Whirlwind (9 page)

Mulder stepped outside and inhaled deeply several times. Too many scents mingled for him to identify, but they were sweet, and he was pleased. He had caught Scully's determination, and with the dust washed away, even the prospects of success seemed more bright.

You're pushing it, he told himself, and didn't much care. It felt pretty good, and he took that where he could get it.

Scully followed, checking to be sure the door locked behind her. A detour to the front desk assured them that the clerk had Mulder's portable phone number and would relay calls or messages as soon as they were received.

Just as they were about to turn away from the desk, Scully gave a nod toward the side entrance. “I think we have company.”

A tall man in denim and a ponytail walked toward them, taking off his hat as he approached. “Agent Mulder? Agent Scully?”

Mulder nodded warily.

The man held out his hand. “Nick Lanaya. We were supposed to meet later.” He cocked a lean hip as he shifted his weight. “Sorry I'm early, but I took a chance catching you. I was going to stop at a friend's first, but the storm…”

“Actually,” Scully said, “your timing is perfect. We were about to drive out to the Mesa.”

His eyes widened. “Alone?”

“No. We were hoping someone from the Double-H would go along. But,” she added with a smile, “now you're here, which is exactly what we need.”

“Damn right about that,” he said, matching her with a smile of his own. “Today's Thursday. You go there today, they'll probably shoot you.”

“What?” Mulder said.

“Well, not really shoot you, Agent Mulder, but you wouldn't have gotten in. It's a…call it a holy day. Kind of like Sunday, only a little more intense.” He used the hat to gesture toward the restaurant. “So what do you say we have something to eat? Chuck said you had a few questions, and I answer better on a full stomach.”

Not long after they were at a table, this time near the entrance. Other diners had already begun to arrive, and the room was more lively, more cheerful than last time. The contrast was startling, and it took Mulder a few minutes before he was able to concentrate on what Lanaya told him.

Anecdotes at first, as their meal arrived and they ate, trying to give them a feel for his people. They were conservative, hard-working, and surprisingly, they didn't feel at all oppressed.

“They've been at Sangre Viento since their Time began. No one has ever defeated them in war badly enough to drive them out, although the Apache gave them a hard time for a while, a hundred years or so back, and the white man hasn't seen any need to do anything but leave them pretty much alone.” He seemed slightly embarrassed. “To tell you the truth, it makes them kind of smug.”

Scully brushed the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “I understand you're an important person there.”

Lanaya closed his eyes as he laughed, shook his head and waved his fork. “Lord, no. Important?” He laughed again. “Not the way you mean, no. Some sort of authority figure, a position of power, something like that?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Nope. Sorry. I'm important only in that I
keep their contacts with the outside healthy, that's all. They're not stupid, Agent Scully. They don't live primitively; not by their standards, anyway. They just pick and choose what they want from the white man's world, that's all. Some have TV, everybody has a radio. Schooling is important. I'm not the only one who went to college.”

“But you went back.”

“Yes. Yes, I went back. Often there are ties too strong to be broken.” His left hand moved to his chest and away, but not before Mulder spotted a bulge there.

A medicine bag, he thought; he carries his power with him.

“Anyway, what is it, exactly, that you want to know?”

Mulder watched Scully's smile, and hid one of his own. The man was taken with her, and whether he knew it or not, Scully had already gotten more from him than he probably wanted them to know.

They.

He said
they
instead of
we.

Scully's next question was predictable, and Mulder couldn't help feeling a faint disappointment at the answer.

“No, there's no significance to any of the things I bring out for Donna to sell. Traditional designs, that's all.” He chuckled. “Once in a
while, the designs are…borrowed, shall we say? The artisans get bored doing the same thing all the time.”

“You mean they fake it? Pass their work off as someone else's?”

“I mean they get bored, Agent Scully. What they use, they make their own.”

They
again.

Mulder began to wonder.

Suddenly the man grunted and clutched at his stomach. Scully was on her feet immediately, but he waved her away. “It's okay,” he said, gasping a little, his eyes watering. “Took me by surprise, is all.”

Scully stood by him anyway. “What did?”

Lanaya gestured toward his plate. “Ulcer, I think.”

“What? You have an ulcer and you eat this stuff?” She rolled her eyes and took her seat. “You're out of your mind.”

“Maybe.” He took a roll of antacid tablets from his pocket and popped one into his mouth. “No, definitely. But I keep hoping I'll get used to it before I die.”

“Don't worry, you won't,” she told him. “Because that stuff will end up killing you.”

He laughed, and Mulder managed a polite smile in response.

He was getting damn tired of people lying to his face.

 

There was someone in the backyard.

She heard movement as she dropped her suitcase into the passenger seat, and swore. With hardly any neighbors to speak of, who the hell would be out there? Unless it was a stray cat, or…she glared. Or a goddamn coyote.

She hurried into the house, yanked open a desk drawer, and pulled out a wood-stock .38. She had never given a damn what the cautions were; it was always loaded. A single woman living alone would scarcely have the time to load if someone broke in in the middle of the night.

She hefted it, thumbed off the safety, and marched through the Pullman kitchen to the back door. As far as she could tell, the yard was empty, its grass long since given over to weeds and bare earth.

Still…

A low, constant hissing.

Shit, she thought; she had left the outside faucet on. That's what it was—water spilling onto the weeds beneath the damn faucet. She tried to remember when she last was out here, and couldn't. Good God, it could have been as long as a week, maybe more. Her water bill was going to be—

She laughed and shook her head.

Who cared about a stupid water bill? She
wasn't going to be around to pay it anyway. Nevertheless, a twinge of guilt at all that waste made her open the door and step outside, swinging immediately to the right and crouching under the kitchen window. She already had her hand on the faucet when she realized it was dry.

No water.

“What the hell?”

The noise grew louder, and now she heard what she thought was whispering.

She rose and turned in the same move.

Too terrified to scream, she managed to fire twice before she was struck and spun away from the house, her arms flailing, her clothes shredded, strips of flesh taken and flung against the wall, her eyes blinded, her lips gone.

When it was over, she remained on her feet for as long as it took for a breeze to touch her.

When she fell, no one heard her.

 

Lanaya folded his napkin beside his empty plate. “If it's all right with you, I'll pick you up in the morning. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can leave.”

Mulder reached for a glass of water. “You don't sound very proud of your home.”

“It's for your own good, Agent Mulder. And there's not much to see.” He pushed his chair
back, but neither Mulder nor Scully moved. “I have to admit, I'm still not convinced you're looking in the right place. Coincidence, that's all it is.”

“Maybe. Probably, if you like. But as I already said to someone, we have no choice.”

“Sure, no problem. I understand.”

Mulder turned around, looking for a waiter to signal so he could get the check. Who he saw was Sheriff Sparrow coming through the front door. By his attitude, the way he snapped a question at the clerk, who had walked over to greet him, it was business. Bad business.

“Scully,” he said quietly, and excused himself to hurry into the lobby.

Sparrow brushed the clerk aside with a brusque nod and stared over Mulder's shoulder. “News,” he said.

“What?”

“Lanaya been with you all this time?”

Mulder nodded. “What's happened?”

“You already eat?”

“Sheriff, would you mind telling me what's going on?”

Sparrow stared, shook himself without moving a muscle, and blew out a sigh. “Sorry. I didn't mean to snap like that. But I guess you're in luck, Agent Mulder. There's been another one.”

Mulder beckoned to Scully automatically as he said, “Who?”

“Donna Falkner.”

 

Shots, two, maybe three, the sheriff told them as he sped out of the parking lot. A neighbor went over to complain, couldn't get an answer at the front door and wandered around to the back. As soon as he saw the body, he called the sheriff's office. As soon as the first deputy saw the body, he called the sheriff, knowing the FBI was in on this case.

Several patrol cars were already on the scene when they arrived, and an ambulance backed into the driveway. Yellow crime scene ribbon fluttered around the property. A handful of people stood in the lot across the street.

“How well did you know her?” Mulder asked as Sparrow led them around the garage to the back.

“She was a pain in the ass.” A sharp wave. “She was okay, though.”

“Did you know she was going on vacation?”

Sparrow stopped and turned at the corner. “Are you crazy? She never went on vacation. Working herself to death is what she was. Wanted to be a goddamn millionaire before she was thirty-five.”

Mulder stepped around him and walked slowly through the shin-high weeds. A sheet had been placed over the body. He didn't bother to ask if the ME had been called; this report wouldn't be any different from the others.

Scully brushed by him and knelt beside the sheet. He stood behind her, holding his breath as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, pinched a corner, and pulled it back.

Mulder looked away.

Scully braced herself on the ground with one hand, and whispered something he couldn't catch. He saw a shudder work its way down her back before she asked if someone had a camera. A deputy appeared at her side, and she directed the lens as she pulled the sheet farther back.

The mutilation here wasn't as complete as the others. There were areas where the skin was raw but still intact, and areas where a gleam of white showed through liquid red. Her face, however, was completely gone, as was most of her hair.

This had not been a swift dying.

While the sheriff barked and grumbled at his men, Mulder began a slow walk around the yard, until he realized that the color near and on the ground was actually bits of flesh. So were the splotches on the wall near an outside spigot. At the foundation just below it, he found the gun, took a pen from his pocket and picked it up through the trigger guard. Two shots, maybe three, the neighbor had said.

At what?

“Scully.”

She looked up, a little pale but recovered.

He jerked his head to tell her he would be inside when she was finished, then opened the kitchen door and went in.

It was still hot, no moving air, and no sign that she intended to return from wherever it was she'd been heading. The drawers in the tiny bedroom dresser were empty; there were a few cartons in the spare room, which looked like those he'd seen in the Cherokee outside. Nothing in the medicine cabinet. Papers and some ledgers in the desk; bills paid and unpaid, but no letters.

He didn't realize how much sunlight had slipped away until someone snapped on an overhead light.

It didn't make the place look any better.

When he took another turn around the room, he saw a briefcase against the wall beside the desk. He knelt, lifted it up, and raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. It was heavier than it looked.

When he opened it, he knew why.

“What do you know?” he said softly, closed it again, and snapped the locks. He kept it in his hand as he went through the house again, finding nothing more than tangles of dust in the corners.

Eventually he found himself by the window, staring at Nick Lanaya, who stood by a pickup parked across the street. Funny reaction, he thought as he headed for the door. The man's partner is murdered, and he just stands there.

He moved onto the stoop and waved, but Lanaya didn't see him.

He was too busy talking to Leon Ciola.

“Mulder.”

He lifted a hand to his shoulder, bringing Scully out of the house and cautioning her at the same time. He pointed when she stood beside him.

“Well, well.”

The two men were close together, sideways to the house, every so often glancing down into the truck's bed. Not once did they show any interest in the deputies bustling around the area, or in the police when they arrived, lights spinning. Mulder couldn't tell if they were arguing or not, but they certainly weren't simply passing the time.

He could see Ciola's shark smile; he couldn't read Lanaya's face at all.

Then Ciola jabbed Lanaya's chest with a stiff finger, once, twice, and leaned so close their noses almost touched.

“Do you think we should join them?” Scully asked.

“What, and disturb their grief?” He sidestepped back into the living room. “Look at this, Scully.” He set the briefcase on the desk and opened it to show her the packets of money he had found, as many as could be crammed in without bursting the seams.

“A bank is safer.” She picked up a packet, another, but there was no sense trying to fix the amount now. Some were in equal amounts, others were mixed. That there was thousands, however, was beyond question. She pulled back her hand and closed the briefcase with a slap. “The same as the others, Mulder.” Her gloves had already been stripped off, but she scrubbed her hands anyway. “Not as complete, but the same.” She looked at him, almost angry. “I'm going to do this autopsy myself. And this time the report will be right.”

“What will it say, Agent Scully?” Nick Lanaya asked from the doorway.

She turned to him. “It will say, once the remains have been confirmed, that Donna Falkner was murdered by person or persons unknown, for one thing. For another, it will say that it appears to be in the same manner of death as the others you've
had in this area.” She turned away. “You'll have to wait for the rest.”

Lanaya sagged against the door frame, head bowed. “I looked in the Cherokee.”

Mulder kept the case as he walked over to Lanaya. “She was your partner. Where was she going with all that?”

Lanaya didn't look up. “I would say she was stealing it. According to the markings, they should have been sold months ago.” Suddenly he kicked back at the screen door, slamming it against the house. “Goddamnit, Mulder, what the hell was she doing? All the years we worked together—” He kicked the door again and stared blindly into the room.

This time Mulder saw the pain. And something else. Maybe betrayal.

He nudged Lanaya until he went outside, and they walked away from the house, Mulder drawing closer until the man had no conscious choice but to take him to the truck.

The bed was empty, except for a length of tarp folded near the cab.

“I didn't know you knew Leon,” Mulder said, careful to keep accusation from his voice.

“There isn't an adult Konochine alive who doesn't know all the others, Agent Mulder. You can hardly avoid it the way we live.”

“It seemed a bit more than just casual, from what I saw.”

“Personal, okay? It was personal.” Lanaya's expression couldn't decide whether to be angry or insulted. “I was with you, remember?” A one-sided, humorless smile flashed on, flashed off. “Just in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn't. I have a pretty good short-term memory. Do you happen to know where Mr. Ciola was?”

“Don't know, don't give a shit.” Lanaya reached into the bed and picked up a twig with long needles on it. He twirled it between his fingers before flicking it away. “Stupid woman. My God, what…what…” He gave up.

“You were lovers?”

The Indian shrugged, one shoulder. “For a while. A couple of years back. Turned out we wanted to be business partners more, so we stopped.”

“That briefcase is filled with money. Would you have any idea where she got it?”

Radio chatter hung over the street.

A cop and a deputy laughed too loudly.

It should be dark, Mulder thought as he waited for an answer, there's too much light here. It should be dark.

“We haven't been doing too well lately, actually,” Lanaya finally admitted. He sniffed, rubbed his nose with the back of a hand, and pushed his hat up off his forehead. “About a year ago, she said the usual stuff wasn't working anymore, that we needed a gimmick, something to distinguish
our product from all the other Indian stuff getting produced around here.” He laughed bitterly. “I got a bad feeling, Agent Mulder. A bad feeling I've been had.” Another laugh, and he slapped the truck's side. “Son of a bitch! When they find out about this, I'll never be able to get them to trust me again.”

Scully and Sparrow left the house, talking softly.

Lanaya swept a nervous hand back over his hair several times. “Will I…she has no relatives, I mean. Will I have to, you know, identify her?”

“That won't be necessary.”

He looked, one eye nearly closed. “That bad?”

Mulder couldn't face him. “There'll have to be the usual tests.”

“Tests?” He moved as if to take a run at the house. “Tests? Then how the hell do you know it's her, Mulder? My God, maybe it's someone else, a vagrant or something.”

The only thing he could say was, “I know, Mr. Lanaya. I don't want to, but you'll have to trust me on this. I know it's her.”

Lanaya made a growling noise in his throat, took a step around the truck, and asked with a look if he was needed. Mulder waved him on, and backed away back when the pickup barreled away, turning the corner without the brake lights flaring.

Mulder watched for a moment, then returned to the front yard, where Scully joined him.

“You all right?” he asked, seeing the expression on her face.

She nodded. “I'm just finding it a little hard to believe, that's all.” She glanced toward the house. “Aside from the method, though, it's strange.”

“That's not strange enough?”

She almost smiled. “Did you get a good look at the yard?”

“I saw the bare patch where she fell, if that's what you mean.”

“Right. But before we leave, take another look. That bare area where the grass and weeds were cut down, that wasn't done by any kind of mower I'm aware of.”

“Wait.”

She passed a hand over her chin. “What I mean is, where she died isn't where she was first attacked. Whoever killed her…it's as if she was pushed around, and the murderer followed her.”

“A force like that, I'm not surprised. When you get into a fight, you hardly ever stick to one place.”

“This wasn't like a fistfight, Mulder. She wasn't punched around, falling down and getting up again. From what I can tell, given the…given the positions of the body, and the flesh and bone shards around the yard, she fell only once. When she died.”

Mulder swallowed, but said nothing.

“The point is, Mulder—whoever attacked
her, with whatever weapon, kept her on her feet.”

“But the force it would take to do that much damage…” He gestured toward the house.

“Exactly, Mulder,” she said. “Exactly. She should have fallen almost immediately. But she didn't.”

 

That night, after the paperwork was done, interviews completed, and he and Sheriff Sparrow had finished debriefing each other, he returned to the bench in the garden. His room had grown too small, and Scully was transcribing her notes into the computer. Her mind was already on the morning autopsy—a fresh, puzzling corpse to decipher.

Oh God, he thought; you're sick, pal, you're really sick. What you need is a vacation.

He almost laughed.

Right; that's what got me into this in the first place.

The Rio Grande was higher after the downpour, but only slightly, and the ground and paths were completely dry. There were no strolling guests tonight, either; that didn't surprise him. Word was probably out that the killer had struck again. For a night or two, people would stick close to home, the papers would editorialize about the alarming incidence of psychopathic murders in contempo
rary society, and someone, somewhere, would manage to reap a large or small political harvest.

Which knowledge got him exactly nowhere.

He reached down between his legs and picked up a pebble. He bounced it on his palm a few times before swatting it toward the water.

He did it a second time, swinging a little harder.

He stood for the third one, and hit it with a fist. It stung a knuckle, but he barely felt it. It was the motion that mattered. When he missed the fourth stone, he considered stopping wasting time and going back to the room. That lasted as long as it took him to find it, and miss again.

Now it was a matter of personal honor, and now he couldn't find the damn thing. Not that any of the others he spotted while on his hands and knees wouldn't have worked, but the one he had missed was the one he wanted.

He was nearly stretched out under the bench, feeling like a jackass, when he heard the rustle of something moving through the brush on the riverbank. At first he thought it might be the evening breeze, but listening for a few seconds told him it was too irregular.

Stop and start.

Just out of reach of the tree lamps and the moonlight, and the lamp poles along the bank.

He used the bench to push himself to his feet,
staring upriver as he dusted off his knees. That, too, was a waste of time; the lamps in front of him blocked any chance of seeing what lay beyond.

The rustling stopped.

All right, so what do they have around here at night? Dogs, cats, coyotes? After that, he went blank.

When he heard it again, he took a long step off the path and picked up a small rock, aimed, and threw it as hard as he could. The crash of the missile through the brush and weeds was followed by the dull plop of its landing in shallow water. But there was no yelp, no sudden rush of an animal scurrying to get away.

Nothing at all, in fact; nothing at all.

Accepting that as a sign he was in danger of losing it, he flicked one more pebble at the water and started back to his room. He hadn't gone three steps when the noise returned.

Not a rustling now, but a barely audible hissing.

Not stop and start, but continuous and moving; slowly, very slowly.

Common sense and experience ordered him to head immediately for the inside, or, at the very least, get Scully out here with him.

What he did, for no good reason he could think of, was sidestep cautiously off the path, turning his head in short stages to try to pinpoint the source's location, whatever the source
was. When he reached the lamp poles, his right hand closed around one as he slipped past, while his left instinctively slipped his gun from its holster.

He wouldn't have done that if he hadn't heard the whispering.

More than one voice, although he couldn't tell how many. Nor could he understand what they were saying. One moment it sounded like muffled laughter, the next like little children exchanging secrets in the dark.

Beyond the last pole, there was still several yards of cleared earth straight ahead, while to the left the ground sloped downward toward the river. He flexed his knees to keep his balance on the slope, to keep from sliding as he moved forward, staring, silently cursing the weak reach of the lamplight. He could barely see the brush, could only just make out a twisted branch above it, no higher than his head.

The noise was on the other side, coming toward him.

Carefully he reached behind him, fumbled for and grabbed the last square pole, an clumsy position until he put most of his weight on his right foot.

The whispering sounded more frantic, quickly blending into what sounded like a low hum.

No animal, he knew; and he couldn't see how it could be people, either. That many would make a different kind of noise, and it certainly would be
louder. Which made his drawn weapon a little ludicrous.

If there was nothing to shoot at, why have it out?

But nothing didn't make a noise.

It didn't hiss.

It didn't whisper.

He released the lamp pole and eased forward, keeping low, freezing when he had a sudden image of a woman about to open a door everyone in the theater knew hid the monster. They called her stupid, they yelled at her not to do it, they threw things at the screen to get her attention, but she opened it anyway.

And she was always wrong.

And what, he asked himself, does that make you?

Hissing, climbing to a higher pitch that puzzled him because the pitch was still quite low.

It reminded him of something.

It definitely reminded him of something.

He took a step back, snapping his head around when something splashed to his left. No ripples that he could see, not even when he heard another splash, farther across the water. He could have turned then, but he didn't want to show his back to whatever was out there. He wanted to see it if he could, just in case it came into the open and could see him, too.

Then something struck the pole, taking a chip from the edge.

He didn't wait to see if it had been a shot; he fired one of his own into the dark, whirled and began to run, slipping once on the grass, flinging a hand out to stop him from falling on his chest.

When he reached the bench, he turned, trotting backward, staring at something he could finally see down by the lamps.

He never had a chance to see it clearly.

He heard a voice, heard a popping sound, and all the lamps turned red.