Eye of the Wolf (10 page)

“He could be guilty.”

“Frankie? Enticed three men who claimed that he'd assaulted them out to an old battlefield in the wilderness and shot them? How'd he do that, Adam?”

“I'm telling you, the man had a motive, and the investigator's going to zero in on that.”

Vicky didn't say anything. She let her bag slide back onto the floor next to her boots and unbuttoned her coat, pushing the fronts back around her gray turtleneck sweater. It seemed hot all of a sudden, the warm air pouring out of the vents. She leaned forward and closed the vent blowing toward her.

“Don't worry.” Adam reached over and patted her hand. “Samantha'll do a fine job. She'll make the investigator prove his case every step of the way. Last night at dinner . . .”

“Dinner?” Vicky turned toward him. “You had dinner with her last night?”

Adam took his eyes from the highway and stared at her a moment. “A business dinner, Vicky.”

“Right.” Vicky heard her own voice, small. A half-voice. She turned her head to the passenger window and the snow flitting by.

“I have a lot of colleagues, Vicky. Many of them are women. We go to lunch and dinner. We talk business. Last night Samantha and I talked about building a new practice. She needs clients, and I assured her that we'll refer all we can. Is that okay with you?”

“Why wouldn't it be?” Vicky kept her eyes on the snow, struggling
to hold back the dam of memories flooding over her from that other time. Ben, coming home reeking of cheap perfume, the lipstick tubes in his jacket pockets, the hours out with the guys.
Just throwing back a few beers. For Chrissakes, Vicky, get off my back.
She tried to shut out the voice, but it rang inside her head. Of course Adam could have dinner with whomever he pleased. She didn't own him. She didn't own his time. And he wasn't Ben.

“I'm glad I have your permission,” Adam said.

They were in the western reaches of Lander now, and the snow had let up. Adam turned off the wipers, leaving a wide swath of gray residue on the windshield. Traffic crawled down the slushy street, and people hurried along the sidewalks, huddled inside hooded jackets.

“Look, Vicky,” Adam said, a conciliatory tone, “we're going to have our hands full with the wolf management plan. You can count on Samantha doing a good job for Frankie. She's very eager. Graduated at the top of her law-school class.”

“When was that?”

“I don't know. Two or three years ago. She spent a couple of years at a firm in Cheyenne.”

“So that makes her, what? Twenty-seven? How many murder suspects has she represented?”

“You're jumping to conclusions, Vicky. We don't know that Frankie's the only suspect.”

Adam made a left into the parking lot alongside the office building. He pulled into the space with the sign at the front that read Lone Eagle, turned off the ignition, and shifted toward her. Then he was running his fingers along the edge of her jaw, pushing back a strand of hair. “We'll have dinner tonight and leave the office behind. Just the two of us.”

Vicky pulled away from his hand, opened the door, and got out onto the snow-slicked pavement, lifting her bag after her. She grabbed her briefcase from behind the seat, aware of Adam outside the other door,
leaning down for his own briefcase. His wife had left him, he'd told her once, because he liked women too much.

Oh, God, she thought, starting across the parking lot toward the back door of the building. Adam Lone Eagle and Ben Holden, shadows of each other. From behind her came the sharp crack of the pickup door slamming shut.

SOMEWHERE IN THE
darkness a bell was ringing. Father John swam upward toward the clanging noise, flung out his hand, and groped for the alarm. It spun out of his grasp, and he patted at the surface of the nightstand until his fingers wrapped around the small plastic box. He pushed the top button, plunging the bedroom into silence, the faintest light from the streetlights tracing the blind. He swung out of bed, groggy from the half-sleep he'd been wandering through all night, images of the bodies at Bates still in his mind. Now there were names: Trent Hunter and two brothers, Rex and Joe Crispin.

The phone had started ringing in the late afternoon. It had rung all through the evening.
How come Shoshones got shot out at Bates?
Fear pulsated down the line.
Arapahos got massacred at Bates. Somebody's out looking for revenge
.

His own voice, saying the same thing over and over. Detective Burton would sort it out. They should try not to worry. And all the time, he was
thinking about the girl, Edie Bradbury, and the stricken look in her face when she'd told him that her boyfriend was missing, as if some part of her had known that he was dead. He'd found a number for her in the phone book and tried to call throughout the afternoon and evening—three, four times. There was no answer.

Now he squinted at the little red numbers on the clock: 5:30. It was his turn to say the six o'clock Mass. The elders and grandmothers who would be scattered about the pews were probably already on their way to the mission, headlights on battered pickups flashing through the darkness. He pushed himself onto his feet and made his way down the hall to the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later—coming alive after a shave and shower—Father John headed down the stairs. The steps creaked under his boots; the whole residence seemed to be groaning awake. He walked down the hall, flipping on light switches as he went. He could hear Walks-On's nails clicking on the vinyl floor in the kitchen. The dog stood at the back door, tail wagging, muzzle pushed against the wood panel. It had been almost four years since he'd found the golden retriever in the ditch beside Seventeen-Mile Road. He'd almost driven past—nothing more than a bunch of golden white straw. And yet . . . something was not right. He'd pulled over and run back to where the dog lay whimpering, his hind legs scraped and broken. The vet had managed to save his life, but not his mangled right hind leg.

“There you go, buddy.” Father John opened the door, followed the dog out onto the back porch, and yanked open the outside door. A wall of cold air fell over him. He watched the dog skitter down the ice-crusted steps, then lift his nose into the cold, and dart through the snow. Father John stared across the yard. In his mind's eye were the three bodies, frozen and gray.

He turned back into the kitchen, shook out some dry food into the dog's dish, and refilled his water. He hadn't been looking for a dog. He'd thought he'd be leaving St. Francis, back on his own career track, finishing up his doctorate, teaching at a university. What would he do with a dog?

He'd collected the dog at the vet's and brought him back to the mission. It was as if the dog had been looking for him. Even the old kitchen rug where he slept seemed to have been waiting for him to arrive. Father John had named him Walks-on-Three-Legs, a name of honor, in the Arapaho Way, for his courage, as if having only three legs wasn't a nuisance at all.

The dog was scraping at the outside door, and Father John went back onto the porch and let him in. He bounded past, took a right in the kitchen, and slid toward the dish of food. Father John shut both doors and, leaving the light on for Elena, who would be arriving at any moment, went down the hall and took his jacket off the coat tree. He was still pulling on the jacket as he crossed the grounds. Stalks of wild grasses were pushing up through the snow. The sky was a dark curtain, but in another thirty minutes, it would be on fire, bands of crimson and gold streaming across the eastern horizon and the sun an enormous red ball lifting out of the earth. Lights glowed through the stained glass windows in the church, but darkness clung to the other structures—museum and administration building. A few pickups stood in Circle Drive, and other vehicles were turning in to the mission. The morning was silent, except for an animal howling somewhere. For a moment, he wondered if the animal might be a wolf, and he thought again of the three dead men, shot to death and left in the wilderness.

He hurried up the steps to the church. Leonard Bizzel, the caretaker at St. Francis since long before Father John had arrived, had already brushed off the steps, so that a thin trace of snow glistened red and blue in the light seeping past the stained glass windows. He stepped into the vestibule and headed down the center aisle, nodding at the handful of parishioners kneeling in the pews. Light from the candles at the sides of the altar flickered across the brown faces that turned up to him as he passed. He stopped to genuflect in front of the tabernacle—a miniature tipi the grandmothers had sewn out of finely tanned white deerskin—and hurried to the sacristy where he found Leonard lifting the Mass books and the chalice from the cabinets.

“You hear that those dead men are Shoshones?” the man asked.

Father John said that he had heard. He draped his jacket over the back of a chair.

“What I can't figure out is what made 'em go out there? Shoshones stay away from Bates like it was haunted. Don't want the ghosts of any Arapahos coming for them. I hear the bodies was arranged so they looked like people killed in the old battles. That true?”

Father John took his white alb off the hanger and slipped it on over his shirt and blue jeans. Somebody at the site—deputy, coroner's officer—had probably told somebody else about the bodies, and the moccasin telegraph had flashed the news across the reservation in minutes. No wonder last night's callers were worried that somebody had killed the Shoshones for revenge.

He could feel Leonard watching him, waiting for an answer as he put on his stole and chasable. “It's possible,” he said.

“Come on, Father. Maybe people don't talk about the massacre, but we don't forget. Somebody might've decided it was time to make the Shoshones pay.”

Father John faced the other man. “Let's pray that's not the case,” he said. Because if it is the case, he was thinking, there would be a war between the two tribes.

He lifted the chalice and walked out to the altar, conscious of Leonard's footsteps padding after him. A few more people were in the pews, all working their way onto their feet amid the clunk of kneelers and the rustle of coats and bags. A cold draft floated like an invisible stream down the main aisle from the vestibule. He felt as if winter had set in again, pushing away the other seasons.

“Let us offer our Mass this morning for the souls of the men killed at Bates,” he began. “Let us also pray for their families. And for everyone who loved them,” he added, his thoughts moving to Edie Bradbury. “Let us pray that God in His mercy will give them the strength and the courage to go on.”

A hushed chorus of amens wafted toward him.

THE PINK LIGHT
of morning flooded the sky as Father John retraced his steps across the grounds. The residence was quiet, apart from the sound of subdued activity in the kitchen. He tossed his jacket onto the bench in the entry and walked down the hall, following the aromas of fresh coffee and sizzling oil. Elena stood at the stove, ladling pancake mix into a frying pan, back bent into the task.

“What's this?” Father John went over to the counter and poured himself a mug of coffee. “No oatmeal this morning?”

“You want the truth, Father?” Elena shot him a sideways glance. The woman was probably in her seventies—her age a closely guarded secret—part Cheyenne, part Arapaho, with wrinkles creasing her brown face and dark eyes shot through with light. “I'm pretty tired of cooking oatmeal.”

He stopped himself from saying he was pretty tired of eating it. “Pancakes look good.” He hoisted his mug toward the round globs of batter browning in the pan. The kitchen was filled with the hot, sweet smells. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down at the round table in the center of the room. The place across from him was vacant.

“Father Ian hasn't come down yet?”

“Haven't seen hide or hair of the man.”

It wasn't unusual, Father John thought. In the weeks since Ian McCauley had arrived, they'd eaten breakfast together only two or three times. Even on the mornings when Ian took the early Mass, he preferred to pour himself some coffee and retire to his room for “a little quiet time.”

“Knocked on his door a few minutes ago.” Elena arranged a stack of pancakes on a plate and set it in front of him. “Tol' him breakfast was ready. He said he wasn't hungry. Man doesn't eat enough to keep a chicken alive, even when he bothers to come to the table. Tol' him I'd bring him some Alka-Seltzer or aspirin, if he needed something.” She shrugged.

Father John dabbed margarine on the pancakes, then dribbled on some syrup, watching the margarine and syrup melt together into a stream that ran around the plate. “Thank you, Elena,” he said, smiling up at the old woman who stood next to the table, like a penitent waiting in line for the confessional. “Why don't you join me?” He motioned to the other priest's vacant place.

Elena turned back to the counter and poured another mug of coffee. “People are real upset about them dead Shoshones,” she said, dropping down across from him. “Looks like that fool Frankie Montana might've finally killed them, after all the harassing he's been doing. Now some fool Shoshone's liable to take after Arapahos. Soon's that happens, Arapahos are gonna be after revenge. Whole rez is gonna be taken over by fools, you ask me. Fools that ain't willing to let the past stay in its grave where it belongs.”

The woman sipped at her coffee a moment. “That fool Frankie's been a trial to his mother since the day he came into this world,” she said. “Nearly killed her doing that, and, you ask me, he's been trying to finish off the job ever since. Lucille can't see it, though. Thinks the sun twirls around that boy of hers.”

Father John took another bite of pancakes, then a sip of coffee. It didn't make sense. Frankie Montana was a hothead, the kind who acted first and thought about it later, if he thought about it at all. He might have shot the Shoshones in the parking lot at some bar, that Father John could believe. But take them out to Bates? Pose the bodies? Record a message that sounded like a robot? Deliberately leave clues? The murders had been calculated to reopen old wounds. They had been
planned.
Frankie wasn't the kind who made plans.

“What makes you think he killed the Shoshones?” Father John asked.

“ 'Cause he hated them.” Elena dipped her head and took a draw of coffee. “They was going to college, gonna make something of themselves. Red apples, Indians trying to be white. Guys like Frankie, they hate Indians like that. You ask me, that's why he wanted to make their
lives miserable. Make 'em pay for showing him up. That's why he shot 'em. They was supposed to go to tribal court Monday and show the judge how Frankie assaulted them. Only they didn't go, on account of they were dead.”

Father John drained the last of his coffee. “You think Frankie got the Shoshones out to the Bates Battlefield to kill them?”

“That's the part that gets me, Father. I don't know how Frankie would ever come up with that, unless he was looking to make all the Shoshones real mad. If that's what he wanted, I hear he's got it. Shoshones got together for a big meeting last night over at Fort Washakie.”

Dear Lord! Father John felt another stab of alarm. He got to his feet, picked up his plate and mug, and carried them to the sink. Behind him, Elena's chair scraped over the vinyl floor. He could hear the raspy inhalation of breath as she stood up.

He turned back to the old woman. “Try not to worry,” he said, patting her shoulder, wishing he could shake his own worry. It was part of him now, a second skin. He walked back down the hall, pulled on his jacket, and started across the grounds. The sun burned yellow in a pale gray sky. The killer had set some inexorable force into motion, he was thinking, like a wolf flushing out its prey.

He was almost at the administration building when he saw the white pickup emerge from the cottonwoods. He waited until the vehicle pulled up beside him, Andy Burton peering over the lowering window.

“Got a minute?” the detective called.

“Coffee's still hot at the residence.” Father John tossed his head back in the direction he'd just come from.