Astride a Pink Horse Read online

  Shaking his head as if the gesture might erase the heartache of the past eleven years, he limped over to the photo, straightened it, eyed it wistfully, and continued out his front door to head for Wyoming.

  Wyoming Platte County sheriff Art Bosack, a onetime pro-rodeo saddle bronco rider who occasionally still rode his horse out on criminal investigations, arrived to begin his investigation into what would become known as “the Tango-11 murder” not on a horse but in a hail-damaged Ford pickup badly in need of new tires.

  His deputy, Wally Sykes, a recent criminal justice graduate of a small college in Great Falls, Montana, was so wide-eyed when the county coroner and Bosack pulled the body of a rail-thin, six-foot-two-inch black man from the access tube that he hardly heard the crunch of sagebrush and the swish of grass that told him someone was approaching the hastily taped-off crime scene.

  Seasoned and crime-scene-savvy, the coroner, who with Bosack was kneeling over the dead man, looked past the sheriff toward the crunching sound to see someone dressed in air force fatigues approaching. Nudging the sheriff, he said, “Looks like the wild-blue-yonder boys you’ve been expecting are here, Art.”

  Bosack barely looked up from examining the deepest of five stab wounds in the murder victim’s back. Puzzled by the pattern of the wounds and the superficial nature of all but three of them, he ran a latex-gloved index finger from wound to wound, connecting them in the shape of an imaginary pentagon.

  “Strange. Real strange.” He grunted, looked up at Sykes, and said, “Wanna go meet our flyboy?”

  The greenhorn deputy glanced across the Tango-11 compound toward a Jeep Cherokee that was parked fifty yards away on the highway shoulder. Recognizing suddenly that the person approaching them was a woman, he simply stared. Their visitor was still fifteen feet away when the sheriff stood, eyed the gold oak leaves on the woman’s shoulder epaulets, flashed her a friendly smile, and said, “How do, Major? Heard we had an OSI officer from Warren headed our way.” He stripped off a glove and offered her his right hand.

  The tall, lithe special investigations officer, who had been dispatched from Cheyenne’s Warren Air Force Base seventy-five miles south, returned the smile as she walked up to the body. “Took me a little bit longer to get here than I expected. A tractor-trailer rig was jackknifed on the interstate,” she said, scrutinizing the partially tarp-covered body lying at her feet. “Sheriff Bosack, I take it?” She extended an arm above the dead man’s head and shook the sheriff’s hand.

  “Yep,” said Bosack, trying to recall whether he’d ever met a female OSI officer and knowing for certain he’d never met an African American female one. “The man standing to your left is my deputy, Wally Sykes, and the one still kneelin’ there, lookin’ like he’s prayin’ for rain, is our Platte County coroner, Dr. Sam Reed.” The way Bosack said the word doctor, as if it were the equal of a military rank, seemed to be the only thing that caused the woman to announce her name.

  “I’m Bernadette Cameron.” There was a self-assured directness in her tone. She extended a hand to the coroner, realized he was still fully gloved, and pulled the hand back.

  “Got gloves in your size if you wanna get down and dirty here with us, Major,” the sheriff said.

  “Think I’ll wait,” said Bernadette. “Just fill me in on what you’ve got.”

  “Sure,” said Bosack, thinking that with a little more makeup, civilian clothes, a tad longer hair, and a set of earrings, the cinnamon-skinned, green-eyed major would be a knockout. “One of our rural-route mail carriers found him about four hours ago, danglin’ from a chain by his ankles inside that missile-silo personnel-access tube over there.” Bosack pointed toward the raised hatch. “He was naked as a jaybird when we found him. I’m guessin’ somebody with explosives know-how blew the hatch cover. Before our mail carrier lifted it usin’ a tree limb, I mean.”

  “Or somebodies,” said Bernadette. “And just so you’re aware, that hatch cover would have been easy enough to raise without an explosive charge if you had the entry code.”

  “Don’t think anybody had that,” said Bosack, eyeing the charred hatch cover. “Wanna have a look?”

  “In a minute,” Bernadette said, looking down at the body. “African American,” she said, pausing.

  “Yeah,” said Bosack.

  “How long do you think he’d been hanging inside?”

  Bosack glanced at the coroner. “Whatta you think, Sam?”

  “Hard to tell,” the coroner said, rising to his feet. “I’d say from the amount of body decomposition, the number of insect and rodent bites, and the lack of skin elasticity that he’d been hanging there for a couple of weeks at least.”

  “Not much smell,” said Bernadette, kneeling next to the body and sniffing.

  “What smell there was is still down there in your tube, Major, and there’s really not much of that. Over time the smell of death dissipates,” said Reed.

  “Any identifying marks?”

  “Just a couple of tattoos,” said the coroner.

  “Where?”

  The coroner hesitated before responding, “On his penis. You can have a look if you’d like.” He teased back the bottom edge of the heavy-gauge black plastic covering the dead man.

  Bernadette took her first good look at the body. The man’s skin, on the grayish side of black, looked corrugated and picked at. It sagged, mostly along the arms and neck, and skin ulcers covered the man’s chest. His penis, missing most of its circumcised head, was peppered with dried-up erosions that looked like insect bites. Even so, the letters “ICBM,” stenciled in red, white, blue, and red again, could be made out running along the top of the shaft.

  Watching the major’s eyes narrow thoughtfully, the coroner said, “There’s another tattoo on the underside.” He carefully lifted the blackened nub of a sex organ with a gloved index finger. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes,” said Bernadette, recognizing the insignia of Warren Air Force Base’s 90th Missile Group. “Strange, and a little ritualistic.”

  “Looks like somebody used a dull knife or maybe even a pair of scissors to do the job. Pretty ragged edges,” said the sheriff, shaking his head. “That insignia seals the deal though, don’t you think, Major? He’s gotta be one of your boys outta Warren.”

  “We’ll have to see,” said Bernadette, glancing around the Tango-11 compound and looking for where the killer might have broken through the fence to gain enough access to drag a body inside.

  Realizing what she was looking for, the sheriff nodded to the east. “Whoever killed him cut a hole big enough to drive a truck through in your eastern boundary fence over there. Didn’t see much evidence of drag marks over to here, but like Dr. Reed said, the body’s been here for a while. No question, though, he probably wasn’t killed here.”

  “Missile-site security is sort of a top priority for us,” said Bernadette, glancing down at the body once again. “So we’ll be looking real hard at how someone did what they did here.”

  “I know the division of labor, Major. Been there and done this kinda thing before. The murder’s mine. The security breach is yours. So let’s get back to what’s mine for a second. We found the head of the dead man’s penis wadded up in a piece of paper that had been jammed into his mouth. I’m guessin’ the killer was lookin’ to not only make a point but shut him up. Wanna show her, Sam?”

  Dr. Reed leaned over, picked up a baggie from a spot of bare earth near the victim’s arm, opened the bag, took out the dried-up penis head and a crinkled piece of paper, and held them up for Bernadette to look at. “I think the killer probably used the paper to stop the bleeding and sop up some of the blood,” said Reed.

  “Reasonable,” Bernadette said, staring at the paper. “Looks like it’s got some lines drawn on it.”

  “My take, too,” said Bosack. “I’ll have it analyzed, and I’ll let you know what we find out.”

  The sound of a vehicle pulling off the highway and coming to a stop on the shoulder cut the conversation s
hort. Looking back toward the highway, the sheriff announced, “Dually.” A satellite-receiver-style antenna poked from the bed of a white truck with dual rear tires. The truck’s nose was pointed toward them.

  “Colorado plates,” said Deputy Sykes. “Recognize the rig, Sheriff?”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’d be coming out here right now besides law enforcement?” asked Bernadette.

  Smiling knowingly and eyeing Bernadette’s Jeep, the sheriff asked, “Have you got a police scanner in that vehicle of yours, Major?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should.”

  “And the reason for that would be?”

  “So you can keep up with the press,” the sheriff said with a wink. “I’m willin’ to bet six months’ pay that dually we’re starin’ at belongs to a journalist.”

  Bernadette watched in silence as the driver slipped out of the pickup.

  “Yep,” said the sheriff. “The antenna. The Colorado tags. Pretty much says it all. We’ve got us an outta-state newshound lookin’ for a story.”

  By the time Cozy Coseia worked his way from the highway shoulder, through sagebrush and timothy hay up to his knees, and to the open north gate of Tango-11, Wally Sykes was waiting for him.

  “Afraid this area is off-limits to visitors today,” Sykes said authoritatively.

  Slightly winded and limping, Cozy reached into the right-hand pocket of his jeans for his press credential. As he did, Sykes’s left hand moved casually to the butt of his .44.

  Quickly closing the gap between Cozy and Sykes and thinking that his new deputy was going to need a little schooling on when it was appropriate to reach for one’s service weapon, Sheriff Bosack, who with Major Cameron had been examining the charred “A-Plug” hatch cover, called out to Cozy, “What can I help you with, bud?”

  Surveying the Tango-11 compound slowly and holding up his press credential for the sheriff to see, Cozy said, “Heard you’ve had some trouble out here today.”

  Without answering, the sheriff examined the press credential, then looked Cozy up and down. He had no doubt that the gangly visitor in aviator sunglasses had been watching their every move through binoculars for a good ten minutes before coming to join them, and Bosack didn’t particularly like being scrutinized from a distance.

  Ignoring the sheriff’s silence and still taking in every inch of the compound, Cozy nodded toward where the coroner and Bernadette Cameron were kneeling. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a dead man on your hands,” he said, taking special note of the air force officer’s presence.

  Realizing that from where he stood, Cozy couldn’t tell whether the body was that of a man or a woman and thinking, Good ploy, the sheriff said, “We’re attendin’ to official police business here, Mr. Coseia. The press will get a briefing later.” He glanced toward Cozy’s truck. “See you’re outta Colorado.”

  “Denver. But like they say, bad news travels fast,” Cozy said, thinking that Freddy Dames’s southern Wyoming “information scouts,” a trio of nosy, aging Vietnam vets whom Cozy had always considered no more than overpaid police scanner eavesdroppers, had finally earned their keep.

  Still staring at the press credential, the sheriff said, “Digital Registry News. Hmm. Web-based outfit, I take it.”

  “Yep. Regional news for the Rockies.”

  “Great slogan,” the sheriff said sarcastically. “But I think you’d better move on. I’ll have Deputy Sykes here walk you back to your vehicle.”

  Cozy removed his sunglasses and tried to stare the deputy down.

  When the sheriff said with authority, “Please show Mr. Coseia back to his truck, Wally,” Sykes broke into a broad, eager-to-please grin. Waving Cozy ahead of him, he said, “Think you better move it, Coseia.”

  Watching the two men turn and head for the truck, the sheriff found himself wondering whether the curly-headed, hazel-eyed reporter with nut-brown skin was American Indian, Cuban, or perhaps maybe even Colombian. Whatever his heritage, he seemed to the sheriff to have the instincts of not simply a reporter but a lawman, and that bothered him. In the time they’d talked, he’d watched Coseia size up the compound, the dead man, the coroner, and Major Cameron. There was something else about Coseia that bothered the sheriff. Something small but troubling. He’d never liked sparring with a man with whiskey-colored eyes.

  There was one thing Coseia hadn’t been able to hide, however: his very noticeable limp. As he made his way back to his truck, the limp became even more pronounced.

  As the sheriff watched Cozy slip into his dually, he had the sense that Elgin Coseia was a man for whom hiding things was important—his eyes, that limp, and other things, more than likely. With his attention still focused on Coseia, the sheriff hardly heard Major Cameron walk up beside him.

  “Who was our visitor?” she asked, holding a pair of aviator sunglasses that she hadn’t been wearing on her arrival in one hand.

  “A reporter,” Bosack said, turning to face her. “And you can be jack-sure he’s just the first of ’em.”

  “He seemed to stare at Dr. Reed and me from behind those sunglasses for quite a long time. Think we’ll see him again?”

  “Absolutely,” said the sheriff, watching Cozy’s truck move slowly along the highway shoulder and knowing as he watched the dually’s retreat that the man behind the wheel was no doubt staring through sunglasses directly back at them.

  She could hear Rikia down in the basement making his strange guttural airplane sounds as he piloted an imaginary World War II Japanese fighter in a dogfight over the Sea of Japan. It always upset her when her forty-eight-year-old cousin cloistered himself in the basement to play mindless toy airplane games for hours on end. But Kimiko Takata knew better than to interrupt him. Any intrusion ran the risk of sending him deeper into his fantasy world, a world filled with samurai warriors, long-dead and mostly forgotten Japanese fighter pilots, and above all honor. A world he could sometimes remain immersed in for days.

  If left undisturbed, he would come up for air in thirty or forty minutes. She knew his routine. After all, Rikia Takata was a man of rigid routine. And when he came upstairs, they’d have plenty of time to talk about the news flash she’d just watched crawl across the bottom of her television screen. Time to discuss the unwelcome intrusion that had sent her rushing to her medicine cabinet for Pepto-Bismol and two aspirin.

  Unaware of Kimiko’s distress, Rikia remained at the imaginary controls of a Mitsubishi A-6M, known commonly as a Japanese Zero. He was sequestered in a musty cellar in a quaint Queen Anne cottage in Laramie, Wyoming, engaging the American enemy in another air battle. Rikia’s lengthy groans and high-pitched nasal whines rose from the cellar as he clutched a U.S. F4U Corsair model airplane in his right hand and an A-6M in his left.

  Shigeo Fukumoto, Japan’s most famous World War II ace, was piloting the A-6M, and a less skilled American pilot, as always, was behind the controls of the Corsair. A low-pitched groan rose from the pit of Rikia’s stomach, becoming louder and louder as he swirled the planes around in a circle above his head, then swung them up and down through the air. Inch by inch and second by second, the A-6M closed in on the Corsair’s tail as the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire reverberated from Rikia’s tongue. Suddenly the machine-gun fire stopped as the Corsair, hit and out of control, spiraled toward the top of a nearby Ping-Pong table, emitting flames and smoke from its tail, and disappeared into the choppy waters of the Sea of Japan. Smiling, Rikia whispered, “Justice.”

  Skimming the tabletop to make certain of his kill, the ghost of Shigeo Fukumoto then nosed his A-6M skyward to disappear in an imaginary curtain of clouds.

  Erupting in a near-sexual climactic sigh, Rikia set the two model airplanes down on the Ping-Pong table, stepped to his left, and recorded another chalk mark and Fukumoto kill on a blackboard he’d mounted as a teenager on the basement wall. He’d recorded thousands of kills since then, but his kill number for the year stood at fifty-three.

  Emotionally drain
ed, he moved the two model airplanes he’d been playing with to their respective Japanese and American ends of the Ping-Pong table to join planes from other Allied and Axis nations.

  A very nervous-sounding Kimiko opened the basement door and called out, “Rikia, come up here, please, and now! It’s important!”

  Rikia frowned, stomped to the foot of the stairs, and yelled up to the woman who’d pretty much raised him, “Can’t it wait?”

  Staring down at her slightly built, unshaven cousin, Kimiko said, “No, Rikia. It can’t!”

  Shaking his head and muttering, “Damn!” Rikia started up the stairs. “This had better be important,” he announced, fighting to enunciate properly through his tongue-tied speech impediment.

  Kimiko flashed him a steely-eyed look and said, “It is.” She grabbed him firmly by the arm when he reached the first-floor landing and walked him into the kitchen. “Have a look,” the surprisingly strong, 105-pound, seventy-six-year-old Kimiko said, waving at the television screen with her free hand.

  Rikia slipped out of her grasp and turned to face the blonde, Cheyenne-based newscaster seated behind a desk that seemed to swallow her.

  Kimiko slapped the top of the TV and said, “Listen!”

  With a look of concern plastered on her face, the newscaster said theatrically, “Neither air force officials nor the Platte County sheriff are saying much about the man that a postal worker found hanging by his ankles inside a missile-silo personnel-access tube at the abandoned Tango-11 missile site near Wheatland. Nor are authorities saying how long the murdered man may have been there. Channel 4 has confirmed that the body is that of retired Air Force Master Sergeant Thurmond Giles, a decorated African American nuclear-missile maintenance technician. A joint air force–sheriff’s office briefing and news conference has been scheduled for seven o’clock this evening in Wheatland. As always, Channel 4 News will be there to keep you abreast of the story.”