The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (4 page)

“Man, am I glad you’re back,” Adam said, gathering her to him. He held her close and laced his fingers through the back of her hair. The fabric of his shirt was soft against her face, and the faint odor of aftershave washed over her. She heard his heart beating. She was thinking that she must try to love him.

“It’s been a long weekend,” he said. His breath was warm on her forehead. After a moment he let her go, except for her right hand, which he kept in his. “What’s with all the women?”

She explained that they wanted assurance that the sheriff’s detective hadn’t forgotten the skeleton in the Gas Hills.

“Why would they forget?” Adam let go of her hand, walked around the desk and sank into his chair. He combed his fingers through his hair. “Don’t tell me you’re going to waste a couple of hours over at the sheriff’s office so you can tell the women everything’s following its natural course.”

“What if it isn’t?” Vicky perched on the edge of the chair in front of the desk. “What if the women are right and the investigation has been pushed to the lowest priority? It’s not like the woman was shot to death yesterday. It probably happened a long time ago.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.”

“Oh, Vicky.” Adam shook his head and lifted his eyes to the ceiling a moment. “Send Roger over to have a talk with the detective in charge.” Roger Hurst was the young lawyer, just three years out of law school, that they’d hired several months ago to handle the mundane cases—DUIs and divorces and leases—that walked through the door almost every day, the residue of her one-woman law practice, before Holden and Lone Eagle. She and Adam would concentrate on the important cases that made a difference. Indian lawyers practicing Indian law.

“We’ve been over this,” Vicky said. “Sometimes there are going to be…”

Adam lifted one hand, palm out. “I know, I know. Those cases that you can’t resist, you feel compelled…”

“I promised them I’d be the one to talk to Detective Coughlin.”

“Why, Vicky? Why does it matter so much? The woman, whoever she was, has been dead a long time. Maybe her family doesn’t know what happened to her, but surely they’ve come to the conclusion that she isn’t coming home. Maybe she’ll never be identified, and nobody will ever know what happened to her.”

It was then that she told him about the girl in the alley, how Lucas had driven past the little crowd—standing there, watching. How he’d jumped out of the car and gone to the girl’s defense. How he’d stopped the beating. “It could happen to any of us,” she said, but what was still raw—a wound ready to break open—was the realization that it could have happened to Susan. “Nobody should get away with murder.”

“So you’re gonna camp out at the sheriff’s office…”

“And ask a few questions,” Vicky said, getting to her feet. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

“I was hoping you’d propose more than dinner,” Adam said.

THE BEIGE STONE
building, bathed golden by the morning light, resembled the bluffs that rose unexpectedly out of the earth around Lander. Most of the building housed the detention center—the county jail—but the rear section was given over to the sheriff’s office. Vicky drove around the building and parked in a space marked Visitors. She walked across the asphalt that yawned like an alley between the rows of vehicles and the glass door next to the red Coco-Cola dispenser shoved against the wall. Black letters on the glass said: Fremont County Sheriff’s Office. Vicky let herself inside.

The entry was small, an afterthought carved out of a corner when the mighty purposes of the building had been constructed. Squinting at the computer screen on the desk across from the door was a woman about thirty with shoulder-length blond hair brushed behind her ears and pinkish skin marked by a band of dark freckles across her nose and cheeks. It was a moment before she looked up. She didn’t say anything.

“Vicky Holden,” Vicky said, snapping a business card on the desk. She’d probably been here a hundred times, but she’d never seen the woman. “Here to see Detective Coughlin.”

The woman took another moment—the light gray eyes glancing at the card—before she said, “You got an appointment?”

“I’d appreciate it if you would let him know I’m here.”

The woman tossed her head to one side, as if she could toss away the disruption, and picked up the phone. The gray eyes fastened again on the screen. “You got a visitor, a Ms. Holden,” she said. Then she dropped the receiver and, still looking at the screen, said, “He’ll come and get you.”

Vicky stepped away from the desk and looked around. Nothing but a pair of doors flanking the desk and cement-brick walls muffling the activity on the other side: the faint sounds of voices, doors shutting, people moving about.

One of the doors swung open. Gary Coughlin, a big man dressed in blue jeans and dark, plaid shirt, leaned into the entry. “Vicky? Follow me,” he said, waving the folder in his other hand.

Vicky brushed past him and waited until he’d closed the door and ushered her down a corridor with doors on either side. “Thanks for seeing me,” she said as he fell into step beside her.

“Must say, I was surprised to get your call.” He veered sideways and handed the folder to a short, heavyset man who’d just emerged from behind one of the doors. “This what you’re looking for,” he said. The other man nodded and backed through the doorway.

Coughlin stopped at the opened door across the corridor. He dipped his head a little so that the fluorescent ceiling light shone on the quarter-size scalp in the back of his dark hair.

Vicky stepped into an office about the size of the entry. A wedge of sunlight bursting past the narrow window lay over the folders and papers stacked on the desk, taking up most of the space. A computer occupied a small table between the desk and a metal file cabinet. Pinned to the wall above was a map of Fremont County, crisscrossed with red and blue lines that marked off the boundaries of the reservation and the towns of Lander, Riverton, and Dubois from the vast spaces of the county itself—the jurisdiction of the sheriff’s department. On both sides of the map were framed photographs: Coughlin posing with a petite blond woman and two small, towheaded boys; Coughlin in a fisherman’s vest and waders, grinning and holding up a trout that might have measured two feet; the two boys in swim trunks and orange inflated vests running through the water at the edge of a lake; the blond woman in a long, white wedding dress.

“So I been asking myself, which one of the Indians we picked up this week are you here about?” The detective had to turn sideways to work his way to the swivel chair behind the desk. “Got two or three DUIs, and Les Willows in again for loitering and public drunkenness. My opinion, old Les likes to pay us a visit from time to time and get sobered up. So who’s your client? I thought Hurst was taking on the small potatoes cases.”

Vicky took the chair next to the door. “I’m here about the woman found murdered in the Gas Hills,” she said.

The detective pulled a blank face. He let a couple of beats pass before he said, “You mean the skeleton. Under investigation, Vicky. You know I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

“That’s what I’m here about,” she said. “The investigation. People on the reservation want to know that the woman’s murder is being investigated.”

“Well, what the hell do they think we’re doing here? Playing monopoly?”

“Two articles in the paper, Gary. One asking for information on any woman who might be missing.”

“It’s not like my phone’s been ringing off the hook with responses.”

Vicky sat back in the chair, taking a moment before she said, “That’s it? Two weeks since the bones were found, and that’s it?” But that wasn’t it, Vicky realized. Coughlin was looking at the corner of the ceiling, avoiding her eyes, running the palm of his hand across his mouth.

“Come on, Gary,” Vicky said. “There must be something you’re working on. I’d like to go back to the reservation and tell the women…”

“Women?”

“They’re very upset. They identify with that woman murdered in the Gas Hills. They think it could have been them or someone close, maybe a daughter.”
It could have been Susan.
“And the thing is, it doesn’t look like the sheriff’s office is placing a lot of importance on the murder.”

The man waved a hand between them, fingers outstretched. “We both know that’s a damn lie. It doesn’t matter when the murder took place. We’re investigating it the same as if it happened yesterday.”

“Then give me something to take back. Anything yet from forensics?”

Coughlin leaned back and, lacing his fingers over his shirt, swiveled from side to side a moment. Finally, he said, “We got the report a couple of days ago. These things take time. It’s not like the lab had a lot to go on. Skeleton wasn’t even intact. Some bones were missing.”

“What else?” Vicky felt the small office begin to blur around her. There was more! All of her attention narrowed on the man seated on the other side of the desk. When the detective didn’t respond, she said, “It’s a public record, you know.”

“It’s an ongoing investigation, Vicky.” Coughlin took a moment, then he swiveled around, got to his feet and yanked open the top drawer of the file cabinet. He ran his fingers over the files crammed inside, extracted a thin folder, and slammed the drawer shut. Dropping back onto his chair, he slapped the folder onto the desk. “She was shot in the back of the head. Twenty-two slug found inside the skull.” He went on, eyes fixed on the top page. “Beaten before death. Several teeth missing; evidence of bleeding into the jaw bones. We gave all that to the
Gazette
. I’m not gonna give you anything that we won’t be releasing in the course of the investigation. Nothing that only the killer knows. You know the drill.”

“What can you give me?” Vicky said.

He shrugged, opened the file folder and started thumbing through the white sheets. “Trouble is, what we know so far is just enough to get people all agitated, bring up a lot of stuff from the past, and none of it’s gonna help our investigation. Just the opposite. Could throw up obstacles that’ll keep us from identifying the dead woman and figuring out what happened to her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Date of death.” He pulled out a sheet and stared at the lines of black type. “Pieces of clothing found under the bones were pretty well disintegrated, but the lab managed to get some identifiable manufacturing marks. Heel on what was left of a boot was manufactured from the late ’60s to 1972. Metal studs on pieces of blue jeans turned out to be Levi’s made in the same period. Obviously murder couldn’t have taken place prior to the late ’60s. Based on the condition of the bones and the physical evidence, forensics ballparks the murder about 1973. Most likely in the warm months because the killer would’ve had a real hard time digging a grave in frozen ground.” He stared at the typed sheet a moment, then snapped the folder shut. “You know what was going on then?”

“AIM,” Vicky said.

“You got it. American Indian Movement, Indians passing through from all over the country, protesting and raising hell, demanding Indian rights, hiding out from the law. Nothing but trouble and violence. Every law enforcement agency in the county was working overtime trying to keep Indians from killing one another, whites from killing Indians and vice versa.”

“Part of the civil rights movement,” Vicky said. She had been in her teens then, trying to catch the eye of the basketball captain, studying for exams, riding her horse in the pasture. She could remember the whispered conversations between her parents in the kitchen, the protest marches in Fort Washakie and her father saying, “We’re staying home. It’s not our business what those Indians are doing.” It wasn’t until later that she’d realized it had been their business—Indian rights were their business. She had started dreaming about becoming a lawyer then, to help ensure that her people had rights. But that was before she’d met Ben Holden, just out of the army, home from Germany, and more handsome and confident than any high school boy she’d ever dated. It wasn’t until ten years later, after she’d broken away, that she’d remembered her dream.

“Was she Indian?” Vicky said.

“Yeah, she was Indian. Report says the flat shape of the face, projecting cheekbones and shovel-shaped incisors are consistent with Native American heritage. She was around twenty years old.”

The women were right, Vicky was thinking. The girl was Indian and she was young. She kept her gaze on the detective, his head bent over the opened folder, eyes skimming another sheet. Then he started flipping through the other pages, taking a couple of seconds to digest each one before he shuffled them back into place. “Postpartum pits on the inside surface of the pelvic bones,” he said finally. “She’d given birth.”

Vicky had to close her eyes against this piece of information. It was a moment before she opened them again. She stared into the blur of sunlight drifting over the papers on the desk, inching toward the folder. It was worse than she’d thought. It was not only the murdered girl. There had been a child.

She said, “What about any young women reported missing at that time?”

Coughlin gave her an exasperated smile. “Sixteen to be exact, between 1970 and 1975. Every one accounted for, either dead or alive. There’s nobody missing from this county at that time that we don’t know about. You know what that means? She came from somewhere else. Woman from another reservation, moving around.” He leaned across the desk. “There was a little piece of red cloth under the skeleton. I talked to some of my neighbors, old-timers who were around then. They tell me you could spot AIM Indians by the black hats or the red bands they’d wear around their hair. Looks to me like she was one of them. Came through here and met her fate. Bottom line, Vicky. Chances of ever identifying her are slim to nonexistent.”

“Then whoever killed her got away with it.”

“You know how many killers are walking around free? We’re not living in a perfect world. People commit murder and get away with it. Police do the investigations and, most of the time, they finger the murderer, but sometimes the evidence is missing—the hard proof they need to get the murderer convicted. So, case remains unsolved until…”

“Someone comes forward. A witness or accomplice willing to testify.”

“You got it. We’re looking at a murder that took place more than thirty years ago. Witnesses and accomplices could have moved on, could be anywhere. Could be dead, for that matter. So we got an old homicide with a victim most likely not from the area and nobody around who knows what happened.”

“But if you could get her DNA,” Vicky said. She could see the faces of the women in her office, the dark eyes shadowed with fear and worry. Another woman murdered. No one held accountable.

“Yeah, and what good’s that gonna do? What are we gonna compare it to? Same with a dental workup. We’ll get one done, and maybe we’ll get lucky and find her dental records. Don’t count on it.”

“What about a facial reconstruction? You could distribute her photo to newspapers in the region, distribute it to all the reservations…”

“We’re working on it now. Soon’s we get the reconstruction, we’ll distribute the photos everywhere, but I gotta remind you, this is a cold, cold case. This is a block of ice at the bottom of a frozen lake. Like I said, everything changes in thirty years. We have to be realistic about our chances.”

“Is that what you want me to tell the women on the rez?”

“Tell them we’re as concerned as they are. We want to find the SOB who did it. We’re never gonna close the case. But unless we catch a break, unless somebody knows something or heard something, unless we get something to go on…”

He shrugged.

“I’ll be in touch,” Vicky said, getting to her feet. She worked her way around the cramped space to the door. The detective was already there, holding it open and nodding her into the corridor.

“I’ll see you out,” he said.

VICKY SPOTTED THE
white paper on the dashboard inside her Jeep as she crossed the asphalt lot. She reached the Jeep and stopped. Past the sunlight dancing in the windshield, she could make out her name printed in black on the front of an envelope. She glanced at the doors. The Jeep was still locked, just as she’d left it.