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Monette hit on both of them. Told one guy she knew ‘all the best places’ in town to get a beer. Seemed like she was determined to hook up with a man, any man, the nastier and rastier the better.”
    “Did the men act interested?” Atkins asked.
    “The guy in front of me did. Said he’d love to ‘get a little something.’ He was a real wit, a regular Bob fucking Hope. He bought a carton of Kools for his wife.”
    “Did you happen to notice whether he smoked them himself?”
    “Couldn’t say. He acted like it was his wife who needed them, but she couldn’t come in and get them herself, because their baby was acting up, so she was out in the truck nursing. Great, huh—nursing and smoking? You ought to arrest her.” Sally was a real prohibitionist when it came to cigarettes. “Did you find any Kools butts?”
    “I don’t know. We’ll see about that when we get things over to the lab. What about the guy in back of you?” Atkins asked.
    “I don’t know. By the time I left, he hadn’t said much of anything. Just stood there looking stupid and revolting.”
    Atkins glanced up from his notes and gave her a wisp of what almost looked like a smile. “Do you think you could give us a more precise description of these guys than that?”
    She narrowed her eyes, trying to get the clearest possible mental picture of the two men. “Sure. I can even tell you what the first guy’s truck looked like. An old white Chevy pickup, maybe a ton and a half, rusty and dented. I didn’t notice the plates, but he said he was from Worland. And, of course, he was traveling with a woman and a baby.”
    “That’s good. Let’s get down to details.”
    “Okay,” Sally agreed. “The second guy was a biker, kind of scrawny and squinty-eyed, had that worked-over, windburned look.” But then she hesitated. She put her hand on Dickie’s arm, gave it a squeeze, and then said, “Look. I hate to say this, but the way Monette was going, there’s no telling how many guys she flirted with before she found Mr. Wrong. It’s not like she was being discriminating.”
    As Scott Atkins recorded what Sally was saying, Dickie worked his lips, like a man who’d taken a drink of milk that had gone off. When he raised his eyes, they were glittering. “I’m not sure Monette Bandy ever had the luxury of being discriminating,” he said.

Chapter 3
Sweethearts of the Rodeo
    The ringing phone woke Sally before seven on Tuesday morning. She fumbled for the cordless beside the bed, mumbled a hello.
    “God, Sally. You and Hawk. You found Monette.”
    It was Delice, and she was barely keeping it together.
    “Yes,” Sally said. “It was horrible. I’m so sorry, honey. How’s Mary doing?”
    “About as bad as you’d expect. She lost Tanya just last year, and now this happens to Monette. Her parents are dead. She’s pretty much down to Langhams.”
    Sally knew what that was like. She was an orphan herself, her brothers far off in St. Louis, the rest of her family even more distant and scattered. More than twenty years ago she had been a bootless California country-rock singer, out on the road, looking for a place to land. The Langhams of Laramie had taken her in. Dwayne Langham had been behind the counter at the Axe Attack music store when she’d stopped in, her head still full of white noise from a marathon drive east from Berkeley to anywhere on I–80. She’d been looking to buy guitar picks and strings, and mentioned that she sang and wrote songs, might even be in the market for a gig. Dwayne had smiled and sent her to see his sister, Delice, who had hired Sally on the spot to play happy hours at the Wrangler. Given her then pathetic financial state, that job had looked to Sally like the opening of King Tut’s tomb.
    Dickie Langham had followed suit, booking her into the “lounge” at Dr. Mudflaps, the phony gourmet restaurant where he tended bar and dealt dope. Almost before she knew it, she’d rented an apartment in Laramie. By the