The Eagle Catcher (25 page)

“I wouldn't put it that way,” Jasper said.

“And as soon as the Arapahos buy the Cooley ranch, you can lease those wells, close them down, and draw out even more oil through your wells in Fremont County.”

“The way I see it, we'd be helping each other here. It's just business. I'm a businessman. I'm not a murderer,” Jasper said.

“I believe you,” Father John said. “The stakes weren't high enough for murder. Even if Harvey had found out about the fraud you're up to, he couldn't have hurt you much.”

The oilman drew in a long breath, as if he were trying to process the words he'd just heard. Then the color began to drain from his face. “You telling me Harvey didn't know? He didn't have any evidence? I just spilled my guts for nothing?”

Father John was quiet, but Luke snickered and looked away.

Jasper had pulled out a white handkerchief and was mop-ping the perspiration from the top of his head. “You going to bring the police in on this?”

“They're already in. I intend to help them all I can,” Father John said.

“Let's get out of here,” Jasper said to his assistant. Turning on his heels, he started for the dark Lincoln nudged against the curb.

Father John watched the car swerve around Circle Drive and careen out onto Seventeen-Mile Road as a roar went up from the ball field. He was anxious to get back to the game, but he stepped inside the church first. Kneeling down in the same pew where he had found the two men, he prayed silently for a few moments for all the brokenness in the world.

F
ATHER JOHN KEPT the Toyota at fifty-five heading west through the empty spaces. He wondered where the Provincial would send him. Another prep school? A university assignment? Funny, he would have jumped at the chance not long ago. Now it was the last thing he wanted. Maybe he'd take a vacation before he started a new assignment. Go back to Boston and see his brother, Mike. He hadn't seen much of Mike and Eileen and the kids since he'd been at Wind River Reservation. Visiting them was always a little uncomfortable.

“Some rival I've got,” Eileen had said, when he'd told her he had decided to become a priest. “God Almighty. How can I compete with God Almighty?” She was crying then, but he usually remembered her laughing, and how blue her eyes were, and soft her hair, and all the colors brown hair could be, and how smooth her skin was. He'd been at the Jesuit seminary about three months when he'd heard she had married Mike.

He forced himself back to the present.
Dear God,
he prayed.
let me find some way to help Anthony before I have to go away.
He had no intention of calling the Provincial to hear about a new assignment, but he wondered how long he could stall before the Provincial caught up with him. The Provincial wasn't a man easily put off.

The sky was uniformly gray except for the black-rimmed clouds descending over the mountains. Moisture hung in the air, and a few drops of rain spattered the hood and windshield. Not enough to turn on the wipers. Rain was coming, though, and judging by the clouds, it would be a downpour. That's how it was on the plains. No rain for weeks. The earth parched and brown. Then a downpour and all the precious water cascading through the arroyos and gullies out to Nebraska.

He had to reach across the steering wheel to turn off the ignition and ram the gear into park when he pulled up in front of the tribal offices. He longed to rip off the contraption that kept his right arm against his chest, but that would prolong things. He'd been through this before. At least the pain had subsided into a mild roar.

He didn't expect to see Vicky, but there she was, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, a black bag slung over her shoulder, chatting with the receptionist.

“I'm sorry about the Eagles,” she said as they walked down the hallway. “Maybe next time.”

“We can always hope.” Father John didn't like to lose—for his team to lose.

“How's the shoulder?”

“Almost completely healed. It feels really great, better than ever.”

“Right,” she said. After unlocking the office door, he pushed it open and followed her inside. There was a grayish tint to the daylight filtering through the window.

Vicky strode across the room and dropped her bag on the floor next to Harvey's desk. Turning around, she said, “When I called your office, your new assistant said you were on your way over here, so I thought I could lend you a hand—no pun intended.” She smiled and hurried on. “We don't have much time to find out what's in these files, or not in them as the case may be. The fed will have an indictment against Anthony before the day's over.”

He pulled out the desk chair for her. After sliding a comer chair across the tile floor for himself, he said, “You were right about Jasper Owens.” Then he told her about the visit he'd had a couple hours ago from the oilman and his sidekick.

“
Niathas
are very clever creatures,” she said, settling into Harvey's chair. “We have to watch them every minute.” Father John smiled at the fact she had said “we,” as if she'd forgotten he was a
Niatha.

“I spent the morning in the Lander offices of the state oil and gas commission,” Vicky continued. “The records indicate a tremendous oil volume in the southwestern part of the reservation. There's a lot of oil under this land. Owens has probably been pumping out oil as fast as possible, getting as much as he could before he's forced to stop. A real windfall for him, I'd say. I've asked to be put on the agenda for next week's business council meeting. I intend to present everything we know about what Jasper Owens has been up to. I'm sure the council will ask the BIA to investigate. Eventually Owens will be ordered to pay back royalties.”

“You'll have his undying gratitude,” Father John said, picking up a folder from the stack on the desk. “Somewhere in this manuscript is the information that got Harvey killed. And so far, all we know is that it wasn't about oil fraud.” Opening the folder, he began flipping through the pages. It was awkward with one hand.

He realized this was the chapter on the early years at Wind River Reservation. He pulled out the photos and spread them across the desk. Both he and Vicky leaned over for a closer view of the fading black-and-white images. Several photos showed groups of Arapahos, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, standing outside tipis. “Black Night's camp on Little Wind River,” Vicky said, her fingers resting on one of the photos.

Another showed several Arapahos outside a log cabin. A man in a white shirt with thick black suspenders and dark pants, a cigar dangling from his mouth, stood on the porch, like a king surveying his subjects. “Mathias Cooley,” Father John said, touching the image. On the porch next to the agent were two piles of what looked like blankets. A couple of cows were grazing to the side of the cabin. Across the bottom of the photo someone had written, “Annuity distribution day, 1878.”

Staring into the black-and-white image, Father John felt transported in time as if he were standing below the porch with the Arapahos, listening to the strange words that the white man spoke. Vicky was also staring at the photo as if she, too, were there, with her grandparents, her great-grandparents. “We were a pitiful lot,” she said after a moment. “Only nine hundred of us made it to Wind River Reservation, freezing and starving. But we were alive.”

Father John opened the folder again and glanced down the outline for something about annuity distributions. It was there, halfway down. Awkwardly he flipped through the manuscript to that section, then skimmed the paragraphs, aware of Vicky watching him and of her quiet breathing.

“No wonder the elders said don't trust the agent. Here it is.” He handed the page to her. “The government delivered the food, blankets, tools, cloth, utensils, cattle—all the things promised in the treaties in exchange for Arapaho lands. But instead of distributing the goods, Mathias Cooley sold them for whatever the Arapahos had of value.”

“We didn't have much,” Vicky said. “A few warbonnets, saddles, parfleches, bows and arrows, deerskin shirts and dresses. What is it that Ned Cooley calls them? Indian trinkets?”

Father John picked up the photos and slipped them back into his folder. He was thinking of what Will Standing Bear had told him: Mother Earth gives us all we need to live. Mother Earth—the basis for all life. The logic was beautiful. All you had to do was set up the correct propositions in the syllogism, and the conclusion became obvious. After a moment he said quietly, “Mathias Cooley didn't buy a hundred thousand acres of reservation land from the Arapahos. He took it in exchange for their own annuities. He stole the land.”

Vicky leaned back in her chair, eyes wide. “My God. After he'd taken everything else we owned, he came after our land. Now his great-grandson wants us to give him five million dollars for our own land.”

“And Ned has sweetened the pot by throwing in the artifacts, hoping Arapahos won't be able to refuse the deal.”

“Or hoping we wouldn't take a close look at how his ancestor got the ranch in the first place,” Vicky added.

They were both quiet, trying to absorb the enormity of it. Finally Father John said, “Harvey must have found some old records that prove what happened. That's why he changed his mind about buying the ranch. Ned Cooley killed him to keep the secret hidden.”

“What about Charlie Taylor?” Vicky asked.

Father John was turning over an idea, looking for the logical path, the correct propositions. “Harvey must've told Charlie. My guess is that Charlie came here Saturday afternoon. As a councilman, he had the keys. He knew what to look for, and he knew he didn't have much time. He tore through the history files until he found what he wanted. Then he went to Ned Cooley with a deal. Charlie would give Ned the records and would get the business council to purchase the ranch, probably by claiming that Harvey had approved of it. And Ned would pay Charlie a percentage of the five million dollars.”

Vicky was shaking her head. “Blackmail. So Ned saw to it that Charlie didn't make the curve on Seventeen-Mile Road. That Indian forgot about
Niatha's
trick.”

“It all fits except for one thing,” Father John said. “Ned couldn't have killed Harvey himself. He must've hired somebody to do it. A hit man.” That had been his new assistant's theory from the first, and now here he was entertaining the idea.

“What makes you think so?” Vicky had taken the folder from him and was skimming rapidly through the other pages.

“He spent part of the weekend meeting with politicians, financial supporters in Denver,” Father John said. “He told me he caught the flight back Saturday afternoon.”

Vicky looked up, surprise flashing in her eyes.

“John, there is only one flight from Denver to Riverton each day. It's a little cigar plane with sixteen seats, you know the type. Last Saturday Larry and I were on it. It was half empty. Ned Cooley was not on that plane.”

A mixture of anger and revulsion rose in Father John's throat like thick smoke. It was one thing to believe that a hit man, someone he couldn't imagine, someone inhuman, had plunged a knife into his friend's chest. It was something else altogether to recall the human face, the voice, the fleshy feel of the hand—the murderer's hand. Then another thought hit him and made him shudder. Did Ned Cooley hate Harvey because Dorothy had once loved him? Perhaps still loved him? Had Ned Cooley enjoyed his terrible deed?

Vicky tossed the folder on the desk. “There's no mention of the Cooley ranch or how the agent got his hands on it in this chapter.”

“It's got to be here,” Father John said, pulling out the outline and running his eyes down the typed lines. About an inch from the bottom, something had been penciled in. It was Harvey's handwriting, a note to himself. Father John had to bring the page up close to make out the faint words: “Add insert here.” Then, “MA 2250 MA 2274.”

“Look for something marked ‘insert,'” he said. Vicky stood up, leaned over the desk and began leafing through the pages again. Father John picked up the next folder in the stack and started through it. Maybe he'd stuffed a section marked “insert” into the wrong folder. He checked another folder, and another. “It's not here,” he said.

Vicky was waiting. “No sections on the ranch. No records. Nothing. We've found what's missing.”

Father John sank back into his chair and rubbed his shoulder in an effort to loosen the muscles that felt as if they were clamped in a vise. “It looks like Harvey wrote this chapter before he came across the evidence about the Cooley ranch. He intended to insert the information later, so he made a note on the outline. It would have been a humdinger of a chapter. This was probably what he had wanted to talk to me about the morning of the powwow. This, and the fact his nephew had fallen in love with Cooley's niece, of all the white girls in the world. Harvey had a lot on his mind when he died.”

“So how do we prove this? We don't have the evidence.”

“Maybe we can reconstruct it,” Father John said. “You know what this means?” He pointed to the penciled words on the outline.

“Mission Archives. Files 2250 and 2274.”

Vicky was out of the chair again, scooping her bag off the floor. “There has to be something on the Cooley ranch in the Fremont County records. I'll check on it while you check the mission records, which you are going to do, of course. I'll meet you back here in an hour, two max.”

Father John got to his feet. “How do you know what I'm going to do? Did I say anything?”

“Volumes,” she said, leading the way out of the office and down the hallway.