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press and harassing the department about our handling of the case—everybody around here just wants her to go home.”
    I glanced up at him. “How is our handling of the case?”
    He pointed at the folder. “As near as I can tell the report got filed by another dancer about a week after the incident. A deputy took the statement, a detective followed it up, but there was nothing to indicate foul play. Her apartment was empty, and her car was gone, so it’s a pretty good bet that she flew the coop—something she has been known to do.”
    “You contact Boise?” He looked confused. “Where she’s from?”
    “Hey, this wasn’t my case until a week and a half ago.”
    I gestured with the file. “This one was on top?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Any chance that she was involved with Holman?”
    He made a face. “You’re kidding, right?”
    My turn to shrug.
    He thought about it. “I know it’s a reasonable avenue of suspicion, but he was three times her age and just not the type.”
    I looked at the next file—a waitress from the Flying J TravelPlaza on South Douglas Highway by the name of Roberta Payne. “Another missing woman?”
    He nodded. “Three months ago.”
    I flipped to the next file and another missing woman—a housewife from east Gillette from seven months previous, Linda Schaffer.
    “These files are all missing women.”
    He studied me. “I know what you’re thinking—Powder River serial killer, but there’s nothing to connect them other than the fact that they were women and are missing, and the time span is not consistent.”
    “You think he just fixated and burned out?”
    “It happens.”
    He was right, it did happen with an alarming frequency—police officers who grew so close to their cases that they simply couldn’t accept the loss or the failure. I tucked the folders into my chest. “Do you mind if I take these and go through them?”
    He stroked a hand across his mustache again and sighed. “Hey, I’m sorry about that, before . . .” He thumped my chest with the back of his hand. “The only thing I ask is that if you come up with anything you get in touch with me first.” He stuck the same hand out. “Deal?” We shook, and I stood. “Where are you going to start?”
    I glanced down at the file on top, just as Gerald Holman had left it. “Evidently, at the Itty-Bitty-Titty Club.”
    He smiled. “Never a bad place to start.”
    “But first I have to go to Kmart.”
    —
    Whether from guilt or a sense of retail avoidance, Lucian decided to stick around at the sheriff’s office, while Dog and Iheaded south on the Douglas Highway to the fabled Kmart; I parked and turned to look at him. “You want dog treats, or should I just go over to the meat section and get you a ham?”
    His ears went up at the word
ham
; they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure seventeen of Dog’s were ham.
    Having taken his order, I got out and started in. It took me a while, but I found the ham and then the coffee urn. Vowing to get Lucian to reimburse me, I made my way out with the cumbersome box but stopped as I passed the bulletin board at the entryway where a shapely lass in a green Stormy Kromer hat and a vintage plaid hunting jacket was replacing a homemade missing persons poster using a heavy-duty staple gun.
    After she secured the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet on the cork with a slap, she turned and looked at me with the remaining posters hanging over her arm and the staple gun at the ready. “I’ve got permission to do this.”
    I looked down the barrel of the device and raised my one available hand. “Okay.”
    She studied me, probably noticing I wasn’t wearing one of those nifty red Kmart vests. “Do I know you?”
    “Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County—we met last night. I’m staying at the Wrangler.”
    “The what?”
    “The Wrangler Motel.”
    She nodded as the pneumatic doors opened and closed behind me, ushering in repeated arctic