Jesse whispered the end of the sentence into a flashlight in the dark of that shed, and I heard it come out of the speaker of my truck. “They are planning to use the boys to claim benefits and open credit lines. Their names, their numbers. They are even talking about adopting them.” The video shook. It ended with a hand in front of the lens and the sound of a door. I sat in the cab with Colt and Wyatt on either side of me and the wind rocking the truck on its springs. Nobody breathed.
I took the phone straight to the sheriff of Laramie County. The deputy at the desk, a young woman named Ortega, took one look at my face and led me back to a small room. She watched the video with the sound off, then on. She asked me to sit. She said, “Mr. Dunn, I need you to leave this phone with me, and I need you to go to your house and stay there with the boys. Do not call anyone. A detective will be at your door within the hour.” I did as I was told, and the longest hour of my life went by.
The detective was a lean, weathered man named Kessler with the quiet of a man who has worked a lot of ranches. He sat at my kitchen table with a notebook and listened to the boys. Colt told it first, in order, like a witness. In March, Tiffany began to bring the man in the black hat around at night. He parked behind the shed. They carried boxes. Jesse followed them one night and saw the stacks of mail. Two days later he told Colt, “If anything happens to me, you go to your uncle Ray. Not the sheriff. Somebody in the office of the sheriff is in on it.”
The secret a father leaves to his sons in a hiding place may be the only inheritance that truly lasts.
That was a detail I could not make sense of, until Kessler explained. A state task force had been working the ring for eight months, he said, and had a source inside the county. They had not known who. The man in the black hat was a career identity thief called Duane Pike, wanted in three states, who found vulnerable families and used them for cover. Tiffany was his partner, and, it turned out, his wife. The shed had been their warehouse. And the owner of the ranch where Jesse worked, Mr. Tolliver, had been renting them the land in exchange for a cut.
Tolliver came to my house two nights later. I opened the door on a stooped man in a canvas coat who looked ten years older than he had at the wake. He stood on the step with his hat in his hands. “Ray,” he said, “I killed him.” I could not speak. He said, in a shaking voice, that he had not meant to, that he had gone to the stock pond the night Jesse told him he was going to the sheriff, to talk him out of it, and that they had fought. Jesse fell. Tolliver had held him under the water. He had let him go, and it was too late.
I let him in. I do not know why. I think I wanted him to say it to the boys, but the boys were upstairs asleep, and I would never have allowed that. So I sat him at the table with Kessler, who had been waiting in the next room on a hunch, and I listened to a man give a confession that lasted ninety minutes. He had been in debt to Pike for years. He had been blackmailed into helping. When it was done, Kessler put the handcuffs on him very gently, and Tolliver thanked him.
The raid took place at dawn on Friday. Twenty officers, state and federal, descended on the trailer and the shed. They found the boxes, the licenses, the list of names. They found a laptop with the files of two hundred victims. Pike was arrested in a motel in Casper with a suitcase of cash. Tiffany, who had been in the truck with the dog, tried to speed away on the highway and was stopped at a roadblock by a deputy who happened to be the cousin of Jesse. She sat on the shoulder, crying, with the dog in her lap.
The trial of Tolliver was short. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder and received twenty five years. At the sentencing the judge asked if the family wished to speak, and Colt, who was eleven, stood on his own. He said, “My father stopped drinking six years ago. He wore a chip on his key chain. He was good at it. He told me every day he was proud of himself. I want everyone to know that he was not drunk.” The judge nodded slowly. She thanked him. She said the court would see that his words were entered in the record of the case.
Both boys live with me on the ranch I bought outside Cheyenne, with an old cabin I had remodeled into rooms. It is not fancy. The roof leaks in one spot over the stove. But there is a dog, the dog of Jesse, that Tiffany abandoned, and he sleeps at the foot of the bed of Wyatt. The boys ride in the mornings. They are learning to rope, badly. On Sundays they go to a church in town, and on the way home they stop at the Elks lodge, where the old cowboys at the bar buy them root beer and tell stories of Jesse.
Last fall the Elks lodge hung his saddle on the wall above the bar, with a brass plate. It says, Jesse Dunn. A good man who got up every day. Colt stood under it with Wyatt, and put his hat on, the old hat that had once come down over his ears. It sat just above his eyebrows. He looked up at the saddle and then at me, and he grinned, and I saw the face of my brother in the face of the boy. I put my hand on his shoulder, and we stood there for a long time while the jukebox played.
