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It wasn't so much of a surprise that Pepper McKay was dead as much as it was an amazement to everyone in the county that it had taken so long for him to die, or for somebody to kill him.

My undersheriff, Victoria Moretti, held one of the new two-way radios she'd ordered for the department in an attempt to sell me on the things. "Eight hundred megahertz, which is what the highway patrol, fire departments, and rescue squads are using. It's got the extended battery system so it'll last longer than those pieces of single-band crap we've been using from back when Marconi patched 'em together."

The patriarch of the extended McKay family was not a complicated man but had led a somewhat complex life with business interests that spanned the globe, including but not restricted to the O-Kay Ranch at the mouth of Crazy Woman Canyon in Absaroka County, Wyoming. The original name of the ranch had been the O-Slash-Y outfit and had belonged to the Harris family, who were the first non-Natives born in the county when the territory had become a state.

"It's got an extended tac button, dual speakers, and can have an RSM, not that you'll ever...