Wife of Moon (22 page)

VICKY LOOKED DOWN
at the headlights streaming through the gray light of Main Street, struggling to rein in the surge of impatience as Gianelli, stationed at his desk behind her, delivered a summation of what she'd spent the last thirty minutes laying out. Photographs of a hundred-year-old murder committed by Senator Evans's grandfather, which proved how the Evans family had obtained a ranch floating on a lake of oil.

Vicky heard the skepticism running through the summation and steeled herself for what was bound to come next: Granted, Senator Evans wouldn't like the scandal if the photos became public. It would be embarrassing, but it would hardly derail his career. Face it, Vicky, nobody cares about a hundred-year-old murder.

She turned and faced the man leaning back in a swivel chair, gaze fastened at the stacks of papers covering his desk, feet propped between the stacks. “What about the murder of Denise's cousin twelve years ago?” she said.

“Okay. Okay.” Gianelli swung his feet to the floor, lifted his bulky frame out of the chair, and walked over to the file cabinets. After thumbing through the files in the top drawer, he yanked one free, then sat back down. He opened the folder and stared at the top page. “October twenty-three, nineteen-ninety-two, the body of Lester Brave Wolf was found on the banks of the Little Wind River. Homicide victim. Shot in the head . . .”

“He was executed,” Vicky said. The moccasin telegraph had reached all the way to the Denver law firm where she had just started working, and with the gossip had come the current of fear pulsating through the reservation. “The murder was never solved.”

“Not for lack of trying.” The fed studied another page, then snapped the folder shut. “We just didn't have the evidence, Vicky.”

“Lester was part of the Sharp Nose family,” Vicky said, fighting back another surge of impatience. “Evans was elected to the Senate that November. If the photographs had been made public, Indians in Wyoming would have turned out to vote against him. He would have been defeated.”

“Photographs,” Gianelli said, tapping the folder. “Where the hell are these photographs? All you're giving me is a grandiose theory.”

Vicky turned back to the window a moment. For an instant, headlights refracted in the black glass like a burst of fireworks.

“I don't know where they are,” she said, locking eyes again with Gianelli.

“Maybe they don't exist, Vicky. Maybe they're just figments of the imagination, black-and-white pictures in your head. Maybe they're part of an Arapaho legend about how the Evans family got the ranch.”

The fed leaned forward and thumped the folder with his fist. “I have to see the photographs. Otherwise they aren't real. None of this is real. Do you know what would happen if I involved Senator Evans in a murder investigation? In five minutes, I'd be packing my bag for a new assignment on the Bering Strait, and you know how long the nights are up there?”

“The photographs exist, Ted. They belonged to Denise.” She could feel the truth of it. She could almost see the black-and-white images of Carston Evans, rifle lowered, and Bashful Woman crumpled onto the ground. She walked over and sat down on the other side of the desk. “Christine Loftus must have taken them. It would explain why she disappeared, wouldn't it?”

The phone had started ringing, but the fed kept his eyes on hers a long moment, as if he were allowing for the possibility. Finally he stretched his hand across the stacks of papers and picked up the receiver.

“Special Agent Ted Gianelli,” he said, turning his gaze toward the window.

There was a long pause before he blurted out, “I'm leaving now.” He hung up and got to his feet. “Seems that Father John found Christine at Black Mountain. Police just got a call that two people were shot . . .”

“Shot!” Vicky jumped up. She clasped the edge of the desk, trying to stop the room from closing around her, choking off the air.

“Take it easy, Vicky,” Gianelli came around the desk and took her arm. She felt a wave of gratitude for the strength in his hand. “John reported the shootings,” he said.

She heard the sharp exhalation of her own breath, like the sound of air escaping from a punctured tire. God, what was wrong with her?

She made herself turn toward the man beside her. He knew, she thought. Everyone knew. “Who, then?” she asked, summoning the most lawyerly tone she could manage.

“The coroner hasn't identified . . .”

“Tell me, Ted.”

“Martin Quinn and Paul Russell.”

Vicky swallowed hard against the shout of triumph erupting inside her. “There's an old cabin at Black Mountain. Christine must have been hiding there, and Evans's men came after the photographs.”

“I have to go,” Gianelli said.

“I'm going, too.”

The agent was already pulling on the leather jacket that had been draped over a hanger on the back of the door. “I'll call you tomorrow and give you an update.”

“T.J. was my client, Ted. He was killed for the photographs. I want to know what happened out there.” Vicky grabbed her coat from the back of the chair and followed the agent through the door and across the dimly lit entry to the stairway down to the street.

 

“
THIS ISN'T YOUR
business, Loftus.” Father John stepped out onto the porch. “The police are on the way. Unless you want to be part of an investigation into a double shooting, I'd suggest you leave.”

“Who pulled the trigger, Padre? You or my wife?” The man tossed his head forward like a bronco coming out of a chute, and for an instant, Father John thought that the man intended to crash past him into the cabin.

Father John didn't move, and this seemed to cause the other man to reconsider. He glanced around at the bodies. “Who are they?”

“They worked for Senator Evans.”

Loftus threw his head back and let out a shout of glee. “Ah,” he said. “The picture is clear. My wife got herself mixed up with the Indian councilman who didn't like the idea of the senator and his good buddies drilling for methane gas on the rez. T.J. Painted Horse threatened to make trouble when the senator paid his visit, so the senator invoked the old code of the West: Shoot your enemy and ask questions later.” He stopped, his gaze still running over the prone bodies. “What was Christine? A witness when they shot the councilman's wife? Oh, it's making sense now. She's been hiding out, just like I taught her. ‘Go to ground when things get hot,' I said. ‘Get yourself supplies and hole up where nobody's gonna come looking for you.' I got it right, don't I, Padre,” he said, looking back.

“Part of it.” Coming through the night from far away was the faint wailing of a siren.

“Well, here's the rest,” Loftus said. “My wife's not mixed up with the deaths of anybody connected to Senator Evans. She wasn't here, you understand? You can tell the police what you want, but Christine's coming with me. Maybe she was staying at the cabin for a few days, but she left before this happened, and I'm gonna swear to it. You see, she was with me all evening.”

“How are you going to explain her fingerprints on the rifle?”

Loftus ran a tongue along the inside of one cheek, so that the skin poked out like a sudden swelling. “Well, I'm gonna have to dump the rifle where it's never gonna be found.” He tossed his head back, as if he'd finally heard the sirens swelling behind the line of trees. “Maybe you don't understand,” he went on, a conciliatory tone now. “My wife is bipolar. That means days of extreme euphoria where she believes herself all powerful, capable of hanging the moon. Then she crashes and spends weeks in bed curled in a fetal position. Do you hear what I'm saying? She's not responsible for what happened here. She could not stand up to a trial. It would destroy her.”

“Your wife won't stand trial. She shot both men in self-defense.”

“Ah, self-defense. Of course. She'd been hiding from them, and when they arrived . . .”

“She thought it was you.”

This stopped the man, as if he'd taken a punch in the solar plexus. He rocked back on his heels and tossed his head sideways. The sirens were loud and distinct now, arrows of noise piercing the darkness.

Loftus steadied himself. “You're as crazy as she is,” he said. “Get out of the way.”

“You won't get more than thirty yards before you're stopped. Then Christine will have to explain why she left.”

“I'm taking my wife.”

“She doesn't want to go with you.” The sirens were filling the air around them, and headlights jittered over the ground.

“You gonna stop me?”

Father John tightened his hands into fists. “Maybe we'll have to find out.”

The sirens cut off, leaving a vacuum that absorbed all sound, apart from the short, quick, gasps of the man standing a few feet away, his face contorted by shadows and rage. Then, car doors slammed shut, and footsteps scraped the ground. “Over here,” a man's voice shouted.

“Your wife's in shock,” Father John said. “If you care about her, you'll let the medics look after her.”

A second passed before the rage in the other man's face began to give way to something that was even more disturbing. “Okay,” he said finally. “I'm gonna let you have this one, but only because I'm thinking about Christine. She'll get better again, then she'll want to come home where she belongs.”

 

VICKY KEPT HER
eyes on the headlights bouncing over the tire tracks that flared across the asphalt ahead. Gianelli was ahead in the darkness somewhere. The sky was cloudless, suffused with the pale-gray light of a moon that looked as if it were plunging toward the line of trees that ran alongside the road.
Look at the moon sideways,
grandmother said.
You can see the face of a white man.

Vicky eased on the brake, watching for the turn-off ahead. A half mile, and she pulled onto the two-track and bounced across the hard ground toward the glow of light swelling through the trees. When the two-track disappeared into clumps of grass, she kept going. Ahead was a cluster of vehicles—red, blue, and yellow lights flashing in the trees like bursting firecrackers. She pulled in behind one of the police cars, threw herself out the door, and started past the vehicles toward the log cabin.

Dark figures were milling about the porch, ducking in and out, merging into little groups before dissolving back into the shadows. Two of the figures were bent over humps that trailed down the porch
step and out onto the ground. One of the figures straightened up and started toward the ambulance parked halfway between the cabin and the trees. She recognized Gianelli.

John O'Malley was nowhere.

Then she spotted him, the tall man in the cowboy hat standing at the back of the ambulance. Through the opened doors she could see two medics hovering over someone on the gurney. She felt John O'Malley's eyes on her as she walked over.

“Are you all right?” she asked when she was still a few feet away.

He nodded. “They're looking after Christine.”

Vicky was aware of the enormous sense of relief, like a warm wind wafting over her, at the sight of him and the sound of his voice. She did not want to imagine a world without John O'Malley.

It was a moment before she noticed the bulky figure of another man on the other side of the ambulance. He raised one hand and bent into the cigarette clasped in his fingers. A red bullet of light flared and faded, then flared again.

“Loftus found her?” Vicky could barely expel the words. She kept hoping the answer was no, even when Father John gave her a quick nod yes.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Suppose you tell me, John.” Gianelli's voice came from the right, and Vicky realized that the fed had planted himself beside her with hardly a disturbance in the air.

Father John was quiet a moment, then—his voice low—he began explaining that Russell had fired at the door. Christine was inside, and she'd fired back, hitting both men. And as he explained, Vicky struggled to fight back the panic crashing over her like the wind and blotting out the scream in her mind:
You could have been killed!

“So all this over some old photos.” Gianelli sound resigned, as if he already knew and only needed the confirmation.

Vicky tried again to focus on what John O'Malley was saying: How T.J. and Christine had offered not only photographs but original
glass plates to the senator for a million dollars, how the exchange was supposed to take place Monday night, and how Quinn and Russell had gone to T.J.'s house intending to take the photographs and plates.

“Denise happened to be there.” The agent was shaking his head. “It probably went down the way you'd guessed, John. The poor woman had convinced them that T.J. had removed the photos and plates to keep them safe. They believed her. After all, she was pleading for her life. After they shot her, they decided T.J. must have given them to Christine.”

One of the medics jumped out of the ambulance and righted himself against the door. “We've got to take her to Riverton Memorial,” he said.