“What did the guy look like?”
“Before or after the crows got at him?”
“Before.”
“I’m looking at a coroner’s photo Bondine e-mailed to me right now. Hard Indian-looking face, what’s left of it, anyway, which is not much. Long gray hair down to his shoulders. Big man, over six feet tall, and real heavyset. Strong hands like a cowboy. Looks mean as a DI on a fifty-mile hump. Last meal was chiles rellenos and beer. Cowboy boots, silver jewelry. This your guy?”
“It’s him exactly. Dammit. Did he have an earring?”
“Let me see… yes. Small silver earring, through the left earlobe. Some sort of cross-shaped thing with a moon over it. A crescent moon.”
“But that’s the same earring I saw on the guy in Venice.”
“I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this, Micah, but sometimes you’ll find they make more than one copy of an earring. They’ve even been known to make them in pairs, the cunning bastards.”
“Why the clinic card?”
“Captain Bondine called the clinic in La Junta. It seems Pinto was being treated for lung cancer. Had it bad, so I understand. Prognosis was real poor. Looks like he just decided not to wait for the cancer to kill him. This sounds like bad news.”
“It is. Tell me, did Jack find out whether or not Pinto had traveled to Italy or England in the last few weeks?”
“Man did not have a passport. You can’t travel very far in today’s world without a passport, even if you are a Marine.”
“So no connection to Italy?”
“He may have ordered a pizza once.”
“How about any linkage to intelligence ops?”
“Now, that part was weird. I tried running a search on his military service and got a ‘file not found’ message. Yet he was carrying a Reserve card and Marine Corps ID.”
“I ran into the same thing.”
“Did you? So I pushed it a little further and called a guy I knew in Marine Corps Intelligence. He grumbled about it but after some digging he called me back to say that Pinto had been a Code Talker in Korea, so his records were suppressed. Routine.”
“That was all?”
“Yeah. They did it for all the Code Talkers. And the U.S. Army often firewalls the IDs of personnel who’ve worked in intelligence.”
That was true; Dalton had requested that his own military records be sealed against all public inquiries, and then had them tagged with a silent Report All Hits alarm that would trigger an e-mail notice back to him if anybody asked about his records.
He should have figured that out for himself.
“Thanks, Sally. So he was never into any intel work? I mean, after the war?”
“Nope. I’ve got his printout here. Into the Marines at nineteen, Korea, Code Talker, Silver Star, in the brig, a three-year beef for unlawfully disassembling an MP in a bar fight. Pulls his time. Mobs out with a dishonorable in sixty-five, gets into drugs, using and dealing. Made a pile of cash and became a big deal around Comanche Station. Ran the local church, even. What you would call a religious leader. Very highly respected at Comanche Station, according to Bondine. The DEA launched an op against him in eighty-four. Something went very wrong and three of their agents disappeared. They made a circumstantial case against him for that, he was their last known contact, so in eighty-six he goes to Deer Lodge for twenty years. Got out in oh six, time served, no restrictions, moved back to Timpas last year. Lived a humble quiet life. In reward for changing his evil ways and becoming a pillar of the church, God gave him lung cancer and he shot himself in the head six weeks ago. Warms the cockles, a story like that, right?”
“No connection to any American intelligence agency?”
“Zip. Nada. Bupkes. Why is it so much fun to say ‘bupkes’?”
“Not even as an informer? A freelancer?”
“Sounds like you made the wrong man, Micah.”
“You have a phone number for this Captain Bondine?”
“Sure. Office line is 719-384-2525. If he’s out on the road they’ll patch you through. I told them they might be hearing from you. You going to go there, check it out?”
Dalton wrote the numbers out on a section of napkin, holding the phone in the hollow of his neck.
“Okay. Got it. I’m on the way to Colorado now. I’m eastbound on I-90. We’re going to a place called Cloud Peak, in the Bighorns.”
“If you’re headed to Colorado, that’s a little out of the way.”
“There’s a reason. I also need you to go our personnel files and pull out anything you can get on a part-timer name of Pershing Gibson. He was in this Sweetwater unit with Willard Fremont. Also known as Moot. His DOB was…”
“November thirteenth, 1939,” said Fremont, after a pause. “El Paso, Texas.”
Dalton repeated the numbers, waited while Sally read them back, and said, “Gibson was in the Marines. So was Pinto. See if they ever served in the same unit, or even in the same AO. I need to know if they ever crossed paths. Basically I need everything you can get on Pershing Gibson. And another thing—”
“I live to serve, sweetie.”
“Cross-reference both these guys with everything we have on Porter Naumann. See if they intersect at any point.”
“You really think any of this connects with Porter?”
“I have no solid link yet. It’s just what I’m running into out here. If it’s a unicorn hunt for you, I’ll make it up any way I can.”
“Promises. Promises.”
“Have I missed anything?”
“Do you have a current location for this Gibson person?”
“Yes. He lives on a small ranch near Greybull, Wyoming. We’re going to head there after we talk to our man in Cloud Peak.”
“Do you want me to ask the local SAIC to send a car out to Greybull and sit on this guy until you get there?”
“The FBI? Jesus, no.”
“How about the local state guys?”
“Much as I admire the county constabulary, I think I’d like to leave this guy under the impression that all is right with his world. A couple of nineteen-year-old ex-linebackers cooping in a plain brown wrapper a half mile down the road from his ranch would mitigate against this blissful state of mind. Have I missed anything else?”
“Well, what I wore to bed last night was pretty spectacular.”
Dalton snapped the phone shut.
Fremont was shaking his head. “I keep telling you. Moot is not your guy.”
“How do we know this?”
“How do we know any guy? I worked with him, risked my life with him. And why would Moot want to kill the guy who put him in touch with Dick Poundmaker and saved his ass from the IRS?”
“Do you have a number for this Poundmaker guy?”
“Yeah. What time is it?”
“Going on eight-thirty. Seven-thirty in Coeur d’Alene.”
“Dick’ll be up. He plays the NYSE and he hates it that they have a three-hour lead on him. What do I want him for?”
“Ask him if he can get a printout of Moot Gibson’s ATM use for the last thirty days. I need locations, specific bank addresses.”
“Dick’s not gonna want to hand out that kind of info.”
Dalton sent him a look. Fremont received it.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“You do that.”
In the end, Dalton had to get on the line and rain down holy federal thunder to convince Dick Poundmaker, Trustee in Bankruptcy, Attorney at Law, Holistic Surgeon, and Certified Doctor of Homeopathic Medicine, that his long-term financial interests, not to mention his choice of permanent residency, depended entirely upon a prompt and full disclosure of any and all banking records pertaining to the ATM usage of Pershing “Moot” Gibson that he could download and fax to a Sally Fordyce at CIA HQ in Langley—