Read Death Along the Spirit Road Online
Authors: C. M. Wendelboe
Death Along the Spirit Road (34 page)
Lumpy looked happier over solving the stolen truck case than clearing both cases of assault, the hammer and the truck.
“I missed the signs,” Willie said. “How could I have missed the signs?”
“Easy,” Lumpy said. “Folks got used to seeing Elizabeth around. Sometimes running, sometimes doing things job-related. No one connected her.” Manny detected a bit of humanity in Lumpy’s voice as he tried to let Willie off the hook. “She was like the UPS delivery man no one sees because he’s always there, or the wino that’s always passed out along the curb. No one notices them after a while.”
“He’s right.” Manny refilled their coffee, and poured Lumpy a cup as well. “We’re just now getting reports that people saw her running to Reuben’s jobsite. They saw her, but they didn’t connect her with the stolen truck.”
“The night she attacked Manny with the hammer, she ran into town,” Lumpy added. “She always ran along the road, day or night, and people were used to seeing her.”
Willie held his head. His eyes burned red from crying during the interview. Elizabeth was more his mother than his aunt, and she’d just confessed to attacking Manny with the hammer and trying to kill him by running him off the road in the stolen truck. His life would never be right again.
“But why the charade about shopping with Rachael Thompson?”
“Too easy to verify or refute,” Manny suggested. “Elizabeth knew that no one would question Rachael Thompson. And no one did until I drove to Martin today and talked with her. As for the truck, Elizabeth knew—through you—that one or more of the Heritage Kids was suspected in the ambush at my apartment. What better way to misdirect than to make us think one of Reuben’s kids stole the truck right off their own jobsite.”
Willie’s eyes dropped, but Manny was quick to prop him up. “It’s not your fault. She fooled me, too. There’s just no good news today.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Lumpy said. He rose slowly and refilled his cup, then put the pot back on the burner without refilling theirs. “We matched the tires on Crazy George’s car to those found at Jason’s murder.” He smirked as if vindicated for Manny’s earlier implication about his own car tires.
“Any match with the latents?”
Lumpy frowned. “We lifted enough partials to know the driver didn’t care if we found them or not. Just not enough points to ID anyone.”
“Smudged?”
“Who knows, the evidence tech just couldn’t pull enough points.”
“Then do something for me,” Manny asked. “Tomorrow, have your tech pull Jack and Lenny Little Boy’s prints. Ricky Bell’s, too. See if anything comes close to matching the prints found in Crazy George’s car.”
Lumpy nodded. “That I can do.”
Manny stood and stretched, his exhaustion reaching a new level. “As for me, I’ve had about as much fun as I can stand for one night. Take me home, please.”
On the way to Manny’s apartment, Willie remained quiet, and Manny knew the guilt was gnawing at him. “You couldn’t have stopped her. Elizabeth chose to do what she did.”
“But I should have seen it coming.” Willie stared out the window. “I told her everything we did these last few days. I might as well have given her my incident reports, passed my field notes to her. I trusted her. And she stabbed me in the back.”
“She felt she had to protect Erica.”
“Does Erica need protecting?”
“No,” Manny answered instantly. “Elizabeth had it in her mind that Erica knew all along about the embezzlement of the tribe’s funds, but when I talked with Erica about it, she hesitated. I plan to have one of the Rapid City agents reinterview her, but I’m certain Elizabeth had it all wrong about her own daughter.”
“Do you think Aunt Lizzy knew there was no Clifford Coyote?” he said, barely audible.
Manny nodded. “She knows. When I confronted her about it, she hesitated. She admitted that the big fight with Jason in her office a week before he was killed was over Jason’s demanding Coyote’s physical address. She caught him rooting through her files trying to find it. He might have gotten it if she hadn’t threatened him with the same gun she held on me. She knows. Jason sent Coyote checks to his Pine Ridge PO box all those years. Elizabeth picked up the checks and deposited them into her Edgemont Bank account, then drew cash. She knows who and where Clifford Coyote is, if he even exists. But we’ll never break her down.”
“What’ll happen to her now?”
Willie had all but lost his family, and Manny wished he had words of comfort to give, but he had none. “She’ll be psychiatrically evaluated. Her mental condition will preclude her from standing trial for the attempted murder charge and the assault charges, but she’ll need help. The best you can do for her is to be there for her, despite her betrayal.”
Tears formed at the corners of Willie’s eyes, and Manny hurried to get out of the car. The last thing Willie needed right about now was for Manny to see him crying again.
Manny squinted in the dark and jabbed the key into the apartment lock. The door swung in, unlocked. Manny froze and strained to hear anything inside. Anger replaced fear as he realized Desirée may have used her key to get in again. She could be inside, waiting for him in some provocative pose.
Scraping noises came from the bedroom. Or was it crying? He reached for the gun and cursed under his breath for letting it be seized after the chase. Manny crouched and pain tore through his chest as his breathing became increasingly labored. His hand felt for the light switch. Stopped. Whimpering came from the bedroom, pained whimpering, followed by muffled sounds.
Manny groped in the dark and his hand found the upright ashtray made from an old aluminum piston, and he silently thanked Lumpy for furnishing the apartment in Old-West-slum. He hefted it close to the base, felt the power he could wield. He duckwalked toward the bedroom, and his foot kicked the coffee table. A woman cried from behind the closed door. Manny stood and his hand found the light switch just as someone rushed him. Light reflected off a knife thrust at his throat. Manny jerked back and swung the ashtray as light flooded the room. The piston glanced off Jack Little Boy’s shoulder, and he staggered before he disappeared outside.
Manny hobbled to the door and peeked around the corner. Jack was gone, but crying rose from the bedroom again. He eased himself along the wall and buttonhooked the door. Desirée Chasing Hawk lay on the bed, her hands tied with sash cord, and duct tape held a pair of Manny’s socks in her mouth. He ran to her and peeled the tape from her mouth and untied the cord that bound her hands.
She threw her arms around him, and he gently pulled her away to examine her injuries. One of her eyes had closed shut from swelling, and her lower lip protruded where blood pooled from a blow. “He said he’d kill me if I made any noise.”
Manny eased Desirée back on the bed. He called 911 before he grabbed a cool, wet washcloth and began dabbing at her lip and eye. “He was going to kill you.”
“Tell me later, after the EMTs transport you to the hospital.”
“No!” She snatched the cloth away. “He’s crazy and I need to tell you this. He wants you bad.” She brushed hair out of her eyes and wiped her bloody nose with the back of her hand. “I used the key Leon gave me to come in tonight. I looked real good. Had my hair fixed. Makeup just right. Though you wouldn’t know it now.”
Manny smiled. “You look just fine.”
She winced in pain as she forced a smile. “As soon as I flipped on the light, he grabbed me. He was waiting here for you with that damned big knife. And for sport I guess he passed the time working me over. Way I figure it, he’d have killed us both and been off the rez before our bodies were found.”
Manny nodded as sirens approached. “We’ll get him. What you gotta do now is get better.”
“But he’ll come after me again.” Desirée sobbed and buried her face in Manny’s shoulder. “I’m afraid.”
“I’ll get Lumpy to post a guard at the hospital. We’ll find him.”
An EMT burst through the door toting his jump bag. He glanced at Manny in passing as he pushed him aside, and he knelt beside Desirée and started assessing her injuries as another EMT maneuvered a gurney through the door.
Manny used the edge of the coffee table to stand, and he watched as Desirée squirmed when the EMT prodded her for injuries. Yesterday she was a manipulating, conniving woman who wanted to wrap Manny around her little finger and get whatever she wanted from him. Now she lay as a victim in need of his empathy. And his concern.
CHAPTER 19
Manny dreamed of days on Pine Ridge when he was a boy, and days of the Lakota before he was born, when all a warrior had to worry about was where to store all his surplus buffalo meat for the winter, or when he would next count coup on a Crow or Pawnee.
Then the figure that had haunted his vision reappeared and beckoned with his bony hand. Manny knew that following the dream figure could be dangerous, even fatal. The spirit of the man who taunted him yet lived, and this
wanagi
would do what he could to entice Manny into the dark part of the afterworld where he didn’t want to go.
wanagi
would do what he could to entice Manny into the dark part of the afterworld where he didn’t want to go.
Danger followed the spirit, but the warrior lured him to crawl from his dream bed and go with him. Manny took two steps when his cell phone rang. He startled awake, sweat dripping from his nose and his face, and he fumbled for the phone on the nightstand.
“Bob Andrews here. Minneapolis Office.” It took a moment for Manny to clear his head and connect Andrews to the homicide investigation. After the “Alex” letter Clara had given him had been processed for prints, Manny sent out an Attempt To Locate for matching prints to FBI field offices in the five-state region. “We’ve got a positive match on your latents. They came back to an Alex Jumping Bull.”
Chief Horn thought that Alex Jumping Bull might still be alive, that he might have fled the reservation when Reuben killed Billy Two Moons. This might be the same Alex Jumping Bull, alive and not murdered that night with Two Moons. Manny just didn’t believe in coincidences.
“What kind of contacts you have with Jumping Bull?”
“Nothing since 1984,” Andrews answered. “It’s just dumb luck that a set of majors was sent in back then by the Hennepin County SO. Jumping Bull was arrested on a public intox charge where he told the booking officer he was Clifford Coyote. The detention officers got hinked by the way he acted, evasive when they asked him standard intake questions. They thought there was more to Mr. Coyote than what he was telling them so they rolled additional prints.”
“So Clifford Coyote is an alias for Alex Jumping Bull?” Manny asked as he realized his question had already been answered. “Can you put the grab on him?”
Andrews chuckled. “I can, but it would be a mighty cold grab. He was found shot to death in a south Minneapolis apartment.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. Coyote, or Jumping Bull, lived in a flea pad among other dregs. One of the upstairs tenants heard shots, but the meth-head was tweaking at the time and waited until he’d wound down to call the Minneapolis PD. He told them Jumping Bull had been shot five times.”
“Certain about the number of shots?”
“Quite. The witness is a Gulf War veteran. Meth-head or not, he knows his weapons. He said he thought it was so odd that the killer shot five times.”
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