Page 1 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

DAY ONE

SATURDAY

CHAPTER ONE

My phone rang at the same time the news aide pointed the stranger toward my desk in the KWMT-TV newsroom in Sherman, Wyoming.

Both those events occupied only a portion of my attention. Another circumstance snagged most of it.

My backup supply of Pepperidge Farm Double Dark Chocolate Milano cookies at the office was empty. I’d checked because the first hideaway spot was also empty.

Walk-ins weren’t unusual in KWMT’s newsroom. Strangers like this were.

He was tall, male, African-American, with an erect bearing, wearing jeans and a crisp, white shirt.

What really made him stand out, however, was he wore neither a cowboy hat nor a ball cap. His gleaming, bald head was uncovered.

He had a bony jaw made for clenching and a vein angling up his forehead made for throbbing. Clenching and throbbing were in evidence, though I suspected not at maximum throttle.

All in all, he was impressive in an intimidating way and the news aide had pointed him toward my desk. Gee, thanks.

Other times, I might have been the pointee because I was the only one in the newsroom. But at the moment there were two other candidates — yes, on a Saturday, because newscasts are daily. Yet I was the one pointed at.

He strode toward me.

My phone rang again. I looked at the screen.

My mother.

Calling about my wedding to Tom Burrell next weekend.

How could I be so sure? Because she basically hadn’t talked to me about anything except the wedding since Tom and I were engaged in December. I’d voted for an elopement. Tom wanted a real wedding.

We compromised. With a real wedding.

This played out as letting my mother and Tom’s daughter, Tamantha, run the circus within the confines of a modest tent I fought hard to keep from bulging out at the seams, while Tom mostly looked on in benign amusement.

“Elizabeth Margaret Danniher?” Scary stranger stood in front of my desk, looming over me.

I had a choice.

Scary stranger?

Wedding-planning mother?

Have I mentioned Mom and Tamantha have a spreadsheet?

Tamantha, who would enter sixth grade after this summer break, finding a template for such a spreadsheet on a wedding planning website didn’t bring me joy, but Mom using one . . .?

I clicked off the phone — for now — and looked up at the imposing arrival. “Yes.”

Don’t judge. She’d call back. She always did.

“One of my men is missing.”

“One of your men?”

“Yes, ma’am. He has a cabin in the north central section of your county.”

That spawned a flotilla of questions, but before we got to those, I wanted to clear underbrush.

“Which branch of the military?”

I wasn’t showing off. The bearing, the ma’am, the one of my men.

Good thing I wasn’t showing off, because he was entirely unimpressed. “Army. Colonel Crawford.”

“Nice to meet you, Colonel. Sergeant Shelton told you to talk to me?”

Sergeant Wayne Shelton was not in the Army, at least not now. He was in the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department.

Which was where I would expect most people to start if they were concerned about someone going missing. With this man, would expect ratcheted up to had not a single doubt.

No way would coming to a TV reporter be his first move.

He went to the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department and wouldn’t have settled for talking to Deputy Ferrante at the front desk — I seldom did if I could possibly avoid it. Which meant Shelton or Sheriff Russ Conrad. Of the two, Shelton was more likely.

More likely to be Ferrante’s pick to handle an Army colonel and more likely to send the colonel on to me.

Again, not showing off. Just following logic.

“He did,” the colonel said.

A trickle of something went up my spine.

If Colonel Crawford had been a completely different kind of person, Shelton telling him to talk to me could have been — almost certainly would have been — an effort to yank my chain. Colonel Crawford, however, was not fodder for chain-yanking, and Shelton wouldn’t have missed that.

“Why don’t you come around here and sit down, so we can talk more easily.” I gestured him toward a chair he could pull up close to mine on the side my chair could turn to face him. It also put him farther away from the other occupants of the bullpen.

Eavesdropping is an occupational skill few journalists can turn off. Better to spare my colleagues the temptation.

“Who’s missing?” I asked.

“Sergeant Frank Jardos, U.S. Army, retired.”

For a second, I felt one eyebrow drop, while the other popped up. I quickly evened them out from the simultaneous frown and surprise.

I knew the name from recent news reports.

Not by me. Nola Choi, a young reporter who’d been here six months, had this story.

A cabin had caught fire Wednesday. By the time the volunteer firefighters reached the tucked-away structure, it was too late. Certainly too late for the lone occupant. Presumed to be Frank Jardos — owner, sole resident, and a retired sergeant in the army.

Although the body wasn’t found until Thursday.

The fire made identity difficult to confirm. It would not be official until a forensic examination at a Montana facility, because Cottonwood County didn’t have the expertise.

However, the body generally matched Jardos’ size, his truck was still on the premises, and remnants of leather boots on the corpse matched the sergeant’s customary choice, according to sources.

One source was a neighbor whose name hadn’t registered.

The other was described as a long-time friend, which I found hard to believe, because Hiram Poppinger was not the kind to have friends.

Oh, okay, maybe that wasn’t completely fair. I’d earlier come across another person he’d considered a friend.

Plus, his recent romantic connection with a woman named Yvette appeared to at least partially unfreeze his Cro-Magnon mentality.

Still, a long-time friend?

Another fact from Nola’s reporting remained vivid: The badly burned head had what the investigators believed to be a bullet hole in it. A bullet hole consistent with being self-inflicted.

There’d also been mention that the cabin owner’s wife of forty-six years passed away last fall.

“You know about—?”

He cut me off. “I know.”

He knew not only that his man had been found dead, but that the authorities’ math added up the facts to equal Frank Jardos shooting himself and — in the process or beforehand — setting his cabin on fire, accidentally or on purpose.

And yet, Shelton sent him to talk to me.

“What makes you think he’s missing?”

“Because he did not commit suicide.”