Bad Company Read online

He turned to the deputy. “Did you call the county attorney?”

  “Yeah,” the deputy replied, “but he wasn’t in the office. I called his house and his wife said he went fishing and he won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “Goddamn it,” said Dickie. “I guess that’ll have to be soon enough. If we need a warrant before then, we can manage. What about Scotty?”

  “He’s on the way,” the deputy answered. “So’s the coroner. And I called the crime lab in Cheyenne.”

  “Good,” said Dickie, turning back to Sally and Hawk. “Detective Scotty Atkins is our investigator. He’ll be here any minute, and he’ll want you guys to answer some questions. If you don’t mind, I’ll listen in.”

  “Thanks,” said Sally.

  “Nothing to it,” Dickie replied. “Where’re you parked?”

  “We left the truck back at the summit,” Hawk said.

  “Okay,” Dickie said. “We’ll give you a lift back there when we’re finished with you.”

  By the time they were all done, it was well past dark. Sally and Hawk sat on rocks and watched as the police did their thing. In a perfectly gruesome way, it was fascinating. The state crime lab van arrived from Cheyenne, not long after Dickie and his deputies. They took about a million photographs and drew sketches, then searched the surrounding area, looking for footprints and taking more pictures. They cast latex impressions of the best footprints, including the waffle tread of Sally and Hawk’s boots and the cowboy boot print Sally had noticed, along with an imprint of a square-toed platform shoe. From Sally’s point of view, the cops weren’t adding to the scenic beauty of the place. The few straggling wildflowers left in the glen leaned at angles, trampled and half broken at the stems. Even the ants didn’t want to hang around. Sally watched as a stream of them marched off to their hole, carrying a yellowed and dried stalk of grass, straight and thin as straw.

  The techs put on surgical gloves and went around picking up every beer can and cigarette butt, putting the refuse in plastic baggies and tagging each bag with the location of the contents. They took particular care with the Skoal tin. It had been crushed, and the techs speculated about whether they’d get any decent prints off it.

  And now here came another man, tall and spare with thinning sandy hair, taking the same hill that had gotten Dickie winded, in long, easy strides. He wore Dockers, running shoes, and a button-down shirt with a pony on the pocket. As he came closer, Sally saw his eyes, sharp and very light green, sweeping over the scene and lighting on her briefly, then on Hawk.

  “Hey, Scotty,” said Hawk.

  “H’lo, Joe,” the man replied.

  Most people in Laramie knew Professor Josiah Hawkins Green not by his college nickname but as Joe, the given name he used professionally. This guy—Detective Atkins, presumably—must be a recent acquaintance, Sally surmised.

  “We play basketball three times a week,” Hawk explained, reading her mind, offering an introduction. “This is Professor Sally Alder.”

  “Professor Alder,” said the man, shaking her hand with both of his. “I’m Scott Atkins. Sorry about this.” He let go of her hand. “I’m handling the investigation for the Sheriff’s Department. I understand that you two found the body. In a little bit, I’ll be needing to ask you some questions.”

  “We’ll tell you what we can,” said Hawk, but Atkins had already turned away, getting out a notebook and walking toward the body.

  This Atkins didn’t waste time. “How’s he on the basketball court?” Sally asked Hawk.

  “Hell on defense, great jumper from the top of the key. I guess he was a hero at Laramie High in his youth, but blew out his knee his freshman year at UW,” Hawk answered.

  Sally waited for more. “Good teammate, bad opponent,” Hawk said.

  The Albany County coroner showed up just as the sun was slipping below the horizon. He and Dickie talked briefly, then he went over and took a look down at the body in the crevice. The coroner took some pictures and made some notes of his own.

  And then it was time to get Monette out of there. Sally didn’t want to watch, but some flaw in her personality made her climb back into the declivity to get a view anyway. Hawk, it seemed, had the same character weakness. He was right behind her.

  It wasn’t pretty. Monette’s body had stiffened up with death, and the rocks she was stuck between were way too big to move. The crime lab techs were as careful as they could be, trying to preserve the body in the condition it had been left, but they had to get the deputies to help them pull and haul for minutes that seemed like hours, cursing and sweating. Dickie, the coroner, and the detective stood to one side, talking in low voices, watching intently, their faces blank. Sally could hardly believe how calm they all were. Once she thought she heard the crunch of breaking bone, but it might have been nothing more than the sound of her own senses stretching to the snapping point. Suddenly she was aware of sitting spraddle-legged on a hard lumpy rock, elbows on her thighs, the almost empty Kum ’n’ Go mug dangling from her forefinger. She drank the dregs of the cold coffee and nearly barfed all over her hiking boots.

  Hawk must have been watching her. The next thing she knew, he had his hand on the back of her neck and she had her head between her knees and he was saying, “Deep breaths. Come on, Mustang. They’ve got her out of there now. They’ll be talking to us soon. Don’t mess up the second pair of shoes in one day.”

  She finally looked up again. Couldn’t help herself. She’d never looked at a corpse before.

  In the waning daylight, the coroner had set up battery-powered lamps, aimed at what was left of Monette Bandy. And then he started handling the body, making more notes, mumbling into a tape recorder. The crime lab techs set to work beside him, but Sally couldn’t quite see what they were doing. The coroner’s body partially blocked her view.

  But she could see that Monette’s uniform shirt was torn and bloody. Sally searched her memory. The Life-way checkers wore a uniform polo shirt with whatever pants they favored. That morning Monette had been wearing black jeans, a little too tight. The coroner got up from where he was squatting and went around to work from another angle, giving Sally a better (was that the word?) view. Monette wasn’t wearing jeans, or anything else on the lower half of her body, now, and there was a lot more blood, dried grass sticking to her legs, and between them. She’d been shot. God.

  One of the crime lab techs had gone down into the crevice and pulled out the jeans. Now Sally saw them draped over a rock, the techs looking in their kit for a bigger plastic bag to put them in. “Hunh,” said the tech. “No blood. The guy must’ve got these off her before he shot her.” That was about as much as Sally could stand. She turned away.

  And registered, distinctly, for the first time, what the coroner had been saying in his soft voice. “Shot twice at point-blank range with what appears to be a small caliber weapon . . . head, abdomen . . . likelihood of sexual assault . . .”

  Only that morning, Sally thought, she’d talked with a living human being, somebody she’d pitied more than liked, but a person nonetheless. Sally couldn’t remember exactly where Monette Bandy had grown up—one of the energy boomtowns, Newcastle or Gillette? She’d come to Laramie to widen her horizons, a young woman, probably damaged by a girlhood that hadn’t offered much in the way of comfort or encouragement or pleasure. (Sally could see her holding up that bag of artichokes: “What’re these?”) Monette had just been looking, as she’d said, to “get it on.” Rape murder, it’s just a shot away.

  “Pull it together, girl,” said Hawk, putting out a hand to help Sally up from her seat on the rock. “The detective and the sheriff want to talk.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Atkins said, all business.

  “I didn’t expect we’d have such a tough time getting the body out of that crack,” Dickie added. “Wish you hadn’t had to watch that.”

  “I assume that was where you found her?” Atkins asked.

  “Yes,” Hawk said. “We were headed up this way, and saw
vultures overhead. We figured something was wrong. Came up to take a look. I got here first, but Sally was right behind me.”

  Atkins just nodded, taking notes. “And you didn’t disturb anything? Didn’t pick up any beer cans or kick things around?”

  “No,” said Sally. “Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I did. Here.” She dug the cigarette pack out of her knapsack and noticed, for the first time, that somebody had torn the foil on top into strips, like the fringe on Buffalo Bill’s jacket. She handed the pack to Atkins, who gave her a look that said, “Real bozo move, girl,” and then handed it to a tech, who bagged it.

  “Sorry. I guess you’ll find my prints on that one. But that was all I touched. We were careful. Still, when I saw her arm, I did go over there and look down into the crevice. That’s how we knew who it was.” Sally shook her head, fighting a small wave of nausea. “What was that cord on her wrist?”

  Dickie looked up, his eyes grim, revealing nothing. “A piggin’ string. The calf ropers use them to tie animals down. There were rope burns on both her wrists.”

  “That’s not for public consumption,” said Atkins, giving Dickie a quick glance. “I reckon we’ll ask the questions, Professor Alder.”

  But Sally wasn’t really listening. The shock had fallen away, and anger was taking over. “Some fuckhead cowboy brought her out here for a party, tied her up, attacked her, shot her? Is that what you think happened here?”

  “We don’t have any idea,” said Dickie. “We’re just collecting evidence.”

  “Not our job to jump to conclusions,” Atkins added.

  “Bullshit,” said Sally. “Tell me that isn’t what it looks like. Beer cans, butts, even a can of chew? Cowboy boot prints in the dirt? A piggin’ string?”

  “We know what it looks like,” Dickie told her, with labored patience. “But at this point, that’s all we know. Lot of work to do on this yet, Sally.” He looked over at the crime lab guys and the coroner, getting ready to put Monette into a body bag. “We’re just beginning.”

  And there was no time to waste. If Monette had been killed by some kinked-up bastard who’d come in Monday morning just for the rodeo and started his week off with a bang, Sally knew he might be gone already. Might stick around for the week, wreaking more havoc. Potential witnesses might only be passing through. Dickie and his people would have to work fast to get their man before the week was out. After that, the trail would get colder than a fence post in February.

  Cold bloody murder and hot brutal rape. They just had to find the guy who did it and make him pay and pay. But what could Sally do?

  Hawk was a step ahead of her. “You saw Monette this morning at the Lifeway, didn’t you?” he asked her.

  “Yes. She checked me out this morning,” Sally told Dickie and the detective.

  Poor Dickie. For a moment the wretched man leaked through and showed in the eyes of the dispassionate cop.

  “Yeah. She got promoted this week. Mary was real proud of her.” He looked down at the ground, swallowed, got possession of himself. When he looked up, the man had gone back inside, and all that showed was the cop. “So did you talk to her?”

  “Yeah, I did. Small talk. She was pissed off that she’d have to work nights most of the week and would miss the fun.”

  Atkins, the investigator, wrote it all down. Dickie stared off into the distance, at something that had him swallowing hard again. “Monette had a fucked-up idea of fun,” he said.

  And just the way he said it made Sally forget her own mad and sad, and remember that Dickie was the dead girl’s uncle, and a man who’d had, and paid for, more than a few wrongheaded notions about fun in his day. “I know what you mean. So when I was checking out, I was in line between a couple of guys who looked like the human versions of a sloth and a salamander—or maybe that’s not fair to the animals. Maybe they were lower species. A blob and a virus. Anyway, Monette hit on both of them. Told one guy she knew ‘all the best places’ in town to get a beer. Seemed like she was determined to hook up with a man, any man, the nastier and rastier the better.”

  “Did the men act interested?” Atkins asked.

  “The guy in front of me did. Said he’d love to ‘get a little something.’ He was a real wit, a regular Bob fucking Hope. He bought a carton of Kools for his wife.”

  “Did you happen to notice whether he smoked them himself?”

  “Couldn’t say. He acted like it was his wife who needed them, but she couldn’t come in and get them herself, because their baby was acting up, so she was out in the truck nursing. Great, huh—nursing and smoking? You ought to arrest her.” Sally was a real prohibitionist when it came to cigarettes. “Did you find any Kools butts?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see about that when we get things over to the lab. What about the guy in back of you?” Atkins asked.

  “I don’t know. By the time I left, he hadn’t said much of anything. Just stood there looking stupid and revolting.”

  Atkins glanced up from his notes and gave her a wisp of what almost looked like a smile. “Do you think you could give us a more precise description of these guys than that?”

  She narrowed her eyes, trying to get the clearest possible mental picture of the two men. “Sure. I can even tell you what the first guy’s truck looked like. An old white Chevy pickup, maybe a ton and a half, rusty and dented. I didn’t notice the plates, but he said he was from Worland. And, of course, he was traveling with a woman and a baby.”

  “That’s good. Let’s get down to details.”

  “Okay,” Sally agreed. “The second guy was a biker, kind of scrawny and squinty-eyed, had that worked-over, windburned look.” But then she hesitated. She put her hand on Dickie’s arm, gave it a squeeze, and then said, “Look. I hate to say this, but the way Monette was going, there’s no telling how many guys she flirted with before she found Mr. Wrong. It’s not like she was being discriminating.”

  As Scott Atkins recorded what Sally was saying, Dickie worked his lips, like a man who’d taken a drink of milk that had gone off. When he raised his eyes, they were glittering. “I’m not sure Monette Bandy ever had the luxury of being discriminating,” he said.

  Tuesday

  Chapter 3

  Sweethearts of the Rodeo

  The ringing phone woke Sally before seven on Tuesday morning. She fumbled for the cordless beside the bed, mumbled a hello.

  “God, Sally. You and Hawk. You found Monette.”

  It was Delice, and she was barely keeping it together.

  “Yes,” Sally said. “It was horrible. I’m so sorry, honey. How’s Mary doing?”

  “About as bad as you’d expect. She lost Tanya just last year, and now this happens to Monette. Her parents are dead. She’s pretty much down to Langhams.”

  Sally knew what that was like. She was an orphan herself, her brothers far off in St. Louis, the rest of her family even more distant and scattered. More than twenty years ago she had been a bootless California country-rock singer, out on the road, looking for a place to land. The Langhams of Laramie had taken her in. Dwayne Langham had been behind the counter at the Axe Attack music store when she’d stopped in, her head still full of white noise from a marathon drive east from Berkeley to anywhere on I–80. She’d been looking to buy guitar picks and strings, and mentioned that she sang and wrote songs, might even be in the market for a gig. Dwayne had smiled and sent her to see his sister, Delice, who had hired Sally on the spot to play happy hours at the Wrangler. Given her then pathetic financial state, that job had looked to Sally like the opening of King Tut’s tomb.

  Dickie Langham had followed suit, booking her into the “lounge” at Dr. Mudflaps, the phony gourmet restaurant where he tended bar and dealt dope. Almost before she knew it, she’d rented an apartment in Laramie. By the end of that summer she was gigging with Dwayne’s band, a sub-legendary group that went by the name of Branchwater, fronted by another of Laramie’s purveyors of illegal substances, the amoral Sam Branch. That had led to several years of mak
ing a hair-raising living in clubs and bars all over the Northern Rockies, and dragging her ass into the Wrangler for Monday morning hash browns and eggs with Dickie and Delice.

  Sally had enrolled in grad school in history at UW, just to have something legitimate to do, and found that she’d accidentally discovered her calling. She’d ended up heading back to California, gotten a Ph.D. at Cal, taught women’s history at UCLA. It was a good enough life, but she’d known some lonesome times in the big city.

  So when she’d gotten the offer to return to Laramie and the University of Wyoming sixteen years later, as the holder of the Margaret Dunwoodie Endowed Chair and head of the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History, she’d jumped on it. To her infinite delight, not only had she and Hawk found each other again, but the Lang-hams took up with her exactly where they’d left off. Of course, Langhams knew how to welcome their prodigals home.

  So Sally played a little music with Dwayne, hung out a lot with Delice, and cadged dinner at Dickie and Mary’s at least once a week. She’d come to think of herself as an aunt to their nearly grown kids, especially Mary and Dickie’s daughter Brit. Gorgeous, amusingly sulky, and bright as a golden Sacagawea dollar, Brit had worked for Sally when she was writing Meg Dunwoodie’s biography. Indeed, Brit had played a big part in solving that particular human puzzle. The Langhams were as much family to Sally now as her own.

  And when she thought about it, they’d been Monette’s only family too. Her mother was dead, and her father— well, nobody ever had a good word to say about him.

  Sally could only begin to conceive of what the Lang-hams were going through. “What can I do to help out?” she asked Delice.

  On the other end of the line, Delice swallowed, sniffled, blew her nose. “We’re going to get together this morning at nine, over at Mary and Dickie’s. The coroner hasn’t released her body yet, but we’re going to plan the funeral, all that stuff. You could come over and hold everybody’s hand if you feel like it.”