Indian Killer (18 page)

“Oh, shit, of course. I remember you. The rookie. Lost your breakfast.” Wilson blushed. “Shit, that case is low priority, rook. One dead Indian don’t add up to much. Some other Indian guy killed her, you know. Happens all the time. Those people are like that. You ask me, it’s pest control.”

“Sir, I don’t think so.” Wilson fought the urge to punch the detective.

“You don’t think what, rook?”

“I know those people, sir. The Indians. They’re my people. They wouldn’t hurt each other. We’re not like that.”

“How the hell are they your people?”

“I’m Indian, sir.”

The detective looked at Wilson’s blue eyes and blond hair. Wilson was tall, six foot, but slight of build. The detective laughed. Indian, my ass, he thought.

“Okay, Sitting Bull,” said the detective, “I’m happy you’re so proud of your people. But it’s still low priority. You want to look into it, be my guest.”

“I just might do that, sir.”

The detective patted Wilson on the head, as if he were a dog, and walked away, laughing to himself. “Indian,” he said and laughed some more.

Wilson tried to talk to the Pioneer Square Indians, Old Joe and Little Joe, Agnes and Old Man, the Android Brothers, but they refused to give him any answers about Beautiful Mary’s murder.

Wilson eventually arrested a homeless white man named Stink and brought him in. The detective who had dismissed Wilson took over the case, led Stink into an interrogation room, and obtained a confession.

Stink hung himself in his cell that night, before he ever had a chance to go to trial, and Wilson was issued a small, vaguely insulting commendation for his “valuable assistance” in solving the crime. But Wilson had earned some respect, and he made detective in 1980. Working homicide, he quickly learned that monsters are real. He also knew that most of the monsters were white men. Plain, quiet men who raped and murdered children. Plain, quiet men who cut women into pieces. Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer. Famous killers, obscure killers. The white man who grabbed his infant son by the ankles and smashed his head against the wall. The white man who doused his sleeping girlfriend with gasoline and then dropped a lit match on her face. While black and brown men were at war with each other, their automatic gunfire filling the urban night, the white men were hunting their own mothers, lovers, and daughters. Wilson never grew numb to any of it. Every Sunday, he knelt at a pew and confessed the sins of others. He worked hard, helped solve more than half of his cases, and slept poorly at night. His record was distinguished only by the small number of days he called in sick. While the other detectives had families and outside interests, Wilson had only his tribe of monsters. Wilson worked homicide for eight years before he injured his knee while on duty. He stepped out of his car near the end of his shift, slipped on oily pavement, and tore a couple of ligaments all to hell. He was desk-bound for a year, all the while in fruitless rehabilitation of his knee. Finally, he retired on a full disability pension. Since he had never married, or even been in love, he wound up alone in his little apartment on Capitol Hill.

A year into his retirement, after another boring Monday Night Football game, he was forced to weigh his options as a middle-aged, lonely ex-cop. Somehow, he found himself missing the monsters. He had no idea how that happened, but he knew he needed something to fill the hole that had opened inside himself. He could become a drunk, spend all his time in one of the cop bars, and get free beer and pity from active officers. He could sink into a deep depression, swallow the barrel of his revolver, and be buried with full honors. Or he could do something. He could, for example, sit down and write. Now, he had never written before, but he had always been good with a story, had always loved books. So he bought the most expensive typewriter he could find, because real writers didn’t work on computers. He brought the typewriter back to his apartment and began to type.

His first book, titled
Little Hawk
, was published by a small local press. It received fairly decent reviews and sold a few thousand copies, so Wilson was hooked. Wilson’s second book,
Rain Dance
, based on the murder of Beautiful Mary, was released a year later and became a regional best-seller. Both of Wilson’s books starred Aristotle Little Hawk, the very last Shilshomish Indian, who was a practicing medicine man and private detective in Seattle. He was tall, so tall, according to the first paragraph of
Little Hawk
, that his long, black hair was taller than most people all by itself. Little Hawk was brutally handsome, of course, with a hawkish nose, walnut skin, and dark eyes.

A beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk in each book, although he was emotionally distant and troubled. The beautiful white women fell in love with Little Hawk because he was emotionally distant and troubled. White women wrote letters to Wilson and confessed their secret love for Little Hawk. They wished they could find a man like Little Hawk, a quiet warrior with a good heart. Wilson knew it was all sort of ridiculous, but he loved the money and attention. Fan letters, small articles in the local newspapers, a three-minute interview on public radio. His fellow officers thought he had become rich and famous, so he went out and bought a brand-new 1994 Chevy pickup with a vanity license plate that read
SHAMAN
.

Lately, a New York literary agent had signed him up.

“Indians are big right now,” said Rupert, the agent. “Publishers are looking for that shaman thing, you know? The New Age stuff, after-death experiences, the healing arts, talking animals, sacred vortexes, that kind of thing. And you’ve got all that, plus a murder mystery. That’s perfect.”

Rupert had gotten Wilson a deal with a New York publisher for his third book, which he had yet to write. His modest success had him struggling with writer’s block. Every morning, he woke up early, ate his breakfast, and stared at the blank page in his typewriter. He had spent most of the advance money, and his agent and publisher were putting pressure on him to finish.

“How’s the book coming along?” asked Rupert.

“It’s going well,” said Wilson, lying.

“They want to publish in the fall,” said Rupert. “You think you can finish in time?”

“Sure,” said Wilson. After he hung up the phone, he suddenly felt dizzy and nearly passed out. He needed help.

Trying to relax, Wilson drove over to the Seattle Police Department’s Fourth Precinct on Second Avenue, his old haunt. He parked in a reserved space, but all the officers recognized his vanity plates and never had him towed. He limped into the precinct, still blue-eyed and blond, although he had put on forty pounds in the last couple of years. He was forty-seven years old, bulky, and working on an ulcer.

“Hey there, Mr. Mystery,” said the desk sergeant, who often felt sorry for Wilson. The sergeant thought Wilson spent entirely too much time at the precinct, as if he were a twenty-two-year-old former high school football star who still went to games because he had nothing else to do. “How you doing?”

“Doing fine, doing fine,” Wilson said. “What have you got?”

Wilson depended on the desk sergeant for inside information. The sergeant never gave him anything important, really, just interesting details that might find their way into his books. The first Little Hawk mystery was based on a true case of what some might put down to spontaneous combustion. An elderly woman had simply turned to ash while watching television in her apartment. There was no rational explanation for it, no hint of foul play. She had been sitting in a chair that also should have gone up in flames. But the chair was just a little charred, mostly intact, and covered with her ash. In the book, the victim was a gorgeous fashion model. In real life, the old lady’s case was quietly filed away and never mentioned again. In the book, Little Hawk caught the murderer, an ex-fireman who’d been spurned by the model. The dead model’s best friend, an even more beautiful and successful model, had fallen in love with Little Hawk.

“I’ve got a good one for you,” said the desk sergeant, wanting to give Wilson something more substantial than he’d given him before. “But you’ve got to keep this one way under your hat.”

“I don’t wear a hat,” said Wilson. It was an old joke between the two men.

“Well, then, keep it in your shorts,” said the sergeant, finishing the joke.

“What is it?”

“You heard about that white guy they found dead the other day?”

“David Rogers?” asked Wilson, who knew about the white man’s disappearance from the Tulalip Tribal Casino. Wilson kept a neat file of newspaper clippings about such crimes.

“No, not him,” said the sergeant. “He’s still missing. I’m talking about the other one. The one they found in that house in Fremont.”

“Yeah, the Summers guy, what about him?”

“Well,” said the sergeant, glancing around to make sure nobody could hear him. Everybody in the precinct knew he gave Wilson inside information, but he’d never before revealed details about an open case. “The killer left two feathers behind. Like a signature or something.”

“Feathers?” Wilson blinked once or twice. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? Feathers. Like as in Indian feathers, you know? But I can’t tell you what kind. We can’t go public with that. The city would go crazy.”

“Really?”

“Really. I thought that would interest you. Kind of right up your alley, ain’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Wilson.

“And that UW student, David Rogers, who disappeared from the Indian casino? I won’t say the killer did that one, but we’re looking real closely at it. And you know that kid, Mark Jones, the one who was kidnapped?”

“Yes.”

“This killer took him.”

“How do you know that?”

“The killer left behind two feathers on that little boy’s bed. Hell, we haven’t even told his parents what those feathers mean. What do you think they’d do if they knew about the killer?”

“Go crazy.”

“Yeah. And this killer’s got a name. You want to hear it?”

Wilson nodded. He knew that police officers and newspaper reporters loved to give clever names to the monsters.

“We’re calling him the Indian Killer. Good, ain’t it? Now get the hell out of here before I get in trouble.”

Wilson smiled.

“See you, Sarge,” said Wilson. As he left the precinct, Wilson could almost see Aristotle Little Hawk sitting on the passenger side as he climbed into his truck. Aristotle and the Indian Killer. Wilson could see the knife separating scalp from skull.

“M
RS. JONES, I KNOW
this is a painful experience for you, but we need to go over it again.”

“I’ve told you everything I can remember.”

“Can we please reconstruct the events one more time?”

“I’ve told you. I came home from work.”

“At what time?”

“A little after six. I usually get home a little after six. Then I walked into the house, and Mark and Sarah, the nanny, were watching television.”

“What were they watching?”

“Some superhero show, I think. I just went right into the kitchen to make dinner and Sarah went home.”

“And where was Mark at this time?”

“I told you, he was watching television.”

“Now, what time did the nanny, Sarah, leave the house?”

“I don’t know. Twenty after six, something like that.”

“Okay, and what were you doing at that time?”

“I was making dinner.”

“And what were you preparing?”

“Shit, I don’t remember.”

“Okay, okay, and then what happened?”

“I got Mark ready for bed, read him a couple stories, and then he went to sleep.”

“And then what happened?”

“I went to sleep.”

“Okay, and what do you sleep in?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you sleep in a T-shirt, a nightgown, what?”

“Why is that important?”

“Well, there might be fiber evidence. Trace materials, you know?”

“Really? Well, I sleep in the nude.”

“Naked?”

“Yes, you have a problem with that?”

“None at all. Does your husband sleep in the nude?”

“Sometimes. But since he was in Japan at the time, I have no idea what he was wearing.”

“Okay, so you went to sleep. And then?”

“And then I was asleep.”

“Where was Mark?”

“He was asleep in his bed.”

“And then?”

“Shit, how many times do I have to tell you this? I woke up in the middle of the night and knew something was wrong. At first, I thought there must have been an earthquake. I mean, I used to live in southern California, so I know that feeling. But everything was still. And I was scared. So I went into Mark’s bedroom to check on him.”

“In the nude?”

“Of course not.”

“And what did you find in Mark’s bedroom?”

“Nothing. He was gone. But I saw the feathers. Two of them.”

“And what time was this?”

“I don’t know. Do we have to keep going through this? I mean, are you trying to find my son or not? And what the hell were those feathers about?”

“Mrs. Jones, we’re doing our best. Now, is it true that Mark has had some discipline problems at school?”

“Yes, but they have nothing to do with this.”

“But he’s been in a few altercations?”

“Yes, he has.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“He’s a six-year-old boy. They have altercations.”

“I’m sure. And how is your relationship with your husband?”

“It’s fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Is there any reason you can think of that Mark might have run away? Have you checked with all your friends and relatives who live in the area?”

“Mark didn’t run away. Somebody took him.”

“Mrs. Jones, do you know of anybody who might want to hurt Mark? Or take him?”

“No. Don’t
you
know?”

“Well, there are certain other crimes that may be connected to your son’s disappearance.”

“Listen, I want to know: what kind of monster do you think would take somebody’s child?”