House Standoff Read online

  DeMarco woke up at eight the following morning, and after showering and shaving, moseyed on over to Harriet’s café for pancakes and sausage. Harriet took his order but acted as if he was a complete stranger. After breakfast, he called the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s general number and said he needed to speak to Jim Turner regarding an ongoing investigation in Waverly. Turner called him back half an hour later while DeMarco was taking a stroll through the town to work off some of the calories from his breakfast.

  DeMarco said, “I wanted to know if you found a flash drive or an external hard drive in Shannon’s room?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because writers tend to back up their files to devices like those.”

  “Okay, but I still don’t see why you’re asking.”

  DeMarco decided a lie might be appropriate. “Because Shannon’s sister asked me to ask. Her sister is the beneficiary of Shannon’s estate and because Shannon was famous, even a partially completed novel could be valuable.” Before Turner could say anything else, DeMarco added, “Now I imagine Shannon’s sister’s lawyer could make a request that you turn over anything you found in Shannon’s room, but the only thing she wants are the backup files if they exist. I thought the simplest thing would be to ask if you found a flash drive or something like that, and if you didn’t, the matter would be closed. If you did find something, I’ll pass the information on to her sister and let her, or her lawyer, proceed from there.”

  Turner, without hesitating, said, “We didn’t find a flash drive or an external hard drive in the room. If we had, it would have been collected as evidence in the investigation. But the only things in the room were her clothes, a suitcase, and a knapsack. There wasn’t anything in the suitcase and the only things in the knapsack were sunscreen lotion, sunglasses, and a cheap pair of binoculars.”

  “Well, then that settles that,” DeMarco said.

  “Mr. DeMarco, how much longer do you intend to be here?”

  “I don’t know, Deputy. Like I told you yesterday, I’ve never been to this part of the country before and I was thinking about doing some exploring. Maybe I’ll see if I can spot some of those wild horses. You got any suggestions for where I should go?”

  Turner said, “Don’t call me again.”

  Turner disconnected the call. He’d never even thought about there being a backup copy of whatever Doyle had been working on. If there had been, God knows what could be in it. The good news was that he’d told DeMarco the truth. The forensic people hadn’t found a backup drive in the writer’s room. If they had, he would have known. He also would have been powerless to stop them from reading whatever was on the drive. So if Doyle had some sort of device for backing up her files, maybe it had been in her laptop case, which had been stolen along with her computer. And if she was the one who’d killed Doyle, she certainly would have gotten rid of any evidence tying her to the crime. He could just see her going for her morning horseback ride on that black mare she liked, taking a small folding shovel with her, and burying everything she’d taken from the writer’s room. If she killed the writer. God, he hoped he was wrong.

  DeMarco continued on his stroll through Waverly, stopping once to call Shannon’s literary agent in New York. The agent’s secretary said he wasn’t available, that he was meeting with Martin Scorsese to discuss the sale of the film rights to one of his client’s books. She said this in a breathless tone, as if a meeting with Scorsese was only one step down from a meeting with God Almighty. DeMarco asked her to have the agent call him as soon as he could.

  He noticed a barbershop across the street and walked over to it. He’d needed a haircut before he left D.C. and the situation when it came to his hair hadn’t improved. There was no one in the barbershop but one man sitting in one of the shop’s two barber chairs reading a newspaper. The man had a shaved head but compensated for his baldness with an impressive waxed, white handlebar mustache. DeMarco figured the man had to be the barber, and thinking it might be a while before Shannon’s agent concluded his meeting with Scorsese, decided to get his hair cut.

  About halfway through the process, the barber asked what DeMarco was doing in Waverly; he apparently knew all his customers and knew DeMarco was an outsider. When DeMarco said he was looking into the death of the writer, Shannon Doyle, the barber said, “Never met the woman. Never read her book either, although my girlfriend tried to make me.”

  He paused then added, “The last book I read was some stupid thing called Vanity Fair by a writer named Wackery, or something like that. This English teacher in high school wouldn’t give me a passing grade til I finished it and wrote a report on it. That damn book was more than seven hundred pages long and I couldn’t understand what the hell the guy was talking about. Fortunately, my buddy Harley—he’s dead now, killed himself on a snowmobile—told me a guy named Cliff had boiled the whole damn book down to about seventy pages, so I read Cliff’s book and wrote the report based on it. Now if you ask me, the man who can tell a story in seventy pages instead of seven hundred is the better writer.”

  DeMarco was just admiring his haircut in the mirror, waiting for his change from the barber, when David, Shannon’s agent, returned his call. He stepped outside the barbershop and explained that he was trying to find out how Shannon backed up her work, and once again told the story of how Shannon had reacted when he’d put a glass of wine near her laptop.

  David said, “Do you think her backup files might tell you something about why she was killed?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to look at them.”

  “Well, she told me the story about spilling the can of Coke into her laptop—that’s pretty traumatic for a writer—and after that she started backing up her files to the cloud. She had an Apple laptop and she used the iCloud feature on the machine. But since she stored them in the cloud, I don’t know how you’d get access to the files.”

  “I couldn’t,” DeMarco said. “But I know someone who can.”

  DeMarco called Neil.

  Neil answered, saying, “Oh, yeah, I forgot to call you back. Sorry about that. Anyway, that gal, Candy, never called Anderson Cooper or anyone else over at CNN.”

  “Thanks, but that’s not why I’m calling,” DeMarco said. The last thing on DeMarco’s mind was Mahoney’s leaker.

  DeMarco explained that he was calling because he needed Shannon Doyle’s backup files, which were stored in the cloud. “Do you think you can find them and get them for me?” he asked.

  “Maybe, if you can provide some basic information,” Neil said.

  “You mean the cloud isn’t secure enough to stop you?”

  “The cloud isn’t secure at all. Google the subject and you’ll see what I mean. But you need to get me as much information on Shannon as you can. Social security number, credit card numbers, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, everything that folks tend to put down when setting up accounts. And if you can get me the password she used for her iCloud account that would make things even easier.”

  “Her password? How the hell would I get that?”

  “I was mostly joking, but people tend to put their passwords into their phones or they put them on Post-It notes under a desk blotter or some other place they can get to easily. I know one idiot who had a file in his computer titled Passwords, which I found when I got into his machine. Anyway, get me as much information as you can and I’ll see what I can do. Expect my bill in the mail whether I get anything or not.”

  “This is urgent, Neil,” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah, well, urgent will cost you more.”

  DeMarco called Shannon’s sister, Leah, and told her what he needed.

  “What are you doing, Joe?”

  “I’m trying to find out why she was killed.”

  Leah was silent for a moment then said, “They cleaned out Shannon’s apartment in California and boxed up everything and sent
it to me. A couple of the boxes contain files like bills and tax returns, stuff like that. I can probably get everything you need from the files.”

  “See if you can find anything that looks like a password she might use on a computer. You know, a string of weird letters and numbers.”

  Leah laughed. “I can already tell you what her password most likely was because she used the same password for everything. It’s CoryJudy. That’s all one word, capital C, small case o, r, y, capital J, small case u, d, y. Sometimes, if she had to, she’d put numbers after it, like 1, 2, 3, or she’d put an exclamation point or a dollar sign. But the basic password was always CoryJudy.”

  “CoryJudy?”

  “Yeah, those are my kids’ names. I told her she was a fool to use the same password for everything but that’s what she did.”

  Two hours later, Leah emailed him the information he’d asked for and he forwarded the email to Neil, adding that Shannon’s password might be some variation of CoryJudy, the names of Shannon’s niece and nephew.

  That evening, DeMarco had dinner again at Harriet’s, this time trying the pot roast. He was hoping that his presence might shame Harriet into talking to him. It didn’t. While he was polishing off a piece of apple pie for dessert, Neil called him.

  “Okay, I got her files from the cloud. There’re about five hundred of them. What do you want me to do with them?”

  “I want you to send me every file she added or updated in the last two months.”

  “Hang on a minute. There’s only one file, a Word file, that was saved in the last two months. It’s about eighty thousand words, maybe three hundred pages double-spaced.”

  “Email it to me but also print it out and overnight it to me. I’m not sure I can find any place near where I’m staying to print out a file and I’d rather read a paper copy than try to read it on my computer.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Waverly, Wyoming.”

  “Where the hell’s that?”

  DeMarco gave Neil the address of his motel. “And thanks, Neil.”

  DeMarco dropped by Sam Clarke’s office before going back to his room to let Sam know that he was expecting a FedEx package tomorrow. He asked Sam to call him as soon as it arrived.

  Sam called Jim Turner at ten the next morning. “Just thought you might want to know that DeMarco got a FedEx package this morning.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I wasn’t going to open the man’s mail. But it felt like a bunch of paper and right now DeMarco’s sitting outside his room in a chair reading something.”

  Goddamnit, Turner thought. Had that son of a bitch managed to get those backup files he’d been asking about? But how could he have done that? And if he had gotten the files, what was in them? DeMarco had indicated that Doyle’s sister wanted the files because one of them could be a partly completed novel—a novel based on whatever Doyle had seen and learned in Waverly. Could there be anything in the novel that pointed to whoever killed her? Jesus, he had to find out.

  12

  DeMarco opened the package Neil had sent him and saw it contained about three hundred pages, just as Neil had said. It was warm in the motel room and the small, stuffy space was making him claustrophobic. He bought a Coke from a vending machine, then took the chair from his room and put it outside on the walkway in front of the door. It was a pleasant early summer morning made somewhat less pleasant by the eighteen-wheelers noisily streaming down I-80.

  He flipped through the pages quickly to see what he had. It appeared to be part journal and part sections of the novel that Shannon had been planning to write and it revealed the two distinct aspects of Shannon’s character: Shannon the person that other people saw and Shannon the writer. The journal material wasn’t dated but appeared to have been written in chronological order from the time she’d arrived in Wyoming, starting with a visit to Gloria Brunson. In these entries, Shannon wrote in a lighthearted, conversational style, similar to the way she spoke, many of her comments humorous and most likely not intended for anyone else to read. Like a remark about a cowboy who’d helped her change a tire when she got a flat.

  She wrote: The kid looked strong enough to have lifted the back end of the car without a jack, but he was so shy he could barely look me in the eye. He kept calling me ‘ma’am’ like I was his grade school teacher, even though I wasn’t more than ten years older than him. Cute guy with a rip in the back of his jeans he probably wasn’t aware of. He was wearing red jockey shorts which made me smile.”

  But with other entries in the journal, the style was completely different, as if Shannon had been looking through a different pair of eyes. There was one section that went on for a page describing a thunderstorm coming across the grasslands, toward an isolated ranch house. It was lyrical, poetic, each word carefully selected for maximum impact and DeMarco could not only see the approaching storm, he could practically smell the ozone in the air. This was the voice of the woman who’d written Lighthouse.

  He’d read the novel entries later. What he wanted now were facts; he wanted to know what she had to say about the people she’d talked to and to see if any of them had frightened her or threatened her or if she’d seen anything that could have put her in danger.

  He kept skimming the document and at one point he read:

  Harriet told me that a man who worked for the BLM was killed today. He was shot in the back. I knew him. I’d never spoken to him but I’d seen him at the Hacienda Grill. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, a short, wiry guy, trying to grow a mustache, probably to make himself appear older. He was wearing a khaki-colored shirt, like a forest ranger might wear, with a triangular patch on one sleeve. What struck me was that everybody in the place seemed to be making a point of ignoring him. I asked the waitress who he was and she said, “Oh, he’s the local BLM dick.” “Dick?” I said.” You mean like detective?” and she said, “No, dick like in pecker.” I’d already learned that people around here didn’t care much for the BLM but it seemed a shame they’d ostracize a guy, basically just a kid, for doing his job. Whatever the case, I was shocked to hear he’d been shot but Harriet had no idea what had happened.

  A few pages later, the BLM agent came up again.

  My God, I wonder if the FBI knows what Harriet told me tonight. Harriet said that about a week before the BLM agent was killed, he got into a fight with Sonny Bunt. Harriet said Sonny’s real name is Steven but everybody calls him Sonny. Sonny Bunt. That sounds comical but I guess there’s nothing comical about Sonny. Harriet said Sonny was in the Grill drinking with a couple of his pals and he started lipping off to Jeff. According to the story she’d heard, Jeff was in there having a beer, working on some kind of report, and Sonny starts giving him a hard time, but Jeff ignores him. That apparently pisses Sonny off, so he goes over and does the I’m-talking-to-you routine. Jeff stands up, says something to Sonny that no one heard, and Sonny takes a swing at him—after which Jeff just cleans his clock, hits him half a dozen times, and doesn’t stop until Sonny’s buddies pulled Jeff off him.

  I’ve seen Sonny several times. He’s four inches taller than Jeff and outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds. He was probably humiliated to get his ass kicked with everybody in the bar watching. But I wonder if the FBI knows about this? In this town, it seems unlikely that anyone would say that Hiram Bunt’s son might have had a reason for shooting Jeff, but I’m sure they must know. They’re the FBI.

  A couple of pages later, there was another entry about Sonny Bunt.

  I saw Sonny down at the Grill tonight while I was having dinner with Joanne and Linda, these twin sisters who belong to the book club. They’re a hoot. It occurred to me that the kind of face Sonny has he’d never be the big villain in a movie. His face just lacks character. Most likely he’d be cast as the villain’s sneaky sidekick, the one who would rat out the villain when the cops start to squeeze him
. When I saw him at the Grill, he was down at the end of the bar talking to Angela, the pretty Hispanic bartender. Linda saw me looking and said, “Sonny better watch his ass. Everybody knows he’s fooling around with her, which means by now someone must have told his wife.” I asked if they’d heard about the fight Sonny got into with the BLM agent and they both had. They said the whole town had heard about it and that Sonny couldn’t show his face until the black eye Jeff had given him had faded. I said, “Do you think he might have killed that agent because of the fight?” Joanne said, “Oh, no, he’d never do that,” but Linda said, “He’s a sneaky shit and I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he did.’

  DeMarco flipped the pages looking for more entries about Sonny and the BLM agent, but didn’t see anything else.

  He’d also noticed that he hadn’t seen anything written yet about the standoff between Hiram Bunt and the feds. It appeared as if Gloria Brunson was right and the standoff didn’t particularly interest Shannon. What interested her were the personalities of the people involved. There were a lot of short entries about men she’d encountered where she described them as being fiercely independent characters who looked on the federal government as some sort of occupying army. She said she could imagine them standing in a line, willing to die to protect what they considered to be their rights. It was almost as if she admired them.

  DeMarco still had a couple of hundred pages to read in the journal but he decided to put it aside for a bit. He wanted to talk to the FBI.

  13

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation has four field offices in Wyoming: in Cheyenne, Jackson Hole, Casper, and Lander. According to what DeMarco had read online, the BLM agent’s murder was being handled by the FBI office in Casper, which was about a hundred and sixty miles from Waverly.