I glanced over. “Just concentrating on the road.”
It was pretty obvious she didn’t believe me. “What was her name again?”
I took a glance at the center console, where I had stowed the autopsy photographs. “Mari Baroja.” She was smiling. “What?”
“It sounds like ambrosia.”
I sighed. “Yep, it does.” I watched the snow for a little while. Lana’s statement still worried me. I guess Lana’s statement didn’t matter if her grandfather was alive but, if he was, why would he have abandoned a perfectly good Kaiser and moved to Vista Verde, New Mexico, without it?
She was still looking at me. “You’re a funny kind of sheriff.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, something I always did when I was forced to really think. “I don’t like mysteries, and I don’t like it when things don’t add up.” I turned and glanced at her. “How about we talk about you?”
“Hey, I’m one of my favorite subjects. Let’s talk about me.” I laughed. “What do you want to know?”
“Oh, everything.” I glanced back at the road but ended up looking at her again. “How does something like you get around without being married?”
She folded down the visor and opened up a small leather purse. “As the queen apparent of Norway, I am only allowed to marry once I’ve reached the age of consent.” She pulled out an even smaller cosmetic bag, glanced at me, and reapplied her lipstick.
I nodded. “That age being thirty-five?”
She closed the vanity mirror and turned back to me with a ravishing smile. “Oh, I do like you.” She replaced the lipstick in the tiny bag and then the bag in the hand-tooled leather purse. “It’s really not all that interesting. I just found myself in an emotional and geographic place where I wasn’t happy.”
“And where was that?”
She cocked her head. “Charlottesville, Virginia. Louis taught at UVA, and after a while we began to regard each other as electives.”
“You chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead of Charlottesville, Virginia?”
“It seemed like a clean slate, and the South is full of ghosts. I had a job similar to this one and a degree in economics, so I came out for an interview at the Wyoming state job fair which, by the way, consisted of three balloons tied to the end of an event table in the conference room of the capitol building.”
“We’re a frugal state.”
She kept studying me, but it took a while for her to get up her nerve. “You don’t seem divorced.”
“Seem divorced?”
Her eyes squinted, but the blue sparkles were still evident. “Too much unreined compassion still there, not enough baggage.”
I waited a moment in respect. “Widower.” She nodded but sat there silently with her legs curled beneath her. I didn’t want to talk about Vonnie, but that wouldn’t have been fair. “There was another woman about a month or so ago.” She didn’t say anything. “I don’t think you could call it a relationship in the sense that it was consummated, but we were close, and it didn’t end well.”
Her voice seemed small and far away. “Can I be honest with you?”
“I would hope.”
“I read about it in the newspapers.”
I felt strangely violated, like somebody had burgled my personal life. “Well… that’s a price you pay for being a public figure.” She reached an arm out and rested a hand on my sleeve, somewhere alongside my heart. I could feel the welling in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether it was for me or for the women whom I had lost. I concentrated on the road and none of the moisture escaped, but I’m pretty sure the blue eyes didn’t miss the emotion. I was pretty sure those eyes didn’t miss much of anything. “We’re talking about me again.”
“Sorry.” Her head tilted forward. “Well, you’re stuck with me for another couple of days at least. I’ve got nine unclaimed security boxes at three different banks so I’m thinking that my predecessor didn’t consider Durant to be high on his list of priorities.”
I was relieved at the change of subject. “So, what do you do when you crack one open?”
“First I ascertain whether the owner is alive and the box has been forgotten or if the box is abandoned due to a death. Next I check on-line credit records or cold-call for possible relatives; if there’s no contact with an owner and the rent hasn’t been paid in five years, it gets turned over to us.”
“How does that go?”
“I get hung up on a lot.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really hard to get people to believe that we’re legitimate. They always think it’s some kind of scam, but we turned over eight million dollars to recipients and generated over fifteen million in unclaimed property just last year.”
I whistled. “Fifteen million. I’d say the state is getting its money’s worth. Maybe they’ll buy more balloons.” The visibility was dropping, so I slowed the truck down even more. At this rate, we might as well have gotten out and walked from the Rez. “You’re the department?”
She saluted. “Unclaimed property manager. I’m my own branch of the Wyoming State Treasury Department.”
“I have to ask. What kind of stuff do you find?”
She looked back out the windshield. “All kinds of things. We found an 1863 ambassadorial appointment signed by Abraham Lincoln, and just last week I found an old collection of Nazi campaign ribbons from World War II. Pocket watches, stocks, bonds… There was this one in Gillette that had a complete change of clothes, a ski mask, and a pistol.” I turned and looked at her. “Then there are the Polaroids. We’ve got a stack of nude snapshots that is over a foot tall.”
“Must be great decoration for the bulletin board.”
“Not really.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of the time they’re of people you wish hadn’t taken their clothes off.”
That image was broken by an ice slick where melted snow must have collected on a short overpass and frozen. Past that, there was another, and the truck kicked sideways; I steered into the skid and touched the brakes but, as the snow curtain blew away, the dark bulk of a vehicle loomed in front of me. I stomped the ABS brakes and felt the surge of the master cylinder as it attempted to keep me from locking the wheels and sliding into the ton of steel that lay on its side ahead of us. Even with the system-assisted brakes, I wasn’t going to get it stopped. In that split second, I saw the opening between the bridge guardrail and the undercarriage of the disabled car. The adrenalin-induced slow motion allowed me to categorize the median beyond as sloping but not bad enough to tip the Bullet; I just had to make sure I kept the tonnage pointed straight so that we didn’t end up like the other vehicle. As we went off the road, I could feel the sudden deceleration as the big tires snagged on the fresh snow. We slid down into the shallow frontage, up the other side, and slowly mired to a stop past the last post and out of harm’s way. I took a deep breath and looked down my outstretched arm, which was holding Dog from catapulting through the windshield and was pinning Maggie against her seat. Dog scrambled as I studied Maggie. “Are you all right?” She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.
I flipped on the light bar and hit the automatic program two on my radio, landing me at 155.445, the HP’s frequency. I needed a lot of help, and I needed it pretty fast. I handed her the mic. “Tell the highway patrol that you’ve got a 10–50 at mile marker 12 on route 87, that you need emergency response with an ambulance and a wrecker.” I smiled. “Got it?”
Her eyes were very large. “How did you know what mile marker?”
“Habit. Stay here, but look for me? 10–50, mile marker 12 on route 87, emergency ambulance and wrecker.”
I crunched through and sank past the powder to the slick surface below. The hard ring of ice at my knees was the only traction I could get, so I used it to bull my way up the slope. The air was burning in my lungs as I got to the shoulder. I looked back in the direction from which we had come; there hadn’t been anybody on the road since we had passed Sheridan, so I had a chance.
I looked at the car again and froze. Lying on its side was Isaac Bloomfield’s ’71 Mercedes.