I still couldn’t feel anything behind me, so I snuck a hand around to make sure I wasn’t half-assed. “Speaking of, did Duane let them out after me?”
“Yeah. He says he saw the flashlight and turned the dogs loose.”
“Where is he?”
“Outside in my unit. I thought you’d want to talk to him.”
“Boy howdy.”
“I can’t believe he’s dead.” People respond to the death of a loved one in different ways; Duane’s was the stunned way. He sank quietly into the backseat, picked his stocking feet up, and then set them down. We had his boots, and the smell of his socks in the close space was enough to take the hair out of our noses. “You’re sure he’s dead?”
“I’m afraid so.” I was having a hard time sitting on one cheek because even with the local, a dull throb was setting in. I took my hat off and put it on the dash of Vic’s vehicle. I held her clipboard up so that I could make out the notes from her previous interview. “Duane, when did you come out here looking for the dogs?”
He pointed at Vic, who was in the passenger seat. “I already told her.”
“Tell me.”
He sighed, and his voice sounded like a recording. “Close to midnight.”
“You turn the dogs out that late?”
“Yunh-huh, it’s the only place I can turn them loose that’s fenced in, otherwise they run off. Check with Mike Thomas, they been over to his place a bunch of times.”
I flipped to the next page but then let it fall back and looked at him. “Duane, I need to ask you something.”
He continued to stare at the floor mats. “Yunh-huh.”
“When I found your grandfather, your boot prints went right up to and then past where he died. Is it possible that you walked by him when you were looking for the dogs and just didn’t see him?”
He began searching the inside of the vehicle for answers. “I don’t know. I just . . .” He clutched his knuckles together.
“Duane, why don’t you tell me what you were up to this evening? Maybe we can get a closer idea about the time if you tell me.”
He thought about it. “Gina and me went to the movies again in Sheridan.”
“You guys go to the movies a lot, don’t you, Duane?”
“Yunh-huh.” He scratched his nose. “When we got home, I drank a few beers and kinda passed out.”
Vic and I looked at each other.
I turned back to him. “Passed out.”
“Yunh-huh. Gina woke me up when she went to work, and then I let the dogs out.”
“What time was that?”
He looked confused. “What?”
“When Gina went to work and you let the dogs out, what time was that?”
“She usually goes to work around eleven-thirty.” He thought about it. “Yunh-huh, it was eleven-thirty, I remember looking at the clock.”
“You’re sure?”
His gaze came up but didn’t make my face. “Is that important?”
“Maybe.” I put the clipboard down on the seat. “Duane, I’m trying to understand something and maybe you can help me with this. If your grandfather was trying to get home, why did he go to the junkyard?”
His eyes finally leveled on mine, and he looked genuinely confused. “I don’t know.”
“Well, his tracks led me down off the ridge to where the path cuts off to the junkyard. Do you know that spot, where the apple trees are?”
“Yunh-huh.”
I waited.
He looked uncomfortable and picked at a hole in the thigh of his coveralls. The quiet settled on all of us like a wool blanket, itches and all. “Is there anything else up there?”
“Nunh-uh.”
It was a quick response, too quick, as the cliché goes. “Aren’t those old tunnel doors up there? The ones that run out from the basement of the main house to where the cathouse stables used to be?”
He wasn’t so quick with a response this time. “Yunh-huh . . . Yeah, I guess.”
I glanced at Vic, who clinched an eyebrow back at me quicker than Duane would’ve ever noticed. “So, why wouldn’t your grandfather have just gone in the tunnel doors and made his way to the house and out of the weather?”
“Oh, those doors don’t work.”
I nodded and scooted farther up on my good cheek. “Then why is there a brand-new padlock on them?”
It took him a few moments to come up with something for that one, and when he did, it sounded like he had been coached. “Gaddamned insurance—they said we had to lock it up so kids wouldn’t fall in there and hurt themselves.”
“Can you get in the tunnel?”
“Nunh-uh, it’s collapsed.”
“From the basement of the house?”
He picked at the growing tear on his pants. “Yeah, I mean . . . a little ways, but there’s snakes.”
Again, he sounded like the dead man. “Snakes.”
“Yunh-huh.”
I looked at Vic and then back at him. “In February.”
He looked at Vic and then back to me. “Yunh-huh.”
There was a growing glow of gold- tinged red with just a sliver of platinum in the sky as Vic and I stood, looking off to the eastern horizon. The snow had stopped, but it was still diabolically cold and windy. I blew a thick pillar of breath and watched as it quickly dissipated between us. “Sailor take warning.”
She studied me. “Yunh-huh.”
Maybe our conversations were piling up in Nebraska after all. “Gee, Vic, do you think Duane is lying?”
She smiled and stamped her feet a couple of times, shuffling her Browning tactical boots and turning her full back to the wind. “As fast as a dog can trot.”
I groaned, figuring this was the first of many dog remarks to come. “Did you get a lot of photos?”
“Yes.”
“Print castings?”
“No, I did not haul plaster out there; it would’ve just frozen. We have his boots and believe me, the tracks are his—the boots match the prints, the prints match the boots.”
“Fresh?”
She nodded. “We can look at them a little closer in the photos, but I’d say the timing works out pretty close to what he said in his statement. That part didn’t change between my interview and yours.”
She looked up at me from under the black rabbit-fur flap of her bomber hat, which indicated that after two weeks of negative temperatures, she was now serious about keeping warm. She resembled Anna Karenina, the kind of woman that if you want to kill, you have to hit with a train. I loved the way she looked in that hat, but I’d never tell her because she’d stop wearing it.
“I wanna look in the basement. Do you wanna look in the basement?”
“Yep.”
She glanced back at Duane, still seated in her unit and wondering what we were talking about. “He’s not going to want us to look in the basement.”
“No.”
“We need a warrant.”
I started toward her unit. “Not necessarily.”
I closed the junkyard gate and locked it with Geo’s keys. Vic drove us back toward the Stewart house and adjacent lodgings. “What’d you do with the dogs, Duane?”
“I put ’em in the big house.” He paused for a second as he continued to stare at nothing. “I feel really bad about that, Sheriff. I didn’t know that was you out there in the yard.”
He looked genuinely sorry, and I felt even worse about having peppered him with questions about his dead grandfather, but there was something about that basement that he and the recently deceased weren’t telling me. “Hey, Duane, do those dogs have their shots?”
“Oh, yeah. Tags and everything.”
“Well, do you think it’d be all right if we swung by the house so I could read them? I really don’t want to have to take those precautionary rabies shots if I don’t have to.”
His eyes didn’t make contact with mine when he responded. “Yunh-huh, sure.” We drove down the lane and made a right. “You’re not gonna shoot Butch and Sundance, are you?”