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More than official confirmation, though, it was about gloating that we’d gotten there before them and without needing no stinkin’ confirmation from no stinkin’ corporation.
But gloating very, very subtly.
One of the best things about dealing with Sergeant Wayne Shelton was he picked up on the subtleties.
Then word came that Wendy Barlow, a member of the wealthy Barlow family of Connecticut, had been reported dead outside Jackson.
“When they bother to say somebody’s wealthy around there, you know they’re loaded,” muttered Leona.
The local Jackson media said she’d been visiting her oldest brother, who owned a “cabin” there — those Jackson-area cabins are equivalent to the Newport, Rhode Island, “cottages” of the Gilded Age.
Interesting that after the things Wendy said about her brothers, she ran to one of them.
Maybe she had nowhere else to go. Maybe she didn’t know what she intended to do, she just ran. But I also remembered her reaction after being questioned at the sheriff’s department and her vehemence that she would never be in a situation like that again.
So maybe she did know what she intended to do, but didn’t want to do it at Elk Rock Ranch.
The account that came to us was she went for a hike and when she didn’t return at the expected time, the family and staff mounted a search. The next day, her body was found off the trail, as if she might have fallen.
Only then did they call authorities.
The Shelton cloud turned into a volcanic eruption.
I happened to meander over to the sheriff’s department after that report came in — covering the distance from KWMT at Diana-like speeds.
So I was there to hear eruptions of steaming lava from behind closed doors that barely tamped the volume.
In this mode, Shelton was not above questioning the ethics and intelligence of his fellow law enforcement professionals.
That’s how I learned Wendy had a bullet hole in the head. A contact wound. But law enforcement for that small, billionaire-dense enclave was not pursuing an investigation. They were satisfied with the fell-while-hiking explanation, which let the family avoid the pesky matter of her being accused of murder in Cottonwood County.
Russ Conrad, as sheriff, and Jarvis Abbott, as county attorney, took it up with their counterparts. No one expected any change in the case’s status.
It wasn’t justice. The perpetrator deciding on her punishment is not justice.
It was an ending.
But not one we liked for a special on the investigation.
****
We were still discussing special or no special when I took another trip to the McCrackens’.
He had been riding with his kids and wife. They were all smiling. The kids volunteered to take care of his horse, so he could talk to me. They were in the stage of horse fandom where even cleaning out stalls seemed exotic, much less unsaddling and rubbing down their mounts.
“Was Keefe descended from the Virtanens?” he asked first.
I considered it a good sign that he didn’t ask about the treasure first.
I explained that unless someone did or paid for a whole lot of family tree research, that would remain unknown, but that it didn’t seem any more likely that Keefe was than he was.
The few things Ulla said that Keefe had interpreted as possibly connecting him to the Virtanens had been about Chester and the Barlows.
I shared the material from the dissertation saying no one knew Pearl’s whereabouts — without any of my speculation about its author’s origins. That left for last the news about the original newspaper interview with the Oscar Virtanen posse member and what it said.
I left Sam to voice the conclusions.
“If Oscar and Pearl had a prearranged drop spot, she got the money and left with their baby. I’d thought Elk Rock Ranch made sense as a burial site because it was their land, but that also makes it more likely she knew where he’d put it. If they didn’t have a prearranged drop spot, it’s back to being anywhere between where the robbery took place and where they captured him.”
