He took another deep inhale from the cigarette cupped in his hand. “Said they called him in on a Sunday morning, real early, and told him to get set up. He said pretty soon they brought Cly in and sat him down, so he hooked him up to the machine and started askin’ him what they call-”
“Control questions.”
“That’s it.” He nodded and looked into the fire. “Well, after he verifies that the lights are on in the room, his name is Cliff Cly, and that yes, the smirking son-of-a-bitch has lied to people that are close to him, the sheriff comes in with some guy in a suit and has Mike unhook Cly.”
I tried not to smile, since without the bandage my cheek hurt even more.
“I just said Mike, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“God damn it.” He shook his head and took another drag from his cigarette. “I’m not really good at this undercover stuff.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Well, they unhook Cliff, and Sandy Sandberg tells Mike that the three of them weren’t ever there.”
I sat up a little. “Sandy?”
“Yep.”
“What about the guy in the suit; Mike have any idea who he was or who he was with?”
“Nope.” I looked at him and thought about it just as a scattered beam of light wavered from behind us and then down the rocky path. Benjamin dropped an armload of gray, splintered lumber beside the fire, and Hershel looked up at the lad as Dog came over and sat. “That’d be about a third of what we need for the night.”
“A third?”
The old puncher’s voice was certain as he flicked more ashes into the fire. “A third.”
His thin shoulders slumped, and the miniature cowboy trudged away only to stop and look back at Dog. “You comin’?”
Dog lay down and placed his head on his massive paws. I nudged him with my boot. “C’mon, earn your keep.”
The boy patted his leg, just as I had. “C’mon.” He slowly got to his paws.
“Good boy.” Dog trotted off after him as I pushed my hat back and came clean. “Not as if you didn’t know, I’m not Eric Boss. My name is Walt Longmire, and I’m sheriff of Absaroka County.”
Hershel turned, and I watched as the flickering light planed off the hard surfaces of his chin and cheekbones. “Longmire did you say?” I nodded. “By God, I think I know your people-your father have a place north of here?”
“He did.”
“Passed?”
“Quite a while back.”
“You got the place leased out to the Gronebergs?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head some more and flipped the butt into the fire. “Well, I’ll be damned… you’ve come home.” The old cowboy pulled the second of his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “So, what are you doin’ out here after so long?”
I thought about how much I wanted to reveal to Hershel, how much the cowboy already knew and, if I trusted him, how far did that trust go? If Cliff Cly didn’t take a polygraph, which Sandy Sandberg said he did, and somebody stepped in to keep it from happening-there were only a few possibilities of what that could mean. It was either Sandy, who wasn’t playing fair, or it was the Feds who had taken a hand. If it was the Feds, then in what capacity? Wade Barsad had been under the auspices of the witness protection program, but why would they have brought an agent in? To pressure Wade on the names and money he’d absconded with from his business associates along the Garden State Parkway and in Ohio?
I figured a good offense was the best defense and decided to try a little lie detecting of my own. Seeing as how clinical psychologists had come to the conclusion that the machines were only correct about 61 percent of the time-only slightly better than random-I took a chance with the police officer’s best friend: instinct. “Hershel, are you involved in any way with this foolishness?”
“No.” He seemed shocked that I’d ask. “No, I’m not.”
I believed him. “Good.” I gathered my legs beneath me and stood. I walked a little stiffly to the edge of the precipice and looked out over the Powder River country. The harvest moon was just beginning to stare at the hills, and the long shadows from the rocks and few junipers cascaded through the draws and gulleys toward the Bighorns.
It was a stark beauty, but you can’t come home again, no matter what Hershel said. I could feel an urgency to get back to my proper place in the rolling hills under the mountains. Before I could, though, I was obligated to Mary to find the truth. She had become my trust when Sandy had sent her to my jail, and I was bound to find out what happened the night that Wade Barsad was killed.
Something felt wrong, and that itch without an ability to scratch was needling me from somewhere in my subconscious. “I need you to tell me everything that happened that night.”
“I already did.”
I pulled my hat down against the wind and turned to look at him. “No, you didn’t really, and when we talked, no offense, you were drunk.” He pulled at a long earlobe, stuck the cigarette that he’d been holding into his mouth, and lit it with a piece of smoldering firewood. “I know that Mary was there. I know that you were there, and I know that Bill Nolan was also there. Now, was there anybody else there?”
He looked up at me. “No, nobody.” Then his eyes dropped to the fire as he thought about it. “I mean Wade but he was dead.”
“When you got there, Mary was in the yard with the rifle on her lap?”
“Yep.”
“The breech was open on the. 22, and the magazine was empty?”
“Yep.”
“Then what?”
He flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “I took the rifle away from her and went into the house.” He looked up at me to make sure this is what I wanted to hear, but I said nothing. “He was in there.”
“Where?”
“Layin’ across the bed.”
“He was dead, you’re sure?”
“God, yes. She’d shot him in the head.” He corrected himself. “He’d been shot a half-dozen times, and there was so much blood that it soaked the mattress and poured off onto the floor.”
“Did you touch him or anything in the room?”
He was adamant. “No, I just backed out of that room; I mean, Jesus, the barn was on fire, she was sittin’ out in the yard like it’s all a dream-”
“You had your gun with you, didn’t you say?”
He gestured toward the repeater lying across his saddle. “I had that Henry. When I got woke up by the fire, I brought it along ’cause I didn’t know what the situation was, and I learned a long time ago that unknown situations with a gun are better than unknown situations without one.”
Boy howdy. “What’d you do with the Yellow Boy?”
“Left it in the scabbard on my horse, tied out at the fence; that horse wasn’t goin’ anywhere near that fire.”
I crossed my arms and looked into the flames licking up and around the broken and splintered wood, which reminded me that Benjamin and Dog were due back soon. “So after you left him in there, and her on the lawn, what’d you do?”
“I ran over to Bill Nolan’s and got him.”
“You didn’t think to use the phone at the Barsads?”
He looked genuinely discomforted. “I didn’t-”
I interrupted, saving him the embarrassment. It wasn’t unusual in just such a situation for any of us of a certain age to forget about modern conveniences, or mistrust them, and simply run for help. “You wake Bill up?”
