Page 38 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

In addition to linear, Hannah was accurate.

The box was big. The box was bulky. The attic was accessed by a ladder.

Something she hadn’t mentioned. The ladder was outside Vidalia’s door.

I climbed up first, so Hannah could check if my noise woke the baby.

The kid had to sleep like a rock, because I was not quiet, even with my best efforts.

Neither was Hannah when she followed me up.

The quilts were varied and beautiful. We took them out carefully and looked at them, thanks to an attic dormer window and our phone flashlights.

Nothing else in the box.

So much for hoping for a spelled-out explanation.

I considered asking if I could take the box of quilts, though I doubted I could get it down.

While Hannah repeatedly glanced at the time on her phone, I took photos of quilts.

We had returned the last of nine to the box when Vidalia’s I’m-awake-announcement blared through the baby monitor.

The quilts sure didn’t scream any answers to me.

Though I did have the information that Frank Jardos had acted to secure what was most precious to him before the fire.

As if he knew it was coming.

* * * *

After picking up lunch at Hamburger Heaven — salad, no fries, thanks to the demands of my wedding dress — I arrived at the gravel parking lot of KWMT-TV well before the time to meet Orson.

I’d already received two texts from Audrey asking when I was coming, because Orson’s questions were driving her crazy, along with every other staffer who passed through the bullpen.

I pulled in between two pickup trucks. Even with a good-sized SUV, they obscured my presence, so Audrey wouldn’t pull me into duty distracting Orson and disrupt my scheduled video call with Jennifer, Mike, and Diana.

“My report’s short,” Diana said from an assignment location that had a much more alluring landscape behind her than KWMT’s parking lot. “I have feelers out, but no nibbles yet.”

Mike raised his hand. “Mine’s shorter. No word of trouble with the vets from anybody. Also, I safely delivered that manuscript to Jennifer. After getting a lot of strange — at best — looks from fellow travelers. That thing stinks of smoke.”

“Tell me about it,” I said without much sympathy.

Though I did feel sympathy for him. He’d flown back to Chicago late yesterday making for a long day and he had more of those ahead.

Jennifer said, “I’ve started on the manuscript. Can send digital files to you shortly. Should be easier to read than Dale’s photos. Stabilizing the physical manuscript will take longer.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait. There’s more. Sergeant Jardos was talking online about concerns. I found a group he messaged with. Seems like mostly military, with the kind of civilians they would have interacted with.”

“Jennifer, this isn’t a government site, is it? Tell me you’re not trying to hack a government site,” I said.

“Trying. Like it would be that hard.” Then she hurriedly added, possibly because of audible intakes of breath from me and Diana, “Nah. Looks like all or mostly retired. Not official. Their security is actually better than, uh, what I hear about government sites.”

She didn’t allow Diana or me a chance to respond.

“Can’t see any discussions in their entirety. What we can see—”

We no doubt included her online cohorts, whose skills matched hers, each with a niche area of expertise, complementing the others. Scary. Truly scary.

“—indicates this group talks about all sorts of things. Negotiating the benefits maze, fishing, home repairs, dogs, fitness stuff, books, movies . . . and troubleshooting when one has an issue.

“A week or so before the cabin fire, Jardos started a topic. They deleted a lot of material the day Jardos went missing, including all of that topic. We’ve retrieved hardly any of that day’s discussion.

I mean, whoever did it is good. That other stuff they talked about was from earlier.

All we can get once Jardos started that topic are pieces, like the cheese around the holes in Swiss cheese.

And this Swiss cheese doesn’t have a whole lot of cheese. But—”

“Wait, Jennifer. Can we use any of this, Elizabeth?” Mike asked.

“We can’t report it on-air, but if it raises questions, we can try to get the answers. Those might be reportable.”

“Okay, so what’s in the cheese around the holes?” Mike asked.

“Fragments about his concern that something illegal is going on. And the sense that it’s sort of cloaked in the guise of being legal, that people — cloudy, unspecified people — are using legal tools to create illegal .

. . somethings. I know.” Jennifer puffed out a sigh of disgust. “Is that vague enough?”

“Was Jardos doing more than mentioning these things?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. He was trying to dig into them. There were definitely phrases about trying to find who was behind — whatever.”

“No clues to what whatever was?”

“Nope.”

“Or guess of who?”

“Nope.”

Mike broke a rather deflated pause. “That’s interesting, but it doesn’t advance us, unless— What are the chances you can extract more info from what they deleted, Jennifer?”

“Soon? None. In a year or so, with tools getting better? Maybe. I’m telling you, these guys are good. Sorry. I know this doesn’t help.”

“Yes, it does,” Diana said. “Because we can draw from this that Jardos does not sound like a man preparing to take his life in grief over the death of his wife. That is a major question that’s been hanging over all of this.”

“But even if that’s strong enough to eliminate suicide — which I don’t think it is — it doesn’t answer if he was killed or if he might be a killer himself,” Mike said.

“There was one specific that came up,” Jennifer said. “A fragment about a lawyer likely being involved. No name, but Jardos wrote that, so maybe it’s somebody local.”

Between that and the vets’ comments, it was definitely time for me to call on James Longbaugh.

“That leaves you to report, Elizabeth,” Mike said.

I started with Hannah, since what Frank told her and his storing his wife’s quilts in her attic meshed with what Jennifer said as another indication of his anticipating problems.

“I thought I’d share photos of the quilts with Richard Alvaro. His sister was a quilting buddy of Irene’s, she should know names of the patterns or if there was anything hidden in the quilts that might be a clue or—”

“A deputy? No. Don’t do that.” Jennifer was aghast. “Send the images to me. We can run those through a friend’s software. It will match the patterns and tell us names. Should pick up any anomalies, too.”

A much better idea.

I agreed to do that as soon as we finished this conversation. “I’ll also send you the names of vets from Tom. Only a couple have first and last names and the first names might be nicknames. So it’s a real long shot, Jennifer.”

“If they served together, we can try a cluster algorithm . . . We’ll see what we can do.”

That was all any of us could do and it didn’t seem like much right now.

Perhaps sensing my mood and its potential contagion, Diana said, “The quilts do make it likely Jardos burned down the cabin. He rigged it to give the flag and manuscript their best chance of surviving, but he wasn’t taking chances with the quilts.

He gave those to Hannah for safekeeping. The perfect choice.”

“Hannah? Perfect choice?” Mike asked.

“Oh, yes,” Diana said. “Because she would faithfully protect the box for him and she wouldn’t ask questions.”

“Probably wouldn’t occur to her,” Jennifer mumbled.

I moved on to recount what the vets, Victor and Zeke, said.

“The sergeant changing his schedule right before the fire looks like another pointer to him planning it,” Diana said.

“Could be a fluke,” Mike said.

“So, again,” Jennifer said, “no progress.”

“Can’t say we’ve made no progress. We can rule out burning down the cabin for nails,” I said sourly.

Mike interrupted his major yawn to say with would-be innocence, “Oh?”

I recapped Mrs. P shooting down that theory, leaving a few bullet holes in me in the process.

“Ah, so, the sergeant didn’t burn down his cabin for nails.” Mike’s voice was almost normal.

Almost.

I zeroed in on him. “Did you already know that?”

“Me?”

“You are lousy at pretending innocence, Paycik. You set me up.”

I took back every iota of sympathy I’d sent his way.

He laughed. “You’re always amused when I run into the Mrs. P buzz saw, thought I’d see how it looks from the other side.”

The other two, wisely, kept a neutral silence.

I drew in a slow breath. “We’re even.”

“But I didn’t get to see it—”

“Even.” I closed the topic. “So, no burning down for nails, but the cabin being burned down for something in it still has to be a consideration.”

“Get back to this pointing away from Frank Jardos being the burner, since he’d taken those precautions with Hannah,” Diana said.

“Unless he needed to hide a dead body,” Jennifer said dourly.

Didn’t bother Diana any. “There’s also the land angle. Land deals can cause all sorts of conflict. Wouldn’t be the first time land led to murder.”

“Not in Wyoming, it wouldn’t,” Mike agreed.

“Are you talking stuff from the 1800s?” I asked.

Their silence confirmed my guess.

“We’re talking about now. Not to mention the other side of this land deal would be Clara and Mrs. P.”

I stopped myself from adding Can you see either of them . . .?

Because the answer would not be unequivocal. Not saying physical violence, certainly by Mrs. P, but—.

“Clara Atwood’s a shark,” Jennifer said. “Remember how she was about those gold coins?”

“Oh, yeah,” Diana said. “She was a shark in trying to get ahold of those.”

Despite my own thoughts, I felt obliged to present the other view. “That was for the museum, and that’s when its financial situation was precarious. Now the finances are solid, not to mention that in this case the museum will receive money.”

“You said she’s stalling the sale,” Jennifer said.

“I didn’t say that. She’s certainly after the best deal for the museum, but I didn’t get the impression she wants to call off the negotiations. Tighten the thumbscrews, sure, but not doing anything to lose the chance to pull more into the coffers.”

“If it comes to that, I’d be more afraid of Mrs. P,” Mike said. “Theoretically.”

The rest of us chuckled.

“All right, all right.”

“Mike might have a point. If there’s anyone who could terrify a man into shooting himself in the head and setting fire to his home, it’s Mrs. P,” I said.

“You can laugh,” he said. “But I’m telling her you said that. When you’re least expecting it.”

And now the other three laughed at me.

“Before we go, I’ve got something else. Not connected,” Jennifer said.