The Dark Horse

2

October 18: nine days earlier, morning.

The sheriff of Campbell County had laughed on the other end of the phone.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Sandy?”

“Everything in that Powder River country strikes me as odd. It’s another world, Walt. Everybody’s got police scanners; do you know what it’s like to try and serve papers out there?” I could just imagine him seated in his luxurious leather chair in his wood-paneled office. What with all the energy development, I was beginning to believe the talk that Gillette would be the largest city in Wyoming in ten years.

I raised my eyebrows. “Yep, but setting your barn on fire and then going to sleep?”

Sandy Sandberg laughed again. He didn’t take anything all that seriously-it was one of his charms-and being sheriff of a county as busy as Campbell would’ve given anybody ample opportunity for seriousness. “Yeah, well… they say it was lightning, but Wade Barsad was known to be kind of reckless.”

I studied the thin, two-page report on my desk. “Not local.”

“Oh, hell no. No man from around here would ever do that to a horse, let alone eight of ’em.”

“Why kill the horses?”

“I think she cared more about them than she did him.”

“That doesn’t sound too difficult.” Vic came in with her Red Bull, sat in my visitor’s chair, and propped her tactical boots on the edge of my desk like she always did. “Sandy, you mind if I put you on speakerphone? Vic’s here.” I went ahead and punched the button; I knew Sandy Sandberg liked to work a big room.

His laughter tinkled from the tinny speaker. “How’d you like that little present I sent over for you, sweetheart?”

Vic looked up from her energy drink and raised her head a little so she could emphasize each word. “Fuck. You. Sand. Bag.”

Sandy roared again. I interrupted before the two of them could get any further. “Where was he from?”

He took a breath to recover. “… Back east somewhere.” The way he’d said it, he might as well have been talking about Bangkok, and I was sure it was for Vic’s benefit.

“What about the woman-Mary?”

“Greenie from down in Colorado. She was one of those Denver Bronco girls, the ones that ride out onto the field after they score a touchdown? Not that the Donkeys have been doin’ a lot of that lately..”

“Where’d the money come from?”

“Oh, she had some, but he had more. To hear him tell it, he had more money than the rest of the inhabitants of the Powder River area combined.”

I stared at the receiver. “What makes you say, ‘To hear him tell it’?”

Sandy laughed again. “You don’t miss much, do you?” I waited. “We had a little visit from some investigators from the IRS about Wade owin’ $1.8 million in taxes and penalties. We found about $742,000 in uncashed checks made out to him personally. DCI guys figured he was tryin’ to keep it away from the revenue boys, but I think he was tryin’ to keep it from his wife, since she’d already filed for divorce.”

“She should have gotten herself and those horses out of there.”

“Well, it was a race.”

Talking with Sandy Sandberg was like sight-reading braille. “What’s that mean?”

“Everybody in three counties wanted to kill that son-of-a-bitch-Bill Nolan bein’ number two.”

I’d gone to primary school in a one-room schoolhouse with a Bill Nolan; it had to be the same man. “What happened?”

“The bank was gettin’ set to foreclose on the Nolan place, so he put the majority up for sale and saved a little spread for himself.” I was sorry to hear that, knowing the L Bar X had been in Bill’s family for four generations. “And do you know that rat-bastard Barsad wouldn’t give Bill a right-of-way?”

“That’s rough.”

“They settled out of court, but Bill was home alone on his place the night somebody-and I mean anybody-could have ventilated Wade’s head.”

“I thought the wife confessed?”

“She did, but until we got the report back from DCI, it wasn’t a sure thing.”

“Anyone else on the short list?”

“Bill volunteered for a polygraph test and cleared it. There was another guy who showed up here recently and was working for Wade-fella by the name of Cliff Cly, who was in a bar over here tellin’ everybody how he did it. Unfortunately for him, we happened to have an off-duty deputy in the bar at the time, and then fortunately for him we brought his ass in and gave him the lie detector, which detected that he was drunk and full of shit.”

Sandy rustled some papers-I was getting the feeling the other sheriff was losing interest in a closed case.

“Hershel Vanskike might have been interested in killin’ the bastard, too. He was looking after Barsad’s herd, including what Wade had siphoned off the surrounding ranchers. From what we gathered, he hadn’t paid the man in three months-just let him live in a trailer out by the old corrals and dipping tanks off Barton Road, where we’re going to have the auction next week. Hey, do you need a tractor?”

“Anybody else?”

“What?”

“Anybody else who would want to kill him?”

“Oh, he screwed an old rancher, Mike Niall, by sellin’ him a dozen barren cows… Jeez, Walt, I’d tell you to just get out a Range Co-op telephone book and take your pick, but his wife confessed. Game over.”

“What’s DCI say?”

“The Damned Criminal Idiots say that her fingerprints were on the weapon, powder-trace elements on her hands, and that she signed a confession sayin’ she shot him.”

“Why use a. 22?”

Sandy sighed. “It was handy? Hell, I don’t know.”

“Was it her rifle?”

There was a pause. “No, it was his varmint gun out of his truck-I think it was parked out front.”

“He have any other weapons in the house?”

“Tons, but they were all locked up in a gun safe.”

“Why would…”

“He was foolin’ around with about three other women and that alone is enough to get your ass shot in that country.” He laughed again. “Hey, Walt Long-arm-of-the-law, protector of lost women, lost dogs, and lost causes, I know what you’re thinkin’ and some rats need killin’, but she made a mistake by getting caught-then she made a mistake by confessing, and now it’s going to cost her the rest of her life.”

It was silent, and I stared at the tiny, red light on the speakerphone. “Something just feels wrong.” This was a sticky business and not my jurisdiction, so that was all I said.

Sandberg interrupted, as I hoped he would. “Walt?”

“Yep?”

“I don’t have the time for this.”

I looked up at Vic with her five sworn in the Philadelphia Police Department and her consequent experience in interdepartmental politics as she silently mouthed the words “Back off.”

“I’ve already got one murder, one rape, two robberies, fifty-four cases of aggravated assault, forty-seven burglaries, and a hundred and eighty-six cases of larceny. I don’t have time for mysteries that volunteer to solve themselves.”

I had already formed an apology of sorts when the other sheriff spoke again. “But hey, you wanna look into it, I’ll pay your gas.”

October 27, 7:32 P.M.

I stepped through the blackened timbers and tried to imagine what the ranch house must’ve looked like before it had burned. The binder that the real Eric Boss in Billings had given me said it was insured at over three million, which wouldn’t come close to covering the cost of rebuilding the mansion, and there would be no money at all if the fire was deemed a case of arson.

Not that it seemed anybody would be rebuilding it.

Wade Barsad had spared no expense, but I figured the home’s design had been his wife Mary’s. The ranch homestead stood a mile and a quarter from the rough-hewn timber and moss-rock archways that trumpeted the entrance to the aspen-lined, red scoria ranch road of the L Bar X. The 7,516-square-foot “rustic” ranch house had been built with two-hundred-year-old timbers and two-foot-thick walls of golden-faced stone in a piazza-shaped plan that included a courtyard wrapped with verandas, open to a view of the Powder River.

I told Dog to stay on the rock patio as I carefully picked my way through the debris.

The nearest fire department was the volunteer one in Clearmont, and obviously they hadn’t hurried in getting here; possibly they knew the man. The roof and supporting timbers were gone, but the majority of the heavy walls still stood with their windows blown out and shards of blackened glass scattered across the stone floors. I walked past the open front doorway, the side panels burnt and hanging loose on the hinges, the moonlight pulling the sheen from the flagstone walkway that led to where I’d parked the rental car.

Through an antique glass door that was curiously still intact, I crossed a greenhouse atrium that separated the public part of the house from the bedroom where the deed had been done. Burnt houses bring out the melancholy in me, but it was possible that burnt greenhouses were even worse. The withered, dead plants hung from the beds as if they had tried to limbo under the smoke to escape the flames. They hadn’t made it. As I looked back from the door of the bedroom, I noticed the collective tracks of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department, those from the Division of Criminal Investigation, and those from the firefighters in the fine, black dust that covered everything.

The master bedroom suite was built over what must’ve been a root cellar, and most of the hardwood floor was gone, leaving only a vast hole that dropped to the charcoaled pit below. There was nothing left of the king-sized bed other than the inner frame and coils of the box spring. T. J. Sherwin and her DCI investigators must have had a time securing and processing the scene.

I stood there for a long while, looking into the abyss and wondering what the abyss was making of me. I tucked the folder under my arm a little tighter and turned, making my way back to the courtyard.

By the time I got there, I discovered that Dog’s idea of “stay” was disinterestedly springing a few western cottontails from the brush. He wandered back in my direction when I called him, marking each stand of sage as he came, and finally rested his muscled behind on my foot. I ruffled his ears, my hand stretching a full octave across his massive head. I peeled some fur back to look at the bullet furrow across his thick skull. “Is that your idea of stay?” He smiled up at me, revealing rows of teeth that shone in the evening moonlight.

It appeared that with the prevailing wind from the river basin, the fire that was started at the barn had destroyed the main house, perversely leaving the courtyard. It was as if the elements had decided to ravage the enclosed areas but leave the open heart untouched.

It was not lost on me that the most obliterated area of Wade and Mary Barsad’s house had been the bedroom.

There was an outdoor fireplace with firewood stacked nearby and a willow chair that yawned with an open seat, but I refused its invitation, walked to the edge of the patio, and carefully leaned on the hand-adzed timbers that supported the cedar shingles and copper gutters and downspouts. Part of this roof was still there and blocked the view of the thick stripe of the Milky Way that was just beginning to trace its girth across the twilight sky.

The courtyard wouldn’t be a bad place to live; well, at least until a month from now when it would be filled with snow and the wind would attempt to blow the whiskers off your face.

It was getting chilly, so I looked at the fireplace again. It looked serviceable and almost as if it’d been used recently. Even if it hadn’t, it wasn’t like I was going to have to worry about burning the place down.

I glanced around, looking for a bit of fresh kindling, and found a big bunch of tiny astrological scrolls that you see for sale in grocery-store checkout lanes. I noticed they were all Sagittarius-which was as far as my knowledge of astrology went-then wadded them up and tossed them into the makings of a fire. There were a few long-stem matches by the mantel in a tin container, and soon I had a blaze where no more than a month ago there had been far too much of the stuff to contain.

Dog, knowing a good thing when he saw one, curled up at the hearth and watched as I pulled the chair closer and unfolded the insurance binder to the middle where I had carefully concealed some faxed sheets from DCI. I was lucky that T.J., the wicked witch of the west, as she was known in some of Wyoming’s law enforcement circles, had done the general on the deceased. She had included some disturbing and detailed photographs on how the rancher had gone not so gently into that dark night.

Six tangential shots from a Savage. 22 automatic rifle had done the trick but, for all practical purposes, the first one had been enough.

Probably not a suicide.

Close range, but not that close-four feet to be exact-and there may have even been a little powder dispersal, but we would never know. The body of Wade Barsad had burned along with his home, his barn, and her horses. Dental records had hung the name on Wade’s toe in lieu of upcoming DNA testing. I was just getting to the meat of the report when Dog growled with a sound as deep and resonant as a powwow drum.

I closed the report and listened to the soft pop of the fire and the chirp of the crickets. “Hello?” I placed a hand on Dog’s back to keep him from disappearing into the darkness and into whatever it was out there. “I said hello.”

The outline of a battered cowboy hat shifted from the partial shadow of the burnt juniper tree at the edge of the house, and I could see the octagonal barrel of a heavy rifle move in emphasis. “Make yourself at home, why don’t’cha.”

Dog growled again, but the repeater was cradled in the man’s arms as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette, so I figured the threat from it wasn’t too great. The glow showed orange on the large, flat face, stubbled with whiskers as prodigious as my own, and on a set of ears that pushed forward from an oversized, flat-brimmed, Powder River-style hat.

I rested the folder on my knee with the label facing out as he came closer. Dog continued to growl. I squeezed his neck and he stopped, even going so far as to sniff at the stained jeans of the stranger’s leg as he stood there in the intermittent light of the fireplace. I tipped my own hat back and looked up at the fence-post-thin man, his clothes and entire body tapering down from the buttoned collar at his bobbing Adam’s apple. “You burn my fortunes?”

“Excuse me?”

“My damn fortunes I had sittin’ on that hearth, did you burn ’em?”

I remembered the tiny scrolls I’d used for kindling. “I’m afraid I did.”

“Well, that’s another trip to the Kmart.” He said Kmart like it was Mecca and studied me for a while. “They told me you was askin’ questions down at the bar, earlier tonight, and that you might be by.”

“They?”

He didn’t answer but leaned against a support timber with the old Yellow Boy wedged in his folded arms-I figured the Henry was probably a reproduction. “Lot of insurance money, I guess.”

“Around three million for the house alone.”

He glanced at the folder on my knee again. “Some racket, I’ll tell ya.” I waited. “That stuff, jus’ a protection racket near as I can tell.” He took a puff on his cigarette, cupped in his hand European style. It was a gesture he’d probably learned from the local Basque sheepherders-with a name like Vanskike, the chance that he was Basque himself was slim. “I guess it’s all jus’ a big protection racket, the government, the insurance companies.” He looked straight at me. “So, how come you’re up here sneakin’ around in the dark?”

“There was more light when I got here, and I guess I didn’t feel like sitting in a motel room.”

He pulled the wrinkled cigarette from his lips, flicking some ashes into the dried grass. “I can understand that.” He nodded and looked off toward the river. “It’s a nice spot. I been coming up here since the fireworks when the weather’s good-sit in that very same chair and drink beer.”

I took a deep breath and started to rise. “Well, we’ll get out of your way…”

“No, no.” He looked genuinely panicked and motioned for me to stay seated. “I don’t get too many visitors, and sometimes I forget how to behave.”

We were both silent, then I apologized. “I’m afraid I didn’t bring any beer.”

He continued to smoke and then smiled with more than a few teeth missing. “ ’At’s all right, I did.”

October 19: eight days earlier, night.

I had been seated at my desk alone, having sent Vic home to grab a shower before she pulled the all-nighter.

I opened the windows in my office and had just leaned back in my chair to enjoy the unseasonably soft breeze when I heard Dog get up from beside my desk and thump his oversized paws to the door. The beast paused in the hall but continued on toward the holding cells. Since I had adopted Dog, he’d almost never left my side, unless it was for Ruby, and I knew she was home and in bed, so I got up to follow his trail when I heard a low, steady noise.

I flipped on the kitchenette light. It didn’t give the flat, antiseptic quality that the fluorescent overheads did and wouldn’t disturb Mary too badly if she was only crying in her sleep.

She was crying but was not on the bunk; she was standing by the bars with her head down. She paid no attention to me or to Dog, who was looking up at her. I took off my hat and stepped forward; there was a lone streetlight across the road that illuminated the sidewalk in front of Durant Elementary, and its light spilled from the windowsill and splashed against the side of her light-colored hair. She was still crying very softly, and I turned to look at her as her shoulders twitched and her voice echoed against the concrete floor in a low moan.

She had a maiden name, but it wasn’t on the two-page report. “Mrs. Barsad…”

I knew that people made noises in jail, whether they were conscious of it or not. Angry sounds, boisterous sounds, sad sounds-some even sang-but as she continued, I could hear it was the wounded sound, the one that caused the stillness in my hands and the cooling in my face.

The one I couldn’t stand.

“Mrs. Barsad?”

She wailed softly, and I could feel that she was in a place that I could never reach. I felt it in me, and it clawed its way up the inside of my spine. I knew that it would come out of my mouth like a regurgitation of emotion, if I let it.

I thought about the missing lovers and the dead parents, the friends and strangers that I had seen behind closed doors and closed eyelids. I had lost people too and had grown used to those surprise visits of the mind that froze my thoughts and my heart.

I stood there, staring down at her, until I became aware of the welling in my own eyes. “Mrs. Barsad?”

She had paused for a second as she’d inhaled. I barely made out the words that she repeated over and over, and over and over: “So-o-o girl, no… Oh, God… So-o-o girl…”

October 27, 9:05 P.M.

Hershel handed me one of the tepid beers he’d retrieved from the spot in the river that he used as a refrigerator as he sat with his back against the post. “There ain’t a pit in hell deep enough and dark enough for that son-of-a-bitch.”

I threw a couple more logs into the fireplace and dusted off my hands on my jeans before taking the beer. Dog lay down between us as a conciliatory gesture to the old cowhand, even going so far as to allow Hershel to pet his broad back.

“Dante reserved the lowest rings of hell for the betrayers.” I popped open the can and took a swig. “Rainier.”

He looked at the fire. “Now, don’t make fun of my beer.”

“Mountain fresh, my favorite. Really.” He nodded without comment, and I took a moment to study the Henry repeater leaning behind his shoulder. “Is that a real Henry?”

“Yes, it is.” He smiled. “I found that gun back in the rocks up on Twentymile Butte at the Battlement.”

“Can I see it?”

He continued to study me. “I don’t know you that well, and my fortune is in this rifle.”

I glanced at the fire. “You got a lot of fortunes.”

“Used to.”

I nodded and looked out toward the river. “Did you know Wade Barsad well?”

He sipped his beer with the cigarette still in the corner of his mouth and then let the can dangle as he supported his wrist on his bent knee. “Enough to not cross the street to piss on ’em if his guts was on fire.”

I took another sip and thought about how much he sounded like my old boss, Lucian Connally; they would’ve been close to the same age. “Did you work for Barsad long?”

He sighed. “ ’Bout four of the longest years of my life.” He reached down and stroked Dog’s thick fur. “He didn’t like animals, and I don’t trust people that don’t like animals. Hell, animals are the finest people I know.” As if on cue, Dog rolled over and laid his head on the edge of the patio. The cowpoke smiled and talked to the nearest animal while rubbing the beast’s belly. “You like to scare the shit out of me, you monster. I thought you was gonna eat me alive.”

“Where was he from?”

“Youngstown, Ohio. Ever been there?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Me neither, but they must breed some true-to-life sons-a-bitches and that’s good enough reason for me to never go.” He took another long draught of his beer. “Made all his money in some steel mill, stole it probably.” His eyes were drawn to the river and the star-dappled sky. “Always talkin’ about how he hated all this cowboy shit.”

I set the insurance binder on the hearth and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “He hated animals, and he hated the West? That kind of strikes me as odd for a fella who buys a ranch in Wyoming.”

He looked at me pointedly. “Hers.”

I nodded. “Seems like an odd couple. Where’d they meet?”

“Some cuttin’ event down in Las Vegas; he liked Las Vegas.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, belching softly at the end. “He was a handsome booger and smart. Don’t get me wrong, he had a boatload of cash and he could turn the charm on like a bug light whenever needed.”

“Why’d she do it?”

His hand stopped on Dog, and he looked out into the darkness. “I don’t think she did, but if she did, she come to it righteous.” He stayed motionless, and I got the impression that the Powder River and the high plains sky was not what he was seeing. “I knew a couple once, up near Recluse; fella was out irrigatin’ and come in for his supper and said somethin’ about his wife’s biscuits. She pulled an old long gun off the wall…” He gestured to the big carbine in his lap. “.. not unlike this one, and splattered his brains all over the dinner table.” It was silent for a moment. “She’d had enough and, brother, believe-you-me, Mary Barsad had had enough.”

“Were you here the night it happened?”

He motioned with the stubble on his chin toward the hills to our right. “My trailer, back at the loading chutes. Saw the reflection of the fire in the window and heard the horses a screamin’ and come runnin’, but it was too late.”

I nodded. “Was there lightning that night?”

He begrudged the answer. “Yep.”

“The fire from the barn caught the house?”

“Yep.”

“Where is the barn?”

“Opposite side from where you parked your car.”

“You go in?”

He looked at me incredulously. “There wasn’t no goin’ in there.”

“Where was she?”

I glanced back at the blackened and cavernous rubble.

This time he motioned with the beer can and the cigarette. “Out there in the grass, with that varmint rifle across her lap.” He took the last puff off the cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground beside the patio, and then stuffed the butt into his shirt pocket. Evidently, Hershel Vanskike was a respectful man, of what I wasn’t quite sure, but I had suspicions. “Her head was down, and it was almost like she was asleep. I touched her shoulder and she looked up at me and said that the horses were dead and that she’d killed him.”

“Did she show any remorse?”

“Nope, just said it like she was talkin’ about the weather.” He studied me for a moment longer. “You sure do ask a lot of questions about people, for a guy that’s concerned with the insurance. You tryin’ not to pay?”

“No.”

“He’s dead, and she’s goin’ to prison; who gets the money?”

“You tell me.”

“He’s got a brother back in Youngstown.”

“Son-of-a-bitch?”

He nodded his head. “Most likely.”

We both laughed. “I’m just curious.” I took a sip and changed the subject. “She was good on horseback?”

He warmed to that line of conversation and smiled. “You ain’t never seen anything like it. She was Junior Cutting Title in Las Vegas, National Cutting Horse Association Super Stakes Champion. Brother, she was the best I ever seen-and I seen some.” He took the last swallow of his beer and crushed the can in his hand. “She could separate a horsefly from a cow’s ass.”

I took a breath of my own and was sorry to take us back to the sadness. “Why burn all the horses?”

The older man resumed petting Dog, then stopped and shook his head with his eyes closed. “I’ll be damned…”

“What?”

His eyes opened, and he looked up at me. “You insured the horses, too, didn’t you?”

I hadn’t insured anything, but Eric Boss had. “Well…”

“And her?”

I strained to understand. “Mary?”

“No, her.” I continued looking at him blankly as the fireplace crackled and popped with small explosions. “Them horses… Barsad didn’t burn ’em all.”