The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (3 page)

“We need your names, addresses, brief statements.” Another officer had pulled out a small notepad and was flipping through the pages with the tip of a pen. The medics still hovered over the girl and the man. Two medics were dragging stretchers out of the back of the ambulance.

“We’ll also need complete statements at police headquarters downtown tomorrow,” the officer said.

Vicky started to say that she was leaving for Wyoming tomorrow, that her daughter had to return to L.A. She stopped, aware of the medics sliding the girl onto a stretcher. She looked so small. So helpless. “We’ll be there first thing,” she said.

“Any idea who the bystanders were?”

Vicky shook her head.

“We’ll talk to the neighbors, see if we can find them.”

“The bastard should be charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault,” Lucas said.

“Thanks for the advice.”

“We can testify that we saw him beating the girl,” Vicky said. She was still shaking, and she could hear the shaking in her voice. She glanced at Susan, who had moved next to Lucas. Lucas had his arm around her. The color had drained from her face. “We all saw what happened.”

After they had given their names, addresses, and telephone numbers, after they’d told the officers again what they had seen, they got into the car and Lucas started backing out of the alley. The ambulance had already pulled away with both the girl and the man inside. Only one of the police cars was left, the two officers walking up and down the alley, shining flashlights across the concrete and along the bottom rim of the fences.

“God…”

“Don’t say it, Mom,” Lucas said, but Vicky knew by the silence in which they drove on that both Lucas and Susan knew what she was thinking. It might have been Susan, alone in an alley in L.A., with some drug dealer or rotten boyfriend deciding to teach her a lesson. It was probably what had happened to the girl who was no more than a skeleton in the Gas Hills. It could have happened to Susan, and she could have ended up dead.

But they didn’t know the rest of her thoughts: It might have been her. In their own home. At the hands of their own father.

WILLIE NELSON BLARED
from the radio—“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” A river of asphalt flowed ahead as far as Vicky could see, sunlight flashing on the bumper of a semi in the distance. On either side of the highway, the plains rolled and pitched and melted into a sky as clear as blue glass. Here and there a ranch house lifted itself out of the brown earth, but the only continuous signs of life were the antelope that had been racing alongside the highway for miles. She passed Sweetwater Station, a rest stop with picnic tables and a scattering of vehicles parked in front of the low brick building that housed the restrooms. Ahead were Cedar Draw, Sheep Mountain, Blue Ridge. And in the northeast, the Gas Hills, where the skeleton had been found.

She’d been awake most of last night, drifting into a half sleep until the images of the unconscious girl curled in the alley and the bones of a young woman in the Gas Hills had collided in a nightmare that startled her into wakefulness. She’d stared into the darkness, knowing that Susan and Lucas were also awake, the images from the alley looping through their minds. When they were children, she’d always known if they were awake, lying quietly in their beds, and it was as if they were still connected to her by an invisible umbilical cord. She could almost see the images that must have played in Susan’s mind, the nightmare terrors spliced with pictures of the man kicking and punching the girl.

And Lucas, staring into the darkness of the den downstairs, worrying about the girl. Oh, how well she knew him. Always worrying, just like when he was a child, the little spy in the house who knew everything, but was too small to do anything about it. The memory of Ben Holden was not as sacred to his son as it was to his daughter.

They were at the police headquarters at eight o’clock this morning, she and Lucas and Susan, ushered into individual cubicles, giving statements of what they’d seen, what they had done. The girl was in serious condition; not that Detective Hopkins, who seemed to be in charge, had said so, exactly. It was what Vicky had heard in the undercurrent of conversation. Her name was Julie Reynolds. Julie Reynolds, nineteen years old, in intensive care at Denver Health Sciences, on a respirator. Her attacker was Theo Gosman, twenty-five and a member of a prominent Denver family. Already lawyered up, the detective had said, with the firm of Owens and Lattimore, known for obtaining acquittals of criminal charges against well-heeled clients.

The sound of her cell ringing cut through her thoughts. Vicky fumbled in her bag on the passenger seat and extracted the small, plastic phone. “This is Vicky Holden,” she said, clamping the phone to her ear, her eyes still fastened on the silvery asphalt unfurling itself. Two golden-tail hawks swooped over the highway before rising into a long, flat glide, their shadows flickering on the plains.

“Where are you, Vicky Holden?” It was Adam, and she knew by the lightness in his tone that he was glad to reach her.

“Just passed Sweetwater.”

Adam was quiet a moment. “Another hour,” he said. “How’d everything go? Kids okay?”

They were fine, Vicky told him. She’d tell him later about the girl in the alley.

“A group of women are wanting to see you.”

“What? Who are they?”

“From the rez. Annie knows them.”

Annie Bosey knew everybody on the Wind River Reservation, Vicky was thinking, which was one of the reasons she’d insisted on bringing her secretary to the new firm that she and Adam had formed. “We need somebody more professional, more polished,” Adam had said. Someone more fitting with the type of firm they intended to build, the important cases they would handle on natural resources, land management, issues of tribal sovereignty. “Annie knows everybody,” Vicky had said. “And she needs the job.” Still in her twenties, divorced and on her own with two kids. It never left Vicky’s mind that she herself had been like that, struggling to look after Lucas and Susan in between the waitressing job and her classes at the University of Colorado in Denver. It had defeated her, and one day she’d driven the kids back to her mother’s on the reservation, promising she’d be back for them. But by the time she’d come back, with a law degree and a job at a Seventeenth Street firm, the kids were grown. They didn’t need her anymore. Adam had understood all that, she knew, and he’d agreed to let Annie stay on.

“What do they want?” Vicky said.

“I suspect Annie knows, but she’s not saying. They want to talk to you, that’s all. You planning to come to the office?”

“I guess I am now,” Vicky said. She’d been planning to go straight to her apartment, unpack, and get caught up on the files she’d taken to Denver and never found the time to open.

“I’ll have Annie let them know. Oh, and Vicky?”

She’d been about to break off the call, the tip of her index finger brushing the end key. She waited.

“It’ll be good to have you home.”

“See you soon,” she said. She pushed the key and tossed the phone onto the bag crumpled on the seat. She was beginning to think that every time she left his sight, Adam Lone Eagle half expected that she wouldn’t return.

THE BROWN FACES
swiveled toward her as Vicky stepped into the reception area. Diana Morningstar and Mary Blue Heart leaned against the closed door to her office. Six other women were scattered about the room. Vicky searched for names: Elsie Barret and Rona Blackman on the folding chairs that Annie must have pulled from the closet. Nan somebody—what was the woman’s name? Janice Silver, Mickey Littleshield, Shana Graybull. They were quiet and reserved—it was the normal way—black hair flowing about their shoulders, hands clasped in their laps, brown eyes fixed on her.

It was Annie, jumping up from the desk across the office, who said, “They’ve been waiting most of the afternoon.”

Vicky tried for a smile that was part acknowledgment and part apology. “Better come in,” she said, starting for her office. The two women against the door stepped aside, and Vicky pushed the door open and walked to her desk, aware of the shuffling noises of the women starting after her. She hooked the strap of her bag over her chair and waited while they filed inside and bunched together along the back wall. Except for Diana Morningstar and Mary Blue Heart who dropped into the chairs in front of the desk. The appointed spokeswomen, Vicky thought.

“Sorry to put you to any trouble,” Diana said. She was a slight woman in her late forties, a couple of years older than Vicky, with threads of gray glistening in her long, black hair. She’d been in the grade ahead at St. Francis Mission school, the prettiest girl in school, lit with energy and laughter. Vicky remembered wanting to be like her, the way Diana walked across the mission grounds, the little bounce in her step, tossing back the long, shiny black hair, and all of the boys watching. Now she was struck by the prominence of Diana’s nose, protruding from the thin face and sunken cheeks, like one of those flimsy noses kids wore on Halloween. Deep wrinkles spread from the corners of her eyes and creased her long neck. Her arms were thin, hanging from the sleeves of the white tee shirt with
Blue Sky People
written in blue across the front. Her legs might have been sticks inside her blue jeans.

“You’re the only one we could think to come to.” This from Mary Blue Heart, nearly as thin as Diana. She was younger, still in her thirties, Vicky guessed, with a mass of curly, light brown hair inherited from a white ancestor and a complexion that changed from light to dark as she moved her head under the fluorescent ceiling lights. She wore a blouse that folded over the top of khaki slacks and revealed the little bulge of a still-new pregnancy.

“You read about the skeleton out in the Gas Hills?” Diana asked.

Vicky nodded. A front-page article in the
Gazette
. “Rock Hunters Find Human Skeleton.” A homicide. The victim had been shot to death. A bullet hole in the back of the skull. Not until almost the last sentence did the article mention that the coroner believed the skeleton was that of a young woman. There had been two other articles, asking for information on any young women missing from the 1970s. Contact the sheriff’s department. And Annie had brought up the skeleton several times before Vicky had left for Denver. “Heard anything?” she’d asked. “Lots of us are wanting to know who she was.” Which had let Vicky know that the moccasin telegraph was buzzing with speculation and theories.

And here they were, women from the reservation drawn to an anonymous young woman, shot to death and left in the wilderness of the Gas Hills.

“Mind if Annie joins us?” Vicky said.

Diana and Mary nodded in unison, as if they’d wanted to ask, but hadn’t been sure of how to bring up the matter without being impolite.

Vicky lifted the receiver and pressed a button. It was a moment before Annie picked up, and Vicky suspected she’d had to dart back to the desk from outside the office door where she’d probably been listening. She asked her to come in, then waited while Annie dragged a folding chair across the carpet, opened it at the corner of the desk and sat down.

“I been telling everybody you’d help us,” she said.

Diana nodded. “She died out there all alone.”

“Except for the murderer,” Annie said.

“That’s what’s got us upset,” Diana went on. “The bastard shot her and got away with it. Tied her arms back. Took her to that godforsaken place, put a twenty-two bullet in her head, and that was after he’d beaten her half to death.”

“Tied her arms back?” Vicky said. The article hadn’t mentioned anything about that. It was the kind of information investigators liked to keep quiet, the kind only the killer might know.

“My sister, she’s a clerk in the sheriff’s office,” Mary said. “That’s what she heard from some of the guys that went to the site. It was pretty bad, she says. Bones dragged out of the grave by animals, scattered around. She says they’re not doing much of an investigation. Just skipping over the fact that somebody murdered her, like she wasn’t important.”

“She deserves more than that, right?” Diana tossed a glance over her shoulder at the women leaning against the back wall, arms folded across their waists. Two of the women started nodding. “Least she deserves is her own name. What does it matter that it happened a long time ago? She was alive once. I mean, she was like us, wasn’t she? Walking around, going about her business. Then some sonofabitch thought it was okay to kill her, punish her, most likely, for something she did that made him mad.”

They were all nodding at this, and Vicky felt the knot start to tighten in her stomach. The dead woman could have been any of them. The girl in the alley. Susan. Herself. My God, what were the statistics? So horrible that she’d wanted to block them from her mind, regretting the fact that she’d come upon them. Homicide, the number one cause of death for Native American women.

“I tol’ ’em you know Detective Coughlin,” Annie said. “You can tell him the women on the rez want answers, tell him no way should the killer be walking around free after what he done, tell him that woman needs to be back with her family, buried properlike along with people that loved her. You can tell him that.”

“It’s a murder case,” Vicky said, threading her way through the logical, legal explanations forming in her mind. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Coughlin will investigate the death. That’s his job.”

“Then why haven’t we heard anything else?” Diana leaned forward and clasped her hands around her bony knees. “Couple articles, that’s all. You know anybody missing, you should contact the sheriff’s office. I’d say, anybody that’s gone missing, the sheriff and the police oughtta already know about it. We hear that nobody at the sheriff’s office is talking about the skeleton anymore. It’s like that girl’s forgotten, left on a shelf out in the coroner’s property room.”

Vicky started to say that the forensics tests probably hadn’t come back yet, then thought better of it. Behind the dark eyes trained on her, she could see the resolution and the fear. There was something about the girl, shot to death and left in the middle of nowhere, stripped to nothing but her bones, that held the women in its grip. At the least, the girl should have her name back.

She said, “I’ll have a talk with Detective Coughlin.”

“I said Vicky’d help,” Annie said.

Diana Morningstar was the first to break into a smile, but it was slow in coming, like the gradual cracking of a clay mask, as if it had taken a moment for the news to become real. “Thanks,” she said. The others were nodding and smiling, pushing away from the back wall, starting for the door.

Diana and Mary got to their feet and started after the others. Then Diana whirled back: “You’ll call?”

“As soon as I learn anything,” Vicky said.

Annie was on her feet, folding the chair. She waited until Diana had closed the door, then she said, “Adam’s been waiting to see you.”

It always took her by surprise when she saw Adam Lone Eagle, as if she were seeing him again for the first time: the handsome, imposing look about him, the black hair flecked with gray and the dark eyes that shone with light, the blue shirt opened at the neck, the sleeves rolled over his brown, muscular forearms. Even when they’d spent the night together, then had gone different ways—she to court, perhaps; Adam to a meeting with tribal officials in Ethete—she always felt the little prick of surprise when she saw him again at the office—so like a warrior in the Old Time, a chief, walking toward her, the way he was now, crossing his office, arms outstretched, face relaxed in a smile that made him even more handsome.