7 THIS THING OF DARKNESS

In the first days of February 1923, the weather turned violently

cold. Icy winds cut across the plains and howled through the
ravines and rattled tree branches. The prairie became as hard as
stone, birds disappeared from the sky, and the Grandfather sun
looked pale and distant.

One day, two men were out hunting four miles northwest of
Fairfax when they spotted a car at the bottom of a rocky swale.
Rather than approaching it, the hunters returned to Fairfax and
informed authorities, and a deputy sheriff and the town marshal
went to investigate. In the dying light, they walked down a steep
slope toward the vehicle. Curtains, as vehicles often had back then,
obscured the windows, and the car, a Buick, resembled a black
coffin. On the driver’s side, there was a small opening in the
curtain, and the deputy peered through it. A man was slumped
behind the steering wheel. “He must be drunk,” the deputy said.
But as he yanked open the driver’s door, he saw blood, on the seat
and on the floor. The man had been fatally shot in the back of the
head. The angle of the shot, along with the fact that there was no
gun present, ruled out suicide. “I seen he had been murdered,” the
deputy later recalled.

Since the brutal slaying of the oilman McBride, nearly six
months had passed without the discovery of another suspicious
death. Yet as the two lawmen stared at the man in the car, they
realized that the killing hadn’t stopped after all. The corpse was
mummified by the cold, and this time the lawmen had no trouble