Page 21 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

Mike and Jennifer each let it be known they thought it was well past time that I’d called.

Not during that first call, when I said there might be something stirring and asked if they had time to discuss. Then, they’d each said they could talk in a few minutes, without asking many questions.

Jennifer said she was nearing a point where she could take a break for a conversation.

Mike’s flight had just landed at Cody. He’d be available to talk during his drive to Sherman.

Diana was at the station and said she’d find a private place to talk at the agreed-on time.

I debated driving back toward town, but decided that as long as I was in the area, I’d take a shot at stopping by the fire department substation in hopes of finding the guy who’d been lead on the fire Miles Stevens told me about yesterday.

No sense going there right away, then sitting outside during the conversation with the others.

If Ned Irvin or anyone else was there that would almost certainly catch their attention and curiosity.

Better to walk in cold, so to speak. So, I went to a turnaround spot not far from the Red Sail Ranch’s entryway, parked under a cottonwood for shade, and checked for connection.

This close to the Walterstons’ ranch I was optimistic, but I’d learned to check.

All good.

That left me time to try to put my thoughts in order.

The time to start the group video call rolled around before I completed that task.

That’s when our Chicago contingent expressed their opinions of my timing.

“Hey, Diana could have called you. Why not get on her case?” I demanded.

“You’re the one who starts these things,” Jennifer said.

“I needed to sort out my thinking about it.”

“No, you didn’t,” Diana said.

“Hah,” Mike crowed.

“Hey,” I objected.

Diana continued blandly, “You were debating taking on this investigation because you were concerned about it interfering with the wedding—”

“I didn’t—”

“—specifically, running up against your mother and Tamantha’s wedding preparation schedule.”

“Well, that’s understandable. Mrs. D and Tamantha — that’s a formidable duo.” Mike’s small shudder was visible through the screen.

As I said, he’s my friend.

“I don’t get what the big deal is — they’re planning the wedding, not you,” Jennifer said.

“I do have a little to do with it.”

My grumble didn’t put a dent in Jennifer’s attitude. “We have days and days before your part, so let’s get started on this.”

Diana made a sound. Mike found a need to put his hand over his mouth.

With dignity and an altruistic view to the greater good, I set aside my righteous indignation, and recounted what happened in chronological order, with Diana picking up with her description of the fire scene.

“I’m sending you all the footage,” she said.

“I’ve already accessed what Nola Choi shot. I’ll get it out to everybody,” Jennifer added.

“How—? Do you have a backdoor—? No, wait. Don’t tell us,” I said.

“You took the words out of my mouth,” murmured Mike.

For years, the rest of us withstood the temptation to let loose Jennifer’s hacking skills, not wanting to risk her getting in trouble.

Now we might need to protect the station’s security, since she was no longer an official employee.

Mike recovered first and said, “Could whoever burned the cabin have done it like they used to in the old days for the nails?”

“Nails?” I asked.

“They were expensive, hard to find. Get an old building that wasn’t needed anymore, burn it down, sift through for nails and you had a supply.”

“There was a dead guy in the cabin. Why burn it down for nails when there was a dead guy there?” Jennifer asked.

“I was trying to cover our bases.”

Before Jennifer could respond with what her expression indicated was not going to be praise, Diana stepped in. “There will be a separate file coming through now showing another element — a pattern in the fire.”

That recentered all our attention as she explained.

We each called up the video.

Yes, Mike was driving, but he was well out of Cody and an old hand at this.

“I don’t see—. Oh.” Jennifer’s self-interruption faded into absorption as she observed the pattern.

Mike whistled. “Good spotting, Diana.”

If she basked in the praise, it was at warp speed.

Next, I told them about my encounter with Hannah and what she’d said. They all remembered her from our previous inquiry.

That brought me to the manuscript, confirming that Dale finished taking page-by-page photos, Mike would pick up the original and take it back with him to Illinois tonight, then Jennifer would pick it up and work magic to preserve the actual pages.

“. . . lucky it was in a metal box, along with other mementos, because that preserved them and—”

My own words pushed me off a cliff into silence.

But it was filled.

“Why a metal box, why not a fire-safe?” Diana asked. “If he was trying to preserve those items, the metal box seems riskier that everything would burn, including his wife’s manuscript.”

“If he had a safe that would make sense,” Mike said, “but if he didn’t and he planned the fire, going out to buy one would be suspicious. When the cabin burned down, everybody would wonder why he bought it right then. Well, not everybody, but we would have and—”

Jennifer interrupted. “Hold up. That’s what Elizabeth said.”

“Huh?”

“She said, And—” They looked at me.

When I didn’t respond, Jennifer elaborated, “She said something about the box, then and, then quit talking. C’mon, Elizabeth. What were you going to say? And what?”

“Actually, I wasn’t going to say anything, because I’d been at that exact same spot in my thinking at the cabin when Diana interrupted me.”

“Sure, blame it on me. So, what would you have thought if I hadn’t interrupted the genius?”

“The important things to him — his medals, his wife’s manuscript, photos—”

“Were all in the metal box. We know.”

“And . . .” I drew it out. “Placed where there was no trail of what we believe was accelerant.”

“Huh.” I took that as admiration from Jennifer.

“And . . .” I repeated, “that box was right next to the body’s boot-wearing feet, which also were free of accelerant.”

Mike took one hand off his steering wheel long enough to snap his fingers. “The boots connected to Frank Jardos, backing up the belief that the dead man was the sergeant.”

“Backing up?” Diana interjected mildly. “We don’t know it’s not him.”

“Huh,” Jennifer repeated. “You’re saying he knew that area would not burn.”

Mike peered at the screen in a way that said he’d toggled away from our faces to something else. Presumably what Diana had sent. I prayed he never forgot he wasn’t in Wyoming when he drove in Chicago.

“Not only no accelerant, but you notice what else was right there?” He can be nicer than I am, so he didn’t make us guess.

“Solid metal log holder — with no evidence of logs. And the metal base of a table — with no evidence of a wood top. And, yeah, the destruction of the fire could have knocked them around to that spot. Or they could have been placed there as further protection.”

“Okay,” Diana said, “I officially apologize for interrupting the genius.”

I ignored that, because before we tossed this around further, I had more to report.

Sticking to my chronological theme, I gave a sketch of what I’d read of the manuscript and promised to send them each a copy of the file.

“No need. Dale sent it to me last night,” Jennifer said. “I’ll share.”

Should have known.

That brought me to this morning’s short encounter with Penny and longer one with Connie.

“Told you he was friends with Hiram,” Diana said.

I neither groaned nor whined. There’s got to be a medal for that level of restraint.

“Not a whole lot there.” Mike wasn’t criticizing, just reporting accurately. “Sounds like it’s pretty well confirmed that Irene was a nice woman, they were crazy about each other, and Frank Jardos was lost when she died, but seemed to be regaining his footing.”

“Is it suspicious people said the same thing?” Jennifer asked hopefully.

“Like a conspiracy? Nah. Sometimes people share the same observations,” Mike said.

“All that smoke,” I muttered.

“What?”

“It’s what Penny said. Hannah, too, though I keyed in more on the flames with her. Another of those shared observations.”

“We’ve had wet weather,” Diana said, “and that will cause more smoke, though it was pretty wet right around the cabin.”

“The firefighters—” Mike started.

“Miles Stevens said—.” I interrupted myself. “No, that’s too strong. He didn’t dispute that it was wetter than he would have expected when they got there. In other words, before their pumper trucks got to work. And there’s another interesting point.”

“The clear-cut area around the cabin had recently been cleaned up,” Mike said immediately.

“Yup.”

Not so long ago I wouldn’t have known what that meant. Now I knew it referred to the open area kept around a structure, especially one set amid lots of trees. The idea being to keep a structure fire from jumping to the trees or vice versa.

“Spotted that in Nola’s first piece,” he added. “Weird this time of year.”

“You mean it was weird he did it recently?” Jennifer asked. She’d been raised here, but always lived in Sherman. Plus, most of her free time had been spent with computers. “Maybe this was when he had time or it was on his mind.”

I jumped on that. “Maybe. But as everyone keeps pointing out, we’ve had a wet spring, so it’s the least likely time for the clear-cut to be on someone’s mind.”

And, yes, this time I was showing off.

“Very good, Elizabeth,” Diana said.

She wasn’t even mocking me, not completely anyway.

Without much conviction, Diana said, “People sometimes do it at different times. A guy like him, retired, a widower, might do it whenever it occurred to him.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. After all, Miles Stevens said that, too.

“But?” Mike and Jennifer said in unison. Then she added, “There’s one of your buts coming after that.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. However,” I said with dignified emphasis, “a maybe could be in order, as I said.”

“C’mon, c’mon, Elizabeth, maybe what?”

Mike has become much bossier since . . . well, he became the boss.

“Maybe the sergeant did the clear-cut when he did because he intended to burn down his cabin and he wanted to minimize chances of the fire spreading. Maybe he even wet down the area, causing heavy smoke when the flames met the wet area.”

“But why?” Mike asked. “I mean burn it in the first place, not the stuff about trying to make sure it didn’t spread.”

“That is the question. And that, of course, depends on if he actually did that.”

“All right, all right,” Jennifer said. “You’re setting up for another maybe. Let’s skip that and get to the possibilities if he did do it.”

Fair enough.

“If Jardos burned down his cabin, he did it to destroy evidence, presumably surrounding the dead body, his or his victim’s. Or he did it to prevent someone from getting something. Or at least to make someone think the something was burned.”

I waited.

Nobody said anything.

“Well?”

“Were you done?” Mike asked. “Was waiting for more possibilities and their plentiful offshoots.”

“Very funny.”

“Mike has a valid point,” Diana said. “All we have are possibilities.”

I sighed. “We’ll have to keep swimming around in possibilities until some become probabilities.”

“What do you want us to do?” Jennifer asked.

“Find what you can on background about Sergeant Frank Jardos and his wife. Also, I don’t have any names, but if you come across anything about these vets he was helping .

. . Boy, is that a long shot. Don’t spend much time on that, Jennifer.

If we can get you names, maybe then. And of course you’ll have the manuscript to work on starting tomorrow. ”

“How do you think that fits in?” she asked.

“I have no idea if it does. It’s another of our possibilities.”

“I have a tight schedule during this trip,” Mike said, “but I can ask around about the sergeant and those vets. See what the general thoughts are.”

“Me, too,” Diana said.

“That’ll be good. I’m going to try to talk to the firefighter who was in charge. We have that lunch with Needham. Then, after that . . . Hiram Poppinger.”

“You know, geographically, it would make more sense to stay out there and go straight to Hiram’s now. I can make your excuses at lunch if you want.”

I knew Mike was yanking my chain. I still couldn’t get my teeth unclenched enough to sound normal when I said, “I am coming to lunch.”

Unspoken, but understood by the other three was and put off Hiram a couple more hours.

They all laughed. Sure, they could, because none of them had that particular assignment.