He nodded. “That’s what it’s for.”
My undersheriff handed it to me. “Where in the world did you get it?”
“An old cowboy my dad knew out on the Powder River called him up one day and then brought it in. I told him I couldn’t pay him what it was worth, but he insisted that he wanted to sell it to me, so my dad made me a loan for about half of what it was worth, and I bought it off him.” I handed the Colt back; he twirled it again and placed it in the holster. “So, you needing some leather or hardware?”
“Actually, we’re here to talk to you about Roberta Payne.”
He looked like he could’ve been tipped over with ten grains of black powder. “You found her?”
The exact thing his father had said. “No, I’m afraid we haven’t, but there are some other women who may have gone missing, so—”
“But nothing on Robby?”
“No.”
He leaned against the shooting bench. “Would it be all right if I sat down?”
“Sure.” I took his elbow and seated him. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m just . . .”
I glanced at Vic, who made a face and then covered it with a hand. “Sorry about that; we just need to ask a few more questions, knock on a few more doors, just to make sure that nothing was missed in that initial investigation.”
“Yeah, I understand.” He took a few deep breaths. “I just wasn’t ready for that, you know?”
My undersheriff wandered off to a different shooting station, just to give the young man some space as I folded my arms and stood in front of him. “I do.”
He took a moment to collect himself and then spoke into his lap. “Every time I think I’ve come to terms with it, something happens and I feel like . . .” He pulled the Walker back out and began disassembling it by rote in a mindless fashion. It seemed to settle his nerves, and the words started falling from his mouth as he clicked each empty cylinder. “When I was younger and just getting started in period shooting, this guy at a local gun shop told me I should top off every black-powder load with a couple of grains of Bullseye just to keep the fowling down; blew the nipple off and blasted the hammer back to full cock—still can’t hardly hear anything out of my right ear.” He looked up at me. “Three months, and it still feels like that whenever I hear about Robby.”
I nodded and studied my boots. “My wife died a number of years back, and I still start conversations with her in our empty house till I remember that she’s not there anymore.”
He scraped his bottom lip through his teeth. “At least you know what happened to her.”
“I do.”
“That’s the worst part, not knowing.” He shook his head. “Wondering what happened . . . I like to think that she’s okay; that she just decided to go somewhere else, you know? Like Florida or Hawaii. I like to think that she just got tired of her life, of me—and is laying on some beach somewhere.”
Vic had wandered back, and I glanced at her, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with either of us.
The kid kept talking, and I was really glad that the Walker wasn’t loaded. “I mean, we were divorced for about six months, and she even went back to her maiden name, but I kept hoping that we’d get back together.” He glanced around. “That’s why I went in with my dad on the family business, you know, in hopes that she’d see that I was settling down and getting my shit together . . .” His eyes shot to Vic. “Sorry about my language, ma’am.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She moved in closer. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“At the restaurant, the Flying J. I’d sometimes go in there just so I could look at her—nothing creepy, I just missed her, you know?”
Finally, Vic glanced at me. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“It was lunchtime, so she didn’t have any time to talk, but we made plans to maybe go see a movie later in the week—but then she never called.” He reassembled the pistol and reholstered it. “She’d rented an apartment downtown, and I went by to check on her. Her car wasn’t there, so I went over to the Flying J and her car was sitting in the parking lot, covered with dust, so I knew it hadn’t been moved. I asked the manager to check the schedule, but he said she’d punched out two nights before and hadn’t been back since.”
“So, wherever she went, she went there from work and without her car.”
“Yeah.”
Vic leaned in. “Did she have any new friends, hobbies, or occupations?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“No new people in her life?”
“No. I mean, not that I knew of.” He sighed. “We were divorced, so it’s possible she wasn’t telling me everything.”
Vic cleared her throat. “Was she seeing anybody else?”
“No.”
“You sound pretty certain.”
He stood and walked a little away from us. “I kept a pretty close eye on her after we split up.” He turned and inclined his head. “Look, I know how that sounds, but I was just worried about her. Robby was good-looking, and you should’ve seen how those guys at the truck stop would hit on her, even when we were married.”
I interrupted. “So you followed her?”
“I did. I know that sounds bad, but I’d just started lightening up on it when she disappeared. Can you imagine how that feels? I mean, if I’d been there the day she . . .”
I waited a moment before asking. “Did she have any friends or family out of town?”
“She had an aunt and uncle in Wisconsin, but she didn’t like them.”
“Nobody else?”
“No.”
Vic interrupted. “What were her hobbies?”
The question surprised the young man, and he took his time answering. “She did plays with the local theater groups—she wasn’t very good but she was pretty and always got cast.” He thought about it. “She worked out and she ran, cooked; she was a really great cook.”
My undersheriff leaned against the shooting stand beside me. “Are there any family members here in town that we could talk to?”
“Her mom—Sadie’s got a place on East Eighth Street, next to the Mount Pisgah Cemetery, which is where the old she-devil belongs.”
I smiled at the age-old war of son-in-law and mother-in-law; surprisingly, I’d gotten along famously with mine. “I take it you two don’t get along?”
“Robby and her mother didn’t get along.”
Vic added. “Father?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Dead; that, or hiding out from Sadie. The old bat got hold of me about a month ago, trying to get a petition together for a . . . I don’t know what they call it—one of those things where they declare you dead without finding your body?”
“Death in absentia?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“The state of Wyoming usually calls for the individual to be missing for five years before you’re allowed to petition for a declaration of death.”
“It didn’t seem right to me, either. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a bunch of stuff and I wouldn’t do it and I haven’t heard from her since.”
Vic pulled her duty notebook and a pen from inside her coat and mumbled to herself. “Sadie Payne? Sounds like a character from Damn Yankees . . .”
“What’s that?”
Vic snorted as she wrote. “A musical where people sell their souls to the devil.”
He nodded. “That’s Sadie, all right.”
“We’ll go talk to her.”
“Is there anything else you can think of that might help us, anything at all?”
“No.” His voice broke. “I wish I could.”
Vic handed him one of her cards. “If you do think of something, give me a call, okay? Unlike some other members of the Absaroka County law enforcement community, I have what they call a cell phone, a bastion of modern technology.”
We stood there for a moment more, and it was as if he didn’t want us to go, his hand dropping to the Colt Walker at his side. “You sure you don’t want to try it?”