Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson

sipped his Coors. “You could be right.” He smiled to himself and, looking for a ring, studied my hand. “You married?”
    “Widowed.”
    “Kids?”
    “One, a daughter in Philadelphia getting ready to have one of her own—due at the end of the week. That’s where I’m supposed to be, but instead I’m here.”
    He lifted his bottle. “That’s the way most folks feel about Arrosa.”
    I lifted my own, and we toasted.
    “Any word on Jone?”
    “Nothing yet.”
    He eyed me through his funky glasses. “Any, you know, leads? From her mail maybe?”
    “Leads?”
    He lowered his beer and looked thoughtful. “Isn’t that what you guys call ’em, leads?”
    “Sometimes.” I sat my Rainier back down. “No, just the usual junk forwarded from her previous address in Boise and some new stuff. But you must’ve noticed that.”
    The postman shook his head, the ponytail wagging back and forth. “Nope, I just sort ’em—I don’t read ’em.”
    I thought about it. “No personal correspondence, nothing.”
    “Kids these days, they text, tweet, or use e-mail.” He pointed to the USPS patch on his shoulder. “That’s why we’re going out of business.”
    “You’d think there would be something, though. Weeks of mail and not a single letter . . . Not even a postcard.”
    A youngish woman came through the door and looked around, pausing for a moment and then walking straight to me. Careful to avoid Dog, she stood a few steps away in her business suit, long wool coat, and sensible shoes. “Are you Walt Longmire?”
    I glanced around the almost empty bar for comic effect, a move which was lost on everybody except Dog. “I am.”
    “Can I speak with you?”
    “Sure.”
    She glanced around, perhaps for her own comic effect, and jiggled her car keys. “Somewhere else?”
    I pointed toward the back. “I just ordered a pizza.”
    “This won’t take long.”
    I stood and raised my voice so the bartender could hear me. “Mr. Pilano, have you already put that pizza in?”
    A voice came back. “Just now.”
    “Can you take it out and put it back in when I return?”
    His head appeared in the swinging doorway. “No problem.”
    Dog and I followed the woman out the door and were surprised when she kept walking toward the Arrosa Elementary School across the street—at least I was surprised. The parking lot was vast enough to allow the buses to make a full circle but right now held only a solitary blue Volvo. Beyond was a chain-link fence and a playground with equipment painted red and white, the school colors. We followed her through a gate in the fence, across the playground, and entered a door in the large, older stone portion of the building, which was, it turned out, the gymnasium.
    She stood alongside the gleaming wooden surface of the basketball court, and turned to look at me, a large canvas satchel hanging from her shoulder. “I’m Connie Holman.”
    “The daughter.”
    She nodded. “I know who you are.”
    I studied her, clocking her age at late thirties. “Have we met?”
    “No, but I’ve read about you in the newspapers, magazine articles, WyoFile . . . Sheriff Walt Longmire, they talk about you like you’re some inevitable form of justice.”
    I smiled a tight smile and threw a thumb back toward the bar. “I stop for a beer and pizza every now and then.”
    She glanced through the metal grating of the multipane window and looked out onto the playground and past. “I’m sorry, but I’m a teacher here and on the school board, and it isn’t good for me to be seen hanging around in bars.”
    I smiled. “That’s okay. It’s not so good for my reputation either, but I do it anyway.”
    She volleyed a smile back. “I’m not stalking you.”
    “I don’t suppose that would be good for your reputation either.”
    “We had an in-service here, and I talked to my mother on the phone; she said something about having hired you.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “To look into my father’s death?”
    I