Dry Bones

Book 11: A Longmire Mystery

by Craig Johnson

Genres: Native American & Aboriginal; Westerns; Mystery

Synopsis

When Jen, the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found surfaces in Sherriff Walt Longmire’s jurisdiction, it appears to be a windfall for the High Plains Dinosaur Museum—until Danny Lone Elk, the Cheyenne rancher on whose property the remains were discovered, turns up dead, floating face down in a turtle pond.

With millions of dollars at stake, a number of groups step forward to claim her, including Danny’s family, the tribe, and the federal government. As Wyoming’s Acting Deputy Attorney and a cadre of FBI officers descend on the town, Walt is determined to find out who would benefit from Danny’s death, enlisting old friends Lucian Connolly and Omar Rhoades, along with Dog and best friend Henry Standing Bear, to trawl the vast Lone Elk ranch looking for answers to a sixty-five million year old cold case that’s heating up fast.

Release date: May 12, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

 

I was wandering through the Natural History Museum in London with my granddaughter when we stumbled onto a T. rex—from all places, Wyoming. I asked my friend paleontologist Bill Matteson and he informed me that the majority of Tyrannosauri populating the museums of the world were from around our area, here in the Northern Rockies.

I vaguely remembered a situation in the ’80s that had escalated among the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, an Indian rancher, his tribe, and the FBI over the largest, most intact T. rex fossil that had ever been found—all of which seemed rife for a Walt Longmire mystery.

Attacking the subject with half-remembered scenarios and forty-year-old public school science would’ve been a mistake, so I jumped into the dig with both feet, reading as much as I could about the creature itself, the history of the dinosaur wars here in Wyoming, and finally the titanic cluster that took place right across the border in South Dakota. Many books, including Peter Larson and Kristin Donnan’s Rex Appeal and Steve Fiffer’s Tyrannosaurus SUE were essential to understanding what had happened in the tiny town of Hill City, South Dakota, along with the marvelous documentary, Dinosaur 13. Two more fabulous sources, which convinced me how little I knew about dinosaurs, were Robert T. Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies and Peter Larson and Kenneth Carpenter’s Tyrannosaurus rex: The Tyrant King.

To dig up a good story you need a team and mine starts with Gail “Hylaeosaurus” Hochman, and Marianne “Mosasaur” Merola at the office in Times Square, one of the most unpredictable hunting grounds in the world. Down island in the West Village epoch reside the fiercely loyal Kathryn “Carnotaurus” Court and her hunting partner Lindsey “Stegosaurus” Schwoeri. Barbara “Compsognathus” Campo reads the fossil imprints and Victoria “Spinosaurus” Savanh handles the details, both large and small. Carolyn “Conchoraptor” Coleburn keeps an eye to the horizon while Ben “Parasaurolophus” Petrone and Angie “Megalodon” Messina keep the herd moving in the right direction and away from extinction.

There’s always a big thanks to Marcus “Rhabdodon” Red Thunder.

Then there’s Judy “Tyrannosaurus rex” Johnson, who makes my cold blood run warm.

 

 

1

She was close to thirty years old when she was killed.

A big girl, she liked to carouse with the boys at the local watering holes, which of course led to a lot of illegitimate children, but by all accounts, she was a pretty good single parent and could take care of herself and her brood. One night, though, a gang must have jumped her; they were all younger than she was, they had numbers, they might’ve even been family, and after they broke her leg and she was on the ground, it was pretty much over.

There was no funeral. They killed her and left what remained there by the water, where the sediment from the forgotten creek built up around her, layer after layer, compressing and compacting her to the point where the bones leeched away and were replaced by minerals.

It was as if she’d turned to stone just to keep from being forgotten.

It’s interesting how her remains were found; her namesake, Jennifer Watt, was traveling with Dave Baumann, the director of the High Plains Dinosaur Museum, when they got a flat—not an unusual occurrence on the red roads the ranchers used for the more inaccessible areas of their ranches where the larger chunks of shale attacked sidewalls like tomahawks. The bigger rock is cheaper, but it’s also the size of bricks and has lots of sharp edges, edges that like to make meals of anything less than ten-ply.

Dave had been trying to squeak another season out of the tires on the ’67 Land Rover, but there they stood, staring at a right rear with a distinct lack of round, in the middle of the Lone Elk Ranch. While he fished the jack and spare from the hood and began the arduous task of replacing the tire, Jennifer unloaded Brody, her Tibetan mastiff, and went for a walk. Hoping to meet a friend on the place, she followed a ridge around a cornice, but the dog, who was 150 pounds with a heavy coat, began panting. Before long Jen decided that it might be a pretty good idea for the two of them to try and get to some shade, not an easy proposition out on the Powder River country; luckily, there was a rock overhang along the ridge with plenty enough room for her and the dog to get out of the late afternoon sun.

She wore her blonde hair in a ponytail that stuck through the adjustment strap of her Hole-in-the-Wall Bar ball cap, and, pulling the collapsible dog bowl from her pack, she slipped out a Nalgene bottle, took a swig, and then poured the mastiff a drink.

Jennifer looked out onto the grass that undulated like a gigantic, rolling sea. It was easy to imagine the Western Interior (Cretaceous) Seaway or the Niobraran Sea that had once covered this land, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The great sea had stretched from Mexico to the Arctic and had been over two thousand feet deep. Jen settled under the rock and petted the dog, her green eyes scanning the landscape.

She pulled her video camera from her pack and panned the distance, seeing things out there on the high plains, things that didn’t exist, at least not anymore—predatory marine reptiles like long-necked plesiosaurs and more alligator-like mosasaurs almost eighty feet long. Sharks such as Squalicorax swam through her imagination along with giant, shellfish-eating Ptychodus mortoni.

When she’d been six, her father had brought her to this country from Tucson, Arizona, and had dragged her along on his private excavations that helped support his rock shop on the old highway out near Lake DeSmet between Durant and Sheridan. She still remembered what she’d said one day as they’d gotten out of his battered pickup, her fingers climbing up his pant leg until she found the reassuring hand with gloves worn like saddle leather, the adjustment straps with the transparent red beads. “There’s nothing out here, Daddy.”

He surveyed the rolling hills that led from the Bighorn Mountains to the endless Powder River country, smiled as he pushed back his straw hat, and spoke gently to her. “There’s everything here; you just have to know where to look.”

Jennifer had learned to look and had never stopped; Dave Baumann’s hands and hers were in the excavations that had led to the displays that crowded the High Plains Dinosaur Museum in Durant, and at twenty-six, she was still searching.

Truth be told, Jen liked dead things better than live ones—they were less trouble, the conversations being one-sided. A lot of investigators and paleontologists are more comfortable that way, able to accept the consensus of truth, disregarding the absolute as something that always carries the danger of being overturned by some new and extraordinary piece of evidence.

She lowered the camera, took another sip of water, and poured her dog more. Brody sighed and shook his massive head, and Jen leaned back under the rock overhang to try to decide what she was going to do with the old man’s rock shop, a ramshackle affair near the lake that had started out as a trailer but through the years had evolved into a labyrinth of wooden fences lined with geodes, gems, quartz, and rock samples, most of them worthless.

He had died the year before, and she knew the land was more valuable than the structure itself, but she’d grown up there and loved the old place, as cluttered and tacky as it might be. She pulled the cap over her eyes and dozed until she became aware of a protracted growl in her dog’s throat. She swatted at him, but he continued to rumble a warning until she finally lifted the bill of her cap to look at him. He was looking directly up. Jen’s eyes followed to where a two-fingered talon stretched out of the rock ceiling down toward her, almost as if it were imploring. She grabbed the camera and began to film what would become one of the greatest paleontological discoveries in modern times.

 • • • 

Victoria Moretti sipped the coffee from the chrome lid of my thermos, leaned forward, and, peering through the windshield, watched the man with an intensity that only her tarnished gold eyes could command. “Is that some weird-ass Wyoming fishing technique I don’t know about?”

I could see that Omar was tossing something into the water from the banks of the man-made reservoir.

“What the hell is he doing?”

Ruby, my dispatcher, had received a call from him early in the morning and had bushwhacked Dog and me with it when we came in the door. I had filled up my thermos and in turn bushwhacked Vic before heading out to the ten-thousand-acre Lone Elk place to find out what was up.

Outdoor adventurer, outfitter, and big-game bon vivant, Omar Rhoades had contracts with all the big ranchers and sometimes used their property for extended hunting and fishing junkets. Usually he kept his spots secret, but this time he’d told Ruby where he was and that I might want to come out and meet him.

Most everything was in bloom in late May, and I breathed in the scents from the open windows of my truck. As I stared at the aspens and cottonwood, they all began stretching to the sky like those cypresses in Italy that looked like thumb smudges.

My undersheriff turned and looked at me some more. “I thought he was in China.”

“Mongolia.”

The Custer look-alike was dressed in a state-of-the-art fishing vest, waders, and his ever-present black cowboy hat with more flies stuck in it than Orvis has in its catalog. All in all, I estimated the total worth of his outfit at somewhere close to two thousand dollars, and he wasn’t even carrying the fly rod, which was sticking out the rear of his custom-made SUV that dwarfed my three-quarter-ton.

I leaned forward and stared through the windshield. We watched as he drew something from one hand, carefully took aim, and tossed whatever it was onto the smooth surface of the water, black like an oil slick.

Vic turned to look at me as she reached back and scratched the fur behind Dog’s ear. “Do you think he’s finally lost it?”

I pulled the handle and climbed out of the truck, careful to keep the Saint Bernard/German shepherd/plains grizzly inside. “Let’s go find out.”

The beauty of Italian descent followed with my thermos as we glided our way through the morning dew in the buffalo grass. “You know, the landed gentry get like this when they spend too much time alone.”

I whispered over my shoulder, “Like what?”

“Fucking nuts.” She increased her pace and caught up with me. “He’s not armed, is he?”

“If he were, I don’t think he’d be throwing rocks.” I stopped at the worn path surrounding the reservoir, curious, but still attempting to abide by the protocol of the high plains angler so as to not upset the fishing—if, in fact, that was what he was doing.

“Hey, Omar.”

He started, just visibly, and spoke to us over his shoulder as he continued throwing pebbles into the water. “Walt. Vic.”

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at us but then tossed another stone. “Trying to keep those snapping turtles off that body out there.”

We tiptoed to the edge of the bank in an attempt to keep the water from seeping into our boots, and Vic and I joined Omar in his target practice, Vic showing her acumen by bouncing a flat stone off the shell of a small turtle that skittered and swam into the depths. “Any idea who it is?”

Omar leaned forward and lifted his Oakley Radarlock yellow-tinted shooting glasses to peer into the reflective surface of the water at the half-submerged body. “I’m thinking it’s Danny.”

I stared at the corpse, which was a good forty feet from the bank, and tried to figure out how we were going to retrieve it, in that we had no boat. “Himself?”

My undersheriff squinted. “How can you tell?”

“Not everybody has hair like that.” Omar nailed a big turtle that had risen beside the body like a surfacing submarine and had gotten caught in the mass of silver locks that had fanned out from the body. “Danny always had nice hair.”

Omar reached behind him and, pulling out a fancy, stainless steel thermos of his own, poured the tomato-red contents into a cut-glass double-old-fashioned tumbler. “Libation?”

She stared at him, one hand on her hip. “It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”

He shrugged and sipped. “Sun’s over the yardarm somewhere.”

Omar and I watched as Vic expertly skipped a pebble across the glossy surface of the water, the pellet deflecting off another turtle. “How many turtles are there in this damn thing, anyway?”

Omar grunted. “Danny and his brother Enic protect them; nobody is allowed to hurt them—they’re sacred to the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne.”

Vic shook her head and nailed another. “Is there any living thing that isn’t sacred to the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne?”

I tossed a stone but missed. “Nope.”

Omar sipped from his Bloody Mary. “They’re a totem for fertility, protection, and patience.” He turned to look at me. “How are your daughter and granddaughter?”

There was a silence as I formulated an answer, but before I could speak, Vic chimed in. “Excuse me, but did I miss a transition in the conversation here?”

I tapped my shoulder. “Cady’s got a tattoo of a turtle—reminiscent of her willful youth at Berkeley.” I glanced back at him. “Should be here the day after tomorrow.”

He nodded. “Lookin’ forward to meeting Lola.”

I smiled and picked up my thermos. “Any ideas on how we get him out of there?” I glanced at the big-game hunter. “You’ve got your waders on.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. The bank drops off ten feet out, and the reservoir is about sixty feet deep—used to be a shale pit.”

I nodded and drank some coffee as Omar refilled his glass and Vic tossed a rock, this time missing her shelled target but causing it to duck its head and silently retreat into the depths. “Can I assume that nine-thousand-dollar Oyster fly rod of yours will do the trick?”

Vic crouched at an inlet on the other side of the pond. “I’m trying to resist saying something about the ironic aspect of a guy who protects the turtles but then falls in his own pond and becomes snapper chow.”

“We don’t know it’s him.”

“Sure we do.” She held up a paper bag. “I found his lunch, and it’s got his name on it.” She read, “Daddy-O.”

“Topflight detecting, that’s what that is.” I watched as Omar flipped the fly rod back and forth, trailing the line in cyclical patterns, reflecting in the morning sunshine. “Think you can get him on the first try?”

He ignored my crass remark and flipped the fly forward, yanking it back to set the hook in what appeared to be the sleeve of a green canvas shirt. The outdoorsman carefully walked the banks and reeled in the body as we watched who we assumed was Danny Lone Elk spin slowly with his one arm extended like a superhero in flight, a trail of disappointed turtles in his wake.

As the body came alongside the bank, I reached in, grabbed it by the collar, and dragged the upper part of him onto the grass. “He weighs a ton.”

“Lungs are probably full of water.” Vic leaned over and grabbed the other side of his collar and we both heaved the deadweight onto the bank, a forty-pound snapping turtle with a carapace the size of a washbasin attached to the dead man’s left hand.

Vic dropped her side and backed away from the radially set iridescent eyes, the color not unlike her own. “What the fuck?”

The aquatic monster released the dead man’s hand, hissed like a steam train, and extended its neck toward us, evidently not willing to give up its breakfast.

Vic drew her sidearm, but I pushed it away. “Don’t. It doesn’t mean any harm.”

“The hell it doesn’t; look at him.” She considered. “I’ve shot people for less than that shit.”

I kneeled down, and the beast stretched out its neck even further and struck at me with snakelike speed, the reach surprisingly far. “You know these things are seventy million years old?”

Vic reluctantly holstered her weapon. “This one in particular?”

“They appeared before the dinosaurs died out.” I picked up a stick and extended the end toward the animal’s open mouth. “See the little wiggly red thing at the end of its tongue?”

Vic raised her eyebrows. “What, that means he’s popular with the ladies?”

“That’s what he uses to ambush fish—they think it’s a worm.”

“That’s disgusting.”

I walked around it and raised its rear end, placing my hand underneath the plastron and lifting the creature, rather awkwardly, from the ground. Its head swiveled back, and it snapped with the sound of a small firecracker.

Both Omar and my undersheriff stepped back. “He’s going to bite the shit out of you.”

“No, they can’t reach if you’re holding them from the bottom.” A stream of something dribbled down the length of my jeans onto my boot.

They studied me, Vic, of course, the first to speak. “Did that thing just piss on you?”

“I believe it did.” I swung the big beast around, lowered it back into the water, and watched as the creature settled in the mud and looked back at me, apparently now in no great hurry to get away.

“I guess he likes you.”

I shook the water from my hands and studied the round eyes that watched me warily. “Might be a female.”

“Well, anytime you’re through turtle diddling, we’ve got work to do.” She approached the cadaver again and rolled the body over, looked at what remained of Danny Lone Elk’s face, and immediately turned away. “Oh shit, his eyes are gone.”

Omar kneeled by the dead man and turned his chin. “Critters always go for them first.” He sighed. “Those turtles sure did a number on him.” They both turned to look at me as I stared at the body. “Walt?”

It was a man I’d seen before, in my dreams.

“Walt?”

In the dreams, he also had no eyes.

“Walt.”

The man’s words came back, and it was almost as if he were standing beside me, repeating the mantra of warning I’d stowed away: You will stand and see the good, but you will also stand and see the bad—the dead shall rise and the blind will see.

“Walt.”

I took a deep breath. “You’re sure it’s Danny?”

Omar nodded and looked back at the body. “His belt says Danny.” He paused for a moment. “And I recognize what’s left of him.”

“Does he have a wallet or anything else on him, like a fishing license?”

Checking the pockets of the dead man, Omar shook his head. “Nothing, but he’s on his own property. I don’t carry my wallet with me when I’m fishing—always afraid I’ll dunk it.”

I glanced at Vic. “Did you check his lunch?”

“Might as well; I’m about to lose mine.” She reached down, picked up the brown paper bag, and, rummaging through the sack, called out the items. “Daddy-O had one can of orange soda, one cheese sandwich, one bag of Lay’s potato chips, an assortment of celery and carrot sticks, and . . .” She fumbled in the bag, finally pulling out a withered, handmade billfold. “One wallet.”

“Is it Danny’s?”

She held it up for us to look at. “Well, seeing as how it has DANNY engraved on the outside, I’d say yes.” She opened it and studied the Wyoming driver’s license and the face of the elderly Cheyenne man. “He liked putting his name on stuff, didn’t he?”

Omar reached out and straightened the collar of the dead man’s shirt. “He was a good old guy—let me bring clients out here whenever I wanted and even let me fly my helicopter into this place.”

I glanced around. “Where is the ranch house from here?”

He ignored my question. “There’s going to be trouble.” He pointed. “The eyes—the medicine men will have to do something about this or Danny will wander the earth forever.” He looked up, and I could see tears for his old friend. “Lost and blind.”

I nodded, fishing my keys from my jeans so that we could load the man into the truck bed and take him to Doc Bloomfield and room 32, the Durant Memorial Hospital’s ad hoc morgue. “I’ll get in touch with the family, Henry, and the Cheyenne tribal elders.” Walking back to my truck, I thought about my vision and what Virgil White Buffalo and the stranger had said—that stranger, the stranger with no eyes, who ended up being Danny Lone Elk.

 • • • 

The last time I’d seen Danny was at the Moose Lodge at the end of town. It had been a few years back, and he had still been drinking. I’d gotten a radio call that there was a disturbance, but by the time I’d gotten there, no one seemed to remember who had been involved in the altercation.

Asking why he was a Moose and not an Elk, I’d grabbed a Rainier for myself and joined him.

“They got a better bar down here.”

He looked up at me and smiled. Lined with more wrinkles than a flophouse bed, the old man’s face was cragged but still handsome and carried the wisdom of the ages. He reached over to squeeze my shoulder with a hand as large and spidery as a king crab.

Well into his cups, he spoke to me through clinched teeth; Danny Lone Elk always talked as if what he had to say to you was a very important secret, and maybe it was. “You off duty, Sheriff?”

“End of watch. I came here looking for trouble, but there isn’t any.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

I gestured with the full can. “Got one.”

He closed one eye and looked at me. “You too good to drink with an Indian?”

“No. I—”

“’Cause you gotta have a reservation.” He kept his eye on me like a spotlight, guffawed uproariously at his own joke, and then leaned in close. “You wanna know why they called you?” He gestured down the bar where a small contingency of men did their level best to ignore us. “You see that sharp-faced man with the ball cap? That fella in the cowboy hat beside him asked him what he was gonna do on his vacation and he said he was gonna go to Montana and go fishing. Well, cowboy hat told sharp-face he couldn’t understand why he was going fishing in Montana ’cause there was nothing but a bunch of damned Indians up there.” Danny sipped his beer and looked past me toward the men. “Then sharp-face asked cowboy hat what he was gonna do on his vacation and cowboy hat said he’s goin’ hunting down in Arizona and sharp-face said he couldn’t understand why he was going hunting down in Arizona ’cause there was nothing but a bunch of damned Indians down there.”

I nodded. “Was that all there was to it?”

“No.” He grinned the secret smile again. “That was when I told them both to go to hell, ’cause there sure wasn’t any Indians there.”

His voice rose. “Bartender.” He looked back at me, again smiling through the ill-fitting dentures. “I think that’s when this guy called you.”

The man approached somewhat warily. “Can I help you?”

He lip-pointed at sharp-face and cowboy hat. “Yeah; I think I better buy those guys down there a beer; I’m afraid I might’ve spooked ’em.”

As the barkeep went about distributing the conciliatory beverages, Danny leaned in again. “I knew your daddy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, made the mistake of tryin’ to get him to go to Indian church one time.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” He grinned again and nodded. “I was working down at Fort Keogh and lived out your way—had this wife that thought since your family lived so close we should go and invite them to go to church with us.” He leaned in again. “Well, just my luck, your father answered the door, and boy did he give me an earful.”

“I’m sorry; my mother was the religious one.”

“He said he figured I was just tradin’ one superstition for another.”

I took a sip of my beer. “He wasn’t a big one for churches.”

“They still have that place out near Buffalo Creek?”

“I have it now—they’ve both passed.”

He nodded. “I am sorry to hear that—they were good people.” He was silent for a moment and looked down at his lap. “Do you ever see them?”

I turned and looked at him, thinking that I hadn’t made myself clear. “They’re dead.”

He nodded again and then stared at the can in his hands. “Yeah, but do you ever see them?”

“Umm, I don’t . . .”

“When I am alone, hunting or fishing . . .” He breathed a laugh. “. . . And that is the only time I’m alone, by the way . . .” He looked at me. “. . . I see my ancestors, the ones who have walked the Hanging Road to the Camp of the Dead. When I see them, they are far away but watching me like the eyes of the stars.”

Not quite sure what to say to that, I nodded. “That’s nice . . . that they’re looking out for you.”

“I don’t know if that’s what it is.” He took out some antacids, shook a few of the chunky tablets into his hand, and washed them down with some beer. “Mmm, peppermint, my favorite.” He started humming the theme to Dragnet, which was also the jingle for the pills. “Tum, tum, tum, tum . . .” Then he opened a prescription bottle that he took from the pocket of his shirt, shook out a few pills, and swallowed them, too. He looked at me blankly. “What was I talking about?”

“Family.”

“Oh, right . . . I am old, and I know I am standing on the brink of the life nobody knows about, and I am anxious to go to my Father, Ma-h ay oh. To live again as men were intended to live, even on this world, but I fear for the remains of my family.”

I knew that his ranch was vast and there had been talk of gas, oil, and fossil deposits, but I still couldn’t understand Lone Elk’s concerns. “You’ve got children, right? I’m sure your family will look after those things after you’re gone, Danny.”

It was a long time before he spoke again. “Maybe that’s true, but I would take some things back if I could.”

 • • • 

“I said . . .” My undersheriff raised an eyebrow and sighed, still holding her end of the now blanket-wrapped body. “Did you hear that?”

With Danny Lone Elk’s voice still resonating in my head, I turned and looked around, fully expecting to see the man and his ancestors. “Hear what?”

She glanced at Omar, and then they both looked at me. “A gunshot.”

I took a deep breath to clear my head and my ears. “Close?”

“What, you were having some kind of out-of-body experience?”

“No, I was just remembering when I had seen Danny last.” I thought about adding more, but I hadn’t shared my experiences in Custer Park with anyone. “Probably the hands w