Tailed (10 page)

chapter 13

S
ilos, red barns, budding cornstalks, and Phillips 66 truck plazas slid by as Nicholas captained our voyage across the sea of Iowa to the isle of Omaha, me riding shotgun, the Chicken of Death behind us on the poop deck reading a
lucha libre
magazine. Amber, thankfully, was back at the streusel stand. But I could feel Wilco breathing down my neck from the backseat next to Vargas.

The vehicle we were driving was neither mine nor Nicholas's rental, but the Vargasmobile, a white '68 Pontiac Catalina hardtop. It was equipped with a figurine of the Virgin on the dash, red fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, and an eight-ball steering wheel spinner. It had the familiar old-car sway and rumble, which was one small twinkle of reassurance as we headed off toward what I feared would be more trouble.

Unlike in the East, where semis tend to be lone wolfs, big rigs in the heartland travel in long packs. In effect, they are like a train, nose to tail, and one wonders why the haulers don't just put their wares onto the rails and save some rubber. So to pass “a truck” takes about five minutes to get by the whole train, and just when you have them safely in your rearview mirror, there's another convoy around the next bend. But passing trucks becomes a way of passing the time as one sails west on the ocean of crops and grassy plains.

We'd left the Lower Peninsula an hour after Nicholas had made his appearance, and the conversation had been kept to a minimum. My brother obviously knew about Draco, so the preliminaries of why we were headed to Omaha were largely moot. As we grabbed coffee and pecan swirls at the gas station on the way out of town, I managed to shoot off a call to Angie on the pay phone, using my calling card, which would disguise the origins of the call. I got the machine, left a message that I was all right and that I was headed to Aunt Jilly's. That was an inside joke. We had a standing black bear mount at home we called Aunt Jilly, named after a relative with an abnormal amount of body hair for a human female. Long since deceased, this aunt lived in Omaha, Virginia. This was my roundabout way of signaling to my sweetie my destination. That way she'd know where to look for my remains when all hell broke loose, as it was apt to. Angie was good at puzzles, and I was confident she'd quickly figure out that I was headed for Nebraska, not Virginia, since last she knew I was in the Midwest.

Nicholas had said zero about the situation in which he'd found me at the streusel stand, for which I was grateful. But there was little doubt he was saving it for later. After passing a particularly long train of semis, I finally broke the silence.

“So, shall we lay our cards on the table?”

Nicholas shot me a glance. “Cards?”

“Yeah. Like what inspired you to come out here.”

“To help you. Hey, I can't get married without my best man.”

“No, there's something else, I can feel it.”

He rolled his eyes. “Feel it?”

“I know you, Nicholas, and I know when something is up with you.”

“My researcher uncovered the Draco connection.” He shrugged.

“And?”

“And, well, my researcher revealed some other interesting little facts.”

I merely waited, and under my scrutiny, my brother finally continued.

“There was once something called the Order of the White Geckos. A fraternal thing.”

“Vargas mentioned that Draco's grandfather was one of the White Geckos. So are we talking about middle-aged guys in fezzes driving miniature cars in parades? That kind of fraternal thing?”

“Basically. And our grandfather, Kit Carson, was also a founding member. It was him and four other big-game hunters, one of them Draco's grandfather, who formed the lodge, and it was open only to big-game hunters.”

“You used the words ‘was once.' Just a guess but sounds like they're no longer around. What happened to them?”

“The five founding members died while traveling to a South African hunting trip. Their boat sank. In 1949. Soon afterward the Order of the White Geckos disbanded.”

“How did this lodge get started? What did the geckos symbolize?”

Nicholas rubbed his jaw. “Apparently it's an ancient Native American symbol of some kind that they latched onto, the same one Draco has on his cape. Symbolizes power in the earth or something, which is partially why Draco adopted it as his badge. But also to honor the legacy of his grandfather.
Lucha
fans love that kind of thing.”

“Since when are you into Mexican wrestling?”

“A Web search for ‘white geckos' brings you to Draco way before the fraternal order. When I saw the connection between the five White Gecko big-game hunters who were killed and the five on the cape of the big-game hunter wrestler, I had a researcher dig deeper. The inception of the Order of the White Geckos happened while the five founding members were on safari in Mexico in 1917 hunting something called a javelina.”

Aha. Fowler babbled something about javelinas.

Nicholas fished in his jacket pocket and came up with a few sheets of folded paper. “Grandpop was quite a famous guy in his day, at least in the hunting world. Here. Something my researcher summarized.”

I unfolded the paper and began to read while Nicholas left-laned past another queue of trucks.

Julius F. Carson was born in 1878 to a Lutheran minister in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At seventeen, he boarded a train west, abandoning his father's hope for college and a career in the clergy. The next five years were spent in a variety of odd jobs for outfitters in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, mostly caring for pack animals, digging latrines, fetching water, and the like. He worked his way up to hunting guide. A turning point came when he and another guide, hunting for pleasure, were ambushed by a mountain lion. The lion had the guide by the neck, pinned to the ground. Julius came running with his gun, took aim at the lion, and the gun misfired and jammed. Throwing his gun aside, Julius pulled his hunting knife. He leapt onto the lion and stabbed it to death, but not before being clawed about the face.

Julius, half blind from his wounds, carried the guide twenty-six miles over rough terrain to town.

Even though the guide perished, Julius F. Carson became a local celebrity, and it only helped that he was instantly recognizable the rest of his days by the diagonal scars across his face and the eye patch. Several nicknames were attached to him, but the one that stuck was “Kit” Carson, after the famous American frontiersman. It was the nickname attached to an article published in
The Field
about his exploits.

He traded on this reputation to become a guide with a top Wyoming outfitter—if nothing else, the well-heeled hunters wanted to hear him tell the story of his tangle with the lion and to say that they had been guided by the famous “Kit” Carson.

From there, Carson started his own hunting camp and befriended visiting hunters who urged him to go to Africa with them. He did, and thus began a core friendship with four of the day's most renowned hunters:

Charles Gateway III, of Gateway Munitions, manufacturers of some of the world's finest hunting rifles; General Raoul Ovando, late of the Mexican cavalry; Bartholomew Jones, a tool and die magnate from Massachusetts; and Titan Harris, publisher of a string of newspapers.

On a hunting trip to New Mexico the five founded a society called the Order of the White Gecko, a name taken from Native American cave paintings they witnessed. The order was open only to fellow big-game hunters, and reached a membership of several hundred.

In 1949, Julius F. Carson and the other four founding members of the Order of the White Gecko died in a shipwreck off of Capetown, South Africa. Carson was survived by his second wife, Amelda, and his son from his first marriage, Stuart.

“Titan Harris.” I looked up from the summary, studying the distant horizon. “Titan Harris III was the one killed in Houston.”

“The men killed so far are all grandsons of the founding five members of the Order of the White Gecko. Charles Gateway III, of Gateway Munitions, manufacturers of some of the world's finest rifles—his grandson was Sprunty Fulmore. Bartholomew Jones—his grandson was Bronte Jones, the TV actor living in Seattle. And Titan Harris's grandson…”

“Titan Harris III, scotch receptacle, Houston, Texas—I get it. And Draco is the grandson of that Mexican general.”

“Then that leaves you.”

“Me? Why me?” And why did I find myself constantly having to say “Why me?”

“The killer already has you involved, you own taxidermy…Let's face it, I don't exactly fit the profile here as a taxidermy collector. Stuff gives me the creeps.”

The notion that I was the one being targeted didn't alarm me as much as one might have thought. Against hope, I'd already come to the conclusion that I was a marked man in this whole mess. Just not by birth.

“Nicholas, this is way out there, doesn't make any sense. I mean, the three that have been killed were all people I did appraisals for. It must be tied to that.”

“That's what the FBI thinks. And maybe it is tied to that. But the coincidences in the rest of it are too huge.”

“Nicholas, wherever you mined this information, the FBI probably has it, too. They'll be headed to Omaha also.”

“Not so sure about that. A lot of that information came from the library, not the Web. The FBI tends to rely on their own files and police computer databases. Electronic stuff. Not that I didn't have my own Web spy check those same sources. So I had to turn to this musty old guy who wears shorts and Birkenstocks year round, Lanier Frankly. He hangs out at the main branch of the New York Public Library. He practically lives there, so the librarians let him have access to all kinds of out-of-print periodicals like
The Field
. This guy lives to do research. In return, I only have to buy Lanier a steak dinner with all the trimmings at Gunther's. That's his other hangout. Also, once the FBI thinks it's a serial killing, they turn to profilers who look at behavior, not stray genealogy.”

“They know at least some of this information about Kit Carson. I was at an FBI tactical meeting and there was a woman, tough old broad, a colonel in the Air Force and also a doctor of some sort. Named Lanston. She had a complete dossier on me, and apparently on Kit Carson. She was busting my chops like I knew about Grandad.”

“That's interesting. We found that the government files on him are sealed.”

“Sealed?” I briefly reflected on the penguin in the desert joke.

“Uh huh. And you'll never guess which branch of the government had them sealed.”

I shuddered. “Air Force?”

“Right-o, buddy boy. Did this Lanston say anything else about Kit Carson? About what connection there was between him and these murders?”

“Nope. But this must mean the FBI knows all about it.”

“Not necessarily.” Nicholas wagged a finger at me. “She's with a different branch of the government. She may have an agenda all her own. I'll make a call and have someone check her out.”

“Wait. Back there in Hell, I overheard Lanston on the phone. She said something about how she'd been working on this for thirty years, and that she was after Fowler, too. And she said someone was being sent out to come take care of me. That make any sense?”

Nicholas shrugged and shook his head. “Did she say who they were sending?”

I scowled, trying to remember. “She said a name, but I can't pull it back. Shoot.”

“Angie was talking about canceling her trip to the jewelry show. I convinced her to go, told her that I'd be sure to have you call her at her hotel as soon as possible. Doesn't look like the killer is after her, but it's better she beats New York for a few days to be on the safe side.”

“Oh, man…I hope she doesn't cancel on that show.” Sure enough, I was screwing things up for her career again. I guessed it was a little much under the circumstances to imagine she could just forget my predicament and go about her business. But I hoped she would. If this had to happen, why not a week later?

“And then there's Fowler.” Nicholas glanced at me. “He's a kook. Read all about his TV archeology career, how he went gaga.”

“I actually remembered who Fowler was on my own. He found me somehow in Seattle, followed me to the Space Needle and ranted about my vuka, which Gabby tells me is some kind of spirit or something, I dunno. Fowler insisted he had a key or something to get rid of it, some sort of dog tag he was wearing. Oh yeah, and I think he thinks he's a werewolf.”

“Come again?”

“You heard me. And get this: Gabby said she and Stuart put a spell on him to keep him away from them. He was after Dad about
his
vuka. She says they turned him into a werewolf. Find anything linking Fowler to Gabby and Stuart?”

“I'd think you were kidding if I didn't know Gabby so well.” Nicholas shook his head. “I still have Mel looking into Fowler. There's a connection between him and the Order of the White Geckos. Somehow.”

I suddenly felt that the moment was right to change tack, see if I could catch Nicholas off guard and get him to open up.

“You nervous about getting married, Nicholas?”

“Please, Garth.” He gave me a withering look. “No head shrinking, OK? I get enough of that as it is. I might as well ask you if you're nervous about getting a dog.”

“Who told you we're getting a dog?”

“Girls gab. Your girlfriend and mine do talk, you know. So how did you know Draco was a target?”

“Vargas.” I jerked a thumb at the backseat. “Did you know he used to be a Mexican wrestler?
El Gallo de Muerte
.”

“Rooster of Death? You're kidding.”

“It sounds funnier when you say ‘Chicken of Death.' Vargas is a big
lucha
fan, and Draco was wrestling on TV. There was a bio piece on him as part of the program. Showed him as a big-game hunter. Five white geckos on his cape, big-game hunter—it was just too coincidental. And the geckos on his cape are arranged the same way as they are on the medallion Fowler wears around his neck. In a circle, nose to tail. Perhaps Fowler's connection to the five white geckos has to do with something Stella told me on the phone. Fowler…well, she says that he's our uncle.”