Hunting the Saturday Night Strangler

  Copyright Information

  Hunting the Saturday Night Strangler: A Bitter Wind Mystery © 2018 by C. M. Wendelboe.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2018

  E-book ISBN: 9780738755243

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration by Dominick Finelle/The July Group

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wendelboe, C. M., author.

  Title: Hunting the Saturday Night Strangler: a bitter wind mystery/C.M.

  Wendelboe.

  Description: First Edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota: Midnight Ink, [2018] |

  Series: A bitter wind mystery; #2.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017602 (print) | LCCN 2018022734 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738755243 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738753621 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E53 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.E53 H89 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017602

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

  Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

  Midnight Ink

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  2143 Wooddale Drive

  Woodbury, MN 55125

  www.midnightinkbooks.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  I dedicate this novel to my wife, Heather,

  who is my constant sounding board and a mentor.

  “Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.”

  – General Douglas MacArthur –

  One

  A full moon—a rustler’s moon—peeks from low-hanging clouds and casts eerie shadows across the grassy pasture. The Midnight Sheepherder, as the Wyoming Wool Growers Association refers to the rustler that’s plagued ranchers hereabouts for a year, douses the pickup lights while still on the county road. Easing up to the fence, the thief climbs out, drops the barbed wire gate, and lays it aside. The sheepherder has had close calls with the Association’s range detective before, and the last thing needed tonight would be having to stop and open the gate before fleeing. If caught.

  The dog in the seat trembles with anticipation as the rustler eases the truck and trailer into the pasture, the moon the only illumination necessary. How many times has moonlight aided in the thieving? And how many times has the rustler gotten away undetected? The original plan last year had been to steal a trailer full of sheep: twenty-five to thirty head a night for a couple nights. Use the money for necessities and quit while ahead. But it was all too easy, with the odds against the lone stock detective the Association put their faith in. The detective, after all, was renowned for solving homicides. Not catching rustlers.

  The sheepherder idles toward a deep depression in the pasture, where sheep mill about like frightened children, and climbs out. The dog jumps down from the seat and sits while the trailer ramp is dropped. The hollow cries of bleating sheep sound like the cries of babies, echoing off the walls of the natural depression of land. A wave of the hand, a silent signal to the willing accomplice, and the dog happily bounds after a group of sheep at the near end of the pasture. The dog doesn’t know she’s an accessory—she’s just doing what she knows and loves: rounding sheep up to be sold out of state.

  The dog herds four sheep up the ramp into the trailer when … the sound of a pickup approaches in the field above the rustler. Light floods the hillside. Instinctively, the sheepherder crouches even though the approaching vehicle is well above the depression in the pasture, the truck and trailer hidden. Another wave of the hand and the dog returns to sit beside the ramp. Her muscles twitch with the thought of herding more sheep, and she pants with anticipation. But for now, she sits, her tongue lolling out her mouth like she’s testing the hot, dry night air. Dog and thief have weathered near misses before. Last month at a ranch on the Snowy Range, the Association’s stock detective nearly caught them. But hunkering down, letting the danger pass, had saved them. And would do so tonight.

  The rancher—for it has to be the landowner prowling around this time of night—stops the truck. A door slams. Muffled voices rise and fall with the stiff breeze.

  As the rustler reaches inside the trailer for a granola bar, a scream pierces the night. Dog and thief scramble up the hillside and peek over the bank. A man in baggy jeans and shirt too big for him drags a woman screaming by her hair out of a truck. She kicks and claws at the man, but to no avail. He slams her against the hood, and headlights momentarily illuminate them. The woman tries biting his hand, but he backhands her across the face. She slumps and he hauls her erect, shaking her awake, prolonging her anguish.

  The rustler keeps quiet. A family fight is no business of—

  The man rips off the woman’s blouse. He clamps a hand over her mouth, but she bites hard. He punches her in the gut, and she lets go. With one hand on her throat, the man grabs something from his back pocket—a leather thong perhaps—and swiftly wraps it around the woman’s neck. Her screams cease. Her eyes bulge out. Her feet kick the air as the man hoists her off the ground with the strangling, when …

  The dog barks.

  Just a faint nip, but the sound carries well on this hot night. And it carries to the couple fighting in front of the pickup.

  The man looks up, his eyes reflecting his headlights, a grimace of hate on his face visible even at this distance. He spots the dog, and the rustler beside her.

  The man drops the woman and runs toward the bank.

  Toward rustler and dog.

  The rustler stumbles to the truck. Trips over a rock. Tumbles down to the bottom of the hill. Recovers and whistles to the dog. She leaps onto the seat of the truck as the thief stomps on the foot feed. Dirt and rocks from the spinning truck tires ping the side of the trailer in a race to get as far and as fast away from the pasture as possible. Sheep tumble down the ramp dragging on the ground.

  The Midnight Sheepherder makes it to the pasture gate, caroms off the gateposts. The ramp slides, a gravel storm kicked up by the tires. The rustler will put the ramp up later. For now, the only thing that matters is escape.

  And survival.

  Two

  He drags Jillie from the truck by her hair. She kicks and claws and fights like most ranch girls would. He admires her spunk.

  He throws her hard onto the hood, the head-to-metal sound echoing in the hot night air. She bounces off the hood and tries biting him. He backhands her. She slumps, and he violently shakes her awake. It’s not her time yet.

  He rips her blouse—not because he has a desire to have sex with this woman, but because her humiliation will add to the pleasure of what he’s about to do. As it always does.

  She screams. Loud enough that someone might hear her, and he clamps a hand over her mouth. She sinks her teeth hard into his hand. Sticky blood runs down his forearm. He punches her in the pit of the stomach, and she lets go with a whoosh of a drunk’s putrid air.

  The fingers of one hand wrap around her throat. She sucks in a breath as she tries breaking his grasp. Fingers claw at his bloody hand, the fingernails of her other hand gouging furrows on his neck, but he only increases pressure. He takes a leather bootlace from his back pocket and wraps it around her neck. He twists the lace, and it digs into the flesh of her neck as he lifts her off the ground. She gasps, coughs, a deep rasping comes from her collapsed windpipe, legs flailing in the empty air beneath her. At death’s doorstep, he lets up. She sucks in great gulps, seeming to recover, when he tightens the bootlace again. Her eyes bulge, her legs slowly kick the empty air, when …

  A dog barks.

  The attacker’s head jerks around to where the noise came from. A cowboy hat just peeks up over the hill. A panting dog sits beside the hat.

  He drops the woman. She falls lifeless on the ground as he sprints toward the hill, to the sound of a truck kicking up dirt speeding away. He makes it to the edge of the bank and looks down: the truck and trail
er are like most others in Wyoming. Except this one has sheep tumbling out the back of the trailer as it races for an open gate.

  Even if he raced after the truck, he wouldn’t catch it. Besides, he has a body to dispose of.

  He walks back to the corpse and bends over her when headlights illuminate the truck. The rancher is approaching from the gate where he entered, coming on fast.

  He abandons the body in the tall grass and jumps in his truck. He slaps the lever into four-wheel drive and bounds over the hill, making a run toward the gate where the witness fled moments before.

  As he starts through the gate, his headlights reflect off something red on the ground beside the fence: a broken taillight from the witness’s pickup.

  He stops long enough to pick up the broken piece before speeding away. He looks back toward the hill, but the rancher has turned around, driving the way he came from, leaving the woman’s body unfound. For now.

  Later this morning—when the excitement of the kill has worn off and he can once again think straight—he’ll go hunting the witness. And dispose of the body.

  He shakes anew at the thought of finding the driver of that truck. He just hopes the witness has as much spunk as this last one did.

  Three

  Arn Anderson never planned to take a job as a range detective when he retired from Metro Denver Homicide. All he could think about was that he’d be associated with the last famous range detective: Tom Horn. Unlike Horn, Arn had no intention of getting himself hung for bushwhacking. But his pension didn’t come close to paying the bills, especially now that he’d undertaken the restoration of his boyhood home in Cheyenne, which he referred to as the MP—the Money Pit. And his pension didn’t allow him the luxury of buying another vehicle, like a pickup that would be better suited to driving the pastures and back country roads than his Oldsmobile 4-4-2.

  He opened the gate and let himself into the field. “Wooly” Hank Doss, rancher and victim of considerable sheep thefts recently, had called this morning. Wooly Hank belonged to the Wyoming Wool Growers Association and, within the last year, had joined the group of ranchers who’d pooled their resources to hire Arn as a stock detective. “It’s damned sure the Midnight Sheepherder,” Wooly Hank had sputtered over the phone.

  Arn had quickly washed up just enough to go out in public. “How many sheep are you missing?” he asked as he knocked his whiskers down with a disposable Bic.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you at least have a general idea of how many got stole?”

  “No, I do not,” Wooly Hank answered. “I haven’t been out to my pasture this morning.”

  “Then how do you know you have sheep missing?”

  “Last night,” Wooly Hank said, as if that were the only explanation needed, and Arn waited for the punch line. “Trucks woke me and the missus up last night.”

  “Did you call the sheriff’s office?”

  “I thought about it. We’ve had trouble with kids sneaking into the east pasture and drinking beer. Partying. Damned near burned some grassland this spring with a bonfire you could’ve seen from the space shuttle. But by the time I pulled my britches on and drove to the pasture last night, the last outfit had roared off. I didn’t think I’d get an accurate head count of missing livestock until daybreak, so I went back to sleep. Figured I’d count up the stolen ones this morning and call the law then.”

  Arn groaned. Getting any information from Wooly Hank was like pulling hen’s teeth. “So, did you count them this morning?”

  “I figured I might as well wait for the range detective—that be you—to do the counting.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Arn took his time dressing. Danny—his formerly homeless houseguest and cook par excellence—had left some cinnamon rolls under a cake plate, and Arn snatched one on the fly. He’d stop by Starbucks on the way—Wooly Hank could just wait a few moments for Arn to wake up.

  By the time he pulled off the county road into Wooly Hank’s pasture, overhead lights of a sheriff’s Expedition reflected from water trickling into a stock tank in the pasture. Wooly Hank stood by his truck staring at the sheriff’s unit. When he spotted Arn, he waved him over. Arn climbed out of his car and stretched, catching Wooly Hank grinning at his Olds.

  “What you gonna do in that pretty car when it snows?” the rancher called.

  “Chain it up,” Arn answered and chin-pointed to the sheriff’s vehicle. “You must have found some sheep missing.”

  “They’re not here for that.” Wooly Hank beckoned with a bony finger, and Arn followed him across the pasture. Yellow evidence tape flapping in the wind—anchored by stakes sealing off a crime scene—caught Arn’s attention. “The deputy said not to come any closer.”

  Arn moved laterally along the perimeter of the evidence tape before he spotted a body on the ground forty yards inside the barrier tape. A uniformed deputy and another man squatted by the corpse taking pictures. “Did you shoot the Midnight Sheepherder?”

  “I would have if I’d have caught him,” Wooly Hank answered, then shook as he recalled the body he’d found that morning at daybreak. “After I phoned you I came out here to start the count when I spotted … a body. I’m no trained lawman, but I knowed right off she was dead.” He rubbed his temple. “I never noticed a body when I drove out here last night. It—she—was just laying there hidden by those clumps of sagebrush and buffalo grass. Naked from the waist up, she were.”

  “Know her?”

  Wooly Hank stuffed Copenhagen into his lower lip. He offered Arn a dip, but he waved it off. “She’s Jillie Reilly. Little Jim Reilly’s daughter.” Little Jim was, as Arn recalled, half-again as large as his teammates when he’d played line for University of Wyoming decades ago. Arn had the misfortune of delivering the death notification when Little Jim’s wife had died in a car accident when Arn worked for Cheyenne PD years ago. He was grateful someone else would notify Little Jim about his daughter.

  “Deputy Slade there said he’s got to secure the pasture until the crime scene technicians arrive.”

  “Mike Slade, I’m guessing.”

  Wooly Hank nodded.

  When Arn worked the Butch Spangler homicide last winter, Ned Oblanski, the Cheyenne police chief, had warned him to stay clear of Mike Slade. “He hates big city cops,” Oblanski had said. “Especially big city detectives. Slade’s one of the SO’s investigators and fancies himself a sharp officer. Even drives up to the academy in Douglas to give rookie classes every session. He has delusions of adequacy.” Yet here Arn was, standing in a pasture with Sergeant Mike Slade approaching, that delusional swagger coming out. He could have been a poster boy for DQ, with his long, lean legs, his bleached blond hair slicked back and pasted down with … Vaseline?

  The deputy stepped over the evidence tape and stopped in front of Arn, looking down. He had Arn by two inches, and he stood a little taller on his toes to accentuate his size difference. He puffed his chest out like it meant something. “Look who showed up—the old retired Denver investigator. Playing range detective, I hear.”

  “When I can.”

  “And I hear you haven’t actually caught this Midnight Sheepherder after damned near half a year looking?”

  “You heard right,” Arn said.

  “Well, that’s just what I want to be when I retire—a stock detective. That’s only slightly above sneaking around to get the goods on a cheating spouse.”

  Arn breathed deeply to calm himself. Even though Jillie Reilly was no concern of his, his cop DNA wanted to know more about it. And right now, Slade was the only soul who could tell him. “Homicide?”

  “You are sharp,” Slade said. “You figure that out just by looking at the body from forty yards away?”

  “No. I figured you and your partner wouldn’t be squatting next to a corpse if she just died naturally,” Arn said. “We call that critical thinking in the big city.”

  “Well, stay out of my hair—”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  Slade turned back and faced Arn. He put his hands on his hips and smiled. “Cause of death will prove to be cerebral hypoxia.”