3
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.”