Sign Off (Caught Dead In Wyoming, Book 1)

Chapter Seventeen

"I told you he was dead."

I'd guessed Mona didn't devote much of her day to keeping up on world events, so I thought we stood a fair chance of being the first to tell her Foster Redus' body had been found.

I was right.

She answered the door in a flowing caftan of polyester chiffon. It was like a pink arrow to the sallowness of her skin and puffiness of her eyes. I caught a whiff of stale beer, stale smoke and stale perfume when she led us into the living room, where she clashed mightily with her sofa. She had the flu, she told us.

Flu? More like the day-after-a-night-at-the-Kicking-Cowboy, but maybe I'm getting cynical.

"They were all laughing behind my back, thinking I'd been dumped. Well, now they know. I wasn't dumped. Foster was going to take me away. He adored me. Couldn't do enough for me. And that's why he's dead."

Better dead than gone was Mona's motto, judging by her triumphant tone.

"You still think your ex-husband killed Redus?"

"Of course," she snapped at me. "This proves it. Now maybe Widcuff will get his head out of his ass and do something. Arrest Tom, get him convicted. Nobody knows those mountains better than Tom. He was always going off to moon around somewhere up there when we were married."

"If he knows the mountains so well," I said, "he was damn unlucky to pick a spot that somebody found, wasn't he?"

"If the man'd been lucky he'd've made something of himself."

"This must be a shock, Mona. I mean," Mike said, taking a seat, "even though you were certain Foster was dead, the reality . . ."

I sat in the chair opposite Mike, out of Mona's line of sight as long as she focused on Mike, which she did.

"You have no idea, Mike. It's a tragedy. We had our whole lives to look forward to. We had so many plans, so many dreams. Now, they're all gone."

She sniffled. Reaching to a brocade-covered box on the end table, she pulled several tissues free and dabbed at her eyes. She leaned farther over the arm of the sofa, reaching to the lower shelf of the end table, and Mike's gaze drifted to the deepening V of her caftan before jerking away.

"I have pictures of Foster and me. Want to see them?"

Mona flipped past several pages in the album she'd retrieved before she held it out to Mike.

He looked at the photos with grave interest, while I itched with impatience. All I'd seen of Foster Redus so far had been a grainy official photo in the clips from the Independence.

"You look very happy," he said at last.

"We were. So happy." Mona sniffled again. When she brought the tissues to her eyes, Mike passed the album to me.

While Mona talked of happy times with Redus, I considered the images of the late deputy.

He was about Mona's height, with a compact build. When he smiled all out, as he did in several photos, his top lip curled, forming a rectangle, pushing his cheeks up and squeezing his eyes closed. It sounds repulsive, but it wasn't. I shouldn't have been surprised that he was appealing, since he had enthralled, at one time or another, Gina, Mona, Marty Beck and reportedly many others.

I flipped to the photos Mona had passed over. Three formed a sequence, with Foster and Mona on the front steps of this house. In the first two Redus' smile was in full force. In the third, he was looking partly over his shoulder, and the smile had become a sneer. Behind him, shadowed by the screen door stood Tamantha.