The Deadline (23 page)

Now the coroner waggled his sausage-like fingers as he explained it would be a day or two before he could positively identify the body with dental records and medical X-rays, if they existed at all.

“We got your basic full-thickness, fourth-degree burns here,” he said with all the passion of his craft.  That is to say, none.

Carter McWayne had always fancied himself a medical professional, even though he was no more qualified to the privilege than a hospital janitor.  He was an undertaker, not a doctor.  But his sepulchral voice rose from the blubbery tomb of his chest and spilled out fifty-cent anatomical words with unimpeachable authority, albeit with a fat man’s breathy punctuation.  The corpulent coroner’s heavy breathing seemed to be a conscious process.  

“There is coagulation necrosis of the epidermis and dermis, with destruction of the dermal appendages.  Soft-tissue facial structures are mutilated, muscle is exposed and ruptured, no fingers for prints, cranial vault shows heat fractures.  We got significant epidural hematomas, frontal and parietal, probably post-mortem.”

“Goddammit, Carter, try to say it in English,” the sheriff bristled.

“That
is
English,” McWayne growled in his deep voice.  “But it means this fella’s a big mess.”

“Will you be able to make an ID?”

“Not me.  I’ll have to get the forensic pathologist down in Cheyenne to come up here.  If he can’t get comparative X-rays, he’ll probably do DNA.  But don’t count your chickens, Trey.  There’s a chance we’ll never know.”

“That’s it?” the sheriff asked incredulously.

“I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Could it be Cal Nussbaum?”

McWayne shrugged his massive shoulders.

“I can only tell you it was a male.”

“How’s that?”

“That’s a funny thing about fire victims.  Where he was laying on the flat, concrete floor, the skin of his back was perfectly preserved, along with some clothing and glass.  No obvious mortal wounds, but there’s too much hair on his back for all but a few of the women around here.”

“Did he die before the fire started?”

The short-winded McWayne shook his head, the mushy bag of fat under his chin quavering out of sync. 

“Sorry, sheriff.  Too friggin’ much damage.”

“Best guess, Carter.”

“That’s your job, Trey.  But the floor under him wasn’t scorched, and there was lots of unburned debris.  It’s a better-than-even bet he was rendered unconscious, maybe killed, by the concussion of the bomb.  Don’t quote me.”

Kerrigan twisted one end of his prodigious mustache as he listened, his forehead creased with impatience.  He wanted more and he wanted it faster than he was getting it.

Morgan couldn’t wait any longer.  He stepped forward and pressed the cassette tape into the sheriff’s hand.  Trey Kerrigan seemed startled to learn that he’d been standing near enough to hear.  Suspects, he knew, should be kept at a comfortable, uninformed distance.

“This should help your investigation,” he said brusquely.  “It’s from my answering machine.  The caller makes threats against my wife.  And if you send a deputy over to my house, he’ll find my dog butchered on the back porch.  They made their point.”

Kerrigan turned the cassette over and studied it.  Then he squinted at Morgan.

“What am I gonna hear on this tape?”

“Threats.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.  But it looks like this explosion is related to the Gilmartin case.  Listen to the tape and decide for yourself.  But, personally, I think you’re going to want to have a little talk with Malachi Pierce.”

“Pierce?  Christ, you think this was a militia hit?”

“It’s more than that.  It might be a murder cover-up.  But right now, you don’t want to take my word for it anyway.  I’m still a suspect, remember?  Listen to the tape yourself.”

Kerrigan unbuttoned his shirt pocket and put the cassette inside.  “Any other surprises?”

“No, but I need a big favor.  Can you have a deputy take Claire to the airport in Blackwater and put her on the next flight to Chicago?  I need to know she’s safe.  The tape will tell you why.  I’ll take her back to the house and pack some things and make the arrangements, if you’ll have somebody pick her up in, let’s say, an hour?”

Kerrigan pondered his request, but not long.

“I ain’t no taxi service,” he bristled.  “Damned if I’m gonna help a suspect’s wife flee the state.”

“In that case, Trey,” Morgan said.  He scribbled Jerry Overton’s name and the phone number for the Chicago ATF bureau in his pocket notebook, then tore the page out.  He handed the scrap of paper to the sheriff.

“Call this guy.  Tell him everything.  He can help.  And if something happens to me or to Claire, make sure he knows.”

Morgan turned and started back to his car, where Claire was anxiously rolling the radio dial up and down the FM band, searching for distraction.  He’d left the motor running.

“Not so fast.  We got things to settle, damn you.”

Morgan kept walking.

“Go to hell, Trey.”

Nightcap Creek was a place of legend.

Before the turn of the century, a mad French trapper claimed the stream was visited by a ghostly brigantine that sailed up its rocky channel at midnight on a certain night each year.  Nobody ever saw the supernatural sailing ship, although in Morgan’s day the secluded stream became a favorite haunt of horny teen-agers who stole away in their fathers’ cars to watch for it through the carnal fog on their windshields.  Many stories were told on the banks of the Nightcap.

A few families — Cal and Betty Nussbaum among them — bought land in the Nightcap drainage and hauled their shabby trailers up there.  Most of them were set back from the dirt road among the lodgepole pines, close enough to pump water from the creek in the warmer months.

Cal’s mobile home was sun-washed green and dirty white, surrounded by a buckrail fence.  A rough-hewn cedar shingle hung from the top rail, with the name NUSSBAUM spelled out in three-inch-high block letters.  Morgan turned through the open gate, rolled the Escort to stop in front of the trailer and set the emergency brake so he wouldn’t have to turn off the engine.

“Want to come in with me?” he asked Claire.

She shook her head.  “I couldn’t take it right now,” she said.

Claire turned up the radio and pushed the buttons huffily.  On the way to Nightcap Creek, her husband had explained why he wanted her to go to her parents’ home in Chicago for a week, maybe two, until he could find his equilibrium again.  She didn’t want to go.  She resisted, saying she was a big girl who learned more about prejudice before she was ten than the grown man who now sought to protect her from it.  The more Morgan deflected her arguments, the more frustrated she got.  By the time they reached Nightcap Creek, she had nothing left to say and no new way to say it.

“I won’t be long,” Morgan said.

The mountain forest around him smelled fresh and clean, although smoke still adhered to his clothes.  The air was cool under the cover of the trees, the soil soft.  Old pine needles crackled under his feet as he climbed the three steps to the trailer’s front door.  Morgan breathed deeply and knocked.  He checked his watch:  it was six-fifteen in the morning and the sun cut long, sharp shafts through the pines.  He hoped he would not be waking Betty to a nightmare.

Someone moved inside.  The trailer rocked gently as someone walked across the floor.  The latch clicked and he steeled himself to deliver the grim news of Cal’s death.  He prayed she didn’t ask if he’d seen the body.

Betty Nussbaum was tall, like Cal, but with a pleasant face and faded strawberry-blond hair sugared with white.  She wore thick glasses that made her green eyes as big as shimmering pools on the Nightcap.  As she opened the door, Morgan smelled fresh coffee and biscuits wafting from the trailer.  She’d been making breakfast.

“Good morning, Jeff,” she greeted him.  “You’re up early.”

Morgan cleared his throat and looked down at his shoes.

“Betty, it’s about Cal.”

“Cal’s not here.  He was gone when I got up.”

“I know.  That’s why I came up.”

Betty saw Claire waiting in the car and waved.

“Oh, your wife is with you.  Don’t be such a fuddy-dud.  Tell her to come on in and have some coffee.”

He focused on his grave task.

“I know Cal isn’t here.  I’m just ...”

“Was he supposed to wait for you?  That man, I swear.  He gets an itch and he’s gotta scratch.  The good Lord put fish in the stream with more patience than my husband.”

“Betty, I’m afraid there’s bad news.”

Oddly, Betty Nussbaum’s pretty face brightened at that very moment.  Morgan was puzzled, speechless as she looked past his shoulder. 

“Then you might as well deliver it yourself,” she said.  “Cal, haul your butt up here and apologize to Jeff for goin’ fishin’ without him, you impatient old fart.”

Morgan swiveled to see Cal Nussbaum, very much alive, stowing his fishing pole and old-fashioned basket creel in a lean-to shed beside the trailer.  He carried a proud stringer of eight pan-sized browns, fresh from the Nightcap.  Breakfast.

Morgan felt the blood drain from his head and, for a moment, believed he might pass out.  He reached for the two-by-four handrail that encircled the small porch.

“You’re alive!” he blurted out.

“Hell, yes, I’m alive,” Cal said, irritated.  “Fly-fishin’s almost as good for a man as gettin’ up before the chickens.  You come all the way up here to tell me that?”

Morgan was dumfounded at the sight of Cal.  The scowling old printer suddenly felt self-conscious.

“Christ, you smell like a jerky fart,” Cal said.  “You been smokin’ them cow-pie ceegars again?”

“It’s from the fire,” Morgan said lamely.

“What fire?  What the hell are you talking about?”

“Cal,
The Bullet
burned down last night.  It was a bomb.  They found a burned body in the rubble and I thought it was ...”

Morgan felt light-headed.  Cal grabbed his elbow and led him inside, seating him in an easy chair near the door.  Betty brought him a glass of water, then hovered nearby like a tall mother hen.  Before he knew what was happening, Claire was beside him.

“I went back down there last night to pick up some work and bring it home,” Cal explained to them both.  “Godawmighty, no wonder you look like you seen the ghost ship.”

Now Cal’s hands were shaking, too.  He sat on a steamer trunk beside the couch.

“Are you okay, Jeff?” Claire asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, holding her hand tightly.  After a long, deep silence, he began to question Cal.

“Was anybody there when you left?  One of the reporters?  Anybody?”

“Nope.  I turned off all the lights, locked her up and came home.  It was nine-thirty, quarter to ten.”

Morgan wondered if the charred corpse in
The
Bullet
’s rubble was the bomber himself, caught in a violent trap of his own making.  He was angry.  He wanted desperately to know who destroyed his newspaper and the body in the wreckage might hold the key.

“Did you see anybody suspicious out back?  Anybody hanging around?”

Cal flexed his fingers, trying to remember.  His memory was blank.  He shook his head.

“Wasn’t there more’n fifteen minutes.  Just loaded up the pages, set some type and hauled my ass outta there.  I came home and worked on ‘em for an hour, then went to bed.”

“You’ve got the pages
here
?” Morgan asked.

“Right over there,” he said, pointing toward the trailer’s breakfast nook.  All the page flats for the week’s edition were spread out on the table.  “Just missing a couple stories and a few pictures.  Pretty much ready to go.”

Morgan leaned forward in the easy chair, his eyes suddenly full of life again.

“Who could print it for us if we fill the holes?”

Cal thought a moment.

“
The Trib
over in Blackwater, maybe the
News-Letter
down in Newcastle.  They’re good people.  They’d make sure we had a paper.”

Morgan stood up and rattled off instructions.  He made a few notes for Cal.

“Get to town and find Crystal and the reporters.  Leave me forty inches across the top of the front page for a fire story and picture, and a hole on the edit page.  Fill up everything else the best you can.  Have one of the reporters take photos of the fire scene and soup the film at the high school newspaper’s darkroom.  Then call around and find somebody who’ll print
The Bullet
for the next few weeks.  Tell them we’ll have one before the end of the day tomorrow.”

“What the hell are we gonna write these stories on?”

“If you can’t beg or borrow a computer and printer downtown, go to the library and type them to fit the holes, the old-fashioned way.  It won’t be pretty but it’ll be a paper.”

“No problem.”

“Cal, I’m sorry to put this in your lap, but you can do it better than anybody else.  Keep me in the loop.  I’ll have my stories done when the time comes.”

Cal nodded.

“One more thing.  Betty, can you take Claire to the airport in Blackwater this morning?  I’d sure appreciate anything you could do.”

“Certainly, dear.  When?”

“Come to the house in, say, an hour.  Is that good for you?”

“I’ll be there.”

“What are you gonna be doin’?” Cal asked.

“You think I’m going to leave this one to the cops?  This is personal now,” he said.

Cal smiled broadly and poked his ink-stained thumb in the air.

“Old Bell brung you up right,” he said.  “He’s sure gonna get a kick outta this one.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

M
organ changed out of his smoky clothes and packed two suitcases while Claire showered and fixed her hair for the trip to Blackwater, the only commercial airport within a hundred miles.  In a futile, last-ditch effort, she had begged him to let her stay, argued bravely.  But she made no headway and had no choice.

Over the phone, the United ticket clerk reserved the last seat on the eleven a.m. puddle-jumper to Denver, with a two p.m. connection to O’Hare.  Morgan left the return ticket open.  He arranged for Claire’s mother to pick her up at the airport and drive her home to Winnetka.  He told her about the fire, but he said nothing about the butchery of their dog or the sinister threats against her daughter.  Some things could wait.

Finally, he called the dispatcher and asked to be patched through to Trey Kerrigan.  He told the sheriff that Cal Nussbaum was indeed alive and the burned body belonged to someone else, probably nobody employed by
The Bullet
.  Maybe it was the bomber himself, Morgan surmised.  Kerrigan exhaled a frustrated sigh and hung up without engaging in any further conversation, much less speculation, with an erstwhile suspect.

Betty Nussbaum came to the door just before eight, gussied up in a flowery print dress for the hour-long drive to Blackwater.  Morgan begged her indulgence for a last few minutes alone with his wife.  Betty winked at him and hovered over the marigold bed, pretending to be enthralled by the wizened blossoms and the controlled tragedy of a city flower garden.

Claire sat on the edge of the rumpled bed upstairs.  Everything was packed.  Morgan sat beside her and rested his head on her shoulder.  She wore no perfume but he smelled the sweet fragrance of her long, soft hair.

“I’ll miss you,” he said, “but at least I’ll know you’re safe.  You need to take care of our baby.”

Claire didn’t look at him.  She began searching in her purse for something, maybe she didn’t even know what.

“But what about you?  Will
you
be safe?  I should be here.”

“I’ll be perfectly fine.  There’s nothing more that can happen.”

He knew it wasn’t so.  Much more — and much worse — could happen.  The idea of it crawled around inside him, scraping to get out.  Morgan closed his eyes and wished it away.

She kissed him and made him promise to call every night.  Morgan carried his wife’s bags downstairs to Betty’s bruised ‘Seventy-eight Chevy pickup and kissed her one last time before she crawled into the front seat.  As the truck rumbled casually away down shady Rockwood Street and disappeared around the corner onto Main, Morgan already felt alone.

Nobody answered the phone at Old Bell Cockins’ house.  Morgan let it ring more than a dozen times.

By now, he reasoned, the old editor probably knew about the fire anyway.  He’d spent fifty years with his finger on the town’s pulse.  He didn’t just stop caring about what happened.  Somebody in town would call him.  He’d hear it on his police scanner.  He’d see the smoke from his majestic cupola.  Hell, maybe he’d just
know
.  Old Bell was probably down there right now, taking notes.

Morgan tried to fight off his fatigue.  He’d been up more than twenty-four hours.  He went upstairs and took some aspirin to tranquilize the drumming in his head.  He lay back on the unmade bed, one foot on the floor to fool his body, if not his mind.

The morning sun streamed through the bedroom’s skylight, its elongated symmetry sliding across the floor imperceptibly toward the bed.  Morgan closed his eyes, still raw from smoke and dulled by exhaustion.  Ghostly designs in the shape of reflected light drifted in the blackness behind his eyelids.  He nestled his face in the cool pillows and smelled Claire’s body beside him again.

Sleep took him without a fight.

And except for dark shapes that flew across his subconscious like the shadows of frightened birds, he didn’t dream.

Morgan heard the thumping even before he awoke.  It echoed in his empty sleep.

When he opened his eyes, the sunlight had filled the bedroom and he was sweating.  His mouth was dry and his left arm, folded beneath his chest, was numb and bloodless.

Someone was pounding on the front door downstairs.  Morgan glanced at the clock as he rolled out of bed.  Two thirty-nine.  He’d slept more than six hours, though it seemed only minutes to him.

He made his way stiffly down the stairs and opened the front door.  Trey Kerrigan stood on the porch with two companions:  a balding, moon-faced man in a yellow golf shirt embroidered with the State Fire Marshal’s logo, and a clean-cut Hispanic man in a dark suit and tie.  Neither smiled.

The sheriff introduced them.  The yellow golf shirt was Ray Forney, a state arson investigator from Cheyenne.  The suit was Bruce Montoya, the sole ATF agent in Wyoming.  Morgan shook their hands and invited them inside.  He offered cold drinks, but they declined.

Trey Kerrigan sat on the edge of the long sofa, uncomfortable and grim.  The two investigators sat on either side of him. 

“Jeff, we’ve got a tentative ID on the body.”

“Was it somebody from around here?”

The two investigators looked at their shoes.  The sheriff cleared his throat. 

“Jeff, it was Old Bell.  I’m very sorry.”

“What?”

“His wallet was still in his back pocket, underneath him.  It was protected by his body and it didn’t burn.  Carter McWayne found it among the remains.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s comparing dental records from Jake Switzer’s office right now, but we’re pretty sure.  I’m really sorry, Jeff.  I know what he meant to you.”

“Jesus Christ ...”  Morgan swallowed hard.

Old Bell must have been inside when the bomb exploded, just like the night Morgan found him there, lonely and alone.  Morgan covered his eyes.  He didn’t want them to see him cry for his old friend and mentor.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked without looking at them.

“Are we off the record here?” asked Forney, the state arson investigator.  Morgan noticed his unusually small hands were smudged black.

Morgan looked up at Forney’s round face, angry.

“Where the hell would I print the story if we weren’t?”

Nonetheless, the dweebish Forney looked to his colleagues for assurance.  Kerrigan consented with a patronizing nod.

“Looks to me like a fertilizer and fuel-oil bomb,” he said.  “It was a high-order blast and my gut tells me it was ammonium nitrate, some diesel and a simple fuse.  Common ingredients, untraceable, big boom in a little package.”

“Like Oklahoma City?”

“Same stuff,” Forney said, his head bobbing comically.  “In this case, small enough to carry, but big enough to bring down half a brick building.  It detonated inside and ignited some flammable materials in the printing area, probably ink or solvents.”

“Was it already there?” Morgan asked.  “Did we just not see it?”

“There’s a remote chance it was planted earlier and wired to a timing device, but I don’t think so.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, you got a nice sized crater in a fairly open and conspicuous area of the floor, just a few feet from the back window of your building,” Forney said.  “Assuming your bomber had any brains at all, if he’d planted it deliberately, he’d have placed it more strategically, to do more immediate damage.  Plus, two or three people came and went without seeing it.  Personally, I think the bomb came in through the window and exploded right where it fell.”

“A toss and run thing?” Morgan asked.

“Probably.  We found a fairly large fragment of a five-gallon gas can in the debris.”

Forney rubbed his tiny fingers together nervously.  He was intimate with volatility, blast physics, chemistry and burn patterns;  he wasn’t so comfortable with soft tissue. 

“And, uh, there was some shrapnel, um, some pieces of the same material we found imbedded in the, uh, body.”

“Will you be able to trace this thing?” Morgan asked.

Forney’s round face rumpled.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and a witness or a feed-store clerk will come forward.  We’re sending the gas-can remnants to the ATF lab in Glynco, Georgia.  Don’t quote me on this, but it has all the markings of a militia-style bombing.”

Morgan stared at his own hands.  Like Forney, he couldn’t wash off all the sooty stains, almost as indelible as printer’s ink.  Or a memory.  Still, he tried to rub it away.

“And Old Bell was inside.  A fluke.  He wasn’t supposed to be there,” he told them.

Trey Kerrigan began to question him.

“Do you have any idea why he was at the newspaper at that time of night?”

“He’d come down at night sometimes, after everybody left, just because he missed the place.”

“Did you know he was there last night?”

“No.  He’d never tell anybody.  He was too proud.  Christ, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“When did you leave last night?”

“After nine.  I came home for dinner and was planning to go back to print some photos when I heard the explosion.”

“Was anyone else around?”

“Nobody.  Cal Nussbaum came back to pick up some pages after I left.  He said he was there maybe fifteen minutes around nine-thirty, then went home.  You can ask him, but he told me he didn’t see anybody or anything unusual.”

“And you ran downtown when you heard the explosion, a little after ten, right?”

Morgan thought about it.

“Yeah, about then.”

“Stayed all night?”

“The whole time.  The firefighters will tell you.  When I got back, I found the dog out back and the phone message on the machine.”

“A deputy should have been here already to pick up the dog and examine the scene.  Was there anything else you think we should know?”

“The tape.  Did you listen to it?”

Montoya, the ATF agent, spoke.  He was less animated than Forney, professional and concise. 

“We have it now, Mr. Morgan.  The ATF will be very involved in this investigation.  We’ll analyze the tape in the next few days for voice characteristics and so forth.”

“Have you contacted Jerry Overton in Chicago?”

“Yes,” Montoya said.  “He vouches for you.  He said you reported some threats against you and, rest assured, we’re investigating those.  We’ve already had some intelligence on those individuals.”

“You’ve talked to Malachi Pierce already?”

“Not yet.  We’d wanted to round up a few more details before we went out to Wormwood,” Kerrigan said.

“So am I still a suspect?” Morgan asked.

“Everybody’s a suspect,” the sheriff said.  “But let’s just say you’re looking less and less likely.”

After the investigators left, Morgan rummaged through unpacked boxes in his little room at the top of the stairs, the place he dreamed of putting all his books and some day writing his own book.  His laptop computer would come in handy until
The Bullet
could be rebuilt, but he needed it for something more pressing now.

Cassie’s disks were still in his briefcase, rescued almost accidentally from the inferno.  So was Kate Morning’s only photograph of her dead daughter.

Morgan cleared the dirty dishes from the breakfast table and propped Aimee’s picture against the sugar bowl.  He plugged in the wall adapter for his IBM 760ED and began downloading all of Perry County’s court data since 1962 into his laptop’s ample hard drive, where once he’d pieced together the puzzle of P.D. Comeaux.

It took only an hour.  Within another thirty minutes, he’d adapted his database software to the court records and was ready to search for the key to Malachi Pierce’s demons.

First, he queried for the name “Pierce,” just as he had asked Cassie Gainsforth’s computer, Alyx, the day before.  And again, his search produced nothing more than twenty-two unrelated hits, plus the locked case of Hosanna Pierce.

Morgan scrolled down and highlighted Hosanna’s filename, then asked the computer to retrieve it.  He expected his request to be rejected, but the computer whirred softly, ticking occasionally.  Cassie might have unlocked all the sensitive data when she transferred it to disk.  He got no lock-out message, no high-tech rebuff.  A good sign.

Within half a minute, a screenful of data appeared.  The once-secret case of Hosanna Pierce proved to be brief and undramatic, except for one detail:

On April 24, 1976, Malachi Pierce sought the court’s permission to commit his nine-year-old daughter, Hosanna, to the state mental hospital.  District Judge Harold Biggerstaff scheduled hearings on Case No. 76-368J within the month and appointed a lawyer to represent young Hosanna’s interests in the matter.

Within ninety days, in midsummer, Judge Biggerstaff agreed with a state psychologist’s finding that the girl was moderately disabled by Down Syndrome, but exhibited no threat to herself, her family or the community.  Neither the state’s nor her interests would be served by locking her up in a public asylum, he wrote in his brief order.  He denied her father’s attempt to warehouse her and ordered indefinite supervision at the request of her court-appointed
guardian ad litem
.

That supervision ended an astounding nine years later, in 1985.

In that year, Hosanna Pierce turned eighteen ... and the lawyer who’d successfully argued to keep her out of the insane asylum retired.  Simeon Fenwick.

Morgan now understood a small part of the hatred boiling in Malachi Pierce.  If he believed Hosanna had been sent by God as his punishment for some mysterious sin — and maybe it was the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse — the courts and Simeon Fenwick had ensured she would rise every morning in his house to remind him of it.

For two hours, Morgan queried the computer with dozens of other relevant keywords, such as “Wormwood,” “Fourth Sign,” “church,” “arson,” even “bomb,” and found nothing remotely related to Malachi Pierce.  The digitized paper trail was cold.

Fenwick would be no help.  His lips were sealed as tight as his ass.  He wouldn’t even admit his role in Hosanna’s case, and Morgan couldn’t broach the subject without betraying Cassie’s confidence.  Still, Morgan had found what he was looking for:  Fenwick’s legal connection to Pierce.  It just wasn’t all he’d hoped for, and it solved no mysteries.

It was an ironic legacy for a lawyer who’d had no children of his own, but Morgan had never been able to divine the spark that burned inside most attorneys he’d known.  For the moment, he was happy that Fenwick had stood up for Hosanna Pierce, who might still be moldering in the state asylum without his help.  No matter what daily wretchedness she might endure at Wormwood Camp, Morgan was certain her life was better than if she were shut away and forgotten in a mental institution.

Aimee Little Spotted Horse, for one, hadn’t been so lucky.  Morgan looked at her photograph and traced his finger across her smile.  In the end, nobody took her side, nobody stepped between her and death.  Somebody should have been there for her, somebody ...