Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery (5 page)

Arnie seemed to be turning this over in his head. Vicky could almost see the gears slip into action. But it was his mother, Betty, who said, “Vicky's right. We got to listen to your lawyer.”

Still hovering close to Arnie, the young blond woman had a sad, defeated look about her, as if she hadn't yet been abandoned but understood it was about to happen. “I can bring your things to you,” she offered in a small, tentative voice.

“Jesus.” Arnie exhaled a breath. “I don't see the rush.”

“Come on.” His mother took his arm and tried to steer him toward the deputy, who had walked over. “The sooner you get rehab over with, the better.”

“Jesus,” Arnie said again.

*   *   *

A FEW CARS,
pickups, and campers lumbered along the streets of Lander. Clumps of sagebrush, dried and brown in the August sun, sprouted from the dried yards. Vicky kept the windows rolled down partway. The wind whistled around and fanned at her hair. She drove with one elbow propped on the top of the door, her hand holding her hair out of her eyes.

You're my lawyer. You have to trust me.
Vicky laughed at the thought of trusting Arnie Walksfast. Maybe when he was sober, but you could never trust him to stay sober. It was Betty who had called after Arnie was arrested. “They're out to get him, Vicky.” Vicky hadn't asked who
they
were. They could be anybody. Police, feds in the big and sometimes frightening—yes, frightening—white world with its laws and regulations.

She had agreed to take Arnie's case. To quiet the panic in Betty's voice at the thought of losing her son to the prison system. Her own son, Lucas, a few years older than Arnie, was moving up the corporate ladder in a high-tech firm in Denver, living like a white man in a condo by the South Platte River within walking distance of Confluence Park where an Arapaho village had once stood. The thought of someone taunting Lucas, insulting him, assaulting him, left a hard knot in her stomach. She had visited Arnie at the Fremont County jail, gotten him out on bond, prepared a defense. Whether or not Arnie was innocent, he deserved a defense.

Vicky swung around the wide curve, stopped for a red light, then turned into a parking lot and drove toward the redbrick building of the local FBI offices. She spotted Adam standing on the sidewalk, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, eyes trained on the highway on one side of the lot. Not until she had parked next to his BMW did he seem to realize she had arrived. He walked over and opened her door. She could still feel the coolness that had settled between them last night when she had insisted upon staying with the body of Dennis Carey. A white man she had never met. Adam, nervous beside her, glancing around as if he expected the killer to rise up out of the borrow ditch and point a gun at them. She had thought of Grandmother Nitti and Grandfather Joseph, her parents and aunties and uncles, the lady who'd served lunch in the cafeteria at St. Francis School when she was a kid, the grandmother who'd made fry bread at the rodeos, all the dead she had known. Someone had always stayed with the body until one of the holy old men could bless it, paint it with the sacred red paint that would identify the spirit to the ancestors.

She lifted herself out of the Ford, conscious of the protective and—was it her imagination?—apologetic pressure of Adam's hand on her arm as he guided her across the sidewalk and through the front door of the redbrick building.

FEDERAL AGENT TED
Gianelli, twenty years ago a linebacker for the Patriots, stood in the corridor, the pebbled glass door open behind him. “Saw you drive up. Come on in.” He had a booming voice that rolled around the walls and the vinyl flooring.

Vicky felt the pressure of Adam's hand on the middle of her back as they followed the fed into a warren of offices with fluorescent lights humming overhead. Right, down a short hallway past a cubicle with a dark-haired woman behind the desk, head bent into the phone at her ear. Left, down another hallway and into a small, tidy office with a bank of windows that overlooked the parking lot. Opera music played softly from the iPod jammed among the massive gray legal books that lined the side wall. A flood of memories washed over her. In John O'Malley's old pickup, opera floating out of the CD player between them on the front seat; in his office at St. Francis, opera wafting from the CD player on the bookshelf. Opera was something they had in common, John O'Malley and the fed. She had grown accustomed to the music, even recognized a few arias. “Celeste Aida”
was playing now.

Gianelli motioned them to the pair of chairs. Vicky sank down and Adam dropped beside her. The fed settled himself behind the desk and leaned back, tapping a ballpoint against the palm of his hand in rhythm with the aria. “I've read the Wind River police reports.” He nodded toward the computer on the table in front of the bookcase. “Sometimes it takes a while for the details to emerge. Let's start at the beginning. What time did you come upon the victim?”

Adam cleared his throat, as if he were the only lawyer in the courtroom and the judge were addressing him. “Must have been close to eleven. The meeting at the tribal college in Ethete adjourned at ten, and Vicky . . .” She was aware of the nod in her direction; she kept her eyes on the fed, ready to read his reactions. What was he looking for? Something new, something they had neglected to tell Banner? A detail they hadn't realized could be crucial? “After she spoke, Vicky stayed to talk to students. We drove out of the parking lot about ten thirty and headed south.”

Is that what they had told Banner? Left at ten thirty, reached the victim's pickup about eleven? It was possible. Vicky felt a shiver run through her. Parts of last night were a blur, a mixture of anger and frustration, fear and shock, with a white man collapsed over a steering wheel, a black hole in his forehead and trickles of blood on his cheeks.

“I spoke to the monthly meeting of women students about careers in law,” Vicky heard herself explaining. She wondered what on earth difference it made. She and Adam could have been munching on hamburgers at the convenience store in Ethete. Except that one clear, inane memory might trigger another, and that might make the difference. “It was a small group, about twenty students.”

“Traffic was light.” Adam looked relaxed, leaning back, hands on the armrests. “Folks are staying home at night with that crazy shooter loose. No one knows when he might show up and send a bullet into your windshield.”

“It has been a few weeks since we've heard from him.” Gianelli shook his head.

“What about last night?”

“Maybe, but we don't think so. Still early in the investigation, but no bullet holes in the truck. So traffic was light. How many vehicles on the highway near the shooting scene would you say?”

Adam was shaking his head. “The highway was empty. That's why I was surprised to see two vehicles pulled over on the side of the road, headlights on. We were still a good hundred yards away when the first vehicle pulled out and made a U-turn. Had to be going seventy when it passed us.”

“Did you get the make? Any part of the license?”

“License?” Adam snorted. “It was pitch-black out there except for the headlights. Big, dark-colored truck, like a Chevy.”

“I was watching,” Vicky said, the memory spurting in her mind. She was in the passenger seat, watching the headlights coming toward them. The dark hulk rushing past. “The driver wore a cowboy hat.” The memory was getting clearer, like a pebble in a creek starting to reflect the sunlight. “I'm sure it was a man.”

Gianelli scribbled in the notepad he had produced from a desk drawer. “What made you stop?”

Adam drew in a ragged breath. She waited for what he would say: she could almost hear the words moving through his head.
I didn't want to stop.
“I expected the second vehicle to pull out. A pickup with its headlights on. I figured the engine was running. I was concentrating on driving past, in case the driver was drunk and decided to pull in front of me.”

“I caught a glimpse of the driver slumped over the steering wheel,” Vicky said. Another memory as clear as glass. “He looked sick or passed out. I asked Adam to stop. He slowed down and pulled in ahead of the pickup. When we walked over, we saw the man had been shot.”

No one said anything for a moment. A matter of respect.
Aida
played softly. “We called 911 and waited for the BIA cops.” Adam's voice was crisp and businesslike. As if that were all of it, the facts. “They showed up twenty minutes later.”

“Did you recognize the victim?”

Adam shook his head. “Not until one of the officers ID'd him. Dennis Carey, white rancher on the rez. We've seen him cooking buffalo burgers at powwows. He came to the farmers' market this summer to sell buffalo meat.”

“Anything else?”

“We stayed with the body out of respect,” Vicky said.

Gianelli made some more notes, then looked up at her and nodded. He had worked among Arapahos and Shoshones on the rez long enough to glimpse their ways. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

Vicky got to her feet and started past the desk toward the hallway, conscious of Adam close behind, the large presence of him. Then she turned back and, looking past Adam, said, “What about his wife? How is she doing?”

Gianelli drew in a long breath. The answer was obvious, Vicky knew. How did she expect the woman would be doing after her husband had been murdered? Still she had asked, a matter of politeness. She had to find the time to stop at the ranch, tell Dennis Carey's wife that she and Adam had stayed with her husband. He hadn't been alone.

“Well as can be expected,” Gianelli said. “Eager for us to find the killer. She's been very cooperative.”

*   *   *

THE HEAT REFLECTED
off the asphalt, the sun blinked on the hood of the Ford. Adam opened her door, and Vicky slid behind a steering wheel that was like a hot iron burning her fingers. Gusts of dry air banked and swirled around the interior. “We have to talk about this, you know.” He was leaning around the door.

This
. The word looped through her mind. Last night, all of it. She had told him she wanted to go to her own apartment. Alone. He hadn't protested, even though they had both expected her to spend the night at his house. Spaghetti dinner at the little restaurant on Main Street in Lander, the meeting at the tribal college in Ethete, the drive home under a field of stars. They had both assumed . . .

Adam had walked her into the glass entry of her apartment building and pressed the elevator button. They had stood silently next to each other, the elevator gears and chains rattling. She had stepped into the elevator alone. Through the narrowing space of the closing doors, she watched Adam spin about and dive past the glass door into the darkness.
Woman Alone
, she had thought, as she made her way down the corridor and into her own apartment. The name the grandmothers had given her after she returned to the rez, divorced from Ben Holden, opening a one-woman law practice, clinging to the belief that she could make a difference, that she could help her people. A woman who had stepped ahead of the warriors and made herself a chief, as if such a thing were possible. Destined to be alone. In the glow of the kitchen light inside her apartment, she had made herself a cup of tea, then carried the cup over to the window bench. She had sipped at the tea and watched the streetlights flickering, the lone car crawling down the street, glad to be alone.

Now she was aware of Adam leaning into her window. She tried to focus on what he was saying. Dinner tonight? “We can go to Hudson and have a good steak.”

Vicky didn't say anything. She stared straight ahead at the redbrick building. The distance between them had been opening for some time. She had known and not known, she realized, not wanting to bring it into her consciousness, where it would demand attention. Since last night, the distance had expanded around them like a black cloud coming across the plains.

“Okay.” She heard her own voice, disembodied in the heat. It demanded attention. She was still staring at the building.

“I'll pick you up at seven.” Adam closed the door. She started the engine, rolled down the other windows, and backed into the lot, trying to ignore the black-haired man watching her in the rearview mirror, waiting until she had driven off.

*   *   *

OUT ON BLUE
Sky Highway, Vicky called the office as she headed north. “I'll be in after lunch,” she told Annie Bosey, her secretary. She had seen herself in Annie the morning the slim young woman with shoulder-length black hair had stepped into her office. “Hear you're looking for a secretary, and I'm a good one,” Annie had said. “I got two kids to feed.” Vicky had hired her on the spot.

“I had cleared your day for the trial. I hear you reached a plea bargain.”

My God. The moccasin telegraph was a thing to behold. It had worked in the Old Time on the plains, when the criers walked through the villages, shouting out the news of the day. “If anyone calls . . .”

“Got it. You'll be in after lunch.”

Vicky pressed the end button. The plains flashed past the windows, sagebrush and wild grass swirling in the wind, little clouds of dust blowing across the highway. Everything looked brown under a sky crystalline blue with a snowy bank of clouds floating past. She had a sense of coming home. This was her place, all the brown emptiness and the blue sky and the sun glowing red and orange on the foothills.

She made a left onto Trout Creek Road, trusting to memory. The RJ Ranch, it had been called when she was growing up. A white man had purchased the land a hundred years ago, when the government had allowed Indians to sell reservation land, and white men had owned it ever since. The law had changed as reservations began to diminish, and tribes were always trying to buy back land owned by outsiders, but white people had hung on to the RJ. About twenty years ago, the owners had decided to raise buffalo and had changed the name to the Broken Buffalo Ranch. She'd heard that new owners had bought the ranch almost two years ago.

She took a left onto a dirt road that ran ahead into a two-track. A tight-looking barbed-wire fence came into view, tall enough to keep buffalo from jumping over. They could jump like deer, she remembered Grandfather saying. Wild animals, tough and hardy. They could never be domesticated; they were always themselves.

Ironic, she thought. Dennis Carey and his wife, a white couple, raising buffalo in Indian country.

The ranch house seemed to grow out of the plains ahead, lifting itself upward like a crop of corn. The two-track led through a gate with
BB
carved into the overhead post and down a narrow dirt road toward a log house with a porch that stretched across the front. Beyond the house, she could see sides of the barn and outbuildings and an assortment of ranch vehicles: a tractor and flatbed, several pickups and trucks and a yellow forklift parked next to the stack of hay bales. A barbed-wire fence with a gate in the middle ran between the buildings and the pasture. Out in the pasture was the buffalo herd, great brown hulks as placid as cows. Until you got close to them, she thought.
Intelligent animals.
Grandfather's voice in her head again.
They gave themselves as food and sustenance for their Indian brothers and sisters. Don't want to be ranched, corralled inside pastures. The plains are home. They used to roam for miles and miles. If you corral them, be very careful. They could kill you
.

Vicky stopped close to the house and waited. If Sheila Carey didn't come to the door, she would write a note of condolence, leave her number in case Sheila wanted to talk about last night, secure the note on the porch, out of the wind, and drive back to Lander.

She was digging in her bag for a notepad when the front door opened. A small, attractive woman with reddish hair stepped onto the porch, came down the steps, and walked over, a mixture of surprise and curiosity in her eyes. “I'm so sorry to bother you,” Vicky said across the top of the window rolled halfway down. “I'm Vicky Holden. Adam Lone Eagle and I found your husband. I just wanted to . . .”

“You'd better come in.”