“Are you aware that there was a large insurance claim that could result in a substantial amount-”
He laughed, and it was not kind. “Are you joking, Sheriff? Whatever amount of money Wade might’ve made from all his wheelings and dealings out there, he most assuredly owed more than that to somebody, somewhere. I’m still paying off some of his debts here. He owed everybody, and I’m sure that when all the parties concerned are through picking the financial carcass clean, there will be nothing left but debt for anyone who had anything to do with my brother. That was the way he did business.”
“Mr. Barnecke, you mentioned your brother’s other wives?”
“Sheriff, do you mind if I ask what all these questions are about? My understanding was that there was pretty conclusive evidence that his most recent wife killed him and that she had confessed to the crime.”
I thought about Mary Barsad, who was only two rooms away. “Well, the evidence is inconclusive, but Mrs. Barsad did confess-”
He interrupted. “Then what is this all about?”
Saizarbitoria, holding a cardboard tray of food from the Busy Bee, appeared in the doorway. “There are some questions that-”
There was a loud sigh. “If there are questions, then why hasn’t the FBI asked them, or the state police investigators, or the Campbell County sheriff, for that matter?”
I glanced up at Vic, who shook her head. “Well-”
“Why am I talking to you?”
I stared at the red button. “I thought you might be interested, concurrent with the investigation-”
“Sheriff, I’ve got a news flash for you-I don’t give a shit. Okey? Wade’s dead and from all the information I’ve been getting, it sounds like his wife did it. Now, unless you’ve got some more information that I don’t know about?”
Vic, Ruby, Saizarbitoria, and Dog all looked at me. “No, I don’t.”
“Then I’d like for you to copy down this phone number.” I picked up a pen and dutifully jotted the number. “That’s my attorney, Sheldon Siegel, any more contact you wish to have with me can be done through him. Now, if there isn’t anything else, I’ve got to attend to an impacted molar and a root canal.”
After bidding a not-so-fond farewell, I was glad I wasn’t having any dental work done in Youngstown, Ohio, this afternoon. I looked up at my attentive staff and, as I’d expected, Vic was the first to speak.
“What a fucksicle.”
Ruby adjusted her reading glasses. “Doesn’t appear to be a great deal of love lost there, does it?”
Sancho looked at all of us. “I take it the brother was less than cooperative?”
I stood but left my hat on my desk. “You could say that.” I crossed to the doorway and took the prisoner’s lunch from him.
The Basquo handed the receipt to Ruby and looked at me. “You going to try today?”
Despite our brief conversation, Mary Barsad was on the fourth day of trying to starve herself. Dog followed me back to the holding cells and to the bag of food that would most likely go uneaten.
She was sitting in her usual position when I turned the corner, and I pulled the folding chair over to sit with her. She momentarily uncovered her face from her hands to glance at Dog but then once again disappeared behind the long, thin fingers.
“Lunch.” I opened the bag on my lap and looked inside. “Grilled cheese sandwich, fries with seasoned salt, a salad, and an apple.” Dog looked at me expectantly, having been the beneficiary of Mary Barsad’s resistance so far. “You know, I’m going to stop giving your food to Dog-he’s getting fat.”
She didn’t say anything.
I took a breath. “Mary, if this situation continues I’m not going to have any choice but to have you transferred back to the Campbell County jail and then to Lusk and the women’s prison, where you will be forcibly fed with a tube.”
She still said nothing, and her hands remained covering her face as I sat there holding her lunch. Maybe it was the phone conversation I’d just had, or the situation she was putting me in, but I was getting a little irritated. “You don’t talk, you don’t eat-what exactly do you do?”
To my surprise, her hands slipped down a little. Her voice was perfectly reasonable. “Haven’t you heard? I shoot people in the head.”
The unearthly azure eyes had focused on me for the first time in ninety-six hours; I thought about another tall blonde I’d been unable to save and swallowed a little of my past.
October 28, 10:33 A.M.
Hershel was looking at the horse trailer Benjamin wanted that neither of them could afford. “How you feeling?”
A somewhat unfocused picture of hung over, he turned and looked at me as he rolled himself a cigarette. “So, why did you let my twelve-year-old horse step on my head?”
“I think it was that twenty-year-old scotch that stepped on your head.” I looked at the powdered paint that was flaking off of the four-stall horse trailer. “What’s it worth?”
The old cowboy shrugged, and I think it hurt. He pulled the trademark Blue Tip match from his hat and lit the hand-rolled cigarette. I counted six matches in his hatband and figured Hershel was pacing his cigarettes these days. “ ’Bout a thousand, maybe.”
Two shotgun stalls with butt-bars and a rotten wooden floor, questionable tires, and broken plastic windows-I figured the auctioneers would be lucky if they got seven-fifty. Benjamin scuffed a boot in the sand of the arena. “I heard you were thinking of taking this little outlaw up to the Battlement?”
Hershel looked at the boy and then back to the faded cobalt paint of the vintage trailer. “Might as well be a million.” He smiled bitterly at Benjamin with his missing teeth. “I’m so stony broke that if they was sellin’ steamboats on the Powder River for a dime apiece, all I could do is run up and down the bank yellin’ ain’t that cheap.”
I glanced at Juana and she rolled her eyes, and the two of us watched the auctioneer attempt to get another twenty dollars out of a manure spreader before moving on to the object of our two cowboys’ affection. “Why do you suppose Nolan is selling his place?”
She leaned against the trailer and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “He was going to get rid of it because he didn’t want to deal with any more of Wade’s crap.”
I joined her and leaned against the trailer. Bill looked pretty satisfied; evidently the sale was going well. “Has anybody told him that’s not much of a problem anymore?”
“Yeah, but I think he got used to the idea of selling the place, so he’s just going ahead with it.”
The familiar auctioneer’s voice echoed in the confines of the building. “Now we have a prime example of a nineteen-and-sixty-eight, dubya-dubya brand, straight-load, bumper pull trailer. What do I hear, what do I hear! Gimme a thousand to start, a thousand to start! Here we go!”
We weren’t particularly going, because no one was bidding.
Larry Brannian was the auctioneer. He was from my county, and from where I stood I could read BRANNIAN AUC-TIONEERING SERVICES, DURANT, WYOMING, on the PA system. He was a comfortable old cowboy and the best auctioneer in the state, with a turquoise and coral bolo tie that bobbed up and down on the freshly starched opening of his white dress shirt when he spoke. He was a little embarrassed at having opened the bid too high. “Eight-fifty, do I hear eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty-”
The crowd remained unmoved.
“Seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd dollars for this fine piece of equipment with tires that…” He peered to get a better look at the bald and dry-rotted tires to our left. “Tires that hold aieeer!” There was a smattering of laughter from the crowd as his eyes caught mine, and he laughed. “Well, we must have some trouble around here somewheres.” I ducked my head and pulled my hat down just a little; I looked behind me as if Larry must’ve been talking about somebody else. The auctioneer was nothing if not quick on the uptake and rapidly changed the subject back to matters at hand. “Seven-hunerd?”
Another disaster averted, I watched the abject misery that passed between Benjamin and Hershel as the old cowpuncher started to raise his hand but then thought better of it. A spotter raised his arm and pointed toward an area we couldn’t see, which was blocked by the trailer itself. “Hup!”
“I got seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd, gimme seven-fifty?”
Mike Niall, who was leaning against the far wall, raised his head and nodded. Another spotter caught the
