Body Brace (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 10) Read online

  BODY BRACE

  Caught Dead in Wyoming,

  Book 10

  Patricia McLinn

  Everything can change, except murder.

  After some upheavals in Elizabeth’s professional and personal life in Wyoming, not to mention those of her closest friends, she has some recalculating to do. With her former KWMT colleague Mike now at a Chicago TV station and tech whiz Jennifer also in the city on a visit, Elizabeth’s investigation of a death discovered at a historical reenactment relies on a widening team of fellow sleuths. And rancher Tom Burrell and the usually forthcoming Mrs. Parens are keeping their distance. Temporary or permanent?

  Caught Dead in Wyoming series

  Sign Off

  Left Hanging

  Shoot First

  Last Ditch

  Look Live

  Back Story

  Cold Open

  Hot Roll

  Reaction Shot

  Body Brace

  Cross Talk (2022)

  “While the mystery itself is twisty-turny and thoroughly engaging, it’s the smart and witty writing that I loved the best.”

  —Diane Chamberlain, New York Times bestselling author

  More cozy mystery

  Secret Sleuth series

  Death on the Diversion

  Death on Torrid Avenue

  Death on Beguiling Way

  Death on Covert Circle

  Death on Shady Bridge

  Death on Carrion Lane

  Mystery with romance

  The Innocence Trilogy

  Proof of Innocence

  Price of Innocence

  Premise of Innocence

  Ride the River: Rodeo Knights

  Join Patricia McLinn’s Readers List and get news on releases and special deals first.

  Copyright © Patricia McLinn

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-944126-77-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-944126-78-0

  EPUB Edition

  www.PatriciaMcLinn.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design: Art by Karri

  Cover image: Nicolaus Wegner

  * * * *

  Dear Readers: If you encounter typos or errors in this book, please send them to me at [email protected]. Even with many layers of editing, mistakes can slip through, alas. But, together, we can eradicate the nasty nuisances. Thank you! — Patricia McLinn

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Book

  Copyright Page

  Day One — Thursday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Day Two — Friday

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Day Three — Saturday

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Day Four — Sunday

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Day Five — Monday

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Day Six — Tuesday

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Day Seven — Wednesday

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Day Nine — Friday

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Other Caught Dead in Wyoming mysteries

  Secret Sleuth series

  Mystery With Romance

  About the Author

  DAY ONE

  THURSDAY

  Chapter One

  Thurston Fine’s voice hit me as I walked into the newsroom of KWMT-TV.

  Mornings aren’t my favorite in the best of circumstances. Morning and Thurston Fine are a deadly combination.

  Then add on the fact that they stood beside the widening in the hallway that served as the break room.

  In other words, they were between me and my next hit of coffee.

  “Children playing at cowboys and Indians? Absolutely not. That is beneath my dignity.” Thurston’s lofty tone was worthy of someone who’d endured a slanderous affront to his journalist ethics.

  For the anchor of KWMT-TV of Sherman, Wyoming, that meant it was play-acting. He has no journalistic ethics. Some — including me — would say he’s not a journalist, period. As for his dignity, he had the touchy spun-glass external kind, involving clothes, cars, and hair gel, but none of the deeper than the bones-into-the-soul kind.

  “It’s not—” began the station’s News Director.

  Fine cut him off. “I don’t do that kind of story. I’m not going out to that God-forsaken dust bowl and report on a bunch of screaming kids.”

  As I discreetly slid past them to reach the coffeemaker, I mentally noted that it was not the first time he’d refused an assignment. And not the first time I’d wondered how he got away with talking to a News Director that way, even though this News Director was Les Haeburn, who possessed a temper but no spine. Not a pretty combination.

  So how did Fine get away with dictating to Haeburn? Tempting to say Fine knew where Haeburn’s bodies were buried?

  As much as I liked to figure out puzzles, did I truly care about this one? Nope. Trying to work out the Haeburn-Fine dynamic felt like the worst possible use of my time. Well below scrubbing toilets.

  At that moment, the best use of my time was pouring a lot of coffee into a big mug.

  In a few of the stations I’ve worked at, the News Director did the dictating. At the good ones it was a collaborative relationship among News Director, anchors, reporters, editors, camera people, and more. Those were the gems.

  KWMT-TV was a lump of coal.


  Over the twenty-some months since I’d arrived, I was pleased to observe it developing into a somewhat more refined lump of coal, but coal nonetheless, at this rate it would require millennia multiplied by millennia to aspire to diamond status.

  Mind you, I don’t take direction from this News Director the way I did at other stations on my climb up to the No. 1 TV news market. The pinnacle from which I’d plummeted to KWMT.

  If you don’t like being ruled by numbers, don’t get into TV news. Every TV news market is ranked, based on “TV households,” because a household and its residents don’t count if they don’t have a TV. From the top, those rankings go from New York, through LA and Chicago, past Washington, D.C. — which considers itself a big deal, but c’mon, it barely slips into the top ten at No. 9, so in TV land it’s barely into the world of the big boys — right down to the bottom of the triple-digits where KWMT-TV resides.

  “It’s a news story.” Haeburn almost pleaded with Fine. “The angle’s the brand-new location this year.”

  “That is another reason I won’t do it. There are important people who are totally against this event.”

  My interest picked up. If Fine’s idea of important people were against it, I might be all for it.

  “Like who?” I asked Thurston.

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “You should be telling our viewers. It’s what journalists do.”

  Before Thurston responded, Haeburn, with the unsettling air of a predator sensing a nearby prey, turned to me.

  “You could do the story.”

  Had he picked up on that fleeting thought about my interest picking up?

  Contractually, Haeburn wasn’t in a position to assign me stories willy-nilly. I had the consumer affairs beat with the “Helping Out! with Elizabeth Margaret Danniher” segment and “special projects” of my choosing. That didn’t mean he couldn’t ask, but he seldom did. The one area we seemed to agree on was minimizing our contact.

  “Me?”

  “Her?”

  Haeburn turned on Fine. “Why not? You won’t and it’s a news story.”

  That gave me an instant to recognize that Haeburn wasn’t asking me solely to put Thurston’s nose out of joint. Nor to get at me. It was to get himself out of something.

  If he had picked up on that tick up in my interest, it was from somewhere deep in his self-serving lizard brain that knew how to manipulate reporters.

  That landed on the negative side of whether to take the assignment. Getting Les Haeburn out of a predicament, especially by being manipulated did not appeal.

  “It wouldn’t kill you,” Haeburn said to me.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I saw my response discomfited Haeburn. Not my intention, but it didn’t break my heart, either.

  He hoped I’d say yes, because not having this story covered put him in some sort of pickle. At the same time, he hated that hope, because it meant relying on me. And he absolutely didn’t want to be grateful to me.

  He also didn’t want Fine chewing his tail.

  Snares in every direction.

  “She won’t do it either,” Fine said to Haeburn, as if I weren’t standing right in front of him. “There’s no dead body involved, her little buddy’s no longer here, and it’s not Pulitzer material.”

  My little buddy was ex-NFL player Michael Paycik, formerly KWMT-TV’s Eye on Sports, and now at a network affiliate in Chicago taking his rightful spot in the big leagues.

  Watching how Mike’s advancement ate at Thurston provided solace for missing Mike.

  “Thurston, you do know there’s no category for TV news in the Pulitzers, don’t you?” I asked.

  He scoffed, as if I’d made a faux pas.

  Then he turned and marched into Haeburn’s office. Time to get started on that tail-chewing.

  Haeburn leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I’ll give you Diana as much as you want if you take—”

  “Les!” Thurston demanded from the News Director’s office.

  Our News Director scurried in and closed the office door.

  Immediately commenced the tail chewing.

  Amazing they still hadn’t figured out that most of what was said in that office could be heard in the newsroom bullpen — especially when it was said loudly by Thurston Fine.

  The thrust of his comments repeated that the story shouldn’t be covered.

  The promise of having Diana Stendahl at my disposal as the assigned cameraperson might otherwise be a nudge toward doing the story.

  She was the best shooter at KWMT-TV and my favorite co-worker — hands down since Michael Paycik left Sherman for the heady climes of the Number Three market in the country. Diana also was my good friend.

  But Haeburn so rarely involved himself in daily decisions that assignment editors — occasionally bullied by Thurston — determined most reporter-shooter pairings. For him to meddle now could turn the assignment board into chaos.

  Boy, I hoped Haeburn wasn’t starting to show interest in day-to-day operations — the downside was so steep, I wouldn’t risk it.

  Especially since Diana and I generally wrangled the schedule to our liking without Haeburn’s blessing.

  On the other hand, if Thurston’s idea of important people didn’t want it covered, it became more tempting.

  Decisions, decisions.

  * * * *

  I went into the station’s library to research.

  It was dusty, windowless, cramped, and entirely devoid of allure. That meant it provided privacy not available in the newsroom bullpen of decrepit desks and chairs … and nosy eyes and ears.

  Usually, the nosiness didn’t bother me much. It had increased significantly over the past year and a half, which I considered a sign of progress from apathy toward being a normal newsroom. In this case, though, until I decided about this assignment, I’d keep it to myself.

  With hints supplied by Haeburn and Fine, I deduced the assignment involved coverage of a week-long camp for children, followed on Saturday by a reenactment by adults of a Cottonwood County historical event called the Miners’ Camp Fight.

  Both events had been held on a specific property in the county for as far back as I spot-checked the clips — at least a couple decades.

  But this year’s was in a new location.

  That was Haeburn’s hot angle.

  Not.

  The change of venue might involve Thurston’s important people, but I wasn’t picking up anything tangible from the Sherman Independence archive. Under owner and editor Needham Bender, if there’d been anything tangible, it would have been reported.

  The name Nadine Hulte, cropped up frequently as the source for unrelentingly upbeat quotes. The woman ran the Two Rivers Camp and organized the reenactment. I hadn’t encountered her before.

  However, familiar names showed as being on the committee — the same names on most of the civic committees in the county. Also, the Sherman Western Frontier Life Museum supported both the reenactment and the camp. Clara Atwood was, essentially, the museum and we’d crossed paths before. I’d consider us amicable professional acquaintances.

  After my first pass at research, it was clear this wasn’t a story that would have the Emmy Awards clamoring and the Pulitzers sure wouldn’t be moved to add a broadcast prize to honor it. But its biggest downside remained setting a precedent of doing anything Les Haeburn asked me to do.

  I went outside. Not to escape the dust, because the wind-swept empty space around KWMT-TV’s building and parking lot generated plenty of that, but for fresh air.

  Considering calling Needham Bender to see if he knew anything interesting not in the Independence, I took out my phone.

  It immediately indicated an incoming video call.

  Mike Paycik.

  Chapter Two

  With the recent encounter with Thurston fresh in my mind, I flashed back to day Mike gave his notice at KWMT-TV.

  It was splendid to see his colleagues — almost all his colleague
s — genuinely wished Mike the very best and were hugely pleased for him moving on to bigger and better things.

  The exceptions were Les Haeburn, Thurston Fine, and a handful of acolytes. If there’d been a bucket of nails to chew, they’d have finished them off in no time.

  Then came the day Mike left for Chicago.

  Not such a splendid day.

  Except it was what he was meant to do. A job he deserved. A place he knew and had friends.

  There was absolutely no downside to this huge career advance for him … except for leaving his friends behind in Cottonwood County.

  But he still had his house and his ranch and his roots here.

  He’d be back, he insisted. For visits.

  At the moment, however, the visiting was going the opposite direction.

  Jennifer Lawton, a KWMT-TV news aide and computer whiz, was in Chicago, visiting Mike.

  Not only was Jennifer gone, but with her there, Mike hadn’t called as frequently.

  He was occupied with his guest, which I understood. Really. I just felt like the kid in the class not invited to the birthday party.

  “Mike!” I answered with extra enthusiasm.

  “Hey, Elizabeth. How are you?” He looked and sounded tired.

  “Good. How are you and Jennifer doing as neighbors?”

  Mike had a small apartment in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. Jennifer’s parents wouldn’t have approved of her staying with him. But Mike solved it beautifully. His neighbor was in Europe and gave permission for Jennifer to stay in her apartment for the week, with Mike thoroughly big-brothering her from across the hall.

  Her own space. From Jennifer’s viewpoint that made the trip a success right there.

  He exhaled. “I thought we’d go to a few ballgames, have great meals, that kind of thing.”

  “Jennifer doesn’t want to do that?”

  “Oh, yeah, we did that. And the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium and the Museum of Science and Industry. And then she went back to Science and Industry — twice — and a library because she can work with 3D printing and a laser something-or-other and other stuff I thought was only in Star Trek movies. And I think she’s ready to move into this robotics workshop place she discovered in the Near North. Or maybe they’re trying to get her to move in, because from what I can tell they’re real interested in a couple of her ideas.