Sign Off (Caught Dead In Wyoming, Book 1)

Chapter Five

"There's a place here in O'Hara Hill, has the best burgers around . . ."

I gawked at Mike. "After what your aunt fed us?"

He grinned. "It's where the locals go."

I considered my options. I do legwork on my own. Not that I'd done much enterprise reporting the past few years. Making sure I'd covered the network on the stories everyone else would have and developing sources for those stories didn't leave much time to wander off the well-worn path.

But Paycik had the connections.

"Tell you what," I offered, "let's look around town first. We could kill some time by talking to that deputy friend of yours."

"Richard? Why-"

"Which reminds me. Blabbing to the sheriff's department that I'm looking into the case not only isn't accurate-" I hadn't committed yet, at least not outside of my own head. "-it's a great way to get a source fired."

He snorted. "Aunt Gee could do a primetime special exposing every last detail of every last case there's ever been in this county, and she wouldn't get fired. Our sheriff's not the brightest, but he knows Aunt Gee really runs the department. And if she hadn't wanted the department to know, she wouldn't have told me to bring you there first."

Maybe. Gee certainly wouldn't have hesitated to make her displeasure clear if she'd felt any, so that gave his take credence.

But if this was the way things worked in Cottonwood County, it left me in a reporting landscape nearly as different from what I was used to as the mountains were from skyscrapers.

"Besides, it'll save time this way," Mike added.

I gave him only a skeptical eyebrow lift.

He grinned. "People will start coming to us with information. We won't have to go searching for them. Like Richard did with whatever he told you by the drinking fountain."

My eyebrow lost altitude. His grin gained it.

"So," Mike said with the self-satisfaction of a man who thinks he's won a round, "what more do you want to find out from him?"

For starters, I wanted an explanation of Richard Alvaro's expression when Mike said I wanted to know about the Foster Redus case. And why Richard had suggested I ask about a teenager who'd committed suicide.

*   *   *   *

Mike said if Alvaro was patrolling on county roads it could take a week to find him. It took eight minutes of crisscrossing the town.

During those eight minutes, Mike told me O'Hara Hill had been born as a mining town. Wyoming had a history of boom and bust cycles in natural resources-coal, oil, natural gas, even bentonite and soda ash-while cattle ranching continued with its own highs and lows. When the mining company pulled out forty years ago, O'Hara Hill shrank, but held on as a supplier to nearby ranches and outfitters.

The marked sheriff's department car sat in an otherwise empty church parking lot. Alvaro was finishing paperwork on a speeding ticket.

"So, you two-" His finger waggled from me to Mike and back. "-an item? Carol's going to want to know."

"No." I might have made it too emphatic, because Alvaro's smile immediately disappeared. "We want to talk with you."

"Off the record."

Off the record. My third-least favorite response from a source. Least favorite is no comment, which is even worse than runner-up go to hell.