Whirlwind (18 page)

"That briefcase is filled with money. Would you have any idea where she got it?"

Radio chatter hung over the street.

A cop and a deputy laughed too loudly.

It should be dark, Mulder thought as he waited for an answer, there's too much light here. It should be dark.

"We haven't been doing too well lately, actu-ally," Lanaya finally admitted. He sniffed, rubbed his nose with the back of a hand, and pushed his hat up off his forehead. "About a year ago, she said the usual stuff wasn't working anymore, that we needed a gimmick, something to distinguish our product from all the other Indian stuff getting produced around here." He laughed bitterly. "I got a bad feeling, Agent Mulder. A bad feeling I've been had." Another laugh, and he slapped the truck's side.

"Son of a bitch! When they find out about this, I'll never be able to get them to trust me again."

Scully and Sparrow left the house, talking softly.

Lanaya swept a nervous hand back over his hair several times. "Will I... she has no relatives, I mean.

Will I have to, you know, identify her?"

"That won't be necessary."

He looked, one eye nearly closed. "That bad?"

Mulder couldn't face him. "There'll have to be the usual tests."

"Tests?" He moved as if to take a run at the house. "Tests? Then how the hell do you know it's her, Mulder? My God, maybe ifs someone else, a vagrant or something."

The only thing he could say was, "I know, Mr. Lanaya. I don't want to, but you'll have to trust me on this. I know ifs her."

Lanaya made a growling noise in his throat, took a step around the truck, and asked with a look if he was needed. Mulder waved him on, and backed away back when the pickup barreled away, turning the corner without the brake lights flaring.

Mulder watched for a moment, then returned to the front yard, where Scully joined him.

"You all right?" he asked, seeing the expression on her face.

She nodded. "I'm just finding it a little hard to believe, that’s all." She glanced toward the house. "Aside from the method, though, it's strange."

"That’s not strange enough?"

She almost smiled. "Did you get a good look at the yard?"

"I saw the bare patch where she fell, if that’s what you mean."

"Right. But before we leave, take another look. That bare area where the grass and weeds were cut down, that wasn't done by any kind of mower I'm aware of."

"Wait."

She passed a hand over her chin. "What I mean is, where she died isn't where she was first attacked.

Whoever killed her . . . it's as if she was pushed around, and the murderer followed her."

"A force like that, I'm not surprised. When you get into a fight, you hardly ever stick to one place."

"This wasn't like a fistfight, Mulder. She wasn't punched around, falling down and getting up again.

From what I can tell, given the . . . given the positions of the body, and the flesh and bone shards around the yard, she fell only once. When she died."

Mulder swallowed, but said nothing.

"The point is, Mulder—whoever attacked

her, with whatever weapon, kept her on her feet."

"But the force it would take to do that much damage ..." He gestured toward the house.

"Exactly, Mulder," she said. "Exactly. She should have fallen almost immediately. But she didn't."

That night, after the paperwork was done, interviews completed, and he and Sheriff Sparrow had finished debriefing each other, he returned to the bench in the garden. His room had grown too small, and Scully was transcribing her notes into the computer. Her mind was already on the morning autopsy—a fresh, puz-zling corpse to decipher.

Oh God, he thought; you're sick, pal, you're really sick. What you need is a vacation.

He almost laughed.

Right; that’s what got me into this in the first place.

The Rio Grande was higher after the downpour, but only slightly, and the ground and paths were completely dry. There were no strolling guests tonight, either; that didn't surprise him. Word was probably out that the killer had struck again. For a night or two, people would stick close to home, the papers would editorialize about the alarming incidence of psychopathic murders in contempo-rary society, and someone, somewhere, would manage to reap a large or small political harvest.

Which knowledge got him exactly nowhere.

He reached down between his legs and picked up a pebble. He bounced it on his palm a few times before swatting it toward the water.

He did it a second time, swinging a little harder.

He stood for the third one, and hit it with a fist. It stung a knuckle, but he barely felt it. It was the motion that mattered. When he missed the fourth stone, he considered stopping wast-ing time and going back to the room. That lasted as long as it took him to find it, and miss again.

Now it was a matter of personal honor, and now he couldn't find the damn thing. Not that any of the others he spotted while on his hands and knees wouldn't have worked, but the one he had missed was the one he wanted.

He was nearly stretched out under the bench, feeling like a jackass, when he heard the rustle of something moving through the brush on the riverbank. At first he thought it might be the evening breeze, but listening for a few seconds told him it was too irregular.

Stop and start.

Just out of reach of the tree lamps and the moonlight, and the lamp poles along the bank.

He used the bench to push himself to his feet,

staring upriver as he dusted off his knees. That, too, was a waste of time; the lamps in front of him blocked any chance of seeing what lay beyond.

The rustling stopped.

All right, so what do they have around here at night? Dogs, cats, coyotes? After that, he went blank.

When he heard it again, he took a long step off the path and picked up a small rock, aimed, and threw it as hard as he could. The crash of the mis-sile through the brush and weeds was followed by the dull plop of its landing in shallow water. But there was no yelp, no sudden rush of an ani-mal scurrying to get away.

Nothing at all, in fact; nothing at all.

Accepting that as a sign he was in danger of losing it, he flicked one more pebble at the water and started back to his room. He hadn't gone three steps when the noise returned.

Not a rustling now, but a barely audible hissing.

Not stop and start, but continuous and moving; slowly, very slowly.

Common sense and experience ordered him to head immediately for the inside, or, at the very least get Scully out here with him.

What he did, for no good reason he could think of, was sidestep cautiously off the path, turning his head in short stages to try to pin-point the source's location, whatever the source was. When he reached the lamp poles, his right hand closed around one as he slipped past, while his left instinctively slipped his gun from its holster.

He wouldn't have done that if he hadn't heard the whispering.

More than one voice, although he couldn't tell how many. Nor could he understand what they were saying. One moment it sounded like muf-fled laughter, the next like little children exchang-ing secrets in the dark.

Beyond the last pole, there was still several yards of cleared earth straight ahead, while to the left the ground sloped downward toward the river. He flexed his knees to keep his balance on the slope, to keep from sliding as he moved for-ward, staring, silently cursing the weak reach of the lamplight. He could barely see the brush, could only just make out a twisted branch above it, no higher than his head.

The noise was on the other side, coming toward him.

Carefully he reached behind him, fumbled for and grabbed the last square pole, an clumsy posi-tion until he put most of his weight on his right foot.

The whispering sounded more frantic, quickly blending into what sounded like a low hum.

No animal, he knew; and he couldn't see how it could be people, either. That many would make a different kind of noise, and it certainly would be

louder. Which made his drawn weapon a little ludicrous.

If there was nothing to shoot at, why have it out?

But nothing didn't make a noise.

It didn't hiss.

It didn't whisper.

He released the lamp pole and eased forward, keeping low, freezing when he had a sudden image of a woman about to open a door everyone in the theater knew hid the monster. They called her stupid, they yelled at her not to do it, they threw things at the screen to get her attention, but she opened it anyway.

And she was always wrong.

And what, he asked himself, does that make you?

Hissing, climbing to a higher pitch that puz-zled him because the pitch was still quite low.

It reminded him of something.

It definitely reminded him of something.

He took a step back, snapping his head around when something splashed to his left. No ripples that he could see, not even when he heard another splash, farther across the water. He could have turned then, but he didn't want to show his back to whatever was out there. He wanted to see it if he could, just in case it came into the open and could see him, too.

Then something struck the pole, taking a chip from the edge.

He didn't wait to see if it had been a shot; he fired one of his own into the dark, whirled and began to run, slipping once on the grass, fling-ing a hand out to stop him from falling on his chest.

When he reached the bench, he turned, trotting backward, staring at something he could finally see down by the lamps.

He never had a chance to see it clearly.

He heard a voice, heard a popping sound, and all the lamps turned red.

Dugan Velador was tired of being old. He didn't want to die, that would be a waste of his life. What he wanted, however, was for people to stop coming to him with questions whose answers they already knew if they would only stop to think. What he wanted was a little peace, and he didn't think that was too selfish a wish. Not at his age. Not after all he had done for his people.

He also wanted the killing to stop. It should have ended the other night, the last night in the kiva.

For as long as he could remember, and for all that he had been taught and told, the last night should have meant the end, for it had always been before.

Not this time.

This time, from what he had heard on the portable radio he kept by his bed, another one had died. A woman. The name was familiar. He couldn't place the face or the occasion of the meeting, so he knew she wasn't Konochine
frastera,
one of those who had left.

Still, the name was familiar, and he worried at it while he ate breakfast, worried at it while, with a sitting blanket over one shoulder, he walked from his place to sleep by the Tribal Center to the Wall that overlooked the road that pointed west. When he was younger, but not young by any cal-culation, he used to sit there every dawn and stare at the unseen place where he knew Annie lived.

He tried to will her to return.

He prayed for her to leave the ranch and move back to her rightful home.

When that didn't work, he figured he had either really garbled the prayers so badly that the spirits hadn't recognized them, or he wasn't half as strong as he thought he was. Velador was a practical man.

When one thing didn't work, there was always something else. If the spirits wouldn't listen, someone else would.

As Nick would say, what the hell.

The only thing he hadn't done, and would not

do, was visit her in person. That would insult her, and demean him.

Practical, however, sometimes meant taking a bite out of pride, swallowing it, and hoping it wasn't poison.