The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (26 page)

Then the familiar voice: “Father John.”

“He killed Ruth Yellow Bull.” She blurted out the fact.

“I know. Where are you?”

“Rawlins. I’m about to get back on the highway. God. Did he kill her before he came for me? After?”

“I don’t think you should pursue the safe house in Denver. Someone there might let him know.”

“We’re close, John. We’re so close to the truth that he’s in a panic. He’s desperate. We can’t stop now.”

The cell was quiet, vacant sounding, so that for a moment she thought the connection had dropped. Finally, he said, “It’s too dangerous, Vicky. I’m going to call Coughlin. Tell him what Ruth told us. Let him put things together.”

She said that was a good idea, then added: “Don’t worry about me.” She pressed the end key, then the menu key. She scrolled to Mary Hennings’ number and pressed send. Another wait through the electronic buzzing noise, the man at the counter still looking through the plate glass window every couple of minutes, as if he would have liked to listen in on her conversations, as if there might be something different about them, something dangerous. Then the woman’s voice, tentative and hurried: “Hello?”

“It’s Vicky Holden,” she said.

“I heard the news on the radio.”

“Is there somewhere you can go for a while?”

“A friend’s place in Bozeman. I’m about to leave now. When’s it gonna stop, all that violence from back then?”

“He’s bound to make a mistake,” Vicky said. “Detective Coughlin will get him.”

“When, Vicky? After he kills more women? After he kills you?”

“You’ve got my number,” Vicky said. She was about to tell Mary Hennings to call if she heard anything, but she realized that the call had ended.

She turned the ignition and crawled back down the street to the highway. Once past the city limits, she pressed down on the gas and drove east on Highway 80, semis looming in the rearview mirror and swooshing past, the gradual hills rising and falling through the bare, open plains, finally dropping into Laramie. She kept going, climbing out of town, driving through the great expanse of nothingness until she was in Cheyenne.

She was heading south on I-25, traffic flowing toward her and around her, when the cell started ringing. She kept one hand on the steering wheel and flipped up the lid. She caught Adam’s name in the readout. “Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded flat and dulled with exhaustion over the whir of the tires and the noise of a passing truck.

“I’ve got the address of the safe house,” he said.

“
WHAT CAN I
do for you?” Detective Coughlin sat down behind the desk and waved Father John to the small chair with wooden armrests jammed between two filing cabinets.

“I’m here about Ruth Yellow Bull’s murder.”

“Wrong office.” Coughlin picked up a pen, as if he was about to jot something on the white notepad squared in front of him. “Feds got that case. Not our jurisdiction, fortunately. We’ve got enough on our hands.”

“Same man tried to kill Vicky last night. He’s the one who shot out her window and shattered the windshield of her Jeep. He sent two warning messages.”

“Last night’s homicide was the result of a drug deal, Father. Feds are pretty sure of it. Victim’s been on the radar of both the Feds and the Wind River police for sometime. They suspect she was dealing marijuana. Somebody got real mad at her. Maybe she forgot to pay off her supplier, and he sent a collection agent. Woman was sixty-eight years old. You’d think she’d know better.”

He shook his head, then stopped, folded his arms across his chest, and leaned forward. He rested his arms along the edge of the desk. “What is it? What do you know?”

“We’ve been talking to people, trying to find out about the skeleton.”

“I got that much from Vicky.” Coughlin started leafing through a stack of folders at the side of the desk and extracted one from the center. He pulled it over and opened it. “Liz Plenty Horses. We verified the ID by some old dental records at the Indian Health Service,” he said, fingering through the sheets of paper. “What’s the victim got to do with her?”

“Ruth Yellow Bull and Liz Plenty Horses were friends. Vicky went to see Ruth a few days ago. We both talked to her yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“I’m telling you now,” Father John said. “She wouldn’t have talked to you or any other cops. You know that.”

“Yeah? Suppose you tell me what she talked to you about.”

“Liz Plenty Horses came to Ruth’s house in the summer of 1973, looking for a place to hide. That means she was frightened.”

“Yellow Bull tell you that? She was frightened?”

Father John shook his head. “She turned her away. She said Liz was a snitch, that she was responsible for one of the AIM leaders, a man named Brave Bird, getting shot to death in Ethete.”

Coughlin was shuffling through the pages now. He pulled one out and set it on top. “Chief Banner sent over the report,” he said, glancing down the page. “Lakota named Daryl Redman, aka Brave Bird, shot to death by Wind River police officer in altercation. Anonymous call…” He stopped and looked up. “Male voice called the local FBI agent and said that Brave Bird was hiding in Ethete, and Wind River officers were sent to check it out. Murdered girl didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Father John was quiet. “Somebody wanted both of them dead,” he said after a moment. “Brave Bird and the girl. Ruth knew who it was.”

“She tell you that?”

“It was what she didn’t tell us. I think she was scared. She didn’t want to be labeled a snitch. But she made the mistake of telling the man she was protecting that Vicky had come to see her. He couldn’t be sure how much information she might have divulged, so he killed her to keep her from talking to anybody else, especially you. He tried to kill Vicky to make certain that whatever she’d learned didn’t go any further.”

Coughlin stared across the desk at Father John for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally, “I’ll take your theory to the Feds. See if we can make sense out of who’s behind this.”

“Whoever it is was the actual FBI snitch.”

The detective picked up the pen and flipped it across the desk in the direction of his gaze. “Thirty-how-many years ago? Some informer working for an FBI agent who hasn’t been around in decades? There were a dozen FBI agents here then. Which one used the informer? Come on, Father. That’s going to be a dead end, and you know it.”

Father John started to get to his feet, then sat back down. “There’s something else,” he said.

“Something else?” Coughlin was still planted in his chair. He closed the file folder, reached for the pen and held it poised over the white pad. “You mean there’s more you’ve picked up from Indians that aren’t gonna talk to the cops, even if they end up shot to death?”

“Another connection between Ruth Yellow Bull and the murdered girl,” he said.

“And that connection would be?” Coughlin’s eyebrows rose into his forehead.

“Jake Tallfeathers. He was married to Ruth’s sister, Loreen.” Coughlin started writing something down, his pen making a scratching noise, like a mouse nibbling at the paper. “After Liz left Ruth’s house, she went to a friend’s in Lander, a woman named Ardyth LeConte.”

“Ardyth LeConte?” Coughlin was scribbling on the pad.

“She goes by a different name now, but Vicky found her.” He hurried on before the detective could interrupt. “Jake Tallfeathers came to her house looking for Liz. He wasn’t alone. Someone else was in the pickup. Liz managed to evade them. The woman thinks Liz made it to a safe house in Denver.”

“And her new name is?”

“She doesn’t want to get involved.”

“I’m going to need her name, Father. This is a murder investigation.”

“She’s scared to death. Now that Ruth’s been killed, she’ll probably leave the area.” Father John stopped, waiting a moment for this to sink in. “Look, the point is that someone Liz trusted, a man named Robert Running Wolf, sent her to the safe house. All these years, the woman believed that Liz managed to escape and start a new life.”

“Robert Running Wolf?”

“One of the AIM leaders. Nobody we’ve talked to knows what became of him. One more thing,” Father John said, and the detective dropped the pen and began massaging the back of his neck. “Whoever killed Liz might have ordered the murder of Jimmie Iron in Washington D.C. Jimmie was the father of Liz’s baby.”

Coughlin leaned toward the desk and picked up the pen again. “What you’re saying is, we’ve got a kind of serial killer out there. Vicky should get away for a while.”

“She’s on her way to Denver.”

“Denver? The safe house? She knows the location?”

Father John lifted his hands, then let them drop onto the top of his thighs. “Not as far as I know,” he said, but he knew that, somehow, Vicky would find the house, if it was still standing, and trace whoever had lived there in the summer of 1973. He knew she wouldn’t stop until she had the name of Liz Plenty Horses’s killer.

“I’ll check out this Running Wolf. You talk to Vicky, tell her to call me. I want the name of Liz Plenty Horses’s friend.” Coughlin lifted himself to his feet, a dismissive sign, Father John knew. He stood up. “You should both be careful,” the detective said. He came around the desk and flung open the door. “I’m going to ask Banner to keep a car in the vicinity of the mission, keep an eye on things. If you hear anything else…”

“You’ll hear from me,” Father John said to Coughlin’s back. He was already following the man back down the corridor toward the entry.

VICKY WATCHED THE
brown sedan slide into the empty space at the curb across the street. She sipped at the iced tea she’d ordered. Lucas’s image shimmered in the sunshine reflected in the café’s plate glass windows as he got out of the sedan and started across the street, stopping to let a black truck swish past, then darting around another vehicle before he reached the sidewalk. The glass image evaporated, and he was inside, striding around the other tables toward her.

He was so much like his father, this tall, handsome warrior with black hair trimmed above his ears, brown skin and black eyes, muscular and strong looking in khakis and a yellow knit shirt. The first sight of Lucas, after a few days or weeks or even months, always made her heart take a little jump, as if she’d somehow stepped into the past and was eighteen again, and the man walking toward her was the one she’d watched riding the bronco bareback at the rodeo, gripping the edge of the bench, praying he wouldn’t fall off. After the rodeo—walking toward her, smiling at her, holding out both hands as if there had never been any question but that she would run into the arms of Ben Holden. Later he’d told her how he’d seen her in the stands, how he’d ridden the bronco into the ground for her.

And this was their son.

She started to get up, but Lucas placed a hand on one shoulder, then leaned over and hugged her. “How’s it going, Mom? Trip okay?”

She told him the drive had been fine. It wasn’t exactly the truth. She’d stared through the windshield at the lines of traffic flowing like metal rivers as she drove toward Denver, so different from the open roads on the reservation, the vast spaces that melted into the horizons all around. It had taken a little time to adjust, refocus herself, concentrate on the lanes ahead, the merging cars and trucks, the semis looming in the rearview mirror.

Hovering at the back of her mind, beyond the traffic and the mechanics of driving, had been the image of the house. She had an address now; she wondered if the house were still there. She knew the neighborhood—the Indian neighborhood near the Denver Indian Center. Arapahos, Cheyennes, Lakotas, Ojibwas, Pawnees, Apaches, Crows, Blackfeet—crammed together in blocks of tiny houses with rusting pickups perched on jacks in the driveways and sofas with stuffing poking out of the cushions jammed on the small porches. It wasn’t where the so-called successful Indians—the whiteized Indians—lived. Lucas lived in a house in Highland, lights from downtown Denver visible from his kitchen window.

Of course the safe house would have been in the Indian neighborhood. Anyone hiding there would have been safe. None of the neighbors would have called the police to report an Indian fugitive.

And yet, Liz Plenty Horses hadn’t been safe.

Lucas settled across from her, picked up the menu, and studied it for a moment. There was the usual polite exchange of pleasantries. His job was going well; she was staying busy, working on a discrimination case on behalf of Arapahos and other Indians employed at Mammoth Oil. The only ones required to take regular drug tests, she told him. He shook his head at this, light flashing in his brown eyes. There was no sign of surprise.

The small restaurant was beginning to fill up. Only one table left next to the window, in the flare of the setting sun, but the couple waiting at the hostess desk would probably be shown there. Memories crowded in on her; she’d spent a good ten years in Denver, lived in a house a few blocks away. In the Old Time, this had been Arapaho land, yet she could never shake the sense that she didn’t belong here. There were restaurants she’d never gone into, shops she walked past, movie theaters she ignored—as if there were invisible signs propped in front: Indians Not Welcome.

And yet, Lucas had walked tall into the restaurant—college degree, systems analyst job at a big company, unaware that the signs had ever existed or that she still carried the image of them in her mind, part of the collective memory of her people. He would have walked just as tall into the office of Owens and Lattimore today for his interview.

They had ordered plates of Italian spaghetti, and the waitress shook shredded parmesan over the top until the tomato sauce disappeared under what looked like heaps of snow. “How was the interview?” Vicky asked, after the waitress had taken the hunk of cheese and the grater to the next table.

Lucas wound some pasta over his fork and shrugged. “You know how all that legal stuff goes,” he said.

“How does it go?” Vicky kept her tone light. There was always an edge to any discussion that inched toward her career. Lucas and Susan had been growing up on the reservation with her mother while she became a lawyer.

“The lawyer, Marshall Owens, kept asking questions. Was I sure I saw what I saw? Was it possible I’d been mistaken? How can I be sure? Was I willing to put his client in prison for a long time based on a shaky memory? Like he was trying to trip me up, make me doubt my own experience, start thinking that maybe I didn’t see what I saw, I don’t know what was real.”

Vicky took a bite of her own spaghetti. After a moment, she said, “He’s trying to build a defense.”

“Want to know how he’s building the defense? ‘Isn’t it true, Mr. Holden,’” Lucas dropped his voice a couple of notes, “‘there were other people in the alley when you stopped your vehicle? Isn’t it possible that another man was, in fact, beating the victim? Isn’t it possible that, in the darkness and confusion, you failed to see Theo Gosman come to the defense of the victim? Isn’t it possible that you confused him with the actual assailant, and that, thinking you were aiding the victim, you attacked the wrong man?’” Lucas worked on another bite of spaghetti, then he said, “He kept trying to shake my story. Better prepare yourself. He’ll do the same to you tomorrow.”

“And did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Shake your story?”

“Are you kidding?”

Vicky smiled. “If that bastard goes to trial, you can be sure Owens will try to shake your version of what happened.” She knew the technique; she’d used it herself at times. Sometimes it worked, but those were the cases where the facts were blurred, where the truth could fall on either side.