House Standoff Read online

“I’ll read it, but regardless of what it says, I’m not going to have some cloud hanging over the investigation of that woman’s death. What I want from you is your word that you won’t go running to the press until I’ve had a chance to do my job.”

  DeMarco nodded. “You have my word.”

  37

  Webber sat for about ten minutes mulling everything over. He wasn’t totally surprised that Jim Turner might be screwing Lisa Bunt, but he was somewhat surprised. He’d always known that Jim ran around on his wife, but in the past, his infidelities had never led to any problems with him doing his job. Jim was one of those guys who’d always been lucky that none of his past affairs had come back to bite him because a woman made a formal complaint or the woman’s husband decided to go after him with a shotgun. The other thing about Jim was that he was the most viable candidate to replace him when he retired next year. He was popular with folks—the ladies, of course, loved him—and other than his sexual escapades, he’d been a good law enforcement officer, and would probably make a good administrator.

  But if his fling with Lisa Bunt became public knowledge—and there was a good possibility it would if he assigned another man to the case—then Jim’s political ambitions would be finished. And God knows what Hiram Bunt might do. If a man as prideful and ornery as Hiram didn’t shoot Jim outright, he might make a big stink about the whole thing with the governor and the governor might demand that Webber fire Jim. And if Jim really had interfered in the investigation of the writer’s death in such a way that he’d intentionally steered the investigation away from viable suspects, then he’d fire the man on his own, and not because of any grief Hiram might give him. He wouldn’t tolerate an officer on his force who helped a murderer get away.

  He punched a button on his desk phone and said, “Irene, tell Pat Morse I need to see him right away. Then track down Jim Turner. I’ll want to see Jim after I’m done with Pat.”

  Pat Morse was the best investigator he had and didn’t harbor any political ambitions to be sheriff. He would have initially assigned Pat to the Doyle case if Jim hadn’t lived in Waverly.

  Jim watched Pat Morse walk out of the sheriff’s office. He’d been waiting twenty minutes to see his boss and the longer he’d sat there, the more apprehensive he became.

  He said, “Hey, Pat, how you doin’?”

  Pat gave him an odd look, then said, “Fine, Jim, just fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Talk to me later? What did that mean?

  Jim entered the sheriff’s office, saying, “Gonna be a hot one out there today.”

  The sheriff looked at him for a long beat then pointed to a chair and said, “Jim, sit down. We need to have a serious talk.”

  Jim left the sheriff’s office less than ten minutes later. He thought for a second that he might throw up right there in the sheriff’s waiting room.

  The sheriff had told him that Pat Morse was taking over the Shannon Doyle murder investigation because Jim had been accused of having an affair with Lisa Bunt. But the affair wasn’t the reason he was being removed from the case. The reason was that the sheriff had been given information indicating that Lisa might be a suspect when it came to the writer’s murder and that Jim, therefore, had a conflict of interest.

  The information given to the sheriff had obviously come from DeMarco, and he wondered if Doyle’s journal was what Pat Morse had been carrying when he left the sheriff’s office. Morse had been carrying a brown accordion file folder like the type DeMarco had used to hold his copy of the journal. Folks joked about people coming back from the grave to haunt them, but the damn Doyle woman was literally doing that with her fucking journal.

  He hadn’t denied that he was having an affair with Lisa—he’d just dig his hole deeper by lying to Webber—but he had said, “Clay, Lisa didn’t have anything to do with that woman’s death. I’m certain of that. But last night a couple of guys attacked DeMarco because Lola Clarke sicced them on him. I just got through interviewing one of the men involved, and I think there’s a chance that Lola might have killed the Doyle woman.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sure Pat will look into that,” the sheriff had said, clearly no longer interested in Jim’s opinion when it came to Lola Clarke or anything else connected to Doyle’s murder. “Now, as much as I hate to do it, Jim, I’m suspending you until Pat completes his investigation.”

  And that was that.

  His next thought was: What the hell am I going to tell Carly when I don’t go to work tomorrow? He supposed he could say he’d decided to take some time off to paint the house like she’d been bugging him to do—but he wondered how long he’d be able to get away with that. But he was going to have to tell Lisa what was going on. There was no doubt Pat would be interviewing her and Pat was going to ask if she had an alibi for the night Doyle was killed. He might even get a search warrant to obtain any weapons Lisa might have. Pat Morse was a good guy, and he’d been a friend for years, and he’d probably try to investigate Lisa in such a way that it wouldn’t get back to Hiram that she’d been screwing him—but that wasn’t certain. And when Hiram found out, there was no doubt that Lisa’s marriage would be over.

  Jim wasn’t ready to go home to face his wife. Before leaving the sheriff’s building, he changed into civilian clothes, then headed to a bar on the east side of Rock Springs, a scruffy place with a scruffy clientele. It was only eleven a.m. but the bar would be open for the neighborhood alkies it catered to.

  The bartender, a good-looking young gal with a lot of tattoos, smiled at him in a way that indicated she approved of his looks. He didn’t return the smile. The last thing he needed right now was another woman.

  He sat for a bit, sipping a beer, trying to figure out what Pat Morse might do. He’d certainly interview Lola Clarke, and if Pat was as smart as he thought he was, he’d toss Lola into a cell and let her sit for twenty-four hours until she’d be dying for a fix and willing to tell him anything. If Lola had actually killed Doyle, Pat would get it out of her, and that would be best for everyone. Pat’s investigation would then end quickly and he might not see any reason to question Lisa. But the truth was, and as much as he hoped Lola had killed Doyle because she needed money to support her habit, he had a hard time imagining Lola being able to pull off a cold-blooded murder.

  Lisa was a different story. Lisa was a beautiful woman but at her core, hard as steel. As repulsive as it might have been for her, she’d married Hiram Bunt to give herself a chance for a better life. That in itself was pretty cold-blooded. And if she thought Doyle might destroy her life and her future, he had no doubt Lisa could muster up the courage to do something about it. The big thing was going to be Lisa’s alibi. Lisa thought she had an alibi but she really didn’t, and he knew Pat Morse wasn’t going to buy it unless Lisa had some way to prove where she’d been at the exact hour Doyle had been killed.

  He finished the first beer, asked for another, and while he was waiting for the bartender to bring it, he texted Lisa. “Call me as soon as you can. It’s important.”

  Ten minutes later, Lisa called and he stepped outside the ratty bar into the sunlight to talk to her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I’ve just been suspended. That bastard DeMarco went to the sheriff, gave him a copy of Doyle’s journal, and accused me of having a conflict of interest since I’ve been sleeping with you. Now the sheriff has assigned another investigator to the case.”

  “I thought you said everything was going to be okay?”

  “Well, it still might be,” Jim said, and told her about Lola Clarke.

  When he finished, Lisa didn’t say anything for a moment, then she shrieked, “That son of a bitch! I told you, you had to do something about DeMarco. I told you!”

  “Well, it’s too late now.”

  “What’s going to happen next?” Lisa asked.

  “I’m assuming Pat Morse, he’s the investi
gator who’s been assigned, is going to question you. He’s going to ask if you have a .22 caliber pistol. If you do—”

  “I don’t.”

  “If you do, he’s going to ask you to give it to him voluntarily to do a ballistic test.” He assumed she really didn’t have a .22. Not now anyway. If she’d shot the Doyle woman certainly that gun would be someplace where it would never be found. “And if you don’t give him any weapons you have voluntarily, he might get a search warrant.”

  “Hiram would never let him search our house.”

  Jim ignored that comment; he knew Hiram wasn’t going to keep Clay Webber from executing a lawful search. “The other thing he’s going to do is ask if you have an alibi for the night Doyle was killed.”

  Lisa said, “You know I do, but what should I say? That I was fucking you the night Shannon was killed?”

  “Lisa, what you do is tell the man the truth. And you ask him, you beg him, to keep what you tell him to himself. But there’s something you need to understand. You don’t really have a solid alibi.”

  “What are you talking about? I was with you in a motel room in Rock Springs the night she was killed.”

  “The thing is, Lisa, I left about eleven that night. Doyle was killed after midnight as best anyone can tell. So unless you can prove you stayed in the room after I left, Pat’s going to say that you could have driven to Waverly and killed Doyle and then returned to the motel.”

  “I’ll just tell him you were with me all night.”

  “That’s not going to work. I got home around midnight and if Pat questions my wife, she’s going to say I was there. So there’s no way I can lie and say I was with you. This whole mess is bad enough without us lying and making it worse. So tell the truth. Say that I left at eleven and you spent the rest of the night in the room. And unless you really killed Doyle, Pat won’t be able to prove otherwise.”

  “I didn’t kill her, goddamnit. How could you say such a thing?”

  “Good,” Jim said. “So tell the truth. Now I have to go home and figure out what I’m going to tell Carly. I can’t—”

  “Shut up a minute,” Lisa said. “I need to think.” A moment later, she said, “What do you think will happen if Pat Morse can’t find Shannon’s killer? Like what if Lola has an alibi or Pat can’t prove she or anyone else did it?”

  “Well, if he can’t prove anything, then that will be the end of it and her death will go down as an unsolved homicide.”

  Lisa said, “No, that won’t be the end of it. That fucking DeMarco is going to destroy my life no matter what Pat Morse learns.”

  Lisa knew she was right. If Morse couldn’t find Shannon’s killer, DeMarco wouldn’t let it go. The man was obsessed. He’d go to the media and get them all stirred up and maybe eventually the politicians in Cheyenne would decide to get the state police or the FBI involved. That’s what DeMarco had told Jim he was going to do. In fact, it puzzled her that DeMarco had even bothered to talk to Clay Webber. And once the media got involved, there was no doubt her affair with Jim would come out. The goddamn media jackals loved nothing better than a sex element in a story.

  But what could she do? She could see that Jim didn’t have the guts to deal with DeMarco. And she couldn’t go to her husband and say: Honey, I’d like you to kill that nasty man from Washington because he’s going to expose the fact that I’ve been fucking around on you.

  Jim got home about two hours before he normally did, and Carly couldn’t help but smell the beer on his breath. Jesus, it was bad enough she drank as much as she did; now it seemed as if her husband had a drinking problem, too.

  She said, “What are you doing home so early?”

  “I decided to take some time off. Told the sheriff I needed a couple of weeks, that it was time for me to get some work done around this place like you’ve been saying. You know, paint the house, get the air conditioner running right again before it gets really hot.”

  She studied his face for a moment, then said, “Jim, what the hell is going on?”

  He started to say something, then he dropped into a chair and started crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Carly said. “You’re scaring me.”

  Jim shook his head, blew his nose, and said, “I’ve been having an affair with Lisa Bunt.”

  She was too stunned to speak.

  “That guy, DeMarco, convinced the sheriff that I had to be taken off the Doyle case because there’s a possibility that Lisa might have murdered Doyle and that I’ve been covering up for her. So I’ve been suspended and another investigator has been assigned.”

  Carly was only half listening to what her husband was saying. She was thinking: My God, I was wrong. He hadn’t been sleeping with Shannon.

  38

  She would wonder later if she did it because of the mirror.

  She had one of those magnifying mirrors that she used sometimes to put on her makeup, and as she was applying her lipstick, she noticed she was getting a small network of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes, too. She’d always had a few crow’s feet—she preferred to call them smile lines—but it seemed as if there were more of them, these harsh furrows in her skin.

  She turned off the light on the fucking magnifying mirror and looked into the regular one over the sink. She was still a beautiful woman—there was no doubt about that—and the big four-oh was still three years away. But thirty-seven wasn’t twenty-seven, the age she’d been when she’d snagged Hiram. What the hell would she do if he divorced her? There was no way she could go back to living the way she was before she met him.

  She’d left home when she was seventeen because her mom was a violent, abusive drunk and her stepdad kept trying to fuck her. She moved in with a guy she knew who was a few years older than her, a loser who couldn’t keep a job, then had to drop out of school so she could make enough money to eat and pay the rent. The best paying job she could find was dancing topless in a bar, a job her asshole boyfriend at the time encouraged her to take. The job was demeaning, but she kept it longer than she kept the boyfriend.

  She finally quit dancing—dancing sounding better than stripping—and got a job at a Hooters in Denver. With her body, she was the perfect Hooters girl and made a lot in tips, but was still always living paycheck-to-paycheck and was never able to afford decent clothes or a nice place to live. Luckily, while she was still working at the restaurant, she got a part-time job with an agency that provided models for trade shows and conventions. She’d be the girl in the short-shorts and the lowcut halter top luring men over to look at the boats or the trucks or the snowmobiles. Which turned out to be the best job she ever had because that’s how she met Hiram, at the gun show in Cheyenne.

  Marriage to Hiram had its downsides, but it opened up a whole new world to her. She started shopping at Neiman Marcus instead of J.C. Penny. She drove a late-model BMW and not some beater that she was never sure would start. Then there were the horses. She loved horses. She’d never ridden one until she met Hiram, and now couldn’t imagine not owning a horse. She grew mentally as well. She got her GED, then started taking business classes at a community college in Rock Springs so she would be able to manage Hiram’s businesses when he was gone. She was surprised to learn that managing a business was something that actually appealed to her, and she knew she’d be good at it.

  Yes, she had a good life—a wonderful life—and there was no way she was going back to the life she’d had before. Even if she’d wanted to do it—which she didn’t—she was getting too old for pole dancing or modeling at trade shows or prancing around as a waitress in a place like Hooters. She knew she’d be able to find a job of some kind because she’d have to, but whatever it was, it most likely wouldn’t pay for shit, and she’d find herself once again living in a small, crummy apartment in some crummy neighborhood. Most important, she knew that the likelihood of finding another man as rich as Hiram to marry would be s
lim, and the odds would diminish with each passing year.

  No! She wasn’t going to lose what she had. She wasn’t going back to what she’d been. And with Sonny in jail, she was in a perfect position to get everything Hiram had—his millions, his land, his businesses—and she wasn’t going to allow that fucking DeMarco to take all that away from her.

  The problem was, she could only think of one way to stop him. And she needed to do it quickly. Hiram didn’t yet know about her affair with Jim, but every minute DeMarco was around, and the longer Pat Morse kept talking to people about Doyle’s death, the higher the likelihood that Hiram would learn of her unfaithfulness—and then cast her back down into the pit that she’d clawed her way out of.

  The prevalent theory when it came to Shannon Doyle’s death was that some trucker, who was most likely an addict, had killed Doyle in her motel room and then stolen what valuables she had. If DeMarco were to die and the evidence pointed to a trucker, that would tend to fit what Jim and all the sheriff’s men were already thinking. Jim would, of course, suspect her—but he wouldn’t pursue her. But there was no way that DeMarco would open his door if she were to knock on it in the middle of the night. Not to mention that the motel was a really dumb place to kill someone. Someone could drive into the parking lot at any time. Or one of the gas workers who stayed there could come stumbling back from a bar. Yeah, whoever had killed Doyle was probably either high or stupid, and just got lucky.

  So killing him at the motel wouldn’t do. But how about the truck stop? That was close to the first murder and a trucker would again be a likely suspect.

  She grabbed her car keys and thirty minutes later she decided that yeah, the truck stop would do. DeMarco was on his own. No one in town was helping him and it was just a matter getting him alone where she wanted him.

  39

  DeMarco took a seat in Tommy’s rented trailer. DeMarco really wanted a beer after his meeting with the sheriff, but Tommy was an alcoholic, in his third year of sobriety, so he and Tommy just sat there in the small trailer drinking Cokes.