Whirlwind (11 page)

He stared at the passing desert, elbow on the armrest, one hand curled lightly across his chin. Now that he had said it aloud, heard his voice, he knew he was right. There was no baroque device a murderer could cart around with him, and there was no group of whip-wielding maniacs.

Sangre Viento was all there was.

And one thing more.

“Mulder,” Scully said in that voice he had heard so many times before, “assuming, and only assuming, for the moment that you're right—”

Sheriff Sparrow grumbled a few words, most of which were “bullshit.”

Mulder couldn't miss the tone of disappointment and disbelief.

“—what you're talking about is…” She faltered. “Is a form of undirected psychic, for want of a better word, energy. Assuming it's true,” she added hastily. “But how does that random activity explain four people dying? It seems to me that where and when they died indicates something else entirely.”

“Premeditation,” he said, still watching the desert.

“Exactly.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sparrow snapped. “Are you telling me there's somebody who can aim this thing? Assuming,” he said sarcastically, “you're right.” He yanked the cruiser so hard off the interstate, Mulder nearly fell over. “For God's sake, gimme a break.”

Unfortunately, Mulder couldn't see any other answer. What he could see, however, was a couple of names who might be interested in such control. The question was, why would they feel the need to kill?

“I mean,” the sheriff continued, working himself into a self-righteous rage, “how can a couple of intelligent people like you believe in such crap? Bunch of old Indians sitting around a campfire, shooting cosmic something-or-other at each other? You been nibbling at some peyote or what?” He slapped the steering wheel hard.
“Scully, you're a doctor, for God's sake. You gonna tell me you actually go along with this shit?”

Mulder held his breath.

“Sheriff,” she answered in her most official, neutral voice, “I have never known Mulder to be so far off-base that I would dismiss everything he says out of hand.”

“Ah…crap.”

Thank you, Scully, Mulder thought with a brief smile, I'd rather have a resounding “absolutely and how dare you,” but that'll do in a pinch.

On the other hand, the day that “absolutely and how dare you” actually came, it would probably kill him with amazement.

They passed the Double-H, and he wondered if any of this had touched Annie. He wondered what she had heard on the wind. Whatever it was, he didn't believe for a second she was in any way involved.

Suddenly the sheriff braked hard, and Mulder shot his hand out to brace himself against the seatback. In the road ahead, a pickup had been parked across the lane. Nick Lanaya lounged against the bed, arms folded across his chest.

“Stupid bastard,” the sheriff muttered. “Has everyone gone nuts on me today?”

They climbed out slowly, Mulder moving around the car to join Scully. As he did, he looked up the boulder-strewn slope on his right and saw
a figure sitting near the top, featureless and black against the sky.

“Dugan Velador,” Lanaya said, pushing away from the truck. “He's like a priest. One of the six.” A tolerant chuckle and a gesture to the hill. “He likes it up there. He says it helps him think.”

“But it's so hot,” Scully said, astonished. “How does he survive?”

“He's Konochine, Agent Scully. He can pretty much survive anything.” He cleared his throat. “So what's up? I got Chuck's message. What can I do for you?”

The sheriff hitched his belt. “Nick, you ain't gonna—”

“We need to see the reservation, Mr. Lanaya,” Mulder said, further cutting the sheriff off by standing half in front of him. “There are some questions we have to ask of the people in charge.”

“The Council?”

“Are they the priests?” Scully asked.

Lanaya shrugged. “Mostly, yes. But I don't think they'll talk to you.”

Mulder smiled. “That's why you're here. To convince them that cooperation in a murder investigation would be the right thing to do. Maybe save some lives.”

Lanaya scuffed the ground with the toe of a boot. “Well, to be honest, Agent Mulder, I'm kind of beat today.” A sour look at the sheriff. “I spent most of the morning with a police accoun
tant, going over Donna's ledgers and bank account. It seems she was cheating me more than just a little.”

“So I gathered.”

“Luckily, most of the money is recoverable, so I won't lose much. But it's the shock, you know what I mean? A lot of years I trusted her, and now I'll never know why she did it.”

“Your people trusted her, too,” Scully said.

“No.” He squinted at the hillside. “No, they trusted me. Like I said, I've got a hell of a lot of damage control ahead of me here. And you coming in like this…it's only going to make things worse.”

Mulder walked over to the truck. “You have air conditioning, right?”

Puzzled, Lanaya nodded.

“Good.” He opened the passenger door and beckoned to Scully. “Let's go.” Expressionless, Scully climbed in first. “We have a job to do. Right, sheriff?”

All Sparrow could do was nod curtly, and Lanaya shrugged an
it's your funeral
before getting in behind the wheel. But his face was hard, and Mulder saw his fingers tremble as they turned the key to fire the engine. Anger, or nerves.

“Ground rules,” Lanaya told them as he maneuvered the pickup around. “You don't get out unless I say it's all right. You don't speak to anyone unless I say it's all right, or they speak to
you first. And you sure don't go in any building unless I say it's all right. Okay?”

“Drive, Mr. Lanaya,” he said. “Neither one of us has all day.”

They drove through the gap, the road curving gently to the right. When the hill was finally behind them, Mulder almost asked him to stop. He wasn't quite sure what he had expected, but it wasn't anything like this.

 

Off the road to the left were small fields filled with crops. Scattered gunmetal pumps resembling steel dinosaurs worked ceaselessly, pumping well water into an effective series of irrigation ditches. He didn't recognize any of the crops except, in the center and by far the largest field, corn.

It was a stark, surreal contrast to the desert land that surrounded it.

On the right, however, was Sangre Viento Mesa.

Lanaya slowed. “The Place, Agent Mulder. You'll see other mesas, but never one like that.”

It rose two hundred vertical feet from the desert floor, its sides ridged and furrowed, and stark. Where sunlight washed it, faint red hinted at iron among the dark tans and browns. There was no green at all. There was no plant life that he could see from this distance. On the flat top were outlines of low buildings. Several large birds
circled over it. Its shadow seemed everywhere.

At the north base was the pueblo, and again his vague expectations didn't match the reality.

“Your people weren't cliff dwellers,” Scully said softly.

“No. No one has ever lived on the Mesa itself.” Lanaya looked at her with a faint smile. “Every so often, maybe once a decade, I'm able to bring in an archaeologist or two and some professors who don't believe it. They insist there have to be cave homes there on several levels, with ladders and all the rest. Like at Puye and Mesa Verde. There aren't.”

What there were were neat rows of small abobe houses, a single story each. One, apparently, for each family. All the doors and windows Mulder could see were outlined in pale green. As the road curved closer, he saw laundry hanging from lines on poles, orderly streets in a grid, and at the east end, two larger structures which, Lanaya explained, were a storage building for crops and a tribal center. Incongruously, to Mulder, some of the homes sported television and FM antennas; only a few had vehicles parked beside them, and most of them were pickups. He also spotted a corral where several horses munched on hay and swatted flies with their tails, a trio of black and white dogs trotting along a street, and a low pen populated by chickens whose plumage was almost garish.

It didn't occur to him to think it odd that he couldn't see any litter.

“Where do they work?” Scully asked, leaning as close to the windshield as she could.

“In the fields, in workshops in the center or in their homes. A few go outside, but not many. The Konochine have no unemployment, if that's what you're wondering. You work to eat. You don't work, you don't eat.” Lanaya laughed, but not cheerfully. “I don't know of anyone who has ever chosen to starve.”

“And your house?” she asked.

Flatly: “You can't see it from here.”

Mulder watched a group of white-clothed children playing in front of a building near the pueblo's middle; another group chased each other through the streets, carrying hoops and switches. “What about Leon Ciola?”

Lanaya forced the truck into a tight U-turn and took a short dirt road that led them to the front of the warehouse and the tribal center. No one looked up as he passed except one small boy, whose eyes grew so wide Mulder had to smile.

When the engine stopped, metal creaking, Lanaya opened his door. “Ciola lives where he wants. I don't follow him around, Agent Mulder. He's…he's having a difficult time fitting back into the life.”

Three steps led to double doors in the center.
Lanaya pushed one open and gestured the others in. “You'll have to ask your questions here.”

They were in a large meeting hall with exposed thick beams in the low ceiling. Two doors in the side walls and one in back were closed, their frames painted a pale green. The walls were white. The floor was uncovered. The only decoration was on the back wall over the door, a huge woven tapestry with a depiction of the Mesa in the center. Lightning in the sky. Symbols of sun and moon, of birds and animals. No people at all. Nothing he recognized as a language.

“No one knows how old it is,” Lanaya said, his voice low. “My grandfather once told me that his grandfather knew an old woman who knew an old woman who helped with the design.” He shrugged. “It doesn't matter.”

Against the left wall was a long table of Spanish oak, with equally bulky chairs arranged around it. He led them over and bade them sit, Mulder with his back to the wall, Scully opposite him. “You'll want to talk to one of the Council,” he said. “Dugan would be the best.”

“The man on the hill?” Mulder said.

“Yes. It's time he came in out of the sun anyway. He's going to get heatstroke one of these days. Wait here. Please. It won't take me long.”

The echo of his boots on the floor lingered after he had gone. And once gone, there was no other sound. The outside might as well not have existed.

Scully placed her shoulder bag on the table and folded her hands on it. “He's a strange man, Mulder. One minute you think he hates this place, and then he goes all reverent on you.”

“He's been outside. How can you not have a conflict?”

She looked doubtful, but she didn't pursue it. Instead, as he expected, she launched into a perfectly reasonable explanation of why, with his belief in the Sangre Viento, he was pushing the limits of her tolerance. While she grudgingly granted him the possibility of undirected psychic energy—a phrase she nearly choked on—she was not about to grant him deliberate control.

“Do you know what that means?”

“Murder,” he answered simply.

“Do you want to try to prove that in court? Do you think Skinner will buy it?”

“Right now, I don't care about Skinner. What I care about is who's doing this.” He leaned forward on his arms folded on the table. “Scully, four people are dead, there's one agent missing, every connection points here, or to someone here, and unless we catch him, there's going to be more.”

She stared at him for a long time.

He held the stare as long as he could, then sighed and looked down at his blurred reflection in the dark polished wood.

“Ciola,” she said then.

He looked up without raising his head.

“Leon Ciola.” She slipped a sheet of paper from her bag and slid it over. “You were so busy driving Sheriff Sparrow away with your story that I didn't have a chance to tell you.” She tapped the paper with a finger. “Preliminary police report on Donna Falkner's house. A lot of prints were lifted. Hers, of course, and Lanaya's, no surprise, he was her partner. And Leon Ciola's.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Some of them in the bedroom.”

He glanced over the form and resisted the urge to shout.

“It's hard with only that one conversation,” she continued, “but I don't get the feeling that she ran that embezzlement scheme on her own. Ciola could have talked her into it. It's been going on for four years. Two of those years were his last two in prison.” Another tap on the paper. “She visited him there, Mulder. Often. Evidently she was the reason he lost his temper in the bar.”

Mulder rested his chin on his arm. “She gets greedy. He finds out. His infamous temper.”

No answer.

He looked up into a disquieting frown.

“We'll assume again, all right? For the sake of argument?”

He nodded.

“Why Paulie Deven? Why the Constellas?”

He had already thought about that; he already had an answer that disturbed him.

“Practice,” he said, lowering his gaze to the table. “All they were to him was practice.”

She didn't react, didn't speak. She pulled the paper back, turned it around, and skimmed it. Then she put it back into her bag and let her head rest against the chair's high back. Her lips pursed; her eyes followed an unseen trail on the ceiling.

“He's not one of the Council, Mulder. Ciola—”

“Well, well, well,
chica,
” Ciola said from the entrance. “Every time I see you, you can't help but speak my name.”