—
Appropriately enough, the Cold Case Files Division of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department was located adjacent to the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department file room in the chilly basement of the building, and was devoid of the charms above.
I sat in what was certainly a cast-off green metal office chair beside what had surely been an abandoned green metal office desk out of which Harvey pulled a few file folders about an inch thick; resting them on the corner of the desk, he sat in the twin green chair. “Merry belated Christmas.”
“Any order to them?”
He shook his head. “Not that I can tell, but he had them on the desk just like that.”
I glanced around at the locked cages surrounding the file areas and could see only one window up near the ceiling, where people’s feet, clothed in various winter footwear, walked by on the sidewalk above. “He worked down here alone?”
The inspector leaned back in his chair and placed his pointy-toed boots up on the surface between us on top of the files. “Now you know why he killed himself, right?”
I looked at the folders under his polished wing tips and even went so far as to flip the corners through my fingers. “Pretty skimpy.”
He ignored my remark and glanced up through the abbreviated window. “I started trying to guess what people did for a living by looking at their shoes, but then I figured out they were mostly all cops and quit.”
“There are a lot of them around here.”
“Uh huh.” His eyes returned to mine. “How ’bout you?”
“How about me what?”
“You a cop?”
I smiled, not making it easy on him. “In what sense?”
He didn’t smile back. “Are you one of them, or are you one of us?”
“I’m just me.” I closed my fingers around the files and yanked them from under his boots.
He slipped the lizard skin boots from the desk and stood, and I was standing right there with him, nose to nose.
“Gerald Holman was a friend of mine, and I don’t want his name dragged through the mud.”
I slipped the files under my arm. “Are you trying to tell me something, Richard?”
He didn’t move. “I want to be sure about who you’re working for.”
“That would be my business.”
He nodded toward the files securely compressed under my arm. “Those are now mine and that makes it my business, too.”
“You want to wrestle for them?”
He looked me over. “You think I can’t?”
“I think I’ve got you by about sixty pounds, and the first thing I’m going to do is grab that .357 on your hip.”
“Well, I’ll be grabbing that .45 at the small of your back.”
I glanced around. “Boy howdy, I sure hope no one comes in down here while we’re doing all that grabbing.”
His face was stony, but after a few seconds fissures started to break through the façade, and finally the cracks formed a grin underneath the extravagant mustache and he chuckled. “Gets lonely down here.” He laughed, outright, and then sat on the edge of the desk. “I hear you’re pretty smart.”
“For a Wyoming sheriff?”
He continued to smile. “You get a lot of press.”
“Meaning?”
He drew a wide palm across the lower part of his face but somehow didn’t disturb the mustache. “Look, Gerald was a good guy . . .”
I sat and leaned back in the guest chair. “We all seem to be in agreement about that, but he’s dead and his wife wants to know why. So, in answer to your question, I’m working for her.” Confrontation largely avoided, I started shuffling through the files. “This is all he was working on?”
“The only things of any importance.”
I nodded and left it at that. “His wife mentioned something about a missing persons?”
“Missing girl from out near Arrosa, a little crossroads east of here along the railroad tracks.” He leaned forward and took the stack from my hands and flipped through until finding the one marked with a name—Jone Urrecha. “Classic case from the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club out there; got off work and disappeared, never to be heard from again.”
He handed the folder to me, and I opened it. “Dancer?”
“Sure, if you say so.”
“Missing five weeks . . .” I glanced up at him. “Not exactly a cold cold case.”
“Nope, but Holman got all the leftovers.” He glanced around the dungeon. “And shit flows downhill.”
I rested my eyes on the photo of the young woman and found her features familiar. “Urrecha, that’s Basque.” I looked up at him. “I met a woman at the Wrangler Motel last night by that name.”
“The sister—she’s been talking to the press and harassing the department about our handling of the case—everybody around here just wants her to go home.”
I glanced up at him. “How is our handling of the case?”
He pointed at the folder. “As near as I can tell the report got filed by another dancer about a week after the incident. A deputy took the statement, a detective followed it up, but there was nothing to indicate foul play. Her apartment was empty, and her car was gone, so it’s a pretty good bet that she flew the coop—something she has been known to do.”
“You contact Boise?” He looked confused. “Where she’s from?”
“Hey, this wasn’t my case until a week and a half ago.”
I gestured with the file. “This one was on top?”
“Yeah.”
“Any chance that she was involved with Holman?”
He made a face. “You’re kidding, right?”
My turn to shrug.
He thought about it. “I know it’s a reasonable avenue of suspicion, but he was three times her age and just not the type.”
I looked at the next file—a waitress from the Flying J Travel Plaza on South Douglas Highway by the name of Roberta Payne. “Another missing woman?”
He nodded. “Three months ago.”
I flipped to the next file and another missing woman—a housewife from east Gillette from seven months previous, Linda Schaffer.
“These files are all missing women.”
He studied me. “I know what you’re thinking—Powder River serial killer, but there’s nothing to connect them other than the fact that they were women and are missing, and the time span is not consistent.”
“You think he just fixated and burned out?”
“It happens.”
He was right, it did happen with an alarming frequency—police officers who grew so close to their cases that they simply couldn’t accept the loss or the failure. I tucked the folders into my chest. “Do you mind if I take these and go through them?”
He stroked a hand across his mustache again and sighed. “Hey, I’m sorry about that, before . . .” He thumped my chest with the back of his hand. “The only thing I ask is that if you come up with anything you get in touch with me first.” He stuck the same hand out. “Deal?” We shook, and I stood. “Where are you going to start?”
I glanced down at the file on top, just as Gerald Holman had left it. “Evidently, at the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club.”
He smiled. “Never a bad place to start.”
“But first I have to go to Kmart.”
—
Whether from guilt or a sense of retail avoidance, Lucian decided to stick around at the sheriff’s office, while Dog and I headed south on the Douglas Highway to the fabled Kmart; I parked and turned to look at him. “You want dog treats, or should I just go over to the meat section and get you a ham?”
His ears went up at the word ham; they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure seventeen of Dog’s were ham.
Having taken his order, I got out and started in. It took me a while, but I found the ham and then the coffee urn. Vowing to get Lucian to reimburse me, I made my way out with the cumbersome box but stopped as I passed the bulletin board at the entryway where a shapely lass in a green Stormy Kromer hat and a vintage plaid hunting jacket was replacing a homemade missing persons poster using a heavy-duty staple gun.