He nodded, still looking a little off balance. “Okay, but I need to go down to my office and—”
She physically turned him around and escorted him back the other way in a slow walk. “I think you better talk to the sheriff very first thing, he mentioned something about a high-priority situation that was going to need special handling and that you were the man for the job.”
He paused for a moment. “Excuse me, but what did you say your name was?”
“Moretti, Victoria Moretti.”
He nodded and then glanced back at me. “Sheriff.”
“Investigator.”
Without another word, he turned and continued down the hall.
Vic called out. “Nice meeting you, Dick.”
He kept walking. “Richard.”
“Right.”
After he was gone, she turned and looked at me. “What?”
I shook my head as I walked past her.
“Don’t you think I’m special?”
We stood at the door zipping, buttoning, fastening; it’s what people in Wyoming do before they go outside in late December.
“What could these three women have in common?”
She snapped her fingers at me. “They’re all missing.”
We climbed into my truck and the atmosphere of Dog breath that had clouded all the windows. “I just keep going back to Gerald Holman.”
“Maybe there’s no connection at all; I mean, maybe he’d just had it.”
“Why shoot yourself twice?”
“He was a lousy shot?” She tugged at her jacket. “Start this thing up and get the heat going. My blood must’ve thinned while I was in Central America—I’m freezing to death.”
I fired the Bullet up and flipped on the heat. “A housewife, a waitress, and a stripper.”
“Walk into a bar . . .”
I shook my head at her, and she rested her chin in the palm of her hand and smiled. Against my will, I smiled, too.
The Browning tactical boots lodged themselves onto my dash. “You did miss me.”
6
“So nobody’s died since Holman’s suicide?”
I turned and looked at her as we sat in the parking lot of the Kmart, within eye-view of the Flying J Travel Plaza in the aftermath of an afternoon storm as a plow service pushed the never-ending snow over to the dividers. “As far as we know.”
She skimmed through the reports. “I’m just sayin’.”
I gripped the steering wheel of my truck with one hand. “He doesn’t fit the profile at all.”
She flipped a page. “Wouldn’t be the first.”
“Read to me about Linda Schaffer.”
She shook her head and dropped the files in her lap. “If I know you, and I think I do, you’ve already read it to yourself about forty-seven times.”
“Maybe forty-eight will be the charm—anyway, I like listening to you read.”
She picked up and reshuffled the reports and held a hand out for the ubiquitous quarter I always paid her for the service.
I deposited the coin from my pocket into her palm as she began her dramatic interpretation. “Housewife with a full-time job at Kmart; worked there for three years . . .” She flipped a page. “I’m assuming after her son Michael was old enough to go to first grade. There are lots of notes . . .” Her face turned toward mine. “Was this Patrolman Corbin Dougherty’s first investigation?”
“He kind of fixated on it, huh?”
Her eyes widened as she looked through the file. “Maybe we should take a look at him.”
“He used to date Cady.”
“So that means he’s innocent?”
“I think he just got . . . too close.”
“And now we’re dragging him back into it?”
“Yep.” I sighed. “If we need anybody to contact them, I guess we could have Corbin do it; I think he keeps in touch.” I thought about it. “The husband . . . The one that moved to Spokane with his son?”
“Mike.”
“Where did Mike work?”
“High Plains Energy, Inc. He’s an engineer; designed coal mining equipment or modified it for use in HPE’s three divisional operations here in Campbell County.”
“How about the waitress, Roberta Payne?”
She flipped the pages again. “Divorced.”
“Anything on the ex-husband—where he worked?”
“No.”
“Phone it in to Dougherty.”
She pulled out her cell and pressed the number. “He’s going to love you.” I listened as she relayed the request to the patrolman and then waited. “Corbin says her ex, Bret Bussell, works at a gun shop/shooting range on Boxelder Road, back toward Arrosa—High Mountain Shooters?”
“He still there?”
She conferred. “Corbin, the font of all knowledge, says yes.” There was a brief pause, and Vic looked back at me. “And, stroke of luck, he says that Schaffer is here in Gillette signing papers to sell his house. He says he can talk to us at four.”
I looked at the clock on my dash. “In the meantime we can go over to High Mountain Shooters.”
Vic nodded and turned back to her phone. “Hey, Corbin, do you have a girlfriend?” There was a pause. “Well, you need to get one.” She ended the call and looked at me as I started my truck.
“Kids?”
“No thanks, via nonelective surgery, I’ve chosen an alternative life plan.” She grinned at me, but it was thin. “You can laugh—that was a joke.” She studied me for a moment more and then went back to the pages. “No children at the time of her disappearance.”
“Linda Schaffer had a son—how old?”
“At the time of his mother’s disappearance, nine.” She looked through the windshield at the skiff of snow swirling through the parking lot and dusting the cars with gray rime as I slipped into gear, circled around, and headed back toward Boxelder Road. “I don’t know where you’re going with the kid stuff, because the stripper didn’t have any children.”
“Far as we know.”
Her tone became exasperated. “What, you think they’ve got day care over at Dirty Shirley’s or they hitch ’em to the pole?” She sat the files on the console. “And she didn’t have a husband, either.”
I caught the end of a green light. “Far as we know.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
I remained silent.
She stretched her arms out and laced her fingers, pivoting the arms and popping her knuckles. “Maybe they all shopped at Kmart, or maybe they all ate at the fucking Flying J . . . I don’t know; it’s like trying to find a needle-dick in a whorehouse. I hate cases like this.”
“Gerald Holman.”
Her arms dropped. “Gerald Holman.”
“What did he know that made him kill himself?”
She chewed on a thumbnail. “Something bad.” Then she completed the statement. “Far as we know.”
—
“High Mountain Shooters, really? I mean, as near as I can tell we’re hours away from any friggin’ mountains.”
We both leaned forward and looked up through the top of the windshield at the smiling mountain man holding a rifle. “I guess they’re trying to capture the spirit of the thing.”
We got out, and Vic gazed at the towering twenty-five-foot giant, complete with coonskin cap, beard, and a musket the length of a car. “I used to see these things over in Jersey when I was a kid, and they have always creeped me out.”
“Why?”
She looked up at the slightly smirking face that all the statues displayed. “That is the classic expression of a child molester.”
“They’re called muffler men.”
“Why is that?”
I looked at her for a while. “Because they started out holding mufflers.” Walking over, I rapped the giant’s leg with my knuckles. “Fiberglass; there was a boat maker who started putting these things out in the sixties, and they used to hold all kinds of things, mufflers, tires, axes, you name it . . .”
As she pushed open the glass door, she shrugged. “I’ve never seen one holding a muffler, but you should see what the one in front of the XXX Theatre in Camden is holding.”