The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (29 page)

“I remember shouting: ‘Get out of here!’ I ran to the kitchen for the phone, and one of them came after me. Grabbed me from behind and hit me in the face. That’s all I remember, his fist coming at me. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor and I heard a baby crying somewhere. There was blood everywhere, ’cause he broke my nose. I could taste the blood in my mouth. I had to hold on to the wall to get up, you know, sort of crawling up the wall, and I saw they were gone. Liz, too. I went into the kitchen, ducked my head under the faucet and tried to clean up some of the blood. My whole face felt like it was on fire with the pain. I went and picked up Luna and I knew, even then, that I was gonna have to take care of her. She was going to be my little baby.”

“Did you call the police?”

Inez gave a snort of laughter and shook her head. “Oh, yes. I called. Took them two hours to get here. Indian neighborhood, another Indian fight, was how they looked at it. Let ’em go back to the reservation and settle their own troubles. Couple of officers wrote in their notepads, shoved the notepads back into their pockets, said they’d file a report. That was the last I heard. I wanted to call AIM, the guys I knew. But I didn’t, ’cause they
were
AIM, you know.”

She went quiet for a moment, kneading her fingers together. “Maybe you’d better tell me what they did with her.”

“They shot her,” Vicky said. “They beat her first…”

A sharp cry erupted behind them, and Vicky turned around. Luna was standing in the doorway to the bedrooms. In her arms was a baby girl, with brown, baby-fat arms and legs and black hair. A pink ribbon was tied around a snatch of hair that stood straight up from her head. She rubbed a chubby hand at sleepy eyes, then leaned back and stared at her mother, who was crying.

Vicky jumped to her feet. “I’m so sorry.”

“No.” Luna pressed a fist against her mouth a moment, then she said, “I want to know everything that happened to my mother.”

Inez pushed herself out of the sofa and went over to Luna. She wrapped her arms around both the young woman and the baby and held them close. After a moment, she said, “Her body was found this summer near the reservation. We can see that she has a proper burial now, in the Arapaho Way.” She led Luna and the baby back to the sofa and sat down beside them. The baby leaned against her mother and patted at her arm.

“Did you recognize the men?” Vicky said. “Can you identify them?”

A couple of seconds passed before Inez said, “One of them stayed at the house. Right after Wounded Knee, came and stayed a couple of weeks. Then he said he was going to Wind River with other AIM people. Lakota, went by the name of Jake Tallfeathers, but he told me once his real name was Walker.”

And he’s dead, Vicky was thinking. Struck by a truck probably driven by the other man—who was still alive. “Who was with him?” she said. Her voice was quiet; she realized she was holding her breath.

“I never saw him before,” Inez said. She waited another moment. “All I know is, he had a funny name. I never forgot it. He was the one that hit me, and just before he grabbed me, I heard Jake yelling: ‘Get her, Mister!’”

Vicky could hear the sound of her own breathing; it was like a bellows in the quiet house. “Do you remember what he looked like?” she managed. “Do you think you could still identify him?”

“I’ll never forget their faces,” Inez said. “I can close my eyes and see their faces.”

“
I KNOW WHO
the killer is!” Vicky shouted into the cell over the whir of the Jeep’s engine. She’d tapped in the telephone number, hurrying down the sidewalk, then opened the door and crawled inside, the phone ringing in her ear. “Get me Coughlin,” she’d told the high-pitched disembodied voice that had finally answered: “Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.” She’d turned on the ignition while she’d waited for the message to wind its way from the receptionist’s desk down the corridors to Coughlin’s office. Finally, the detective was on the line.

“Start over,” he said.

“His name is Lyle Bennet. He goes by the name of Mister.”

“We’re talking about Ruth Yellow Bull’s homicide?”

“And Liz Plenty Horses’s.” Vicky pressed herself against the seat and fought to keep her voice steady. My God, she and Adam had agreed to help the man. They were going to do everything they could to help him obtain his rights.

“Tell me what you’ve found.”

Vicky told him what Inez Horn had said: that Liz Plenty Horses and her baby had stayed at her house—an AIM safe house—in Denver for four days, that Jake Tallfeathers and Mister had broken into the house and forced Liz to accompany them, that she had never heard of Liz after that night, that she had raised Liz’s daughter, Luna. “He’s still on the reservation,” Vicky said. “He’s one of my clients, for godssake, and he wants to kill me. He killed Ruth, and he’ll kill anyone who can connect him to Liz Plenty Horses’s murder.”

“It’s a good lead, I give you that, and I’ll definitely investigate…”

“A lead? You have to pick Mister up right away before he kills anybody else. I have his address.” God, what was it? She fumbled in her bag, dragged out her Day-Timer and scrolled down to
M
. She had it then. Lyle Bennet/Mister, on Middle Fork Road. “He’s desperate. He might come after Inez and Luna.”

“Okay, take it easy.”

“Inez can identify him, Coughlin. She’s never forgotten what he looked like. She’ll testify that Mister and Jake Tallfeathers dragged Liz out of her house. They were the last ones to be seen with her.”

“It doesn’t prove they killed her.”

It came like a slap in the face. Vicky flinched at the truth of it. The heat of the sun bore through the windshield and burned into her forearm. They’d taken Liz from the house; yes, that was true. She could almost hear the rough, gravelly voice of Mister trying to explain his version of what had happened that night. They’d stopped for gas, and Liz said she had to use the john, and she never come back. That’s the truth, so help him God. He’d swear it was true. He was no murderer, why would he murder her? Just bringing her back…

Bringing her back. The idea stalled in her head like a roadblock Vicky couldn’t get past. Suppose it were true. Suppose Jake and Mister were the errand boys, dispatched to bring Liz Plenty Horses back to the reservation to answer for something she hadn’t done. Suppose someone else—a man intent on remaining in charge, a man who had eliminated anyone he thought was competition: Jimmie Iron in Washington, D.C., Daryl Redman in Ethete—had given the order to bring Liz Plenty Horses back to the reservation. Then he had killed her to keep her quiet.

She could see Inez Horn looking out the window, the sadness outlined in the hunch of her shoulders. More than thirty-five years, and Liz’s killer was still free. And now—where was the evidence that Jake Tallfeathers and Mister were the men who had beaten her and shot her to death? Where was the gun, the blood spatters in a truck that had been crunched into a scrap heap years ago, the bloody clothes and fingerprints and strands of hair, the DNA that might have been swabbed from under fingernails? There was nothing but a skeleton.

“He knows what happened to her,” Vicky said, and she knew that was true. Mister knew who had killed Liz Plenty Horses. “You have to pick him up.”

“We will, we will, Vicky. I want to talk to this Inez Horn.”

“Hold on.” Vicky checked the cell and gave him the number Luna had used this morning. Then she read off Luna’s address.

“I’ll see about sending a man…”

“There isn’t time,” Vicky said. “Pick him up now. Please,” she added, and realized that was ridiculous. He would handle matters his own way. “Mister knows who the murderer is.” And here was a new thought. She blurted it out, “He could be in danger.”

This seemed to get his attention because the line went quiet for a long moment. “We’ll pick him up, talk to him,” he said. “Where are you now?”

She told him she was about to start for the reservation, and glanced at her watch. Two o’clock. She would have to retrieve her bag from Lucas’s house, leave a note on the table:
Sorry, honey. Something came up. Had to return to the rez. We’ll have a long visit soon
—
I promise. I promise.
So many broken promises. The house was near I-25 and she should be on the highway in thirty minutes. “I’ll be on the rez by nine thirty.”

“Look, Vicky. Until we find this guy and sort through things, maybe you shouldn’t go to your apartment.”

She told him she’d be at the mission.

HE THOUGHT HE’D
heard a car pulling into the mission a moment ago, and Father John had pushed back from his desk in the study and gone to the window. The last of the daylight had begun to fade. Darkness was crawling over the grounds, wrapping around the yellowish light of the streetlamps. No sign of any vehicle outside. The old house creaked around him, settling into evening, and from overhead came the faint clicking noise of Father Ian’s laptop. Familiar sounds, and yet, he couldn’t shake the sense of something different, some disturbance.

He’d been expecting Vicky at any moment; she’d called around three. Just leaving Cheyenne, I-80 flinging itself ahead through the sagebrush and wild grasses and blown dirt in a great expanse of nothingness. They’d talked a good ten minutes, Vicky’s voice lost at times in the roar of semis barreling past her Jeep. Mister and Jake Tallfeathers had taken Liz from the safe house, she’d told him. They may have been involved in her death—the brutal beating, the gun fired into her skull. At the very least, Mister knew who the murderer was.

She asked if she could stay in the guesthouse. He’d hesitated at that. The silver sedan had been at the mission yesterday. “Just tonight,” she’d said, a firmness in her voice that met his hesitation. She hurried on, explaining that Coughlin would have Mister in custody tonight, and tomorrow, Adam would be back.

“Yes, of course,” he’d said. He didn’t want to think of her alone in her apartment, a killer on the loose.

He peered across Circle Drive toward the road that tunneled through the cottonwoods, willing the headlights to appear, shimmering through the trees and lengthening across the grounds, but there were no headlights.

He was about to sit down at his desk when he heard a faint rumbling noise. This time, looking out the window, he watched the headlights gather and shoot across Circle Drive. Behind the headlights, he recognized Vicky’s Jeep.

Father John went to the front door. He was halfway down the sidewalk when the Jeep slid into the curb and Vicky got out. She slammed the door behind her and came to meet him. The night was hot, probably only a few degrees cooler than the afternoon, but she was pulling the front of a sweater around her, as if she wanted to ward off whatever chill had come over her.

He placed an arm on her shoulders and ushered her into the residence. “Have you eaten?” he said.

THEY SAT AT
the kitchen table. She took a few bites of the sandwich he’d made for her—bologna, mayonnaise, and a leaf of lettuce—and sipped at the fresh coffee he’d brewed. “It doesn’t matter if Mister pulled the trigger,” she said. “He and Jake Tallfeathers are accomplices in her murder. They went and got her, dragged her back to the rez so that some psychopath with a grandiose vision of himself could silence her forever, make certain she never told anyone about Jimmie Iron’s murder in Washington, D.C., or who the real snitch was.”

“You’re saying someone else killed her,” Father John said, and that meant, he was thinking, that even if Mister were arrested, the killer would still be on the loose.

Vicky nodded. “He couldn’t trust her. She’d been picked up by the police, held in custody for twenty-four hours. No telling what she might spill if the police picked her up again. And chances were, they would pick her up. They knew who she was, a vulnerable girl with a baby and no one to protect her. No one to hire a lawyer for her. They would have held her as long as possible, putting pressure on her. Tell us what you know about AIM and we’ll let you go. Whoever her killer was, he knew how it worked.”

Father John got up, refilled her mug, and poured a little more coffee into his own. He set down the coffeepot and glanced out the window. The backyard, the baseball field, and the dirt road that the silver sedan had taken were lost in the darkness, but there was no sign of movement, nothing out of the ordinary. He took his chair again and thought of telling her about the silver sedan, then decided against it. He’d tell her tomorrow. She looked exhausted tonight, her eyes red rimmed with fatigue and strain.

Vicky set her mug down and pulled her bag off the back of the chair and around to her lap. She drew out her cell and began pressing the keys. Then she stared past his shoulder. “Put me through to Detective Coughlin,” she said after a couple of seconds. “I know he’s off duty. This is Vicky Holden and it’s urgent. He knows what I’m calling about.”

She threw Father John a half smile of exasperation and began tapping out a rhythm on the tabletop with her fingertips. A long moment passed before she said, “Do you have him yet?” She paused. “He couldn’t have just disappeared, dropped off the face of the earth. He didn’t know you were coming after him. Why would he run?” Another moment passed before she said, “I’ll check back in the morning.” She pressed a key, snapped the phone shut, and set it on the table.

“Mister’s on the run,” she said. “Coughlin thinks he got nervous after Ruth Yellow Bull’s murder. He could be heading for Pine Ridge. He has relatives there. There’s an alert out for him. The highway patrol will pick him up.” There was little conviction in her voice, and Father John had to glance away from the tiredness in her eyes.

“You need to sleep,” he told her. He’d decided that he’d stay awake tonight, watching, in case the sedan returned.

They walked back through the residence and out to the Jeep. The night was still warm, and a deep quiet had dropped over the mission. Across Circle Drive, the church and administration building loomed out of the darkness, washed in a mix of moonlight and the glow from the street lamps. “I know the way,” Vicky said, giving him a little smile over the rim of the door as she got into the Jeep.

Well, that was true, he thought. Still he preferred to ride along with her tonight. He rapped his fingers on the hood as he walked around and got into the passenger seat, and—strange, this—despite her protest, Vicky waited until he’d pulled his door shut before she started the engine. How well they knew each other, he thought. He wondered if she’d sensed his worry about the mission, or even sensed that the killer had also come here. In any case, she knew he wouldn’t let her go to the guesthouse alone, fumble with the key in the dark, search for the light inside.

The Jeep’s headlights bounced over the gravel road, the edge of the lights catching the sides of the church and the administration building and throwing a column of light toward Eagle Hall. A few old cottonwoods lined the road, and here and there a stray branch dangled over the road. The guesthouse was ahead, a dark, blocklike shape against the pale moonlit sky.

Vicky parked in front and left on the headlights while Father John got out and, pulling the keys from his pocket, went to the front door. He kept to the side so as not to block the light, inserted the key and pushed the door open. He reached inside for the light switch, just as the headlights went off. There was a moment of darkness: the sound of Vicky’s door slamming shut, her footsteps on the gravel. His fingers found the switch, and light burst out of the round glass fixture on the living room ceiling.

It was then that the sound of a gunshot crashed around them. “Get down!” Father John shouted. He hit the switch and turned off the light. God. They’d been sitting ducks in a shooting gallery, both of them, backlit by the light inside. He hunched over and ran toward Vicky, crouched against the front tire of the Jeep. Another gunshot then, blasting the air. Wood shattered in the front door where he’d been standing a half second ago. He felt the sharp pricks, like needles, driving into his back.

“You okay?” he said. She was so quiet, as quiet as death. He took hold of her shoulders. “Vicky! Are you hit?”

“No. No,” she said. It was almost a whisper, a half-strangled noise in her throat. “I’m okay.”

Another shot, then, slamming into the Jeep, rocking it sideways as if it might lift off the tires and collapse into a heap. There was the sound of glass shattering, and shards of glass rained over them. He was firing wildly, whoever he was, firing from the cottonwoods across the road. He knew he had them pinned down by the Jeep.