Sign Off (Caught Dead In Wyoming, Book 1)

Chapter One

In journalism, it's called a tick-tock.

It's a piece that recaps a big, ongoing story by hitting each important date and occurrence in order to bring the audience up to date to that very moment.

Tick.

Spewing blood from a battered nose and curses from a mouth of ill repute, Sheriff's Deputy Foster Redus climbed into his brand new forest green Ford pickup outfitted with flared fenders, chrome brush guard, skid plates and Holley headers and drove into the Wyoming gloaming last fall. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving. That was the last anybody in Cottonwood County admitted to seeing him.

Tock.

That same week, in a land far to the east where the canyons are concrete and the herds are SUVs, I finally opened my eyes to the fact that my divorce decree covered not only a man, but a career.

Tick.

A week before Christmas, the Cottonwood County, Wyoming sheriff arrested Thomas David Burrell, who'd caused the aforementioned spewing of blood and curses, and charged him with murder, though neither Foster Redus nor his pickup had been found.

Tock.

I spent that week in my Illinois hometown with my family, which was evenly divided among considering me a marital failure, wanting to kick some ex-husband butt, and assuring me this would all turn out for the best because I could now get out of that nasty city and nastier business. That three-way split was not among the members of my family, it was within each and every one of them old enough to put sentences together.

It made for a trying week, since I never knew which one-third of a relative I was going to encounter at any given moment.

Tick.

On New Year's Eve day the Cottonwood County prosecuting attorney dropped the charges against Burrell without prejudice for insufficient evidence.

Tock.

I signed off for the last time from a New York newscast that night. That's right, after two weeks of vacation, the schedule required me to return for one last shift-why waste a precious commodity like New Year's Eve off on a has-been?

On April Fool's day I arrived in Cottonwood County, Wyoming-no cracks about the timing, please-and went on the air the following week as "KWMT-TV's 'Helping Out' reporter E.M. Danniher."

The gap between New Year's and April Fool's Day?

Not a thing happened officially on the Foster Redus case. As for my life, no comment.

That brings you right up to a particular crisp morning in early May in Sherman, Wyoming.

Tick.

Tock.

I'd heard about the Redus case-it was hard not to in KWMT's newsroom-but it didn't occupy a lot of my attention. I had my own concerns.

Concerns like figuring out how come LL Bean and Harry and David had no trouble with my change of address, but my ex-husband's lawyer couldn't master the concept. Like finding more congenial surroundings (no matter how temporary my stay in Wyoming might be) than the hovel masquerading as a house that I was renting. Like adjusting to a landscape that looked as if it came out of the head of a science fiction writer. Like acclimating to co-workers who treated me either as visiting royalty or a particularly nasty-tempered shark circling their very private swimming hole.

As eighteen second-graders from Lewis and Clark Elementary School and three harassed adults scattered through the KWMT-TV newsroom's maze of dented desks and mismatched chairs, I was specifically contemplating how to handle anchorman Thurston Fine, who'd botched the intro to my package the night before.