They leaned their arms over the top rail of the corral at the opposite sides of the corner post. Each held a steaming cup of coffee and put a single boot up on the bottom rail. When they breathed or talked, small clouds of condensation puffed out and haloed their heads before dissipating.
“Like I said, long night,” Reed said.
“Seems like you want to tell me something.”
“That’s right, Joe.” There was gravity in Reed’s words.
“Then you’d best get to it,” Joe said. “I’ve got horses to load and a trainee to pick up, and if the sheriff or one of his spies sees us out here talking, he’ll think we’re plotting against him.”
Reed barked a laugh. “At this point, he’s probably already convinced of that. At least as far as I’m concerned.”
Joe sipped his coffee and waited.
“Since I’ve worked at the department,” Reed said, “I can’t remember more of a clusterfuck than we’ve got going right now. And the timing! Just a few weeks until the election. I should be kind of happy, I guess, but I almost feel sorry for that idiot of a sheriff right now.”
“Meaning what?” Joe asked.
“Well, the triple homicide, of course,” Reed said. “We’re not getting anywhere on that. We’ve notified the FBI, but we haven’t made a request for assistance. State DCI boys are bumping into each other in the office, but until something breaks, we’ve got nowhere to run with it. Ballistics is inconclusive, other than they were all shot with a big projectile that passed through their bodies and can’t be found. No one’s come forward to link them up, and nobody seems to know anything about why they were in that boat in the first place.”
Joe looked into the top of his coffee cup, because he couldn’t meet Reed’s eyes.
Reed said, “On top of all this, we get a call from Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein. She’s a psychologist from Winchester. You know her?”
Joe shook his head no.
“She’s… interesting. Anyway, this psychologist was in a house with a man named Bad Bob Whiteplume out on the res.”
“I know Bob,” Joe said, looking up.
“Anyway, according to this Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein, she was staying over with Bad Bob at his place Monday night and someone started honking their horn outside about three-thirty in the morning and wouldn’t stop. Bad Bob went outside to see what the problem was in his bathrobe and never came back. She thinks something might have happened to him and she’s raising hell with the sheriff to start a search.”
“Did she hear an argument or a fight?”
“No. She was in the back room.”
“She didn’t see anything?”
“No.”
“Why’d she wait two days to call?” Joe asked.
“Actually, she didn’t,” Reed said. “She called Tuesday. But with everything we’ve got going on, nobody got back to her. That really hacked her off.”
“I see,” Joe said.
“So when Bob didn’t show up later and nobody from the sheriff’s department came out, this doctor went on the warpath, so to speak.”
“So to speak,” Joe echoed.
“She started calling everybody. The newspaper, the radio station, all the television folks in Billings and Casper. Even the governor. She accused the department of racism because we didn’t respond quickly.”
Joe looked up. “Well…”
“I know,” Reed said, shaking his head. “But that sort of thing happens all the time on the res. We all know it. People just kind of come and go. We don’t get too worked up about it until we know someone’s really missing and the Feds give us the go-ahead since they’ve got primary jurisdiction.”
“Was this your decision not to call her back?” Joe asked.
Reed shook his head. “No, it was McLanahan’s. But it doesn’t reflect very well on any of us.”
“Probably shouldn’t,” Joe said.
“Anyway,” Reed said, “what happened happened. The result was the mayor and the city council called McLanahan in yesterday to demand some answers. Nobody likes it that we’ve got unsolved murders like this, but it’s even worse when the whole department is accused of racism. Nobody likes us making this kind of news, especially the sheriff. I almost feel sorry for him, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
Joe clucked his tongue. He thought he knew where this was going but didn’t want to encourage it.
“That’s not all,” Reed said. “About eleven last night, we got a call from the FBI in Cheyenne. They wanted to see if we could confirm the fact that our person of interest in the triple homicides, Nate Romanowski, was the son of one Gordon Romanowski of Colorado Springs, Colorado.”
Joe felt his throat go dry.
“Seems a body was found in the senior Romanowski’s place. No ID, but a massive head wound that sounds suspiciously like our three rubes from the boat.”
“No ID?” Joe asked.
“That’s what they said. We don’t have a lot more information on it yet, but they’re investigating. You know the Feds-they don’t share information. They just collect it and make their case and keep us in the dark pretty much.”
“Do they think the body was Gordon Romanowski?”
“No,” Reed said. “That they’re sure about. But they said it looks like Gordon and his family-a second wife and two little girls-have split the scene. No one can locate them.”
Joe’s head spun. He’d checked the falconry website that morning and there had been no new entries.
“I got the impression there were some other unexplained things going on down there in Colorado Springs,” Reed said. “They wouldn’t tell us what was going on, but maybe there were other bodies found. I don’t know.”
“Man oh man,” Joe said, and whistled.
“So because of this mess we’ve got,” Reed said, leaning forward on the rail so he could get closer to Joe, “McLanahan is personally leading the Whiteplume investigation, so he assigned me as lead investigator on the triple homicides. He called the mayor and the editor of the newspaper last night to let them know. He hung me out to dry and set me up to fail. It was a good move on his part, I’ll give that to him. This way, when the election comes around, the voters will have a choice of the racist incumbent who has been there for a while and the incompetent deputy who can’t solve a triple homicide. It evens the playing field, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yup.”
“I need to ask you something,” Reed said, his voice dropping. “I know we’re friends, but I’ve got a job to do.”
Here it comes, Joe thought.
“I know you’re close with Romanowski,” Reed said. “So I’ve got to ask you if you’ve been in contact with him the last couple of days. In any way.”
Joe looked up. “I talked to him a couple of nights ago.”
Reed’s face hardened.
“He told me he didn’t commit murder,” Joe said. “I believe him.”
“You knew we wanted to talk with him,” Reed said.
Joe nodded. “And there wasn’t-and isn’t-an arrest warrant. I could have asked him to voluntarily show up at your office for questioning, but he wouldn’t have done it.”
Reed said softly, “I appreciate you being straight with me.”
Joe looked away again.
“Now I’ve got to ask you if you’ve been in contact with him in any form the last couple of days.”
Joe said, “I haven’t.”
“But you’ll let me know, right? Now that our department and the Feds are wanting to talk to him?”
“The Feds have been wanting to talk to him for years,” Joe said. “That’s nothing new.”
“But a dead body in his father’s house is.”
