The Supernaturals (22 page)

Reynolds’ posture eased. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew his wallet. He handed a card to Leonard.

“Use this. It’s a company credit card. Try and keep it reasonable, okay?”

Leonard smiled and nodded. “You bet. The big city hookers can wait until I have an expense account,” he joked. Reynolds shifted uncomfortably, and so did the two network security men. Leonard stuck out his hand, and when Reynolds took hold of it, he turned his hand upside down and grasped Reynolds’ hand with both of his in a hood-shake.

“Thanks Mr. R, I’ll be cool with it.” He let go of his hand and then smiled again. “Give my regards to the pukes inside; tell them my main man needs me.”

“Leonard, do you even know what you’re getting into?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you know what this man does now?” Reynolds asked.

“What does he do now?” Leonard asked the two men.

“Sir, all we know is that he is working for the producers of a reality television show.”

“Yeah, what’s it about?” Leonard asked.

The two men looked at each other, and the larger one opened the door and turned.

“Ghosts I believe. A haunted house type of thing. Shall we go, sir?”

Leonard’s smile faded. He started to wonder what the hell he had just agreed to.

“Ghosts, huh?” he asked as he cautiously stepped forward.

“Yes, sir,” the small man said. He gestured for Leonard to leave first.

“Haunted house?”

“From the rumors and gossip we’ve heard at the network, sir, it’s very, very, haunted.”

Leonard felt a sudden chill. He reached out and snapped on the front porch light before stepping out into the darkness. “I thought Professor Gabe was a full time shrink,” he mumbled to himself. “Ain’t there enough live people around, he’s gotta go after dead ones?”

Kennedy’s team had its second member for the live broadcast from Summer Place.

Browning, Montana

John Smith—at least, that was how he had signed in—sat alone inside the coroner’s examination room. The lights were low, with only a single spotlight illuminating the sheet-covered body on the stainless steel table before him. He knew the sheriff and coroner of Glacier County would be coming along soon, so he waited. That sheriff would know him as John Lonetree, headman, activist, and also the Chief of Police of the Blackfeet reservation, located near the border with Canada. He had used the fake name and ID to gain entrance to the county offices when the sheriff and coroner went to dinner. He had made his prayers, his examination, and had done all the right things his people traditionally called for, for the young woman laid out on the cold steel table.

The girl’s name was Betty Youngblood. John had known her from the day she came into the world, and now on this dark day he performed her death rites. As he lowered his head, he removed his cowboy hat and tossed it on the chair next to him, freeing his long black hair to cascade around his shoulders. Blood had stained the area at the top of the sheet, and at her midsection. Betty hadn’t been important enough for the coroner to delay his dinner. Her wounds were unattended and had been unexamined when John had arrived. He swallowed hard to keep his emotions in check. The world would never change for his people, it seemed.

The girl had been born, like most Indians on the Blackfeet reservation, into abject poverty. She had endured a life of abuse by a single mother who had tended toward the bottle, and who had taken out every one of life’s failures on her oldest child. At fifteen, Betty had left the Rez and escaped into the white world. John had heard she had taken to prostitution and other forms of criminal life to keep from going home again. He shook his head. She could not avoid it now; she was going home with him tonight. Another bright red spot on everyone’s shame: the reservation system, the white world, and his own closed world of the American Indian.

John heard their voices long before the examination room door opened. As the overhead lights came on, he kept his head lowered and his hands clasped in front of him. The voices ceased suddenly when the two men saw they weren’t alone.

“Just who the hell are you?”

Lonetree finally looked up. He saw the small, balding fat man who called himself the county coroner, standing with his hands at his sides. Beside him was Sheriff Van Kimble. They had been friends since they were kids, but now the sheriff had his hand on the butt of his nine-millimeter, looking at him in anger.

“What are you doing here, John?” the sheriff asked.

“Who is this man?” the coroner asked.

“He’s the police chief over at the Blackfeet reservation. You two haven’t met yet. John this is Doctor Fleming, our county coro—”

“I know who he is, Van,” Lonetree said, standing. He towered over both men at six feet five inches. “Doctor, do you usually leave a body to sit while you go and eat, without taking the decedent’s vital stats?”

“I, uh—”

“This girl was raped; there may be seminal fluids that are at this moment deteriorating. Have you even fixed the time of death through body temperature?”

“Now wait a minute, John, we already have the killer in custody,” the sheriff said. He stepped forward and let the door close behind him.

“Yes, I’ve heard that also. Randy Yellowgrass, that right?”

“Your Harvard education hasn’t failed you. Yeah, that’s right. My deputy found the drunken, stupid bastard still standing over the girl in the alley at Eighth and Monroe.”

“And you believe Randy, harmless Randy Yellowgrass, could do something like this?” Lonetree pulled the white sheet away from the body and let it fall to the floor.

On the table, Betty lay with her eyes open. The left one was half shaded by her eyelid, the other dilated to almost pure black. Her throat had been savagely cut from ear to ear. Her left breast had been completely removed, and her vaginal area was wrecked. John stepped forward and placed his hand on her hair. It had been tinted with tiny streaks of blonde dye. He shook his head.

“Please don’t touch her until—”

“Until what? Until you examine her, Doctor?” John turned and faced the much smaller coroner. His own nine-millimeter handgun was temptingly heavy at his right hip.

The sheriff looked at the gun and the man wearing it. John was dressed in Levis and a plain blue chambray work shirt under a denim jacket. His features, although darker than the sheriff’s own, were light in comparison to some of the other Indians that frequented the town, but he looked most definitely like most white men would expect a modern day warrior to look.

“Why are you armed, John? You’re not on the Rez; you’re in my bailiwick now.”

Instead of answering the sheriff, Lonetree walked to the other side of the table and looked down at Betty.

“She used to walk up to my pa’s porch. We could see she had been crying. Her face was puffy and swollen…she was only nine, and had learned even at that age to cover up her mother’s beatings. My father and mother would feed her, clean her up and wait until morning to send her back.” He looked up at the sheriff. “Betty’s ma would be sobering up by then, and would be more regretful. On the Rez secrets are kept pretty well.”

“John, why are you here?”

“I had a dream the other night.”

“Do your dream-walking on the Rez, John. Not here.”

“The dream was of falling stars, a meteor shower. Then a smiling girl came into the dream. It was the young Betty, coming over to my ma’s house after a beating. The stars in my dream circled her, colliding as she smiled at me. Then the stars stopped, and all but one fell. That lone, single star stayed floating around her heart, and then it too finally vanished, and as I looked up in my dream, Betty wasn’t smiling anymore.”

“And?” the coroner asked.

John shook his head and smiled briefly. “Then…nothing. I woke up. Didn’t think a thing about it until this evening. I received a call from Randy Yellowgrass’ mother, telling me about Betty and of her son’s arrest.”

“All right, John. Now that you’ve entertained us, the doc has an examination to conduct. I’m sure this young woman’s mother would like her daughter’s body back.”

“Betty’s mother died of cirrhosis of the liver five years ago.”

“John, damn it—”

“Tell me, Doctor what you make of this.” He pointed to a small red line, a mere impression to the right of center on Betty’s chest, not far from the breast that had been removed. It was shaped like a tilted, backward L.

The coroner leaned in close, and then lowered the large light and magnifying glass.

“Seems like a compression wound.”

“That’s what I see, Doctor. Obviously postmortem, wouldn’t you agree?”

The coroner nodded. “Yes, there was no blood pumping through her system when this was made.”

“And the vaginal wounds, I see the same. Post mortem. Oh, there was blood, but not as much as should be present in a wound such as this.”

The coroner examined the vaginal area and then looked up. “I concur, Chief, but—”

“Don’t call me that,” John said. He walked to the head of the examination table.

“I meant no—”

“It’s an Indian thing, they don’t like the word Chief,” the sheriff explained.

“Now, the removal of the breast was obviously done while she was still alive. The wound would have eventually been fatal if she hadn’t had her throat cut, correct?”

This time the coroner didn’t have to look at the body. With the amount of blood that had been expelled through the chest wound, the large Indian was obviously correct. He nodded his agreement.

John swallowed and then raised his right hand and gently touched the cold flesh at the side of the young woman’s face. Then he slowly pulled her lips apart. The girl’s front teeth were broken all the way to the gum. John looked from the table to the coroner, waiting.

“Well, from first impressions, I would say the killer held her mouth closed while he tortured her. Maybe even struck her with a fist.”

“Close, Doctor. But, notice the bruising around the mouth, the redness, the breaking of small capillaries in the lips and the lower cheek area, all the way up to the orbital bones of the face?”

“Yes, I see that now. Not a blow to the mouth, but a constant pressure, yes. Her mouth was being kept closed with some considerable force.”

“Not only that, but with enough force not just to loosen her teeth, but to snap them off. Quite a feat for little Randy Yellowgrass, all one hundred and forty-five pounds of him.”

“There could be any number of expl—” the sheriff started to say, but John cut him off.

“Yes, any number of explanations for it, I’m sure,” John patted Betty’s face lightly, closing her destroyed mouth. “Sheriff, it’s not the wound itself, but the size of the impressions left on the skin. Randy would have had to use both of his hands to cover that much area with that much force. Not only that, but he would have to have fingers of steel. Mere pressure would not have been enough to sheer those teeth off like that. The hand that did this was not only a larger one, but one that wore at least one ring, possibly two. Metal needs very little help to cause damage to teeth. I suspect if you check Betty’s throat, you’ll find a few of the broken teeth, chipped by metal.”

The coroner nodded his head, conceding that John was possibly right.

“So?” the sheriff asked.

“Randy Yellowgrass wears no jewelry, except for a small cross around his neck. But you know that, because you took his personal effects when he was booked.”

“Jesus Christ,” the sheriff mumbled.

“You agree with this so far?” he asked the coroner, who merely nodded once.

The sheriff’s radio crackled to life. “Sheriff, this is Jennings. We just had a message dropped off at the station from the reservation. I was told to deliver a telegram to John Lonetree over at the coroner’s office. Is he there with you?”

Sheriff Kimble reached for the microphone clipped to his brown jacket, but stopped when John raised his eyebrows and then held his hand up.

“Your deputy, Jennings, he was the one who discovered the body?”

The sheriff’s silence was answer enough for John.

“Ask the deputy to bring the message to me here.”

After the sheriff relayed the order, the answer came.

“It’ll only be a minute, Sheriff; I’m right outside the county building.”

 
John picked up his cowboy hat and put it on.

“What now?” Kimble asked.

“We wait.”

Five minutes later, a knock came at the door. The sheriff opened it and took the small yellow piece of paper from the young deputy and invited him inside. Spotting the exposed body on the table, the deputy quickly turned away. He started to leave, but John stepped forward and closed the door, effectively blocking it with his large frame. The sheriff looked up from the message, then at the closed door, and then at John. He handed the telegram to Lonetree.

“From New York, of all places,” he said. Lonetree pocketed the paper, ignoring it and the sheriff. Instead he looked at the deputy.