Craig Johnson: The Dark Horse

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.