Ill Wind (20 page)

“Stay,” Anna ordered.

Jamie bristled but stayed. Anna didn’t add “Sit!” but she thought about it.

“Will you be here for a while?” Stanton asked the interpreter. “I’d like to talk with somebody who really has a feel for this place.”

Jamie’s bristles lay back down. She tossed her braid over her shoulder and almost smiled. “I’ll be here.”

“More flies with honey, Anna. Got to get them flies,” Stanton said as they walked down the path.

The kiva had not been disturbed since the body was carried out. Yellow tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and held down with stones was placed an “X” over the top of the kiva. Once Stanton had examined the scene the tape would be removed and the floor raked smooth.

The FBI agent sat down on the edge where the roof had once been and dangled his legs over the side. “Other folks find bodies in dumpsters, storm drains, vacant lots. Yours turn up in bizarre places. Your karma must be very strange,” he said to Anna.

“Out in the sticks you’ve got to take what you can get.” She sat down next to him.

He took the envelope he’d been carrying under his arm for the last forty minutes and pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. Pictures of the body had been blown up into 8x10 color prints.

Looking at the photos, Anna knew memories of Stacy in life would be hard to come by. This was how she would remember him: a banquet for flies. She’d never viewed Zach’s body really, just the barest of glimpses to ID it. Studying pictures of Stacy, the value of open-casket funerals, the laying out of the body, night watches—rituals that cut across religious and cultural lines—became clear. To let the living see the dead were most certainly dead and so to let them go. Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.

“The man is dead.” Frederick startled her with an echo of her thoughts. “He’s curled himself up—”

“Or been curled up by somebody.”

“In a what... a fire pit?”

“Yes.”

“Gun on, radio on, no marks of violence, no tracks but his, the ground all raked neatly and his little hat tidy on that wall thing.”

“And his shoes off. See.” Anna pointed to the cordovan shoes tucked up near the brown-stockinged feet.

“You know what I like? I like big old bullet holes and somebody standing a few feet away with a smoking gun screaming, ‘My God, I killed him! I killed him!’ ”

“That happen often?”

“All the time. How do you think we catch as many as we do?”

Anna stared down at the trampled kiva floor. “At least this gives us job security.”

Stanton laughed and she realized how rare that occurrence was. Too bad, it was a good wholesome sound.

He put the photographs back and took out the autopsy report. “The envelope, please,” he said as he ripped it open. “And the winners are . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked over the three single-spaced typed pages.

Anna couldn’t read the small type without all but sitting in his lap so she possessed her soul in patience, passing the time by imagining how the village would have looked with cook fires burning, people hauling water, weaving cloth, children playing on the kiva roofs.

“Time of death.”

Her attention snapped back to the twentieth century.

“Somewhere between eight P.M. and three A.M. Monday night, the twenty-first of June. Had rice and chicken for dinner and red licorice for dessert. Cause of death, heart failure.”

“Can’t be!”

“Right there.” Stanton pointed a big-knuckled finger at the bottom of the second page.

Anna took the report and read the offending sentence. “Natural causes?” she ventured, then read on. “Doesn’t say.”

“Could be a lot of things. Did he have a history of heart disease?”

“His wife said he was in perfect health. Perfect. And that’s a quote.”

Stanton pondered the underground room. “Shock, fear, drug overdose, respiratory failure, what causes the heart muscle to stop?”

“Electrical current, lightning, blunt trauma.” Anna couldn’t think of anything else.

“I opt for one of those,” Stanton said. “Even if he had a bad heart, I can’t see a guy with chest pain, nausea, having trouble breathing, climbing up, crawling down, kicking his shoes off and the bucket.”

“Callous.”

“Sorry.”

“Neither can I.”

“Read me that third paragraph on page two—after all the chemical breakdown gobbledygook,” Stanton said.

“There was no sign of drug or alcohol in the blood or muscle tissue.”

“There goes drug overdose,” Stanton said sadly.

“No bruising of the soft tissue.”

“There goes blunt trauma.”

“No sign of ingested poison. No entrance or exit wounds. No occluded arteries or symptoms of arteriosclerosis.”

“Damn. So much for natural causes. That pretty much leaves us with your Miss Burke’s spirits. Fear and shock. Guy lays down for a nap in the fireplace, up pops a sipapu and
wham!
scares him to death. Case closed.”

“A sipapu’s a place, not a thing.” Anna pointed to the crockery-lined hole. “Your bogeyman had to come out of there. Pretty tight squeeze for a truly terrifying critter.”

“Bad things come in small packages.”

Anna went back to the autopsy report. “ ‘Oval burn marks approximately one inch by an inch and a half, first degree, on the right arm between the elbow and the shoulder. Similar mark on the left upper arm two inches above the antecubital space.’

“I saw that. That mark. I thought it was a bruise. I get bruises there sometimes from the butt of my gun banging my arm.”

Stanton pulled a pair of half glasses out of the breast pocket of his madras shirt and shoved them up onto his nose. They were the kind with heavy black frames sold by drugstores. A children’s show host Anna had watched as a child wore those same glasses. Uncle Happy, she remembered.

The agent held the photo they’d been discussing under his chin and stared down at it through the magnifying lenses. “Oval burn marks. That smells clue-y to me. What did they look like?”

Anna took her eyes from the picture, rested them on the stone of the kiva floor, and let Stacy’s corpse materialize. “I didn’t inspect them closely at the time. Like I said, maybe bruises from the gun or being grabbed too hard. Thinking back, they were brownish—no purples, greens, blues, or yellows you might find with a healing bruise. And scaly. I touched one and it felt the way sunburned skin does when it’s just beginning to peel.”

Stanton whistled “An Actor’s Life for Me,” from
Pinocchio .
Lost in thought, he waggled his feet over the open air. “Leaning against something hot,” he suggested. “Like a motorcycle manifold.”

“Both arms and both on the inside? Odd.”

“True. He’d have to be hugging the Harley. Pretty silly he’d look too, if you ask me. Sorry,” he apologized automatically.

They thought awhile longer. “Something dripped?” Anna ventured. “Hot wax. He was reaching up to take a candle off the mantel or something.”

“Could be. Kinky sex stuff? I’ve seen wax used in S and M movies—strictly Bureau research, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Stacy didn’t seem the type.”

“Still waters?”

“Maybe.” But Anna didn’t think so.

They fell into silence again. The steady hum of the tourists below provided white noise, the occasional call of a canyon bird a pleasing counterpoint.

Grating sounds cut through and Anna pulled her thoughts up out of Stacy’s grave. Jamie Burke marched toward them along the wall that accessed the kiva where they sat, her heavy tread designed more to garner attention than to protect an “easily impacted area.” Claude Beavens was behind her. There was no tow rope visible but he moved with the reluctant hitching motion of a vehicle not under its own power.

“That’s him.” Jamie pointed an accusatory finger at Frederick Stanton. “The FBI guy.”

Stanton scrambled to his feet and stuck out his hand. “How do you do?” he asked formally.

Beavens looked around for someplace else to be. Not finding one, he took the proffered hand and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you,” the way children are taught to in grade school.

“Look,” Beavens began. “This isn’t my idea. I just—”

“Tell him,” Jamie insisted.

Looking annoyed but beaten, he shrugged. Beavens had been so anxious to be a part of the murder investigation the day the body had been found, Anna wondered what held him back now.

“Claude was here the night Stacy died,” Jamie said for him, and Anna understood. Few people wanted to participate quite that intimately in the investigative process.

“Not
here
here,” Beavens defended himself.

“But here,” Jamie said. “Tell him.”

Frederick folded himself back down onto the lip of the kiva and stared expectantly up at the interpreter.

“I was out on the loop Monday night—that’s when Jamie says Stacy was... was here. That’s all. No big deal.”

Stanton seemed less interested in Beavens than in Jamie. She stood with her profile to them, her long black hair trailing down her back. Her arms were crossed and her feet were planted wide apart in what, for good taste’s sake, Anna hoped was an unconscious parody of Hiawatha.

“Monday night. You hit it right on the nose, Ms. Burke.” Stanton flapped the papers from the autopsy. “The coroner says that’s the date.”

Not willing to break the pose, Jamie shot him a scornful look from the sides of her eyes. “Summer solstice.”

Stanton waited. Beavens fidgeted and Anna watched. Claude was clearly uncomfortable about something but there was no way of telling what sort of ants were inhabiting his mental trousers. Guilt, embarrassment at being dragged into Jamie’s little drama, nervousness at being questioned by the FBI—all were possible, as were a dozen things that didn’t come readily to mind.

Jamie was basking in the limelight, dragging the interview out with cryptic sentences and pregnant pauses.

Anna was sorely tempted to spoil the show, but Stanton was satisfied to let the scene play out.

“It’s when things tend to happen,” Jamie said after a moment. “Some people have a feel for these things. A kinship. I felt it. Ask Anna. Something was coming down on the twenty-first.”

“Or up,” Anna said, pointing at the sipapu.

“Go ahead. Investigate me, Mr. FBI.” If one could judge by the glint in Jamie’s pale eyes, the prospect wasn’t unwelcome. “You’ll have to look in your paranormal films for this one,” she finished.

“
The X Files
,” Stanton said gravely.

Jamie liked that. She turned on Beavens, now with hands deep in pockets, poking at a dung beetle with the toe of his shoe. “Tell him,” she ordered.

“Better tell me,” Stanton said. “Just the facts, like Joe Friday says. Nobody’ll interrupt you.” He didn’t glance at Jamie when he said it. Somehow he didn’t need to.

“Doggone it, Jamie!” Beavens exploded, then took a deep breath. “It really is no big deal. I was out here that night—Monday. I didn’t go to Balcony House with everybody. That New Age stuff—crystals and mantra-ing at the moon—is crud.” His hand went to his throat and he nervously fingered a tiny gold cross Anna hadn’t noticed before. “I just rode my bike out here. Sat on the rocks over the canyon till the moon was up. Later I guess, two or two-thirty, maybe. Then I rode home. No big deal. I didn’t see Stacy or anything.” He stopped, waited a moment, then shrugged. “That’s it. No biggie.”

“God, I hate invertebrates masquerading as men,” Jamie sighed. Turning her back on Claude, she said to Stanton: “Claude saw.”

Anna remembered the phrase; the words she had used the morning the body was discovered. She’d hissed it as Anna squeezed through the gate above Cliff Palace.

“Just spit it out,” Anna growled.

Stanton deadpanned in her direction. “You’re such a people person, Anna.”

“Claude saw what?” she pressed.

“Where they come through, the veil,” Jamie said triumphantly. “He told me Tuesday morning, before anybody’d even thought to look for Stacy. He said he’d seen the shimmer in the light of the solstice moon as if the spirits were passing through.”

“Not exactly,” Claude complained.

“Exactly,” Jamie countered.

“Exactly in your own words.” Stanton stopped the argument.

“What’s the time?” Beavens asked.

All three of them glanced at their watches. “One-ten,” Anna said before anyone else could.

“Gotta go. Balcony House tour in twenty minutes.”

“The veil?” Anna asked again.

Beavens pulled his hands out of his pockets. Again the shrug Anna was beginning to think was a nervous habit. “I was just kidding around. Jamie’s always on about this spirit garbage. I was kidding. Ask the other interps. I heard some of them leaving the loop in their truck later than I did.”

They watched Beavens trot off, surefooted, down the balcony to disappear into the ancient alleyway.

“He is a lying little weasel,” Jamie stated.

It was the first thing she’d said all day that had the ring of truth.

ANNA AND STANTON FOLLOWED JAMIE OUT OF THE closed part of the ruin and left her at the entrance clicking visitor statistics into the metal counter.

Rather than go against the flow of traffic, they climbed the four ladders at the western end of the alcove and regained the mesa top. The climb always winded Anna but she forced herself to breathe silently through her nose, enjoying the sound of Stanton’s puffing. “Want to rest?” she asked solicitously as they walked back toward the parking lot.

“Yes, please,” he said humbly, and threw himself down on half a log round smoothed to make a bench. Gratefully, Anna sat beside him and refilled her hungry lungs with the thin air. Her childishness made her laugh.

“I hope you’re duly impressed,” she said. “It’s damn hard to hold your breath after that climb.”