Well, if it isn’t the sweetheart of I-two-five.” I watched as the trademark grin showed bright white teeth, and her blue eyes sparked.

Maybe my evening was looking up. I wondered when Vic would be back.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Walt, but we got a call in, and Ruby said this would be where you were.”

"What’ve we got?”

“Some ranchers found a body down on Lone Bear Road near Route 249.”

Maybe my evening wasn’t looking up.

That was near Powder Junction. It was July, and it didn’t take much deduction to figure out why the locals were out on that desolate part of the county road system. “Swathers or balers?”

“Balers. They supposedly swathed last week.”

No square hectare of grass went unshorn in a Wyoming summer. The Department of Transportation usually subcontracted the cutting of grass along its motorways to the lowest-bidding local ranchers, which allowed the state grass to become a private commodity commonly known as beer-can hay.

I poked a thumb toward the blond patrolperson as Dorothy returned with the dish full of chicken and lemongrass. “Can I get that to go?”

* * *

No matter what aspect of law enforcement with which you might be involved, there’s always one job you dread. I’m sure at the more complicated venues it’s the terrorists, it’s serial killers, or it’s gang-related, but for the western sheriff it’s always been the body dump. To the north, Sheridan County has two unsolved, and Natrona County to the south has five; up until twenty-eight minutes ago, we’d had none. There you stand by some numbered roadway with a victim, no ID, no crime scene, no suspects, nothing.

I got out of Rosey’s cruiser and nodded to Chuck Frymyer and Double Tough, my two deputies from the southern part of the county. “Walt. She’s down over the hill.”

We headed toward the giant balers at the edge of a large culvert. Lieutenant Cox, the highway patrol division commander, was standing halfway down the hill toward the barrow ditch with two more of his men, still writing in their duty books. It was near their highway, but it was my county. “Hey, Karl.”

“Walt.” He nodded at one of the pieces of equipment where two elderly cowboys sat, one in a beaten straw hat and the other wearing a Rocking D Ranch ball cap. “You know these gentlemen?”

“Yep.” The two got up when they noticed me. Den and James Dunnigan were a couple of hardscrabble ranchers from out near Bailey. James was a little wifty, and Den was just plain mean. "How you doin’, James?”

Den squinted and started in. “We swathed two days ago, and she wasn’t here....”

James cut him off. “Hey, Walt.”

"What’a we got?” I figured the HPs had already gotten a statement from them, but I thought I’d give the brothers another shot at the story before we went any further.

"Already told ’em.” Den gestured toward the HPs. It had probably been a long day, it was late on a Saturday afternoon, and he evidently felt they had been detained long enough.

“Tell me.” I remained conversational but made sure it wasn’t a question. Frymyer had his notebook out and was scribbling.

James continued in a soft voice and did his best to focus on the conversation at hand. “We was balin’ and come up onto her.”

“What’d you do?”

He shrugged. “Shut ’er down and called 911.”

"Go near the body?”

“Nope, I didn’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep.”

I glanced at Den, who was blinking too much. "Den?”

He shrugged. “I went over to the edge of the culvert and yelled at her.” He blinked again. “I thought she might be asleep. Then I saw she wasn’t breathin’.”

I had Den show me the exact route that he had taken, and then I retreated to the top of the culvert with my two deputies, where it was unlikely anybody had been. I squatted down in a hunter’s crouch and listened as Cox dismissed the Dunnigan brothers.

I turned to Chuck. “You know how to open a baler?”

The sandy Vandyke smiled back. “Born to it.”

“Go crack that one open and check the contents and then split the last two bales northbound. If she was walking or running from somebody, then she might’ve dropped her purse or something along the way.” Frymyer paused for a moment, and I looked at him. “You need help?”

He glanced back at the one-ton bales. “Yes.”

I looked at Double Tough, and he started off with Chuck.

There was still a lot of light—it was like that in the summer this far north—and you could plainly see where the young woman had played out the last moments of her life. She was provocatively dressed, inappropriate for the surroundings. She had on a short skirt, a pink halter top, and no shoes. Her long, dark hair was tangled with the grasses; it had been blown by the ever prevalent Wyoming wind, and you could see her delicate bone structure. The eyes were closed, and you might’ve thought she was asleep but for the blue coloring in her face and a swollen eye, and the fact that, from the angle, it was apparent that her neck had been broken.

I listened as Cox came up and squatted down beside me. "You losing weight?”

“Yep, I’m in the gym with Cady every day.”

He nodded. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s good, Karl. Thank you for asking. Hey, speaking of Cady, could I get you to have Rosey call into our dispatch and ask them to tell her I won’t be coming home tonight?”

“You bet.” He tipped his campaign hat back. “DCI’s on the way. I think you got the wicked witch of the west herself.” I nodded. T. J. Sherwin was always looking for a reason to come up to the mountains in the summertime. The division lieutenant plucked a piece of the prairie and placed the harvested end in his mouth. “We checked all the way back to Casper, Walt, but no abandoned vehicles.” He glanced after my deputies. “Your guys gonna check the baler?”

“Yep.”

“Good. My guys wouldn’t know which end to look in.” He studied the body of the dead girl and then looked up at me. “I’ve got men checking all the Chinese restaurants in Sheridan, Casper, and Gillette to see if anybody’s missing....”

“Don’t bother.” I ran my hand over my face. “She’s Vietnamese. ”

2

“She wasn’t walking, not without shoes.” T. J. Sherwin watched as the technicians zipped up the black plastic bag and carefully placed the Asian woman’s body onto a gurney under the constant racket of the generators. The flat, yellow shine of the emergency lights made even the living look jaundiced.

I closed my eyes. “Fresh?”

It was getting late, and the warmth of the sun was long gone, replaced by the stars and the clear, cool air creeping down from the Bighorn Mountains. It hadn’t rained in more than a month.

She hugged herself. “Less than twelve hours.” I put my arm around her because I wanted to keep her warm and because I wanted to. She’d been the chief forensic pathologist for Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation for half of my tenure in Absaroka County. She’d thought me antiquated, but in seventeen years I’d grown on her. “She wasn’t killed here. Preliminary says asphyxiation, manual strangulation by someone very powerful. Whoever it was, they started by strangling her and then broke her neck.”

“They didn’t do a very good job of hiding the body.”

I could feel her eyes on me. “No, they didn’t.”

I took a quick look ahead to the county road, toward the highway. “There’s an exit only a mile up.” I looked at the uncut grass on the other side of the culvert. “We’ll have to look for drag marks or footprints farther north. We’re going to need to check the roadside back to 249 and down to 246 at the south fork of the Powder.” She shivered and snuggled closer under my arm. “My guys about through with the bales?”

She snickered. “They’re gonna love you.”

“Yep.” I watched as the bag boys loaded the dead woman into the Suburban for transport to Cheyenne. “So, you’re not going to stick around?”

“Too much to do.” She left my protection and started back up the slope toward the emergency vehicles splaying their revolving blue, red, and yellow lights across the wildflowers that were blooming under the sage.

I started to follow but stopped, sighed to myself, and called after her. “Anybody check that thing yet?”

She turned back to me. “The tunnel? No, I think they were going to wait until daylight.”

* * *

“You wan’ company?” Double Tough gave me his Mag-Lite.

I took half an egg sandwich and shook my head. “Nope.” The food had just arrived, and I knew they were hungry; I figured I could prowl around on my own. “But I’ll take one of those cups of coffee.”

It was a clear night, and the full moon and thick swath of the Milky Way gave plenty of illumination on the area surrounding the tunnel, if not the hole itself. I threw a leg over a guardrail and started down the embankment to the entrance on the other side of Lone Bear Road. I wasn’t expecting to find a culprit shivering at the mouth of the thing; I figured that whoever had killed the young woman had walked back to his vehicle and driven away, but it never hurt to look.

I opened the Styrofoam cup, shook off the lid and stuffed it in my back jeans pocket in an attempt to keep Absaroka County clean, and stepped down into the three-quarter inch of Murphy Creek.

I sipped the coffee, listened to the distant sound of the eighteen-wheel trucks on I-25, and shone the beam of the four-cell flashlight into the black opening of the drainage tunnel; there was something blocking a complete view of the other side. I took a step and listened to it resound off the hardened walls of the concrete. In the most likely scenario, it was a yearling that had followed the creek bed and gotten stuck or confused; few things in the natural world are as easily confused as a heifer— just ask any cowboy.

There were some rabbit carcasses and a few deer bones a little farther into the tunnel, and I could see that there were some broken pieces of two-by-fours and truck skids piled at one side with a collection of blankets, tarps, and cardboard boxes gathered on them. It was possibly the regular flotsam and jetsam of Murphy Creek, but I didn’t think the water flow was that strong.

I thought I’d seen a small movement, but it was probably the shadows of the flashlight. The refuse pile smelled like something dead and got worse as I leaned in closer and nudged one of the blanket layers of the sofa-sized bundle—more cardboard. Something must have been using the blockage as a nest, and the stench made my eyes water.

An old warning bell went off, so I transferred my cup of coffee to the flashlight hand and pulled the Colt 1911 out and to the right, cocked and locked. I clicked off the safety and stooped down as close as I dared, recognizing the quilt as a packing blanket from a rental truck place.

I had pulled my sidearm on a pile of trash.

I started to resafety and reholster my weapon when something in the pile shifted, and the entire collection of blankets, cardboard, and smell exploded straight at me, lifting me completely off the ground and against the far side of the tunnel. The flashlight disappeared, coffee went everywhere, and the .45 in my hand fired as my fingers contracted on impact with the cement wall. The compressed sound of the big Colt plugged my ears like a set of fingers. All the air in my body hung there as I fell forward.

Whatever it was, it was bigger than me, and hairy, and it caught me by my chest and pushed me back. It was roaring in my face as it slapped me, the Colt splashing into the water.

My head felt like it was coming apart, but I thrashed at whatever it was, bringing my arms forward and kicking with my legs. It pressed against me with the force of a front-end loader. My only hope was to get away from the thing before it sunk its claws into me or took off half my face in one bite.

I got a lucky punch at its head, but it still threw me sideways, where I slid along in the muck. The thought of being mauled to death or eaten alive in the darkness of an irrigation tunnel renewed my fortitude for fighting; I leveraged a fist loose and brought it forward with all the force my clumsy position would allow. There was a bit of a lull, and I took advantage and raised my head, but it was back on me in an instant.

I shouldn’t have exposed my throat because it started to choke me. I flailed with both fists, but I might as well have been striking the concrete floor. I kicked, but the weight of the thing held me solid, and I was just beginning to feel the blood vessels in my head explode and my vision fail.

I could see flashes of light where there were none, and I could see faces in the flashes; women, they were all women. I could see my mother on a grassy hillside, the summer sun shining through the sides of her pale blue eyes. I saw my wife, the first time I asked her to dance, and the gentle way her fingers first reached for mine. I saw Victoria Moretti, lowering her face to me with her bathrobe undone. I saw my daughter, her determined look in the weight room, and could only think,
Ish okay, Daddy
.

There was splashing, and there were other voices above the roaring of whatever had me and whatever I had. I made one last struggle to bury my thumbs into the front of its throat and could just feel my fingers making headway into the fragile, egg-carton-like cartilage of its larynx, a method I’d used to stay alive in Khe Sanh.

If I was going to die, something was going with me.

I heard a loud crack and felt a shift in the thing’s weight as it toppled to one side, just before the women’s faces disappeared and it all faded to black.

* * *

I sat there on the bank of the hillside as the EMTs worked on the back of my head. I continued to clear my throat and massaged my forefinger and thumb into my eye sockets in an attempt to replace the stars in my eyes with real ones.