House Standoff Read online

  McCord said, “Mrs. Bunt, why don’t we step outside so we can talk privately.”

  They walked out together and stood on the sidewalk near the front double doors to the school. McCord had noticed when she’d arrived at the school that the front doors had thick bulletproof glass and were locked, and she had to use an intercom next to the door to request permission to enter. There was also a camera above the door so whoever opened the door could see that the person entering wasn’t a kid dressed in Goth-black, carrying an AR-15. God bless America.

  McCord said, “Mrs. Bunt, I need to ask—”

  Elaine said, “If this is about Sonny shooting that BLM agent, I can’t talk to you without Sonny’s lawyer being present.”

  “It’s not about that,” McCord said. Before Elaine could speak, McCord said, “Can you tell me where Sonny was the night Shannon Doyle was killed?”

  “But what does Sonny have to do with that?”

  “Probably nothing, but it’s just a question I have to ask. So was your husband home with you that night?”

  Without hesitating, Elaine said, “No. He went to a rodeo near Fort Collins with Shorty Warren the day before she was killed, and they stayed the night in Fort Collins.”

  Fuckin’ Shorty again.

  “And you’re sure he was in Fort Collins that night?”

  “I’m positive. I remember when Shannon Doyle was killed because when I drove to school that morning and saw all those sheriff cars down at the motel, I knew something bad had happened. I didn’t find out until later exactly what had happened, but that was definitely the morning after Sonny went to Fort Collins.”

  “But how do you know he really went to Fort Collins?”

  “Well, I guess I don’t for sure, but why would he lie to me?”

  McCord saw no reason to answer that stupid question. Instead she said, “Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Bunt. I don’t need anything else.”

  Fuckin’ Shorty.

  McCord returned to her car and called the cell phone number Shorty had given her. When he answered, she said, “This is Special Agent McCord.”

  “What do you want now,” Shorty whined. She could hear cows mooing in the background.

  “I want to know if you were in Fort Collins with Sonny the night that writer Shannon Doyle was killed. And don’t you dare lie to me.”

  There was a brief hesitation before Shorty said, “We didn’t go to Fort Collins together. Sonny spent the night with his girlfriend, you know, the Mexican chick. Sonny told me that if his wife asked, or if she called me if she couldn’t reach Sonny, I was supposed to say we went to the rodeo.”

  An hour and a half later, McCord was finally on her way back to Casper.

  She’d gone to the Hacienda Grill and questioned the bartender, first threatening her with all the terrible things that would happen to her if she lied. The woman eventually admitted that she and Sonny were together at a motel in Red Desert the night Shannon Doyle was killed. The bartender, by the way, was gorgeous, and McCord couldn’t imagine why such a good-looking woman would have anything to do with a snake like Sonny Bunt.

  As she drove back to Casper, she remembered that this was the day that DeMarco was supposed to appear in court for trespassing. She wondered how that had gone.

  27

  When he finally got back to Waverly from Rock Springs, DeMarco took a long nap as he’d hardly slept the night before in the jail. He then took a shower and shaved in a gingerly fashion due to the bruises on his face. His ribs, almost cracked by the cowboy-booted kickers, hurt worse than anything else. He dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and top-siders sans socks, and walked across the highway to the truck stop to buy three bottles of beer. Back at the motel, he got ice from the machine, dumped the ice into the sink in his room, and placed two of the beers in the ice. He opened the third beer, and because it was hot inside his room, he took a chair and went to sit out on the walkway in front of his room, where he was treated to the now too familiar sight of the traffic on I-80 and Harriet’s place across the highway.

  He’d only been sitting there a few minutes, trying to decide what he was going to do next when it came to Shannon, when his phone rang. It was McCord.

  “I heard you got off with just a fine.”

  “Yep. Law and order prevailed once again in the great state of Wyoming.”

  “Well, I got some bad news for you. Sonny Bunt didn’t kill Shannon. Not only was the gun you found in his house not the murder weapon, but Sonny has an alibi for the night Shannon was killed.”

  “Who’s his alibi? The same guy who said he was in Cheyenne when Jeff Hunter was killed?”

  “No. It’s the bartender at the Hacienda Grill in Waverly. Sonny has been having an affair with her, and the night Shannon was killed, he told his wife that he was going to Fort Collins and would be spending the night there. He actually spent the night at a motel in Red Desert with his girlfriend and she confirmed this.”

  “Maybe she’s lying,” DeMarco said.

  “She’s not. The clerk at the motel confirms that Sonny paid cash for the room and cameras at the motel don’t show him leaving his room until the next morning.”

  “Well, shit,” DeMarco said.

  “DeMarco, you might have to accept that Shannon was killed by some trucker like the sheriff thinks.”

  “She wasn’t killed by a trucker,” DeMarco said. “Someone who lives in this fucking place killed her.”

  “Just let the sheriff do his job, DeMarco,” McCord said and hung up.

  DeMarco looked across the road at Harriet’s place. He had to get Harriet to talk to him. And that’s when he remembered the last conversation he’d had with Harriet, when he’d told her that he might have found the guy who’d killed Shannon. Harriet’s response had been: “The guy?”

  Harriet knew it wasn’t a guy.

  He’d never finished reading Shannon’s journal because he’d been so convinced that Sonny had killed her. He went into his room, got his copy of the journal and another beer, and went to sit back outside.

  He started flipping pages—this time focusing on the entries related to the women of Waverly.

  28

  The first entry DeMarco came to concerned Harriet. He almost skipped over it as he didn’t consider Harriet a likely suspect, then decided not to.

  I’m really glad Harriet’s taken a liking to me. She’s a tough old gal. She doesn’t tolerate any sass from the truckers who go to her restaurant and isn’t particularly friendly to the locals, either. But once she found out I wrote Lighthouse, she opened up to me. She has a hard time sleeping, and some nights she’ll sit in the café at a table near a window and sip bourbon and watch the cars streaming down the highway. There’s a painting by Edward Hopper of a lonely woman sitting on a bed staring out a window and that’s who she reminds me of. Because I’m always up so late, I’ve gotten into the habit of going over to the café sometimes when I see her and we’ll talk for an hour or so. She’s the best source of gossip in Waverly and she likes telling what she knows.

  I’ve noticed that Harriet rarely says anything about her past so last night I asked her how she ended up in Waverly. She told me that thirty years ago she and her husband owned a restaurant in Cleveland and her husband got tired of the city, and the neighborhood where the restaurant was located had started to go downhill. Her husband, his name was Gene, learned that the café in Waverly was for sale. Harriet didn’t know how he’d found that out, maybe from a trade magazine, but he sold the restaurant in Cleveland and bought the café in Waverly based on nothing but photographs. He’d been to Yellowstone once when he was a kid and he thought all of Wyoming looked like Yellowstone. Harriet said, “The first time I saw this town . . . Well, I could have killed him.” But she said her husband, unlike herself, was an outgoing person and people liked him and the café earned them a living, if just barely. Then Gene died unexpecte
dly and she was pretty much stuck here. It’s hard for me to imagine a woman like Harriet letting her husband push her into doing something she didn’t agree with, but who knows what she was like when she was younger.

  DeMarco flipped a few pages until he came to:

  Lisa Bunt is an interesting woman. According to Harriet, there’s no doubt whatsoever she married Hiram for his money and he married her because having her on his arm made him the envy of every man in the county. Harriet said Lisa was twenty-seven and Hiram was sixty-six when they wed. They met when Lisa was working at the gun show they hold at the fairgrounds near Cheyenne, dressed in a skimpy outfit, luring guys over to look at the weapons some dealer was selling. Lisa charmed the pants off him and within six months they were hitched. At the time Hiram, even though he was in his sixties, was still a vigorous, virile man, maybe with some assistance from those little blue pills. But about two years ago, right after the famous standoff, he screwed up his back riding an ATV and since then he can barely walk. But if Lisa has any regrets about being married to a man forty years her senior, you’d never guess it from talking to her. She’s smart and funny, always pleasant, and acts as if life’s a ball.

  The next entry was a surprise: a discussion about the motel’s maid.

  I’d told Harriet last night that Sam’s daughter had most likely stolen my earrings. Harriet said the girl’s name is Lola and she started hanging out with the wrong crowd in high school and got hooked on drugs. “She was such a sweet kid,” Harriet said. “It’s a shame, what she’s become. It’s killing Sam.”

  I was coming out of my room to go to lunch today and found Lola Clarke with her cleaning cart standing in front of the room next to mine. She looked terrible; the drugs are definitely taking their toll on her physically. When she saw me, she said, “You gotta lot of goddamn nerve accusing me of stealing.” I said, “I didn’t accuse you. I told your father my earrings were missing and asked if anyone had been inside my room but you, and he said no one had.” She said, “Bullshit, you’re not accusing me. You better watch your fancy ass. I won’t stand for you telling lies about me.” I said, “Are you threatening me, Lola?” She said, “I’m just saying don’t go badmouthing me or you’ll regret it.” I feel sorry for her. I hope she gets the help she needs. As for her threat, I’m not worried about that. Lola doesn’t know I played hockey in college and whipped girls a lot tougher than her.

  The next entry DeMarco stopped to read began with: Hoo-boy. DeMarco smiled when he read that, “hoo-boy” being an expression Shannon had used when something struck her as scandalous or shocking.

  Hoo-boy. I saw something tonight and I’m dying to talk to Harriet about it. I’d just pulled my car into the motel parking lot and I saw a striking cloud formation to the north. It looked like the fist of God about to come down on Waverly. I decided to study it for a while; I knew taking a photo wouldn’t really capture it and it was changing by the moment, and I wanted to get my head around how to describe it. So I walked around to the back of the motel, where the trailers and RVs are parked, to get a better view and I saw Jim Turner come out from amongst the trailers. I was going to say hi to him and point out the cloud formation, but he got into his cruiser and took off before I could say anything. I didn’t think too much about seeing him there, figuring that he was probably on sheriff’s business, checking on someone who lived in one of the trailers. After he left, I stood there for about ten minutes, studying the clouds, when I see Lisa Bunt coming from the same direction that Jim Turner had come from. When she saw me, she stopped dead in her tracks, then smiled and walked over to me, and asked what I was doing. We BS’ed for about ten minutes, literally talking about the weather, then she left. She never said what she was doing in the trailer park and I never asked, but when I first saw her, I could see she looked really uncomfortable. Or maybe guilty?

  The next page was filled with a description of the cloud formation Shannon had seen: the colors, the way it advanced toward Waverly, the pent-up energy about to be released upon the land. DeMarco was once again struck by the difference in Shannon’s voice when she was writing what he guessed would be a part of her novel as opposed to the informal entries in her journal, which approximated the way she spoke.

  Harriet confirmed it. Jim Turner is having an affair with Lisa Bunt. Harriet said this is bad news for both of them. Lisa signed a pre-nup that says if she fooled around on him, Hiram could divorce her without giving her a cent. How Harriet knows these things is a mystery. As for Jim, he’d certainly lose his job because Hiram would make sure he did. Harriet said she suspected that Jim and Lisa meet in places other than Waverly as it was too dangerous for them to be having a tryst so close to home, but she’d seen Lisa’s cute little BMW half a dozen times go around to the back of the motel and not long after that, she’d see Jim’s cruiser arrive. Jim could always say he was there investigating some gas worker who’d committed a crime, but Lisa Bunt had no excuse for being there. As for the trailer they used, Harriet had no idea which one it was or who owned it. Lisa probably gets a big enough allowance from Hiram that she could afford to rent a trailer. Harriet also said that this wasn’t the first time Jim had cheated on his wife. The guy was so damn good looking that women just threw themselves at him and Harriet was aware of affairs he’d had with local women, one of them married, and she imagined Jim’s wife was probably aware of them too.

  I find it hard to believe that Carly Turner would tolerate her husband cheating on her. I’ve spoken to her a couple of times since the dinner party at Hiram’s house and have gotten to know her a bit. She comes across as a strong woman, very bright, and very independent. Yet I can’t help but feel sorry for her. She told me she was at the University of Wyoming in Laramie when she met Jim, who’d just gotten out of the army and had been hired on as a city cop. She’d been planning to go for a law degree, but then gets pregnant, marries Jim, and drops out of school. The second kid, another boy, came along a couple of years later. In the meantime, Jim gets a job working for the Sweetwater County Sheriff and becomes a rising star in the department. The local scuttlebutt is that he’s going to run for the sheriff’s job when the incumbent retires. Anyway, I like Carly. For one thing, she’s the only unabashed liberal I’ve met here in Wyoming, other than Gloria Brunson, and she’s very outspoken about her political beliefs and doesn’t care that the majority of the people in the area don’t agree with her. I get the sense, however, that as much as she loves her sons and her husband, that she feels like she’s wasted her life in Waverly. I also think she has a drinking problem. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been drinking and is always a bit drunk.

  I’m more sure now than ever that the main character in my novel is going to be based on Carly Turner: complex, conflicted, strong yet vulnerable. Maybe I’ll marry her to a younger version of Hiram Bunt, a successful rancher, an arrogant, aloof man who barely speaks to her. She’ll love the land yet feel as if it’s sucking the life out of her.

  A few pages later, Shannon was back to Lisa Bunt.

  Lisa Bunt invited me to go horseback riding with her and I’m so glad she did. Seeing the country from the back of a horse gave me a totally different perspective than driving around in my car. I asked Lisa if she knew someplace where I could rent a horse and she told me I could borrow one of hers any time I wanted and I’m going to take her up on the offer. During the ride she asked me if anyone in my book would be recognizable as a real person in Waverly. I told her no. I said that I was still developing the characters in my head and they would be based in part on some of the people I’d met, but that what I would be trying to do was capture the attitudes of people, their outlook on life, their feelings about living where they did and doing what they did, but none of them would be recognizable as people who actually lived in Waverly. Although she didn’t say so, I think she was genuinely concerned my novel would expose her affair with Jim Turner. What I didn’t tell her was that my novel was going to be centered around a couple w
ho were married to other people and having an affair that was going to turn out very badly for both of them. If I’d told her that, she would have probably freaked out.

  Saw Carly Turner tonight at the Hacienda Grill. She was there with a couple of women I’d never met, and when I walked in to have dinner, she waved me over. I couldn’t help but notice she was drinking about twice as fast as everyone else. At first she was funny, just as she’d been at the dinner party at Hiram’s, but after a while she tended to become a bit belligerent, snapping at the server, and her mood got darker the more she drank. When one of her friends pointed at the pretty Hispanic barmaid and said she’d heard that she was having an affair with Sonny Bunt—something I already knew about—Carly’s reaction seemed over the top. She said, “These goddamn bitches who go after other women’s husbands oughta be shot.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Carly knew about Lisa’s affair with her husband. Or maybe she was reflecting on past affairs that he’d had with other women. Harriet had told me that he’s had more than one. Whatever the case, there’s a lot of anger in Carly that she probably suppresses when she’s not drinking. Seeing that she was in no condition to drive I offered to drive her home, but she just laughed and said, “You think anyone’s going to give a deputy sheriff’s wife a DUI?”

  The next section he came to was about Harriet, which DeMarco again almost skipped over because he couldn’t imagine that Harriet would have anything to do with Shannon’s death. But he decided to read it anyway.

  I was at Harriet’s last night and something odd happened. I told her I wanted to find a book with photos of the area, maybe one which identified the plants and discussed the geographic formations. I said I could find things on the Internet but sometimes it’s easier to flip through an old-fashioned book. Harriet said her husband had bought a book like that when they first moved out here and it was upstairs in her apartment, and she asked me to go upstairs with her and try to find it. I’d never been in her apartment before. It’s a loft with a sleeping area at one end and a sitting area with a TV at the other end. There’s a fairly large bathroom with a huge, claw-footed bathtub, but no kitchen. Her kitchen is the restaurant. There were two bookcases in the place, one in the sleeping area and one in the sitting room. She told me to check the books in the sitting room and she’d look in the other bookcase.