The Shape Shifter (15 page)

“I’m thinking about maybe just a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Something sweet.”

“I presume from that you didn’t drive all the way out here just for a fancy Crownpoint luncheon then,” Rostic said. “And I am very eager to learn what aroused your interest, after all these years, into the cremation of ole Ray Shewnack.”

A waiter had arrived, a Navajo boy in his teens, who brought them each a glass of water, and took Rostic’s hamburger order. “Hamburger for me, too,” Leaphorn said. “And a doughnut.”

“Doughnut for me, too. What kind?”

“The fattest one,” Leaphorn said, “with frosting on it.”

“What aroused our interest in that fire, as I remember, was a call from the New Mexico State Police, who had a call from the McKinley County sheriff’s office, that someone had called from Totter’s Trading Post, said they THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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had a man burned to death out there, and that this dead fellow might be someone on our Most-Wanted list. So I, being the newest man in the New Mexico side of our Gallup office, got sent out to look into it.” Leaphorn sipped his water, waiting for Rostic to add to that. But Rostic was awaiting a Leaphorn question. He occupied himself staring at Leaphorn.

“Well,” Leaphorn said. “Did the caller explain why he thought the dead man was a noted fugitive?”

“It was a woman. The first caller, I mean. Time it got to me the story was thirdhand. Actually fourth. Woman told sheriff’s office, who called state police, who called Gallup FBI office, from which I get the message. But apparently this burned man had a bunch of those Wanted posters in a folder on the seat of his car, or somewhere.

Collected from here and there.”

Leaphorn nodded, considering this. “Just Shewnack posters, I presume?”

Rostic laughed. “I know what you’re thinking. Some creepy people might just collect Wanted posters. But who, who but Shewnack himself, would just collect Shewnack posters? They didn’t even have the usual photograph on them.”

“Oh?”

“Because we never got a photograph of the slippery bastard. He was never arrested, at least not under that name. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anybody in the bureau who ever actually identified the bastard. Always seemed to pick places without surveillance video or many people around to do his robbing. Crime scene people would collect all sorts of fingerprints. Most of them would be people who worked there, others would be unidentifi-136

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able. Maybe Shewnack, maybe a customer. After it began looking like this guy was a genuine serial bandit, the lab went back and tried to do comparisons on the various crime scene sets.” Rostic laughed, made a dismissing gesture.

“In fact,” he said, “got to be sort of a hobby for some of the old timers who had time on their hands. Compar-ing crime scene stuff. Huge job, and finally they came up with one set that showed up in four places.” Rostic was grinning as he recounted the details of this. “Then they finally nailed the guy with the fingerprints. Turned out he was a salesman who took orders at all those places. I sort of made a hobby of it myself, since this Shewnack business was my first really weird one. I finally found an old-timer retired from CIA special operations who thought he knew this bird’s real name. Or at least one that went all the way back before our famous Handy’s affair.”

Their hamburgers arrived, plus the doughnuts and refills of their coffee cups. Leaphorn took a careful bite, waiting. Not wanting to break Rostic’s chain of thought, anxious to hear Rostic’s statement concluded. The pastry was good. Not quite up to Dunkin’ Donuts’ high standards, but very tasty. Coffee was good, too. He sipped.

“Another name? Another identity?”

“Just bureau gossip, of course. You know. The bureau knocking the agency. FBI finding ways to offset the CIA’s looking down its lofty secretive noses at the bureau.” Leaphorn smiled. Nodded. “Yeah. The word was this Shewnack was CIA?”

Rostic depreciated his gossip with a shrug. “Had been, anyway. The way it went he was a guy in the early THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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stages of those special operations deals in Vietnam. Back when the Kennedy group had decided that President Diem wasn’t cutting it and that little bunch of South Viet generals were being lined up for the coup. Remember that?”

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “Diem was ousted, but it didn’t seem to be a very slick operation. Or very secret either.”

“Far from it. Lots of CIA careers dented. Lots of bad political fallout. Little bits of bad stuff started leak-ing out of cracks later, when people were quitting. And one of the bad-news items was about a special ops guy running something in the mountains, in Laos, I think it was. Anyway, the story was that the ARVN generals he was delivering the money bags to, they started claiming that they’d been shorted in their share of the payoff.

Amounted to a lot of money. The guy who was telling me said it amounted to better than eight hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow,” Leaphorn said. “I picked up that gossip before, but the tale I heard didn’t have the dollar amount with it.”

“Probably exaggerated,” Rostic said. Anyway, the bird supposed to have the sticky fingers was, was . . . let me put it this way. He was George Perkins then, but he was showing that shrewdness that made Shewnack our Most-Wanted hero. He rigged it up so he left the proper memos, notes, etc., in all the right files so he could present the CIA brass with an unpleasant choice. They could lock him up and watch him try to demonstrate to all who would listen that all he did was heroically deliver the taxpayers’ money to a bunch of corrupt ARVN generals. Generals who, it seemed to Perkins, must be splitting the loot
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back with the CIA accountants. And yes indeed, he would be perfectly willing to testify and help the taxpayers recover their money from these villains.”

“Let me guess,” Leaphorn said. “So they said, ‘Oh, well, boys will be boys. You resign, and we’ll put such little things behind us.’ ”

Rostic laughed. “Leaphorn,” he said, “you have been there in the J. Edgar Hoover building, and you understand how federal law enforcement bureaucracy works.”

“But I don’t understand how this connects with Shewnack. Or any of the rest of this.”

“Well, nobody could ever prove there is any connection,” Rostic said. “But the shrewd way he made the money sort of disappear reminded me of the way he planned things. And then, according to my gossip, this guy shows up in Northern California, under some different name, no longer George Perkins. The FBI wouldn’t have minded seeing the CIA get its feathers burned, so it tried to keep a sort of halfway eye on him. Of course, the ex-Mr. Perkins, being an old, old hand at that game, seems to have caught on in a hurry. Maybe he was already calling himself Ray Shewnack. Anyway, the bureau lost track of him.”

Rostic shrugged, considered what he’d been saying, then went on. “But the timing was right. I mean, the sort of slick Shewnack-type jobs happened a time or two. And then when I think the agency was catching on and checking, Perkins seems to have sensed he was being looked at by the FBI. He just disappeared. Next thing you know, a couple of crimes turned up in New Mexico that reminded the bureau of Shewnack jobs in California. And then the double murder of the Handy couple, with the slick setup THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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that left fall guys behind, and absolutely no witnesses or fingerprints. By then that Shewnack MO was familiar.”

“But no actual physical evidence?”

“No, nary a trace that I’ve heard about.”

“You’re an old hand in this business. What do you think?”

“I would imagine that Shewnack might have previously been George Perkins, or who knows who else. But I would also bet nobody is ever going to know for sure. My trouble is I had the bad luck of getting sent over to check on that Totter fire, and there the bastard was, all burned up, and I got stuck with him. And he’s such a spectacu-larly evil son of a bitch that he’s hard to forget.”

“What I’d like you to do,” said Leaphorn, “is sort of give me a picture of what happened when you got to Totter’s place.”

Rostic thought. Nodded. “Two cops already there. A sheriff’s deputy and a state policeman. My only business, as a federal, would be if the burned man was wanted for a federal crime. So I looked at the corpse. They’d moved it out of that burned-up gallery place and laid it out on the trading post floor.” He grimaced. “I guess you guys see a lot of violent scenes, but we’re more into the white-collar crimes. I can still see that bunch of baked meat and scorched bones in my dreams. So then they showed me the folder full of posters. Eleven of them, with a note on the bottom of each naming where it came from. There was Farmington, New Mexico, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Tucson, Los Angeles, and so forth. Eleven different places. But all of them from western states.”

“Enough to make you suspicious.”

“More than that,” Rostic said. “I call in the list of
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places. Gallup checked the files on Shewnack. Six of the eleven had the sort of out-of-the-way robberies that fit our idea of Shewnack’s mode of operations. When they checked later, the other seven looked like they fit, too.”

“You mean the same MO?” Leaphorn asked. “Carefully planned. No fingerprints left behind. Places with no security cameras. Relatively small communities? And how about leaving accomplices behind to take the rap?”

“That, too, in some of them.”

“Were there any live witnesses left in any of those?” Rostic laughed. “How come you waited so long to ask about leaving witnesses behind? Of course he didn’t.” Leaphorn sighed, feeling sort of sick. “I guess I didn’t want to hear it.”

“I can’t blame you. In most cases it worked pretty much like the Handy robbery. If they got a good look at him, he shot ’em.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Usually twice. The dead tell no tales.”

“A very careful man from what little I know about him,” Leaphorn said. “Did it make you wonder why he’d left those Wanted posters out on the front seat of his car?”

Rostic looked thoughtful. “No, not then, but now that you mention it, you’d think he’d have tucked them away out of sight. Most likely packed in with his stuff locked up in the car trunk.”

“That was going to be one of my questions. Had Totter, or the fire department boys, or the other cops gotten all that out by the time you got there?”

“No. They’d broken one of those wing windows to reach in and get that folder with the posters in it, but the THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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car was still locked. When we got the call, Delbert James was in charge, and he told the sheriff that if the victim was Shewnack, it was very important, and he should make damn sure everything was secure and not messed with until we could take over.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“I see you grinning,” Rostic said, and laughed. “I know how you local cops feel about that. To tell the truth, I can’t say I blame you. The feds come in, take over, screw everything up because they don’t know the territory. They take the credit if a bust gets made, and if it doesn’t they write up reports on how the locals made all the mistakes.”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “But we don’t blame it on you guys doing the work. We blame it on the Washington poli-ticians looking over your shoulders.”

“As you should,” Rostic said. “They’re the ones we blame.”

“And sometimes we notice we’ll be dealing with a special agent who just got in from Miami, or from Portland, Maine, and he’s giving our people directions when—” Leaphorn cut that complaint short, noticing that even now just thinking of the couple of horrible examples he was about to use was causing him to lose his temper.

“I can finish that for you,” Rostic said. “We’re giving your people directions when this is the first time we’ve set foot on the reservations, and if we wanted to get to Window Rock we’d have to ask what road to take.”

“Something like that,” Leaphorn said.

“Or as Captain Largo often told me, ‘It ain’t that we think you federals are plain stupid. It’s just that you don’t know nothing yet. It’s the total absolute invincible ignorance that trips you up.’”

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“That’s about it,” Leaphorn said, chuckling at Rostic’s imitation of Largo’s emphatic way of expressing himself.

“But right now I am very glad you did take over and made sure nobody got into whatever Shewnack had locked safely away in his car trunk.”

“He had some things locked in the glove compart-ment, too. One particularly useful item. An almost empty pint bottle of cognac. Very expensive stuff.” Rostic was smiling as he related this. “And being glass, a gold mine of the very first fingerprints we ever had of the murder-ous bastard.”

“Wonderful,” Leaphorn said. “This is just exactly what I hoped you could tell me. And how did they match with the prints the bureau must have collected from all those other places where you had noticed his MO.”

“Also got prints off his stuff in the car trunk. And other evidence, too. For example, a fancy little gold-trimmed paper weight that had been part of the loot in a convenience story robbery in Tulsa. And an expensive little leather zipper bag that still had the Salt Lake City victim’s name and address stitched in the lining. Couple of other things, too. A pair of those fancy soft-soled shoes good for sneaking up on people with, and which leave that soft rubber streak on hard floors if you’re not careful. The rubber matches what the crime scene boys had scraped up from the floor at the Tucson killing.”

“Sort of like he kept souvenirs of his crimes,” Leaphorn said. “How about money? Sergeant Garcia went out to the Totter fire site and found that Delonie there.”

“The assistant bandit at Handy’s?”

“Yeah. He was out on parole. He told us he’d heard Shewnack had burned up there, and he figured, slick THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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as Shewnack was, he would have hidden the loot from his latest robbery somewhere. And Delonie was digging around, looking for it. He said he hadn’t found anything.”

“Neither did we,” Rostic said. “We had the same idea.