"Kajika," he said, proffering his hand. The folds in his knuckles and palm were lined with dried blood.
Both agents looked at the filthy hand, but made no move to shake it.
"Don't worry, boys. It'll wash off at your next manicure," Kajika said with a lopsided smirk. "Besides, a real wolf would lick the blood right off my hand."
"A real wolf would be more worried about its hide," Wolfe said.
"Ahh. You like my skins? I could sell them at a stand for ten bucks a pop. If that. But I have buyers on Rodeo Drive who pay me twenty times that. When I see someone like Paris Hilton carrying around a purse or wearing boots made from my skins, it makes me feel good, knowing I got to stick it to her just a little."
"Is this guy great or what?" Wolfe said.
"We were hoping to ask you some questions, Mr. Dodge," Carver said.
"So you'll be playing the role of Bad Cop?"
"We've already found eight more bodies, Mr. Dodge."
That seemed to sober him up.
"All young girls like the first?"
"We don't know yet. How did you find out the remains weren't ancient Sinagua?"
"Here in the desert, word travels on the wind," Kajika said, looking past the agents to the other side of the street. Two men leaned against an old Jeep Cherokee in front of a small house fifty yards back from the road, staring directly at them. The front curtains quickly closed when Carver looked. "Why don't you boys come on inside where we can talk without having to worry about the wind?"
Kajika led them through the front door into a great room at odds with the exterior. The matched set of sofa, loveseat, and chair was new, overstuffed for comfort. An empty glass perched on a coaster on the coffee table, the only sign of disarray in the otherwise impeccable order. A large plasma-screen TV hung on the wall, surrounded by framed artwork reflecting a common motif: God and man, heaven and earth. An open doorway at the back of the room led to a kitchen that shined with new appliances; a hallway to the left presumably to the bedrooms.
And displayed in the center of the room against the rear wall as some might showcase a cabinet of curios or collectible figurines, was an enormous Plexiglas cage with heat lamps and full-spectrum UV bulbs directed through the locked lid onto a miniature desert landscape. A rattlesnake basked on the flat top of a stack of rocks beneath the lights, black tongue flicking lazily.
"Not what I would have expected from the outside," Wolfe said.
"What? You think just 'cause me live on reservation me got no wampum?" Kajika asked.
"No," Carver said. "It just appears as though you've gone to great lengths to hide it."
Kajika nodded. "Maybe so."
"You make this kind of money selling rattlesnake skins?" Wolfe asked, already knowing the answer.
"That's just for show. I don't really sell that many myself. I help the kids on the Rez catch and skin their own, and help sell them. They get some cash, their parents get some cash, and it helps foster good will."
"Why would you need good will?" Carver asked.
"I left the Rez as a teenager and didn't come back until my dad died in a car accident and my mom got sick. That's just one of those things you don't do. You don't turn your back on your people. But I did." His eyes clouded. "First chance to leave, I ran as fast as I could. College. Grad school. Even started my own company a world away from here. I tried so hard to prove I was better than the Rez that I guess I forget it was the Rez that made me what I was. It took coming home again to realize it. So now I do what I can to help make this place what I always wished it had been growing up: a place of opportunity versus oppression."
"So where did the money come from?" Wolfe asked. "If you don't mind me asking."
"I sold my business."
Carver strolled around the room. The paintings were framed under glass, originals as evidenced by the texture of the brushstrokes. There was something incongruous about the scenario: a man of obvious wealth on an impoverished reservation finding a body in the middle of the desert while hunting rattlesnakes for the sake of pretense. His opinion mirrored Wolfe's. His first impression of Kajika was favorable, but there was something wrong with the situation.
"What kind of company did you own?" Carver asked, turning again to Kajika in time to see the man's eyes light up.
"Let me show you."
Kajika ducked out of the great room into the kitchen. The sound of a door opening and closing came from beyond.
"Something stinks," Wolfe said.
"You think he's involved?"
"Nah, but my gut still tells me something around here isn't Kosher."
The bang of the door off the kitchen silenced them. Kajika returned holding both hands cupped in front of his chest, what looked like a white string hanging from their union. Something squeaked inside. He squeezed the contents into one hand so he could pull a keychain from the front pocket of his jeans. The whiskered head of a mouse poked out of his fist. It squealed and tried to nip at his skin. He walked over to the custom aquarium, unlocked the latch, and opened the lid just far enough to drop the mouse through.
"Watch this," he said, beaming.
The diamondback's tongue flicked faster and it raised its head to peer down at the sand where the mouse scampered nervously against the cage wall, trying to scratch its way out.
"I don't understand how this has anything to do with--"
Kajika shushed him. "Just watch."
The rattler slithered down the rocks and resumed its coiled posture on the sand. Its rattle vibrated, a faint anticipatory buzz.
The mouse became frantic, racing and scratching faster and faster.
Slowly, the snake raised its head, drawing up its body into the shape of a swan's neck from the coils. It wavered, still tasting the mouse on its forked tongue.
Its neck flattened and expanded into a hood like a cobra.
"Dear God," Carver whispered.
A lightning strike and the mouse was on its side, legs twitching uselessly, crimson splotches spreading on its fur.
VI
Flagstaff, Arizona
Emil tossed his keys on the Spanish-tiled eating bar and produced a bottle of single-malt from the cupboard beneath. He poured two fingers and threw it back, swallowing the first slug and savoring the second. Shaking his head, he sighed and set the tumbler by the bottle, certain it would take more to chase away his stupidity. He had forsaken the sure thing in hopes of rectifying a past mistake. Stacey and Josie had both been disappointed when he had dropped them off at their cars where he had met them at the Park n' Ride. He'd seen it on their faces. They were both voracious in their own ways, and perhaps with the added element of danger brought on by the arrival of the FBI and the fact that their dig was instead the site of a mass murderer's burial, he could have bedded them together. What was he thinking? He supposed it was the fact that he'd never been with Elliot and the anticipation of her arrival had been building for days. She looked even better than he remembered, even after all these years. It had been a good idea to call her, even if it hadn't been his. At least now he was off the hook.
Or so he hoped.
He filled the glass halfway and walked into the living room. Maybe it wasn't too late to make a phone call. Or two.
Something was wrong. He noticed it immediately. Since his now ex-wife Leila had left, the house had taken on a more lived-in appearance. Some might call it cluttered, but he subscribed to the theory of a place for everything and everything in its place, whether that meant in a drawer, on the floor, or strewn across any available surface. The papers on his desk had been moved aside to reveal the oak grain and the keyboard hung out from beneath on its trolley.
He glanced around the room. The front door was still locked, the coat tree undisturbed. The staircase leading upstairs was deserted and what he could see of the hallway at the top was empty. The cushions on the suede couches were untouched, the coffee table a mess of trade journals.
The black leather chair at the computer hutch had been pulled back, the wheels no longer resting in the grooves in the carpet.
"Is someone in here?" His voice was small and meek in the vaulted room.
Leaning over the desk, he powered on the monitor and gasped.
There was a picture of him with a former student in a tenure-compromising position. His new screensaver faded to another image. A different student, her chin raised to expose her neck to his mouth, the sweat of their passion glistening on their faces.
They swore these pictures would be destroyed if he did what they asked. They promised!
The snapshot faded, and in the brief moment of darkness on the screen before the next shot materialized, he saw the reflection of a shadow behind him.
Emil whirled to face the shadow, silhouetted by the fluorescents from the kitchen beyond.
"You? What are you doing in my house?"
The shadow took a step forward and Emil staggered backwards, banging into the desk.
The phone rang from the kitchen.
"There's no way you could have beaten me here."
Something glinted in the shadow's hand.
"I did what you asked!" Emil screamed, scooting along the hutch until he met with the wall, cornering himself. "She's here, isn't she? I called her just like you asked. You saw so yourself. Just leave me--!"
A flash of steel silenced his protests.
An arc of scarlet patterned the monitor. Thin rivulets of blood drained over the image of the professor's face like tears onto the much younger woman beneath him.
The phone continued to ring.
VII
Verde River Reservation
Arizona
Kajika explained how he had found the body over iced tea at the table in the kitchen. Thinking he had stumbled upon a Sinagua burial, he had called the university instead of the police, and had followed with a call to the Diné Division of Natural Resources. There was nothing extraordinary about the story, but Carver couldn't shake the feeling that Kajika himself was of greater importance than the fact that he had made the discovery.
"My undergraduate degree was in Biochemistry at UCLA," Kajika said. He led them out the back door from the kitchen and along a fitted-stone pathway toward the weather-beaten aluminum outbuilding. "Two doctorates in Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Human Genetics from Stanford. After that I spent a couple years working as a genetic counselor for the Center for Perinatal Studies at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle to save up some money. I lucked into a couple fat research grants, which I used to buy my equipment, then turned around and used the equipment as collateral against an even fatter business loan."
He paused at the locked door to fish out his keys.
Solid concrete walls showed through the rusted seams of the corrugated aluminum sheets.
Kajika opened the door and guided them into a small tiled room. Machinery whirred all around them and there was the hum of forced air.
"You're a man of many secrets," Wolfe said.
Kajika toggled a series of switches and the overhead lights snapped on, revealing that the entire back half of the building was shielded from them by a thick wall of Plexiglas. Beyond was a laboratory reminiscent of the one at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, though on a much more intimate scale. Everything shone of stainless steel from the workstations to the tables and storage racks to the hoods on the ceiling, which drew the air from the room.
"You made that snake here?" Carver asked.
"I call it a Quetzalcoatl, which means plumed serpent, after the Aztec snake-god of intelligence."
"Is that what your company did?"
"Kind of." Kajika shrugged. "Though nothing quite so exotic. This is just for fun now."
"Why did you go out of business?"
"We didn't fold. I sold the place. Made a killing. Besides, the time was right. Not only did I have personal issues that demanded my attention here, I think I reached the burnout point as well. Man, the money was great and everything, but I was spending all my time on the administrative and financial portions of the job and not enough time working under the hood. That's the whole reason I went into genetics in the first place. I wanted to stare God in the eye, open Pandora's box and share all her dirty little secrets. Now we have all these regulations and legislations. You can't engineer a train without protests from PETA and Greenpeace. I mean, we developed a variant of the Chinook salmon that matured faster and averaged nearly fifty pounds at two years, which effectively cut the impact of commercial fishing on the wild population by half. We even--"
"Salmon?" Carver blurted. His heart felt like it had stopped beating. "What was your company's name?"
"HydroGen. I thought it was pretty clever. Hydro... water. Gen...genetics. Hydrogen. Get it?"
Carver had to brace himself against the wall to slow the spinning of the room.
"Are you all right?" Kajika asked.
Carver looked at Wolfe, whose face registered the same expression of surprise.
"You knew Tobin Schwartz," he finally said.
"Knew?"
"What do you know about him?"
"Tobin and I go back to grad school. Did something happen to him?"
The link between the two cases had been intangible before, based on supposition and intuition, but now there was no denying it. Could Schwartz have killed the victims they were only now digging out of the sand so many years ago? It wasn't like a serial killer to change his modus operandi. The girls in Colorado and Wyoming had been butchered with complete lack of regard for their physical vessels, while the killer down here had gone to insane lengths to preserve them in precise, ritualistic fashion. His gut said the killers couldn't be the same person. Or could they? Schwartz had been schizophrenic. Was it so unreasonable to think that his damaged psyche could have split into two distinct personalities capable of mass murder? That theory just didn't ring true. One method was an expression of passion, rage, the other the almost clinical approach of an organized mind. Somehow Kajika tied what he believed to be two killers together. That, and the other undeniable connection.