Strange Country (28 page)

“The other woman in the picture?” Gerson said. “That’s Ms. Stalking Horse’s sister?”

Tel nodded his head once, as if he was remembering. “Yep. Shannon. That was her name. Came over from St. Paul or Minneapolis, someplace like that, after Prue had got me to agree to front some money at that point, which was when the picture was taken. They were close back then, she and Prue. Odd gal. Intense. She had this scarf she wore winter and summer—well, you can see it in that picture.” He finally took the picture and looked at it. “You can’t tell in this anymore, but it was this incredibly bright blue. She’d wear it with everything—flannel shirts, fancy dress, whatever. Meant a lot to her, I guess. It’s the thing I remember most about her now.”

“Wait,” Boyd said. “What?” He took the picture back and looked at it again. Tel was right: It was impossible to tell what colors things had been from the picture, but Boyd could see now what had looked so familiar when he’d seen this picture the first time. He hadn’t seen her hair and she’d been wearing a heavy coat. “I’ve seen her,” he said. Though he hadn’t or it hadn’t exactly been her, couldn’t have been, because the woman he’d seen would have been about the same age as the woman in the picture.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He stepped outside, called Ole on his cell phone, and asked him to check a license plate, giving him the plate number he’d noted last Friday outside Prue Stalking Horse’s house. When he was finished, he went back into the office, where it looked like Tel and Gerson hadn’t said one word or even looked at each other while he was gone. He picked up where he’d left off.

“Did Prue’s sister have any children?” he asked.

“Shannon? I don’t think so,” Tel said, as if the thought hadn’t ever occurred to him. “She wasn’t that old when I knew her. Maybe your age, maybe a little younger. No, she didn’t. I’m sure she didn’t. Hell, I don’t know.”

Boyd looked at Gerson, but he didn’t want to say more until later.

Gerson gave a small nod and took the photograph back. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Sigurdson,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, please call the sheriff’s office. And we’ll be verifying everything with your wife,” she added. “Tell her to expect our call.”

When they left the office, the day had turned darker, the wind strong, dry, and bitter cold.

Boyd didn’t know how he knew, but the minute they walked out the door, he could feel it, not even words, just a thing that he knew in that instant.

“Get down!” he shouted, and tackled Tel, knocking him into the iron-hard ground as something thwacked into the doorjamb behind them. A startled
oof
from Tel, and Boyd was up and running, using the cover of his SUV and one of the ranch trucks parked at an angle to his own vehicle and the house.

Gerson shouted at him, “Davies!”

Careful, he told himself, the caution unnecessary, but it was the kind of thing he did tell himself. Whoever it was had a gun. Probably a good deal longer range than his service pistol. Careful. He crept around the corner of the house, not because the killer was that close; Boyd was certain whoever it was, wasn’t very close at all—a thousand yards maybe, across the big field, close to the road. But he wanted to catch a glimpse of the car they were driving, and he didn’t want to get shot while he was doing it. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of his own breathing, of the wind burning his face. He put his back against the rough stone wall of the house, looked at the empty road, looked back at the barn, where Gerson was helping Tel to his feet.

Prue Stalking Horse. Laddie Kennedy. And now, Tel Sigurdson.

Maybe
Tel Sigurdson, he corrected himself. Tel wasn’t dead, after all. It could be a setup. One of his ranch hands? To turn suspicion away from him?

But why? And how would he have done it?

Boyd listened, thought maybe he’d hear a vehicle engine even if he couldn’t see one. Though where someone could conceal a vehicle within a mile or even two of Tel’s ranch house, he wasn’t sure. Whoever this was had parked somewhere out of sight, walked up the road, and waited. Even though it was likely that if Boyd hadn’t been here, no one would have looked as he was looking now, their attention completely taken by the sight of Tel on the ground, a bullet through his brain. Even though. They’d planned for it. Prepared for it. Because they were careful.

Or it was a setup.

He heard it then, thin and clear on the wind, the sound of a car engine, somewhere west past the line of cottonwoods near the creek. Boyd waited until the sound faded; then he walked back around the house and returned to the barn.

Tel said, “What the hell was that?”

“Do you have one of the stones?” Boyd ignored his question. “If you do, you need to show it to me now.”

Tel bent down and picked up his Stetson, which had been knocked off when Boyd tackled him. “No, hell no. I told you.” He dusted off the crown of his hat. “I got out before things went to hell.”

“Or maybe you found your own stone and didn’t need Prue Stalking Horse or her sister or any of them anymore.”

For the first time, Tel looked really angry. “If that were so, my daughter would still be alive.”

“But she isn’t. Do you blame Prue for that? Did you hate her enough to kill her?”

“What the hell are you talking about? Someone just tried to kill me.”

“Or you want it to look like someone did.”

“Oh, hell,” Tel said.

“Mr. Sigurdson.” Gerson spoke for the first time since shouting Boyd’s name. She’d been watching Boyd steadily, like he was hiding something or planning something, and she didn’t take her eyes off him now as she was speaking. “You’ve admitted that you were acquainted with both the victims and possibly with the person whose remains we found in Ms. Stalking Horse’s cellar, which we’ve confirmed belonged to a William Packer. We have witnesses who can place you in West Prairie City on the nights in question.”

Boyd looked at Gerson. Tel took a step forward and stopped, as if he didn’t know exactly what to do next. Boyd could see what he was thinking written clearly on his face: Hadn’t she been listening? To anything?

“Someone just tried to kill me,” Tel said.

“It certainly appeared that way,” Gerson said.

“I didn’t just try to kill myself,” Tel tried again.

“It doesn’t rule out the possibility of an accomplice, however,” Gerson said.

Tel looked at her, looked hard at Boyd as if he should intervene, but why? He’d just asked the same question himself.

“You know what? Talk to my goddamned lawyer,” Tel said, slapped his Stetson on his head, and stalked away from them to the house.

Gerson looked at Boyd. “Sometimes anger is revealing,” she said.

“I don’t have an evidence kit with me,” Boyd said.

“What?”

“The bullet. We’re going to want that.”

Gerson gave a quick nod. “Right,” she said. “Of course.”

27

It was a dry cold morning as Hallie headed toward the Badlands. She had her shotgun and an iron fireplace poker and the empty seat beside her. She could have let Boyd come with her; that would have been easy. She’d have liked him with her, someone she knew she could rely on, who would do the right thing, provided he could figure out what that was—and he would figure it out, because that was part of Boyd, knowing the right thing and doing it.

As she drove, she saw a dead deer on the side of the road and a dead coyote. She saw a dead Angus steer in the ditch and she stopped, grabbed the iron poker as she got out for a closer look. Roadkill wasn’t unusual, was pretty common—empty roads and fast pickup trucks. It happened. Dead cattle were different, not that they didn’t sometimes get hit, but it did a lot of damage, to the car and to the animal. This steer didn’t look like that. And it wasn’t on the road or even the edge of the road. There were no skid marks and there weren’t any bits of broken glass or plastic. Hallie approached the body cautiously.

It was cold enough and dry enough that there weren’t many flies—something had chewed a bit on one leg, but the corpse itself was still fresh. Not hit by a car, definitely not. Aside from the leg, the steer was unmarked, like it had fallen where it stood. There was a smell—and not the steer—that seemed familiar. Like gunpowder, but not exactly. Not quite sulfur either. Much of the grass had been trampled—deer and cattle, probably—but Hallie could see a line, less meandering, less like a place something bedded for the night and more like something traveling from one place to another. She moved farther into the field. Maker appeared at her side.

It sneezed.

“Do you smell that?” Hallie asked. “What is it?”

“Death,” Maker said matter-of-factly.

“Well, you’re here and there’s a dead cow. So, yes. Death all over, I’d say.” But then she looked more closely at the dead steer and the surrounding area. The grass and undergrowth were all dead, but that was as it should be in March in western South Dakota. She made a circle and she was out almost ten yards from the dead steer when she began to notice it. A dead hawk, three dead voles, a dead rabbit, and some mutiflora rose that looked like all the moisture had been sucked out of it. In the middle of the field now, she looked back toward the road; all of it, the dead animals, the rosebushes, the dead steer, were within a ten-foot path pointing straight through the field to the road.

Hallie remembered Travis Hollowell, how the reaper magic he wielded drew the life from living things, from birds and animals and even grass and trees, for its power.

“Is it a reaper?” Hallie asked. “What does it want?”

“Not a reaper,” Maker said, and sneezed.

“Unmaker?” God.

Maker said nothing, which either meant she was right, or it wasn’t going to say.

“So, unmakers in the world just kill things?”

“Unmakers
being
in the world kills things,” Maker said.

“Abominations.” Hallie almost laughed. In the under
she
was the abomination. “Why?” Hallie said. “I mean I know what it wants, but why does it come? How does it come?”

“You.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “Because it wants me to replace Death.”

“Because you’re here.”

“What?”

“It leaves a crack.”

“What? Me in the world? Because I’m not dead? Is that why you’re here?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Maker said.

“Maybe you don’t know or maybe you’re not telling me?”

Maker sniffed the air. “Should go.”

“Is something coming?” Maker had already gone.

Hallie turned slowly, but she didn’t see anything except grass, open prairie, and the dead Angus steer. She headed back to the truck anyway.

A crack. Because she was here. What did it really mean, though? That the walls between the worlds could open up again? That saying no to Death’s offer would thin the walls in the same way Martin Weber’s magic had? There had been a time in her life when the world hadn’t been all that complicated—do the job and get back home. Even if sometimes getting home had been difficult or even dangerous, it was knowable. Doable. Things weren’t that way anymore.

As she got back into the pickup and started it up, a coyote emerged from the tall grass maybe thirty yards in front of her. It stood on the shoulder, looking at her, like it expected something. She put the truck in gear, pulled onto the road again, and the coyote stood its ground. She slowed as she passed. She felt like it was telling or asking her something—I don’t know, she wanted to say. I’m doing the best I can.

At the northeast entrance to the Badlands, Hallie pulled to the side of the road again. She told Boyd once that she’d never been to the Badlands, which wasn’t strictly true, because they were close for South Dakota definitions of close, and it was a place people drove past on their way to other places. It was hard not to go there. Though mostly Hallie didn’t.

She’d been in the mountains in Afghanistan and once on leave to Switzerland and hiked in the Alps. She could acknowledge that those mountains were beautiful, particularly from a distance, and standing at the top of a mountain or the entrance to a valley could be breathtaking, everything spread out before her, like the promise of a new life. But in the pass, between the mountains, on winding roads leading up or down, everything seemed small and sharp and dangerous, closed in until she wondered if there were something wrong with what she was seeing because her eyes kept trying to find the distant horizon and there was no horizon to find. Hallie preferred the prairie, everything right out in the open. She liked a distant horizon, big sky, big weather, and a sense of vastness and possibility.

The Badlands weren’t mountains, more like prairie interrupted by great upthrust rock, the rock weathered by storms and long winters. But it had those same closed-in spaces, that same feeling that something was going to happen and there would be no escape. Still, it was beautiful. Even this morning, with gray sky leaching the color from everything, it was beautiful, starkly black and gray and white, no color clear to the horizon, which was foreshortened by the chaotic expanse of rock. Tiny snowflakes, dry and light, landed on the windshield, only to be whipped away by the wind.

As Hallie put the truck in gear and eased onto the loop road, two things happened—or the same thing happened twice—Maker leaped in through the passenger window, and a ghost drifted into the pickup cab, bringing a deep cold like arctic ice.

Maker sneezed, then sat with its back against the door. “You don’t have to come, you know,” Hallie said. “If you’re worried about being unmade or something.”

“Might be interesting,” Maker responded.

Hallie laughed. “It might,” she agreed.

The ghost, a woman, looked old, as in died a long time ago, not old in years lived. She looked vaguely Lakota, though skin color and even subtleties of hair color were lost on ghosts. She wore a pale shirt and a long dark skirt and wore her hair in a single thick braid down her back. She wore no jewelry, which might have helped Hallie pin down her background and era, and her shirt and skirt were both plain. She was just … there, just floating in the middle of the seat, spilling cold and waiting, though Hallie had no idea what she was waiting for.