Death Without Company

4

I told the ladies at vehicle registration to punch up Charlie Nurburn on the DMV computer and show me what they had or I was going to set fire to the place.

It didn’t take long for them to tell me zip, so I asked them how far back the data went. They asked me how far back I wanted to go. The ladies at vehicle registration were like that. After all the years of abuse at the hands of the local citizenry, they had developed the finely honed tact and manners of Russian wolfhounds. I asked for the forties, and they came forth grudgingly with nothing. I asked for the fifties, and they eventually showed me that Charlie had registered a 1950 Kaiser but had failed to pay taxes or registration a year later. He had also failed to have his driver’s license renewed. There were no further records to date. I asked them what a Kaiser looked like. They said it looked a lot like a Frazer. I asked them what a Frazer looked like. They said it looked like a Hudson. Before I left, I reminded them about the fire. They asked me when the fire was going to start so they could be sure to call the county commissioners and get them in the courthouse for a meeting. I told them I was going across the hall to the county clerk’s office. They said that was a good place to start a fire, that there was enough blue hair over there to burn down the whole damn county.

I walked across the hall and once again put forth the human query of Charlie Nurburn. Wyoming has no income tax, so I asked for anything the ladies there might have concerning Charlie’s birth, life, marriage, children, or death, not necessarily in that order. They were nicer than the ladies over in vehicle registration and came back with more. There were three birth certificates for his children, David in ’47 and the twins in ’48, a death certificate for the sad-eyed young lieutenant, circa 1972, and a marriage certificate dated 1946. Nothing else. No death certificate for Charlie Nurburn, so I copied down his social security number and warned them about the impending fire. They didn’t seem to care either way.

I walked down the hall past the stairs that led to the courtroom above but got corralled by Vern Selby. He wanted to talk about the outstanding warrants we had on people who had neglected to show up for jury duty, which told me that we might not have reached our quorum for the afternoon. He leaned an elbow on the newel post like Clifton Webb in repose and twisted the end of his mustache; it was officially winter because the judge had grown his matinee-idol lip warmer. He didn’t seem pleased. “ We only had seven jurors today.”

“Maybe you need to get more entertainment values involved, you know, bang the gavel more?”

He studied me a while longer. “I knew you were the wrong person to talk to about such things.”

I shrugged and headed for the assessor’s office but stopped after a step. “Vern, do you remember a Charlie Nurburn from the southern part of the county, married to Mari Baroja?” I was saving the lawyers as a final connection.

“Related to Kay Baroja-Lofton over in Sheridan and Carol Baroja-Calloway in Miami?”

I should have known. I noticed he didn’t mention Lana; her not being a lawyer probably dropped her down to the level of the rest of us mere mortals. “He was the father, of those two and another one.”

“David Nurburn?”

“Yes.” So Lana’s father had kept his father’s name, but she hadn’t. Interesting.

“I believe he was about the same age as my William, and you, come to think of it.” The judge contemplated the acoustical tiles in the ceiling for a moment. I wondered how he could play with his mustache that much and still leave it intact. “I don’t seem to recall the father.”

“He wasn’t on the scene for long.”

“Ah,” he smiled. “But I remember her.” I was a little taken aback by the smile. “She used to come to town on Thursday afternoons, park her car in the exact same spot. I used to watch her from the windows of my office as she walked up Main Street.”

The image of his honor hanging out the second-story window of the courthouse and watching Mari Baroja sashay down the sidewalk was almost too much. “Jeez, Vern. You’re a pervert.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “She was a beautiful woman and very hard not to look at.” He took his elbow from the post and patted it in thanks for supporting him. Even inanimate objects were good for votes in Vern’s book. “In any case, I’m not the one you should be talking to. Lucian used to have lunch with her every Thursday, like clockwork.” He stepped down to my level, turned the corner, and carefully put on his coat and muffler. “At least I assume it was lunch

…”

I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings, until I became aware that the judge had stopped, turned, and was looking at me. “How is she?”

“Dead.”

He continued adjusting his coat. “I suspected as much; too bad, really.” He misunderstood my staring at him. “One hates to see that much beauty go out of the world these days.” The next thing I knew, he was standing next to me with his gloved hand on my arm. “Walter, are you all right?” I mumbled something, and he nodded. “Let’s see about getting some more jurors, shall we?”

After the stun had worked its way off, I went into the assessor’s office and asked Lois Kolinsky if she had anything on Charlie Nurburn. She looked up with her little Mrs. Santa Claus glasses and asked me who was asking, and I remembered to tell her about the fire. She snickered and looked for the ledgers as I stood there thinking.

Lucian had lied. Lucian had lied when he said that he hadn’t seen her for all those years. I looked up at the large map of the county that was illuminated by the flat, winter sun and wondered where in the hell I was. The place on the wall wasn’t where I happened to be as of late; I was in a strange new place, a place where the people I had safely put on shelves were wandering around getting into messy things.

Lois came back into the room, placed a large ledger on the cast-off library table, and opened it to the exact page held by her index finger. I pulled out a chair. It amused me that the two places that had computers couldn’t seem to slap their asses with both hands, but the nice little old lady in the assessor’s office could conjure Charlie Nurburn in a matter of moments. Always follow the money; rendering unto Caesar what is his may not be pleasurable, but the records are great. I was having second thoughts about the computer; maybe I didn’t need one after all. I could use the extra money for a lie detector.

We have ledgers like these back at the office, three of them to be precise. They are beautiful, handbound leather with golden edging and marbled inner leaves with information that stretched back to the mid-1800s. Now we have floppy discs. The ledger was alphabetically organized, so it didn’t take long to find Charlie on the open page; he was the only Nurburn in the county. He had bought a small property in 1946, about 260 acres adjacent to the 50,000-acre Four Brothers Ranch; the brothers had sold it to him. Both Mari and Charlie were on the deed. He had paid the taxes on the property until 1950, whereupon he must have piled his syphilitic, wife-beating ass into his Kaiser, whatever it looked like, and driven off into the sunset. Or not.

Mari had paid the taxes on the property beginning in 1951. The Four Brothers had been split between her and her cousin, the priest, according to the Will of her father, the last of the four brothers to die. I asked for the B book. She said that it had been a popular letter lately. I asked her why, and she said that Kay Baroja-Lofton had been in yesterday to check things out on her mother’s behalf and that Carol Baroja-Calloway had requested information to be faxed to Calloway, Moore, and Gardner in Miami; the letters in Mari’s room were from that firm. It just kept getting better and better.

Where was Charlie Nurburn? I looked at the nine-numeral scrawl that I had made on the scrap pad. It was time to use my own resources. I left the courthouse, completely forgetting to set fire to it.

I keyed the mic. “Charlie Nurburn.” I read her the number from the piece of paper.

Static. “Who is this character?”

“Somebody I’m not so sure I want to find.”

It was only forty-five miles south to Swayback Road, then another three miles east toward the Wallows where the Four Brothers Ranch was located, or where I thought it was located. As I drove down the interstate, the tailgate of my truck buffeted by the gusts from the northwest, I started feeling like I was being pushed.

I had stood there in the doorway of Lana’s shop. It was one of those moments when you weren’t quite sure if what you heard was what you thought you had heard. In the second that it took me to make up my mind, she laughed. It was a wonderfully musical laugh, one that you couldn’t help but join. After I did, questions didn’t seem appropriate. I told her that if she wanted to see her grandmother, she could probably do it this evening; but, on the lonely stretch of highway between Durant and Powder Junction, with the Big Horn Mountains guarding my right and the Powder River flats racing east, my mind began to wander back to a man who had had the one woman in his life taken away. It’s one thing if she’d been gone but, as near as I could tell, she had only been forty-five miles distant.

There’s no way I’d have been able to stay away. I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact. It was like the combination of moisture and sunshine on wood; sometimes it turned out all right, most of the times it didn’t, but you couldn’t ignore its strength. I had always dealt with passion with an evenhanded balance of attraction and mistrust, but I was talking about Lucian Connally, and he was a mechanism that operated on the caprice of passion as if it were jet fuel. Thursday midmornings would never be the same for me again. Where was Charlie Nurburn, and what was he feeling lately, if anything? Maybe I needed to see what Mari Baroja was about, but if that were the case then I would have to make an extended search in better weather for the place where a small house leaned away from the blows of the wind.

There was an aged wooden sign for the Four Brothers Ranch, which contrasted with the new one that read PRONGHORN DRILLING, RIG # 29, when I cut off the paved road and onto the county gravel. The snow wasn’t too deep, and there appeared to have been quite a bit of traffic as late as this morning. I slowed to a stop as I rounded the hill that led to the small valley where the homestead still sat, the snow sweeping around me and dropping into the rolling hills of the high plains. I thought about those hard men on their short horses. I wondered if they were still here and if they were aware that Mari was now with them.

I watched the sage straining at its roots to escape the force of the northwest wind, edged the truck farther out on the road that followed the hills, and descended into the valley of the four brothers and one lost girl. I buttoned my coat, flipped the sheepskin collar up, and twisted my hat down tight. With the sun starting to ebb, the temperature was dropping fast, and I was just starting to hear the little voices that spoke to you when you were out where you shouldn’t be when nobody knew where you were and the weather was getting bad.

I stumbled up to the first wheel hub and locked it in, trudging through the midcalf drifts to the other side and locking the mechanism there as well. Over the sound of the big ten-cylinder engine, I listened to the keening of the wind and to the cry of things you didn’t hear in town. If I could just separate Mari Baroja’s voice from the screaming cacophony, I felt that she would tell me the things I needed to know. There was a small switchback around a juniper tree at the base of the hill where the snow had filled a trough, but other tires had busted their way through and had created a path of sorts. I drove up the slight grade and stopped at the edge. This area was slightly sheltered, and the snow blew over the cab of the truck like a fake ceiling.

I had wondered what it was that could be of so much importance and, now that I was looking at it, I felt like a fool. I could make out at least a dozen methane wellheads, containment tanks, and a compression station. If all the wells I could see, and the ones I suspected I couldn’t, were on line and producing, someone was making a lot of money. I followed the most recent set of tracks across the arch of the hill. From this vantage point, I could make out another three dozen wellheads. There was a vague outline of a drilling rig with numerous vehicles parked below it; I shifted into low and headed in that direction.

Methane development in the northern part of Wyoming had become a mixed blessing, and it seemed like every jackleg that could turn a wrench had suddenly become a roughneck. The amount of trucks with plates from Oklahoma and Texas had certainly increased, but the number of people who were actually benefiting financially from the methane boom was few. In Wyoming, there is a practice of carving off a portion of the mineral rights from a property at the point of sale, resulting in ranchers who had very little say over whom the leases were sold to and, consequently, who could drive on your land and pretty much do as they pleased. The methane industry’s propaganda poster children were the ones who had retained their mineral rights, could enforce a suitable surface agreement, and got a portion of the money from the gas that was produced.

The impact the industry had made on my life had been relatively negligible. Other than the odd roughneck getting overly self-medicated and needing some downtime in the jail, keeping the ranchers and the drillers from killing each other was about it. I suppose I looked at methane development as a false economy in a boom-and-bust cycle.

When I got to the site, there didn’t seem to be anybody outside, and there was no activity on the rig itself. I don’t know that much about methane drilling, but just about everything shuts down in my part of the world when the temperature closes in past zero. The printing on the truck doors read NORTHERN ROCKIES ENERGY EXPLORATION, an outfit out of Casper. I waited, but no one in the truck was moving very fast to see what I wanted; finally, the man in the driver’s seat tightened the hood of his Carhartt coveralls and climbed out. He walked in front of my truck, opened the door, and climbed in on the passenger side, slamming the door behind him.

He peeled the hood back, pulled the fleece scarf from his face, and revealed a set of pale blue eyes. He was of average height, but was disproportionately large in the shoulders and hands, one of which he had de-gloved and held out to me. Between the glove finger in his mouth and the amount of ferocious red beard he had to talk through, I had to listen carefully to understand him. “Wanna thank you for cumin’ down, but I think we got ’er under control.”

I looked at him. “No problem.” I kept looking at him in hopes that he would say something more on the offhand chance that I might understand it. I took the hand that was almost as large as my own. “Why don’t you just tell me all about it?”

We shook, and he nodded and pulled the hood all the way back to reveal a lot more red hair and a yellow Northern Rockies Energy Exploration hat. “He’s not a bad ol’ boy, he just gets carried away some times.” He looked at his lap. “I’m not gonna lie to you, mighta been some drugs. Shit, he’s so loopy he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.” He sniffed. “Just a little ol’ thirtytu.” I looked at Yukon Cornelius and raised an eyebrow. “Ah’m aw right.” He nodded. “Just glanced a rib.” He assisted the last statement by unzipping his jacket and poking a finger through what I assumed was a bullet hole in both the front and rear of his coat. There was a dark stain at his side where the blue plaid flannel was exposed, but he only shrugged and looked at me. “Just a little ol’ thirtytu.” He nodded some more. “Told ’em not to call yuh.”

As far as I knew, they hadn’t. “Well, I like to be informed when people are shooting each other in my county.” I pulled the aluminum form folder from the door pocket, placed it on the center console between us, and pulled my pen from my shirtfront. I clicked it. “What’s his name?”

He took a deep breath. “Cecil Keller.” He looked at me, and I was impressed by the direct and steady quality of his gaze. “Constable, I just don’ want him to get in trouble fer this.”

“You don’t want to lose him?”

He shrugged. “He’s just a dumb kid.”

After a moment, I clicked the pen closed and placed it on the clipboard. “What’s your name?”

He automatically stuck out his hand again. “Jess Aliff, foreman.”

We shook again. “Jess, unless you’re willing to press charges, seeing as how you’re the one that he shot, I can’t do too much about this, but I have to file a report on any gunshot wounds in my jurisdiction.” He nodded some more and pulled at a wayward blondish-red tuft just below his lower lip. “But I don’t suppose you’re planning on going to a hospital?”

He blew out a dismissal puff of air and looked at me. “Naw.”

“Well, then I guess there’s not a lot to do officially.” His mood visibly brightened. “But I don’t like the idea of drug-crazed individuals running around my county with unregistered weapons shooting people.” He nodded and did his best to look serious. “Mister Keller is going to have to come in with the gun and have a little chat with me tomorrow.”

We both nodded. I looked out the windshield at the silent rig and the assembled vehicles idling in the frigid air. “Quite an operation you’ve got going here.”

He followed my gaze. “Not today.”

“Just out of curiosity, what does an outfit like this produce in a day?”

He thought and pulled at the tuft again; I was starting to see a pattern. “Well, we’re on tap with three pods, the biggest on the tail end of the Big George coal seam, 220 heads.”

“High production?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Millions. I looked back out the windshield and let it sink in. “How long have you fellas been in operation here?”

“A little less than a year.”

That was a lot of methane being pulled out of the ground of Four Brothers Ranch. From my quick glance at the mineral rights at the courthouse, I figured the Barojas were making more than a lot of money but, if Mari had died of natural causes, there was no need to search for a motive. I had piqued my own curiosity and was going to have to go back to the courthouse, but it was creeping up on five o’clock. There was always tomorrow. I looked back at the man sitting in my passenger seat. “ ’Bout time for you guys to pack it in, isn’t it?”

He glanced past me to the truck alongside. “They will. I’ll stick aroun’ to see if the weather changes.” Before he climbed out, I reminded him that I wanted to talk to Mr. Keller tomorrow. Mr. Aliff said he’d make sure that the young man would be there first thing, and I had no doubts that he would. Mr. Aliff did not strike me as a trifling individual, bullet holes notwithstanding.

I did some quick figures as I carefully picked my way across the ridge to the county road and back toward the highway. I was tired, but I needed to talk to someone about all of this before I went and talked to Lucian. I figured I’d check in at the office, gas up, stop by the house to check for snowdrifts, and go see Henry Standing Bear.

When I got to the office it was close to six, but I recognized every vehicle, including one that took me a minute. I parked the Bullet and took a deep breath to prepare myself for what was inside.

When I opened the office door, I became instantly aware of a kangaroo court in full session. It was in the air, like the snowflakes. Ruby was seated at her desk, and Vic was leaning against it with her arms folded; Saizarbitoria was standing a little away-he probably didn’t want to get blood on the borrowed uniform. I noticed they were all holding plastic wine glasses, except for Sancho, and there was an open bottle of merlot on Ruby’s desk.

I closed the door behind me and turned to look at all of them. There were a number of Post-its on the doorjamb of my office, but I figured I’d get to those. I was about to say something witty when I caught a pair of very nice legs out of the corner of my eye belonging to someone sitting in one of my visitors’ chairs with a coat and a large dog head on her lap. I leaned forward around the coat rack and met a vivacious set of deep-sea blues, “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Slow day at the safe-deposit boxes?” I leaned a little farther and took her all in. Dog didn’t move, and I didn’t blame him.

Her hand paused on his head, and she looked down; she was also holding one of the plastic wine glasses. “What’s your dog’s name?”

I felt just a little ashamed. “He doesn’t really have one. I’ve been calling him Dog.” I looked back at her. “I’ve only had him for a couple of weeks now.”

She did a slow nod. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought I’d stop by and deliver a gift of gratitude for last night.” She raised the glass in a slight toast and then used it to gesture toward the pack. “They said it was okay.”

I looked at the assembly. “I bet they did.” I made a great show of pulling out my pocket watch. “Whose got the watch tonight?” Both Ruby and Vic finally looked at something other than Maggie Watson. I looked over at Saizarbitoria, too. “You pulling double duty?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind. I used to do it in Rawlins all the time.”

I turned to Ruby. “You give him the beeper?”

She didn’t look at me. “I gave him the beeper.”

I needed a quick neutralizer to change the point of interest, so I walked over and poured myself a glass. “Great.” I smiled and turned to Vic. “How’d he do?”

She held the synthetic glass at her temple. “He’s really polite.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She took a sip and glanced over to Ms. Watson. “We all choose where to expend our energies.”

I was pretty sure that that arched eyebrow could pierce steel, but Maggie Watson saved herself and me. “I was wondering if you were free for dinner?”

All their eyes swiveled back to her.

“Dinner?”

All their eyes swiveled back to me.

“Yes.”

I was feeling a little dizzy with all the attention. “I just have a bit of work to do, and then I’ll swing by and pick you up.” I looked down at the exposed and very lovely legs. “Dress warm, okay?”

“Okay.” It was easier on everybody’s eyes since we were now standing beside each other.

I helped her with her coat and opened the door as she turned and looked at the assembly. “Nice meeting everyone. Bye.” I closed the door as she stepped into the darkness and onto the stoop, and I turned back to face the afternoon of the long knives.

“Her car was stuck.”

“Really?”

I took a sip of my wine. “Really. Look, don’t think that you’re so big that I can’t put you over my knee and spank your little Italian butt.”

She looked up at me with a carnivorous smile. “Watch it, big man, it might work with the locals, but I’ve been to the rodeo.” She walked past me toward her office. “Anyway, I’m not into that stuff, and it sounds like you better save it for tonight.”

At least she hadn’t said fuck fourteen times. Maybe she really was on her best behavior. I turned back to Ruby. “Charlie Nurburn?”

She turned back to her computer, and I noticed there wasn’t anything on it except a blank blue screen. I also noticed that her coat was in her lap, even if she still had her half-glass of wine. “Go read your Post-its.”

I leaned over and kissed the top of her head, sighed, and trudged off to my office. I glanced back at Saizarbitoria. “You got anything to say?”

“No, sir.”

I guess that’s when I hired him. He sat in the chair opposite my desk as I tossed the Post-its on the blotter and carefully placed the mostly full goblet on top of them. People always took precedence over Post-its, so I asked him what was on his mind.

“I’m having a good time.” The silence hung in the room for a moment.

“Good.” I wondered if he’d feel the same way standing in front of the IGA accosting the citizenry. “You can have wine some other time.”

He laughed, and I looked at the bright young man sitting in front of me and felt like Monsieur de Treville with the young Gascon in attendance. It was hard not to with the Vandyke and the mischievous glint. I wondered if, like D’Artagnan, he was going to be an inordinate pain. He seemed to be waiting for more, so I reached into my coat pocket and produced the bookmark I had taken from Mari Baroja’s room. “You’ve got quite a facility with languages. Maybe you can help me out with something.” I flipped the piece of paper on the desk, careful to avoid the wine. He leaned over and turned the scrap so that he could read it. He was smiling. “What?”

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I’m Basque?”

I kept looking at him and, in a flash, it all fit. “Just a lucky guess.”

“I’m French Basque.” I contemplated that one as he looked back at the piece of paper and the scribbled hand. “It says ‘We can no longer say.’ ” He waited, and it was an old world wait, the kind that doesn’t concern itself with giving you a fast answer. The Cheyenne and Crow were masters of such things, but the kid was pretty good. “I’m not sure if it means anything, but it’s also a line from a poem by Jean Diharce about Guernica.” It didn’t take him long to remember the translation. “Guernica. This name inflames and saddens my heart; centuries will know its misfortunes… We can no longer say the names Numancia and Carthage without saying in a loud voice in Euskara, lying in its ruins, Guernica.” There wasn’t a lot of drama in the presentation; he stated it as if it were history. “Is this from the woman that died?” I nodded, and he studied it some more. “You think it’s important?”

“Everything’s important when you don’t know what you’re looking for, or if you even should be looking.”

“She was Basque?” I nodded some more. “Is there anybody you’d like me to talk to?”

I sighed, thought about the old priest, Mari’s cousin, and looked at the scrap of paper. “Maybe.” I looked back up at him. “You got a place to stay tonight?”

“I figured I’d just stay here.”

“Okay, but you might need a vehicle. If anything happens, take Vic’s. There’s an extra set of keys on the wall by the door.”

I couldn’t tell if he was smiling when he left my office, and that probably was a good thing. I picked up the piece of paper. “We can no longer say.” It was capitalized at the beginning, which led me to believe that it wasn’t the continuation of a stanza or part of a poem. I didn’t know Mari Baroja but thought she might have had enough on her plate without political intrigue. She was Basque, though.

I stuffed the paper scrap back in my pocket and picked up my life in Post-it form. Vic appeared in my doorway with her jacket over her shoulder and wine glass in hand. “I can’t fucking believe you’re gonna get laid before me.”

“Maybe you should stop looking at this as a competition?”

“You are such an asshole.” She took a sip. “Not that I give a shit, but where have you been all day?”

I took a sip of my wine, its complex bouquet undiminished by the styrene stemware. “Following up on this Baroja thing.”

“There’s a thing?”

I blew out and thought back on my day. “Spoke with the ME from Billings. His opinion is that she smoked too much, she drank too much, and I’m coming to the conclusion that she might have done other things too much as well.”

She shrugged and toasted with her glass. “That’s how I wanna go.”

I curbed the urge to say something about slow starts. “Talked to the personal physician.”

“Who is?”

“Isaac Bloomfield, who concurred. There was something else, though.” She held the edge of the plastic against her lip. “She’d been consistently beaten.” Her eyes widened. “Massive tissue damage on the back and other areas.”

The lip slipped away. “Holy shit.”

“It gets better. I went to see the granddaughter.”

When I told her what Lana had said, she came and sat in the chair opposite my desk and scooted it in so that she could lay her arms on the flat surface and rest her chin there. The glass dangled over the edge, unseen. Her voice was low, but it cut like only a woman’s voice can. “No fucking way. Lucian?”

“It gets better.”

“It can’t get any better, unless you found the body.”

“Trust me, it gets better.” I told her about the conversation with the judge.

“Fuck me.” She glanced around the room; she had just been given a passport to strangeland where I had spent the day. The big eyes finally came back to rest on me, and they were heavy. “He did it. I’ll bet you anything he did it.” The cutting voice was back. “The love of your life is taken away and is being slowly beaten to death? Charlie Nurburn is lying in a shallow grave in Absaroka County or eaten by coyotes and shit off a cliff, which is too good for the son of a bitch.” She folded her arms on the desk again, having spoken. “What are you gonna do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you gonna do?” It was a smile, a wonderfully vicious and lovely smile with no warmth in it. “The sheriff has killed a man, the one-legged bandit, your pal.”

I leaned in until our noses were about sixteen inches apart. “I really wish you weren’t enjoying this so much.”

“I can’t help it. This is one of those great fucking moral quandaries, and I can’t wait to see what you’re gonna do next.”

I folded an arm and supported my head with a fist. “I’m going to wait and see what comes back from the NCIC.”

“It’s going to say that Charlie Nurburn is dead as the proverbial doornail and that somebody hammered him a very long time ago.” She trapped her lower lip in thought. “Can I go with you when you go to talk to Lucian?”

“No.”

She whined. “C’mon.” I didn’t say anything and, after a moment, she asked again: “C’mon.” We stared at each other for a while, and then she drank the last sip of her wine, placed the empty glass on my desk, and stood. “I don’t have to mention that there is no statute of limitations on murder, right?”

I sighed, still holding my head up with my fist. “No, you don’t. You also don’t have to impress upon me how easy it is to drive a man to the act.”

She pulled a wayward lock behind her ear, sparkled her eyes with a quick batting of the lashes, and quarter curtseyed. “Just here to help out.” She paused at the door. “By the way…?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you get the clap.”

I collapsed my head on my arm and looked at the small amount of wine in my plastic glass, trying to figure out how to drown myself in it. What was I going to do? Hard as I tried, I couldn’t see myself marching into Lucian’s room and accusing him of something I wasn’t sure he had done. I was going to have to feel the outside edges of the thing first. I wanted to know why he had lied to me; it was a start, a chicken-shit start, but a start. As soon as I looked toward the Post-its, Ruby appeared in the doorway.

Her tone was stern. “Have you read those?”

“I’d rather have you tell me.”

She came in, and I noticed she had a large mailing envelope under her arm. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“There’s good news?”

“Charlie Nurburn is alive and well and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.”

My head came off the desk like it was on fire. “What?”

She tapped the Post-its with a bright red nail, which had a little holiday wreath painted on it. “According to the records, Mr. Charlie Nurburn has been paying his taxes in Vista Verde since 1951. Here is his address and phone number.”

I yelled out the door. “Vic!”

“She’s gone.”

I got up and walked around the desk and kissed the top of her head again. “Thank you. You have no idea how much.”

She looked up at me. “Does this mean you’re ready for the bad news?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Mari Baroja is in Billings. The medical examiner said that there were tests he wanted to perform and that he couldn’t do them here.”

I stared at her for a moment and then rubbed my hands across my face. “When was this?”

“He phoned about an hour ago.”

“He already took her?”

“Yes. He said that he left a series of autopsy pictures for you at the hospital. I had the Ferg pick them up before he left.” She was watching me, but I was looking out the window and into the darkness of my life. I wasn’t in any hurry to see those pictures. She placed the large envelope on my desk.

“Is there any more bad news?”

“Cady called. She said to tell you she was packed and to remind you that she would be here tomorrow.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, it’s not that bad. I’ve got some ideas. Do you want me to just use the department plastic?”

“Yes, by all means. Just keep the receipts.” I nudged the Post-its with my fingertips. “Anything else?”

She shrugged. “The rest of it’s all kind of mediocre.”

“How’s the new kid?”

She brightened immediately and looked directly at me to let me know that she meant business. “We have to keep him.”

“I’m working on it.” I took the last sip of my wine, my mood having been improved. “He’s Basque.”

“That’s nice.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it; it just seemed like such a Ruby thing to say. “I don’t suppose Mr. McDermott mentioned what kinds of tests he wanted to run?”

“He did not.” She studied me for a while. “This is going to be a problem with the family?”

“Oh, yes.”

“The church?”

I snorted. “Worse than that, lawyers.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know, I wish somebody would ask me something besides that today.” She waited. “I think I’m going to run away to the Rez.”

She smiled and had a little silence of her own. “Maybe you two need to touch index fingers and recharge.”

I picked up the Post-it with Charlie’s information and the pictures, feeling the weight of the photographs. I followed Ruby out the door and into the snow, scraped off her windshield, and watched her drive slowly away. I loaded Dog into the truck, sat on his snowy footprints, and stuffed the Post-it into my breast pocket. I didn’t look at the photos, choosing instead to place the manila envelope carefully in the center console. When the console lid snapped shut, it was very loud.