C. Box - Cold Wind

Missy’s eyes were rimmed with red. Without her customary makeup, she looked pale, drawn, small-and her age. They’d handcuffed her in front, and the heavy stainless steel bracelets made her wrists look even thinner. For the first time, Joe noted how the skin on the back of her palms was mottled with age and that her fingers looked skeletal. He’d once heard that no matter what a woman did to fight off the years, her hands revealed all. And Missy’s hands were revealing.

Missy kept her eyes on Joe, silently pleading but not groveling, as the deputies marched her across the lawn toward the car. Behind her, Sheriff Kyle McLanahan filled the doorframe, scowling briefly at Joe and then peering over Joe’s head at the ranch yard. He carried a leveraction.30–30 Winchester carbine with plastic-gloved hands. Behind him was Dulcie Schalk, the new county attorney who’d replaced Joe’s friend Robey Hersig.

Joe looked over his shoulder to see what the sheriff had fixed on, and saw the television satellite truck rumbling up the long driveway. McLanahan had no doubt frittered away time inside until he could make a dramatic appearance before the cameras.

Dulcie Schalk was in her early thirties, with dishwater-blonde hair, dark brown eyes, and a trim, athletic figure. She’d been hired by Robey as his assistant a few months before he was killed three years before, and she’d stepped into the vacuum and filled it so well that when she’d run for the office she was unopposed. Schalk was unmarried except to her job, and Joe had found her to be honest and professional, if very tightly wound. Marybeth and Dulcie Schalk ran in the same circles, and shared a profound interest in horses. They’d gone on trail rides together and Marybeth spoke highly of her, which counted with Joe.

Schalk was driven and passionate and worked long hours. Her record for obtaining convictions was a hundred percent. In Joe’s opinion, if she had a weakness as a prosecutor it was her penchant for not going into court unless the case was airtight. Joe had been frustrated by her a few times when he brought her cases-one involving the suspected poaching of an elk and the other an out-of-state hunter who may have falsified his criminal background of game violations on his application for a license-because she thought there might be too much “air” in the case to pursue it further. So when he saw the determined set to her face as she came out of the door behind McLanahan, he knew there was substance behind the arrest. And for the first time that day, he questioned his initial assumption that Missy was innocent.

Even so, Joe said to both McLanahan and Schalk, “Are the handcuffs really necessary? I mean. look at her. Does she look like she might resist?”

Missy thanked Joe with a barely perceptible nod. She seemed to need a champion, and Joe felt odd playing the role. He even admired her a little for her dignity and poise, given the situation. The deputies towered over her.

Dulcie Schalk nodded at Joe as if she agreed, and turned to the sheriff for his reaction.

McLanahan lowered his lids and smiled slyly at Joe. “Keep ’em on,” he told Sollis, who had moved toward Missy with his cuff key. Sollis retreated.

Missy said nothing, and lowered her eyes to continue her slow walk toward the GMC. But McLanahan chinned a silent command at his deputies to hold her there. Joe realized the sheriff wanted to make sure Missy was caught on camera being escorted to the car.

“Come on, McLanahan,” Joe said, feeling his anger rise, and surprised it did. “There’s no point in humiliating her even more.” He looked to Dulcie Schalk for support, but Schalk had turned away.

Joe saw something remarkable when McLanahan finally gave the go-ahead to his deputies to resume the perp walk with Missy toward the GMC. As the video camera rolled and both Jim Parmenter and Sissy Skanlon snapped photos with their digital cameras, Missy’s entire face and demeanor changed. Not just changed, but transformed. Her walk became a shuffle. Her shoulders slumped. The poise she’d shown earlier morphed instantly into pathos. Her eyes moistened, and her mouth trembled as if holding back a wail. She looked suddenly pathetic. A victim. She seemed barely capable of entering the GMC without help. He assumed the cameras captured it all.

McLanahan had missed the show, however, and was clearing his throat so the reporters would look back his way. When they did, he displayed the.30–30 and said, “Although we still need to run it through ballistics to verify it beyond doubt, we believe this is the rifle that was used to murder Earl Alden.”

Joe squinted. He’d seen the rifle before, or one that looked a lot like it, in The Earl’s antique-gun cabinet.

For the cameras, the sheriff worked the lever of the rifle, ejecting a spent cartridge case that was quickly gathered up by Sollis and placed in a paper evidence bag. Then McLanahan gestured toward the GMC: “And there, we believe, is the woman who pulled the trigger. Missy Alden killed her husband with this rifle.”

“Allegedly,” Dulcie Schalk corrected.

“Allegedly,” McLanahan echoed with slight irritation. “And then she allegedly hoisted her husband’s body to the top of one of his new wind turbines and rigged it up to the blade so it would spin around until it was discovered.”

With that, McLanahan handed the rifle off to Sollis, who took it away. He put his hands on his hips and rocked back on his heels in his well-practiced I’m-the-law-in-these-here-parts stance. “I’d like to publicly recognize and salute the efficiency and professionalism of my team here at the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department for their prompt and thorough investigation, which led to the arrest of. ”

Joe tuned out as the briefing turned into a “Reelect Sheriff Kyle McLanahan” stump speech. The county attorney approached him and stood there until he noticed her.

“I wish he wasn’t so blatant,” Schalk whispered to Joe under her breath. “He’s grandstanding. Tainting the jury pool. ”

“Do you have a minute?” Joe asked.

He led her away from the press conference, but noted she didn’t want to go so far that she couldn’t interject again if McLanahan’s statements got out of hand.

“We need to make this short,” she said. “I’m not sure I should be talking to you. Don’t you have an interest in this case?”

“She’s my mother-in-law,” Joe said.

“I know. So understand that anything I tell you is purely for public consumption. It’s the same thing I’ll tell the press. Nothing more, Joe. No inside information, so don’t put me on the spot. This is a delicate situation.”

“I realize that,” he said, glancing over her shoulder. He could see the side of Missy’s head through the window of the GMC. Missy stared straight ahead now that the cameras had swiveled to McLanahan. She seemed to have shed her pathetic persona as easily as Joe removed a jacket.

“Where was the rifle found?” Joe asked.

“Under the seat of her car. She drives the Hummer, right? That’s her personal vehicle.”

Joe nodded. The Hummer was constantly blocking his driveway so he either couldn’t get in or out. Usually with the motor running.

She said, “The tracks we found out on the ranch where we think the murder took place appear to match up with the tires on the Hummer. Our team couldn’t explain why we couldn’t find a spent cartridge on the ground until we found the gun and realized the casing hadn’t been ejected but was still in the gun. Plus, her fingerprints were all over the rifle itself.”

“So the tipster even knew where the crime took place.”

“I’m not going there,” she said.

Joe took that in. “McLanahan didn’t mention an accomplice.”