Page 5 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

I could have gone back to the friendly young woman behind the counter, but that struck me as weak. I turned the opposite direction and went deeper into the building.

And, there, in the break room was my quarry.

Unlike Shelton, Deputy Richard Alvaro gave me a genuine smile of welcome . . . until he remembered he was Shelton’s protégé. Then he quashed the smile and spoke a noncommittal “Elizabeth.”

I smiled broadly at him and a drift of pink consciousness touched his cheeks at having killed his smile.

“Shelton said to find you, so you could tell me all about the cabin fire northeast of town.”

Close enough.

Richard didn’t question it. Not because he’s not smart enough to know that had to be an exaggeration, but because Richard wanted to talk about it.

He’d already learned a lot from Shelton, not all of it good from my point of view. But chewing over possibilities of a not-official case was not on the Shelton agenda.

Maybe Richard had another colleague or two in the department for such conversations, but I hadn’t encountered them.

“Have you been to the scene?” I asked him.

“Uh-huh. Couple times. When the fire call came in, I wasn’t on duty, but I’d been up there a few times and—”

“On calls? There were problems?”

Domestics, neighbor disputes could change the complexion of this fast.

“No, no. Nothing like that. My sister Sandra—”

I flipped through a mental list of Richard’s numerous relatives. I was almost certain that was the same sister who worked for the doctor in Montana who did forensic autopsies for Cottonwood County.

“—knew the sergeant’s wife, Irene. I mean Sergeant Jardos, not Sergeant Shelton.” I’d figured that since Shelton wasn’t married. “And sometimes, if we had a family gathering and she had something for Irene, she’d give it to me to drop by, because she knew I’d be in the area sooner or later.”

“What kind of things?”

“Fabric, mostly, I think. Irene Jardos used to quilt and so does my sister. They said fabric can get heavy to mail, so they tried to avoid the expense. A couple times Irene gave me things to hand off to my sister. Wasn’t any rush, because they both have enough fabric to wrap around the whole Rocky Mountains a couple times. ”

“Received a few quilts, have you?”

He grinned. “Yeah. They’re great, but how many does one guy need? It’s a good thing there are younger ones coming up needing quilts to take to school and such.

“Anyway,” he picked up with a return to seriousness, “I knew my sister would want to know anything there was to know about the fire, so I went.”

“What did you see?”

His left shoulder twitched in a truncated shrug of dismissal. Potentially contradicting that, the tinge of pink reappeared.

I put that aside for later consideration.

“The building was still burning. You could really feel the heat.”

“Right. Our reporter, Nola Choi, got some compelling footage for her first report on the fire.”

“Did she?”

His elaborate casualness triggered an ah-hah, I didn’t voice. Though it was tempting, especially with the heightened color tinging his face again.

“She did. Were you out there the same time she was?”

“I guess I did see her.” He needed to work on his deadpan.

Or not, since it left open a window to him.

“Have a chance to talk to her?” My casualness was light-years more convincing than his. “You must have come across each other in the six months she’s been here.”

“We’ve talked a time or two. I mean,” he added hurriedly, “she asks questions, because I’m on duty, and I don’t answer because—”

“Shelton would chew your derriere. But that night you weren’t on duty.”

The color intensified, but he remained silent. He was learning. Darn it.

“What else did you see or find out?”

“Nothing to find out. Cabin was owned by Frank Jardos and his wife. He retired from the Army as a sergeant. They moved here eight years ago. Irene passed away in late September — cancer — and he lived there alone ever since. Fire was reported Wednesday afternoon. Fire department worked to make sure it was contained. They were still keeping an eye on it the next day when I went back. That’s when they spotted the body. ”

“And that changed things, because with the finding of a body, you were immediately back on duty, while Nola was on the story.”

He ignored the implication. “Called it in and started the process. Preserving the scene as much as possible.”

“Preserving the scene? You mean kicking out Nola Choi.” I shook my head at him. “Not the way to endear yourself to a journalist.”

“I wasn’t trying to— Besides, there wasn’t much of a scene, considering the fire and the firefighters fighting it. And she’d already been around it. And it was routine to secure it.”

Yeah. He hadn’t endeared himself to Nola and he knew it. We’d come back to that another time, but for now I had other matters to pursue.

“Could you tell anything about the body at that point?”

He side-eyed me. Justifiably. That question might elicit information from an onlooker, but not from most law enforcement, especially a Shelton protégé.

I segued into, “An ID?”

“Not until the post-mortem exam is completed.”

“By the doctor your sister, Sandra, works for?”

He didn’t speak, but he still confirmed it . . . which I wasn’t telling him. No reason to give him that feedback to accelerate his poker-face training.

I asked, “The general description matched the man who lived there?”

He paused. I guessed he was remembering firefighters confirming that on camera for Nola. I remembered it, too, but there was value in getting him to agree.

“Yeah.”

“With an apparent bullet wound in the head?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the gun?”

“It was found several feet from the body.”

“Oh?”

“No,” he said to my suspicions. “They knew whose cabin it was and he volunteered with them since he moved here. They went in as hard as possible.”

“He was a volunteer firefighter?”

“Some. Also support, him and his wife.”

“You think that in their zealous efforts to put out the fire, the gun was knocked out of its original position?”

“With the smoke and the debris around, it makes sense, especially considering they couldn’t even see the body was there until the next day.”

“Did the gun belong to Jardos?”

“It was badly burned. They’re trying at the lab, but with the damage . . .”

“Colonel Crawford clearly didn’t accept that his friend committed suicide. That would leave that the dead man isn’t the sergeant. Or that the dead man is the sergeant and was murdered.”

Richard gave no response.

Then, as if it were a change of subject, I said, “The colonel’s certainly impressive.”

“Even more impressive when you know his background. I looked up his career. Still,” Richard said, “the boots were definitely the kind Frank Jardos wore, confirmed by two friends. Even the colonel acknowledged the sergeant never wore any other brand.”

I eyed him. “That sounds like this department doesn’t give the colonel’s assertion that the dead man wasn’t the sergeant, that the sergeant is missing, credence.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Right. Especially not in the colonel’s hearing. So, sending him to me was to placate him, get him off your back—”

“No, no. The sergeant — Sergeant Shelton — didn’t think Colonel Crawford would like our timeframe. The postmortem exam and all. You could act faster. You’re used to deadlines. Working on a tight timeline for TV news.”

“Tight timeline? TV news?” I scoffed. “Try a wedding.”

He grinned. “I know. I got the invitation. Thanks. Looking forward to it.”

News to me. I hadn’t included him on my guest list, but since my list consisted of Tom, Tamantha, and me, it was ruled ineligible and replaced by lists from Tom, Tamantha, and my mother.

I couldn’t complain — much — since it meant including Diana, Mike, Jennifer, and more friends, as well as my siblings and their families.

Heck, I didn’t object to Richard coming, either. Though he must have been on Tom’s list.

And if Richard was on the list . . . Shelton, too? Almost certainly.

“Great. Glad you can come,” I said with a warmth I was sure would please my mother.

I drove toward the fire scene, my thoughts leaving the wedding zone for the more familiar territory of a potential investigation.

There was a nuance to Shelton’s citing the timeline that had nothing to do with his implicit dig about him being busy with important things while mere TV journalists could waste their time playing around with what could turn out to be nothing.

He also meant my cohorts and I could explore based on an assumption that the dead man wasn’t Frank Jardos, in line with Colonel Crawford’s theory, while the sheriff’s department remained largely constrained until official results came back.

But was that assumption by the colonel reasonable?

I’ve heard investigators say they prefer to complete their investigation before they talk to the primary suspect.

That’s not unreasonable for those investigating, say, white-collar crime. Especially for those examining complex information. As one said, they don’t want to sit down with a suspect who knows all the facts of the situation when the investigator knows nothing.

Yet that was pretty much the situation with the deaths we’d looked into. We didn’t have the luxury of gathering, organizing, and making sense of information before talking to suspects. We dealt with them on the fly.

Although in this case, we had a shortage of people to talk to, what with the dead body most likely belonging to the person the colonel wanted us to talk to.

Talking about the colonel . . .

I hit a number in my phone’s contacts.

“Elizabeth!” Wardell Yardley answered. “Don’t you have a wedding to get ready for?”

That’s Wardell Yardley, a network reporter only those courting deliberate ignorance wouldn’t recognize. He recently left a long stint as White House correspondent to hot-shot from story to story.

That let him pursue what he wanted most — to know everything about everybody, not an entirely uncommon trait in journalists.

“Don’t you have a job to do?”

He laughed. He has a good laugh.

“You know, Dell, now that you’re out of the White House press corps, where you didn’t have many reasons to laugh on-air—”

“Oh, plenty of reasons to laugh. Just not appropriate.”

“Hah. You, the king of appropriate. But laughing could be appropriate with some of your stories now. I bet watchers would like you even more for that laugh. One of your skills they don’t know about.”

This time he chuckled. Also good. And wicked. “I have other skills they don’t know about. Though Clara—”

“I don’t want to know.” Not about those skills, not about his relationship with the curator of the Sherman Western Frontier Life Museum.

In all the years I’d known Dell, this was the longest relationship he’d had with a woman other than his mother and a sister. And sometimes he was on the outs with his sister.

“I do not want to know,” I emphasized.

He chuckled again. “You want to know something or you’d’ve waited until I see you next weekend for the wedding.”

That wasn’t tough to figure out. It fell under the heading of takes one to know one.

“What do you know about Colonel Chester Crawford, U.S. Army?”

“You think I know every officer in—?”

“I know you can find out. Reputation. Reliability. Anything else you come up with.”