Pyramid Lake (17 page)

Cassie went to the sink to wash her hands and help. I found it disturbing that the tribal chair’s family would be so matter-of-fact about poaching these endangered fish, but I kept my discomfort off my face. Still, Christina must have caught something in my expression, because she laughed.

“Don’t worry, these two are perfectly legal. Every year, the researchers down at the hatchery sacrifice a few and remove their opercular bones to build a profile of seasonal growth rates. They give the rest of the fish to the tribe, and we hold a lottery for which family gets them. This was our lucky year.”

She flipped the steak-size white fillets into a glass pan layered with crushed nuts, then turned them over to encrust the other side.

“Nevada pine nuts—another Paiute staple,” she said. “A friend collects and roasts these locally—trust me, the stuff from China doesn’t even come close.”

Moving with the quick precision of a TV celebrity chef, she slid a pair of shiny copper pans onto the heavy-duty stainless-steel gas range, and began tossing in ingredients she had arrayed in little glass bowls on the countertop.

James handed me a beer. “You’re in for a real foodie experience,” he said. “Christina’s nouveau-Native recipes are her passion—her cooking’s been featured on Food Network.”

“I feel pretty useless right now,” I said. “What can I do to help?”

“Billy’s got a couple rabbits on the barbecue outside.” Leaning against the counter, James wagged the neck of his beer toward the back door. “He might need a hand bringing them in.”

Out in the backyard, the river was loud in the darkness beyond the trees. I found Cassie’s brother, Billy, whom I recognized from the bar, standing over a big stainless-steel propane grill alongside the house, brushing something onto skewers of pale meat. Fat sizzled and dripped. I had my doubts about the ugly suckerfish, but the rabbit smelled delicious.

“You kill that guy?” Billy asked without looking up.

“Did you?” I asked. “They figured the killer was an ‘associate’ of Cassie’s.”

“Killer’s white,” he said. “They’re high if they think he was Indian. That geyser’s sacred to us.”

I moved up next to him and leaned over the grill. “Looks tasty.”

“Just shot ’em a couple hours ago.”

“With what?”

Billy turned his head and stared at me. His eyes were unfriendly. “A gun.”

I laughed. “No kidding, hotshot. What kind?”

“Seventeen Remington Seven hundred Varmint SPS,” he said. “A larger caliber like a three-o-eight wouldn’t leave enough rabbit to be worth skinning.”

I thought of Roger’s snide comments about my .223 AR, and how I needed to “man up” and get a .308.

“Know a good local FFL?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me.”

So Billy was a federal firearms license holder—a government-authorized gun dealer—whom I could use to order what I wanted from out of state.

“I’m getting a Knight’s Armament SR-twenty-five ECR,” I said. “What would you charge me for the transfer?”

“Civilian version of the M-one-ten.” Billy snorted. “In Iraq, snipers and designated marksmen from my unit used ’em. That’s a pricey toy. What’s a yuppie like you need one for?”

I shrugged. “To shoot tighter groups. From farther away.”

He snorted again. “A six-thousand-dollar rifle ain’t the answer. It’s about the shooter, not the gun.”

Straightening up, he spread his collar and fished out a heavy knapped-obsidian arrowhead that hung from a leather thong around his neck.

“See this? Every couple months, the best shooters on the rez go out for a dawn varmint hunt. It’s kind of a tradition. First shooter that downs an animal from more than three hundred yards wins this and keeps it until the next time we go out. But I might as well carve my name on it,
sigumuhu,
because nobody’s been able to take it from me in three years. Unless maybe you want to try once you get your fancy new toy?”

“I don’t see anything fun about shooting defenseless animals,” I said. “You want to handle the transfer on the rifle or not?”

He turned over a skewer of rabbit to baste the other side. “Seventy bucks. I’ve got paperwork in my truck.”

I thought about what he had said earlier. “Marine Corps?” I asked.

He nodded. “Company B, First Battalion, Third Marines. You better hope Cassie never has any reason to complain to me about you.”

“You talk pretty tough for a guy who just sat there and let a dude insult his sister.”

Billy frowned at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Calling her ‘Pocahontas’?”

“That was her nickname back in high school,” he said. “Cassie and I went to school with Ray. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

I thought of Ray’s kid’s car seat again, and turned away to poke at the meat on the grill. “Oh.”

The rabbit was ready. I picked up the platter sitting next to the barbecue, and held it while Billy used tongs to slide the pieces of rabbit off the skewers. Then we went inside.

Our plain-looking platter of barbecued rabbit looked out of place amid Christina’s elegant presentation of food, which lined the dining room table like pieces of art on white serving plates.

I ended up sitting at the head of the table, across from James and next to Cassie. I was getting a kick out of watching her. Around her relatives, she seemed younger somehow—a little self-conscious, like a shy high-school kid bringing a date home for dinner with the folks. It made an interesting contrast with the put-together, professional side of her I had seen so far at work. I thought about what she had said about having to live up to people’s expectations, as the tribal chair’s adopted daughter and a senator’s protégé. It sounded as though other people had been planning her life for her for a long time. No wonder that four years ago she had run away from it all.

I was pretty sure Cassie’s little act of rebellion yesterday was why I was sitting down to dinner at the Barrys’ table right now. I was amused, but also a little chagrined, by the realization that Linebaugh had been more than willing to accede to my twelve-million-dollar request mainly because he expected me to be gone by now, and Cassie to be the one benefiting from it.

I figured James had been in the loop for that whole thing, too. Since Cassie had threatened to leave unless I stayed, he had invited me to dinner to sniff me out and get a better sense of just how big a nuisance they now had to deal with.

“Trevor,” he said, “please tell us a little about yourself. I’m curious: what brought you to Pyramid Lake?”

I almost smiled at that.

“Not much to tell, really,” I said. “I’m a California kid, from near Bakersfield, originally—a not-so-nice little area called Oildale, better known as “the ’08.” Not really a lot of opportunities there, but I was good at math and computers, so I applied to MIT and got in. Moved out to Boston and worked my way through an undergrad degree in aeronautics, then a master’s in CompSci, and then a doctorate focusing on high-performance computing. Spent a year working at Lincoln Labs, but that wasn’t really the right environment. Then DARPA reached out to me and it sounded interesting, so I signed on and here I am.”

That was the sanitized version, anyway—I was leaving out a lot. Unlike my MIT classmates, nearly all of whom were prep-school valedictorians with fat scholarships, I was a dirt-poor ’08er who had to cover the forty-thousand-a-year tuition on my own. But nobody here needed to hear about how I had managed that.

Cassie took a small bite of food. Watching the delicate way her mouth moved, I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss her. But I had no business thinking anything like that. No business at all. I shoved the thought away and looked back at James.

“I’m curious about something, too,” I said. “I checked the news and didn’t see a single word on any site about McNulty’s murder.” I suddenly remembered my manners and looked at Christina in apology. “I’m sorry. That’s not really an appropriate topic for dinner conversation.”

“It’s okay, Trevor.” She smiled warmly at me. “My husband’s the tribal chairman, so just about anything’s fair game at our table. We’re sorry to hear about your loss.”

James nodded. “But we don’t see any reason to turn our reservation into a media spectacle over it, and neither does the Navy or anyone in law enforcement. At least, not until the killer is found.”

I thought about that a bit. It seemed surprising that the news media could be kept at bay this way. But then, an Indian reservation was a unique kind of place—and a closed military base located
on
a reservation, doubly so. Access could readily be denied, especially if federal and local law enforcement agencies were cooperating with the tribe and the Navy to enforce a news blackout.

We were operating in a gray area, with rules I didn’t completely understand.

“So how does that work?” I asked. “Is the Pyramid Lake reservation technically even part of the State of Nevada? Or not?”

“Geographically we are, but legally we’re not,” James said. “Tribal sovereignty is protected by federal law. That means we’re very much a separate nation here, Trevor, with an inherent right to self-government. Our treaties are with Congress and the federal government,
not
the State of Nevada. We do maintain a great relationship with state authorities, but they have to play by our rules when we let them on our land. For example, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department is here, working alongside the tribe, but only because we’ve asked them to help since we lack the manpower and experience to deal with a crime like this on our own.”

“So the reservation is like a foreign country, but inside U.S. borders,” I said.

“More or less. We have our own tribal courts, our own police. We enact our own criminal and civil laws, which are often completely different from the laws of the surrounding state. Hence the proliferation of Indian casinos. Although, for
our
tribe, with Reno only thirty miles away, gaming doesn’t bring too much to the table.” He grinned. “Pun intended, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “But I’m still not clear on how much autonomy you actually have here.”

“Well, we and we alone determine who is officially enrolled in our tribe and who isn’t; who is allowed to enter reservation land and who isn’t. But ‘autonomy’ is the wrong word to describe us. In addition to being members of our tribes, we Indians are all United States citizens, too, Trevor. And we’ve served our country with pride and distinction.”

He nodded toward Billy. “We’ve fought alongside our European-ancestry counterparts in every war—even the Civil War, on both sides. We’re patriotic Americans. And we’ve paid a very high price for the special relationship we have with the federal government and for our exemptions from state law: we’ve effectively ceded most of our ancestral lands to the United States.”

“But as you say, the reservation isn’t exempt from U.S. law,” I said. “Murder in Indian Country is a
federal
crime.”

James Barry nodded. “The FBI has an ‘Indian Country’ task force dedicated to protecting tribal communities.”

“So where does Homeland Security fit into the picture?”

“New kid on the block,” James said. “Trying to carve out more of a role for themselves, even where none exists—they feel obliged to stick their nose in.”

“And get it caught in a door.” Cassie laughed her musical laugh. “Speaking of which, Trevor, what did you say to Bennett to get him so bent out of shape?”

I hid a grin. “Pretty much what your uncle just said. Only I put it a little less diplomatically.”

I took another bite of the fish, which was really good, although I preferred the rabbit. I didn’t buy the glib explanation James had given for Bennett’s presence, not at all. It didn’t explain fourteen trips in six months, or his arrival the night before McNulty’s murder.

“So who do you guys think really killed McNulty?” I asked.

“No idea,” James said. “It’s a strange one—ritualistic, almost.”

I nodded. “Does the way he was killed match any of your people’s old legends or stories?”

He shook his head. “No, but it matches one of
your
people’s.”

I raised an eyebrow at that.

“The simoniac,” he said. “From Dante Aligheri’s
Inferno
.”

“
My
people?
Dante?
Do I look Italian to you?”

James laughed. “Okay, I apologize for the generalization. That was rude of me. But technically, Dante was Florentine, not Italian.”

Still, now that I thought of it, Dante was
exactly
what McNulty’s body, stuffed headfirst in the geyser, had reminded me of. I could almost picture the medieval woodcut image now—a half-remembered illustration I’d seen somewhere, depicting a scene from Dante’s
Inferno
. I’d have to Google it later.

“So in Dante’s version of hell, I guess simoniacs get buried head-down in a burning pit, with their feet sticking out.” I frowned. “But what
is
a simoniac, anyway?”

“Someone guilty of the sin of simony,” Cassie said. “The conferral, transfer, or resignation of ecclesiastical offices for worldly gain. Like accepting money to ordain someone new into the priesthood, or taking money to let someone
out of
the priesthood—both of which, apparently, were common practices back in Dante’s day.”

“I have an excuse for being the least educated person in the room,” I said. “Undergrads at MIT chose our nontechnical electives by how little effort we would need to actually spend on them.”

But I was thinking through the implications of what Cassie had said, and not liking where that line of logic was leading me.

Time to change the subject.

“Izabui,” I said, and Cassie stiffened. Stifling a grin, I pretended not to notice. “Coyote the Trickster—what can you tell me about him, James?”

Glancing at Cassie, James cleared his throat. “The Trickster is common to almost all Native American belief systems. But different tribes characterize him differently. He doesn’t necessarily correspond to the Christian concept of the devil at all. Christina, how would
you
describe Coyote?”