The Deadline by Ron Franscell Page B

personal items, but they never actually get their hands on the money.  I believe Mr. Gilmartin, for instance, tied fishing flies and wholesaled them to a local sporting goods shop.  Conceivably, an inmate could accumulate a sizeable sum in his prison account.  Will there be anything else?”
    Morgan pressed one last question.
    “Hypothetically, Mr. Barron, how much money must accumulate before a convicted killer with terminal cancer would be released after almost fifty years in prison?”
    Morgan heard pages rustling over the phone as Barron contemplated the question.  Morgan was certain he was thumbing through Neeley Gilmartin’s prison files.
    “ Hypothetically , Mr. Morgan,” he replied, “in excess of seventy thousand dollars.”

    That afternoon, Morgan wrote the next week’s editorial about the town council’s expensive new dog pound and sent one of his phlegmatic reporters to a Little League game, the other to interview a farm-wife poet who’d been published in a Denver literary magazine.  But he couldn’t get Neeley Gilmartin out of his skull.
    Seventy thousand dollars .  How could a con start with almost nothing and end up with that kind of cash?
    Just after four o’clock, he ventured back out into the parching July heat.  He loosened his tie as he walked back toward the courthouse and felt sweat trickle down the middle of his back.
    The district court clerk’s office was on the third floor opposite the dark state courtroom.  The door was a frame of brown wood around a panel of frosted glass, the office name handpainted in discreet Roman lettering.
    A small bell tinkled when Morgan came through the door.  The counter was empty and a few women worked quietly at computer terminals beneath fluorescent lights.  One of them looked up briefly, but quickly resumed her muted tapping at the keyboard.
    A teen-age girl who looked like a summer employee came out of a small room at one end of the office and walked directly to the counter.
    “Can I help you?” she asked.
    She had braces on her teeth and her limp, dark hair hung straight down, except for two strands that were pulled back across her temples and clipped in back.  The syrupy scent of strawberry perfume was so strong, Morgan could almost see a pink haze around her.
    “I’d like to see a court file,” he said.
    “Come on back here,” she said, lifting a hinged piece of the counter to let him pass through.
    She led him into the dead air of the vault.  She showed him a bank of dented card-files, some labeled with letters of the alphabet, some with six-digit numbers.  The whole cabinet was thick with dust.
    “These are by name of the parties in the case,” she said, touching the first several rows of drawers, “and those are by case number.”
    “Thanks,” he said, hoping she’d leave him in unscented peace.
    “Is there a specific case you’re looking for?” she asked, more curious than helpful.
    “I think I can find it, thanks.”
    Morgan opened drawer “G-H” and thumbed through yellowing index cards until he found the State of Wyoming v. Neeley Gilmartin, Criminal Case No. 48-0237.  He scribbled the number in his notebook and closed the drawer, sending a small cloud of dust into the stagnant air of the government vault.
    The young clerk helped him find the conspicuously thin file.  He’d seen some capital murder cases take up four or five thick folders in Cook County’s Hall of Records;  Gacy’s alone filled a shelf.  Gilmartin’s folder had a few affidavits signed by Deuce Kerrigan, Judge Darby Hand’s order assigning Simeon Fenwick to the case, a brief confession and a few other perfunctory court records.
    The sheriff’s affidavits outlined the flimsy case against Gilmartin, relying largely upon statements by the two witnesses to his drunken threat against Charlie Little Spotted Horse.  While authorities could not account for Gilmartin’s whereabouts on the day Aimee disappeared, a fact omitted from the sheriff’s