Read Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery for Free Online

that I can tell, but he had them on the desk just like that.”
    I glanced around at the locked cages surrounding the file areas and could see only one window up near the ceiling, where people’s feet, clothed in various winter footwear, walked by on the sidewalk above. “He worked down here alone?”
    The inspector leaned back in his chair and placed his pointy-toed boots up on the surface between us on top of the files. “Now you know why he killed himself, right?”
    I looked at the folders under his polished wing tips and even went so far as to flip the corners through my fingers. “Pretty skimpy.”
    He ignored my remark and glanced up through the abbreviated window. “I started trying to guess what people did for a living by looking at their shoes, but then I figured out they were mostly all cops and quit.”
    “There are a lot of them around here.”
    “Uh huh.” His eyes returned to mine. “How ’bout you?”
    “How about me what?”
    “You a cop?”
    I smiled, not making it easy on him. “In what sense?”
    He didn’t smile back. “Are you one of them, or are you one of us?”
    “I’m just me.” I closed my fingers around the files and yanked them from under his boots.
    He slipped the lizard skin boots from the desk and stood, and I was standing right there with him, nose to nose.
    “Gerald Holman was a friend of mine, and I don’t want his name dragged through the mud.”
    I slipped the files under my arm. “Are you trying to tell me something, Richard?”
    He didn’t move. “I want to be sure about who you’re working for.”
    “That would be my business.”
    He nodded toward the files securely compressed under my arm. “Those are now mine and that makes it my business, too.”
    “You want to wrestle for them?”
    He looked me over. “You think I can’t?”
    “I think I’ve got you by about sixty pounds, and the first thing I’m going to do is grab that .357 on your hip.”
    “Well, I’ll be grabbing that .45 at the small of your back.”
    I glanced around. “Boy howdy, I sure hope no one comes in down here while we’re doing all that grabbing.”
    His face was stony, but after a few seconds fissures started to break through the façade, and finally the cracks formed a grin underneath the extravagant mustache and he chuckled. “Gets lonely down here.” He laughed, outright, and then sat on the edge of the desk. “I hear you’re pretty smart.”
    “For a Wyoming sheriff?”
    He continued to smile. “You get a lot of press.”
    “Meaning?”
    He drew a wide palm across the lower part of his face but somehow didn’t disturb the mustache. “Look, Gerald was a good guy . . .”
    I sat and leaned back in the guest chair. “We all seem to be in agreement about that, but he’s dead and his wife wants to know why. So, in answer to your question, I’m working for her.” Confrontation largely avoided, I started shuffling through the files. “This is all he was working on?”
    “The only things of any importance.”
    I nodded and left it at that. “His wife mentioned something about a missing persons?”
    “Missing girl from out near Arrosa, a little crossroads east of here along the railroad tracks.” He leaned forward and took the stack from my hands and flipped through until finding the one marked with a name—Jone Urrecha. “Classic case from the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club out there; got off work and disappeared, never to be heard from again.”
    He handed the folder to me, and I opened it. “Dancer?”
    “Sure, if you say so.”
    “Missing five weeks . . .” I glanced up at him. “Not exactly a cold cold case.”
    “Nope, but Holman got all the leftovers.” He glanced around the dungeon. “And shit flows downhill.”
    I rested my eyes on the photo of the young woman and found her features familiar. “Urrecha, that’s Basque.” I looked up at him. “I met a woman at the Wrangler Motel last night by that name.”
    “The sister—she’s been talking to the