He set the lantern—damn thing was still burning, even after all the abuse it had taken of late—on Travis’s table and carried the blanket to the door.
It didn’t take much to extinguish the fire there. A little snow did the trick. But by then, of course, there was no sign of the three boys. Little shits. Longarm hoped they hadn’t taken any souvenirs with them. Like, for instance the calling card of whoever it was who’d killed the girl known as Nancy.
Longarm cussed and grumbled some, but there really wasn’t anything to be gained by that. After a few moments he shut his mouth and then the door, in that order, and went on about the business that had brought him back out there.
He hadn’t thought to look for the girl’s clothes before, or to go through them or her handbag, if she’d been carrying one that last day she spent on earth … if she’d been carrying one and if he could find it now, that is.
Not that he was conducting an investigation here or anything.
He was not.
After all, he had no jurisdiction here and so, of course, he wasn’t actually looking into the case.
He just, well, wanted to be prepared. In case Mayor Parminter should happen to ask for Longarm’s advice again some time in the future.
Surely there couldn’t be anything wrong with that.
Longarm adjusted the wick of the much-abused lantern, then set about conducting a slow and thorough search through the Travis cabin.
Chapter 14
The technical term for what Longarm found was … nada. Nothing. Not a damn thing worth bothering with. And assorted stuff in the same useless vein.
Before he could be sure of that, though, he learned that Darby Travis had excellent taste in whiskey, which he kept hidden from casual visitors, and that the old man had enough gold dust tucked away in a cleverly hidden box to keep him in comfort for some years to come. Travis most definitely intended to return home from wherever he’d gone; no one would walk off and leave that much raw gold behind. Not even someone who’d just committed murder and panicked.
Longarm put the cabin owner’s things back where he’d found them, and concentrated on the items that he was sure belonged to the girl. Those were few enough.
Her dress was plain, cheap, and much patched. Her coat was threadbare and as plain as the dress. Her shoes, on the other hand, were almost new. He suspected she must have treated herself, perhaps out of her earnings at Norma Brantley’s house of happiness. Those, however, were the only things he found that he could be sure would have belonged to the girl.
If Nancy had carried a handbag with her on the Sunday past, Longarm could not find it now. Which did not prove anything. If the party or parties who killed her went in for robbery too, either as the initial reason for jumping her or possibly as an afterthought once she was dead, they very likely could have taken the handbag with them. In that case it should now be in a trash heap somewhere in or near Kittstown, or under a snowdrift, where it was likely to lie undetected until the next thaw.
As for evidence, though … nada, nothing worth a damn.
Longarm sighed and took a final look around the cabin. Nancy’s body had long since been decently covered again after its violation—that, at least, was the way Longarm thought of it—by the local boys.
Hoping to repair the lock enough to avoid a repeat of that visit, he took a few minutes to examine the hasp on the cabin door, and discovered that it was doubly busted. Not only was the padlock broken, the screws holding the iron hasp had been jimmied out of the rotting wood and then pressed finger-tight back in place.
Longarm found that to be at least mildly interesting. Not that he’d ever had any idea that Darby Travis was a suspect in the killing, but this pretty much proved it. After all, Darby Travis had a key and did not need to bust up his own property.
The youngsters who reported the body to the mayor admitted to breaking the padlock.
So it must have been Nancy’s killer who pried the hasp loose.
Damn it anyway, Longarm thought. Why couldn’t the son of a bitch have left something, forgotten something, given some sort of indication of who or what he was. There was nothing. Longarm closed the door and wedged a scrap of wood under it to keep it from being blown open by the swirling winds, then arranged the jimmied hasp and broken lock so that from a distance they would give the appearance, false though it was, of being intact.
Maybe that would be enough to keep any more gawkers from sneaking in.
And tomorrow, if he could, or anyway as soon as the storm permitted, Longarm figured to have whoever it was in Kittstown who provided mortuary services pick the girl’s body up and see that it was properly attended.
The thought of Nancy, so young and so pretty and with that tear frozen on her cheek, lying abandoned in a frigid shack with nothing but pack rats for company … that bothered Longarm.
Dammit, he would see that the girl was taken care of if he had to pay for the burial out of his own pocket.
He pulled the fur cap low on his forehead, turned his coat collar high, and set out into the force of the storm once more.
He was already back in town, walking in the lee of a block of tall buildings where the wind was broken and there was a sense of relative warmth, when someone took a shot at him.
Chapter 15
It sounded like the world’s biggest bumblebee zipping and sizzling past his left ear. Except no bee alive could ever fly that fast. And there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of bees that went out for a look-see in the middle of a Wyoming blizzard.
Besides, Longarm was kinda cheating when he recognized the sound of the bullet; he’d heard its like many a
