Jude Devine Mystery Series (8 page)

Which was another reason she’d taken the Huntsberger case. She wanted to show the department that she and Tulley were willing to go the distance on a tough investigation. Which was exactly what this had been so far.

The Montezuma sheriff had assigned five deputies and two detectives to the case, under Jude’s control, and six additional staff had been committed by the Cortez PD. Montrose and San Miguel preferred to be left out of the real work, since they had plenty to do getting ready for the Sweet Corn Festival on top of Telluride’s annual shindig, and besides, Darlene was a Montezuma girl. Digging deep, they had helped put up
Information Wanted
posters.

Jude had the team sifting leads from the public and searching the databases going back twenty years for any other killings involving a biter or a stake through the heart. She and Tulley had been systematically interviewing every householder from Slip Rock to Muleshoe Bend and Big Gypsum. Now they were working their way south to Cahone. No one had seen any unusual activity near the river in the past several weeks.

She’d spent most of the previous day in Towaoc, discussing the facts of the case with several members of the Ute tribal council and cops from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Helpfully, the council members had informed her that this was a white man’s crime and no one on their reservation had the kind of snaggleteeth she was looking for. They had offered one significant fact. A young woman without a tongue had caught a ride with a local potter named Eddie House six years earlier, around the time of the Bear Dance. She was in a bad way and had stayed with him for several months. One day, while he was working in the pottery factory, she had hanged herself. Now her spirit was free to fly.

Jude had an appointment to speak with Mr. House in a couple of hours’ time. Meanwhile, she wanted to look up the local pottery on the Internet so she could make a couple of educated remarks about his chosen art form.

“Did you get those posters up in Disappointment Valley?” she asked Tulley.

He nodded. “Mr. Huntsberger’s coming in later to help with that some more.”

“I think he’s taken a shine to Smoke’m,” Jude said. Clem Huntsberger usually showed up with a beef bone or a bag of liver treats he could ill afford.

The hound looked up at the sound of his name.

“That’s one intelligent animal,” Tulley said. “He knows that family’s grieving. Every time he sees their truck, he makes a special noise like he’s real sorry for them. It’s the only time he whines like that.”

“You don’t say.” Jude gazed at a pottery bowl on her screen. A band of dull turquoise encompassed the base. Above it a precise geometric pattern was painted in black. The colors made a striking contrast against the fine pale ivory clay. It was actually beautiful.

“I believe one reason his breed makes such fine cadaver hounds is because of their emotional sensitivity,” Tulley said.

“The olfactory receptors probably help too.”

Tulley took her teasing in good humor. “Another great thing about him—animals never lie.”

*

Jude contemplated that fact as she drove to Eddie House’s place, a few miles out of Towaoc. Her own life had been punctuated by liars. Most notable in the recent past was the girlfriend who’d cheated on her and the close buddy on the job who’d spent a year not mentioning that he was the jerk she was cheating with. But top billing belonged to her father, decent in so many ways but unable to tell the truth in his personal life if it meant unpopularity. He wanted to be his children’s hero, the man who promised them the world. When he reneged, he blamed their mother for the broken promises, a habit duly adopted by his offspring. Mary Devine was still held responsible by Jude’s brother and sister for almost everything that went wrong in their lives.

Jude had weaned herself from that particular crutch in her twenties when she finally caught on that her mother’s one big dream in life had also fallen prey to Patrick Devine’s need to look good without having to deliver. Mary had yearned to set up her own business making gourmet chocolates, and as far back as Jude could remember, her father had promised each New Year’s Eve that he would buy her the equipment to get started. Instead he would trade in the car, or the house would require new paint, or they would have a family vacation because he needed time out from the stress of his job, and his wife’s dream would be deferred yet again. Their worst fights were over her wanting to get a job so she could pay for the chocolate project herself. Patrick Devine said he saw firsthand what happened to latchkey kids and he wasn’t going to do that to his own. His wife was a stay-at-home mom. Period.

Not long before they moved to Mexico, he’d commented on the lean retirement they were facing and said what a pity it was that Mary had never done anything about her chocolate idea.

Occasionally, when Jude found herself telling women what they wanted to hear instead of being honest, she thought about her father and felt sick. She still had a way to go with that behavior pattern, which meant she needed to phone Mercy soon and ask to see her again. They had concluded their passionate episode on good terms, both agreeing that it would be better if they didn’t sign up for a repeat performance. Neither could afford to be outed and Cortez was way too small for them to conceal a liaison for long.

But Jude had lied through her teeth about being cool with that. It was not like she imagined love at first sight, or anything. But she thought Mercy was being overly paranoid. Why not arrange the occasional weekend out of town? They were smart enough to see one another every now and then without the locals finding out, weren’t they?

She unclipped her cell phone and dialed Mercy’s office number. No answer. She tried her cell and left a message. “Hey, Mercy, it’s Jude. I’ll be in Lands End one day next week following up on a few leads. Maybe we could have a meal. Hope you’re well. Phone me when you get a minute.”

As she ended the call, she exhaled sharply and realized she had not drawn breath as she made it. She felt like a teenager who’d worked herself up to phoning a crush, only to feel a weird mix of relief and anticlimax that she’d had to talk to a machine instead.

She drove through Cortez and took U.S. 666 south. Soon after she’d arrived in Paradox, Jude had worked an attempted murder at a dude ranch out this way, interviewing Ute Indians and skinny cowboys with leather faces beneath a vast blue sky. She’d been stunned, then, by the contrast between life in these wide open spaces and the torrid city maze that was D.C. That awe, the sense of being remote from the world she had once known, was always present. Even more so on the lonely drive to Towaoc.

The Devil’s Highway didn’t earn its nickname for being pretty. A pothole-ridden band of gray asphalt cutting through a desolate landscape, the route to the casino could easily pass for the road to hell. On either side, broken glass and aluminum cans glinted in the merciless sun and a few sad sagebrush clung to life in the sulfurous yellow earth. No one had bothered to “adopt” this miserable stretch of road, unless you wanted to count Oliver Stone, who’d immortalized it in his movie
Natural Born Killers
.

The state transportation honchos had recently renumbered it to the less satanic 491 after extensive lobbying by the Ute casino board, the neighboring Navajo, and the state of New Mexico. Locals said the authorities weren’t moved by the guys in suits or the lure of fancy lunches. They’d just gotten sick of replacing all the stolen highway signs.

The change hadn’t caught on yet, or maybe it just wasn’t that easy to transform the “number of the beast” to something innocuous. Even the small chapel run by the Trucking Troubadours for Christ failed to instill peace of mind among either tourists or locals. It was a known fact in these parts that the accident rate for the triple-six was twice the national average. Which said it all about who ruled in this wasteland, at least that was the inference.

Jude had laughed off the superstitions when she’d first arrived in the Four Corners, but every time she drove this route a strange unease crept over her. She wanted to dismiss the grim menace of the place as mere imagining, but as she stared out across the stark, khaki vista of volcanic cones and stunted mesas, she was overwhelmed with gloom.

It had been madness to move all the way out here, she decided. No matter how much distance she put between herself and the past, it would always come crawling after her. She could feel that ghost presence now, unsettling the orderly world she was trying to create for herself.
Leave me alone
, she thought.
I can’t do this anymore.

*

Eddie House had a photograph of the girl he’d picked up that day after the Bear Dance. She was small and slender with long mousy hair and haunted gray eyes. He had also kept a few of the notes she’d written him. The hand was childish and the writer could not spell. Jude guessed she hadn’t seen much schooling.

“Did she ever communicate about the loss of her tongue?” she asked.

House drew a slip of paper from the pile. It said:
I did not keep sweet.
He spoke slowly and softly, his eyes lowered. “There were things she wanted to forget. But she could not escape from them, even in her sleep.”

“What exactly was the nature of your relationship with her?”

“I gave her a home.”

Jude glanced around the living area. There had to be six dogs, and the large gray one at House’s feet looked like a wolf. One of its hind legs was missing and its tawny eyes tracked Jude’s every move. Eddie House also had a few injured wild birds in lofty enclosures along the front path to his home. He was a man with a weakness for strays, she gathered.

“So you and she weren’t in…an intimate situation.” Catching a look of affront, she added quickly, “I’m sorry. It’s a routine question.”

“She was a child,” House said with dignity. “She needed a parent.”

“Any idea about her family?”

“No.”

“And she never wrote her name on a piece of paper for you? Not even her first name?”

“She was afraid.”

“That’s why you didn’t talk to the police?”

“Yes.”

Which explained why she was unidentified. After she’d killed herself, the police had tried to trace her so a death certificate could be issued. The case was left open. The girl had been buried by House, under the name Poppy Dolores. She liked the flower, he explained, and he had found her near Dolores, hence the last name. She was nineteen. At least that was what she had told House in one of her notes.

“What makes you think she was from Utah?” Jude asked.

House referred her to a note that read:
I come from Utah.
He added, “I knew it the first time I saw her.”

“Why was that?”

“She was mistreated.” Perhaps sensing he’d lost her on the math, he said. “An old prejudice, Detective. Utah holds bitter memories for my people.”

“The forced march?” Jude referred to the shameful episode in 1881, when the Colorado Ute were evicted from their lands and marched 350 miles to a reservation in Utah. All who had weakened along the way were shot. Women. Children. Old people.

“There are many reasons. Did you know, a greater proportion of our people served in the Second World War than the white men of Utah, but still we couldn’t vote?”

“I think I’d have a problem with that,” Jude acknowledged.

Given the ugly history their races shared, she was amazed that any Native American could tolerate being in the same room as a white person. However, Eddie House had been welcoming and hospitable, if somewhat reserved in his manner. Since living in the Southwest, she’d found that the Native Americans she encountered had quite different body language from most other people she came in contact with, and they did not seem especially talkative.

It was hard to pick Eddie House’s age. Around fifty, perhaps older. His hair was silver-white and dead straight, his face lined but not heavily wrinkled. He wore a thin leather thong around his head. From one of the ties hung several tiny beads of turquoise and coral, a piece of bone, and an unusual banded cream and brown feather.

“Is there anything at all she ever shared with you about her life?” Jude sifted through the other notes. Most were single lines. One stood out.
No one will help us.
She handed it to House. “Do you know what she meant by this?”